Homocon

You know the drill -- please follow all hyperlinks to the full articles. Worthwhile reads to the last.

1. "The UN is not a good body to run the Internet," said Jeanette Hofmann, a German academic representing the Internet Governance Caucus, a nongovernmental group. "We don't want nondemocratic countries to have influence over a system that is so important to the freedom of expression." Excerpt from "Internet users say debate over control misses point", International Herald Tribune

2. "The Texas district attorney (Ronnie Earle) who brought the criminal case against House Majority Leader Tom DeLay gave a movie crew behind-the-scenes access during the investigation — proof, DeLay's defenders say, that the D.A. is trying to make headlines for himself." Excerpt from "D.A. in DeLay Case Courted Film Crew", Associated Press

3. "Rather than investigate and report, they (the liberal media outlets) create news from unsubstantiated second, third and fourth hand reports or worse.... if it suits their prejudice. They also see poor blacks like those in New Orleans as hopeless deviants who need the Democratic party to give them their daily bread, while in reality it is the Democratic party that continues to suppress the ability of poor minority populations to succeed outside of the "compassionate liberalism" party." Excerpt from "The Truth About New Orleans & Katrina", Amy Proctor

4. "With the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Ginsburg is the only woman on the high court. She has said she has a list of qualified women, but hasn't been asked for it by the Bush administration." Excerpt from "Justice Ginsburg says she'd prefer another woman on court", The Dispatch

5. "The World Health Organization moved Friday to dampen fears over alarming predictions quoted by one of its own officials that a pandemic stemming from the bird flu virus ravaging parts of Asia could kill as many as 150 million people." Excerpt from "WHO Tries to Calm Bird Flu Fears", ABC News

6. "Things like race, sexuality, and gender are not ideologies. They are characteristics. Sexual orientations do not take positions (ahem). Homosexuality is not liberal. Nor is it conservative or libertarian. It simply is what it is." Excerpt from "Hungry, Hungry Pinkists", Prism Warden

7. "The appointment of Gonzales would mean that the President has moved the Court exactly nowhere. And that, I’m afraid, would be his conservative legacy. It will also, I’m quite certain, erode his support from many non-social conservatives who would rather take our chances with a Constitutionalist than with someone who will act like a judicial activist on key “conservative” social issues (porn, abortion, drugs)." Excerpt from "Judging Alberto", Protein Wisdom

8. "Here’s the deal: regardless of your opinion of the President’s fiscal policies, or whether the current crop of Republicans in the House and Senate are making with the bacon, right now there are people that are calling for changes. One of them is this Pence guy from Indiana. Now, I’m not saying one way or the other about the Republicans right now. What I’m trying to point out is that right now is a good time for us to look at what’s going on with our fiscal policies and maybe correct what the Democrats have done from 50 years past." Excerpt from "Mmm . . . Elephant, My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

9. "The United States and its allies must act to stop Iran's nuclear programs -- by force if necessary -- because conventional diplomacy will not work, three senior Israeli lawmakers from across the political spectrum warned yesterday. As a last resort, they said, Israel itself would act unilaterally to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear arms." Excerpt from "Israelis urge U.S. to stop Iran's nuke goals", The Washington Times

10. "In short, despite the angry rhetoric of Democrats in Sacramento, a number of left-wing interest groups and public employee unions, my man Ahnuld has accomplished a good deal in his short term in office — and continues to put forward reforms to fix California’s dysfunctional political system. He has shown a great command of the issues and an understanding of the problems facing our state." Excerpt from "Why I luv my Guv (Ahnuld, that is)", Gay Patriot

Posted by at 6:47 PM | Permalink

The European Union, in cahoots with the United Nations, is again pushing for the United States to give up control of the Internet, pretending, this time, that it's somehow in the best interests for "the developing countries" that the United States not retain sole control over a technology it developed all on its own . . . thank you very much.

Get this: "The European Union proposed stripping the Commerce Department and the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers of authority over domain name management and other regulatory tasks . . . Delegates to the Geneva session cited international opposition to the Iraq war as one factor fueling the Internet controversy. A statement from the Brazilian delegation said, "On Internet governance, three words tend to come to mind: lack of legitimacy. In our digital world (as it is now), only one nation decides for all of us."

Whatever, Brazil. Maybe you don't have any control over the Internet because you did nothing to develop it? But as socialist governments are accustomed to nationalizing what they don't have the brains or balls to develop themselves, so I can't say I'm particularly suprised that Brazil is throwing a hissy fit about legitimacy . . .

Internet Cassandras are wailing about countries that might set up their own domain systems if the United States refuses to relinquish sole control, and I say fine, let 'em. Any country that wants to shut itself off from the present International web of commerce and information can go right ahead -- and don't let the Web Door hit their asses on the way out.

I've mentioned this issue before, and wish to repeat the point: We cannot allow the United Nations, an international body stuffed with the representatives of dictators, tyrants and outdated monarchies, to gain control over a medium that requires absolute freedom in order to thrive. We've already seen what happens when commercial enterprises like Yahoo! bow to the will of the Chinese government (jail time for dissent), and I shudder to think of what will happen to free expression and free commerce should representatives from Iran, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Venezuela, Cuba and Singapore start meddling with what can and can't be done and said, and the rules for obtaining information about alleged "dissidents" in their own countries.

Senator Norm Coleman is working diligently to make sure that the United Nations does not get its hands on the internet, and it's important that he has your support, as well as the support of your representatives in Congress. Please write and/or call your representatives in Congress and ask that they do whatever possible to ensure that the Internet remains under the free governance of the United States, or you might just kiss your blogs goodbye.

Posted by at 10:56 AM | Permalink

While I don't always agree with Michelle Malkin (her uber-obsession with illegal aliens seems a bit lacking in perspective of the economics behind our government's blind-eye regarding our southern borders), she offers a fascinating, and continually updated, posting about the Tom DeLay indictment, with analysis from third-party and legal sources, as well as information about the Democratic Texas prosecutor, Ronnie Earle, at the forefront in bringing the indictment against DeLay. It's good stuff.

A prime excerpt from former Department of Justice official Barbara Comstock reads: "There was no violation of the Texas Election Code. There was no conspiracy. The underlying transaction was legal. Had corporations sent money directly to the RNC or RNSEC, the transaction would be legal. How could anyone conspire to do indirectly what could legally have been done directly?" Others note that Mr. Earle has a history of bringing bogus charges against Republican officials that fall apart under trial, and that this is just another example of what many consider his politically partisan prosecutorial style.

Whew -- try saying that three times fast.

It's not that I'm a die-hard DeLay fan, but Democrats have been gunning after this guy (he's nicknamed "the hammer" for his ability to get things done and push legislation through) for years, with nearly every leftist political figure weighing in with his or her two bits, liberal media outlets tut-tutting and far-left websites ranting as though DeLay is the anti-christ personified.

With all that leftist fire-power arranged against him, he's gotta be doing something right.

Pardon the pun.

The guys over at PowerLine had this to say back in November of 2004 about Ronnie Earle and the attempted indictment against Tom DeLay: "It is entirely reasonable to believe, however, that in the meantime, Earle may also indict the Majority Leader. It would be an outrageous injustice for a single, politically-motivated district attorney to dictate who is eligible to serve in a leadership position in the House of Representatives."

And regarding the Senate rules change (which would have allowed a Republican leader to retain his position even though indicted, as an indictment is not an admission of, or proof of, guilt) that the Republicans first voted to repeal and then voted again not to repeal due to the appearance of impropriety, one of the PowerLine readers wrote in to say: "[W]hile Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders are publicly criticizing the abandonment of the rule by the Republican caucus, the Democrats themselves DO NOT have the same rule and never have. So Pelosi & Co. are criticizing the Republicans for "lowering ethical standards" by adopting the same rule they themselves have. Is that called "hypocrisy," or do I not understand my Webster's dictionary?"

And when you recall that Howard Dean proclaimed DeLay guilty of wrongdoing before any indictments were made or charges brought against him, while blithely stating "I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama (bin Laden), who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials" -- then claims of ethical misconduct against DeLay start resembling farce more than reality.

Captain's Quarters has more on Democratic chicanery in the DeLay investigations here: "Despite the Democrats' best efforts to paint controversial lobbyist Jack Abramoff as a GOP tool -- especially in relation to Tom DeLay -- further investigation by the Washington Post shows that Abramoff put significant money into the coffers of leading Democrats as well. In fact, two of Abramoff's biggest winners were the present and former Senate Minority Leaders."

The Washington Times printed this article by Christian Bourge back in June of 2004: "The House Ethics Committee has determined the charges (against DeLay) were properly filed, and in the minds of many, the credibility of the committee and the House at large is at stake . . . the panel must prove it can deliberate in a forthright manner without falling into the rank partisan bickering that defines policy-making in Congress these days."

Which would explain Nancy Pelosi's yippity fixation on the DeLay indictment (and, it must be noted, her own circle the wagons defense of Democratic party member Martin Frost, who was also accused of campaign finance irregularities), as her own credibility as House Minority Leader would take a rather sharp blow should DeLay be acquitted of the charges brought against him.

Bourge also goes on to note that Democrats point to Earle's investigations and indictments against Democratic leaders as proof of his non-partisan approach, but while Earle has publicly (and angrily) condemned DeLay and Republicans both in the media and at Democratic fundraisers, he had little to say about investigations into Democrats, such as the potential illegal contributions to candidates by Texas Democrat Martin Frost's Lone Star Fund.

"A top House GOP leadership aide told UPI that the Frost investigation would have little meaning or impact because it is only political maneuvering by Democrats. "Earle will simply find no problems in his investigation (of Frost) and then say, 'See? I am bipartisan,'" said the aide.

And lookee here if that exact thing didn't just go ahead and happen: "U.S. Rep. Martin Frost has been cleared of an allegation that he illegally funneled more than $100,000 in corporate donations to Texas legislative candidates in 2000, Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle announced . . ."

Color me surprised!

BlogHouston sums it up best: "Recently I pointed out how the (Houston) Chronicle has worked very hard to tell its readers that Rep. Tom DeLay is a corrupt politician, a bad man, and something akin to the personification of evil here in Texas, except when that title goes to Halliburton. In the Chronicle's world, it's probably a toss-up between the two."

Substitute "Democratic Party" for "Houston Chronicle" and we've got a wrap.

Posted by at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

For some people, I guess there's always a silver lining: "For the battered residents along the Gulf Coast, the chaos caused by flooding, looting and desperate bids for rescue is subsiding -- but now a different form of confusion is taking its place: a frenzy of real-estate deals."

Annual home price appreciation for the New Orleans area, which averaged in the 6% to 8% range before the storm, is expected to double over the next year, with demand already so high that tenants are calling in to FEMA and telling them that they now have nowhere to live because their landlords have evicted them with only a few days notice in order to cash in on the sudden real estate boom.

