Leave it to Michelle Malkin to compile a good list {are you listening, New York Times?} of things our very own MSM has to be thankful for.

In between breathless condemnations of the Bush administration for stifling its free speech, endless court filings demanding classified and sensitive information from the military and intelligence agencies, and self-pitying media industry confabs bemoaning their hemorrhaging circulations (with the exception of the New York Post), my colleagues in the American media don’t have much to time to give thanks. Allow me:

Read her list here.

…. To All!

Imagine listening to this, sung by a woman with an awesomely beautiful voice (Annie Haslam, with Renaissance, circa the mid 1970s) that can easily do five (count ‘em, 5!) octaves, vs the raucous and or frantic BS that passes for Rock or Pop that you hear on the radio today:

Tried to take it all away
Learn her freedom just inside a day
And find her soul
To find their fears allayed
Tried to make her love their own
They took her love they left her there
They gave her nothing back
That she would want to own
Gold and silver rings and stones
Dances slowly of the moon
No-one else can know
She stands alone
Sleeping dreams will reach for her
She cannot say the words they need
She knows she’s alone
And she is free

Chorus:
Ocean gypsy of the moon
The sun has made a thousand nights
For you to hold
Ocean gypsy where are you
The shadows followed by the stars
Have turned to gold, turned to gold

Then she met a hollow soul
Filled him with her light
And was consoled she was the moon
And he, the sun was gold
Eyes were blinded with his light
The sun she gave
Reflected back the night
The moon was waning almost out of sight
Softly ocean gypsy calls
Silence holds the stars awhile
They smile sadly
For her where she falls
Just the time before the dawn
The sea is hushed
The ocean calls her
Day has taken her and now she’s gone

Chorus

No-one noticed when she died
Ocean gypsy shackled to the tide
The ebbing waves were turning
Spreading wide
Something gone within her eyes
Her fingers lifeless stroke the sand
Her battered soul was lost
She was abandoned
Silken threads like wings still shine
Winds take pleasure still make patterns
In her lovely hair
So dark and fine
Stands on high beneath the seas
Cries no more
Her tears have dried
Oceans weep for her the ocean sighs

Chorus

I am so glad that I was blessed to hear, both via LP and live, at their concerts, the music of Renaissance….

So here it is, 7 am on the nose. I’ve been keeping my usual unconventional schedule of working overnight and finally decided to take a break.

Yesterday was a good day, all in all, I managed to get a lot of work done while my new housekeeper did her usual excellent job — for those outrageously busy or domestically challenged {like me} in the Charlotte area who need someone to do a truly great job of immaculating (my word) your house, I would highly and without reservation recommend Nicci of Tally Rags (check out this website, Nicci does the vocal).

So here I am, sitting in front of my computer, decidedly calling it quits for “the day”, sipping coffee and brandy and listening to what can only be described as an ultra-mellow playlist — currently, in keeping with the hour, I have a few morning songs going, ie the Monkees’ Sometime In The Morning, the Sandpipers’ Come Saturday Morning and Vanity Fare’s Early In The Morning, and reading at some other blogs.

Among them, The Pugil Stick, The Educated Shoprat and I’ve been attempting to blogroll a great site called Conservative News And Views, the current Blog Of The Week at The Liberal Lie, The Conservative Truth, but BlogRolling seems to be having some access issues at the moment.

Nevertheless, CNAV will get blogrolled as soon as I can get in there.

While for those on more normal schedules breakfast, that first cup of coffee and so forth are the items of immediate concern here on the east coast, my own next major event will be dinner. I’m kinda sorta leaning toward broiling a Cajun seasoned (cheating, I have some Luzianne Cajun spice) 1/2 lb. strip steak with Zatarain’s dirty rice as a side dish. I just got a new stove, one of those ceramic topped (electric, no coils) ones with a self cleaning oven (H/T to Jeff and Bob for delivery and installation), and have been treating it like a new toy, it’s awesome, all the bells and whistles, etc.

Well, ravenousness dictates, so….

I was perusing the comment section at another blog yesterday and read a liberal’s comment that made me thankful he and I were not in the same room — had we been, I probably would have strangled the son of a bitch out of sheer frustration. My own comment, in reply to his, was as restrained as possible, I believe it remained within, though pushing the envelope, the boundaries of respect due the owners of that most excellent site.

I mean, these people (not the owners of said most excellent site, but liberals) are such — such varmints!

Look.

They claim to be champions of human rights, for example. Here in America, human rights are honored more than they are anyplace else on earth. Freedom of speech? C’mon. Here, you can shout obscene jokes about the President from the rooftops if you feel like it.

