Chicago police shot a mountain lion found roaming Chicago’s North side in an alley behind the 3400 block of North Hamilton Avenue (a bit west of Lincoln Avenue and a bit north of Belmont Avenue.)

Chicago Tribune:

A cougar ran loose in Chicago on Monday for the first time since the city’s founding in the 19th Century. But by day’s end, the animal lay dead in a back alley on the North Side, shot by police who said they feared it was turning to attack.

No one knew where the 150-pound cat came from, though on Saturday Wilmette police had received four reports of a cougar roaming that suburb, roughly 15 miles from the site of Monday’s shooting.

Whatever its origin, the 5-foot-long cougar’s unlikely journey ended in the Roscoe Village neighborhood, where residents reported sightings throughout the day to the Chicago Commission on Animal Care and Control. Resident Ben Greene said police cornered the cougar shortly before 6 p.m. in his side yard on the 3400 block of North Hoyne Avenue.

Greene said he heard a volley of gunfire as he was bathing his 10-month-old son. His wife, Kate, ran upstairs screaming with their 3-year-old son, and they all took cover in a back room.

“At first, I’m thinking there’s a gun battle in the street,” said Greene, who owns a trucking company.

As the shots stopped, Greene heard the police yelling, “We got him! We got him!” He ventured downstairs and moved on his knees to the front door, where he saw police on his lawn. The officers had shot holes in an air conditioning unit on the side of Greene’s house while aiming for the tan cougar, which died in the alley near Greene’s garage.

Chicago Police Capt. Mike Ryan said the cougar tried to attack the officers when they tried to contain it. Police said they could not tranquilize the animal because police officers typically do not carry tranquilizer guns. Police said no one, including officers, was hurt and they did not know the cougar’s gender.

“It was turning on the officers,” Ryan said. “There was no way to take it into custody.”

2:13 video

Sun Times

Dave’s Urban Legends notes that the shooting occurred two months after the the Illinois Department of Natural Resources issued a statement debunking false Internet rumors about cougar sightings in the state.

“While it is not completely impossible for a cougar to be found in Illinois,” Acting IDNR Director Sam Flood said at the time, “sighting of a wild one is highly unlikely. Wild cougars have been found in neighboring states but again, very, very rarely.”

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

James Taranto, in the Wall Street Journal, explains that Obama’s expressed opinion of the misfortunes responsible for the politics, religion, and avocations of small-town Americans, in fact, demonstrates that it is actually his own urban elite which is hostile to real diversity and afflicted with a negative and paranoid view of persons not exactly like themselves.

Obama’s promise rests on a false premise: that it is within the power of the president to restore the Rust Belt’s luster. Every incumbent president in living memory has sought at least one additional term, and the Keystone State has for decades been a key electoral battleground, both large and closely contested. If presidents had the power to make Pennsylvania’s declining towns wealthy, don’t you think one of them would have done so by now?

In truth, the decline of industries is simply a fact of life, like old age, sickness and death. Yet just as new generations supersede the old, a free economy produces innovation that gives rise to new industries. And while some places have declined, the nationwide economy has grown impressively for most of the past quarter-century.

Now consider the issues to which Obama claims these Pennsylvanians “cling” instead of economic ones. One of them, trade, is in fact an economic issue. It’s odd that Obama would criticize Pennsylvanians for “antitrade sentiment,” given that pandering to such sentiment has been a central feature of his campaign. You voters are idiots, and I promise to give you what you want!

Obama’s reference to “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them”—which he notably did not repeat in Indiana—seems just a cheap shot, an appeal to his San Francisco audience’s antipathy toward people who aren’t like them. Or perhaps it is evidence that he was listening more attentively than he has admitted to the sermons of his “spiritual mentor” about the “U.S. of KKK A.” ...

Underlying this criticism is a curious normative premise: that the nonaffluent ought to prioritize their material interests over moral and cultural concerns. “Workers of the world, unite!” meets “The Virtue of Selfishness.”

Unlike Ayn Rand, Feingold and Obama see selfishness as a virtue only for bitter-off cultural conservatives. The well-heeled San Francisco Democrats Obama addressed last week stand to pay much higher taxes if he is elected. Many of them no doubt back Obama because they like his liberal positions on subjects like guns, abortion and same-sex marriage. If you think Obama criticized their priorities, we’ve got some change you can believe in. In Barack Obama’s America, rich people who vote on cultural issues rather than economic self-interest are principled and self-sacrificing. People of more modest means who do so are credulous and bitter.

When Feingold and Obama refer dismissively to cultural and moral issues, it is not because they do not take those issues seriously. It is because they would rather not take seriously the arguments on the other side. It is much less intellectually demanding, as well as flattering to oneself and those San Francisco Democrats, to caricature opposing positions as the products of poverty, ignorance and bitterness.

And Pat Buchanan, in Human Events, links Obama’s “bitter Pennsylvania small-towners” remarks to earlier statements, demonstrating that the sympathy Obama expressed in his famous Philadelphia speech to both sides separated by the racial divide is far from evenhanded.

It was said behind closed doors to the chablis-and-brie set of San Francisco, in response to a question as to why he was not doing better in that benighted and barbarous land they call Pennsylvania.

Like Dr. Schweitzer, home from Africa to address the Royal Society on the customs of the upper Zambezi, Barack described Pennsylvanians in their native habitats of Atloona, Alquippa, Johnstown and McKeesport. ...

A few months back, Michelle Obama revealed her mindset about America with the remark that, “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.” Barack has now revealed how he, too, sees the country. The Great Unifier divides the nation into us and them.

The “us” are the privileged cosmopolitan elite of San Francisco and his Ivy League upbringing. The “them” are the folks in the small towns and rural areas of that other America. Toward these folks, Obama’s attitude is not one of hostility, but of paternalism. Because time has passed them by, Barack believes, they cannot, in their frustration and bitterness, be held fully accountable for their atavistic beliefs and behavior.

Though neither mocking nor malicious, Barack’s remarks are, nonetheless, steeped in condescension. Inherent in his words is that these folks in Middle Pennsylvania are in need of empathy, education, assistance and perhaps therapy. ...

Note, from that Philadelphia address, the highlighted words.

“Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race … as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything. ... They … feel their dreams slipping away … opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.

“Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.”

In Barack’s mind, black anger and resentment at “racial injustice and inequality” are “legitimate.” But the anger and resentment of white folks, about affirmative action, crime and forced busing are born of misperceptions—and of “bogus claims of racism” manipulated and exploited by conservative columnists and commentators to keep the racial pot boiling and retain power, so the right can continue to do the bidding of the corporations that are the real enemy.

Barack has stumbled into the eternal failing of the left-wing populist. He cannot concede that the anger of white America—that its right to equal justice has been sacrificed to salve the consciences of guilt-besotted liberals—is a legitimate anger.

How the Royal Navy Dealt with the Pirate Blackbeard

The London Times reports on the latest case of Pecksniffery from Britain’s Labour Government: Asylum for Pirates!

The Royal Navy, once the scourge of brigands on the high seas, has been told by the Foreign Office not to detain pirates because doing so may breach their human rights.

Warships patrolling pirate-infested waters, such as those off Somalia, have been warned that there is also a risk that captured pirates could claim asylum in Britain.

The Foreign Office has advised that pirates sent back to Somalia could have their human rights breached because, under Islamic law, they face beheading for murder or having a hand chopped off for theft.

Hat tip to Walter Olson (who reminded me of this one).

Tim Blair quoting Dave S.:

Well, I do go a-churchin’ every Sunday with a bunch of bitter folks who complain about how the government is evil and screws them over, and we yell an’ whoop it up when the preacher rails against them Italians and Jews, an’ then we …

Oops, wait a minute, that’s not me, that’s Barack Obama.

Earlier postings on Berkeley, California versus the Corps.

Hat tip to Rich Duff.

In his famous Philadelphia speech on Race, Barack Obama justified the inflammatory statements of his pastor, friend, and former campaign advisor, the man he selected to marry him and to baptize his children, the Reverend Mr. Jeremiah “God damn America” Wright by quoting William Faulkner’s famous statement that “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past,” pointing to “segregated schools,” “legalized discrimination,” and “a lack of economic opportunity (for) black men” as the historical basis for Wright’s vicious hatred and malicious lies.

(Segregated schools, legalized discrimination, and lack of economic opportunity were) the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted.

But, as Ronald Kessler points out, there is no truth in such a picture of Jeremiah Wright’s early life at all. Jeremiah Wright never experienced segregated schools. In fact, Wright attended the ultra-elite Central High School, essentially Philadelphia’s equivalent of New York’s Stuyvesant High School, a college preparatory magnet school, the second oldest public secondary school in the United States, and the only high school in the country authorized to grant academic degrees.

In his speech on race, Barack Obama tried to explain away his longtime minister’s denunciations of America by saying that for blacks of his generation, memories of “humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away.”

But an examination… of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s background reveals that Obama’s characterization of his upbringing is mythology.

Described by Obama as his sounding board and mentor for more than two decades, Wright was born in Philadelphia in 1941. He lived in a racially mixed section called Germantown, which consisted of homes on broad tree-lined streets in northwest Philadelphia. The owners then were middle-class families.

For 62 years, Wright’s father, the Rev. Jeremiah Alvesta Wright, was pastor at Grace Baptist Church of Germantown. He was one of the first blacks to receive a degree from the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

Wright’s mother, Mary Elizabeth Henderson Wright, was a schoolteacher. She was the first black to teach an academic subject at Roosevelt Junior High, the first to teach at Germantown High, and the first to teach at the Philadelphia High School for Girls. She became vice principal of Girls High in 1968.

Rather than attend the more racially mixed Germantown High School at 40 East High St., Wright traveled a few miles to the elite Central High School at 1700 West Olney Ave., graduating in 1959. Opened in 1838, Central High has a distinguished past and admits only highly-qualified applicants who are privileged to attend from all over the city. It is comparable to the Bronx High School of Science and Boston Latin School, both public schools known for academic excellence.

