…defines, in this column, the true source of the “War On Children”.

Put as succinctly as this, any logic blessed American voter reading the column should stop and ponder:

1. Why aren’t the Democrats in Congress thinking about the future their social programs will leave to “the children”, who will grow up to be tax-paying adults? Why do they attempt to emulate failed European policies while ignoring the negative results of same?

Could it be that they’re only concerned with the politics of the now rather than the realities of the future?

2. Assuming they are concerned about the future of our country and about “the children”, is this simply a case of the Democrats being incapable of assessing the down-the-road ramifications of policies they set today?

Are political leaders who lack even an iota of perspicacity qualified to lead the country?

The United States of America is a perpetually ongoing concept, yet the Democrats treat it as though it is a political Busy Box whose attention span needs only to extend from one Election Day to the next.

If the Democrats feel the need to invoke “the children”, they need look no further for invokees than those occupying seats to the left of the aisle.

…that I have somewhere along the line become a stone Internet (© Algore) addict, the last half week supplied all the proof I need.

I lit up Mr. Inspiron at Zero Dark Hundred Hours on Thursday to find a blue screen informing me that I couldn’t come in, because there was something-or-other afoot that would damage my computer if I did.

“Bummer,” I thought.

I called Dell Tech Support, went through the usual Pomp & Circumstance you go through before you find yourself in touch with a human being in the proper department, and was dumbfounded when I discovered that the homosapien in question was, while obviously elsewhere in the world (it’s hard to say whether she was a Latina or a Bangalorian, and I’ve always been really good with accents, but I think that was because her English, diction and vocabulary both, was nothing short of excellent), was eminently understandable, profoundly knowledgeable and had a real ease about her, the kind that comes, part and parcel, with experience. Our entire exchange was more a conversation, including some mutually enjoyed humorous asides, than it was a report/response exchange.

Her diagnosis was that I needed to reinstall Windows XP Professional, using the back-up CD they should have sent me with my notebook. She also told me that when I’d purchased the computer, Dell hadn’t been including the XP disc among the others in the box, so she had to overnight it to me. She made the soonest appointment available (for she or someone from her unit to call me and walk me through the reinstall, once I had the CD), which was for Saturday Afternoon.

Aaargh!!!! I was contemplating up to 2 1/2 days without being able to get online from a PJ-friendly environment! I repeat, Aaargh!

I must confess to a certain degree of withdrawal symptoms, probably like a heroin addict “Jonesing”, only without the physical stress. To pontificate and employ more scientific language, well, let’s just say it sucked.

So yesterday, a Dell Dude, also uncharacteristically knowledgeable and with undeterminate accent, called and we did the thing with the CD, which entailed him calling me back a few times while the disc took its time doing its job.

After that, it took 2 restarts and I was back in business.

Being of the half full and silver lining persuation by nature, I will say that my computer’s performance has improved quite a bit since the CD and the Dell folks did what they did, it turns out that a lot of a slowness of loading, despite the fastest DSL available from AT&T/Yahoo!, was as much the fault of some sort of deterioration in my operating platform as it was from the drag (as opposed to thrust) of IE-7.

Boy, don’t I sound high-tech…

Back on-line, I was confronted by a highly daunting quantity of emails to reply to, emailed news/opinion subscription venues to work my way through and 2 1/2 days’ worth of spam that goes around the filters thanks to what is hopefully only negligence on the part of Blogspot (don’t blame “Desenex”, I’m a Munuvian and I use Word Press: They allow megaspammers to use their servers — the only spam that penetrates into my comment sections have Blogspot URLs, and they come both simultaneously and in large quantities). Blogspot is apparently hosting a movie sequel: I, Spambot.

Plus, I have two days’ worth of catching up to do as regards visiting the sites of many, many fellow bloggers, which for me is a priority pursuit after eating and sleeping.

Okay…

Now that we’ve gotten the above “adventure” out of the way, the first thing I want to do is express my intense satisfaction at the election of Bobby Jindal as governor of Louisiana.

U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal easily defeated 11 opponents and became the state’s first nonwhite governor since Reconstruction, decades after his parents moved to the state from India to pursue the American dream.

Jindal, a 36-year-old Republican, will be the nation’s youngest governor. He had 53 percent with 625,036 votes with about 92 percent of the vote tallied. It was more than enough to win Saturday’s election outright and avoid a Nov. 17 runoff.

This guy is phenomenal, he’s one of those rare politicians who embrace the concept of what I tend to think of as “practice over theory”. He does stuff rather than expound upon it, and at the relatively young age of 36 he has won the respect and confidence of the vast majority (just look at the figures, and these published by Yahoo!, a highly liberal, PC client of the Associated Press) of Louisiana voters.

