Confessions of a Liberal Republican

We're all Cash Cows now....

2011-03-20T10:31:00.000-07:00

Well, the do-gooders have managed to ruin something else. My Second Life is infested with them, and all the other grifters, cons and peeps who have figured out that you can get *real* money out of it.

Every time I turn around these days, inworld, somebody has their grubby little paw out for money. Tip this, donate to that. It is hoped that I will slip 50 lindens to some person who does nothing more than greet me when I rez into a sim. I'm sorry....what?

Everybody has a pet cause and they *all* expect everyone they come in contact with to donate to it. I'm suspicious of all but a very few SL charities because you don't have a way to fact check the people collecting the money. They will promise you that every cent goes to whatever charity they are collecting for at the moment, but they are telling you this while their AV is wearing a 2000L (about $10 usd) couture gown and another 5000L worth of designer jewels. It just makes you wonder where the money really goes.

I went to a "charity" concert inworld today and was subjected to some woman lecturing me in a flat, midwestern accent, who obviously was speaking with no idea where she was going with it, didn't really know where she was, didn't know what instrument the act before her played, and then put up a graphic slide show of pathetic Japanese tsunami victims while she told us all why we should give 'til it hurts. Evidently she doesn't care that she's the umpteenth do-gooder to ask me for money for the cause du jour. I'm charitied out, ya'll.

Then there are the sim owners who harangue every patron in their sim to tip the venue....everybody wants a piece of that Linden Lab money pie, and average users are coming more and more to be seen as nothing more than a source of revenue. I'm sorry, if you want to own a money pit, don't expect me to pay for your dream. I have my own dreams and they are more realistic.

I've also noticed a disheartening trend in the music venues, i.e., musos who only come into SL to play for large fees and tips. They do not really belong to the SL community, they have crappy AVs because to them an AV is a means to an end, and they're only there to collect whatever money their music will bring in on any given day. I'm very disappointed in what seems to me as the sort of attitude that their fans in SL are no more than cash cows and not to be interacted with outside of a gig.

When I started 4 years ago this wasn't the case. The musicians were a part of the community and the oldest ones still are. I do see some musos who support the other musicians and turn up at gigs other than their own but they are much fewer in number than the ones who just show up to play. The old school musos in SL were there to share their music and it wasn't about the money....it was about the music. Its not that way so much anymore.

Now we are all cash cows.

Pretty Pictures...just because I can.

2011-01-05T08:38:00.000-08:00

When Did Adults....

2011-01-05T08:17:00.000-08:00

When did adults stop being adults?

Right now, in Austin, the powers that be want to set up "sobriety check points," whereby the police stake out a certain place, bottlenecking traffic so that they can ostensibly catch drunks. On the surface, this seems like a reasonable thing to do. But, is it really?

In most, if not all states, the law says that the people responsible for drunks who drive is the establishment where they got drunk and the people who actually served them the drinks. This approach takes responsibility for their condition out of the hands of the drunk and makes whomever enabled him to get drunk, his keepers. WTF?

When did we stop holding *adults* responsible for what they do?

Don't give me that tired tripe about alcoholism being a "disease." It's not. It's a lifestyle choice. If you must drink, and you know you drink to excess, stay home. It's very simple. You can get as drunk as you want to, still, in your own home. Most people who get drunk on a regular basis know they do it. I mean, come on...if, by the time you are 30 years old if you wake up with a headache every morning, wondering how you got home, you're probably an alkie.

Taking responsibility for their actions out of the hands of the person who is actually *doing* the behavior isn't a boon to the drunk, nor is it a boon to society to hold his enablers responsible for his behavior. Checkpoints and prosecuting bartenders, who by the way, are subject to the orders of the person who pays them (the owner/manager) and are just trying to earn a living is not the way to keep people from driving drunk. Stricter sentencing guidelines will. Not being able to buy your way out of a DWI with an obscenely expensive lawyer who has a couple of judges in his pocket, or plead it down to a slap on the wrist, will make the act of driving drunk alot less attractive to the drunks who do it.

Infantilizing the citizens is a slippery slope to the government plantation. Allowing law enforcement style pat downs in airports and random "alcohol" checkpoints violate our constitutional right, endowed by our *Creator,* not the federal or state government, to be free of unreasonable search and seizure. This is the first baby step to the police being able to randomly search your house for drugs or contraband guns (or heck, anything they want just so they can look around) because it's against the law to have such things.

I, for one, am sick of it. Put personal responsibility back where it belongs. On the *adults* that do it. I am NOT my brother's keeper unless my brother is gonna listen to me when I say stop, which isn't bloody likely to happen in this lifetime.

The Upside of Obama

2010-10-05T12:33:00.001-07:00

I have come to the conclusion lately that the Obama presidency has indeed had an upside. The race card is worthless now and even sleazy black politicians can now be prosecuted for the thieves they are. Crying "RAAAAACCCCCIIIIISSSSM" is not a get out of jail free pass any more and pols like Charlie Rangel, Maxine Waters, Eleanor Holmes Norton and many others are now being exposed for the grifters they are.

Halleleujah. All I can say is....it's about time. These people have been stealing their constituents blind for decades and now they'll finally get what they so richly deserve. Ousted from their cushy senate seats and maybe...even a little jail time.

So much for a post-racial presidency. Yawn.

Oh HELL Yeah!

2010-09-27T11:07:00.001-07:00

I love Charlie Daniels. Been a fan for years and I can actually recite the lyrics to "Devil Went Down to Georgia..."

Well, it seems that Mr. Daniels has written an open letter to Barak Obama. Its written in Charlie's usual simple style and comes right to the point. I encourage any and everybody to read it.

I love it. You GO Charlie!

EUREKA!!!

2010-08-17T15:21:00.000-07:00

A "moderate" muslim finally speaks....

In an essay today on the website Asarq Alawsat, Mr. Abdul Rahman Al-Rashid weighs in on the question of the proposed mosque, 2 blocks or so from the site of the former World Trade Center in New York city. He wags a rhetorical finger at Barak Obama for supporting such an idea (another unforced error for Dear Leader, ala "acting stupidly" He sure does a lot of that, for a trained lawyer). He goes on to say that this mosque is what most of the people against it are saying, which is "sure, on the question of religious freedom, they have the freedom to build this mosque, but is it really what they (the group wanting it built) say it is?" And further, it's not something the muslim world (street) cares all that much about anyway.

I agree.

I see it as a thumb in the eyes of New Yorkers by a cabal of people who, by virtue of the fact that they all want to see America fall, are the uneasy allies in this political and emotional farce. Sure, America is founded upon religious freedoms, but as Mr. Al-Rashid points out, the site is a commercial district in Manhattan that has no ready congregation because there isn't much residential property around there. I have been there and it's true. This is right in the heart of the financial district and although there are a bunch of hotels, the streets of that area are deserted on weekends.

This isn't about tolerance. It's not about religious freedom, and it's damn sure not about mending fences. Its about putting a finger in America's eye and reminding us all that the radical brand of Islam is bent on conquering the infidel, by any means necessary.

Be sure to read the whole post.

I've Learned a New Skill!

2010-07-11T23:18:00.000-07:00

I've wanted to learn Photoshop for years and for some reason, it never stuck. I figured out why recently...I never really had a burning reason to learn it because I wasn't interested in manipulating pictures.

Until now.

Behold the fruits of my new skill...

I still haven't learned Photoshop, but I'm learning the same (more or less) skills in a freeware program called GIMP. I have wanted to do modeling in Second Life and the better your pictures are, the more likely you are to be chosen to at least compete for the job, and I got tired of asking my friends who know how to retouch pictures to do it for me, so it motivated me to finally buckle down and learn it myself.

Not bad for a newbie.

Free Speech and Opinion Media

2010-06-30T16:10:00.000-07:00

Seems to me that everybody's a critic these days. Myself as well, and the post prior to this one has brought out the long knives in the comments, which I moderate before they are shown publicly. Consequently, I can post or not post comments that insult me personally, instead of taking to task what I wrote about. If you want to address what I wrote, I'll publish your comments anytime. If they're filled with hateful comments on how pathetic my life must be because I took the time to write about whatever, I'm not going to publish them. Simple.

I can do that. It's my blog, and I'm entitled to my opinion and if you don't like it, tough titties.

I wrote a review of the SL Chicago Jam that wasn't well received by the organizers. So what? I'm allowed to post my own opinion of things in my own blog and as long as I don't threaten to assassinate the president, I'm allowed to do that with impunity. Its called free speech.

Free speech isn't always speech you agree with. Most often it's speech you don't agree with and although I will defend the maroons writing me hate mail, I won't dignify them by posting their drivel on my blog any further. Again, I can do that.

If you want to post on your own blog or in your own forum that I'm the devil incarnate, you can do that, also with impunity. Of course, I won't be reading it or writing you hate mail because your opinion of me matters little in the scheme of things. Just like my opinion of a botched and bungled event shouldn't really matter to you. If it does I can only surmise that I hit a nerve and perhaps you should ask yourself why you let one blog post by an unknown woman make you crazy enough to write personal attacks on her appearance, rather than attack her ideas.

Just sayin....

A Review of the Second Life Chicago Jam 2010

2010-06-27T09:47:00.001-07:00

I'm a huge fan of live music in Second Life.

That said, I've been greatly disappointed in the way the SL Chicago Jam 2010 was showcased. Not by the music, which was great, but by the conspiracy amongst a few of the participants to hijack it with the intent of making it an "exclusive." By that, I mean the broadcast was limited to one venue and if you didn't have the knowhow or the connections to get the URL for the music stream, you had to go and, basically, camp out at that one venue to hear it. From what I've learned about streams, they are intended to hold several hundred listeners at a time and the URLs are generally available for the asking. One of the musicians, the one with the stream, told me that he had bandwidth issues with many people listening to his stream from different locations, which is odd, because that's how it works when they play a gig. This is plausible, but given that these streams are set up for multiple listeners, I'm not sure I believe him.

The problem with limiting the broadcast to one venue is that when you have a real life jam going on, there are a bunch of musicians there who have never played together, have their own equipment and their own styles, and sometimes just getting set up between sets can take a while. Then, they have to go through "let's play this" or "do you know that?" This process can eat up more time and to those marooned in the venue, there is no sound. So, there you sit, trapped in a sim with nothing to do (there is a small shopping area in this particular sim, which takes about 5 minutes to see completely) and your screen lighting up every few minutes as a few morons play multi-line ASCII art gestures over and over because they think it's cute. Those gestures are particularly annoying because they take up, sometimes, as many as 15 lines of the open chat, and when you have your viewer set to only 5 lines of chat, your whole conversation disappears in broken up ASCII art. One of this venue's owners is particularly fond of huge ASCII gestures, so it's kinda hard to discourage their use when the owner is banging them out every 5 minutes.

I've been in SL for over 3 years now and I've never seen something like this done to a RL (real life) jam, and this one isn't the first. I don't understand it, either, because the SL venue did not charge a cover for anybody to hear the music, but I resent being marooned in one sim for hours when I can paste a URL into my winamp and go about my daily business and have great music too. The only scenario that makes any sense to me for doing it this way is money. They had a huge prim tip jar set up in the sim, with a promise that it would be split among the musicians after the real life event is over. Personally, I don't see how they can do that fairly, so I suspect all the money collected under the assumption, on the parts of the donors, that their money would be going to *all* of the participating musicians, will instead find it's way into the pockets of only a few people, namely the sim owners, the stream provider and a couple of the musicians who are in on it. I may be wrong, but what other reason is there to confine 60 or 70 people to one sim for that length of time? And what musician is gonna say "where's my cut of the tips?"

The music, however, was wonderful and I saw several musicians I'd never seen before. Participants included Gina Stella, Maximillion Kleene, Skye Galaxy (both of whom look pretty much like their SL AVs!), Kaklick Martin, Krystian Radikal, Kurosh Eusebio, Anek Fuchs, and several more that will go unnamed because we were not given that information, which brings me to another issue. The video stream was not monitored, and most of the marooned AVs were watching it while they sat listening in the venue. We had no idea who we were watching, and there were times when the stream would either time out or crash and because it wasn't monitored, the video feed was off for long periods of time. At one point during the day, the video stream was switched to another channel completely, but nobody remained on the first channel to let new viewers know they were not in the right place!

There is supposed to be more music today (Sunday) but after what I went through yesterday to get a few hours of quality music, I doubt that I will try to tune in today. Being marooned in a full, laggy sim for several hours to get maybe 1 or 2 hours of actual music isn't really worth it in my book. Maybe the next jam will have more generous and thoughtful sponsors, and I can just get the stream URL and paste it into my Winamp and enjoy the music wherever I am.

I sure hope so.

The Entitlement Mentality

2010-06-16T07:48:00.000-07:00

Anybody who reads this blog knows that from time to time I post an essay about the virtual world I play in, otherwise known as Second Life.

I think it's fair to say SL is a microcosm that represents, pretty much, the rest of the western world and to some degree, parts of asia and the middle east as well. I've been debating a virtual friend of mine, lately, on the merits of socialism. He tells me it's a perfect ideology and I say, far from it. In an academic setting, where everything is on paper, sure....socialism looks good. But in practice, with all the messy details, it becomes fascistic. It has to. Socialism requires that everybody "play by the rules." But....the messy fact is, some folks don't and some never will.

I got a lesson this morning in the entitlement mentality that socialism tends to foster and it just blew my mind. I was in a store that sells hair and I got a message from another player asking me to "give" her hair, skins and other fripperies of the game. Things that require Linden currency. She did not ask for help. She asked for a handout, and in the process, she told me that she doesn't put her own money into Linden currency because she finds it "stupid." Turns out, she was from France.

I was appalled.

She gave me every reason in the book as to why I should give her money and other things that, for years, have been "no transfer" (meaning one person cannot give the object to someone else) in Second Life. For good reason. She gave me her best sob story, while out the other side of her mouth she was basically saying to me "you're a rich American, you owe me because you have more than I do, and I'm much more comfortable spending YOUR money on myself than my own." I could feel her disdain for my American-ness even as she begged me for money.

This is the sort of entitlement that the Europeans have been spoon fed for several generations, and why Europe is headed down into the sewers of history. They have forgotten how to work to support themselves, they have no imagination and no desire to even make an effort. Begging is not shameful to them....working is.

I might have been more inclined to help her had she asked me where to find the things she wanted for free, or if her SL age hadn't been almost 2 years. At 2 years of age in SL, you should have enough experience to know where to find the things you want at low or no cost. I do, and it isn't like I don't want to help folks who may have less than I do...it was her entitled attitude that just blew me away. She didn't want information on how to seek out what she wanted for herself, but like a spoiled, envious child, she thought that I should give her what she wanted because my avatar was well done and obviously, for SL, well heeled.

I've never been a Ron Paul supporter because I feel like his notions are somewhat simplistic, but at this point, his simplistic "isolationist" point of view is starting to look good. I get so tired of euro-trash looking down their patrician noses at the "barbaric" Americans while their hands are out for our money and our military protection. Maybe it's time to leave the soft bellied Europeans to their own fate before they drag us down with them.

Hell Must Have Frozen Over....

2010-04-12T16:46:00.001-07:00

I'm about to link a liberal site. I never, in a million years, thought I would ever write those words in the same sentence....but....*bites her lip and continues to type*

Francis Lam's essay about his experience with the new Double Down sandwich from Kentucky Fried Chicken (I refuse to say KFC) is....well...hilarious! We may disagree on politics, but his take on the sandwich made me laugh out loud.

Read it here.

Where is Our Churchill??

2010-04-10T08:43:00.001-07:00

The Obama administration seems to be hell bent on repeating history. Unfortunately, as liberals are wont to do, they are on the wrong side of the history they're trying to repeat.

Having witnessed the grand "Apology Tour" of europe, the curiously tacky "gifts" to the Prime Minister and the Queen of England, the pavement scraping bow to the Emporor of Japan, among other faux paux, not to mention the utter gall to acutally accept a Nobel for not being George Bush, I'm begining to wonder if, since we don't really know much about Obama's schooling....is Barak Obama a graduate of the Neville Chamberlain School of Government?

For those of you who may not be history buffs, Neville Chamberlain was the Prime Minister of England in the run up to World War II. He was a man of piece...meaning he was willing to give a piece of Europe to Hitler in hopes that the Nazi alligator wouldn't come to eat them. We all know how that worked out for them.... But, the upside is that out of Neville Chamberlain's cowardice in the face of a rapacious predator like Hitler, came probably one of the best things that ever happened to the British. Winston Churchill.

Winston Churchill became Prime Minister during the war, when the British realized that Chamberlain's spineless policies, in the face of Hitler's determination to annex all of Europe, were worthless and they needed a Statesman at the helm of the ship of state, rather than a craven fool. Good choice for them, as it turned out. Churchill was possessed of the intestinal fortitude that the times required and in conjunction with all the other Axis powers, managed to stem and turn the tide of Nazism.

Where is *our* Churchill? Is there anybody on the right....republican, independent or little green man from mars who can stem the tide of socialist, welfare junkies and ignorant, faceless "czars" who are running our country off a cliff? Is there a single Statesman left in the sorry political swamp our congress has become? Is there anybody who still thinks Americans should stand on their own two feet and not become dependent on "daddy" government? (Note to you statists out there...what happened to the people of New Orleans who waited in vain for "daddy" to come save them?)

In a policy orgy that is bound to have made Osama bin Laden laugh (if he's not taking a well deserved dirt nap), Obama has single handedly managed to lose or throw away any tactical advantage that a stockpile of nukes which could make parking lots of most of the world might have had, all in the naive belief that disarming will make the bad guys throw down their weapons and love us. Is he diabolically evil or just criminally naive? Time will tell but it doesn't bode well. I'm afraid that he has invited a repeat of 911, and perhaps worse.

I so hope I'm wrong.

Hammer...Meet Nail

2010-01-27T15:05:00.000-08:00

I once had a boyfriend whom, I learned later, was a malignant narcissist. When I met him, he made himself into the man of my dreams. Romantic, sweet, with a real desire to help his fellow man. He was just the nicest guy you'd ever want to meet. My friends all loved him. Animals and children liked him....but when I realized that everything was a lie and tried to end the relationship, I stepped into the seventh circle of hell. I've never seen such a glib liar in my life and it took me longer to rid myself of him than I had had him! But that's a story for another day...

My point here is that a malignant narcissist can shape him/herself into whatever it is you want them to be...for a while. Once the jig is up and you realize you have been conned, the malignant narcissist will turn on a dime and give you 8 cents change.

The Anchoress has a post in her wonderful blog today that analyzes some pictures of President Obama. She stops short of actually saying that Obama might be a malignant narcissist, but the pictures and her astute analysis of them certainly point the reader in that direction.

Having dealt with such a personality in my own experience, I can see the parallels as well and it's striking. Obama even said it himself that he was a "blank screen" that others could project their hopes on....

The Founding Fathers Would Be Proud

2010-01-23T09:11:00.000-08:00

The recent triumph of Scott Brown in the Massachusetts senate election is a fitting place for the start of the return of America to it's center right roots.

Fitting, for a number of reasons, dating back to the American Revolution, which is the iconic event that set the United States on the path to the particular lifestyle that we enjoy in this country today.

How many critics of say....Hugo Chavez, can write anything in a public forum that could be considered negative and not find themselves carried off to what passes for the Gulag in Venezuela? Or...how about Cuba? How many of Castro's critics are still languishing in Cuban prisons for criticizing him? I suppose the critics of Putin live the high life, too....oh wait...uhm, I guess not. Instead of the Gulag, these days, they just get a dose of radiation poison. How very progressive of the Russians. My point here is, of course, that we Americans still enjoy free speech, even down to being able to call the current Prez a monkey and not worry about the Secret Service descending on our houses like the German SS.

The voters in Massachusetts exercised their right to free speech recently, and they shouted to the current administration that they'd better put the brakes on, or else. Some of the pundits say that this election is a fluke, influenced by out of state Tea Partiers and that, like the gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, the candidate herself was flawed. She ran a bad campaign, they say. Perhaps the democrats should try retail campaigning and running more positive campaigns, rather than treating elections as coronations. In the present political mood, even Barbara Boxer should worry....

I say, that like Lexington and Concord, this is the first shot in the war to take our country back from the progressive wing of the democrat party. This is the first few drops of the tidal wave to come that, hopefully, will sweep enough incumbents out of office that our Congress will have a fresh, humble new attitude of service to the people who elected them, not the special interests who are attempting to subvert our country by paying off our elected officials.

The current administration, as well as the tone deaf party ideologues in DC have tried to ram their far left agenda down the throats of the people despite all civil efforts to stop them, and they have done so at their own peril. Like the first shots fired in our struggle for freedom from England and taxation without representation, the people of the state of Massachusetts took the first step in striking down the dynastic ambitions of the democrats.

How iconic and ironic is it that a seat that had been held by one Kennedy or another since 1956 was lost as soon as it was up for grabs? I expect a report any day now that there is smoke coming from the Kennedy mausoleum because Teddy is spinning like a top in his grave. I have to say....I love it!

The powers that be in the democrat party should be very afraid of what they have set in motion for themselves, and the moderates of the party should reassert their dominance or they will be swept out of power come November 2010.

I can't wait.

The White House has "Disappeared" Joe Biden

2010-01-14T06:42:00.000-08:00

Ed Morrissey, over at Hot Air, has a post this morning that shows how effectively the current administration has muzzled their Vice Presidential "attack dog." The man is such a loose cannon, and in his defense, if I was Obama, I'da muzzled him, too, but I digress....

I wondered, at the time of Biden's selection as the Vice Presidential candidate, just what kind of drugs Obama was doing. But...as I thought about it, I realized that Biden was probably the only viable candidate for the ticket at the time. Of course, we know what we know now, but the campaign insiders probably knew about it, or they suspected it then. Turns out that an Obama/Edwards ticket would have blown up in everybody's face when the National Enquirer outed John Edwards' affair with Reille Hunter and their subsequent "love child." The Obama/Clinton ticket was a no-go for 2 very big reasons. Number one....their personal feelings for each other after the bloody campaign, and second...Bill Clinton. Another loose cannon with an eye for the ladies, and a former President, to boot. Of course, it could also have gotten back to Obama that Clinton didn't feel Obama worthy to bring him and Teddy Kennedy their coffee.....

At the time, I figured it was because Biden was the only one who said "yes." More astute polititians saw the Obama train wreck coming in the distance and didn't want to end their careers quite that soon, so they demurred. Biden, on the other hand, had long years in the Senate and the Vice Presidency could be considered the pinnacle of his career. He could retire in style, write books or whatever and be set for life, even if Obama turned out to be the next Jimmy Carter. After all....what's Walter Mondale doing these days and does anybody really care?

Now, after a series of gaffes that would do Captain Ahab proud, the White House has seen the necessity of muzzling poor ole Joe. Even a meeting on the supposed transparancy of the Stimulus bill is closed to the press....

Oh. My. God.

2009-11-16T17:32:00.000-08:00

I think hell may have just frozen over. I actually agree with Pat Buchanan!

Writing at Worldnet Daily, Mr. Buchanan lays out his arguments as to why the Obama administration's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and several of his co-conspirators is such stunning lunacy.

To me the money quote in the article is "It is possible that we have done an injustice to this man, keeping him locked up for all these years, without a trial. But that is what a trial implies...that he may not be guilty."

And why have the trial in New York City, of all places?? If the people of NYC are not still suffering from 9/11 PTSD, the traffic problems caused by the sheer amount of security necessary to guard such a trial will snarl traffic in Manhattan to the point of bringing it to gridlock. Any first year law student would know to ask for a change of venue. But seriously....where is a guy like KSM gonna get a jury of his peers in the US? And if he does, would maybe one of them be anti death penalty, or even a muslim who won't convict him, no matter what he did for fear of retaliation in the community? Puleeze.

What if, as Buchanan points out, some whacko decides to take a stab at the Great Satan and blow up a car in Manhattan? Again?! This shows the utter cluelessness of the Obama administration, and makes using Air Force One for a photo op above the city look like a kindergarten prank. This is the mother of all dark practical jokes. What if he gets off? What then? Why take that risk?

What are these maroons thinking and do they have America's best interests at heart?

The Fatal Flaw of Socialism

2009-11-12T09:49:00.000-08:00

Two of my long list of favorite blogs to read are Bookworm Room, and The American Thinker. They are both prolific blogs and the content changes frequently, so for a junkie like me, it's a no brainer. The opinions offered on both also closely reflect the conclusions I've come to about life in my own experience as well. Although Bookworm Room is a blog mainly written by one woman, American Thinker is a collection of essays from many contributors.

Nevertheless, Bookworm Room had a post today that referenced a particular essay by Joe Herring, published at The American Thinker. Joe relates his experience with a young co-worker who seemed to understand the intent of Socialism, but was never educated on the consequences and the natural outcome of such regressive social constructs as communism, socialism, progressiveism and collectiveism. He quotes 20th century economist Fredrich Von Hayek's prophetic pamphlet "The Road to Serfdom.

To paraphrase the essay, Socialism requires that everybody "play nice," according to the rules. Unfortunately, Man is a perverse creature and there will be some who will never play by the rules, for one reason or another. Perhaps the joy of just going against the majority, or because they just want to be left alone. The natural progression of what happens to the dissenters, rolls down the slippery slope from re-education to elimination.

I agree with him when he says that we must inform our friends, our neighbors and anybody else who will listen that this is a failed ideology, and will never work because there is no "right" way to do it. Socialism is critically flawed because it does not take the perverse nature of Man into consideration and it demands the rigid adherence of all who live under it for it to survive.

Killing the Golden Goose

2009-11-08T12:46:00.000-08:00

This post was originally intended for musicians and venue owners in Second Life, but it also applies to anybody who does anything "artsy" and then tries to sell their own creations. There is a reason that artists and musicians have managers. The managers are, theoretically, supposed to have at least one foot in reality, and their job is to make the artist they manage understand that there is a difference between what the artist thinks their talent or their creations are worth, and what the public will pay.

Starting in the real world, I live in Austin and we frequently have street fairs, where people can rent a stall or booth and set their wares out for sale to the general public. Over the years, I've seen tons of beautiful things at these fairs....things I might purchase if it were not for one small detail. They are usually so overpriced by the artists who are trying to sell them, that most folks remark on how nice it is, myself included, and keep walking. I have asked these artists why they price their creations so high and the inevitable answer is, "my talent and my time are worth alot of money!"

Uhm...sorry to harsh your vibe, man, but your talent is only worth what the general public is willing to pay for it, not what you think it's worth.

This kind of "you need to pay for my genius" attitude is slowly creeping into the virtual world as well, which is a damn shame.

One of my passions in Second Life is the virtual live music scene, which is quite vibrant. New performers are appearing every day. Some are great and some not so great, but for the most part, the music is amazing and up until recently, most of the musicians were content to take a small payment from the sim owner and take tips from the audience for their performance. There are also a number of sims that are "tips only," meaning the sim owner doesn't pay the talent at all and they work for tips from the audience.

Recently, however, a number of elite SL musicians who are no longer satisfied with the level of compensation received from the venue owners are wanting to charge a cover for their performances. I'm not sure whether this cover will be split with the venue owner to help defray the expenses of maintaing a sim or if it all goes in the performer's pocket. In principle, I really have no problem with charging a cover, per se, but the problem is that the performers tend to think in US dollars and not in Linden dollars, nor do they consider their services relative to what things and/or services go for inworld. They also don't consider the fact that their fans go to several concerts a week and if all the performers charged a cover for their music, the cost to the fans could run into the hundreds of real life dollars in the course of a month. There is also the fact that some, if not most of the music fans do not put their real life discretionary income into the game, but work inworld for their spending money, which covers their living arrangements, clothing budgets and so forth, so a cover charge running into the hundreds or thousands of linden dollars would be excessive and pretty much untenable.

"But it's only 5 dollars!" they say....

Five US dollars in Linden currency is L1295. For that amount, I can pay a week's rent on a virtual apartment or purchase a complete outfit, hair, jewelery, shoes and a dress, all of which will reside in my inventory until death do us part...or I use the delete key. I have addressed the SL shopping angle in another essay, but the bottom line is that one gets way more "bang for the buck" as a shopper in SL than in the real world, but these musicians do not see their cognitive disonance, or the unintended consequences of a move to charging to hear live music. In other words, not only do I get an exaggerated value for my linden money, I also have the goods in my inventory. To put out $5 USD for a virtual concert is unsustainable for all but the wealthiest of SL residents in the long run. If this trend catches on, I am afraid that these foolhardy folks will price all but the newest musicians (meaning the ones so new they're willing to play for tips only) right out of the market.

As for the venue and club owners, I have very little sympathy for their complaints about having to fork out thousands of linden dollars to pay their staffs and the talent they bring into their sims. Uhm, sorry, but you buy a sim at your own risk, and if you are counting on the people who visit your sim to pay your bills you are sadly mistaken, possibly bordering on delusional. Anybody with an SL age of over a year knows that sims are expensive. Anybody who opens a club or music venue should know that virtual clubs are money pits and be prepared to run in the red for quite some time, if not forever.

