Saturday, July 26, 2008

The Audacity of Dissent

This is what senator and presidential nominee John Kerry said about dissent in one of his speeches, justifying his pathetic use of a war time conflict to propel his political career.

Dissenters are not always right, but it is always a warning sign when they are accused of unpatriotic sentiments by politicians seeking a safe harbor from debate, from accountability, or from the simple truth. - Sen. John Kerry
Of course you cannot fault those who have a certain 'ideology', for enthusiastically supporting that ideology. I sure would hope that the “Dissent is Patriotic” party would never attempt to deny that patriotic right within their own bureacratic process.


Oh, wait a minute. That is exactly what they just did.

Democrats Banish Clinton Delegate Who is Now Undecided

So much for the enfranchisement of free thinking and free voting. I'm sure their hearts and feelings were well placed for the overall benefit of the proletariat.

Monday, July 21, 2008

Old Spicy and Classic

I finally ran out of the twin-bottle set of Old Spice I have been nursing for the last five years.


I am not talking about the blasphemous new Gay Spice, using the Old Spice label for unthinkable new odors.

I saunter over to the men's shaving supplies and I am promptly denied and dismayed. The only thing with after-shave written on it, is Aqua-Velva, which I cannot stand. I have never seen a sorrier selection of metro-sexual white flags of male surrender in my life.

None of this stuff was designed by men or women who want men to feel like men and go after women.

All of it was designed by women and (heh) 'men', who want the whole population of men to feel like women, and go after the remaining men.

It's no longer after-shave. It's now called post-shave skin balm. There are bottles of Nair hair depilatory not just for 'men' but exclusively for 'black men'. There is acne spot repair, eye-rescue formula and oatmeal exfoliating facial scrub.

In my house, the facial scrub is a industrial sized pump of Lava soap,




followed by a generous wad of engine degreaser.




They usually contain a dose of solvent just shy of the threshold of ignition. This permits immediate approach towards the propane grill or lighting that big cigar without a big surprise.




Axe body spray.. give me a break. In my house, the body spray is the leftover overspray of the pressure washer, loaded with chlorine bleach deck cleaner, or the spatter of residual hornet killer, which I'm too lazy to wash off.

Men like rocks, fuel, caustic chemicals that kill dirt and kill insects. We like turpentine, acetone, naptha and old style Old Spice. We like pumice in the soap to scrub off our labors. We like pumice in the grill, to catch all that heart-healthy fat, oozing from our burgers, convert it into carbon credits and re-deposit them on the burgers. We like fuel in the grill, fuel in the hand cleaner and fuel in the Old Spice bottle, scented like classic Old Spice.

This is the closest we get to the borderline of our significant others, only because it can cover the scent of Lava, mineral spirits, barb-e-que rub and cigar smoke. There's also a simple ship on the bottle, not a graphic of some guy with his package bulging through a set of spray-on leotards.

Damn. I considered buying a bottle of rubbing alcohol, to hold me over.

During the same shopping session, I also bought a package of Hanes premium white crew-neck tagless T-shirts. I get the package home and notice something weird. The bag the shirts come in is re-sealable by a zip-lock plastic rib. This is a 'feature', which they are careful to brag about in writing.

Now, I don't know about my readers, but I have a habit of ripping the underwear bag open with my teeth and tossing the ones I don't want to use right away into the drawer. I don't need to treat my underwear like a bag of frozen shrimp. I don't need to re-seal my unused portion of underwear, to preserve the freshness.

"Gee Honey.. While you're pulling out those frozen waffles, could you grab me a fresh set of briefs ?"
All of the new age men are evacuating Mars, moving into their girlfriends' apartments on Venus and driving them into the stone age by getting stoned and aging. We should be re-shaping Mars into a war planet again. Meanwhile, I will look for some classic Old Spice and chuck the re-sealable bag from my new underwear.

More Editing from the Ministry of Truth

I guess the New York Times thought that your rational sensibilities would not be properly massaged, if you actually read both sides of an issue. They rejected Senator McCains Iraq editorial, because it did not meet certain NYT standards of bias.

Here is McCains letter, followed by Obama's. Thanks to the new media, you can decide. Be careful not to feel too uncomfortable that your pillow wasn't fluffed by the Times.

John McCain on the Iraq War


In January 2007, when General David Petraeus took command in Iraq, he called the situation “hard” but not “hopeless.” Today, 18 months later, violence has fallen by up to 80% to the lowest levels in four years, and Sunni and Shiite terrorists are reeling from a string of defeats. The situation now is full of hope, but considerable hard work remains to consolidate our fragile gains.