Real estate specialists said speculators (or what some people call "real estate vultures") purchased so-called "distressed properties" when prices fell for apartments in downtown Manhattan after the 2001 terrorist attacks, or for oceanfront property hit by Hurricane Andrew in Florida in 1992.

"I thought this storm was the end of the city," said Arthur Sterbcow, president of New Orleans-based Latter & Blum, one of the biggest real estate brokerages on the Gulf Coast. "If anyone had told me two weeks ago that I'd be getting the calls and e-mails I'm getting (from those wanting to buy houses and commercial properties), I would have thought he was ready for the psychiatric ward."

It's a seller's market in New Orleans, with calls requesting property running 20 times higher than calls from people who wish to sell their property. There are, of course, complaints from those who think that any type of reorientation of the city of New Orleans would be "gentrification" and are then automatically opposed to speculators coming into the ruined areas, buying property and fixing it up for resale, but many New Orleans homeowners and property owners, especially those who didn't have insurance, see the potential real-estate frenzy as a godsend. And there's even the possibility of eminent domain as a boon for poor homeowners -- "there are already proposals to convert certain flooded areas — including some water-logged neighborhoods — into parks. Under the Supreme Court's recent ruling broadening the definition of eminent domain, speculators could be forced to sell their properties to the government. That would be a great outcome for many homeowners in the parishes south and east of New Orleans that bore the brunt of the storm."

''It's a running joke (that Hurricane) Hugo was the best thing that happened to South Carolina because of all the government money that helped rebuild Charleston," said Ryan Dougherty, noting that after Hugo hit in 1989, historic buildings were rebuilt and/or renovated with insurance and government money.

Even the real estate market in Baton Rouge, 90 miles upriver from New Orleans, has experienced a surge in value after Katrina: "Some properties doubled in price overnight," explains Ben Johnson, sales manager for the commercial real estate division of Latter & Blum's Baton Rouge office. "People were bidding up prices, not even caring about the price. They just had to have a place to live."

Yet the boom in real-estate speculation could very well be the party before the crash: "(T)he more pessimistic feeling among other economists is that the rapid home-price growth over the last eight years is winding down. In July, existing-home sales dropped 2.6%, while new-home prices in June fell to $219,500, from a record $237,300 in February 2005. As of Aug. 26, the Mortgage Bankers Association reported that its index of demand for mortgages used to purchase homes was 470.6, down 11% from the peak of 529.3 in June."

Anybody recall how Internet companies were ridiculously over-valued right before the majority of them went belly-up in the early 2000's . . . yeah, well, so do I.

OFF TOPIC:
Patrick Ruffini has been hosting a monthly poll on potential Republican candidates for the 2008 Presidential election. The poll has been steadily growing in size of respondents, and the more that join in, the more interesting the results. I highly recommend dropping by and participating. Rudy Giuliani has been pulling ahead as each month passes . . .

You can visit the unofficial straw poll here.

Posted by at 1:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

On September 26th, the Guardian published a brief article noting that left-handed women may be twice as likely to develop breast cancer before menopause than right-handed women. As I'm a cross-handed (and footed) individual myself, my curiosity was piqued, and I set about doing some additional research into what people are saying about what's termed "handedness", and what being on the left side of the spectrum as opposed to the right might mean for a person's health and well-being.

The Schizophrenia Daily News Blog references a Japanese study which concluded that ambidextrous and left-handed individuals are at a greater risk for schizophrenia; two University of Montpellier researchers discovered that the higher the incidence of left-handedness in a primitive society's population, the higher the murder rate; a Stanford grad student in genetics states that left-handers have a higher mortality rate at younger ages due to the casualties of stumbling through a world designed for right-handedness; and statistics show that left-handed people are more likely to be alcoholic, delinquent, dyslexic, and contract Crohn's Disease, diabetes and ulcerative colitis, as well as develop asthma, migraines and mental disabilities, than their right-handed counterparts.

But before all you disease-riddled, accident-prone, murder-driven, migraine-inflicted and madness-filled lefties head for the nearest bar to drown your alcoholic sorrows, there's actually a lot of good news beginning to trickle out from the fields of research regarding left-handedness and the state of the universe, with many scientists reaching the conclusion that, far from being the doom and gloom it's cracked up to be, left-handedness may very well be the natural order of things, right down to the molecular level.

While lefties are from 10 to 13 percent of the human population at present (depending on whom you ask), left-handedness makes up around a third of the chimpanzee population -- and digging even deeper, Arizona State University chemists John Cronin and Sandra Pizzarello published this finding in the February 14th, 1997 issue of Science magazine: "(I)n Earth organisms, amino acids, which are the building blocks of life, are all left-handed" (though scientists have also discovered that sugars are all right-handed, which might suggest that while lefties are important as a foundation to our very existence, righties are the frosting on the cake . . . but then, we always knew that righties were sweeter, didn't we?).

Sorry, I couldn't resist . . .

But just as all twenty of the amino acids which comprise living things are left-handed while the human species is predominantly right-handed, there are scientists suggesting that our continuing evolution is introducing a rising percentage of left-handed humans into the mix to correlate with what we are at the molecular level. Russian doctor Alexander Dubov claims that "the number of left-handed babies that were born in 2005 doubled the amount of left-handed children which saw the light in 1990", leading him to conclude that "mankind is changing slowly," while Pyotr Chereda, a Russian scientist of anomalous phenomena (telepathy, remote viewing and other claptrap, so take it for what it's worth), believes that right and left-handers are virtually different types of people with their own special mindsets and perceptions of the world. "They get along with each other perfectly, but there is a hidden evolutionary struggle taking place between them, which reminds (me of) the struggle between primeval humans -- Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal men." Chereda concludes that "the left handers will eventually win the fight owing to their anomalous abilities."

Although it sounds rather Star Trekish, Anna Salleh at ABC Science Online tends to agree: "If we include the number of people who throw a ball, strike a match or use a pair of scissors with their left-hand, the searchers say the world looks more of a left-handed place."

Chris McManus, the author of Right Hand, Left Hand, is also convinced that the proportion of left-handers in human society is rising, and that this may bode well for the human species as a whole, for while left-handers are disproportionately represented in the mental disabilities and physical maladies department, they also disproportionately occupy the genius spectrum, such as Einstein, Newton and Franklin.

What this may mean for the human species as a whole is anybody's guess, but Glyn Humphreys from Birmingham University's school of psychology puts it this way: "In right-handed people, the right hemisphere sees the whole picture, whereas the left hemisphere attends to the details. However, we have found that in left-handed people, this is completely reversed . . . not only our language function, but even the way in which we see the world can depend upon our handedness."

Could this mean that warp drives and time travel are right around the corner?

ADDENDUM:
Canadian researchers back in 2000 attempted to correlate a link between left-handedness and homosexuality, offering the thesis that the tendency toward an increased level of left-handedness was markedly greater among gay men and women than in the population at large (and especially so among lesbians), but had to eventually conclude that though the increased numbers were reliable, they were so small in absolute magnitude as to make it impossible to conclude that handedness and homosexuality had anything to do with each other. There was a brief flurry of speculation that perhaps handedness is determined before birth and this might suggest that human sexuality might also be determined before birth, but a survey of identical twins quickly dismisses such a conclusion, yet not without raising the alternative possibility that a combination of heredity, environment and prenatal stresses (along with the age of the mother, as women over 40 are 128% more likely to bear a left-handed child than a woman in her twenties) may produce both left-handedness and/or homosexuality.

"Handedness is controlled by a whole lot of pathways in the brain," says Stanley Coren, the author of The Left-Handed Syndrome. "If any one of these pathways is mucked up during gestation, then handedness becomes a cosmic dice game . . . we believe this accounts for about half of all left-handers."

OFF TOPIC
This is mind-numbingly bizarre.

Posted by at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Ever since the movie project for 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' was set into pre-production in 2003, I've been patiently awaiting its release on DVD so that I could see how it held up to the original BBC series, which I liked immensely for its oddity and sharp social/political satire. And now that NetFlix so kindly delivered the DVD to my very doorstep, I had the good combination of fortune and misfortune to watch the whole thing . . . twice.

It's said that Douglas Adams kept rewriting the HG2G every time it was adapted, from radio, to novel, to stage, to television and now film, and while Adam's died in 2001, he's given screenplay credit for the film, with a romantic triangle (a necessity in Hollywood films, it seems, which leaves me to wonder at the reflection this must be of Hollywood reality) introduced between Arthur, Zaphod, and Trillian, an element that a lot of critics and fans disliked, but a plot device that actually helped hold all the whacky elements of Adams' imagination together, especially considering that nearly the entire movie takes place in space locales that are alternately dark, industrial and/or desolate (except the manufacturing floor of Magarathea, which is quite a wonder, thanks to the film's FX budget).

Things I really liked about the film adaptation: all the main characters are well cast, but President Zaphod, played by Sam Rockwell (who's fast becoming one of my favorite people to watch on-screen for his roles in Charlie's Angles and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) is terrific, constantly tossing his bleach-blonde hair, flashing a ridiculously white smile and giggling like a rockstar on ecstasy . . . waaaaay better (IMHO) than the original and woefully low-budget BBC series Zaphod, while the casting of American born Zooey Deschanel as the Trillian character is also an improvement, with the adventurous, no-nonsense brunette replacing the bubble-headed, squeaky-voice blonde from the series.

Mos Def as Ford Prefect is so good that I can't even remember the Ford Prefect who came before him, and the hippity-hoppity, toe-tapping greeting between he and Zaphod when they first show up on the stolen spaceship Heart of Gold, with its marvelously rendered Improbability Drive (that creates some of the most memorable visual effects of the film -- like the sight of a giant ball of yarn, with knitting needles stuck through it, hurtling through interplanetary space), is a genuinely sweet toss-away in a film stuffed with so many ("Take his brain!" and John Malkovich, for example).

But Marvin the Paranoid Android is a bit of a disappointment (where's his mouth?), Hellen Mirren as the voice of Deep Thought is just plain wrong, and the absence of the restaurant at the end of the universe is unfortunate (I was looking forward to the cow that asks to be eaten), but maybe in a sequel . . . ?

I was gratified to see, however, that they did include the scene with the sperm whale plummeting towards ground.

Slartibartfast and the planetary-construction industry is a gorgeous element, with its special-effects flight through a galaxy-sized factory floor littered with half-finished mountain ranges and alien landscapes, and the POV gun (Point of View), created by Deep Thought, contributes to what I thought was the funniest moment in the entire film (where the disappointing film version of Marvin makes up for everything).

So, yeah . . . it has its ups and downs, but it was intriguing enough to watch more than once, and clever enough to hope a sequel comes along (but with a better voice for Deep Thought, hopefully).

