Environmentalists Politicizing Death

Katrina and Disgusting Exploitation
James K. Glassman

A profound tragedy is unfolding in New Orleans, the most beautiful city in America, with the richest cultural history and the most wonderful style of living. I lived in New Orleans for seven years. I was married there. My children were born there. I have many friends there.

My daughter, her husband and their little baby managed to get out of the city ahead of the flood on Sunday, driving 14 hours into Texas with the few belongings they could stuff into their car. They have no idea what has become of their house and their possessions, not to mention their friends, their pets, their jobs, their way of life.

Tragedies happen, and my daughter and her family are happy just to be alive. Their losses and those of hundreds of thousands of other innocents deserve mourning, prayer and respect.

That is why the response of environmental extremists fills me with what only can be called disgust. They have decided to exploit the death and devastation to win support for the failed Kyoto Protocol, which requires massive cutbacks in energy use to reduce, by a few tenths of a degree, surface warming projected 100 years from now. - More @ Tech Central Station


Global Warming Blame Game
Michael Reagan

By now you've probably heard about the lunatic comments of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Cindy Sheehan of the environmental movement, who blamed Hurricane Katrina on President Bush and Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour for not buying into the global warming hype, and not signing up for the thoroughly-discredited Kyoto Treaty.

RFK is not alone in his delusions. In Europe the president is being castigated for not falling in line with all those Old World socialists eager to use the alleged warming of the world climate to create a new world order organized along the lines laid down by Karl Marx. More @ NewsMax.com


Hurricane Katrina Bush's Fault?
By Brit Hume

Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, who was camped outside President Bush's Texas ranch for the past few weeks, says Hurricane Katrina is all President Bush's fault, insisting that the president is "[now] heading to Louisiana to see the devastation that his environmental policies and his killing policies have caused." - More @ FoxNews

Savages

Another boy-bomber caught at Hawara












The number of terror threats continued to rise on Monday, with the security establishment registering 57 threats of plans by terrorist organizations to launch attacks.

On Monday afternoon, security forces arrested a 14-year-old Palestinian at the Hawara checkpoint north of Nablus, caught attempting to smuggle three pipe bombs.

Paratroopers and military police became suspicious of the teenager, identified as Hassan Khalifa of the Balata refugee camp in Nablus, as he carried a bag containing a box through the checkpoint. They demanded that he pass through the metal detector, and when he set off an alarm he was inspected and the pipe bombs in the box were discovered. - More At The Jerusalem Post

Via Little Green Footballs

Recommended Listening For The Week

Frank Zappa & The Mothers Of Invention - Burnt Weeny Sandwich

Originally released at the end of 1969, this is a collection of archival material from The Mothers of Invention, largely instrumental and featuring a lot of piano work from Ian Underwood. The doo-wopping "WPLJ" leads off a progressive jazz-influenced set including the full studio version of "Little House I Used to Live In" (far longer and more involved than the overture version on FILLMORE EAST); and "Holiday in Berlin, Full-Blown". Jimmy Carl Black, Roy Estrada, Sugar Cane Harris and Don Preston are among the supporting cast. - Rycodisc


One of my favorite albums, not for the faint of heart though. - KS

Crawford House of Hate

In her ongoing cameo as news media darling, Cindy Sheehan has been cast as the bereaved mother of an American soldier killed in Iraq. Sheehan has embraced that role with an activist’s gusto. She has called for the withdrawal of American troops and made vile attacks against Israel, justifying both by citing the tragic loss of her son Casey. Thus has Sheehan turned her 15 minutes of fame into a mendacious infomercial for the very elements who have dedicated themselves to murdering other mothers’ sons. In calling for the U.S. to pull out of Iraq, Sheehan is providing effective propaganda for the likes of the PLO and the diehard remnants of Iraq’s Ba’ath Party.

