This pretty much speaks for itself.

No wonder the ACLU fights so blasted hard to keep the world safe for wierdos, perverts and dangerous people.  Turns out it's personal.

Here's a great news story to which the Drudge Report links today.

Bush's tax cuts have done wonders not just for the economy but for the deficit as well.  The Dow is hitting all time highs, the unemployment numbers are steady at all time lows, and the future looks bright.

At least for the next two years.  Bush will veto any bills which really threaten this state of affairs, but he won't be president forever.

The author, Mark Trumbull of the Christian Science Monitor, does confuse matters a bit.  The CBO, he says, believes that when the Bush tax cuts end in 2010 as scheduled, why then the revenues will skyrocket even further because of the de facto tax increases that will kick in.  Then, in the same paragraph, he points out that Bush is lobbying for his tax cuts to become permanent.  Why would he do that, I wonder?  :-)

Rationality, meet schizophrenia.  If high government revenues can be laid at the feet of the tax-cut-stimulated economy, then the end of the tax cuts must and will mean some kind of end to the booming economy. It's only common sense.  And when the economy slows, government revenues will slow, not "skyrocket". 

Kennedy spoke of this in 1962, when he said at an economic luncheon in New York that if we want the economy to be stimulated, we should cut taxes.  And Reagan's years proved it in spades, tripling government revenues when taxes were slashed in the '80s.

And Bush's tax cuts are proving it again. 

For now, at least.

 In the story linked to the post below, the morally superior liberal uses violence against the evil chickenhawk conservatives who support the war from the safety of their comfortable American lives.

Violence being the exclusive province of the liberal left, it isn't worth further discussion.  The chickenhawk argument, however, is worth a few words.

"If you really believed in the war, you'd join the military and go and fight.  If you don't/didn't, you are contemptible and cynical and cowardly, and your words mean nothing."

Liberals love arguments which would invalidate any meaning in their opponents' words.  It's probably due to the inconvenient fact that their arguments have virtually no merit and they can't survive an actual battle of ideas.  

That's why they so often employ victims as spokespersons.  You can't speak against Kristin Breitweiser and the Jersey Girls, because those poor grief-stricken women lost their husbands.  To criticize them is cruelty.  And don't forget Cindy Sheehan, whose left-of-Marx worldview doubtless offended her heroic son Casey, a brave and good American who volunteered for dangerous duty repeatedly.  Her use of him as a club with which to beat conservatives into silence worked for a year or so, and would still work today if she had not revealed her communist worldview so completely that she even frightened Democrats into backing away from her.

So it's no surprise that they try to invalidate the views of anyone who supports the military but does not join it (even as they ignore the views of those who did join, the soldiers who support Bush by a vast majority and want to complete their mission).

But is it accurate to say that failure to serve invalidates rational and moral conclusions involving use of military force? 

On it's face it's absurd.  Much of congress would have to recuse itself from all votes involving deployment of the military, as the majority of them did not serve.  Every television show in which media members discussed military deployments and interventions would have to be yanked off the air.  People like Chris Matthews of MSNBC, who joined the Peace Corps and served in Africa for three years rather than be drafted in 1968, would go silent on the issue.  (Does anyone ever ask Matthews why he did that, why he didn't serve when so many good men did?  Or whether that decision at age 22 influences his stridently anti-military views today?  Could it be he is still attempting to justify in his own mind an action 40 years ago which still tugs at his conscience?)

And rationality itself declares their chickenhawk argument worthless.  After all, the libs' contention is that without military service, it is not valid to settle on one side of an argument with two sides to it.  Surely, then, the same handicap applies to those who settle on the other side! 

If you didn't serve and don't know what the military goes through, who are you to state so rigidly that this or that deployment is wrong, or this or that mission is going badly, or we're winning or losing?  Surely you lack the requisite information to judge well in this area, just as you claim I do when I judge that we should finish our mission and that much depends on its successful conclusion.  After all, you say, I did not serve. 


There is nothing more irrational than to state that lack of experience disqualifies a person from choosing ONE side in an argument, but not the other side.  If full knowledge of the issue depends on such experience, then those without that knowledge are lacking the means to judge properly no matter which side they choose. 

