I am happy to announce that I was wrong when I predicted that the amnesty supported by the President, the Democrats and a few worthless Republicans was likely a done deal. Fortunately, the bill kinda sorta fell apart in the heat of a rather fierce battle.

The jubilation that I have since received in emails and read of in a number of other places, however, should be tempered: It was such a spirited ruckus, including a Republican filibuster and politicians of both parties crossing the aisle and some proposals that threw everyone for a loop that the folks at the Tower of Babel could sooner have produced a coherent result.

Harry Reid finally jerked the bill, stating time concerns, so it is not yet any kind of a resolved argument.

The immigration “grand bargain” imploded in the Senate last night under a Republican-led filibuster, with the bill under attack from both sides and collapsing of its own weight.

In two votes yesterday Republicans blocked Democratic leaders’ bid to end to the debate and hold a final vote on the bill — each time joined by more than 10 Democrats.

At the end of the day, it was certainly the hammering voters all over the country gave our senators and their staffs regarding the will of the people that spawned those results.

To add to the positive side, RINO John McCain, a Kennedy Kohort in the attempted sellout of America, went away mad. I’ll bet he was muttering “drat, and double drat!”

Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican and a 2008 presidential candidate who had invested a lot of his political capital in the issue, refused to talk to reporters as he left the Senate floor.

“I don’t have anything to say. I apologize, but I don’t have anything to say,” he said as he ducked inside the senators-only elevator. Mr. McCain was one of the seven Republicans who sided with Democrats to break the filibuster.

This is far from over, count on it.

But Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican and another who voted to break the filibuster, said he will try to force the bill back onto the schedule.

“We could see the finish line,” he said. “At the end of the day, there’s a small group of people, probably on both sides, that want to make sure we don’t succeed. And we’ll find a way around that.”

Mr. Reid left open the possibility of returning to the bill again this year, but Democrats said that will depend on Mr. Bush.

“When the president calls Harry Reid and says I can get some more votes for you, we’ll come back to it. But until that time we can’t,” he said. “They said he made some phone calls, but he could only deliver six or seven votes.”

Passing an amnesty bill is of vital strategic importance to the Democrats: Doing so could literally blast the Republicans out of the ball park. The severe damage it would also inflict on our economy and our national work force are of no concern to the Democrats, not when compared to their party’s political aspirations. So much for patriotism.

Outside winning the War on Terror, the same amnesty is Bush’s first priority, and the President can’t campaign for reelection, as he’s had his two terms.

Given that his own political base is opposed to amnesty for criminal aliens, this says quite a bit,
that he has motives that are strong enough that he’s willing to tell his own party to go piss up a rope.

I’ll bet that when the bill was yanked (not defeated, remember), he was on the telephone with one of his senior people at the Committee On Foreign Relations, discussing strategies for garnering more support for the next go-round on the issue. Amnesty soon would make the transition, three or so years in the future, to the North American Union infinitely smoother.

Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy and the rest of that crowd will no doubt be browbeating or offering pork bribes to the Democrat senators that oppose amnesty, setting the stage, along with Bush, for enough votes to kill a filibuster and win a vote.

The amnesty bill will be bock!

Here is one idea I think needs to be forgotten about immediately.

Senior Fatah officials in the Gaza Strip have asked Israel to allow them to receive large shipments of arms and ammunition from Arab countries, including Egypt.

The group says it needs the weapons to counter attacks by Hamas, which has an overwhelming advantage in the Gaza Strip.

You mean, allow Palestinians to receive an arsenal and armored mobility?

Israel has not officially responded to the request, which includes dozens of armored cars, hundreds of armor-piercing RPG rockets, thousands of hand grenades and millions of rounds of ammunition for small caliber weapons.

For Palestinians, right?

Under certain circumstances, Israel may allow the transfer of armored vehicles, since they are not considered a threat to its security. In the past, during the Oslo Accords, Israel allowed then-Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat to receive a number of outdated armored vehicles.

When the second intifada began, the armored vehicles were destroyed in air strikes.

On the other hand, Israel is unlikely to allow rockets to enter Gaza, since they may fall into the hands of Hamas and be used against Israeli forces.

PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was quoted as saying during a closed meeting on Wednesday that he is “very frustrated by the fact that Israel is not permitting the transfer of arms and ammunition for his men.”

