For over a year the media has struggled to try and define just what exactly the movement was. Now they have a definition.

Sarah Palin.

I don’t know what planet Kleinheider lives on, but here on Earth the MSM hasn’t had to struggle at all to label the tea party movement the ugly expression of the angry, gun-toting, racist, ignorant, unwashed and despicable masses (ie, non-coastal whites). That particular classist depiction has been around for years, and as soon as folks started to get together and speak up, they were tarred with it. Read the whole thing for more crazy assertions and petulant left-wingish whining.

Reading Obama budget: criticized 43 for adding 2.9 tril to debt in 8 yrs (CONT’D)

but BHO plans adding 3.2 tril by end FY10, 20 mths, 11 days into term, +4.7tril w/in 4 yrs. WOW

WOW is right. Get busy creating wealth, everyone – so your betters can spread it around “a little”.

He then launched into a point of contention in the Obama camp – voter registration.

“So, you know I have fun with the media. We all know that the press is really an independent, civic-minded and non-partisan group … like ACORN.

“In case you haven’t been following my opponent’s ‘Get Out The Vote’ campaign, ACORN is helping to register groups that were previously excluded, overlooked and under-served – second-graders, the deceased, Disney characters.”

I think it might be fun to coin a more succinct phrase for these under-represented voting blocks. If we drop the second-graders from the list, maybe we can start calling them the animated and the re-animated.

Hillary will probably become the new Teddy K. –a lioness of the Senate, serving there until the end of days for most of us. She will even enjoy and perhaps earn a unique sort of authority, an uber “been-there-done-that” wisdom. If she ever writes a candid book, it will be riveting.

(my emphasis)

Bad news for waitresses.

Assuming they’re both guilty of what the rumors say they’ve done, the upside is that they aren’t as stupid as they sound. The downside is that they’re even bigger scumbags than I’ve been assuming they are, if that’s even possible. And if the Clinton campaign’s denials are true, well, that means in addition to being a slimy, disgusting politician, she’s as stupid as she sounds.

In one of history’s more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is “an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.”

The article is a little incoherent, though:

By barring any Buddhist monk living outside China from seeking reincarnation, the law effectively gives Chinese authorities the power to choose the next Dalai Lama, whose soul, by tradition, is reborn as a new human to continue the work of relieving suffering.

How does a Chinese law constrain the actions of Tibetans outside of China (or Tibet)? The Dalai Lama doesn’t live in China, and can reincarnate himself into any Tibetan child born outside of Chinese territory he cares to. The author further suggests that this law will allow the Chinese to put forth their own Dalai Lama to compete with the next version of the current (and only, I suppose) one, but I don’t see how.

More research into this brouhaha is called for.

The more I think about “global warming”, in light of the most recent United Nations report, the more confident I become in averring that it is a fraud, a political stunt, a criminal imposture, that every intelligent journalist should be helping to expose.

I’m sure all five of them are doing everything they can.

Does running for President allow a candidate to freelance at a time of war by talking to our enemies and triangulating against the president? Why is Gov. Richardson talking to North Koreans, or Sen. Kerry trying to talk to the Iranians, or Sen. Bayh to the Syrians? Wouldn’t that be like a Tom DeLay talking to Milosevic to undermine Clinton during the Kosovo bombing? Or Trent Lott dealing with the Taliban as Clinton sent cruise missiles against them?

[...]

Sen. Kerry in Cairo just praised Hosni Mubarak, lauding him by chastising President Bush’s failure to listen to this voice of reason and his criticisms of the United States. And why not listen to such advice, since this autocrat has been the recipient of billions in American aid, while squelching all reform for some thirty years in the bargain?

No doubt Kerry also lectured Mubarak about once hyping the WMD threat (“Mubarak lied, thousands died?”). Remember, the Egyptian strongman, as part of his reservations about Iraq, had warned our generals that American troops would be targeted with gasses of all sorts by Saddam.

Kerry also called for new talks with Iran—a rogue state presently in the middle of uranium enrichment, supplying IEDs to the militias in Iraq, promising to wipe out Israel, and hosting a Holocaust denial love fest in Teheran. Surely if the senator once denigrated our own soldiers as terrorizing Iraqis he can at least say that Iranians do the same?

