Iran's Terrorist Prez?

Is Iran's new sham President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a terrorist? (Mahmoud pictured on the left above.)

Five Americans, who were taken hostage in the 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, allege with certainty that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was one of their captors. The Iranians deny Ahmadinejad's participation.

"The Bush administration today demanded that the Iranian government clarify the role of President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 1979 storming of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the prolonged hostage crisis that followed.....The 444-day ordeal of the Americans held captive in the Tehran embassy marked one of the most searing and emotional collective public experiences in recent American history.....the hostage-takers went on to become top officials and legislators in the parliament".

If the hostage-takers are so popular, revered, and holding political office, it shouldn't be difficult to identify and bring forward the person in the photograph above to determine if he is indeed Iran's new president-elect.

Read more here, here, and here.

"Iran's president-elect has proclaimed an Islamic revolution of global proportions, and would seek to revive the principles of the Islamic revolution in 1978".

Bush's Speech

President Bush spoke tonight to a sometimes fickle American populace that often suffers amnesia, and is certainly embroiled in the concept of instant gratification.

Citing insurgent failures to: prevent transfer of Iraqi sovereignty; force allied withdrawal; incite civil war; prevent elections; stop Iraqi government formation; and prevent security forces recruitment, Bush vowed to "complete the mission".

Acknowledging that much work needs to be done in Iraq, Bush said the task "demands the perserverance of our citizens".

This was a good speech urging public support of the Iraq policy spoken to a forgetful public that needs to be reminded what the War on Terror is all about.

Also - Ran

Also-ran John Kerry shows up at DNC branch headquarters (aka The New York Times).

The guy who voted for the Iraq war before he voted against it, the guy who declaimed wrong war, wrong time, wrong place, the guy whose fabulous Christmas in Cambodia is seared in his memory is telling President Bush what to say about Iraq.

Butt Crack

Check out Butt Seriously from the New York Post.

Don't forget to view the spread.

Hattip: Michelle Malkin for her Crack Reporting.

China and Unocal

China is building its military forces and emerging as a potential military threat while pursuing world energy sources through its vibrant economy. This is no gray area.

Beijing also is facing a major energy shortage that, according to one
Pentagon study, could lead it to use military force to seize territory with oil
and gas resources....China "is looking not only to build a blue-water navy to
control the sea lanes [from the Middle East], but also to develop undersea mines and missile capabilities to deter the potential disruption of its energy
supplies from potential threats, including the U.S. Navy, especially in the case of a conflict with Taiwan," the report said.....U.S. officials have said two likely mercentile targets for China are the Russian Far East, which has vast oil
and gas deposits, and Southeast Asia, which also has oil and gas resources.

Added to this are the overwhelming national security implications in China's bid to takeover Unocal.

Wake up and smell the coffee -- don't give China the rope with which to hang us.

Read more here, here, and here.

Yes and No

The Supreme Court handed down a yes/no decision to uphold the premise of: separation of church and "state buildings".

Displaying the Commandments on a Kentucky courthouse wall has unconstitutional religious intent, while displaying the Commandments in the Texas Capitol yard has secularly historical context.

Uh - huh. The logic is supreme.

"The road map is keep your mouth shut about the religious purpose, talk about secular and historical things, and you can probably get away with it," said Douglas Laycock, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Texas.

Nothing much has changed.

Flag Burning

"The House on Wednesday approved a constitutional amendment that would give Congress the power to ban desecration of the American flag,"

Mark Steyn weighs in: Old Glory Can Take The Heat

"A flag has to be worth torching. When a flag gets burned, that's not a sign of its weakness but of its strength. If you can't stand the heat of your burning flag, get out of the superpower business. It's the left that believes the state can regulate everyone into thought-compliance. The right should understand that the battle of ideas is won out in the open."

Stealing Home

Stealing Home: "Now that the high court has cleared the way for elected officeholders to trump private property rights, abuse of eminent domain becomes more likely,"


The Corner: The quickest way to reverse Kelo is to find some conservative town in Utah somewhere to shut down an abortion clinic in order to make room for a Wal-Mart. (Hat Tip: Blogs For Bush)

Practice

Fargus And Obstructionism

Fargus takes exception to "Democrat obstructionism", preferring the terms "defense" and "survival".

I agree that the Democrats are in a defensive struggle for their survival.

The Democrats' alternative ideas were rejected in the last presidential election. Perhaps, they now feel they can escape future rejection and criticism by not advancing any ideas at all.

Regardless of the nomenclature used, opposition for opposition’s sake is still “obstructionism”.

