The right-wing conspiracy just got vaster

Tuesday, December 31, 2002

Tim Blair has posted his predictions for 2003.  Here’s a couple of my favorites.

June 19th The music video for Christina Aguilera’s latest release is banned after parents’ groups complain about its “inappropriate language” and “vulgar images”. Despite the ban, Cum Drunk Fuck Slut is the year’s best-selling single.

August 9th Speaking from a Saudi prison where he has been held captive and tortured daily since April, US President George W. Bush hails the Saudis as “trusted allies” in the war against terror.

Go read them all, he’s got some good ones in there.

I just wanted to wish everyone a safe and happy New Year’s Eve tonight.  Drink all you want but take a taxi home.  Make sure you’re here to blog with me in 2003!  As for me, I’ll be drinking Crown Royal and setting off $700 worth of fireworks. :)

I was going through my extensive MP3 collection earlier today, transferring some new tunes to my iPod, and I came across some old school metal from the late 80’s which, even though the song was written with tongue firmly in cheek, I think had some pretty damn prescient lyrics, considering the current geopolitical climate.  The song is Fuck the Middle East by Stormtroopers of Death (S.O.D.) from their brilliant 1988 album Speak English or Die.

Fuck the Middle East
There’s too many problems
They just get in the way
We could sure live without them
They hijack our planes
They raise our oil prices
We’ll kill em all and have a ball
And end their fuckin crisis

BEIRUT, LEBANON, won’t exist once we’re done
LIBYA, IRAN, we’ll flush those bastards down the can
SYRIANS and SHIITES, we’ll crush their faces with our might
Then Israel and Egypt can live in peace without these dicks.

Monday, December 30, 2002

I just got back from seeing Catch Me If You Can, the new movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks.  This is a fantastic flick.  I read the book a year or so ago and thought the film was a great adaptation.  The other Leo flick out right now, Gangs of New York I have not yet seen, but Deb over at Insomnomaniac has an excellent review. 

And for those of you who have missed Deb’s brilliant comments in this post you need to get in there and start reading.  I haven’t been blogging as much as usual because (a) I’m still on vacation, and (b) Deb has been doing such a superb job in my stead.

Sunday, December 29, 2002

Aussie journalist Tim Blair has written his review of Bowling for Columbine in The Australian.  And he gives a link to MOOREWATCH!  Thanks, Tim!

So I have been forced to disrupt my Christmas vacation once again to debunk the asinine ramblings of England’s cowardly Jew-hater, Roy McCoy.  For those of you just tuning in, start by reading this post, and then read this one plus the subsequent comments.  What follows is my response to Roy’s comments in the second post.

Friday, December 27, 2002

It seems that everyone’s favorite limey coward Roy McCoy has posted a lengthy screed in response to my post Pansies Across the Pond.  I figured that this was worth a post all on its own.  (Make sure you read the whole thing, there’s a nifty little surprise at the end.)

Fucking Hell - What A Wanker!

Congratulations, with this quote you’ve just made the Hate Mail section on the front page.

You’re an offensive git aren’t you? So I have responded in like manner.

Please do.  Unlike you I can take it.

If you think I was referring solely to you, you are mistaken there are many more idiots like you unfortunately.

There are most definitely more like me, and you better be thankful that we’re here.  Here’s what John Stuart Mill had to say on the subject.

“War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth fighting for is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing he cares about more than his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”

Miserable creatures such as yourself will always be kept free due to the exertions of men and women who answer the call of duty to fight against evil, no matter what its form.

While perusing the server logs a minute ago I noticed a referral from a site I had never heard of before.  Intrigued, I checked it out.  It’s from some British dude named Roy McCoy who writes a blog called A Man In the Street, and apparently the poor bastard has taken issue with some of the content of this blog.  His post entitled Lions are Pussies Too! is deconstructed forthwith.

Thursday, December 26, 2002

If you’ve never seen the film The Boys from Brazil you need to head down to your local Blockbuster.  It might not be Nazis trying to recreate Hitler, but it appears that a bunch of goofy assholes from the Raelian UFO cult have cloned a human being.

A BABY has been born through cloning, French scientist and member of the Raelian sect Brigitte Boisselier has claimed.

The baby, a girl, was born on Thursday by caesarean section. The birth “went very well,” said Boisselier, president of the human cloning society Clonaid, on the telephone.

As the effort by the Raelians to achieve the first human birth by cloning was carried out in the secrecy, it was not immediately possible to obtain any independent scientific confirmation that the baby was in fact a clone.

The baby born yesterday was the first of five the Raelians have said were due.

I’m not sure that I’m necessarily against the idea of human cloning, but jumping into it helter skelter is just the wrong way to approach it. Pandora’s Box has been opened and God only knows what is going to come out.

So in between family activities and bouts of heavy drinking I decided to check all five of my email accounts, and lo and behold there was a letter from Lynn Woolsey, the left wing dunce who represents my disctict in the House of Representatives.  The letter was a reply to one I had ostensibly sent her urging her to support President Bush in his plans for Iraq.  The only problem is that I never sent her such a letter.  I do remember filling out something on Vote.com a while back, whish said that the votes would be forwarded to our respective members of Congress.  That must be where it came from.  Knowing the kind of left-wing intellectual midget Lynn Woolsey is I wouldn’t have bothered to write her at all.  At any rate, the letter she sent me is, if nothing else, worthy of a good dissection.  Here it is, verbatim, with my commentary.

The ever reclusive completely dead Osama bin Laden has apparently sent a message of goodwill to Algerian rebels.

Three members of al Qaeda delivered a message this month from Osama bin Laden to a leading Algerian Islamic rebel believed to be in neighboring Niger, news reports said on Thursday.

The three emissaries, all Saudi nationals, traveled through Syria and Egypt and met Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a regional leader of Algeria’s Islamic rebel Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat.

The daily L’Expression, quoting reliable sources, did not say what the content of Bin Laden’s reported message was.

They didn’t even spring for an audio tape this time.  I don’t know what kind of bullshit stunt our government is trying to pull but bin Laden is dead.  He couldn’t be any deader if Hillary Clinton had murdered him, then stuck his body in a park and staged it to look like a suicide.

If anything truly exemplifies what this country is made of this Christmas season it’s this story.  As a former sailor in the United States Navy I would be honored to serve on this vessel. 

Steel salvaged from the wreckage of the World Trade Center will be used to build the Navy’s USS New York, a warship named in honor of those who perished in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.

The scrap steel will be extricated from the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island on Friday and trucked south to a Northrop Grumman shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss. Northrop Grumman will start building the USS New York in Pascagoula in the middle of next year.

The USS New York will be the fifth of 12 amphibious assault ships in the San Antonio class, which the Navy calls one of its most technologically innovative. The 684-foot vessel will carry a Navy crew of 402 and up to 800 Marines.

The $800 million vessel should be ready for active duty in 2007.

Not to be outdone the Iraqi government has stated that it will recycle the rubble from its bombed out buildings into stones to be thrown at the tanks and artillery of the Great Satan

Tuesday, December 24, 2002

Have a Merry Christmas everyone.  And thanks for making this blog successful beyond anything I had ever hoped!  Enjoy your time with family and friends, and I hope you got the DVD player you wanted.

I wasn’t planning on blogging again.  I’ve been making cookies and rum balls with my mom, and the house is full of the smells of baking yummies, but this is just too damn good to pass up.  Clifford May has a wonderful piece on Baghdad Sean Penn, and how he is nothing but a dupe for Saddam Hussein.

How can Sean Penn be so naive as to believe he would see the reality of Iraq touring around Baghdad by limo and dining on kabobs with Saddam’s deputies? Does he really believe that average Iraqi citizens were going to invite him into their living rooms and share their feelings with him? Did he expect Saddam to open his dungeons to show him the political prisoners whose tongues have been sliced and whose eyes have been gouged? Did he think he’d have more luck finding caches of biological and chemical weapons than has Hans Blix?