In the Soviet Union, you’d have been hauled off to the Lubyanka, or perhaps Lefortovo Prison, in a heart beat, and not seen again for quite some time, if at all.

If they needed information they thought you might possess, there was none of this patty cakes BS like water boarding or playing loud music at you, they were somewhat more practical — maybe running some electricity through your genitals, or shooting you up with interesting chemicals like lysergic acid mixed with amatol that might get you to babbling, but might also scramble your brains permanently. Then again, permanently might have only meant a couple of hours, anyway.

So what did American liberals do? They extolled the virtues of communism in all its grand superiority over capitalism, even as they enjoyed instant gratification at the local mall while Soviet citizens were standing in bitter cold, in four and five hour lines, to buy a potato.

North Vietnam, an oppressive communist regime, invades the south, and our country defends the South Vietnamese against the north and its VietCong terrorist apparat. Liberals at home fight tooth and nail against the conflict. They influence politicians, who influence the war effort itself, prolonging it by several years. They eventually succeed in getting our troops pulled out. They rejoice. Ho Chi Minh’s communists sweep into South Vietnam and butcher hundreds of thousands of innocent people, then they enslave the country under said oppressive government.

Meanwhile, here in America, the liberals are celebrating their “victory”. They could care less about the fates of those poor souls thousands of miles away, human beings they’ve helped murder as surely as if they’d been there, splattering brains across the ground.

In the 1990s, there was brutal conflict in the Balkans. Muslims were slaughtering Christian Serbs, and Milosevic’s people were killing Muslims.

The EU, led by Germany, exploited the violence in order to get a foot in the door for influence in the Balkans. They altered intelligence reports and manipulated the media to paint a gruesome picture of Muslims being victimized via
“ethnic cleansing” by Milosevic’s people. Peaceful, nonviolent Muslims, victimized!

Then-boss liberal Bill Clinton bought into it and got us into it, and we helped eliminate a lot of obstacles al-Qaeda and fellow travellers faced in the day-to-day ethnic cleansing operations they were engaged in over there.

Milosevic was arrested and tried for his “crimes” — and died in custody five years later without ever being convicted of anything.

Muslims in the Balkans continue murdering Christian Serbs to this day.

Onward to Iraq, and to the global war we are waging to defend ourselves against the abolition of liberty under Islamic rule.

There we are again — which side are liberals on?

The other side, of course, as usual!

America’s enemies, any enemies, have never had a better friend than a liberal.

You want some liberal friends? Just declare war on the United States and they’ll be coming out in droves to shake your hand or, if requested, stick their noses wherever you wish.

Liberals….

Certainly not on our side, ever, yet when you state this obvious truth, they will actually argue the opposite, as often as not with that smug smirk that brings out the strangler in many of us….

Farmer’s Letters is keeping up with the latest in Muslim fashion.

… be discarded, to some extent and be replaced by the U.S.’s asserting ourselves.

At the conclusion of actual combat in the Korean War, the U.S. signed a treaty with South Korea that has seen American troops over there ever since, their mission to protect the SKs in the event of an invasion by their northern neighbors (the NKs), who view both Koreas as being the same country and believe that SK should also fall under the thumb of communism. In short, the Ills in Pyongyang have long wanted their piece of the ROK.

I haven’t a clue as to how much money it costs the U.S. taxpayer to maintain what? Thirty thousand or so troops in perpetual presence over there? I know it’s got to be at least a few bucks more than dinner at the Four Seasons, Superbowl tickets, a new suit or even ten million times the amount of money I’ll “own”, collectively, in my entire life.

Which is why this kind of ticks me off.

South Korea will not join a U.S. plan to intercept North Korean ships suspected of carrying arms cargo out of fear of raising tensions with its neighbor, officials said on Monday.

South Korea officials have said interdicting North Korean ships could lead to military clashes between the two countries that are technically still at war.

Okay, fine. So why the hell are we there?

“To protect them”.

Great. They obviously haven’t got much faith in our ability to do that, or they wouldn’t worry so much about making Kim Jong Illness angry.

Add on the fact that their “grateful” citizens spend an awful lot of time expressing hostility toward the United States. They don’t even want us there. Maybe they’d rather be lickin’ boot for the “Dear Leader”.

Washington has been pressing Seoul and other governments to take a tough stand toward Pyongyang. However, South Korea, which fears instability in its heavily armed neighbor to the North, has remained committed to engaging Pyongyang.

If they want to go against us thus, we need to pull the plug on the treaty, begin withdrawing our troops, and then — and then see if they still want to give us an argument.

We need to do this everywhere we provide protection — “You don’t like the way we take care of business? Okay, fine. We’re gone, do your own thing….”

