…to our micromanaging leftist Obama/Pelosi/Reid government’s intentions for sticking their noses into, and therefore, as liberal politicians are wont to do, stamping out opportunities in the hitherto beneificial, career building concept of internships.

John Stossel’s got it spot-on.

Do you employ unpaid student interns — college students who work in exchange for on-the-job training?

If so, President Obama’s Labor Department says that you’re an exploiter. The government says an internship is OK only if it meets six criteria, among them that the employer must get “no immediate advantage” from the intern’s activities. In fact, the employer’s work “may be impeded.”

Impeded? No immediate advantage?

I’m in trouble, then. I have an intern at Fox Business News, and I’m getting immediate advantages from her work all the time. I’ve had interns my whole career and gotten lots of immediate advantage from them. Occasionally, I’ve been impeded — but the better interns did the research that made my work possible. I’d asked my TV bosses to pay for research help, but they said, “You think we’re made of money?”

The plot thickens…

So I spoke with Village Voice writer Anya Kamenetz, who wrote a column titled “Take This Internship and Shove It” in The New York Times. (http://tinyurl.com/2anss9s)

“We have minimum wage laws in this country for a very good reason,” she replied. “We had them to avoid exploitation like child labor.

But what’s wrong with a free internship if a student learns something about the career he wants to pursue?

I was a little stunned by Kamenetz’s answer: “Employers could say we cannot afford to pay anybody, so why should we be forced to pay the guy who cleans the floors?”

Because they wouldn’t get people to clean floors if they didn’t pay. But I guess I shouldn’t expect a New York writer to understand markets.

“Interns are people that come in and work for below minimum wage,” she said. “They pull the bottom out of the labor market, and it’s less fair for everybody.”

So it should be banned?

“There are a lot of ways to fill in the need for interns and the need for college students to get experience. One way is for colleges to pay stipends.”

But they won’t.

“They will if the law is enforced. Another way is for companies to hire students that are eligible for federal work-study.”

Oh, I see. The taxpayers should pay for my interns.

“Nobody is saying that these interns should go away,” Kamenetz added. “What they’re saying is a company should put money in their budgets to pay people the minimum wage to work for them, and that is just the basic issue of fairness. If you start working for free, where’s it going to end?”

Give me a break. It would end when the interns have the skills to earn market salaries. Minimum-wage law and union rules already killed off apprentice jobs on construction sites. Contractors say: If I must pay high union wages, I’ll hire experienced workers. I’d lose money if I hired a kid and helped him learn on the job.

Emphasis mine.

My interns often told me that working — unpaid — at WCBS or ABC was the best learning experience of their lives: “I learned more from you than at college, and I didn’t have to pay tuition!” It was good for them and good for me.

SNIP! (A little technical blogger talk, there)

What’s happened to the rights of contract and free association? If student and employer come to an agreement, both expect to benefit or it wouldn’t happen. The student is no indentured servant. If the employer “exploits” the student, the student can quit. The contract ought to be nobody’s business but theirs.

Butt out, federal bullies. Grown-ups can take care of ourselves.

Basically, this is another example of liberals who believe that they can “help” society by legislating against human nature. Ain’t happenin’.

…as portrayed by revisionist history.

I was only going to do one post today, then I read this column by Thomas Sowell in Jewish World Review a little while ago and thought it needed another post in which to share it.

Mr. Sowell is right on point when he talks about the fact that our educational institutions have filtered slavery, as a historical subject, down to a simple affair of whites enslaving blacks, which, as inaccurate as this revisionism tends to be, is one of the cornerstones of the unjustified, even lie-based guilt trip laid on all white Americans by the political left and by certain race-card waving rabble-rousers looking for a hand-out or an edge in the game of politics.

Many years ago, I was surprised to receive a letter from an old friend, saying that she had been told that I refused to see campus visitors from Africa.

At the time, I was so bogged down with work that I had agreed to see only one visitor to the Stanford campus — and it so happens that he was from Africa. He just happened to come along when I had a little breathing room from the work I was doing in my office.

I pointed out to my friend that whoever said what she heard might just as well have said that I refused to go sky-diving with blacks — which was true, because I refused to go sky-diving with anybody, whether black, white, Asian or whatever.