Progress has been due primarily to an increase in the number of troops and a change in their strategy. I was an early advocate of the surge at a time when it had few supporters in Washington. Senator Barack Obama was an equally vocal opponent. "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there,” he said on January 10, 2007. “In fact, I think it will do the reverse."

Now Senator Obama has been forced to acknowledge that “our troops have performed brilliantly in lowering the level of violence.” But he still denies that any political progress has resulted.

Perhaps he is unaware that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has recently certified that, as one news article put it, “Iraq has met all but three of 18 original benchmarks set by Congress last year to measure security, political and economic progress.” Even more heartening has been progress that’s not measured by the benchmarks. More than 90,000 Iraqis, many of them Sunnis who once fought against the government, have signed up as Sons of Iraq to fight against the terrorists. Nor do they measure Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s new-found willingness to crack down on Shiite extremists in Basra and Sadr City—actions that have done much to dispel suspicions of sectarianism.

The success of the surge has not changed Senator Obama’s determination to pull out all of our combat troops. All that has changed is his rationale. In a New York Times op-ed and a speech this week, he offered his “plan for Iraq” in advance of his first “fact finding” trip to that country in more than three years. It consisted of the same old proposal to pull all of our troops out within 16 months. In 2007 he wanted to withdraw because he thought the war was lost. If we had taken his advice, it would have been. Now he wants to withdraw because he thinks Iraqis no longer need our assistance.

To make this point, he mangles the evidence. He makes it sound as if Prime Minister Maliki has endorsed the Obama timetable, when all he has said is that he would like a plan for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops at some unspecified point in the future.

Senator Obama is also misleading on the Iraqi military's readiness. The Iraqi Army will be equipped and trained by the middle of next year, but this does not, as Senator Obama suggests, mean that they will then be ready to secure their country without a good deal of help. The Iraqi Air Force, for one, still lags behind, and no modern army can operate without air cover. The Iraqis are also still learning how to conduct planning, logistics, command and control, communications, and other complicated functions needed to support frontline troops.

No one favors a permanent U.S. presence, as Senator Obama charges. A partial withdrawal has already occurred with the departure of five “surge” brigades, and more withdrawals can take place as the security situation improves. As we draw down in Iraq, we can beef up our presence on other battlefields, such as Afghanistan, without fear of leaving a failed state behind. I have said that I expect to welcome home most of our troops from Iraq by the end of my first term in office, in 2013.

But I have also said that any draw-downs must be based on a realistic assessment of conditions on the ground, not on an artificial timetable crafted for domestic political reasons. This is the crux of my disagreement with Senator Obama.

Senator Obama has said that he would consult our commanders on the ground and Iraqi leaders, but he did no such thing before releasing his “plan for Iraq.” Perhaps that’s because he doesn’t want to hear what they have to say. During the course of eight visits to Iraq, I have heard many times from our troops what Major General Jeffrey Hammond, commander of coalition forces in Baghdad, recently said: that leaving based on a timetable would be “very dangerous.”

The danger is that extremists supported by Al Qaeda and Iran could stage a comeback, as they have in the past when we’ve had too few troops in Iraq. Senator Obama seems to have learned nothing from recent history. I find it ironic that he is emulating the worst mistake of the Bush administration by waving the “Mission Accomplished” banner prematurely.

I am also dismayed that he never talks about winning the war—only of ending it. But if we don’t win the war, our enemies will. A triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us. That is something I will not allow to happen as president. Instead I will continue implementing a proven counterinsurgency strategy not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan with the goal of creating stable, secure, self-sustaining democratic allies.




My Plan for Iraq by Barack Obama

The call by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki for a timetable for the removal of American troops from Iraq presents an enormous opportunity. We should seize this moment to begin the phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated, and that is needed for long-term success in Iraq and the security interests of the United States.

The differences on Iraq in this campaign are deep. Unlike Senator John McCain, I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president. I believed it was a grave mistake to allow ourselves to be distracted from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban by invading a country that posed no imminent threat and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Since then, more than 4,000 Americans have died and we have spent nearly $1 trillion. Our military is overstretched. Nearly every threat we face — from Afghanistan to Al Qaeda to Iran — has grown.