In this context, it is instructive to consider the groups that have pledged their support for Sheehan’s publicity stunt. Among those of her comrades less remarked upon is the Crawford Peace House of Crawford, Texas. Aside from being one of Sheehan’s most vocal backers, Crawford Peace House is a front group for several radical causes, among them the support of Palestinian terrorism and Ba’ath Party insurgents under the guise of promoting “peace” activism. The group’s homepage features a photo in which the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean—what is now Israel—is wiped off the map. This is supplemented by an ahistorical banner complaining about “Israel’s attacks, invasions and occupation.” (No mention is made of the successive Arab assaults on Israel from its birth in 1948, then again in 1956, 1967, and1973.) To stress the point, the site displays a tired rant by one Hadi Jawad, in which all the problems of the Palestinians are blamed on Israel. - More From Lee Kaplan @ Front Page Mag

More Government Meddling

Feds to ask CRTC to rescind pay-radio licences

Lobbying from broadcast operators is intensifying amid reports the federal government is ready to ask the CRTC to revoke its decision to licence satellite radio.

"Everything suggests that the cabinet will ask the CRTC to overturn its decision," an official close to the file said in an interview with The Canadian Press on Friday.

In June, the federal broadcast regulator granted the first satellite radio licences to Sirius -- a consortium of Radio-Canada and Standard Radio -- and a company called Canadian Satellite Radio (CSR). - More At CTV

Via Neale News

This is not a suprising development actually. I don't think sat radio will see the official light of day in this country until the Feds get a chance to cram it full of French and CanCon. Do not dispair though, there are plenty of American Sirius Radios for sale in Canada anyway. - KS

New Race Car

NASCAR drivers Dale Earnhardt Jr., right, and Mark McFarland look over the recently unveiled No. 88 car at Lowe’s Motor Speedway in Concord, N.C., on Tuesday. JR Motorsports will run McFarland in the car, which is sponsored by the U.S. Navy. The Navy hopes to use the car as a recruiting tool.

Recommended Listening For The Week

Ian Dury & The Blockheads - Do It Yourself

One of my favorite disks from the late 70's. - KS

Review
Ian Dury's music always bordered on the functional, since it was used as a backdrop for his wry vignettes and stories, but on his second album Do It Yourself, that aspect came to the fore. Largely abandoning the punk inflections that were scattered throughout New Boots and Panties!, Do It Yourself is a record of mid-tempo pub rock disco -- competently played, but rarely engaging. Dury's stories are all wonderful, filled with humor and penetrating detail, but only a handful of tracks, such as the terrific "Inbetweenies," are married to actual hooks, and by the end of the record, the steady disco throb has become a little numbing. Even with these faults, Do It Yourself remains one of Dury's very best records, since his lyrical facility throughout the album is simply amazing. - Amazon.ca

Steyn On Sheehan

Hold Your Tears
Free Sign In Required

"I resisted writing about ‘Mother Sheehan’ (as one leftie has proposed designating her), as it seemed obvious that she was at best a little unhinged by grief and at worst mentally ill. Start with her insistence on a face-to-face meeting with Bush. Even if you don’t think the President should see her, you can sympathise with the demand, born out of her anger and pain. But it turns out she’s already had a face-to-face meeting with Bush. Her son Casey was killed in April last year and in June the President met the Sheehans to offer his condolences. The story appeared in the 24 June 2004 edition of the Reporter, their hometown paper in Vacaville, California:

‘“I now know he’s sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis,” Cindy said after their meeting. “I know he’s sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he’s a man of faith....”

‘For the first time in 11 weeks, they felt whole again. “That was the gift the President gave us, the gift of happiness, of being together,” Cindy said.’

Mrs Sheehan wants a second meeting with Bush because she no longer feels the way she did at the first one. Instead of gratitude for ‘the gift the President gave us’, she now says her son was ‘murdered by the Bush crime family’." More At The Spectator

Coulter On Sheehan

Ann says it like I wish I could...

"Fortunately, the Constitution vests authority to make foreign policy with the president of the United States, not with this week's sad story. But liberals think that since they have been able to produce a grieving mother, the commander in chief should step aside and let Cindy Sheehan make foreign policy for the nation. As Maureen Dowd said, it's "inhumane" for Bush not "to understand that the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute."