The kind of thinking that produced a passing misconception about me has, unfortunately, produced much bigger, much longer lasting, much more systematic and more poisonous distortions about the United States of America.

Slavery is a classic example. The history of slavery across the centuries and in many countries around the world is a painful history to read — not only in terms of how slaves have been treated, but because of what that says about the whole human species — because slaves and enslavers alike have been of every race, religion and nationality.

If the history of slavery ought to teach us anything, it is that human beings cannot be trusted with unbridled power over other human beings — no matter what color or creed any of them are. The history of ancient despotism and modern totalitarianism practically shouts that same message from the blood-stained pages of history shouts that same message from the blood-stained pages of history.

But that is not the message that is being taught in our schools and colleges, or dramatized on television and in the movies. The message that is pounded home again and again is that white people enslaved black people.

It is true, just as it is true that I don’t go sky-diving with blacks. But it is also false in its implications for the same reason. Just as Europeans enslaved Africans, North Africans enslaved Europeans — more Europeans than there were Africans enslaved in the United States and in the 13 colonies from which it was formed.

The treatment of white galley slaves was even worse than the treatment of black slaves picking cotton. But there are no movies or television dramas about it comparable to “Roots,” and our schools and colleges don’t pound it into the heads of students.

The inhumanity of human beings toward other human beings is not a new story, much less a local story. There is no need to hide it, because there are lessons we can learn from it. But there is also no need to distort it, so that sins of the whole human species around the world are presented as special defects of “our society” or the sins of a particular race.

“Our society”.

If American society and Western civilization are different from other societies and civilization, it is that they eventually turned against slavery, and stamped it out, at a time when non-Western societies around the world were still maintaining slavery and resisting Western pressures to end slavery, including in some cases armed resistance.

Only the fact that the West had more firepower than others put an end to slavery in many non-Western societies during the age of Western imperialism. Yet today there are Americans who have gone to Africa to apologize for slavery — on a continent where slavery has still not been completely ended, to this very moment.

It is not just the history of slavery that gets distorted beyond recognition by the selective filtering of facts. Those who go back to mine history, in order to find everything they can to undermine American society or Western civilization, have very little interest in the Bataan death march, the atrocities of the Ottoman Empire or similar atrocities in other times and places.

Those who mine history for sins are not searching for truth but for opportunities to denigrate their own society, or for grievances that can be cashed in today, at the expense of people who were not even born when the sins of the past were committed.

An ancient adage says: “Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.” But apparently that is not sufficient for many among our educators, the intelligentsia or the media. They are busy poisoning the present by the way they present the past.

Spot On!

…and I’m remembering the joke NASCAR pulled a year ago, when they announced that the Obamunists had forbidden any of the automakers whom the government had bailed out to spend the money entering racing vehicles for NASCAR events.

It was quite the joke, they definitely got over on a few right thinking columnists and other commentators, bloggers and pundits, to judge by the feedback that issued forth from even a few of the better informed and more celebrated among us (not me, simply because I was rather indisposed that day -whew!)

Later in the day, of course, they did the corporate version of grinning and told the truth, that the announcement had been an April Fool’s Day joke.

I’ve been thinking, and realize that the Obama Administration and the far left dominated Congress just might be able to redeem themselves with the American people if they announced that every single thing they’ve done since a) the Democrat majority was sworn in in January, 2009 and b) Obama was ordained sworn in a year later was an elaborate April Fool’s joke and that they really aren’t communists or jihad sympathizers, but Americans who love their country, respect the Constitution and are about to vote unanimously to retract and reverse their every official act.

This is, of course, highly unlikely as it would be too much, for the American people, like waking up from a terrible nightmare to find that all is well in the world.

Unfortunately, all is not, and that is particularly true with the lying lefty loony linx who, through profoundly pounded propaganda from the kommie media and many a shovelfull of malarkey from the politicians both in the White House and on the Hill, finally won in their battle to staff the upper echelons of the U.S. Government with enemies of the state.

The only silver lining to that particular cloud is that we’ll be well rid of Barack Hussein in November 2012, at which time we’ll also have picked up the spares among the Democrat majority — the ones we won’t get to give the bums’ rush in November of this year.