When Wright attended Central High, the student body was 90 percent white, according to students who attended around the same time. At least three-quarters of the students were Jewish. Former students of the period say racial tension did not exist.

Bill Cosby, who attended the school until transferring to Germantown High, has referred to Central as a “wonderful” school. In contrast to Wright, Cosby has denounced blacks who take refuge in self-pitying victimhood and seek to blame whites for problems in the black community.

“Central High was a marvelous academic environment,” says Tod Mammuth, who graduated in 1965 and is now a Philadelphia-area lawyer. “You had to have high academic credentials to be accepted and a high IQ score. Many later said it was more rigorous than college. We had no racial friction.”

There was no legally-enforced discrimination in 1950s Philadelphia. Nor was Jeremiah Wright embittered as a young man. He attended Virginia Union University in Richmond, but was sufficiently patriotic in 1961 that he dropped out of college, apparently inspired by a speech by John F. Kennedy, to join the US Marine Corps. He subsequently became a Navy Corpsman, and trained as a cardiopulmonary technician at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Wright served on the medical team which cared for President Johnson, and received three letters of commendation.

The radical “God damn America” Mr. Wright is not a product of 1950s segregation, but is clearly instead the result of Wright finishing his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Howard University in the late 1960s, where he undoubtedly found a lifetime supply of leftwing politics and racial grievances.

“Lack of economic opportunity?”

Jeremiah Wright could have earned a very respectable middle-class income as a cardiopulmonary technician, but instead he finished college, acquired a master’s degree in English, then a second master’s in Divinity, and finally a doctorate in Divinity. In addition to being pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, Wright has been a professor at two theological seminaries. He has served on the Board of Trustees of Virginia Union University, Chicago Theological Seminary and City Colleges of Chicago. He has also served on the Board of Directors of Evangelical Health Systems, and on numerous boards and committees of other religious and civic organizations. Wright has received a Rockefeller Fellowship and seven honorary doctorates.

He can expect a comfortable retirement. Ronald Kessler observes:

In retirement, Wright will continue a life of privilege that dates back to Central High. As a retirement gift, Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ is building him a million-dollar home abutting Odyssey Country Club and Golf Course in the nearly all-white Chicago suburb of Tinley Park. The home sits on land the pastor purchased in 2004 for $345,000. In December 2006, Wright sold the land to his church, which took out a $1.6 million mortgage on the property. In April 2007, the church applied for a building permit for the brick and stone structure.

Wright’s new home has 10,340 square feet of space, about four times the size of a typical suburban house. It includes four bedrooms, an elevator, an exercise room, and a four-car garage.

Scrappleface:

Bush to Appoint Jimmy Carter Ambassador to Hell

As former President Jimmy Carter meets this week with Hamas leaders in the West Bank and Syria, sources at the State Department say President George Bush will soon honor Mr. Carter’s decades of freelance diplomacy by appointing him as the first U.S. Ambassador to Hell.

“Bush just wants Carter to go there,” said an unnamed State Department source, “and to set up an embassy, and try to be a good listener, open a communication channel, find common ground.”

What an excellent idea! The sooner it is implemented the better.

Timcheh Amin-o-Dowleh, Kashan Bazaar

Ahshin Memarian photographs the Old Bazaar in Kashan, Isfahan, Iran.

Kashan rugs

Mr, Memarian is a rug dealer. His commercial web-site is here.

The SF Chronicle describes how Obama’s famous “bitter” condescending remarks were captured by an enterprising (Vassar ‘68) Huffington Post blogger.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign has been in full damage control mode since the senator’s blunt remarks about the nature of small town Pennsylvania voters were secretly recorded by a Huffington Post blogger at a recent San Francisco fundraiser that was supposed to be off limits to the press.

Obama, asked last Sunday why it was so hard for him to reach blue-collar voters, said that many had been overlooked economically and that “it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton pounced on the comment over the weekend, calling it “elitist and divisive.”

An Obama campaign insider tells us the blogger, Mayhill Fowler, had tried to get into one of two Obama fundraising events in the Bay Area a couple of months back where former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley stood in as a proxy.

She was turned away, even though she had offered to pay, says our source.

“There’s a very basic (fundraiser) rule – you don’t let press in, and anyone with an interest in reporting shouldn’t get in,” said the source.

Just how the MP3 – wielding Fowler managed to secure an invite to the $1,000 a head fundraiser at the San Francisco home of developer Alex Mehran wasn’t immediately clear – but Obama campaign higher-ups were said to be livid, with fingers pointing at a local fundraising consultant for the slip-up.

There should be a special award for bloggers like Charles Johnson (who debunked the Dan Rather forged National Guard letter in 2004), and Mayhill Fowler, who this year exposed the views about the common people that Barack Obama shared with a wealthy audience at a private fund-raiser held atop San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, whose reporting of the truth makes a significant impact on the course of Presidential Election contest.

Hillary had better be careful. Efforts to embrace false images of red state lifestyle are easily overdone, and there has gotten to be a journalistic tradition of ridiculing bogus claims of personal prowess in the hunting field. Hillary’s recent reminiscences of gun handling—

“You know, my dad took me out behind the cottage that my grandfather built on a little lake called Lake Winola outside of Scranton and taught be how to shoot when I was a little girl,” said Clinton.

“You know, some people now continue to teach their children and their grandchildren. It’s part of culture. It’s part of a way of life. People enjoy hunting and shooting because it’s an important part of who they are. Not because they are bitter.”

She later added, however, that she is not herself an expert with firearms: “As I told you, my dad taught me how to shoot behind our cottage. I have gone hunting. I am not a hunter. But I have gone hunting.”

Here’s an AP video of Hillary (trying to cinch that PA primary) knocking back a shot with a glass of beer in her other hand:

0:58 video

I’d a lot rather watch this form of competition than baseball or football.

Devonport (whatever that is) versus Portsmouth 5:49 video

Hat tip to Theo.

Bird Dog, at Maggie’s Farm, identifies the crucial subtext which has echoed around the entire country.

The reason Obama’s words keep getting so much attention is because they reveal so much of what we already know about how the self-ordained elite think about regular folks. ...

Obama gets in trouble whenever he says what he thinks – and either he or his wife do it all the time. They don’t hide it.

Do they think we all live in Berkeley or Cambridge among the bien pensant brie-eaters? (disclaimer: I am known to eat brie.) Hillary is too “smart” and too lacking in conscience to make these sorts of errors of honesty.

I think the story is that Obama’s words have some legs because they expose the old story of the Left’s condescension towards, and sense of superiority in relation to, regular folks. Rush has always contended that the Left refuses to run on their real beliefs, and I think that is true. Truth is, the hard working folks of America are doing fine as long as they live within their means. They have many concerns and interests beyond their bank accounts and whatever freebies they could be entitled to.

And Americans are not babies: they neither long for a government mommy nor do they take politicans’ promises or pandering seriously. They are used to government taking their earnings and offering little in return. Mostly, they want the nanny government to leave them the heck alone. They are, in fact, thinking, responsible, hard-working adults. I know lots of “them,” including myself.

As Mark Levin always says (approx.), “If things are as terrible and hopeless in America as Hillary and Obama say they are, then how come every ambitious and freedom-seeking person in the world wants to come here to pursue their dreams?”

Obama’s political problem is that he is not enough of an impostor to fool the savvy American middle class.

Scrappleface reports on Hillary’s latest populist gesture:

Hillary Totes Bible to Gun Range

(2008-04-13) — Sensing an opportunity to portray Sen. Barack Obama as elitist and out of touch after his remarks about “bitter” rural Americans who cling to guns, God and xenophobia, Sen. Hillary Clinton stopped after church today at an indoor gun range, where she fired roughly 300 rounds through a handgun she said she carries concealed everywhere she goes.

Her lower lip bulging from a dip of Skoal, Sen. Clinton put her Bible in her handbag, and drew out her own Para Ordnance Warthog .45 caliber pistol.

As reporters looked on, the Democrat presidential candidate emptied one 10-round magazine after another, with fair accuracy, at a human silhouette target.

“Small town folk like us,” said Sen. Clinton, “don’t cling to God or guns because we’re bitter about the economy, as my opponent suggests. We believe in God because he’s real, and we keep and bear arms as the best insurance against tyrants who would strip our freedoms if they didn’t fear our collective power.”

Read the whole thing.

General Petraeus has received a lot of the sort of service awards which senior officers accumulate simply as a result of having occupied important posts, but he has also been awarded the Bronze Star (with “V” device signifying it was awarded for valor), presumably in connection with his leading the 101st Airborne in the 2003 drive on Baghdad.

Members of the United States Marine Corps are wont to comment negatively on the abundance of badges and awards displayed by US Army personnel. References to alleged prizes for spelling and deportment are not unusual. But when the kind of badinage normally occurring in the context of interservice rivalries starts coming out of the mouths of liberal sissies who probably flunked their physicals for the local cub scout pack, it is time to be outraged.

First, Matthew DeBord, best-known as a wine writer, in the LA Times, has the temerity to offer General Petraeus fashion advice on how to wear the uniform when delivering testimony to Congress:

Gen. David H. Petraeus may be as impressive a military professional as the United States has developed in recent years, but he could use some strategic advice on how to manage his sartorial PR. Witness his congressional testimony on the state of the war in Iraq. There he sits in elaborate Army regalia, four stars glistening on each shoulder, nine rows of colorful ribbons on his left breast, and various other medallions, brooches and patches scattered across the rest of the available real estate on his uniform. He even wears his name tag, a lone and incongruous hunk of cheap plastic in a region of pristine gilt, just in case the politicians aren’t sure who he is.

That’s a lot of martial bling, especially for an officer who hadn’t seen combat until five years ago. Unfortunately, brazen preening and “ribbon creep” among the Army’s modern-day upper crust have trumped the time-honored military virtues of humility, duty and personal reserve.