I think we residents of Massachusetts are sending the same two messages to the rest of the country every time we send John Kerry to Washington. I suspect it would be less offensive and result in better outcomes if we replaced this horse’s ass with an actual horse.

Hilarious! The GOP commissioned this from David Zucker, however they (unfortunately but understandably) passed on running it.

Podcast here.

(via)

Radley Balko on the rise of the militarization of our police:

Americans have long maintained that a man’s home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing. Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.

Of course, if all these folks had properly filled out their BZ/ST/486/C forms, there’d be no problems.

People seem pretty unhappy with the police state in Iran.

The U.S. is pulling almost all of its military forces out of Iceland. This is not exactly big news, except perhaps in Iceland itself, which has no other military force. Indeed, the Iceland government has actually been trying to convince the U.S. military to stay, but the U.S. (rightly, I think) has decided that Iceland is no longer a strategically important place.

Interestingly, the U.S. still has an agreement obligating it to provide defense arrangements with Iceland (the deservedly obscure 1951 agreement can be found here). Who knew that the U.S. defense perimeter included Iceland … or that a withdrawal of military forces from there would actually be unwelcome?

On the contrary, who would have thought anyone would be happy to see them go? Besides the obligatory mish-mash of local students socialists, politicians socialists, activists socialists, pacificists socialists, and lunatic fringe, of course. If the host nation is no longer actually relying on the US for security (and saving a big chunk of their GNP in doing so), they’ve likely become accustomed to the lifestyle afforded by all the dollars circulated by servicemen and women, and dread the economic fallout of a withdrawal.

(See also, Germany, South Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, – and if I recall correctly, Saudi Arabia – and all those who profit from the shipping lanes kept safe and open by the Great Satan.)

DOWN WITH AMERICA!

But not until they put a stop to the piracy just offshore, if it’s not too much trouble?

Having read Steyn’s latest, NZC opines

And for example, the whole assumption that societies with low birth rates will continue to decline is persuasive but not at all obvious. People can change their behaviors. I’m not saying they will, I’m far from certain it’s in any sense likely, but the Europeans and the Japanese could start having more children.

and provokes some rambling, semi-coherent thoughts from me: IIRC, Steyn and the various other blogospheric entities sounding the alarm don’t quite go so far as to paint replacement rates in developed western countries as moral failure or crisis of confidence, but many probably see it that way. Are declining fertility rates just a sign of progressive self-loathing? IMO there’s far more to it. What pressures might drive the fertility of a western, developed population down?

At least partly to blame is the unprecedented-in-human-history levels of wealth, health and freedom we’ve achieved. Between women voting and entering the workforce, the automobile, longer lifespans, an increasingly socialist government providing family-replacing subsidies to the retired and unemployed, reliable birth control and legal abortions, people are not channeled into building families as they once were. So, if it’s the sum of these new forces that has given us falling fertility rates, how easy would it be to counter them? Not so easy, IMO. I suspect one of the first major side effects we’ll see is the inability of European welfare states to continue delivering welfare. I think it’s far more likely that people who are used to rioting over entitlements, subsidies and protectionism will wreck their own goverments long before doing something constructive like taking responsibilty for the problem and starting to have more children again. Further, as European welfare-states begin to deliver less and less welfare, I’m guessing immigration will drop off, slowing the dilution of westernism somewhat.

It seems to me that the parts of the world where cultures are most screwed up and fertility rates are highest will, if the Bush Doctrine is success, eventually fall prey to these same downware pressures on fertility rates themselves. So, exporting Anglospheric values – with all due enthusiasm – seems like an important thing to me.

I’m reminded of Kelly’s blogpost about the park service. Apparently the arrogance she revealed is matched only by the ignorance that fuels it.

Masked gunmen stormed into a club for United Nations workers in Gaza City on Sunday and blew up the drinking hall in a new sign of spiralling unrest ahead of a Palestinian election.

It was the first such attack in Gaza on a U.N. target and came against a backdrop of growing unease among foreigners.

[...]