Mr. Penn also told CNN: “The insight that I would have and I think for it to be productive, I would hope that this would not be a political commentary on my part but more a human commentary.” To which one can only respond: “Whaaa???”

If Mr. Penn & Co. were serious about grasping Iraqi reality, they would meet with those who have fled Saddam’s oppression to London and Washington and, yes, probably to Los Angeles. They would visit the Kurdish areas in northern Iraq, protected from Saddam troops by U.S. and British air power. They would learn about the 182,000 Kurds who were slaughtered by Saddam, about the villages wiped out by poison gas, women and children lying in the gutter in a final embrace.

In other words, if Sean Penn and other Hollywood types really want to see what life under Saddam Hussein is like and the kind of danger he represents to the people of Iraq, the Middle East and the world, Baghdad is the last place they should go.

Read the whole thing, it’s great.  Sean Penn is a fool and a dupe.  He’s much more Spicoli than he’d ever want to admit.

If you’ve got small children in the house, you might want to show them this.  NORAD is using its powerful ICBM-monitoring radar technology to keep track of exactly where Santa is during his trip around the world.  It’s very well done.  If you’re got little ones running around you should show this to them.

Monday, December 23, 2002

For those of you who are convinced that we never landed on the moon (Jim) then this page should provide a little enlightenment.

Is that the moon or a studio in the Nevada desert? How can the flag flutter when there’s no wind on the moon? Why can’t we see stars in the moon-landing pictures? For three decades, NASA has taken the high road, ignoring those who claimed the Apollo moon landings were faked and part of a colossal government conspiracy.

California is seeking to address its $35 million budget shortfall by releasing prisoners to save money.

Proposals to release some nonviolent and elderly prisoners early have emerged in California and other states confronting massive budget shortfalls.

Kentucky Gov. Paul Patton enraged prosecutors by recently allowing hundreds of low-level felons to leave jails and prisons early as part of a plan to fill a corrections shortfall. And proposals to release some inmates early, pare down parole periods or reject the return of criminals nabbed in other states have emerged in Washington, Connecticut, Oregon, Nevada and Oklahoma.

California is facing a nearly $35 billion budget deficit, and leading Democratic lawmakers are suggesting chopping some sentences to shave state costs.

Gov. Gray Davis announced last week that the state is facing a $34.8 billion budget deficit over the next 18 months. The Democratic governor will submit his plan to deal with the deficit in January, and despite his longtime tough-on-crime stances and hesitancy to parole prisoners, aides said he has not ruled out any proposals to cut costs.

So, rather than cut government spending on asinine environmental programs, or strengthen the borders to keep out parasitic illegal immigrants, or cut some of the countless social welfare programs for unwed mothers or drug addicts or other societal refuse, our illustrious governor is going to release prisoners.

I saw a comedian once do a bit about Kwanzaa.  I can’t for the life of me remember who it was or the exact wording of the quote, but it went something like this:  “What the hell is this Kwanzaa thing?  Oh, so blacks want to be like Christians and have a holiday at the end of the year?  You know, I thought they already did have a holiday.  It’s called CHRISTMAS.” (If anyone knows the name of the comedian please leave a comment.)

Kwanzaa is yet another attempt by black Americans to segregate themselves from white society.  Separate but equal is the goal of mainstream black Americans, no matter how much the white leftist hand-wringers want to believe otherwise.

Have you ever wondered just what Kwanzaa is?  Paul Mulshine has a great article over at the ever-brilliant Front Page Magazine on just this subject.

On December 24, 1971, the New York Times ran one of the first of many articles on a new holiday designed to foster unity among African Americans. The holiday, called Kwanzaa, was applauded by a certain sixteen-year-old minister who explained that the feast would perform the valuable service of “de-whitizing” Christmas. The minister was a nobody at the time but he would later go on to become perhaps the premier race-baiter of the twentieth century. His name was Al Sharpton and he would later spawn the Tawana Brawley hoax and then incite anti-Jewish tensions in a 1995 incident that ended with the arson deaths of seven people.

Great minds think alike. The inventor of the holiday was one of the few black “leaders” in America even worse than Sharpton. But there was no mention in the Times article of this man or of the fact that at that very moment he was sitting in a California prison. And there was no mention of the curious fact that this purported benefactor of the black people had founded an organization that in its short history tortured and murdered blacks in ways of which the Ku Klux Klan could only fantasize.

Be sure and read the rest.  Let your black friends know just what it is they’re celebrating.  Kwanzaa is no more a legitimate holiday than Festivus is.

Saturday, December 21, 2002

San Francisco recently had the distinction of being the only city in America where unionized strippers go on strike for better pay.  Now, proving once and for all that this city is the truly the most glorious bastion of American left-wing lunacy, the city plans to regulate psychics.

Under the law, the first of its kind for a major U.S. city, fortune-tellers would no longer be allowed to perform such classic curse removals as the knot in the thread, the blood in the glass, or the hair in the grapefruit.

The bury-the-money trick would be outlawed, too.

“Everyone is going to think this is a little bit hokey,” said Supervisor Aaron Peskin, introducing his ordinance at the Hall of Justice.

“But it’s not hokey if it’s your money that’s being taken,” chimed in District Attorney Terence Hallinan, who is backing the proposal.

Saving people from their own abject stupidity.  This is what the left has been reduced to.  Now, if we could just get them to prevent people from stupidly voting for Democrats in 2004 we might be getting somewhere.

Alright gang, I’m off to the airport.  Next post will be from Houston. See ya!

Just watching her on Jay Leno.  She’s one of these girls who thinks that everything she says is funny, so she giggles obnoxiously after virtually every sentence.  The problem is, nothing she says is funny.

Friday, December 20, 2002

“We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analyzing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will. I cannot believe that such a program would be rejected by the people of this country, even if it does mean the establishment of personal contact with the dictators. “
-- Neville Chamberlain

From The Daily Mirror:

BUSH’S RACE TO WAR PUTS WORLD AT RISK
THE day has been marked in President Bush’s diary. January 27, 2003. The date when he will decide on war against Iraq.

No, that’s the date that it is speculated that he will decide on the war on Iraq.

But no one really believes that a big decision will be taken in the White House on that day. The die was cast long ago.

Absolutely.  When the UN Security Council passed its resolution ordering Iraq to disarm, and Saddam Hussein decided not to, the die was indeed cast.

Christmas has come a litle early this year.

Embattled Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) announced this morning that he is stepping down from his leadership post, just a day after Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) launched a campaign to oust him.

Lott said he would serve the four years left in his term, thus helping to insure that the Republican Party maintains its narrow control of the Senate.

“In the interest of pursuing the best possible agenda for the future of our country, I will not seek to remain as majority leader of the United States Senate for the 108th Congress, effective Jan. 6, 2003,” Lott said in a written statement. “To all those who offered me their friendship, support and prayers, I will be eternally grateful. I will continue to serve the people of Mississippi in the United States Senate."

It looks like Bill Frist is shaping up to be the new majority leader.  Let the good times roll.

I just got an interesting email from the RNC giving some interesting figures from the 2002 elections.

• Republicans hold a majority of state legislative seats for the first time since 1946. In the last twelve years, Democrats have gone from 61 percent of state legislative seats to just 49 percent.
• Nationally, the total votes cast for Republicans this November exceeded Democrat votes by five percentage points, marking the first time since 1994 that any party has broken the 49 percent barrier in a national election.
• The Republican share of the Latino vote surged to 38 percent, up from an historical average of 20 to 25 percent. Even with the expected growth in the Latino population, Republicans can continue to win solid majorities nationally by continuing their successful outreach efforts.

Thursday, December 19, 2002

I just caught this brilliant post over at NRO.  It’s written by someone known only as a Southern “professional Republican operative we know,” and it perfectly sums up the situation now facing the GOP over Trent Lott.  Here’s a taste.

