Merry Christmas!

Linda Chavez has most certainly pegged Scooter’s successor in the annals of legal vandalism from the left.

His name isn’t yet familiar to most Americans, but I expect it will be by the end of 2008: Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. He is the man, according to recent press reports, who ordered the destruction of interrogation tapes made by the CIA, which allegedly show the effects of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” used against terrorists Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. In the next few months, his name will likely be dragged through the mud, and he will be vilified as a rogue official engaged in a massive cover-up. I think he deserves a medal.

Hard Astarboard is behind her column 100%. It’s like, like… some occult prescience or, at the very least, simply a conclusion based upon what The Racing Form refers to as Past Performances, only applied to donkeys instead of horses.

I am in full agreement that Rodriquez is highly deserving of a medal for his actions, not the collosal villification he’s sure to have come his way in the not too distant future.

…in liberals’ war on Christianity,

(CNSNews.com) - With Dec. 25 only days away, a central image in the celebration of Christmas — the manger scene featuring replicas of Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus — has become the focus of attacks by vandals and leaders of “the secular Left,” Christian groups charged on Wednesday.

Okay, so how far do some of these G-dless folks take this? What’s all the hubbub about? Well, here’s one example:

While the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights was erecting a nativity scene in New York City’s Central Park, the group issued a news release condemning three dozen instances in which manger scenes were vandalized or stolen from Antioch, Calif., to Leesburg, Va., this Christmas season.

“In perhaps the sickest incident, a public school coach in Marietta, Ga., drove students around the area in his pickup truck, instructing them to thrash Christmas displays after dark,” League said.

During their Dec. 8 vandalism spree, 46-year-old John Hayes and several middle school students damaged a number of Christmas displays, let the air out of inflatable figures and rearranged plastic reindeer into X-rated sexual positions.

According to the WGCL TV, Hayes has been charged with trespassing, contributing to the delinquency of minors and reckless conduct.

(above emphasis mine)

So this Hayes fellow is one of those modern, “progressive” school faculty members to whom parents entrust their children and the minds of said children for several hours a day, five days a week. Now isn’t that special…

In addition to physical attacks, nativity scenes are “part of a larger war that the secular Left is waging on all things Christian,” said Gary McCaleb, senior counsel with the conservative Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) - which describes itself as “a legal alliance defending the right to hear and speak the Truth through strategy, training, funding, and litigation” - in a news release.

During the past week, ADF attorneys have offered to defend free of charge two cities in Wisconsin that faced legal action from the secularist Freedom from Religion Foundation (FRF) if those governments did not remove nativity scenes from their public holiday displays.

Thank G-d that there are some people like those at the Alliance Defense Fund out there to counter satanic wingnuts like FRF.

Face it, these self appointed grinches fall into two and two categories only:

1) Socialists with communistic leanings who understand that as long as the majority among the masses are united by common religious beliefs, these beliefs will stand between the people and total government control of hearts and minds, and

2) Spiritually empty pond scum who feel it is their duty to force their atheism on the rest of us. The mutts described in “1)” do all they can to encourage these soulless losers to do whatever it takes to dumb down Christian religious expression, and Christmas is the most accessable target because being the holiest, it invokes the most outright public symbolism of any Christian holiday.

The claim by liberals (liberals, atheists, same thing) that Nativity scenes on public property constitute the ironclad merging of church and state is pure fallacy, another piece of lying propaganda by a segment of our society that has been eroding the core values of our nation, principally through left leaning courts and portside politicians, for the last three decades, increasingly gaining momentum along the way.

The linked article, in its entirety, can be read here.

…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….

My Jonesing, as William Teach so aptly described it in a comment in one of my last two posts before Mr. Inspiron passed away, has come to an end — I just received my new Dell XPS-M 1330 (a couple of hours ago, actually, but there’s all that set-up stuff you have to do, in which I’m still involved).

The reason for my relative silence these last couple of weeks is, simply put, that I can’t stand Internet cafes and library computers. I’m spoiled that way — ever since I first started blogging I’ve always done so from home or from hotel rooms, with my own choice of atmosphere (music, silence, whatever) — also, being a smoker, I prefer that option as well when I write posts or visit and comment at other blogs, something you can’t do at libraries or Internet cafes. They’re also distractive.