“The legal organs of the Palestinian Authority have become weaker than the militias due to the lack of equipment,” Abbas added.

Israeli intelligence officials are not unanimous in their assessments of
Fatah’s and Hamas’ strength in Gaza. Most Shin Bet experts and officers in charge of activity in the territories believe that Fatah is on the verge of collapse in the strip ¬and that a future confrontation with Hamas may bring about its final defeat. They argue that there is no point in supporting Fatah, because all the equipment the movement receives will eventually fall into Hamas’ hands.

On the other hand, Military Intelligence and other intelligence experts believe that Fatah is not close to surrendering, and that reinforcing the group with equipment from abroad should be considered seriously.

Wasn’t it Mahmoud Abbas who said not long ago that rather than Palestinians (Hamas and Fatah) fighting among themselves, they should all be turning their guns on Israeli Jews?

Giving guns to the Palestinians?

I’m all for allowing those animals to kill each other off, but I’m against supplying them with more ordinance than they already have. Let either side wipe out the other, then the IDF should take its queue and destroy the surviving faction, root and branch.

The last paragraph of the article drew a good laugh from me.

Also on Wednesday, Palestinian sources in Gaza said the military wing of Hamas has acquiesced to cease firing Qassam rockets at Israel, following intense pressure by the political leadership. Iz al-Din al-Qassam will continue launching attacks, but it will revert to using mortars.

ROTFLMAO!!!!

This perspective arrived via link in an email from Ryan Jones at zionist.com.

Israel this week marked 40 years since its stunning victory over vastly superior Arab forces in the 1967 Six Day War. The rest of the world remembered the event by unleashing a flood of criticism over Israel’s continued “occupation” of Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights.
When Israel’s detractors speak of the “illegal occupation” they are basing their position on UN Security Council Resolution 242.

However, an honest examination of the resolution and the subsequent events of of the past four decades reveals that Israel’s control of these territories in fact constitutes a legal occupation.

Read the rest.

I couldn’t care less who’s ahead of who on a reality TV show or which designer clothed some actress for a major award show, for that matter I don’t even give a flying whatchamacallit who won the damn Grammies. This may have something to do with the fact that I rarely even watch TV anymore unless I have a DVD in my deck or I’m watching a political program or Presidential speech.

I read and hear all the chatter about celebrities whose names are meaningless to me but seem to be a big deal to so many other people.

I could care less which Hollywood star married which other Hollywood star, which empty eyed teen sex symbol is divorcing which professional gigolo in order to hang on to all the profits from her next tour or….

….about the trials and tribulations of a spoiled, talentless, mega-rich girl who’s been living in her very own narcissistic fantasyland party ever since she came of age. A “celebrity” without portfolio who is, literally, famous only for being famous. You see her name on Yahoo, Excite and other home pages under “Top Ten Searches”.

“Waaaah,” she bawls, “it’s not fair! You people are interrupting my party!”

The fact that such a creature is a “person of interest” in this country makes a highly revealing statement about the evolution of the public mindset….

…of a long time back, before I became mired in barrages of work and other inescapable responsibilities and my posting here was punctuated by long gaps, a few days or even a week at times, and just one post a day when I could work in the time.

Now it seems that when folks visit, they often expect that whatever new post they see is the only new one, read it and move on. (sigh)

Back in my earlier blogging days, it wasn’t unusual for me to do multiple posts in one day. Now that I’m doing my semiretirement thing and getting more time to myself, I hope to have more days (well, maybe I shouldn’t say “days”, since I prefer to blog in the stillness of the hours between midnight and dawn) like that.

It felt good to be able to do that this morning.

That said, here it is, four decades after a tiny country called Israel beat the everlovin’ tar out of the overwhelmingly massive bulk of the Arab world in a mere six days. I imagine that a lot of red faces peered out from within the confines of their dish towels after that humiliating attempt at an invasion was over, and that a lot of Islam’s wives and daughters, in the absence of dogs for fathers and brothers to kick, were thoroughly beaten by male family members.

Yeah, that was one solid ass whuppin’, and Israel even came away from dishing it out with some nice parcels of real estate. The Arabs could’ve had it back had they been smart enough to negotiate peace, but they preferred to play the roll of Menacing Moozlims, and so after a few years, Israel made use of the land, settlements sprawling out as Jewish immigrants arrived from America and Europe.