However…

I actually came here to share another great Ann Coulter column, this week’s, which I received yesterday.

On the “Today” show this Tuesday, President Obama claimed the massive government takeover of health care the Democrats passed without a single Republican vote was a “middle of the road” bill that incorporated many Republican ideas.

One Republican idea allegedly incorporated into the Democrats’ health care monstrosity is “medical malpractice reform.” Needless to say, the Democrats’ idea of malpractice reform is less than nothing. Until trial lawyers are screaming bloody murder, there has been no medical malpractice reform.

The Democrats’ “malpractice” section merely encourages the states to set up commissions to “study” tort reform, in the sense that frustrated mothers “encourage” their kids not to slouch. By “study,” the Democrats mean “ignore.”

So we get more taxpayer-funded government workers under the Democrats’ “medical malpractice reform,” but not one tittle of actual reform.

Democrats manifestly do not care about helping Americans get quality health care. If they did, they could not continue to support trial lawyers like John Edwards making $50 million by bringing junk lawsuits against doctors who are saving people’s lives. (At least Edwards has not done anything else to publicly disgrace himself since then.)

At a minimum, any health care bill that purports to improve Americans’ health, rather than trial lawyers’ bank accounts, must include a loser-pays rule and a restriction on damages to actual losses — as opposed to punitive damages, which mostly serve to enrich the John Edwardses of the world, and their mistresses.

LOL!!!!

The Democrats also lyingly claim their health care reform includes the Republican ideas of competition across state lines.

I know they’re lying because — well, first because I read the bill — but also because Democrats are genetically incapable of understanding the free market. You might say it’s a pre-existing condition with them.

The Democrats will lie to anybody about anything if they believe it will help one of their destructive agendas reach fruition.

Democrats want to turn the entire citizenry into welfare recipients.

Amen to that!

Truncating a ways…

A few weeks ago, The New York Times ran an editorial noting the amazing fact that, by the middle of this year, there will be an estimated 6.8 billion people on Earth — and 5 billion will have cell phones! (Even more astounding, at least one of them is seated directly behind me every time I go to the movies.)

How did that happen without a Democrat president and Congress using bribes, parliamentary tricks and arcane non-voting maneuvers to pass a massive, hugely expensive National Cell Phone Reform Act?

How did that happen without Barney Frank and Henry Waxman personally designing the 3-foot-long, 26-pound, ugly green $4,000 cell phone we all have to use?

How did that happen without Obama signing the National Cell Phone Reform bill, as a poor 10-year-old black kid who couldn’t afford to text-message his friends looked on?

The reason nearly everyone in the universe has a cell phone is that President Reagan did to telephones the exact opposite of what the Democrats have just done with health care.

Before Reagan came into office, we had one phone company, ridiculously expensive rates and one phone model. Reagan split up AT&T, deregulated phone service and gave America a competitive market in phones. The rest is history.

The column can be found here, in its entirety.

…is that of helping our defeated enemies rebuild and letting them have face, rather than colonializing them or simply leaving them to fester in ruins.

When we won the Cold War, and the former Soviet Socialist Republics as well as the Iron Curtain countries gained their independence from underneath the heavy thumb of Russia, we could have left Moscow to fend for itself, but instead we poured the largesse of the American People into the task of helping them get back on their feet.

Perhaps in Russia’s case, we made a mistake.

Witness their invasion of Georgia, and as Caroline Glick sums up so well, the effects the entire affair, including the lackluster U.S. response to same, may well have on much of the rest of the world, including the Middle East.

Georgia can now claim membership in an exclusive club whose other members include a number of Cubans of Bay of Pigs fame, the South Vietnamese, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and who knows, maybe one day the Taiwanese!

But I digress.

Russia has been becoming increasingly uppity since Putin first arrived at the helm and is continuing to do so under his puppet, Dmitry Medvedev.

Can you imagine, they’re even threatening possible air strikes in Poland should that country manifest its agreement with the U.S. to install a missile interceptor base on its soil.

“Poland, by deploying (the system) is exposing itself to a strike — 100 percent,” Nogovitsyn, the deputy chief of staff, was quoted as saying.