I'm not sure what "moral authority" is supposed to mean in that sentence, but if it has anything to do with Cindy Sheehan dictating America's foreign policy, then no, it is not "absolute." It's not even conditional, provisional, fleeting, theoretical or ephemeral.

The logical, intellectual and ethical shortcomings of such a statement are staggering. If one dead son means no one can win an argument with you, how about two dead sons? What if the person arguing with you is a mother who also lost a son in Iraq and she's pro-war? Do we decide the winner with a coin toss? Or do we see if there's a woman out there who lost two children in Iraq and see what she thinks about the war?

Dowd's "absolute" moral authority column demonstrates, once again, what can happen when liberals start tossing around terms they don't understand like "absolute" and "moral." It seems that the inspiration for Dowd's column was also absolute. On the rocks." - More...

News From Wired

Mac Hacks Allow OS X on PCs

Imagine if your next Mac cost you only $300, and ran faster than any G4 or G5 you've ever used.

That future may already be unfolding: Hackers have found a way to bypass a chip designed to prevent the Mac OS from running on non-Apple PCs, which are often cheaper than Macs.

Some of the hackers are running the tweaked version of the operating system on their PCs natively. Others are using the system with VMware, which allows the Mac OS to support more PC hardware. - Wired.com

Recommended Listening For The Week

This Is For The Boys At Work

Tom Waits - Nighthawks At The Diner
One of my favorite cd's.
More Tom Waits stuff here...

Rush On "Able Danger"

Clinton Didn't Want to Deal with Terror

"It's starting to look as if the 9/11 Commission turned a blind eye to key questions that could embarrass one of its own members, Jamie Gorelick. This week brought the stunning revelation that elite military spies pinpointed Mohamed Atta and three other hijackers as a terror cell more than one year before 9/11. But they were barred from alerting lawmen to try to lock 'em up. A prime reason why that warning never came is that Gorelick issued a 1995 order creating a wall that blocked intelligence on terrorists from being shared with law enforcement. Commission staffers had first denied knowing that the elite military unit known as Able Danger even existed, but later admitted that they were briefed twice that Atta was specifically named." Still it was conveniently left out of the 9/11 report. Do you know why? Because the 9/11 report already had its agenda. The 9/11 report already had its story. - More @ RushLimbaugh.com

How Did She Do That?

Privacy chief: No-fly list could breach rights

Federal Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart says that despite promises that she would be consulted on safeguards for a no-fly list, her office still hasn't been briefed on the new plans announced last week by the federal transport minister.

"The no-fly list announced last Friday represents a serious incursion into the rights of travelers in Canada, rights of privacy and rights of freedom of movement," Stoddart said in a statement Tuesday. - CNEWS

So she hasn't been briefed yet but she already knows that it violates the rights of travelers. - KS

Cultures aren't equal
Michael Barone with some thoughts on the moral bankruptcy of Multiculturalism.

Treason threat cleric leaves UK
Welfare fraud Imam gets while the going is good. - LGF

Trust politicians to do nothing useful - Do the politicians have the guts for the job? - Mark Steyn

Tony Stewart Wins At Indy, Takes Points Lead

Indiana native Tony Stewart managed to stave off a late-race charge from Kasey Kahne and pulled away to win the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard on Sunday.

Stewart's victory combined with Jimmie Johnson's crash on Lap 145 gave Stewart the points lead with only five races remaining before the Chase for the Nextel Cup begins at New Hampshire. Stewart now leads Johnson by 75 points. Greg Biffle is third, followed by Rusty Wallace and Kurt Busch.

The long-sought Brickyard win was Stewart's fourth victory in the past six races. His average finish in the last seven races -- dating to a second-place finish at Michigan on June 19 -- is a 2.57.

The rest of the top five were Brian Vickers, Jeremy Mayfield and Matt Kenseth. The rest of the top 10: Casey Mears, Mark Martin, Jeff Gordon, Sterling Marlin and Kyle Busch.