Read more here about “A Party Without Ideas” whose “reactionary liberalism” keeps them hanging on “to the status quo at all costs”.

More Rove

Ken Mehlman reacts to Democrat attacks on Karl Rove: "It’s outrageous that the same Democrats who stood by Dick Durbin’s libeling of our military are now expressing faux outrage over Karl Rove’s statement of historical fact."

"We, The Undersigned, Citizens And Residents Of The United States Of
America … Appeal To The President Of The United States, George W. Bush … And To All Leaders Internationally To Use Moderation And Restraint In
Responding To The Recent Terrorist Attacks Against The United States."
(MoveOn.Org Website, "MoveOn Peace,")

The White House is standing by Rove's implication that "liberals are soft on terrorism". Key word here is LIBERALS.

"I think Karl was very specific, very accurate, in who he was pointing
out," communications director Dan Bartlett said. "It's touched a chord with
these Democrats. I'm not sure why. It's somewhat puzzling why all these
Democrats ... who responded forcefully after 9-11, who voted to support President Bush's pursuit of the war on terror, are now rallying to the defense
of Moveon.org"

The New York Post thinks Libs Are Wimps: "All Rove did was speak about the comparative attitudes of liberals and conservatives on how best to conduct the War on Terror. And you know what? He was right.

"But perhaps the most important difference," he said, is "in the area of
national security. Conservatives saw the attacks and prepared for war; liberals
saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer
therapy and understanding for our attackers."

"The hysteria of his critics proves just how close to home the remarks hit."

As usual, Rove cut to the chase last night on Scarborough Country:

Rove: "There are a lot of Democrats who have not gotten over the last election. They're rage-filled. They thought they were going to win. They have never gotten over 2000. They will not get over 2004. And they are just letting their rage work its way through. And that's not helpful for them or for the system."

That statement, more than any other, cuts to the root cause of the political divisions and Democrat obstructionism that exist today.

Crappuccino

How about a cup of coffee that shoots out of a cat's ass?

Sounds like crappuccino to me !

Karl Rove

Karl Rove: "Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers." Conservatives, he said, "saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war."

Karl Rove is spot on!

Dems are outraged? The kingpins of blame America first, divisiveness, obstructionism, and trashing Republicans now demand apology or resignation. Their hypocrisy is unbelievable.

Captain's Quarters: "What we have here, in this demand for a retraction after a season of personal attacks from Howard Dean, Harry Reid, and the entire leadership of the Democratic Party is pusillanimity at its most hypocritical. Talk about dishing it out and not being able to take it! That the party of Harry Truman has descended to this jaw-dropping level of political cowardice and sheer crybaby status boggles the mind."

Right On The Right: "Durbinizing Rove".

GOP Vixen: "Now They're Outraged"

Ankle Biting Pundits: "Karl Rove Nails It. Somebody clone Karl Rove and put him in the Senate. He utterly and completely took it to the Democrats in a way that Republicans need to emulate."

Michelle Malkin: "The Dems are having a hissyfit over the comments, as if stating the obvious is on par with slandering American troops and invoking hysterical analogies."

Social Security

WSJ -- "Congress should give workers back their extra Social Security taxes."

Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan and South Carolina Senator Jim
DeMint are calling for legislation to bring an immediate halt to the ongoing
political raid on the surplus payroll taxes collected by Social Security.

Every day that Congress fails to act, another $200 million is spent
rather than being saved for future retirement.

For the past 20 or so years, the federal government has collected $1.67 trillion more in payroll taxes (and accumulated interest) than it has paid out in retirement benefits to senior citizens.

But not a penny of this money has been saved for any worker's retirement. The surplus dollars get spent by Congress, and the Social Security system is credited with an IOU from the right hand of the government, the Treasury Department.

Where the money will come from to pay these debts is anyone's guess--though if history is any guide it will be higher taxes. Wherever the money comes from, it can't be from the Social Security "trust fund" because those dollars have already been spent.

Instead of spending this retirement money, the reformers would allow individual workers to divert every surplus Social Security dollar--from
now until the extra cash runs out in 2016--into personal retirement
accounts.

As for the politics, this calls the bluff of Democrats who claim to be the sole protectors of the Social Security trust fund but have done nothing to stop depleting it.

Update: Paul Ryan -- the first step in saving Social Security must be to make sure all of Social Security's taxes go to Social Security, rather than to other federal spending.

Dick Durbin Apologizes

Bellicose and belligerent, Dick Durbin trashed the U.S. and its military; said he was misunderstood; and defiantly refused to backtrack.

