Pollo Chavez

Bush Lies Again! How much more of this are we expected to take while that warmonger runs amok all over the planet smothering the dreams of the hungry masses yearning for social justice?
In Columbia we are seeing the signs that the armed bullying tactics of the BushLied clique are forcing another indigenous resistance group to fold up it's tents and retreat. This is sickening. Can't these bloodthirsty imperialists ever get the message that their military bluster is not the answer to the world's problems? One look at the diplomatic successes that have ended the war in Darfur and brought peace and justice to its people, the negotiations that have brought electoral fairness to Zimbabwe, the UN's successful mission to bring food aid to the typhoon victims in Burma should show the futility of military efforts and the power of unleashed diplomacy!
Now, added to the bragging about the so-called 'victory' over 'terrorism' in Iraq we have to contend with more insults to cultural diversity as these retrograde fascists gloat at the destruction of the FARC resistance group.
In March of this year a force of elite Columbian troops, trained and equipped by the US, crossed the Ecuadorian border and raided a FARC training camp. One of the leaders of the FARC was killed and several computers were grabbed containing, apparently, loads of damaging information about the group. In the months since then the FARC has suffered defeat after defeat.
In the days after the raid Hugo Chavez made a bunch of noise about the sanctity of international borders. Here's how Reuters, a left-wing news service extremely sympathetic to Chavez put it:

Colombia’s police chief said documents were found in the raid in Ecuador showing that Chavez gave the FARC $300 million. Venezuela denied the charge and said it had its own evidence that the police chief was a drug-trafficker.

Colombia also linked the slain commander, Raul Reyes, with an official close to Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa.

“The government of Ecuador energetically rejects these accusations which cynically add to the hostile attitude shown in the recent violation of our sovereignty,” Ecuador’s government said. [Reuters]

Chavez rushed tanks to the border and made threatening noises but backed down extremely quickly when confronted with the Columbian military; well-trained with years of operational experience. Chavez can't say either of those things about his military. He also must have some doubts about his conservative officers and how loyal to the regime they might prove. Military defeats have brought down dictators in South America before and Chavez had little to gain and much to lose by pressing the issue. Even just with the limited noise he made his climbdown was a humiliation. As the economic scene in his country grows ever more grim and the crime wave unleashed by the gangs of thugs aligned with the ruling party effects more and more people his popularity continues to erode.
Which brings us to the real point of this post. Here we have an anti-US terrorist group that has been funding it's violent activities by selling cocaine in the US market decisively defeated. A bombastic enemy of our country, who denounced us before the UN and compared our President with Satan has suffered a humiliation and a loss of prestige. The forces of Democracy have struck a winning blow! Read All About It!
Except you didn't. The US media prefer Chavez to Bush. The Democrats are openly hostile to Columbia's ruling party. Nancy Pelosi recently spike a free-trade deal with the Uribe government. This war, another war won against terrorists by the persistent Bush, is viewed as a defeat for the forces of good by these 'citizens of the world'. The media has only one story line and they're not going to report news that doesnt fit that storyline. Even when the Columbians, using information captured in the Ecuador raid, rescued a bunch of long-held hostages the coverage was long on hugs and kisses with the family and short or background or analysis about the crumbling fortunes of the FARC or the success of Bush's policy in Columbia. One of the hostages, a French woman effusively thanked all the left-wing groups who had begged and sent petitions to Chavez, the UN and the thugs at FARC imploring them to release her and had scant praise for the Columbian military who rescued her and of course didn't mention that they had been trained and equipped by the US under Bush. They should have left her in the jungle with her ideological soul brothers. her fellow citizens of the planet on the left are none too happy about these developments and it shows how much the media is controlled by the left that this entire story has been effectively spiked or buried.

Reparations

I wondered when it would come up, and here it is, raising it's ugly head again. Reparations to the victims of 'America's sad past' are what the Dem nominee has endorsed at some convention of minority journalists.

"There's no doubt that when it comes to our treatment of Native Americans as well as other persons of color in this country, we've got some very sad and difficult things to account for," Obama told hundreds of attendees of UNITY '08, a convention of four minority journalism associations.

http://starbulletin.com/2008/07/28/news/story05.html

"I consistently believe that when it comes to whether it's Native Americans or African-American issues or reparations, the most important thing for the U.S. government to do is not just offer words, but offer deeds."