I am a conservative Republican, in fact make my living as one, but if [Trent Lott stays on as majority leader], the disappointment and embarrassment will make it incredibly difficult for me to remain “proudly” Republican.

Which makes me wonder if Senate GOPers have really absorbed just how significant is the question facing them at present. Bill Kristol today demands they stop being coy and come out and declare themselves. But before that (lest one by one by one they come out for Lott), I’d ask these Senators some other questions: If Trent remains, what does the world look like come January 7th? More pointedly, do you envision a time when the President can again appear in the same room with the Senate majority leader? (I can’t.) Can you then justify electing a leader who subsequently becomes for the president his party’s own Yasser Arafat, with whom he will never meet nor shake hands? Will you put the President in that horrible position?

Forget about the passing of a conservative agenda—can the party or the conservative movement themselves hold together and withstand that strain?

Beautifully and succinctly stated.  This is make-or-break time for the Republicans.  If Lott stays I’m going to have serious reservations about voting for the GOP in the future.  He needs to go.  Now.

As of one hour ago I’m on vacation for two weeks.  And not a moment to soon!  I leave Saturday morning for Texas, where I’ll be spending the holidays with my folks.  But don’t fret, gentle reader, I’ll still be blogging. :)

The utterly inept INS finally did something logical in the war on terror.

Hundreds of Iranian and other Middle East citizens were in southern California jails on Wednesday after coming forward to comply with a new rule to register with immigration authorities only to wind up handcuffed and behind bars.

The arrests were part of a post Sept. 11 program that requires all males over 16 from a list of 20 Arab or Middle East countries, who do not have permanent resident status in the United States, to register with U.S. immigration authorities.

Monday was the deadline for men from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Sudan. News of the mass arrests came first in southern California, which is home to more than 600,000 Iranian exiles and their families.

Seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? These people are not citizens, nor are they permanent residents.  As you can welll imagine the bleeding hearts at the ACLU are going apeshit.

According to The Sun, it’s this:

GET ready for what could be the coolest film of all time.

QUENTIN TARANTINO will bring back Vincent Vega, played by JOHN TRAVOLTA in Pulp Fiction, and Vic Vega — played by MICHAEL MADSEN in Reservoir Dogs — for a spectacular , a prequel to both films called The Vega Brothers.

My source said: “Expect the charm to come from Travolta and the crazy stuff from Madsen. It will follow the pair’s exploits around a club they own, set in the late Eighties.

“There is also an argument between the brothers over a woman.”
In true Tarantino fashion, it will be a film full of twists, plenty of action with gangsters a plenty.

Tarantino hopes to complete writing The Vega Brothers early next year so he can start shooting in the summer.

I swore I wasn’t going to blog on this again, but while perusing the server logs I discovered that this site gets hit when people are searching for gay porno videos.  Take a look at this:

http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=simon+rex+jerkoff

Apparently Simon Rex is a gay porn star.  I’m hit #8 on the list.  How did I get there?  The page in question referrs to former California gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon, film critic Rex Reed, and also contains the word jerkoff.  So now gay guys searching for jerkoff porno are going to end up at a conservative opinion blog.

The wonders of the internet.

Wednesday, December 18, 2002

Any blog post that contains these words is worth a look:

At any rate, we had fun, we didn’t study, and we got to play with boobs and duct tape. All in all a good night. In fact, if us poor college girls could afford a couple of beers I’d have to call it perfect.

Even better—there’s pictures!  See for yourself!

CNN is reporting some comments made by our former disgrace-in-chief, Bill Clinton.

Former President Clinton said Wednesday it is “pretty hypocritical” of Republicans to criticize incoming Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott for stating publicly what he said the GOP does “on the back roads every day.”

“How do they think they got a majority in the South anyway?” Clinton told CNN outside a business luncheon he was attending. “I think what they are really upset about is that he made public their strategy.”

He added: “They try to suppress black voting, they ran on the Confederate flag in Georgia and South Carolina, and from top to bottom the Republicans supported it."

Delightful, huh?  Much like Al Gore decided to end the tradition of the loser conceding to the winner in an election, his former boss has totally destroyed the tradition of former presidents to keep quiet and stay out of the way of the current one.

The Lotta Flava phenomenon keeps rolling along.  I just took a peek at the server logs and I’ve had about 500 people come to my site today from one particular page.  It appears that a talk show host named John Carlson from Stattle station KVI has posted the Lotta Flava picture on his website. 

Apparently this is the local affiliate for Rush, Sean Hannity, and Larry Elder, so this is definitely my kind of radio station.  If you’re one of the recent visitors, welcome!

Update: Well, the picture has ended up at Free Republic.  Check out this link, and scroll down for another gut-buster of a picture.

I got an email today from columnist Steve Young regarding my Lotta Flava picture.  Steve pointed me towards one of his columns dealing with, what else, Trent Lott and his umpteen apologies.

The outrage in both Democratic and Republican circles over Trent Lott’s round of apologies for his Strom-Thurmond-shouldabeen-president comments reached fever pitch Friday.

After his first apology, which said that he was “only trying to make the old man feel good,” which he apologized for with “I’m sorry if I offended anyone,” which he followed with the apology, “What I meant to say was that if Lester Maddox had been elected president in ‘48, we wouldn’t have the problems we have today,” he issued another apology that read, “For goodness’ sake, I was telling a freakin’ joke.” Even his barbershop-quartet rendition of Paul McCartney’s, “We’re so sorry, Uncle Albert” failed to stem the flak from his side of the aisle.

While written with a humorous bent, Steve’s point here is right on the money.  The whole thing is a farce.  The multiple apologies are obviously contrived, and being done solely to save Lott’s political ass.

Today we hit a couple of milestones.  I launch this blog on September 7th of this year, and for the first six weeks I averaged about 8 readers a day.  As of today we passed 20,000 unique visits and 30,000 page views.  Unbelievable!  Thanks to everyone who has visited, and I hope you keep coming back.  (And tell your friends!)

Also, sorry for the lack of posts tonight.  My dad had a six hour layover on his way back to Houston from Indonesia, so I went down to the airport and had dinner with him.

Tuesday, December 17, 2002

I’ve been pretty hard on Trent Lott lately, and rightly so.  As I said in this post I believe that he has damaged the GOP for years to come in the one area where it needs the most help, and that is in race relations.  Rod Dreher says the same thing at The Corner on NRO, only much better than I did.

[T]here are lots of liberals who are convinced that every conservative is dying to put on a white sheet and re-enact Jim Crow. It’s a lie and a slander, but then when we have one of the top Republicans in the Senate play right into the left-wing stereotype with foolish remarks, we see years of hard intellectual labor establishing our bona fides on this issue collapse. And, Lott has handed the Democrats a cudgel with which to beat us all for years to come. That’s where the anger comes from.

The Democrats cry institutional racism, but a growing, successful black middle class begins to disprove that slanderous theory.  These are the people that the Republican Party had the best chance of reaching.  Now these same middle class blacks can marvel to themselves that the lefties had it right all along.

For better or worse Trent Lott has become the poster boy for institutionalized racism, and he can no longer lead the GOP because of it.

Monday, December 16, 2002

Incoming Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott appeared in an interview on the BET network this evening. 

After “givin’ a shout out to his niggaz” Lott answered questions about his recent comments, which some have attributed to support for segregation. “Yo, dat is some wack shizzle.  I’s jus’ givin props to mah homie Strom Thurmond, you know what I’m sayin’?  I ain’t out to get all up in nobody’s grill an’ shit.  I’m a lover, you dig?  Much love, baby, much love.”

David Frum nails Gore in his column on National Review Online.

Gore seems to have calculated that the risk of losing the nomination in ’04 was too great to bear – especially in an election year when the incumbent president was looking very strong. So he’s decided to do a Nixon – sit out the election after his defeat, let some other shmoe get whomped next time out, and start preparing now for ’08.