He added, in clear reference to the agreement, that Russia’s military doctrine sanctions the use of nuclear weapons “against the allies of countries having nuclear weapons if they in some way help them.” Nogovitsyn that would include elements of strategic deterrence systems, he said, according to Interfax.

At a news conference earlier Friday, Nogovitsyn had reiterated Russia’s frequently stated warning that placing missile-defense elements in Poland and the Czech Republic would bring an unspecified military response. But his subsequent reported statement substantially stepped up a war of words.

Where is the late, great Ronald Reagan when we need him!?

…but…

Three posts ago, I made mention of the “jihadi wagons” (the stainless steel roach coaches, towed daily to their curbside locations, from which Muslims within sell various hot hallal foods, everything from shish kebob and falafel to lamb and all beef hot dogs. With few exceptions, curbside food vendors in New York City are Muslim immigrants. I also remarked that these jihadi wagons are as commonplace in Manhattan, these days, as are yellow cabs.

In a comment therein, Always On Watch wrote,

Sooner or later, one of those “jihadi wagons” is bound to be a security threat. The police can’t possibly monitor all of them.

She was right on point, only perhaps in a different way than her comment implied.

All these jihadi wagons are part of one or more fleets belonging to Muslim entrepreneurs who reap most of the profits of their farflung enterprises. Obviously, for the food to meet hallal standards, it must come from Muslim distributors.

The jihadi wagons themselves are a purely cash business. For anyone who’s never been involved in a purely cash business, well, let’s just say that it’s really easy to take a lot of money out of the equation, especially when the product involved is perishable, “we didn’t/couldn’t sell it, so we threw it away” merchandise like food. Good write-off, as well.

Not only can’t, as AOW put it, the police monitor all of them, but there are a hell of a lot less field qualified tax revenue auditors working for the city of New York than there are police.

Most of the legions of smaller hot dog and pretzel stands are also run by Muslims. So are nearly all the delis, small markets, smoke shops and, surprise, surprise, guess who sits behind the wheel of just about every taxi cab in New York…?

A large number of these delis, small markets and smoke shops are cash only, no credit or debit cards.

So, call me paranoid, call me Islamophobic, but…

When an ethnic group whose very scripture declares itself the enemy unto death of our civilization, our religious beliefs, our form of government, our freedom, our way of life and, for that matter, our lives, period, an ethnic group which, incidentally, has already cheerfully sacrificed numerous of its own in order to butcher thousands of our citizens while promising to butcher still more, suddenly has monopolies on several cash businesses in our greatest city at an infiltration rate that would have made the occupants of the Trojan Horse green with envy…

…I think I have the right to be just a tad concerned.

When you take all the revenues involved into account, we’re talking some serious millions. Millions that can be skimmed in order to finance an awful lot of terrorist activity both here and abroad.

There are an estimated 600,000 Muslims in New York, and they keep on coming.

Many are employed within the metropolis’ vast infrastructure in places such as the Metropolitan Transit Authority, the Police Department, the Fire Department, the Dept. of Corrections and so forth.

Of course, such concerns expressed in certain public forums would result not only in the usual fatwas coming out of the mosques, but in officially registered outrage by terrorist front organization CAIR (Council on Americam Islamic Relations), the Marxist-founded, “down with America” ACLU and their kindred spirits from among the liberal progressive, politically correct, multiculturalist zoo.

CAIR’s job is to see to it that most of us are prevented from realizing the truth until after their brethren have murdered lots more Americans and mired us in the Sharia. The ACLU’s job is to see to it that our enemies have every possible advantage in these efforts. The kindred spirits are just a lot of useful fools who live in some Utopian dream that those of us who embrace reality will never be able to understand, and probably wouldn’t want to, anyway.

Perhaps the most frightening bit is that the government apparently finds no cause for concern with the above. There is a word for such people: Dhimmis.

So call me paranoid, call me Islamophobic, but…

Now that Channukah, Christmas and New Year’s have come and gone and I’ve recovered sufficiently from a rather active New Year’s Eve to take a poke at this keyboard again with some semblance of coherence…

First, being a smoker, I need to pitch a brief bitch about the no-smoking-in-bars law that was moved up from this coming summer to the day before yesterday (1 January, 2008) here in Illinois. I read all these pieces about fellow smokers facing the tribulations of having to step outside the bar, into the Chicago winter (if I’m not mistaken, it’s less than 10 degrees outside as I type this), to smoke a cigarette. They speak of everything from purchasing ear muffs and extra scarves to giving up the tobacco habit.