This civilian wine expert is obviously unacquainted (probably because the US military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy was too upsetting) with the fact that the correct uniform and the display of medals and decorations for various occasions are prescribed. Soldiers do not, in fact, while dressing in the morning, get to reflect, “I’m a bit out-of-sorts today, and don’t feel like getting all dressed up. I think I’ll just wear my fatigues.”

Superannuated television personality Dick Cavett (famous back when the Beatles were the coming thing) emerges from the assisted-living home to bring his 1960s perspective to the matter.

I can’t look at Petraeus — his uniform ornamented like a Christmas tree with honors, medals and ribbons — without thinking of the great Mort Sahl at the peak of his brilliance. He talked about meeting General Westmoreland in the Vietnam days. Mort, in a virtuoso display of his uncanny detailed knowledge — and memory — of such things, recited the lengthy list (”Distinguished Service Medal, Croix de Guerre with Chevron, Bronze Star, Pacific Campaign” and on and on), naming each of the half-acre of decorations, medals, ornaments, campaign ribbons and other fripperies festooning the general’s sternum in gaudy display. Finishing the detailed list, Mort observed, “Very impressive!” Adding, “If you’re twelve.”

There are regrettably some people in this country, so self-obsessed and so utterly removed from reality, that they are able to believe that their own third-rate careers in the entertainment industry place them in a position to sneer at men who have devoted their careers to defending their country, and who have on occasion placed their lives in hazard to preserve this country’s freedom and institutions. If military service and its symbols fail to impress the likes of Mort Sahl and Dick Cavett, that is a reflection on them and not upon the soldiers they have the unmitigated indecency to mock.

Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap.
—Kipling

Obama’s San Francisco remarks, attributing the Keystone state’s small town residents’ religious faith and enthusiasm for hunting to bitterness over economic failure, are not winning him a lot of friends in Pennsylvania.

Scranton mayor Chris Doherty responded with an impromptu press conference in Lackawanna County’s Courthouse Square, accompanied by his predecessor in office, local union officials, the mayors of four nearby boroughs, and a visiting New Hampshire state senator, denouncing Obama’s contemptuous analysis.

(Scranton) Times-Tribune:

Former Scranton Mayor Jim Connors said the remarks demean people here as hicks. Mr. Obama wants to transcend stereotypes, but then he stereotyped others, Mr. Connors said.

Standing in front of the John Mitchell statue, Mr. Doherty called hunting a tradition, borne not out of spite but culture and pride. The area’s churches, he said, were built on hopes of improving life and fostering families, not because the population here is downtrodden.

Mr. Doherty pointed to economic growth and investment. He said it’s necessary to combat that negative image.

“That’s not the truth,” he said.

At Mr. Doherty’s side were Mr. Connors and the mayors from Jessup, Taylor, Freeland and Moosic, along with New Hampshire state Sen. Lou D’Allesandro.

Taylor Mayor Richard Bowen said Mr. Obama’s comments hit home beyond Pennsylvania, and he predicts it will cost the senator voters who are on the fence.

Mr. Connors said what most offends him is that Mr. Obama said these things on the other side of the country behind closed doors. Mr. Connors bet Mr. Obama wouldn’t have made such remarks in Altoona.

6:03 video

AP reports that Obama tried apologizing in Winston-Salem:

Obama tried to quell the furor Saturday, explaining his remarks while also conceding he had chosen his words poorly.

“If I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that,” Obama said in an interview with the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal.

Those condescending San Francisco remarks were a major misstep. They are going to assure a Clinton victory in Pennsylvania.

I happened to be speaking to a Pennsylvania hunter from Berks County on the telephone yesterday. “Who would ever have imagined,” she marveled, “that Hillary Clinton would become the working man’s candidate in this state? But that’s the way it is. Only rich people and the college professors are for Obama.”

Meanwhile in Indiana, that redneck Hillary, proudly notes her own Scrantonian roots, brandishes her deer rifle, and fondly remembers granddad heading off to work at the mill (just before he gave her a childhood shooting lesson behind the fishing cabin he built with his own hands!). 2:55 video

Rodion Medvedev picks the 13 “most irresponsible” self defense gadgets.

How about a flashlight which doubles as a single-shot .410 shotgun? The catch is: It fires out the rear, so that when you are using it as a flashlight, the business end of the shotgun is pointing in your direction.

Contemporary European culture will be manifested in all its glory later today when a new production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera opens in Erfurt, Germany.

Telegraph:

A German opera house is to unveil a provocative new production staged in the ruins of New York’s World Trade Centre.

It features naked pensioners and Mickey Mouse masks, Hitler salutes and Elvis impersonators.

The self-consciously outrageous September 11th staging of Verdi’s ‘A Masked Ball’ has been dreamed up by Austrian director Johann Kresnik.

He has described the concoction as a populist critique of modern American society, aimed at showing up the disparities between rich and poor, which attracting a large audience.

It will be a different, a provocative masked ball on the ruins of the World Trade Centre,” he told reporters before Saturday’s premiere. “The naked stand for people without means, the victims of capitalism, the underclass, who don’t have anything anymore.”

Rehearsals suggest that Mr Kresnik’s anti-capitalist staging is unlikely to be celebrated for its subtlety.

Some of the cast are dressed in soldiers uniforms, or in the red white and blue of Uncle Sam, or in day-glow pink Elvis costumes, slashed to the waist. Many, however, appear to spend their time on stage not wearing anything at all.

They include dozens local pensioners, recruited by the opera house in Erfurt, eastern Germany, to appear naked wearing nothing but plastic Mickey Mouse masks.

“It’s a very beautiful, poetic scene,” said Guy Montavon, the theatre’s general manager.

He said that 60 eager amateurs were keen to appear naked before an audience for the premiere, but only 35 made the final cut.

The staging deliberately toys with images that are extremely sensitive both in the US and Germany.

Foreign audiences may find naked singers cavorting in front of the iconic ruined mesh of World Trade Centre metalwork most provocative.

In Germany however, a female singer with a painted on toothbrush moustache performing a straight arm Nazi salute appears particularly conceived to outrage.

The original 1859 production of the opera was sadly impacted by Roman censorship, which forced the change of the opera’s setting from 1793 Sweden to colonial Boston, and reduced the rank of the assassinated ruler from king to colonial governor. One has to hand it to Herr Kresnik. He succeeds in making one feel that there is a definite place in Europe these days for some old-time Roman censorship.

Back in the more familiar environs of San Francisco after campaigning in small-town Pennsylvania, a still-shuddering Barack Obama explained the economic basis for the red state malaise of religion, gun ownership, xenophobia, and Republican-voting.

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Just a soupçon of federal job-training and economic aid, you see, and all those rednecks will turn in their deer rifles, subscribe to the New Yorker, and suddenly become sensitive to the urgent need for diversity down at the Polish-American Fire House.

Rand Simberg reports directly from “the Alabama of the North.”

I asked around the area, to see how his obvious compassion for Pennsylvanians was viewed. This is just one story, from one man in West Deer Township, but I’m sure that it’s typical.

“By cracky, it’s like the man sees into my soul!

“Thirty years ago, I had a good job in the mill in Pittsburgh. I was bringing in a good income, going to jazz clubs, discussing Proust over white wine and brie, with my gay friends of all colors. I was all for free trade, so that we could sell the steel overseas, and I never bothered to go to church, let alone actually believe in God.

“But then, the plant closed down, and I couldn’t get another job. I went on unemployment, and found odd jobs here and there, but they barely paid the rent in the loft, and the payment on the Bimmer. I couldn’t afford the wine and brie any more, and had to shift over to beer and brats.

“Of course, as a result, I started hanging out with the wrong crowd—the beer drinkers.

“And it wasn’t just the beer. Some of them actually went out in the woods in the fall, and shot animals. And kilt ‘em. With real guns!

“I was shocked, of course. For all their diversity, none of my gay friends would have ever thought of doing anything like that. But with my job loss, and lack of money for pedicures and pommade, they didn’t want to hang with me any more. So I borried a twelve gauge over’n’under, and went out with my new beer-drinking animal-killing friends in the woods. And I’ll tell you what, when I shot down that eight-pointer, I felt a sense of power over the helpless in a way that I hadn’t since I’d been looking down on the rednecks when I had that good job in Pittsburgh, driving around town in my 528i.

“But somehow the killing, and hating those two-timing nancy boys wasn’t enough. I was still in despair. I started to search for answers, and I thought that I found them in Jesus. It started small, just church on Sunday, with prayers and a lecture from the preacher.

“But it didn’t stop there. Soon I was attending Wednesday night revivals, and huzzahing and hossanahing, and babbling with the best of them. After a few months I’d graduated to juggling garter snakes, then rattlers.

“But it wasn’t enough. Despite all the gun caressing, and animal killing, and hatred of people who weren’t like me, and anger at the Colombians who were…doing something to me—I’m not entirely sure what, and the tongue speaking and snake handling, I still couldn’t find a job.

“My social life continued to deteriorate. Not only was I no longer interested in those sensitive swishes, or literature, but I was starting to look with lust at my sister. And not just look, I’ll tell you what. She’d been out of work, too, and was getting mighty interested, if you know what I mean.

“I have hit rock bottom.

“Please, help me, O Bama. Forgive me, O Bama. O Bama, my Bama, rescue me from this living hell in which Reagan, and Bush, and Clinton, and Bush, have consigned me. Restore unto me my loft and my teutonic status symbol. Give me back my poofter friends, and my pinot grigio and my baked gruyere, and lattes. Save me from the killing and the beer, and most of all, from Jesus. Save me, O my Bama, and I will commit my vote unto you.

This is just one story of the many lives that Barack Obama has touched, and blessed, this day in the benighted Keystone State. But with his obvious compassion, and ability to feel the pain of others so unlike him, he is sure to carry the state in a couple weeks.