Amidst mounting public pressure, Durbin was finally compelled to apologize for comparing Gitmo to Nazis, Soviet gulags, and Pol Pot's killing fields.

Durbin was ready and willing to humiliate the U.S., but when the backlash and pressure forced Durbin to eat crow -- all of a sudden it's crying time.

His voice quaking and tears welling in his eyes, the No. 2 Democrat in the
Senate also apologized to any soldiers who felt insulted by his remarks.

Is he sincere? Are Durbin's tears the result of heartfelt regret and sorrow for his remarks that he now considers incorrect, or are the tears the result of regret and sorrow for the backlash? I suspect the latter.

Asked what the next step for Durbin would be, an aide to Bill Frist told
FOX News, "Well, when you say something that appears all over Al Jazeera, you have a lot of work to do."

Footnote to Dick Durbin: US policy in no way compares with the policies of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot.

Take Back The Memorial

Families of 9/11 victims held a rally to protest the International Freedom Center building a "museum of freedom" at Ground Zero.

"You wouldn't put a debate about Nazism and authoritarianism at Dachau."

Take Back The Memorial

Illegals

"Sixteen foreign-born construction workers with phony immigration documents were able to enter a nuclear weapons plant in eastern Tennessee because of lax security controls, a federal report said Monday.....the workers had fake green cards that certified them to work in the United States."

Outrageous!

Bolton Blocked

More obstruction and stonewalling from Senate Democrats. "The vote was 54-38, six shy of the total needed to force a final vote on Bolton."

Joe Biden isn't much interested in Bolton, but rather is feigning indignance about "taking a stand" against President Bush.

It's all a charade of a trumped up issue.

Opposition to Bolton has become a party matter.....This baffling process becomes
intelligible only in terms that Dodd and Biden want to hold together the
Democrats on grounds of senatorial prerogative in demanding information. Sen. Charles Schumer, a Democrat who often removes the veils from his party's
strategy, conceded that this trumped up issue unified the caucus as it had in
opposing Miguel Estrada's failed judicial nomination.

Social Security

John Fund writes about "proposing the creation of personal "lockboxes" to ensure that the government can't raid Social Security taxes for other programs"

A good idea -- keep Social Security taxes for Social Security.

Downing Street Memos

Captain's Quarters weighs in on the Downing Street "retyped copies" memos.

More from Power Line.

Iraqi Torture House

Insurgents torture Iraqis, via PoliPundit.

Marines on an operation to eliminate insurgents find a torture center equipped with electric wires, a noose, handcuffs, a 574-page jihad manual
- and four beaten and shackled Iraqis.

The men said they had been tortured with shocks and flogged with a strip of rubber for more than two weeks,

"They kill somebody every day," "They've killed a lot of people."

Marks from beatings criss-crossed his back, and deep pocks, apparently from electric shock burns, were gouged in his
skin.

The American military has found torture houses after invading towns heavily populated by insurgents.

Awaiting another comparison from Dick Durbin.

From Little Green Footballs: Despite the incredible cheapening and trivialization of the word by the likes of Amnesty International and Dick Durbin, this is what real torture looks like—and it’s being dispensed by the people Michael Moore compared to “Minutemen:”

Dick Durbin's Slander

Mark Steyn comments re: Dick Durbin.

"Every third-rate hack on every European newspaper can do the Americans-are-Nazis schtick.....it's about senior Democrats who are so over-invested in their hatred of a passing administration that they've signed on to the nuttiest slurs of the lunatic fringe.....what he's done -- in a time of war, make an inflammatory libel against his country's military that has no value whatsoever except to America's enemies."

Zzzzzz's

Had a chuckle over this one. My husband's snoring registers about 5.3 on the Richter scale.

A woman upset about her husband's snoring is accused of stabbing
him with a pen and hitting him with a dumbbell to wake him up. The woman first poured water on her husband, but that did not wake him up.

"She then stabbed him with a pen in the arm twice," "After he went back to sleep after the pen thing, she woke him up again with a workout weight."

Guys, pay attention when your wife says, "stop snoring".

Europe

Thoughts by Paul Johnson in the WSJ.

The EU -- "symbolic corpse of a dying continent".

In Europe today: anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, exceptionally low birthrates.

Dick Durbin

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) defecating from the mouth on the Senate floor.

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred
here [at Guantanamo Bay]--I almost hesitate to put them in the [Congressional] Record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated
room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor,
with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his
hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime--Pol Pot or others--that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

A detainee was chained, messed himself, heard rap, pulled his hair, got hot, got cold. But to Little Dick, this is equivalent to the atrocities of the Nazi holocaust, the atrocities of the Soviet gulags, and the atrocities of the killing fields of Cambodia. The horrors of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot are diminished and cheapened by Durbin's comparison.