Maybe we should build a gigantic welfare state, institute minority hiring quotas and quotas to govern the numbers of minorities in universities, have judges running school systems in the name of fairness and dismantle the capitalist economic system so we can redistribute income. Whats that? You say we've done all those things? Isn't that part of our 'tragic past'?
If we are stupid enough to install this paragon in the White House we're going to have a tragic future!
Reparations? Let's see...Obama's half white and the other half wasn't from a family which was ever in slavery so he should pay. On the other hand Michelle is pure slave-descended which makes her a 100% beneficiary but the kids, I guess they just break even so the Obama family is pretty much a wash. We're going to need some pretty intensive calculations to make this work. The Reinhardt Heydrich Institute for Racial Classification has created a sliding scale of historical victimization. Points are given for participation by your group in oppression as victims and taken away by participation as oppressors multiplied by the number of years the oppression took place and the intensity of the oppression. Instead of determining the exact amount of complicity-victimhood by expensive and cumbersome genetic tests the amount to be paid out can be determined by a simple test which measures the shape and circumference of your skull. Groundbreaking work on this science, a field of study every bit as conclusive as the work done proving the effects of carbon emissions of Global Temperatures, was started in 1933 but unfortunately lost its funding in 1945 due to political discrimination. The scientists involved in this research were able to put into place 'Operation Reinhardt' to implement some of the important ethnic science lessons learned but again, changes in the political climate forced cancellation.
But we can do better! YES WE CAN! Obama mentions the Hawaiian natives bill that that crackpot Daniel Akaka has been pushing for the last thirty years. This bill would create a special class of people in one of our states and give them rights which trump those of 'non-natives'.
The question is...why is this guy considered a serious candidate for president? Do people have any idea what they're voting for? He is on board for every foaming-at-the-mouth crazy radical notion that has been raised in the fever-swamp of academia for the last forty years. Any one of these loony ideas will cost trillions to implement at a time when we are already on the precipice of bankruptcy, a subject which Obama seems to know little about. How can the press not be reporting this on the front page? Has our nation reached the sad state where the voters are so blind to their own interests that they will put a group of people led by this guy into power? Well, they've already handed the Senate and the House over to people equally stupid.
Yesterday Nancy Pelosi explained that no one was going to drill for oil in her nice clean country and that she was 'saving the planet'. Its nice to have leaders with such modest aims, ones which take our individual needs and problems into account. But she wins in her district by landslide margins. The members of the House vote to keep her Speaker. This is what America wants.
This is how the good times end...

Uncivil Unions

Every time there's a ballot measure here in Cali limiting the power of government or restricting state spending up for a vote there appear out of nowhere thousands of TV ads featuring actors claiming to be firemen, teachers and nurses expressing their OUTRAGE! that the SPECIAL INTERESTS want to hurt California's firevictims/patients/children by proposing this immoral attack on human decency! It turns out that these helpless victims of inhumanity have enough money to saturate the most expensive media markets in the country for months. A wall can't get painted on HGTV without a tearful nurse interrupting to plead, beg, beseech the voters to stop the ravening Special Interests from throwing terminal cancer patients out onto the streets untreated. An episode of 'Modern Marvels' can't play on the History Channel without a manly but oh-so-upset fireman imploring us to make sure that when the orphanage burns down someone will be there to save the helpless little tykes from being parboiled by the flaming insulation. Teachers invade the local news painting a picture of classrooms more densely packed than a Javanese opium den filled with mouth-breathing illiterates thirsting for knowledge.
Where are these guys getting the hundreds of millions that they use to saturate the airwaves with heart-rending sob-stories pushing every liberal cause imaginable? Huey Long had a tradition, when he was governor of Louisiana in the 1930s, called the 'deduct box'. If you were a state employee you had to pony up a part of your salary to a slush fund that Huey and the boys used for whatever nefarious purposes they decided were in the best interests of the people of Louisiana. The Public Employee Unions have their own version of the Deduct Box. You have to be in a union to work at most State jobs and that means you have to pay dues. Because most of the loyal union members just look on the impost as yet another of the endless bites from their checks and have never been to a union meeting or taken any part in any union activity this money is just a slush fund in the hands of the 'activists' who abandoned their hated careers in the stultifying bureaucracy and wormed their way into the arcane depths of the union's inner circles.
These people are without exception leftists of various degrees of fervor. It cant be said that they haven't looked out for their charges, either. They've made it almost impossible to fire any public employee who has not been convicted of a violent felony. They've gotten pay scales that have completely outstripped anything in the private sector for the same work; not to mention that you can be disciplined or even fired in the private sector for bad performance or malfeasance or your company can cut back or even go out of business. They've gone on the air or hired effective lobbyists to hector the members of the legislature to give ever larger budget increases to the metastasizing offices filled with state employees busily doing God Knows What. They fight every budget cut, or , since budgets never seem to actually get cut, they oppose the cuts in the rate of increase that are occasionally suggested by hopeless reactionaries. They push for higher and higher taxes on 'those who can most afford it'. They always support The Democratic Party. Public employee unions like SEIU and The National Education Assn. are mainstays of the Party, both in contributions and volunteers. They sit at the table and expect to be listened to.
Where they have done their best work is in the realm of pensions. Most state employees can retire in their fifties to a pension that would make anyone in the private sector green with envy. This pension is indexed for inflation and in ten years or so, even in a low inflation environment, will equal the take-home pay that the person earned while they were working. The pensions are paid by CALPERS (CALifornia Public Employee Retirement System) which is the largest single investment entity in the world, controlling hundreds of billions of dollars. So far, so good!
But what happens to CALPERS in a high inflation environment? Much of CALPERS' investments are in bonds, which don't adjust for inflation. Inflation makes investments in the stock market much less profitable. The high-tax anti-business environment coming soon at the hands of the Dems and their union allies will make keeping these pension promises impossible. All paper investments are only a reflection of the health of the general economy and that health is declining rapidly. States like California and New York can only staunch the flood of red ink with massive cuts in state spending. The example of Michigan has shown that further increases in tax rates will lead to lower revenues. The power of the unions prevents any real cuts. The system is headed for a crack-up and the special interests who run it are committed to things staying the same as they have always been. They are the ultimate reactionaries. The unions and the receivers of transfer payments, represented by socialist vulture groups like the AARP, have enough muscle to fight any reform or cut proposed by politicians looking a few years down the road or even staring into the maw of state bankruptcy this year. With a new government which appears to be certain to be completely dominated by Democrats on the federal, state and local levels the hope for any change or reform of anything is zero. It will be full speed ahead to an Argentinian meltdown of the economy and the currency. In a poverty-stricken, sterile society these people who 'had it made' will be broke and betrayed. They will deserve it.