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

UPDATE:
Am now on the fourth audiobook of the Narnian chronicles ("The Voyage of the Dawn Treader"), and I'm amazed at how good these books actually are. I thought that I just liked them when I was a kid because, well, I was so young -- but C.S. Lewis is a much better writer than I would have remembered to give him credit for, the story lines themselves are fascinating, and the people that were selected to read these books for the audio versions are all, so far, spot-on (Kenneth Branaugh and Lynn Redgrave are my favorites as yet).

Posted by at 9:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A quick glance at what my kind of bloggers are saying across the web. Click on the hyperlinks to visit their sites and read the full articles -- they're all well worth it.

1. "After hearing of Louis Farrakhan's "trip to the mother ship that circles above the earth" where the inhabitants of the mother ship (?) told him that Bush breeched the levees purposefully to kill all the Blacks, I decided to do a bit of reading about the Nation of Islam . . . " Excerpt from "Nation of Islam and the Mother Ship" at Blonde Sagacity

2. "(Gay men and women) need to talk about marriage as a sacred institution and make clear that we do not just see this as a right to which we are entitled, but a privilege for which we are willing to work. That we understand the obligations of matrimony and are committed to living up to them just as heterosexual couples have done for millennia." Excerpt from "Getting Gay Marriage the Old Fashioned Way -- Earning It" at Gay Patriot

3. "The only way to substantially reduce CO2 emissions is to develop energy technologies that obsolesce fossil fuels. Those energy technologies are coming eventually. People who want those technologies to come sooner (whether to avoid global warming or get cleaner air to breathe or to lower total energy costs) ought to support accelerated development of nuclear and photovoltaic energy technologies." Excerpt from "Tony Blair Wants Technological Advances To Reduce CO2 Emissions" at Future Pundit

4. "Now, am I saying, "Don't worry, be happy?" Of course not. And I'm not saying we couldn't stand to cut a lot of fat from the federal budget. But the Krugmans of this world who run about in circles, screaming, "The sky is falling!" because of Katrina and the Iraq war are doing so without an empirical leg to stand on. The facts just don't support that conclusion, Chicken Little, because either a comparative or a time-series view of our national debt burden suffices to dispel the rising tide of panic you're doing your best to install in ignorant and inattentive voters." Excerpt from "Paranoia Will Destroy Ya" at Villainous Company

5. "Iraq is turning into a geopolitical disaster for al Qaeda, but the Western press is so wed to its story of American failure that it is not reporting the humiliation of our enemy. That is not surprising, since the anti-war Left continues to propagate the opposite story." Excerpt from "Our chance to humiliate al Qaeda in Iraq" at Tiger Hawk

6. "The recent hubbub about Iran's nuclear ambitions raises the hypothetical question: 'What would the situation be like in the region if Saddam was still in power in Iraq?' . . . I'm willing to be that Mr. Khan, the Pakistani scientist would be selling nuclear plans to people like Saddam and others. Libya still would be in possession of nuclear development equipment, and so on. How about the thought of a nuclear weapon capable Taliban for scary?" excerpt from "What if . . ." at Common Sense & Wonder

7. "In an 11th-hour breakthrough, North Korea reaffirmed some of the promises it made during the administration of U.S. President Bill Clinton, which it immediately violated, adding however that 'this time we really, really mean it.'" Excerpt from "North Korea Vows to Give Up Nukes, Lying" at Scrappleface

8. "Some people say they'll be voting with "yes" because they want to defy terrorism that is trying to stop the democratic progress while others say they'll be definitely voting with "no" because the draft isn't even close to their aspirations. The street is actually divided over this issue and other than saying that we're most likely to see a wider turnout than the January elections, nothing is predictable." Excerpt from "On Iraq's political scene . . ." at Iraq the Model

9. "A second myth is that the political process has abandoned the poor. Not so. Welfare reform was not punitive; it aimed mainly to counteract a self-defeating dependency. Other major programs for the non-elderly poor have not been similarly scaled back. Some have been repeatedly expanded, usually without much fanfare." Excerpt from "Poverty Chic" at Don Surbur

10. "There does seem to be a negative cycle at work in the young male population - the pursuit of sex, and the demands that women placed on men before they were allowed to have sex, used to be one of things that led young men to try to accomplish worthy things and generally establish a defined, serious, somewhat stoical masculine identity during their teens and twenties. But now that sex is so readily available, there's no reason for such an identity to develop - and once that happens, there aren't any male role models for the next generation of young men to follow, except for the Maxim-Emo extremes, and so the cycle continues and a defined, adult masculine identity slips further away." Excerpt from "Sex and the Single Guy" at The American Scene

ADDENDUM:
I have to admit that this op-ed by Chris Crain in the Washington Blade, a paper I ordinarily dismiss out of hand for its absurdly leftist slant, left me speechless. Crain is writing in response to the inordinate amount of obscene and vitriolic emails from readers sent to the Blade after a few op-eds by Jeff Gannon. Here's an excerpt:

"We gay Americans do not have the luxury of intolerance. When it comes to minorities, we are remarkably minor. Kinsey was nice enough to propagate the 10 percent myth, but subsequent surveys place us at even smaller numbers, well under half that amount. And about one-quarter of us — of us! — voted for the election and the re-election of George W. Bush . . . If we cannot tolerate the viewpoint of someone who tries to explain why one-quarter of us like and support the president, then how can we expect the 96 percent of Americans who are heterosexual to listen seriously to our demands for equality?"

Right on! It's about frickin' time the gay-left began to examine its own role in the recent social blow-backs against gay marriage, and even homosexuality in general. Do yourself a favor and read the entire article -- it's a revelation, especially considering that it's coming from the liberal end of the spectrum . . .

Posted by at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Now that Israel has removed itself from Gaza and Hamas is "parading its private army" through the streets, with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas completely unable to bring order to the region, it's taken no time at all for Agence France Presse to start printing articles portraying the Palestinians as victims of the internationally mandated Israeli evacuation. While Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom notes that 'The Iron Wall' that stood between Israel and most of the Arab and Islamic countries is coming down as a direct result of Israel's historic evacuation, French journalists spitefully hammer away at the region's fragile steps towards peace by downplaying the instability and military insecurity of Gaza at present, while up-playing the notion that cruel Israel has somehow abandoned all the sick and dying Palestinian children by restricting travel from Hamas-ridden Gaza to Israel (neglecting, as well, to inquire as to the whereabouts of all the billions of dollars of foreign aid donated to the PLO for the health and welfare of the Palestinian people).

This type of reporting by the media may very well be a prime example of "the new anti-semitism" -- a free-floating, international focus upon Israel as the source of all woes for the region, with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee making a bid for world victim status by casting the Jews as the modern oppressor, worse than Hitler's Germany and Apartheid in South Africa, combined. In its quest for world attention, the AADC attempts to portray itself as the true victim of Israel, the United States, and especially September 11th, decrying an atmosphere of mistrust towards Muslims in America (and worldwide) after the World Trade Center was destroyed, a Madrid train station bombed, a crowded Bali nightclub obliterated and the London subway system attacked by . . . well, uhm, erm, Muslims.

The AADC then marches on to portray the Muslim community as suffering from a vicious international retaliation orchestrated by the dreaded Zionists, despite the fact that it's Jewish synagogues that are being bombed in Istanbul, Orthodox Jewish Schools torched in Paris, Jewish graves desecrated, Rabbis beaten in Belgium, Jewish students stabbed on London buses, Dutch filmmakers murdered by radical Muslims and German citizens advised not to wear anything in public that will identify them as Jewish because their safety cannot be guaranteed from the country's sizable Muslim minority population.

Oh yeah, the Muslims are way oppressed -- but mostly by each other. So why are Western media outlets still eagerly drinking from the trough of anti-Israeli (and, by extension, anti-American) propaganda as if Israel is the only nation in the world obliged with moral obligations? Is it anti-Zionism (an opposition to the right of a Jewish state in Palestine) that's the underlying cause (and which is usually proffered as the source for what media members and politicos deem their "criticisms of Israel"), or is it the age old beast of anti-semitism stalking to and fro, roaring at whom it wishes to devour?

In a December, 2004 Washington Post article, writer Glenn Kesslar noted that "Senior Arab officials . . . rejected the Bush Administration's assertion that greater democracy would help end terrorism, arguing that the administration's strong support of Israel made it difficult to undertake political reforms or halt extremists driven by hatred of U.S. policies." Kesslar states that one of President Bush's central goals for his second term is to bring greater democracy in the Middle East, yet Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit summed up the problem perfectly when he stated that he resisted the notion that "reform" was necessary: "I prefer the word 'modernity'" he said, saying that reform means something is wrong and needs to be fixed.

Imagine that.

Modernity: "denoting a current or recent style or trend in art, architecture, or other cultural activity marked by a significant departure from traditional styles and values". Okay, so Gheit believes that nothing about Middle Eastern culture needs to be fixed, so how about a significant departure from the traditional style and value of blaming Israel for all the violence and murder their own people commit, and for all the unhappiness and dissatisfaction prevalent in their own populations.

And this is the conundrum with which the Bush Administration, and really, the Western world, is faced: How do you bring reform (or modernity) to a region that won't (not can't) significantly depart from it's traditional styles and values -- styles and values which embrace racial hatred and encourage xenophobic violence? And how do you encourage a reflexively anti-authoritarian media, seemingly stuck in Gunga-Dan style emotives, to separate the very real war against Israel from the rocks in their heads?

In Christian cultures, science managed to eventually trump religion because the Pope was not as powerful as the Caliph, thanks to the wise separation of Church and State. In Islam, there is no separation of Mosque and State, so progressive, liberalizing forces such as classical Greek rationality and contemporary scientific discovery cannot prevail and are ultimately stifled. As late as March, 2005, the Syrian Ministry of Information has approved for publication an updated version to the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a conspiracy laden and virulently anti-Jewish tract which claims that Jews run the world by proxy, that they drink the blood of Palestinian children and that the Holocaust never happened (and so on).

Oy vey.

The new, revised edition of the of the Protocols was introduced at this past February's Cairo International Book Fair, only months after Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Faisal claimed to the Western Press that, "Let's face it: our (the West's and the Middle East's) differences are neither religious nor cultural. We perceive no clashes of civilization or competing value systems. The real bone of contention is the longest conflict in modern history." That Middle Eastern leaders and spokesmen go virtually unchallenged by Western media sources when they make such claims (that Israel is the source of the present clash between East and West) is what Jewish scholars refer to as the casual indifference of the Western media to blatantly anti-semitic thought.

For example, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published a June, 2004 interview with the parents of Samia El-Moslimany, a vice-chair member of the local CAIR chapter and someone who believes that international law only matters should Israel be in alleged violation of it, in which the parents stated: "Muslims and Jews have always gotten along until recently with the state of Israel" -- a claim that's meant to imply a contemporary context for the Palestinian suicide bombings (which only begs the question of why we're bothering to attempt an "objective" discourse with those who believe suicide bombers have context), but which deliberately neglects to mention the very real Jewish hatred ensconced in ancient Muslim holy texts themselves (i.e. Hadith Volume 4, Book 52, Number 176: "Allah's Apostle said, "You (Muslims) will fight with the Jews till some of them will hide behind stones. The stones will (betray them) saying, 'O, (slave of Allah)! There is a Jew hiding behind me; so kill him.'".