In the 18 months since President Bush announced the surge, our troops have performed heroically in bringing down the level of violence. New tactics have protected the Iraqi population, and the Sunni tribes have rejected Al Qaeda — greatly weakening its effectiveness.

But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true. The strain on our military has grown, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated and we’ve spent nearly $200 billion more in Iraq than we had budgeted. Iraq’s leaders have failed to invest tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues in rebuilding their own country, and they have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge.

The good news is that Iraq’s leaders want to take responsibility for their country by negotiating a timetable for the removal of American troops. Meanwhile, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, the American officer in charge of training Iraq’s security forces, estimates that the Iraqi Army and police will be ready to assume responsibility for security in 2009.

Only by redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis’ taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country. Instead of seizing the moment and encouraging Iraqis to step up, the Bush administration and Senator McCain are refusing to embrace this transition — despite their previous commitments to respect the will of Iraq’s sovereign government. They call any timetable for the removal of American troops “surrender,” even though we would be turning Iraq over to a sovereign Iraqi government.

But this is not a strategy for success — it is a strategy for staying that runs contrary to the will of the Iraqi people, the American people and the security interests of the United States. That is why, on my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war.

As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces. That would not be a precipitous withdrawal.

In carrying out this strategy, we would inevitably need to make tactical adjustments. As I have often said, I would consult with commanders on the ground and the Iraqi government to ensure that our troops were redeployed safely, and our interests protected. We would move them from secure areas first and volatile areas later. We would pursue a diplomatic offensive with every nation in the region on behalf of Iraq’s stability, and commit $2 billion to a new international effort to support Iraq’s refugees.

Ending the war is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven. Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently pointed out, we won’t have sufficient resources to finish the job in Afghanistan until we reduce our commitment to Iraq.

As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan. We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there. I would not hold our military, our resources and our foreign policy hostage to a misguided desire to maintain permanent bases in Iraq.

In this campaign, there are honest differences over Iraq, and we should discuss them with the thoroughness they deserve. Unlike Senator McCain, I would make it absolutely clear that we seek no presence in Iraq similar to our permanent bases in South Korea, and would redeploy our troops out of Iraq and focus on the broader security challenges that we face. But for far too long, those responsible for the greatest strategic blunder in the recent history of American foreign policy have ignored useful debate in favor of making false charges about flip-flops and surrender.

It’s not going to work this time. It’s time to end this war.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Awww Rats

Palestinians: Israel uses rats against J'lem Arabs


In the reports, Palestinians were quoted by the agency as saying that they had seen Israelis release herds of wild pigs, which later attacked them.



They were mistaken. Those were not herds of wild pigs, those were herds of captured Palestinian militants, released by liberal Israeli courts. They attacked the civilian populations, so the Israelis could be blamed. I can see why they would be mistaken for wild pigs.


But this is the first time that Palestinians have spoken of rats being used against them.


In 2007, the year of the Pig ended. Now it's 2008; the year of the Rat. Check it out. It's true! Don't blame the Israelis. Blame the Chinese. The evidence is far more compelling.

"Rats have become an Israeli weapon to displace and expel Arab residents of the occupied Old City of Jerusalem," Wafa reported under the title, "Settlers flood the Old City of Jerusalem with rats."

If it's not global warming, it must be the Jews. There is no possibility that the lifestyles of these people are creating a huge rat magnet. Walking around in pee stained undershirts and beating up your wives to the point where they can't sweep the garbage of the floors, is a sure way to invite new 'friends'. Besides, the city is one of all faiths. I wonder why the rats seem to only be a problem for the Arabs? Yes; that question was rhetorical.


"Over the past two months, dozens of settlers come to the alleyways and streets of the Old City carrying iron cages full of rats. They release the rats, which find shelter in open sewage systems."



Maybe the settlers just do not wan't all those Palestinian bred rats, making a run for the border of the new city of Jerusalem. They are just deporting them back to their 'homeland', for repatriation.


Wafa quoted unnamed Arab residents as saying that they had tried to eliminate the rats with various poisons, but to no avail.

If you build it, they will come. Well for Rats, the field of dreams is a pile of rubble, corpses, old garbage, shite and flies. One rat's meat is another rat's poision.


Israel's goal was to "increase the suffering of the [Arabs] in Jerusalem by turning their lives into a real tragedy and forcing them to evict their homes and leave the city," Hasan Khater, secretary-general of the Islamic-Christian Front in Jerusalem, was quoted as saying.

