About That Crowd

....outside the UN

Seems straight-talking John Bolton knew they were there --- and said to them:

It’s really heartening to see this crowd here today -- very heartening for me to have a chance to leave the United Nations building, walk across the street and come out here in the sunshine.
I want to say that the President yesterday gave I think the clearest statement of American views of liberty and democracy in the Middle East that any president has ever given. He spoke directly to the peoples of Middle Eastern countries who suffer under tyrannies and authoritarian rule. He spoke of the hopes of people in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan that seek democracy. He talked about of the importance of spreading democracy in countries like Lebanon and Syria. This is critical to the long-term resolution of the conflict in the Middle East.
But we have a long way to go, sadly, until we get to that point. The first thing we can do is what Security Council Resolution 1701 calls for. We want the unconditional release of the captured Israeli soldiers. ...We want Iran and Syria to give up their sponsorship of international terrorism. Iran alone contributes over a hundred million dollars a year in support to Hezbollah. It supplies Hamas, as does the government of Syria. These practices have to end if they want to be accepted into the community of civilized nations....We want Iran to give up its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
And I can tell you that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction -- nuclear, biological or chemical -- in the Middle East is a profound threat, not only to Israel, to the United States, to our friends in the region, but to the world as a whole. And let me just say this is not simply a problem of Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. It’s a worldwide problem.
We speak of the “axis of evil.” We mean, for example, North Korea’s proliferation of ballistic missile technology into the Middle East. North Korea is the world’s largest proliferator of that technology, selling and dealing to regimes like Iran. So it’s not just Iran pursuing nuclear weapons. It’s Iran pursuing longer range and more accurate ballistic missiles as well. We have laid down a foundation. We have said to the Iranians “we the United States are prepared to talk to you, even though you continue to support terrorism, because of our concern about nuclear weapons.” This is an extraordinarily generous offer by the United States. We ask only one thing of Iran: that they stop their pursuit of uranium enrichment activities. And to date the Iranian government has refused to do that. We have made it clear until they do that, unequivocally and verifiably, we will move for sanctions -- not just in the UN Security Council, but against financial institutions. We will pursue the President’s Proliferation Security Initiative to stop the flow of weapons and materials and technology of mass destruction.
President Bush... said over and over again it is “unacceptable” for Iran to have nuclear weapons. And what he means when he says “unacceptable” is that it is unacceptable [he emphasised]. So there is a lot we want out of the region because we want peace, we want stability, we want freedom. I thank you all for coming here today. I appreciate the honor of being here.

And those of us who have a clue appreciate you also, Mr. Ambassador.

Election Day Resurrections

In linking to a Washington Times column on the Voter Proof-of-ID debate, AnkleBitingPundits has a post titled Dems: "We don't need no stinkin' ID", which snidely observes/asks:

Gee, I'm really curious as to why the Democrats voted against a bill requiring voters to show ID at the polls. Could it be that in many big cities, the only ID their voters would have is a death certificate, or a note from a veterinarian that all the shots are up to date -- and that the law prohibits fake ID's from those here illegally?

I suspect they're on to something here.

And Furthermore...

PowerlineBlog also covers the big demonstrations outside the UN against the deranged NutJob from Teheran.

Question for Hugo

Yo! Dude! About that sulfur smell around the UN podium: Didja check
I'm a Damn Nut Job's Ahmadinejad's shoes, Estúpido?

News Unfit to Cover

While the collection of clueless morons inside the UN generously applauded the mad rantings of I'm a Damn Nut Job Ahmadinejad the other day, around 35,000 people outside seemed to view the barbarian who participated in the '79-'80 Iranian hostage episode a bit differently.
You say you hadn't heard about that? Hmmm..... if those same folks had demonstrated against "El Diablo" (who addressed the fools inside that morning), do ya reckon there may have been some mainstream media coverage? Just wondering -- and you should be too. My hat tips to the professor, Freeman -- and, of course, Atlas (Gotta love that Koffi/Carter sign!).

