I haven’t posted for the last few days because I was inordinately busy and was also having to address some move- related problems with my DSL. I seem to be settled in now, at last.

Over at the FBI’s website, there’s a small quiz on the Law Enforcement agency in pop culture, for those who are trivia buffs, 5 questions and 1 bonus question.

If you’ve ever wondered how Starbucks Chairman Howard Shultz built the coffee concern into such a dynamo, try considering the employee loyalty factor as one element of his success. Until I read the bio linked above, I actually gave no thought to the man.

According to the bio, he came from poverty, got out of the projects with a college football scholarship and never looked back.

He worked for Starbucks and during that period of employment, when they only sold their coffee in bean or grounds form to take home, he tried convincing the company that they would do well to open a chain of cafes. They declined to act on his suggestions, he left and later bought the firm, then metamorphised it into what it is today. 

What kind of employee loyalty do you suppose you enjoy when you give 20 hour per week part timers full health coverage, and health coverage to unmarried spouses and institute a generous profit sharing plan, especially in these times when most employers go for the cheapest benefit packages they can scrape up and treat part timers like red headed step children(in fact a lot of companies, including the one that picks up and delivers most packages sent in the United States, I won’t reveal  the name of that company whose acronym is the opposite of ‘downs’, keep most of their rank and file employees on part time status so they don’t have to give them any benefits).  At any rate, Shultz is a great American success story if I’ve ever seen one, and he shares with his employees. The reason, he says, is because he wants to give others the chance to work for the kind of company his father never got to work for. Here’s the link again, check out his bio.

What actually brought on this curiosity about the Starbucks chairman was a link emailed to me by my good friend Steve who, like me, is an avid supporter of Israel. It is a long post on a Muslim website inciting readers to boycott Starbucks because Howard Shultz is also an avid supporter of Israel. He’s done business there, raised funds for Israel and is a very good friend of the Jewish state, so naturally, it stands to reason in the convoluted minds of members of The Religion Of Peace, he is the archenemy of Islam.

The Islamic site’s post begins:

Research Findings  Howard Shultz, chairman of Starbucks is an active Zionist.

Read and enjoy.

The U.K. website must have a more sedate readership than we’re accustomed to on Islamic forums, since there hasn’t been anything in the news as yet about anybody hijacking buses or eighteen wheelers and crashing them into Starbucks coffee houses, or anyone like Mr. Emoticon, here, setting up shop in a nearby mosque. 

Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger is taking on the California tax and spend liberals who, as usual, are looking to sleaze yet more money out of the tax payers with blind-siding, sneaky legislation. Proposition 13, a 1978 initiative that capped California property tax increases, is the issue at hand with the state’s Dems looking to change it or add taxable increments to the prop that would enable them to extract more money from voters.

Santee, San Diego County — Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger’s special election campaign suddenly became all about the landmark Proposition 13 property tax initiative Tuesday when he warned elderly homeowners they could lose their houses to taxes if Democrats and union leaders got their way in the fall.

“They want to back us into a corner so eventually they can force us to raise taxes,” Schwartzenegger told about 25 people in a backyard gettogether at this town outside San Diego.

He accused Democratic legislators of sneaking around with backdoor efforts to “tweak” Prop. 13, the 1978 initiative that put tight caps on property taxes in the state.

….The attack enraged Democratic leaders, who accused the governor of campaigning on issues that aren’t on the Nov 8 ballot.

Changing Prop. 13 to boost taxes on homeowners “isn’t on the ballot and it isn’t even on anyone’s radar screen,” said Maviglio, a spokesman for assembly speaker Fabian Nunez, D- Los Angeles. “The governor is trying to scare people to the polls and that’s shameful.”

Democratic legislators have authored bills that would amend Prop. 13 to make it easier to impose special parcel taxes and backed efforts to boost taxes on commercial property.

The San Francisco Chronicle article that tells the story will not link, but in today’s online edition of the paper, the item reads Guv: It’s About Prop 13.

California is the liberal stronghold of America, the home base of those who think we should be a socialist country, a nation in which the government and, through taxation, the rank and file tax payer and successful businesses are responsible for every last Utopian jerkoff social whim these asshats want to espouse. 

Oh, shit! We’ve blown all the state taxpayers’ money, we’d better hit ‘em up for more….

Their tax the people into the ground, the more the merrier attitude, during previous gubernatorial administrations such as that of Gray Davis, whom we fired in favor of electing the Governator, has driven businesses(can you say, jobs?) out of California and into neighboring states with more agreeable business tax rates.