A Muslim's method of interrogation might well be to cut off the detainee's hand; Saddam's method might be to rape the detainee's wife and kill his children; an Iraqi insurgent's method might be to videotape a detainee's beheading, or hang dead detainees from bridges.

Instead of detaining unlawful, enemy combatants, Dick Durbin would rather trash US troops for the sake of a political ploy.

Reaction from White House spokesman Trent Duffy: "What this is is a disservice to any man and woman serving in the U.S. military who's putting their life on the line each day"

--
Gitmo Cookbook

Jacko Leaving Country?

When asked on Larry King Live if Michael Jackson would be leaving the country, brother Jermaine said, "I would".

Fox News' Roger Friedman is also reporting that Jacko is bound for Europe.

I wouldn't be surprised if Jacko skips out, a la Roman Polanski, before another victim / accuser surfaces with charges of sexual molestation (extradition and all that). There have been many boys in Michael's bed.

--
Jacko Walks

Hat Tips

Speak Easy tips its hat to:

Little Green Footballs -- "Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill) suddenly launched into a bizarre rant comparing the American military to Nazis, the Soviet KGB, and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge."

Michelle Malkin -- "Prominent Senate Republicans said Tuesday that closing the Guantanamo Bay prison will not fix a U.S. image tarnished by allegations of
American troops mistreating terrorism suspects."

Hillary Closed To The Media

A major appearance by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in Buffalo was
suddenly closed to the media Monday, a week after the senator lambasted
reporters for lacking enough "spine" to stand up to the Bush administration.

In a conference call, Clinton said: "I did not make that decision."

A week ago at a fund-raising event, Clinton said, "The press is missing in action, with all due respect".

Senior county Democratic officials told The Buffalo News early in the day that Clinton aides had told County Democratic Chairman Leonard R.
Lenihan that the senator's people wanted the event closed to the media.

But later, Lenihan said that "it was my decision" to bar the media.

Uh-huh. Yeah, right.

Roadblock Obstructionism

Bush blasts Democrats' "agenda of the roadblock".

President Bush last night ripped the Democratic Party as do-nothing obstructionists who stand for nothing except obstruction.

"We hear 'no' to making tax relief permanent, we hear 'no' to Social Security reform, we hear 'no' to confirming federal judges, we hear 'no' to a highly qualified U.N. ambassador, we hear 'no' to medical-liability reform. On issue after issue, they stand for nothing except obstruction, and this is not leadership,"

Bush cited the Democrats' approach "to simply do nothing, to delay solutions, obstruct progress, refuse to take responsibility".

Spot on.

Jacko Walks

The Michael Jackson jury did not return a verdict of innocent, as Michael claims.

The verdict was: not guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt" in this particular case.

Despite a preponderance of circumstantial evidence amidst patterns of pedophilia, this jury (who is "reasonably certain" Jackson has sexually molested boys) let Jacko walk on 10 counts -- they disliked the victim's finger-snapping mother.

LARRY KING: Did his lifestyle, which had to be uncommon to 99.5 percent of all of the people, did that throw you?

PAUL RODRIGUEZ (jury foreman): We did consider that a lot, you know, just him sleeping with children and so on, so forth. There's not too many grown men that we know that would do that. But, again, we had to base it on the evidence presented to us, and come out of there with -- deciding on everything with -- beyond a reasonable doubt. I can't emphasize that strongly enough. So if the evidence was there, we would have worked with it but there was a lot of things lacking, so we just didn't have anything that we needed to complete the case.

CYNTHIA MCFADDEN, ABC NEWS SR LEGAL ANALYST: So, you did think there might've been a pattern, just not proof beyond a reasonable doubt in this case. Is that what you are saying?

RODRIGUEZ: Yes.

KING: Did you ever, Raymond, come close to guilty on any of the counts yourself?

RAYMOND HULTMAN (juror): I had some real strong feelings toward guilt .....I feel that Michael Jackson probably has molested boys.....but that doesn't make him guilty of the charges that were presented in this case.....and we had to make a decision on that and it showed that there could be reasonable doubt.

Memos, Kofi, and OFF

A memo has surfaced stating that Kofi Annan: (1) met in 1998 with Cotecna's then vice president, (2) discussed Cotecna's effort to win an Oil For Food contract, and (3) promised support for Cotecna winning the contract.

Kofi Annan has denied involvement in influencing Cotecna's selection, denied meeting Cotecna's executives, and denied discussing the contract with his son, Kojo, who was employed by Cotecna at the time.

