ORACULATIONS

Public Service Announcement You can imagine my annoyance at Socialites Life when they showed a picture of Charlize Theron smoking shit through an apple bong (1300 pix of this babe are here). WTF is an apple bong?, I thunk to myself. I've been smoking shit for 40 years and never heard of it. So first I went to a giant picture of Charlize getting loaded using said apple bong. No help. Then I found this site with instructions so complex that I'd rather shoot heroin than make it. So I went HERE and found a sort of simple way to make it. Briefly: Skewer in the side of the apple till you reach the core, skewer in the top of the apple till you reach the core, pull through on the side of the apple. If it pulls through nicely you have done it; if it hasn't shove the skewer in the top and mash around a bit but just don't make the hole in the top too big that all your bud falls through.. wallah you're done. I don't reccommend smoking hi quality bud in it, it does get you ripped but you're better off only using it if you havent got a bong around. Others think differently. Then there is this great idea for a bong:

17 Year old arrested for using a man's head for a bong.
Morrisville, VT - A 17-year-old Morrisville youth was being held on $100,000 bail after police said he raided a tomb in a cemetery and removed a head from a corpse. Court documents said the suspect allegedly talked of using the man's head as a bong or a pipe for smoking marijuana

Give the kid a break. He might be able to patent the process. And there is always the chance that Paris Hilton will endorse it.

Larry Kudlow, the host of the boring Echo Chamber AKA "Kudlow & Company" on TV has a very good post up. But as I've said many times here, these secret "numbers under the numbers" are more than likely a secret nobody knows. As a long time trader I can tell you that the guys trading by the numbers under the numbers are out on the street within two weeks. The numbers reported by media are the numbers the dopes read, and it's the dopes that make the world go round. I believe that Kudlow misses the fact that gasoline prices represent a brand new tax on every American other than the well off. BTW; gasoline prices are $2.45 many places in LA, down from the cheapest available $2.61 several weeks ago.

Last night's Presidential Press Conference??? Thank God there were several good games on.....

It all started with a guy named Bork back in 1987. Back in 1987, with Reagan a lame duck, the Liberals had a chance to stop the Reagan Revolution. Bork was one of the most respected judges in the U.S. and was praised far and wide (but not far and wide enough). Ronald Reagan tried to get him confirmed......

Well, a lot of historic decisions have been taken in this building, but none more important than the reason that we rally today. Americans who are committed to a Supreme Court with the highest standards speak with one voice. Judge Bork is not the conservative or liberal nominee; he is America's nominee to the United States Supreme Court. And just like my other nominees to the Court, he's not going to promote my political views; he's going to apply a superb legal mind to the task of interpreting the Constitution and the laws of the United States. The support for him reveals the fact that he is superbly qualified, an individual of unsurpassed integrity, and a principled advocate of judicial restraint. We will not be satisfied with allowing special interests to determine the qualifications to serve on our country's highest court.

In the realm of legal philosophy and jurisprudence, as you know, labels can be deceiving. There's a little story about the great Supreme Court Justice, Benjamin Cardozo, that makes the point. Many years ago, when he was serving on the Court, he received a letter from a member of the public, and it read: ``Dear Judge Cardozo, I read in the newspaper that you are a liberal judge. Will you send me $10, as I'm really very hard up. Sincerely.'' I don't have the name. [Laughter]

But more relevant than a political label are the qualifications of the nominee, and all of us better understand the significance of that point. Our history commands that the nomination of a Supreme Court Justice by a President and the act of confirmation by the United States Senate be carried out with the highest level of statesmanship. Whether President, Senator, or concerned citizen, when we enter the halls of justice and select the next steward of our Constitution, Americans traditionally leave outside their partisan leanings and the narrow special interests. Each of us owes a sacred debt to our ancestors, who established the rule of law in this Republic, and to the citizens of the future, to whom we entrust our nation's destiny. In a special way, this duty now falls upon the United States Senate as it nears a crossroad, a crossroad of conscience, as it prepares to decide on the confirmation of Robert Bork. Let us insist that the Senate not give in to noisy, strident pressures and that elected officials not be swayed by a deliberate campaign of disinformation and distortion.

Retired Chief Justice Warren Burger took the unprecedented step of addressing the Senate Judiciary Committee because of, in his words, ``the hype and disinformation on Bork.'' And today all of us join Chief Justice Warren Burger in urging the Senate to reject those who want a Justice who makes law and approve Robert Bork, who believes a Justice should interpret the law. [Applause] It's apparent that Chief Justice Burger is not alone.