For me, this just means I won’t go to any bars other than those in restaurants where I’m having dinner with friends, and I’ll abstain until after I leave the establishment. I simply won’t hang out at my favorite watering hole any more, or any other local drinkeries, for that matter. So I’ll save a couple of hundred bucks a week.

Then there’s this other law that kinda’ sorta’ went into effect without my even knowing about it: I noticed, over the duration of my last carton of Chesterfield Kings, that the durn things kept going out on me when I laid them in the ashtray (more of my cigarettes spend time in the ashtray than they do being smoked, as I light up most while I’m on-line, blogging, reading, commenting, etc). It seemed that there was a problem with the paper — so I called Phillip Morris to inquire, and they informed me that certain states (including Illinois) had adopted a law requiring that all cigarettes sold in them had to have the paper thickened so that they go out when they’re not being smoked. This was explained as a measure to prevent cigarettes from starting fires. Right. Okay. Whatever. I search-engined the law and read all the statistics. Fine. Ram it.

It’s sure nice to have government entities, be they local, state or federal, protecting us from ourselves. I mean, what would we do without intrusive government? Let’s make things really easy: Let’s simply shitcan the Constitution altogether. Who needs it, right? Today’s politicians apparently haven’t read it, anyway, so why bother to perpetuate its existence?

Having gotten that out of the way, let’s move on to the meat of this post:

Just like that–like flipping a switch–Congress and the president banned incandescent light bulbs last month. OK, they did not exactly ban them. But the energy bill passed by Congress and signed by President Bush sets energy-efficiency standards for light bulbs that traditional incandescent bulbs cannot meet.

The new rules phase in starting in 2012, but don’t be lulled by that five-year delay. Whether it’s next week or next decade, you will one day walk into a hardware store looking for a 100-watt bulb–and there won’t be any. By 2014, the new efficiency standards will apply to 75-watt, 60-watt and 40-watt bulbs too.

So now the government is dictating what kind of light bulbs will be available to us, cost be damned.

As a disclaimer, I will say that I use compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) for the simple reason that I dislike pedestrian hassles, especially being a high ceilings kind of guy, and the spiral bulbs mean not having to change a light bulb for a really long time.

However, I don’t believe that CFLs should be forced on the public, like it or not. They are significantly more expensive, for one thing, and for another, as was bandied about the Blogosphere several months ago, they bring a serious element of risk into the household.

Brandy Bridges heard the claims of government officials, environmentalists and retailers like Wal-Mart all pushing the idea of replacing incandescent light bulbs with energy-saving and money-saving compact fluorescent lamps.

So, last month, the Prospect, Maine, resident went out and bought two dozen CFLs and began installing them in her home. One broke. A month later, her daughter’s bedroom remains sealed off with plastic like the site of a hazardous materials accident, while Bridges works on a way to pay off a $2,000 estimate by a company specializing in environmentally sound cleanups of the mercury inside the bulb.

With everyone from Al Gore to Wal-Mart to the Environmental Protection Agency promoting CFLs as the greatest thing since, well, the light bulb, consumers have been left in the dark about a problem they will all face eventually – how to get rid of the darn things when they burn out or, worse yet, break.

So here we’re talking about government regulation requiring families and individuals to purchase and install in their dwellings common objects (unless, of course, they have no problem with living in the dark) that present potential health hazards.

Now, I’m not a litigious person, but…

… if the government can impose this upon the masses, then the masses should, by all means, be able to sue the government, big time, in the event that these CFLs, once they’re the only game in town, present the problem they did for Brandy Bridges. Instead of the citizen with no remaining freedom of choice paying for the clean-up, let Uncle Sam pay for it. After all, Uncle is forcing the situation on us, and doing so by ignoring the Constitution and the very principles of freedom that our founding fathers bestowed upon us.

…time on my hands, one thing I did to keep myself entertained was watch a lot of movies. One of them was Covert One: The Hades Factor.