But the memo appears to raise questions about the secretary general's role.

CQ weighs in.

G8 and Kyoto

Bob Novak

"In reality, Kyoto was never about environmental policy," a White
House aide told me. "It was designed as an elaborate, predatory trade strategy
to level the American and European economies."

Europeans' desire to bring U.S. prosperity down to their level is
no conspiracy theory of American conservatives.

The 20th HiJacker

Time has obtained a Gitmo interrogation log of the 20th hijacker, Mohammed al Qahtani.

He had tried to enter the U.S. in August 2001, allegedly to take part in the Sept. 11 attacks. But while Mohammed Atta, the eventual leader of the hijackers, was waiting outside in the Orlando, Fla., airport parking lot, al-Qahtani was detained inside--and then deported--by an alert immigration officer who didn't buy his story.

More than a year later, al-Qahtani had been captured in Afghanistan and transferred to Gitmo's Camp X-Ray.

The initial questioning by the FBI went poorly. "We were getting nothing from him," a senior Pentagon official says. "He had been trained to resist direct questioning. And what works in a Chicago police precinct doesn't work in war."

In the war on terrorism, the personal dignity of a fanatic trained for mass murder may be an inevitable casualty.

Jihad Spin Docs

Quran desecration crock a win for Jihad spin docs

Are only devout Muslims allowed to desecrate the Quran?

No doubt that's why the Egyptian foreign minister and company had no comment on the recent suicide bombing at a mosque in Kandahar, which killed
20, wounded more than 50 and presumably desecrated every Quran in the building.

Yet, as is often the way, the Muslim world's whiny spokespersons
have been effortlessly topped by the old hands of the anti-American left. Thus,
according to Amnesty International, Gitmo is the "gulag of our time."

Workplace-Safety -- No Ho Ho Ho

One of the worst workplace-safety violations in modern Houston history.

Eric Ho, a naturalized citizen, bought the defunct Alief General Hospital and Professional Building which needed $400,000 worth of asbestos
abatement to bring it up to code.

Ho paid $700,000, exactly $400,000 less than the owner's asking price.

After receiving a $325,000 bid by a licensed asbestos-abatement
company, Ho decided instead to put Manuel Escobedo in charge. Escobedo's
qualifications? He had lived well into his 60s and had worked at times as a
handyman for Ho. Escobedo had no asbestos training.

Escobedo hired at least 10undocumented Mexican workers, paying them in cash.

They were not given training nor even told that the material they were removing was asbestos that is known to cause cancer.

They were given paper masks, raincoats and putty knives, and they worked 12-hour days.

A city inspector responded to a complaint that Ho was renovating
without a permit in early February 1998, and ordered the work stopped.

Ho obtained a bid from another licensed asbestos-removal company in
less than two weeks. It was $160,000.

Instead of hiring the company immediately, Ho re-hired the Mexican
workers and ordered them to work at night to avoid detection by city
authorities.

Ho judged the work to be completed March 10, after paying bonuses
to the workers to speed up. The next day he instructed a contractor hired to do
the renovation to hose down the interior by hooking up to an outside water
line.

The unmarked line turned out to be a pressurized gas line, and the
explosion burned the contractor and three workers, and blew a hole in the wall of the hospital.

One day later, Ho called the workers to his office and made a final $1,000 payment to each after having them sign wage releases. He paid another
$100 each for them to sign papers in English releasing him from liability for
the explosion. The liability releases were read to the workers in Spanish.

Ho was indicted and convicted of several criminal counts.

North Korea

North Korea is, and will almost certainly remain, a nuclear power.

Kim Jong Mentally Il's totalitarian regime, with its massive human rights violations, is kept afloat almost entirely by massive foreign aid, and China pulls the largest purse string.

"Engaging" N. Korea amounts to little more than appeasement, and keeps this tyrannical regime in power.

The six-party negotiations have produced no results.

N. Korea is a rogue state with nukes and needs to be cut off from Chinese support.

When diplomacy fails, the next step is sanctions.

Interesting reading here, here, and here.

The Rise And Rise Of China

Mark Steyn's take on China. (Hat Tip to Instapundit.)

The assumption that this will be the "Asian century" is so universal on the
grounds that no one could possibly compete with the unstoppable rise of a
Chinese behemoth that by mid-century will have squashed America like the
cockroach she is.

What we're seeing is a cunning simulation of external wealth and power that
is, in fact, a forbidding false front for a state that remains a squalid
hovel.