I lived in Nawlins for many years in earlier periods of my adult life, from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s, from days when the Superdome and the Hibernia Tower were pretty much the city’s skyline to an era in which there is a full skyline of modern hotels and other high rises.

Truth to tell, I preferred things the old way — I so miss pre-high tech architecture (from back in the days when men were men and sheep were scared — sorry, my own sense of humor, as bizarre as it sometimes happens to be, rendered it impossible for me not to interject that particular semi-appropriate cliche), when an architect was someone who designed buildings via creativity rather than computer model and a mason was permitted to add artistic detail to the project.

But as usual, I digress…

Remember my admission re “half full” and “silver lining”s? Well, keeping in mind Hurricane Katrina’s introduction of profound tragedy to the Crescent City and much of the rest of southern Louisiana, with its resultant out-of-state relocation of so many residents (here, at risk of sounding like the racist I’m not — this is for any readers who tow the PC line rather than the realism one) from the low-income neighborhoods that produce gang bangers and related homicides and draw the bulk of public largesse, and the fact that residents of parishes like Orleans and Jefferson hold the same kind of sway at the polls that NYC voters do in New York State politics, my own interpretation of the Jindal victory is that:

Louisiana voters see their present circumstances as an opportunity to fix the presently (and historically) corrupt, southern Democrat “old boy network” run political system, and they’ve voted in Jindal, exactly “the man for the job”.

Bravo to the Louisiana electorate!

The next item I would have posted on had I not encountered my computer problem would have been linking this must read column by Diana West.

In my opinion, the most powerful segment reads:

The point of my talk — based on my new book, “The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization” (linked below) — was to explain why perpetual adolescence is not just a cultural drag, but also dangerous to our way of life. I argued that the leveling of adult authority over the past half century or so was accompanied by a leveling of cultural authority.

This brought on the age of multiculturalism, a time when Western Civ (like the adult) no longer occupies its old pinnacle atop the hierarchy of cultures. The multiculti conception of equally valuable cultures (except for the West, which is deemed the pits) depends on a strenuous non-judgmentalism. This non-judgmentalism expresses itself in a self-censoring adherence to political correctness.

Such non-judgmentalism, such PC self-censorship, is infantilizing because it requires us to suppress our faculties of analysis and judgment.

Finally, we come to one of those topics that’s near and dear, as they say, to my heart: Security.

Security screeners at two of the nation’s busiest airports failed to find fake bombs hidden on undercover agents posing as passengers in more than 60% of tests last year, according to a classified report obtained by USA TODAY.

Screeners at Los Angeles International Airport missed about 75% of simulated explosives and bomb parts that Transportation Security Administration testers hid under their clothes or in carry-on bags at checkpoints, the TSA report shows.

At Chicago O’Hare International Airport, screeners missed about 60% of hidden bomb materials that were packed in everyday carry-ons — including toiletry kits, briefcases and CD players. San Francisco International Airport screeners, who work for a private firm instead of the TSA, missed about 20% of the bombs, the report shows. The TSA ran about 70 tests at Los Angeles, 75 at Chicago and 145 at San Francisco.

How comforting is that?

Anyone who has visited here over the last couple of years knows that as a protection professional I’ve kinda-sorta expressed my doubts where the TSA, at ground level, is concerned.

From my own considerable domestic airport experience (speaking strictly as a traveller), my personal top rating for professionalism in post-9/11 passenger screening goes to Logan International — those folks have no intention of allowing a second 9/11 from taking off out of Boston.

Look, my air travel is haphazard, I usually fly on short notice and, if the trip is multi-city, I take things one-way by one-way. The security programming in post 9/11 airline reservations systems often forwards requests that TSA search the luggage of/wand the bearers of one way or “day or two before reservations” fares and/or give them “special attention”. I have no problem with that. All “out of the norm” situations should be investigated.

As a human being, I tend to look at issues with the inclusion of “pros” & “cons”.

That is pretty much why I thought I should bring up this product.

Privacy experts are concerned that a full body x-ray scanner the Transportation Security Administration is testing will produce such revealing images that they could violate Americans’ civil liberties. And some experts, who see no civil liberty problems, think the machines are too expensive, too bulky, and not needed given current security procedures at airports.

“We are not convinced that it is the right thing for America,” said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Technology and Liberty Program. “We are skeptical of the privacy safeguards that the TSA is touting.”

TSA, which operates under the Department of Homeland Security, will be testing the Active Millimeter Wave body scanners at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, with plans to test machines at New York’s JFK and LAX in Los Angeles over the next few months.

TSA will also purchase eight millimeter wave units at a cost of $1.7 million to be used in other cities.

WTF is a “privacy expert”? Is this a bona fide job title or professional designation?