Help Wanted: Lazy Fairies

In the 1920's John Maynard Keynes, Britain's Chancellor Of The Exchequer and the economist who wrote the instruction book for government tinkering and intervention in the economy, asked the flippant question, "Do you want your economy governed by a bunch of lazy fairies?"referring to the laissez faire Free Market economics of pre WW1 Europe.
After nearly a century of Keysianism (or worse) by the Big Government geniuses in which they have proven that they can screw up anything that they touch like a kind of negative magic we want those lazy fairies back! The British Empire controlled two fifths of the world's surface. Hitler couldn't defeat it in a six-year conflict. But it was brought to its knees after the war by the British electorate who threw the reactionary Churchill and the lazy fairies surrounding him out of office and installed a government so inconceivably stupid that eight years later Britain was deep in poverty and still had wartime rationing while Germany, completely destroyed by Allied bombing and the battles which took place in the ruins at the end of the war was undergoing an 'economic miracle' brought on by the lazy fairy economics imposed by her American conquerors.
In America in the 1920's two of the most egregious lazy fairies (Harding and Coolidge) cut Wilson's overpadded Federal Government, slashed taxes and then proceeded to take a long nap while the economy exploded, hemlines rose almost as fast as the stock market and bathtub gin flowed like water. HL Mencken described Calvin Coolidge as 'old laughing boy' and accused him of turning the White House into a dormitory. But even Coolidge had a Chairman Of the Federal Reserve, Benjamin Strong, who was committed to supporting the boom with aggressive monetary expansion. In Coolidge's cabinet, frothing at the lack of government meddling and general sleepiness all around him sat Herbert Hoover; engineer, humanitarian, meddler extrordinaire! A sardonic Coolidge dubbed him with the title of 'Wonder Boy'.
"That man's been suggesting ideas to me for six years, all of them bad!" remarked the taciturn Coolidge in one of his longer sentences. But the canny Coolidge could see a train-wreck coming just around the bend as the speculation in securities ran amok (a problem with lazy fairies, they dont prevent people from being really stupid sometimes). People were buying on margin- 10% down and the balance after you cashed out. Nice if every thing goes up. In 1928 there were plenty of signs that this was going to come a cropper but Strong stepped in with a huge expansion of the money supply to deliver a 'coup of whisky' to the out-of-breath stock market.
And that's the biggest danger of Keynesianism; it works for a while, the larger and larger waves of freshly printed money make it seem like the problems are manageable, until one day the point of diminishing returns is reached and the meltdown occurs.
Which brings us to now. The 'stimulation package' which tossed $200 billion or so off the back of the Federal train for us peasants to spend was dwarfed by the rise in gasoline prices and the decline of house prices. The falling real estate market, retreating from stupid lending policies designed to admit 'minorities' and 'the poor' to the joys of home ownership without bothering with formalities like credit ratings invited a crowd of speculators into a market that 'couldn't go down'. Now additional hundreds of billions are being funneled into the banks to try to stave off the ruin brought on by all those now-worthless loans. Jerks like McLame are calling for Federal regulation of executive salaries to punish all those stupid bank executives for their stupid lending policies, as though creating a precedent like that wouldn't lead in a short time to Federal regulation of ALL salaries in the name of 'fairness'. As the feds move in to bail out the banks and stave off panic they bring along a truckload of new regulations, all as stupid as the ones which caused the crash in the first place. The social fascists in Congress keep proposing price controls on pharmaceuticals, nationalizing health care, Global Warming caps and taxes on carbon emissions and draconian tax increases which will chase every penny of investment offshore in a giant bug-out which will flatten the economy like a tire with a spike in it. The Lazy Fairies must be pulling down fat salaries on some government 'Human Rights Commission' somewhere so they can scheme on more creative ways to legalize getting married to each other and have lost all interest in economics. Apparently even less interested in economics is the front-runner in the presidential foot-race, a guy named Barry, who has yet to utter one single syllable regarding the economy that makes sense. When asked why he wants to sharply and progressively raise taxes in these precarious times he replied that it might be bad for the economy and even decrease revenues but that it was surely 'the right thing to do'. Fairness you see. Lazy fairies aren't fair. Neither is the inevitable result of the policies endorsed by the vast majority of our political and business leaders as they attempt to protect their cushy positions from any rivals; national bankruptcy. We're seeing the beginnings now. Huge cuts are in the works in state governments; the bluer the state the bigger the cuts. New York, California and Michigan are visibly sliding toward the edge. The rest of the country is close behind.
Bring back the fairies!