Ace summarizes Obama’s campaign message to small-town residents of the Keystone State:

Obama To Rural Pennsylvanians: Vote For Me, You Corncob-Smokin’, Banjo-Strokin’ Chicken-Chokin’ Cousin-Pokin’ Inbred Hillbilly Racist Morons

And compiles reactions:

Of course Obama is wrong. Rural Pennsylvanians loved their guns, hated foreigners and minorities and used religion as a front for their hatred loooong before the mills closed.

London Times:

The secret site where Iran is suspected of developing long-range ballistic missiles capable of reaching targets in Europe has been uncovered by new satellite photographs.

The imagery has pinpointed the facility from where the Iranians launched their Kavoshgar 1 “research rocket” on February 4, claiming that it was in connection with their space programme.

Analysis of the photographs taken by the Digital Globe QuickBird satellite four days after the launch has revealed a number of intriguing features that indicate to experts that it is the same site where Iran is focusing its efforts on developing a ballistic missile with a range of about 6,000km (4,000 miles).

A previously unknown missile location, the site, about 230km southeast of Tehran, and the link with Iran’s long-range programme, was revealed by Jane’s Intelligence Review after a study of the imagery by a former Iraq weapons inspector. A close examination of the photographs has indicated that the Iranians are following the same path as North Korea, pursuing a space programme that enables Tehran to acquire expertise in long-range missile technology. ...

according to Jane’s Intelligence Review, the satellite photographs prove that the Kavoshgar 1 rocket was not part of a civilian space centre project but was consistent with Iran’s clandestine programme to develop longer-range missiles.

The examination of the launch site revealed that it was part of a large and growing complex “with very high levels of security and recent construction activity”. It was clearly “an important strategic facility”, Dr Forden said.

The former Iraq weapons inspector said that Iran was benefiting from the North Korean missile programme and following its designs.

It will not be terribly long before the Iranian mullahs will be able to subject the countries of Europe to nuclear blackmail. If either democrat should win the upcoming Fall Presidential Election, or should the democrat party merely secure a veto-proof majority in Congress, the ABM missile-shield proposed by the Bush Administration for installation in Central Europe is sure to be cancelled. The European interest in the American election will be much greater than many Europeans realize.

This 9:53 video quotes Barack Hussein Obama reading the audio book version of his autobiography, Dreams From My Father, and his pastor the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, on racial attitudes, providing an interesting comparison to the sentiments expressed in his more recent (presidential campaign period) Philadelphia speech.

Obama supporters will try to say that it’s just a partisan attack piece, but when his opponents have simply taken the words out of the candidate’s own mouth, they are not so easily dismissed.

Hat tip to Gateway Pundit.

The MSM and the blogosphere has moved on from unimportant subjects like Islamic terrorism and the upcoming presidential election to what really matters: Is that really a babe reflected in Dick Cheney’s fishing shades?

McClatchy:

Since Wednesday, the blogosphere has been atwitter over a photograph on the White House Web site of Cheney with a caption that said he was fly-fishing on the Snake River in Idaho.

The photo is a tight shot of Cheney’s face sporting dark sunglasses and his trademark grin.

What’s stirring all the buzz is the reflection in the vice president’s dark glasses. Some thought that the reflection looked like a naked woman and, this being Cheney and this being the Internet Age, they immediately shared that thought with the world.

In a Google search for the words “Dick Cheney” and “sunglasses,” 79,300 hits came back at mid-afternoon on Thursday. By 7 p.m., the count was 130,000.

On DemocraticUnderground.com, the discussion starts with this question: “Notice anything … interesting … reflected in his sunglasses? Something that has little to do with conventional ‘fly-fishing’?”

Photographers discuss.

No one wants to see the last remnant breeding population of the Greater Spotted Watzit hunted to extinction. So passing Endangered Species Legislation internationally was a piece of cake. Hunters and animal rights enthusiasts came happily together, beaming with joy, as our political leaders a generation ago signed measures providing such protections into law.

No one foresaw that, in the United States, obscure and totally uninteresting weeds, rodents, or newts would soon be utilized to block developments opposed by selfish neighbors or mere crackpots.

It was also overlooked that somebody, i.e. a committee of obscure and unknown academics meeting happily during well-funded junkets to Geneva, would be empowered to identify as “Endangered” anything they pleased, with no appeal, or recourse to the facts, available.

Big game hunters soon found that many trophies of legally shot game species could no longer be brought back from Safari, because, for instance, the reduction of numbers of leopards in certain portions of the big cat’s historic range (and the politics of preservationism) proved perfectly adequate to persuade the Olympians meeting in Geneva to declare all leopards “endangered,” even where leopards were superabundant or where leopards locally represented a hazard or a pest.

In today’s Britain, superabundant badgers are causing problems for farmers by spreading bovine tuberculosis, but Brock the Badger is utterly and completely protected by law. So much as mess with a badger’s den, and you may get six months in chokey for every badger you’ve theoretically inconvenienced.

The Times of London notes:

Once a species manages to creep on to a protected list, there is no shifting it. Badgers have gained their untouchable status because, in the 1950s and 1960s, farmers were ploughing up their setts. A law requiring farmers to seek licences before destroying setts was passed in 1973. As a result, badgers featured in the Council of Europe’s Bern Treaty in 1979, which committed Britain to protecting the species for ever after. The more badger numbers have increased, the more the Government has defended them. The 1992 Act does include provisions for farmers to seek licences to control badgers, but hardly any have been issued since 1997.

In other words, whether an animal is protected or not owes little to its current numbers; it just depends on how EU ministers were feeling after a good lunch in Switzerland 29 years ago.

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

Professor Richard Crandall posted a photo of Ronald Reagan and various conservative political cartoons on his office door at Lake Superior State University. He was reprimanded and ordered to remove the materials last year, as he had created “a hostile environment.” Meanwhile, other faculty members posting non-conservative expressions of political opinion were left alone. Is anyone surprised?

Inside Higher Ed

Why, of course! It’s creating Gender-Neutral Student Housing.

Yale Daily News:

An “ad-hoc committee” of administrators is investigating the possibility of gender-neutral housing on campus, Dean of Administrative Affairs John Meeske said this week.

The committee, which was convened late last semester around the same time the Yale College Council formed a gender-neutral housing committee of its own, will spend the 2008-’09 academic year drafting a recommendation about the housing option, committee chair Meeske said. ...

Meeske said the administration began exploring the issue after attending Ivy League housing conferences over the past two years and discovering that gender-neutral housing was “an ‘in’ thing at other schools.” Still, given the distinctiveness of Yale’s residential college system, all decisions will be made with Yale specifically in mind, he said. ...

LGBT Co-op student coordinator Benjamin Gonzalez ’09 said Yale’s current housing policy ignores the needs of transgender students. Gonzalez said he knows of no openly transgender students currently at Yale, which he said is the result of the University’s policies — policies that do not promote a comfortable environment for such individuals.

“Yale,” Gonzalez said, “is failing in its basic mission not to discriminate on gender identity and expression.” ...

Some form of gender-neutral housing is available at more than 30 colleges and universities nationwide, according to the nonprofit Gender Public Advocacy Coalition, including the majority of the eight Ivy League universities as well as nearby schools like Wesleyan University and the University of Connecticut.

When ten Congregationalist clergymen gathered at Samuel Russell’s parsonage in Branford in 1701 and contributed 40 precious folios for “the founding of a Collegiate School,” the poor misguided fools thought they were founding a school to train ministers of the gospel.

Of course, now we know that the real mission of their undertaking was avoiding discrimination on gender identity and expression and providing a comfortable environment for the transgendered.

Robert Kagan examines the wide-spread belief that “Neoconservatism” was responsible for an unjust and ill-considered war in Iraq, and finds today’s foreign policy quarrels to be part of a very ancient pattern of American arguments pro and con a more expansive, ambitious, idealistic foreign policy.

The idea that today’s policies represent a decisive break from the past would certainly come as a surprise to the many critics of American foreign policy across the generations, for there has not been a single criticism leveled at neoconservatism in recent years that was not leveled at American foreign policy hundreds of times over the past two centuries.

The oldest, and in some ways most potent, critique has always been that of genuine conservatism, a powerful counter-tradition that goes back at least as far as the debates over the ratification of the Constitution in 1787. The supporters of the new federal Constitution—George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison—insisted that the concentration of energy and power in the federal government was essential if the United States was to become a world power capable both of protecting itself and achieving its destined greatness on the world stage. “Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness!” Hamilton exhorted in the Federalist papers. But Patrick Henry, a leader of the anti-Federalist opponents of the Constitution, accused Hamilton and his allies, not unfairly, of seeking to “convert this country into a powerful and mighty empire.” This, Henry insisted, was a betrayal of the nation’s true purpose. “When the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different: liberty, sir, was then the primary object.”

That quotation is a favorite chestnut of Patrick Buchanan and that ancient confrontation has recurred in almost every generation since the founding. At the core of this conservative critique has always been the fear that “empire,” however one might define it—in Henry’s day, it meant simply a wide expanse of land under a single, strong central government—is antithetical to, and ultimately destructive of, American democratic and republican virtues. A big, expansive foreign policy requires a big, powerful central government to advance it, and such a government imperils American liberties. It also imperils its democratic soul. As John Quincy Adams memorably put it in 1821, America might become “the dictatress of the world,” but she would “be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

In one way or another, all the major critiques of expansive, ambitious, idealistic American foreign policy have been shaped by this concern about overweening ambition and the temptations of power. It may not even be right to call this inclination “conservative” but rather, as Bernard Bailyn long ago suggested, a manifestation of American “republicanism”—a deep and abiding suspicion of centralized power and its corrupting effects on the people who wield it. Such fears have been expressed by conservatives, liberals, socialists, realists, and idealists alike over the past two centuries.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Japanese culture, behavior, customs, etiquette, and social expectations are very, very different from our own. Don Roley provides some useful advice for Occidentals considering studying martial arts in Japan.