According to TSA, the process — a voluntary alternative to a pat-down during secondary screening — works as follows: A passenger steps into the machine and remains still for a matter of seconds, in two different positions, while the technology creates a three-dimensional image of the passenger from two antennas that simultaneously rotate around the body. Once complete the passenger steps through the opposite side of the millimeter wave portal.

The scanner’s manufacturers, L3 Communications, said the machine “penetrates clothing and packaging to reveal and pinpoint hidden weapons, explosives, drugs, and other contraband,” calling it “more reliable and less intrusive than pat-down searches.”

Yet “this technology produces strikingly graphic images of passengers’ bodies,” said Steinhardt. “Those images reveal not only our private body parts, but also intimate medical details like colostomy bags.”

“That degree of examination amounts to a significant - and for some people, humiliating - assault on the essential dignity of passengers that citizens in a free nation should not have to tolerate,” he said.

Before I comment on the immediate above, read this:

“They say that they are obscuring faces, but that is just a software fix that can be undone as easily as it is applied,” warned Steinhardt. “And obscuring faces does not hide the fact that the rest of the body will be vividly displayed.”

“Over time, the personnel operating this system will get mischievous, and it will be misused in ways that are very offensive,” added Jim Harper, director of Information Policy Studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Right.

“Yo, Ralph! This guy’s wearing a colostomy bag!”

Haw, Haw!!!!

What a bunch of Bee Ess!

Who gives a xxxx?

This is a typical liberal pitch, based upon “what if?” — “This could happen, so we need to flee, capitulate or downright surrender, to do otherwise would be politically incorrect!”

The above paragraph defines those on the far left to the letter.

Thank G-d that we right thinkers don’t follow the same directives that are adhered to by the left.

Okay, that should more than adequately convey my own attitude on the subject.

My other concern here is that –

TSA chief Kip Hawley, responding to previous reports about screeners missing hidden weapons, told a House hearing Tuesday that high failure rates stem from increasingly difficult covert tests that require screeners to find bomb parts the size of a pen cap. “We moved from testing of completely assembled bombs … to the small component parts,” he said.

This is total bullshit (© El Toro). It is “in name only” security. Either you secure a venue or you don’t, period. If you own a dress factory, it’s okay to hire seamstresses who skylark as they work, but if you run a security department, contractor or agency you’d damn well better employ people who can stay focused and for whom you’ve spent whatever sums it takes to see that they are trained and prepared for every eventuality, in their area of responsibility, that might come to pass.

Ex: A friend of mine was the security director for a major tenant brokerage firm in the World Trade Center at the time of the first bombing, which occured on the front end of a weekend. When the markets opened on Monday, he had relocated all the brokers, etc to a location on Hudson Street and they were doing business as though nothing had happened.

Ex 2: When I was employed in casino security in Nevada years ago, I was fortunate enough to work for a security director who believed in training the #&*%^$#& out of his floor officers, investigators and supervisors (After coming in at entry level, I was all of the these as time progressed). We attended classes, courses, workshops, lectures, etc in every area that even remotely affected us and our responsibilities, and it all paid off majorly for the casino in a number of ways that would require either a book or an extremely long post to even scratch…

To continue, however,

Terrorists bringing a homemade bomb on an airplane, or bringing on bomb parts and assembling them in the cabin, is the top threat against aviation. “Their focus is on using items easily available off grocery and hardware store shelves,” Hawley said.

In My Personal and Professional Opinion (s), security concerns are paramount in both the Public and Private sectors, and costs should never enter into the equation. If you’re a guest in My House and tragedy ensues, I’ll put my life on the line to ensure that you emerge unharmed.

Period.

…or something like that.

It seems that whenever I foresee a surplus of free time up ahead, something comes up that relegates it to the realm of the “almost”. Pardon my not-quite-serious sounding demeanor, but at present I’m listening to a song called Bamboo Town (the Tom Tom Club), the Tina Weymouth presiding. It is so basic, amusing — fun, and… and…Caribbean, and never fails to drape me in a whimsical mood.

So I had planned to post on a couple of things a couple of days ago, and it didn’t get to occur.

Al Gore’s prize was one of them, as I ran across an interesting item of a very definitive nature that hasn’t yet been censored by the Government Scientific Research Grants Police or whomever, yet nonetheless shows up the thankfully former Veep and his Inconvenient Myth rather well.

If you can spare the time, it will be worth it to take the 8 minutes and change to watch the video linked from the article. What Gore says, what the climatologists’ observations are.

Their findings that C02 increases have followed planetary warming trends by periods of decades, I’d say, relegate the ingenius, Nobel Prize winning buffoonery of the Algore critter to the cart before the horse category.

He blinded them with “science”.

Moving right along, there has been a proposal put forth by environmentalists that we change our culinary indulgences. I wonder what A.A. Milne would say if he learned that Kanga and Roo would be available for consumption at tomorrow’s Sunday brunch buffet.

