ORACULATIONS

It is not always accurate to make an analogy between the practices of states and those of human beings but this one is close. This analogy is presented so we can understand the behavior of Arab states though our own human experience. Arabs have grown up since the 3,000 BC with a dictator under one guise or another running their tribes or states. It has always been this way and it never changes, no matter what. The "people" have always had a daddy. Like all humans have had one. But their daddies have always been abusive strong men. And their children expect what they grew up with and expect another strong man to lead them. Why is that? Why don't they "do" something? It's like they are looking for it.

They are like the girl who always picks the wrong men. Exactly like that. She is always "getting screwed". She can't, or won't, make the right choices. She has children who are the same. Studies of incest between male family members and their daughters indicate that the activity leaves the victim with certain scars. Incest is usually interpreted by the unconscious as a betrayal of the most sacred trust a child can have. The daughter trusted her father to protect her and care for her and he violated that trust, a trust that is most sacred

The reactions to the violation of trust vary. Two that are visible are grossly overweight women who eat themselves into "safe" unattractiveness to men; a second, but not as common, is sexual excess, usually doing porn films, going into prostitution, or just being total sluts; high risk sexual activities loaded with victimology.

Then there is the most common reaction to the betrayal of the sacred trust. Incest is interpreted by the girl, and later on the woman, as affection. The only affection the child ever knew. Love. She was prey, the father preditor. The grown woman will act out this relationship in most aspects of her life. In seeking love she seeks a preditor because that is what she is used to. These women will involve themselves with men who beat them, steal money from them, abandon them, etc. When the preditor leaves she will find another, and another. She may take lousy jobs, buy things that break, get lots of traffic tickets, etc. That is the pathology. It's the only thing she knows.

Which brings us to the Arab states. Every Arab state or section has a history from the beginning of time that has as its main feature the Strong Man as a leader. The Strong Abusive Man. This leader promises better times, better lives, and tells people he is a kind ruler. He will kill rivals, crush the population, conquer neighbors if he can, and restrict success to a chosen few; those few will keep him in power; he abuses the trust of the people but it's what they expect. He knows that his "friends" are plotting against him just like he plotted against the guy he killed to gain power. Everybody knows this. So he kills his friends and the friends of his friends as a matter of routine. That's the way it is. He is Strong. Ruthless. He violates every trust. This has been going on forever.

Men and women are "victims" of this system. Arabs are expected to do what they are told. Serve the state, the Strong Man, or daddy spank; meaning they will be killed, tortured, beaten. Men in the "system" will never make "correct" choices because they are never presented with choices. They know and expect the Strong Man. Within their own families they are the Strong Man. The women are presented with few rights, cannot participate in the state or business, and must cover their heads (sometimes their entire upper body), and in some tribes be divorced any time the husband simply tells her she has been divorced. Men are strong inside the family. Really strong. All marriages are arranged for the purpose of making both families stronger. It is the job of the female to have sons. To refuse the marriage arrangement by either party who might want to marry for "love" brings shame to the family. The party refusing the arranged marriage will most likely be killed. That's the way it has "always been" and that's the way it is today. Follow the rules or daddy spank.

This is the Arab society and make no mistake, they like it that way. Pay no attention to these stupid American feminists who go to these countries to free the poor Muslim women from their life of slavery. The Arab women like wearing the hadj. They like being Muslim women. They are a part of a family of Muslims. Men like it too. They "like" being told what to do. Being pushed around. Every Arab who writes or speaks out seeks a Strong Man to run things. Of course this Strong Man should be fair, run the country correctly, and improve "things". But what is really xpected is a repeat of the preditor/prey relationship practiced for centuries. They want a government that is unfair; that will violate trust. It's what has been their lives for thousands of years. They have lived under some of the worst tyrants in history and they seek them out.

A government that doesn't betray their trust doesn't love them.

Democracy? Democracy is weak. Shared power is weak. Partnerships and trust must be violated. Preditor and prey is the way of the Middle East. Deal with it. It's going to happen again. Arabs don't want therapy. They don't want to be "cured".

The Magna Carta Changed the West, not The Enlightenment

The "Enlightenment" was just the usual bunch of French psuedo sophisticates lounging around salons and writing smart things, but it was the Magna Carta, stupid. Strong Man government is not desired by we in the West. Any more. But for thousands of years that is what we had and we liked it. The Magna Carta was created in 1215 and forced on King John. It was the first Bill of Rights and started out this way:

First, that we have granted to God, and by this present charter have confirmed for us and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired. That we wish this so to be observed, appears from the fact that of our own free will, before the outbreak of the present dispute between us and our barons, we granted and confirmed by charter the freedom of the Church's elections - a right reckoned to be of the greatest necessity and importance to it - and caused this to be confirmed by Pope Innocent III. This freedom we shall observe ourselves, and desire to be observed in good faith by our heirs in perpetuity. We have also granted to all free men of our realm, for us and our heirs for ever, all the liberties written out below, to have and to keep for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs:

The document clearly gave to the people 63 rights. Quite a beginning. This document grew into democratic forms over the next 500 years in the West. It took us a long time to grow to the point where we didn't need a daddy. The Magna Carta was created because King John was not following Christian doctrine as spelled out in the Bible; England was a Christian country and when the King was presented with a moral imperative he had no choice but to sign. The Religion demanded it.

The Muslim religion has no such Magna Carta. On the contrary, Mohammed was a strong man. The Koran has a section that describes The Prophet killing 600 men of his own tribe for revenge. He slaughtered people he beat in battle. The Prophet expected obedience. No Magna Carta for them. They want daddy and that is what they are going to get.

QUICK MARKET NOTE: I don't execute trades on news but you must read this for protection. Hillary Clinton announced that "we're going to take something back FOR YOUR OWN GOOD". Watch the idexes carefully because if the public thinks the Dems will win, the market will tank 2000 points in a day or three. This is an announcement of her intention to install socialism and a controlled economy. Watch it. Watch your indexes. Here's Schultzie's impression.

Oil A big plus: Look for a fall to $30 or less. Inventories are at all time highs, the charts are showing the bears taking over, with a blow off top at the end of May, the SPR (strategic reserves) are the highest in history too, around the world. Put option buying is huge. There is now more supply than demand. Gasoline prices will drop to $1.50 per gallon (without taxes) and look for the Dow to explode to at least 12,000 if oil drops below $30. Some "experts" (always be wary of those assholes) are looking at $25 crude.

Moore is the King of a new pseudo film language. He has created a seamless tissue of lies through the use of computers and digital sound techniques that we have to call the LANGUAGE OF COMPUTERIZED PICTURE/LANGUAGE COMMUNICATION. This means we have visual/aural elements that are totally false. All images can be created without us knowing it. Voices can be looped in from various sources too. We have no way other than our own logic to determine their fidelity, and even then we may be wrong. The only element I have seen of the Moore agit-prop horror is the clip being shown on TV where GWB tells the camera about hunting down terrorists and then turns while apparently saying "now let's play golf"; then he swings and tees off. My logic tells me this is a total lie but there is no way of knowing, as in actually knowing, that this is a computerized fraud. Keep in mind that most of the commercials we see are computerized with no reality there. Tolkin's 3 pic saga was 1/2 computer images. Matrix, Terminators 2 and 3, Spiderman 1 and 2; you get what I mean. Done well you cannot tell.

Sullivan, a cinematic dilettante and motion picture illiterate, thinks you can take a tape recorder into a theatre and discover something. No you can't, this is a combination visual/sound tissue of lies and you must have the print, or a copy, to get anywhere. You won't. This is 21st century lying; Orwell to the 10th power; Goebbels to the hundredth; Riefenstahl to infinity. The cuts and phony sound are seamless and when you think about it, stuff like this is truly dangerous; think of the government doing it; think of Terrorists doing it (you can bet your sweet ass they will).

While the Left stupidly applauds Moore's tissue of lies, far too many are Hollywood Left who know dam well the fraud that is being committed. They do the computerized movies themselves. Anybody sane needs to scream FRAUD. This is a COMPUTERIZED PICTURE/LANGUAGE COMMUNICATION assassination attempt on the President of the United States. We won't know if it succeeded or not for a while yet, meanwhile you can bet a Republican Moore will see this and launch one on Kerry. Not good. Al Qaeda Productions will be making some doozies and the Left will probably tell us they are truthful.

First let's assume that we have very smart people. All the army/marine brass are highly educated and many are students of history. Powell has a terrific background and many in the State Department are well schooled in history of the Mid East.

I refer you first to my post on bakshish which is here. Consider the history of the region and particularly Iraq. Every new Iraq leader since WWI, after the first "king" who died a natural death, has taken over after either murder, intrigue, "mysterious" deaths, and a few forced exiles after a bloody takeover.

Every new leader paid off lots of people inside the prior government, but every single one of them had the Iraq army on his side in the rebellion or as part of the new government before seizing power. All wiped out the opposition, then solidified their power by surrounding themselves with family and their old tribe members, making sure they were well compensated, with women, money, nice homes and steady incomes from businesses. Every leader knew that there was many below him plotting to overthrow him in the same way he achieved power so "purges" (mass killings) were frequent. That's the way of the Middle East.

Enter Sadr. First, there was no army he could corrupt or control. Second, there were very few people he could pay off to side with him outside his immediate area. He started his "revolution" surrounded only by his closest associates. The army was the U.S. Armed Forces. The civil service was controlled by the U.S. Students of Middle East History knew that this was an attempted takeover that didn't fit the matrix. The local imams, who also knew history, or if they didn't you can bet U.S. authorities explained history to them, may have been paid off but they all knew that without an army to support him he couldn't win.

Our people decided to simply keep the pressure on and allow nature to take its course. By surrounding Sadr they prevented any "army" from joining him. Slowly the imams started to side with the winner as they had done all through history. The U.S. was going to be the winner and the Shias lined up against him. The Sunnis were bottled up in Fallujah so any that might have supported him couldn't get there.

History ruled. I think our people were simply educated enough to let him hang by picking off his "army" two by two and finally forcing all the imams to basically order him to quit. They read history too and their purpose is to gain power for themselves later.

So far this strategy hasn't worked in Fallujah because the Sunnis have limited goals. Taking over the Sunni Triangle is what they want to do and they have all the support they need, except for an army. The Fedayeen imports are their army. But now they are surrounded and cannot be re- enforced. Let's see how this one plays out. There is no way the Sunnis can expand beyond their border. There is nobody to corrupt, although Iran is capable of pumping billions into bakshish when the new Iraq government takes over.

So far so good, although not knocking them off when we could have may still be a monster mistake.

Right Wing radio and media: COLOR IT BORING, REACTIONARY, AND INTELLECTUALLY BLAND EMPTY Ann Coulter, while funny, hasn't had an idea that would improve anyone's life other to give people who are unemployed real jobs. Hannity is the opposite of whatever liberal he decides to attack; another vacant lot posing as a luxury condo-complex. Tell me Laura Ingraham has ever said anything worth remembering besides "ok, I'll fuck you". In fact they are all broken records of old old old rants and excuses. Only Limbaugh with his sense of humor and satire, together with his really good mind, keep him fresh once in a while. He stands alone on the Right.

You have to have something besides "get the government off my back" and "reacting" to every liberal or they have nothing. The real problem with conservatism is failure to show that their real purpose is to create more opportunity for everyone and that these opportunities will raise incomes for everyone. I think we have a situation now where 2% at the top earn fifty times what the 20% at the lower end can earn. Eventually this won't compute, and since the poor all have guns and will use them if the right guy comes along, we should all wake up. Now.

I had the "chance" to drive down Vermont Avenue in LA the other day past the down at the heels pathetic looking whores, the horridly painted motels and filthy looking housing and I asked myself the question: "Would I fight for this way of life?" The answer was "No fucking way." What we on the so-called "right" have to figure out is how to make freedom of opportunity available to everyone. Ask yourself this: What do you think it takes to open up a hot dog wagon in your city? Just a little wagon with hot water for the dogs and a place for buns. I'll tell you. Bribes, insane environmental requirements, more money than you may be able to make back, and layer after layer of regulations. Here in LA the poorest people get around that stuff by selling barbequed illegal food from their back yards, food that may be contaminated, but it tastes good and it's cheap. The cops are told to close them down. Instead they drive by and talk to people hoping they won't have to come back and cite them, knowing they have no money and won't show up in court. That means a warrant will be issued for their arrest and they will go to jail for selling food out of their backyards. If conservatives can't act on the local level to improve people's lives, conservatism is nothing.

Right now it's nothing.

At least half our guys that die in Iraq have been MURDERED by Congress. Better be well medicated before you link. WSJ this AM

Simmons has some very interesting stats on the success of the much maligned CPA. Take a look.

MKT: Consumer confidence (a bogus but much watched stat) is at a two year high. People who can't find work is at a one year low. Bad news for the Dems, again. Rasmussen isn't nearly as rosy.

Both Daniel Pipes and Tariq Ali think this Iraqi government is a fraud and won't work. A depressing intereview with both of them on Australian TV today. Take a about five Zolofts and go over there.

Reynolds continues to tout that self promoting financial illiterate Virginia Postrel Her latest line of total crap is that she has discovered "secret productivity gains". She has to be the only one who hasn't read a financial page since 1980 because productivity is reported all the time. I predicated my prediction of a 9500 plus Dow based mainly on productivity gains starting last August. The reasons for the current gains are a "secret" only to her. Productivity has risen because of automation, weak unions (no bargaining power with high unemployment), "downsizing" that means companies fired workers and productivity either stayed the same or rose anyway due to "excess capacity" that had to be used up before the economy could grow, outsourcing (sending jobs overseas to slave wage countries like China), massive illegal immigration of workers willing to work for shit, and finally the low interest rates creating growth (people could borrow money to buy things). I'll bet all I've got that she has never made a dime in the markets. She is the kind of useless self promoting tout that can cause you to lose your ass if you listen to them. Here's a secret for you: the MARKET is in a trading range.

Listen to nobody but market generated info. BTW for those of you who have taken some money out of the market, 5 year CD rates are 4.69% In Los Angeles, factoring in several short term rate hikes. (best overall site) Rates can be 5.5% on a ten year where offered. You can get 5.5 on a 5K account; 5.25% on a 1K account. CD rates haven't been this good for years.

WTF?? Go here for about ten of the most insane PC violations of free speech any Democrat would be proud of. People fired for nothing, suspended for nothing. Read it.

When normal people, as opposed to Hitchens, see 9/11 their evaluations are the same. Sullivan was bored and Matt Labash thought it so ridiculous he couldn't take notes because of the hailstorm of conspiracy theories hurled unendingly from the screen. He called it "an offal-laden (that's shit laden for you high school drop outs) piece of junk." National Review weighs in without even seeing the movie (nice job guys, and Left Leaning Slate socks it to him with a series of rifle shots:

This is not quite a documentary—which I define, very loosely, as a work in which the director begins by turning on the camera and allowing the reality to speak for itself, aware of its complexities, contradictions, and multitudes. You are with Moore, or you are a war criminal. The film is part prosecutorial brief and part (as A.O. Scott has noted) rabid editorial cartoon: a blend of insight, outrage, and sniggering innuendo, the whole package threaded (and tied in a bow) with cheap shots, some of them voiced by Moore, some created in the editing room by intercutting stilted images from old movies. Moore is largely off-screen (no pun intended), but as narrator he's always there, sneering and tsk-tsking.

I speak here as somebody who has edited or assitant edited five or so movies. There is something called "The Language of Film". By this is meant that you never see what is actually there. Editing produces effects like people being hit over the head with chairs, punched in the face, and so on when what actually is on the film itself is a series of movements that result in you believing you have seen somebody punched in the face etc. With the employment of computers in editing the cuts become seamless. Moore is lying with the invisible cuts, and your brain has to be able to sift out fact from fiction, and in this pseudo doc there is almost no fact at all. There is something wrong with all of us who believe propagandist junk put out by either Left or Right. The Nazi broad (Riefenstahl) did a documentary and then cut it up so that it became propaganda too. It will make a lot of money because it cost next to nothing (according to the liar Moore). And if you want Brown Shirts be sure you read this, if you didn't link it from Drudge yesterday. The Brown Shirts are not only on college campuses, but also among the crowd outside of 9/11. No real news there but plenty of hypocrisy, character revelation, and what we all know about the hard Left.

A LITTLE HISTORY OF THE FEDAYEEN ON THIS DAY OF CREATION OF THE IRAQ STATE. These guys are now volunteer Muslim killers who just show up ready to kill anyone they are directed to kill; terrorist attackers with guns and modern arms instead of backpacks. The Fedayeen have a thousand year history of murder. They started out being called Hashshashin (also Hashishim) or Assassins in the 11th century. They were a religious militant sect active through the 14th century starting as a group of robbers on the medieval Afghanistan Silk Road. Their own name for the sect was ad-dawa al-jadida which means "the new doctrine" and they called themselves fedayeen from the Arabic fida'i which means one who is ready to sacrifice his life for the cause. The name Hashshashin was given to them by their Muslim enemies, the Sunnis.

The Fedayeen (Assassins) were the first to transform the act of murder into a system and an ideology directed against Muslim rulers that they saw as unpious usurpers; if a ruler wasn't Islamic enough they killed him. They were careful to kill the targeted individual, seeking to do so without any additional casualties. Their weapon of choice was a dagger, rejecting poison, bows and other weapons that allowed the attacker to escape. Their "style" was to kill up close and personal in blood drenched ritual murder. If caught during or after their ceremonial slaughter, under no circumstances did they commit suicide. They wanted to be killed by their captors because that kind of death guaranteed paradise.

The name "assassin" is commonly believed to be a mutation of "hashshashin" (Arabic: haffáfn), or "hashish-eaters" (Arabic: haffáf). This is an elaborately told fiction started by Marco Polo. Can you imagine a raid conducted by guys stoned on shit? The evolution of the Fedayeen from robbers to Assassins is usually marked as 1090 when Hasan-i Sabbah established his stronghold in the mountains south of the Caspian Sea at Alamut. A Yemeni emigrant and an Ismaili Shiite, Hasan set the aim of the Assassins to destroy the power of the Abbasid Caliphate by murdering its most powerful members.

The group inspired an aura of fear out of all proportion to their power. Legends stated that the Assassins were trained using ideology and drugs to convince them that they were assured a place in paradise if they were successful in murder with their golden daggers. They subdued, kidnapped, drugged and seduced the fiercest caravan guards, convincing them with elaborate means that they had died and awakened in Paradise. Thereafter, on subsequent raids, they fought furiously, believing that their death would only return them to that Paradise. The training technique was sophisticated for its time, especially the use of Islamic dogma, drugs, and sex in combination.

Most of the original victims of the Assassins were Sunni Muslims. The modern Fedayeen proudly trace their beginnings back to this "noble" beginning. They look forward to dying in battle or dying after they are captured. They are totally focused on fighting, much like the old Samurai in Japan or the Knights of Medieval times. The Samurai were killed (almost)to the last man by the Japanese government in the 1860s sick of the parasitic murderers running around the country and stopping all progress, a story entertainingly mis-told in the movie The Last Samurai. The knights, who contributed nothing to society besides killing, were wiped out by the technology of both the long bow and the gun; the gun meant their horses could be slaughtered at long range leaving the armor clad knights helpless on the ground.

The Fedayeen is the last parasitic fighting force in the world, a fitting tribute to the 10th century religion and tribal culture they inhabit. Like the Samurai, what women they have possess no rights, like the Samurai they produce nothing, feast off whomever they choose, and do nothing but plan and practice to kill. Realize that Japan could not have progressed at all had they not killed off the Samurai. The knights, if allowed to continue, would have stopped all progress in Europe as well, but they fell victim to the evolutionary rule of natural selection, fast.