Most non sim owners look at the venue and club owners as social climbers or wannabe big shots who want to schmooze with the elite of the SL performers and patrons, and they seem to want everybody else to contribute to their "vision." What a load of crap. If you have a vision for a sim, wonderful! But YOU pay for it and don't expect those of us who come to your sim to help pay your bills. Your sim may be important to you, but I've got news for you, Mr. Sim Owner, you and your sim are not anybody else's priority and you have a nerve to ask everybody else to pay for your dream. The sim owners may have the noblest of intentions, but their begging really chaps my ass. A discreetly placed contribution basket is fine...but don't use the internal messaging system, or have the performer harrangue the sim visitors for money. You wanted to be a sim owner and wear the vaunted "owner" tag, so don't expect everybody else to pay for it.

For the past 3 years, the Second Life musicians and venue owners have benefited from the unstinting generosity of the fans, some of whom tip them until it hurts, and from those of us who have supported SL music from day one with our lindens and our time. I fear that if they try to fix a system that ain't broke, they will end up killing the golden goose that has been so good to them. I'm also afraid that it's not about the joy of sharing their music anymore, but has become about getting a piece of the linden pie, and in the end, this attitude will hurt us all.

Spectacular Failure

2009-08-31T08:28:00.001-07:00

As of today, the Rassmusen poll has President Obama's "passion index" at -11, which, though it's not the lowest it's been in his short time in office, but it's down there around the lowest. Geoffrey P. Hunt, writing at The American Thinker says that Obama is setting himself up to be the worst president since Woodrow Wilson. That's a total ouchie.

I'd like to think I've been somewhat more generous....I think Obama will knock Jimmy Carter out of first place on the list of Worst Presidents Evah, and since presidental history isn't my strong suit, I'm fairly willing to take Geoff's word on Wilson. In point of fact, Woodrow Wilson was the first "progressive" president of the 20th century and this just proves that Americans, by and large, don't toe the socialist/marxist/progressive line in politics....mainly because it goes against everything America and American's think they stand for.

I haven't written much on Obama since the election because I was trying to "give him a chance." A friend of mine who is center-left leaning in politics and I agreed that Obama owns the economy come January 1, 2010, but I'm not sure it's going to take that long for America to realize that Obama is no more than an empty suit, ill prepared (although he had an education that most of us would envy) for the job he has been given by the guilt ridden white progressive political class, and a general populace fatigued with the relentless criticism and left wing hate of George W. Bush. Obama's election was the American population's "can't we just all get along?" moment, and now reality is sinking in to bite them in the ass.

I lived through Jimmy Carter's presidency. It wasn't fun, and I remember lines for gas that stretched several city blocks, stagflation, and a smug Mr. Carter in his little "Mr. Rogers" cardigan telling us all to turn down the heat to save energy while he ran the economy into a wall, and handed the country of Iran over to a bunch of apocalyptic clerics who rewarded his support by promptly taking our embassy staff hostage for over a year. Then they further humiliated him by releasing them at the very moment Ronald Reagan was taking the oath of office. His domestic policy was abysmal and his foreign policy dangerously short sighted....we're still cleaning that mess up as I write this and the threat of nuclear attacks on Iran is being considered because of Carter's shameful meddling in the politics of what was, at the time, an ally.

There is a story on the internet right now that the President of Iran is now ready to have talks with the west regarding their nuclear ambitions (funny how they're all reasonable in the wake of a badly botched, rigged election, huh?) and Obama could fuel the fires at home by actually sitting down at any table with them. This is unacceptable to me and it should be to any Americans who actually still believe in our brand of republican democracy. Should Obama decide to give these goons legitimacy, and ram through a very unpopular domestic agenda, he will certainly pass Carter as the Worst President Evah.

Will Obama Legitimize Ahmadinajhad?

2009-08-18T08:34:00.000-07:00

There is a headline at Fox News online that says the Iranians are ready to have talks with the West, with "no preconditions" regarding their nuclear plans. Funny that they should be so reasonable now that the world knows their election was not only rigged, but badly so.

Will Obama legitimize this travesty by undertaking these talks?

Time will tell, but given what he's said and done in the past, I suspect he will go ahead with these talks under the guise of "not meddling" in another country's politics.

Disgusting.

Thoughts on Second Life and Child Avatars

2009-07-18T07:54:00.000-07:00

As most of you who read my blog know, I play a game called Second Life, and from time to time I post an essay on my views of or about things that happen within the virtual world called "SL." Today I am going to offer my opinion on people who insist on playing child avatars (called AVs in SL) and taking those child AVs into what should be, and are classified as, mature, or adult simulators (called sims in SL).

Personally, I think people who insist on playing children in an essentially adult world have some mental issues to begin with, and those issues are multiplied exponentially when these people take a child avatar into a mature (meaning sex beds are in use in said sim or that the sim has sexual or adult activities) sim, as their mere presence, in my humble opinion, makes most of the other adults in the area very uncomfortable. It certainly makes me uncomfortable, and for obvious reasons, if one uses common sense. Of course, people who play child avatars tend to abdicate common sense in their zeal to make the rest of us "tolerate or accept" them in any situation. Sorry, but no, and I'll detail my reasons in the subsequent paragraphs.

There are many reasons why people choose to play children in SL and I'm ok with most of them. So you had a crappy childhood and you feel that you need to "get that back" by playing a child in a virtual world....ok, fine. Stay in the sims where children are welcomed, and there are picnic areas and playscapes abounding. No sex beds and no noobs with huge phalluses running around naked and jerking off every 10 meters.
The whole reason that SL had to set up an "adult" continent is because they were taken to court by some incensed parent who caught little Johnny watching cartoons fuck. Do you think those outraged parents are going to be comforted to see a child AV on the new "adult" continent, dancing with an enormous cock? I don't, and these militant people with the child AVs know it too.
To me, the only reason a child AV is present in an adult sim is to suck a potential pervert into trying to play with them. This is entrapment in it's purest form. Get the perv to make a move and zap them with a report. Seems to me that if the temptation isn't there, the perv would never make a move, because there wouldn't be anything to move ON.
Lastly, we have "child" AVs who have baby talk on their profiles, telling the world that they're 8 years old, yet they have an SL "partner," meaning a wife or a husband. How many 8 year olds do YOU know that are married in rl? If you're going to present yourself as a child, either do it all the way or put on an adult AV when you are in an Adult area.

The thing that chaps me most about people who play child AVs is their utter hypocrisy. They present themselves as "children," complete with the baby talk and the sexed up, Bratz doll look, and then they want to say they're adults when they're confronted in a place where children don't belong.

You want to play a kid? Great. Stay in the Disney sims where you belong and stop forcing the rest of us to look at you in places where no children should be found and we'll get along just fine. I don't hang out in sims that are child friendly and the people who play child AVs don't need to invade the places where the rest of us go to be rid of them.

Thank You

2009-07-04T07:45:00.000-07:00

Today is July 4, 2009. America is 233 years old and we are celebrating the anniversary of Her birth, so I would like to pause for a moment, between the tragedies and crises of the day to say a profound and heart-felt Thank You to the members of our past and present Military.

Thank you for understanding that there is something bigger than yourselves.

Thank you for doing what most of us cannot or would not...your sacrifice of time and physical abilities in the service of protecting our country.

Thank you for the fact that I, as a woman, can get an education, can drive, can have control over my daily life.

Thank you for defending our shores from hungry tyrants that would see us, as Americans and Westerners, on our knees in submission.

Thank you for ignoring the peaceniks and haters who would denigrate your service. We who are grateful see their ignominious behavior and are embarrassed for them.

Thank you for keeping America the "Home of the Free and the Brave," for you surely rank among them.

The Chinese have an interesting curse...."May you live in interesting times..." It seems that we do. Evidently we are poised on the brink of history, watching as it rolls over us, times that seem to challenge the very foundations of what liberty means to each and every one of us. Are we so soft and bloated and apathetic that we will allow the destruction of such a beacon of light in the dark and ugly world? Only time will tell, but for now, our nation is safe because of your sacrifice.

Sleep well, brothers and sisters in arms, I fear we will need your courage again in the not so distant future.

I Am a Virtual Shoe Whore

2009-07-03T09:39:00.000-07:00

Since this is a blog with the word "confession" in the name, I'm going to do a little confessing. I am a virtual shoe whore.

I'm a shoe whore in real life too, but in virtual reality (aka, Second Life) you can have shoes that are impossible to have in the real world, because they would never hold your weight. They are 10 inch, spike heeled, ethereal works of primage that set my heart aflutter with a mere picture, let alone the real thing. Behold the Stiletto Moody shoe.

In virtual terms, Stiletto Moody is the Manolo Blahnik of Second Life shoes. Her shoes are walking works of art. As I write this, her rabid fans are waiting with bated breath and itchy fingers on the mouse for her sim's grand re-opening and several new styles. I can't wait. I intend to be the proud owner of at least one pair in each style. I'm quivering with anticipation.

Yes, Stiletto Moody shoes are probably the most expensive shoes in Second Life (her *Bare* styles with sculpted feet run L2300 per pair and L8k for a color set), but they are also the most technically advanced as well. They come with beautifully sculpted feet and toes, have tons of skin color and toenail color options, as well as prim toe rings, and they also come with a little prim bag that allows you to save the settings from one pair to another, and believe me, that's convenient! Second Life skins have such a broad range of texture colors, so it's very difficult, especially if you tend to wear different colored skins (as I do), to color one pair, let alone half a dozen. The little back up bag is great for storing your settings and recalling them at the click of a mouse, instead of spending a half hour trying to match your skin color every time you put a pair on. The new styles will also be featuring alot more toenail colors, as well as tattoos for your feet! Sounds very cool and I just can't wait to play with those menus!

I must also mention another shoe creator. She has the most amazing coloring system in her newest style of shoe, the Wow. 2408 Alexeev has worked her little virtual fingers to the bone and come up with a hud for her sculpted foot shoes that uses textures instead of a monochrome sculpted foot, using the standard SL coloring system. The difference in using textures on the sculpted foot, as opposed to the system that all the other creators use is that the foot does not become a chalky, yucky color in different sim lights. The textured foot never changes color, and 2408 has done her homework in matching pretty much any skin that comes down the road. Her shoes come with 2 huds, one for pastel tones, and one for other skin tones. You wear the hud that matches your skin the closest, then there are about 100 different shades to choose from...you select the one that comes closest to your skin. The shoes themselves are nice, but not quite as hot as the Stiletto Moodys, though I think this lady is still in her educational evolution (still learning to sculpt), so I think the appearance of her shoes will continue to develop. I have high hopes....

The King is Dead...Long Live the King

2009-06-26T09:52:00.000-07:00

Michael Jackson is dead.

Called "the King of Pop" in his day, Michael Jackson has reached his ignoble end. Most of us knew it was coming, but like a train wreck, we couldn't look away. It's hard not to be ambivalent about his tragic demise, because on one hand, MJ had a huge influence on the popular culture of his day, not to mention his musical genius that leaves us with a huge body of work, spanning close to 40 years, and on the other hand, his life in the past 10 years was a freak show worthy of the heyday of Barnum and Bailey. I grew up with Michael Jackson. He's a year older than me, and I remember my love for the Jackson Five and their cutest member at the ripe old age of 12. I wanted to have his babies.....*sigh*

Both his life and the tragic quality of his death are certainly reminiscent of other mega-stars of their day....Elvis Presley coming to my mind almost immediately. Both stars were the "it" pop stars of their time and both wore the mantle of "king" of rock and roll and pop respectively. Elvis died of a legally obtained drug overdose, and as I write this, the autopsy on Jackson is underway and will probably reveal a toxic cocktail of drugs in his body as well. Which begs the question, in my mind...when did people in these men's lives stop saying "no" to them? At what level of celebrity, or wealth, do people begin to abrogate their obligation to keep someone from killing themselves with excess?

Celebrities of the recent and not so recent past...all died of drug overdoses administered by supposed doctors, whose first vow is to "do no harm." Heath Ledger, Anna Nicole Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and now Michael Jackson. The list is larger, of course, but it would do no good to list them here. All huge celebrities in their times and all fabulously wealthy. When do the hangers on and their families and the people who allegedly love them take the bull by the horns and intervene? Can someone who hasn't heard the word "no" in 20 years actually change? Do these people become so self centered, that, like actual kings, their merest desire is fulfilled instantly without thought for the possible consequences? Do the enablers surrounding these people think so much of their golden goose that they would allow it to kill itself? Evidently so.

When I heard of Michael Jackson's demise, my first thoughts were..."I wonder how long it's going to be before the report comes out that he died from a drug overdose?" Not long. Within hours, there was a report on the web (the UK Sun) that his personal physician administered a dose of the drug, Demerol, several hours prior to the emergency 911 call to his home. Fancy that. Funny, the same thing happened to both Anna Nicole and Elvis. Their personal physicians enabled their deaths....

It's truly a shame that talents like this live fast and die early, but it's a further shame that their deaths are hastened by the people who are supposed to have their best interests at heart, and who, firstly, take a vow to "do no harm."

The Legacy of Jimmy Carter

2009-05-26T08:03:00.000-07:00

Jimmy Carter has a legacy, all right, but it's not the golden legacy he had in mind. His presidency has already been judged a colossal failure by historians, and if he has a conscience at all, the man shouldn't be able to sleep at night knowing that his actions as president, over 30 years ago, will ultimately lead to the deaths of millions of innocents.

How, you say?

Well, his refusal to help the Shah of Iran keep his throne, back in the 70's, started a low grade war that has raged for the last 30 years. Instead of supporting the Shah, Mr. Carter decided to turn the country over to what he thought was a coalition of harmless clerics.....religious men like himself, who, he thought, would rule Iran with a gentle hand. In actuality, he turned the country over to a bunch of apocalyptic, religious nuts who executed what was left of the ruling class of Iran and then proceeded to humiliate Carter by taking over the US Embassy, holding 400 or so Americans hostage, and not agreeing to free them until the moment Ronald Reagan took office. This is when America became the Great Satan.

Yes, the Shah had his problems as a leader, and he was a king, so his word was law, but what Carter didn't know, or ignored at the time, is that the Shah was eaten up with what would become terminal cancer, and when he died, his Western educated son would have become king. The key phrase there, dear readers, is Western educated. Iran would, today, be an American ally if Carter had kept his little fingers out of their affairs. Instead, Carter let the Shah fall because he "didn't like the guy." How about that for a reason for changing history? I don't like you, so I'm going to help the religious nuts take your country. Of course, the Mullahs had him fooled and his eyes were not fully opened until his political humiliation at their hands, and by then it was too late.

Now, we are poised on the lip of the abyss that Carter created. These Mullahs are ok with sacrificing half the population of their country (they'll all be martyrs and get their 72 virgins, so who cares?) so that they can bring forth the 13th Imam (aka, the Hidden Imam) by lobbing a nuke at the Israelis in an attempt to "wipe them off the map." The subsequent chaos, according to their religious teachings, will bring out the Hidden Imam and bring on the new Caliphate.

Thanks, Mr. Carter, for all your wonderful work, and I hope the fact that millions of innocent Iranians and Israelis will soon be sacrificing their lives for your foolishness will give you more than a few sleepless nights in the future. Lord knows, millions of victims of your "legacy" will be having a more permanent dirt nap once the Iranians get a nuclear device or two under their robes.

Thoughts on the Manson Family, 40 Years Later

2009-03-20T07:52:00.000-07:00

It's been 40 years since the Manson Family murders in 1969. For those of you out there who are too young to remember, Charles Manson, the self-styled guru and leader of a gang of then teens and twenty somethings, led his followers (some say exhorted them) to commit horriffic crimes in his name, i.e., the Tate-LaBianca murders, whereby the victims were not only killed, but their bodies mutilated (Sharon Tate's unborn child was viciously pulled from her dying body) and the walls of the homes scrawled with their blood.

After they were apprehended and during the trial, the members of the "Family" etched swastikas into their forheads, sang and shouted at witnesses, and in general gave the impression that they were above mortal law.

Now, forty years later, some of the Family members are asking to be released. I say why?

Take Leslie Van Houten for example....by all accounts she has been a model prisoner during her 40 years in prison, helping other inmates to adjust, reading books for the sight impaired, earning 2 college degrees, etc., but does this mean she should be released? Originally, she and her co-conspirators were given the death penalty, but their sentences were commuted to life when California banned the death chamber. To me, such a commutation means life, without parole. Surely the very viciousness of her crime demands her continued incarceration. She, of all the followers, had the best upbringing....upper middle class, a sound moral underpinning, and all of the potential for a wonderful life that goes with such a childhood. She could have been anything at all....professional or otherwise. Yet, she chose to follow the LSD drenched ravings of a sociopath and participate in murders so heinous that they will surely go down in the annals of crime history, and she had knowledge, through Pat Krenwinkel, of the Tate murders the previous night, which would have sent most moral, thinking people screaming for the door. Instead, she goes out the next night, knowing murder would be committed and participates in the murders.

And now, 40 years later, she thinks she should be paroled. Sorry, but life is life. Would she be a danger to society if released? I doubt it. I believe that she is aware of what she did and is truly remorseful, but does this mean she should be released? I say no. Sometimes what you do at 19 CAN and DOES have lifelong consequences. The Tate family is without their sibling and although he's a possible child molester himself, Sharon Tate's husband at the time, lost his son. The LaBianca family is without their parents and has been for 40 years now...why should any of them be released?

Gotta give Manson props on this one....he knows he'll never be released and hasn't bothered to show up for parole hearings in years. Given his life before the murders in 1969, prison was the only home he had known anyway and the place where he was most familiar....

Abortion...Is It A Passe Issue?

2008-09-02T13:14:00.000-07:00

I'm inclined to say yes.

Roe V. Wade was ratified by the Supreme Court when I was 13 years old. I am now 48, which means it has been the law of the land that abortion is legal in all 50 states for 35 years, and unless the makeup of the present Supreme Court is radically changed in the next 4 years, I don't see it being overturned by the McCain/Palin republican ticket if they are elected.

Personally, I'm very pro-choice and I believe that abortion, though it should never be used as a means of birth control (even though we know it is), should be safe, sane, legal and available to any woman who feels like she wants to have one, and I have believed for years that the Republicans need to get off of it as an election issue, because in my mind, it's passe, and only gives the Democrat attack dogs a reason to beat the public over the head with their paranoia that the Big Bad Republicans are gonna snatch their god given right to end a pregnancy.

So far, in talking to Democrat Obamanoids, all I've heard is that McCain wants to overturn Roe V. Wade.....so what? People in hell want ice water, too, and I doubt very seriously that in the first 4 years of a McCain administration that either McCain or Palin would waste much time trying to reverse Roe v. Wade. Let's face it...it's really not high up on the list of things they will need to confront in the Oval Office, and unless 2 or 3 of the more liberal members of the court retire (which I doubt, unless one of 'em dies in office, the libs on the SCOTUS will hang onto their seats until a fellow liberal becomes president), which I don't see happening. I can see Ruth Bader Ginsburg now (in my imagination, of course), hanging onto her seat until she is a desiccated skeleton with a gavel in her hand. They can time their retirements according to who's in the white house, unless they die in office, and I don't think any of them are on their death beds at the moment, or in the next 4 years.

If all that keeps anybody from voting Republican is abortion and the identity/minority game, then you're not too smart, but of course the abortion meme has turned into a giant bludgeon for the left, so they're not going to be giving it up any time soon, which is really kind of a shame. I benefited from Roe v. Wade, and I refuse to be a hypocrite in my old age because I don't have to worry about unplanned pregnancies anymore, but I still vote Republican because I believe that our sovereign country needs to be defended and protected, and I despise the leftist, socialist political agenda that would see us on our knees both politically and economically.

As I wrote in a previous essay, I think that my own generation, the baby boomers, are the most self centered and destructive generation ever born to America. They grew up with perfect, comfortable childhoods and learned nothing but contempt for the very country that has given them the advantages they have in life. There has been no real adversity in my life, I have never suffered on behalf of my country because even though there have been 3 wars in my lifetime, my own life was not touched by these events. They were fought and are being fought abroad by an all volunteer military, and I have not been required to make any sacrifices to my own way of life for these wars, and neither have my generational peers.

Of course, I'm at the tail end of the boomer generation, so I wasn't a 60s radical hippy, and though I was much more liberal in my misspent yoot, I've never been the type to hate my country for a laundry list of historical sins. You cannot rewrite or really repair historical wrongs, and to hold an entire nation of people hostage to the historical grievances of a minority group of people is simply untenable. Yes, I'm sorry that the people who went before me did the Native Americans wrong, and I'm sorry that those who went before me owned slaves, and I'm sorry that the Japanese were interned in camps during the 2nd World War, but that happened before ANY of us (the boomers) was born and it is history. What we can do as a nation is acknowledge that our ancestors did wrong and perhaps apologize, which has been done, over and over, and even a congressional proclamation to blacks apologizing for slavery, and move on. Enough already.

I doubt that there will be any American muslims seeing the inside of a concentration style camp if war were to break out with a muslim country (oops, it did!), so we can safely assume that Americans have learned their lessons from history and that that less than pretty part of our history as a nation is over and will never happen again. Same with slavery and killing Native Americans for sport.

I would like to see both the far left and the far right abandon abortion as an issue as well. Women can only be free if they have full authority over their own reproduction and having abortion available is a necessary function of a free society, whether the religious people like it or not. It is the same with the pill. To me, it is none of your business if you don't believe in birth control and I want to buy the pill from you if you are a pharmacist. Your political and religious beliefs should not be forced on me, and if you don't like dispensing the pill, get another job...one that does not conflict with your beliefs and that you can practice within the bounds of what you believe.

When Does Persistence Turn to Stalking?

2008-08-31T08:16:00.000-07:00

When the contact is unwanted.

As most of you who read this blog know, I play a game called Second Life. It is a virtual world in which you can do pretty much anything you do in this world, and then some. It is basically a chat program with a visual element in the form of a physical manifestation of you....you can have a home, a husband/wife, a baby even, and the players pair up and break up at a dizzying rate. The average romantic relationship in Second Life lasts 4 or so weeks, however, a week in Second Life should be measured like dog years, because the nature of the medium accelerates everything and the mind to mind communication allows for rampant emotionalism.

It also can be an incubator for stalkers.....folks who can't take "I don't want to see you anymore" for an answer. Such a situation has befallen me. I met a man in the game, we became "virtual" lovers, the relationship fell apart after about 6 weeks (this happened in late January or early February), and the man involved just won't go away. I wish he would, because what he sees as persistence, I see as stalking.

He got banned from my land and my life after he decided that pursuing me to my private space in the game, without an invitation, was the right thing to do. Fortunately, SL has a "mute" feature where you can turn off all communications with any given "AV" or character, and I muted him in the game, whereupon he decided to start emailing me, outside the game. I used the spam feature of my email to block his address, so he sent emails in his wife's name, which were promptly blocked as well. Now he is posting to my blog in an attempt to get my attention, which, in my opinion, constitutes stalking, since I have made it perfectly clear to him that I want no communication with him on any level or in any venue.

Persistence is a wonderful quality in a person, and all too lacking in our fast paced, very shallow society, where instant gratification is the order of the day, and very few people will follow anything to the bitter end. It also has a down side, and if allowed to run amok, produces a situation like this. I consider myself fortunate that this man cannot show up on my doorstep, as he lives in another state and has physical disabilities, as well as a wife and family, but I wish he would just leave me alone. I will post this in the hope that he will see himself in my words, and finally respect my wishes. If he does not, I will investigate my options with the Authorities, since he has stalked me on the internet and I believe there are laws in place against such things now, since a young woman recently committed suicide after having been harassed online by the overprotective mother of the girl's neighbor, out for a laugh at the expense of an emotionally vulnerable teenager.

This is my last plea to you, Michael (you know who you are)....please, leave me alone, and cease all attempts at communications with me or I will take steps to make sure that you do. Your persistence has turned into stalking and it MUST stop.

Brilliant.....The Maverick Picks A Maverick

2008-08-29T15:06:00.000-07:00

Wow...I didn't think McCain had it in him and I'm absolutely pleased and proud that, in fact, he does. His choice of Sarah Palin for his running mate is just brilliant. To the Dems....checkmate. I confess that up until now, I was not really all that gung ho for McCain, however, now I can actually vote FOR a candidate, instead of against one, for the first time in many years.

Sarah Palin couldn't have been a more insightful, intelligent and positively energizing choice for the Republican ticket. She is a fresh face, NOT a beltway insider, a mother with 5 children, former mayor and present Governor of one of the largest statest in the union, and above all, a woman who took on the corrupt Republicans in her own back yard and beat them at their own game. Gotta love it. She is a hunter, a life long NRA member who believes in the 2nd ammendment, and a well rounded candidate with more practical experience than the number one guy on the opposite ticket, as well as a great compliment and contrast to McCain himself. She is also pro-life, which isn't such a great thing to me, but the religious base will not be unhappy about it, so they are not likely to revolt.

Personally, I think the GOP needs to stop with the anti-abortion meme, because most of the country doesn't care about it anymore...it's been 30 years since Roe v. Wade, and I think more mainstream Americans are concerned with the cost of groceries and gas than abortion. Message to the anti-abortionists among us...please...get over it. Women are only truly free when they control when or whether they have children, and although I am past my childbearing years, I benefited from Roe v. Wade and I refuse to be a hypocrite in my old age. Abortion should be safe, sane and legal whether the fundamentalists like it or not. Women have been aborting unwanted pregnancies since the beginning of time, and if it becomes illegal in this country again, more women will die from backstreet abortions because they will have them anyway.

The Democrats will have to step very carefully in their attacks against Palin as well, because to belittle her accomplishments too much will, I think, offend middle class, female Democrats who are already feeling disaffected by the treatement that Hillary Clinton received at the hands of the Obama camp, so there is a distinct possibility that those voters will now vote for McCain instead of just staying home.

All in all, an excellent pick!

Nope..No Hillary...it's Joe Biden!

2008-08-23T06:00:00.000-07:00

So, Obama wasn't faking us out to pick Hillary in the end. He made a much more destructive choice...Joe Biden. And, I think the reason that the whole "text announcement" wasn't made is that Obama either couldn't bring himself to actually commit to a running mate, the one thing written in stone that Obama cannot equivocate on or change his mind about, or he was turned down by the top 2 or 3 on the list who can see the train wreck coming and didn't want to harness themselves and their careers to a loser....a BIG loser at that. Ya'll know this is gonna get ugly, right? You can see the wheels falling off the Obama bus, right?

I can't wait to see Biden on Meet the Press, twisting himself into an intellectual pretzel, trying to weasel out of his words at one of the primary debates where he stood behind his prior statement that Obama, who was standing right there, wasn't ready to be President. The problem with Biden as a running mate is that everybody knows he barks a lot (the reason for his selection as VP is because he has a reputation as an "attack dog."), but the problem with attack dogs of Biden's stripe is that they mouth off in the heat of the moment and often have to mitigate or retract what they've said down the line and they often end up looking real stupid.

So, Joe...what's changed in, oh....SIX MONTHS?

In an election cycle that should have been a cakewalk for the Democrat Party, they've done nothing but shoot themselves in the foot. First, by pitting their 2 biggest voter demographics against each other for the nomination, they have secured the enmity of the voters who feel like their candidate was not only defeated in the primaries, but was disrespected as well. Next, they have used their Machiavellian "electoral college of superdelegates" to select Obama over a more experienced and more electable candidate (granted, nobody would motivate the Republicans to rise up and vote en mass like Hillary), thus alienating what I see as a plurality of the independents and those folks who are sick of the present administration, but who were waiting to see if the Dems could actually pull it off. (Message to independents: THEY CAN'T) Last, but hardly least, is the candidate himself with his messianic image and campaign promises that even Moses himself couldn't keep. The moment when the oceans started to rise? Is he real?

I'm beginning to think that the left in our country just lives in a fantasy world of their own imaginations. They must be in la-la land to think that an ivy league educated guy who lives in a million dollar mansion, paid for with help from now-convicted felons, who hangs out for years with unrepentant terrorists who wish they could have done more to bring down the federal government, and who spent, literally 1000 Sundays sitting in the congregation of a radical, black power church (where he didn't hear the toxic message, don'tcha know), and who concerns himself with the price of arugula instead of milk and eggs, could EVER get elected President of the United States.....it just boggles the mind. Factor in the angry wife with a racial chip on her shoulder and an only recent, new-found love of her country and what do you have? A recipe for a historic landslide. If this (losing by a landslide) doesn't bring the Democrat Party back into reality, nothing will.

Now he picks Joe Biden for a running mate? What a laugh. He's probably the only one who accepted the gig...the rest of 'em ran screaming from the Messiah with their hands covering their privates!