This last item is hat-tipped to “News You Can Use”, courtesy of James Taranto.

In the Liberals Gone Wild Department, well, you know, there are a few big differences between the political left and the political right in this country that stand out big time.

Our conduct on the starboard side, our demeanor, our sense of civility, our consideration and respect for others’ property are evident. Our mature behavior.

When we conservatives stage a demonstration, what you see for the most part is a bunch of folks showing up in orderly numbers, most of us holding up signs.

When liberals stage a demonstration, it more often than not involves disruptive behavior, bags of feces, graffiti, property damage, vulgarity…

Having made that point, I refer you to a great column by Melanie Morgan that not only describes some of the above portside conduct, but also more than adequately describes the left’s complete lack of respect for those who lay their lives on the line to perpetuate the freedom liberals exploit in order to attempt to deprive us (headscratch here, them too) of it.

Oh, I did mention bags of feces, right?

************ GORE/NOBEL UPDATE ************

I enjoyed some good chuckles at some of the statements quoted in this article.

While supporters of Al Gore and his stance on global warming celebrated the former vice president’s win of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, skeptics of man-made climate change dismissed the award as another example of the Nobel committee naming someone “Liberal of the Year.”

“Al Gore should probably get a prize for most travel in a private jet, but not the Peace Prize,” said Myron Ebell, director of global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). He also called the award, which was shared with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “a sad day for the Nobel legacy.”

Giving Gore the annual prize was “an unfortunate and misguided move by the Nobel committee,” Ebell said, because “the energy-rationing policies he espouses would perpetuate the poverty and human misery associated with political instability and conflict.”

Timothy Ball, a retired climatologist who leads the National Resources Stewardship Project, told Cybercast News Service that Friday’s award “just makes a travesty of the whole concept of Nobel Prizes.”

“This tells me everything I need to know about Nobel Prize winners,” he said. “I notice they just gave one to the guy who discovered holes in the ozone layer - but there are no holes in the ozone.”

Heh….

…from Julia Gorin.

Being a career (attemptedly semi-retired) security professional, I have been watching the Blackwater saga unfold with great interest. You really need to follow that link to their website and take a good gander at what they do, the services and training they provide and what they’re about, keeping in mind that while they’re big guys in their particular segment of the Protection Industry, they’re not without competitors — they simply happened to fall into the media spotlight due to an “incident” or two.

These beleaguered folks, by now, must know how Microsoft feels on any given day where litigious persecution is concerned.

Looking at the video embedded in the article regarding the Iraq shooting incident, I can’t help but observe that the aftermath views looked a lot more to me like those of a firefight than the results of a security detail running amok. Firms like Blackwater tend to do serious background checks on prospective employees and subcontractors and inject psychological data into the equation. The very idea that the Blackwater security team would have gone off on a collective berserk episode sounds suspiciously like the allegations (and slander) against U.S. Marines that now has traitor John (spit!!!!) Murtha in the legal hot seat, where I sincerely hope he fries to a fine golden brown.

I’m hoping that the “joint Iraqi and U.S.” investigation into the incident is conducted with strong U.S. participation, so we stand the best chance of getting the facts straight. I am infinitely more trusting of the investigative abilities of the likes of the Bureau and other U.S. agencies than I am of people whose religion endorses takkiya and who have lived their lives, or the bulk of same, under the thumb of a regime that determined innocence or guilt based on expediency rather than evidence.

It should be interesting to see how the arms-to-terrorists bit comes out — here, I draw no conclusions. Given the kind of revenues Blackwater enjoys, I doubt that they would take the risk of losing everything to generate the relatively paultry income of selling arms to the bad guys. On the other hand, there are always the possibilities that either some of their onsite personnel could be “in business for themselves” or, to paraphrase any liberal’s dampest and stickiest dreams, that the firm is arming the terrorists in order to perpetuate their own Iraq security operations.

None of the above is anywhere near even speculatory status with me, I’m simply tossing out some possibilities. I fervently hope the last idea is not the case.

All that aside, what actually comes into scrutiny is the mainstream media (MSM)’s reporting of the event.

Employees of Blackwater USA have engaged in nearly 200 shootings in Iraq since 2005, in a vast majority of cases firing their weapons from moving vehicles without stopping to count the dead or assist the wounded, according to a new report from Congress.

In at least two cases, Blackwater paid victims’ family members who complained, and sought to cover up other episodes, the Congressional report said. It said State Department officials approved the payments in the hope of keeping the shootings quiet. In one case last year, the department helped Blackwater spirit an employee out of Iraq less than 36 hours after the employee, while drunk, killed a bodyguard for one of Iraq’s two vice presidents on Christmas Eve.