I guess that explains the videos of Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg . . .

Douglas Davis, writing in a November, 2003 essay for AIJAC, talks about media bias against Israel: "I do not deny the BBC's right -- the right of any news organization -- to be critical of Israel. Criticism of politicians and political institutions is an integral part of the democratic process . . . but the BBC's relentless, one-dimensional portrayal of Israel as a criminal state and Israelis as brutal oppressors responsible for all the ills of the region bears the hallmarks of a concerted campaign of vilification . . ." But Mitchell Bard, in his excellent April, 2005 article for the Israel Insider titled, "Does the Media's anti-Israel Bias Matter?" notes that "journalists usually justify their anti-Israel bias by claiming they get just as many complaints from the Arabs as the Jews, which they rationalize as an indication their coverage is balanced."

Jonathan Freedland, in an articled titled "Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitism?", writes that "Loosely translated, Zionism represents nothing more than a belief in the right of a Jewish state in Palestine to exist", which would mean that anti-Zionism is an opposition to this specific idea (whereas anti-Semitism is a broad opposition to Jews, period), and it's here that the boundaries get very blurry. Freedland continues (as most authors are wont to do, and which I'm afraid this post will continue to do, as well): "If the right to self-determination is honored in every other case -- Palestinians and Basques and Algerians are all allowed to describe themselves and chart their own destinies, but not Jews -- then we are confronted with a straightforward case of discrimination . . . If our anti-Zionist(s) took the same hard line on all new societies founded by immigrants who displaced the earlier inhabitants . . . if (they) denied the right of, say, the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and whole swathes of Latin America to exist, then (they) would be immune to charges of anti-Semitism."

Yet Israel is often relegated to the role of stand-in for all previous population displacements, hence the paradox of American and European anti-Zionist outrage against Israel while contentedly living on property brutally yanked out from underneath native populations of their own.

Brendan O'Neill at TomPaine.com claims that the United States is "no longer the all out supporter of Israel and Israeli interests it once was", but Mr. Bard puts forth the salient factor that a 2004 Gallup poll showed that 55% of Americans sympathize with Israel, and handily points out the difference in anti-Israel bias in the United States as opposed to Britain and the rest of the E.U. in this way: "For those who are convinced the (anti-Israel) bias is universal and irrevocable, I have two words for you: Fox News. Actually, let me add three more: Wall Street Journal."

But though the American conversation about Israel isn't as full of invective as, say, the BBC, O'Neill quotes an anonymous U.S. journalist who says, "People should realize how difficult this is for us -- reporting on such a divisive issue. It can be confusing, and hard to get right all the time", but Douglas Davis offers this explanation as to why the media finds reporting on Israel so "hard to get right" -- "Israel's continued existence remains a profound affront to the fine sensibilities of a Sixties generation which now occupies the high table of establishments . . . In (their) collective world-view, Israel is the imperial outpost of power-crazed, oil-hungry America; a bastion of white, American hegemony in the Middle East; a proxy to be vilified; and an illegitimate, artificial state to be trashed, just as the kids of the Sixties trashed their university campuses in a frenzy of anti-American violence."

Though how this explains the likes of political anti-Zionists like Pat Buchanan ("Either Israel gets out, or it pays the price of staying in: terrorism", which, beyond its Blame the Jews rhetoric, can only be a rationale for a philosophy of political isolationism, considered a dead-end foreign policy since WW2) and George Soros ("Anti-semitism is the result of the policies of Israel and the United States", with its bizarro "I'm a Jew and I take full responsibility for 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'" mentality ) is beyond me.

Anti-Jewish sentiment is an old problem, most likely dating back thousands of years to when the Hebrew nation was a conquering force that swept through Canaan with full military and religious fervor, and able to do so precisely because they were "the other" -- a nation of people who followed strict dietary regulations, copious social limitations and vastly (for the time) unusual religious conventions which bound them tightly to one another. Plug into that a cultural support for intellectual property and merchandizing (which has only recently become a respectable, and very profitable, occupation) and you've got a pressure-cooker of social resentments, both old and new, with everybody eager to point fingers at just who's responsible for the lid occasionally blowing off the pot.

Despite what has been hailed as cultural progressions across the board, European and Middle Eastern, and to a lesser extent, American thought continues to suffer from the snaggletoothed baying of racial and cultural isolationists. European media seems to almost aggressively undermine Israel as the region's one open and liberal society while virtually contorting themselves to excuse extremist Islamic clerics and Arab dictators, their lack of even a basic human-rights charter be damned. Jonathan Kay of Canada's National Post once remarked that "if Robert Mugabe walked into an Arab League summit, he would be the most democratically legitimate leader in the room" -- yet the howls of outrage are aimed at Ariel Sharon and the Israeli military, instead.

Perhaps we, all dressed up in Western academic theory, approach the Arab-Muslim culture with what is referred to as "the soft bigotry of low expectations" -- the resultant chaos and violence in Gaza after the evacuation of Israel is barely remarked upon because nobody considered there would be anything different? The billions of dollars missing that were to go towards building a viable Palestinian state go uninvestigated because Arab corruption is only to be expected? Terrorism is an inevitable result of the presence of the Israeli nation because Arabs are savages and who cares if they blow themselves up anyway (as long as they're only taking Israelis along with them)?

Whatever.

Maybe if we raised our expectations for Arab democracy and liberalization to match our human rights rhetoric, and Western society as a whole rose up and confronted rather than excused violent fundamentalism and anti-Jewish bias on the part of devout Muslims (not to mention undevout Muslims, the European media and American terrorist-apologias), we'd truly watch anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism go down the drain, along with cultural conflict in the Middle East.

I'd gladly blame the Jews for that . . .

Posted by at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I have to admit that part of my motivation for writing a multi-part posting on anti-Israel / anti-Jew bias in media, society and politics is my own personal, and recent, encounter with the seamy underbelly of irrational Jew hatred. I grew up in a Christian household (though I'm not a Christian myself) in a rural town in the Midwest where I was taught that Jews were "God's chosen people" and Israel held a special place in the hearts of all Christians, so I was always rather skeptical about claims of global anti-semitism, as I simply couldn't imagine such a thing. "What? Hate Jews?" I thought. "Whatever for?"

Little did I suspect that logic or rational thinking had nothing to do with the unpleasant equation of anti-Jew bias.

Shortly after the outbreak of the Iraq war in 2003, my boyfriend and I decided to take a trip to Australia and New Zealand (thinking that we may as well go before things got so bad that we could never safely leave the country again). On one of the days we were in Australia, we flagged down a taxi, and the moment the very Australian taxi driver learned we were from the states, he began to talk about the Iraq war. Which was fine. I have no problem discussing with foreign citizens what my government chooses to do, and what my personal opinions are regarding those choices. But what floored me was when he said, and I quote, "Yeah, it's all about the damn Israelis -- the Jews have really got your president under their thumb, don't they? They control the banking, the media, the government, they have their hands in everything!" My mouth dropped open in astonishment, and my boyfriend just laughed, because he had always told me that I was too naive about anti-Jew sentiment throughout the world. What was the most astonishing part of it, though, was that the taxi driver literally assumed that we would just agree with him and start complaining about "those damn Jews" ourselves. When my boyfriend replied, "I just love the Jews!", I thought the driver was going to slam on his brakes and throw us out of his taxi. The rest of our ride was spent in utter silence.

Israel has some of the most liberal laws in the world for homosexuals (a hated group within Islamic culture), and by far the most liberal laws in the Middle East for women (though Palestinians do allow their women a prominent role in blowing themselves up), yet lefty feminist and allegedly gay-friendly media and academia members continue to assert that the state of Israel is "an affront to civilization" and "a vindictive Israeli victimizer" (and let's not forget the litany of anti-Israel resolutions passed by the UN General Assembly each year). Paul Varnell in the Chicago Free Press stated that, regarding the treatment of gay men and women, "Palestine makes rural Texas look like San Francisco," yet Palestine is the who, what and where that the far-left (including the gay-left) lines up to champion, with leftist spokespersons stating that "the surrounding Arab nations (only) allegedly wish to see the destruction of Israel" -- willfully (for this is the only term that fits) dismissing the very real and persistent call among Palestinian and other Arab groups for the complete elimination of the state of Israel.

It boggles the mind.

In February of 2001, the London Observer published a poem by British-Irish author and Oxford Academic Tom Paulin titled, "Killed in the Crossfire". The poem labels the Israeli military as "Zionist SS" wantonly slaying innocent Palestinian children, and its usage of the term "dumb goys" for non-Jews reflects Hitler's similar usage of "dumb goyim" in 'Mein Kampf' for those he considered "duped" by the "sly" Jews. Also in 2001, France's ambassador to London purportedly stated that the present international security crisis in America and Europe had been triggered by "that shitty little country Israel". In July of 2002, D.D. Guttenplan wrote in The Nation that unrest in the Middle East was the direct fault of Israel's defense policies, and that the Arab attackers aren't terrorists or extremists, they're simply the country's "disaffected and marginalized Arab minority" -- thereby laying fault for suicide bombings at Israel's own doorstep by hoisting the canard of "the poor Arabs" who, it's worth noting, come from countries whose leaders earn billions in oil revenue (which apparently doesn't "trickle down" to its citizenry).

D.D. Guttenplan also noted that "(T)he tattered mantle of Jewish victimization is draped over policies of collective punishment and murderous reprisal (against the Palestinians) that are modeled on the tactics used to crush Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto," while further complaining that the tragic history of the Jews is being used as a gag to stifle dissent against Israeli brutality.

Answering-Islam.org.uk reports that "during the last 20 years, Muslim terrorists have targeted and murdered tens of thousands of males, females, adults, and children. All over the world, in Kenya, Algeria, Indonesia, Egypt, Iran, France, South America and America, etc., Muslim terrorists have attacked and murdered those they felt were a threat to their aims." But apparently, in Guttenplan's world-view, it's Israeli brutality that's the scourge of the global community.

Even the Catholic Church, long considered a fair-weather friend of the Israeli nation, is warning of rising anti-semitism, with Pope Benedict XVI proclaiming that "Christians and Jews must join forces so the insane racist ideology that led to the Holocaust never resurfaces."

Oops, too late.

******Next: "Those Darn Jews: Part 3"

ADDENDUM:
Hmmm, maybe the Palestinians are reforming . . . ?

OFF-TOPIC:
"A twirling ice cream cone that, divorced from intent, looks like the Arabic inscription for Allah no more is the Arabic inscription for Allah than a cloud that looks like a sheep is likely to yield a sweater and a pair of wool socks . . . "

*sigh*

I have such a blog-crush on Jeff Goldstein.