These people are so far beyond unreasonable that it borders on insanity! They have no concept of budgets, they simply spend money on their bottomless pit feel-good agendas and when the kitty bottoms out, they seek to squeeze more money out of Joe Taxpayer. European countries, whom the liberals admire to the extent of worship, confiscate more of their citizens’ wages and salaries than they allow them to keep, and their economies still fall short of ours by enormous margins(more than double the unemployment, etc).  

We are a Capitalist Republic that’s proved out(the richest, strongest nation on this planet) with a constitution that forbids taxation without representation(remember the Boston Tea Party, or has that, too, been stricken from primary education textbooks by liberal revisionists of history?), and the vast majority of liberal agendas are just that. The liberals’ favorite passtime would seem to be spending our tax dollars on issues that the majority of us would vote against if given the opportunity to do so, if for no other reason than to hang onto enough of the money we earn working to live under reasonable conditions. The liberals want us to be just like France and other failing countries.

Arnold’s referendem for the vote in November is a counter to the California libs’ tendency to obfuscate issues in order to get the voters to pass laws and enact policies they might not vote on if they had the true picture.

A good example is a proposition that was on the ballot here in San Francisco, where all the politicians are liberals, in 2002. The city supervisors(the local equivalent of councilmen) needed a venue for rewarding their more noteworthy supporters, so they decided to form an entertainment commission that would decide issues relating to licencing night clubs and like businesses that would consist of their political cronies. They voted it in among themselves without consulting the voters, and on the proposition ballot they gave the voters a choice as to whether or not the mayor(the baksheesh and political advancement seeking Willie Brown) should be able to appoint X number of members to the commission and the city supervisors the rest. The way it was worded on the ballot made it appear to most local voters that they were actually having a say on whether or not to form the commission to begin with, a “yes” or “no” vote all that was required. In my book, that constitutes misleading the public.  

The California branch of the Angry Left has been maligning Schwartzenegger since he took office and the opinion on the street(read that as “among the state’s liberals”) is that he’s “sold out” the citizens of the state and reneged on what he purported to stand for when he ran for governor.

Bullshirt. Like the rest of today’s Democrats, the majority in California’s legislature would rather sabotage their GOP governor(like the Dems on Capital Hill do to W at every opportunity), letting the rest of us pay the price, in order to undermine his performance and get him voted out in favor of their own candidate in the next election. These anal cavities should be slowly smothered to death, or exported to France where they belong. 

I don’t envy the California governor his job, which has to be a frustrating ordeal in itself just because of the obstructions he faces on a day-to-day basis from the state legislature’s liberal majority.

I am moving today, and SBC won’t have my service transferred until tomorrow, so unless my notebook finds me a wireless network in the meantime, I will be offline for about 24 hours.

shudders

You can preview and order the Gulag Archipelago here. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1973, three volume nonfiction work on the brutal Soviet prison camp system describes a reality that places Amnesty International’s reference to Camp Delta as a gulag squarely at the top of the Bullshit List.

That they can even remotely refer to the Guantanamo Bay detention facility thusly(even if they hadn’t admitted not knowing what goes on there) tells us that they have no credibility whatsoever anymore and are letting their left wing, anti-Bush, anti-U.S., anti-freedom, pro-terrorism agenda do their talking for them.

Asshats.

“Guantanamogate” has reaaallllly gotten out of hand.

We get a Newsweek story based on misinformation and quickly retracted as such, then Amnesty International, admitting that they don’t know what’s happening at Camp Delta, the Gitmo detention facility, but going ahead and calling it a gulag anyway, so,

Based on no factual evidence whatsoever(to Bush hating liberals that’s plenty of proof), the left has begun to crow with their usual glee beneath their patented false veneer of concern and hurl accusations of torture and inhumanity, creating yet another wave of anti-Bush hysteria, demands pouring in from liberal politicians and pundits that the detention center be shut down. What a bunch of reactionary obstructionist buffoons!

Let’s read how Oliver North weighs in on the subject.

An exerpt,

Here’s Amnesty’s “gulag:” Upon arrival, detainees are issued a blanket, a sheet, two orange “jump suits,” flip flops, a foam sleeping pad, two bath towels, a washcloth, toothpaste, soap, shampoo, a prayer rug, and a Koran. They are allowed two 15-minute showers per week; They get recreation time and three culturally sensitive meals per day. Schedules are respectful of Islamic traditions, prayer calls are broadcast five times a day and arrows painted on the floors point to Mecca. Their regular quarters include a flushing toilet, running water, and an off-the-floor bed. Detainees who ask for them are provided with soccer balls, playing cards, chessboards and paperback books. All of this, courtesy of the American taxpayers the detainees have sworn to kill.