Is Obama Faking Us Out....or Hillary for VEEP?

2008-08-22T07:01:00.000-07:00

Has Obama been faking us out all along and actually intends to select Hillary Clinton for the VP slot? Well....it's plausible, but stupid, for a myriad of reasons. If Obama is looking to unite the Democrat party by selecting her, that's probably the smart thing to do, but only if party unity is more important than actually winning the election. Nothing would mobilize the Republican base more than an Obama/Clinton ticket, unless it is a Clinton/Obama ticket!

The following are the reasons why, in my humble opinion (which means absolutely nothing), selecting Hillary Clinton for the VP slot would be stupid:

First, there's the bitter battle fought between the two for the nomination to begin with. Her campaign and her husband both played the race card....badly, I might add. The surreptitious release of a picture, by the Clinton camp, of Obama, tarted up like a muslim, went over like a lead balloon and I suspect there is more than a little personal enmity between the two of them because of her consistent negative attacks on him during the primaries, once she realized that Obama had bamboozled his way into winning caucus states that, evidently, her campaign didn't take into consideration in their planning of her coronation...

Second, Hillary's already been co-President and would probably not willingly do her duty and fade into the background, only to be trotted out to break a tie in the Senate, or nod enthusiastically during the State of the Union addresses. She would, I think, take any and every opportunity to steal the limelight for herself and upstage the Messiah at every turn. I'm thinking that after the primary fight with her, Obama would much rather drive a stake through her heart than give her a position as his running mate...but that's just me.

Third...well, there's Bill. Does Obama really want a guy like Bill Clinton loose within 100 yards of the White House interns? With no accountability for his debauched behaviors? Does he really want a running mate who is married to a former President, who, by all accounts, already feels like his position as an elder statesman of his party has been disrespected? Talk about a loose cannon.....Bill Clinton would have no "official" position in an Obama administration, but as a former President and the husband of a possible current Vice President, he would be free to create as much trouble as he wants and never have to pay the political price for it.

Fourth, and finally, would selecting Hillary really make the PUMA's (that's Party Unity My Ass) happy? I think not. They would still be mad because their girl should be at the TOP of the ticket, not playing 2nd fiddle to a rank amateur....sure, some of them would come around, but how many, and is it really worth it when we know Hillary wants the Oval Office for herself come 2012? If that's the case, Obama has to lose this time, so why would she yoke herself to a loser?

If all the Obama camp is looking for is party unity, selecting Hillary would be the way to go, but at what cost? The wheels are coming off the Obama bus faster than a wreck at a NASCAR race, and they're starting to show a little desperation.....kinda early in the season for this kind of desperation from the guy who has been "anointed" as the Great Unifier, isn't it?

Pass the popcorn...I can't wait for the carnage at the DNC....

The Greatest Generation Goofed....

2008-08-21T06:48:00.001-07:00

And their children are making it worse.

The Greatest Generation are generally thought to be those who fought and survived WWII. They came home from the privations and traumas of war to father and raise the next generation, generally referred to as the Baby Boomers. Your erstwhile author is at the tail end of that generation, having been born in 1960.

Those of the Greatest Generation were probably the last generation of Americans who really ever suffered or sacrificed for their country, with the exception of anybody who has served in the military, to this day. This generation of Americans, most of whom were born at or near the turn of the century, were raised with a work ethic, moral values, and inculcated with a love of their country. They grew up in a simpler, yet a much harder time in the evolution of America. There were no microwave ovens, remotes or cell phones, and the young men of this generation were the ones who marched off to war to fight the Germans and the Japanese, while the rest of America stayed home and made their own sacrifices. American women, for the first time, were forced to work outside their homes, making up for the male workforce and the family income lost to the war. Their food and gasoline was rationed, as well as many other things, so these at-home Americans were participating in the war effort alongside their fathers and brothers who were sitting in jungles and trenches in Europe and the Pacific theatre.

These men came home from that war, got jobs, started families and raised their children with the idea that they did not want their heirs to ever suffer the privations that they had suffered, fighting in the last world war. They wanted, as all parents do, to give their children a carefree life...for them to live up to the potential invested in all children, and to be able to live their lives free of the spectre of another world war. In other words, these parents wanted the best for their children, so they set about raising them in complete comfort. Protecting them from everything, giving them everything they ever wanted and granting their every wish. They goofed.

The Baby Boomers turned out to be one of the most selfish and destructive generations ever born to America. Witness what happens when there is little or no adversity in your life. You create it. The children of the Greatest Generation are the spoiled, pampered, elitist America haters they are because they were never inculcated with the same work ethic, values like love of country means duty to country, or a willingness to sacrifice themselves for something bigger than themselves. So they evolved into the feckless, relativist, tune-in-turn-on-drop-out, anti-war, hippy dippy, let's-all-link-arms-and-sing-Kumbayah collectivist Marxists that we see today.

What does the left in this country have to be mad about, and why do they think that ruining our econonomy with a treaty like Kyoto, socialist health care, dumbing down education and making our population more dependent on the government, not to mention being more like Europe is going to make America better? Why do people who have had the most advantages in this world feel like they have it so bad? The problem with making the government your daddy is that you might wait in vain for daddy to come get you....can you say....Katrina? All those folks waiting for daddy government to come and rescue them were wishing by the end of that experience that they had walked or skateboarded out of New Orleans, I'm sure....it's not like that hurricane was a surprise. They had nearly a week of warning, but their dependence on the government tit was what kept them waiting for daddy and he didn't come quick enough.

America is the richest country in the world. We have a lifestyle rich with technology, we give the most to charities, and even our poorest people are fat. Show me a fat person in Zimbabwe or Darfur and I'll show you a crony of the guy in power.

Now the Baby Boomers have come full circle....they want to be our nannies. They want to protect us from everything, give us everything, and grant our every wish, provided, of course, that you toe the marxist line and live your life the way they tell you to. You'll never be responsible for your actions again. You'll be taken care of by the state from cradle to grave, but we own your ass. I'm sorry, but I don't want to live that way. I want to be responsible for myself. I want to be self sufficient. I am proud of my country and it's people. I don't want to be more like Europe...hell, we fought a war to get away from them!

I'm sure there are many Boomers out there who still love their country, and can still think for themselves. Fortunately, most of us got our educations before the left got a stranglehold on it, and still have critical thinking skills that the younger generations lack, big time. It's going to take all of us to turn the tide of socialism creeping into American life, and take responsibility for ourselves and our world back from the creepy leftists who have it all but want to give away that belonging to the rest of us.....our pride in America and our certainty that this country is the best place in the world to live and to raise our children.

Don't let them.

Thoughts on Michelle Obama as First Lady

2008-08-11T05:45:00.000-07:00

Could the mental image in the mind of the average voter, of Michelle Obama in the White House, lose the election for Barak? I'm inclined to believe it could.

Her newfound pride in her country (which is a total turnoff to the rest of us who love our country despite it's flaws) aside, her attendance at the Rev. Wright's church for 20+ years, where it's obvious to anybody who listens to her speak that she has definitely absorbed some of his toxic, "get even with whitey" message could very well cost Obama the election. Even if Barak can hide it, she cannot. Of course, she wasn't groomed from the cradle to be the wife of a politician, and though she is a trained lawyer with an Ivy League degree, she hasn't quite mastered the rigid control of self necessary to deceive the "unwashed" masses and convince them that she should be the next First Lady, any more than her erstwhile husband has convinced us that he's anything more than a vapid rock star wannabe.

Since it's very un-PC to say that she comes off as a very angry black woman, suffice it to say that she comes off as just plain angry, and her complaints about finding the 10 thousand dollars to pay for her daughter's ballet lessons is just short of loony. Does she really believe that average Americans who struggle to put enough gas in their cars to make it to work are going to be sympathetic to her whining that it's so expensive to put their kids in dance school?

How clueless and elitist is this?

There are average Americans every day who have to decide between transportation and food and this woman is whining about the cost of dance lessons and the fact that she's only recently (since her hubby decided to run for Prez) had reason to be proud of her American citizenship, and that America is a "mean" country. I wonder if she thought it was so mean when she got her affirmative action scholarship to Harvard? I wonder if she thought America was so mean when she got a 250 thousand dollar raise in her already no-show job? I'm sure she thought America was mean when the Rev. took his little PR junket to the Washington Press Club, not to refute his toxic message, but to reaffirm it. I'm sure America was mean to actually take him at his word.

But I digress...

This is a woman who claims to want to represent us all as our First Lady. I'm sorry, but she doesn't represent me. I love my counry, right or wrong, and I think it's the best nation in the world to live in, bar none, and I don't want to hear the woman who occupies the White House whine that it's only a great country when she says so. Americans want another Jackie O in the White House, not another two-fer co-President with bigger balls than her husband, ala Hillary Clinton. That two-fer thing didn't work out so well for the Clintons either, as Hillarycare was shot down in flames and the co-Prez was humiliated for all the world to see.

Michelle Obama's clueless, racialist, elitist attitude toward her country cannot but hinder the Obama campaign, and if she was as smart as they like to tell us she is, she'd tone down the negative rhetoric and start baking cookies.

Obama's But is Showing.

2008-08-08T05:05:00.000-07:00

I love my country, but.....

I'm proud to be an American, but....

The Democrat's but's are showing. They love their country, but.....it's not what it once was. The last 6 words of that sentence were directed recently, by Mr. Obama, at a 7 year old girl asking the candidate why he ran for president. What purpose, do you suppose, is there in telling a little girl, with her entire life ahead of her, that her country sucks? Why tell a child that the only place she's ever known as home "isn't what it once was?" Why not just tell her he's running because he loves his country and leave the "but" out? Why poison a child?

If this is love of country, count me out. If this is Obama's pride in his culture, we're in deep do-do. I'm not one, generally, to echo Rush Limbaugh (I'm not a huge fan of his, due to his propensity to call strong minded, independent women Feminazis), but...why couldn't Obama just tell that little girl that he ran for president because America is the greatest nation in the world and he wants to be president of it because of that?

Americans don't want to hear the buts. We want to hear "I'm proud of my country," or "I love my country." We don't want to hear it qualified. We want to hear it plain. We want to know that the man we elect to lead us loves his country without reservation, without qualifications and without the "but's." Obama tells us he loves his country, but....we should be more like Europe.

We know America isn't perfect...nothing is, and despite the liberal dream of a perfect, utopian society, which, to them is NOT this one, why is America still the country that people in every other country want to emmigrate to? They don't say, "I want to live in America, but, it's not the country it once was," they just say they want to live in America because it's a better country than the one they're coming from. Isn't it strange that they only immigrants you hear complaining about America are the ones that come here illegally?

Why can't Obama bring himself to just say..."I love my country, and I'm proud to be an American?" Why does he have to qualify it with a "but?" Hopefully, sane, thinking Americans will tell Mr. Obama, by means of a historic landslide for the most boring Republican in years, that his "but" is showing and we want none of it.

The Emperor Has No Clothes

2008-08-04T08:32:00.000-07:00

Is the Obama Cult of Personality on the downslide?

I think so. He's beginning to be seen in even the most liberal circles now as being a bit arrogant, as grudgingly admitted on the McLoughlin Group yesterday by, of all people (!), Eleanor Clift! I immediately snooped the Internet to see if hell had frozen over, but alas, no, it hasn't.

Are the scales beginning to fall from the eyes of the hard core liberals and are they finally realizing that Obama is, as we say in Texas, "all hat and no cattle?" Are they starting to see that running for "President of the World" is, maybe, a bad idea? Is it sinking into their numbed little skulls that average Americans might be turned off by the idea of a mere presidential candidate acting like he's already won the election by using his own fake "presidential seal," having a seat on his "O Force One" plane embroidered with the word "president," or courting the German/Euro/world vote?

It seems to me, being one of those average Americans, that a mere 60 years out of World War 2 (you know, the one where the Germans tried to take over the world?), that giving a speech to a cheering crowd of Germans isn't going to read well at home. But, of course, the liberals are not all that into history, and this probably never occurred to them when planning this event. It doesn't surprise me that Obama's European victory lap (taken before the election, of course) didn't get the huge bump in the polls that his campaign staff thought it would. There are plenty of WWII vets still alive and they all have families, extended families and friends, and they might see a presidential candidate pandering to the very people they fought a mere 60 or so years ago as not all that special. But that's just me.

I don't see average Americans as being as enamored of the Europeans as the liberals in our country seem to be. They're all for abolishing borders and having a EU style government of the North American Union. Give me an absolute break. Fortunately for America, average voters still love their sovereign country (America) and are not about to support the Marxist Mexican government and the loony, Eurostyle Canadian government (they're already prosecuting people in Canada who don't toe the PC party line...see Mark Steyn) being joined cheek by jowl with America. I see America falling to socialism eventually, but I'm hoping I'll be dead by then.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.....average Americans will NOT elect a presidential candidate whom they feel has nothing in common with them. You can spin it until you're blue in the face, but Obama is not, and can never be, everyman. As boring as John McCain is as a Republican presidential candidate, he is seen as a more common man than Obama ever will be.

What McCain needs to do now is ridicule Obama for his hubris in acting like the President before he gets elected....who cares about race when you can poke fun at an elitist? John Kerry lost his bid for the presidency the last time because he was seen as a snob who did not understand the day to day travails of the average citizen, and who could not seem to hold ONE position on anything. Obama is stepping into the same trap. Between his flip flops on core liberal issues and his obliteration of the fine line between being seen as potentially Presidential and being seen as presumptuous, his value as a candidate is hitting the liberal skids, even.

If somebody like Eleanor Clift is forced to admit that Obama is presumptuous, then the Emperor truly has No Clothes.

British Journalist Skewers the Messiah

2008-07-26T06:44:00.000-07:00

Thank God....finally, a British journalist asks, "can we make fun of Obama?"

Yes we can.

So far, the only attempts to roast Barak Obama in the US have come in the form of a SNL skit making fun of the old media's slavish devotion to Obama, and a too close to the bone cartoon satire on the cover of the New Yorker magazine, to which the Obama campaign reacted like a typical bunch of oversensitive whiners. You CAN'T make fun of the Messiah!

Yes we can!

But it took a Brit to do it right! Gerard Baker does an amazing job of skewering the cult of Obama, and you had best read it without your coffee in your hand unless you want to see it all over your keyboard. Side splittingly funny....the razor sharp British humor we've all heard about, but rarely experience outside of a Monty Python movie.

In an article titled "He Ventured Forth to Bring Light to the World," Baker slices and dices Obama's cult of personality and the fawning, obsessed press for the world to see, and his witty commentary cuts right to the bone.

And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.
The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow.
When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: “Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?” In the great Battles of Caucus and Primary he smote the conniving Hillary, wife of the deposed King Bill the Priapic and their barbarian hordes of Working Class Whites.

Hilarious. Read the rest here.

It's really too bad that the American press is so in the tank for Obama, as he's a rich target for satire. Candidates for POTUS have to tread a fine line between looking "presidential" and being presumptuous. Obama has not only stepped across that fine line, he has set a new standard in "audacity." Channeling JFK by staging a rally in Germany? Co-opting the Great Seal of the United States? Puleeze.....

The Pig in the Poke

2008-07-21T09:15:00.000-07:00

There is an old expression about not buying a "pig in a poke." A poke, is an old term for a bag, so the expression essentially says, don't buy something sight unseen, because you may get ripped off. The Democrat Party has bought itself a pig in a poke, and the mainstream media is so wholly in the tank for Obama, that they have stepped up their coverage of him in order to convince the voting public to buy that pig, too, regardless of his lack of experience, his typical leftist grasp of history (uhm...none.), and his unapolagetic friends and backers who are former domestic terrorists....

I'm not one to quote polls, but even Rassmussen shows that more than 50% of the voting public believes the media favors Obama. Gee, do ya think?

McCain has been to Iraq many times, and so far, not one of the "news royalty" has deigned to fly along and broadcast the news from wherever, yet Obama goes, and sure enough, so does the fawning press. And wouldn't you know, the anchors of all three major networks are going too....Sheesh, it's sickening.

I still have faith that the sane, voting public will not buy into this attempt to shove socialism down our throats, and despite the money and the fawning press, Obama will lose in the general election.

The totally delicious part of all this is the shock and outrage on the day AFTER election day when the left realizes that despite their best efforts and all the money they could spend, in the end, they lost again, and hopefully, for quite some time.

Pass the popcorn.

The Devil and Barak Obama

2008-07-16T06:22:00.000-07:00

"Above all else, the Devil cannot stand to be mocked." -- C.S. Lewis

The Narcissist in Chief is at it again. This week The New Yorker magazine came out with a cover that depicts Obama and the lovely Michelle as radical, fist bumping muslims who will burn the American flag in their rush to lose the war in Iraq.

Of course, the first thing the Obama campaign did was squeal like stuck pigs that the cover was "insensitive and offensive." What a bunch of whiners. The New Yorker is famous for skewering political figures on their cover (a 2006 cover depicted Bush and Cheney as the 2 gay cowboys from Brokeback Mountain), so the Obama camp should be happy that The New Yorker chose to skewer them....any publicity is good publicity, isn't it?

Unless there's a grain of truth to the subject matter and said cartoon cuts it a bit toooo close to said truth. Methinks the Ivy Tower liberals are too sophisticated for their own good.

Personally, I think it's disingenuous to paint Obama as a fifth column muslim. He may sympathise with muslims because it's the politically correct, leftist thing to do, but I don't believe that he is religious at all....after all, how can the Messiah be religious when he's at the center of the cult? Obama worships at no altar but that of his own ambition, fed and nurtured in the smoky back rooms of the Chicago political machine that spawned him, and is fooling nobody but the mindless leftist drones that would follow anybody who is as anti-mainstream America as Obama led them to believe he was in the primaries. Of course, those extreme lefties are always the jilted bride, waiting at the altar of their political ambition for the anointed prince to show up, which, of course, he never does.

Guess what, lefties? He's gonna jilt you again....hope you haven't bought your new duds for the inauguration ball that won't be happening.

Now the rumor is that the Hillary folks are negotiating for a floor vote with Hillary's name on the ballot during the convention, which the Obamabots are fighting tooth and nail (scared of a little buyer's remorse??). Floor votes have typically, in the past, been little more than a show for the nominee, but the Obama folks don't trust Hillary's supporters or their delegates, apparently, and I can't wait to see if it happens.

Pass the popcorn.

Let's Control the Bullets!!!

2008-06-29T07:16:00.000-07:00

I start my Sunday mornings, every week, with a program called CBS Sunday Morning. It's one of those "magazine" type shows with a smattering of everything....culture, politics, arts, sciences and humor. There are also video "editorials," by several different contributors. One such, a Miss Nancy Giles, did her editorial on guns and the recent SCOTUS ruling that the citizens of the District of Columbia have a right to protect their homes and themselves by personally owning firearms. She whined about how scared she is of guns, and how she jumps at the sound of a firecracker. Man, she must be a real fun gal at a fireworks show! Her solution was don't control guns...control the BULLETS! Yeah! That's the ticket! Control the bullets!

Why do I get the feeling that I'm watching a Saturday Night Live sketch every time a liberal opens their mouth? I keep expecting Jon Lovitz to jump out and grin into the camera....

Guns, themselves, don't kill anybody or anything. I've had a shotgun sitting in my closet, loaded, for over 2 years and it hasn't killed anybody yet. Myself and my 2 cats are still breathing. Why can't liberals understand that controlling the weapons doesn't mean you will be controlling the behavior that leads to somebody using a gun? Why is it, that they need to blame an inanimate object for the behavior of some people? It's not the gun that kills anybody, it's the person pulling the trigger. Why do they ignore the fact that Man is a violent being and will do violence to his fellowman with whatever weapon is available? Why, for example, are prisoners being stabbed on a daily basis in a place where there are not supposed to BE any weapons at all? Why? Because Man is a violent being who will commit violent acts with whatever he can use....be it a gun or a toothbrush that's been sharpened into a weapon.

And how will taking the guns from the hands of the law abiding citizens do anything to reduce crime? Do these naive liberals think that the criminals are suddenly going to have an epiphany, realizing that guns have been outlawed and turn both themselves and their unlawful weapons in to the authorities? I can see it now....the light bulb going on over the robber's head and his face falling in despair when he realizes....oh my GOD....guns are illegal!! I could get.....arrested!!! Yeah, riiiiight.

An armed populace is a polite one. If you take guns from registered gun owners (for you libs out there, that would be, uhm....the law abiding citizens), then only the government and the criminals would have them, and the rest of the population would have no way to defend themselves against either the petty tyranny of criminals or the major tyranny of a possible dictator forcing the unarmed populace to his will.

It was not the possibility of a spike in crime that led to the decision in the SCOTUS case, but the second possibility. The populace should be able to form extemporaneous militias, i.e., armed neighborhood watches/defense committees, for the purposes of defending our way of life and our Republic against the depredations of a possible takeover of our government by a person or group of people bent on destroying our elective representation and installing a president for life or dictator. How can the people form militias if they have to wait to be armed? Where would the neighborhood munitions be stored if they did? Who would be in charge? It makes perfect sense to have the munitions already scattered among the people, because there would be no central place to neutralize by capture or destroying it, and to completely disarm the populace would require a door to door search....very risky if the population isn't of a mind to cooperate.

So instead of controlling the bullets, or the knives or the sharpened toothbrushes, why not control the behavior of the criminals? Let them think twice about robbing MY house because they may be shot, not knowing that they can tyrannize and terrorize me with impunity because the liberals, in their eternal arrogance, have decided that my home is not worthy of defense and neither am I.

In the meantime, I'll hang onto my shotgun in case my neighborhood militia needs me for defense against the tyranny of a dictator!

Karl, You Magnificent Bastard, You!

2008-06-25T22:16:00.000-07:00

Gotta love Karl Rove.

Once again, he skewers Obama beautifully. In this piece on the Wall Street Journal website, Mr. Rove points out Obama's abject narcissism, and shows us what we might be in for with an Obama presidency. I couldn't have said it better myself. He begins with Obama's co-opting of the Presidential Seal, mentions his reluctance to have face to face Town Halls and/or Lincoln-Douglas style debates with McCain and goes on from there:

Many candidates have measured the Oval Office drapes prematurely. But Barack Obama is the first to redesign the presidential seal before the election.

His seal featured an eagle emblazoned with his logo, and included a Latin version of his campaign slogan. This was an attempt by Sen. Obama to make himself appear more presidential. But most people saw in the seal something else – chutzpah – and he's stopped using it. Such arrogance – even self-centeredness – have featured often in the Obama campaign.

Consider his treatment of Jeremiah Wright. After Rev. Wright repeated his anti-American slurs at the National Press Club, Mr. Obama said their relationship was forever changed – but not because of what he'd said about America. Instead, Mr. Obama complained, "I don't think he showed much concern for me."

Translation: Rev. Wright is an impediment to my ambitions. So, as it turns out, are some of Mr. Obama's previous pledges.

For example, Mr. Obama has said he "strongly supported public financing" and pledged to take federal funds for the fall, thereby limiting his spending to roughly $84 million. Now convinced he can raise more than $84 million, he reversed course last week, ditching the federal money and its limits. But by discarding his earlier pledge so easily, he raises doubts about whether his word can be trusted.

Last month he replied "anywhere, anytime" to John McCain's invitation to have joint town hall appearances. Last week he changed his mind. Fearing 10 impromptu town halls, Mr. Obama parried the invitation by offering two such events – one the night of July 4, when every ambulatory American is watching fireworks or munching hotdogs, and another in August. His spokesman then said, "Take it or leave it." So much for "anywhere, anytime."

Read the rest here.

I suspect Obama's reluctance to meet McCain face to face has more to do with his poor performance when he doesn't have a script, and Obama's campaign is afraid that McCain, even with his lack of grand rhetorical skills, would wipe up the floor with him in an extemporaneous debate, where Obama is required to speak on the fly...without a teleprompter. His worst gaffes have occurred in this manner.

Beautiful....just beautiful. All McCain has to do is hammer Obama on the facts. Who cares about his race? I don't. I care more that he seems to be unable to keep his word in the face of political expediency.

Obama doesn't belong in the Senate, let alone the White House.

Narcissist in Chief

2008-06-21T08:19:00.000-07:00

Well, he's gone and done it.

Barak Obama, Narcissist in Chief, has gone and co-opted the Presidential Seal. I'm sure it's an attempt on the part of his campaign to make him look more "Presidential," and to get voters accustomed to seeing him in the role of President.

I, for one, find it appalling and offensive.

First off, he hasn't earned it yet. One has to be elected President to be authorized to use the presidential seal, the vice presidential seal or the Great Seal of the United States. Who does this guy think he is? Who is he to co-opt the symbol of presidential power during an election? Am I the only one who is offended by this? It's bad enough that he's taken to wearing the flag pin, giving speeches with 20 bazillion giant American flags behind him, but to steal the ultimate symbol of the US and the Presidency for his own campaign is beyond narcissistic.

Secondly, I do believe that it's illegal:

18 USC Sec. 713 ...(a) Whoever knowingly displays any printed or other likeness of the great seal of the United States, or of the seals of the President or the Vice President of the United States, or the seal of the United States Senate, or the seal of the United States House of Representatives, or the seal of the United States Congress, or any facsimile thereof, in, or in connection with, any advertisement, poster, circular, book, pamphlet, or other publication, public meeting, play, motion picture, telecast, or other production, or on any building, monument, or stationery, for the purpose of conveying, or in a manner reasonably calculated to convey, a false impression of sponsorship or approval by the Government of the United States or by any department, agency, or instrumentality thereof, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.
(b) Whoever, except as authorized under regulations promulgated by the President and published in the Federal Register, knowingly manufactures, reproduces, sells, or purchases for resale, either separately or appended to any article manufactured or sold, any likeness of the seals of the President or Vice President, or any substantial part thereof, except for manufacture or sale of the article for the official use of the Government of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.

The question is...will the Treasury Department either arrest him or insist that he stop using it?

Obama Lied, Credibility Died....

2008-06-20T08:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Barak Obama announced that he would forgo public funding for his presidential campaign, after vowing earlier on in the race that he would "aggressively pursue" an agreement with the Republican nominee to use public funds for his campaign, should he get the nomination. He even went so far as to affix his signature to said document. Of course, this was grandstanding on his part because at that time, Hillary was planning her inauguration and nobody thought Obama had a snowball's chance.

Is this what America really wants in a president? A guy who will say or do whatever is necessary to win? A man whose word and signature mean nothing? Sure, Obama can outraise McCain, but at what expense? I'm seeing a man who has no ethics, no morals, and does not back his grandiose words with actions, which can have far reaching consequences if this man is voted into the White House. We are still suffering the ill effects, to this day, of the spineless Carter administration's refusal to support the Shah of Iran....

This is a neophyte politician who expects us to take his word on where he stands, yet he doesn't appear to stand for anything that you can put your finger on. At least McCain has a record as a Senator, and whether you like him or not. Personally, I'm luke warm on him at best, but compared to Obama, he's downright stalwart! Evidently McCain's the closest thing we have to a statesman these days....and of course, I'm not all that happy about it, but I will vote for him anyway because I just can't stomach a man who promises everything to every one, then starts breaking his promises even before he can get elected! This kind of betrayal does not bode well for what he would do as president. As much as everybody hates George Bush, you gotta give the man credit for taking a stand on something and sticking to his guns, whether the feckless public likes it or not.

What is even more depressing is the comments I've been seeing on various websites and blogs(Washington Post and New York Times editorial comments) saying things like "I don't care that he changed his mind" or "I'm glad he did." To me, that's the equivalent of saying that you share Mr. Obama's lack of morals and ethics and that you support lying and subversion to accomplish your goals. In other words, you will lie or cheat to get what you want, so you don't understand why it's a big deal....after all everybody does it! Is this really a characteristic that the American people want in their President?

So much for hope and change. This is none other than politics as usual, and Obama is a willing tool for the left in the guise of a centrist. Puleeze.

What Now?

2008-06-04T06:31:00.000-07:00

Ok, now that Obama has declared himself the winner of the Democrat primary process....what now? Do the Dems really believe that all or even most of Hillary's supporters are going to line up like good little socialist soldiers and cast their votes for Obama?

I think not....

If the following is any indication, Obama's got a tough row to hoe to convince his fellow Dems that he is indeed their Messiah. I read this on the NY Times website, in a column called the Opinionator. It is a comment posted by one of the readers, presumably a Democrat:

Didn’t anybody notice the screaming supporters that follow Hillary pushing her to stay on? That there is at least half of the democratic party that isn’t cheering for Obama? That unlike republicans democrats will not fall in line just because they are told that they need to turn from Hillary and vote for Obama? I wasn’t a Hillary supporter and didn’t even vote for her in either senate race, though I must admit that I have come to respect the job she has done in the senate and the in-roads and alliances she made there herself. But watching, listening and reading what’s been said about her, her supporters and her voters, Camp Obama has made me a Hillary supporter.
I would vote for her, but I wouldn’t vote for him. I distrust the person I fear he is. We’ve watched Bush abuse loyalty to the detriment of the nation, but I fear Obama has none other than to himself. I distrust his rhetoric, he talks only in soundbites with no real substance - he promises substance but in months and months of campaigning we’ve seen none. So just how many of Hillary voters will become meek little lambs and vote how they are told to by Camp Obama?
—
Posted by Katy

If this is the average Hillary supporter talking here, then Obama has his work cut out for him just to get the half of his party that doesn't support him to come around, let alone the other half of the country that thinks he's an empty suit with a grand rhetorical style, but no grand substance to match.