Berlin! Bombed!

Berlin's been the scene of memorable oratory by many of the world's finest speakers. JFK proudly announced that he was a doughnut in this fair city; and undoubtedly sampled a few tasty German tarts of his own before jetting off into the sunset. Ronald Reagan bellowed, "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" to the throaty applause of hundreds of thousands of Germans who were undoubtedly sick of the noisome graffiti smeared on the unsightly concrete by the hippies who were leaching off the fat dole checks handed out by the Bundestate and yearning for a rebirth of the kitschy pastoral scenes that were so popular before the world was plunged into fire and destruction in two world wars and a nuclear showdown. Then there was that guy with the mustache. I forget his name. He had big plans to redecorate the city. One of his projects was the Victory Monument that Obama gave his speech at celebrating victories that never quite came off, a warning about the limits of oratory. Little else survives of this mesmerizing speechmaker's legacy; his redecorating scheme came to an abrupt halt right at the end of the demolition phase of the project. But it left Berliners (the people, not the doughnuts. There was a proposal to rename the city Krispen Kremenstad but anti-capitalist radicals rioted in the streets and put a stop to the notion) with a hankering for tub-thumping oratory.
It seemed they were going to get their wish yesterday. The giant noise of the Obama campaign was coming to town. True, his previous attempts at Gravitas in the Middle East had fallen a bit flat and the Hossanah chorus in the media had come across as overdone and phony but this was it. The Babe was going to go to the plate and whack the ball out of the park! He had a more than friendly crowd; atheists who so reviled and hated Bush that they nightly found themselves on their knees beseeching God to free the world from this eight-year Bushy plague. He was the political equivalent of Michael Jackson; a superstar, black but not too black, with a show that would make the hairs on your arms stand up straight! Women have been known to faint during his speeches. The air crackled with excitement. All the commentators, sensing that something had gone wrong with the Overseas Triumph up to now, were sure that this would be the Defining Moment, the Cover Shot, the oft-used film clip, the international version of 'I Have A Dream!'
But it wasn't. On any level. The crowd was big but far smaller than the million-sized monster predicted by the Adoring Press. The speech was a rambling pastiche of shop-worn cliches with no pacing or timing, no FEELING. It dragged on dully for forty-five minutes or so. The lukewarm applause that was there in the beginning faded and all but died out by the end. The Mighty Babe had struck out!
Obama himself knew it. His heart was never into foreign affairs. His only real stated foreign policy goal was the pathetic hope that 'they'll like us again' after the horrible Bush years. So he tried to connect with that. We're all citizens of the world, Blah, Blah, Blah...forgetting that the Germans are already citizens of a vast multi-national conglomerate of nations and are growing increasingly sick of being tied to a gaggle of struggling economies and of being pushed around by faceless international bureaucrats. So he read through his speech in a cadence that would have made blinding rhetorictitians like Gerald Ford proud and as soon as he uttered his last word the networks cut away. FLOP!
The reason none of this is working politically for Obama is simple, he's not addressing what people are concerned about. The falling value of their house, the rising price of energy, the insecurity of their jobs, state and local governments going bankrupt, banks teetering on the edge of failure; every day people are looking at bleaker and bleaker future prospects and they're terrified. Even a dimwit like McLame has a better feel for what's going on than the lordly Obama and his media entourage. They're essentially even in the polls. None of this foreign stuff has helped Obama one single bit. Possibly it's hurt him to be at the center of such an obviously phony campaign gimmick while real people are looking for something that will give them confidence that they will weather this storm intact.
Will Obama's tin ear and the surprising lack of bite in his speeches since he clinched the nomination continue? Has the world finally noticed that he has nothing to say? His gaffe-prone performance off-script is shockingly inept and his handlers are much less skilled than the Clinton's ones were at shielding their charge from reporters who have done a little fact-checking and have noticed his many discrepancies as he veers to the center. Can this lightweight, flawed candidate go the distance?
Time will tell.

A Man You Can Bank On!