China is (to borrow the formulation they used when they swallowed Hong
Kong) "One Country, Two Systems". On the one hand, there's the China the world
gushes over - the economic powerhouse that makes just about everything in your
house. On the other, there's the largely unreconstructed official China - a
regime that, while no longer as zealously ideological as it once was,
nevertheless clings to the old techniques beloved of paranoid totalitarianism:
lie and bluster in public, arrest and torture in private.

China is the Security Council member most actively promoting inaction on
Darfur, where (in the most significant long-range military deployment in five
centuries), it has 4,000 troops protecting its oil interests. Kim Jong-Il of
North Korea is an international threat only because Beijing licenses him as a
provocateur with which to torment Washington and Tokyo, in the way that a mob
boss will send round a mentally unstable heavy. This is not the behaviour of a
psychologically healthy state.

How long can these two systems co-exist in one country and what will happen
when they collide?

Beijing's leadership does not accept that the cause is lost: unlike most
outside analysts, they do not assume that the world's first economically viable
form of Communism is merely an interim phase en route to a free - or even
free-ish - society.

The internal contradictions of Commie-capitalism will, in the end, scupper
the present arrangements in Beijing.

Russia and Europe have no future at all. But that doesn't mean China will
bestride the scene as a geopolitical colossus. When European analysts coo about
a "Chinese century", all they mean is "Oh, God, please, anything other than a
second American century". But wishing won't make it so.

"One country, two systems" will lead to two or three countries, three or
four systems. The 21st century will be an Anglosphere century, with America,
India and Australia leading the way. Anti-Americans betting on Beijing will find
the China shop is in the end mostly a lot of bull.

Howard Dean's Rhetoric

Democrats tells Howard Dean to tone down the rhetoric after his recent inflammatory remarks.

Political analysts agreed that Dean's recent comments could hurt Democrats. "Every time he makes an outrageous remark, other Democratic leaders have to answer questions about it," said John J. Pitney Jr., a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College. "So instead of talking about their best issues, they're talking about their loose cannon.

"He's throwing them off message."

"We really don't have a message right now," Harry Ford (D-TN) lamented.

With no message, solutions, or alternatives, the only diversionary tactic left is vitriolic rhetoric and invective.

The messenger has no message other than "I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for".

Toned down or not, the message is clear.
Dean's days as DNC Chair are surely numbered.

Ground Zero -- IFC Response

Another top notch entry from Michelle Malkin on June 9th.

The Wall Street Journal has given equal space to Dick Tofel, president of the International Freedom Center.

Michelle's critique: "Blah times 3".

China

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in Singapore over the weekend that China has hidden its defense spending and is expanding its missile forces despite facing no threats.

According to a new intell report, the US failed to spot Chinese military build-up over the past decade due to Chinese secrecy and intell analysts downplaying evidence of China's growing military.

A former U.S. official said the report should help expose a "self-selected group" of specialists who fooled the U.S. government on China for 10 years.

"This group's desire to have good relations with China has prevented them from highlighting how little they know and suppressing occasional
evidence that China views the United States as its main enemy."

Yes, yes.....the US is China's main enemy and our strategy is to Wal-Mart them toward democracy. Why else would China feel this way?

The answer is that rather than
feeling threatened, China intends to threaten others, especially the United
States.

China has defined America as
its "main enemy" and can now
launch nuclear weapons at the United States that are capable of killing 100
million of us.

It controls more than $200 billion in U.S. debt and sells more
han 40 percent of its exports to America, using the profits to strengthen its
economy and advanced weapons systems aimed at the U.S.

The United States is fulfilling one of
Lenin's doctrines by purchasing the rope with which the communists plan to
hang us.

Too many things sold in America are
made in China and too many
corporations have moved their plants and operations to China, undermining the U.S. domestic economy and
helping a nation that seeks to destroy
us.

Meanwhile, China is being pressured to reform its currency.
U.S. manufacturers say the yuan is undervalued by as much as 40 percent, giving China an unfair export advantage.

Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, said Chinese leaders needed to outline a timetable for moving to a freely floating currency.

Schumer is co-author of a bill that threatens China with a 27.5
percent across-the-board tariff on U.S. imports of Chinese goods if it does not
revalue its currency, the yuan .

"Our bill is intended to get China to play fair, once and for all," Schumer said.

Schumer repeated his contention that the Bush administration was quietly backing his efforts to pressure China on the yuan.

Evidently, the Chinese know a good thing when they see it and shrug shoulders at the suggestion of a freely traded yuan.

US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan yesterday urged China to ease tight controls on its exchange rate.