This time around, race trumps gender, though I don't understand what either quality has to do with being prepared to tote the nuclear football around and answer that red phone at 2 o'clock in the morning. The fact that Obama has insisted until recently that he would meet with Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, shows me that he is naive at best and dangerously inexperienced at worst. Now is no time for on-the-job training.

I see Obama as the second coming of Jimmy Carter or worse....a Neville Chamberlain type socialist appeaser who, if elected, will make us long for a return to the spineless administration of Jimmy Carter or the halcyon days of the corrupt Clinton administration.

Of course, we all want a return to September 10, 2001, before our security as a nation was shattered by a bunch of radical muslims bent on terrorizing Americans into submission to Allah. Unfortunately, our world and our way of seeing the world was changed the next day, and those of us who live in the real world, and not some liberal fantasy world where everybody loves each other and links arms to sing Kumbayah every night, understand that the threat to our way of life is very real and a far left appeaser who will throw Israel to the radical muslims as a way of holding off the alligator is unacceptable.

Why Do Jews Vote Democrat?

2008-06-02T14:46:00.000-07:00

Are Jews so endemically victimized and genetically suicidal that they just can't resist the urge to immolate themselves by voting to elect a man who will jettison their religious homeland as soon as it is politically expedient to do so?

The drumbeat on the left is drumming these days for the poor, downtrodden Palestinians. Former President Jimmy Carter recently made a trip to Syria to hug on Khalid Meshal, the erstwhile leader of the Hamas party in Gaza, who is such a good leader he has to do it from another country. Mr. Carter was making nice with the terrorists who would see the Jews run into the sea and their country wiped from the face of the earth. In fact, we all know that the Hamas organization charter calls for the destruction of Israel, yet Mr. Carter feels free to negotiate with these monsters while accusing the Israelis of South African style apartheid.

Why?

The Israelis built a fence to keep their people safe from the rockets being fired into their country from the Occupied Territories, which, by the way, aren't Occupied anymore by anybody but the Palestinians. In my book, firing a rocket from one country into another constitutes an act of war. What would Americans think if the Mexicans started firing rockets into Texas? Well....*grins* that might not be such a good example because the Texans would mobilize all by themselves and go across the border to kick some ass. So, what if the Mexicans started firing rockets into California? Would we just let 'em do it? What if the Canadians started bombing New York? Would we just stand there like sheep and die? My guess is no.

So why are the Israelis practicing apartheid if all they are doing is trying to keep their population safe? And why is the left in this country supporting the wrong guys?? What would we, as Americans think if some crazy Canuks decided to start blowing themselves up at the Mall of America? Or Mexicans blowing themselves up in crowded buses full of innocent commuters, whose most radical thought in their entire lives might be whether or not to try arugula?

And why, oh why do American Jews want to aid in the destruction of Israel, and a possible 2nd holocaust by voting the liberal Democratic ticket? Are they blind or just stupid? Do they not read the papers or listen to the news? Do they not understand that the liberal drumbeat of dumping American support for Israel means them, too? Do they not get that they will be the next on the liberal list of persona non grata? Or are they gonna feed their brothers in Israel to the alligator hoping he won't come eventually for them?

I'm sorry but I just don't understand. I read somewhere on the Internet that the Ashkenazim are supposed to be the most intelligent people on the planet, but I'm just not seeing it....they can't be all that smart if they continue to vote for a party who would appease the radical muslims by abandoning support for Israel as soon as they attain power.

In my mind, voting for your own destruction isn't very smart at all. But....there must have been Jews that voted for Hitler too, thinking that he didn't really mean all those things he campaigned on....you know, eradicating Jews and other non-Arians. The alligator got them too, didn't he?

I'll See Your Hagee and Raise You a Phleger

2008-05-31T07:11:00.000-07:00

Looks like Obama is losing in the "preacher" sweepstakes. Again.

Just as the Obaminator rids himself of Pastor Wright and the media seas start to calm for him, up pops yet another colorful priest to pontificate in His name. Every time I raised Pastor Wright recently to one of my more progressive friends, he would come right back with..."well, what about Rev. Hagee?" Ok, I'll see your Rev. Hagee and raise you a Pastor (or is he a Rev?)Phleger....I probably use this term way too much in my writings concerning the stumbles and bumbles of the Democrat Party, but it's sooo hard not to. It's just......well, PRICELESS!!!

Obama's claims of great judgement are once again called into question as another of his alleged spiritual advisors spews a hate filled, sexist rant in Obama's own church! But of course, Mr. Obama didn't hear the actual racist rant (he wasn't there), and of course, he doesn't agree with what his spiritual advisor said....though he's Mr. Obama's self confessed spiritual advisor, and Phleger occupies space on Mr. Obama's website and all...but of course, Mr. Obama doesn't agree with his divisive message....yeah, that's the ticket! Mr. Obama doesn't agree with his message! Do you get the feeling you're in a Saturday Night Live sketch? I keep expecting John Lovitz to jump out while Obama to smiles cheesily into a camera somewhere and shouts..."LIVE FROM NEW YORK....IT'S SATURDAY NIGHT!!!"

Unfortunately, that's not going to happen.

A man should rightly be judged on the company he keeps. Mr. Obama's choice of church calls his judgement into question, and rightly so....he has kept the company of men like Rev. Wright and Rev. Phleger for the last 20 years, and now he expects us to believe that these men have had absolutely no influence on him in all that time. I say balderdash.

If you associate yourself with men and women like the Revs. Wright and Phleger (both of whom Obama has had 20+ year relationships with, unlike Pastor Hagee who has little or no real relationship with McCain), William Ayers and Bernadine Dorn (both of whom are unapolagetic former domestic terrorists who have had a relatively intimate relationship with Obama...remember his initial announcement of his presidential candidacy happened at an event in their home), and participate in shady land deals with guys like Tony Rezko, chances are you will be judged by these associations, and guess what?? You should be.

The really ironic part of all this is that when I question Mr. Obama's thin resume, questionable relationships with former terrorists, and his relationships with hate spewing, alleged men of God, I am reviled as a "racist" by my progressive friends who are wholly in the tank for Obama. Most of these folks don't see this whole "pastor" flap as an issue because they don't really believe in God all that much anyway....some go to church to hedge their bets, but most true liberals believe in the Marxist tenet that religion is the opiate of the gun toting, bitter masses.

For the sake of full disclosure here, and because I call myself a "liberal" Republican, I will confess that I'm not all that big on organized religion myself. Because of men like the ones mentioned above, I tend to see organized religion as organized hypocrisy, and a tax free business that the top members of the church use to enrich themselves and promote whatever agenda they happen to have at the time.

So the question here for Mr. Obama is this: did you join the Trinity Church because you truly believed in the theology that Rev. Wright presents, or did you join the Church because you wanted to be seen as authentically black? In other words, were you lying then or are you lying now? Either way, it's disingenuous....and dangerous.

Reaping the Whirlwind

2008-05-29T07:52:00.001-07:00

Sow the wind, and ye shall reap the whirlwind.

Profound words that the Democrat party should be considering right now. They are in a unique historical and political position and they've done it without any help from the Republican party, for a change. In an election cycle that should be a cakewalk for them, i.e., Bush's low approval ratings, the economy, gas prices and the War in Iraq, they have painted themselves into a corner, and are positioned, IMO, to lose an election they should win, by a landslide.

Not only have they pitted their two biggest voter demographics against each other, they'll be forced to give the nomination to a neophyte politician with a paper thin resume, no real executive experience, questionable associations with former domestic terrorists and radical racist pastors, and the dubious distinction of being the number one far left Senator in the US, just because he's black. Not to mention his naive foreign policy comments, and I won't even start in on his choice of advisors. For a guy who is running on his vaunted "judgement," his selection of advisors calls that judgement into question. The Democrat party bosses know that if Obama doesn't get the nomination, blacks and probably young college voters will bolt the party, and they've decided that women are the lesser of the two voting blocs to throw under the bus. Perhaps because they don't always vote in lock step with the party....women tend to be practical beings and will vote for the pol they think best suits their needs.

Hillary Clinton is looking more and more like a winner, while Obama has won a few since Super Tuesday, he got crushed in states like West Virginia and Kentucky....but, he speaks well and he's telling his "fans"(I actually heard a woman who called the Rush Limbaugh program refer to herself as an Obama 'fan') that he's the agent of Hope and Change!! and they're swallowing it hook, line and sinker. Yuck...I can't imagine being a "fan" of a presidential candidate.

But the Democrats are stuck now.

According to what I've read, Hillary trounces McCain in states like Kentucky and Arkansas, but in the McCain/Obama matchup, Obama loses big. Unfortunately, there are not enough liberal, latte drinking, rich, black people who went to Ivy League colleges to get Obama elected. Joe Average doesn't like to be patronized by candidates for president...or anybody else, for that matter, and trust me, he knows Obama is patronizing him to pander for votes and it ain't happenin'. Joe Average will reject Obama in droves in the general election and give McCain a win for the history books. Something along the lines of DEWEY BEATS TRUMAN. Of course, we all know now that there was no President Dewey!

The other corner the Democrats have painted themselves into is calling anybody who questions Obama's annointing a racist. This is sooooo going to backfire. Yes, I'm sure there are people in this world who still refer to blacks as niggers, and I'm equally sure there are blacks that still refer to white people as honkeys, or something equally malicious....so what? These people are the minority now, and the only people ghetto blacks have to blame for their crappy living conditions are themselves anymore. "The Man" doesn't exist, and if he does, just get an education and go around him.

Call me a racist and I'll vote for the devil himself to spite you.

Barak Obama is Jimmy Carter, John Kerry, and Jesse Jackson all rolled into one very charismatic and very empty package. If this is the best the Democratic party has to offer, they are indeed going to reap the whirlwind in the form of a Republican landslide.

Surprise!

2008-05-08T07:48:00.000-07:00

This is the essay I never thought I would write, and the following are words I never thought I would actually put to paper, or the internet, or even admit to myself.....I am actually starting to admire Hillary Clinton!

First, let me say that despite my new found admiration for Hillary, I would never, ever vote for her, because I don't agree with her on policy, but I confess, it did my heart good to hear her say that if Iran lobbed a nuke at Israel, she would annihilate them.

This is the way I want to hear my President talk. Tough. I want to know that my President supports the only allies we have in the middle east, and I don't want to hear any waffles or quibbles about supporting them. The Israelis took a barren piece of rocky land in the middle east, paid for it, then turned it into a vibrant and successful nation. What have the alleged Palestinians done but never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity? What did they do when Israel abandoned the settlements, with lovely, working greenhouses to the Palestinians? They were promptly torn down and their pieces stolen and or completely destroyed. Greenhouses that could have been used to feed the Palestinians, they would rather tear them down and let the people starve. Let's hear it for the Palestinian leadership! Yeah! We'd rather let our people starve than cultivate food in buildings erected by JOOOOOOSSS!

But I digress...

This essay is about my newly discovered respect for Hillary the fighter. As Kyle-Ann Shiver notes in her piece on American Thinker:

Hillary has been hounded by her once-adoring Democrat fans to withdraw and fade
quietly from the race. For the good of the party, they have said.
Balderdash!
If there is a single shred of grown-up quality left in the
Democrat Party, it is only evidenced by Hillary Clinton's refusal to let the
Party blindly nominate a thoroughly wet-behind-the-ears, know-nothing candidate,
who has gotten to this political height on the strength of a cowering, blind
media elite (as Bill Clinton said earlier in this campaign), a bunch of
hormonally driven college students, and the color of his own skin. What else
could it have been that got Obama here? He has nothing of substance to offer
this Nation. No integrity of character. No wisdom. No experience, except continuously campaigning, organizing and latching onto bad mentors and money-raisers. Democrat qualities all, to be sure, but usually their candidates have something else to bring to the table. Hillary Clinton has actually served more than one full term in the Senate. She has actually served in a Republican-majority
Senate. And she actually has crossed the aisle and worked side-by-side with Republicans to actually get a few things done. Barack Obama has done
nothing, nothing. Yet, Hillary has been painted by the media as the
humorless shrew, an old hag, and a pantsuit-wearing, androgynous harridan

Any reasonable person, even one who thinks that up until this time, Hillary has done nothing but sell out her "woman card," by staying with a womanizing, abusive husband, and who would say or do anything in her naked ambition to hold power, including carpetbagging a senate seat in New York that she thought was an easy win (evidently it was), has to admire her intestinal fortitude in stubbornly refusing to quit the race for the Democratic Party nomination. Especially in the face of all the former Clintonistas jumping ship left and right, like the feckless professional politicians they are.

This is a testament to why women were, as Kyle-Ann pointed out, chosen by God to bear children. It takes guts and grit to bear and raise children, to maintain a home and a family, and in some cases, work a very stressful job as well.

Hillary is a fighter, if nothing else, and I must admire her abject refusal to admit defeat until the first vote of the convention. The reason the Democratic elites want her to quit is so that they can recover from the debacle of pitting their two largest voter demographics against each other, but I fear the damage is already done. The reason the Democratic Party is in this mess to begin with is their eagerness to jump the gun and the deadlines, now they want to make it worse by having Hillary quit the race when she still does have a chance. Most people don't know this, but half the National Rules Committee is composed of Clinton supporters and she's got a pretty good shot at getting the Michigan and Florida delegates seated, with votes, at the convention, which would put her neck and neck, maybe even a few delegates ahead of Obama. Why should she quit?

I wouldn't.

Miley Cyrus Learns to Sing the Blues

2008-05-03T21:40:00.002-07:00

Whither Miley Cyrus...

I will be the first one to say that Miley Cyrus has been had. She's fifteen years old, people. Get real. Anybody who would say that this girl wasn't manipulated to produce the "shot sold 'round the world" has a screw or three on the loose. It just occurred to me that maybe she's the tabloid princess to replace Britney Spears.

Think about it....I'm broke, so I don't have cable TV. By virtue of that fact, I am barred from the 24/7 media coverage of this story, other than the coverage on EVERY major television netowork, so I'd pretty much have to live in Borneo to not know about it. But, since I have internet access and a pretty boss, fairly new, really BIG tv....I know about it.

This is a total non-issue as far as the minor in question (Miley Cyrus) is concerned. The fact that the pic was taken at the end of the shoot, after her handlers (Dad & Co.), thinking the shoot was done, or nearly so, had gone, leaving the minor child with the photographer, who has an international, long term reputation for taking....uh....artistic shots of celebities, and who happens to be.....well...uhm...an unabashed and unapolgetic...uhm...LESBIAN...well it's just natural to leave your..uhm...15 year old daughter in the hands of such a....trustworthy artist. Heck even Rosie O'Donnell thinks the pictures are....uhm....artistic!.....yeah!...that's the ticket!....yeah...ARTISTIC.....with a captial A; artistic....that's what it is. I call it lesbian porn...but what do I know? I'm not a lesbian. But if I was a talented and unapologetic lesbian photographer, talented to the extreme.....three times the age of the young woman in her charge...would I just maybe....maybe, just a little bit...push the edge of the envelope to get the picture she got.

Imagine that.

Now, the adult purpetrator of this porn shoot with a child gets away with her crime in public in the name of art and the victim of her lesbian pornographic pictures gets pilloried by the sanctimonious press, at fifteen years old, makes me physically sick. What in the world is our world coming to when a 50-something lesbian can manipulate a 15 year old girl and the young one suffers the consequences? I'm sorry, but I so don't get that.

Yes, maybe her handlers fell down on the job. Maybe her parents actually trusted the photographer with an international, long term, award winning repuation. I might. I might be so star struck by this particular photographer, who has photgraphed everybody who is anybody for the last, oh....thirty years, that at the end of a shoot, I might succumb to my own schedule, and leave my famous, 15 year old female progeny in the most capable hands of such an artistic *cough**lesbian**cough* photographer *cough**cough******

But what do I know? Nothing. The fact is that the 15 year old CHILD with a woman's body was manipulated by a worldly wise lesbian who had everything to gain from exploiting this inexperienced little girl. The photographer got her "artistic" shot....the child got the shaft.

Will Bill be Hillary's Achilles Heel?

2008-04-23T06:54:00.000-07:00

Is Bill Clinton unconsciously sabotaging his wife's efforts to become President of the United States?

Given his most recent meltdown on a Philadelphia radio show, and his comments regarding the results of the South Carolina primary, the case can be made that Bill Clinton really doesn't want his wife to become POTUS.

After all, we know Bill's ego is monumental, and whatever "legacy," and I use that term loosely, Clinton has from his 2 terms as President would pale in comparison to what Hillary would accomplish in one stroke if she wins the election. She would make history as the first female POTUS right off the bat, and that's just for starters. Bill's shameful "Cigargate," his false testimony to Congress, and his selling of pardons taint his terms in office, not to mention being only the 2nd US President in history to be impeached. That's hardly the kind of accomplishments one wants in one's obituary....

If Hillary wins the nomination after a hard fight with another historical candidate, and then somehow manages to win the general election, her star would eclipse his immediately, and anything she does after that, short of her own impeachment, would overshadow his accomplishments and she would become the star of the family. Can Bill's ego live with that? I don't think so. Does he really want to be the "First Gentleman?" I can't even type that title without a giggle. Instead of going down in history as a President, Bill's presidency would end up as a footnote in dusty presidential history tomes and his legacy will become having been the husband of the first female President of the United States.

So, it doesn't surprise me that he's dropping little bombs that can ultimately keep his wife from winning the nomination, thus keeping her out of the presidency completely. I would venture to say that most politicians are passive/aggressive personalities, so it's completely reasonable that Bill would use passive/aggressive tactics to maintain whatever legacy he thinks he has, and to do that he has to sabotage his wife's candidacy, but in such a way that nobody can completely blame it on him.

The World has Truly Gone Crazy

2008-04-21T20:11:00.000-07:00

I must have lost my mind....I sure hope so. Otherwise, the world has truly gone crazy.

This past weekend, in a suburb of Austin, a 15 year old boy took a car out joyriding at 3 in the morning, wrecked it, killed two other people, and on the news tonight was some moron from the neighborhood, complaining that the accident could have been prevented had there been a stoplight where the wreck happend...

In what world? The kid was out at 3 am, joyriding around in, presumably, his parent's car, a buddy with him, no driver's license, and the imbecile on the news says that a mere stoplight would have prevented this???? How? Does this moron really believe that at 3 o'clock in the morning (which is past the curfew for kids that age), after having stolen his parents car (the kid is too young to even GET a driver's license in Texas), out speeding around his subdivision, that he would even stop for said stoplight? Are you freaking kidding me?

Sure...! Blame the city for not putting up a stoplight. That would sure stop a criminal juvenile out for a joyride...are these people serious? How in the world did that idiot live to be as old as he is thinking that a mere stoplight would slow down a kid bent on speed? I can't believe that the news would even run a story like that. What moron even thinks this could happen in a sane world?

It's time to get out the can of whoopass and take our world back from kids who think they can do anything they want and get away with it, enabled by moronic fools like the one carping that the subdivision should have a stoplight at that intersection and it would have prevented such a catastrophe. And, wouldn't you know...the criminal kid survived while his buddy and another driver, presumably on his way home, died. This is a travesty, but it has nothing to do with the lack of a stoplight. And I would bet my last dollar that a stoplight would have done nothing to prevent this accident.

Elitist Tone Deafness - Obama has a Tin Ear

2008-04-13T07:42:00.000-07:00

Welly, welly, welly....welly well. Obama has finally unmasked himself. Is anybody surprised that he is an elitist who thinks small-town Americans are "bitter," and "cling to their guns and their religion" and hate anybody who isn't them?

Is anybody surprised that these remarks were made in front of a mega-rich group of liberal donors in San Francisco? Of course not. He was preaching to the choir. This is how your west coast libs see the rest of the US of A...a bunch of gun toting, bible quoting, bitter, queer haters who cling to their outdated morals and silly patriotic traditions and keep their women barefoot and pregnant. These out-of-touch liberals probably think we don't need a military either....morons. They'd be the first ones screaming for military intervention to save their sorry asses in the event of an invasion, though the learned and progressive citizens of Berkeley have made it perfectly clear to the military that "they aren't wanted in this city."

You may be asking yourself what Obama was thinking when he issued this statement? The answer is that he was thinking that his remarks would go over well with his audience, which, of course they did, but I doubt he was thinking that he'd be ratted out over it by his own....the Huffington Post. Ya gotta admit....that's priceless!

Yet, my liberal friends assure me that the Dems will line up behind whomever gets the nomination like good little soldiers. Yeah, right. They're eating their own already and it will just get worse as the convention nears, because Hillary will never give up, and you gotta admire her determination, even if it's on the dark side.

Of course, if I was Hillary, I wouldn't give up either. She can't help it if her party is a bunch of lilly livered, spinless surrender monkeys who don't have the stomach for a nasty election campaign, let alone the spine it takes to stand up to international bullies who would see the Jews run into the sea and Americans on their knees with a sword on their necks. Now that Obama has unmasked himself for the elitist, inexperienced politial hack that he is, she might still have a shot at the nomination. A few more dumbass remarks like Obama's on middle America, and who knows? She might actually win the nomination at the convention, because between the radical, paranoid, anti-American rantings of his "friend and mentor of over 20 years," the Rev. Wrong and his elitist, condescending remarks about middle America....Obama's looking less and less electable.

Another Liberal Social Experiment Run Amok

2008-04-10T06:22:00.000-07:00

I was watching the Today show this morning, and they did an interview with a Baltimore public school art teacher who was badly beaten in her own classroom by a student, while the other students in the class stood in a ring around them, cheering the attacker on. One of the students subsequently posted the video of the beating on the internet. The story stated that only one student went for help. Disgusting.

The liberal social experiment that has caused the State to take the responsibility for disciplining their children out of the hands of parents is showing predictable results. Our children are running amok. They cannot be disciplined and they know it. They know they can assault any adult with impunity, because any adult who tries to corporally discipline a child can be prosecuted for child abuse by the state. The kids know that all they have to do is call the police and their disciplinarian will be arrested. This is unacceptable.

I got my last whoopin' at the ripe old age of 15, and even though I was righteous in my indignation at the time, in retrospect, I deserved it. I was a big girl and it took both of my parental units to hold me down and administer said whoopin', but I got it and I changed my behavior as a result.

Now, I'm not advocating whipping kids with electrical cords and wire coat hangers, and I know that there are some adults out there who would take corporal puninishment to an extreme, and those people ARE child abusers, but, let's face it, some teens are not too old for an old fashioned butt whipping. That's why God gave them an ass. In fact, I favor public caning of first offenders who tag, steal or assault adults, as that young man in Singapore was caned for vandalizing a car. I bet he never vandalized another car again....

The way I see it, corporal punishment should remain in a parent's arsenal of ways to control and educate their children, and it should also be an option in school for unruly children of all ages. Sometimes with teens, a "good talking to" or a "time out" does nothing to get through to them. In fact, they regard it as no punishment at all. Sometimes a kid just NEEDS an asswhoopin to get their attention. I assure you, I haven't forgotten that whipping I got at 15, and if a few more of these unruly kids got one, the world would be better off in the future for it.

Children need to know there are boundaries. They need to be taught that they bear personal responsibility for their behavior and that there are clear and painful consequences for certain behaviors, especially for violent attacks on adults. Inner city kids have even less reason to behave in a socially acceptable way because often they do not have discipline in their homes, due to the high percentage of unwed mothers with multiple fatherless children, who must devote most of their time toward the support of all their children, and thus, cannot spend the necessary time to sit on their teens and instill the proper social behavior and respect for their elders and teachers. They are latchkey kids who basically raise themselves and their only exposure to normal social behavior occurs in their school environment.

There was a time in this country when, if a kid acted up at school (and attacks on adults were rare at that time), not only would he get a whipping at school, he might get one or more from other concerned adults on his way home, and then yet another from the parents. This is how you teach children acceptable behavior. They learn to associate unacceptable behavior with pain and they learn that if they behave in an acceptable manner, they don't get a whipping. Simple aversion therapy.

Associate bad behavior with pain. Works for me. Actually, it WORKED for me, and I believe that the liberal social experiment of taking corporal discipline out of the parental arsenal has resulted in violent children who know they can assault an adult with impunity because the best the schools and the parents can do at this point is to give them a stern talking to. Yeah, right. Did any of you actually listen to a thing your parents and teachers told you when YOU were a teen? Thought not.

But I bet those lessons hit home, literally, when there was a switch or a belt on your ass.

Clay Feet and Leftist Politics

2008-03-30T08:45:00.000-07:00

Barak Obama has run his campaign so far on the politics of the "post racial." Meaning, he is a man in whom the blood of both races runs, which makes him the ideal person to represent us all. Although I agree with this concept, it is unfortunate that Mr. Obama does not turn out to be all that he has assured us he is...or isn't.

What he assured us that he wasn't, is a scion of the Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton school of "angry black man" politics. He bent over backwards in the beginning of the campaign NOT to make it about race, and I confess, I admired him for that, which is why I feel so used and deceived, because it turns out that Obama IS of the aforementioned school of politics....he is Jesse Jackson 2.0. A youthful, polished, well educated Jesse Jackson. He of the "the white man owes us a living because our great-great-great grandfathers were slavessss!!!" politics. He of the "Hymietown" school of politics that has a hundreds of years old grievance with the world and supports terrorist tactics to drive the Jews into the sea....

How do we know that Mr. Obama is, in fact, an angry black man?

Well....it doesn't take a brain surgeon to look at the hateful, racist sermons given by Mr. Obama's mentor, Pastor and good friend of the last 20 years, a Mr. Jeremiah Wright, and conclude that if Mr. Obama can sit in that church for 20 years, listening to the hate filled, anti-American, afro-centric rhetoric week after week, that he cannot, in good conscience (but, then again, when has a politician ever had a conscience?) tell us, the voters, that he really doesn't buy into this man's message.

If he doesn't buy the message, then why waste 20 years, week in and week out, listening to his racist rants? This is a man who says that the US invented AIDS to kill black people! He has said that America had 9/11 coming! He is a loony conspiracy nutball that has a public pulpit, who preaches his hate message to thousands of people, yet Mr. Obama tells us that he's merely a "crazy old uncle" who says things and everybody ignores him.....he must think we are stupid. It's all well and good to have a crazy uncle, most of us do, but our crazy uncles do not have access to thousands of minds from the pulpit, and thousands more through his "best of" series of sermons for sale in the church gift shop! Our crazy uncles don't have the ear of a potential President of the United States.

I'm disappointed that in his political ambition, Mr. Obama has condoned this sort of hateful speech for over 20 years, yet seeks to distance himself from it now that it has become a public issue....and it is an issue, I assure you. Mr. Obama has run on his judgement, and in my opinion, supporting the racist, afro-centric, anti-American message that Mr. Wright spews for the last 20 years calls Mr. Obama's judgement into question in my mind.

Hate speech in any form, coming from anyone is unacceptable, and if Mr. Obama does not buy into this, he should have left the church years ago, instead of allowing Mr. Wright and those succeeding him (the new Pastor of this church is equally racist) to inculcate his children with this racist message. This, in my mind, is beyond the pale. Hopefully the Obama's teach their children not to hate people based on the color of their skins, but then they go to this church every week, where the pastor is telling them that white people are not just bad, but the enemy? How many other black children in this church are being inculcated with this ugly message? Michelle Obama certainly buys it, as she's said that she's only just now beginning to be proud of her country? Evidently, Pastor Wright's angry black man message got to her...

My more progressive friends call me the racist for pointing this out, and I fail to understand why I'm the bad guy here for calling hate speech what it is....why is it ok for black folks to spew vile, racist, hateful rhetoric when white people are hammered for the same thing?

Dr. King said that a man should be judged for the content of his character, not the color of his skin....I find the content of Mr. Obama's character to be less than honest, and I believe his clay feet have been revealed, and he is more of a mere mortal now, not the Messiah that the left touts him to be, which brings him to the level of a normal politician, not a rock star who walks on water.

Delightful Days Ahead

2008-03-10T10:27:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers:

I've been perusing the pages of the Huffington Post lately, and I am delighted to report that the Dems are indeed beginning to eat their own. The party is being ripped apart, and it is fast headed toward political obscurity for the rest of my natural life and I can't tell you how wonderful it is to be living in such interesting times, as the Chinese would say. Of course, when a Chinese wishes you thusly, it's a curse....

