I posted on this situation this past Friday, and yesterday, it would seem, Hamas decided to decline the Palestinian Authority’s kind offer of membership in their cabinet, which Mahmoud Abbas had hoped they would accept in time for both entities to work together on transitioning the Gaza Strip, after the Israeli evacuation, to Palestinian occupancy.

The Jerusalem Post has more.

Hamas’ decision not to join the Palestinian Authority’s cabinet poses a serious threat to the PA’s efforts to impose law and order in the Gaza Strip after Israel’s evacuation, PA officials warned on Tuesday.

….Hassan Yousef, a senior Hamas leader in the West Bank, said his movement prefers to hold parliamentary elections first before a national unity government is formed.

….”We are not interested in being in the PA just for the sake of it. We believe that the right way to do it is through elections.” Mushir al-Masri, a spokesman for Hamas in the Gaza Strip said his movement was insisting on the formation of a united national committee to run the affairs of the Palestinians after the withdrawal.

Hmmm, what do I read into this?

I think Hamas is being clever here, not as in sneaky(at least no more so than anyone engaging in politics), but as in smart.

a) Had they joined the PA’s cabinet, the Israelis might well have objected to the terrorist organization’s being part of the official mix and decided to delay the evacuation of Gaza, while the turnover of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians will be a phenomenon that will be in their best interests as it will present them with an independent subdivision on which they can stockpile weapons and from whence they can mount terrorist operations into Israel.

b) Hamas has designs upon taking the PA away from Abbas and Fatah and they realize that the most “legitimate” way of doing so in the current climate is by winning democratic elections. When they say they believe that elections are the only way to go, they are looking at the fact that they have become a popular political party and realize they could do better winning the votes of the people than suborning themselves to the Abbas faction by allowing themselves to be absorbed(keeping in mind that, as a “political party,” the terror organization has both gained legitimacy among the Palestinians and also won a hell of a lot of municipal elections).

If the Palestinians finally gain statehood and then Hamas takes over their government, they’ll be Terrorist Central, not only imposing Sharia law on their people but also intensifying the violence against innocent Israeli men, women and children.

I’d like to be able to say, with total honesty, that this is “fucking unbelievable,” but unfortunately I can’t as it seems our society, from the perspective of timing coinciding with the War On God, has regressed in some quarters to a level at which human life is valued as worthless as it is in so many third world countries while racism, thanks in large part to the bottom feeders at the ACLU, has begun a revival in America.

Despite what the ACLU would have us believe, racism can also define an anti-white stance.

July 6, 2005 — A racist excon confessed that he fatally stabbed a beloved mother of two at a White Plains mall because he wanted “to kill a white person.”

“She was not innocent. She was white,” convicted rapist Phillip Grant confessed in a chilling videotaped statement to cops that was played in White Plains City Court yesterday — the same day victim Concetta Russo Carriero was laid to rest. 

This is a real shame, my prayers and my deepest condolences go out to the family of Mrs. Russo Carriero.

Today is our country’s birthday, the day the patriots who founded our great nation gave King George his walking papers and declared the United States of America a free country. The 229th birthday of a nation that, despite to this day being many centuries younger than countries that once dominated the globe is today the most free, the most awesome economic force and the nation that ”owns” the most powerful military machine in existence. 

I won’t expound, I’ll simply leave the talking to my president. 

Happy 4th of July! 

I hope this guy’s luck holds to the end, screwups that work out like this one are truly a rare gift.

Goof Puts Man in Major Poker Tourney

Killeen, Texas - A computer Goof has Robert Guinther headed for a seat at the World Series of Poker tournament in Las Vegas later this week.

Guinther, 65, entered what he thought was a $10 online poker tournament, but midway through he realized that he had accidentally clicked on a World Series of Poker satellite tournament with a $100 entry fee and it was too late to back out. He went on to win, defeating 180 other competitors and earning a spot in the WSOP $10,000 no-limit championship.

The tournament, which begins Thursday, will involve more than 6,600 players who either qualified by winning a satellite tournament or paid the $10,000 entry fee.  

“This is the dream of a lifetime,” Guinther said. “I watch these guys on television all the time, and I’m excited about the chance to sit down and play with them.”

“Diplomats…. The best diplomat I know is a fully armed phaser bank.”

                 —-Lt. Commander Scott, Engineering Officer   NCC 1701   

                 Episode 23:  A Tale Of Armageddon

I found this article  in tomorrow’s Haaretz online(time zones, remember).

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has invited the militant group Hamas to join his cabinet immediately so the two can jointly oversee the smooth handover of the Gaza Strip following Israel’s withdrawal under the disengagement plan this summer, a Hamas official said Friday.

Hamas is considering the offer….

WTF!!!?

What was it Abba Eban said, “The Palestinians never miss the chance to lose an opportunity,” or something like that?