No society infested with this army of fanatical killers can advance, either socially or economically. Progress is the actual enemy of the Fedayeen. They must be killed to the last man. (a few Samurai corrections courtesy of emailer Daniel D. Remaining Samurai worked in regular jobs)

Not only is today a big day for Iraq but for America and GWB. The inclusion of NATO is a body shot to the Democratic contention that Bush has body slammed allies. I think that the Democratic attacks have turned voters off anyway. From the polls, it looks like the public support has risen during these horrid attacks. Sometimes, just like the Democratic elites I hold in contempt, I think the American public is dumb and that I'm one of the few really sharp guys who sees what is going on. The facts are that time after time the American voter has seen through various slime tactics and voted accordingly. The constant attempts to link Republicans and Bush with the Nazi Party are failing, which is a great thing for all of us. Nobody should be allowed to get away with that type of a campaign.

My take on this sudden NATO involvement is that our movement of troops out of Germany and other places sensitive to European interests has had an effect. Europe is defenseless, they don't spend any money on their military and are naked at a time when they are under attack themselves. Additionally, their economies are sinking fast as both China and India will supass the EU by 2010 and SE Asia as a group is already bigger. European police are not burdened with many civil rights concerns when going after terrorists but they find themselves inundated with them anyway. Europe grabbed at the first log that came along in the flood and Bush really sandbagged them with the early turnover this morning. It was actually (cough, gag, embarrassed snort) brilliant. I have to take back quite a few posts. WTF I don't get paid for this shit so I can be wrong.

The Democrats are now falling back to "more troops on the ground" and that the NATO support amounts to "very little". I think once again The Moron outsmarted them. The Republicans seriously underestimated the power the president can bring to bear when they went after Clinton; the president can control events. Bush has shown it again today. A little note in the middle of a Washington Post story says this:

As Watson's men pursued the fighters on foot, a grenade arced over the cemetery wall and exploded beneath a Humvee. After the loss of one Humvee a week earlier, sparking a celebration by Sadr's men, the soldiers refused to surrender this one. The resulting firefight turned into a six-hour defense of a burning car. "We weren't going to let them dance on it for the news," said Capt. Ty Wilson, 31, of Fairfax, Va., who commands "Apache" Company. "Even all the guys they lost that day, that still would have given them victory. Once they saw we weren't going to leave it, though, they really stepped up the attack."

(Hat Tip Belmont Club) Make your own interpretation of the network news. Late add duToit weighs in too. If a lot of blogs sound the same today it's a good thing. We cannot lie down for charges of being storm troopers, Nazis, and liars. Bill Quick and his band of angry men are on it too. Simon, hell everybody.

A terrific success story over at HERE. Could help all of out of a really bad day.

For those of you who read Roger L Simons I wrote one year ago about the similarity of the Godfather and Iran politics.

If you're not stopping by Nice Doggy once or twice a week you are missing some good stuff.... BTW "nice" he ain't. Attack doggy......

OK, it looks like the GOP may be deciding to attack back at the Nazi ads. Hat tip here to Terpsboy who links to Nice Doggy I've had private communications from other bloggers that they too will launch ballistic this week. However I think this GOP response stinks, it isn't specific, it doesn't address the Storm Trooper allegation, and it is confusing as hell. Whatever you think you might want to let THEM know, not me.

TOLE 'JA My post on the Liberal Bias of quotes for 9/11 is here....

Watch for phony quotes, spun facts, and lying about the box office grosses for Fahrenheit 9/11. They have every liberal reviewer lined up, which means everybody is in the tank. It doesn't have very wide distribution here in LA. They can't spin the real box office but they will make claims like "biggest opening for a documentary ever"; "stunning box office for a doc"; "Even Miramax surprised at opening figures"; and on and on and on. Also look for things like "biggest opening in (fill in the blank) theatre ever." This is an old time commie agit-prop movie for the Red Chior. And the Red chior directors are the movie reviewers in the daily newspapers. Will it change even one vote? No.

Today, the film industry flak page, Box office Mojo is saying this:

"Fahrenheit 9/11'" Ignites Box Office Passion. In one weekend, director Michael Moore's latest became the highest grossing op-ed documentary ever and the first ever to hit the No. 1 spot..

See, it's now an "op ed documentary" hitting #1; not even a documentary. Moore lies, the Left industry lies, and the bullshit flies.

BTW: After a solid May, the June box office is down big. I think it is the now ridiculous movie prices. It costs almost $50 to take three kids. Way out of the reach of most people. I think Shrek 2 and Harry Potter ($700 mil) sucked the family incomes.

LATE ADD:
Michael Moore is NOT the new Leni Riefenstahl. He's not the Soviet master of propaganda Siergï Eisenstein either. When you look at the real propaganda masters you realize that every one of them made positive movies about their subjects. The "Berlin Olympics 1936" (Winner of the first Cannes Film Festival, beating out Snow White) idealized the male Aryan body, Triumph of the Will (winner of The Grand Prix at the Paris World's Fair in 1937) glamorized the Nazi Party Rally in Nurenburg and made Nazism appealing to a world audience; Sergeï Eisenstein's "Potomkin" glamorized a rebellion aboard a battleship that projected the desireability and glamor of revolution. Incidentially he created a scene that is copied to this day by directors. Goebbels turned out happy movie after happy movie for the Nazis; and made one misstep when he did a movie comparing Jews to rats that nobody liked. "Liked" was always the key for the great liars of film.

And most importantly these propagandists changed minds. The really awful truth about Leni Riefenstahl is that "Triumph of the Will" sold Nazism around the world; Eisenstein prepared the mind for revolution in "Potomkin" and "October", while in "Ivan the Terrible" he sold Stalin. His most effective piece of propaganda was "October", a fictionalized glorification of the October Revolution. These two, among others, were Evil Geniuses. Moore is a not very convincing stunt double for the real thing. (A balanced or revisionist? view of Riefenstahl can be found here)

Moore creates dislike. He is a negative phony documentary film maker. He lies, and his lies can be checked. He is making religious documentaries complete with the devil (GM, guns, George Bush etc.). His followers don't care about the truth, or the facts. I'd call what he does a spin from editorial cartoons. Crockumenty Film is the best you can say. But do not compare him to Nazi or Communist propagandists. They were really good.

Moore's 9/11 did almost 10Gs per theatre opening day which classifies itself as a good grossing movie, so far. A 5% drop off on Saturday. Movie won't be a major hit, look for $35 million domestic. It will be a huge hit in America hating Europe.

In response to three or four emails challenging my assertion that torture hurts the torturer,

Hannity was excusing our practices at Abu Grahiab. Fuck you Hannity. I don't know if Rush is similarly inclined, but my position is that we are Americans. We have a different standard for ourselves. More important is the fact that the person DOING the abuse is seriously affected too. Once that line is crossed it's an open field with no goal line. You just keep going til somebody shoots you.

I refer you to the original Stanford study confiming my statement here as well as my own April post which is here. There is no doubt that without proper training together with psychological preparedness and conditioning, the guard invariably becomes abusive with no holds barred.

Good piece on Belmont today Let's hope he's right, and I'm beginning to think he is. Things are going much better in Iraq, not that you'd know it from TV. Webzines, excepting the Leftzines, are all reporting basically the same thing. This turn over is much bigger than I thought it would be.

Then Fallujah. Don't read this piece by Michael Rubin unless you are ready to get pissed off really angry. A huge mistake and a great argument can be made that at least 200 people have been killed over this another White House fuck up teensy tiny mistake. I honestly don't think these people have a fucking gosh darn clue. Have I cleaned up my act? Have I found God. No, but I hear He's looking for me.

Whether you call it mordida (the bite), un pot-de-vin, or just bribery, nowhere on the planet is it as universal as in Middle East. There, under the term "bakshish", it controls every form of business or government service. You cannot get a job without bakshish, roads don't get built, you can't sell so much as a date on the street without bakshish.

Buy stock? Oh no! A powerful person (or people)simply takes 10% of the stock and agrees to pay for the stock when the accrued dividends match the stock price at time of "purchase"; in addition he gets a seat on the board of directors PLUS a salary. In exchange, the business won't have tariff problems, labor problems, or any problems. Judges take money from both sides and routinely rule in favor of the biggest bribe (he keeps both bribes); hospitals have two sections, one for the people who have paid a bribe and one for those who have not.

Hospital doctors are the ones who paid the most in bribes to the government guy in charge of hospitals, business executives are where they are only because of bakshish, army officers, artists whose works are shown, and so on, bakshish seeps into every facet of society. This has been going on for thousands of years. When you pair bakshish with the "shame/honor" of the society at large you have hell on earth. Any criticism of a doctor puts shame on the doctor. To regain his "honor" he will go to the guy above him, the one to whom he paid bakshish in order to get his job in the first place, and the guy above him will go after the complainer and perhaps put him in jail. Nobody cares if the patient dies....unless the patient had paid bakshish to somebody much higher than either of them, etc., etc., etc.

It is a nightmare because any complaint is shame. Praise is honor. Everyone walks the line of shame, honor, bribery. Naturally everybody lies in that society. It is the only way a man can stay alive. The main reason everyone comments on the extreme politeness of Arabs is that every word is measured in honor/shame/bakshish. Who are you really? This is who I am (pretend). This food is good (because I might be killed). Everyone honors everyone and lies like hell to get what they may want. If your son wants a government job and goes to your tribal leader to ask for one the tribal leader cannot say "no", because a "no" would shame both his family and his position as leader of the tribe. He has to "see what I can do". Then he may have to go to the head of another tribe who works in the correct section of the government. Haggling is done. If the government guy already "owes" a favor then the deal can be done relatively quickly, perhaps for a consideration in return later. Otherwise a deal must be made so that nobody is shamed. The unqualified kid becomes an official for the right consideration and everybody has honor. The parents of the kid "owes", the kid "owes", the tribal leader looks strong, the father of the kid looks like a strong parent and so on. It is a society built on lies.

Right now we are in a place where the Saudi family tells Americans one story and a completely different one to the Arabs on TV at home. This is normal. Nothing wrong with it. What is really going on? Honor is going on. The Arab people know what was told to Americans and by telling the opposite story to them on TV the Saud family shows "honor" by both lying to the Americans and getting away with it. But suppose the Saudis told us the truth and lied to their own people? That's OK too, the Saud prince shows he can conduct smart business. The Saudis may have made a secret deal with Powell by telling Powell that they would have to lie to their people but that they are telling the truth to Powell.

Get it? Arabs lose wars because their generals are only there because of bakshish. Their scientists are there for the same reason. There is not one aspect of their lives where competence is the criteria for position. Period.

God invented the A-Bomb for a reason.

The Congressional report condemning the CIA and their ill equipped agents has been confirmed up by going back and reading the Help Wanted sections of local newspapers during the 1990s. Oraculations has obtained some CIA recruitment ads that were widely run in the 90s.

Attn H.S. grads. Why go to college? There's big bucks in spying. Jerry's Spy School, Orlando, FL; Call 24 hrs. 800/CIA ask for Bernie.. Gov't loans avail for tuition.

Become attractive to women. Call 900/CIA ask for Bernie

SWF; super model looks with plenty of money seeks young adventurous well equipped male for good times in romantic Middle East. Call 900/CIA ask for Bernice

BiMale seeks young well built stud who likes sun and fun. Call 900/CIA ask for Bern

DWF: Satisfy me. Young Middle Eastern type males make me wet. If you can handle hot nights and even hotter days, Call 900/CIA ask for Bernice

Employment opportunities
Join the exciting world of international espionage. On line training available. www.cia.sp.gov. You will be a secret agent within six weeks.

Be sure you read Hanson very good as usual. There is no money quote; this is a money essay.

Gore's use of the term "Brown Shirts" is being picked up by far too many people to ignore. The "Brown Shirts" were the hundreds of thousands of thugs that ruled the streets for the Nazi Party through Hitler's rise to power in 1933.

The "Brown Shirts" started out as the tough young bastards around Hitler in the early 1920s, all between the ages of 17 and 23. They would go out and beat up communists and socialists. They were the most violent and radical paramilitary organization in Bavaria before 1923. They were "terrorists" in every sense of the word. Violent, aggressive, anti-Semitic, and against the Republic. That is what Gore is calling Republicans. Remember, the Democrat charge that Republicans were Nazis was used successfully for decades.

The "Brown Shirts" were also known as Storm Troopers. To quote from the Nazi organization chart, page 203

.....a semi-military voluntary organization of young men trained for and committed to the use of violence, whose mission is to make the Party the master of the streets."

As indicated by its name (storm troopers), it was a voluntary organization of young men trained for and committed to the use of violence. To quote from a pamphlet compiled on order of the Supreme SA Headquarters:

"The SA was not founded as one forms just any sort of club. It was born in midst of strife and received from the Fuehrer himself the name "Storm Troops" after that memorable hall battle in Hofbrauhaus at Munich on 4 November 1921. Blood and sacrifice were the most faithful companions of the young SA on its hard path to power. The Storm Troops were and still are today the fist and propaganda arm of the movement".

The Brown Shirted SA had only one purpose, which was control of the streets by violence. Here's a quote from Hitler:

"What we needed and still need were and are not a hundred or two hundred reckless conspirators, but a hundred thousand and a second hundred thousand fighters for our philosophy of life. We should not work in secret conventicles, but in mighty mass demonstrations, and it is not by dagger and poison or pistol that the road can be cleared for the movement but by the conquest of the streets. We must teach the Marxists that the future master of the streets is National Socialism, just as it will some day be the master of the State."

Gore is accusing Republicans of the same tactics as used by the SS. They terrorized all political meetings beating up attendees and in many cases the speakers themselves. In February of 1927 the "Brown Shirts" armed with blackjacks, brass knuckles, rubber truncheons, walking sticks, and beer bottles broke up a huge meeting of the Communist Party with violence that resulted in hundreds of serious injuries.

So when Gore and many others call you and I "Brown Shirts" they are accusing us of thug politics. The kind that is being practiced every day on college campuses throughout our country and encouraged by the Democratic Party.

We can't lay down for this kind of accusation. Not for one second. Gore also compared Bush to Julius Caesar, King George III, totalitarian regimes, and The administration works closely with a network of "rapid response" digital Brown Shirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors for "undermining support for our troops." I guess that means thousands of computer users interrupting web sites, vandalizing private files, or something.

We can't allow this.

1. Schultzie out does himself today with this one. Warning you must run your mouse over the pic.
2. I swear on my dead doggy that I ain't running no shit on Clinton. I am so sick of him and his escapades I can't tell you. What a waste of time to continue commenting on his tenure. I heard Hannity for a second in my car yesterday ranting about Jennifer and Kathleen, and all I could think of was that the Republicans figured out a way to lose in 1998 but that won't stop them from bringing up the same tired shit again. Right Wing radio is getting very boring.

Continuing along this line, Hannity was excusing our practices at Abu Grahiab. Fuck you Hannity. I don't know if Rush is similarly inclined, but my position is that we are Americans. We have a different standard for ourselves. More important is the fact that the person DOING the abuse is seriously affected too. Once that line is crossed it's an open field with no goal line. You just keep going til somebody shoots you. I think we are all potential emotional cess pools. Civilization is created in part to keep that stuff off limits. Period.

BTW, one of the greatest song writers most people have never heard of is the late Townes van Zandt who may have been the worst singer of his own songs in history. Quite a few people have recorded his songs but now it seems that everybody is doing it. Guy Clark has an album, The Flatlanders have cut a couple of his songs, but the absolute best cut ever is Nanci Griffith's dynamite version of "Tecumseh Valley"; if you have ipod or something get it. An incredible song.

Haven't blogged on markets lately because we have been range trading since January. Those of you who INVEST are doing fine. GWP revised down to 3.9 means zilch; inflation at 2.0 annual ditto. Interest rates will go up 1/4 and is already "priced into the market". Just use market generated info, pay no attention to the hustlers, hawkers, and touts. As I said a while back, we are in very perilous times and you should be scaling out of profitable positions so that you are in your stocks with no risk. This from my April 3rd piece still holds:

Our markets? Still in a trading range in spite of all the data. Keep in mind that the "trading" of a billion plus shares each day is being done by gamblers looking to scalp a few 1/8ths and mutual fund fakers trying to look good by "locking in" profitable stock trading practices instead of buying stocks which pay dividends and passing these dividends on to their customers. Fuck them. Use your market generated info. Look for buying opportunities in new companies (not Google) with new products and hope the war in Iraq finally goes well. Rates will rise, and this is GOOD for the economy, especially for seniors with savings accounts.

EEEEEeeeeek! High School Lesbo sex on video and in Scarsdale NY. This is bigger than.....than....terrorism, 9/11 (the movie), and even Britany Spears knees.

The video shows the partially nude girls groping and kissing one another while being egged on by boys who make coarse sexual comments and repeated references to drinking beer, The Journal News reported.

The girls I went to high school with thought lesbian meant somebody from Lebanon. BTW the vid is on the Web but I can't find it. Darn.

The new hot book coming out in two weeks will be the anonymous CIA agent's account of what is wrong. In a nutshell this spook claims that it is our fault that the terrorists don't like us. All we have to do is:

U.S. policies that generate anger in the Muslim world include support for Israel, occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, support for Russia, India, and China against their Muslim militants, and U.S. pressure on Arab energy producers to keep oil prices low, the book said.

No problemo, dude. Let's get after the Jews; tell the Russians to FOAD and let their terrorists win; tell India, the only real democracy in SE Asia, to FOAD, and somehow or other "force" the Chinese to be nicer to their terrorists. We should let the Taliban back into Afghanistan, and abandon Iraq. Then we have to stop the Saudis from lowering oil prices. The liberals will try to sell the shit out of this book; look for the author to be pimped by CBS.

All the Iraq blogs express total fear about the June 30 take over. Some fear the U.S. will leave. The bombings yesterday have obviously done their job. Many of us who have argued for more troops on the ground may wonder if having more would just mean more targets. We have enough to crush anything, it's just that the White House won't let them do it. An additional POV is supplied that the only real routing of terrorists took place in Algeria when an area was "created" where terrorists thought nobody would attack them. Consequently they began to gather there and get supplies. Once concentrated they were crushed. Could be what we are doing in Fallujah. Who knows? The Terrorists are broadcasting all over the Middle East that they routed the U.S. Marines; that is what Bush calls winning the war on terror. Exactly what happened in Viet Nam with Tet; the press created a loss that didn't happen. Nice job, George.

Watch for phony quotes, spun facts, and lying about the box office grosses for Fahrenheit 9/11. They have every liberal reviewer lined up, which means everybody is in the tank. It doesn't have very wide distribution here in LA. They can't spin the real box office but they will make claims like "biggest opening for a documentary ever"; "stunning box office for a doc"; "Even Miramax surprised at opening figures"; and on and on and on. Also look for things like "biggest opening in (fill in the blank) theatre ever." This is an old time commie agit-prop movie for the Red Chior. And the Red chior directors are the movie reviewers in the daily newspapers. Will it change even one vote? No.

Michelle Malkin nails both Clintons in another lie (shock shock)a couple of days ago. Hillary and Bill have been claiming that Hillary was named after the guy who first climbed Everest. Only problem? She was born 7 years prior to the event. Just a reminder of what unconditional liars both of them are. And she could be president.

Joe Biden says the Iraqi police have almost no weapons and that they are being slaughtered because they don't have guns. Again, great planning.

Johnson beheading tape shown on MSNBC I think it was almost all of the tape, they may have left out chopping his arm off but it was gruesome. On Scarboro.