The Obamessiah is doing his victory lap around the world and the media lapdogs are fawning and crawling on their well-stuffed bellies in the throes of political ecstasy! What a genius Our Barry turns out to be! Robert Mugabe, another overrated egotistical politician of African heritage, gets tougher press in Zimbabwe than Obama gets in this country.
Ah yes! An example of a member of our esteemed unbiased press corps trying to braid his nose-hairs with the ones in Obama's butt is David Broder, who in today's Washington Compost writes a paean of hagiographic love to his beloved candidate's miraculous walk across the political waters overseas.
A year ago Obama voted with seven other left-wing critters to cut all funding from Afghanistan and withdraw all the troops, in keeping with his Nutroots terrorist sympathies. On this triumphant trip he says that he has always been for a ten thousand troop increase in our forces there. Magnificent!
If Obama had had his way Saddam or Uday Hussien would still be in power in Iraq. The mass graves would still be filling with corpses, the torture chambers (the REAL ones) at Abu Ghraib would still be going full tilt and the luxury hotels would be filled with leftist congressmen and crackpot Hollywood types running to kiss the hem of Hussien's garment. So what better for Obama's foreign policy credentials than to go to Iraq and claim credit for the victory he opposed with every breath for the last year? What statesmanship!
After opposing the Senate resolution labeling the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization (the same group who are supplying our enemies in Iraq weapons to kill our troops) Obama makes the statement that 'my banking committee' passed a sanctions bill against Iran. "Judge me by my actions!" declared Obama in a statement that caused the hearts of his media lapdogs to flutter. Only one problem with that...The Man Of Hope, The Paragon Of The New Politics, The Change Agent isn't on the banking committee. Of course trivia like that doesnt bother hacks like Broder who in the presence of The Obamessiah regularly foam at the mouth, talk in tongues and write columns like the one linked below.
This foreign trip has been a revelation about The Obamessiah. It shows that he will say anything, no matter how far it strays from the truth, to get elected. It shows the amazing ego that he has. Some of his most egregious misstatements were preceded by the admonition, "if you had bothered to check the facts..." when the most cursory fact-check (something beyond the grasp of alleged 'news' organizations like ABC, NBC, CBS, The New York Slimes, The Washington Compost, etc.) shows that this clown is a Clinton-level prevaricator. That is to say he tries to be as dishonest as Clinton and in the same way-- the current lie is spoken with aplomb and outraged assurance that negates all previous contradictory statements-- but one does have to ask if he's talented enough of a liar to get away with it until November.
Another thing that this trip has shown is how bad this clown is when he's off script. When he's lying he's channeling Bill Clinton, when he's stumbling and fumbling and screwing up questions he's channeling Dan Quayle. When one of his Disciples, oh excuse me, when a member of the Esteemed UnBiased Press Corps lobs a softball at Barry he more often than not flubs it. His ignorance is vast and, unlike the Lovable BJ Clinton, he doesn't know how to not answer a question. Maybe his campaign team should sit him down and show him movies of Dwight Eisenhower, who gave incoherent answers on purpose to confuse people and prevent follow ups; "here Barry, try doing THAT!"
Well today is Barry's speech at the Victory Memorial in Berlin. What Victory was that BTW?
The krauts were badly whipped in both world wars, maybe this is a monument to the Franco-Prussian War. They're expecting a million people. Yes, the disarmed Euros want a collapsing socialist America to withdraw its shrinking military (the likely scenario under an Obama Administration) and leave them to 'engage in meaningful negotiations' with the hungry jackals who surround their aging and shrinking populations. But I'll bet the swoon from the press, US and European, will rise to a crescendo like the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony; a true 'Ode To Barry'!