My bet is that some tunes will be changed, posthaste.

Not too long ago, I posted about the coming of the North American Union, an agenda which, much to my chagrin, is being engineered by the man I voted for twice for President and his counterparts in Mexico and Canada.

Some commenters took this either with a grain of salt, some with a degree of alarm, some, I thought, may have humored me with their comments.

As they say, it’s all good. The very concept sounds both farfetched and absurd, like the plot of a Robert Ludlum novel or the fantasies of a serious paranoid.

After all, conspiracy theories abound, right?

I had thought my research on the subject was pretty extensive, in fact, somewhere along the line I was reminded of my ex-wife’s own “ravings”, back in the days of the Carter Administration, when she talked about then National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s ambitions toward what was called the Trilateral Commission.

In those days I was still kinda’ sorta’ liberal and pretty laid back, and to tell the truth, couldn’t give the proverbial “flying fuck” about such things. Please excuse mah French (spit!)….

In the comments section of my post on the North American Union ambitions of those involved, the forever awesome Always On Watch suggested that I contact a great blog called Sixth Column, who had been following the NAU proceedings for some time. I did.

We resolved to share information on anything our respective research unearthed on the subject. In that quarter, they have thus far kicked my ass, LOL.

An emailed article I recently received provides the entire history, names, methods, intentions, chronology and all, of events leading up to what is now the plan for the North American Union. It is lengthy and will require some time, but I urge you to read it in its entirety.

It should convince you, in alarming detail, of what is to come in the next four years, no matter what else occurs in the political spectrum of the United States of America.

It is here.

As I said last time out, we are indeed in grave trouble, because our very sovereignty is about to be sacrificed on the altar of corporate expediency. While our future Congresses and POTUSes will govern our country, they will be like state legislatures, while extranational congresses determine the details of our economy (a collective with Mexico and Canada), eventually becoming part of a global collective consisting of the EU, the NAU, the SAU, the AU, etc….

We are in big trouble here, a world government awaits just around the corner, and most unfortunately, the politicians who might be able to prevent it are being kept outside the loop.

As I said in my previous post about this, the involved congresses/parliaments, etc involved herein have been kept in the dark about it, as has the media.

I am wondering whether we are going to wake up and deal with this, or whether we’re simply going to drift into it in blissful ignorance, becoming an entirely different country….

ULTRA-MAJOR and MEGA-GRATEFUL hat tip to CUBED!

When I was much younger, and I stress much here, in my mid to late twenties, I was one of those people who had absolutely no clue as to what I wanted to do with my life. As a kid, I’d always wanted to be a geologist, as a young adult, a journalist. I began to follow the latter course in college, but events occurred that interrupted that endeavor.

Following said events, I spent a few years roaming around the country. I lived very much hand to mouth, getting bored easily with whatever I was doing and moving on. I worked as a tugboat deckhand, a roustabout and then a roughneck on a few offshore oil rigs, I did general labor, peeled bricks, blended coffee, did construction labor, laid bricks, did pipe yard labor and various other things, often living an “if I don’t work today, I don’t eat tonight” existence. There was also some retail management in the mix, heh, and some loss prevention work, as well as a stint as an undercover rent-a-cop. I spent a short time living in a flophouse and lived in some pretty sleazy hotels. After all that, I worked in the Commodities business on Wall Street (back then, when computers weren’t following you all over the country and can’t-do ignoramuses hadn’t yet turned Human Resources into an industry that does more harm than good for Corporate America, it was pretty easy to jump from one scenario to another), spent the early 1980s therein, also running a mail order business and dealing in Persian rugs at the same time, and again got bored, only I was then in much better financial shape to take a hiatus and again look for what I really wanted to do.

It arrived, at long last, after two interesting years of traveling around without the stress of survival concerns – I went to work in an entry level position in casino security in Nevada and advanced pretty rapidly, floor officer to undercover officer to investigator to shift supervisor. The Security Director, an ASIS member and a great believer in absorbing information got me into the same mode, and I eventually left the casino and went into freelance work, in executive protection and consulting as I explored various other areas of the Protection Industry, kept on learning and expanding my areas of expertise. A couple of additional “hiatuses” and a lot of clients, countless seminars, workshops and conferences later, I’m in pretty good shape.

This piece of biography I’m sharing is being shared for a reason:

To point out the following – when I blog about issues involving day-to-day life and the situations of low income workers and so forth, I am not speaking from the position of those people who do all their talking from columns of government figures, pie charts, graphs and so-called “statistical data” – I’m speaking as someone who has been around the block on the graphic reality end of things. It’s very easy for someone who’s always maintained a level state of financial security and pursued the same career since college to opine on subjects he or she has not only no firsthand knowledge of, but hasn’t been within a zillion miles of same.