Bush put on defensive by DNCBush, who keeps refusing Democratic demands that he take Sensitivity Training,was attacked by Democratic firebrand Ted Kennedy (Trait.MA) who denounced Bush for having a lack of diversity in his Cabinet that would make it "look like America."

"The days of having a Cabinet with no members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, no street gang members, and no single moms on welfare will end this November," Kennedy told a group of released felons before sending them out on a door to door voter registration drive. Terrified residents who feared giving their phone numbers and social security card numbers to former felons were classified as "racist crackers who deserve what they get" by voter registration rep and former child molester, Democratic activist Phillip "the baby raper" Donaldson. Democrats denied the "scurrilous" slander that Donaldson was telling residents that he'd baby sit for them while they went to see "Fahrenheit 9/11"..................Developing

More print media woes as overall circulation is down, and who knows how far down as all papers "re-audit" their numbers. Media defenders have a point in that a paper is not just read by the subscriber or news stand buyer, but is read by family or office help. One thing I can attest to as a consultant working in many offices in Los Angeles: young people are NOT reading any of the daily newspapers here. They get their news from porn sites, specialty biz pubs (IBD WSJ) or specific web sites. I find most I contact don't have a clue about what is really going on in the world, no matter their education. Far too many are conspiracy oriented (Left and Right), few believe what they see on TV, and just don't care.

Stephen Schwartz has a long but terrific piece in Front Page today. I briefly touched on my two year experience dealing with Arabs. Schwartz calls their dialogues "a Hall of Mirrors". I prefer the term subtext. You always have to be aware that an Arab is functioning on three levels simultaneously; they have a 4,000 year fear of being caught. What they really mean in conversation is buried under symbolism. Schwartz:

I and the Saudi reformers who talk to me believe that the old argument that the Saudis supported al-Qaida out of fear they would be attacked was bogus then and is bogus now. They have not been attacked. They are not being attacked. Their princes and princesses continue to jet around the world, to shop and party, to visit bars and brothels, without a single one of them ever being harmed. And that is not because the terrorists were paid off. No terror movement in history could show that much discipline.

Very good read.

Re; Bubba's poor book sales outside of Manhattan A large number of people no longer go to bookstores, they shop at Amazon. As somebody once pointed out, the so-called elites rarely read the books they buy. They are just book shelf decoration so their friends think they read. When the Amazon count comes in the book will be #1. A friend of mine who DID buy the book told me that it is unreadable anyway, and he is a liberal guy (not a fanatic) who would like the book if it was good.

Sometimes when I'm wrong the only thing to do is delete an entire post I posted some info gleaned from various publications but written by the same person. In researching thirty or so pieces she has written I discovered that this person has been wrong, completely wrong, and almost delusional too often to consider reliable. I could still get a job with the New York Times, but only as a drug dealer. For those of you who read it during the 12 hours it was up, qualify the info.

Entire CIA story of mis-management is HERE (To avoid the insane registration, go HERE first) Impossible to summarize except to say that we have no CIA. Absolutely terrible. And it's a Republican report. Senate report is similarly bad.

1. The CIA has ignored its core mission of spying, has refused to take corrective action and is heading "over a proverbial cliff" after years of poor planning and mismanagement
2. "For too long, the CIA has been ignoring its core mission activities. There is a dysfunctional denial of any need for corrective action."
3. "The damage to the [human intelligence] mission through its misallocation and redirection of resources, poor prioritization of objectives, micromanagement of field operations, and a continued political aversion to operational risk is, in the committee's judgment, significant and could be long lasting."

And it goes on, and on, and on..... This could easily destroy Bush. Tenet is a guy who clearly should have been replaced when Bush took office, instead he was retained. Bush ignored failure after failure, and in fact continued to rely on an already bad agency. Bush is a bad manager. Period. If I didn't believe that the Democrats were dominated by a traitorous Left I'd never vote for Bush again in a million years. Who else is responsible? Monica Lewinsky?

Another video tape from Abu Grahaib has surfaced and is in the hands of Senator Barbara Boxer (Comm. CA). Senator Boxer showed the tape to unbiased reporters from The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and Socialist World. Reports the Times:

The tape clearly shows Corporal Don Slyke confronting a helpless but smiling racial minority prisoner who is playfully advancing upon him with what might be a knife. Corporal Slyke sadistically grabs the prisoner, and using an illegal judo hold that is clearly forbidden by the French and German military, spins the prisoner against the wall and then forces the knife hand in a position so that the knife went into the anus of the helpless prisoner. Corporal Slyke is clearly heard saying "Give up, towel head or I'll see that for the rest of your life you'll cut your fingers every time you wipe your worthless Muslim ass."

A clearly angry press corps and a sobbing Ms. Boxer vowed an investigation into the racist comments made by Corporal Slyke claiming that they were authorized by people at the very top of the Government. In a related story, Hamas announced their support for John Kerry in Novermber.

Newsaper circulation scandal hits the Los Angeles Times "Auditing" their circulation, they have closed two papers and laid off fired 160 employees including some top writers. Nothing will change the totally Left bias of the paper no matter how low the circulation. The LA Times has fired more than 1200 people in the last ten years, lots of them in their news department. Sob, sob, sob.

HAS THE LEFT DONE IT AGAIN?

They have been wrong about everything during the entire 20th century starting with their support of Stalin. They just may be wrong again still. Their reactionary attack upon the war in both Iraq and Afghanistan could be completely off the mark.

GWB caved to Germany and France at the G8 Summit when he didn't issue a "unilateral" statement for reform in the Middle East, probably cowed by the American Left. However there is surprising news that our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan are causing an awful lot of highly placed Middle Eastern leaders to think the real "age of the despots" is over. There have been little publicized meetings in Tunis (the Arab Summit), Yemen, Turkey, Egypt, and plenty of other places. #1 on everyone's agenda was "broader participation" in the governments. The general feeling is that a Muslim state is DOA. The overall conclusions of all these meetings was that democratic reform is the only way out of their own "quagmire".

The thinking, or more importantly the actual writing and publishing; together with actual meetings of Muslim leaders concerning these views is a surprise. When we kicked out the Taliban we kicked out the penultimate pure Islamist "government"; the removal of Saddam was the removal of a guy who emulated Hitler while actually practicing communism. Nobody ever wants to see these two again. There is no longer the determination to create an Islamic state, instead they seem to be heading toward something different. There is still argument about the compatibility of Islam with democracy. But there is lots of support toward "democratizing" Muslim states.

Al Jazeera seems to be behind the curve now because all kinds of words are appearing in independent newspapers that were never seen before. Things like open society, freedom, and tons of awful words like that. Lots of us, including me, have missed the large number of actual elections in "backwater" countries like Kuwait, Yemen, Mauritania (quick, find it on a map. Hint: it's to the left of China. Someplace.), Morocco, Jordan (Jordan for Christ sakes), and others. While these "elections" are not our kind, they are a hell of a lot better than those held in Africa, most of Asia, and parts of Latin America. Missing from the list are Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, and Syria (but they are under enormous pressure to change). Saudi Arabia may be about to grant women full citizenship, a monster change there.

The elections in Iraq and Afghanistan are crucial. Crucial.

The Left cannot face the possibility that another stupid cowboy might succeed like Reagan did. This is a horrible prospect for them. We don't get to hear stuff like this news from the Middle East very often but we might get more of it----from the Web naturally, never from the press or TV. The only thing missing is for Bush to openly support democratic forms in the area as his policy. We can hope that this inarticulate president can somehow articulate an understandable policy of supporting democracies in the Mid- East.

Anything is possible. I never thought I'd live to see the Berlin Wall come down or Communism implode without firing a shot, and I was wrong. I may be wrong about my cynicism regarding the history of despotism ruling everyone's lives in the Middle East, forever.

There ain't no forever, and as somebody famous once said, "Never say never."

For some cold water on this piece or at least the Saudi part go here. Do it quick because you can only access it for 6 days. The already sewn seeds of hate my stop this stuff yet. Saudi Arabia is the elephant in the family room.

Iraq the Model has some good stuff up. Then there is this from Hammorabi

The recent unconfirmed news indicates that another more serious man appointed as the leader of Al-Qaeda in KSA. He is Saleh Al-Offi (38 years). He was a member in the security forces of Saudi Arabia after graduating in a training course in that aspect in 1988. He then went to Afghanistan 1992 before returning back in 1995 to SA. He is well trained in the security and military aspect more than his predecessor! He also spends more time in SA last few years. ---at Hammorabi

He reports lots of stuff that doesn't bode well for us, or Iraq.

Responding to many email questions about yesterday's piece "Have We Taken Investment Advice from the Best Plumber in Town? Many of you pointed out that both Britain and France set up Parliaments and other democratic forms during their tenure between the two World Wars. True, but the colonial powers over-ruled anything passed by these bodies that they didn't like or that threatened their rule. The Brit or French military became the Tribal Leaders enforcing laws and disciplining law breakers in civil cases. They allowed Shiria law by just closing their eyes. Secondly, and most importantly, the old Arab tribal ways were even more entrenched by this phony democracy.

To cover this era quickly, the people "elected" during the period between the wars were all members of the already powerful tribal families. No more than 200 families out of the thousands in any country held seats in the "parliaments". If anybody wanted anything from anyone in government they had to go back to bargaining lives with other families. During the Cold War, the "independent" Arab countries (all became dictatorships almost immediately)were particularly adept at "electing" or appointing families that might support the Soviet Union or the U.S. depending on who would give them the most money in foreign aid. Iraq was particularly clever in this regard until Saddam came along.

Several of you emailed opinions that said basically "screw these assholes, they do what we say or we walk" which is basically what we are going to do anyway. An "occupation" of a year or so is not going to erase 3,000 years of their "civilization". We have opened schools so that what? Just what are these young people going to do with their new tools? What industry or work will they do? The same as always: work for the government, engage in primitive entreprenurial bargaining busineses, or become smarter robbers (see the Sadr "followers"). Girls will be kicked out of the schools the moment we leave so they can go back to the "old days". I pointed out in an essay over a year ago that most people in the U.S. would toss out sections of our own constitution. What makes us think Iraqis want freedom anyway?

Defining Movie Reviewing Down: Putting politics aside The Josef Goebbels film festival of hate movies is entertaining; ditto the Stalinist output by their teams of agit-prop liars. Now we are supposed to put aside politics and go see Fahrenheit 9/11 because it's "entertaining". Whoever placed Moore with Leni Riefenstahl missed only the fact that both raised lying so that we can painlessly assimilate hate. The Left owned USA Today defines movie reviewing down. Way down.

I guess we can add Bill Safire to the short list of reporters willing to to report on the oil for blood scandal; along with Claudia Rosett.

This was the biggest cash cow in the history of the world," says one of the insiders familiar with the $10 billion U.N. oil-for-food scandal. "Everybody — traders, contractors, banks, inspectors — was milking it. It was supposed to buy food with the money from oil that the U.N. allowed Saddam to sell, but less than half went for that. Perfume, limos, a shipment of 1,500 Ping-Pong tables, for God's sake."

Too bad the rest of his slimy paper hasn't jumped on the story. Go there, it's a good read because he approaches it from a more human angle.

Outrage at new torture allegations Prisoners force fed Twinkies, Big Macs, and French wines; denied Café latté; MPs "tee peeed" Holy sites (threw rolls of toilet paper over trees at burial site of Salaam el Dareem Krareoke Khomen-Farek the inventor of the automatic wife beating machine); former prisoners tell New York Times of being forced to masturbate while looking at pictures of Nancy Pelosi; DNC has copies of orders Rumsfeld signed allowing MPs to call prisoners "assholes" (a violation of the Cancun Convention hosted in 1999 by the French and Germans). French demand War Crimes trials; Outraged Congress to form three committees to investigate..........Three reserve guards convicted of filling condoms with a clear liquid (a violation of the "Condom Use order (13377668654B) and then "water bombing" helpless criminals inside of prison.........Developing

I'm like a lot of you. I look at this "war on terror" and I am confused. I don't for a second subscribe to all the conspiracy crap put out by the Left and I'm not a blind flag waver of the Right. It is also obvious to anyone honest that the CIA had zero intel about Iraq as well as al Qaeda; I can fully understand their failure to penetrate Islamic Terror orgs for the many reasons I've blogged about, but I cannot understand trusting them to be correct about Iraq after observing their failures regarding 9/11. So what are we into? That's what I'm trying to figure out now and I will share what I am discovering. For today's piece I have used a couple of Indian tribal experts I know personally as well as reading I have done on tribes and customs of Islamists.

It's obvious that all of the 1 billion Muslims do not follow the religion with complete dedication. Many pretend devotion to Islam for appearances in their community. Like the summer soldiers and the springtime patriots of our Revolution and the Easter Sunday Christians, Islam has as many slackers as any religion or movement. I'd be surprised if 30% of "Muslims" really practiced Islam seriously. Therefore a large number of Muslims have varying degrees of true involvement in their religion. Many more will pretend for the sake of society or appearances. And in the Arab world appearances are everything. You cannot afford to be tagged a "bad Muslim". If you bring shame to your family or tribe you must die. Islam is the "big tent" that may or may not rally all Muslims to one single cause.

Arab society is a tribal society where it's family and tribe über alles. Within these groupings the most important things for any Arab (Middle Eastermer) are honor, shame, and respect. It is in their tribal context that the Arab functions and it is the tribal system that is always first in an Arab's mind. The Muslim religion allows for this, because just as the early Catholic Church accommodated to the Pagan Gods of Rome and Greece, Islam had to accommodate to tribal ethos from Pakistan to the Sudan.

In any tribe there is competition for the top spot within the tribe. A chief. A shaman. The competition has no limits. It is expected that you might kill to get there and it is expected that the top dog will kill to stay there. Any duplicity, lie, or criminal act in order to obtain the top of the tribe is expected. Comparisons with the American Mafia are very apt. People at the top try to keep everyone around them "family" which is the tightest unit in any tribe. The leadership is expected to allow all profits drain down to their other tribal friends and freeze the rest out. We need go no further than the Saudi "family", the Hussein "family", The King of Jordan's family, and so on to see this played out. The family is the only thing standing between the top dog and his death. The top dog might be killed by a member of his own family who wants to be top dog. That's the way it is.

Bernard Lewis in his "must read or you don't know nothin' about Islam" book, The Middle East — A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years makes the observation that there isn't one moment in all that time that any Arab state has had any democracy at all. It is a history of one despot after another (read one tribal thug after another, including the colonial powers), who gains rulership through devious means or inheritance and stays there until killed by the next leader, is thrown out by a foreign power, or passes power to family when he dies. Islam failed to overcome the tribal ethic, the despot who rules as he sees fit. This may be why lots of Muslims feel that Islam has gone downhill since the fourth caliph, forgetting that since the last three caliphs were murdered the down part started right after the death of the prophet.

The tribal top dog can also become top dog because of his wealth; success in business. Wealth brings respect. Brings honor. It is OK to lie, short weight, refuse to honor a contract, anything it takes to get ahead. The Iranian mullahs (see here) are an example of grabbing all the wealth in a country and sharing it with whomever they choose while freezing out the rest. A successful Arab will be respected for his clever dealings; his sharp sense of business. A successful Arab will dress for success, surround himself with servants, even allow a few of his fingernails to grow to excessive length to "prove" he doesn't do manual labor. Is this in violation of the Koran rule of equality? Of course it is, but honor and respect are an integral part of Islam and the tribe. Successful Arabs have been known to drive down the center of the road with their private armies and force everyone on each side into the ditch as a show of power and his demand for respect.

But suppose there is another big shot coming at him down the road with his private army who refuses to move? Now we will have a problem. Honor will be at stake on both sides. Each will demand respect. If one of them loses he will be shamed. Shame is the worst thing that can happen to an Arab. Neither will move unless some sort of honorable conclusion can be reached. It may result in a fight to the death on both sides. It may result in an agreement of one to marry the other's daughter. An arranged marriage between their sons and daughters. But somehow one of them must move for the other while at the same time retaining honor. There is no such thing as being humble in this situation. Perhaps both will go back home. Maybe they will make a deal for some future business arrangement and both will retire to the side of the road and discuss it while their armies pass on either side of the road. But it will be settled NOW. The problem for westerners is that the settlement talks may take a week in order for both sides to come out with honor.

This is what we are apparently trying to do in Fallujah and Sadr City. Because shame will always result in revenge. Always. Men kill their own sons and daughters because of some shame or dishonor one or the other have brought on the family. Tribal leaders will dole out harsh punishments including torture or death to anybody in the tribe who brings shame to the tribe. That's the way it is. In the above traffic situation both parties know they must not shame the other while retaining their honor. It's been like this for two thousand years and it has never changed.

This is the situation we stepped into in Iraq. Saddam was one of the worst despots of the 20thcentury and he had a hell of a lot of company. Anyone who stepped out of line was killed, tortured to death in public, or had his wife and daughters raped. Saddam lived to shame an adversary. That is why so many refused to stand up to him. To lose was to be shamed. It looks to me like State, CIA, and the Russian expert Condeleeza Rice knew zilch about the Arab way of life. With all due respect to Ms. Rice, who is a brilliant expert on Russia and the Soviet Union, having her as national security advisor when we face Islamo-fascism is like taking investment advice from the best plumber in town.

That is what we are dealing with in Iraq. We should have gone in there with raw power and stomped them. After that we could have quickly, had we had a plan, quickly installed a new government and got the hell out. But our CIA didn't even know that the infra-structure of the country was basically non-existent. There is nobody to blame for this but Bush. The peso stops inside the White House.

How can we get out of this thing with honor, and hopefully some form of government that is not another Islamic despotism? I think we are now playing the hand dealt. It may play our way or it may not, but whatever the result, Iraqis must not be shamed. They have to emerge with their honor intact. Knowing the reality we now know this is something that we should have not undertaken unless they were a direct threat to this country. A threat we were prepared to destroy.

Hate to admit that, but like you, I knew zippo about the Arabs.

It looks like every Right Wing blogger who is out there is slamming Bush for his mismanagement. Drezner busted his butt on Sunday, but I missed it. (Hat tip Blair) I get the feeling, without any proof at all, that he is not running the government because he doesn't have any ability. How else can the staffing of the CPA, the most important thing in Iraq, with sycophants and PC slugs who didn't even speak the language. I know everybody said those things about Reagan without knowing anything and they were wrong, but Reagan was right on everything but Iran Contra. This guy has been right on the economy and wrong on everything else. The everything else includes a thousand dead soldiers. Our soldiers.

Ledeen hits one against the wall in right, over at NRO. I don't know why he, out of all the stupid news orgs gets the Brit boat deal correctly:

The Brits were laying down a network of sensors to detect the movement of ships toward major Iraqi oil terminals. The Iranians considered that a bit of a threat. So they attacked.

He shares my view that the CIA and State are asleep along with everyone else. The Iranians intend to attack the terminals in Iraq. Read it.

As more and more awful reviews for both the Moore and Clinton epics appear, the grosses extracted from the true believers go ever higher. People like these two triumph over "informed" opinion. Tell people what they want to hear. The people don't care if the two of them are lying or not.

No matter your political leanings go here and ask yourself after reading this short piece if this country can possibly survive the traitorous leaks coming from State and CIA. Pipes is an honest guy and he just lays it out there. It's on the New York Sun too but their site is tough to get on to. Bush hasn't appointed people capable of managing, proof that he can't manage either.

Scientists on the entitlement wagon slam Bush because they aren't getting enough money from the government. Big surprise, Kerry guarantees them a bigger handout from the non Nobel Prize winning tax payers and the Nobel winners support Kerry. Washington Times piece is here. New slogan: "Nobel Prize winners need money. Tax the stupid."