After losing a rematch in 1973 (Syria and Egypt were the unlucky attackers there, with a new, and as it happened, short lived monicker: The United Arab Republic, or UAR), the Arabs decided that the smart thing to do was to let the so-called “Palestinians” carry on the campaign of ridding the Mideast of Israel and the Jews by proxy. Israel is still there, along with lots and lots of Jews.

Muslims and other Israel haters, most of these styling themselves “intellectuals”, including many shamefully misguided liberal Jews here in the west tend to have revised history to support their descriptions of Israel as a usurper of Palestinian lands, the perpetrators of an “occupation”, “oppressors”, etc. Forty years means those of us old enough to remember are at the youngest middle aged and provides the opportunity for the creators of anti-Israel propaganda to use it to disinform two generations’ worth of subsequently born young people via schools and the media.

This OpEd from yesterday’s Opinion Journal by WSJ Editorial Board member and columnist Bret Stephens unrevises some embroidered or otherwise innacurate accounts of situations and events circling around, or as results of, the Six Day War.

On the morning of June 5, 1967, a fleet of low-flying Israeli jets surprised the Egyptian air force on the ground and destroyed it. This act of military pre-emption helped save Israel from what Iraq’s then-President Abdul Rahman Aref had called, only several days earlier, “our opportunity . . . to wipe Israel off the map.” Yet 40 years later Israel’s victory is widely seen as a Pyrrhic one–”a calamity for the Jewish state no less than for its neighbors,” according to a recent editorial in The Economist.

And the alternative was?

The linked article, while not long, is a good and worthwhile read. Here it is again.

…is so true.

I bought a bird feeder. I hung it on my back porch and filled it with seed. Within a week we had hundreds of birds taking advantage of the continuous flow of free and easily accessible food.

But then the birds started building nests in the boards of the patio, above the table, and next to the barbecue. Then came the poop. It was everywhere: on the patio tile, the chairs, the table…everywhere. Then some of the birds turned mean: They would dive bomb me and try to peck me even though I had fed them out of my own pocket. And others birds were boisterous and loud: They sat on the feeder and squawked and screamed at all hours of the day and night and demanded that I fill it when it got low on food.

After a while, I couldn’t even sit on my own back porch anymore. I took down the bird feeder and in three days the birds were gone. I cleaned up their mess and took down the many nests they had built all over the patio. Soon, the back yard was like it used to be…quiet, serene and no one demanding their rights to a free meal.

Now lets see…our government gives out free food, subsidized housing, free medical care, free education and allows anyone born here to be an automatic citizen. Then the illegals came by the tens of thousands. Suddenly our taxes went up to pay for free services; small apartments are housing 5 families: you have to wait 6 hours to be seen by an emergency room doctor: you child’s 2nd grade class is behind other schools because over half the class doesn’t speak English.

Corn Flakes now come in a bilingual box; I have to press “one” to hear my bank talk to me in English, and people waving flags other than “Old Glory” are squawking and screaming in the streets, demanding more rights and free liberties.

Maybe it’s time for the government to take down the bird feeder

AY-MEN!!!!!!!!!

H/T Brenda

This one makes me chuckle, three of the most offensive liberal politicians in the history of the universe and the offspring of one, connected all but intimately to a majorly rich scammer of senior citizens — and not sweating any publicity because they are Democrats, and as such immune to any Congressional actions. That particular precedent was pointedly established in a recent affair involving Representative John Murtha.

Forget the Democrat Who’s Who, I want to see the What’s Next!

Anyway, back from the unavoidable (for me, at least) realm of digression, I suppose it would be best if I first hit you with the bona fides.

According to the The New York Times, InfoUSA compiled and sold lists that disclosed the names of elderly men and women who would be likely to respond to unscrupulous scams. The lists left no doubt about the vulnerability of the elderly targets. The Times reported, for example, that InfoUSA advertised lists of “Elderly Opportunity Seekers,” 3.3 million older people “looking for ways to make money,” and “Suffering Seniors,” 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. “Oldies but Goodies” contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents apiece. One list said: “These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change.”

InfoUSA sold lists to companies that were under investigation or closed down by courts because of their criminal activity. The company’s internal emails show that employees were aware that the investigation for elderly fraud involved their customers, but sold the lists anyway.
The Times profiled one unfortunate 92 year old man who entered a sweepstake sponsored by InfoUSA. The information that he innocently provided was then sold to the predator marketers.