You Lost Me, John

Rich Lowry, on The Corner blog, recently heard from an emailer, who said:

I thought I’d write and ask you to consider... what strikes me as an important point. It seems clear that he [John McCain] is shooting himself in the foot politically with his stand on interrogations. All his hard work reconciling himself to the conservative base could go down the drain. Yet he persists, almost surely on principle. Isn’t that incredibly admirable? Can you name one other likely candidate for either party’s presidential nomination who has stood on principle even when it hurt politically? As you dump on McCain for taking a position with which you disagree, shouldn’t you be praising his integrity?

Mr. Lowry responded, in part, thusly:

Yes, he believes what he’s saying, which is admirable, and he must know it’s not helping him with conservatives, which is brave. But it’s more complicated than that. I wish he’d be more forthright about what he’s effectively been doing, which is trying to ban any coercive method whatsoever, even including the shaking and slapping that even the most hyperbolic opponents of coercive interrogations support (and that isn’t allowed under the new Army Field Manual). Also, he says he supports the CIA program, which is bizarre given his general posture.

My response to the email would have likely begun:
Well I may not be able to quickly come up with a name "who has stood on principle even when it hurt politically" from among prospective candidates, but I damn sure know somebody who's been doing that for, Oh, about five years now -- and McCain, if he really wants that job, would do much better with the Republican base by supporting that principled fellow's ideas for protecting American lives rather than doing his damnedest to "distinguish" himself as a determined protector of prisoner's "rights". Especially when said prisoners don't operate by any "conventions" whatsoever.

Financial "How To" Site

At the All Things Financial blog. Links on HOW TO:

Understand Roth IRAs and 401(k)s
Title an Inherited IRA
Calculate the Return on a Fixed Immediate Annuity
Simplify Your IRA
Link Additional Accounts to Emigrant Direct
Create ING Direct Subaccounts
Track CDs with Quicken
Build a CD Ladder
Compare Online Savings Accounts
Use Fatwallet Cashback When Buying Online
Save Money Buying Textbooks Online
Understand a Good Faith Estimate list of home closing costs
Write a Mortgage Gift Letter
Sell Your House in Five Days
Obtain Your Free Credit Report [Hey, I do it every 4 months.]
Dispute Credit Report Errors [No problemo here... yet.]
Calculate Your FICO Score
Plan for College (Four Parts)
Calculate How Much Life Insurance You Need
Design Your Asset Allocation
Calculate Your Personal Rate of Return
Calculate Your Net Worth (Four Parts)

And much more.

Atypical Post on DailyKos

A couple days ago Jerome A. Paris posted a rather thorough explanation that "There is NO manipulation of gas prices" at, of all places, The Daily Kos -- considered by most web surfers to be the premier Liberal/Democratic blog out there. I suspect most most of its regular readers likely are aghast that it would appear there. (Since dropping oil and gas prices are a BushCheneyHalliburtonBigOil conspiracy to win "elephant" votes this November, dontcha know) Perhaps there's hope after all. It begins:

The sharp drop in gas prices in recent weeks has given birth to many diaries or comments suggesting that this is a BigOil pre-electoral trick (too many to link to, in fact). I'd like, with the help of a former oil trader, to guide you through the explanations as to what is happening -- which is perfectly understandable under normal market mechanisms under the current international context.

A first point to note is that gas prices rose in 2004 right up to the election, and dropped just afterwards, so there was no manipulation of that kind in 2004.

You can read the rest HERE.

Another Bitter Irony

Yesterday, at Ace of Spades quoted briefly from an essay he read by "a liberal who gets it" -- then commented (in part):

There's a great amount of odious liberal condescension at work here. No matter how many times Jihadists say "We are killing you because Allah commands it," liberals keep saying back, "Oh, pish-posh. We know what's really driving you -- a need for more day-care and infrastructure development." Don't liberals believe in actually listening to the diverse narratives of oppressed peoples? Or is that just a cover for making up their own one-size-fits-all narrative and hegemonically imposing it on the world's repressed?
.....They are convinced we cannot win this war in a way they find morally acceptable. And for many, fighting a war is itself morally unacceptable.
Ergo, the steady drumbeat from the left that we deserved it, we actually blew up the WTC ourselves, etc. They have decided the only liberally-correct response to the War on Terror is to lose it, and they're comforting themselves... by telling themselves, basically, "We didn't want to win it anyhow."
You can't win a war unless you fight it. And the left simply doesn't believe that Western civlilization is worth defending -- despite the ironic fact that Western civilization is the most "progressive" civilization ever to grace the earth.