Posted by at 2:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I was going to write a post about London's Mayor, Ken Livingstone, comparing a Jewish reporter for the city's Evening Standard newspaper with a Nazi concentration camp guard, plus Tony Blair's top advisor on Muslim affairs calling on the British government to cancel the country's official Holocaust Remembrance Day because it offends Muslims -- but when I began researching material on the internet, I soon discovered that I was aswamp in article after article that outlined and detailed a growing trend in anti-Jewish sentiment across the board, mostly throughout Europe and Britain, but in the United States, as well, so I considered this to be a subject which deserved its own focus.

From major British newspapers to mainstream French publications to a long list of political and social publications across the European Union, Andrea Levin, director of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), notes that anti-Jewish bias throughout Europe "is of a magnitude that is shocking to us (here in America). People don't realize how extreme it is."

For example, Mayor Ken Livingstone, who ran for Mayor of London on a platform of anti-racism and anti-bigotry, started down the path of anti-Jewish racism and bigotry the day he blithely invited Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi (the Muslim Brotherhood-influenced Islamic jurist who has supported human bomb terrorism by the Palestinians and expressed murderous prejudice against Jews, gays and women) to London to preside over the annual meeting of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, and a conference on the hijab. Livingstone warmly embraced Qaradawi, praising him publicly as a noted scholar and respected authority within the modern Muslim community. Qaradawi, for his part, knew an opportunity when he saw it and proceeded to use his newfound star-power in the London political scene to pedal his particular brand of Islamic racism and bigotry as the next hip thing. Livingstone (or, Red Ken, as he's often called for his communist flirtations) bought into the radical Islamic rhetoric completely, resulting in Livingstone denouncing criticisms of Qaradawi's published (and vile) utterances as "a conspiracy by Jewish Zionists to make Islamists look bad" (as if they need any help in that department) -- the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, which describes Jews as "rats" on its website and is a staunch supporter of Qaradawi, Palestinian suicide bombers and Livingstone, states that Livingstone must be supported against "this vicious attack by our Zionist enemies… Ken Livingstone is a faithful and tireless friend of Muslims. And now the Zionists are closing in for the kill – what will Muslims do?"

What will Muslims do, indeed.

Melanie Phillips writes in Front Page Magazine that the real embarrassment of the Ken Livingstone affair is how "Britain's 280,000 Jews are now utterly disposable, to be traduced and abused to buy 1.8 million Muslim votes" as the British Left grovels before Muslim prejudice and Islamic terror to stay in power. She goes on to describe, on her own website, the new anti-Jew bias this way: "Instead of Jews being demonized, the Jewish state is demonised. Israel, the one democracy in the Middle East, is now viewed with a loathing that is never applied to Arab dictatorships . . . the very worst is automatically believed of people who normally tell the truth, while claims made by those who have told demonstrable lies are reported as proven fact . . . the result is that it seems the Jews alone are obliged not to defend themselves but to submit passively to mass murder."

The French paper, Le Monde, celebrated the new fashion of Jew-bashing with its 2002 article titled: "Israel-Palestine: The Cancer" . . . three guesses as to what they consider "the cancer": "One is hard pressed to imagine that a nation of fugitives, descended of the people persecuted longest in the history of humanity, having been subjected to the worst humiliations and the deepest contempt, should be able to transform itself in two generations into a dominating and self-assured people and, with the exception of an admirable minority, a contemptuous people taking satisfaction in humiliating others."

Whew -- that's a lot of bile to spit out of only one mouth, and perhaps that's why it took three French journalists to write the article. The three authors also go on to laughably state that the Palestinians have abandoned the PLO charter of the principal of eliminating Israel, while just today, it's been reported that Ahmad Jabari, a senior Hamas leader, declared "The jihad and the resistance are the only ways to liberate our homeland, not negotiations and agreements”; meanwhile, Egyptian authorities said they had uncovered a tunnel stashed with Hamas weapons on the southern Gaza border, and Palestinians are gleefully torching empty Jewish synagogues as the security situation in Israeli evacuated Gaza rapidly deteriorates, with six Gazans killed and 89 injured due to internal violence. But despite Le Monde's claims that the Palestinians have "abandoned" the PLO charter of eliminating Israel, Hamas leader Mahmoud Zehar insisted his group would not disarm: "We are not going to rest until we raise the flag of Islam over the minarets of Jerusalem."

It sounds more like stalking than abandonment.

The UK's The Guardian has equated Israel with al Qaeda, the Evening Standard equated Israel with the Taliban in Afghanistan, while Robert Fisk, the Independent's Middle East correspondent, stated that the White House has fallen into the hands of the Jews: "The Perles and the Wolfowitzes and the Cohens . . . (the) very sinister people hovering around Bush."

And with the increased web of media interconnectedness across the globe, the European anti-Israel / anti-Jew rhetoric has begun its seep into American media and American politics.

*****Next: "Those Darn Jews: Part 2"

OFF TOPIC:
Blame Bush! is on a roll. Check out his post-hurricane satire. "Bush Tours New Orleans, Hides 10,000 Bodies" and "What's Bush's Angle?" are classics.

STUPID PEOPLE TRICKS:
Chicago's City Council votes to withdraw all our troops from Iraq. Alderman Bernard Stone channels MoveOn.org: "Do you think we can make the citizens of Iraq accept democracy by having our troops killed in the roads?" he said. "We're not supporting our troops by having them killed."

Nice employment of emotion over reason, Mr. Stone. I'm sure Michael Moore has a spot for you in Fahrenheit 9/11 and 7/8ths . . .

One of the few voices of sanity on the council, Alderman James Balcer, voted against the resolution, saying he was demoralized by anti-war sentiment while serving as a Marine in Vietnam and didn't want the same thing to happen to today's military, no matter how caring and compassionate the terms in which the anti-war crowd frames their demands (there's also the niggling little matter of millions of Vietnamese perishing in forced marches or fleeing their country in rafts and small boats after Americans evacuated under pressure from the liberal American media and the anti-war organizations, not to mention the horrible treatment of U.S. servicemen by the anti-war citizenry upon their return to the U.S. -- because, you know, Vietnam was "an unjust war" and who cares about the natives, anyway?).

"I know everyone in this council wants our troops home," said Balcer. "But I can tell you this (resolution) does not help our troops, nor does it help the war on terror." He followed his "no" vote during the roll call with a loud "Semper Fi!"

Posted by at 4:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I want to point you to the latest IMAO Podcast, which features yours truly in a spoken-word piece I wrote especially for this week's time-travel theme Podcast.

The IMAO Podcast is a weekly political-comedy production, performed and produced by the members of IMAO.us -- you'll want to check them out, if you haven't already discovered their irreverent approach to life and politics.

Posted by at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

In a move that has purportedly surprised gay organizations across the country (though not anybody else), Arnold Schwarzenegger has stated that he will veto the latest end-run in the California Legislature by gay-agenda activists determined to push a sexual-identity based society upon the majority of California's citizenry, even though over 61% of the citizenry clearly expressed back in 2000, with Proposition 22, that they preferred the current heteronormative model, thank you anyway.

And while a new poll, released last weekend, shows that California voters are divided nearly even on the issue of same-sex marriage (polls being what they are), Schwarzenegger's press office announced that the Governator believes the legislature has no business attempting to circumvent the will of the people or the due process of the judiciary, as the issue of same-sex marriage is slowly heading toward the California Supreme Court, and will undoubtedly go to the U.S. Supreme Court from there.

The text of Prop 22 reads “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California” -- and while we can have debates over the right or wrong of the definition of marriage so espoused (and the issue of the federal government recognizing relationships in the first place), it really is unheard of for a legislative body, whose sole purpose is to represent its people, to move so blatantly against the will of its own people in a bid to reorganize a social structure via fiat.

I believe this would be considered "an unjust or excessive exercise of power", which is the definition of oppression. Funny, that -- how the side that claims it's being oppressed via the marriage-thingy so willingly pushes to use its legislative influence (in the form of gay California Assemblyman Mark Leno) to force a social change that benefits only itself.

While gay organizations delight in touting the Gay Every Day ethos as a Civil Rights issue, there's actually a very spirited debate among the actual beneficiaries of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as to whether indulging in a homosexual lifestyle has more to do with personal preferences than with innate rights, civil or otherwise.

There is presently scant scientific support for a genetic trigger for homosexuality, despite decades of painstaking research -- which, of course, doesn't stop the politicos from declaring that the evidence is incontrovertible, much the way they do with global warming. There's a lot of maybe's and could-be's tossed about by researchers and gay groups eager to convince a skeptical population that "really, it's not voluntary -- we're born this way," but researchers themselves even admit to a need for a far deeper understanding of what sexual orientation is in the first place before they can even begin to determine where it comes from -- which is why it's disturbing when a state legislative body takes it upon itself to leapfrog past hard science and decide for itself that homosexuality is a biological characteristic rather than the behavioral option it may very well be . . . based on their feelings ("Do what we know is in our hearts," said the bill's sponsor, San Francisco Democrat Mark Leno).

When an identical twin study shows that if one twin is gay, then the other has a 52% chance of being gay as well, this is trumpeted as proof of a biological equation to homosexuality. Yet, as one pundit so cleverly pointed out, try telling an Asian woman that one of her identical twin children has only a 52% chance of being Asian like the other, and she'd laugh you right out of the room . . . and with good reason. Tendencies and predilections are not evidence of a biological blueprint, and as such, do not require legal protection, minority status or the usurpation of a legislative body, and this is where the Anti-Choice crowd must confront their own demons, because they can hardly continue to use tar and feathers as political weapons should they be required to accede to the very real probability that maybe gay men and women just like to be gay.

Not that there's anything wrong with . . . oh, never mind.

Look, I obviously have nothing against homosexuality, as I very much enjoy my own gay life with my very own gay boyfriend and our deepening circle of heteronormative friends, but I believe it's important for gay men and woman to harbor no compunctions against admitting that being gay is our choice to pursue, and not some twist of fate over which we have no control. The entire "coming out" process is actually the process in which a man or woman commits to a firm decision that what they want is a life that will make them personally happy as opposed to socially popular. Choosing personal fulfillment over social tradition, then claiming that somehow your biology trumped you when you weren't looking, seems disingenuous at best, and outright deceptive at most.

Coming Out requires a level of personal responsibility that has been abandoned since the advent of biology politics, and I do wonder if, by attempting to remove any and all consequences from what can only be considered socially revolutionary behavior, we're dooming present and future generations of gay men and women to lives half lived, or, lives in which they follow some fantasy of genetic pre-destiny rather than personal responsibility (and we wonder why disease rates in the homosexual population just keep going and going and . . . ).