Of course, there’s another strong national Democrat with an eager eye on ’08: Hillary Clinton. And quite a lot of the psycho-drama of the next six years in American politics will be watching these two strange beasts try to do each other in. And the most exciting part of the psycho-drama will be watching the most popular and prominent of all national Democrats, Bill Clinton, decide which of these people he dislikes more.

Frum is dead on about Gore, and even more dead on about Clinton. 2008 will be like slitting a shark’s belly open and watching it eat its own guts.

David Horowitz chimes in on Trent Lott over at Front Page Magazine.  As usual he’s right on the money.

In his book Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, Paul Fussell defines the term chickenshit as

... behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige… insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. Chickenshit is so called—instead of horse—or bull—or elephant shit—because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously. Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.

I cite this definition because it fits so perfectly the attitude of Mitch McConnell, the incoming majority whip, regarding the potential official censure of Trent Lott.

Sunday, December 15, 2002

I’ve posted strange search strings before, but this one beats even “John Travolta Cigar Cutter.” Someone just hit this site after searching Yahoo for (ready for this?)... Gay men at play in suit and ties.

God only knows.

I just caught Gore’s interview on 60 Minutes where he stated that he won’t seek the presidency.  A thought occurred to me while watching it.  How much of his decision is an altruistic desire to see Democrats win in 2004, and how much of it is because he simply thinks that Bush is unbeatable in 2004?  If he went on the ticket in 2004 and lost, he’d be a three-time loser and it would absolutely, unequivocally relegate him to the ash heap of history.  By sitting this one out he retains the option of running in 2008 or beyond.

I have to admit that I’m astounded he didn’t run.  I figured his ego wouldn’t allow him to sit this one out.  However, maybe there’s much more of a method to his madness than I had previously considered.

Update: Great minds think alike.

Owen Courrèges has blogged on a story regarding the success of an absinence program in quelling HIV infection rates in Uganda.

Although some may find this surprising, the African nation of Uganda is an oasis on that continent in terms of its experience with AIDS infection rates over the past decade (link via Jim Kalb). According to USAID, “HIV prevalence peaked at around 15 percent in 1991, and had fallen to 5 percent as of 2001.” USAID credits these drops to a resurgence of traditional sexual morality (i.e. abstinence and monogamy).

You can see for yourself that USAID’s assessment is correct both in their own report and from the agenda of the Uganda AIDS Commission, which emphasizes abstinence but makes no mention of condoms. This case study should certainly serve to refute certain elements such as the UN and Planned Parenthood International who erroneously assume that you can throw condoms at people and lower AIDS rates. It doesn’t work that way.

Now, compare this to am AP news report I blogged on recently about HIV infection rates in San Francisco.

In the last two years, the number of HIV and AIDS victims in the city has more than doubled, according to an annual report presented Tuesday to the San Francisco Health Commission by the city’s AIDS office.

In 2000, there were approximately 500 cases in the city of people reportedly infected with HIV and AIDS. In 2002, that number increased to 1,084 cases, said James Loyce Jr., deputy director of health for AIDS programs in San Francisco.

Most of those infected were between the ages of 18 and 30, he said.

Loyce said the reasons for the increase was complex, including a belief among some that new drugs and drug treatments will keep HIV and AIDS patients healthy longer.

“Yes, they will keep you alive,” he said. “But when you use those drugs you have to follow a very strict regime, you must follow to the letter all the instructions.”

He pointed out that the rate of sexually transmitted diseases in the city also has risen in recent years.

My comments to this report are doubly correct in light of the Uganda information.

San Francisco, with its substantial gay community, was one of the first areas where HIV struck in a big way. People in this city are bombarded with print, billboard, and television advertising reminding them about the risks of HIV. A case could be made that the San Francisco gay community is the most AIDS-aware in the nation, with almost a quarter-century of firsthand experience with the disease. If a city like San Francisco, with an educated and aware gay community, has a doubling of its HIV cases, what hope is there for a continent like Africa, with a largely ignorant, uneducated, and superstitious population?

AIDS activists and left-wingers in general decry abstinence/monogamy programs as being anachronistic and ineffective.  But nothing succeeds like success.

This perfectly exemplifies why we consider Moore to be dangerous.  I’ve stated ever since I saw Bowling for Columbine that it had a blatant anti-gun message.  Moore has stated repeatedly that this is not the case, but he has a long history of saying one thing on the record and then qualifying it at a later time.

Take a look at this review of BFC, written by a high school sophomore.  The review itself is pretty mundane, simply a synopsis of what Moore presents to the viewer.  The closing paragraph, however, is the clincher.  Now, as we all know from high school, the closing paragraph is where you provide a summation of the overall message of what you have written.  As far as this review is concerned, this is what the reviewer took away from the film.

"Bowling for Columbine” is a memorable, important film, and anyone interested in the current state of our country should see it, but it isn’t flawless. It is rather long and slow-moving, as Moore seemed compelled to make the same point over and over again. Ultimately, it doesn’t say anything that can’t be summed up right here: Guns are bad; guns kill people; America has way too much gun violence; and we need to get rid of guns. [Emphasis added]

There you have it, folks.  After watching Moore’s movie this teenage reviewer concluded that guns are bad, they kill people, we have too many gun deaths, and that we need to get rid of guns.

Michael Moore should be appalled that someone could get this message from his film, and should correct it immediately by issuing a “Mike’s Message” on the subject.  Somehow I don’t think this is going to happen.

Drudge has a link to a CBS News story which claims that Al Gore has decided not to run for president in 2004, and will make that statement tonight on 60 Minutes.

I’ve decided that I will not be a candidate for president in 2004,” Gore told Lesley Stahl. “I personally have the energy and drive and ambition to make another campaign, but I don’t think that it’s the right thing for me to do.

“I want to contribute to ending the current administration. I think the current policies have to be changed. I think that my best way of contributing to that result may not be as a candidate this time around."

Now, refer to my Dec. 11 post on this subject, where I wrote:

This is going to be really interesting if he indeed decides not to run. It will be very telling on what type of man Gore is if, after deciding not to run, he still keeps himself plastered in the media. There is an unwritten compact in this country which states that previous administrations stay the hell out of the way of the current one. They come out for the occasional interview, but by and large they fade into history, where they belong. Not so with Clinton and Gore, who never give up a chance to slam the Bush administration over one policy or another. If Gore is planning another presidential run I can understand his media presence, but if he’s going to bow out then he needs to bow out completely.

Obviously Gore has no intention of staying out of the spotlight.  This is actually pretty smart on his part.  Because of his notoriety as a former VP, and the guy who lost the 2000 election, he’ll be given much more media access during the election cycle than just about any other pundit.  And during the interviews that the fawning liberal media will be granting him he won’t be constrained in his message as he would if he were a candidate.  (Note the speech he gave earlier in San Francisco.  He never could have given that speech as a viable candidate.)

Gore wants to play spoiler.  It’s going to be an interesting two years.  See ya in ‘04, Al.

Our illustrious former president, Bill Clinton, is now claiming that he had plans drawn up to attack a North Korean nuclear reactor as far back as 1994.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton said Sunday he had warned North Korea in 1994 the United States would destroy its nuclear reactor unless it agreed to freeze its operations.

Speaking at a dinner for Dutch businessmen and public figures, the former president said it was more likely North Korean would use the nuclear issue to bargain for more aid, rather than put weapons on the market.

“We had a tense situation with North Korea in my first term,” Clinton said. Pyongyang “was planning six to eight” bombs a year.

“We drew up plans to destroy the reactor,” Clinton said, and he told Pyongyang the facility would be attacked unless it were frozen.

Isn’t this truly pathetic?  If I was a Democrat I would be absolutely humiliated to be associated with this man.  Shortly after 9/11 he was out in the press talking about how he was just “10 minutes away” from getting bin Laden.  Now, in the face of irrefutable evidence that yet another one of his foreign policy “successes” (one which also helped Jimmy Carter get the Nobel Peace Prize) has helped to destabilize world peace, he’s talking up about how he could have done something but didn’t.