Why the newspaper circulation story is big news. Print media is no longer what it was (1950s) but most thought it had leveled out. I used to be attached to that business (magazine) and I can tell you that nobody tells the truth once one pub starts to lie. Everybody knows the news stand sales (suscription lies are too dumb for words) so fakery spreads. You can bet the large dailies are "recomputing" their numbers as we speak. This could hurt wages of columnists. This is not a small story til it stops. NY Post link here. LA Times is owned by the same company that owns Newsday, one of the culprits.

Hitchens "review" of Fairenheit 9/11 is as long winded and convoluted as he says the movie is. Fact: the Left will go because the Left doesn't care about fact. They just hate Bush, the U.S. and Britain; they will swallow the unsupported paranoid fantasies that any clever dolt will throw them. You don't need to quote Orwell, Jefferson, or anyone else because they want to believe. With the Left, all you have to do is toss them rancid fabrications about George Bush and America and they will be happy. Hitchens piece in Slate is long, as in really really long. He pretty well demolishes the so-called "documentary" because (surprise surprise) Moore is not only a liar but uses selective excerpts. I'd have liked to read a far shorter version. The guy has always been a talented fraud.

UN criminals play hardball accuse U.S. of stealing Iraqi oil money. Quite frankly this is what some small time pol would pull to take the heat off of him. This time it is 52 criminal nations turning up the heat. From the way Bush has handled things so far, the U.S. will be guilty and the U.N. will get off, helped along by The New York Times and the American Left. It is agonizing. Why does Bush take so long to respond to ANYTHING. Because he's a lousy president, that's why.

I take the Reynolds hype for Andrew Sullivan a move by Sullivan to regain "market share". I have deleted him from my links because he has become a roaring boring Brit fruit with nothing to offer but the "gay agenda" and no substance. Writing one thing in The Advocate (a fuit mag) and another thing on his blog reveals a dishonest man. He isn't an American anyway. He once stole from me without credit or acknowledgement. He and Hitchins ought to go back to Britania and lob their stink bombs across the Atlantic from the safety of the Halls of Eaton and Cambridge. Anybody who thinks Provencetown is somehow America is a true Lotus Eater royalist arm pit sniffer anyway.

The London Times published a major article yesterday on the oil supply problem. Can't link because they require the most insane registration on the planet. The gist of it is

Refinery margins are now $10 per barrel
OPEC is fixing prices
We are afraid to disturb the House of Saud
Environmental and other permitting restrictions make it virtually impossible to build new refineries
There is a "risk premium" of between $5 and $10 per barrel right now
(1)Terrorists in Iraq periodically sabotage that nation's pipelines. Unrest and violence in Nigeria, Africa's largest producer, make that country an unreliable source of oil. Islamic terrorism casts doubt about the reliability of supplies from Kazakhstan.
(2) Putin's jailing of all the capitalists has completely dried up capital investment in Russia's reserves
(3) Chavez in Venezuela has replaced all the managers with amateurs and they can't deliver low sulphur oil.

Most important is Saudi Arabia which sits on almost 300 billion barrels of "unproven" reserves, but they know exactly where they are. In addition these reserves are recoverable cheaply. They haven't drilled a well in years. Finally, the Saudis are about to bite the dust because it has become obvious that they have allowed the al Qaeda Terrorists to almost take over; foreigners are now leaving in droves and there is nobody else to run the business. Late add: Peter Brookes (the best business reporter for any daily) has a terrific column up right now. London Times piece is now on Weekly Standard HERE

Iran seizes Brit boats and men What to do? Well if Bush had done his job we'd have CIA agents in there who could do plenty. But he hasn't and we don't. Not a leader. But who else is there? Kerry and his Left pals who want to make deals with the French and Germans? The completely corrupt UN? It may be that we are in a state of decay from the top. Possible.....

"When you get elected president, you must move fast to put your own people at Justice and CIA. In different ways, these are the two bureaucracies that can destroy a presidency." Super Spook Herbert E Meyer has a great piece right here. Really worth the read. GWB wrong, one more time.

Headline of the day: "Germany edges out Arkansas in per capita GDP."

It is the goal of every Muslim to return to the "Golden Age"; the perfect state run on Islamic principals. Muslims believe that the Muslim "Golden Age" lasted only 32 years, from the time of Mohammed to the death of the fourth caliph. That was the time when Islam was pure. That was when everyone was happy. They were happy because their religion was practiced by all the people and they obeyed every required nuance of the Koran; they were divinely ruled. Muslims believe that it's been all downhill from there. Muslims don't blame their religion for the downfall. They blame themselves. Any Muslim failure is caused by their failure to practice their religion as they are supposed to. All it will take for a return of the Golden Age is for all Muslims to be perfect Muslims; all they have to do is just follow the rules. The rules are right there in front of them. Freedom comes with obedience. In other words, the rules make men free.

This single-minded mission for a return to the Golden Past creates the passion. Muslims hypnotize themselves; praying five times per day; reflecting on the Koran; engaging in constant Koranic discussions with each other. This process effectively closets them from the world. Bernard Lewis, as well as almost every other writer about the Mid-East, notes that Arabs haven't created anything in 200 years; you can look in your house and not find a single Arab contribution made during the past two centuries. Nothing an Arab uses was created by an Arab. But this is not Islam's fault. It is the fault of individual Muslims for not being good enough Muslims.

Add to this mix the peculiar, to us, the Muslim ability to compartmentalize. We think that they lie and pay no attention to the lies they tell us. The Muslim view is completely different. Anything done outside of the religion doesn't relate to the practice of the Muslim religion. Another way of saying that "you do what you have to do" in order to get what you want in politics, business, or whatever activity takes place outside of The Religion. Things taking place outside of the religion don't count.

It has been said by more than one "great" mind that being a fundamentalist about anything creates parasitism. The Muslims are a near perfect example of a parasite people. They feed off of the West for almost every single thing they need; clothing, cars, TV, medicine, education for doctors; everything they have they suck from the West. The only thing they have of value in exchange for these "things" is oil. Oil has perpetuated the parasite Muslim people for the better part of 60 years

Parasites can get angry. What we are seeing now is either the death throes of a parasite unable to sustain itself or the advancement of a parasite into a gorging bloodsucker that can never be satisfied. A huge freeloader who won't get off the dole; a panhandler turned street thug with guns and a capacity for terror. Under the current conditions the Muslim crusade to recapture their imagined past won't end until either they or we are dead.

We have to realize this. I have no idea if our Left, with their long history of appeasing demons, will allow us to defend our civilization. The parasite has been sucking the blood of the Left for sustenance for several years. The Left can no longer supply enough nutrients for it to survive. The parasite needs more food.

Great job by Gorelick and company My take is that nobody on the committee wanted to find the links because the Saudi funding is the same type of charity money laundering funding that the Democrats use (LINK HERE). I called them Charity Daisy Chains because they give donated funds to a single charity and then that charity donates to another one in an endless chain; all pay out funds along the way to their "friends". I suspect that the Republicans have their own underhanded methods and they each traded off. The laundering of money through various charities has been in the news for three years, but this committee "could find no funding links". Here are just a few, with their branch offices

Al-Haramain: offices in Afghanistan, Albania, Bangladesh, Ethiopia and the Netherlands plus 65 more countries.
World Assembly of Moslem Youth, or WAMY, infamous for sending their hate the Jews books around the world. Offices in 55 countries around the world. Virginia office busted by the FBI.
Islamic Relief Organization. Offices Islamic Relief Organization has branch offices throughout the world: 36 in Africa, 24 in Asian countries, 10 offices in Europe and 10 offices in Latin America, the Caribbean North America.

A virtual endless list can be found HERE.This outrageous whitewashing by this joke of a committee speaks for itself. I laid out the Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira Heinz Kerry daisy chain of laundering money to the DNC (same link as above: 9/11 Moms); the Saudi daisy chain has been PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE for years. In addition the arrests of Saudi charity hustlers can fill a page: Benevolence International Foundation (the organisation was established by Adil Abdul Galil Betargy, a wealthy Saudi sheikh who is an associate of Bin Laden), Global Relief Foundation accused of trying to send atomic info to terrorists, the now notorious The Holy Land Foundation to name a few. I'd remind you that Muslim "charities" are on every campus in the U.S. The 9/11 Commission could not find anything linking the Saudis to 9/11 because they did not want to find anything. LATE ADD Bill Quick points out the Republican "secret": Many are directly funded by Saudi interests both in their campaigns and private lives. So what we have is a completely corrupt committee investigating a Saudi connection which is in their vital interests to cover up. There's plenty more there, go read it when you have a loose twenty minutes. Safire in the NYT blames runaways staff acting on their own for premature release of an untrue outline that nobody on the committee bothered to read. What me worry?

The Great God says in the Koran: Oh true believers, when you encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads." The above command of the Great God is a great command and must be respected and followed.---Nafia in the Muslim year 93

Sunday Help Wanted
Air America seeking comedy one liners about Paul Johnson beheading. Must be in good taste.........

Those of us still thinking of voting for Bush because of his strong stand on terror haven't read this Pipes weblog.

....the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will stop all special security checks imposed in November 2002 on adult males entering the United States from the 25 countries considered a special risk for terrorism. Asa Hutchinson of the Department of Homeland Security announced to an Arab audience on June 11, "Our long term goal is to treat [all visitors] the same way, and not based on where you come from."

The "where you come from countries" include Yemen, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. There is only one reason for this and that is the one I offered here in Defining Incompetence Down. Bush has abandoned any semblance of supervion and accountability from his appointees. He has no strategy. No plan. He is an incompetent manager. Read this and hope you don't relieve yourself in your pants.

Why are "seniors" not getting their drug discout cards? Because most of them are in Reaganville. People will have to do it for them and if you've ever dealt with Florida voters you know that they can't do what they are told to do even when they want to. And the Democrats aren't helping by screaming all around the country that the drug discounts aren't really discounts but a device to steal their money. The card should have been automatic with Medicare, but that would have been too easy.

Every indicator on the plain showss the economy growing stronger, right? Not to the LA Times which spins it as another White House semi truth: "Bush Claims Economy Is Growing Stronger", Claims being the spin word. We get great info here. The second largest city in the U.S. has this sludge sheet for a paper.

The Clinton book and book tour is what happens when you do anything "just for the money". There is no reason for this partial auto-bio-confessional other than money and political convenience. If his toadies at the New York Times don't like it, this 950 page two pound tome must be a real stinker. Will it hurt book sales? Not one bit. His worshiping throng of idolators and political groupies will buy anything he puts out. They always have.

LGF has the link to the tape of the Paul Johnson murder. While our media has no trouble showing anything bad our soldiers do, they refuse to show anything bad our enemies do. But we are all getting to know that, aren't we. WARNING, this is very very tough to watch. They break his arms, chop off his hands, beat him about the kidneys for what seems like an eternity. Just awful, but the media wants us to concentrate on bad stuff our people might do.

Al Qaeda Says It Beheads U.S. Hostage in Saudi...Drudge has the pix.

"The governments of the world should know that Islam cannot be defeated. Islam will be victorious in all the countries of the world, and Islam and the teachings of the Koran will prevail all over the world.....--
Ayatolla Khomeini of Iran August 1979

Now the Lotus Eating Left will demand that the prisoner abusers in Iraq be hung. If any of us lacked a sense of proportion here, I think this ends it. We are dealing with a medieval religion. These are people who have no life at all outside their fatwas, imams, and jihad. They are now guaranteed Heaven. Not with 72 virgins (that is a made up tale), but with women who don't ever have periods. That is what they believe. This is the hate being spewed in at least 90% of the mosques in the world. This is the religion we are supposed to be tolerant of. This is THE wake up call. Don't think they won't be here soon. They will be, if they are not here already due to the open border with Mexico. This isn't solved with the COO program (Cooperation with Others) that Kerry's military advisor, Claudia Kennedy advocates. We are in a war with the Barbarians and we HAVE to win it.

THE LOTUS EATERS on the American Left a ton of really good stuff from Ledeen, Pipes, and others over at Front Page on the same day. Main link to all is here and then hit continue, and then go here and look in the extreme RH column for "The Darma Trial". but these guys know their stuff. All are concerned that we are returning to a 9/10 world as a result of the Lotus Eaters in the Democratic Party. I have remarked here that the charge from some Democrats that we have taken our eyes off the real threat of terrorism has some traction, but that their remarks are pure election year bs. Go there, these people are the top of the deck and they disagree.

What would World War II have looked like had FDR named it the War against Surprise Attacks?

The disagreements among these top people are very enlightening. Front Page is becoming more and more one of the top dogs among the WebZines, a light year ahead of what they were a year ago.

All in all, 70% of all French newspapers are in the hands of two weapons manufacturers. Defense and aeronautics contractor Lagardère owns the Hachette publishing empire, which is the world's largest magazine publisher and the tenth largest publisher and which owns, to name but a few examples, the magazines Paris Match (which recently scored a soft-ball interview with president Bush) and Elle and the radio station Europe 1

From No Pasaran AKA Merde etc. Take a look because the government now basically controls the entire French media, unless you think a government contractor is going to shit on their benefactors.

One question: Would the predominently Jewish Hollywood types make a Jew bashing movie like they have just made about Christians? Poke barbs at Orthodox Jews? Israel? Oh no, that would be attacked as Nazi.

This guy should be a Republican, but they are too dumb to have him. Joe Lieberman gave this speech last Tuesday and for some reason I didn't pick it up.

Our ponderously affected politicians sermonize about our failure to penetrate al Qaeda as "proof" the intel community has failed us. They point to that weirdo from Marin County as an example of "how easy" it is to get to bin Ladin. That is how easy it WAS, if you just followed orders when in training camp and if all you wanted to do was set eyes on the great man. It takes five years to learn to read and write Arabic fluently. Then, as in every country, there are accents and dialects which will let everyone know where you are from. Who in your hometown knows you? What is your family? What mosque did you attend as a child? etc., etc., Then in Pakistan they speak Urdu, in Iran they speak mainly Farsi; in Afghanistan and surrounding they speak: Pashto, Dari, Farsi, Baluchi, Pashai, Nuristani,and other lesser dialects. In fact there are over 75 different and distinct languages spoken in various areas of the Middle East. Real easy to penetrate.

AND THEN you cannot fake being a Muslim. A Muslim lives the religion 24 hours per day. Everything is a ritual set in stone, from going to the bathroom (you cannot face Mecca or turn your rear end to Mecca), you must wash in a certain way: wash the hands up to the wrists, rinse the mouth with water, clean the nostrils with water, wash the face from the forehead to chin and from ear to ear, wash the right arm and then the left one upto the elbows, pass the wet fingers on the head and in the ear holes, then wash first the right foot and then the left one up to the ankle - three times and in the exact order mentioned. And if someone is near you and sees you make an error....you have been busted. Every other daily activity from walking, entering and leaving a house, to combing the hair is strictly proscribed. Every Muslim has learned everything possible about the religion from all the dead imams and heroes going back to 636AD. A thirty year old Muslim has been learning about the religion for twenty five years, every day.

Listening to the counterfeit experts in Congress pontificate grandly about the failings of the CIA make me want to relieve myself on their wives dresses. None of them are interested in the war on terror, only making Bush look worse than he does already and getting us to forget that Clinton was every bit as sleepy.

America is dealing with a people who have dedicated their entire beings to the practice of their religion; you cannot fake it for very long. As I've remarked many times in this blog, 99% of all spies in history have been turncoats. Since Muslims regard our society as immoral, harmful to the soul, and a threat to their personal tranquility they ain't turning....

As a now secular society (Godless) we have lost our ability to deal honestly with people of faith; to respect people who believe in God. On the contrary, we regard them as stupid, ignorant, creatures of contempt and hopelessly "out of it". We don't even respect Christianity any more. God is dead.

Right.

Hypocrisy, thy name is New York Times. Today they are running an editorial demanding "strong action" in the Sudan. Before you assume the Left Wing fish wrap means Lefties should run more full page ads in the Times daily and Sunday gazettes, you forget our "allies" and the UN. The Times, always appealing to some American self annointed victim group, appeals to "women"

Women have been raped and branded (how awful, never heard of that before), villages razed and crops destroyed. More than 15,000 people have been killed and about a million more driven from their homes.

That would have been a light morning workout for Saddam. Does "Strong Action" mean sending those awful soldiers with guns to stop it? Does it mean sending human shields to the upper East Side? No, "strong action" to the Times means sending food and "talking". Wake me when the death toll reaches a million. Maybe The Times will tell us to send the poor bastards some Happy Meals and some non genetically engineered food from the EU.

Even the Wall Street Journal shared in the lies about the contents of the 9/11 report. It has been said many times that the reporters on the Journal are just as biased as the rest of the media. That only the editorial pages are conservative. Yesterday was proof. And Drudge reported early this AM that there was a link between bin Laden and Saddam as far back as 1998 and linked HERE Which is a court document that contains this

The indictment noted that Al Qaeda, Bin Laden's international terrorist group, forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in Sudan and with the government of Iran and with its associated group
Hezballah to "work together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States."

Additionally, the indictment states that Al Qaeda reached an agreement with Iraq not to work against the regime of Saddam Hussein and that they would work cooperatively with Iraq, particularly in weapons development.

But the lies will continue. BUT why does it take Drudge to do what the absolutely inept White House should have done? Again, this country deserves much better than this sad and sorry White House.
Late add The WSJ this AM reports the same in an EDITORIAL. No retraction of their "news" reports from yesterday.

Hey! For all you "Deadwood" fans, the great series on HBO, and the language used. I've been talking with friends who watch it too and we were all of the opinion that the language in the show was not used in the period, 1881. Well I had access to the Oxford Dictionary yesterday and guess what? The term "mother fucking" and "cocksucker" were actually used in a Texas court case in 1888 so we can assume it was common street language. The term "cunt" goes so far back it's almost an ancient term, a taboo word from the very beginning; so much for the president of the University of Colorado who thinks it's a "term of endearment". The word "fuck" goes just as far back, and the middle finger salute goes all the way back to a reference in Ancienbt Rome of an actor giving it to a booing audience. So "Deadwood" is dead on.

Does anybody on the planet care what Ron Reagan Jr. and former Playboy nude Patty Davis (a truly vile layout) have to say, about politics or anything else? It's tough to be the offspring of any super successful person and I know it's tough for them, but Ron Jr. wouldn't have a radio show anywhere short of Mars if his name wasn't Reagan. They know zilch. None of us will listen. Nobody knows what Reagan would have done about anything. Leave it go at that. BTW Noonan has a very moving piece in today's WSJ. The real exception to her perception is that "everybody" doesn't care about Reagan. No Blacks were mourning, no Hispanics other than Cubans who escaped from Castro. I work around Blacks and they hate him. Hate. And as we know the white Left hates him too. The funeral did not bring us "all together". Just white conservatives. Too bad, but that is the truth.

This Administration is defining incompetence down. The latest "Oh My God" over some terrorist being "taken off the books" has only one component that is bad: incompetence. It's at times like this we all miss a guy like the late Senator Patrick Moynahan.

In his famous essay, Defining Deviancy Down, he was talking about crime. Crime, like incompetence, has always been with us. By defining what is not criminal we can define what IS. As we gradually allow certain crimes to be OK, and what are OK under certain circumstances, we "define deviancy down".

With Bush we have the luxury of defining incompetence down. Bad intel? Keep the guy on the job, he's competent. Bad SEC and stock fraud? Keep the SEC guy on the job, he's competent. Total lack of airport secutity? Keep Minetta on the job. And so on.