'Tis a glorious time to be alive, I tell you! Watching the identity politics abound, seeing the Clinton apologists in the Democratic Party jump ship like diseased rats....well it's just priceless!

Some of my more liberal friends tell me that no matter who secures the Democratic Party nomination, the Dems will all line up behind whatever candidate it is like good little progressive soldiers who are loyal to their party.

Poppycock.

The crack in the Crackpot Party is expanding by the day. Those who are for Obama detest Hillary and vice versa. It's hilarious! They are fighting amongst themselves and will continue to do so until August, and then they will brawl on the floor of the convention center like drunk denizens of a trailer park on Saturday night, unless one or the other of the candidates withdraws in favor of the other, which I don't see happening. Kinda reminds me of why the Irish could never govern their own country as a whole. The ruling clans were more interested in THEIR part of the pie and could never work together, so the English divided and conquered....go figure. The Dhims are headed the same way, and I would love to say I'm sorry about it, but I'd be laughing too hard.

The really delicious part is all the Clintonistas. The scales are falling from their eyes and they are beginning to realize that Hillary is only interested in power for...uh....HILLARY! They are just now starting to understand what those of us on the other side of the political blanket have known for years, and that is that Hillary will sell out anything and/or anybody to have power. Oh the horror! They are shocked!! Shocked, I tell you! They've been supporting her for years and she dares to show them her true colors! How dare she do this?? Just when they are just an election away from power? Is she Lucy to the Dems Charlie Brown? Will she take the football away just as they're about to kick that all important field goal?? In a word or two....you bet. If she can, she will.

The bloodbath is coming, and I, for one, am stocking up on popcorn so that I can sit in front of the television and watch the Democratic Party come unhinged at the seams. I'm not big on reality TV shows, but this is one I won't miss! It will be better than the best Survivor! It's Big Brother with a wicked, nasty twist! I can't wait....

Much like the sinking of the Titanic, the boat is the Party and the iceberg is Obama. Should Hillary do political business as usual, the arms of the Superdelegates will be very sore, and she will steal the nomination, thus alienating most of the black voters who have voted for generations with blind loyalty to the party, and many of the newly made younger voters who have so much idealistic faith in Obama. No matter who wins the nomination, half of the Democratic Party is gonna be mad. The Obama haters will defect because Hillary couldn't steal it, or the Hillary haters will defect because she "stole" the nomination. See? Priceless!

This election should pretty much put the Democratic Party into political obscurity for the rest of my natural life....I love it!

Obama for VEEP?

2008-02-08T09:38:00.000-08:00

Lately the liberal trolls on my favorite blog have been calling for Hillary to select Obama for VP...

I believe we will see pigs with wings on that day.

There is no way in heck that Hill's gonna pick Obama for the vice presidential slot. He would upstage her at every turn, and after all she's been through, she wants to be the star. You know what they say in Hollyweird...never work with animals and children, because they're natural scene stealers. Obama has the youthful look JFK had, and every bit of Bill's natural charisma. Hillary would be shooting herself in the foot to pick him.

Better to pick a schlepp like Bill Richardson whom she could dominate and who actually has some skills other than a law degree and a pretty fact to bring to the administration, and who would never, ever upstage the Queen.

Once again, the libs are delusional.

I'm lovin' it!

Immigration and the Law of the Land

2008-02-07T06:57:00.000-08:00

An Open Letter to the Honorable (yeah right) members of our esteemed Senate and all the people who think illegal aliens should be granted citizenship:

I agree.

I think illegals should be granted citizenship on one condition: I, and every citizen who have followed the laws of our land for our entire lives should get a free felony, too!! I want mine to be a free murder....

If 20 million people can commit a felony and be rewarded with citizenship for having gotten away with it for years, then, by God, the other 280 million citizens of this country should get a free felony, too. Why should I have to obey the law when illegals sneak into my country by the millions and the ignorant, pandering, scum of the earth politicians want to reward their perfidy with citizenship? The rest of us law abiding citizens should get a free felony too! Why is it that the rest of us are expected to obey the law, but a bunch of people who commit felonies right off the bat, and thumb their noses at our laws because they "want a better life" should be rewarded for this abhorrent behavior???

I have nothing against immigrants. They are hard working folks who do just want to provide a bette life for their children, but they must be willing to a) come into the country LEGALLY, i.e., file the proper paperwork and wait their turns; b) they must be willing to assimilate and learn our language and customs; and c) they must follow our laws from day one, not just after they commit a felony by sneaking into the country. They must not try to import their culture into mine, because, let's face it, if your country was so great, you wouldn't be risking your life and committing felonies to get out of your toilet of a country to live in America. So don't tell me how great your country is while you are trashing mine or go home...the choice is simple.

I have a very short list of candidates for my free murder, but at the top of the list is a man who very nearly succeeded in ruining my life, merely because I figured out he was a lying sociopath (textbook!) and tried to get rid of him. He had me arrested, tried to steal my belongings, and then used the local police to stalk me for 8 months after that, until he was finally evicted from his residence and forced to leave me alone by his own circumstances. The police even had the nerve to call my unlisted phone number to get background information on him after he threatened one of them with an imaginary gun. Suddenly he became America's Most Wanted....he stalked and harrassed me with impunity for almost a year and the authorities did nothing, even after at least 20 calls to the police on his part, they told me they were "mandated" to investigate the calls, even though it was patently clear that he was a nutjob and was using them to harrass me. But let him threaten one of them and it's a Federal Case. Puleeze.

Anyway, if the illegals can commit a felony and the pols will reward them with citizenship, then why can't the rest of us get a free felony too? Makes sense to me.

Second Life

2007-12-16T08:53:00.000-08:00

Ok people, today I'm going to talk about a world I have recently discovered. I affectionately call it "middle aged fat chick paradise," but most people just call it Second Life. No, it's not some new church, it's a facinating multi-player game on the internet. Sounds weird, huh? What's a 40-something, relatively intelligent, single woman doing playing a video game on the internet?

Having a ball.

Second life (SL) is what is referred to (in layman's terms) as a "virtual world." Believe me when I tell you that anything you can do in this world, you can do in SL and then some. For example, in SL you can fly or teleport from place to place, like something out of a Star Trek episode....you can ride a flying carpet, battle a dragon, drive a bumper car, dance a waltz or a hot salsa, or be a Cruise Director on a virtual ship! You can also rent a virtual condo, a virtual escort, or hang out on a nude beach.

SL has an economy and it's own currency, which can be purchased online either through PayPal or your debit card at the present rate of 1000 Linden Dollars for approximately $4 American, and the residents are actually allowed to keep their intellectual property, i.e., whatever they might create in this virtual environment, which can be in the arts, music, fashion and even things like engineering and medicine belongs to them, not the creators of SL (Linden Labs). Harvard actually conducts classes in SL, and companies like IBM have meetings in virtual conference rooms where the attendees are represented by what is known as an Avatar or AV.

An AV is the virtual manifestation of you. The picture above is my AV, Duchess. She's a leggy, lovely blonde with great personal style and a huge collection of clothing, and the other is Duchess and her boyfriend, Gat. It is essentially a cartoon, but it is a cartoon that the player puts together, limited in scope only by their own imaginations. You can be a humanoid, an animal, a robot or any combination of all of them. You choose your skin, your shape, your clothing or not, and you learn at your own pace. Word to the wise...you only get one shot at your name, so think carefully before you push that button to name yourself. I once met a guy who called himself Pimpin8ez, and he couldn't understand why I didn't really want to talk to him.

There is a huge learning curve, so it's very easy to get frustrated and quit, but if one sticks it out and learns, it opens up a world of opportunities that average people might not otherwise have. There are people from all walks of life, and all the countries of the globe traversing SL, meeting under circumstances that were unavailable to past generations, and possibly opening the eyes of us all to other cultures. I declare it marvelous!

The basic premise of SL is willing suspension of disbelief. It can be a fantasy world or a world of dark torture. The player chooses everything and essentially controls the quality of the experience. SL is basically a sophisticated chat program, like Yahoo Messenger or Skype, but with the most amazing graphics and gadgets! You can have a virtual home, a virtual car, horses and even a baby! I cannot describe all the experiences you can have in this relatively small blog post because to describe it completely would require a book....which exists already. Hopefully my words will tickle your curiosity bone and you will investigate it for yourself.

And did I mention shopping??? Ladies! Lemme tell you.....I got hooked on SL when I got my first ballgown. I confess...it's like being 12 years old again, and actually getting to BE Barbie! With an unlimited digital wardrobe, to boot! There are the most amazing ballrooms where you can dance the night away in a lovely, designer ballgown, have scintillating conversations with handsome men and never leave your living room! You get a huge bang for your virtual buck, and the designers are incredibly creative, and friendly! They'll actually talk to you, and are interested in your feedback....

There is also a live music component in SL. I have been to symphonies, classical recitals and blues rock concerts. The musicians stream their music live into the game, and the AVs are gathered in one venue or sim (short for simulator) to listen and dance. There are slam poetry venues, DJ venues where there is a live person choosing the music, and even a ballet company. Some of the more popular musicians and merchants actually cash out of the game at the end of the week. It is possible to make real money in SL, if you have a marketable skill or talent.

It's truly a world worth exploring, as there is a surprise around every corner.

Universal Health Care is a Pipe Dream

2007-12-16T08:19:00.000-08:00

This morning I watched on television as John Edwards chirped away on the necessity of universal health care in America. I am all for it, provided that guys like him, all the rest of the liberal pack running for the presidency, and all members of Congress have to go to the same public clinic that they would doom the general populace to. Otherwise, forget it. I'll take my chances with the system we have now. Where do Canadians go when they need elective surgery? Uhm...they come to America! They have universal insurance...why not stay in their own country? Because the line is too long, and you have to book your surgery before you need it, several years in advance! The pols hold up the British system as the beau ideal of the socialist health care system and the British have made medical tourism a new business, because of the same overcrowded system in their own country. Hillary Clinton and her peers running for president would see us in the same broke down system! What are they thinking?

Here in Texas we have what is called the Medical Assistance Program, or MAP. It is a series of public clinics, co-payments on a sliding scale, intended by the good liberals of Texas to service the underinsured or the uninsured...basically poor people and illegal aliens, most of whom have at least one anchor baby and are thus qualified to receive public assistance. The clinics are so overcrowded that getting an appointment takes a month or more, and you can forget a same day appointment if your kid has a cold. Go to the overcrowded emergency rooms and sit for hours, waiting for the medical personel who are busy patching gunshot wounds and fielding heart attacks to find time to treat your kid's mere cold. The good liberals like the present Democratic pack running for office are all for turning our entire country into either a system like MAP, or worse yet, the VA! I don't know a single veteran who is satisfied with the treatment they have received fromt he Veterans Administration, yet the universal health care pushers want to create yet another bureaucracy to supervise the bureaucracy!

The problem with all of this, of course, is that these liberal politicians, nay, all politicians and anybody with an income over a certain amount have the economic luxury to go to private doctors and hospitals, thus being able to bypass whatever horrible system (and it would be horrible, I can pretty much guarantee it) they foist upon the "little people." The wealthy are not bound to use the same facilities they decree for us, therefore they do not suffer the consequences of their political follies and social experiments. We, the People, do.

Perhaps our free market system isn't as fair as it could be, but who said you have a "right" to a fair life??? Nobody. You want good insurance? Get an education, get a job, don't have 12 kids you can't afford and you'll live a nice life. It's really not that difficult, and anybody who says it is, probably doesn't have an education or a job, or has 12 kids. The free market system encourages research and development, as well as the high quality of care that Americans are accustomed to. If the system is socialized, the incentive to excel, or to discover something new will be stifled because why should anybody excel when the government will confiscate their ideas? Why shouldn't the pharmaceutical companies turn profits on new drugs? They paid for the R&D, not the government, so they are entitled to recoup those losses for a time.

The free market economy isn't the perfect economy, but I've said it before and I'll say it again, it's the only ISM that works. Communism and Socialism do not work in countries with populations that are not relatively homogeneous. America will not work on the Swedish or the British, or even the Canadian models. The free market health care is the best health care, and we should not fix it if it ain't as broke as everybody else!

Will the Goracle get Drafted?

2007-10-13T13:12:00.000-07:00

Will Al Gore be drafted to run for the White House on 08? I think so, and here's why....

The Dems are fully aware of Mrs. Clinton's shortcomings, among which is a very low opinion rating among women, which is thought to be her strongest constituency, and should be. Most of the women I know, myself included, would love to see a woman as president. Just not THIS woman. In my humble opinion, she is seen by most thinking women as someone who traded her integrity as a woman and a wife for her ambitions to own the White House, and compete with her husband for political posterity.

I, personally, see her as someone bereft of ethics, and for whom nothing....nothing will stand in the way of her ambition, up to and including jettisoning her very charming, former President of a husband if it will get her elected. The Goracle, by comparison, with his Nobel Prize, his Oscar and his 8 years of actual experience in the White House will look like a more electable candidate to the powers that be in the Democratic Party (or he should if they're not all completely stupid or on the Clinton payroll).

I see a very coy Goracle, claiming right up until the moment he's drafted at the convention, that he doesn't want to run for President, but he will, of course, graciously accept the nomination for the good of the Party...boy would I love to be a fly on the wall of whatever room Hillary is in when she learns that Algore is going to steal her thunder, and her shot at becoming the first woman POTUS. Not that I'd vote for anybody the Dhimmicrat party runs, but to me, Algore has a much better chance of getting elected President than Hillary, any day. She starts out with 50% of the voters in the country voting against her, and it goes downhill from there.

Of course she looks like the best candidate, compared with the inexperience and obvious ignorance displayed recently by Senator Obama. Saying that he would negotiate, without conditions, in his first year as President with some of the most despicable tyrants and dictators in the world, seemingly unaware that any visit like that would be a propaganda coup for the tyrants involved, makes Senator Obama look naive at best, and stupid at worst. She looks good compared to the other "front runner," John Edwards, who lives in a huge mansion, makes money from sub prime lenders, then whines about "two Americas" while he gets his $400 haircuts...sheesh, is this the best the Dhims can do? Of course Hillary is going to outshine this kind of candidate dreck! Bluebeard could do as well against these two maroons.

The question is, though, can she overcome the Goracle to clinch the nomination? Only if he is true to his word not to run, and declines a movement to draft him, which I sincerely doubt his ego would allow him to do....he would, of course, demur all the way up to the podium to make his acceptance speech. I really can't wait to see if I am right.

Justice Is Not Served Completely

2007-04-12T06:50:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the Attorney General's office of the State of North Carolina dropped all the charges against the Duke Three. It's about time. Of course we all know now that this should have been done some time ago, and better bloggers than I have parsed this story pretty much to death.

What I want to address in this post is the fact that the DA has declined to press charges against Crystal Mangum, the erstwhile stripper/accuser in the case.

This is not justice being served. It is a craven act on the part of the DA's office because they fear the reaction of the black community, not because they're such nice guys.

Crystal Mangum, through her own actions, ruined the lives of these three boys. Granted, she was used as a tool by an unethical prosecutor, but the fact remains that there would have been no case had she not cried rape. These young men will never live down the stigma attached to this case, and now their reputations, for the rest of their natural lives, and Miss Crystal gets off scott free instead of paying the legal price for her vicious lies. She should be prosecuted, because she, also, had several opportunities to stop this train wreck before it picked up too much speed, as did Mr. Nifong, and I believe they should both be prosecuted for whatever the legal terms may be for bearing false witness, among other things.

Nifong will be prosecuted, but the stripper gets off....why? If not for her actions, and her lies, and her prevarications, these boys would have had a nice party and continued the rest of their lives without ever having been arrested, booked, fingerprinted, humiliated, and their parents having to bear the immense financial burden of their defense, which I'm sure the state will end up paying in a civil suit. What has happened to the liar?

Nothing.

Some bad publicity....so what? What does this teach her? Evidently she's no stranger to false rape allegations, so one would think that it's time for her to pay for her lies. This is a travesty. The parents of the boys can win a judgement against her in civil court, but she's a broke down whore....how much money will they realistically see from a judgement against her? OJ will pay the Goldman's more....

Prosecute this woman. Teach her that she cannot ruin lives with her lies and walk away to lie again another day.

Then justice would be served completely.

Don Imus and the Race Baiting Bullies

2007-04-11T07:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I watched as Don Imus abased himself before the race-baiting demigogue, Al Sharpton, on both Sharpton's radio show and on the TODAY Show. A thought occurred to me as I watched this train wreck of a non-story unfold, even this morning, as the Rutgers women's basketball team weighed in on the issue. Why is it that the world can excoriate a white man for his crude and tasteless remarks, but guys like Jay-Z and C-Murder and commedians like Chris Rock not only don't lose their jobs, but are actually given awards for their racist tripe? Tune in to any black comedy show these days and all you hear are jokes about how lame white people are. I can't think of one white commedian since Andrew Dice Clay who could make jokes about black people like that and not have to spend time in Rehab.

Granted, what Imus said was tasteless and crude, and his words brought back another time in our history when he could have said something like that on the air and nobody would have thought twice about it. This says something for the progress that America has made in the area of civil rights.

That said, why is it that nobody, and I mean NOBODY brought it up to Mr. Sharpton that the reason he's even got a national bully pulpit is because of Tawanna Brawley. Anybody remember her?? The black girl who was supposedly raped and smeared with fecal material by "white men?" Turns out that much like Ms. Mangum (the accuser) at Duke, she was a liar, who spawned the story to avoid getting in trouble with her family for staying out too late....this is a man who makes his living pandering to the victimhood of blacks who are still convinced, 150 years after slavery was abolished, and 40 years after the civil rights struggle, that the "man" is holding them back from success. This is so much poppycock. This man makes money off the backs of ignorant blacks who seem to think that the white man owes them a living because their 5 times great-grandparents may have been slaves. Please....America is the land of opportunity, and the key to success lies in one word. EDUCATION. Stop regarding getting an education as "acting white" or "selling out." Start looking at it as a passport out of the metaphorical ghetto, or even the REAL ghetto or barrio. Stop young women from having several, essentially fatherless children before the age of 20. Have some respect for yourself, and maybe a little ambition, and stop this socialistic, parasitic practice of letting the government take care of you, because IMO, you're still on the government plantation if you're on the dole, and the "man" is still controlling your life if you're taking his money. He who has the money makes the rules. Live with it.

So, why is it that it's ok for a rapper like Snoop Dogg to denigrate women as "bitches and ho's" in what passes for his "music," not to mention the way young blacks call each other "nigga" all the time?? Personally, I don't get it. Of course, I'm not defending Imus (who deserves the punishment he got) as much as questioning how you can have a "colorblind" society if parts of the language of that society are the exclusive province of a particular group. Until these offensive phrases are ejected from the vocabularies of ALL people, regardless of race, creed or color, the politically correct, fascist language tyranny from the left half of the political spectrum needs to stop. If it's sauce for the goose, it's sauce for the gander.

You want to stop racism? Wash everybody's mouth out with soap, and stop the victim mentality.

An Open Letter to John Edwards

2007-03-22T12:22:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Edwards:

What sort of egotistical, self-absorbed martinet are you??

Your wife has just been diagnosed with a recurring cancer, this time of the malignant, bone variety, and you seem to be planning to sacrifice her and your marriage on the alter of your all-consuming ambition to be President, in spite of the fact that in the coming months, she's going to be very, very sick, either from the disease or the cure. Are you nuts? Are you so determined to be President that you would allow your wife to go through the hell of radiation and chemotherapy in the middle of a campaign, and in the glare of the public eye? It is stressful enough for a healthy woman to be subjected to the 24/7 scrutiny of both the press and your opponents during a presidential campaign, but for a woman who is being treated for cancer? Do you even care? Of course, you mouth all the politically correct platitudes, but do you really mean it?

Are you planning to parade her in front of the cameras as a plug for the need for universal heath care? Are you planning to exploit her condition, and the side effects of chemotherapy for the world to see just to garner a few sympathy votes? Do you think that because of her condition, the critics will decide you are above the usual mud slung at presidential candidates because you have the moral high ground (a sick spouse)?

What the hell are you thinking? Isn't it enough that that this woman has given you her youth, your children, and supported your ego through thick and thin? Do you now feel that her diagnosis is a drag on your ambitions, so you'll just have her "soldier on?" Have you so brainwashed her into believing that you can, uh, win.....that she's ready to brave the flashbulbs and rude questions while her hair is falling out, and the effects of the chemotherapy make her want to barf every 5 minutes?

If this is your idea of being a supportive husband, I truly feel sorry for Elizabeth. If you were a man, instead of a mealy-mouthed, self-absorbed worm, you would do your duty to your ever-faithful wife and quit the race. It's not like you're even considered a front runner anymore, and that you've even got a ghost of a chance to win (you are a distant 3rd or 4th)....you're just going to drag your sick wife through the mud of your campaign, and rest assured, there will be mud, instead of being a loving husband and sublimating (for probably the first time in your miserable life) your desire to serve your ego, and support your wife, the mother of your children, during HER time of need.

At this point, even if I were inclined to vote for you (which I'm not), your consumate selfishness in wanting to go through with your campaign for President in the face of your wife's fight for her life, would definitely lose you my vote. I hope there are millions of others who feel like I do, who will eventually shame you into quitting.....

Update: It seems that not only did Mr. Edwards have the unmitigated gall to drag his sick wife through a presidential campaign, he was having an affair with another woman during the same time. His "excuse" in a recent interview was that his "ego" took over and basically, he couldn't help himself. I imagine he justified it in his head because his wife was too sick at the time to take care of his physical needs, so he just handed off that wifely duty to another woman out of "sympathy" for his wife's condition.....what a waste of skin.

And THIS guy wanted to be President?

Candid Camera for Teenaged Drivers

2007-03-01T16:03:00.000-08:00

I was watching the news tonight, and the program ran a story about teenaged drivers, and what a mess they are while they're learning to drive. Of course, you can't tell 'em anything. They were born knowing how to drive, and how dare you suggest that maybe they can't play with the radio, comb their hair, or have a 44 oz. Coke between their legs while they drive that 5 speed through heavy traffic!! With a cell phone to their ear! And their 3 best friends in the car!

Well, just as there must be a special ring of Hell for the schmuck who invented Viagra, there must be a special wing of paradise for the inventor of DriveCam.

What a marvelous idea! Candid Camera for Kiddies! And it works, too! The kids, knowing they're under surveillance, become more careful, and the risky behavior behind the wheel decreases by an average of 60-70%. I'm all for that. I used to be a teenager myself, and in the day, I had a lead foot, too. As does my child....but she got that from her father.

click here to see their videos.

At least 2 or 3 times a year there is a bad accident in my area involving teen drivers, and most of the time the cause of the accident is either speed or distraction. The camera goes on when the driver brakes hard, swerves or speeds and I can't think of a worthier invention for saving the lives of new drivers.

Islam is not the Enemy....

2007-02-12T16:40:00.000-08:00

I was reading this week's op/ed by Frank Pastore on Townhall.com, and he mentioned in his column that Islam is not really the enemy in this war on terror.

I have to agree with that. There are millions of practicing Muslims all over the world who aren't planning to blow up the neighborhood coffee house, and wouldn't dream of strapping on a bomb and stepping aboard a croweded bus full of people. And there are quite a few of this number of Muslims who wouldn't dream of hurting a fly, and who are born, live and die in communities of people of all faiths. Fair enough.

I do though, believe that there are people out there who are, by virtue of the fact that their followers have less education and little access to the world beyond their own, in a position to influence the knowledge (or lack thereof) of thousands of dissaffected people, who have been shunned by their own for hundreds of years, and who have the potential of such collective rage that is now spewing forth in the form of the terrorist practices of radical Islam.

Radical Islam is the enemy here. These people are actually practicing Islam the way Muhammad meant it to be practiced. They are probably correct in their assertion that anybody who doesn't practice Islam the way they do is probably, by their lights, an apostate. This includes all the mild-mannered Muslims who don't actively practice Jihad. Or, all the fallen Muslims that drink, and eat pork products like bacon. Which is probably the vast majority of Muslims, especially those who live in more liberal countries, outside the middle east.

But there remain a lot of people in the middle east who have crappy lives. And those crappy lives are made crappier by the machinations of their governments, the greed, the corruption, and the fact that they really don't see individual life as important....given the lack of real education, the constant 24/7 bombardment of propaganda, the fact that most of the people in the middle east will never actually set eyes on America or live here, so how can they imagine a world where life isn't hard?

Where life is so hard that death seems like a release from prison!

What is it with Liberals and Haliburton?

2007-02-10T11:02:00.000-08:00

Why is it, that whenever a Republican gets into a political debate with a Democrat, they always, at some point in the conversation, have to bring up Haliburton. "HALIBURTON!!" They throw it at you like a verbal stun grenade...a desperate attempt to shift the onus of the conversation back, like the mere mention of the devil Halliburton is going to stop his opponent in their verbal tracks, because it is an unassailable fact that Haliburton made money helping to clean up the mess in Iraq!

Oh, the humanity! The utter effrontery of any capitalist business wanting to turn a profit on what is arguably one of the riskiest construction sites in the world! So what? Somebody has to help clean up the mess in Iraq, and since most of the population of that country has no idea how to build infrastructure, to American standards, I might add, and God forbid such a company, which does business around the world, mind you, should make a tidy sum helping to do the backbraking, frustrating, hard work involved in putting Iraq back togther for the Iraqis. Disgusting! How incredibly......captialist!

I will be the first one to say that I don't approve of nobid contracts, and that each company involved should submit bids and go through the process, but at the end of the day, for whatever company that gets any federal contracts, they have to turn a profit on the business, because that's how capitalism works. And granted, it may be the worst of the "isms" but it's the one that works the best because it involves incentive, and rewards hard work.

Communism and Socialism remove the incentive to excel. Why should anybody work harder than the next guy if the government is going to take the fruits of MY hard work, and give it to my slacker neighbor? Life isn't fair. Get over it and get off your lazy ass and go to work. Get an education. Get motivated to do for yourself, and quit expecting "Daddy" to take care of you. Life is what you make for yourself, not what somebody's going to give you.

So what if Haliburton, Bechtel, Brown & Root and a hundred other American businesses are making a profit helping to put Iraq back together? What the screamers of "HALLIBURTON!" aren't taking into consideration is that behind the name there are thousands of actual people on the ground in Iraq, building schools, electricity grids and water treatment plants, getting shot at, risking their lives on a daily basis to help people who are depending on their product, and that despite the mainstream media's pointed lack of coverage of that progress, there IS progress being made. By actual people who happen to get a paycheck from Haliburton, Brown & Root, etc. These dedicated people should get paid well. They're leaving their families, risking their lives in a war zone....so what if their companies turn a profit as well?

How NOT to Wage a War....Let the Politicians Run It

2006-12-11T09:47:00.000-08:00

The publicity that the newly published Iraq Study Group report has been generating inside the beltway has proven to me, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the best way to lose a war is to let politicians run it.

The war in Iraq, although it had a specious beginning, is on, and we need to let the people whose business it is to run wars, run the damn war, not a bunch of politicians who live and die by polls. The ISG Report is a prime example of why you don't want politicians to run your wars....these old farts were pulled out of cold storage to form a supposedly "bi-partisan" committe to study which way we should change our tactics regarding the rising civil unrest in Iraq. Their "report" is basically a strategy for defeat. The recommendations they put forth are utterly unrealistic. Negotiate with Iran and Syria?? Puleeze. They would like nothing better than to see us fail in Iraq, so that they can move in and take over. What are these men thinking?

If I were king, this is what I'd do:

1. Pull all embedded reporters out of active units in Iraq and send them home.

2. Institute a blackout on news coming from that part of the world, unless it's news about progress made, i.e., good news. Our media is a willing tool to the fanatics who hate America and Americans, and not only are they using stringers who actually make up the news, there is a conspiracy among the left leaning 4th estate to overload the American public (read: joe sixpack) with bad news, thus giving the impression that we are not making progress, and are, in fact, losing. This is unacceptable in a time of war, and should be stopped.

3. Indict Pinch Sulzberger and the editorial staffs of both the New York Times and the LA Times for treason, based on their outing of classified information which gives aid and comfort to the enemy in times of war. They are criminals, and should be executed for their actions. This is NOT free speech. It's the equivalent of yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre.

4. Take out Muqtada al-Sadr. There is a 12-cent bullet with his name on it. The whole culture of Arabs is not a "feel good" culture. They are savages and do not understand anything but brute force. There are no "nuances" for them. It's black and white. Either you are weak or you are strong. If you kill the head of the snake, as an old Arab saying goes, you will kill the body. Most of Sadr's militia are young, uneducated young men with no job prospects, and he gives them something to do, however destructive it may be. Not to mention the fact that the guy is no general. His humiliation in Falluja gives proof to this. He is nothing but trouble to the fledgeling government and should be dealt with for the criminal he is (in case you didn't know, there is a warrant for his arrest for murder that has never been enforced, so he IS a criminal). If he is taken out, his militia will disband.