History is not going to judge Bill Clinton well.  And for a man so wholly consumed with his legacy, this must be burning a hole in his soul.  In addition to being remembered as the man who stuck a cigar into the vagina of an intern young enough to be his daughter, he’ll also go down as the president most responsible for the turbulent state of world peace in the early years of the 21st century.

Saturday, December 14, 2002

I won’t be posting much tonight, I’ve got the company Christmas party to go to.  Depending on how drunk I am I might get some more posts up later tonight.  If you just can’t wait to get some new info, there’s a couple of good arguments going on over at MOOREWATCH that you can take a look at.  See this one and this one.

Enjoy!

The Republican Party has blown it.  Totally, utterly blown it.  I’m pissed off, disillusioned, and disgusted.  I’m sitting here working on the computer and I have CNN Headline News on in the background.  Understandably they’re running the Trent Lott story on regular rotation.  Here’s the gist of their report:

1. Trent Lott apologized again for his remarks which some have interpreted to being pro-segregation.
2. Senate Democrats have called on Lott to resign, where Senate Republicans have stated that it’s time to move on.
3. Civil rights leaders such as Jesse Jackson and NAACP President Kwesei Mfume have called on Lott to resign. 
4. So far Lott has has stated that he has no plans to resign his post.

No matter what happens now the GOP looks like racist, opportunist, pandering assholes.

Michael Moore likes to make much ado over America’s culture of violence, and holds up other nations like Canada, England, and Australia as examples of nations who are doing things right.  Unfortunately the rest of the world isn’t the crime-free utopia that Moore makes it out to be.

From The Economist
A NATION OF CRIMINALS
Feb. 22, 2001

BRITAIN may have slipped down many world league tables over the past few decades, but it beats all other rich countries except Australia in one activity: crime. According to a new victimisation survey of industrialised nations, people in England and Wales are at greater risk than anywhere else of having a car stolen. And apart from Australia, people who live in England and Wales are at greater risk of being assaulted, robbed, sexually attacked and having their homes burgled than are people in any other rich country.

Friday, December 13, 2002

With all the brouhaha regarding Trent Lott’s racist statements currently occupyingthe blogosphere, a number of pundits have used the phrase “the party of Lincoln” to describe the Republicans.  Indeed, the GOP takes a great deal of pride in pointing out that it was the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, that fought the civil war to free the slaves.  It is a badge the Republicans wear proudly. 

I think, under the circumstances, a little education about Lincoln is in order.  Consider the following quote:

"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the White and Black races--that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with White people, and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the White and Black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the White race. . . I give. . . the most solemn pledge that I will to the very last, stand by the law of the State, which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes.”

-- Fourth Debate with Stephen Douglas at Charleston, Illinois

Wouldn’t it be great if the last thing we ever saw of Sean Penn was from the camera in the nosecone of a 5,000 lb. laser-guided bomb?

The actor and director Sean Penn arrived in Baghdad on Friday morning at the start of a three-day visit to Iraq.

“By the invitation of the Institute for Public Accuracy, I have the privileged opportunity to pursue a deeper understanding of this frightening conflict,” Penn said in a statement released in Washington and Baghdad on Friday. “I would hope that all Americans will embrace information available to them outside conventional channels. As a father, an actor, a filmmaker, and a patriot . . .

Note the way he always refers to himself as a “patriot.” I can refer to myself as the Sugar Plum Fairy but that doesn’t necessarily make it so.

. . . my visit to Iraq is for me a natural extension of my obligation (at least attempt) to find my own voice on matters of conscience."

Sean Penn, in his quest to prove to the world just how liberal he is, has become the equivalent of Hanoi Jane.  Perhaps he’ll stand at an Iraqi gun turret and remark how he’d love to shoot down a US plane.

What a dick.

(Link via Instapundit.)

Thursday, December 12, 2002

Jimmy Carter, having swallowed hook, line, and sinker the bullshit abotu him being a “peacemaker,” has offered to netogtiate peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, “but only if they and the U.S. government asked him to.”

"We would go immediately and with great alacrity,” the Nobel Peace Prize laureate said during a speech to students at the University of Uppsala.

However, Carter gave no indication he had been asked to mediate.

Well, yeah, no shit.  If we’re going to send someone to negotiate peace (and let’s be real, there is never going to be peace in the Middle East until one side vanquishes the other,) why would we want to send someone like Jimmy Carter, who’s just so damn bad at it?

It seems that the shape of things to come is “rotund.”

Bowling for Columbine has been named the Best Documentary of All Time by the International Documentary Association.  Yes, gentle reader, you read that correctly… the best documentary of all time.  Obviously the members of the International Documentary Association have no idea what the word documentary means.  According to Dictionary.com it is “Presenting facts objectively without editorializing or inserting fictional matter, as in a book or film.” The same site defines polemic as “(1) A controversial argument, especially one refuting or attacking a specific opinion or doctrine; (2) A person engaged in or inclined to controversy, argument, or refutation.”

Which one of these sounds more like Moore?

My local UPN station has been showing The Simpsons from 11:00 to 11:30 every night since I first moved here four years ago.  On Monday that started showing that colon polyp of a show, Will & Grace.  Who actually watches that shit?

Look, I’m not much for grass roots activism, but I’m contacting that fucking station.  How dare they take off The Simpsons and put on 30 minutes of mindless drivel?

Update: I found a comments page on the local UPN station’s website.  Here’s what I left.

When you switched the schedule around and started showing Will & Grace in the evenings instead of The Simpsons I learned to adapt.  I told myself not to worry, that I would always be able to watch The Simpsons at 11:00.  But now you have taken away my lone half-hour of daily sanity.

Look, I know Will & Grace is a hot show on NBC, but let’s be real here—it sucks. Bad.  It sucks snot through a sock.  It’s one of the worst shows of all time.  It’s horrible.  It’s simply, utterly unwatchable.

I have been a faithful viewer of your station for years during the 11:00-11:30 time period.  This week I’ve been switching to Fox to watch Seinfeld.  If the Simpsons doesn’t come back on I’ll be making that switch permanent.

Please.  PLEASE.  Give us back The Simpsons.  Have mercy.  Don’t leave us with Will & Grace.  Suicide is a more palatable alternative.

Update 2: “Last’s night Itchy and Scratchy was without a doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured, I was on the internet within minutes registering my disgust throughout the world. Worst episode ever.” — Comic Book Guy

Wednesday, December 11, 2002

I wake up every morning to Howard Stern.  I listen to him on the way to work, too.  Occasionally, if Howard is doing something boring (like this morning, he had Carly Simon on the show - ugh!) or if the show is a repeat, I’ll tune in to Rush Limbaugh.  I can’t get any radio reception at my desk, so the next time I get to hear the radio is at lunch.  My local talk station, KSFO, has Sean Hannity on from noon to 1:00, and that useless twat Dr. Laura takes over the airwaves from 1:00 to 4:00.  So most days I get to hear a little bit of the Hannity show when I am driving to and from lunch.  I’d describe myself as a big fan of Hannity’s—he’s much more in tune with my political views than Limbaugh or Michael Savage.  But the way he’s been sucking up to Trent Lott really makes me ill.  Check out the transcript of their conversation and make up your own mind.

Hannity needs to put aside the excuses for a second and see Lott for what he is:  an inept Majority Leader, and someone who—intentionally or otherwise—has just portrayed the GOP as a party of apologists for segregation.  Lott needs to go.  Let the voters of Mississippi decide if his words are worthy of his ouster from Congress, but I don’t want him representing my party on the national stage.

Update: Check out what Andrew Sullivan had to say, he’s on the same page as me.

Update 2: The Center for the Advancement of Capitalism has set up a page through which you can contact your senators and urge them to boot Lott.  I used their default letter, but added this paragraph at the end.