In the current redefinition, we had a terrorist so important that they took him "off the books" and then did nothing with him, like in nada, bupkis, and zilch. There are two ways to delegate authority; give people free rein and let them do their jobs while retaining accountability for the results and checking on them; the second is give them free rein and then walk away. Reagan understood the first, Bush has thoroughly mastered the second; in fact no President in our history as mastered it so well. The main problem is that we have a president, much like Carter, who had no experience contacting national leaders on his own, til he ran for president. He had no contact with the people he would appoint to positions in government. In contrast, Reagan had been going around the country for years. There was nobody he didn't know and nobody who didn't know him. He could select the best. Bush ran for president as an afterthought, designated to run by "the party" because of his huge election victories in Texas and only because of his perceived electiveness. So this is what we got. A guy who knows nobody competent; a guy who had to consult with "elder statesmen" from prior administrations in order to appoint people to do jobs he didn't understand. And our guys die.

Norm Minetta is now competency. How's that for down?

Bill Quick drives it into the seats:

The Bush-hating left would rather see America lose the war on terror than admit GWB is right. And the Bush-worshiping right would rather lose the war on terror than admit GWB is wrong.

Go over there and weigh in the comments are good.

And if not, why not? And if we have, where are they? If our genius class in DoD and the White House haven't used the past eight months to sneak CIA and other operatives into Iran with the purpose of destablizing their government than we must kick the entire administration out. Kerry and Hillary cannot possibly be worse. In fact Nader couldn't be worse. I get the feeling that DoD and Bush have just been sitting around playing the entire thing by ear since "hostilities" ended. There is no plan. There is no plan to WIN. Like in WIN. These terrorist acts are obviously coming from Iran and we sit by and do nothing. Why? Because we haven't sent anybody into Iran to do something. I'm just sick. I'm a hard core Reagan Republican and conservative and I honestly don't think I vote for these people again. Bush is NOT a leader. He's just there saying things. And our guys die. Bush the oneth would not have gone to war without a plan in place to infltrate Iran with a purpose. I'm at the point where I can't watch the news knowing that we have nothing in place.

The Tereeezaahhh Heinz Kerry/Max Cleland/Democrat to Republican to Democrat Odessey is best told right HERE.

Malkin responds to the Krugman charge that Ashcroft has produced no significant prosecutions. What Michelle doesn't understand is that prosecution of terrorists is PERsecution of terrorists to the Left. BTW Krugman has used phony data as far back as Reagan, see this link to NRO which is too long by far to read unless you have nothing to do for a day or so.

Two serious questions for all of us---
Q1: Would you let some man sodomize you for $23 million?
Q2: Would you let some man sodomize your 12 year old son for $23 million?

The parents of that boy Michael Jackson "seduced" are the most despicable of pimps. Then we are presented with those Hollywood scumbags who put that 10 year old boy into sexual activity with Nicole Kidman (see Hollywood Left movie too); with the obvious consent of the parents. Why? For money. These two events out of thousands has to be moral commentary about the state of Western Culture. These are adults that sell their kids into depravity. There are adults that just stand there and let it happen. In the Kidman case we are talking about at least 100 cast and crew as well. What the hell is going on?

Rome was bad? Do we wonder why other countries hate us? Think about it. This is a culture completely out of control; something the Left calls democracy.

Another "Hollywood Left" movie this time Kidman has sex with a ten year old boy. Story is in this week's Enquirer but copyright forbids even one quote.

NICOLE Kidman has sparked outrage with her new film in which she gets passionate in the bath with a ten-year-old boy.

Says the always reliable Brit tab "The Sun" The Aussie press has a better story HERE. While the The New York Daily News had the "story" yesterday, which makes me believe that this is a publicty stunt; the scene will be "cut" amid much screaming about the fascists in the White House and the Nazi types at the FCC. But where the hell were the parents of this kid? Where were the cops? This is a crime to everybody but the Roman Polanski loving Hollywood Left. The Kerry campain which runs ads like, "I'm a big movie star and I know what's best for you", will have one hell of time if Kidman comes out for him. (Hat tip to Terpsboy).

We are turning Saddam over to the Iraqis further proof that Bush has zero policy. Want to bet that a massive suicide squad won't spring him? Depressing.

Not that I believe that the Democrats believe anything they say, but the charge that Bush has ignored terrorism in favor of a war in Iraq is gaining with me. It looks like terrorists have used the war in Iraq to organize around Africa and parts of Europe and are ready to make hellacious trouble.
If Ledeen doesn't scare you to the toilet Daniel Pipes sure will. He has a blog that I haven't read for a week what with the funeral and a graduation, but he is loaded. Item One:

Brit tax payers foot most of the bill for huge mosqe in London. BBC touts the opening without mentioning the speaker is one of the most radical of the radical Islamists; Jews and advocates violence against non-Muslims.

This amounts to official patronage for jihad, covered up once again by the BBC. Go HERE.

Then, like in big surprise, Pipes tells of Islamist terrorists who tried to spring the the badly wounded ringleader of the massacre in al-Khobar. They were dressed in burkas as many attacks before, they couldn't find their pal and Saudi security guards let them escape. Hello!!! Big article HERE.

And if you think Powell has a "grasp" of anything try this one on:

Once again our State Department has "goofed". Their latest "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report is a highly politicized document, reflecting the Washington debate and diplomatic imperatives, but this year it has veered into unreliability and even falsehood. It's a dangerous document likely to harm the war on terrorism.

Subsequent Patterns of Global Terrorism reports have been no less unsatisfactory, but they seemed untouchable, for who can or will tell State to clean up its act?

Read this.

Next, if you didn't read it, Pipes believes there is already a Civil War in Saudi Arabia. I forget that he has a daily blog and with the funeral and my feelings I neglected to read him for a week. If you haven't been there you better go. Pipes is close to the best.

but were afraid to ask. Here is a list of the signers of the "letter" condeming the Bush policy in Iraq; demanding the impeachment of the president. I have put the LAT descriptions in parenthesis at the beginning of each entry. They fall into three categories. The first would be supporters of Kerry and outright Left Democrats; the second would be stand up guys who see the policy as a failed one (I have put these in bold), by far the largest are the people who don't like seeing what they have built up over thirty to forty years destroyed. They built the UN alliances (now revealed as almost totally corrupt), the alliances with France, Germany, most of Africa, and the Arab states. They mourn for the good old days. The LA Times and other media won't dig into who these people really are. The signers:

Alexander Watson----(LAT:assistant secretary of State for Inter-American affairs, 1993-96; deputy permanent representative to the U.N., 1989-1993. )Truth: not mentioned in most places, he is part of the Charity Daisy Chain with Teresa Heinz Kerry. A big time member of The Nature Conservancy" an outfit outed in a book called: "Undue Influence: Wealthy Foundations, Grant Driven Environmental Groups and Zealous Bureaucrats That Control Your Future" by Ron Arnold. An eco extremist org. Think this guy isn't a Kerry guy?

Retired Adm. Stansfield Turner, the CIA Director under Carter (let's all remember that fiasco) who is pissed that Tenet was fired. This unbiased guy is a member John Kerry's Senior Military Advisory Group, now advising John Kerry. Late add He was also a guy who stripped the CIA.

Retired Air Force Gen. William Y. Smith; (LAT:deputy commander in chief, U.S. European Command, 1981-83. )Amplified: this guy goes all the way back to the Cuban missile crisis. He's close to 80 years old (West Point ‘48) and has been associated with Democrats all his active life. Could be one of the sincere ones, then again...

John E. Reinhardt; (LAT:professor of political science, University of Vermont, 1987-91; ambassador to Nigeria, 1971-75. ) Amplified: this guy goes all the way back to Edward R Murrow. An associate of virtually every Democrat since the 50s

Michael Sterner---(LAT:deputy assistant secretary of State for Near East affairs, 1977-1981; ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, 1974-76) Truth: a long time predictor of Arab "Moderates" being our friends. Member of Columbia University Middle East Institute which is funded in part by PLO, Saudi interests; imports pro terrorist speakers. This guy is hard core left

Ronald I. Spiers---(LAT:undersecretary-general of the United Nations for Political Affairs, 1989-1992; ambassador to Pakistan, 1981-83. ) Truth: has joined with plenty of Arabs and Palestinians in denouncing Bush II endorsement of Arial Sharon and all the latest efforts in the Israel-Palestine area. He's against the wall, the lack of PLO participation, and on and on. He is pro-PLO to a huge degree. He's also against Tony Blair.

James Daniel Phillips---(LAT: ambassador to the Republic of Congo, 1990-93; ambassador to Burundi, 1986-1990.) Truth: this guy really was an ambassador to almost everywhere at one time or another. Bush I appointed him and Clinton appointed him. Cut the guy some slack, he probably signed without any ties to the Left or Kerry.

Phyllis E. Oakley: (LAT: assistant secretary of State for intelligence and research, 1997-99.) A classic of leaving things out. Let's see, she serves on the U.N. Population Fund with such luminaries as Susan Sarandon, Bette Midler, Jean Rather, Gail Sheehy, Mrs. Cyrus Vance, and a ton of other lefties; she has spoken out against interventions (Somalia etc) with her associates Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, Alcee Hastings (as a Judge impeached and now a big time Democratic congressman); she has spoken out against discrimination against Arabs with a string of Lefties, and so. This may be just a natural function of who she is. But impartial? No way.

David D. Newsom (LAT:acting secretary of State, 1980; undersecretary of State for political affairs, 1978-1981; ambassador to Indonesia, 1973-77) He's a liberal, has spoken out against the "clumsiness" of the Bush foreign policy and is opposed to the Iraq War. Nothing wrong with the guy but he ain't unbiased.

George E. Moose (LAT:assistant secretary of State for African affairs, 1993-97; ambassador to Senegal, 1988-91). Another of the doctrinaire liberals in the foreign service. Nothing dangerous about him. His name is another in the Daisy Chain of Charities sacking the tax system and Atlantic Council of the United States, his deal is ranked very low by Charity Navigator. Unbiased? Ho ho.

Retired Air Force Gen. Merrill A. McPeak (LAT:chief of staff, U.S. Air Force, 1990-94) Truth: he is much more than that and has a long record of heroic and honorable service. Fought Clinton tooth and nail about military cutbacks and thinks Bush is totally wrong. Good guy.

Donald F. McHenry (LAT:ambassador to the United Nations, 1979-1981) Truth:.Long history of accomplishment and is an academic. He was appointed to UN by Carter. He voted for a viciously anti-Israel resolution in the UN but he may have been acting under Carter's direction; he is another "by the numbers" liberal. Believes what he signed.

Jack F. Matlock Jr. (LAT: ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1987-1991; director for European and Soviet Affairs, National Security Council, 1983-86; ambassador to Czechoslovakia, 1981-83) Truth: This is a serious player. He has written books on the collapse of the Soviet, called Reagan more than correctly in books; also called Gorbachev. If he details his opinions, read them.

Princeton N. Lyman (LAT: assistant secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, 1995-98; ambassador to South Africa, 1992-95). This is a guy who has spent most of his life focusing on Africa. He is very angry at the Bush Administration's lack of focus on what he sees is a most serious terrorist threat in Africa, and as of this writing al Qaeda could take over the Nigerian oil fields. He thinks Bush hasn't focused on the right terrorists around the world.

Samuel W. Lewis (LAT: director of State Department policy and planning, 1993-94; ambassador to Israel, 1977-1985). Truth: this guy is a legit expert on Israel and he thinks Bush has completely screwed up policy over there. Long before this "letter" he was interviewed in the Washington Post and he blasted Bush to pieces over his bad policies in Israel. Narrow focus but a serious guy.

Robert V. Keeley (LAT: ambassador to Greece, 1985-89; ambassador to Zimbabwe, 1980-84) Truth:.This is a serious guy who is very pro Palestinian. He is one of those guys who knows history and thinks the thug down the street is acting because of a similar understanding of history. Again, a very narrow focus on one area only. Not a whack job and not a hater.

H. Allen Holmes (LAT: assistant secretary of Defense for special operations, 1993-99; assistant secretary of State for politico-military affairs, 1986-89) Truth:.this was Clinton's guy who was supposed to be in charge of counter terrorism regarding WMDs. He said Clinton was doing all that could be done and so on. He also claimed that agencies were working together. Now he signs something about Bush. ???? You've got to read his testimony before the Armed Services committee to know that this guy is a total incompetent. He should have been called before the Gorelick Committee. He thinks Bush stinks? Wow.

Retired Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar (LAT: Commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, overseeing forces in the Middle East, 1991-94; deputy chief of staff, Marine Corps, 1990-94.) A serious player who was opposed to the war long before it started, for most of the reasons stated by many other Generals. He just signed what he has been saying all along. He called Chalabi a fraud quite a while back.

Arthur A. Hartman (LAT: ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1981-87; ambassador to France, 1977-1981)Truth: this could be the most serious of the serious signers. A Reagan appointee and no liberal lap dog. He has a huge reputation. His Google runs for pages. He is widely quoted.

William C. Harrop (LAT: ambassador to Israel, 1991-93; ambassador to Zaire, 1987-1991) Truth:
a persistent critic of the State Department going back to Clinton. Nobody paid any attention to him. He is just one more former State Department guy who has seen a lifetime of building alliances with dictators, Sheiks, and corrupt UN members come falling down. He feels he has wasted his life.

Charles W. Freeman Jr (LAT: assistant secretary of Defense, International Security Affairs, 1993-94; ambassador to Saudi Arabia, 1989-1992) Truth: this guy is on a crusade against the American Empire through something called "Committee for the Republic." He serves with a ton of Arabs on Middle East Policy Council, He doesn't want us to win anywhere. He writes about it. Of course he opposes Bush.

Donald B. Easum (LAT: ambassador to Nigeria, 1975-79) Truth: this guy has been ambassador to everywhere, a career State Department apparatchik. He has also done a world of good for a million or so people through his involvement in the River Blindness Foundation which is NOT one of the Daisy Chain charities. One of the people who doesn't like to see everything he's spent his life working for destroyed. Wants the old system back.

William A. DePree (LAT: ambassador to Bangladesh, 1987-1990) Truth: the only "ghost" of the bunch. Just a guy who was an ambassador and that is it.

Jeffrey S. Davidow (LAT: ambassador to Mexico, 1998-2002; assistant secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, 1996) Truth: that's what he is. Another State Department guy passing the time as well as he can.

Retired Adm. William J. Crowe Jr. (LAT: chairman, President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Committee, 1993-94; ambassador to Britain, 1993-97; chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1985-89.) Truth: Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom (as did Wesley Clark, Jessie Jackson, and a ton of others). This is a scandal ridden guy, part of the group that sold Anthrax to Saddam. Crowe now owns 13% of the company that is selling anthrax vaccine to the DoD. A sub has been paid more than $4 million and the company hasn't delivered a drop. Where's the money??? Oh, when the company was inspected it was so contaminated they were forbidden to ship anything. The funding from the Pentagon from his pals at the Joint Chiefs stinks. He has also stated that there is a 100% chance of a bio attack on the U.S. Not a trustworthy person.

Avis T. Bohlen (LAT: assistant secretary of State for arms control, 1999-2002; deputy assistant secretary of State for European affairs 1989-1991) Truth: one of those pedigreed people; her grandfather was the semi-legendary Charles "Chip" Bohlen who was ambassador to Russia when Stalin died; her mother (also named Avis) was a big shot. She is a missile hawk wants a credible defense. Another serious but lesser known player.

William C. Harrop,(LAT: ambassador to Israel, 1991-93; ambassador to Zaire, 1987-1991.) Truth: 39 years in service. Another guy who is probably pissed that all he worked for is being destroyed. Been everywhere done it all. Former ambassador to Israel and Arabia and knows the area. Is adamant about alliances, that is his history, and he will do all in his considerable power to topple Bush and return things to the U.N. France, Germany etc.

REAGAN SHOULD HAVE GONE TO JAIL OVER IRAN-CONTRA
Link to response to charge #1 HERE and response #2 HERE
IRAN CONTRA: A secret arrangement in the 1980s to provide funds to the anti-Communist Nicaraguan Contra rebels partly from profits gained by selling arms to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages held in Lebanon by Iran supporters. That's it. But of course it has a little more hair than just that.

FACTUAL BACKGROUND

The press and academia are controlled by the Left therefore much of what we read is a Left "slant". The American Left has been supporting Communist governments since the 30s. In the early 80s they wanted a non elected Communist "Sandinista" government that invaded Nicaragua from Costa Rica and Honduras in 1979 to retain power in Nicaragua. The Democrats did everything they could to keep the Sandinistas in power including passing legislation in Congress to assure the Communists were not touched by the Reagan Administration. The Sandinistas (don't call them Communists) were originally an old line revolutionary movement formed in 1962 ostensibly to kick out a dictator named Anastasio Somoza Debayle (AKA Somoza). Somoza, like all dictators was corrupt as hell, the family had been in power since 1936, and ran things in the usual way. FDR made the famous remark: "He's an SOB but he is our SOB" referring to the first Samoza, not about Trujillo as it was originally reported. The assassination of La Prensa publisher Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal by Samoza's son in 1978 meant that no matter what the Sandanistas stood for, everyone wanted the Samosa family gone. In January a nationwide strike began and the workers demanded an end to the military dictatorship.

It was on tough guy Jimmy Carter's watch that the Sandinistas launched an offensive from Costa Rica and Honduras during 1979 that finally threw the last Somoza out. They did not hold elections and the American Left approved. Instead, they established a junta. Translation: the "Sandinistas" invaded in order to throw out the dictatorship of Somoza and established a Left Wing military dictatorship. Nicaragua is a very poor country and the Sandinistas nationalized such industries as banking and mining, "postponed" elections, and moved steadily to the left eventually espousing "Marxist-Leninist" positions (not Communist to the Democrats in Congress). Ortega and his Sandinista Party was a dictatorship loved by the American Left, especially the Hollywood Left, because the government actually owned the institutions of production instead of controlling them. (I don't get the distinction either.)

By 1984 Sandanistas had taken control of practically everything in the country – mass organizations, the army, police, labor unions, and the media. They censored all freedom of speech, suspended the right of association and crushed the freedom of trade unions. They also started a "re-education" program on the Indians who lived on the Atlantic side of the country forcibly "relocating" the Indians from their land. Then like Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mugabe they used state-created famine as a weapon against these "enemies of the people." By 1983, the number of political prisoners in the Sandinistas' Nicaragua were estimated at 20,000. Numerous human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and the United Nations Human Rights Commission, have documented the atrocious record of Sandinista human rights abuses, which stood as the worst in Latin America. This is what the American Left supported and the Democratic Party wanted to remain in power.

For some reason that horrible Ronald Reagan was opposed to them.

For some side reading check this out.

Castro supposedly supported the "Sandinistas" with money and arms while they were in the jungles, but this isn't possible. Castro was broke. This support actually meant Russian support. The Sandinistas clear and stated goal was to spread Communism to the rest of Central America. Their government in Nicaragua was opposed by U.S.-supported guerrillas (Reagan support) known as Contras . In 1984, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega Saavedra (Always called "Ortega", Danny Glover's pal) won the Nicaraguan presidency in an actual election that was tainted by mistrust. Lots of opposition groups boycotted it. The arms for money and hostages occurred two years later.