I seem to form these strange attachments to my computers: I don’t like other people using them, and I don’t like to use other peoples’ computers. I don’t know if this is merely a personal eccentricity or whether a lot of other folks are the same way, but that’s me.

The configuration of places to plug in cables, etc differs greatly from that of my Dell Inspiron, where all were located in the back. On this notebook they’re on the sides; The DVD/CD ROM drive is bay-style, you slide the discs in through a slot, and there is a touch pad above the keyboard that allows you to play, pause, control volume, eject and so forth without having to maximize and use the controls on the media site to do everything.

I haven’t had much chance to explore yet, so I have no idea whether or not there will be any difference on my part where the Windows Vista operating platform is concerned.

I’ve owned three computers in my life, one desktop, my Inspiron and now my second notebook, and this one is by far the fastest — according to the folks at Dell, it’s their best model currently in production. I have 2 gigs of memory, so I don’t foresee any problems there, and once the carrier I ordered arrives, I’ll be able to use my old hard drive as an external and put a lot of stuff from the late Mr. Inspiron’s lifetime into the new computer.

I have a few more set-up related items to deal with and a veritable 18 wheeler load of emails to deal with, after which Ah’ll be bock!

…is killing us.

Perhaps it’s just me, a product of Ukranian and Polish grandparents who, prior to producing my mother and her two sisters and later raising me, immigrated to the United States and immersed themselves in the business of becoming English speaking, patriotic Americans, but…

I have long been rather nonplussed at the drive by our portside political community to make light of the above concept.

Should the Salvation Army be able to require its employees to speak English? You wouldn’t think that’s controversial. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is holding up a $53 billion appropriations bill funding the FBI, NASA and Justice Department solely to block an attached amendment, passed by both the Senate and House, that protects the charity and other employers from federal lawsuits over their English-only policies.

The U.S. used to welcome immigrants while at the same time encouraging assimilation. Since 1906, for example, new citizens have had to show “the ability to read, write and speak ordinary English.” A century later, this preference for assimilation is still overwhelmingly popular. A new Rasmussen poll finds that 87% of voters think it “very important” that people speak English in the U.S., with four out of five Hispanics agreeing. And 77% support the right of employers to have English-only policies, while only 14% are opposed.

But hardball politics practiced by ethnic grievance lobbies is driving assimilation into the dustbin of history. The House Hispanic Caucus withheld its votes from a key bill granting relief on the Alternative Minimum Tax until Ms. Pelosi promised to kill the Salvation Army relief amendment.

What aggravates me here is that, we being a democracy and all, the Democrats, knowing that the vast majority of Americans believe that the English language should be coin of the realm here in the U.S., continue to press their multi-lingual agenda — of course, we know that they are motivated by targeted minority votes rather than the good of our country — and that they are willing to make light of the will of The People as such.

Maybe they should rename their party…

Yet the public is ready for leadership that will forthrightly defend reasonable assimilation. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger won plaudits when he said last June that one way to close the Latino learning divide was “to turn off the Spanish TV set. It’s that simple. You’ve got to learn English.” Ruben Navarette, a columnist with the San Diego Union-Tribune, agreed, warning that “industries such as native language education or Spanish-language television [create] linguistic cocoons that offer the comfort of a warm bath when what English-learners really need is a cold shower.”

“SNIP”, as they say,

But the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that last year filed over 200 lawsuits against employers over English-only rules, has a different vision. Its lawsuit against the Salvation Army accuses the organization of discriminating against two employees at its Framingham, Mass., thrift store “on the basis of their national origin.” Its crime was to give the employees a year’s notice that they should speak English on the job (outside of breaks) and then firing them after they did not. The EEOC sued only four years after a federal judge in Boston, in a separate suit, upheld the Salvation Army’s English-only policy as an effort to “promote workplace harmony.” Like a house burglar, the EEOC is trying every door in the legal neighborhood until it finds one that’s open.