I am a Republican and did not vote for you.  I have no plans to vote for you in the future.  I do, however, trust that partisan differences can be put aside in this instance to remove this man from his position of power.  Anything you can do to further that end will be appreciated by Republicans everywhere.

MOOREWATCH is really taking off.  We got linked on Instapundit, so we probably ended up with thousands of visitors from his site alone.  If you haven’t visited MOOREWATCH yet, take a look.  And if you’re a blogger and want to become a contributing member of the site, .

From Matt Drudge:

A half-dozen friends, advisers and close associates of Al Gore tell the NY TIMES’ Adam Nagourney they think the former veep has decided not to run for president again and will announce in early January that he is stepping aside to allow a fresh face to challenge Bush in 2004...

I have a hard time believing this.  Al Gore has been constantly in front of the cameras lately, running his yap on every subject on the political spectrum, including the recent Trent Lott disgrace.  Why would he do so, if not as a precursor to another presidentian bid?  I suppose he could simply enjoy playing spoiler to the man who he views as having stole the election from him, but even I would like to give Gore more credit than that.

This is going to be really interesting if he indeed decides not to run.  It will be very telling on what type of man Gore is if, after deciding not to run, he still keeps himself plastered in the media.  There is an unwritten compact in this country which states that previous administrations stay the hell out of the way of the current one.  They come out for the occasional interview, but by and large they fade into history, where they belong.  Not so with Clinton and Gore, who never give up a chance to slam the Bush administration over one policy or another.  If Gore is planning another presidential run I can understand his media presence, but if he’s going to bow out then he needs to bow out completely.

Show Me
Show You
Ki-kko-man
Ki-kko-man

This has to be seen to be believed.

Tuesday, December 10, 2002

This is yet another example of why Matt Drudge rules.

After a fiery speech by Strom Thurmond at a Mississippi campaign rally in November 1980, Lott, then a congressman, told a crowd: ‘You know, if we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today’... MORE… Quotation appeared in an account of the rally on Nov. 3, 1980, in Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss...

Hopefully this will prove to be the catalyst that undoes Trent Lott.  Personally I don’t think that Lott is a racist, but anyone willing to make these type of statements is—at the very least—too stupid to be heading the Republican party in the Senate.  If he has any integrity he’ll resign his leadership position tomorrow.

Update: When I said “the catalyst that undoes Trent Lott” I referred to this being the event that finally gets rid of a man who shouldn’t be majority leader for a host of other reasons.  In his usual style Arthur Silber says exactly the same thing, but much better than I did.  Take a look.

A few days ago I blogged on Bill Clinton’s recent speech to the Democratic Leadership Council.  In that post I referred to him as “our illustrious former president and cigar sodomizer".  Hazehead, one of my leftie readers, took me to task in the comments section over the definition of sodomy.

You need to learn which oriface is which… you don’t sodomize someone in the vagina. (that where billy stuck his blunt) This is a common confusion for Republicans however, so don’t feel too bad.

Now Slate is offering a quick guide to sodomy.  If you’ve ever wondered what constitutes legal sodomy this article will answer your every question.

And for the record Hazehead, I was right.  As usual.

This is just too damn funny.

A Gambian man unused to Germany’s winter weather woke up to find his car had gone completely white overnight and called police to complain vandals had painted it.

Police in the central German town of Hildesheim responding to investigate the crime discovered the man had mistaken snow on his car for paint when he looked down from his apartment window.

“To him it looked like paint when he was looking down on the car from the fifth floor. He was really worried and it wasn’t a hoax, otherwise he would have been fined for it,” police spokesman Walter Wallott said Monday.

Some drunk was running his mouth off about the president, according to CNN.

A man who made a remark about a “burning Bush” during the president’s March 2001 trip to Sioux Falls was sentenced Friday to 37 months in prison.

Richard Humphreys of Portland, Oregon was convicted in September of threatening to kill or harm the president and said he plans to appeal. He has said the comment was a prophecy protected under his right to free speech.

Humphreys said he got into a barroom discussion in nearby Watertown with a truck driver. A bartender who overheard the conversation realized the president was to visit Sioux Falls the next day and told police Humphreys talked about a “burning Bush” and the possibility of someone pouring a flammable liquid on Bush and lighting it.

“I said God might speak to the world through a burning Bush,” Humphreys testified during his trial. “I had said that before and I thought it was funny."

Now, I’m all for laws against threatening the president, but doesn’t this seem a little extreme to you?  Consider that there are violent criminals who don’t get 37 months.  Some drunk running his mouth does not, in my mind, make a credible threat against the president.  Don’t get me wrong, the Secret Service should have drug his ass into an interrogation room and kept an eye on him while the president was in town, but sending this poor bastard to prison for three years is a tad over the top.

For the past couple of weeks I have been working feverishly with Jim Kenefick and Rachel Lucas on a new website devoted entirely to Michael Moore.  The site is called MOOREWATCH, and it is finally ready to go online.  Here’s the mission statement:

MOOREWATCH is dedicated to unearthing the truth behind the doublespeak and falsehood that spews from the mouth (and keyboard) of Michael Moore on a regular basis. Moore is a disingenuous danger to this country, and his assumptions and assertions should not go unchallenged. The collective expertise and research abilities of the entire Internet are more than enough to debunk most of the nonsense Moore regularly puts forth as fact, and we at MOOREWATCH hope to be the clearinghouse for this information

Ready to take a look?  Here’s the URL:  http://www.moorewatch.com

We’re looking for contributors for the site, so if you’re a blogger or just feel like writing the odd Moore critique, feel free to sign up. 

You can run but you can’t hide, lard ass.  You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool everyone.  Your every utterance will be pored over by the collective genius of the internet, it will be run through the ringer, critiqued beyond anything you can imagine, and you will be revealed for the lying, disingenuous, pathetic blowhard that you know yourself to be.

Monday, December 09, 2002

It seems that a whole new buch of Hollywood lefties are taking on the president over Iraq.

Mike Farrell and Anjelica Huston will release a letter Tuesday signed by a hundred celebrities who want President Bush to stop his war rhetoric toward Iraq.

The letter reportedly is signed by stars including Kim Basinger, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, Jessica Lange and Martin Sheen, publicists for the event said Monday.

This is such a reflection on the tendency of our society to place great value on the opinions of entertainers.  Would you care what Kim Basinger’s opinion was on planning for your retirement?  How about Matt Damon’s input on whether you need a root canal?  Would you seek the advice of the ever-brilliant Jessica Lange on how to get your daughter’s math grades up?  No?

Then why the fuck do we care what these people think about US policy on Iraq?

A woman in England is suing the UK’s socialized medicine system for the right to go to France to obtain a hip replacement surgery.

A woman is suing the NHS after she was refused permission to seek hip replacement surgery in France in a test case that could determine the right of British patients to go abroad for treatment.

In what is believed to be the first legal action of its kind, Yvonne Watts, 72, is suing her local NHS primary care trust for the right to be treated straight away by doctors on the Continent under new European Union rules.

Ms Watts, of Queen’s Park, Bedford, has to use a wheelchair and is in constant pain but has been told by local health managers that she may have to wait up to a year for a hip replacement on the NHS.

Did you catch that?  A wait for up to a YEAR?  Oh yeah, this is a wonderful idea, let’s implement it in America right away!  But here is, what I think, is the most telling paragraph:

Last week, EU ministers agreed a formal declaration enshrining the right to be treated anywhere in the union. Patients will be able to travel to other countries for treatment if their own country cannot provide it “within a time limit which is medically justifiable”.

Obviously this is enough of an issue with the various systems of socialized medicine in Europe to where the EU has issued a formal policy on it.  What a wonderful system to emulate!

According to a new European survey, smokers would rather give up sex for a month than stop smoking.

Most smokers in Europe would find it easier to give up sex for a month than cigarettes and many view even bungey jumping or parachuting as less difficult than kicking the habit.

Nearly 80 percent of British smokers, almost 70 percent in the Netherlands, France and Germany and more than 55 percent in the Belgium and Spain would forgo sex rather than live without cigarettes for a month.