In short, I’ve lived a pretty full life.

That said, one thing my younger years taught me was that I am very definitely a survivor. I don’t share the fear so many others have of being stripped of everything I own and tossed into the street, so to speak, because I know that even at the half century mark, I have the natural instincts and the marketable asset value to “make a comeback”. You can’t keep a good Seth down.

Another product of my rather adventurous younger years is a penchant for seeing humor where most others might see only tragedy. I suppose that when you’ve had your share of hard times with no one to blame but yourself, your outlook on life changes. You often feel like you’re as much a spectator as a participant in life.

You learn to laugh at yourself, and at the idiocies of others.

I view politics thus: I am a patriot, I believe in the Constitution as it was written and I cherish my liberty, but when I watch our political leaders, the people my fellow Americans and I vote into office do what politicians do, I must admit I get a big charge out of much of it. You get streetwise, you find you see through all the passionate bullshit the politicians project from their rostrums and you laugh when they make what they, and the vast majority of those reading their quotes or listening to them speak take completely to heart.

You laugh at mainstream media spin and you laugh at outrageously off the wall declarations by idiots like Jack Murtha, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, the Admiral of Chappaquiddick, et al. You laugh, even knowing that they are now in a position to give this country the biggest fid in the history of the universe.

Why? Well, in this case, why cry? The Republicans in Congress let us down and got themselves fired in large numbers, so now the southpaws rule the roost. That’s it. Done deal. Nothing we can do about it until this month in 2008, while we’re also deciding who we want to be the CEO of the government.

The next two years will be fraught with legislation that runs in utter contradiction to what America’s founding fathers intended for this country. What those folks intended served us quite well for a couple of centuries, give or take, and was respected by both of our major political parties before a bunch of liberals decided that they needed to dismantle it all, and began subjugating the once great Democratic Party for their own ends.

In the next two years, we’ll see our taxes increase significantly, very possibly a return to the recession of the late 1990s and early 2000s, we’ll see once again a French (spit!) like cut-and-run from a war that will sell out several million people who trusted us to see them through and lead to a bloodbath not unlike that our withdrawal from Vietnam left in its wake, and a resulting emboldenment of terrorists to once again attack targets right here in the good ole U.S. of A. We’ll see them aided and abetted by the Democrats via “revision” of the Patriot Act. Perhaps we’ll also see the Democrats win the War On Fetuses, see the floodgates open for Mexico to empty its unemployed and unemployable into the U.S.

So, yes, I’ll be laughing quite a bit in sheer amusement, because of

a) The idiocy of my fellow voters in “punishing” the Republicans in Congress by replacing them with Democrats
b) The idiocy of the soon to be realized agendas of a political party that claims to have America’s best interests at heart
c) The idiocy on the part of the Democrats in blowing their first majority in a dozen years over a period of less than two.

You see, this is my own point of view: You voted for it, you deserve it. For those who voted Democrat who have no real money in the bank or in investments, or equity they can live on for some time without a paycheck, you deserve whatever happens to you in the next two years, no sympathy from me. I would rather laugh at you than give you a quarter.

Those of us who weren’t gullible enough to vote in the Democrat majority will deal with it, confident in the fact that in far less than two years most Americans will realize their mistake and in November 2008, vote to starboard. I only hope that those who voted to the right last Tuesday are financially prepared for the coming Democrat economy.

As for me, I’m heading into the kitchen to do a 1.6 lb porterhouse, marinated in my own chiante, olive oil and garlic marinade, and a big pile of from-scratch garlic mashed potatoes.

Then read some more articles and posts that abound of that which the Democrats have thus far said and done in preparation for January, since winning their congressional majority, and chuckle some more. …

Atheling2 over at The Pugil Stick has a post up regarding a response to CAIR from a courageous and refreshingly un-PC Florida congresswoman who…

well…

Congresswoman Ginny Brown-Waite (R-FL), wrote a response to Ahmed Bedier, head of the Tampa Chapter of Council of American-Islamic Relations regarding their pressure to have her condemn Hernando County Commissioner Tom Hogan’s wife, Mary Ann for her remarks in a letter to their local newspaper that Islam is a “hateful, frightening religion”. The Hogans have experienced a political fallout replete with criticisms from CAIR as well as from Gov. Jeb Bush.

Read the rest of this great post here.

If we had a whole lot more Republicans in Congress like Ginny-Brown Waite, we might well have retained our majority on Tuesday. We can only hope that her actions serve as an inspiration to other Republicans on the Hill.