The report by the Democratic majority staff of a House committee adds weight to complaints from Iraqi officials, American military officers and Blackwater’s competitors that company guards have taken an aggressive, trigger-happy approach to their work and have repeatedly acted with reckless disregard for Iraqi life.

But the report is also harshly critical of the State Department for exercising virtually no restraint or supervision of the private security company’s 861 employees in Iraq. “There is no evidence in the documents that the committee has reviewed that the State Department sought to restrain Blackwater’s actions, raised concerns about the number of shooting episodes involving Blackwater or the company’s high rate of shooting first, or detained Blackwater contractors for investigation,” the report states.

Before I even consider going any further, I must first address the part about Blackwater contractors firing from their vehicles and not stopping afterwards to check for wounded and dead, etc — anyone who is even remotely conversant with executive protection knows that when your detail comes under attack, your only job is to get the principal out of harm’s way — you don’t hang around for humanitarian purposes or whatever, you beat feet, protectee in tow. An assassination or abduction attempt could include a back-up detail, right there on the scene.

When a (protection) client’s life is in your hands, proprieties be damned. Your only purpose is to keep him/her alive, whatever happens to other people is their business.

Period.

The rest of the account is not only also pure MSM, it’s also very nearly the soulmate of a template that could have been used in the left’s failed attempt to embroil Blackwater in the same politics-based, politically motivated millieu as the selfsame “news” media attempted to place on the Marines a couple of years ago, as referenced above, during whose endeavor disgrace to the Marines and general purpose traitor Representative Jack Murtha, without awaiting even the preliminary results of any investigation, accused U.S. Marines of being cold blooded murderers.

This kind of stuff, given the fact that over three decades ago I had strongly considered a career as a journalist, really makes me despair of those on the port side of that particular equation — they are so dedicated to forcing their political point of view on the unsuspecting public that the truth, impartiality and accuracy of delivering unbiased, factual news to their faithful American audience has become a secondary consideration to these “reporters”.

Shame on them!

As far as the Democratic majority in Congress are concerned, well, they have been true to form on this issue — their actions on same, showing their usual lack of sincerity on any subject vs their politically opportunistic nature, have managed to tack a domestic agenda of theirs onto this situation:

The Senate on Monday gave final approval, 92 to 3, to a defense policy bill that included the establishment of an independent commission to investigate private contractors operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bill, which must be reconciled with a House version, faces a veto threat because it includes an expansion of federal hate-crimes laws

.

Emphasis mine.

In summary, our diplomats are using security firms like Blackwater for protection in terrorist/war zone environments they must negotiate in order to do their jobs without being murdered in the process. This is not a job for rent-a-cops from Wackenhut or Securitas, it is a job for seasoned combat veterans armed with military smallarms and prepared to return fire without compunction.

Blackwater’s chairman, Erik Prince, made no bones when it came to defending his firm on the Hill.

The State Department made their position clear here and here.

Condi Rice has responded thus.

It seems to me that the bottom line is that, having had their collective ass kicked public opinionwise, over the Petraeus Report, the left is now using Blackwater as a new avenue for attacking our endeavors in Iraq.

If only they expressed the same degree of concerns on our economy, our national security and even the most basic of moral considerations…

…it’s that no matter what happens, any and every solution the Democrats will devise to any and every problem will be based upon raising taxes.

Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, is proposing a new carbon tax to reduce U.S. energy consumption. Part of the proceeds, he said would help pay for “universal health care — “upon passage,” he noted.

Dingell, here, wants not only to raise taxes, but also to create a new tax to pile on to those we already pay. A “carbon tax”.

But he’s not finished!

In addition to the carbon tax, Dingell’s plan to reduce global warming also includes higher taxes on gasoline; and a phase-out of the mortgage interest deduction on what he called “McMansions.”

If that’s not enough, he’s holding free reign on the as yet unproven concept of man-made global warming.

Yeah, yeah, we know — Dingleberry and his ilk ignore the scientists who employ actual science to refute the man-made “climate change” theories that are based totally upon politics rather than science, so…

“The earth is getting warmer and human activities are a large part of the cause,” Dingell said. “We need to act in order to prevent a serious problem.”

Dingell admits that reducing greenhouse gas emissions will be a “massive undertaking,” but he believes higher taxes and fees are “the most effective way” to solve the problem.

Dingell said he would levy an additional 50-cents-a-gallon tax on gasoline, jet fuel, kerosene, to be phased in over five years and then adjusted for inflation.

Boy, it must be nice to be able to simply pile on the taxes and restructure the Constitution at the same time. After all, the end result of this idiot’s agenda will be a socialist state to replace the present structure of the United States Government — Ding has already decided that socialized medicine is a done deal, so…

Where will the revenue go?