This chickenhawk argument is in fact not meant to be a rational challenge at all, but a bit of schoolyard bullying.  It is meant to shame conservatives into silence, to call them cowards.  It's an insult, and it's the sort of thing liberals resort to very quickly when they are faced with an argument they cannot win.

That and violence.  See below.

 I read a lot.  And I've never read a story about conservatives or Republicans using physical violence in an effort to make the other side submit to their political beliefs.

Would that I could say the same about liberals and Democrats.

Here is another of the many faces of moral superiority, wherein one of the "good" attempts to bring three of the "evil" back from the dark side. 

Michelle Malkin wrote a book about this phenomenon, called "Unhinged".  She was writing immediately after the '04 elections, and many of her examples were of "good" people urgently attempting to sway the outcome of the election; even so, the way in which these people lose their minds, their self-restraint and their civility over political events is neither explainable nor excusable.

If you read a lot, like me, I'd appreciate being clued in on any story about conservative or Republican violence. 

But I won't hold my breath.  Real goodness, in explaining itself, simply sighs and walks away from intransigence.   Fake goodness will not walk away; failure to accept it is an offense worthy of corporal punishment.

I saw this video a week ago, laughed myself sick, and promptly lost the link.

Atlas Shrugs has it.   

Remember, this is a French military team preparing to test-launch a shoulder-fired anti-tank missile.

About halfway through, you start to figure out what will happen, sort of.  But it's still a hoot.  If you get bored, you can fast forward through about half of it and it's just as entertaining. 

UPDATE:

As a French speaker, I've long been aware that the French are offended at creeping English use in their country, even to the point of having official government meetings over the word "hamburger" being added to dictionaries.  Les Grands Fromages are bothered by the slow shrinking of French cultural influence. 

So I was amused to hear that, just before the "launch" button was pressed, the team leader shouted "stand by!"  The rest of the chatter is clearly in French, but I guess the French don't have a word for "stand by". 

I've opined here in earlier posts that the "civil war" so often quoted by the media is not actually happening in Iraq.  The reason casual observers might think so is because the attacks are quite specifically targeted against one religion or the other, in the hope that each might take it upon themselves to execute counter-attacks and thus in time civil war would be the right description.

But the attackers, for the most part, are still the foreign fighters most often associated with al Qaeda, combined with a few Sunni remnants of Saddam's powerbase, and of course the ugly Iranian assistance/influence, helped by Syria.  So civil war isn't what's happening here.  The fuse has sputtered a few times, but neither Iran nor AQ hasn't managed to actually light it.

Civil war, though, is happening.  It's just not an Iraq-specific thing.

Check out this post on MEMRI.  It's a Syrian born, London based Arab historian, commenting on what the Iranian government is really up to and what it will mean for Sunnis.  (He's typically anti-Semitic but outside of his belief in the creeping evil of Zionism he does make sense).

As I said a few weeks ago, if the 12th Imam's job is to bring peace to this earth, then the killing and subjugation of the Western infidel worldwide is just the beginning; Islam itself is destined for worldwide internecine war, Shia against Sunni, to the death. 

I do not know if Sunni believes in the 12th Imam, and I haven't heard anything about their version of that story (which is itself significant, as I do pay attention to these things).  But the Iranian government is busily establishing itself as the base for worldwide Sharia government, and if their momentum is not interrupted, then it is not impossible that Sunni Islam will seek survival in an alliance with the West.

The plot, as they say, thickens.

IF you want the world to be a better place, just leave it to the "good" people, the "smart" people, the ones who nobly rise above the typical materialistic fat greasy moneygrubbing American and boldly step into the breach on behalf of mother earth.  They care.  They think about the future.  They worry about our grandchildren and theirs.

Leave it to those people, and all will be well, for they, my friends, have good intentions.

If you put your finger on Houston and then rotate the globe, you'll find the fingertip traverses North Africa.  Morocca, Algeria and Libya pass by, then Egypt, and you'll note that Houston and Cairo are on an identical latitude.