The EEOC is no friend of the American People. They stink of the SPP/NAU agenda.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.), who authored the now-stalled amendment to prohibit the funding of EEOC lawsuits against English-only rules, is astonished at the opposition he’s generated. Rep. Joe Baca (D., Calif.), chair of the Hispanic Caucus, boasted that “there ain’t going to be a bill” including the Alexander language because Speaker Pelosi had promised him the conference committee handling the Justice Department’s budget would never meet. So Sen. Alexander proposed a compromise, only requiring that Congress be given 30 days notice before the filing of any EEOC lawsuit. “I was turned down flat,” he told me. “We are now celebrating diversity at the expense of unity. One way to create that unity is to value, not devalue, our common language, English.”

That’s what pro-assimilation forces are moving to do. TV Azteca, Mexico’s second-largest network, is launching a 60-hour series of English classes on all its U.S. affiliates. It recognizes that teaching English empowers Latinos. “If you live in this country, you have to speak as everybody else,” Jose Martin Samano, Azteca’s U.S. anchor, told Fox News. “Immigrants here in the U.S. can make up to 50% or 60% more if they speak both English and Spanish. This is something we have to do for our own people.”

Azteca isn’t alone. Next month, a new group called Our Pledge will be launched. Counting Jeb Bush and former Clinton Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros among its board members, the organization believes absorbing immigrants is “the Sputnik challenge of our era.” It will put forward two mutual pledges. It will ask immigrants to learn English, become self-sufficient and pledge allegiance to the U.S. It will ask Americans to provide immigrants help navigating the American system, the chance to eventually become a citizen and an atmosphere of respect.

Go to any other country in the world and try to undermine its official language, and see how well recieved you are.

In 1999, President Bill Clinton said “new immigrants have a responsibility to enter the mainstream of American life.” Eight years later, Clinton strategists Stan Greenberg and James Carville are warning their fellow Democrats that the frustration with immigrants and their lack of assimilation is creating a climate akin to the anti-welfare attitudes of the 1990s. They point out that 40% of independent voters now cite border security issues as the primary reason for their discontent.

In 1996, Mr. Clinton and a GOP Congress joined together to defuse the welfare issue by ending the federal welfare entitlement. Bold bipartisan action is needed again. With frustration this deep, it’s in the interests of both parties not to let matters get out of hand.

The entire quoted Opinion Journal column, by John Fund, is here.

The only reason the Democrats are so dead set on creating a multi-lingual America is to get the votes of those immigrants/minorities who don’t consider learning English or otherwise assimilating into mainstream America a priority.

The modern Democratic Party is so, so different from the one to which I belonged and that which I supported during my younger, less informed years. Today, they are more than willing to sacrifice our country, the form of government that makes it great and any and every other ideal that distinguishes America from infinitely less desireable geographic entities for the sole purpose of having their politicians elected to office.

To my way of thinking, that is not only grossly disgraceful, but it is also pure, unmitigated treason.

I had a bug of some sort over the past weekend, flu-like symptoms and so forth, and kept somewhat low key. It’s still there, but seems to be finally clearing up.

Needless to say, I watched a lot of movies and, being me, imbibed large quantities of my favorite flu medicine, a prescription whose suffix is VSOP.

One of the DVDs I watched is one of my absolute favorite all-time action films (I hadn’t viewed it since it was released nearly 30 years ago, and had looked for it on and off for some time before finally discovering that Second Spin had about half a dozen copies — suddenly, right out of the blue, and I ordered it at once), The Wild Geese.

The Wild Geese is about mercenaries on a mission in Africa.

The acting was majorly enjoyable (Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Roger Moore, Hardy Krüger and Stewart Granger), and the action was more realistic than that in most such films, as the technical director of the movie was one Colonel “Mad Mike” Hoare, a “been there, done that” real life merc who’s among the best known in his chosen field.

The above linked Answers dot com bio gives testimony to Hoare’s rather colorful professional background and references the books he’s written on same. Faulkner, Richard Burton’s character in The Wild Geese, was based on Mad Mike.

If you want to see a truly enjoyable action flick, one that’s going on three decades old yet hasn’t gotten nearly enough fanfare, this is it.

(On a note of interest, Richard Burton passed away early on during the filming of Wild Geese II, which, both without him and via the plot, etc, was, in my humble opinion, a “968 thumbs down” offering.)