“First and foremost, the Earned Income Tax Credit will be expanded,” Dingell said on his website. He said the higher EIC (a tax refund for poor people who don’t pay taxes) will help lower income families compensate for the increased taxes on fuels.

Dingell said the money raised by the higher gasoline tax would go into a highway trust fund, with 40 percent going to mass transit and 60 percent going to roads. (The revenue from the tax on jet fuel would go into the airport and airway trust fund.)

Finally, Dingell said the revenue from his proposed fee on carbon emissions - the carbon tax - would go into the following accounts: Medicare and Social Security; Universal Healthcare (upon passage); State Children’s Health Insurance Program; Conservation
Renewable Energy Research and Development; Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

.

This is such a Democrat issue: Employ junk science as a basis for dumping large new tonnages of taxes on the American people while shoving our government in the direction of a political philosophy that is 180 degrees in opposition of the Law of the Land upon which our great and hitherto profoundly successful nation has been based from its founding.

To take things a step further, the politics advocated by the Democrats represent the cornerstones of those governments that have been our sworn enemies and collective anti-thesis over the last century.

Socialists. National Socialists. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

These folks simply don’t understand even the most fundamental reasons why we broke away from England in the latter part of the 1700s, why our great Constitution says what it says or why the United States of America is boss trump in the global arena.

We are.

Even when we read about the citizens of foreign countries opposing us via demonstrations and so forth, we can understand that the reason they’re bitching is that we’re the boss — we possess the factors that make any entity existing within the boundaries of humanity boss: We are both economically and militarily superior to the rest of the world. When America makes a move, it is felt across the globe. That’s the way it is.

We don’t simply sit on our riches and/or our military might, we share both. The Democrats find fault in the latter. They found fault in our protecting the South Vietnamese from communism and they find fault in our attempts to introduce democracy to the Arab world. They would prefer to surrender.

If the Democrats are so dedicated to the options of

a) living under Sha’aria law or

b) being beheaded

that’s their lookout.

If the Democrats are so dedicated to taxing us to death

that’s a good reason to vote otherwise

If the Democrats are so willing to transform us into a socialist country

that’s a spectacular reason to do away with their party.

‘Nuff said.

…a second post on the same day, it’s great to have some time on my hands.

Given my history of general contempt for the French (they’re now spared the “spit”), I was impressed enough by a) their rejection, as a voting mass, of the ultra-socialist EU constitution served up awhile back and then, later, b) the election of a right thinker and former interior minister named Nicholas Sarkozy as the successor to America-hating leftist president Jacques Chirac, to travel hopefully on the future of French-American relations.

To go further, I also see that the French government now has a realist at the helm, a realist who will hopefully guide his country along a path that both extracts France, to some degree, from the morass of the socialist EU and brings her into both a stronger economy and more positive relations with the United States (it would be nice, since our fearless leaders — right! — insist upon continued membership in the U.N. — SPIT!).

I am, in fact, beginning to wonder if maybe George Bush and all of Congress should consider employing Sarkozy as a consultant.

The National Assembly approved tough new restrictions on immigration yesterday, completing a major step in President Nicolas Sarkozy’s program to roll up a famously well-trodden welcome mat.

The bill, which still needs Senate approval and a second vote in the Assembly, requires would-be immigrants for the first time to demonstrate a knowledge of the French language and cultural values.

When my grandparents arrived in N.Y. from Russia and Poland in the late 1920s/early1930s, respectively, they came with the sole intention of becoming Americans, as one with our heritage, language and social customs. Today, we are becoming inundated with immigrants who have little or no desire to assimilate into our society — they flee one system, but feel no loyalty to the system that takes them in, provides better opportunities to prosper and allows them freedoms they didn’t possess back in the old country.

Bravo Sarkozi!

“For many of our countrymen, immigration is a source of concern,” said Immigration Minister Brice Hortefeux upon introducing the bill. “They see a threat to their security, their jobs, their lifestyle. We must understand the … hopes of this silent majority.”

However, the bill has roused a range of critics, including leftist politicians, scientists, human rights groups, the Vatican and even French police and members of Mr. Sarkozy’s own party and government.

Some argue that would-be immigrants, if they cannot enter France legally, will simply do so by illegal means.

“The desire to go to Europe is very strong,” said Catherine de Wenden, an immigration specialist at the National Center for Scientific Research, a Paris think tank. “And the tougher the policy, the more likely it will lead to illegal immigration.”

That last bit is so very typical of liberals/leftists — “If we pass a law against it, it will lead to people breaking that law, so we shouldn’t pass it or we might have to enforce it.”

And these people want to govern — excuse me, micromanage western civilization?

“Lawd”, as they say, “have mercy!”

You Go, Sarkozi!