In mythologies across the board (Western/Greek mythology, especially) there's a point where the hero or the heroine of the tale is confronted with a choice he or she has to make, and it's usually a difficult choice, fraught with peril and involving intense personal sacrifice. But once the choice is made, the task faced and the sacrifice accepted, the reward is a deep enrichment of character and the attainment of a much wiser and broader happiness than had existed beforehand (though often tinged with a subsequent loss of innocence or the relinquishment of a deeply cherished belief).

Gay advocates delight in pointing out examples of lauded gay artists and thinkers of the past who have contributed so much to our contemporary ideas of who we are as a culture and a society, yet these same advocates proceed to steadfastly ignore that the very reason the Michelangelos, Tennessee Williams's and Willa Cathers of the time produced works of art that were deeply influential and near stunning in the depth and breadth of human experience portrayed was precisely because each of the artists faced their options, made their choice and lived with it.

I mean, that's why it's the road less travelled, and not the super-frickin-highway.

The more rational approach to human sexuality, it seems, would be to stop biologizing it altogether. There are researchers who argue that the brain develops as part of a social system and that early social learning is likely more powerful an influence on the development of our sexuality than genetics ever could be. The course of research on human sexuality has long been shaped by the current of cultural attitudes and the shifting of ideological trends, unsurprisingly resulting in support for those same attitudes and ideologies -- which is plainly evidenced in much of our current sexual research. Adult bisexuality, homosexuality and heterosexuality are more than likely three fully natural behaviors that are variations on the same theme, yet sex researchers (and gay advocates) have chosen to push a "biology as the main determinant of sexual orientation" meme rather than recognize a more flexible view of sexuality, a flexibility which allows for behavioral choice and encourages tolerance, but doesn't condemn a social model that may value and reward one type of socio-sexual behavior over another.

And this is the crux of the gay-marriage debate, the "How dare you value your relationship more highly than you value mine!" . . . but society does value heterosexual relationships more, and it's undeniably because of heterosexuality's instinctually streamlined approach to procreation and child-rearing. Can same-sex couples procreate and raise children? Well, yes, of course -- but through a much more convoluted process, which DNA, in its waste no time, take no prisoners characteristic, eschews (the more religiously inclined among us interpret this eschewment as abhoration, hence the biblical "abomination" that gets bandied about).

Realistically, the best way to end the entire marriage argument is to remove the government from the business of relationship recognition (which I, personally, am all for). As marriage has been traditionally considered a ceremony with deeply religious underpinnings (which explains the mainstream resistance to gay marriage), there's still yet a good deal of validity to the points being made by same-sex marriage advocates about the unequal treatment of same-sex couples under the auspices of government. We do have Domestic Partnerships, Civil Unions and opportunities under contract law which afford same-sex couples the same opportunities for legal recognition as heterosexual couples, but our Federal Government is not supposed to take sides in religious matters or religious customs, but that's precisely what they've done by rewarding heterosexual marriages with federally funded and federally protected benefits, creating the Pandora's box with which we're now presently faced (and the very nature of a Pandora's box is the you don't know what you've unleashed until it's too late).

Hooray, Federal Government.

While our culture has made impressive strides towards social liberalism and personal freedom, a lot of gay lefties yet insist upon equating their own contemporary battle against social traditions with the black American civil rights movement, but a quick comparison of this and this only reveals the intellectual bankruptcy of such a correlation. The language of victimhood is not relevant to the same-sex marriage debate, as gay men and women may encounter social disapproval for their lifestyle choices, but very little in the way of widespread (note: I said "widespread") persecution (and absolutely nothing like it was for black Americans up until the 60's).

In a perfect world, the federal government would cease validating relationships altogether, perhaps offering domestic partnership benefits to all its partnered employees (though I admit I have a problem with the government using tax money to provide for workers' spouses and families), and allow private businesses the option to offer domestic partnership benefits should they so choose. This would afford businesses and institutions the ability to attract qualified gay employees through the extension of partnership benefits, it would remove the Federal Government from our personal relationships (privacy advocates, rejoice!) and it would force heterosexual and homosexual partners alike to care and provide for one another through deliberate, binding commitments via the legal system rather than lazily shrugging off the future and letting the government take charge (the number of couples I talk to who don't even have basic wills drawn up astounds me).

Simon LeVay, the gay researcher whose studies first provided the biology-queens with the script for their "I was born this way!" production, had this to say about the movement towards biologizing homosexuality: "No one can really prove that the Freudian theory of sexual orientation is wrong. There's a bunch of possibilities . . . (but) there is no question that people who think sexuality is inborn are, in general, much better disposed towards gay people and gay rights than people who think it's some kind of lifestyle choice," which leads us back to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the California Assembly and Proposition 22.

Homosexuality in the United States is increasingly portrayed as something other than the sexual option it may very well be (a fully natural option, but an option nonetheless), drawing heavily on LeVay's self-serving principle that the perception of an inborn sexuality is beneficial for the gay-left's stab at social re-engineering, lack of hard evidence be damned. But this is a fundamentally dishonest argument, and I'm surprised and disappointed at the willingness of academia, the mainstream media and gay members of state and federal legislative and judicial bodies to revamp long-standing social structures out of a desire to change what they've concluded is an oppressive Dead White Man's culture. And when you get right down to it, this, really, seems to be what it's all about -- the far left (incorporating a majority of the gay population) abhors contemporary Western culture, so there's a push in academic and media circles to reinvent it entirely by removing the traditional social foundations upon which it's built (for example: heterosexual marriage). And when those who value the structures upon which our present society has been built speak out against such a dismantling, they're branded as alarmists, extremists, haters and bigots for refusing to drink the kool-aid of gay rhetoric masquerading as science (much like Intelligent Design pretends to be more than religious philosophy in new clothes).

And this is the unenviable position in which Governor Schwarzenegger finds himself -- damned if he does, damned if he doesn't. But the gay marriage bill passed by the California legislature deserves a veto, as it's little more than social engineering by a legislative body unmoored to the will of the people it claims to represent. Gay Marriage cannot be defined as a Civil Right when homosexuality has yet to be proven to be anything beyond a natural behavioral preference, and should the government take it upon itself to revise the concept of marriage to include same-sex couples based only upon what's "in their hearts" rather than the actual merits to the debate, then we'll be the unfortunate recipients of an emotionally driven Congress, funded by ever increasing tax monies ("We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good," says Senator Clinton) and ruling by feel-good policies that incorporate the very latest in fashionable social trends.

*hmph* . . . no thanks.

Hell, if even the Mormon Church could change the behavior of its adherents to better fit within the accepted legal parameters of traditional marriage, then why are our legislators rushing off all half-cocked and fully-baked to change the accepted parameters of marriage to better fit gay behavior?

ADDENDUM:
A classic example of political/social views leading researchers to a 'preferred' result: "Sexism May Shorten Men's Lives"

Posted by at 1:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

From a Reuters article titled "FEMA Accused of Censorship": "When U.S. officials asked the media not to take pictures of those killed by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, they were censoring a key part of the disaster story, free speech watchdogs said on Wednesday."

Newspaper reporters are up in arms, shrieking about the impossibility of writing about the disaster without splashing photos of floating corpses and bloated bodies across their front pages, but Mark Tapscott, a former editor at the Washington Times newspaper, states that "Nobody wants to wake up in the morning and see their dead uncle on the front page. That's just common decency." He goes on to say, "Let's not make a common decency issue into a censorship issue."

In an e-mail explaining the request that photographers not indulge their more macabre tendencies, a FEMA spokeswoman wrote: "The recovery of victims is being treated with dignity and the utmost respect, and we have requested that no photographs of the deceased by made by the media."

Sounds right by me. I can't imagine any purpose beyond mere sensationalism that a bunch of photos of dead bodies might serve. I have no doubt that "Now how am I going to get my Pulitzer?!" is screaming through the heads of news photographers, but have these same photographers become so completely voyeuristic about the pain and suffering captured in their lenses that any notion of respect or dignity for the dead, and the families of the dead, is beyond their ability to comprehend?

Perhaps.

Take this, for example: "media monitors" are correlating this request by FEMA with the request by the Bush Administration that news media outlets not publish photos of flag draped coffins of the military dead being brought home from the war in Iraq. A stink, a hue, a cry and a major hissy fit were raised by the media when the Bush Administration made that request back in 2004, and the media photographers are now resurrecting the issue in a bizarre attempt to make both of these common sense requests for behavioral decency and situational solemnity examples of their own cruel victimization by a big, bad government.

As if.

It's strange to me that media photographers, and leftist propagandists in general, see a "no pictures policy" as an attempt by governmental organizations to shield themselves from criticism rather than the standard of public decency it actually is. Mona Charon, writing for Townhall back in 2004, had this to say about the Flag Draped Coffins issue: "Some members of the press cover every death in combat as if it represents a defeat for the nation. They suggest that if men are dying, there must be a problem with the policy. And they summon pity instead of respect in their reporting. That is probably what the Pentagon and the families of the dead are most eager to avoid. It is a deeply moving and grieving sight to see coffins lined up and to know that young men have been cut down for our sake. But the proper emotional response is sadness, honor and gratitude -- not pity or despair."

Ditto for FEMA. Reporters are eager to show the destruction, death and devastation in New Orleans in order to bring despair and encourage pity in the population at large, a despair that will, they hope (oh god, they hope), translate into defeat for Conservative candidates come the next election cycle -- "See? We told you that Republicans would bring you nothing but trouble!" But the members of FEMA are not interested in gloom-peddlers, as they have rescue work to do and recovery missions to accomplish that take precedence over wallowing in swamps of self-induced pity.

We have one of the freest media's on the planet, and even the photographers who have been denied access to FEMA recovery missions are saying that they'll just simply grab their own boats and take pictures anyway, thank you very much, which can hardly be considered censorship. Censorship is when your cameras are confiscated, your film destroyed and your physical well-being threatened should you continue down the path of taking pictures that an oppressive government has not condoned (see: China). So to turn a polite request from FEMA, and their unwillingness to allow recovery missions to become photographic opportunities for a vulturistic media, into the latest, "Help! I'm being oppressed!" routine is simply juvenile to the point of being absurd in its irrational perspective of the world.

Rebecca Daugherty, of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP), had this to say: "The notion that, when there's very little information from FEMA, that they would even spend the time to be concerned about whether the reporting effort is up to its standards of taste is simply mind-boggling . . . You cannot report on the disaster and give the public a realistic idea of how horrible it is if you don't see that there are bodies as well."

Thanks, but no thanks, Rebecca. There are a lot of horrible things in the world that I can easily comprehend without having my nose rubbed in your salacious obsession with dead bodies, and I'm sure that the families of these very dead can do without your Pulitzer-grubbing at their expense.

UPDATE:
Powerline has a quote from Glenn Reynolds that addresses this very issue: "The Press wants to show bodies from Katrina. It didn't want to show bodies, or jumpers, on 9/11, for fear that doing so would inflame the public. I can only conclude that this time around, the press thinks it's a good thing to inflame the public. What could the difference be?"