To maintain its currency controls, China has to buy large quantities of US dollars -- an arrangement that Greenspan said "cannot go on indefinitely."

Witness the introduction of free-market communism.

Ground Zero Heist

Received an e-mail from TopCat in which he states:

Having read the article in the Wall Street Journal The Great Ground Zero Heist by DEBRA BURLINGAME, I am of the opinion that The World Trade Center
Memorial should be exactly that, not an individual's or committee's
interpretation of World history.

To refresh the IFC, a memorial is defined as.... Something, such as a monument or holiday, intended to celebrate or honor the memory of a person or an event.

This is what Americans wish, a monument to honor the victims of
9/11. If the IFC ( International Freedom Center ) wishes to conduct a history
lesson, do so somewhere else... not at Ground Zero.

Update

Here's a link to Debra Burlingame's article on the Ground Zero Heist (no registration required).

The so-called lessons of September 11 should not be force-fed by ideologues hoping to use the memorial site as nothing more than a powerful visual aid to promote their agenda.

More here from Michelle Malkin.

Howard Dean's Mouth

Howard Dean mouthing off in Frisco:

Republicans are "a pretty monolithic party. They all behave the same. They all look the same. It's pretty much a white Christian
party.

"The Republicans are not very friendly to different kinds of people,"

Keep spewing forth, Howard.
Vent your spleen and spread that hatred.

Person Of The Day

Person of the day

Ground Zero

Michelle Malkin has an excellent June 7th entry on a WSJ article written by Debra Burlingame, the sister of Pan Am flight 77's pilot.

Titled "The Soros-ization of Ground Zero", here are some highlights:

• George Soros and other human rights zealots are trying to turn Ground Zero into a blame America monument.
  
• The principal tenant of the WTC Memorial Cultural Complex is the International Freedom Center (IFC).
  
• The IFC gets 300,000 square feet to teach us about liberty, and serve as a gateway to the 50,000 square feet allotted to exhibit 9/11 artifacts out of sight and underground.
  
• The IFC is allotted generous space for exhibits on Chinese dissidents and Chilean refugees.
  
• The driving force behind the IFC is Tom Bernstein, an activist lawyer of Human Rights First.
  
• Human Rights First, along with the ACLU, filed a lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld on behalf of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  
• The IFC's list of those shaping or influencing the Ground Zero exhibit includes George Soros, among others.

Amnesty Int'l & Moral Idiocy

here are some comparisons
between the Gulag and Guantanamo, courtesy of David Bosco and published in The New Republic:

Individuals detained:
Gulag: 20 million.
Guantanamo: 750 total.

Number of camps:
Gulag: 476 separate camp complexes comprising thousands of individual camps.
Guantanamo: five small camps on the U.S. military base in Cuba.

Reasons for Imprisonment:
Gulag: Hiding grain; owning too many cows; need for slave labor; being Jewish; being Finnish; being religious; being middle class;
having had contact with foreigners; refusing to sleep with the head of Soviet counterintelligence; telling a joke about Stalin.
Guantanamo -- Fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan; being suspected of links to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

Red Cross Visits:
Gulag: none that Bosco could find.
Guantanamo: regular visits since January 2002.

Deaths as a Result of Poor Treatment:
Gulag: at least two to three million (Bosco
understates).

Guantanamo: no reports of prisoner deaths.

If Amnesty International does not fire Irene Khan and retract her obscene comparison, it is unworthy of respect or support.

Hillary

Hillary Clinton raised $250,000 by trashing Republicans and the Bush administration.

Democrats have only themselves to blame if they feel marginalized and hamstrung.

The Dems are out of touch with mainstream America as evidenced by the last Presidential election. Left wing liberals run the party. Hillary wants to be the first woman President and is trying to re-invent herself as a moderate.

If anyone is "mad with power", it is the Dems who seem hell bent on a minority of Dem senators determining circuit, appelate, and Supreme Court justices. Why else would Harry Reid call the McCain Mutiny a "victory". So much for comedy, er, comity of the Senate.

For over 200 years, judicial nominees were NOT filibustered. The Dems invented this little device because they can't effect policy any other way except relying on the judiciary and liberal, activist judges to legislate from the bench.

Someone should tell Hillary that THESE are the people "abusing power to further their own agenda", undermining checks and balances, and the constitution.

"Destroy" the Senate to gain political advantage over the Dem minority? The whole point of being in the majority is to gain political advantage. The Dems are in the minority because they can't get elected. The Senate is not "destroyed" because Republicans are in the majority. But, constant Dem obstructionism could certainly provoke something nuclear.