Stewart led a race-high 44 laps, while Kahne and pole-sitter Elliott Sadler both led 39. - Nascar.com

Mark Steyn On Total War

The etiquette of modern warfare

Were we to re-run World War Two, advisors to the president would counsel against the poor optics of dropping the big one, problems keeping allies on board, media storm, Congressional inquiries, UN resolutions, NGOs making a flap, etc. And chances are the administration would opt to slug it out town for town in a conventional invasion costing a million casualties.

There's no doubt the atomic bomb wound up saving lives – American, Japanese, and maybe millions in the lands the latter occupied. The more interesting question is to what degree it enabled the Japan we know today. They were a fearsome enemy, and had no time for decadent concepts such as magnanimity in victory. If you want the big picture, the Japanese occupation of China left 15 million Chinese dead. If you want the small picture, consider Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands. It fell to the Japanese shortly after Pearl Harbor, when the 22 British watchkeepers surrendered to vastly superior forces. The following year, the Japanese took their British prisoners, tied them to trees, decapitated them, and burned their bodies in a pit. You won't find that in the Geneva Conventions. The Japs fought a filthy war, but a mere six decades later and America, Britain and Japan sit side by side at G7 meetings, the US and Canada apologize unceasingly for the wartime internment of Japanese civilians, and an historically authentic vernacular expression such as "the Japs fought a filthy war" is now so distasteful that use of it inevitably attracts noisy complaints about offensively racist characterizations. The old militarist culture – of kamikaze fanatics and occupation regimes that routinely tortured and beheaded and even ate their prisoners – is dead as dead can be. - More @ The Jerusalem Post

Silence Almost Everywhere Except...

Robin Hood and Air America

Did Al Franken's liberal radio network Air America divert city money for the elderly and inner-city children to itself? That's the question people should be asking this week after the revelation that the New York Department of Investigation is looking into whether hundreds of thousands of dollars were illegally transferred from a Bronx community center to Air America. Only a community paper and a few Internet bloggers seem interested in what could be an egregious case of illegal funneling of tax dollars to a private, partisan organization. - More @ Washington Times

Via Sister Toldjah

Speaking Of Terrorist Shitheads on Welfare

I dought that our welfare systems is any better shape. - KS

Four bomb suspects 'had £500,000 in benefits'

POLICE are investigating allegations that the four suspected July 21 bombers collected more than £500,000 in benefits payments in Britain.

The claim was made as the Bank of England moved to freeze financial accounts belonging to the men. Bank officials also disclosed the financial details of the suspects, Ramzi Mohammad, Yasin Hassan Omar, Muktar Said-Ibrahim and Hussain Osman. These showed how the men, all in custody, have used multiple aliases and addresses in recent years.

Mr Ibrahim, is said to have had six aliases. Some are also shown to have claimed several nationalities, ages and national insurance numbers while in Britain. Investigators believe that bogus names were used to make some benefit claims. - More @ Times Online

Via Little Green Footballs

Boo Hoo

Deportation not fair, says extremist (on benefits)

An extreme Muslim cleric whose family have been living on benefits in Britain for 20 years says it would not be 'fair' to deport him.

Speaking after the Prime Minister announced his clampdown, father-of-seven Sheik Omar Bakri said: "I have wives, children, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law. It would be hard on my family if I was deported." - More @ Daily Mail

Via Neale News

Deportation Watch: England Finally Gets It

Blair Announces New Anti-Terror Measures

Prime Minister Tony Blair proposed strict anti-terror measures Friday that would allow Britain to expel foreigners who preach hatred, close extremist mosques and bar entry to Muslim radicals. "The rules of the game are changing" following last month's bomb attacks, he declared.

The proposals, which also target extremist Web sites and bookshops, are aimed primarily at excluding radical Islamic clerics accused of whipping up hatred and violence among vulnerable, disenfranchised Muslim men. More @ Fox News

Recommended Listening For The Week

Still Alive And Well
Johnny Winter

Audio CD (October 4, 1994)
Original Release Date 1973

Excellent album, one of my all time favorites.

Apple Immersion

Thing are going to be a little weird here for a while. I am embarking on an Apple Computer Immersion program here at the Central Office. The goal is to to completely switch all of my PC activity over to Apple. So far so good.