On the surface this would seem to indicate just how addictive cigarettes are.  However, unless sex was as easy to obtain as cigarettes the comparison is pointless.  If I could go down to the little Israeli corner store by my house and buy a pack of sex I might be a lot less tempted to give it up for a month.  And, let’s face it, unless you’re involved in a healthy relationship or look like a fucking movie star getting sex multiple times a month is a pipe dream for most people.  It’s a lot easier to “give up” something that you weren’t going to get anyway.  If it was a choice between giving up smoking for a month and, say, not winning the Nobel Peace Prize, it’s not much of a decision, is it?

“You know how at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life George’s little girl, Zuzu Bailey, says, ‘Look, Daddy! Teacher says every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings.’? Well, keep in mind that if that happened today the ACLU would hunt down that teacher and sue her.”

-- Jonah Goldberg, NRO

The Coca Cola corporation has finally released a diet version of Vanilla Coke.  My life is now complete.

Some guy has written a critique of one of my posts.  He’s apparently an American living in French Canada, which I suppose is roughly comparable to being banished to the eighth ring of hell.

In this post over at Right-Thinking from the Left Coast is what I suppose is intended as an example of why the European opinion of America (and its politics) can be safely ignored. My question is this: why should any country (European or no) follow the lead of a country that can spawn and sustain the likes of Jerry Springer? I mean, doesn’t that invalidate all Americans (and our opinions). If you follow the logic of that post, it must. Yeah, I know, Jerry Springer doesn’t really have anything to do with any of this, does it? I guess anything that supports your argument is fair game, even if it doesn’t make any fucking sense.

I believe a post this monumentally ignorant deserves a response.

There is a petition online to try and persuade Michael Moore to run for president.  You might be surprised to find that I think this would be a great idea.  Every leftist lunatic who might otherwise vote for the Democrats will vote for Moore.  In addition to the Green party the Moore fans would strip precious votes away from whomever the Democrat candidate ends up being.  Any vote that doesn’t go to the Democrats is a vote for the GOP.  If you would like to see four more years of George W. Bush, take a moment and sign the petition.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before but I’m a Mac guy.  I’ve been using one since 1985.  Before that I had two computers from Commodore, a VIC-20 and later a 64.  At school we had a computer lab full of TRS-80’s.  But I’ve been a loyal Mac guy ever since my dad first brought home our first little toaster Mac in 1985.  I’ve used Windows at work for years, and right now I do my work on a PowerMac G4 and an old UNIX workstation, which will (hopefully!) soon be upgraded to some sort of Linux box.  But I digress.

Earlier tonight I was checking the web stats page, and I noticed I was getting a large number of hits from the website for a company called Ranchero Software.  Intrigued I took a peek.  It seems that they make a website browser product called NetNewsWire, which is a MacOS-only app which allows you to browse weblogs and similar sites to see if they have been updated.  it does so by checking the XML feed.  Most sites run by pMachine (as this site is) or Movable Type (Rachel Lucas, Instapundit, and a zillion others) allow you to syndicate the site using XML.  You can find the link to my XML feed in the gray bar on the right side, or by clicking here.

For more info click on the links above to visit their site.  I mention this only because this seems to be a really cool product, it’s MacOS X native, (sorry Windows users!  I’m sure there’s something similar out there) and I felt like giving them a plug.

And if you’re not using a Mac with MacOS X… what’s wrong with you?  :)

Sunday, December 08, 2002

One of the world’s most notorious internet spammers has become the target of organized revenge by rank and file internet users.

West Bloomfield bulk e-mailer Alan Ralsky, who just may be the world’s biggest sender of Internet spam, is getting a taste of his own medicine.

[H]e says he’s been inundated with ads, catalogs and brochures delivered by the U.S. Postal Service to his brand-new $740,000 home.

It’s all the result of a well-organized campaign by the anti-spam community, and Ralsky doesn’t find it funny.

“They’ve signed me up for every advertising campaign and mailing list there is,” he told me. “These people are out of their minds. They’re harassing me."

In this day and age he’s lucky that someone hasn’t parked a Ryder truck full of fuel oil and fertilizer outside his $740,000 home.

(Link via Ryne McClaren.)

If anything truly shows what an utter farce the UN weapons inspection is, it’s this article in The Telegraph.

Iraq yesterday handed the United Nations a 43-volume 11,807-page declaration on its weapons of mass destruction as America reacted with fury to a ruling that it will not be allowed to see the full report. The contents of the document will decide whether Iraq faces war.
 

An Iraqi official shows documents on Iraq’s arms programmes to journalists in Baghdad

Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, has told the 15 Security Council members that they will be given the report only after sensitive information about weapons manufacture had been removed.

The purged details are expected to be the most sensitive - precisely the information that America most needs to compare with its own intelligence.

There you have it, folks.  The UN is denying the United States—a permanent member of its own Security Council—access to the Iraqi report precisely because it knows that the US has intelligence that will prove the Iraqi’s are in material breach of the terms imposed on them.  The UN is apparently much more concerned about restraining the cowboy Bush and curbing American hegemony than it is about such trivial matters as, oh, disarming Iraq.

What a useless, morally bankrupt organization the UN is.

The Sydney Morning Herald has one of the most sycophantic articles about Michael Moore and Bowling for Columbine that I have ever read.  It repeats every lie Moore has ever told.  If a newspaper article could be rationally compared to a sex act, this one is a big sloppy hummer.

Tim Blair, as usual, comes out with both guns blazing.

So, Canada doesn’t like America, Americans, American values, or our president.  According to the bleeding hearts in our media this should carry some significance.  Well, for a nation that seems to take great delight in lecturing us in morality they sure seem to have a soft spot for people who like kiddie porn.  Facts gleaned from the story:

• Last March a British Columbia judge declared that a defendent’s stories, entitled Kiddie Kink Classics, had artistic merit, even though they were “morally repugnant.”
• In the wake of this decision the Ottawa justice minister is introducing legislation to “narrow” the definition of the artistic merit license for child pornography.
• In January, 2001, the Canadian Supreme Court “upheld the law banning possession of child pornography but broadened the artistic merit exception by saying it should encompass any work with objectively established artistic value, however small.” [Emphasis added]
• The Ottawa justice minister “will not ban possession of child pornography outright because he fears it could violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantee to freedom of expression.” [Emphasis added]
• The same Ottawa justice minister is rejecting calls to raise the age of consent from 14 to 16.

Now, just like with Europe, can someone please explain to me why we should give a damn what Canada thinks of us?  They permit terrorists to enter their country, they permit Hezbollah to raise money, and they think child exploitation should, in some instances, be covered by “artistic merit.”

Sounds like a real paradise.  Good thing they have free health care and no gun crime.

(Link via The Ville.)

Saturday, December 07, 2002

It appears that Rice University, in my home town of Houston, has figured out a sly way of considering a potential student’s race during the admissions process, even though technically they are not permitted to do so.

When a federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled in 1996 that the University of Texas Law School could not legally consider race in admitting students, lawyers at Rice University, a highly selective private college here, reluctantly decided that the ruling applied to it, too.

Like that?  “Awww, shucks.  We can’t continue our illegal shunning of qualified white applicants in favor of unqualified minorities.  Damn that pesky Constitution!”

As many of my regular readers know I’ve been pretty hard on the Canadian government for their anti-American attitude, and their cowardly appeasement of terrorists and Saddam Hussein.  Yesterday, while perusing Matt Drudge’s site, I came across this report that a couple of Canadian women have gone to Baghdad to act as human shields.

So, it seems the much maligned Miss World Pageant is finally over.  The winner?  Miss Turkey.

A 21-year-old Turkish model and dancer took the Miss World crown on Saturday in a contest moved to Britain from Nigeria after deadly Muslim-Christian riots sparked by controversy over the pageant.