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/obama_lucky_and_good.html

The Dark Night

I went to the theater yesterday and saw 'The Dark Knight'. I'm kind of a film snob and I dont like action-adventure movies very much but this one was great! It was dark, sardonic and fast-paced. the script was intelligent and delivered twists and surprises at every turn. The acting, directing and editing all were superb. The special effects were so good that it really did seem as though you were really seeing something that was there when it wasn't. This isn't to say that the film was realistic; there were many things that you just had to accept as part of the comic-book story so you could just sit back and enjoy the show. Even with that said, the mood of the film was hung with gloom and negativity; the good guys were almost destroyed by their hollow victory.
Later on in the evening I turned on the News. I'm a politics snob as well as a film snob so when the glowing TV box showed me the latest episode in 'The Obamaman' franchise, 'Barry Goes Abroad', I viewed it with the same skepticism that I used with 'Dark Knight' a few hours earlier. The two were similar in so many ways. There was a flawlessly delivered script on the part of our star, the heroic backdrops and the adoring fans were presented with exquisite timing. The entire media seems to have dropped their drawers for this guy like a pack of teenage groupies confronted with their favorite rock star.
But like the other fantasy flick there's a whole lot you have to ignore for this farce to work for you. You have to ignore how wrong Barry and the Dem Gang were all along on Iraq and the War On Terror. The media hype has airbrushed this gigantic Dem faux pas out of any 'analysis' of the current situation but the fact remains for anyone with a memory that goes back more than a month or two; it wasn't Bush who lied for years about the War In Iraq, it was the Democrats and with main star Barry singing the lead in the chorus for the last six months.
Now he's surveying the defeat of the terrorists him and his pals so avidly supported and claiming credit! Luckily for the Dems their fellow anti-Bush liberals in the Taliban have launched an offensive against the NATO forces in Afghanistan, giving Barry the chance to say, "See, if they had only listened to me!" The media sages cluck, yes, an offensive by the Taliban means the dastardly Bush has been defeated. Democrats look on any military activity by the enemy as a defeat for our side, or should I say, for the US side which they oppose. Just as Whiner Chronkite was reduced to sniveling tears of surrender by the Tet Offensive, a suicide charge by the commies which ended in a decisive US victory, the libs have been moaning and complaining that our enemies still exist while they refuse to report US victories, exaggerate or even invent US 'atrocities' and cry over and over again "Where's Osama Bin Laden?" when they know damned well he's across the border in Waziristan in territory belonging to our allies in Pakistan whom we cant risk undermining by violating their border because with a hostile government in Pakistan we would lose overflight access to Afghanistan entirely. But Barry solemnly pronounced that he would raise the number of US troops, forgetting that this is a NATO mission and that the cowardly and stingy Euros are already reneging on their commitments.
Today he flies to Jordan, surrounded by his barmicide gaggle of hosanna-singing liberal media clowns. Will he equal his equally liberal predecessor Jimmy The Jerk and give a full-on, toe curling , tongue-slobbering kiss to the head of Hamas or will he just subtly encourage the bloodthirsty savages who lurk on the outside of the Israeli security wall that Barry and his leftist friends were so adamantly against to feel that the new US regime will cut those nasty, imperialistic Jews loose and sit by wringing their hands as Holocaust II opens in theaters around the world?
All this Middle East stuff is just the prelude, of course. The real victory lap will be among the Euros. They've been so horrified at the anti-PC lapses of the cowboy Bush-lied regime that they yearn for an accomodationist socialist who will destroy the US economy and back down on the use of any armed force for any reason against the misunderstood Third Worlders who surround the aging and shrinking populations of Europe. They eagerly await this reincarnation of the Roman Emperor Honorius, who as part of his policy of peaceful negotiations with the barbarians withdrew all the warmongering Roman legions from Britain, leaving them with a stirring statement of the continuing Roman commitment to British security. The Euros will dance in the streets for the hombre who will free them from militarism and use diplomacy instead of force, just like Honorius. The fact that Britain was soon overrun with barbarians and Rome was sacked by the Visigoths doesn't discredit the tactic of negotiating with the violent, it just enjoins one to be a little more cautious and courteous.
So yes, it will take a slew of media special effects to make this incompetent and surprisingly ignorant leftist seem like a candidate with a solid grasp of foreign affairs and a coherent world view that will allow him to soberly assess America's national interests but if we all just suspend our judgment about this and his equally ruinous domestic policies we can learn to imagine the wonderful new future of change which unstoppably lies before us. Yes We Can!
But like 'The Dark Knight' this happy parade also has the dark and gloomy potential to destroy our way of life with its empty and hollow victory, which looks more and more certain, and usher in a different 'Dark Night' that wont need any special effects, hosanna-singing or media hype; it will be all too real.

Holy Carbon, Batman!

The debate on "Global Warming' continues on two levels. On the first level, the scientific level, the trend is pretty clear; there is NO evidence that man-made carbon emissions affect the Global Climate, which is currently cooling. NONE of the assertions made in 'An Inconvenient Truth' can be supported by scientific data. The entire panoply of statements about Global Warming announced as Gospel by the leftists ten years ago have been disproven. Here's an article written by the scientist "who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia's compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector."

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24036736-7583,00.html

This article talks very specifically about how data collected in a systematic, scientific manner failed to find any evidence that Man-made Global Warming has any validity at all.
The article states:

"If there really was any evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming, don't you think we would have heard all about it ad nauseam by now?

The world has spent $50 billion on global warming since 1990, and we have not found any actual evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming. Evidence consists of observations made by someone at some time that supports the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. Computer models and theoretical calculations are not evidence, they are just theory."