In the course of email correspondence with an Angel, she indicated her displeasure (yeah, an understatement, and being a fellow Noo Yawkah –though not dwelling there presently — I share her consternation and disgust) at the thought of an enemy of our very form of civilization being welcomed to New York to speak at the U.N., or for any other reason, for that matter.

This stuck in my mind for a bit, and the result was that every time I’ve come across a link on anything related to the matter, I’ve clicked on it.

Articles like this one.

And Ahmadmanjihad is the enemy.

US-led forces in Iraq say they have arrested an Iranian officer operating in the north of the country.

They say the man was a member of the Quds Force - an elite unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards - and was detained in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya.
“This individual has been involved in transporting improvised explosive devices,” the American military said.

The US has accused the Quds Force of helping arm Shia militias in Iraq. Iran denies any involvement with militants.

A statement by the US military said the arrested man had been involved in the “infiltration and training of foreign terrorists in Iraq”.

Okay…

So, just to show how well the “intellectual elites” (lefteez) have done at taking over academia, the past and present jihadi with nuclear arsenal ambitions is to speak at Columbia U during his visit, by invitation. I wonder if they’ve sent any invitations to Nicholas Sarkozy. Probably not, as he’s a right thinker rather than a malevolent threat to our national security.

This is certainly true.

Meanwhile: As Columbia welcomes Ahmadinejad to campus, Columbia students who want to serve their country cannot enroll in the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) at Columbia. Columbia students who want to enroll in ROTC must travel to other universities to fulfill their obligations. ROTC has been banned from the Columbia campus since 1969. In 2003, a majority of polled Columbia students supported reinstating ROTC on campus. But in 2005, when the Columbia faculty senate debated the issue, President Bollinger joined the opponents in defeating the effort to invite ROTC back on campus.

A perfect synecdoche for too much of American higher education: they are friendlier to Ahmadinejad than to the U.S. military.

The ROTC bit really rankles me as an American: The Democrats have no problem pushing their tax-devouring, vote-chasing, negative-result social agendas at the federal level, but there doesn’t seem to be any sort of patriotic movement afoot among the rest of their political folderol. If they can peddle their socialist wares on a national footing, it seems to me that the Republican side of the political equation could mandate onsite ROTC, which is, after all, one of the building blocks of the future in the national security/defense sector, as a requisite for any federal university tax subsidies. No tickee, no washee, no exceptions.

As far as the Iranian Islamofascist terrorist president’s declared intention of visiting and placing a wreath at Ground Zero is concerned, they’d damn well better not let him. Not only would it be a desecration, of that national shrine, of the highest order (it would be the equivalent of spitting on the graves of all those who perished on, or as a result of, 9/11), but it would also provide Ahmadmanjihad with provender for a veritable feast of propaganda opportunities.

…what happened was, I received an email from a year-ago client about three weeks ago, one of those “we should have listened to you to begin with” kinds of things — I won’t go any further than that in the interests of professional/proprietary considerations, but let’s just say that the project has blossomed from the week it might have required me a year ago to a period of weeks today.

More interruption of my much needed semi-retirement, but I sometimes feel emptily bored not having something challenging to my career skills around, anyway…

I don’t always have a lot of trouble balancing professional and other concerns, but for the last couple of weeks or so, I’ve been practically living this project, which has involved a few one-day out of town trips and a lot of other factors that have consumed my time and as a result, I haven’t had any time to post more than two articles since Labor Day, and I’ve had the same paucity of time where visiting other blogs has been concerned.

Luckily, the project’s about completed, and FedEx will be hearing from me presently.

This doesn’t mean that I’ve been ignoring the news, and I have to laugh at this one…

Certain portside “journalists” have turned the Sally Fields awards incident into a possible dastardly right-wing FOX censorship of the Flying Some, But Not Much’s First Amendment rights. Others who also list sharply to port suggest that not only Sally, but other Hollywood types whose profanities were omitted or bleeped over, were also being persecuted ala deprivation of their freedom of speech.

The whole kerfuffle stems from Fields making a comment that if mothers were in charge, there would be no “g’damd” war. The censors cut off the last two words for the expletive, and I suppose these lefties, always grasping at any straw to villify some conservative or some conservative institution, equate the missing non-swear word with some great and profound political revelation.

It wasn’t even an original line, in fact it’s adorned many a bumper sticker in years gone by.

These folks can get really, really pedestrian. It’s beginning to sound a lot like the kind of stuff you’d have found in Pravda “back in the day”.

Racial bigotry conjuring, parasite exploiters of their fellow blacks comedy team Sharpton & Jackson are back in action on the Louisiana front, looking to milk some political capital out of events in Jena.

On the Israeli front…

Speculations abound surrounding the Israeli air strikes on Syria.

The speculation of Bret Stephens, author of the linked OpEd makes the most sense among the theories brought up, and speaking of Israel, my favorite all time Democrat and a former mayor of my hometown Ed Koch has written another column that’s worth reading.