5. Carpet bomb Sadr City. Sadr City is a hotbead of insurgent activity, and it needs to be leveled, to show the insurgents that we mean business. Oh, so sorry for the collateral damage. They don't seem to have a problem with killing thousands of their own, anyway. What's a few thousand more martyrs? They will be celebrated in the streets and the mosques for their sacrifice. I say sacrifice MORE of them, not less. Let 'em ALL be shaheeds! The more martyrs, the merrier the party in hell.

6. Declare martial law.

7. Disarm any illegal militias, and try the leaders for treason against their country.

8. Muzzle American politicians, and put the running of the war back into the hands of the people trained to run wars. No more politically correct wars. War is hell, and things and people get broken. Oh well. We'll clean up the mess like we always do after it's over. In the meantime, the gloves are off and lots of insurgents are going to die.

The mainstream media are mostly left wing socialists and anarchists, and would like nothing more than to see America brought low in the eyes of the world. Why are we letting them succeed?

Thanks Giving

2006-11-23T10:04:00.000-08:00

Today is Thanksgiving, and as it is that time of the year to reflect on one's life, and to give thanks to whatever deity or deities one believes in for the positive things in life. In spite of the gluttonous tones of the holiday, I think it's a time to really think about the things in my life for which I have good reason to be thankful.

For me, the past year has been a relatively quiet one, and in my life, quiet is good. I have a good job, my health is pretty good (I'm not on lifelong medicines yet), I have a nice place to live, healthy pets, my car runs, I have plenty to eat, nobody close to me is dead, I haven't gone to jail, no traffic tickets, even....

And, best of all, I have GREAT friends.

They say a man who has good friends is a rich man, indeed. I agree. Your true friends are the ones who will bail you out of jail or loan you money. I know, because I am fortunate to have such friends. The ones who still talk to you when the world has kicked you in the teeth for whatever reason. They're the ones who will pay your rent when you've lost your job, or throw a benefit barbeque for you because you broke your leg. They're the ones who are always there to help you pick yourself up when life has thrown you a curveball.

They're also the ones who will give you a year's supply of canned tunafish and a shotgun because you were worried about surviving a hurricane Katrina situation! A very rich woman, indeed, am I to have such friends! You can always lose your "stuff" in an unanticipated disaster...fire, flood, acts of God, but stuff can be replaced. You can buy another television, or living room furniture, but friends like these cannot ever be replaced. They are a lifeline....a support system that keeps you in touch with sanity.

During this time of giving thanks, I give thanks for the family that I've built for myself. People who don't have an obligation to me by blood, but by choice. People that I choose to love, and love them I do. That's the best kind of family. The family that, regardless of blood ties, chooses to love each other.

The Dance is On

2006-11-16T07:25:00.000-08:00

The move to de-fund the war has started. Dennis Kucinich is calling for an all-out defunding of the war, ala Vietnam. Disgusting. Hopefully, nobody will listen to him anyway.

Then we have Nancy Pelosi backing Jack Murtha for 2nd in command in the House. Is she nuts? Jack Murtha is one of the biggest porkers in Congress, and was implicated, although never charged, in the ABSCAM investigation in the 80s. He's also a very vocal opponent of the war, and has insulted his brothers (and I use that term loosely) in arms on many occasions, calling them murderers before any charges were brought.

My fervent hope is that now that the Dhims have to actually govern, they'll devolve into the fractured, splintered special interest groups they were to begin with, and show themselves to the electorate for what they really are....wackos. One can only hope.

Election Day is Over

2006-11-08T13:22:00.000-08:00

And the Democrats swept into power.

Of course, I'm not happy about it, but I don't think my life is going to change all that much. The lives of the Iraqis, though, may be changing a whole lot....already Donald Rumsfeld is gone, and I'm sure this is just the beginning of cut and run. Why don't these people understand that our reputation as a country that keeps it's word is at stake, as well as the lives of millions of people who trusted that the US would keep it's word? Who would trust us in the future? Or is keeping your word an anachronism from another time? When somebody's WORD meant something?

I can see the writing on the wall, and I'm writing this down for posterity, as well as a reference point when everything goes to hell. I really don't think the Libs understand that cutting out of Iraq will make us look, not only stupid, but weak, and evidently they're ok with weak. The terrorists LOVE weak, and they hate us with a passion I don't think the fat, happy American public understands, and they're determined to destroy our way of life. Misery loves company, and they're envious of our well-fed, wealthy, liberal culture. Cutting and running from Iraq will leave a vaccuum that the Islamist theocrats will jump right into, and the middle east will become the jumping off point for attacks against us and Israel.

I also think this will open the door to more events like 9/11. The libs will kill all the programs that have helped us track and thwart other attacks, catch terrorists and their paymasters, and they'll let the sun set on the Patriot Act. Evidently they're ok with sacrificing a US city to a dirty bomb before they'll wake up and understand. Oh well, I guess I'm fortunate that I live in a city that won't go up in the first wave....and I won't be moving to Chicago, LA, Miami, Houston, Dallas, Washington DC, Boston or NYC anytime soon.

I hope I'm wrong. Desperately.

I LOVE John Kerry!!

2006-11-06T16:41:00.000-08:00

You gotta love John Kerry.

In one, swift moment, John Kerry shot a big assed torpedo right into the heart of the Democratic campaign machine. With a few bumbling words, he managed to insult millions of people. I mean millions of people. Just about everybody either has someone, or knows someone, or knows someone who knows someone in the military, and to suggest that if you don't do well in school, you'll end up as cannon fodder in Iraq is just.....well priceless.

Ya just gotta love that....If you're a Republican.

What a monstrous, all-consuming EGO that man must have! Incredible! Of course, his handlers want to chalk it all up to a "botched joke." Yeah freakin' right. That comment was none other than the "Freudian Slip." The unconsious utterance of true feelings; the slip of the tongue. Mr. Kerry's carefully crafted politician-slick facade slipped, and in that moment, he revealed himself for the elitist, leftist, liberal hack he is, and he revealed his utter contempt, and I think, instinctual leftist fear of the military.

This is one of the "leadership" faces of the Democratic Party! Ya gotta just love that! Even his fellow Democrats are distancing themselves in droves!

I can't understand for the life of me how this man ever thought he'd get elected president. I remember that awful clip of him marching around some field, dressed in a camo suit, and carrying a shotgun. Oh please. His body language was incredibly stiff, and he was trying so hard to be Joe Sixpack. And then he can't believe that act didn't fool anybody. How could anybody buy that?

And you know, for as long as he's been in Congress, he's never authored a single bill. In fact, he's hardly there. He made average grades in college, married money, and even though he did join the military, he didn't complete his tour of Vietnam, and after he got back, he protested the war and threw his medals away (supposedly). And then he had the consumate gall to address the Democratic Convention as "Reporting for Duty!!" So, in light of the fact that he traded on his military service, such that it was, during Vietnam, he has the nerve to insult our men and women in uniform? Sheesh. What a maroon. What a clown. The Dems need to just fire him, or muzzle him.

Of course, he's great for the other side, though!

9 Reasons I'll always be a Conservative

2006-10-26T08:33:00.000-07:00

In all fairness to my earlier post, "10 Reasons I'll Never Be a Liberal," I found the opposing view at a blog called Villanous Company. I probably could have written it myself, but Cassandra says it much better.

She writes:

What It Means To Be A Conservative

1. Conservatives believe that while many matters are open to debate, there are also some eternal truths. We do not believe right and wrong are flexible concepts, wholly dependent on one's frame of reference.

Like Liberals, Conservatives are skeptical of censorship and celebrate free and open debate. Moreover, we understand that in a society where people use threats or intimidation to force their views on others, enforcing the rules is needed or our rights become meaningless.

One cannot "fairly and open-mindedly consider the truths of others" if speakers are shouted down or forced off the stage, no matter how distasteful their ideas may be. The way to defeat inferior ideas is with better ideas, not with brickbats or heavy-handed threats of government censorship.

2. Conservatives believe we have an obligation to live together peaceably and tolerate each other's differences, but we have no duty to subsidize, support, or lend our approval to choices we find wrong or destructive. Responsible adults understand we must all make our own way in life. While we have no right to interfere with the lives of our neighbors, they have no right to reach into our pockets and ask us to pay for the consequences of lifestyle choices we find difficult to understand or approve of.

We do not ask them to change what they are doing. We only ask that they not expect us to fund lifestyles we don't agree with. Live and let live. This, to us, is the true meaning of tolerance.

3. Like Liberals, Conservatives believe individuals ought to participate in public debate. However we are not inclined to force them, or round them up like cattle come Election Day. We believe voting is an individual responsibility, and we have seen what happens when liberals load first-time voters who don't understand how to fill out a ballot, or know the names of the candidates or what they stand for, onto buses on election day to swell the ranks of Democrat voters.

These people are not stupid, but they are not prepared to vote and the nation is not well served by sending an uninformed electorate to the polls. The nation is also not well served when the parties exacerbate racial tensions at election time.

4. Conservatives see government as a social contract in which individuals freely and intelligently barter some small part of their freedoms for mutual protection from the more rapacious elements of human society. This is a factor which Liberals often forget, preferring to take the benefits of government protection while giving up none of their freedom. This is an unworkable proposition. With their inherent suspicion of all authority liberals cede too much power to the press, setting up a completely unelected and unaccountable fourth branch of government which openly defies the law with complete impunity, releasing classified information at will, blowing federal terrorism investigations, interfering with law enforcement, and defying grand juries. Liberals are fond of talking about reproductive freedom and choice, but their rhetoric conveniently ignores the fact that men have exactly zero reproductive choice:

Legally, from the point of view of a woman: the fetus is a lump of tissue which may be excised at will if she subsequently regrets having conceived a child. It imposes no obligation or legal duty unless she chooses to accept it.
Legally, from the point of view of the man: the fetus is a human being which must be allowed to live, even if he subsequently regrets having conceived a child. It imposes an absolute and irrevocable legal duty, regardless of his wishes in the matter.
This one, I don't really agree with all that much. I'm still pro-choice (see my comments at the end of the article)

5. Conservatives believe that justice ought to be blind. There should not be different laws for whites, blacks, Latinos, females, gays, or other demographics. We are not blind to the fact that humans can and do discriminate, but we do not believe the law should, in addition to the thousand injustices and inequalities which exist in nature, impose additional unfairness via our justice system.

How does a human system weigh unfairness? How do we compensate individuals for the hardships imposed by skin color? Gender? Nationality? What if there are offsetting factors? What then? Does that rich black kid who ends up at Harvard get the same compensation as a poor black kid from the inner city? How about the poor disadvantaged white boy from West Virginia with the alcoholic parents? Does he get nothing, just because his skin is the wrong color? Isn't that institutionalized racism? Or is it just Liberal values in action? Equal protection is often what liberals call a "code word" for making exceptions in treatment based on race or gender. Enforce the laws strictly, across the board, regardless of gender or skin color. Period.

6. Conservatives believe people have a fundamental duty to help themselves and they will be stronger and better if they develop the habit of self-reliance rather than dependence on government. We don't believe people are helped by programs that sap personal industry and initiative and undermine family bonds, as Daniel Moynihan warned in the 1960s. Rather, we prefer to see the private sector handle charitable giving, perhaps with tax incentives to encourage donation. This is a more ethical alternative to forcibly appropriating the paychecks of the more productive members of society to support less productive members, regardless of the wishes of the former.

7. Most conservatives don't wish to see entanglement of church and state either. The difference between liberals and conservatives here is that conservatives understand the purpose of Establishment Clause was to protect the free exercise of religion, not to drive all mention of God from public life. Even non-churchgoing conservatives like me are offended by the ACLU's open persecution of Christians and Christian symbology. Not every historic cross on a county or city seal amounts to state sponsorhip of religion and the miscasting of abortion as a religious debate is beyond dishonest. There are atheist liberals who oppose abortion and religious conservatives who are pro-choice. The Left's near-obsession with, and paranoia about, religion is as good a proof as any that the Party of Tolerance and Diversity, isn't.

8. Conservatives understand that our individual liberties are bound up in many of those larger societal rights liberals love to decry. Try exercising your so-called "individual" rights (your sexual freedom, perhaps?) once the city you live in has eminent domained your home right out from under your feet, a lovely court decision for which you may thank the liberal half of SCOTUS and its stunning disregard for the original, and quite plain, meaning of the Public Use clause. There is such a thing as competing interests, like the tension between freedom and security. Liberals like to argue, because we already have security, that personal freedom should somehow be unlimited. But without the former we will not long possess the latter. They are inextricably intertwined.

Our fellow humans prey on the helpless and on children and liberals (in addition to championing some very valuable causes) have also championed some pretty worthless causes like the freedom to view child pornography (which is illegal) and the freedom of ten year old girls to get abortions without their parents finding out. Personally I am not convinced a ten year old girl really needs the freedom to have sex with pedophiles. She is not a "woman" yet, so it is neither a "woman's right to choose" nor a "woman's sexual privacy" that is at issue. But apparently this shocking opinion makes me some sort of snake handling Jesus freak, though I don't attend church and am something of a libertarian.

Not all individual freedoms are worth protecting.

9. In response to the liberal statement of belief below, conservatives believe government must protect us also. What we believe, however, is that liberals often assert the rights of individuals over the collective right of society to be secure, often to a degree that is unreasonable. A good example is the NSA wiretapping brouhaha. Most Americans when polled don't object to having the NSA monitor and sample from a large number of calls. They understand the risks and they don't wholly trust the government, but they also understand the risks of inaction, and on balance they trust our own government more than they do the terrorists. Liberals, on the other hand, have allowed their dislike of this administration to lead them to make statements like "the administration is more of a danger to our freedoms than the terrorists".

The bottom line is that they may well believe that, but they don't have the right to allow their subjective doubts and fears to imperil the rest of us, and unless and until Congress is willing to call a halt to the NSA program (and so far it is not) they need to stop with the conspiracy theories. The truth is that democracy is functioning exactly as it should. They are simply outnumbered and their side didn't win the argument. Get over it.

Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, for without such protection liberalism is impossible. This, of course, is less a tenet of liberalism than a reply to those who attack liberalism. The accusation that liberals are unwilling to protect the nation from internal and external dangers is false. Because liberals respect competing values, such as procedural fairness and individual dignity, they weigh more carefully particular exercises of government power (such as the use of secret evidence, hearsay and torture), but they are no less willing to use government authority in other forms (such as expanded police forces and international diplomacy) to protect the nation and its citizens.

10. Conservatives believe there is an inherent tension between the rights of the accused and the safety of law abiding citizens. Therefore government must intelligently balance the rights of accused criminals against the rights of crime victims and ordinary citizens to be secure in their homes and on the streets. There is no liberty without security. On the extreme end of the scale, when we have liberal judges defining pedophilia as a disease and letting defendants off because they're "sorry" (there's an inconvenient truth for you), something is wrong. This is about as fair to your average liberal as tarring all conservatives with the excesses of the religious right, but it is liberal philosophy carried to the illogical extreme: individual rights trumping societal rights. Yet liberals can and do tar conservatives with that broad brush - all the time.

I copied the piece in it's entirety, and I also captured where it is in my link to the Villainous Company website, so that you can view the comments appended to this piece.

Like many of us, I have right-leaning and left-leaning reactions to certain issues....i.e., what makes me a LIBERAL Republican is my pro-choice stance, which is in direct opposition to most conservatives. It is my opinion that when she got too old to need an abortion for any reason, Jane Roe became a hypocrite, and I refuse to go down that pathe, even though I've passed my prime childbearing years also. I believe that abortion needs to be a safe and legal option for any woman who is pregnant with an unwanted or unplanned child. Until abortion was legalized, women still had them, they just died more often because of unsterile back street clinics, or worse, untrained "doctors" who shoved any and everything into a woman's vagina in hopes of causing a spontaneous abortion, not the least of which were wire hangers, which would perforate the uterus and cause massive infection, and in some cases, death. It needs to stay legal.

Of course, I don't advocate abortion as a means of birth control, and I'm sure there are women out there that abuse this procedure because they're too lazy or stupid to protect themselves in other ways, and further, I believe that if you're too stupid to know you're preggers before the first three months are up....well, too bad. You're stuck. And, make sure you give that baby up for adoption once it's born, because you're way too stupid to be a mother, and too irresponsible to raise a child. So, I guess in some ways, I'm conservative about abortion, too!

Blogging Gas Prices for Posterity

2006-10-25T07:03:00.000-07:00

Just so we can keep track of it, the price of gas at the corner gas station in my neighborhood just went down to a new low of $2.12 this morning.

On Wednesday, September 13, I noted that gas had fallen to $2.40.

I saw a news story on the Today show this morning, where they pointed out that lots of people think the low gas prices are being manipulated by the gas companies for W's benefit just before the election, and speculated that gas prices will be going up after the election. Well...DUHHHHH.

What's after the election? The Holidays! Thanksgiving and Christmas...the high holy days of travel. Of COURSE the gas prices will go up for the holidays, just like they do in the summer. The question is, when they go back up, will they go back to the $3.00 range, or stay more reasonable? Time will tell....

Interesting Website Alert

2006-10-23T17:07:00.000-07:00

I was reading LaShawn Barber's Corner today, and she linked to a marvelous blog about the Duke Rape Case. It's called Crystal Mess. If you're interested in a well written view of the case, mosey over.

Today's essay is an answer to a newspaper column by Cash Michaels, on the recent 60 Minutes episode on the Case. Mr. Michaels contends that the program didn't present a "balanced" report, and proceeds to lay out his arguments, which Crystal Mess proceeds to shred in a most methodical manner. The author doesn't give his name or much about himself, but I 'magine he's been to law school, and his writing has a real bite to it. I found his style very informative and entertaining to read, in spite of the gravity of the subject.

Sitting down to pen his latest article, entitled How '60 Minutes' Failed The Fairness Test, published Thursday in the Wilmington Journal, Cash Michaels made an affirmative and despicable decision. By-passing the wholly appropriate opportunity to drive the final nail into the coffin bearing Mike Nifong's dwindling election hopes, Michaels consciously elected instead to channel South Park's Johnny Cochran and, in so choosing, staked his place among those doing their part to keep those hopes alive.

Cash will feign insult at the accusation, and protest that he has never, and CAN'T, tell the electorate how to vote. He's free to speak, and I'm free to tell him to shut up. Simple. Cash is acutely aware of the sway his opinions hold over the local black community. He may deny undertaking to endorse or decry the endorsement of a particular candidate. He cannot deny that he is deeply trusted and eagerly looked to for guidance by his flock, and that his pronouncements have the practical effect of spurring black community action largely in accordance with, and furtherance of, his views.

Michaels has often claimed that he reports upon the Hoax as an "entire process," rather than a "football game," merely noting what he sees and hears. In the very next sentence of his linked musings, however, he chides that, "when somebody says I'm "waffling," they made the grave error of assuming I was on their side." He will respond that I have mis-interpreted that statement. He will say that he wrote it to convey that he does not have a side. Shut up.

It's worth the read.

Kinky Friedman - Future Governor of Texas?

2006-10-22T08:46:00.000-07:00

My friend and fellow blogger, M. Simon, has a very interesting post on his blog today, regarding our friend and candidate for Governor of Texas, Kinky Friedman. Now, I found it very interesting that a guy who doesn't even live in Texas, would be interested in the Governor's race, let alone blog about it.

The article he referenced, appears in the online edition of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, and is written by a reporter named Matt Labash.

Mr. Labash writes:

When it comes to black, Kinky Friedman picks up where Johnny Cash left off. He wears a black bull-rider hat, black boots, and a black belt with a buckle the size of a Mini Cooper hubcap. Over his black pearl-button shirt, he mixes things up a bit. He'll either wear the black leather vest, given to him by Waylon Jennings, or the black "preachin' coat," cut by Manuel, the famed former head tailor of Nudie's in Nashville.

In the airy, pastel atrium of the Ambassador Hotel in Amarillo, Ma and Pa Frontporch do double takes at the breakfast buffet, pausing by the Froot Loop dispenser, saying, "Isn't that . . . " when they spy the dark rider with bandito facial hair hunched over his omelet, skimming the newspaper. Kinky looks less like a Texas gubernatorial candidate than a desperado fortifying himself to knock over a stagecoach.

As I join his table, he welcomes me warmly. I've read a stack of Kinky stories on the plane, so I know how it works: Kinky is a shtick-Tommy gun, so if you tape eight hours of interviews with him, but are looking for original material, you know you'll have to throw seven out right off the top. Most of it will already have traveled several times around the
world. He's pro-recycling: He calls it "rotating the crops." And so I try to peel the onion a bit, getting right down to his raw, vital essence--not political, but musical.

Kinky (so named for his "Jew-fro," as the ladies at Supercuts call it) is most famous these days for trying to become the first independent governor of Texas since Sam Houston in 1859. For two decades prior, he was known for his 17 well-reviewed comic-mystery novels, with himself cast as the protagonist ("I'm not afraid of anything, just that I may have to stop talking about myself for five minutes," he's said). But it was as head cheese-maker in Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys that he first entered public consciousness.

Before that, Kinky did a two-year Peace Corps stint in Borneo, where he introduced the locals to Frisbee while they introduced him to betel nut and hallucinogenic rice wine. Perhaps under the influence of it, he conceived the Jewboys. When Kinky got back to Texas in the early '70s, Austin had become a hothouse for outlaw country heroes who'd said adios to the slick sounds of Nashville in order to do some honest-to-God songwriting. Cosmic Cowboys and gypsy troubadours like Michael Martin Murphey, Jerry Jeff Walker, Billy Joe Shaver, and other guys with two first names walked the land.

Read the rest here.
It's a very well written article, at times laugh-out-loud funny, and overall I thought it was pretty informative.

It definitely talks about Kinky's strategy for winning the election. His campaign manager is the same one Jesse Ventura used for his gubernatorial run in Minnesota, and he surprised the political establishment in that state by actually winning. And the way he won was to bring out the college vote. He was spectacularly successful in getting lazy, politically apathetic college kids to actually get out of bed on election day, and go vote. Evidently, Kinky is trying to do the same thing.

Trouble is, he doesn't fit the multicultural, feel good, left wing sort of politician archetype that college kids are indoctrinated to be attracted to. He's actually fairly conservative on some things (fiscal conservation, border security) and fairly liberal on others (gay marriage). He also smokes....great big, smelly cigars! And he sprinkles his speech liberally with all the taboo words and phrases that get most people tagged by the politically correct as racist, mysoginist, and homophobic.

He freely admits that he has little political experience (he ran for JP in his home district years ago, and lost), and in a State House as contentious as the one in Austin, one wonders, even if he were to actually get himself elected by popular vote (read: Will of the People), would he have the political chops to actually accomplish what he wants to do? Will the "old guard" political establishment shut him out? Will he have the political clout to cut deals with the old guys who've been around the State House since God was a boy? I'm not so sure.

I do know this, however, that Kinky has certainly pumped some much-needed life into what is usually a dry-as-dust gubernatorial race in Texas. Mix in "One Tough Grandma," Carol Keeton Strayhorn, who, by the way, is just as much a showman as Kinky (when Kinky and Carol turned in their petitions to get on the ballot, they both had way more signatures than were needed, but Carol saw fit to trumpet her submission by delivering over 100 boxes to the Election Commission. Kinky turned in 12), the uber-liberal Chris Bell, and a beleaguered Rick Perry, and it promises to be a pretty amusing and exciting time coming down to election day in Texas.

Star Trek as Fascist Fantasy

2006-10-21T07:08:00.000-07:00

Gotta love the Captain. Ed Morrissey, of the Captain's Quarters Blog has an essay up today suggesting that Star Trek has much in common with fascist ideology. He quotes another essay, written by Dr. Kelley Ross of Los Angeles Valley College in Van Nuys, CA, entitled "The Fascist Ideology of Star Trek."

Dr. Ross postulates:

Star Trek typically reflects certain political, social, and metaphysical views, and on close examination they are not worthy of the kind of tribute that is often paid to Star Trek as representing an edifying vision of things.
In a 1996 newspaper column, James P. Pinkerton, discussing the new Star Trek movie (the eighth), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), quotes Captain Picard saying how things have changed in his day, "The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force; we work to better humanity." Perhaps Picard never stopped to reflect that greater wealth means greater material well being, which is to the betterment of humanity much more than any empty rhetoric. But this is typical of Star Trek. A first season Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called "The Neutral Zone," has Picard getting up on his high horse with a three hundred year old businessman who is revived from suspended animation: The businessman, naturally, wants to get in touch with his agents to find out what has happened to his investments. Picard loftily informs him that such things don't exist anymore. Indeed, poverty and want have been abolished, but how this was accomplished is never explained. All we know is, that however it is that people make a living, it isn't through capitalism as we know it. Stocks, corporations, banking, bonds, letters of credit -- all these things seem to have disappeared. We never see Picard, or anyone else, reviewing his investment portfolio. And those who still have a lowly interest in buying and selling, like the Ferengi, are not only essentially thieves, but ultimately only accept payment in precious commodities. In the bold new future of cosmic civilization, galactic trade is carried on in little better than a Phoenician style of barter, despite the possibilities of pan-galactic banking and super-light speed money transfers made possible by "sub-space" communications. ...

If daily life is not concerned with familiar economic activities and the whole of life is not informed with religious purposes, then what is life all about in Star Trek? Well, the story is about a military establishment, Star Fleet, and one ship in particular in the fleet, the Enterprise. One might not expect this to provide much of a picture of ordinary civilian life; and it doesn't. One never sees much on Earth apart from the Star Fleet Academy and Picard's family farm in France -- unless of course we include Earth's past, where the Enterprise spends much more time than on the contemporaneous Earth. Since economic life as we know it is presumed not to exist in the future, it would certainly pose a challenge to try and represent how life is conducted and how, for instance, artifacts like the Enterprise get ordered, financed, and constructed. And if it is to be represented that things like "finance" don't exist, one wonders if any of the Trek writers or producers know little details about Earth history like when Lenin wanted to get along without money and accounting and discovered that Russia's economy was collapsing on him. Marx's prescription for an economy without the cash nexus was quickly abandoned and never revived. Nevertheless, Marx's dream and Lenin's disastrous experiment is presented as the noble and glorious future in Star Trek: First Contact, where Jean Luc Picard actually says, "Money doesn't exist in the Twenty-Fourth Century."

So what one is left with in Star Trek is military life. Trying to soften this by including families and recreation on the Enterprise in fact makes the impression worse, since to the extent that such a life is ordinary and permanent for its members, it is all the easier to imagine that all life in the Federation is of this sort. Not just a military, but a militarism.

Read the rest here.

Now, I can see where Capt. Ed is coming from, I'm inclined to be more ambivalent about it than he is. I can see the correlations to our present-day Earth, however, Star Trek belongs to the science fantasy genre of television, and....well, it's fantasy.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but when you're writing fantasy, you try to get as far away from where you are in the cosmos when you write it. In other words, if you're fantasizing, your fantasy world would be perfect. Of course there would be no money, no starvation, no disease, no pestilence, no wars, no violence, and the problems you would face in a fantasy world, would be, by logical definition, different on a grand scale from what any ordinary person would face in an ordinary world. A fantasy world is no ordinary world, because it would be, well...perfect!

If you're writing a fantasy, you're going to, I would think, put your wish-list into it for the ills of whatever world you live in at the time you write that fantasy. If there is famine and pestilence and violence in your ordinary world, those things will no longer exist in your fantasy world. If you're unattractive or shy in your world, in your fantasy world, you're ten feet tall and bulletproof.

Of course, present day leftists and liberals do fantasize a utopian world where everybody is green, we all have what we need according to our needs, and everybody loves each other and gets together every day to sing "Kumbayah" and hold hands, but that's purely a fantasy, too, because liberals believe in the ultimate goodness of man, which isn't reality. Some people are just born evil and they stay that way. You can't breed envy and greed out of people any more than you can breed out 10 fingers. That's why none of those leftist "isms" (communism, socialism, humanism) works in practice. None of those ideologies taks in consideration man's natural propensity for evil.

I'll continue to love Star Trek in all it's forms, just because I appreciate it for what it is, and what it was, in it's time. For me, it was just great entertainment, and at the time, I guess I was too young to catch whatever political message there was.

Democrats - The Mature Party!

2006-10-20T10:44:00.000-07:00

Just when I think Howard Dean can't be any more stupid, he surprises me by doing just that. What in the world moved him to decline an invitation to be on the TODAY Show this morning, just because he would be sharing the screen with the RNC Chairman, Ken Mehlman? They actually had to resort to having the former Chairman of the DNC on instead, which IMO makes Dean look really petty. Is it me, or does this sort of childish, I'm-not-going-if-HE'S-going-to-be-there attitude reflect well upon the liberal left? I think not. I still can't understand how Dean got the job in the first place, unless it was due to the Kos Kids' influence in the DNC.

