Bush on the latest breach of national security

(Via LGF) Byron York posts the text of Bush's radio address in The Corner:

This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security. Its purpose is to detect and prevent terrorist attacks against the United States, our friends and allies. Yesterday the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk. Revealing classified information is illegal, alerts our enemies, and endangers our country.

I must say that whenever I bother to check into one of these "disturbing allegations", it turns out there's no there there. Turns out the "hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States" being surveiled are those with "known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations". And it turns out that our rouge president and his NSA have briefed Congressional leaders "more than a dozen times on this authorization and the activities conducted under it".

Munich

Jason at Libertas has a post about Spielberg's latest. He includes the full text of David Brooks' op-ed on the movie:

This is a new kind of antiwar movie for a new kind of war, and in so many ways it is innovative, sophisticated and intelligent.

But when it is political, Spielberg has to distort reality to fit his preconceptions. In the first place, by choosing a story set in 1972, Spielberg allows himself to ignore the core poison that permeates the Middle East, Islamic radicalism. In Spielberg’s Middle East, there is no Hamas or Islamic Jihad. There are no passionate anti-Semites, no Holocaust deniers like the current president of Iran, no zealots who want to exterminate Israelis.

There is, above all, no evil. And that is the core of Spielberg’s fable. In his depiction of reality there are no people so committed to a murderous ideology that they are impervious to the sort of compromise and dialogue Spielberg puts such great faith in.

Which is odd, since those murderous fanatics work so hard to get noticed. Yet, so many in the West work over-time to excuse or ignore them.

Yet more sickness

My Mia, not Ahmadinejad. I'm trying not to turn this into the Vomit Blog, but... I lost my second bedspread in a week last night at midnight. So, today has been all laundry, no bloggy.

We know that Bush is extending his fascist empire

across the globe through the use of America's Imperial War Machine. So, why can't anyone seem to get a decent picture of American soldiers? According to John Kerry, any Iraqi child could snap a picture of one, what with them constantly rampaging through Iraqi houses.

Update: Great comment at Medienkritik: "Spiegel's mistake is certainly understandable. The United States takes all its actions unilaterally. Therefore every soldier you see in a picture by definition has to be American."

analogy with the word woo

That's what someone from Poland was Googling when they found my blog. Somehow, I don't think they found satisfaction.

But on the bright side: Someone from Poland visited my blog. Cool.

Viva La Merchandise...

To rip off a great T-shirt slogan. I get why Che sells T-shirts. Most kids wearing the shirts are way too young to remember his crimes and way too vacuous to care. Long wavy hair. Stickin' it to the man. What more can you ask for in teenage rebellion-wear?

But Erich Honecker? Selling shower gel?














Yeah, that was gonna work.

(Via Observing Hermann, great German culture blog)

Charles Crawford: Closet Anti-Idiotarian

Charles Crawford, British Ambassador to Poland, was exposed, through a leaked e-mail, as an intelligent man with a good sense of humor. He calls the Common Agricultural Policy:

...a programme which uses inefficient transfers of taxpayers money to bloat rich French landowners and so pump up food prices in Europe, thereby creating poverty in Africa, which we then fail to solve through inefficient but expensive aid programmes. The most stupid, immoral state-subsidised policy in human history, give or take Communism.

Ouch. (via The Corner)

Perry DeHavilland is outraged: "Yes, this guy should indeed be fired from his job as an ambassador... he belongs in 10 Downing Street doing Tony Blair's job!"

Nick Schultz to Jonah Goldberg: "There’s a lot of blame to go around in the trade game (and developing countries have their own harmful protectionist policies). But France is risking scuttling the entire poverty-alleviating global trade system to protect 1% of its total wealth. It is one of the most evil government policies known in the history of man. Your ambassador friend is right." More on that 1% figure here.

German-American Relations

The Carnival of German-American Relations is up and it's full of good stuff.

Priorities

I like this from Ace:

Bush demands objective goals be met, and then he hopes for a fairly quick withdrawal. While the Democrats demand a fairly quick withdrawal, and hope that objective military goals will be achieved by the Iraqis.

That seems accurate, at least as it describes the Dean-Murtha-Pelosi-Kerry contingent. Even though the Dem leadership claims their position isn't that different from Bush's every time they're called on it, this seems like a pretty big difference to me.

Making Children's Lit Safe For Children

We've all heard about HarperCollins airbrushing the cigarette from the phots of the illustrator in a new edition of Goodnight Moon. Karen Karbo suggests ways to make this classic even safer for the kiddos.

(Via Joanne Jacobs)

I thought It Was Just Me...

who was unimpressed by the new pseudoephedrine-free decongestants. But Rob at Fortress of Solitude has a low opinion of the new NyQuil. (Via The Consumerist)

The other day, I got carded at Wal-Mart buying cold medicine for Mia. The computer made the cashier verify that I was over 18. What? From what I pick up watching the news, most meth makers are well over 18. And don't they just steal the stuff anyway? Keeping it in the pharmacy at least makes sense as a theft control measure.

I've posted before on the silliness of these laws that only inconvenience the law-abiding. Criminals are all about ignoring the law, after all.

Update: Stephen Green, also not happy to loose Nyquil.

Snow Day!

There's at least a foot of snow out there. And let me tell you, snow is much more beautiful when you don't have to drive anywhere in it. Mia's home from school today because of the weather. That's no surprise. They close the schools around here for a few inches of snow. The big news is that the university is closed. When I worked there, we joked that they only closed up when the chancellor couldn't make it to campus. (The chancellor lives on campus.)