Now compare that to a Soviet gulag as described by gulag survivor Alexander Solzhenitsyn. If you haven’t yet read his  (1962) novel, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovitch, I highly recommend adding it to your reading list.

Another of Solzhenitsyn’s books on the subject (in nonfiction mode) is The Gulag Archipelago. A link to a preview at Amazon.com that includes the opening segment follows in the next post.

Last Monday I posted about the Supreme Court’s ruling that it is okay for the DEA to bust medical marijuana patients.

Fox News, on their online video page, reports that the DEA has said it will not actively pursue medical marijuana patients, but focus its efforts on serious traffickers of nonprescribed marijuana. Fox news videos do not possess their own linkable URLs, but this report is presently on the page, which changes from day to day.

Go to the right sidebar, click on Only On Fox, then on Smoked Out? Here is the link to the page.

I have seen stories about the Court’s ruling and surrounding issues in several MSM venues, but none seem to have mentioned the above development, probably because it’s in the liberal interest to keep the folks concerned mad at the Bush Administration for as long as possible.

I know, the Supremes that ruled against medical marijuana were the liberals, those that dissented the conservatives, but you’ll see: It’ll somehow become Bush’s fault, as always.

There’s also a good take on the issue by Daniel Henninger in The Wall Street Journal Online.

Marijuana!

Supreme Court Just Says No

The Supreme Court’s liberal bloc — Stevens, Ginsburg, Souter and Breyer — ensured Monday with the support of Justices Kennedy and Scalia that people sick from cancer treatment will have to think first about a house call from the federal drug police before using marijuana to treat their symptoms. Even the Court’s language was unfeeling: ”The case comes down to the claim that a locally cultivated product that is used domestically rather than sold on the open market is not subject to federal regulation. Given the…undisputed magnitude of the commercial market for marijuana, Wickard and its progeny foreclose that claim.”

Liberalism to cancer patients: Drop dead.

Read the entire column. 

And here we have the New York Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, a man so full of ambition to build the resume he feels he needs to further his political career that he executes the duties of his position using a  jungle rules approach, attacking target companies through what amounts to browbeating them into “out of court” settlements, because he knows he wouldn’t win any of his dubious, weakly conceived cases against them before a jury.

An Op Ed in WSJ Opinion Journal’s Review & Outlook(Friday, 10 June), titled The Siphol Verdict   A jury instructs Eliot Spitzer on the rule of law, discusses a case in which Spitzer went after one Theodore C. Siphol for “late trading”, as the defendant had been helping Canary Capital trade mutual funds after 4:00 P.M., when the market closed for the day. The problem the Spitz encountered was that there is no law on the books that says “late trading” is illegal, only that trading after the NAV(net asset value) of a mutual fund is computed for the day is illegal, and that happens about an hour and a half after the close of trading of a mutual fund for that day.

Mr. Siphol is the exception to the usual Spitzer rule of using strong-arm tactics to coerce settlements out of business. The Attorney General has become famous for assailing a business practice that is either controversial or legally ambiguous, and then using leaks via the media and the threat of indictment or the destruction of an entire company to force his targets to surrender.

In the case of mutual fund “late trading,” that tactic worked with Bank of America and Canary Capital, the hedge fund whose trades Mr. Siphol had helped execute. But when Mr. Siphol, a mid-level functionary, refused a plea offer that included jail time, the Attorney General came down on him like J. Edgar Hoover on John Dillinger, with multiple counts and potential jail time of up to 30 years.

This led Mr. Spitzer into the terra incognita of a jury trial, where he’d have to prove that “late trading” was illegal….

Eliot, Eliot, Eliot….

What’s wrong with being a man of honor? If you want to feather your cap so badly, why not find some legitimate criminals to pursue rather than simple targets of opportunity?

I know, I know, you really don’t care all that much about your duty to those who elected you AG, it’s all about finding vulnerable shortcuts to glory and thereby(hopefully, to you) a platform from which to launch a campaign for governor. Did you serve in Vietnam? If so, be sure to include that in as many sentences as you can in your campaign speeches, it just might work this time. The last guy that tried it  nearly succeeded, but unfortunately(for him, not for the nation) many of those who knew him in Southeast Asia came out of the woodwork with accounts of his service that weren’t quite as heroic as his own version. Can you say “180 degrees?” 

I try so hard not to sound like an extremely right wing kind of guy, I really do, but sometimes it can’t be helped, because I am an American and I’m proud of my government and my country and my President. This, I think, is what causes me to digress. I promise to try not to do that.

Still….

But seriously, before you drag your next would-be victim before a jury, you should take a year off from work and study under John Edwards. He’ll teach you how to manipulate a jury to the point that they’d convict an armless, legless, blind, four year old deaf mute of strangulation to death of the Heavyweight Champion of the World. 