But I'm watching 'Fox News Sunday' as I write this. Every commercial by companies like Dow Chemical and Exxon Mobil looks like they hired a band of Marxist eco-hippies to run their advertising campaign. They're SO GREEN! SO CONCERNED! The Planet is about to shrivel up like a raisin but...DONT PANIC! Big Business and Big Government are going to be working along with Big Media to save the world from the excesses of us gluttonous consumers. It's amazing to compare the scientific argument to the political argument in which the voices of the anti-Greens are almost inaudible. When Barbara Boxer proposed a three-trillion dollar Global Warming tax increase that would have completely sunk the economy within three years there was no national outcry. Babs will win reelection in California in a landslide. If she bothers to run any campaign ads against whatever sacrificial candidate that the Other Global Warming Party runs against her she'll use her attempt to murder our economic system as proof that she is the only Green choice. No matter which of the socialist Weather-Fixing political parties wins the election this November the trend towards government domination of the economy and the absorbing of the giant moribund mega-corporations into planned monopolies who no longer have to fear demanding stockholders or upstart competitors will continue.
Why is this lie taking over the consciousness of our society without any opposition? How have the people who are fanatically eager to impose the failed policy of government economic planning been able to use this climatic fraud to finally turn the foremost Capitalist nation on Earth into a centrally planned 'privately owned government corporation' that will bring the same results that we got from Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac? Why are the politicians and even the business titans who dominate our economy so completely ignorant as to the real facts, or if they know them then silent as this travesty plays out? There are voices of opposition in the scientific community against this charlatanism, where is the political and cultural opposition?
Is this it? Do we just hand over our freedom and our prosperity to a claque of rich, arrogant elitists who are using this flumery to dispossess us of our political and economic rights and gain total control of everything? If they can destroy the economy to fix the weather doesn't that imply that they think that they are Gods? You might laugh at that but that's how Utopians think. Solzhenitsyn wrote a book entitled 'We Never Make Mistakes' which talked about that mentality among the Stalinist antescendants of our current crop of geniuses. The Stalinists embraced Lysenko's phony science with the same enthusiasm as The Gorians feel for their self-serving brand of hogwash. If the new 'revealed theory' mandates a reduction in the population of us pollution-causing economic units wont a Green Himmler emerge to set up the industrial capacity to reduce the number of these Pestiferous Plebeians? Being able to Fix The Weather gives you the capacity to make these sorts of God-like decisions and to use a cold-blooded brand of situational ethics to justify the 'necessary steps'.
This is a result of our political system becoming a one-party state, a development that started in the 1960s and came to it's ultimate fruition under the feeble corporatist 'leadership' of George W Bush. Maybe Marx was right; trends in a society are a result of underlying forces beyond the conscious control of mere individuals-- you know, like the weather.

Curse You MegaDoppler!

It was dim and dark this morning. The marine layer had moved onshore during the evening. In Southern California when you wake up and there's a thin layer of clouds between you and the sun you know its going to be a beautiful summer day. Sure, it'll burn off by eleven, just in time to catch me doing the Saturday yard work, but it wont get to that fiery furnace desert heat that makes you go inside, close all the windows and turn on the AC. A beach day! A day to drive up to Angeles Crest or the Santa Monica Mountains and go on a hike. Time to get out the hedge trimmer, the edger, the blower and the lawnmower and try to keep the constantly encroaching plant-life at bay. After that's done you can sit in the garden at the glass picnic table in the shade of the trees and read a nice book while the cats each grab a soft spot and have an afternoon siesta.
But hey! This is an angry blog. I started it so that I could vent my socially unacceptable middle aged angst without offending anyone. My tiny audience has expectations! Shouldn't I be denouncing someone? Well, now that you mention it, what would be more typical for me than to rail against the liberal media? But this time, instead of deriding them for liberal bias or writing scathing lines about how they've replaced most of the actual news with 'fluff' news I'm going to question the expensive technology race that cropped up between the three local network affiliates; the race for Doppler Radar supremacy. When they first started with this Doppler nonsense I tried to figure out whether they all were getting their data from the same Doppler or if they were engaged in some multi-million dollar spending race generated by tiny ups and downs in the ratings.
"Oh my GOD! Channel 4's kicking our ass--it has to be the radar!"
"If we dont get better radar than them our ratings will be lower than the news on...Channel Nine!"
"Get that radar upgraded and do it NOW!"
But they're too cheap to actually spend money. The race was in the graphics departments; who could come up with the most compelling name for the radar that they all shared with The National Weather Service. MegaDoppler 7000 on Channel Seven seemed to have won the war. Does Channel Four escalate to AstroDoppler 40000? Channel Two the would need to raise to OmniDoppler 200000; it could end up like an Argentine inflation report with zeros proliferating into the trillions.
But all this loud, breathless promotion of their hi-tech prowess has one flaw. This is Southern California. Between the middle of April and the beginning of October there usually arent any clouds within a thousand miles except for the stupid marine layer. Even in the rainy season we only get four or five downpours which you can see coming for a week on the satellite photos; They start off Alaska and roll clockwise down until they collide with the West Coast. The Chumash Indians a thousand years ago probably had as accurate idea of what the weather was going to be as we do now. But still the TV stations tease the weather in the beginning of the show ("I'll have the weather for your morning commute coming up later in the broadcast!")
as though we were living in Minnesota or Florida or some other place that has weather all year round that you have to take into account when you're planning your day.
And where do they get those weather dudes? I guess they're supposed to look tan and healthy so they spray on this orange man-tan and then truss them up in ill-fitting suits so they look like the corpse at an open-casket funeral. And the JOY they exude when they tell you that its not going to rain tomorrow as though it just MIGHT rain in July--it did in 1993, it could happen again.
Its better news for them when there are giant brushfires. They have to share that one with the rest of the news crew but they get to say whether the humidity will drop or if the marine layer will move in. Brushfires keep the weather guys relevant in the summer, they probably send their interns out to light them if they don't start spontaneously.
Well, I've got to trim a tree, mow the lawn and leaf-blower the patio. Enjoy your Saturday; if where you are you can look up and see a puffy white cloud tell it I said Hi!