After responding to their telemarketing calls seeking financial information, his entire life savings was stolen from his bank account at Wachovia Bank. These practices, using lists supplied by InfoUSA were repeated all over the country.

I can’t help but scratch up something from deep in my memory and a lot of really serious information imparted by Ann Coulter in her first book, High Crimes And Misdemeanors.

Okay, the former President and first-lady-cum-senator see no problem butt-bumpin’ with a criminal, so Speaker Of The House, third in line to be Boss of America Nancy Pelosi sees no reason not to get in on the fun.

One benefit is a lucrative boost to her son’s career.

Why not, right? Why shouldn’t Pelosi enjoy some attention from the same godfather the Clintons do?

These folks are so like monkeys that fit in a teacup, LOL. The fantasy land they live in is on a par with a kindergarten class. Fortunately for them, their constituent flocks are as naive as the likes of Pelosi and the Clintons want them to be.

But let’s try to get past all that, leave Nancy & Son to it, give ‘em some room, as it were…

Let’s move on, try to forget at least some of the Clinton-Gupta connection, or “allegations thereof”, and look at cold, practical facts.

From time to time, an innocent person is officially or consensus inspiredly (gotta be a Seth creation in the world of words) accused of wrongdoing. At the end of the day, they are either vindicated or condemned.

Bill & Hill, on the other hand, seem to lead a spectacular parade of suppressed criminal background.

My pernt bein’, if you’re accused of a crime and get off, okay. If you’re accused of a whole bunch of crimes and get off, you’re one lucky or well represented S.O.B., but guilty as hell.

Like Bill & Hill

…got that right!

The United Nations is increasingly becoming a parody of itself while American taxpayers last year provided $439 million to the regular U.N. budget — plus a headquarters in New York that the U.N. management wants to expand. Not only has this dysfunctional and occasionally corrupt organization failed to stop the genocide in Darfur, but on May 11, the insatiably brutal Robert Mugabe’s government of Zimbabwe was elevated by the United Nations to chair its Commission on Sustainable Development — dealing with land, rural and economic development, and the environment.

Read on…

About a year and a half ago, I posted on the possibility, if not sheer likelihood, of future nuclear terrorist attacks on the United States.

In that post, I linked to a book I had then recently read, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, by Graham Allison. While Allison’s politics and mine travel opposite paths and while he has been associated with the Bilderbergs, I consider him an authority worth listening to as regards the subject matter of the book.

It is in the nature of our society, one that has, by virtue of a generally excellent defense structure and ideal geographic placement, been spared the bulk of the grim realities that seem to befall many other nations as a matter of course, to utterly refuse to consider the possibility of anyone setting off a nuke on American soil. After all, the government certainly wouldn’t let that happen, who would want to do a thing like that? and anyway, where would they even get nukes? The only places one sees this are in fiction novels and on the TV series, “24″. Besides, attacking us with a nuclear weapon would be too big a project for some sanity challenged terrorist group.

Of course it would, just like 9/11.

Meanwhile, in the real world…

NewsMax has been touting a new book by Paul Williams, titled The Day of Islam: The Annihilation of America and the Western World

I haven’t read it yet, but I will be picking up a copy shortly and placing it at the top of my reading list.

Here is a link within one of today’s NewsMax emails in which Williams responds to a few interview questions.

Unlike in the case of mainstream liberals, those of us whose political focus is founded by evidencial and accurate history based reality are fully aware that Islamic terrorists (is that a reverse oximoron, or what?) and most of their leaders would have little if any compunction about sacrificing their own lives to murder lots and lots of infidels, especially American ones.

To repost a Khomeini quote from the good old days of Carter’s Iran,

We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.

Obviously, the Ayatollah was not referring to an unpopulated Iran, but to the vaporization of the entire country along with millions of his fellow Muslims.

This exemplifies the kind of thinking that drives Islamofascism and, as we have seen, drives them to translate that thinking into action; and they think big. To them, theirs is a mega-zealous, global religious agenda — so called “fire & brimstone” preachers in the Bible Belt have no idea, but then, being Christians, they wouldn’t. Too many factors like humanity and love of G-d stand in the way of that. Islamic hirabahists lack not only any trace of humanity or love of G-d (Muslims aren’t compelled to love Allah, they are only ordered to submit to their satanic lord and his pedophile prophet), but they remain someplace in the 8th Century while the march of time leaves them increasingly farther behind its dust.