Gunmen burst into the U.N. club, one of the few places that alcohol is served in conservative Muslim Gaza. It had been closed for the day. The attackers tied up the security guard and struck him with gun butts.

Then they set explosives in front of the bar, unrolled a detonator cable and blew up the charges, ripping up the roof and shattering the windows.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

I had no trouble getting worked up about this, however:

The United Nations is generally viewed with sympathy Gaza. Its agency supporting Palestinian refugees and their descendants, more than half of Gaza’s 1.4 million population, is the second biggest employer after the Palestinian Authority.

How ridiculous.

…let us consider some of the people who have won it in the past, and see if their names are more familiar to you than mine is: Karl Adolph Gjellerup, Henrik Pontopiddan, Carl Spitteler, Wladyslaw Reymont, Grazia Deledda, Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, Frans Eemil Sillanpää. Ring any bells? In short, if you think Lee Harris is too obscure to win the Nobel Prize, you are obviously wrong.

[...]Can I really expect the committee to give the prize to someone who has said nice things about America, even in his dotage?

But that is precisely why I decided to go ahead and publish my acceptance speech now, because that way I could make it clear to those guys in Sweden that I know exactly what kind of thing they are looking for in a Nobel Prize laureate, which is fanatic, frothing-at-the-mouth, virulent anti-Americanism of the most vicious kind.

[...]

“America sucks! It sucks now and it has always sucked. As long as there is an American left alive, the world will suck because it has Americans in it. All Americans suck. I suck and all my friends back in America suck, too. In America, even the cats suck. It’s sickening to think how much we suck. In fact, just thinking about America makes me want to puke. See, look, I’m vomiting right now.” Of course, I won’t really be vomiting — I’ll just be pretending to, the same way the Swedish Academy pretends to award literary merit. It will be like a work of conceptual art, and you can only imagine the electrifying effect as the Reuters newsflash bulletin makes its way around the globe: “American Nobel Prize Laureate Lee Harris Pukes All Over Himself Denouncing His Own Country.” You won’t hear anybody asking “Lee Harris Who?” after that, will you?

LOL!

See the article for a link to Harold Pinter’s actual and totally bizarre “America sucks” acceptance speech.

(via)

…but you can’t pick your family:

“You know Wafah bin Ladin?” Valvo asks the men loudly.

“Wafah Dufour,” she snaps, shooting him a look that’s more pleading than hostile.

[...]

Ms. Dufour, who’s vague about her age but almost certainly younger than 30, sits down at a good corner table and thanks me for helping her tell her story. “It’s really important for me,” she says with a French accent. “I was born in the States, and I want people to know I’m American, and I want people here to understand that I’m like anyone in New York. For me, it’s home.

“It’s really tough that I have to always explain myself,” she continues in a soft, husky voice. “It’s like every time I meet someone, I have to move a huge mountain that’s in front of me, and sometimes I get tired.”

Everyone’s got an embarrassing relative or two tucked away somewhere, but this has gotta be rough.

This is probably horrible, but while reading Fran’s post about torture, when I came to the Church’s position

“The varieties of crime are numerous: all offenses against life itself, such as murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and willful suicide; all violations of the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture, undue psychological pressures; all offenses against human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children, degrading working conditions where people are treated as mere tools for profit rather than free and responsible persons: all these and the like are criminal: they poison civilization; and they debase the perpetrators more than the victims and militate against the honor of the creator.” [From Gaudium Et Spes.]

…I heard the whole thing (internally, you understand) being read in the voice of the guy from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly who reads off Tuco’s crimes in first of the “turn Tuco in for the money and then spring him” hanging scenes:

“Wanted in fourteen counties of this State, the condemned is found guilty of murder, armed robbery of citizens, state banks, and post offices; the theft of sacred objects, arson in a state prison, perjury, bigamy, deserting his wife and children, inciting prostitution, kidnapping, extortion, receiving stolen goods, selling stolen goods, passing counterfeit money, and contrary to the laws of this State the condemned is guilty of using marked cards and loaded dice…”

Or is there only one scene? Well, anyway. Probably not an association the authors intended. ;-)