I never saw it the “first time around”, as it were, and when I ran across it and saw that it was based (though loosely) on work by the late suspense/espionage novelist Robert Ludlum, I thought I’d buy it. So I did.

The premise of the film boiled down to Islamic terrorists smuggling a biological agent into the United States…by infecting themselves with it prior to entering the country, then coming into the U.S. before the symptoms became visible.

Had the bad guys been along the lines of, say, Nicholas Baader (though he reportedly, as did his girlfriend and co-terrorist Gudrun Enslin, hung himself in his prison cell at the end of things) most IRA types or the various and sundry terrorist groups in South America, I’d have done what I do with a lot of action films — let it go in one eye and out the other and enjoy the story and the action as intended, for its pure entertainment value.

However, most western fanatics plan and execute their operations with the intention of surviving them. They will place their explosive devices and then get out of Dodge before the big bang or they will open fire on their targets from safe vantage points and have their escape routes planned. They will kidnap and demand ransom or political concessions, or they will kidnap and murder. The ones with the brown curduroy pants, burgundy sweater vests and coke bottle glasses might email computer viruses to their “oppressors” while the eco-terrorists burn down peoples’ houses or hammer nails into trees so as to cause grave injury to loggers.

But they all have one thing in common: They don’t want to die in the course of “championing” their causes.

Islamic terrorists, however, thrive on the concept of murdering themselves along with the soft targets they specialize in killing.

The U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut over two decades ago. The scores of Muslims who strap on suicide vests in the name of Allah and walk into crowds, restaurants, hotel lobbies, board buses, etc and happily blow themselves up along with the people around them. The 9/11 hijackers, who knew long before that terrible day that when it arrived, they would be crashing airplanes into buildings.

Professionally, I’ve long considered the probability (as opposed to possibility) that al-Qaeda or affiliates thereof would one day lay hands on biological weapons. Looking at it from their point of view, a bio attack would be far more logistically feasible than one involving a suitcase nuke — radioactive materials are far more easily detected than are micro-organisms, and the technology used to address the former concern is abundantly deployed beyond, for obvious reasons, the radar of the mainstream media. The NYT would publish instantly, under the pretext of outrage that the jackbooted thugs of the Bush regime were invading the privacy and human rights of innocent Americans (including the children) by monitoring their radiation levels, or some such idiocy (liberals don’t pay much attention to the logic or intelligence employed in the course of their diatribes, they just spew whatever it is they spew and assume that those on the receiving end will perceive it as mature, sane and logical).

Back, however, to The Hades Factor.

Early on, the main character, played by Stephen Dorff (actually, to me the main character was Mira Sorvino’s, but that’s just me), an expert on biological warfare, is asked at a conference, as a speaker, if a bio attack is preventable, and he replies in the negative.

He is absolutely correct.

From Osama’s POV, while a mushroom cloud over Manhattan would be great PR, well, as a default scenario, millions of Americans writhing in the purest agony, emergency rooms overflowing and American cities and the commerce within paralyzed while the government scrambled helplessly and ineffectually to do something about it would be just fine. Hell, break open that bottle of non-alcoholic Piper-Hiedsieck and let’s party! C’mon, let’s get some good tunes playing in this damn cave, let’s dance! Eat hummus, be merry!

What’s to stop such an attack, once the bad guys get their hands on a bio agent, from happening? If a guy (or gal, for that matter) has no problem self-detonating anyway, why not simply become infected with an easily communicable virus and distribute it via the simple means of coming into contact with other people and infecting them as well? Ten family members alone would infect 30 or 40 people (spouses, children) who would in turn spread the bio agent to classmates, fellow PTA members, neighbors, employees at the grocery store, etc…

If there are a few hours or a couple of days before the symptoms become evident, the bearer of these grim tidings needs only pass through Customs and Immigration with a legitimate front. Yeah, yeah, there’s a terrorist watch list and all that. Right. They search Habib’s luggage and find nothing, because the national security threat is flowing through his veins or his lymphatic system or whatever.

Imagine 100 or so such terrorists entering this country as tourists, students or businessmen, deploying into all of our largest cities.

I’m not trying to be an alarmist here, I’m simply pointing out a very real, very grim reality.