That should tell you a little about typical Houston weather.  The past few years have been inordinately hot, with daytime highs in the upper 90s and lower 100s F, and attendant humidity levels in the high 90% range.  Dangerously hot.  Old fat men like me fall down dead on golf courses in that sort of weather.  High humidity means you can't shed heat through evaporation, and heatstroke shortly follows.

The past couple of winters have told the same story, with warmth lingering until December and little actual cold to deal with.  It was worrisome, even to me.

Well, in DC they cancelled a big meeting on global warming this week because ice and snow made arriving at the meeting a chancy thing.  All across the nation temps are much colder than last year.

And here in Cairo Houston, our overnight low is forecast to break records, down into the mid 20's. 

Try and keep this top-of-mind, folks.  The media will never discuss the weather as it relates to global warming, UNLESS the weather happens to support the theory.  Remember all the doomsday predictions of horrible hurricanes for 2006, after an admittedly spectacular 2005 hurricane season?  Not much media discussion of how wrong they were.

And not much media discussion going on now about how !#$%^&*  cold it is, either.

I can't forget about the former Soviet climatologists who stated in the summer of 2005 that in their opinion the world would be cooler in ten years, not warmer.  Their theory was that the current solar flare cycle was heating us up, and that cycle was already over the top and on the wane when they made their prediction.  And how sensible is that?  The sun makes us hot, and when it's hotter, so are we.  And vice versa.

There's a fat juicy news story; compare the chart of solar flare activity with the chart of temperature activity over the past 30 years....  with all the public controversy that story's a sure winner, right?

Don't hold your breath.

And so farce has become reality.  Al Franken, who made a good living in entertainment back when he was funny, has announced a serious candidacy for Norm Coleman's Minnesota senate seat.  (ht Powerline, the Minnesota boys).

I asked myself the quick question, "who can you think of who has made the transition from entertainment to politics?" and the quick answers that came to my mind are Ronald Reagan, Sonny Bono and Fred Dalton Thompson.

All Republicans.  Not sure what that means, but it could mean something.

Franken's views are well known in Minnesota, and less so in the other 49 states.  He was, of course, the lead host on the national liberal talkradio network "Err Amerika", and that may well be why the nation knows so little about what he thinks.

The days of Franken and Davis on SNL are long gone, and the younger generation knows Franken only as a failed radio host and as the author of "Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them".  A quick page-flipping in that dreadful tome reveals Franken has little grip on facts and apparently very little grip on reality.

To his credit, he's been to Iraq and entertained the troops, and did not talk politics while doing so.  Clearly, though, it was a trip designed to give him credit in advance of this Senate campaign, so he can point out he's been there and seen that, yada yada. 
 
Having just sent Keith Ellison to congress, left hand on the Koran, Minnesota voters will have to prove themselves to me as having some sense.  Fortunately Ellison's election was a district thing and the wider state does have some conservative elements.  

Franken these days is bitter, angry and rarely funny.  His worldview is the classic leftist one, Bush lied people died Cheney shot a guy Halliburton evil conservatives want old people and babies to die ooga booga ooga booga.

After all these years of watching Democrats grow more and more out of touch with reality and common sense and decency and goodness, I'm still baffled.  I still don't understand how a person can come to believe such hooey, how anger and bitterness can overwhelm rationality and decency, how so many can want so much for their own country to be "put in its place", "taught a lesson".   It's disheartening and sad.  But it is what it is, and we have to face it and fight it or suffer the consequences of letting it win because we didn't have the stomach for the fight.

I hope Minnesota will agree with me that we have enough bitter and angry leftists in congress. 

In Britain some call the BBC "Auntie".  This is Auntie Beeb, the government-owned broadcasting system for which citizens pay with annual licenses, sometimes in the hundreds of pounds. 

And the Beeb is well known for leftist bias going back decades, even to having editorialized against Winston Churchill being elevated to Prime Minister. 

Churchill, of course, was proven to be right in his little-heard predictions that Hitler would eventually go to war against Britain.  The BBC, meanwhile, were busy crowing about Neville Chamberlain's treaty with Hitler, the famous "peace in our time" fiasco.

But even after the war was over, the BBC helped reduce Churchill's popularity to the extent that he could not win another election.