So anyone who doubts for even a second that these animals wouldn’t light off a nuke or five in American cities the minute they are able needs to ponder just a bit harder. Such an act(/ acts) would inspire worldwide terror on a scale that would dwarf even 9/11. Non-Muslim countries that hadn’t already begun the dance of the dhimmi would be scrambling to become friends of Islam (I will point out here that becoming such a friend of Islam is exceedingly more dangerous than becoming a Friend of the Library). This would be a major victory for Islamofascism, hastening their quest for global Sharia law, among other evils.

With all that ignored evidence out there coupled with the zeal of our terrorist enemy, one can only pray that the government has a handle on this issue that the New York Times and ABC don’t hear about.

…unconditionally pro-Israel.

I grew up mostly in New York in a conservative Jewish family (in my maternal grandparents’ house) that included a number of still-living witnesses to the horrors of the Third Reich. My grandmother, who had grown up in Poland, described pogroms during her childhood. She lost her two brothers to the Gestapo. Some of my relatives emigrated to Palestine in the early 1940s. Their children still live there, and their childrens’ children.

During the first of my thus far twoish years of blogging, I posted a lot more than I have since on Israeli affairs. This, I suspect is my profound disappointment combined with a touch of despair over the fact that because of its present utterly spineless, inane, capitulatory liberal leadership, I might well see Israel cease to exist long before the end of my lifetime (I turn 52 in a couple of months). I sometimes start to post on Israel, then quit in disgust.

The Great Gaza Giveaway about did it — any friggin’ moron at the farthest corner of the planet had to know Hamas would use the ceded land for exactly what they have been using it for, and the leaders of the terrorist organization cum “political party” crowed loudly as to how terrorism had worked well against Israel, and would have to be increased until those leftist idiots have given away all of Israel and however many Jews that hadn’t been slaughtered had hightailed it out of the country in refugee mode.

Then came the war in Lebanon, when Ehud Olmert seemed determined both to rescue the Israeli soldiers and eliminate Hezbollah once and for all, and I thought, they’ve got their spine back, yay!

“Get those abducted soldiers back from the terrorists!” Oh, wait, Hamas and Hezbollah aren’t terrorists, they’re, um… Freedom fighters, I think… no, wait! Wait! Like Hamas, Hezbollah is a political party. Of course. They just happen to specialize in, as cowardly, spiritually barren and soulless as they are, inflicting aggressive Islam upon infidels, especially innocent women and children in stores and on buses.

However, the Israeli leadership (think Faron, the limp cat in the Peanuts comic strip), such as it is, chose to become French just at that time.

Ehud Olmert withdrew Israeli forces right in the middle of the war, sending a message to the Arabs that Islam had defeated Israel. The message in question comes in a form letter.

In the course of his Presidency, Bill Clinton used the same form letter a few times as a response to terrorist attacks on Americans abroad (a couple of our embassies and the U.S.S. Cole, for example) and, of course, during our troops’ “redeployment” from Somalia (this was back before “redeployment” acquired its new definition: To order total retreat in the face of the enemy; to order surrender or otherwise capitulate, in simpering weasel fashion, without an iota of personal shame, patriotism or pride in either ones’ military or ones’ country.

And the kidnaped servicemen have not been brought home.

Olmert refuses to step down, the single most patriotic thing he can do for Israel. I say, throw the bum out, bring back Netaniahu!

NOW!!!!

During this lowest of all periods in the entire chronology of Israel’s existence as a sovereign state (a scant few years ago, Israel wouldn’t even have considered negotiating with terrorists, today they fork over large chunks of the country along with blessings well spiced by the Kiss Of Shame), the international carrion of the left have begun to exploit the weaknesses of Olmert and his crowd by rehashing the false occupation and oppression rhetoric that has long been the mantra of anti-Israel leftism.

I won’t fall over in cardiac arrest over the news that the portsiders at Amnesty International are bellowing their anti-Semitism and pro-terror fanaticism in an Israeli direction using revisionist history as the keystone, but I will point you towards a must-read and creatively presented post on the subject by Angel over at Woman Honor Thyself.