When you take a Japanese martial art in Japan the first thing you need to understand is that it is not a business to the teachers. It is a relationship. In many ways it is like a marriage. But unlike a marriage- one side, the teacher, has all the power. The students defer to the teacher and follow his directions. There is no negotiations, no pick and choose of what to follow or not. The student pretty much jumps when the teacher says jump and sits when the teacher says sit. Your only choice should you not like the situation is to sever your ties and leave. Again, unlike a marriage leaving this relationship is much cheaper. Since you place so much control over yourself when you enter into this relationship, finding a teacher worthy of that trust is important.

Frederick W. Kagan explains why defeat is not really the most desirable option.

Losing wars is always bad. One of the major reasons for America’s current global predominance economically and politically is that America doesn’t lose wars very often. It seems likely, however, that the American people are about to be told that they have to decide to lose the Iraq war, that accepting defeat is better than trying to win, and that the consequences of defeat will be less than the costs of continuing to fight. For some, the demand to “end this war” is a reprise of the great triumph of their generation: forcing the U.S. to lose the Vietnam War and feel good about it. But even some supporters are being seduced by their own weariness of the struggle, and are being tempted to believe the unfounded defeatism — combined with the unfounded optimism about the consequences of defeat — that hyper-sophisticates have offered during every major conflict. Americans have a right to be weary of this conflict and to desire to bring it to an end. But before we choose the easier and more comfortable wrong over the harder and more distasteful right, we should examine more closely the two core assumptions that underlie the current antiwar arguments: that we must lose this war because we cannot win it at any acceptable cost, and that it will be better to lose than to continue trying to win.

The hyper-sophisticates of the American foreign-policy and intellectual establishment direct their invective at the whole notion of winning or losing. What’s the definition of winning? If we choose to withdraw from an ill-conceived and badly executed war, that’s not really losing, is it? We can and should find ways to use diplomacy rather than military power to handle the consequences of any so-called defeat. Less-sophisticated antiwar leaders on both sides will ask simply why the U.S. should continue to spend its blood and treasure to fight in “a far-off land of which we know little,” as Neville Chamberlain famously said in defense of his abandonment of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis. We have, after all, more pressing problems at home to which the Iraq war is only contributing. As is often the case, there is a level between over-thinking and under-thinking a problem that is actually thinking. Yes, in the world as it is, whatever line we sell ourselves, there really is victory and there really is defeat, the two are different, and their effects on the future diverge profoundly. And yes, the reason we must continue to spend money and the lives of the very best Americans in that far-off land is that the interests of every American are actually at stake.

We will consider below just how much of a diversion of resources away from more desirable domestic priorities the Iraq war actually is, but the more important point is simply this: Unless the advocates of defeat can show, as they have not yet done, that the consequences of losing are very likely to be small not simply the day after the last American leaves Iraq, but over the next five, ten, and 50 years, then what they are really selling is short-term relief in exchange for long-term pain. As drug addicts can attest, this kind of instant-gratification temptation is very seductive — it’s what keeps drug dealers in business despite the terrible damage their products do to their customers. “Just end the pain now and deal with the future when it gets here” is as bad a strategy for a great nation as it is for a teenager.

Getty House, site of Obama fundraiser

Zombietime today has a photo essay of Barack Obama, champion of the downtrodden, visiting some typical supporters in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights.

Obama supporters arrive at fundraiser

Michelle Malkin updates the Absolut advertising controversy, reporting that, having angered many Americans with an ill-conceived ad campaign picturing the entire American Southwest, including California, Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Arizona (and beyond the Southwest: Oregon, along with most of Wyoming, and much of Idaho) incorporated into Mexico, in the face of mounting criticism, Absolut withdrew the offending ad and apologized, and then the Swedish company, now part of France’s Pernod Ricard, announced its launch of new Gay-oriented advertising.

Bar owner Matthew Rogers of Pt. Richmond, Calif., sent this note to the company: “I run a bar in Pt. Richmond. … After seeing your ad campaign where you show a western map of the United States in which California is part of Mexico again, I’ve decided to do the following: 1) Never carry Absolut. Ever; 2) Lower the price of Ketel One vodka to $2 a shot indefinitely to build loyalty; 3) Print a copy of your ad and put it above the Ketel One drink special; 4) Tell all my friends and family what Absolut thinks of the United States of America and our right to enforce border laws. I am on the frontline of illegal immigration and its effects. Where are you? Oh, yes, Sweden. Good riddance.”

Absolut’s initial response to complaints was to hang up on consumers who phoned and to delete their e-mail without bothering to read it. But the controversy spread like a California wildfire stoked by Internet Santa Ana winds. In the first of two statements, Absolut Vice President of Corporate Communications Paula Eriksson attempted to douse the flames by touting the company’s embrace-diversity ethos. “As a global company,” she pedantically intoned, “we recognize that people in different parts of the world may lend different perspectives or interpret our ads in a different way than was intended in that market. Obviously, this ad was run in Mexico, and not the U.S. — that ad might have been very different.”

That arrogant, p.c. sanctimony had the effect of pouring gas on the flames. So over the weekend, Eriksson issued a new statement announcing withdrawal of the ad. It was comically titled “We apologize” — and disingenuously argued that “In no way was the ad meant to offend or disparage, or advocate an altering of borders, lend support to any anti-American sentiment, or to reflect immigration issues. …This is a genuine and sincere apology.” ...

Fresh off its Aztlan debacle, the company announced its newest campaign this week featuring an ad titled “Ruler,” described as “a humorous look at gay men and their fascination with perfect, eight-inch ‘member’ measurements.”

Absolut Press Release:

The brand’s two new, daring print ad executions include: “Ruler,” a humorous look at gay men and their fascination with perfect, eight-inch “member” measurements, while “Stadium” engages on the issue of gay marriage when one half of a gay couple “pops” the question during a sports outing. Created by SPI Marketing/Moon City in New York, these new lifestyle-driven ads build on a heritage of advertisements that prominently featured gay artists since 1984.

“As a long-time supporter of the gay and lesbian community, we acknowledge that you can’t simply speak to gay men and lesbians as consumers, but instead need to make real connections to their lives which we believe we are achieving with our new creative executions,” said Jeffrey Moran, ABSOLUT® spokesperson. “As a company, we respect gay men and lesbians not simply in advertising messages, but behind the scenes as well. We’re not gay-washing here.”

The preferred brand of vodka for gay and lesbian consumers, ABSOLUT® was one of the first major brands to place an ad in a gay magazine 27 years ago and is a long-time supporter of events and causes important to the gay and lesbian community.

Original story.
———————————————-

Dominique Poirier also notified us of Absolut’s apology.

The Republican National Committee contrasts General David H. Petraeus’s testimony to Congress with the two democrat candidates’ campaign pledges to withdraw rapidly from Iraq.

2:28 video

Hillary supporters are fed up with her unfair treatment by the biased and leftwing MSM, and they’re not going to take it anymore.

9:03 video

Slate reviews current cognacs, and discloses a pretty outrageous gambit by Hennessy to fleece the excessively affluent and vainglorious consumer. Flaunt your taste, Hennessy advises.

In 2007, a record 158 million bottles were sold worldwide, and the cognac houses are naturally rushing to cash in on the flush times, particularly at the high end. Hennessy recently introduced a new cognac, called Beauté du Siècle, whose specs are as over-the-top as its name: Only 100 bottles are being produced, the bottles are all made of Baccarat crystal, each one comes in an ornate mirrored chest apparently fashioned by a team of 10 artists, and the cognac is hand-delivered to buyers by members of the Hennessy board. The cost? $235,000 per bottle.

Many of us living outside the urban communities of fashion have experienced mild astonishment at the capacity of mankind for complaint upon reading of protests stemming from the improvement and rehabilitation of formerly slum neighborhoods by new arrived upper middle-class residents, a process pejoratively termed “gentrification.”

The Onion reports that the a new upscale trend, fueled by increasing affluence and the limited supply of urban housing, has appeared, of even more alarming character.

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

Maybe he will.

Musical link

The Telegraph reports that yon wee Gordon Brown is thinking of repealing the 1701 Act of Succession, thus restoring the rights of the Jacobite heir to the royal succession, Duke Francis of Bavaria.

Jon Caruthers, at American Thinker, identifies the left’s Climate Management agenda as simply a more ambitious version of earlier human attempts at managing Nature on a smaller-scale, as in Yellowstone Park, for example, described at length in Alston Chase’s Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America’s First National Park.

The conceit that scientists and bureaucrats can use the power the state to manage nature has lead to disaster in the past, and will again if the global warmists keep getting their way.

When Yellowstone National Park was first created, park officials believed they had to “save” the native fauna as well as protect the visitors by killing off the native wolf population. This they did in grand form. Additionally, they noticed the yearly occurrences of wildfires which, according to the then “modern” and “progressive” thought of the day, should be stamped out at all cost.

The net result of these notions was that 110 years or so later half the park burned down. It turns out that without the wolves the ruminants ran wild and ate up the deciduous trees, leaving only the pine trees to go forth and multiply. Anyone who’s started a campfire knows what happens when you compound this with 110 years of pine needles and flotsam and jetsam—you end up with the perfect firestorm. This is nothing natural. This situation was created by us—by human intervention into a formerly pristine ecosystem that was supposedly “managed” by the federal government – and the result was that half the park burned down.

Once again, on the issue of “global warming” we’re faced with government control—in this case not of the national park system, but of the entire globe. The “progressives” and their “grand thoughts” of the age seek to “manage” the globe in the same “modern” way our ancestors “managed” Yellowstone. Like our ancestors of yore, today’s environmentalists believe the government can control the environment better than Mother Nature can. Are we to suppose that the people who give us the DMV and the IRS are going to “manage” the globe in the same efficient and benevolent manner? In the grand scheme of things are we supposed to believe that we humans are actually better than Mother Nature at “managing” the global environment? For some reason, the enviro-nazis of the age seem to believe that Mother Nature is some kind of octogenarian Alzheimer’s patient and they’re the designated colostomy bag.