HERE'S THE "SCANDAL"

The Democrats wanted the Sandinistas (oh no, not Communists) to retain power in Nicaragua. The Democratic controlled Congress passed legislation, known as the Boland amendments, that prohibited the Defense Dept., the CIA, or any other government agency from providing military aid to the Contras from Dec., 1983, to Sept., 1985 and then passed even stronger amendments. Reagan basically defied Congress and got around these limitations by using the National Security Council (NSC), which was not explicitly covered by the law, to supervise covert military aid to the Contras. Under Robert McFarlane (1983–85) and John Poindexter (1985–86) the NSC raised private and foreign funds for the Contras. This operation was directed by NSC staffer Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North. All this was legal.

The scandal part: McFarlane and Oliver North were also the central figures in a plan to secretly ship (sell) arms to Iran in exchange for hostages held in Lebanon by pro-Iranian groups. This despite a U.S. trade and arms embargo on Iran. The people involved in this deal wanted to placate "moderates" within the Iranian government figuring not only to secure the release of the American hostages held in Lebanon but to influence Iranian foreign policy in a pro-Western direction. The arms were sold. The money obtained was used to aid the Contras conducting their guerrilla war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. This transfer was in violation of the Boland amendments. The sale of arms was a violation of the arms embargo. What made it even worse was that there was bookkeeping fakery that when exposed meant that the "scandal" could not be covered up when and if anyone got wise.

Somebody did get wise. A Lebanese newspaper blew the whole arms for hostage deal out of the water; we'll leave it up to the reader to decide if "moderate" Iranians leaked it or not. Reagan went on television and vehemently denied that any such operation had occurred. He retracted the statement a week later, insisting that the sale of weapons had not been an arms-for-hostages deal. Despite the fact that Reagan defended the actions by virtue of their good intentions, his honesty was doubted. Polls showed that only 14 percent of Americans believed the president when he said he had not traded arms for hostages. At any rate the Communist supporting American Left had their meat and they went after it. Lawrence E. Walsh was appointed a special prosecutor . Congress was after Reagan and everything was done to involve him. There was some testimony implicating Reagan, Vice President Bush, and William J. Casey (former director of the CIA, who died in May, 1987). But nobody figured out the extent of the involvements. Poindexter resigned before the end of the month; North was fired. Under a grant of immunity North testified before Congress in July, that he believed Reagan was largely aware of the secret arrangement.

Although laws had been broken, and Reagan's image suffered as a result of Iran-Contra, his popularity rebounded. In 1989 he left office with the highest approval rating of any president since Franklin Roosevelt. I interpret this to mean that the American public approved of the effort against another American Left supported dictator and showed it.

Later on, criminal convictions resulted, including those of McFarlane, North, and Poindexter, but North's and Poindexter's were vacated on appeal because of immunity agreements with the Senate concerning their testimony. Former State Dept. and CIA officials pleaded guilty in 1991 to withholding information about the contra aid from Congress, and Caspar Weinberger, defense secretary under Reagan, was charged (1992) with the same offense. In 1992 then-president Bush pardoned Weinberger and other officials who had been indicted or convicted for withholding information on or obstructing investigation of the affair. It is general consensus that Weinberger was railroaded.

Whether you think this is a big deal about nothing other than going after the Communists in Central America, criminal activity on the part of a U.S. president who belongs in jail, or a Communist suporting Democratic Left that was furious that their Communist pal was under attack, the facts remain that nobody went anywhere, except for Ortega who went out of office in 2002. Reagan's poll numbers dived more than 20 points in three weeks and it took quite a while for them to recover to new highs. People now shrug their shoulders and shake their heads over this obvious violation of the law by a President who in every other respect was one of the most ethical ever. Many think that this was when he showed "he was losing it", but we will never really know. The fact that Bush I pardoned everyone seems to speak that the Iran-Contra Affair happened and that Reagan was involved. This is the only albatross the Left can hang around Reagan's Administration and they do all they can to "keep it alive" while covering up the human rights record of one more Communist government that they did everything in their power to prop up.

As a side observation: Nobody in the Reagan Administration knew how to deal with politics in the Middle East either. Had they known they would never have tried to deal with "moderates" in Iran. Nothing means anything to anyone over there and the Iranians almost succeeded in bringing Reagan down.

Sandanista acts: What the American Left Approved and Reagan opposed after the Sandanistas took over:

A "weak" judiciary continued to hamper prosecution of human rights abusers.
Discrimination against women is a "problem".
Violence against women and children, including domestic abuse and rape, remained a "problem". (If women are victimized by communists it's OK on the American Left)
Discrimination against "indigenous people" (the Indians are being totally screwed) is a "problem".
Child labor also remained a "problem".
Trafficking for forced labor and trafficking in women and girls for the purpose of forced prostitution is a "problem".
FSLN (Sandanista)leaders continued to threaten, in speeches and public statements, the use of violence for political ends.
Judges' political sympathies or acceptance of bribes reportedly often influenced judicial actions and findings.

Bad boy Ronnie. Bad boy. Oh, and biggest Sandanista supporter in U.S. Senate? John Kerry.

Was out in the Simi Valley area for a junior high graduation and the crowds were already lining the freeway at 1:30. There is a picture on Yahoo that captures it completely. Crowds that completely stopped the freeway and covered the hill. Bill Quick has a great shot of the crowd leading up to the cemetary from the freeway. The post grad party with twenty or so adults were all talking admiringly about Reagan and had been talking to their kids about him. We have all learned a lot about our 40th president this week. Totally different than the viciously lying press had ever told us. I'll bet Reagan books dominate Amazon this weekend.

Several emailers have suggested that you need to understand the 1966 race for governor of California to really "get" Reagan. This is the race where he was viciously attacked for being an actor..."he's an actor and you know who killed Lincoln don't you?"---His opponent, Pat Brown, spoken to a child. The only known book is "The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics" by Matthew Dallek; criticized for stiff writing.

You could do a lot worse than reading Peter Schweizer's "Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism". Many of the other books, like his letters, suffer from rushed editorial practices that don't "fill out" certain subjects even though the material was available.

The bad news for Bush out of this graduation party talk is that almost all commented regarding his seeming lack of any authority in government, his failure to fire people, and the fact that everybody who leaves trashes him. This funeral only serves to remind everyone how lacking in basic communication skills our current president is.

And as all of us now know, the no class Clintons both appeared to have "nodded off" for National TV, showing publicly their contempt. Naturally the best large photo of the snoozers is HERE. However FOX has a picture of the same two people appearing to be sleeping in a much wider frame context. It appears that they are standing. paragraph is false. They were not sleeping

See the LA Times shot from another angle to include 20 other people. They were caught looking like they were sleeping. I'm inclined to cut the Clintons some slack here. Nobody in the picture looks good. Don't rush to judgement. Looks like a Right Wing hit piece without checking. They were NOT sleeping.

As you know, I'm a reader of super spy Herb Meyer but have failed to note his recommended reading of a person he considers "never wrong". I have taken some time during this day of National Mourning to read what she has published. I urge your to take a trip through ten or so pieces listed here when you have some time. She's consistently called the shots. Start at the bottom and work up, you will see now CIA Director Tenet was wrong from the start and stayed wrong. Why he was allowed to stay on is one of the great mysteries of our time. I hope you read her stuff, it's an education.

The perfect documentation of my piece yesterday is run by Sullivan today. The Left is composed of pretentious cowards afraid to do anything, including challenging the slaughter of millions. It's a cabal, against Reagan and now Bush.

Link to Response #1 is here
"The Russia would have collapsed anyway story"---a look at Reykjavik--It's Reagan, an old line labor leader and negotiator vs Gorbachev, a communist to his core and under pressure at home. A man who never negotiated with anyone in his life. He gave orders or followed them.

"Not winning the Cold War" absurdity ignores the fact that the policy in Washington had been MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), Detente (Let's be friends while armed to the teeth), and Balance of Terror. Reagan thought living like that was MAD. Reagan as early as 1958 had been articulating and writing on the concept of attacking Soviet Communism economically. He wanted to win, not just hang around "saber rattling". Win! Something not one Lefty wanted to do; they were afraid. By 1986 Reagan had already done great damage to the Soviet economy; he had "allowed" the Russians to steal a phony computer code which the Russians had put into gas and oil pipelines. The stolen code resulted in the largest explosion inside Russia since they tested an atomic bomb. He had cut off credits. He had made hard currencies almost impossible for them to get so they couldn't trade effectively. He had run them out of Afghanistan at huge cost to them. He wanted to meet with Soviet leaders, but "they kept dying on me" said Reagan referring to the endless string of Soviet leaders who died of old age while in office.

When Gorbachev took over and met with Thatcher she told Reagan, "I think we can talk with this guy." Reagan met briefly with him in Switzerland and proposed a zero zero solution; zero weapons on each side which was basically shrugged off. But groundwork had been laid and they parted. Gorbachev requested another meeting to be held in Reykjakik Iceland.

Now here is where everyone (all the liberals running the media) misses one of the great strengths of Ronald Reagan. He had been the president of the Screen Actors Guild labor union. In this capacity he had to negotiate contracts with three of the toughest bastards in business. Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia, was a thug and a real gangster think Al Swearinger the whore house saloon owner in the HBO Series "Deadwood" and you've got Harry Cohn). Everybody was afraid to cross him because they realistically feared him. Louis B. Mayer was the toughest businessman on the planet and you crossed him at peril for your future, meaning you would never work again. Jack Warner of the Warner Brothers was a super ruthless guy who violated labor agreements whenever he could. These three guys had already busted one huge Hollywood craft union combine called the CSU that the actors and teamsters did not join. This CSU was lead by a Communist (Herbert Sorrell, not proven but close) and the strike exploded into real violence all across Los Angeles that involved the communist Harry Bridges led longshoremen and the newspaper guild which was regarded as a communist union too.

Strikebreakers and goons "were armed with chains, bolts, hammers, six inch pipes, brass knuckles, wooden mallets, and battery cables." Steel-helmeted county sheriffs were armed with "30-30 Garrand rifles and two were weighted down with an arsenal of tear-gas bombs."

Cutting to the chase, the studios eventually "settled" with a gangster controlled IATSE craft union and the strike was crushed. Gangsters took a huge role in Hollywood instead of Communists. A Teamster Union Leader (Joe Tuohy) immediately became a high official in one of the studios, and so on.

Reagan went nose to nose with these really tough guys who had made deals with gangsters who could blow your brains out if they didn't like your hair style. He did this on a regular basis and hammered out contracts that were increasingly favorable to actors. It was said his "charm" was impenetrable. He was always in "good spirits" and the gangsters probably liked him a little. Many think that the demise of his movie career was caused partly by the real anger the studio heads bore him for his role in the negotiations of the 40s.

At any rate the "negotiations" between Reagan and Gorbachev was like Tyson vs the referee. Gorbachev didn't know who he was in with. He entered the negotiations with no strength at all. Reagan also knew from super CIA agent Herb Meyer that the Soviet economy was crumbling on the spot. SDI (Star Wars) was key. Gorbachev and Reagan came close, but Reagan wouldn't budge on Star Wars. Not one inch. Keep in mind this old labor negotiator was bargaining with nothing. There was no Star Wars. Reagan knew it. Knew it was still a laboratory concept but he acted like he was going to pull the whole union out on strike. Gorbachev demanded that Star Wars "stay in the Laboratory" but he had no bargaining chip, nothing to negotiate with; Reagan saw him as Harry Cohn on a bus stop bench ten cents short of the fare; he could take the studio. Finally they parted:

"It is a question of one word," Reagan said. Gorbachev agreed, saying, "It's 'laboratory,' or goodbye." Gorbachev could not go home and tell his people that he had agreed to eliminate ballistic missiles while allowing Americans to develop a space-based defense system. As a tight-lipped Reagan escorted the general secretary to his limousine, Gorbachev said, "I don't know what more I could have done."
"You could have said yes," replied the president.

The old line labor union negotiator knew there would be more. There always is a settlement. Eventually. Well this time there wasn't. The company (Soviet Union) went broke within three years. What every left wing labor leader (which is what Reagan was in the 40s) dreams of. In fact Barry Goldwater thought he was a Communist.

Every liberal on the planet would have agreed with Gorbachev and prolonged the enslavement of millions for another ten years. None of them, like in nobodeeee, wanted to win other than Ronald Reagan. Reagan WANTED to win, and that is why the Left hates him. They hate winners.

Reagan won the Cold War and nobody else.

Some side reading on the Hollywood strikes of the 40s is available around the web, much of it is Communist stuff, but all is interesting. I didn't go into the details in this piece.

Insults lead to death in the Middle East. Reports from the Arab League Summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, when Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia exchanged insults in open session, accusing each other of selling out to colonial powers launched an assassination plot against the Saudi Prince. Pipes has the story, but this has to affect oil prices. We are dealing with primitive thugs.

"Right Wing" FOX is all over Rumsfeld AND Bush for their total confusion over Iraq. Here we can learn plenty from Reagan. Reagan formed his ideas over a period of thirty years before he became president. He really knew Communism, really had solid ideas about lowering taxes and what the 90% tax rate was doing to America. He was fixed. Nothing was going to get him off the target. He had written and formulated his ideas over time.

Bush and everyone else in Washington is not prepared in the least for Islamofacism, terrorism, or any way to deal with it. Once again O'Reilley was all over the "White House" in an interview with Robert Kaplan of Atlantic. Kaplan was also angry. He was "embedded" with the Marines who ended up in Fallujah for eight weeks. He said our Marines are fighting with one hand tied behind their backs in deference to the "confused" politics in Washington. If FOX is going there you can bet your ass that Bush and Rumsfeld are out to lunch here. Kaplan did not argue with the O'Reilley statement that the brass are fed up with Rumsfeld.

After we get Reagan in the ground we will still have this meandering President and his "brilliant" Defense Secretary hoping their seeing eye dogs show up to bail them out. The real problem is that nobody in either party has a clue. The Democrats just want to feed the crocodile. The Republicans want to defeat a hundred million primitive fanatics on the cheap.

We have real problems and I don't see a solution.

The Roman Legions used the short sword for centuries to stab and hack at opponents. It was effective because the stabbing motion could disable an enemy (peer competior to the Kerry crowd) and allow a Roman soldier to move on to the next peer competitor and respectfully adjust his ability to compete. Reagan has been disabled since 1992, but perhaps because they feared that "The Great Communicator" could somehow fight back they let him alone. Not now. The short swords are out. Stabbing thrusts punched from mostly webzines, the New York and LA Times, as well as the Networks are meant to disabble a corpse. It's as if a dead Ronald Reagan could still menace them with his smile. Like he might sit up in his coffin and destroy them with

...all in all I'd rather be here than in a government program."

The current attacks are an election tactic by the Left. They don't want Bush to get any traction from Reagan. The networks all put out the same deficit story last night, so it can't be an accident. The charges being made against him are two: that he lied about a deficit by lowering taxes and created a $4 trillion dollar debt, and that the Soviet Union would have collapsed anyway; that Reagan had little or nothing to do with it. Side issues of the "crime" of Iran Contra, the usual accusations of racism, ignoring AIDS, and hurting little people fill out the dance ticket.

TODAY I'll examine just the 4 trillion deficit. Twenty million "tax generating" new jobs were created for a deficit cost of $4 trillion, probably not an accurate figure because lots of the money went to government entitlements, but let's work with the 4 tril. Dividing it out, twenty million jobs were created at a cost of $200,000 per job. Some of the jobs were new businesses. Microsoft was nothing. Software was nothing. Computers were toys. There was no Dell. HP made calculators. Biotech??? Hi Tech? There was only Texas Tech and Georgia Tech. But business creation exploded. Each one of those new jobs and businesses in turn paid back in taxes and job creation how much? . Nobody can say, but Reagan's policies certainly created more tax revenues EVENTUALLY than the cost of the twenty million new jobs.

Deregulation was part of the package. The Deregulation of the phone company in 1984 reduced telephone costs to the consumer by $40 billion per year. When Reagan took office it was illegal to have a phone answering machine. If you wanted an answering machine you had to hire an answering service at a cost of $30 per month and up. You HAD to have a phone manufactured by Bell approved companies (Western Electric out west) and they rented phones to you at a fixed cost every month. Private switchboards were not allowed, they had to be approved by the phone company. So you have to count the amount of money pumped back into consumer pockets as part of the "deficit".

At the time Reagan was elected I was the national sales manager for The American Entrepreneur Association (Entrepreneur Magazine). It was a very small operation. We had great product aside from the magazine. We produced manuals on how to start and operate more than 100 businesses. When the 70% tax was cut to 28%, our company grew 300% in a matter of 6 months. Suddenly all kinds of people decided to go into their own businesses because it finally made economic sense. We went from grossing about $500,000 per month to nearly $1,000,000 per week. Our customers were black, Arab, Asian, white, and everything else you can think of. That tax cut was raw meat for millions of people who wanted to start their own businesses. I remember talking to a woman who "didn't understand" a manual she had bought from us. She was telling me that she just couldn't start a business because she wasn't educated. I remember that I told her to read the manual carefully and if there was one word in it about having to be educated I'd give her a 200% refund. The SBA had told her she wasn't qualified; they told her in effect that she was too stupid to go into business for herself. The manual told her how to start her particular business from her house at a total cost of three or four hundred dollars. I called her back a week later and she told me she was going downtown to get her business license in the morning; she could hire a bookkeeper when she needed one; she bought another manual we had on promoting a business for no money. She made the decision when she simply factored in the deductions for running a small business under the new tax laws (simple math). The tax cut "made her feel good". Made her feel that anything was possible for her. Anything is possible for any of us, we just need the frame of mind to try. Reagan gave us that. Reagan gave that lady the confidence to try.

The four trillion was a creative deficit, eventually. The stock market advanced twenty per cent per year for more than eight years, increasing wealth exponentially and generating even more taxes; capital gains and income. The Dow went from under 1,000 to more than 2,000; the S&P rose 113%, the smaller indexes gained even more. Unemployment went from 10% to just over 6% (at that time 6% was considered full employment and anything lower than that was supposed to be ruinously inflationary).

The question for us today is only this: why the nastiness about our 40th prez? It's because Reagan cut the government out of the success story. He asked and answered the question: isn't it better to put policies in place that will allow individuals to create our own jobs and opportunities than to have government do it with make work programs? Don't the private sector jobs last longer than a bridge building project? Yes, he ran up a 4 trillion dollar deficit. I think what was produced was more than worth it. A GI Bill for regular people.

The current criticism is not over the deficit. The criticism is over cutting government out of the process. The Left now attacking Reagan would have taxed everyone to death and put people to work on government projects. Reagan didn't play that game. He is still the moron to the Left. Even dead and buried he is a menace. He must be stopped. Then so must Jefferson. People have said that if Thomas Jefferson was alive today he'd be in jail. If it were up to liberals that is where Reagan would always have been.

Tomorrow I'll look at the Soviet Union collapse.

Still another "White House" blunder The Kurds were left out of the resolution so they may walk. You have no idea how stupid this is. The Turks would like to kill every one of them in a micro-second as would the Shias. Without some kind of counter balance they have no chance. Bush ain't no Reagan. He has no plan, no core idea, nothing for the area. My old post on the conflicts in the area is HERE

Every media outlet that is Right of center is pointing out how filled with hate the media on the Left has become. How morally depraved they are. How superior the rest of us are. But what about us? What about the writing that is to the Right? Kerry is "Fuck Face", Shit for Brains, French Piece of Shit, and so on. The Democrats are traitors, scum, liars and whatever.