Does Abbas really think the Israelis will maintain benevolent diplomatic relations with, let alone negitiate with a government comprised in part by a terrorist organization?

It seems like every time peace negotiations over there begin moving forward, the Palestinians find some way to sabotage them.

Predictably,

“Hamas is a murderous terrorist organization responsible for countless acts of senseless violence against innocent civilians,”(Israeli foreign Ministry spokesman Mark) Regev told the Associated Press. ”Hamas is no partner for us in any sort of political process. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution,” he said.

Did I say Mahmoud Abbas is a dumbass?

He’s got to be, unless….

….he’s doing this to forestall any Israeli concessions in order to prolong the violence, which would no doubt suit the al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and all the rest of the asshats whose only true ambitions involve killing Jews and causing whatever collateral damage(tourists, fellow Arabs, etc.) they can in the process.

Remember  this website?

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has announced that she is stepping down from the Court.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, an important swing vote and the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court, said she is stepping down, opening the door for President Bush to begin reseating the high court with a more conservative bent for a generation to come on everything from abortion to affirmative action to business regulation.

In the near term, however, the high court vacancy could lead to a paralyzing confirmation fight that ties up Congress for the foreseeable future, delaying — or derailing — other ambitious elements of Mr. Bush’s second term agenda, like overhauling Social Security and the tax code.

Justice O’Connor, 75 years old, said she expects to leave before the start of the court’s next term in October, or whenever the Senate confirms her successor. It’s been 11 years since the last opening on the court, one of the longest uninterrupted stretches in history.

….Justice O’Connor’s departure would leave Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the only woman among the current justices. Congress and various interest groups had been gearing up for Chief Justice Rehnquist, who is battling thyroid cancer, to step down, and the list of possible replacements discussed had largely focused on those who would take his seat. Possible replacements for that position include Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and federal circuit judges J. Michael Luddig, John Roberts, Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Michael McConnell, Emilio Garza and J. Harvie Wilkinson, III.

….The length and intensity of the confirmation battle hinges on how the White House chooses to fill the court opening. While Mr. Bush and aides have said repeatedly they’re looking for “strict constructionists” of the Constitution — judges seen as more likely to curb the powers of the federal government and more accepting of religion in public life — some candidates would be more controversial than others.   

Yeah, it looks like we’re in for a long haul, here, where confirmation of a Bush nominee is concerned. If the track record of Democrat opposition to every other Bush nominee for every position is any indicator, this one will be another quagmire, courtesy of those folks on the left, as they continue their bitter, relentless war on George W. Bush. It doesn’t matter whom he puts forward, there’ll still be a battle just because the Dems have no other platform than their driving will to make Bush fail.

So far, luckily, they themselves have failed miserably in their attempts because the President is a stronger and better man than anyone musterable-up from among the human resources of the DNC.

I say a “long haul” for two reasons. There will not only be the pitched, lengthy battle over the O’Connor replacement, but if Chief Justice Rehnquist also retires as anticipated, there will be two positions to fill on the court and thus double the fun for the obstructionist Democrats, who will see a sterling opportunity to tie up Congress for an even longer period, holding up other legislation important to the Bush Administration as they pound exhaustively away at every detail they can think of to discredit Bush nominees.

In the Silver Lining Department, being ever the optimist, I wonder how many more conservative Democrats the coming partisan BS will move into the GOP camp in time for next year’s elections. Hopefully lots.    

When I was growing up back in the 1950s and 1960s, I, like most people, I suppose, never dreamed that our society would become like it is. There was always healthy competition between the Democrats and Republicans, but there was always a line of sorts that neither side crossed. People on both sides were proud of America and proud of our country’s Judeo-Christian heritage. Patriotism was fashionable, even among Democrats. Children were raised to respect authority figures like teachers and cops(though, during the Vietnam conflict, the peace movement deviated from that aspect of their upbringing), television left more intimate events to the imagination and produced great shows(better than what I saw more recently before I stopped watching it) and the news media had a better grasp on the meaning of the verb “report”. You felt you could trust what you read in the papers or heard on the evening news. People could say what they meant without having to couch their words in the obscurity of so-called ”political correctness”(PC is still a foreign concept for me, I still say exactly what I mean, using whatever words I feel best get my point across).

Today we seem to have gone 180 degrees in the opposite direction.

We have the Democrats, a party that, since being hijacked by liberals, has moved so far to the left that were the earth flat, they’d have all fallen off years ago, bashing their country at every opportunity under the guise of caring one way or the other about an issue; In reality, the current crop of Dems have demonstrated that they are more concerned with scoring political victories than with the economy, national security, the citizens’ rights they claim to champion or pretty much anything else they express an interest in.