In a rather shocking twist of events, it appears that CNN has sued the government for access to dead bodies so it can film them. Scott Ott of Scrappleface published a sharp parody of the media: ""While we were petitioning the court to cover the recovery of corpses, some victims were hastily buried," said an unnamed CNN spokesman. "Our viewers have a right to see the decaying flesh of each and every citizen who perished from lack of federal government assistance. That's why the First Amendment exists."

ADDENDUM:
Sympathy from our allies in Germany. With friends like these . . .

ADDENDUM 2:
Congressman Tom Tancredo writes a blistering letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, urging him to bypass Louisiana officials entirely with the federal aid slated to rebuild New Orleans and the surrounding Louisiana area, citing the incompetence and the history of corruption in Louisiana state and local New Orleans representatives and officials.

Posted by at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I don't usually pay much attention to Rush Limbaugh, but bloggers have been linking to some of the things he's saying in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and as I've been reading the transcripts, I have to admit to being a little surprised at just how lucid and rational he's being (rather than the over-the-top dramatics he usually employs). Take this, for example:

"If we go back to the highway bill and members of Congress would act as big-hearted as they're asking everybody else to act and say, "I'm going to cancel the pork project for my district and I'm going to send that money down to New Orleans for the relief effort." If every congressman would simply forgo the pork that is in that highway bill and send it for relief efforts, then that's something that would be decent and productive that the federal government could do. That would be the wise, proper allocation of resources, given the existing circumstances."

Yes, please. When we see the wreckage that's the Gulf Coast area (not just New Orleans), then each of us needs to write to our senators and congressional representatives and ask them to cut the bloat and "pork" from the latest highway and energy bills and use that money for rebuilding the southern states that have been hit so hard. The Washington Post claims that the new Highway Bill "contains a record 6,371 pet projects inserted by members of Congress from both parties" -- that's $24 billion dollars (and since the Highway Bill is spread out over five years, that would be nearly $5 billion dollars per year) that could, and should, be used for disaster relief now that it's so desperately needed.

We also have the upcoming debate regarding amnesty on illegal immigration under the guise of "guest worker visas" which, if approved, would make the billions spent on the Transportation Pork Bill look like spare change, and do we really have that kind of spare change just laying around any longer (especially when you consider the continued military operations geared towards reshaping the social structures of the Middle East, plus a vast voting constituency that's growing older and will demand more and more in medical aid and income supplementation)?

I think not.

Just Say No! to a congressional investigation of the federal response to Katrina. There's no such thing as an "independent" investigation of the frickin' government, and it will simply wind up costing us taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, with the only real results being face-time for grandstanding senators, as well as the creation of yet another government bureaucracy to replace the . . . well, government bureaucracies that performed so inefficiently.

Yes, FEMA wasn't so terrific at responding to the hurricane disaster, but is pushing FEMA into stand-alone status (again) the answer that we really need? If FEMA was lousy at dealing with a large-scale disaster here in the United States, shouldn't we just slash FEMA into nothingness and take the money that went into weighing it down with red-tape and bureaucracy and channel it directly into the hands of the States, instead?

*blink*

Though, I guess, when you stop to think of how pathetically the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana used their earmarked federal funds, it makes one pause before considering sending such states even more in the way of federal funding, doesn't it.

Let's not use Hurricane Katrina as an excuse to expand our present (and obviously) overgrown, unwieldy and mismanaged federal relief agencies. You want a faster response to natural disasters? Get the government agencies out of the way, since it was the private aid organizations and the military that moved in and swiftly helped rectify a situation that FEMA and Congress could only stand and gaze upon in dazed incomprehension.

ADDENDUM:
BTW: has anyone yet asked Hillary Clinton why she voted to fold FEMA into the Homeland Security Department if she thinks that FEMA was so great on its own?

For those who aren't inclined to be as obsessive about the linkage as moi, here's a (very) brief summary of the creation of the Homeland Security Department, which enfolded FEMA, along with 21 other federal agencies, into its warm bureaucratic embrace:

Originally crafted by a group of lawmakers led by Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks, President Bush had initially opposed a homeland security agency proposal until democratic lawmakers launched a probe into alleged intelligence lapses that allowed al-Qaeda militants to strike with hijacked airliners, killing more that 3,000 people . . . Democratic Senate Majority Leader at the time, Tom Daschle, stated for the record that "Creating a Homeland Security Department was a Democratic idea to begin with" (take that, oh "Homeland Security is Fascist Bushies' fault!" whiners), and though Hillary Clinton criticized the Homeland Security Bill for what she believed to be its lack of power to address critical infrastructure threats, she nevertheless voted for the bill -- the very same bill which placed (her now so precious) FEMA under the jurisdiction of the Homeland Security Department.

Which leads us to the events of the present, where Clinton, of course, plays it as if she had nothing to do with FEMA's present lack of independence and bureaucratic unwieldiness in the face of disaster. Note to the Clintanista: If your husband's independent FEMA was so wonderful, then why did you (yes, you -- there were only 9 senators who voted against the creation of the Homeland Security Department, and you weren't one of them) vote to take away its independence? If you stamp your feet and demand an investigation into the federal governments' response to Hurricane Katrina, then I want the investigation to include a public hearing about all the current senators who voted to strip FEMA of its independence in the first place . . .

#*@! Senators. No wonder people rarely elect them to the presidency.

Posted by at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

PowerLine is posting this excerpt from a New York Post article: "Sean Penn's Hurricane Katrina rescue boat just wasn't sound enough to help those in New Orleans. Penn had planned to rescue children waylaid by Katrina's flood waters, but apparently forgot to plug in a hole in the bottom of his vessel, which began filling with water seconds after its launch the other day, reports the Melbourne Herald Sun. The star was seen wearing what appeared to be a white flak jacket and frantically bailing water out with a red plastic cup. When the motor didn't start, Penn and his entourage — including a personal photographer — were forced to use paddles to propel themselves down a flooded street."

I think my favorite part is that he had a personal photographer along with him: "Here, take a picture of me reaching out to this drowning child . . . oh, crap, that angle is all wrong. No, don't pull the child in yet, you fool -- I need you to take another picture!" Oh, and the fact that he's the only one out of his "rescue group" with a flak jacket . . .

And there's more: "While telling viewers that the government was once again failing its citizens, one TV camera crew from MSNBC callously filmed a little girl crying to them for help. Then, after zooming in for a close-up of her tears, moved on, leaving her standing in the water, begging, “please help me.” Neither the crew nor Keith Olbermann, who aired the footage, saw the irony. To them, evidently, compassion and aid is the responsibility of the government and every other American citizen, but not that of the media folks."

And don't even get me started on Shepard Smith's very public and very embarrassing on-screen meltdown as he idiotically shoved a microphone into the face of everyone walking past while thoroughly ignoring their desperate pleas for water.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton does what liberals do best: call for a bureaucratic "investigation" into the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (because we all know how helpful the 9/11 commission turned out to be; I mean, for anything but furthering political careers). As if, somehow, without the government "investigating" itself, we as a nation would be unable to move forward in any way whatsoever.

Yeah, right.

And The National Debate has a few choice words to say to the Blame-Game media: "This week I see reporters literally grabbing victims off the street, putting them live on the air and asking them to opine about things they have no way of judging, then crediting those comments as insights. Rumors are being reported as fact at every turn. I mentioned earlier Matt Lauer's sudden realization that erroneous news reports about shootings in New Orleans were keeping rescue workers out of the area. I broke the story earlier today that Goodyear was keeping its airships out of the region based on these reports even though they could not confirm them."

He goes on to say: "Martin Savidge of NBC News reported that there were 10,000 people at the Convention Center. Soledad O'Brien reported there 50,000 people there. A National Guard spokesperson put the figure at 3,000. How can the viewer have confidence that any of this information is accurate?"

Exactly. The media is there looking for drama and tragedy-fueled photo-ops, otherwise they would have all immediately dropped their cameras and "objective" posturing and actually pitched in to help -- or at least stopped shoving microphones in everybody's faces.

Fat chance.

But the media's complete inability to do anything but gaze at its navel doesn't stop them from attempting to gaze in at someone else's navel, too. Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post has this entirely ludicrous thing to say: "Every city and town in Louisiana that wasn't blasted by the hurricane is full of evacuees. Then there are the tens of thousands in Texas and the multitudes scattered across neighboring states. Their host communities have the best of intentions, but many won't be able to stand the added drain on resources indefinitely. Where will these people go? Why wasn't there a plan? . . . George W. Bush told us time and again that our cities were threatened. Shouldn't he have ordered up a plan to get people out?"

What's that you say, Mr. Robinson? Order up a plan? -- "One complete evacuation of an entire destroyed metropolis to go! Hold the mustard, and extra pickles!"

Coo-coo ka choo.

Not to be outdone by the likes of Eugene-Come-Lately Robinson, Paul Krugman (*groan*) weighs in at the New York Times with a clownishly inept "attack" on both the Bush Administration and the military ("Two, two, two swipes in one!"), implying that a strange federal paralysis kept the administration from ordering the U.S.S. Bataan to assist in relief efforts, as if the captain and crew of the Bataan were simply twiddling their thumbs indifferently off the Louisiana coast while New Orleans sank into oblivion. However, it only takes a quick visit to the Bataan's website to see that Paul Krugman is a blithering idiot. He says: "the federal government's lethal ineptitude wasn't just a consequence of Mr. Bush's personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good" . . . thereby turning one of the worst natural disasters in the country's history into a Blame-Bush rant that, in its breathtakingly clueless rhetoric, neatly echoes South Park's classic "Blame Canada" ("It seems like every-thing's gone wrong / since Dub-ee-ya came along / Blame Dub-ee-ya! Blame Dub-ee-ya!").

I swear, it's like nearly every print and television journalist (not to mention the Hollywood media whores, who pretend to be smart or courageous for a living) has gone stark raving mad.

UPDATE:
A curiously novel method of hurricane relief fund-raising . . .

UNRELATED BUT REALLY DISTURBING:
"A French media watchdog said Tuesday that information provided by Internet powerhouse Yahoo Inc. helped Chinese authorities convict and jail a journalist who had written an e-mail about press restrictions . . . Reporters Without Borders said in a statement, "How far will (Yahoo!) go to please Beijing?

"Just last month, Yahoo paid $1 billion for a 40 percent stake in China's biggest online commerce firm, Alibaba.com."

SPANKED:
A former Air Force logistics officer clarifies a few things for "the idiots" in the Left Wing Media -- my favorite example: "4. We do not yet have teleporter nor replicator technology like you saw on "Star Trek" in college between hookah hits and waiting to pick up your worthless communications degree while the grownups actually engaged in the recovery effort today were studying engineering."

Ouch!