You would think that Dean would jump at the chance to bash the Republicans in any forum, on any day, at any time....after all, isn't that his job description as Chairman of the DNC? Sure looked like Mehlman was doing his job....where was Dean?

Real mature, there, Howie! I guess this is the sort of behavior we can count on after the Dumbocrats lose the 2008 presidential race, too, huh?

Leak to NYT May Have Been Found

2006-10-20T06:44:00.000-07:00

It seems that the Dumbocrats are at it again. Ed Morrissey, over at the Captain's Quarters has a blog post about this today. Seems that there was a certain Democratic Staffer on the House Intelligence Committee (sounds kinda oxy-moronic doesn't it?) has been suspended pending an investigation.

Here's an excerpt of that post:

With the election pending, the temptation would be to look at this as an electoral issue, but it's not going to have that kind of impact. Leaks do not generally come from one party or the other; they do usually have political motivations, though, and it's always been more likely to have been a Democrat than a Republican for a number of reasons. Democrats have been shut out of the oversight process and would be more likely to lash out in this manner. Their opposition to the programs, at least after their exposure, also provides another motive. However, I doubt that people will consider the staffers when it comes time to vote for their representatives.

What is the problem with these people? Why do they feel like they can take an oath not to reveal this type of intelligence, then do it anyway for a mere political agenda? Do these people suffer from delusions of grandeur, or think that they're heroes of some sort by "bringing down" programs that actually help defend their fellow citizens from terrorist attacks? Obviously the Dumbocrats can't be trusted with the security of our nation, if they're so ready and willing to divulge state secrets merely because they disapprove of the present administration, which, will be gone in 2 years anyway!

What part of "George W. Bush is a lame duck" don't they understand? They're beginning to remind me of the Palistinians, who made it perfectly clear by electing Hamas that they hate the Israelis more than they love their children. Evidently, the Dumbocrats hate GW more than they love their country. Sad. Very sad.

And these are the folks that some Republicans would let into power just to "teach the R's a lesson?" What are you, nuts?

All the more reason to vote Republican in this, and any other election, unless of course you want to learn Arabic...

A New Feature - Local Restaurant Reviews

2006-10-19T12:06:00.000-07:00

I'm adding a new feature to my blog today. Restaurant reviews. Occasionally, from now on, I will post my own review of places that I go to eat.

As a smoker, it's getting increasingly hard to find places, besides my own home, where I can enjoy a meal, and then enjoy a cigarette afterwards. The following restaurants are smoker-friendly, which is unimportant to a non-smoker, but is of paramount importance to those of us who still puff.

Today I will review 2 such places, to start off the new feature.

First up on the list is Jalisco Mexican Restaurant, on Hwy 290 East, in Elgin, Texas. Jalisco is a family-owned Mexican restaurant. They feature many of the classic mexican dishes, like enchiladas, tacos, tortas and more. For me, their crispy tacos are the best! Homemade tortillas, crispy fried with ground beef, lettuce, tomato and cheese. They have a very resonably priced lunch menu, that features combinations of many of their excellent dishes. If you're a smoker, it's paradise. They have a large back room where you can puff to your heart's content after your meal. The staff is very friendly, and the service is great. Prices are reasonable.

The next one is a restaurant that I just discovered today. City Cafe, in downtown Elgin is a wonderful old restaurant, located on Main Street in the heart of the old city of Elgin. For those of you who aren't from Texas, you don't pronounce it like the brand of watch, the "g" is hard. Founded in 1910, the location is in a wonderful old building, which they spiced up with murals painted on old bricks. They have a wonderful lunch counter, or you can take a table in either the smoking room, or the adjacent dining room. Today, I had their lunch buffet, which featured pot roast, real mashed potatoes and braised carrots in butter sauce. This restaurant is probably not for those who count calories or cholesterol, but for those who yearn for comfort food, this is certainly your place!! The staff was both friendly and helpful, as I couldn't make up my mind about what to try, so I asked the waitress for her opinion, and.....she gave it to me! Prices are a little on the high side for lunch, but not unreasonable. I understand their desserts are pretty good too, but I'll have to save that for my next visit....it'll give me a reason, besides great food, to go back!

Why am I reviewing restaurants in Elgin you ask?? Well, because I work in that area, which, even though it's a suburb of Austin, is still pretty much farm land, and good places to have lunch are few. Heck, I got excited when they opened a new KFC/Long John Silver's down the road!! You gotta be pretty bored with the local cuisine to get excited about a new KFC....

Now THIS is Funny!

2006-10-18T13:24:00.000-07:00

I just happened to stumble upon this blog at Town Hall.com. This is part of an essay written by a man who calls himself Jimmy Carter, and he seeks to overthrow the government in Austin, and install his own regime.

Mr. Carter writes:

My fellow Texans...

My associates and I have come to the conclusion that we here need a change of pace. Therefore, I have developed a plan for taking over the hands of government in Austin and installing my dictatorship.

Why a dictator you ask? First and foremost I think it is the funniest word in the English language. Just try to seperate the first syllable from the second two and keep from laughing. Second, less beauracracy.

First order of business will be to secede from the United States and once again become a Nation of our Own.

As a new and Independent Nation I will immediately declare War on Oklahoma. As all Texans know we have special genes that make us hate all things Oklahoma. After having conquered Ok. we will then have breakfast.
Oklahomans will be made to wear a pink bonnet, shorts, black socks, and sandals when visiting Texas so as to be easily identified and avoided.
The joke that every Texan learns first:
Why doesn't Texas float off into the Gulf of Mexico?
Because Oklahoma SUCKS!!

Oklahoma will be given to the first person who brings me a keg of beer, a "log" of Copenhagen, and a new, bright and shiny, brass cuspidor.

Speed limits will be abolished. On the interstate, if you are passing someone on the righthand side you are allowed one free shot at the tires of said passey for driving too slow in the left lane. There will be no "Special" parking designations, if you can drive you can park at the back of the lot at Wal-mart next to me.

Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys will be the official band of Texas. It will be illegal to hurt, injure, kill, mock, or insult any member or any of their work.

President Roanld Wilson Reagan will replace fdr on the dime. We will mint a special coin with the likeness of John Wayne on the front and the back will contain the "Canon of San Jacinto" with its motto "Come and Get It!" This coins' worth will equate to exactly the purchase price for a case of beer. While making a "beer run," it would be convenient to simply toss the clerk a coin and not wait in line.

It will be legal to treat abortionists with the same care and consideration that they give to a Mother's child.

Vegetatians will be rounded up and dropped over California at 15,000 feet.

I love this guy. Read the rest of the essay here. It's definitely worth the read!

Ten Reasons I'll Never Be A Liberal

2006-10-16T10:13:00.000-07:00

What It Means To Be A Liberal

Taken from an article in the Chicago Tribune, written by Geoffrey R. Stone, Law Professor at the university of Chicago.
Mr. Stone writes For most of the past four decades, liberals have been in retreat. Since the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, Republicans have controlled the White House 70 percent of the time and Republican presidents have made 86 percent of the U.S. Supreme Court appointments. In many quarters, the word "liberal" has become a pejorative. Part of the problem is that liberals have failed to define themselves and to state clearly what they believe. As a liberal, I find that appalling.

1. Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others. This is at the very heart of liberalism. Liberals understand, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed, that "time has upset many fighting faiths." Liberals are skeptical of censorship and celebrate free and open debate. Yup, just as long as it coincides with what THEY believe in. They have no problems censoring debates and anything else they don't agree with. Columbia University, anyone? Instead of listening politely to the speaker, Columbia University students decided that storming the stage and shouting the opposition down was the order of the day. Real champions of free speech there, huh?

2. Liberals believe individuals should be tolerant and respectful of difference. It is liberals who have supported and continue to support the civil rights movement, affirmative action, the Equal Rights Amendment and the rights of gays and lesbians. (Note that a conflict between propositions 1 and 2 leads to divisions among liberals on issues like pornography and hate speech.) All programs and ideas that have wreaked untold damage on those it was meant to help, i.e., the poor and black. In my opinion, welfare has done nothing for blacks except reduce black men to sperm donors. They have been replaced as providers for their families by the ubiquitous "welfare check." And we wonder why they go to jail in such alarming numbers, way out of proportion to their percentage of the population.

3. Liberals believe individuals have a right and a responsibility to participate in public debate. It is liberals who have championed and continue to champion expansion of the franchise; the elimination of obstacles to voting; "one person, one vote;" limits on partisan gerrymandering; campaign-finance reform; and a more vibrant freedom of speech. They believe, with Justice Louis Brandeis, that "the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people."Yep, the Liberals believe in voting, all right! They believe that the dead should still vote, that convicted felons should vote, and that illegal aliens should have the vote, too! Who cares if they don't have that pesky citizenship? The Liberal philosophy is "Vote Early, and Vote Often!!

4. Liberals believe "we the people" are the governors and not the subjects of government, and that government must treat each person with that in mind. It is liberals who have defended and continue to defend the freedom of the press to investigate and challenge the government, the protection of individual privacy from overbearing government monitoring, and the right of individuals to reproductive freedom. (Note that libertarians, often thought of as "conservatives," share this value with liberals.) As long as We The People are in charge, of course. When it's the Republicans in charge, it's Bushitler all the way!

5. Liberals believe government must respect and affirmatively safeguard the liberty, equality and dignity of each individual. It is liberals who have championed and continue to champion the rights of racial, religious and ethnic minorities, political dissidents, persons accused of crime and the outcasts of society. It is liberals who have insisted on the right to counsel, a broad application of the right to due process of law and the principle of equal protection for all people.
And it's those same Liberals who want to treat terrorists like mere criminals, give them lawyers, and hold trials. They just don't seem to get the idea that terrorists do not fall under the jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions, and although I'm sorry for John McCain's experience in a Vietnamese POW camp, today's terrorists do not wear uniforms, and do not represent a particular country. They don't DESERVE protection, as they don't recognize Western laws anyway.

These are also the same Liberals who would have your school aged children reading about Dick and Lane, instead of Dick and Jane. They want to make homosexuality not just an "alternative" lifestyle, but they want it to be considered mainstream, and the aggressive Gay lobby wants to indoctrinate YOUR children that homosexuality is OK. Well, it's not a mainstream lifestyle. I have gay friends, and I don't have any problem with them practicing their lifestyle if it makes them happy. What I DO have a problem with is the idea that it's a NORMAL way of life. It's not. As far as I'm concerned, there are plenty of civil documents that can be used to address the issues that gays think marriage will solve, i.e., who can be in the emergency room when someone is dying (living will), inheritances (a regular will) and breaking up (a contractual agreement, signed and witnessed). They don't NEED marriage, per se, what they WANT is to have homosexuality accepted as normal. Sorry, but it isn't normal.

6. Liberals believe government has a fundamental responsibility to help those who are less fortunate. It is liberals who have supported and continue to support government programs to improve health care, education, social security, job training and welfare for the needyest members of society. It is liberals who maintain that a national community is like a family and that government exists in part to "promote the general welfare." Sorry, but I'm grown and don't need the government to be my DADDY. What ever happened to personal responsibility and civic duty? All the problems that occurred in New Orleans would never have happened if all those poor blacks had been encouraged to DO FOR THEMSELVES, instead of waiting on DADDY to come bail 'em out. The welfare mentality is killing our country. What ever happened to "Ask not what your Country can do for you, but what YOU can do for your Country." JFK must be twirling in his grave. WELFARE DOES NOT WORK. Handouts don't work. There is no dignity in handouts. Welfare should be a hand UP. What part of that don't the Libs understand?

7. Liberals believe government should never act on the basis of sectarian faith. It is liberals who have opposed and continue to oppose school prayer and the teaching of creationism in public schools and who support government funding for stem-cell research, the rights of gays and lesbians and the freedom of choice for women. Well, this may be the one point the Libs and I somewhat agree on. I'm in favor of stem cell research, and I'm also pro-choice. I realize that this doesn't quite jibe with the image of a conservative, but that's why I call myself a Liberal Republican. I really don't understand why they need to take the phrase "under God" out of the Pledge of allegiance, though. This country was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, and the lips need to get over it. If you're not religious, great, I'm not, but I respect the idea of God, and I respect the Judea-Christian principles that our country was founded upon. I believe there MUST be morals in any society that wishes to survive.

8. Liberals believe courts have a special responsibility to protect individual liberties. It is principally liberal judges and justices who have preserved and continue to preserve freedom of expression, individual privacy, freedom of religion and due process of law. (Conservative judges and justices more often wield judicial authority to protect property rights and the interests of corporations, commercial advertisers and the wealthy.) Judges are appointed to INTERPRET the law, not MAKE the law. Until the lips get the difference, I hope the only Presidents choosing Judges will be conservatives, who want the Judges to STICK TO THE CONSTITUTION.

9. Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, for without such protection liberalism is impossible. This, of course, is less a tenet of liberalism than a reply to those who attack liberalism. The accusation that liberals are unwilling to protect the nation from internal and external dangers is false. Because liberals respect competing values, such as procedural fairness and individual dignity, they weigh more carefully particular exercises of government power (such as the use of secret evidence, hearsay and torture), but they are no less willing to use government authority in other forms (such as expanded police forces and international diplomacy) to protect the nation and its citizens. Boy, Anita that the truth! Trouble is, they're willing to use the government to impeach and otherwise harass conservatives! The Libs flat cannot be trusted with national security. They can't even be trusted to reform immigration. If they had their way, they'd just throw open our borders and actively encourage the Mexicans to take back California, Texas and parts of Arizona and Nevada. The Libs idea of "diplomacy" is to throw all kinds of money at Kim Jong Il, and then turn a blind eye when he goes back on their "deal" before the ink is even dry. They're all about appeasement, and will never learn that appeasement does not work.

10. Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, without unnecessarily sacrificing constitutional values. It is liberals who have demanded and continue to demand legal protections to avoid the conviction of innocent people in the criminal justice system, reasonable restraints on government surveillance of American citizens, and fair procedures to ensure that alleged enemy combatants are in fact enemy combatants. Liberals adhere to the view expressed by Brandeis some 80 years ago: "Those who won our independence ... did not exalt order at the cost of liberty." Innocent people, eh? Like Mumia? Like Tookey? Please, the ACLU needs to be disbanded and done away with. We're harboring Marxist/Lenonist/Communist traitors in our own ranks, and the rot is corrupting our society from the inside.

How the Left Enables Terrorism

2006-10-16T07:38:00.000-07:00

Dr. Sanity has a great blog article today on why/how the Left in this country enables terrorism. She is a phychiatrist, and addresses the psychosocial aspects of the narcissism of the Left in regard to giving aid and comfort to the enemy in a time of war.

It is my contention that the Democrats, the MSM, the Left (including feminists, communists and socialist dead-enders) and various other assorted groups I choose to comment on do exactly that: wittingly or unwittingly, they enable, support, or facilitate terror and terrorists

However, in their current toxic iteration; and because they seem to have taken over the previously tolerable Democratic Party, I can no longer ignore them. Their unbelievable behavior over the past 5+ years has consistently provided aid and comfort to an enemy that is simply the greatest threat to civilization in my lifetime. Whether their behavior is conscious or not, I really don't care. The results are the same.

And, if you don't think that their enabling behavior has caused considerable death, destruction and other serious consequences to our country and our military, then you are not looking at the big picture of what is going on in the world today. If you do not understand that all their activity and bluster; all their slogans and hysteria are designed to make the United States lose this war, then you are extremely naiive. Take a look at what they are doing. They have attempted to obstruct the prosecution of this war on every front. They have deliberately and with malice aforethought managed to create the impression that our military forces are composed of brutal thugs; while at the same time they coddle the real brutal thugs we are fighting. Rather than being the "loyal" opposition, they have descended at times, I believe, to actual treasonous behavior. The Democrats, in particular, have shown repeatedly that they hate George Bush and Dick Cheney more than they love this country. The Republicans, as I have said many times are bad enough with their slippery and opportunistic behavior patterns, but the Democrats are completely despicable.

As one commenter put it: the Republicans suck like Hoover vacuum cleaners, but the Democrats are a bleeding black hole of corruption, opportunism, and malignant narcissism.

Read the whole post here.

What the Hell?!?!

2006-10-03T16:02:00.000-07:00

What the hell is our world coming to? What kind of immoral, rudderless, spineless, godless society could produce not one, but two monsters, who, in one week, would inflict their nihilistic, narcisisstic, selfish grievences against the world on innocent children? And then, to compound their crimes against humanity by giving them a salacious, slimy, sexual element??

When grown men will invade a school, bent on doing violence to little girls? What the hell is wrong with them? According to news sites, the perpetrator in the most recent shootings in Amish Country was "getting even" for some perceived slight that allegedly happened when he was 12 years old!!! WTF? This guy, basically marked out 12 little girls for death, that he'd never set eyes on before yesterday. They had done nothing to him, had no connection to him whatsoever, none of their families had a connection with him, so he was "getting even" with 12 little girls he didn't know from Adam.....Why??? Why execute 12 little girls, innocents for crissakes, you've never seen before? Why not take your revenge, if you must, on whomever it was that abused you, broke your heart, yada, yada....??

What about the one in Colorado?? That's even worse, because the poor people of Colorado are already traumatized for a generation because of the shootings at Columbine High School several years ago. Geeze, can it get any worse? Of course it can, and it did last week, when a 50-something man, again with the grievences, infiltrated a high school, took over a classroom, molested and sexually assaulted half a dozen girls, and then killed one on his way out of the world. Why are they sexually assaulting young women they've never met, to get even with society?? WTF???

Are men more highly sexualized today or have they always been pigs and it just wasn't as widely known? Why are these guys not just killing, but sexualizing little girls? Is the American moral compass broken? Are we all sick at the core like this, but some of us just control it better? Is this a personal disease or is society sick?

I'm sure that the plethora of easily accessed pornography on the internet, the violence that saturates our society, explicit and violent rap lyrics, cartoons, sexually explicit videos and explicit video games, as well as poor parenting, and lack of significant adult guidance leads some of these people down the path less righteous. But, I'm also afraid that Pandora's Box is open, and there's no way to "unring" the bell. Our society is just slowly sliding down the path to wrack and ruin.

In the above 2 cases, I would wager that sexual abuse was at the root of why these two monsters committed their atrocities, but that doesn't excuse in any way what they did, and the only upside to this whole, horrible mess is that they had the good grace to at least off themselves, and save the states the cost of prosecuting them, and it saved the families of the slain girls the agony of having to confront the monsters who murdered their children.

Thomas Sowell on "Peacemongers"

2006-10-01T08:48:00.000-07:00

Writer Thomas Sowell has some very interesting thoughts on the "Peace Mongers." He contends that peacemongering has done nothing but put off the inevitable wars, and, in the end, make them worse than they needed to be.

Very interesting reading.

One of the many failings of our educational system is that it sends out into the world people who cannot tell rhetoric from reality. They have learned no systematic way to analyze ideas, derive their implications, and test those implications against hard facts.

“Peace” movements are among those who take advantage of this widespread inability to see beyond rhetoric to realities. Few people even seem interested in the actual track record of so-called “peace” movements — that is, whether such movements actually produce peace or war.

Take the Middle East. People are calling for a cease-fire in the interests of peace. But there have been more cease-fires in the Middle East than anywhere else. If cease-fires actually promoted peace, the Middle East would be the most peaceful region on the face of the earth instead of the most violent.

Was World War II ended by cease-fires or by annihilating much of Germany and Japan? Make no mistake about it, innocent civilians died in the process. Indeed, American prisoners of war died when we bombed Germany.

There is a reason why General Sherman said “war is hell” more than a century ago. But he helped end the Civil War with his devastating march through Georgia — not by cease fires or bowing to “world opinion,” and there were no corrupt busybodies like the United Nations to demand replacing military force with diplomacy.

There was a time when it would have been suicidal to threaten, much less attack, a nation with much stronger military power because one of the dangers to the attacker would be the prospect of being annihilated.

“World opinion,” the U.N., and “peace movements” have eliminated that deterrent. An aggressor today knows that if his aggression fails, he will still be protected from the full retaliatory power and fury of those he attacked because there will be hand-wringers demanding a cease fire, negotiations, and concessions.

That has been a formula for never-ending attacks on Israel in the Middle East. The disastrous track record of that approach extends to other times and places — but who looks at track records?

Remember the Falkland Islands war, when Argentina sent troops into the Falklands to capture this little British colony in the South Atlantic?

Argentina had been claiming to be the rightful owner of those islands for more than a century. At no time did the British have enough troops there to defend them. Why didn't Argentina attack these little islands before?

Before there were “peace” movements and the U.N., sending troops into those islands could easily have meant finding British troops or bombs in Buenos Aires. Now, “world opinion” condemned the British just for sending armed forces into the South Atlantic to take back their islands.

Shamefully, our own government was one of those that opposed the British use of force. But fortunately British prime minister Margaret Thatcher ignored “world opinion” and took back the Falklands.

The most catastrophic result of “peace” movements was World War II. While Hitler was arming Germany to the teeth, “peace” movements in Britain were advocating that their own country disarm “as an example to others.”

British Labour Party Members of Parliament voted consistently against military spending and British college students publicly pledged never to fight for their country. If “peace” movements brought peace, there would never have been World War II.

Not only did that war lead to tens of millions of deaths, it came dangerously close to a crushing victory for the Nazis in Europe and the Japanese empire in Asia. And we now know that the United States was on Hitler's timetable after that.

For the first two years of that war, the Western democracies lost virtually every battle, all over the world, because pre-war “peace” movements had left them with inadequate military equipment and much of it obsolete. The Nazis and the Japanese knew that. That is why they launched the war.

“Peace” movements don't bring peace, but war.

Islam Wants to Conquer the World

2006-10-01T08:36:00.000-07:00

Another banned op-ed, German Professor Egon Flaig's piece on Islam....sure to be on the Islamic Hit Parade, coming to an Infidel near you! (Hat Tip: Michelle Malkin)

"For we want the flag of Islam to fly over those lands again, who were lucky enough, to be ruled by Islam for a time, and hear the call of the muezzin praise God. Then the light of Islam died out and they returned to disbelief. Andalusia, Sicily, the Balkans, Southern Italy and the Greek islands are all Islamic colonies which have to return to Islam's lap. The Mediterranean and the Red Sea have to become internal seas of Islam, as they used to be".

These are not the words of Al Qaeda, they were taken from the programme formulated by the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al Banna, in a speech. The Brotherhood today has millions of adherents and spread out far beyond Egypt. Its intellectuals are working in Europe and the United States; they count as "moderates" and are treated accordingly by the media. Re-conquest of "lost" territory according to plan is part of the agenda of states, that is political communities, fighting about territorial power. How can it be part of a religion's programme? Is Islam a religion like any other?

Since the beginning of the classical period between the ninth and the eleventh century Islamic jurists have divided the world into two parts, namely the "House of Islam" and the "House of War". This dichotomy is independent of where Muslims live in large numbers, or even form the majority, but depends on where Islam rules supreme - by applying Shariah - or where it does not rule. So, this dichotomy is not religious in nature, but political. Between these two parts of the world naturally exists a state of war, until the House of War is no more and Islam rules the world (Sura 8, 39 and 9, 41). Thus, according to classical teaching, for the Muslim community there is a duty to wage war against the disbelievers, until those either convert, or submit. This war is called jihad.

While Jesus' missionary call meant to convert all peoples, but to leave their political order untouched, Islam's aim is to submit all non-muslims politically, but to leave their religion untouched, if it is a religion of the book. God's general call to jihad is based on surah 9, 29. It is true though, that minute factions of islam did not accept this interpretation. The Shiites accept it, but demand that a true imam must be leading the Muslim community (and has been waiting for such a one for more than 13 centuries), so that for the time being they only feel bound to defensive jihad, in the case of attacks on the Muslim community.

On the other hand, the other factions, e.g. the so-called Kharijites, have radicalised the content of Sura 9.29: for them, jihad is an individual duty of each able-bodied muslim, which counts as a sixth pillar next to the other five cardinal duties. In the consequence of such teachings: when everyone has to either take part in the collective war against the unbelievers, or, should the Muslim community be too weak for the time being, has to wage war alone or in small groups, then assassinations and terror attacks are right. What the Kharijites demand for offensive jihad, most proponents of orthodox Sunnah-teachings demand for defensive jihad: when Islam is being attacked, or islamic territory is being invaded by infidels, jihad becomes an individual duty, e.g. a fatwa of the Grand Mufti of Cairo's Al-Azhar university - against Israel - leaves no doubt about that. Any enemy power that acts according to the Hague rules of warfare and strictly distinguishes combatants and non-combatants will be in great difficulty. The state of war lasts so long, until the House of War is destroyed, and the world is conquered. This is why Majid Khadduri calls Islam a "divine nomocracy on imperialist foundations". Peace treaties, which Islamic rulers closed with non-Islamic rulers, were only considered as cease-fires; this is why as a rule, they were only closed for no more than ten years. Two schools of jurisprudence permit no more than three to four years of peace. The short deadlines made it possible for the militarily superior Muslims to constantly blackmail their adversaries; this way throughout the centuries huge amounts of money and humans went to the Muslim side. When the paradigm of power shifted, Muslim rulers had to change their practice.

Thus in 1535 Suleiman the Magnificent made a peace with the French king which was to last for the lifetime of the Sultan - a break with tradition. Christian theologians tried to define, in the face of a plurality of states, what could be deemed a "just war" and what could not be deemed such. To wage war just in the interest of faith for the most part was not considered just. For Muslim scholars on the other hand, the "house of islam" is a political unit, which does not permit internal war, therefore only war for the sugjugation of infidels was considered legitimate and even a duty, as the famous fourtheenth-century scholare Ibn Chaldun categorically states: "In Islam the jihad is prescribed by law, because it has a universal calling and is supposed to convert all of humanity to Islam, be it of their own free will, or by force".

The rules of engagement for jihad are flexible. According to Khadduri, anything is possible, from mercy to mass enslavement to mass killing, just like with Greeks and Romans. This is a fundamental difference between the holy war of islam and of Old Testament Judaism, which prescribed the killing of all males outside of Israel, and the killing of every living thing within Israel (Deuteronomy 20, 10-20). We usually are outraged at what the Crusaders did in Jerusalem in 1099. Yet, the Crusaders acted in accordance with the ius bellum of the times, Muslim conquerors did the same all the time and everywhere: 698 they hit Carthage, in 838 Syracuse; the notorious vesir of the Cordoban Caliphate, Al Mansur, led 25 wars in 27 years against the Christian realms of northern Spain, enslaving, destroying, laying waste. They hit Zamora (981), Coimbra (987), Leon, Barcelona twice (985 and 1008), then Santiago de Compostela (997).

The worst destruction was wreaked by the jihadis on Byzantine Anatolia, which was then still full of cities; the massacre of Amorium (838) has remained a symbol for a long time; the urban culture of Anatolia never recovered from it.

The Seljuk Alp Arslan had entire Armenian cities massacred, the worst being the capital Ani in 1064. Bat Ye'or's evaluation therefore is more than justified: "Its lack of measure, its regularity and the systematic character of the destructions, which Islamic theologians had decreed to be law, make the difference between jihad and other wars of conquest".Certainly, mass enslavement remained the favourite aim of the wars. That was the way in which, as early as the eight century, the biggest slave-holder society developed that world history has ever known; it demanded a permanent influx of new slaves, transformed the African continent into the biggest supplier of slaves, a destiny which Europe narrowly avoided.

The incredible speed, in which in 90 years an Arabian empire spanning from the south of France to India developed, with no single conqueror guiding the expansion, is unique. The world's most succesful imperialism was admired by no less than Hegel: "Never has enthusiasm as such done bigger deeds". If "enthusiasm" could do such a thing - what was its source? The answer is simple: martyrdom. Something happening in 963 in Constantinople may illustrate this: the emperor Nikephoros Phokas had just swept the Muslim invaders from Crete; now, he was planning a big war, to liberate eastern Anatolia and northern Syria from muslim rule. A council should help him: he pleaded with the bishops, to elevate soldiers dying in the war to the status of martyrs. Paradise would then have been assured for those soldiers. The patriarch stood up against the emperor: no church council could be empowered to anticipate God's decision, only God could decide on eternal salvation.

A scene of historical significance. The emperor knew what was at stake. Again and again, the Byzantians had to witness the Muslim troops fighting with a ferocious courage that the Christians could not emulate. Fallen Muslims were considered martyrs of the faith and marched straight to paradise. The concept of a martyr is fundamentally different in the two religions. Christian martyrs imitate the passion of Jesus, passively submit to torture and death; Muslim martyrs are active fighters.