Read the whole thing.

David Kahane, at National Review, has lots of fun with those Clinton tax returns.

By now we’ve all had a chance to take a gander at the Clintons’ tax returns, and all I can say is that I’m proud to be a Democrat. Not since that poor Irish immigrant, Richard “Boss” Croker,” left the humble employ of Tammany Hall and retired to his horse farm in Ireland to breed Derby winners has the Party of the Little Guy paid off so spectacularly for a lifetime of “public service.” Talk about a Little Tin Box!

In the old days — say, way back in 1989 — everybody went into full high-dudgeon mode when the Cowboy (no, not Bush; the other one) went to Asia post-presidency and made a couple of speeches for a coupla mil. From the reaction, you would have thought Reagan had just turned over national-security secrets to the Chinese or something. And then Ronnie went back to his ranch, got Alzheimer’s and died.

But the Clintons changed all that. Not only has the Big He made piles of loot for himself, the little woman, the queen of England, the pope in Rome, and their twelve best friends, he’s also kept his big red nose planted firmly in the face of the American people, carping here, criticizing there, meddling to the best of his abilities, all the while trying to get his erstwhile helpmeet elected president of the United States, of all things.

And how did he do it? By inventing something that people want to buy? By coming out of nowhere to write a bestseller or a hot spec script? By putting Microsoft out of business? No, he did it by getting himself twice elected president with less than 50 percent of the popular vote, hanging on tenaciously despite calls from across the country for his resignation during the Starr Inquisition, and basically daring Trent Lott and Chief Justice Rehnquist, in full Gilbert and Sullivan drag, to convict him after the House impeached him. That made him a celebrity, and in this day and age…just spell my name right, baby.

Not for Bubba was Harry Truman’s example, putting on his fedora and going home to Bess in Independence, Mo. Or Ike’s retiring to Gettysburg. Or even Tricky Dick, stalking the beach at San Clemente in a sweaty blue serge suit and muttering darkly about the Jews. Whether gadding about the Middle East, showboating with his buddy Ron Burkle on private jets, or barking and wagging his fingers at reporters in South Carolina, Billy Blythe, the pride of the old gangster mecca of Hot Springs, Ark., has redefined the notion of a kosher post-presidency.

Which is why, out here in post-strike Hollywood, we’re for Obama.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like we’ve changed our minds about Monicagate; if we had to do it again, we’d do it again. Because we weren’t defending Clinton, we were defending, well… us. Our right to do whatever we want whenever we want and suffer absolutely no adverse consequences. Hey — we’re the guys who hate guns and violence and make movies about serial killers and sadistic torturers, but don’t blame us if some impressionable wing-nut yahoo takes us up on our suggestions and starts hanging women from meat hooks. That’s what free speech is all about.

The thing that Clinton established was not, as his wife, Nurse Ratched, would have it, that the personal is political; it was that political is now personal. And thus none of your business: Caught with your pants down in the Oval Office? Personal! Hiring your boy toy for a state job for which he was manifestly unqualified? Personal! Making dubious wire-transfers to your hooker’s prostitution agency? Personal! Using campaign funds to squire mistresses and maybe bed them down in a classy motel on the Upper West Side?

Personal! Personal! Personal!

You can practically feel our contemptuous spittle on your nasty, bigoted, right-wing faces, can’t you?

Read the whole thing.

I was arguing last night with one of my snobbish Yale friends who, though conservative, has imbibed enough of the toxic perspective of the elect to view the Religious Right as a major problem.

I contended that coercion, these days, was typically coming from intolerant secularists determined to drive religious symbols out of public spaces, and eager to punish private individuals or groups (like the Boy Scouts) who differ with them on moral issues. My friend countered by alluding to a legislative proposal in some retarditaire fly-over state which would compel Reproductive Health clinics to notify parents before supplying birth control items to persons under 18.

My own view is that children are expensive and a lot of trouble. Their parents, not the state or Planned Parenthood, brought them into the world, fed them, housed them, clothed them, and sat up with them when they were sick. Parents have a right to bring their children up with their own values. And parents’ rights include, at least, the formal (even if only theoretical) right of deciding if Peggy Sue at age 17 can go on the pill. Practically, I expect lots of 17-year-old kids can, and do, go around their parents and make these kinds of decisions for themselves, but that’s their business. These are matters for individuals and families to decide, not for teachers or school administrators, and not for government or public interest groups.

The notion that “we know better, kids are going to have sex, and we’re going to give them the tools to have sex without consequences whether their parents like it or not” is arrogant, simplistic, and typical of the liberal elite which is universally ready, willing, and eager to intrude into everyone else’s private sphere in order to tell everyone just what’s best for him.

I’m not religious or particularly Puritanical, but even I find the story below, from Natural News (4/3/08), appalling.

A middle school in Portland, Maine is considering a proposal to provide birth control pills and patches to students as young as 11 years old. King Middle School launched a reproductive health program after five of the 135 students who visited the school’s health center in 2006 reported being sexually active. The program already provides condoms to students, but the new proposal would expand this to include prescriptions for birth control pills and patches (which would then have to be purchased at a pharmacy).

The contraceptives could be dispensed without the knowledge of parents, although written permission would be required for children to receive (unspecified) services from the health center.

The proposed program has attracted controversy, with some people accusing the schools of taking away parental power and encouraging children to have sex too early. But school officials dispute these claims.

“We do certainly sit down and speak with them about why [being sexually active] is not a good choice,” said Amanda Rowe, the school’s nurse coordinator. “But there are some who persist… and they need to be protected.”

Logan Levkoff, a sexologist and relationship expert, said that while the school may be stepping into a role that would better be filled by parents, many parents do not feel comfortable enough to do so. “Parents should be the sex educator for their children,” Levkoff said. “The problem is not every parent feels empowered [to do so].”

Parents interviewed by ABC News were split on their feelings about the proposal.

“I don’t think I would want my child in middle school to be getting birth control pills unless I had something to do with it,” one woman said.

But another woman, a mother, disagreed: “I think that education at that age is appropriate because our culture is saturated with messages about sex,” she said.

Natural News is running a story which really dates back to last Fall.

AP (10/18/07):

After an outbreak of pregnancies among middle school girls, education officials in this city have decided to allow a school health center to make birth control pills available to girls as young as 11.

Maine’s King Middle School is the first in the state to offer full range of contraceptives to 6th-8th graders.

King Middle School will become the first middle school in Maine to make a full range of contraception available, including birth control pills and patches. Condoms have been available at King’s health center since 2000.

Students need parental permission to access the school’s health center. But treatment is confidential under state law, which allows the students to decide whether to inform their parents about the services they receive.

There are no national figures on how many middle schools provide such services. Most middle schoolers range in age from 11 to 13.

“It’s very rare that middle schools do this,” said Divya Mohan, a spokeswoman for the National Assembly on School-Based Health Care.

Portland’s three middle schools reported 17 pregnancies during the last four years, not counting miscarriages or terminated pregnancies that weren’t reported to the school nurse.

The Portland School Committee approved the plan, offered by city health officials, on a 7-2 vote Wednesday night. Whether the prescriptions would be offered this school year or next wasn’t immediately clear.

King is the only one of the three schools with a health center, primarily because it has more students who get free or reduced-price lunch, said Lisa Belanger, who oversees Portland’s student health centers.

Five of the 134 students who visited King’s health center during the 2006-07 school year reported having sexual intercourse, said Amanda Rowe, lead nurse in Portland’s school health centers.

Barack Hussein Obama is a radical leftwing democrat from Chicago, a city where private ownership of handguns is banned. But the upcoming Pennsylvania primary will play a crucial role in the bitterly contested race for the democrat party’s nomination, and Obama, as the Politico reports, is not letting his record of total and complete support for gun control and gun confiscation stop him from going after the votes of Pennsylvania gun owners.

After all, Obama knows just how stupid those deer hunting hicks really are. All he has to do is make a deal to gain the endorsement of a backwoods democrat state rep from Elk County to vouch for his acceptability to sportsmen, and do a little of his personally patented fancy footwork around the issue, and he’ll get plenty of rube votes.

He’s not pro-Gun Control. Goodness gracious, mercy me, no! He’s a Constitutional Law professor, and supports the individual right to keep and bear arms (for hunting and target shooting). He’s merely for “reasonable and common sense” regulations, which you can bet will limit you to owning very limited types and calibers of firearms and ammunition, and which will allow you to own guns as long as you obtain the necessary permits and register each and every one, and then keep them locked up, inaccessible, and unusable except at the properly licensed shooting range or hunting facility at which you actually be permitted to use them under proper supervision, of course.

Barack Obama did not hunt or fish as a child. He lives in a big city. And as an Illinois state legislator and a U.S. senator, he consistently backed gun control legislation.

But he is nevertheless making a play for pro-gun voters in rural Pennsylvania.

By highlighting his background in constitutional law and downplaying his voting record, Obama is engaging in a quiet but targeted drive to win over an important constituency that on the surface might seem hostile to his views.

The need to craft a strategy aimed at pro-gun voters underscores the potency of the issue in Pennsylvania, which claims one of the nation’s highest per capita membership rates in the National Rifle Association.

It also could provide clues as to whether Obama, as one of the Senate’s more liberal members, can position himself as an acceptable choice to a conservative-minded demographic in later primary contests and in the general election.

“Guns are a cultural lens through which they view candidates,” said Jim Kessler, vice president for policy at Third Way, a progressive think tank. “If you are seen as way off on that issue, then you seem way off on everything. If you are seen as OK, if the lens is clearer, then they continue to look at you and size you up on other things.”

“For Obama, who is less known and is from Chicago, a city guy and an African American, the feeling is that he is anti-gun,” Kessler continued. “By handling the Second Amendment correctly, he starts to get a hearing among these folks.”

