I can’t believe I neglected to post on this yesterday, which was the 208th birthday of the very naval sailing vessel that heads up this blog.

On 21 October 1797, the frigate U.S.S. Constitution, known also as Old Ironsides was launched at Edmund Hartt’s Shipyard in Boston Harbor.

Let’s hoist a pint in her honor.

Tony Blankley has written a detailed and must-read piece on the premises behind his book The West’s Last Chance: Will We Win The Clash Of Civilizations?, in which he discusses the serious threat posed to western civilization by radical Islam, citing among other causes for alarm the rapid ongoing ingestion of Europe by Muslims.

It is beginning to dawn on Europeans that the combination of a shrinking ethnic-European population and an expanding, culturally assertive Muslim population might lead to the fall of Western civilization in Europe within a century.
This phenomenon, called Eurabia, is viewed with growing fatalism both in Europe and in America. Such fatalism, however, is premature.
Last November, an Islamist terrorist’s butchering of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who had made a movie revealing abuse of Muslim women, aroused deep fears in Holland and across the Continent.
The public anger, which included the burning of mosques in traditionally tolerant Holland, is evidence that the European instinct for survival has not been fully extinguished.
But that survival instinct is threatened by the multiculturalism and political correctness advocated in media and academe — and institutionalized in national and European Union laws and regulations for half a century.
Europe’s effort at cultural tolerance since World War II slowly morphed into a surprisingly deep self-loathing of Western culture that denied the instinct for cultural and national self-defense.
If Europe doesn’t rise to the challenge, Eurabia will come to pass. Then Europe will cease to be an American ally and instead become a base of operations (as she already is to a small degree) against us.

Another excerpt from the article that should be kept in mind,

Many Muslims in Europe are content to be law-abiding, culturally integrated citizens. But an increasing number feel some degree of alienation. Many are beginning to believe that they have a religious duty not to integrate.
Radical Islam, sometimes accurately called Islamo-fascism, has all the “advantages” the Nazis had in Germany in the 1930s. The Islamo-fascists find a Muslim population adrift, confused and humiliated by the dominance of foreign nations and cultures. They find a large, youthful population increasingly disdainful of their parents’ passive habits.
Just as the Nazis reached back to German mythology and the supposed Aryan origins of the German people, the radical Islamists reach back to the founding ideas and myths of their religious culture. And just like the Nazis, they claim to speak for authentic traditions while actually advancing expedient and radical innovations.
The Islamo-fascist mullahs encourage young Muslims not to turn to their parents for guidance on choosing a wife (or wives). Nor are young Muslims to be guided by parental or community disapproval of making an individual commitment to jihad. They are allowed to drink alcohol, shave their beards and commit what otherwise would be judged immorality in a Muslim — in order to advance jihad.

Read the entire series, three parts, the second two linked at the ends of their “predecessors.”

We are fighting a war against a religious entity that has actually been at war with the rest of the world, in one way or another, for about a dozen centuries, because they believe that only Muslims are entitled to live, the rest of us must be killed.

The technology of today has enabled them, for the first time in their entire bloody history, to mount the war they’ve always wanted on a global scale.

And we are fighting them tooth and nail, despite obstruction from our own lemminglike left and politically partisan propaganda, spins, omissions and outright lies by the mainstream{liberal} media, all of whom either take the side of or play into the hands of our terrorist enemy.

The superbly well prepared, well fact-checked outing of a left wing media stooge who is a very good friend, indeed, of the terrorists in Iraq can be found at GM’s Corner, and a definitive rebuttal to the left’s decomposing dead horse, “Bush lied! We only invaded Iraq because he said they had WMD!” awaits at Kender’s Musings.

The Democrats have for years hammered us with the myth that the nation’s wealthier folks pay less or no tax at all, leaving the poor to carry the tax burden.

Pat’sRick proves otherwise.

Brian Carney’s New York experience in yesterday’s Opinion Journal talks about something I, too, have recently encountered.

I was in New York for several days last month, and man, has the city of my birth become expensive in the last few years. I mean, here’s a place where people have become so accustomed to being robbed at the cash register that they don’t bat an eye when forking over $8.00 for a pack of cigarettes or $4.50 for a coffee and a bagel “with a schmear” to go.

I am preparing to move back to the east coast soon and buy a house, and have studied real estate prices from Maine to the Carolinas and New York… well, let’s say you’re single and you badly want to live in Manhattan, where you are willing to buy a condo or co-op{personally, I wouldn’t even consider a co-op, because then you’re subject to a “board of directors” whose decisions can in many ways decide upon how you can live in your own “home”). If you search very hard and are blessed, beat the multitudes of competitors for the property and win the day(strike up the band!) you may get really, truly lucky and be able to buy your own tiny studio condo for a mere $350,000.00 plus monthly maintenance fees. Woo, at least you won’t have to spend a lot of money on furniture, since there’d be noplace to put it. Add a couple of hundred thousand dollars or considerably more if you’re looking to buy a small or medium sized house or a multiroom condo. On the even brighter side, you would have the opportunity to pay the city’s high property tax, a gift to the people of New York from mayor and “former” Democrat, billionaire Michael Bloomberg.

The other four boroughs, especially Brooklyn and Queens, with the exception of New York’s few remaining enclaves of “live here and die, whitey!”, are fast catching up on the inflated property gravy train.

Brian Carney, looking to buy a home for himself and his family, searched high and low for a property that was affordable, without success:

But even Brooklyn has gone real-estate crazy, especially if you limit your search to neighborhoods with decent public schools. After seriously considering a two-bedroom basement apartment in Brooklyn Heights going for far more than we could afford, the reality hit home. New York might be great–greater than ever in many ways–but it was beyond our financial grasp. We regrouped and started to look in the suburbs. Which is where we ended up.

And he’s got a family in tow, jeez! It’s enough that prices in New York repelled me, intending to live by myself, from its real estate market.

There’s this bubble thing, you see, in many large cities, among them New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and Washington, DC, that has real estate prices titanically overvalued, and in my opinion as well as those of acquaintances in the business, this bubble will burst in the not-too-distant future, transforming current sellers’ markets into big time buyers’ markets, and that $500,000.00 house you buy today might suddenly enjoy a market price of only $300,000.00 three or four years down the road, if that.

So, like the author of the linked article, I, too, am looking elsewhere for my house.

Tom DeLay turned himself in quietly at the sheriff’s office in Houston earlier, got himself fingerprinted and photo’d, spoke to a judge and posted bail and was gone within half an hour, depriving self seeking, politically motivated, shyster, Travis County, Tx D.A. Ronnie Earle of the dog and pony show he would have preferred.

DeLay showed up with his attorney, Dick DeGuerin.

“Now Ronnie Earle has the mugshot he wanted,” DeGuerin said, referring to the Travis County district attorney who brought the charges. DeLay and his lawyer have accused the district attorney of trying to make headlines for himself.

Earle is a shameless maggot who has no compunction about destroying another man’s reputation or career if he believes it will advance his own political future.

DeLay had been expected to turn himself in in his home county outside Houston, Fort Bend, where a horde of reporters awaited. But under Texas law, he could check in anywhere in the state.

“That’s what Ronnie (Earle) wanted. He wanted a perp walk and we did not want to do it,” the defense attorney said.

I predict Tom DeLay will be cleared of the trumped up charges against him, but unfortunately, as happens as a result of human nature, there will always be a lingering doubt among the voting public, and that will have a highly negative impact on the future of his career in politics.

This is the latest email announcement from Move America Forward:

Fellow Move America Forward Supporters,