“I am so happy and excited,” Azra Akin told Reuters after winning the 2002 title and 100,000 pounds ($157,000) prize money ahead of Miss Colombia, Natalia Peralta, in second and Miss Peru, Marina Mora Montero, in third place.

“I hope to represent the women of the world in a good way,” Akin said.

Now, does it strike any of you as just a tad suspicious that a woman from a Muslim country ended up winning the prize?  There’s no way to prove this, of course, but given the recent slaughter in Nigeria by followers of The Religion of Peace™, I can’t imagine that Turkey’s religious orientation could have been far from the minds of the judges.  To me this seems like something a beauty pageant judge would think:  “Maybe if we let a contestant from an Islamic country win it will show the world that we’re not such bad people!”

I’m not trying to malign Miss Turkey in any way.  I didn’t watch the pageant, so perhaps she was so superior to all the other women that it was no contest.  But imagine this:  a beauty pageant is being held for the first time in the deep south.  Local racist groups riot over the fact that there are non-white women included as contestants.  Eventually the pageant gets moved to New York City, where the black contestant from Alabama ends up the winner.  Wouldn’t you smell a rat under those circumstances?

I would, and I smell one here, too.

Checking my webstats page I’ve been gettng a ton of hits for people searching for some variation of “cat looking at eminem’s house”.  Come for the cat humor, stay for the brilliant, insightful conservative political analysis.

Also, I had someone from Finland hit this site after a search for “clitoris low blow”.  I just tried this string and, as expected, it came up with about 14 trillion porno sites, so how this guy ended up here I have no idea.

Friday, December 06, 2002

If there was ever anything that clearly demonstrated just how asinine the concept of “performance art” is, it’s this.  (Not to mention that this story is riotously funny.)

Visitors to a off-beat Berlin arts center thought a dead woman on the ground was a performance art act rather than a suicide, police said on Thursday.

“A group of visitors to the center at first thought the body lying on the ground at the art center was part of an art performance,” said police spokeswoman Christine Rother. “It took a while before anyone realized it was not an act but a suicide."

Considering the penchant for the wine-and-cheese dumbasses that staff the National Endowment for the Arts to fund performance art, I think this is an avenue we should explore.  If the NEA wants to use my tax dollars to encourage performance artists to jump off buildings and die, well, I say that I’m all for it.

To the anonymous donor who just kicked in $5 towards the site… THANKS!!  Every little bit helps to pay the bills.  And if you like what you see here and would like to help out with a buck or two, click here.

Thursday, December 05, 2002

Things that cannot be kept apart:  teenagers in love, Michael Moore and Jelly donuts, and Al Gore and Chinese money.  (To convert Chinese yuan to American dollars, divide the yuan by 8.)

I wish this was a joke.

1. See Eminem’s house for sale on eBay.
2. See a picture of a cat looking at Eminem’s house for sale on eBay.
3. See a picture of a cat looking at a picture of a cat looking at Eminem’s house for sale on eBay.

I think these two headlines speak volumes:

Bush fails to win over sceptical Europeans: Poll on war with Iraq shows France, Germany and Russia opposed, UK divided, and Jerry Springer Opera Gets London World Premiere.

What do these people like about America?  They don’t like the fight against terrorism, but they love Jerry Springer.  Can someone give me one good reason why we should give a fuck what Europe thinks of us?

If you want to see what a wonderful, peace-loving man saddam Hussein is, take a look at this website.

WARNING:  PAGE CONTAINS GRAPHIC IMAGES

(Link via I Am Always Right.)

This is just unbelievable.

TOURISTS to Russia can now experience one of the horrors of Soviet life and spend one night in a Stalin-era gulag, local media have reported.

Russians may still shiver at the name of the Perm work camp in the Urals, but tourists can now voluntarily stay the night, eat prisoner food, and feel what it was like to be a political prisoner in Soviet times.

According to Western historians, up to 30 million people died from repression under Lenin and the brutal Stalin regime, many in the infamous network of forced labour camps known as the gulag.

Perhaps they can open a Saddam’s House of Horrors in Baghdad after the 101st Airborne gets through demolishing it.

(Link via Tim Blair.)

Wednesday, December 04, 2002

So, yet again we have another writer spewing forth Michael Moore’s lies and distortions without bothering to check their veracity.  Most recently it was a columnist for a college newspaper.  This time it’s a writer for the Smoky Mountain News named Hunter Pope, who has written a fawning review of Bowling for Columbine.  I’ve debunked in previous posts much of what Pope has written here, but there are a few points I want to address.

Tuesday, December 03, 2002

A new report reveals that cases of HIV in San Francisco have doubled in the past two years, according to the AP.

Sorry for the lack of posting today.  I’ve been both under the weather, and busy on another project.  (This new project will be revealed here in the coming days.) If anything else catches my fancy tonight I’ll pop up another post, but otherwise I recommend any of the sites in the blogroll to the right.  See ya!

It seems that our illustrious former president and cigar sodomizer, Bill Clinton, spoke at a meeting of the Democrat Leadership Council today.  Unlike most former presidents Clinton feels the need to run his yap at every possible opportunity.  As the first true Rock Star President he simply cannot be outside of the limelight for more than five minutes.  Ar any rate, he said a few things today that were surprisingly honest and accurate.

I got out of the Navy in 1992, and began contemplating what the hell I wanted to do with rest of my life.  I got myself an entry-level job job doing CAD work, and I began taking a few courses at the local community college in Houston, North Harris County College.  One of my classes was basic freshman Political Science, and I had a professor named Warren Anderson.

Anderson was a noted leftie.  At the time I was still rather ambivalent politically, but I most definitely had a noted leftward tilt.  (How leftward?  I donated money to the ACLU, Greenpeace, and used to hang Handgun Control Inc. propaganda on the walls of my office.  No shit.  Yes, me.  I did that.  Yes.  No, I’m not kidding.) I found Anderson’s class interesting, mostly because my political ignorance had given me nothing substantial to compare it to.  However, the main textbook we were assigned to read, Democracy for the Few by Michael Parenti, really didn’t sit well with me.  I didn’t fully comprehend why at the time, but the neo-Marxism inherent in the text went against some internal instinct I had, even if I then had no way of accurately rationalizing it.

Monday, December 02, 2002

Canada’s health care system is held up by most of the American left wing as the ideal to which we should aspire.  I’ve done a number of posts pointing out the massive shortcomings in Canada’s system.  (Take a look at this great article on NRO by David Frum for some blunt facts.) According to the Regina Leader-Post a new internal report highlights a number of deficiencies in the Canadian way of doing things.  Facts gleaned from the article:

• Many patients wait longer than three months for treatment, but since the government controls the entire health care system there is no alternate method for them to receive treatment.  (Other than, one presumes, coming to America.)
• Patients are routinely denied treatment because the system “fails to live up to its commitment.”
• There is a drastic shortage of health care workers in Canada.
• One third of all Canadian families have difficulty accessing a family physician.
• More than half of Canada’s doctors are foreign-trained.
• There is a shortage of CT scanners, MRI machines, and other diagnostic equipment.

Yeah, this is the system that we need to aspire to in America.  Even though 85% of the population in this country has access to the world’s best health care, the leftist punditry would have us create a behemoth like Canada’s, which promises universal shitty health care for everyone.

(Link via Owen Courrèges.)

Reader Bane alerted me to this story a couple of days ago.  It appears that the turbulence of post-Taliban Afghanistan has enabled the reintroduction of an apparently-accepted practice of child prostitution, according to Pravda.

Sunday, December 01, 2002

A week ago I began re-reading Dinesh D’Souza’s brilliant book The End of Racism.  One chapter therein deals with Afrocentrism and the “academics” who promote it.  D’Souza quotes a scholar named Mary Lefkowitz who said, in a critique of Afrocentrism, that it was “one part fact, two parts speculation, and three parts outright falsehoods.”

I can’t think of a better thumbnail definition to describe the work of Michael Moore.