And these days, of course, it's gotten worse.  I heard it and saw it during my years in Europe, as we were never far from BBC radio and BBC International News on TV.  If it can be said that a worldwide English-speaking news network is even more leftist than CNN, then this is it.

Naturally,this letter caught my eye, written by a BBC listener in England who has made as concise and compelling a summary of the state of the BBC as any I've read.

As we were packing to leave Belgium for Texas, and the television was the only furniture remaining in the salon, BBC were airing a promo for an upcoming program.  The landscape of England appeared, and like an approaching thunderstorm a gigantic dark American flag was rolling in and blotting out the sun, while the announcer intoned, "is America taking over the world?" or some such nonsense.

Lucky for me the movers packed the telly before the actual program was broadcast.

 This speaks for itself.

Darn global warming is gonna broil us all to death, I tell you.  It's all Bush's fault.

Moqtada al Sadr, erstwhile Shi'ite political leader and warlord/thug, has decided to get the heck outta Dodge. 

Perhaps Moqtada can't bring himself to watch the tragedy of American lives wasted, as Barack Hussein Obama says, in the ongoing troop surge.  

Or perhaps, in the manly tradition of Yassir Arafat, he's just not terribly interested in having eternal sex with 70 virgins.

There must be SOME reason why Moqtada has left Baghdad and taken refuge in Iran.  It cannot possibly be that he believes his life wasn't worth a plugged dinar in that city now that General Petraeus is in charge and Baghdad is well on the way to being cleaned up.

Because we all know the surge will fail....  right? 

I saw a Yahoo News story about Anna Nicole Smith this morning headlined "why we cared about Anna Nicole".

The subheading was "she persevered when others would have given up".

Ironic, as she's overdosed. Where I come from that's called "giving up".

She was a talentless beauty whose looks went on to become almost a parody of themselves. In her mid-20's she was the iconic blonde bombshell-- long legged, curvy and ample and happily dumb (which Marilyn Monroe was emphatically NOT, but did create the character to great effect).

But lately, at 39, her looks were fading fast. There was no more income from television, and she had failed to latch onto the billions of her late husband's fortune. Some very large legal bills were coming due, and she had been evicted from her recent residence, a mansion on an island somewhere I think.

And her son, of course, had died recently, a drug overdose abbreviating a wasted life in a fishbowl full of money. Anna Nicole had to feel responsible somehow for his misery and suicide.

Her present role was reduced to that of a prize to be won by the two men who were  competing for her like bull walruses, bragging about fathering her new baby.

I believe she was depressed, and had good reason to be. I believe she saw the future and rejected it, the financial limits and the anonymity and the aging of her body. The life she so badly wanted had happened already, and was history. Perhaps she dreaded failing her new baby the way she failed her son. Perhaps she was ashamed to go from rich and famous and beautiful to aging and middle class and unpopular, or worse, unknown.

If there is one thing we cannot say about her, it is that she persevered when others would have given up.

And having failed her son, now she has failed her daughter as well.

Well, it's not on TV yet, but like millions of wannabes all over the world I've hit the YouTube.

I was looking at some of my old fishing video clips and something wafted across the horizon, lurked darkly at the back of my mind and wouldn't leave me alone.

Turned out it was an idea.  I hate that.

... I hope you do it, as I've just done.

I hope you sign the Grassfire.org petition to have Agents Ramos and Campean pardoned by the President.

I've been following along with the story on KSEV AM's morning show with Pat and Ed, and it just horrifies me.  Read the latest, and scroll down for all of it, on Lone Star Times.

I won't clutter a page with details, as they're amply available elsewhere, but this is a fundamental wrong that has gone way too far.  It is injustice on a scale that seems to cry out for some kind of uprising amongst the public.  And, sadly, it seems to be related to some old and deep connections between George W. Bush and AG Gonzales and others. 

Sign the petitition, and go to Mrs. Ramos' blog to get the latest on her husband.   These two men are in mortal danger, and it was predictable.  I cannot bear to believe that our government wants them to be beaten to death by prisoners to keep them silent, but the possibility can't be ignored.