There I go again, dammit!    

Read the editorial.

In Jewish World Review today, Linda Chavez has a column on  the Detention Center at Guantanamo Bay that sums up, completely, totally, eloquently and thoroughly the whole story in a way that even the stooopidest liberal could not refute her without looking even more stooopid. 

Gitmo is a necessary evil

Senator Joe Biden, D-Del., thinks that the United States detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, “has become the greatest propaganda tool that exists for recruiting of terrorists around the world.”

Sure, Joe. Bubba Clinton’s policy of turning the other cheek no fewer than half a dozen times when terrorists attacked us during his administration worked a lot better, right? We should show these extremists that we feel their pain, reach out to them in the spirit of compassion and friendship, nurture them with tender loving care and then, because we’ve demonstrated our peaceful goodwill, those gentle spirits will throw away their explosives and smallarms and leave us alone as they go on to pursue productive, meaningful lives. Right.

Biden told ABC’s “This Week” that “we should end up shutting it down, moving those prisoners. Those that we have reason to keep, keep. And those that we don’t, let go.” Biden wants Congress to appoint a commission to study Guantanamo, but the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee seems to have no clue what the practical consequences of his suggestion would be.     

It’s not that he doesn’t have a clue, it’s that he doesn’t want one. Like most of the flaming leftists the Democratic Party has allowed to hijack it, he apparently believes that the consequences of something he sets in motion are just some picayune detail of little or no consequence, the main thing is to score some imagined political point in the LWOB(Liberals’ War On Bush). This has reached the point of ridiculousness, one of our primary political parties slavering with so much anger and hate towards our president that they’re willing to endanger the rest of us, get American troops and civilians killed, just to sling some mud on Mr. Bush and hope at least part of it sticks.

Can anyone say, treason?

Since January 2002, when the United States began detaining at Guantanamo Bay enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other fronts in the war on terror, critics have complained of human rights abuses. Last month the secretary general of Amnesty International compared Guantanamo to the Soviet gulags, a charge that can only be described as obscene. From 1929 to 1953, 18 million people were imprisoned in the Soviet slave labor camps. The gulags’ horrors have been documented by their most celebrated inmate, Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and most recently by JWR columnist Anne Applebaum in her Pulitzer Prize winning book, “Gulag: A History.” Men, women, children guilty of nothing were sent to camps in Siberia where they wereworked often literally to death. Applebaum writes that “[p]risoners were also locked in punishment cells until they died of cold and starvation, left untreated in unheated hospitals, or simply shot at will for ‘attempted escape.”’ 

The men imprisoned at Guantanamo are members of an international terrorist organization that has killed thousands of innocent civilians. Most were captured while fighting U.S. and coalition troops. They have provided valuable intelligence about al Qaeda, including its recruitment efforts in Europe, its training methods, especially its use of suicide bombers, and its exploitation of charity fronts to raise money for its efforts. More than 200 men have been released from Guantanamo, some of whom have rejoined terrorist networks and are trying to kill Americans again.

Read the rest.

Jewish World Review today features an Op Ed by Sam Schulman that seems to me to be dead on, regarding the failure to pass of the EU constitution and what it means to Israel, Let’s congratulate the national peoples of Europe for their courage.

Don’t be disturbed by the stories from France and the Netherlands that a motley coalition of communists and neo-nazis have defeated the EU constitutional referenda. The restoration of the principle of self-government to the various European nations is the best news for the Jews to come out of Europe since  the acquittal of Dreyfus.

The fact is that the European “superstate” was founded on one idea: nationalities cannot be trusted with a state of their own. A majority of Frenchmen or Dutchmen must not be permitted to decide on their own economic and foreign policy— lest — well, lest the heavens fall. Under the new European constitution, a panel of unelected experts would take all decision-making power away from individual national groups. The Dutch, the Germans, the French, the Czechs would surrender their ability to govern themselves in the interest of something higher. What, exactly, that higher value might be was never explained— but if one opposed it, one was a “xenophobe” or a reactionary.

So the national peoples of Europe were about to surrender their states. Needless to say, the notion that, of all people, the Jews should be allowed alone to have a state in which they could govern themselves and choose their own leaders under the rule of law was an outrage to the “European Idea.” To the extent that the European Union continued its march against national self-determination, Israel’s legitimacy would be eroded.   

I agree. The Weasel States, who carry the most weight in the EU, pretty much call the shots at the U.N., and that unctuous, corrupt, anti-America, anti-Israel bureaucracy has, for as long as I can remember, opposed Israel at every turn, siding with the Palestinians and whatever other Arab countries have had issues with Israel.

Read the rest.