The Perfect Democrat Movie

Jason at Libertas fisks a review of the Showtime movie Homecoming, where the dead rise to vote Democrat. No, really.

Joe Leiberman keeps reminding my why I left the Democrats

By that I mean that every time he speaks, like in his recent WSJ editorial, he reminds me of what I thought the Democrats were, back when I considered myself one. And then via Instapundit, I see that the arbiter of all things leftist thinks Lieberman is "corrossive to Democratic unity" and can't wait to rid the Democratic party of him.

And that is when I switched sides. When I realized that Joe Lieberman was the only person in the Joe Lieberman wing of the Democratic party. That the party base actively wants to get rid of him tells me I was right. He's waaaay in the minority over there.

Update: As if on cue, here comes Chairman of the DNC, Howard Dean, saying we cannot win in Iraq. Of course, it's all about Vietnam. Then he gets clever:

He said the Democrat proposal is not a 'withdrawal,' but rather a 'strategic redeployment' of U.S. forces.

Redeployment to where? Seems he didn't say. I thought Murtha was just confused when I heard him with Katie Couric this morning. For awhile, I thought Katie had him on the ropes, but now I suspect that his argument is so weak that Katie couldn't help but poke holes in it. He seems to be saying "There's lots of trouble in Iraq. We should move our boys out of the way, to a neighboring country. Then they could go back in if there were trouble." Umm, the kind of trouble you want to run from now, or some other kind of trouble that would be worth fighting.

But apparently this is Democratic foreign policy. Dean again:

And we need a force in the Middle East, not in Iraq but in a friendly neighboring country to fight (terrorist leader Musab) Zarqawi, who came to Iraq after this invasion.

So, it's all our fault that Zarqawi is in Iraq, so we need to move our troops out of Iraq...to fight Zarqawi.

And then they wonder why no one takes them seriously.

(Via Ace)

What is it about Asian Women...

that drives lefties nuts? From Derbyshire:

Since one of the lefty bloggers posted that picture of my wife & I on our wedding day -- Rosie at that point a 23-yr-old working professional woman with a university degree -- you'd be surprised how many mocking, scornful, and downright rude e-mails I have had from sensitive lefty feminist anti-racist souls. Keywords: "mail-order bride," "jailbait," "cradle robber," etc. etc.

The Holiday Tree

Bookworm makes a good point about the concept of a "Holdiay" Tree:

What I also found entirely silly is the ignorance behind the holiday tree. No other winter religious celebration (Hannukah, Kwanzaa) has a tree as its centerpiece. The only one that does is Christmas, which celebrates, yes, Christ's birth. That is, it's a Christian holiday. To take a tree whose only symbolism is manifestly Christian, and to pretend it's just a holiday tree when no other holidays include the tree is so ill-informed.

Is this like what the early Catholic Church did when they co-opted pagan customs and mixed them in with Christian celebrations? Have we gone from "See, you can have all your old pagan fun and still be Christians" to "See you can still have all you Christian imagery without all that pesky religion?"

That Didn't Take Long

Peace group blames U.S., U.K. for Iraq hostages:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A peace group blamed the United States and Britain for the abduction of four activists shown in an insurgent video, saying the kidnapping was the direct result of the occupation of Iraq.

Well, of course. It couldn't have anything to do with these "peace" activists wandering into a dangerous situation armed only with their ideology. And Lord knows it couldn't be the fault of the head-choppers with guns. If it can't be traced back to the Great Satan, it just isn't worth talking about.

The Stepford School

Yes, a school can be too perfect.

I've been checking out schools trying to help us decide where to move. I found the web page of one that claimed to have a modified Montessori program. It's located in a place we call Corporate Woods, a fancy office park filled with law firms. I guess that should have been my first clue. "The Most Academic Curriculum For Your Child" should have been clue #2.

But still I persist, because Montessori elementary programs are few and far between around here. Extra-curricular activities. Full-time registered nurse. F-3 Tornado Shelter. Closed-circuit TV to observe the classrooms. Key card entry. But I finally picked up the undeniable scary-perfection vibe when I read that the playgrounds "...are surfaced in the synthetic “field turf” found in professional football stadiums. Our playgrounds are green in January, produce no grass stains, and are never muddy! "

Plastic grass? Hmmm. I find grass stains as annoying as the next mother, but that doesn't mean I want to ban grass. Maybe I really don't belong in the snobby suburbs.

Technorati Tag: kansas city

Why Teaching Religion in School is a Bad Idea, Part 312

Here's the story of a little dust-up at the University of Kansas over a professor apparently designing a course to mock conservative Christians. The course was originally called "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationisms and other Religious Mythologies," later changed to "Intelligent Design and Creationism." The controversy erupted when an e-mail from the professor to the Society of Open-Minded Atheists and Agnostics, a student organization for which he serves as faculty adviser, was made public. In it he "called supporters of the teaching of intelligent design and creationism religious "fundies" and said it would be a "nice slap in their big fat face" to teach the subjects as mythology".

I don't know whether this guy is a righteous advocate of science or a big jerk. But my point is that conservative Christians seem to think the local pastor will be teaching the Bible class at the local high school, when, in fact, it will be taught by guys like this.

Finally Learned Something On The Morning Shows

No, it wasn't insightful commentary on world events, but it was useful. When you are ordering on-line, if there is a box for a coupon code when you check out, then there is a coupon somewhere and if you google the store name and "coupon code", you'll find it. That little trick just saved me $8.00.