Yeah. The Palestinian authority has done nothing to turn the lives of these people into a tragedy, with their jihads and suicide bombers and hate campaigns. Israel's goal is to increase the suffering of the Arabs in Jerusalem, by exposing them to more Arabs.

Sunday, July 06, 2008

Galluping Conservative Schizophrenia

Gallup has American freedom defined in full statistical reality.

Gallup is a repectable polling organization. There is an enormous amount of information in this poll. The poll question is simple and unbiased. It is obviously designed to petition a person's basic, heartfelt position, instead of providing the desired opinion, by proxy intimidation.
What does the poll tell us?
It tells us that Americans put their optimum trust and complete faith in the institutions that have either made the country great, or keep the country safe.
The top dogs:
Americans want security. We have shed enough blood for it, to protect every freedom we enjoy. Apparently, the poll shows Americans have the greatest faith in the military and the police, in spite of the relentless media and judicial attack on these institutions, with fabricated venom like the Tawana Brawley case and the Haditha 'massacre'. Wow... As a statistical whole, in spite of Hollywood conspiracy theories, Americans can trust other fellow citizen Americans, who are well trained to control themselves, to act as civilized professionals. We can actually trust them to control Americans and non-Americans who are out of control. Who knew? (Except everyday Americans of course.)
With their vote for small business, Americans value freedom to engage in fair commerce. Everybody who knows this blog, knows I support big business, only when it continues to act in the interest of our freedom. The emergence of large Chinese government subsidized companies, has put crappy, unreliable products on our shelves, without competitive alternative. Large government seized energy interests in the Mideast and Latin America are buying political influcence in both our D and R camps. Together they are stifling and crippling our energy independence. This restricts our flexibility to produce and move forward. The most dangerous big businesses around the world now, are state monopolies. Yes. Government, hand-in-hand with business means long term danger.
Americans agree with me. Small business is great. Some of the big business is terrible. These big businesses would not be in this position, if they did not resemble big government. Some of the big business would not be in this position, if they did not work for, or influence big government to take our hard earned scratch, without competing to produce their product. Americans trust small business. And why shouldn't they? In its freedom to mature and grow. It has given us all that we have. Government driven big business and business driven big government, does not serve the interest of American freedom.
Our founders knew that freedom of religion was first. Americans are religious. That is why the founders put the right of religious expression, in the first amendment. People are free to practice their religion, as long as they do not violate the rights of individuals, like say a woman, who does not wish to have her face caved in, by some insecure Islamic male, with a desire to compensate for his microscopic manhood. Our founders knew that every individual must enjoy every freedom imaginable, not restricted by the very limited range of power given to the government over that freedom. Unlike the UK, we should view radical Islam as a form of government, embedded in a religion. This form of religion has NO place of legal authority in America.
Do you see a freedom theme here? Of course, you do. Of course you should. You are American. Unless you forgot, and became a David Souter or John Kerry 'world citizen'.

Fair to the Middle:

The president would be much higher on the list, somewhere around the military and the police, if he was not thinking about his legacy. He would be higher on the list, if he was thinking like the Commander-In-Chief. The man has American boys in the field. In his twilight presidency,he is floundering around with apologetic platitudes and indecisiveness; unwilling to show us the powerful president in a flight suit. Unwilling to address national security, to the public or deliver more hot Thanksgiving turkey to our troops.

President Bush is the executive of our laws; yet, he will not execute the laws regarding immigration. He has let the main stream media derail his presidency. He has let them define, then destroy his character. He has done this, without challenge. He has let them convince him of their fabricated truths, like global warming and carbon credits. George Bush is a flawed man. Hell; so am I. So are we all. The more power a man has, to affect real substantive change, instead of just talking about it, the more his character will be scrutinized for that ability. He is responsible both for effective and decisive action against terrorism and blundering inaction against the domestic threat of socialism.

Oh well. At least George Bush, President of the United States, is blowing away the Congress, in the eyes of the Americans polled by Gallup.

The SCOTUS is the definitive mixed bag of tricks. One day they are upholding the Constitution, the next day they are pruning it like a Bonsai, to bring it up to our 'modern standards'. So the court sits in the middle ground. With one or two conservative appointments, they could be enjoying military popularity. With one or two liberal appointments, they could be wallowing in the Congressional muck.