Obama aides would not discuss the campaign’s strategy. While the effort so far in Pennsylvania appears modest, it is noteworthy for a race that has largely avoided such direct engagement with gun owners.

The campaign has asked gun rights advocates like state Rep. Dan Surra, a Democrat from rural Elk County with an “A+” rating from the NRA, to form a coalition of supporters who can vouch for Obama.

“It is clear out there that I am for Obama, and they have reached out to me as a sportsman and a gun owner,” Surra said Thursday. “There has been an outreach to pro-gun legislators, pro-gun people who are sympathetic to Obama’s message.”

The campaign sent an e-mail this week to the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs, saying it would “appreciate all sportsmen taking time to learn the facts: Our candidate strongly supports the right and traditions of sportsmen throughout Pennsylvania and the United States of America.”

And with an endorsement last month from Sen. Bob Casey Jr., Obama got a boost within a community that the Pennsylvania Democrat has courted assiduously. As part of an initiative to move beyond his party’s traditional bases during the 2006 Senate campaign, Casey visited stock car races, demolition derbies and gun clubs. Campaign operatives to both senators are now working closely together.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton does not appear to be making the same level of effort. She has reminded audiences in the last few months that she learned to shoot a gun during childhood vacations in Scranton and bagged a duck as an adult. But neither the state Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs nor her pro-gun Democratic supporters have heard of any specific campaign outreach. ...

Obama has long backed gun-control measures, including a ban on semiautomatic weapons and concealed weapons, and a limit on handgun purchases to one a month. He has declined to take a stance on the legality of the handgun prohibition in Washington, D.C., which the U.S. Supreme Court is reviewing, although Obama has voiced support for the right of state and local governments to regulate guns.

In the Senate, he and Clinton broke on one vote, in July 2006. Siding with gun-rights advocates, Obama voted to prohibit the confiscation of firearms during an emergency or natural disaster. Clinton was one of 16 senators to oppose the amendment.

A two-page white paper on Obama’s website doesn’t mention his voting record.

Instead, he introduces himself as a former constitutional law professor who “believes the Second Amendment creates an individual right, and he greatly respects the constitutional rights of Americans to bear arms.”

“He will protect the rights of hunters and other law-abiding Americans to purchase, own, transport, and use guns for the purposes of hunting and target shooting,” the paper states. “He also believes that the right is subject to reasonable and common sense regulation.”

Melody Zullinger, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs who received the Obama campaign e-mail on his gun record, said Obama sounds like he is “speaking out of both sides of his mouth.”

“I was at one of our county meetings last night and I mentioned this to [federation members],” Zullinger said Friday of the Obama outreach. “Everyone basically blew it off and weren’t buying it.”

Obama’s approach is similar to one advocated by Third Way, which issued a seven-step blueprint in 2006 to close the “gun gap” with Republicans. In a memo on its website, the group urges progressives to avoid silence on gun issues, and instead “redefine the issue in a way that appeals to gun owning voters.”

Paula Eriksson, VP Corporate Communications, V&S Absolut Spirits explains why Americans shouldn’t get bent out of shape over Absolut’s playful rearrangement in its Mexican advertising of the United States’ border with Mexico.

The In An Absolut World advertising campaign invites consumers to visualize a world that appeals to them—one they feel may be more idealized or one that may be a bit “fantastic.” As such, the campaign will elicit varying opinions and points of view. We have a variety of executions running in countries worldwide, and each is germane to that country and that population.

This particular ad, which ran in Mexico, was based upon historical perspectives and was created with a Mexican sensibility. In no way was this meant to offend or disparage, nor does it advocate an altering of borders, nor does it lend support to any anti-American sentiment, nor does it reflect immigration issues. Instead, it hearkens to a time which the population of Mexico may feel was more ideal.

As a global company, we recognize that people in different parts of the world may lend different perspectives or interpret our ads in a different way than was intended in that market. Obviously, this ad was run in Mexico, and not the US —that ad might have been very different.

Until I see the Absolut ad featuring the liberal who panders to special interest groups treated as below, I’m afraid I’m going to be purchasing Grey Goose.

Original posting.

The Nantucket-Treweryn Beagles starting the Three-Couple competition

We’ve spent much of the last two days attending the Spring Trial Pack Competitions of the National Beagle Club at the Institute in Aldie.

The Wolver Beagles returning from competing in the Three-Couple.

Karen and I follow the two packs illustrated above, who did not win.

Friday’s Three-Couple Pack competition was won by the York County, Pennsylvania’s Holly Hill Beagles, who ran a cottontail for 45 minutes and then captured the quarry, alive! People are still talking about that one.

John Borsa, Master of Beagles, holds the captive safely, Whip Amy Burke stands by his side. (Photo: Russell Wagner)

Socialized health care in Massachusetts produces strained resources. Who would have imagined that? Certainly not the New York Times.

Once they discover that she is Dr. Kate, the supplicants line up to approach at dinner parties and ballet recitals. Surely, they suggest to Dr. Katherine J. Atkinson, a family physician here, she might find a way to move them up her lengthy waiting list for new patients.

Those fortunate enough to make it soon learn they face another long wait: Dr. Atkinson’s next opening for a physical is not until early May — of 2009.

In pockets of the United States, rural and urban, a confluence of market and medical forces has been widening the gap between the supply of primary care physicians and the demand for their services. Modest pay, medical school debt, an aging population and the prevalence of chronic disease have each played a role.

Now in Massachusetts, in an unintended consequence of universal coverage, the imbalance is being exacerbated by the state’s new law requiring residents to have health insurance.

Since last year, when the landmark law took effect, about 340,000 of Massachusetts’ estimated 600,000 uninsured have gained coverage. Many are now searching for doctors and scheduling appointments for long-deferred care.

Here in western Massachusetts, Dr. Atkinson’s bustling 3,000-patient practice, which was closed to new patients for several years, has taken on 50 newcomers since she hired a part-time nurse practitioner in November. About a third were newly insured, Dr. Atkinson said. Just north of here in Athol, the doctors at North Quabbin Family Physicians are now seeing four to six new patients a day, up from one or two a year ago.

Dr. Patricia A. Sereno, state president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, said an influx of the newly insured to her practice in Malden, just north of Boston, had stretched her daily caseload to as many as 22 to 25 patients, from 18 to 20 a year ago. To fit them in, Dr. Sereno limits the number of 45-minute physicals she schedules each day, thereby doubling the wait for an exam to three months.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get the government to force those rich investment bankers and hedge fund managers to pay for your health care? Unfortunately, as the late Ayn Rand pointed out, that inevitably means then that you have to pay for health care for every unemployed wino and heroin addict yourself, and you get to stand behind them in line the next time you’re sick.

The New York Times warns of the latest occupational health peril: blogging.

They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

When Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin (who each do about five or ten times the work most of the rest of us do) start falling over, then I will begin to worry.

London Times:

The internet (as we know it currently) could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.

The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day – the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.

Cern, based near Geneva, started the grid computing project seven years ago when researchers realised the LHC would generate annual data equivalent to 56m CDs – enough to make a stack 40 miles high.

This meant that scientists at Cern – where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 – would no longer be able to use his creation for fear of causing a global collapse.

This is because the internet has evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, much of which was originally designed for telephone calls and therefore lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission.

By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.

Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.”

That network, in effect a parallel internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world.

When Charlton Heston was elected president of the National Rifle Association in June of 1998, he posed holding a rifle, and delivered a jab at then-President Clinton, saying, “America doesn’t trust you with our 21-year-old daughters, and we sure, Lord, don’t trust you with our guns.”

Bloomberg has a nice tribute:

Heston stood 6-feet-3-inches, and his baritone voice, iron jaw, aquiline nose and rippling muscles lent masculine strength and sex appeal to many of his roles, any number of which he played bare-chested. He gained fame as Moses in the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille epic, ``The Ten Commandments’’ and owned the role ever after.

Heston also played Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Thomas More, John the Baptist, Cardinal Richelieu and Mark Anthony among dozens of others on stage, television and the movies. He made more than 70 films.

He was the “actor of choice for historical drama’’ in the 1950s and ‘60s, Robert Osborne, host of Turner Classic Movies on cable television and a columnist for the Hollywood Reporter, once said of him.

“Charlton Heston looked like he came from another era,’’ Osborne said in a June 2006 interview. ``He looked like he was kind of chiseled out of granite. He looked heroic.’’ ...

..his conversion to conservatism began in 1964, when he saw a billboard for Republican Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. It said: “In your heart, you know he’s right.’’ Concluded Heston: “He IS right.’’

Heston’s career surged in an era when “the difference between good and evil, and the eventual triumph of the good, the reward of the virtuous, of the heroic, was almost always recognized,’’ he said in a 1995 interview. “Yet, more and more, we see films made that diminish the American experience and example, and sometimes trash it completely.’’

Heston saw a cultural war “raging across our land, storming our values, assaulting our freedoms, killing our self confidence,’’ he said in speeches.

He decried affirmative action and feminism, complained of bloated government. And he changed his mind about gun control, becoming a vehement opponent of it.

Heston became president of the National Rifle Association in 1998, holding the job until 2003 and touring the country protesting efforts to restrict gun ownership. He developed a mantra dear to NRA crowds: Raising a rifle overhead he would shout that the only way gun-control advocates could take it would be to pry it “from my cold, dead hands.’’

In defiance of President Bill Clinton’s call for increased gun controls, NRA members sometimes put bumper stickers on their cars that read “Charlton Heston is My President.’’

Even the Washington Post printed an admiring tribute:

He was the hawk.

He soared. In fact, everything about him soared. His shoulders soared, his cheekbones soared, his brows soared. Even his hair soared.

And for a good two decades, Charlton Heston, who died Saturday at 84, was the ultimate American movie star. In a time when method actors and ethnic faces were gradually taking over, Heston remained the last of the ramrod straight, flinty, squinty, tough-as-old-hickory movie guys.