Posted by at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Thankfully, a note of sanity in a sea of ill-informed blather: "FEMA is reporting that 90% of the New Orleans infrastructure is gone. 300,000 people stayed behind, not heeding warnings to evacuate. To blame the resultant chaos in the immediate aftermath on the Bushies is to argue implicitly that you expect your federal government to act as a surrogate parent, not as a smaller, hands off federal entity that defers power to local governments . . . to be clear: I’m not saying the feds shouldn’t doing everything they can to help; but what I am saying is that too many people seem to think they have magic powers, and that their failure to have all the problems in New Orleans solved by now—in the absence of an infrastructure on which to operate—is an institutional failing rather than an obvious certainty of terrestrial physics."

I've been a little surprised at the haste with which analysts and pundits have rushed in to criticize the federal government and federal relief agencies. This was a natural disaster, not some game of dodgeball -- roads have been washed away, the main interstate into New Orleans is shattered, and the outlying areas have also been severely damaged and need attention, as well. There's this strange obsession about New Orleans only, as if the storm occurred locally and nobody else needs help -- relief agencies are spread across Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, but the news agencies are only reporting on New Orleans, which makes it seems as though the delay in getting people out of that particular city is just sluggishness on the part of the state and federal agencies rather than the sad fact that these agencies are completely overwhelmed by the magnitude of the damage to the entire Gulf Coast region (not just New Orleans).

And I am so frickin' pissed at the Congressional Black Caucus. To suggest (no, scratch that -- they came right out and said it!) that the people in New Orleans are being left to die because they are poor and black is a slap in the face to the several hundred thousand people who are already on the scene helping, and to the rest of the American population who have presently donated tens of millions of dollars in financial aid, food, clothing, water and medical supplies, and this is only days after the hurricane.

For all those who insist that nothing was done in preparation for the disaster, and that nobody thought in advance about what would be needed, here are excerpts from an August 29th AP article:

"As the Category 4 storm surged ashore just east of New Orleans on Monday, FEMA had medical teams, rescue squads and groups prepared to supply food and water poised in a semicircle around the city, said agency Director Michael Brown . . . Brown, in a telephone interview with The Associated Press, said the evacuation of the city and the general emergency response were working as planned in an exercise a year ago. "I was impressed with the evacuation, once it was ordered it was very smooth," he said.

"Also, the Forest Service, which is part of the department, has an incident command team that will coordinate with FEMA and the Red Cross."

There was a lot of preparedness on the part of federal agencies and relief organizations, yet despite the frequent statements that the magnitude of the disaster simply overwhelmed the organizations set in place to provide relief, the news media and race obsessed spokespeople insist that there was nothing in place, no relief intended and that poor black people were simply left to die, conveniently ignoring the fact that FEMA and other organizations had trained for this event, had people in place to help, but were horrifically outdone by the storm and its aftermath

Much of the south is suffering a blackout that won't end for weeks, with power outages across the entire state of Alabama, plus roads and bridges made impassable due to flooding and debris. Biloxi, Mississippi is near decimated, and Mississippi in general has suffered enormous damage -- Interstate 10 has been made impassable, seawalls have been washed away, numerous towns along the coast were heavily damaged (if not outright destroyed) and will take years to rebuild, the dead are still being counted and there are presently over 12,000 people housed in temporary shelters with nowhere left to return to.

So what's up with the New Orleans obsessed race-mongers? The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has nothing to do with race or politics, and everything to do with a disaster that has engulfed the southern coastal region. To focus purely on the plight of black people in New Orleans, while completely ignoring the very real suffering and misery of everyone else in the surrounding regions, is far more racist and bigoted than anything the Bush Administration could ever be accused of. Are poor black people in New Orleans the only ones who matter to the likes of Jesse Jackson? Let's have a little less race-baiting, blame-gaming and 20/20 hindsight, a lot less obsession over New Orleans as the only area of any concern whatsoever, and way more perspective on the overwhelming geographical magnitude of the hurricane's effect.

News flash for the media, the raving left and the extremists on the right -- Katrina didn't just damage New Orleans, and the political beliefs or skin color of the people affected shouldn't mean squat. We have a lot of work to do as a country, and a lot of damage across Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana to repair. Let's knock off the political posturing and blame-flailing and get down to actually helping people rebuild their towns, cities and lives.

I've personally recommended Americares in a previous post, which is delivering hundreds of thousands of dollars of antibiotics to the area, as well as truckloads of bottled water, but I also hear that The Salvation Army is doing terrific work.

ADDENDUM:
This is now the second major disaster that has happened under one president. I well think that George W. Bush may be remembered historically for the challenge of dealing with both a national security disaster and a horrific natural disaster, not to mention major international turmoil. How Katrina plays out in the next several years, regarding economic effects and the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast, will make or break his legacy. Here's hoping that it makes it, not because it personally concerns me as to whether President Bush is remembered fondly by historians, but because a positive legacy would mean that the United States citizenry were able to take a terrible natural disaster in stride, and come out swinging.

That's my hope.

ADDENDUM 2:
Remember when, during the Cold War, we had Civil Defense stockpiles around the country? Water barrels, food rations, medical kits, sanitation kits, radiation kits and other supplies -- there were also more than nineteen hundred 200 bed mobile hospitals stored around the country, similar to an army field hospital. With natural disasters, such as forest fires, floods, earthquakes and hurricanes, as well as recent fears of biological and more standard forms of terrorism, it only seems like common sense to begin establishing Civil Defense stockpiles again so that we have extra resources more readily available in times of regional or national crisis.

The American Red Cross alone had an estimated 200,000 people ready around the New Orleans area with food, water and other supplies, but they were completely overwhelmed. It would have helped greatly if the country had had stockpiles of additional and necessary food, water and emergency supplies, plus mobile hospitals, already existing in key geographical areas that could have been readily accessed and trucked (or helicoptered) in.

I'm just sayin . . .

UPDATE:
As long as New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is taking deflective potshots at the Federal Government for allegedly "not doing enough," I thought I'd pass on this photo, linked on The Drudge Report, which shows an entire lot full of school buses engulfed in flood waters. The caption on Drudge reads: "WHY DIDN'T YOU DEPLOY THE BUSES DURING THE MANDATORY EVACUATION, MAYOR?"

Why, indeed. For a man who's "blasting" President Bush and allegedly "spitting fury" at the White House, Ray Nagin certainly has a lot of responsibility to shoulder for the vast amount of people still left in New Orleans when Katrina hit, and I believe that this is why he's yelling so loudly to the press about the Federal Government -- "No, don't look at that flooded parking lot full of empty buses that could have been used to evacuate the population, listen to what I have to say about George Bush . . ."

Posted by at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

If we're to learn anything from Hurricane Katrina, it's that we're far too reliant on one source of energy. With 90% of our oil production facilities damaged and/or lost to the storm, we're facing a nationwide shortage of fuel that's simply staggering in its absurdity.

I vote that President Bush declare a national emergency and authorize new nuclear power plants across the country. For instance, take a look at what this small village in Alaska is doing: "The small town of Galena, Alaska, is tired of paying 28 cents/kwh for its electricity, which is three times the national average. Today, Galena "is powered by generators burning diesel that is barged in during the Yukon River's ice-free months," according to Reuters. But Toshiba, which designs a small nuclear reactor named 4S (for "Super Safe, Small, & Simple"), is offering a free reactor to the 700-person village . . . Galena will only pay for operating costs, driving down the price of electricity to less than 10 cents/kwh. The 4S is a sodium-cooled fast spectrum reactor -- a low-pressure, self-cooling reactor. It will generate power for 30 years before refueling . . . "

After all, Finland has four nuclear power plants which supply 27% of the country's power, with a fifth plant currently being built. They're among the world's most efficient nuclear power plants (with an average capacity of 94%), and "are remarkable in the extent to which they have been updated since they were built."

Because of the cold climate in Finland, their economy consumes a lot of energy. In the absence of indigenous oil, coal and natural gas resources, a hydropower industry that was abandoned in the 60's for its lack of efficiency, and a dearth of real wind power, the Minister of Trade and Industry, Ms Sinikka Mönkäre, who is a Social Democrat, argued for the building of the fifth nuclear power plant -- another consideration was that an additional nuclear plant would assist Finland in meeting its stringent climate commitments under the Kyoto protocol (and oh, that must send environmentalists into a tizzy).

And as of June, 2005, there were a total of 204 nuclear power plants in Europe, with six more under construction (France alone has 59 nuclear power plants, with 78% of their energy generated from nuclear, while also winning a recent bid to host a 10 billion-euro experimental nuclear fusion reactor project, partnering with The European Union, the United States, Russia, Japan, South Korea and China -- nuclear fusion is seen as a cleaner approach to power production than nuclear fission and fossil fuels.). Even after renouncing nuclear power in 2000, Germany still has 17 nuclear power plants generating over 1/3 of their energy, while Belgium, France, Russia and the UK chemically reprocess their spent nuclear fuel rods for further use ( with Japan building its own nuclear reprocessing plant). The Carter administration ceased reprocessing efforts here in the States in the 70's in some vain hope that the rest of the world would follow suit and nuclear proliferation would magically cease -- which didn't happen. Attempts, since then, to restart our nuclear reprocessing capabilities have met with fierce resistance from environmental organizations, who have also fiercely resisted the building of additional oil refineries and the drilling for oil in Alaska -- moves which would have lessened the current negative economic impact of Hurricane Katrina.

We now have lines at gas stations, shortage fears and prices skyrocketing, with at least one airline (or even more) on the brink of collapse. Even the President has publicly urged people not to buy gas unless they absolutely have to, while also promising to release oil from the strategic reserves, which won't have much impact in the short term as there aren't enough functioning refineries to process the crude oil into usable fuel (have I mentioned environmentalists).

Hurricane Katrina has shown all but those in denial that we as Americans need to put our priorities in order. If we'd gone ahead and just drilled for oil in Alaska, as well as continued to construct (as well as modify) nuclear power plants, we wouldn't be in the energy mess we're in now. We have to be serious about our energy options, and recognize the limitations of both solar (have to have enough consistent sunshine) and wind power (the geography has to be perfect for continuous winds) for a chugging economy that's only on the increase. Besides, wind farms kill birds and spoil the lovely Cape Cod views, so perhaps wind turbines are out of fashion with the latest Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. style liberal.

So how about some nice, clean nuclear energy? If it's good enough for France, Finland, Belgium, the UK, Sweden, Russia, Japan, China and more, then why are we still stuck in our 1979 post-"Three Mile Island" paranoia? It's been 25 years since, and stunning advances have been made in both safety and efficiency in the nuclear power fields. Yes, Chernobyl was a disaster, but so was the entire Soviet economy at the time, which was more a contributor to the failures of its power plant than any inherent danger in nuclear power in and of its own.

And for heaven's sake, let's get back to reprocessing our own spent fuel rods instead of just burying them under a mountain!

Posted by at 2:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)