The threat, however, doesn’t end with the above. Rather, it is enforced by our own legal system or, to be more precise, the liberal attorneys (think ACLU and that ilk) who are more concerned with defending the rights of our enemies than they are with protecting the very lives of Americans in America.

These cowardly folks of low degree simply assume that the government they assail will protect them from the disastrous results of their arguably treasonous lawsuits. Stupid idea. You don’t disable your protection and then expect to be protected.

To be blunt: Our most lethal and most immediate enemy consists almost homogeneously of Arab Muslims, and they demonstrated, on 9/11, that they are highly skilled at entering our country legally, studying the means of executing a terrorist attack against us in our own learning institutions and then carrying out their plan.

The Bush Administration has done a fantastic job of protecting the United States and those of us living here from terrorism for over six years, but…Dubya’s done so under artillery fire from the MSM, who have done all they could to undermine his efforts.

The long and short of it is that in order to at least attempt to prevent a bio attack, the administration (not only this one, but all those that follow until we’ve decisively beaten Islam in this war that our own government misnames “The War On Terror” –we are not at war with some guys in a cave, we are at war with a faschistic political system disguised as a religion) needs to become as tough, if not tougher, than the Israelis are when it comes to letting people fly into their country or even board one of their commercial airplanes.

Remember that old Bob Dylan line I quoted some time ago?

“And if my (thought) dreams could be seen

they’d probably put my head in a guillotine…”

Well, I know exactly where he was coming from….

…is, as the Bard might have said, much ado about nothing.

The MSM and much alternative media as well promote the information czar turned New York mayor’s quitting the Republican Party as a significant event. Right, sure, um… it’s, er, truly an epic event.

Bah!

That’s right, Bah!

Bloomberg was a staunch Democrat prior to the N.Y. mayoral elections at the end of the Giuliani years. However, the Democrats already had a candidate. Really determined to be the mayor, Bloomberg went the turncoat rout and “became” a Republican for the sole purpose of running for mayor. He won.

His first move as the new Republican mayor was to revert to a Democrat, big time.

Now that he’s in the twilight stages of his second term, he no longer needs to be a “Republican”.

The headlines shouldn’t read, Bloomberg Leaves GOP, they should say, Hizzoner Casts Off Sheep’s Clothing.

Now the speculation begins: “Will Bloomberg make a run for President in 2008?”

The media and assorted pundits make reference to his $5.5 billion smackers, wondering if he will use a chunk of it to campaign for POTUS.

And then the wishful thinking makes its way to columns, blogs and broadcast — if he runs as an Independent, his candidacy will be good for, depending upon the commentator, the Democrats or the Republicans.

Now, all opinions are based upon the fact that he won’t win the general election, but that he’ll take votes away from one of the two major parties, like a major league Ralph Nader.

I am not a wishful thinker. Though I’m not always right, I tend to base my opinions and/or projections on what I view as reality based on evidence, human nature, track records, real circumstances, etc, etc. As often as not, I find myself at odds with fellow conservatives who continue to have faith in the integrity of today’s politicians while I reserve judgement under an umbrella of doubt based upon the “bitter pill” of experience.

Personally, as a conservative I would welcome a Bloomberg campaign.

He is for gun control, he is pro-”choice”, he is for stem cell research and other Democrat themes. He certainly wouldn’t get any votes from conservatives or true Republicans.

He would, however, get a lot of votes from moderate Democrats who mistakenly view Bloomberg as a conservative possessed of “progressive” ideals. With or without Nader running, the billionaire, with his monetary edge, would suck up Democrat votes like an aardvark with a Dyson tromping through ant country.

So sure, let the schmuck run for President. His loss would be America’s gain.

…to ethanol, preferring to wait and see how well the fuel substitute does for itself on a commercial basis and, not being a scientist by any means, have thought that with all the great reviews it gets from what some call those in the know or perhaps the smart money, it might put a damper on both the consumption of Islamic fossil fuels and the doomsday uproar coming from the Man-Made Climate Change hucksters on the left.

Luckily, columnist John Stossel has come along with an article that casts formidable doubts regarding all this ethanol business.

No doubt about it, if there were a Miss Energy Pageant, Miss Ethanol would win hands down. Everyone loves ethanol.