ANYONE Bush nominates to the Supreme Court would be considered "confrontational" by Hillary and the Dems. And Hillary is determined "to stand as firmly as possible against" any nominee THEY consider confrontational.

And God forbid (or should I say Democrat forbid) that any Republican be a person of faith, or even worse -- a Christian. Hillary must have forgotten that the country was founded on Judeo-Christian values and ethics, not on a channel to Eleanor Roosevelt.

The Dems have no solutions to anything (including Social Security) except tax and spend, tax and spend.

Hillary sent up a rallying cry to the liberal, agenda driven, mainstream media to go after the Bush administration. A few years ago, investigative reporting was all part of a "vast right wing conspiracy" when Bill didn't know the definition of "is".

"We can't ever, ever give in to the Republican agenda," she declared. "It isn't good for New York and it isn't good for America."

It seems Hillary and her extreme, far-left, liberal, "progressive", base expect Republicans to give in to the Democrat agenda.

Democrats Criticize Howard Dean

Howard Dean is the Chairman of the DNC but, according to Joe Biden,

Dean "doesn't speak for me with that kind of rhetoric and I don't think he speaks for the majority of Democrats,"

And this from John Edwards:

Dean "is not the spokesman for the party."
Dean is "a voice. I don't agree with it,"

Dean is not a spokesman for the party, and doesn’t speak for Democrats.

Hmm, I didn’t know that was the job description for DNC Chairman.

Doesn't "Know For Sure"

Despite highly publicized charges of U.S.
mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, the head of the Amnesty International USA, William Schulz, said on Sunday the group doesn't "know for sure" that the military is running a "gulag."

Schulz noted that it was Amnesty's headquarters in London that issued the annual report on global human rights, which said Guantanamo Bay "has become the gulag of our times."

Asked about the comparison, Schulz said,
"Clearly this is not an exact or a literal analogy."

I know for sure that comparing Gitmo to a gulag sounds clearly exact and literal to me.

Amnesty International must have learned "reporting" from Newsweek's, Mark Whitaker, who commented amidst criticism on Newsweek's Koran flushing by US guards story, "We're not retracting anything. We don't know what the ultimate facts are".

Assumptions, suppositions, and anonymous sources -- Amnesty International's gulag analogy needs to be flushed.

Koran Flushing

U.S. military officials say no guard at the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects flushed a detainee's Koran down the toilet

Hood also said his investigation found 15
cases of detainees mishandling their own Korans. "These included using a Koran as a pillow, ripping pages out of the Koran, attempting to flush a Koran
down the toilet and urinating on the Koran," Hood's report said.

No mention of these 15 confirmed cases in Al-Jazeera's coverage of the investigation.
Instead, Al-Jazeera details five confirmed and four unconfirmed cases of US mishandling the Koran.

Newsweek and Al-Jazeera --- any excuse to promote anti-American, anti-Bush sentiment and provoke riots -- 'nuf said.

Prudent Dan Rather

KING: Are you saying the story might be correct?
RATHER: Well, I'm saying a prudent person might take that view.
KING: Do you have that view?
RATHER: Well, I'm saying a prudent person might take that view

What the panel did say quite specifically on page 14 of the report is this:

The Panel has not been able to conclude with
absolute certainty whether the Killian documents are authentic or forgeries.
However, the Panel has identified a number of issues that raise serious questions about the authenticity of the documents and their content.

The use of the words "absolute certainty" in the first
sentence and "serious questions" in the second would lead any "prudent" person
to the exact opposite conclusion Rather suggests.

Oh, Danny Boy

Dan Rather castigates Richard Nixon’s hubris during Watergate that the rules don’t "apply to us because we're in power".

Obviously, Dan felt the rules didn’t apply to himself because of his own power at CBS.

Dan likes to harp on about "best obtainable versions of the truth" while denouncing his critics as partisan hacks.

There’s not much moral or ethical difference between illegal
break-ins and faked, forged docs to influence a Presidential election -- unless you’re pushing a rather biased, liberal, media agenda.

Aaargh!

Howard Dean continues to take Democrat fundraising to new lows by accusing the GOP of embracing a "dark, difficult and dishonest vision" for the country......and....."a lot of Republicans have never made an honest living in their lives."

Aaargh! Dean is one loon who flew over the cuckoo's nest a long time ago.

Prison Religion

"The U.S. Supreme Court sided with a witch, a satanist and a racial separatist Tuesday, upholding a federal law requiring state prisons to accommodate the religious affiliations of inmates."

Now inmates must be legally allowed to worship Satan in prison if they want to -- that's probably how they got there in the first place.