Once I call you a liar, them's fightin' words. And nothing moves forward from there. Literary shit fights are not new in this country. Read any of the old newspapers before the advent of government controlled radio and TV. You will read the same and worse. Starting with Jefferson the papers were vicious; politicians "bought" their own papers so they could lie back. Falsifications, accusations, and disgusting personal attacks were the staple of 18th and 19th century journalism, tactics that carried through the early part of the 20th century til radio and then TV ended it because they were "public airwaves" and government controlled what was said. We just haven't grown up with a pamphleteering type of press. The web has allowed all our bar conversations, filled with school yard expletives, dirty jokes, and urges to kill or maim a politician to be "out there" for all to hear and read. All our wishes for the death of a political figure we disagree with are published. The Democrat websites over the past few days have been disgusting, but are we any better? This is bar talk brought out of the alcohol fumes and into the public air for all of us to hear is just new to us. It's well to keep in mind that when we read the Democrats we read ourselves too, it's just that we on the Right pretend a higher plane.

Reagan's death has made me realize how bad I have been in this arena and how much more effective I can be if I allow a better side some sway. It is pretentious beyond reality to say that I have not become part of the sewer media. Because that is what the web is, or has become.

I'm moving to a better sewer.

READ MY LIPS IRAQ DOES NOT HAVE A DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT, not only are all these people appointed, lots of them live and work in the U.S. Everybody I'm reading seems to think this is democratic. It's a step toward a possible democracy. The Shia majority wants a Shia state governed by Shria Law and you better be ready for it. The current government is NOT Iraqi, it's exiles. Not a democracy by any stretch of the imagination.

Iraq thanks U.S.---TWICE but Bush Hating Media doesn't report it. Read this.

I'll defer to the experts here who say today's 150 point Dow move and huge NASDAQ move are related to "feeling good" about Reagan one more time. I personally think it's more related to oil prices hitting $38. I'd remind you that we are in a trading range still, with the lower end being pierced pretty good for a few days. As a political aside here I'd caution you. The communication skills of this White House are still pathetic, especially when compared to "the Great Communicator" and this rally, if it is a Reagan Rally, will drop like a rock. Nothing has changed. Bush's problems are of his own personal shortcomings in that he is the least articulate politician since Ford.

We will have to see. The nastiness of the Media Elite and the Left are still to be seen regarding our late President. They still hate Bush and there will be no civility from them. I say that either this week's hiatus by Bush will somehow magically create a man who can simply talk to people or it will be more of the same. I predict it will be more of the same.

The trading and investing rules still apply. Just look at this rally as one more set of numbers, pay no attention to the real emotion you may feel, and stay detached. The employment numbers are good, the indicators are good, but just look at the numbers generated by the market itself and not the crap coming from all media, websites, blogs, and your local drug dealer.

From the Left today: Reagan did not end the Cold War, he prolonged it. He was responsible for "progressive" (Communist Governments) being illegally eliminated in Central America; for the defeatist Left's version you can go here for just spin without foul language. Somebody has written that somewhere along the line Liberals have lost all courage to try anything other than hide out and hope everything will go away; we call it feeding the crocodile. Anyway, Reagan and Thatcher did nothing that wouldn't have happened anyway, the sources for all this are the old line Communists from Russia. Have a great day, but pay attention to what is going on and let Reagan sort of rest.

BTW: FUCKING DETROIT beat the Lakers Some are blaming Bush, others Kerry. In Detroit they credit Reagan. And you can always feel better by getting the real news from PAGE SIX; like this doozy with a great pic

"PLANET of the Apes" starlet Estella Warren went bananas at Scores the other night, performing a steamy, topless lap dance for boyfriend Peter Berg. The model-turned-actress shocked patrons when she whipped off her top during a bawdy bump-and-grind for her man. The maitre d' spotted Warren's striptease and ran over to demand that she cover up.

Now THERE'S REAL NEWS. ANOTHER BTW: I've been saying for months that John Kerry's awful wife Terayyyyzzzah is a horror story that will destroy him if nothing else will. Check this out, her speech delivered an hour late at a Dem fund raiser.

Now the Iraqis are accusing the USA of covering up the Oil for Food Program Make no mistake, tens of thousands of Iraqis died as a result of this scandal, and it looks like Bush is trying to cover it up. This thing not only has legs, it is growing arms. After all of us get through feeling bad about Reagan we might find that the Iraqis are so pissed they might throw us out.

Meanwhile the Arabs are calling Reagan a criminal; they must be reading American Left websites.

"....an economist is a fellow with a Phi Beta Kappa key on one end of his chain and no watch on the other. That's why they never know what time it is." Peggy Noonan has a terrific recollective column on Reagan today. You could do worse than read it. Then go to Nancy Reagan's last essy on her husband. "They broke the mold after they made Ronnie."

How Ronald Reagan Cleaned the Communists from the Screen Actors Guild and effectively ended the Communist Party in Hollywood.

First, understand that the "Hollywood Ten of the 40s were not Liberals, they were Communists. They lied and dodged the questions before the HUAC; the media to this day claims they were NOT Communists. They WERE Communists. There were two groups: the 1947 Hollywood Ten who were Communists and actual agents taking orders from the Comintern; they have admitted so and in fact bragged about it. Then there were the "left overs", the Communist agents who were not called, and people who stayed cocktail party Communists through the fifties.

The "Ten" had plenty of company. All admitted later outside meetings that they had loaded scripts with party line messages.htm Others felt the Communist Party was a "social club" (gulags, the slaughter of millions, etc., was a "social club" to these jerks), others admitted they structured scripts and scenes at the "direction of the Comintern". In other words they HAD to stick together and defy Congress or risk going to jail. Many went to jail. Ronald Reagan was a member of a Communist Front organization, exposed by hostorian Arthur Schlesinger, until this time. He resigned "when he found out what they were up to". He remained a registered Democrat til 1962.

The Hollywood Left and the Communists rallied around a cry of "Right of Free Association"; that is anyone has a right to believe in anything they want to believe in and to associate withomever they choose. The scream is still so loud that the truth can't be heard. The truth is that "Free Association" has no connection with working for a foreign power, which the CPUSA clearly was. And that foreign power advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. That's what the Hollywood Ten was doing. Period. Check everything including the Venona intercepts but leave out Sparticus and the rest of the Left Wing references on Google.

Getting back to Reagan, the question arises around what the 50s Communists were doing and what they were capable of doing

First, they had the same "Red List" that exists today; only Left people would be hired if they had anything to say about it. Secondly, they tried to write movies in which the business people were evil; priests and other clergy did bad things, conservatives were old villains, and they wrote movies about an underdog with "a social conscience" (liberal) who challenged the horrible people and beat them. The "film noir" was mostly about the evil of all governments. The writers, directors, and actors came out of The Group Theatre in New York and assembled on the West Coast in "The Actors Lab". But what exactly did they do that was "un-American"? Did they advocate the overthrow of the American Government by force or violence? Did they send money to Moscow to fund the KGB? Were they engaged in activities that could result in a revolution? It is now a matter of record that the Communist Party USA was under the direct control of Moscow and Stalin. Something all Lefties deny.

What the 50's Hollywood Left and the Communists wanted to do was organize Actors, Writers, Directors, and all the crafts under one single union dominated and controlled by Communists. This single union could then dictate content of scripts, casting, and employment. They could sledge hammer all negotiations with the threat of a unified walkout over any and every issue that Moscow wanted. This grandiose plot never got past the usual phony Hollywood "let's have a meeting" stage once Reagan stepped in. The Hollywood "activists" then as now lacked the guts to really follow through when it was their careers that they would have to put at risk. They were mostly cocktail party limp wristed big mouth fakes who could only operate within a group. They stuck with the mob of Lefties. Ronald Reagan alone stopped the Screen Actors Guild Lefties and Communists in their tracks and effectively ended the plot. He was not part of a group.

This is what went down and what made Reagan "someone to watch". Reagan was a registered Democrat; he was a New Deal Democrat in the FDR mold and president of the Screen Actors Guild union . He could never have been elected had he not "been in the club". Back in the 1957-58 period the Communists in the Guild wanted to combine with Communist dominated AFTRA (the TV and Radio people) to form one giant union of actors. They then would combine with the equally communist members of the Directors and Writers Guilds and form one Giant Hollywood Union that would control scripts, actors, and directors; their fantasy was to make Hollywood an "agit prop" arm of the Left.

The first step was to be the takeover of the Actors Unions by uniting them. The reasons the Communists and their pals gave for this uniting of unions were that medical insurance would be better and cheaper, credit union would be stronger with more members, and a contract could be negotiated that would be so strong that no producer, network, or studio would dare step out of line.

Reagan and a few others in the Guild were hip to what the Communists masquerading as Democratic Liberals really wanted. Reagan had an ace to play and waited. He knew that actors in Hollywood couldn't negotiate contracts for newscasters in Des Moines, disc jockeys in Memphis, and announcers in Dallas any more than the aforementioned radio and live TV people could negotiate contracts for actors on sound stages all over the world. He didn't play the card early. He allowed the Communists and their allies to bring the unification issue from committee to a SAG meeting for a vote, a vote they "knew" they would win. How do I know? I know because I was a Left Wing young asshole on the committee. I didn't know shit about Communists, I knew a lot of the committee members were "Left" but I thought their stated reasons for uniting unions were valid. I had no idea of what was really going down. I only knew that the Lefties on the committee hated Reagan's guts. I didn't know why.

HOW REAGAN DID IT.
The motion to combine unions was to be brought up at the SAG meeting held at the Hilton Hotel Ballrooms in Beverly Hills. Attendance was a record for that time because the subject of Union Unification was of interest to everybody, the stars didn't show of course because they are always too good to associate with day players. Reagan allowed the motion to come to the floor and be seconded. He then showed his real political savvy. He threw the floor open to all discussion without any restraints on the free speech of anyone other than a three minute time limit. This happened at around 8:15PM.

Just imagine several thousand whacked out actors, many on the drugs of the time; alcohol, pot, and "bennies"; on release from their therapists; nut cases on Left and Right; as well as the opinionated semi-educated and the well educated who think they know everything, getting into a "discussion". It went on. And on. And on. Eight thirty became Nine. Nine became ten. Ten became eleven. And the endless accusations, pontifications, prepared and unprepared statements droned on. Everyone was ready to nod off. The "discussion" was in the never never land of actor pot dreams.

Reagan siezed the "moment" of maximum exhaustion. He took the floor on a "point of order" (and trust me, not one actor in a thousand had the foggiest notion of what a "point of order" was). He did 45 seconds of really impassioned oratory. He asked questions: "Do we want a union run by thugs from back east like the Teamsters? Do we want a bunch of stupid disk jockeys telling us how long we rehearse? Do we want a bunch of news readers (snide as hell) telling us what our working conditions on remote locations in the jungle should be?" Do we want anybody but actors decding what actors should have as a contract? And he immediately "called the question" (another thing not one actor in a thousand knew anything about). The only people to vote in favor of union unification were the Communists and Lefties.

That was the end of the Communist "plan" to take over the Hollywood unions. The two actors unions didn't combine until a few years ago, and then only in a carefully crafted way which was eventually tossed out.
.
AN END NOTE:
The 1947 Commies, the people who went before the HUAC and "stood up" (lied) were not brave. First, they "stood up" in 1947, long before Joe McCarthy, but during the time that Nixon exposed Alger Hiss as a Russian spy (Venona Link); an accusation now proven by old Soviet documents. The focus of the Left was that Nixon was lying and that Hiss was innocent. The "Ten" were called up and there was a huge left opposition, but the country was convinced of the guilt of Hiss and the committee had broad public support. This is what producer (Salt of the Earth, 1954) Paul Jerrico had to say when asked the inevitable question, "In the event of a war between Russian and America, would you support the United States?". He stood mute. Reagan became a target of choice for all Liberals after the union vote. He registered as a Republican in 1962

A great LINK to Reagan's early thinking regarding the economic vulnerability of the Soviet Empire and his ideas as early as the 50s.

"You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done."

And the press that slobbers over his death now, never stopped calling him a dope.

"When the Lord calls me home ... I will leave with the greatest love for this country of ours and eternal optimism for its future," he wrote on Nov. 5, 1994. "I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead."

The Left will always hate the man who killed Communism, but the rest of us around the world can thank God he came along. We know. They don't. Then there is Reagan's opinion:

"You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream-the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, "The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits."

Let's hope there will be another Reagan and may God forgive those people on the Left who attempt to ridicule and dishonor him. I am feeling a deep sense of personal loss, as if a close friend or relative had died. Forgive me if I'm totally pissed at the people who insult him.

Warning: addictive game link

CREATIVE TALENT WANTED

Air America seeking LIBERAL RADIO COMEDY WRITERS. Must be able to switch all dumb blonde jokes to stupid American jokes, switch all racist jokes to Republican or American soldier jokes; Example switch from anti Black joke:

What do you call an American Soldier with a wooden leg? A: Shit on a stick.";
"Why do more Republicans get hit by cars in the winter? A: They are easier to spot."

These two jokes got us more email praise than our Saddam Hussein Legal Defense Fund show. In order to broaden our base we need more pro-Muslim material like this one that got our show blockbuster ratings in Dearborn Michigan:

"How many jews can you fit in a VW Beetle?
A: 54, two in the front, two in the back, and fifty in the ashtray.

This also got us a donation from an Arab charity. You need to be able to write snappy satirical songs comparing cowardly American soldiers to brave French soldiers and German Gestapo heroes; this sample rap lyric got a standing ovation at Berkeley

None of ouer soljers is brave like da French
They don't have the qualities, just sit on the bench
The French be brave cuz dey growed up in France
Our soljers is just white boys with small dicks in dere pants.

; composers must be able re-arrange all the old Nazi marches to bouncy happy polkas and waltzes (The Horst Wessel Polka, The Dead Jew Boogie etc.), you must be able to write hilarious comedy bits about teachers being raped by Republicans, urproarious routines about home invasions, street gang murders, and violence against animals, comedy sketches about abortion, Global Warming killing millions, and other issue orented laughs and chuckles. Anti-Semitic college students will be given preference; anti-white African Americans will be guranteed employment equal to their representation in the population; women will be over represented; support for genocidal Middle Eastern dictators will not be reasons for exclusion (torture chamber jokes, so long as they are not hateful, will help spread understanding and diversity; the "What do you tell a Jewish bitch with one black eye?" joke is still a torture chamber classic and got big yuks at the Move On dot Org rally for Islamic Jihad). Pay is negotiable depending on oil prices coming down.

DuToit strikes. I'd only add that Kerry apparently will name the world's biggest feminist moron to head the Joint Chiefs. He has her on his military advisory staff now. Her name is Claudia Kennedy, the first female three-star general -- a feminist famous during the Clinton years for charging a fellow general (whose advancement she hoped to stop) with "inappropriate touching." This is the same feminist moron who once bragged to West Point cadets that "this is not your father's Army anymore!" She doesn't like the word "enemy"; she relies instead on the term "peer competitor." Another "accomplishment" of hers was the COO program. And what does a special forces soldier learn in COO? Why COO stands for Consideration of Others. We have to be considerate of terrorists world wide. Her allies include Hillary Clinton who sits on the Armed Services Committee. Kerry increasingly looks like the worst of the Political Correctness of the Clinton Administration and no economic brains at all. Ten million (now only nine) new jobs so we can import six million new unskilled immigrants to fill them? Wow.

Over the next few months, I hope to write a fair bit about the dominant feature of our political life: polarization. I hope to figure out how deeply split the nation is, and what exactly it is we are fighting about ? questions that leave me, at present, confused. Simon links to

this piece from the op ed pages of the NYT today written by David Brooks. Well worth the read and well worth thinking about. I too have been wondering about it. If you would check the newspapers of the 40's and 50's you'd be astonished at how many of today's wild lefties are taking the same positions the reactionary Right took back then. The only thread that I can see is the broad one of economic control from government and the lack of it. Republicans used to be isolationist, now it's the Left. The entire purpose of the Left of the "Greatest Generation" was to have an EU formed so that no more European Wars could pull the world to a conflagration. They wanted trade. They would fight to stop an imperialism. There is no way the old Left would allow the massive starvation in Africa. There is no way the old Left would have permitted Saddam to so much as START what now may turn out to be a worse slaughter than previously imagined. My hunch is that when the Left went so far Left that they were supporting communist governments and movements over democratic movements things began to change, but nobody in the political parties caught on. Hence supporting the Communist Sandanistas in Nicaragua was seen as the same thing as supporting workers in the work place, etc. We have a confused electorate. The Left is the Right of the 40s and 50s, a fascist control of the University system and news outlets, hostile toward all religion and so on. The Right supports free trade and is demanding freedom of speech in the university system as well as news rooms. The Right supports rights to get out of the Public School System, demands teachers be better, demands that kids learn while the Left "supports" a failed teachers union. I hope Brooks writes more. I'm confused too.

Emailer William F. sent me a missive from the fringes of the Left that apparently has currency there. Dated 6/4, the piece is by the Lefty, Alexander Cockburn, and is typical of the crap that is coming out of both extremes in our country these days. The Cockburn site claims twenty million viewers and could be easily titled "Godisapig dot com". Out of deference to all writers, I won't quote his entire piece but you can go there. He says
1. that Bush is insane,
2. that the White House is like Nixon's in the "Last Days"
Then spins a tale of a "Richard III" nightmare, without the limp but with a hump on Bush's back called Christianity and God. A short reminder here that Richard III is a story of pure fiction about the real King Richard that Shakespeare made up to please Queen Elizabeth and get more funding for his theatre. Perhaps Cockburn is seeking funding from King George (Soros)for his theater of the absurd. You can link to the entire pile of puke HERE. The plagiarized source of the attack is Capitol Hill Blue and you can link to the original article. I quote one short paragraph to demonstrate the total absence of sources

"It reminds me of the Nixon days," says a longtime GOP political consultant with contacts in the White House. "Everybody is an enemy; everybody is out to get him. That's the mood over there."

You will note that even the anonymous sources use anonymous sources, a new record. More point:

3 Goes into obscene tirades and calls Democrats enemies of the state.
4. Links Bush to a drunken Nixon and implies that a crazy person has his finger on the nuclear b utton
5. Claims Bush fired Tenet in a fury after Tenet challenged him at a meeting.
6. Claims that Bush calls people "fucking assholes" in front of other staff, and/or "unpatriotic" or "anti-American."

All anonymously sourced. It is becoming very clear that Christianity is the demon to the Left, and you ought to read Cockburn's very short piece to see it. This is a "hit piece" without a single named source. Can internet libel be the coming thing?

Simon has what sounds like a great drink recipe. The recipe leads me to the "getting loaded ritual", something that pot doesn't really have any more; I mean you can buy it from some loser at the Post Office these days. In my old days "scoring shit" had a sort of ritual that made getting loaded sort of exciting. You "knew somebody" who had "good shit" (there was only two kinds in my youth: good shit and bad shit). We (always "we" because it was part of the party) would drive to a darkened street that contained six or eight cookie cutter apartment buildings, locate the address, then go around the block six times "checking for the heat" before parking a block away from our "connection's" pad. Now, this is really cool. We'd walk up a flight or two of stairs to the apartment. The "connection" would answer the door. The connection always wore sunglasses, I mean that was the deal, nobody would deal with a connection that didn't look cool at midnight. After a pause, he would let us in. He always had this mysterious piece either sitting on the floor or on the arm of a chair; the mysterious piece usually wore shades too. What the tip off was to "really hip" as opposed to just "cool" was if she was nodding her head in time with Chet Baker or Shorty Rogers jazz records playing softly in the background. Some really cool connections had their shade masked chick answer the door and just stare at us for a minute while allowing us to check out her body, (while moving slightly in time with Chet and Shorty in the background) now that was insane; I'd always rather deal with a connection that had a hot babe answering the door. Buying good shit while I had an erection was the coolest. The connection never introduced his chick and she would never speak to anyone either, we would always presume the shit our connection was going to sell us was so strong that it rendered women speechless, and therefore an easy lay. In those days we bought it in nickel bags ($5) or "a dime" ($10 baggie) and without much conversation he'd look at us and inquire, "nickel"? Then, and this was always so cool, he would go to the hiding place for his stash which was something like inside the leg of a kitchen table. So we'd help him turn the table over and he'd unscrew the leg and pull out a nickel bag from a literal treasure trove of "good shit". Then we'd all sit around and take "hits" from his own personal shit, tell a joke or two and leave.