Ouch.

2nd Greatest Story Ever Told

Amid the repeated parroting of "Bush is the friend of big business", "Most of the tax cuts of several years ago mostly benefit big corporations, blah, blah, yada, yada...", the U.S. government just recorded record high tax revenues on the September 15th quarterly deadline date for business tax payments. Total intake was $85.8 billion. Overall tax receipts for that day -- including personal and payroll taxes -- were the largest in a single day in U.S. history: twenty percent higher than a year ago according to Treasury Undersecretary Randal Quarles.

The Tasteful Cult of Passivity

The ever-brilliant Mark Steyn does it again with a biting expose' of wimpiness. Excerpts:

On the morning of Sept. 12, I was pumping gas just off I-91 in Vermont and picked up the Valley News. Its lead headline covered the annual roll call of the dead -- or, as the alliterative editor put it, "Litany of the Lost." That would be a grand entry for Litany of the Lame, an anthology of all-time worst headlines. Sept. 11 wasn't a shipwreck: The dead weren't "lost," they were murdered.

...Last year, I criticized the Flight 93 memorial, the "Crescent of Embrace," whose very title is a parodic masterpiece of note-perfect generically effete huggy-weepy blather. And in return I received a ton of protests pointing out that the families of the Flight 93 heroes had "approved" the design. All that demonstrates, I think, is how thoroughly constrained our society is within its own crescent of embrace: The cult of passivity has insinuated itself deep into our bones. Behind those "IMAGINE PEACE" stickers lies a terrible failure to imagine.

At what point does a society become simply too genteel to wage war? ...Acts of war against America have to be draped in bathetic music and uncomprehending reflections and crescents of embrace.

He concludes with a relevant reference to the "incident" mentioned by Michael Reagan in my previous post. You can read his entire masterpiece HERE.

So Where IS Bill Sherman?

Mike Reagan, the eldest son of the late -- well, you know -- has this to say about the timidity of the non-incident I mentioned last Wednesday (excerpt):

This incident is an example of the out-of-control political correctness that is driving the U.S. strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Out of fear of offending the people whose freedom we are fighting to ensure, we are waging a war by half-measures. Our enemy is a furtive force lurking hidden among the civilian population, using civilians as human shields. The only way to deal with these fanatical insurgents is to kill them all, and in order to kill them all you have to be willing to inflict unintended damage on the civilian population, just as we did when we bombed Berlin and Tokyo and Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When you fight this kind of war, you incur the wrath of the media and the anti-war left, who remain ever-alert for any chance to charge the U.S. with committing “atrocities.” When you allow fear of their reaction to dictate the rules of engagement, you allow them to lead you to defeat.

“War is Hell,” Sherman once said. It still is, and always will be. Live with it, or go hide someplace and hope the victorious enemy won’t find you and cut your head off, a form of political incorrectness that doesn’t bother them one bit.

Amen, Brother Mike!

And Freeman adds...

Freeman Hunt adds an even more-concise (and dead-on!) analysis/conclusion on the issue.

Winning Hearts-n-Minds

Amid the recent brouhaha/insanity over the Pope's simple quotation of some guy (OK, an Emperor) hundreds of years ago, TexasRainmaker yesterday posted a concise analysis of it all. I love conciseness. And the ever-vigilent Little Asian Bulldog (I may copyright that nickname) is all over it too. If you keep scrolling at that latter link she also has a post today on the fifth anniversary of the anthrax attacks -- with a pic of a New York Post cover back then. Never saw that one at the time. It's a good one!

Blog Carnivals

Readers, are you aware of the numerous blog "Carnivals" out there? Simply stated, they are weekly (typically) compendia of like-minded blogs on one blog site that serves as that weeks "host". The original carnival was "Carnival of the Vanities", or links to blogs-in-general (regardless of subject) back in the days when blogs were in their infancy. (There are, literally, millions of them.) Perhaps the best place to search for or access links to the latest carnivals of Recipes, Home Schooling, Autos, Personal Finance, Medicine, Genealogy, Cats etc, etc, etc is at Blog Carnival. Happy hunting.