The Bottom Feeders:
The Gallup poll tells us that the depressing, relentless MSM narrative has only served to expose them as the drama queens they are. That is something to be proud and optimistic about. If this poll is to be believed, I think they will continue to sink, until they meet their friends, the Congress, at the bottom of the list. The Boston Globe left a 'free paper' on my driveway, in an effort to increase readership. I intend to call them to pick up their trash, or be fined by the police for throwing litter on my property. I encourage others to do the same. For many years now, the MSM has been an outrageous insult to democracy and free thought.
Why are HMO's where they are? Nobody really wishes to look at the medical system in terms of economics. They somehow feel, because it is a physical imperative, that it deserves a market dispensation unlike other free market driven products and services. They could not be more wrong. The HMO's are the business side of a struggling system, trying to provide a service, at a very low cost, in an environment which has been artificially driven to high prices and cost by actors that have no direct consumer connection to the services and the product. Medicare and Medicaid pay out their booty with little or no complaint, since they are not the patient. The government passes laws restricting providers, without consideration or recompense. Tort lawyers sue the system and extract money away from medical services, even when this activity is proven to be fraudulent or based on poor science. Insurance companies raise insurance rates, instead of aggressively pursuing cost reduction, or defending legal cases, since it is easier to pass the burden to the rate payers. All these forces drive the costs up and disconnect the money providers and recipients from the medical system. It exposes all to risk. In essence, we already have the facets of socialized medicine. It is the reason some of the big corporations want socialized medicine. It will make competition and competing innovation difficult or impossible. People do have faith in medicine itself and its providers, which is why the medical system is on the other side of the Gallup poll.

Note that the police are at the top of the poll, but criminal justice is at the bottom. I guess the public really does detest the duplicities, sloth, civil service stagnation and pandering to the ACLU, that defines our criminal and civil court system. Gee. We do not like criminals released to victimize civilization and tire the police, over and over, on technicalities and lenient sentencing. Gee. We do not like judges using obtuse, emotion driven judgement to override public referendum laws, approved by voters. Gee. We do not like judges, who pass sentences for DUI, bankruptcy, lewd behavior and the like, then get caught exhibiting those behaviors themselves. Gee. We do not like having to endure the lifetime appointments of these officials, watching them go slowly insane, with their institutionalized radicalism, spewing it all over us and our kin.

What can I say about Congress? People can detect a serious leadership vacuum when they see it. Congress is polluted with corruption, perversion, nepotism, graft and a general moral decay.
Normally, this would have the people of the founder's day, bringing torches, guillotines, rakes and fresh lumber to Capitol hill. When they are not on the take, they are immersed in sexual scandal. When they are not immersed in sexual scandal. they are superficially patching the issues of our day, with pathetic diversions and excuses, which violate the very laws they pass and swear to uphold. They are disconnected from reality, because they are too lazy to research any controversial topic, deeper than their media mouthpieces, or lobbyist sources, would like them to. They are grossly uninformed and incapable of rational thought and discourse. They are unsympathetic to their consituents. When they are not providing superficial legislative patches, they are embracing and advocating radical solutions, like global warming hysteria, ethanol mandates, bailouts and nationalization of refineries, without any conscience consideration of consequences. They are seriously and dangerously flawed. They have sunk to the bottom of the poll, at an all time low, weighted by the plumbum of their hubris. By the way, both of our presidential nominees this year, come from this 'wonderful' Congress.

An Unfortunate Omission:


I wish Gallup had included our current liberal University system, as a collective institution in the poll. I think the liberal universities are far worse than any public school. They probably take as much money (if not more) and deliver far more civic damage, to the concept of American freedom, than other institutions. They plant the seeds of dissent. By dissent, I do not mean the seeds of freedom or free speech or any of the bullshit paradigms, used by these sophists to mask their destructive behavior. I mean the seeds of mind control and the curtailing of freedom, by truncating debate and thought on their own campuses.

These institutions are polluting young minds, which are just learning to think and reason. They push their shabby theories of some fictitious form of socialism, which if given the right chance, will bring us to utopia. They incessantly push the soft racism of diversity and multiculturalism. They push for government power over all, to enforce their elitist ideals. These institutions, which should be burned to the ground and re-built, are injecting their untested and detestably unacceptable theories, in those young minds. All the civics and American history has been either omitted from the curriculum, or distorted as evil and unacceptable. It is seditious, ugly and may result in the end of our fragile democracy.



If Gallup is to be believed, Americans are still resisting this, even if it is on a collective, subconscience level. If we wake up from our slumber, connect the dots and fill in the paint-by-numbers canvas, things could look quite different, in November, then is speculated by the media.