Decisive for the warriors' acceptance of death was the firm promise of eternal salvation for those who die for the faith (surah 4, 74-76). Muslims should withstand a tenfold force (surah 8, 66-67); retreat was judged to be acceptable by later scholars if the enemy was at least double as strong, as Khadduri describes. As the decisive factor in any war is the fighting human being and his readiness to sacrifice himself, being on a par technically with the Arabs and Seljuks - in the long run, they had to succumb, if their morale was not of the same kind. Higher readiness to die is an enormous advantage in a fight- foolhardy operations can be waged and dashing manoeuvers to surprise and confuse the enemy; in that way, victory can be forced, that is technically and materially almost impossible, and battles are won, that would be lost under the usual circumstances.

Nikephoros knew about the military consequences of surah 4, 74-76; he was the first who tried to correct the conceptual military disadvantage of the Christian religion. But the bishops of the Eastern Church found themselves incapable of manipulating their theology in a way to create warlike martyrdom. This was it. The Byzantine emperors had to wage their heavy defensive wars against the permanent Saracen and Seljuk aggression without the help of religion, where they needed that help most.

Only the Western Church changed the theological-political situation: when Pope Urban II called the first crusade in 1095, he promised the Christian warriors forgiveness for their sins: fallen crusaders avoided divine judgement and were put on a par with martyrs in that respect, although they were denied that name.

The Pope as head of a monarchic church did just that, what the Council of Eastern bishops had not been able to do: he dispensed salvation. The papal church now could have the kind of "holy war" islam had been waging for centuries. What is the difference between Crusade and jihad? A Crusade could only be called by the Pope, and thus remained a rare occurence - compared to the countless, neverending and ubiquitarian jihads of the islamic world.

And the goals of the Crusades remain precisely defined; in November 1095, Urban II defined reason and aim of the crusade: "it is obvious, we must give help to our brothers in the east as soon as possible. The Turks and Arabs have attacked them and have invaded the realm of Romania (Constantinople) and by invading the lands of these Christians ever more deeply, they won seven battles, killed or captured a huge number of the Christians. If you don't oppose them now, the faithful servants of God in the Orient will not withstand this storm much longer". The first Crusades were meant to either help Christians in need, or to liberate the holy places in Palestine or to liberate Christians that had been subjugated by Muslims. On the other hand, the Muslim scholars always kept firm to their final goal, to conquer the "house of war" and subjugate all infidels.
Urban II was right. Had Constantinople fallen in 1100, the enormous military power of the Turk armies would have plagued Europe four hundred years earlier. Then the manifold European culture probably would never have been: no free urban constitutions, no constitutional debates, no cathedrals, no renaissance, no scientific boom, because in the Islamic world, free - Greek! - thinking was dying just at this time. Jacob Burckhardt's evaluation - "A stroke of luck, that Europe as a whole could ward off Islam" - means, we owe about as much to the Crusades, as to the Greeks' victory against the Persians.

But, have the Crusades not been abused? Certainly. Crusades "derailed" and were "abused", like the one that led to the conquest of Christian Constantinople in 1204. But that happened much more often with jihads. When slaves became scarce, emirs did not merely wage wars against non-Muslim peoples, who had to be enslaved anyway, but more and more often against Islamized peoples, under the pretext, that they were no true Muslims. That happened mainly in Africa and against black Africans, e.g. when first in 1468 Songhay and then the Moroccans in 1552 invaded Mali, or when in the 18th century religious reformers waged their jihad against Muslimized Hausa cities, which led to the creation of the Sokoto-caliphate - containing the third largest number of slaves after Brazil and the American south. Africa to this day suffers from the consequences of this permanent jihad with its genocides and mass-enslavements

Well, and what was the political order that the Muslims waged their holy wars for with such vehemence and success? For Shariah. A political order, which for one strictly separates masters from the subjugated and secondly takes political and social order away from human influence for the most part. Let's talk about the first aspect: According to the Shariah, the Muslims are masters, the followers of other "book religions" - Christians, Jews, Parsees, Buddhists, are subjugated, Dhimmi. These were not religious minorities, but huge majorities, especially in Syria, Anatolia or the Christians of North-Africa.

The subjugated were not allowed to carry weapons, they were unarmed, thus not 'real men'. Christians and Jews had to wear special colours or pieces of clothing (this discrimination was the origin of the "Judenstern") so as to be visibly "dhimmi"; they were not allowed to ride on horseback, only on mules, to remind them of their subjugation; they paid a special tribute (jizyah), that they had to pay personally, while being given a slap on the head. They had to let themselves be beaten by any Muslim, without being allowed to defend themselves; if a dhimmi retaliated, his hand would be cut off, or he would be executed. A dhimmi's witness did not count against a Muslim, who only had to pay half the fine for any crime committed against a dhimmi, and could never ever get executed for any such crime. On the other side, the most cruel methods of execution were reserved for the dhimmi.

Even the discrimination against the Jews, installed by the Western Church in the 4th Lateran Council in 1215, four hundred years after Islam, and which seems so barbarian to us, did not intend and did not lead to such a degree of humiliation and demeaning of people. A special horror was brought by the Turkish rule: from 1360 up to a fifth of Christian children were abducted into slavery. They were forcefully converted. The number of slaves through four centuries must have been millions; hundreds of thousands of choice boys among those were raised to be fanatical Muslims and elite fighters, the notorious Janissaries: a politic meant to systematically increase the Muslim population and slowly exterminate Christians. It was successful. "Dhimmitude" put non-muslims in a state of radical "otherness". To call people in this state "second class citizens" is a euphemism.

In the same way national socialism divided humans into master-race and subhumans on racial grounds, so Shariah did it on religious grounds. As the first world-religion, Islam created an apartheid, where Christian or Parsee majorities were colonised and slowly Islamized. Islamic tolerance meant: tolerate the subjugated as humiliated and demeaned. All this is well known via studies about "dhimmitude". But who wants to hear about the millions of victims?
Islam religiously "cleansed" huge territories: the second Caliph made the Hijaz, Arabia except Yemen "judenrein" and "christenrein"; the alternative was either to convert, or to be forced into emigration. Except for some Old Testament cases no religion ever before had done that. In the same way the Almohadis and Almoravids "cleansed" Spain after the breakdown of the Caliphate in 1031: tens of thousands of Jews and Christians had to either convert or flee to the Christian north of Spain, or the Levant. Certainly, English and French kings and the kings of Spain later on did the same - they applied the Muslim recipe in doing it. And the pogroms? Since the Caliph Al-Mutawakkil (847-861) waves of persecution again and again hit the Orient and North Africa, where Jews and Christians were forcibly converted, kicked out or massacred. The destruction of churches went on and on right until the century before last. Slowly, the rosy picture of Muslim Spain created by European anti-imperialism in the 19th century loses its fake colours. A scrupulous study of documents shows a different picture below that. In 889 in Elvira and in 891 in Seville, there were massive pogroms against Christians. In Moroccan Fez in 1033, 6000 Jews were massacred. 1058 Christian Antioch was forcefully Muslimized with torture and threats of death.

The first large pogrom against Jews on European soil happened in 1066 in Muslim Granada, 1500 Jewish families were killed. In 1135 the Jewish quarter of Cordoba was burnt down, it might be good, not to know the number of people massacred then. In 1159 all the Christians in Tunis had to chose between conversion or death. At this time, the vital Christianity of North Africa was completely wiped out. The pogroms in Christian lands are nothing to be proud of in European history, but their scope lags behind the ones in the Muslim world. We urgently need a comparative study of religious oppression.

Let's talk about integration of the Jews? Nowhere under the rule of Islam, not even in the Spanish Caliphate, were Jews citizens of their own cities, they always remained subjugated. In some German cities - Worms, Augsburg and others - during the high Middle Ages the Jews were citizens, albeit of special legal satus. They had the right to carry arms and were better off than poorer Christian people. Right until the 14th century, when their situation got worse, they were far better integrated than Jews in Muslim Spain could ever hope to be. Who thinks highly of political integration cannot but prefer Augsburg to Cordoba. All this has been well known in academic circles for fifteen years. But who wants to hear it?

To ignore the past means to re-live it. He who keeps on spreading the fairytale of muslim tolerance, stands in the way of those Muslim intellectuals, who seriously work towards a reformation of islam, which started out so promisingly in the 19th century. He steals away their chance to overcome a past, which threatens to become a horrible presence. If the reformers could achieve a radical de-politicization of islam, the muslims could become real citizens of their states. That would leave the highly spiritual religion, which fascinated not only Goethe. Hegel called Islam the "religion of sublime".

What part of this do the Liberals/Leftists not understand? When Hitler said he wanted to conquer the world, nobody listened until it was too blatant to ignore. Are we doomed to repeat history with radical Islamists? Are we going to stick our heads in the sand until they're HERE with their swords at the necks of your families and friends? Do we really want to fight them hand-to-hand in our own neighborhoods? I don't. Do you?

Another Critic of Islam Goes Into Hiding

2006-10-01T08:14:00.000-07:00

If Islam is so great, why can't they take critisism? Dr. Robert Redecker writes an op-ed critical of Islam, which has been banned in Egypt, is now receiving death threats to himself and his family, and has had to go into hiding.

What is wrong with this picture? Why does a journalist have to go into hiding because he wrote a critical piece on Islam? Because Islam cannot stand up to critisism...plain and simple. When one starts to question it's dogma, the whole thing falls apart, which is why Muslims don't tolerate questions or critique. Another example of "It's the Religion of Peace, dammit, and We'll Kill You to Prove It!!"

Disgusting.

This is the piece that got him in trouble: (Hat Tip: Michelle Malkin)

"What should the free world do while facing Islamist intimidation?

The reactions caused by Benedict XVI’s analysis of Islam and violence highlight the underhanded manoever carried out by Islam to stifle what the West values more than anything, and which does not exist in any Moslem country: freedom of thought and expression.

Islam tries to impose its rules on Europe : opening of public swimming pools at certain hours reserved exclusively for women, ban on caricaturing this religion, demands for special diets for Muslim children in school cafeterias, struggle to impose the veil at school, accusations of Islamophobia against free spirits.

How can one explain the ban on the wearing thongs on Paris-Beaches* this summer? The reasoning put forth was bizarre: women wearing thongs would risk “disturbing the peace”. Did this mean that bands of frustrated youths would become violent while being offended by displays of beauty? Or were the authorities scared of Islamist demonstrations by virtue squads near the Paris-Beaches?

However, the authorization of the veil on the street is more disturbing to public peace than wearing a thong, because it invites complaints against the upholding the oppression of women .This ban represents an Islamization of sensibilities in France, a more or less conscious submission to the diktats of Islam. At the very least it is the result of the insidious Muslim pressure on the minds: even those who protested the introduction of a “Jean Paul II Square” in Paris would not be opposed to the construction of mosques. Islam is trying to force Europe to yield to its vision of humanity.

As in the past with Communism, the West finds itself under ideological watch. Islam presents itself, like defunct Communism, as an alternative to the Western world. In the way of Communism before it, Islam, to conquer spirits, plays on a sensitive string. It prides itself on a legitimacy which troubles Western conscience, which is attentive to others: it claims to be the voice of the oppressed of the planet. Yesterday, the voice of the poor supposedly came from Moscow, today it originates in Mecca! Again, today, western intellectuals incarnate the eye of the Koran, as they have incarnated the eye of Moscow. They now excommunicate people because of Islamophobia, as they did before because of anti-communism.

This opening to others, specific to the West, is a secularization of Christianity that can be summarized thus:the other person must come before myself. The Westerner, heir to Christianity, is he that exposes his soul bare. He runs the risk of being seen as weak. With the same ardor as Communism, Islam treats generosity, broadmindedness, tolerance, gentleness, freedom of women and of manners, democratic values, as marks of decadence. They are weaknesses that it seeks to exploit, by means of useful idiots, and self-rigtheous consciences drowning in nice feelings, in order to impose the Koranic order on the Western world itself.

The Koran is a book of unparalleled violence. Maxime Rodinson states, in Encyclopedia Universalis, some truths that in France are as significant as they are taboo. On one hand: “Mohammed revealed in Medina unsuspected qualities as political leader and military chief (…) He resorted to private war, by then a prevalent custom in Arabia (….) Mohammed soon sent small groups of partisans to attack the Meccan caravans, thus punishing his unbelieving compatriots and simultaneously acquiring the booty of a wealthy man.”

There is more: “Mohammed profited from this success by eradicating the Jewish tribe which resided in Medina, the Quarayza, whom he accused of suspect behaviour.” And: “After the death of Khadija, he married a widow, a good housewife, called Sawda, and in addition to the little Aisha, barely ten years old. His erotic predilections, held in check for a long time, led him to ten simultaneous marriages .”

A merciless war chief, plunderer, slaughterer of Jews and a polygamist, such is the man revealed through the Koran.

Of , the Catholic church is not above reproach. Its history is strewn with dark pages, for which it has officially repentaed. The Inquisition, the hounding of witches, the execution of the philosophers Giordano Bruno and Vanini, those wrong-thinking Epicureans, in the 18th century the execution of the knight of La Barre for impiety, do not plead in the church’s favor. But what differentiates Christianity from Islam is obvious: it is always possible to go back to true evangelical values, the peaceful character of Jesus as opposed to the deviations of the Church.

None of the faults of the Church have their roots in the Gospel. Jesus is non-violent. Going back to Jesus is akin to forswear the excesses of the Church. Going back to Mohammed, to the conbtrary, reinforces hate and violence. Jesus is a master of love, Mohammed is a master of hatred.

The stoning of Satan, each year in Mecca, is not only an obsolete superstition. It not only sets the stage for a hysterical crowd flirting with barbarity. Its import is anthropological. Here is a rite, which each Muslim is invited to submit to, that emphasizes violence as a sacred duty in the very heart of the believer.

This stoning, accompanied each year by the accidental trampling to death of some of the believers, sometimes up to several hundreds, is a rite that feeds archaic violence.

Instead of getting rid of this archaic violence, and thus imitating Judaism and Christianity (Judaism starts when it abandons human sacrifice, and enters civilization; Christianity transforms sacrifice through the Eucharist), Islam builds a nest for this violence, where it will incubate. Whereas Judaism and Christianity are religions whose rites spurn violence, by delegitimizing it, Islam is a religion that exalts violence and hatred in its everyday rites and sacred book.

Hatred and violence dwell in the book with which every Muslim is brought up, the Koran. As in the Cold War, where violence and intimidation were the methods used by an ideology hell bent on hegemony, so today Islam tries to put its leaden mantle all over the world. Benedict XVI’s cruel experience is testimony to this. Nowadays, the West has to be called the “free world” in comparison to the Muslim world; likewise, the enemies of the “free world”, the zealous bureaucrats of the Koran’s vision, swarm in the very center of the free World."

Observations On Arabs

2006-09-27T12:45:00.000-07:00

An amazing piece. Arabs really don't think like us. Say it slowly and let it sink in, then click here and read the piece. This man spent several years living among Arabs and has some interesting observations on the differences between us and them.

Amazing Reads

2006-09-25T12:46:00.000-07:00

Doctor Robert Godwin is amazing. He's a psychologist, and has a blog worth reading. His politics are conservative, but he has great insight into why liberals say/do what they say/do. The most recent post (today's) is a treatise on why former President Clinton went ballistic on Chris Wallace's program last Sunday. Great read!

Read the whole site. It's worth it!

For My Liberal Friends

2006-09-20T09:36:00.000-07:00

Head-In-The-Sand-Liberals

Isn't It Ironic...

2006-09-20T07:16:00.000-07:00

Recently, Pope Benedict XVI made a scholarly speech, at the University of Regensberg, to an obscure fellowship of priests and clerics, and in the text of this speech, he made reference to words written about Islam by a long-dead Byzantine Emperor, Manuel II Paleologus.

Now, Manuel II was an interesting character. Seems he had a couple of brothers who wanted to rule also, and a civil war ensued, whereupon Manuel went to the local Caliph and offered to pay more tribute to the Caliphate than his brother, whom he was competing (warring) with for the throne, and although he did eventually become Emperor, it was at the discretion of the Caliphate, thus making Manuel a Dhimmi.

The Pope quoted Manuel II, to the effect that Islam promotes itself at the point of a sword, and a rational, reasonable religion doesn't need to recruit souls by violence. Muslims will tell you that Islam is the "Religion of Peace," and does not use violence to promote itself.....yeah, right. Tell Steve Centanni and Olaf Whigg about that. Funny, I saw with my own lyin' eyes, their conversion at gunpoint. Religion of Peace, my big, fat, patootie.

The Muslim community has reacted to this speech by, among other things, firebombing churches in Gaza, murdering nuns in Somalia, and calling for the assassination of Pope Benedict.

So, let me see if I got this right, Muslims....Islam is the Religion of Peace, and we'll kill you to prove it!

Does anybody besides me see the irony in this?

This is What Our World has Come To

2006-09-13T16:07:00.000-07:00

I went by the gas station today, and it was $2.40 a gallon. I was excited...I can't believe I'm getting excited by $2.40 a gallon gas. Why would the price of gas come down almost 40 cents a gallon in about a month? It was almost $2.90 a gallon a month ago.

I know about market fluctuations, blah, blah, blah, but come on....40 cents in less than 30 days just can't be entirely due to market influences.

I confess that I read Bill O'Reilly's column regularly, and although I don't agree 100% with some of the things he said, his rant about the oil companies artificially inflating prices and playing fast and loose with our money, not to mention the obscene profits they post. Seems to me that if they can artificially influence the price of gas to go up, they can do the same for consumers to make it go down, too.

The Factor has accused oil companies of gouging consumers, and now posits that prices are falling because big oil fears a congressional investigation. Economist Ben Stein disagreed with any suggestion of price manipulation. "Your whole thesis just doesn't make sense. Oil prices are set on world markets, and profits are good things. Profit is not a dirty word, and oil companies are owned by ordinary Americans. There's never been evidence of gouging." Stein was seconded by investor Wayne Rodgers, who blamed high gas prices on regulation. "I agree with Ben in that this is a free market out there. It's about supply, and we haven't had a refinery built in this country for thirty years. You can not just sell oil in the ground, you have to have a refined product." The Factor reiterated that oil companies are manipulating prices. "People who work in the gas business told me that these guys gouge whenever they can. The price is coming down now because oil companies are scared. There's a cabal, not a free market. This is about people heating their homes, people suffering, and these are greedy oil companies."

I guess this is where I earn my tinfoil hat...

Where were YOU on 9/11/01?

2006-09-11T08:53:00.000-07:00

Today is September 11, 2006, the fifth anniversary of that date in 2001 when our world changed completely. We should all pause to reflect on just what this date means to us, as Americans and citizens. To some, it means the birth of a child, a welcome, joyous moment not meant to be marred by death and misery. To most, it means the destruction of an iconic part of the New York City skyline by young Muslim men bent on killing not just themselves, but as many of us as they could in the name of their "religion," which worships death and intolerance.

Where was I on 9/11? It was a Tuesday morning and I was awake, drinking my morning coffee, watching Matt Lauer and Katie Couric on the Today show as was my usual morning routine. Suddenly, there was a commotion offscreen, and they broke away from their story to tell us, the viewing public, that there had been an explosion at the North Tower. The picture changed to a view of the smoking north tower. Of course, at first blush, everyone watching thought it was nothing more than a horrible, tragic accident. After all, nobody would purposely fly an airplane into one of the Towers, would they?

As I stood there, eyes glued to the television, watching the tower smoke and burn, coffee forgotten in my hand, a second plane flew into the second tower and hell erruped right there on my TV! Live!! Oh horror of horrors! Another one! Hard on the heels of this came the reports of the Shanksville crash and the Pentagon. What was going on?? Who would do this? Why did they do it? Nobody knew. I continued to watch the horror from my living room as the scenes played out 1500 miles away in Manhattan, with the occasional cuts to Washington and Shanksville in an unending loop of death, wondering, as did we all, how many more would explode before it was all over....of course, the scenes playing out right before my eyes were nothing more than a bad B-movie plot until it happened. Imagine blowing up the World Trade Center! What an idea....

The evidence was right there....in front of my disbelieving eyes. Somebody had attacked the twin towers of the World Trade Center with commercial airplanes, as well as the Pentagon and a fourth plane meant either for the Capitol or the White House, which was successfully defended by the brave passengers of that flight, ending in the crash in Shanksville, PA. Using commercial airliners as guided missiles. Who'da thunk it? And who knew that the buildings, crippled by the heat of jet fueled fires melting the infrastructure, would then collapse in such a disasterous way? I confess, the way the buildings collapsed was strangely beautiful, sort of like 2 concrete and steel prima ballerinas doing their ballet of death for all the world to see.

To say that I was stunned would be an understatement. The world was stunned. And when we found out who was responsible, we Americans were stunned and angry. Especially when we found out who and what was responsible for these horrific acts, and why.

What religion encourages its adherants to kill? What sort of God wishes for people to die or kill in His name? The answer is: NONE. No real God asks that of anybody, but the God that does thirst for blood is Allah, that is, according to his prophet on earth, Muhammed. Consult any given copy of the Quran and the Hadith (the immortalization of Mohammed's exhortations to his flock) and you will find very few chapters or quotations that refer to Allah's mercy. Most of what you will find are exhortations to lie, cheat, steal and murder, as Islam isn't so much a religion as it is a manifesto for war, or Holy War (Jihad), as the Muslims call it.

If you do your homework, you'll find out that Mohammed was nothing more than a terrorist himself, and the proof is right there under everybody's nose in none other than the Hadith, which is a compilation of Mohammed's speeches to the faithful. By their own admission, historians and Muslims alike will tell you that the Hadith is Allah's own words through his prophet on earth, Mohammed.

What they don't tell you is that Allah started his life out as a rock. Evidently, a piece of a meteorite or some kind of rock that fell to earth from the sky, and was worshipped along with 364 other rocks by pagans in Mecca, hundreds of years after the birth of Christ. Mohammed's father was named Abd'allah, which means "slave of Allah." Abd'allah was the keeper of the Ka'aba in Mecca which housed the Allah rock and all the others, as was his father before him. Abd'allah's father made a promise to the rock god, Allah, when he was young that he would sacrifice one of his sons to the rock if Allah (rock) granted him 10 sons. Of course, after his wish was granted by the rock god, Abd'allah's father got himself out of the bargain by offering 1000 camels in his son's stead. Kind of like wealthy families offering up a servant to do military service for a fortunate son.

Ever wonder why a fatwa was issued for Salmon Rushdie? His book was called the Satanic Verses and it was about the 3 rocks that Mohammed christened as the daughters of Allah. There were verses in the Quran about the 3 daughter rocks of Allah until it was pointed out to him that they were FEMALES and goddesses, therefore not worthy of worship, at which point Mohammed declared those verses Satanic and struck them from the Quran. That is why the fatwah was issued for Salmon Rushdie. He had the temerity to bring that to light in a novel, and that was enough to put a price on his head.

Anyway, Mohammed (son of the Ka'aba Keeper, and a Pagan) was illiterate and the Quran is nothing more than Old Testament Bible stories turned inside out. Evidently Mohammed was a wannabe, and more or less failed at everything he did, including founding a religion until he hit upon the mix of sex and money to sell his product (Islam). Once he realized that he could tempt his followers with either booty in this life or sex in the next one, he started to acquire adherants. Up until that time, however, his religion was a failed one. Then he started robbing caravans, and it blew up from there.

This "religion" is more of a social structure than a religion. Allah says, through Mohammed of course, that it's ok to lie, steal and murder in his name, which means the Religion of Peace has nothing in common with Peace. The Islamists do not want peace. They want to dominate the world and we'd better wake up and smell the coffee or our great-grandchildren will be wearing burkhas and praying 5 times a day.

I sat glued to the television for the next 2 days, watching that unending loop of death and destruction on every television station (I could afford cable back then, so I had like, 50 channels). I barely moved off the couch. I didn't bathe. I didn't even change out of my pyjamas. I cried alot, and grieved, and wondered what was going to change in my life. And like millions of other Americans, I swore I would not forget this day.

Israel and Lebanon....Who Won?

2006-08-29T08:53:00.000-07:00

All the blogosphere armchair quarterbacks are parsing the Hezb'alla "win" over Israel these days. Some say Israel won and some say Hezb'allah won, depending on the reader's political and/or religious affiliation.

I think they both lost, and the Lebanese Shia lost the most. They lost their homes and the things that most of us Americans take for granted, like a roof over our heads, the grocery store, electricity and refridgeration, the local gas station, and roads that actually GO somewhere. While Hassan Nassrallah preens from his spider hole and proclaims Hezb'alla's "victory," thousands of his constituents are homeless, jobless and broke. These are regular people who have children to feed and who are now faced with starvation and homelessness, just because Nassrallah decided to kidnap a couple of Israeli soldiers. Of course, in Nasseallah's head, it was "business as usual," behind that kidnapping. In other words, "we take one or two of yours and you return a couple HUNDRED of ours." Fair deal, huh? What he got instead was Israel's refusal to do business as usual, and a near decapitation of Hezb'alla's infrastructure, as well as nearly 1000 Lebanese dead, along with the death rattle of their fledgling economy and the loss of their tourist season for this year, and probably the next 4 or 5 years, due to rebuilding.

Wow, with victories like that, who needs defeat?

The Israelis lost in this conflict, also. They lost some of their vaunted invincibility. They've been shown to have clay feet, and so given the Islamic radicals hope for the eventual possibility that the Israelis might be wiped from the earth some day. Maybe not today, but some day.

Where are all the Statesmen?

2006-08-11T06:59:00.000-07:00

I've been watching the news and the internet these days with intense interest. The situation in the middle east is becoming more intense as each day passes, and I'm wondering where are the Statesmen? Where are the Churchills and the Trumans and Ghandis when you need them? Where are the great men who put statesmanship and love of country above their personal agendas?

For instance, instead of a dithering, crying, hand wringing Fouad Siniora, Lebanon could benefit, not from a politician covering his broad backside and trying to survive politically, but a Statesman with a backbone and a willingness to make the hard decisions, like driving Hezb'allah out of the militia business in Lebanon. I realize that this issue is full of contradictions and issues not understood well by most of the Western world, but geeze, guys, maybe you could give it a try?

Mr. Siniora is not endearing himself to anybody by his dithering and sobbing, and I'm beginning to wonder if maybe the Lebanese put tribal loyalties and/or love of self above loyalty to their country, which is why the legitimate government of Lebanon was unable for the last few years to deal with the question of disarming Hezb'allah. I understand the Lebanese were loathe to get themselves right back into another civil war like the one they had just concluded, but allowing an armed militia to operate within the borders of a legitimate State cannot continue, and shouldn't have been allowed in the first place.If the legitimate and internationally recognized government of a country cannot or will not control it's citizens, then it cannot be considered a soverign nation, and they will find themselves in this situation again and again if the Lebanese cannot gain control of their government. I have no problem with Hezb'allah being a political party, and I don't have a problem with their social agenda. It speaks well of them (somewhat) that they are partially in the business of building schools and hospitals for their people, but the armed militia by the same name has to go if Lebanon has any hopes at all of remaining a free and Democratic country, not the cat's paw of the Iranian mullahcracy and their enforcers in the form of the Hezb'allah militia.

To me, leaving Hezb'allah intact within south Lebanon would be the equivalent of the Union having left an armed and angry militia intact in say, Alabama, after the Civil War. Can you imagine what would have happened if such a thing had been allowed? More civil war, I assure you, and each one successively worse than the previous one before, which is what Lebanon is doomed to unless their leaders find their backbones.

Being an equal opportunity blogger, I ask the same question for the Americans....where are the Statesmen? Where are the Jeffersons and the Washingtons and the Adamses of today? The closest thing I've seen (Joe Lieberman) has just been dumped by his own party because he wouldn't toe the pacifist, anti-war party line. Where are the politicians in America who are willing to put their COUNTRY and their constituents first? Are there any left out there who are not deep in the pockets of whatever special interest groups have the most lucre? Are there no more principled men left in Congress?

When I was in junior high school Civics class, I remember a part of the class that focused on compromise. The object of our government, with it's checks and balances, is to promote compromise. Compromise means you get some of what you want, and I get some of what I want, and we both have to live with it. Why have both parties been allowed to be hijacked by the extremes of both sides? I understand why people don't want to do their civic duty anymore. Nobody feels like their vote counts, because elected representatives vote their wallets instead of their consiences. It's all about the "party line." The whole immigration mess is a classic example. I know it's not practical to try to deport 12 million people, but we have to do SOMETHING or we'll be overrun.

Another question....where is the civilized dialog? Has our political system devolved permanently into vitriolic partisan groups like the Kos Kids? Why is it that very few people can have a friendly, civilized debate without it degenerating into an immature name calling session? Is this what American politics has come to? Is there no middle of the road anymore?It's high time the centrists of both parties take these parties back, before the extremists of both sides implode them. We need to stop electing self-centered, greedy politicians who only want elected office for the personal benefits to themselves. These people care not about their constituencies or their country, it's all Party Politics for them, and it is killing our nation. Both parties are guilty of misbehavior and we must strive to bring civility back into our political system.