I am forever hearing liberals complain about “income inequity”, whose dubious statistics the Democrats and the MSM use to press for more and more government interference in the marketplace. When you tell a lefty that a major reason Congress has such a low approval rating is that they haven’t accomplished a thing since the Democrats assumed leadership on the Hill, he or she invariably replies that “they raised the minimum wage”.

Then the more “informed” among them (the ones who read the New York Times), will give you bogus income statistics to show that the average wage has decreased. Some attribute this falsehood to a failure of the Bush tax cuts to help the “little guy”.

My stock reply is that the only thing that might offset the positive effect of the tax cuts is the increase in the minimum wage. Whenever it increases, everybody gets a raise, not just the guy at the bottom of the wage scale. An employer has to pay that increase x 8 x 40 x 52 to all his employees, and that adds up, often to such measures as downsizing to pick up the slack for significant decreases in company net revenues.

Naturally, that falls on deaf ears as liberals believe that a business is responsible for assuming the role of a social services department for employees, even if it loses money in so doing.

But I’m getting a little off track, here.

Where this so-called decline in employee wages is concerned, I am in complete agreement with an article by a columnist I have long considered to be as spot-on as one can be, Thomas Sowell.

Anyone who follows the media has probably heard many times that the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and incomes of the population in general are stagnating. Moreover, those who say such things can produce many statistics, including data from the Census Bureau, which seem to indicate that.

On the other hand, income tax data recently released by the Internal Revenue Service seem to show the exact opposite: People in the bottom fifth of income-tax filers in 1996 had their incomes increase by 91 percent by 2005.

The top one percent — “the rich” who are supposed to be monopolizing the money, according to the left — saw their incomes decline by a whopping 26 percent.

Meanwhile, the average taxpayers’ real income increased by 24 percent between 1996 and 2005.

How can all this be? How can official statistics from different agencies of the same government — the Census Bureau and the IRS — lead to such radically different conclusions?

There are wild cards in such data that need to be kept in mind when you hear income statistics thrown around — especially when they are thrown around by people who are trying to prove something for political purposes.

One of these wild cards is that most Americans do not stay in the same income brackets throughout their lives. Millions of people move from one bracket to another in just a few years.

So much for “the rich get richer…”

The column can be read in its entirety (highly recommended, it’s brilliant) over here.

I’ve debated (actually, given the propensity of liberals to screech and try to talk over dissenting opinion, “argued” might be a better word) with subscribers to both liberal doctrine and the MSM over their misbegotten statistics regarding the results of the Bush tax cuts, notably among them millions of jobs that have been created as companies invest surpluses created by their lowered tax bills in expanding their interests and hiring more people.

They say that the average wage has decreased.

I say that “Well, what do you expect? When jobs are created en masse, most of them are entry level. People who had no jobs are suddenly working again, and they are starting at the bottom.”

Most of them will eventually earn promotions and pay raises and, as Thomas Sowell said, they will be followed by others who, while starting off on the lower rungs of the compensation ladder, will progress, as time goes by, into higher income brackets.

Mainstream liberals are, for the most part, either financially comfortable or on food stamps. Neither group has any idea whatsoever as to the other’s realities, though the former believes they are experts on the latter’s realities.

Right.

A liberal who earns two hundred thousand bucks a year, up from fifty G’s right out of college, hasn’t a clue re the life of, say, “the guy who sweeps”, a dishwasher, a retail sales clerk, a cabbie, a homeless person, a bus driver or a welfare mother of three. The valet who parks the liberal’s car at his favorite night club, a busperson in a restaurant, a cashier at a gas station or convenience store, a desk clerk at a hotel, all are ciphers due to the very reality of their being there to serve. Individually, they are outside the equation. All the subjects of liberal attention, with the exception of specific opportunities to play the dreaded “race card” or conservatives ripe for attacking for political ends, are anonymous masses, which allows for a plethora of creative statistics and the interpretations thereof.

Unrelated to the topic at hand but relevant where disinformation by the MSM is concerned, Ann Coulter has a column out on the fearless leader of the liberal propaganda and lies community.

…an awesome Thanksgiving to all!