Last but most definitely not least, and whether you believe that there exists a North American Union (NAU) agenda behind the Security & Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) or you don’t, this is exactly the kind of thing — the only thing, hopefully — needed to beat back advances of that stealth agenda.

Cudos to folks on both sides of the aisle for foiling the Mexican Truckers From Hell debacle.

The Amendment was sponsored by Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota), and passed by a whopping 74-24 margin. Since the amendment contains language already included in a House-funding bill, it will likely survive the conference committee and stop the program. Susan Tully of the Federation for American Immigration Reform says the Senate vote is a real blow to the Bush Administration.

“It’s a real big deal stopping the Mexican trucks from coming. President Bush signed the agreement with Mexico and Canada for the Security Prosperity Partnership across the borders and through that partnership without any agreement or any oversight on the part of Congress,” says Tully.

She says there is great concern that the Mexican trucks have lower safety standards, and could facilitate the smuggling of drugs, terrorists, and illegal aliens. However, Tully says that perhaps the greater concern is that the Mexican truck pilot plan is just one step in the overall agenda of bringing about a North American Union. According to Tully, one can go to SPP.gov and find all of the documents pertaining to this pilot program and see exactly what is taking place.

This also makes the score U.S. 3, “La Raza” 1 (and this by outright cheating on the part of the Democrats, imagine tampering with the scoreboard at Wrigley Field or Fenway Pahk!) in recent Congressional actions.

I was reading someplace that Mexican Prez Calderon is furious about this setback to his U.S. invasion plans, and said something in a speech to the effect that Mexico is a country that extends beyond its borders.

Oooops!

Sounds to me like the little shit needs to have a professional slapper-arounder in his entourage to tend to him when he blurts such boneheaded blurtings.

**************** UPDATE ****************

This article contributes some amount of creedence to Bret Stephens’ theory in his above linked OpEd.

…in large part, the success of the left in having infected such a large quantity of voters with disinformation sickness is, in many ways, the fault of the right-thinking side of the equation, yet this is, at the same time, somewhat excusable from an adult’s point of view.

After all, if anything at all has become cornucopially evident, it is that the Democrats have become, since Bush beat Gore, blatantly irresponsible in their anti-administration {and anti anything else that doesn’t glorify their own political agendas} rhetoric. Everything from comparing Camp Delta with the killing fields of the Pol Pot regime to attempting to smear the reputation of a great and patriotic general in order to achieve purely partisan political ends.

So here we have half a Hill full of Republican senators and representatives who are accustomed to addressing their professional affairs in a dignified and mature manner, as one would expect of folks we’ve elected to lead the country, beset by aggressively sub-adolescent attacks whose opposition would require playing in the same Romper Room environment that the Democrats play in. Being a conservative myself, I can understand where a fellow conservative might be at a loss to respond to such attacks, other than to offer up a mature reply, and at the same time feel reluctant, out of sheer self respect, to respond on the same level on which the attack-in-question was delivered.

Envision, for example, someone like John Bolton being forced to have a lengthy political debate with the likes of a Cindy Sheehan.

My point is that we conservatives tend to value our dignity, and the farther left you travel, the less value is placed on that very concept. As a result, those politicians who represent us are civilized men and women who would need to regress, drastically, in every way in order to remain on the same page as today’s Democrats.

Too many of them obviously don’t know what to do, I know that I’d be pretty nonplussed if a bunch of colleagues started questioning my integrity without any kind of evidence to support their innuendos, or blurted idiotic, platitude-related non-realities at me, expecting me to respond on an adult level.

The silver lining (for We, the People) I perceive here is that today’s Democrats are completely obtuse when it comes to reading the disposition of the American people. The problem, for them, is that they suck up the campaign financing offered up by ultra-leftists and other wingnuts on that end of the political divide, and then have to sing for their supper. This means that even against the sensibilities of We, the Voters, they are forced to pursue the agendas, no matter how unpopular among the majority of Americans, of those paying their freight — or lose a lot of campaign funding. We’ve seen how desperate Democrats are to garner, even at the sacrifice of their very morality, campaign contributions, even welcoming them from fleeing felons and others who run “bundling” schemes.

I don’t think the Republican Party will have as much difficulty as the media wants us to believe, in 2008, regaining a majority in Congress and another right-thinking President in the White House.

The Democrats have supped with the devil, and now he owns them. Hmmm, I seem to recall an old New York deli restaurant called Lox, Stock & Bagel. Now what made me think of that?

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On another and totally unrelated thought, I wonder how Muslims felt about the first day of Ramadan being sandwiched in between Patriots’ Day (9/11) the day before and the first day of Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year) the day after.

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Speaking of which,

to my fellow Jews, Shana Tova!