That was the "pot" ritual. The drink ritual as described by Simon is much more sociable and actually just as much fun. It would be even more fun if Daiquiris a la mode de Simon were illegal and you faced five years in the pen for drinking them.

But you can't have a total ritual anymore.

It's the Republicans.

Oil and gasoline prices Here are a few facts on gasoline and the mis-interpreted expansion in refinery "capacity". Maximum refinery capacity is 90 per cent because they always shut down for maintenance and for the required resetting for the environmentally required mixes for every area. We are getting as much gasoline from our refineries as is possible; OPEC production could increase 100 percent and we'd still only produce the gasoline we do now.

We currently import 35% of our gasoline from Europe, because WE CANNOT refine enough. Why does Europe have more refining capacity than we do? Our jerk environmentalists and nuclear power.

Steven den Beste has a post about the fallacy of "new" fuel sources. Long but thorough, as usual. Note: den Beste link is now correct

Another quater million new jobs created in May.

Nonfarm payroll employment rose by 248,000 in May, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 5.6 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. The May increase in payroll employment follows gains of 346,000 in April and 353,000 in March (as revised). Job growth in May again was widespread, as increases continued in construction, manufacturing, and several service-providing industries.

The Democrats have nothing to talk about other than Tenet and Iraq. More than a million new jobs in four months can do that.

Tenet---his fault or ours? The "reports" from the Gorelik committee are going to blame the CIA. In fact the fault is Congress's. It was they who castrated the agency back in 1976 and continued when Bush I cut the funding for CIA drastically, through Clinton. We elect the Congress. Now we will have the patriots like Pelosi, Clinton, Kerry, etc. "reforming" the CIA. There is no way these super-Left politicians will allow anyone strong to head the agency. The person will have to support abortion, parental leave, diversity, and all the rest; precisely what got us here. Bush will have to prove that he interviewed Blacks, Hispanics and women to head the agency before the new head can be approved. If you think this is fantasy, check this link courtesy of Terpsboy. On the plus side of the CIA etc., is that there has not been another terrorist attack since 9/11 and that has to count for something; just check out this, the latest terror attack in a Moscow shopping mall so the CIA has done some things right. The CIA didn't trust Chalabi from day one and it may turn out that overriding that concern was a huge mistake. Some of the "spin" going on now is that the bureaucracy is full of Democrats who wanted to stab Bush in the back. Well, Bush could have fired every Democrat in the place when elected and he chose to keep both Tenet and that moron Minetta. I have been super-critical of Bush's inability to fire people and Tenet clearly should have been fired. But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the ENTIRE agency let us down, as did the FBI (Robert Hanssen), but they played within the rules set by Congress. NRO has a good piece today, and has a clear focus on the "softness" of the intel as well as the fact that leaks from both agencies who only police themselves have cost us thousands of lives.

It is a mess, but one created in large part by Congress.

A little perspective on Tennet Sometime back I posted the following and referred to super spy Meyer who was gracious enough to endorse what I wrote:

We are faced with the reality of gathering intelligence from inside a tribal culture both in Iraq and the entire Middle East. This is why we are continually surprised by Muslim groups. Going back to WWII and the Cold War you will note that dam near every spy of note on both sides were people who turned against their own governments. Note the Burgess-Maclean "Cambridge Group" etc. in Britain and all the Hiss-Rosenberg etc. guys in the Roosevelt administration. We had many top Nazis and Kremlin people feeding us from inside their governments too. We had no actual spies crack those countries. We had racial similarities, language skills, and people who could easily assimilate into the cultures of both Germany and Russia who could spy, but no outside spies were able to get anywhere. We and they had handlers to work with the turncoats. I cannot recall any story of a U.S. spy penetrating Japan; we cracked their codes, not their political structure. We penetrate only with "handlers".

Think of a Muslim country where we have both physical dissimilarities and a serious language gap. It's not easy to find Westerners capable of putting on a show. The main impediment to "spying" is the nature of Muslim culture itself. Muslims marry within their extended family almost exclusively (cousins). They trust no one outside of their own families. They will kill any outsider who gets too close or nosey. This is extreme tribalism. It is impossible to crack these "tribes" from the outside. The only way we can get intelligence is to have somebody "turn". It seems that the pressure from inside the Muslim community is too great for this to happen.

Most every voter's approval of the castration of our own intel, starting with the Church Commission back in 1976 in order to rein in FBI activities that were clearly out of control at the time, is the problem. We, the voters, did not insist on looking at the FBI and CIA again. We made sure we had a weak intelligence service. It will take ten years minimum to get intel working on the ground within any Muslim Tribal Society. Somebody has to "turn" a person within a family in order to get reliable intelligence. Don't look for this to happen any time soon. We have a horrible reputation of running away and leaving people to die in torture chambers. And if Kerry or Hillary Clinton ever get elected that is just what will happen, and every highly placed Muslim knows this and spreads the word.

Muslim tribes throw in with each other under the banner of their religion to accomplish multi-tribal goals that are usually restricted to kicking somebody's ass. Robert Kaplan's must read book called "Eastward to Tartary" relates incident after incident where they were suddenly stopped by little local tribes armed to the teeth who wanted money. He pointed out that Muslim young men who had no money couldn't marry because of dowry requirements, and their religion forbad sex. They have no other way to express their manhood other than fighting and profiting from confrontation with outsiders. These "tribes" will only join with each other under the banner of religion, and then only for the purpose of violence. I'm afraid we are going to continue being "surprised" by Muslim tribes who join together for a time. That is their tradition.

There is another point, elequently stated on NRO this morning, by Herb Meyer who is THE intel expert of experts, who makes the point that intel is largely a function of "insight", of spotting what is obvious and connecting the dots. It's a good read.

Nothing has changed. People who talk about "live intel" don't know what they are talking about. Two emailers who claimed to be former CIA told me that "every good spy in history" was a turncoat from within. Remember that the load of Communist spies in the Roosevelt Administration were all Harvard, Yale, and other Americans who turned. This won't stop congressional posturing screaming for the impossible.

When things get tough I always go to Page Six in the New York Post.

June 3, 2004 -- WHICH pro basketball player, husband of a world-class beauty, is said to be having a torrid affair with a recently divorced actress? And when he's not with her, he's chasing other foxes . . .

See what I mean. Karmizin is replacing Eisner too. Hot Model there too. Who cares about anything else?

Latest Chilabi spin, now you have to be sitting down to really get this one: "Intel agencies fear that (cough, tears in eyes) Iran "used" Chalabi to Lure U.S. into Iraq." Tennet has just resigned and right after this news. I can connect dots that don't even exist.

Why is Sadr so successful at getting an "army" together? Middle East "armies" differ from our street gangs like Blackstone Nation, the Crips, Bloods, and the Mafia. It is true that most members of both groups are ignorant and many are just plain stupid. It is also true that they engage in thuggery, robbery, and murder. But the Sadr army, like al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad and other terrorist armies in the Mid-East are composed of people who have great faith in a God. Today Bill Quick refers to Eric Hoffer, a 50s icon now out of favor because to believe him is to abandon most mass movements now required by Leftist thinking. Here's just one quote from that 50s philosopher that might make you realize why somebody of great faith becomes a terrorist.

Faith, enthusiasm, and passionate intensity in general are substitutes for the self-confidence born of experience and the possession of skill.

The substitute for self-confidence is faith ... the substitute for self-esteem is pride; and the substitute for individual balance is fusion with others in a compact group.

In the chemistry of the soul, a substitute is almost always explosive if for no other reason than that we can never have enough of it. We can never have enough of that which we really do not want. What we want is justified self-confidence and self-esteem.

We can be satisfied with moderate confidence in ourselves and with a moderately good opinion of ourselves,........

But the faith we have in a holy cause has to be extravagant and uncompromising, and the pride we derive form an identification with a nation, race, leader, or party [religion] is extreme and overbearing."

Just think Crips and Mafia. The world is filled with people with grammar school educations willing to follow a successful ruthless leader. When you put GOD into the equation you get Islam. When you put in a human substitute like Hitler you get Hitler Youth and the Japanese "code of the Samurai" (Bushido). Think the Vikings (not Minnesota). When you add well educated people you get total fanatics, sure in their belief system and direction; top Nazis, Communists, Mulims; you can never stop the educated fanatics unless you kill them. All, the uneducated and the educated, "know" that death in war is the highest possible way to die; that death in battle, even suicide in battle, guarantees Heaven.

Guarantees Heaven. Think about that. Every bad thing you have ever done is erased by a grateful God. Every loser can achieve Paradise just by killing someone and dying in the course of doing it.

Combine faith with peer approval and parental approval, and you have the street thugs of Iraq and the terrorists of Islam. If the U.S. gangs ever had a purpose higher than money, drugs, and sex you would see the same thing here. And don't think that can't happen; see Nation of Islam and our pal Louis Farrakhan.

The daisy chain of "news" continues today as Sullivan, quotes New Republic (a liberal mag) which quoted a pollster by the name of Greenberg; Sullivan also side links to a story in the NRO. The story is then spun about how and why rural Republicans are defecting from Bush. What Sullivan and presumably the New Republic leave out is that relied upon pollster Greenberg, is an exclusively Democratic poll guy, and generally an extreme liberal poll guy. In other words DO NOT TRUST in the truth category.

The main source of this story is in the National Review on Line yesterday, which cites an ABC poll that Bush support among conservatives generally is slipping

Rather, I think President Bush is paying the price for having abandoned conservative principles on too many occasions over the last three and a half years, which has sapped his support among the Republican party's base.

Poll data support this analysis. According to the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, almost all of Bush's decline in support has come from his base.

The speculations about rural voters are just that, speculation. I am an American Rural Type, having grown up in one of the smallest of small towns (then, not now). Unlike the old days of getting news in bars, from the guys on the street, or a newspaper, the ARTs now get their news from TV, a few go on the web. TV is Left and there is no doubt that CBS/NBC/ABC shapes rural opinions. Farm prices shape even more, and farm prices, including cattle and hogs, are on the moon; it has been decades since farmers have had the incomes they enjoy today. I really suspect the "rural" defection. You have to be there and none of us are. BTW Sullivan leaves out the NRO conclusion which is that conservatives have nowhere to go because Kerry is worse in every category conservatives are concerned about. What is not mentioned is that a lot of conservatives may just stay home.

Anyway, there's the daisy chain as of 6:50AM EDT. See what you want to see.

Reality in Iraq: A successful democracy in Iraq is just as bad for the American Left as for the dictatorships in the Middle East. We only have to look at our country to understand that politicians take cheap shots in order to win. The Iraqi political candidates will start to attack all Americans as the source of everything that is wrong, and the American Left will be at the forefront "coaching" them in tactics. By the middle of the campaign Iraq may be too dangerous for Americans to remain and the Left will be after Bush big time. This is the goal of the American Left. As I said, this is could be what winning really looks like. You saw what one punk like Sadr could do. A population with an average 6th grade education can be stirred up in a micro second and we need look no further than our own Black populations in our major cities to see it. Look for Chomsky and the rest of our horrible Left to be involved up to their ears. A Michael Moore movie?, don't count it out. "Air America" and Franken?, don't be surprised. Sontag, Soros (of the billions and billions), Moveon.org, and all the rest. They hate Bush, hate anything he might accomplish and will do anything, as in anything, to ruin him. If democracy in Iraq fails, it's just part of the "game".

Many bloggers, as well as others are suggesting that we all support Spirit of America, a "charity" that supplies things like carpentry tools, equipment, and so on to U.S. Military so they can "build" Iraq. I don't oppose this, but I am pissed about it. We taxpayers have chunked out around $200 bil of our taxes so that our super hero government can fail to build TV stations, supply the tools for rebuilding, the soccer balls, uniforms and so on. Click on the link above if you want to get involved. I guess it's a worthy purpose and I may throw a few bucks at it after I calm down. I just think that $200 bil is enough.

I'm not totally into this but Roger L has a good piece ripping Moore's epic 9/11 on one set of "facts". I assume he and others will get on it once they've actually seen it and find more "facts" that exist only in the mind of Moore and the Left.

Chalabi, cutting to the chase "Accusations" that Chalabi told an Iranian that we had broken their code is now making the rounds. But, if he did tip off an Iran official why did that official continue to communicate using the code after being tipped?(The Ledeen argument) It could be that Iran wanted Chalabi out on his ass and this was the perfect way to do it. When we get to talking about code breaking these days, almost everyone in that business knows that a process called quantum technology can break almost any code; another way of saying that there ain't no codes except ones that change with every transmission. But new technologies jump up every day, and who knows? Remember, we never broke that Nazi Enigma code without getting our hands on one of their coding machines. Letting info out that a code has been "broken" is just as likely to be dis-information as information. Another way of saying just stay tuned because this story has long legs and an even longer tail.

What's the news? Anything horrible happen? So did Don Imus segue into the news this AM. This is the mind set, the attitude, and the focus of the Left. They like it when our guys get killed, when Iraqis get killed. Just as sick as can be.

TODAY IS A GREAT DAY, make no mistake as the new government in Iraq is formed. By Iraqis and not America or the UN. The Left is already attacking it by saying that a New Tet is around the corner, uprisings will happen, and that nothing has been done. Here is what has been done:

1. This new government is composed of Shia, Kurds, and Sunni.

2. The oil industry is up and running

3. No mass refugee exodus has happened.

4. More electric power is being generated than before the war.

5. The casualty rate is actually low when compared to all past conflicts other than Gulf War I and the Bosnia fight. Total casualty rate of about 2.5%; it's 1.5% if you include navy and airforce in the total troop deployment. Compare to:

Civil War (Union forces): 29% (Southern may be as high as 40%)
Mexican War: 22%
War of Independence: 11.6%
Korean War: 7.8%
World War I: 6.8%
World War II: 6.6%
Vietnam War: 6.2%
Philippine War: 5.6%
War of 1812: 2.3%

6. We have liberated a country of 25 million with an army of around 130,000
7. Saddam himself is our prisoner and not dictator
8. Most children in Iraq have been vaccinated.
9. Hospitals have been rebuilt and stocked with medical supplies including medicine.
10 Thousands of schools have been opened and teacher salaries increased 1,000%

I could go on, and you can bet the White House will be silent as usual. The Left has no problem immediately attacking. If not Bush, who? I wish there was somebody.

The Kauster waxes hot about privacy on Slate, and then goes off on a guy at "E" suing management for promoting friends ahead of everything. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is as nepotistic and "friend" hiring as Hollywood. Mistress is a job category at the unemployment line near Beverly Hills. Look behind every string of credits for every movie and you will find family, sex partners, and people "owed" as contributing something. If someone were to "Fiske" the credits on ten major movies this year you'd have ten sex scandals, five illegal tax shelters, two dope deals in the works, and at least three "Teresa" like charity scams funneling tax exempt money to the DNC.

Is the Media losing THEIR war? Which is the one they declared AGAINST the War in Iraq, our troops, and Bush. I'm beginning to think so. The non-reporting of success, or ignoring failures that turn successful is beginning to seep into the common sense of the population. Today's Journal has an interesting piece on Fallujah. Now the Journal is not "main stream" but they are the loudest voice (highest circulation) outside of the main stream and has impact much like The New York Times. The Journal points out what I said in my piece "Suppose You Didn't Know what Winning Looked Like; an Iraqi solution to an Iraqi problem is in the works and you never stop "negotiating" with an Arab. The incomprehensible incompetence of the "White House" shown by the premature release of a president of Iraq has resulted in another Iraqi Soulution which will work out better for all concerned.

I still say the biggest problem with Iraq is the "White House" (Bush) and their (his staff) near total ineptitude regarding communication skills. And it's BUSH, not a bunch of staff he hires. He either is or ain't the President. Along this line, NRO is reviewing (or hyping) a book out today called The Connection also says that the Bush administration has failed "abysmally" to communicate. This failure is nearly a disaster for our country, and if anyone was running who was an American I'd vote for him in a nano-second.

The few oil refineries left in the U.S. are making record profits. This is a result of the combination of environuts and the ageing beyond usefulness of others. Refineries have been upgraded to handle all the new mixes and it took them almost 15 years to do it. With the single exception of dams, refineries are the most capital intensive operations in the modern world. Current capacity is only 18 million barrels per day. The UK version of the Financial Times has a good story. I don't know how accessible it is.

US refineries were unlikely to spend more capital because they had earmarked $20bn (£10.9bn) to upgrade plants for stricter emissions laws, leaving them with little money to expand capacity. Mr Saunders said: "It's going to cost more to make gasoline. They will want to wait a few years to see their money back before spending more funds.

As an add here, we have a refinery in NoCal (Tosco now owned by Conoco/Phillips) that is so old that employees are being killed, but this makes no difference to the environmental lobby. In a sane society it would be closed down or completely rebuilt. It ain't likely that new refineries will be built in California. In fact, from 1985 to 1995, 10 California refineries closed, resulting in a 20 percent reduction in refining capacity. Further refinery closures are expected for small refineries with capacities of less than 50,000 barrels per day (1 barrel = 42 gallons; 50,000x42 divided by 2=a lot of gasoline. Half the production of a refinery goes to gasoline). The cost of complying with environmental regulations and low product prices (now changed with the $40 crude price)will continue to make it difficult to continue operating older, less efficient refineries.

To comply with federal and state regulations, California refiners invested approximately $5.8 billion to upgrade their facilities to produce cleaner fuels, including reformulated gasoline and low-sulfur diesel fuel. These upgrades received permits since low-sulfur diesel fuel regulations went into effect in 1993. Requirements to produce federal reformulated gasoline took effect at the beginning of 1995, and more stringent state requirements for CARB reformulated gasoline went into effect statewide on April 1, 1996.

It won't get better because because a large part of the refining capacity is in NoCal, home of the Pelosi Democratic enviro-Nazi hordes. They produce around 145 million gallons of gasoline each day, some of it from really old refineries that have not been allowed to upgrade.

California refineries supply gasoline to most of the southwest (AZ, NV,) and some to southern Oregon. I'm not prepared to give the national stuff right now.

Thanks Mel "The Passion" as a musical? The artistic whore set that is our "entertainment business" is doing it. A musical opens in September, "The Ten Commandments", produced only to make money will hopefully die. I'm looking for Brad Pitt as Moses (he is taking singing lessons as I type), Brittney Spears as one of the Marys (she is taking virginity lessons as I type). The actual Ten Commandments will be played by Tom Cruise (he is at the Actors Studio learning to be a slab of granite as I type).

An add to my post Murder in Saudi Arabia, on damage to the oil business in Saudi Arabia Pipes, in a radio interview, thinks that terrorizing westerners out of the country would be a bigger coup for the terrorists than destroying or damaging refineries. Either way the Royal Family will now have to deal with the terrorists because they have killed Saudi citizens, as opposed to killing Westerners. Crude is up $1.07 over night. Late add up 1.31 in New York. Keep in mind that a barrel of oil yields around 21 gallons (depending on quality) of gasoline so this represents around five cents per gallon if it holds.
Pisssst you are up $1,500 on your gold if you bought at my buy in of $383. Watch it, gold is linked to oil. And DO NOT roll forward. Get out.