“Ramp up the availability of ethanol,” says Hillary Clinton.

“Ethanol makes a lot of sense,” says John McCain.

“The economics of ethanol make more and more sense,” says Mitt Romney.

“We’ve got to get serious about ethanol,” says Rudolph Giuliani.

And the media love ethanol. “60 Minutes” called it “the solution.”

Clinton, Romney, Barack Obama and John Edwards not only believe ethanol is the elixir that will give us cheap energy, end our dependence on Middle East oil sheiks, and reverse global warming, they also want you and me — as taxpayers — to subsidize it.

Hmmmmm, wait a minute…

Better read the entire column.

Ahem.

Like Professor Clyde Crashcup used to say to his assistant, Leonardo, “Back to the drawing board”.

Sorry about that, I couldn’t help myself. What a pun! What a — oh… well, the title of this post certainly applies; if one considers what the mainstream media has been focusing on of late. First there’s the 100% political firing of a small quantity of U.S. attorneys, which happens to be a mid-term event that is practiced by nearly all administrations — as we know, Clinton’s Justice department terminated all of theirs. There was no MSM uproar when the latter occurred under Clinton, but since there is a Republican administration ensconced at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue led by George W. Bush, the former has been blown up to Armageddonal proportions by the liberal media as the Democrats raise the roof with blaring accusations and utterly moronic, blatantly politics-based innuedo….

It is eroding the Anna Nicole moment, which was just starting to wan, anyway, for all except those who are truly without lives of their own to live, and as it gathers momentum, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announces that she is going to Syria on a “fact finding” tour. The White House requests that she not go, but she announces that she’s going, anyway.

She does, and not only does she perform the Kiss of Shame on Bashir Assad, she delivers a false diplomatic message from Tel Aviv to Damascus that not only isn’t she asked to deliver, but there has been no message sent. Then she reports false peace policies of Assad’s government regarding Israel to the local media. There is no “fact finding” involved in her tour, only hints and not so subtle hints that indicate that the United States has two completely different sets of official policies on the execution of the War on Terror, and that the Democrats’ policies are equally as official as the President’s. What she is doing is in total violation of the concerned articles of the U.S. Constitution, dangerous to both our diplomatic relations and Bush’s message to the world on America’s resolve to defeat terrorism and a serious threat to U.S. troops in Iran and Afghanistan.

Some of the same liberal media that supports her editorializes her activities in a negative light while most of the same liberals that disagree with every point made at conservative blogs they frequent of course present laughably thin, generally downright stupid defenses of Pelosi’s harebrained, purely political exploits.

Don Imus comes into the picture, making a joke that has the race baiting team of Sharpton & Jackson crawling out from beneath their respective stones — did I employ the word “picayune” at the top of this post? Um, sure did! Back in the 1970s when I lived in New York, Imus had the morning show on an A.M. station while Howard Stern worked mid afternoon to early evening on the same station. Both of them were shock jocks, and both made a living out of boldly offending whatever or whomever came to mind. Nothing has changed with either, particularly Imus. Now he makes a “nappy haired ho” remark about players on a female college basketball team, which is not, by far, the most offensive thing he’s ever said into the mic, and it’s suddenly treated as the most important, dynamic story on the planet by the MSM and Democrats (as well as a few soulless Republican politicians whose lives revolve around pandering for votes wherever they can find them), conveniently drowning out much of the Pelosi-in-Syria affair. Now, Nancy’s talking about taking a trip to Iran to nasalize some butt for Ahmadmanjihad.

Liberal politicians are doing their best to take a bite out of our First Amendment rights by enacting “hate crime” laws that aren’t crimes.

The Democrats have absolutely no issues of a positive nature on the table, everything they do attacks the President, the Constitution and the American way of life, and most of their purely political assaults are based upon trivialities that they themselves have blown up into maelstroms of misinterpreted laws and ridiculous innuendo, from Scooter Libby, who did nothing wrong, to the federal judge firings, the liberal media conducting disinformation campaigns to bring things to a boil.

The media we are confronted with today is a joke, I mean why waste money on a newspaper today when one can enjoy the same awareness of what’s going on in the world by reading The Onion?