LA Times Veers To The Left!

Free market economists trembled this morning as the Los Angeles Times, one of AmeriKKKa's leading underground newspapers made the startling announcement that free markets have failed the American people and that they were looking for alternatives!

(http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-losingfaith16-
2008jul16,0,1516735.story)

"Spurred by the continued housing crisis, turmoil in financial markets, spiking oil prices, disappearing jobs and shrinking retirement savings, the nation and its political leaders have begun to sour on the notion that the current market system is the key to a fair, stable and efficient society."

Gee, Peter Gosseln, the writer of the article left out one of the most egregious failing industries in our nation today--dead tree newspapers. The free market has certainly settled their hash for them. There are massive staff cuts at The Times. Whole sections are being cut and a third of the writing and editorial staff is being let go. There are similar massacres occurring at almost every 'dead tree' newspaper as circulations drop and advertisers migrate to the internet and cable TV. The newspapers and the similarly failing 'major' network newscasts look on in dismay as New Media conservative types like Rush Limbaugh land nine-figure contracts.
But with that obvious bias against the free market aside, look at the above excerpt. Everything that the writer talks about is a direct result of excessive government intervention in free markets. Two massive 'government chartered' corporations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, greatly loosened the criteria for qualifying for a mortgage a few years ago to give 'the poor and disadvantaged' (AKA minorities and people with bad credit) the opportunity to 'share the American dream'. This empowered a cloud of noisome real estate 'flippers', fly-by-night developers, and oily loan sharks to descend on the benighted poor and encourage them to sign on the dotted line and enter real estate nirvana. Meanwhile the Middle Class went on an orgy of home purchases or massive expansions of their old houses based on equity created by trillions of dollars of phony government-backed paper surging into the financial markets through the two bogus government 'independent guarantors'. But like all speculative surges this one reached a point where it became unsustainable and now the ebb-tide is pulling formerly strong financial institutions into the vortex along with the overinflated retirement dreams of the 401k worshipers who are sitting on the balconies of their 3,000 square foot McMansions cursing that damned free market for going down as well as up. The government is stepping in with trillions of dollars in further 'guarantees'; of course with a truckload of new rules and regulations attached. We're seeing the beginning of what might be the effective nationalization of the financial sector. Some free market.
Another bone in the throat of the Muddle Class is the steep rise in energy prices. They sold their 1,200 square foot houses near the city and moved twenty or thirty miles away to a 3,000 square foot McMansion in the satellite suburbs where the schools hadn't been totally destroyed by federal intervention, radical 'educational reform' zealots and rampaging minorities using their victim status to evade any discipline. Taxes were lower and you could jump in the air-conditioned Navigator, get breakfast at the drive-thru window and gab on the cell phone as you cruised slowly in the gridlock stream to your job downtown. Of course you voted for the local Democrat who could be counted on to rein in those filthy polluting oil companies and prevent them from annoying any endangered species with their horrible drilling rigs, pipelines and refineries. These Tribunes Of The People also could be counted on to keep any nuclear power plants from being built within a thousand miles of your house and to demand the closing of coal-fired electrical generators. In foreign policy 'No Blood For Oil' became the watchword. But 'No Blood For Oil' means...no oil. Not expanding production while demand rises all over the world can only lead to one result. We're seeing it now. The LA Times article makes the absurd claim that energy demand has only risen 1% but doesnt give a time-frame for that figure or site a source. Another vague number tossed out by liberals to make their point; $140 a barrel oil has probably suppressed any recent growth in demand but long term overall demand is way up and the trend hasnt stopped. Cringing weak policies in the Gulf have allowed the Iranians to create periodic scares which threaten to close the Straits Of Hormuz and keep the markets in a constant state of price-inflating panic. Yet even now the Democrats resist allowing drilling off the continental shelf and in ANWR. When President Bush lifted the executive order against new drilling (its about time this weak-kneed liberal took some kind of action) the price of a barrel of oil dipped $9 in one day...until it became clear that the Pelosi-Reid leftist enviro-zealots had no intention of following that executive action with legislative action. The Democrats are directly responsible for energy prices because of their environmental fanaticism that blocks any serious energy development at any cost to the stupid electorate who are convinced that these are the Bush policies.
The leftists will do the same to Health Care; introduce some unworkable 'free market reforms' to make everything 'fair' and then when the whole structure collapses under the weight of the unworkable new rules they'll go for nationalization to 'fix' the free market.
This country was made great and wealthy by the Free Market. There has been more freedom of opportunity for anyone willing to exert themselves then there ever has been ever in human history. We are now actively abandoning the underlying premises that created that greatness; this election should confirm in power a radical socialist party and place a totally incompetent dilettante who has spent his life being steeped in radical anti-market theories into power in the White House. The result will be a hyper-inflation that will equal that of any third-world thugocracy, which is what we will become.