They want to abolish God from any and all public properties, hiding behind a “separation of church and state” that doesn’t appear anywhere in the Constitution, yet insist on butt munching Muslims when it comes to Islamics’ religious rights, even those of incarcerated terrorists. Last year I read of a school in California where, though Jewish and Christian kids aren’t allowed to pray, all students were required to attend Koran classes and one day per week show up in Arab garb.   

Along with a news media that’s drifted far to the left, they presently focus all their energy fighting the War On Bush, crowing joyously out from behind facades of concern whenever we lose soldiers in Iraq, comparing our troops to Nazi storm troopers, Camp Delta to a gulag or a concentration camp, anything to discredit President George W. Bush and truth doesn’t even factor into the bargain. They obstruct Bush any way they can, fighting every appointment he makes to every agency and organization whether the candidate is good, bad or otherwise, their goal being to make the President fail. It doesn’t matter that such a failure might result in more 9/11s, Iraq falling to another bloody dictatorship after all the sacrifices of our brave military personnel and those of other coalition countries, or even Armageddon. All these traitors — that’s right, t-r-a-i-t-o-r-s, there’s no other word that so aptly describes these assholes — care about is their partisan politics and what’s really scary, on the order of the Dems getting the White House and/ or Congress somewhere in the future, is that while they lambast Bush over every move he makes, not one of them has any solutions to any of the problems that my President has thusfar addressed rather brilliantly. 

While the left has chanted their “Bush lied, people died” and “No blood for oil” slogans, we have seen two murderous Islamic dictatorships become democracies, the concept of democracy embraced in a couple of other Arab states and we have enjoyed tax cuts that allow us to keep more of our own money. We have seen the economy, measured in new jobs, begin to grow again and a homeland security structure bringing our various intelligence and security agencies into a cooperative loop and greatly decreasing the chances of more terrorist attacks. We have seen government programs enacted that are aimed at bringing our educational standards back to their former excellence.

This has been solely the work of the Bush Administration and the Republican party, despite incessant, aggressive obstructionism by the Democrats, the same people whose major contribution during the Clinton Administration was to make America appear weak in the eyes of the global terrorist organizations Bubba and his people should have been fighting. 

Today, while the Bush Administration fights the Global War On Terror, the Democrats fight their own war on the President.

The upside to all this is that as the Democrats become more and more vitriolic, and downright insulting to the intelligence of the voting public, they continue to drive away votes(not entirely, of course, they’ll always have dingbat California liberals and a faithful following of blue state boneheads to keep them from being shut out altogether), and the longer we can stave off a resurgence of power from the left side of the aisle the better off America, and the world, for that matter, will be.

In today’s Jewish World Review there’s an interesting piece by Dennis Prager called The case for Judeo-Christian values: Without man, the environment is insignificant. 

Based on the Story of Creation, Mr. Prager’s premise is that the environment, like all else that God created on the first 5 days, was put there for the use and enjoyment of man, who arrived on Day 6.

One major conflict between the Judeo-Christian value system and the various secular ones competing with it revolves around these questions: Is nature created for man or is man merely a part of nature? Or, to put it in other words, does the natural environment have any significance without man to appreciate it and to use it for his own good?

The Judeo-Christian responses are clear: Nature has been created for man’s use; and on its own, without man, it has no meaning.

Dolphins are adorable because human beings find them adorable. Without people to appreciate them or the role they play in the earth’s ecosystem to enable human life, they are no more adorable or meaningful than a rock on Pluto.

That is the point of the creation story — everything was made in order to prepare the way for the creation of man(and woman, for those whose college education leads themto confuse the generic “man” with “male”). G-d declared each day’s creation “good,” but declared the sixth day’s creation of man “very good.”

Critics find three biblical notions about nature unacceptable: that man shall lord over it; that it was created solely for man and therefore has no intrinsic value; and that it is not sacred.

Go ahead and read the whole thing. If you are one of those liberals devoted to the atheist left’s War On God or one o’ them thar environmentalists it will probably piss you off, but who cares? I believe in God and it really irritates me that there are assholes in my country who are trying to legislate and sue every last vestige of Judeo-Christian belief out of existence while demanding that Muslims’ religious beliefs are indulged to their tiniest whim.

Yeah, that’s right, man rules nature, he’s not its equal, according to The Book the left so detests. The environment is there for man. Go cry in your tofu, then learn to live with it.

Does this mean that the biblical view of nature gives man the right to pollute the earth or to abuse animals? Absolutely not. Abusing animals is forbidden in the Torah:

The ban on eating the limb of a living animal, the ban on placing two animals of different sizes on the same yoke and the ban on working animals seven days a week are just a few examples. To cause gratuitous suffering to an animal is a grave sin. As for polluting the earth, this, too, is religiously prohibited. If the purpose of nature is to ennoble human life and bear witness to G-d’s magnificence, by what understanding of this concept can a religious person defend polluting nature?

We are indeed to be responsible stewards of nature, but for our sake, not its. 