He and his producers and directors understood his appeal, and used it for maximum effect on the big technicolor screen. Rarely a doubter, never a coward, inconceivable as a shirker, he played men of granite virtue no matter the epoch. He played commanders, Biblical prophets, Jewish heroes, tough-as-nails cowpokes, calm aviators, last survivors, quarterbacks and a president or two.

Later in his life, he took that stance into politics, becoming president of the National Rifle Association just when anti-gun attitudes were reaching their peak. Pilloried and parodied, lampooned and bullied, he never relented, he never backed down, and in time it came to seem less an old star’s trick of vanity than an act of political heroism. He endured, like Moses. He aged, like Moses. And the stone tablet he carried only had one commandment: Thou shalt be armed. It can even be said that if the Supreme Court in June finds a meaning in the Second Amendment consistent with NRA policy, that he will have died just short of the Promised Land—like Moses.

I’ve had a link to the NRA membership page with a picture of Chuck Heston on it in the right hand column, since I started this blog.

The New York Times reports that Hillary has finally released her family tax returns, and they demonstrate that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet better start worrying about their spots on the Forbes 400 List of Richest Americans should Hillary win this coming November.

The Clintons’ charitable donations have not always matched their rhetoric, typically going only to their personal foundation, but their foundation’s disbursements have dramatically increased recently for some reason.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and former President Bill Clinton released tax data Friday showing they earned $109 million over the last eight years, an ascent into the uppermost tier of American taxpayers that seemed unimaginable in 2001, when they left the White House with little money and facing millions in legal bills.

The bulk of their wealth has come from speaking and book-writing, which together account for almost $92 million, including a $15 million advance — larger than previously thought — from Mr. Clinton’s 2004 autobiography, “My Life.” The former president’s vigorous lecture schedule, where his speeches command upwards of $250,000, brought in almost $52 million.

During that time, the Clintons paid $33.8 million in federal taxes and claimed deductions for $10.2 million in charitable contributions. The contributions went to a family foundation run by the Clintons that has given away only about half of the money they put into it, and most of that was last year, after Mrs. Clinton declared her candidacy. ...

Mr. Clinton has earned $29.6 million from two books, “My Life” and “Giving,” while Mrs. Clinton has collected $10.5 million from two books, “Living History” and “It Takes a Village.” She donated $1.1 million from book proceeds to charity.

Mr. Clinton last year earned $6.3 million from “Giving,” a book on philanthropy, and reported giving $1 million of that to charity. In the book, Mr. Clinton espouses his own formula for charitable donations, recommending that people give away 5 percent of their income to charitable causes. “If giving by the wealthiest Americans even approached these levels,” he wrote, “I’m convinced it would spark an enormous outpouring of contributions from Americans of more modest means.”

The pace of the Clintons’ own charitable giving, which peaked last year at $3 million, has not always kept up with their income, and by at least one measure, has sometimes fallen short of the spirit of the 5 percent goal, which is to get money into the hands of charities that do good works.

In 2002, for instance, they reported income totaling $9.5 million and $115,000 in gifts to charity. In other years, they have given much larger amounts to their family foundation, but it has yet to disburse all of the money.

The Clintons took a tax deduction in 2004 for $2.5 million in charitable gifts, $2 million of which went to their family foundation, which as a tax-exempt nonprofit is considered a charity under the tax code. That same year, the foundation gave away just $221,000 to charitable groups, according to its tax return.

A representative of the Clintons said that when they and their foundation filed their 2007 tax returns, the records would show that all of the $3 million they gave to the foundation last year had been passed on to other charities. That will account for more than half of all the charitable donations that the foundation has made since 2001, according to a review of its tax returns.

Ed Kaitz, at American Thinker, has some observations on the contradictions inherent in the rhetoric of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Recent polls are showing that by a good 60% margin, Barack Obama is seen as a candidate who can “unify” the nation. This may be the most brilliant example of what George Orwell called “doublethink” in the recent history of the Democratic Party. Think about it: for over thirty, maybe forty years the American public has been variously sermonized and threatened by crusaders in Obama’s same party into embracing not unity, but “diversity.” Call it what you will – brilliant or duplicitous – it is still a masterful political achievement.

For decades students in our schools have been told to “celebrate difference” and to see America as a “salad bowl” rather than the “melting pot” of old. Those who resisted the collective swoon for “diversity” and who descried the resulting balkanization of our educational institutions were forced into “diversity training seminars” and reeducated under the watchful eyes of “diversity officers.” For as Mao Tse Tung famously said, those who oppose progressive change “must go through a stage of compulsion before they can enter the stage of voluntary, conscious change.” But if these polls are correct, and Obama is indeed the great unifier, what will happen then to all of the “diversity officers” and “diversity training” seminars on our college campuses and in our corporations? Will the entire “diversity” superstructure in our society finally be dismantled? Will Democrats, for maybe the first time since JFK or MLK start talking about what unites us rather than what divides us? Will citizens be thought of as “Americans” first and not categorized and rewarded based on skin color? Is Obama, the great unifier, going to finally liberate us from this divisive ideology? Don’t hold your breath.

George Orwell claimed that there was something more calculated at work when politicians begin to claim for example that “Slavery is Freedom” or that “Hate is Love,” or in Mao Tse Tung’s words, that “Compulsion is Voluntary.” The new and improved Democratic Party version seems to be that “Diversity is Unity.” Orwell called this “doublethink” and he claimed that it was a condition endemic to the totalitarian mind. It meant the ability “to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory” and “to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies.” For example, a liberal socialist political platform usually involves “liberating” us from our attachments to property, families and nation in the name of “freedom.” When the State chooses for us, however, the result is slavery. Doublethink in Mr. Obama’s case (“Diversity is Unity!”) gives him the luxury of defending not only the divisive and intolerant Reverend Wright and his party’s divisive policies over the years, but it also allows him to be seen as the savior who will finally make America whole.

Since it is difficult to recall a time when national unity was high on the list of Democratic Party priorities, the coming months should be a rather curious time for many. ...

When.. divisive affirmative action programs were challenged in courts across the country “diversity” was invented as a way of continuing the assault on what many considered “white privilege” or “white oppression.” In the final analysis however, diversity or multiculturalism were never more than a charade to cover the underlying Marxist theory of conflict. Minority students brought in on affirmative action were rarely encouraged to study other languages and cultures because the liberal gatekeepers understood something rather disturbing about this endeavor: a thorough and sensitive investigation of other cultures and religions reveals a rather conservative, not liberal, orientation in their respective beliefs and habits. ...

The bottom line is that when the Left in this country embraced Marxism they committed themselves to conflict and division, not cooperation. Obama, unlike Hillary however is smart enough to understand that fostering division is a poor strategy for winning elections. In the words of Eric Hoffer:

Those who would transform a nation or the world cannot do so by breeding or captaining discontent. . . They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope.

Obama’s relationship with Reverend Wright complicates this strategy, as does his receptivity to and defense of the anger in much of the black electorate. But if Obama’s message is “unity” then it means absolutely nothing unless he addresses several decades of divide and conquer liberal ideology. In other words, unless he does this, Obama’s message will amount to nothing other than the latest form of Orwellian doublethink: “Diversity is Unity!”

And used the same Winner Take All Primary System we do, what would the delegate count look like? Rassmussen Reports’ Wesley Little provides the answer.

Peter Carr, Principal Deputy Director of Public Affairs at the Department of Justice, responded to Glenn Greenwald’s request for clarification as follows:

In a question-and-answer session after his Commonwealth Club speech last week, Attorney General Mukasey referenced a call between an al Qaeda safe house and a person in the United States. The Attorney General has referred to this before, in the letter he sent with Director of National Intelligence McConnell to Chairman Reyes on February 22, 2008. In that letter, contained in this link [.pdf], the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence explained that:

“We have provided Congress with examples in which difficulties with collections under [Executive Order 12333] resulted in the Intelligence Community missing crucial information. For instance, one of the September 11 hijackers communicated with a known overseas terrorist facility while he was living in the United States. Because that collection was conducted under Executive Order 12333, the Intelligence Community could not identify the domestic end of the communication prior to September 11, 2001, when it could have stopped that attack. The failure to collect such communications was one of the central criticisms of the Congressional Joint Inquiry that looked into intelligence failures associated with the attacks of September 11. The bipartisan bill passed by the Senate would address such flaws in our capabilities that existed before the enactment of the Protect America Act and that are now resurfacing.”

This call is also referenced in the unclassified report of the congressional intelligence committees’ Joint Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks.

Greenwald spills buckets full of indignation and continues beating his accusatory tom-tom, being absolutely in love with the notion that he has found a deliberate falsehood he can explode to the embarrassment of the evil Bush Administration, and he has a pretty good echo of his theory (accepting it as proven gospel) going in a number ( 1, 2, 3) of the standard cages making up the left blogosphere’s monkey-house, but (sorry, Glenn!) he has actually proven absolutely nothing.

At best (from Greenwald’s point-of-view), the Attorney-General offered an inelegantly-phrased hypothetical open to misinterpretation. On the other hand, it is not impossible at all that there really was a phone call from an al Qaeda safe house which was not intercepted because of legal red-tape. In which case, Mr. Greenwald is going to be very sorry that he has so heavily invested in this story.

Still developing.

Original story.

Readers should be aware that blogs these days are absolutely flooded with Spam comments (advertising on-line casinos, insurance, prescription drugs, Viagra, and porn-sites). NYM receives hundreds a day, and Spam filtering software is not completely effective. Faute de mieux, I have recently started running multiple Spam filters. In most cases, comments not simply eliminated wind up in temporary storage, and I have to glance over them before they are allowed to appear. Consequently, a posted comment may not show up for most of a day sometimes. My apologies, but this state of affairs will prevail for a while (until I find a better solution).