This morning, in a post about Camp Delta titled Club Gitmo, Vilmar of Ranting Right Wing Howler fame linked to an article in FRONTPAGEMAG.COM by Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu, who wrote about a visit to GITMO to see first hand this detention center referred to by (Bene)Dick(t) Durbin as everything from a concentration camp to Pol Pot’s killing fields.

In the article, the author described extremely humane circumstances, big meals and generally a state of detention any inmate in a carefully monitored U.S. federal prison would envy.

The only inhumanity he cited was the agressive hostility of the prisoners, who physically attack guards who are bringing them meals or other items, reaching under face masks to try to rip out eyes, trying to grab and break guards’ limbs, thowing feces, yelling death threats, you need to read the article, then compare what you read with the remarks of Dick Durbin.

You are right to worry about inhumane treatment taking place at GITMO. But your concern should be for the dedicated, well trained, highly professional American men and women who are subjected to a daily barrage of feces, urine, semen and spit hurled at them along with vile invective as they implement a humane, enlightened system of confinement on men who want nothing more than to kill Americans.

These quiet, professional Americans, who live under the motto “Honor Bound for Defense of Freedom,” deserve our utmost respect and concern. Shame on anyone who slanders or disrespects them for short-term and short-sighted political advantage.  

As Vilmar pointed out in his post, you’d better read it there because you won’t see it anyplace else, and he was definitely correct there, as I searched several MSM venues for any reference to the fact that Durbin had it backwards: The detainees are the people doing the mistreating. You know, the detainees the liberals are so deferrent to, those peaceful Islamic souls who would just as soon butcher an American liberal’s six month old baby as they would any other American’s. 

I did find an article over at Fox News titled Senators Agree On Gitmo Operations that unsurprisingly got no mention in the New York Times. After all, it wasn’t anti-Bush enough to earn its place in the Newspaper of Record. 

WASHINGTON- A group of senators who travelled to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, this weekend to observe the conditions at the detention facility held separate news conferences on Capitol Hill Monday, but seemed to agree on one point— that the facility should not be shut down.

Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Ben Nelson of Nebraska said that while they believe some kind of standard should be set for the status and treatment of the prisoners there, they did not observe anything in interrogation practices or conditions that would prompt them to agree with a call to shut the facility down.

“It is my opinion that closing the detention camp at Guantanomo Bay would result in less accountability in the treatment of prisoners, not more,” Wyden said. ”The question we have to ask is who do we trust more to treat these prisoners humanely — Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt or the United States?”

…Wyden said that past practices he had heard about at Guantanamo, a.k.a. Gitmo, have been changed, and procedures and conditions at Camp Delta, where the prisones are housed, offer the best committment to human rights. He acknowledged that the prisoners at Guantanamo “are not your garden-variety criminal defendants.

“However, the most urgent task now is for Congress to articulate what reasons can justify holding these prisoners and for Congress to finally establish the precise legal status of these prisoners,” Wyden said. “Just because it is a war doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be any concrete rules.”   

That’s nice. The Democrat couldn’t find anything wrong and couldn’t very well make anything up about what he saw because also present were two GOP senators, so he told the truth about Camp Delta, albeit putting a nowwww it’s okay spin on his statements and adding that Congress needs to establish the legal status of the detainees and justification for detaining them, a little lip service to his party. His remark that, “Just because it is a war doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be any concrete rules.” is pretty lame.

I don’t remember finding any special humanitarian rules posted anyplace that determined special guidelines for fair and balanced treatment of those human beings who died in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field on the morning of 11 Sep 01. Still the point has been made by two Dem senators that conditions at Camp Delta are fine.

Also on the trip were Repulican Sens. Jim Bunning of Kentucky and Mike Crapo of Idaho, both of whom went further than Wyden and Nelson and said not only are conditions acceptable at Guantanamo Bay, but that they want to ”set the record straight” that prisoners are being treated in a way that’s totally consistent with American values. They noted that the new facilities at Gitmo include air conditioniong, good meals, facilities for religious worship and “top-notch health care.”

Prisoners have “everything to make them as comfortable as possible in detention,” Bunning said.

“It’s my conclusion that I don’t think you would be able to find a detention facility where people were better treated … the health care is better or equal to what our own troops get,” added Crapo, who did say it might be useful to come up with some kind of new status for these prisoners. Crapo said the reason is not to ensure better treatment but only because it would set a universal understanding of their status.     

When I looked through the NY Times earlier for some mention of this visit and these remarks and couldn’t find any, I figured there are two possible reasons:

1. GITMO being found not to be the gulag they’d hoped the two Dems would report it to be is not in their best interest to share with their liberal readership.

2. They might print the story later, after they’ve had the time to get the right anti-Bush spin on it.

What!? No gulag? No killing fields? No electrodes for the detainees’ testicles? This… This is outrageous!