Other noteworthy people are coming forward. In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Howard Krane, managing partner of one of our nation's most prestigious law firms and long-time associate of Justice Bork -- Judge Bork, I should say -- stated that Judge Bork has proven to be ``a man free from prejudice toward any group, who has exemplified the values of equality throughout his life.'' Well, Mr. Krane told this compelling story of how, as a young associate in a major law firm, Robert Bork courageously confronted the senior partners in that firm who had decided to deny employment to Mr. Krane simply because he was Jewish. Robert Bork urged those partners to consider Mr. Krane solely on the merits, and today Mr. Krane is the managing partner of that law firm.

Last week President Carter's counsel, Lloyd Cutler, testified in support of Judge Bork's nomination. Although he disagrees with Robert Bork on some political issues, Lloyd Cutler is convinced that Judge Bork's judicial philosophy represents the mainstream of contemporary thought. He believes, as I do, that Robert Bork's training, experience, character, and sheer intellectual capacity give him the potential to be a great Supreme Court Justice, like the legendary Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis.

Full text of Reagan's remarks is here. The Democrats crucified Bork, accused him of all sorts of awful things (disagreeing with the Liberal Agenda) and after months of abuse and lies, Bork was denied a place on the Supreme Court solely because he wasn't a liberal. This bitter tarring and feathering started us down an obscene road (Justice Thomas) and road's end is the elimination of the filibuster so a judge can get an up or down vote. The Democrats brought this upon both themselves and the institution of the U.S. Senate. Judge Bork ain't dead yet by a long shot.

Larry Kudlow, the host of the boring Echo Chamber on TV has a very good post up. But as I've said many times here, these secret "numbers under the numbers" are more than likely incorrect. As a long time trader I can tell you that the guys trading by the numbers under the numbers are out on the street within two weeks. The numbers reported by media are the numbers the dopes read, and it's the dopes that make the world go round. I believe that Kudlow misses the fact that gasoline prices represent a brand new tax on every American other than the well off. BTW; gasoline prices are $2.45 many places in LA, down from the low point of $2.61 several weeks ago.

If you really need to start your day pissed off and ready to kill be sure to go HERE. The teachers across this country are lining up to allow illegals to go to college free. See if the schools fill up more then...........you have to hire more union teachers. North Carolina will be the illegal state of the east coast, sooner than later.

The Kauster or is it The Mickster??" does a nice piece on the news biz and costs, desirablity and shit that you should read before linking to the vastly improved FOX site. I only mention FOX because Murdoch made a conscious decision to make the webiste THE news outlet for all news rather than his own news channel. MSNBC, the slug of slugs on cable, has always had a top notch website. I suggest to you that both of those sites cost a hell of lot of money to maintain but their TV outlets make it possible.

Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose.....

"THE students had begun to lay out their picnic in the spring sunshine when the men attacked. "There were dozens of them, armed with guns, and they poured into the park,� Ali al-Azawi, 21, the engineering student who had organised the gathering in Basra, said.

�They started shouting at us that we were immoral, that we were meeting boys and girls together and playing music and that this was against Islam. �They began shooting in the air and people screamed. Then, with one order, they began beating us with their sticks and rifle butts.� Two students were said to have been killed.
Standing over them as the blows rained down was the man who gave the order, dressed in dark clerical garb and wearing a black turban. Ali recognised him immediately as a follower of Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shia cleric. Ali realised then that the armed men were members of Hojatoleslam al-Sadr�s Mehdi Army, a private militia that fought American forces last year and is now enforcing its own firebrand version of Islam.

The picnic had run foul of the Islamist powers that increasingly hold sway in the fly-blown southern city, where religious militias rule the streets, forcing women to don the veil and closing down shops that sell alcohol or music. In the election in January, the battle between secular and religious forces in Basra came down to the ballot box. The main Shia alliance triumphed with 70 per cent of the province�s vote, most of the rest going to a secular rival. That victory has brought to a head the issue of whether Iraq�s new constitution will adopt Islamic law � or Sharia � as most religious Shia leaders desire.

In Basra, however, Islamic militias already are beginning to apply their own version of that law, without authority from above or any challenge from the police.
Students say that there was nothing spontaneous about the attack. Police were guarding the picnic in the park, as is customary at any large public gathering, but allowed the armed men in without any resistance.

One brought a video camera to record the sinful spectacle of the picnic, footage of which was later released to the public as a warning to others. It showed images of one girl struggling as a gunman ripped her blouse off, leaving her half-naked. �We will send these pictures to your parents so they can see how you were dancing naked with men,� a gunman told her. Two students who went to her aid were shot � one in the leg, the other twice in the stomach. The latter was said to have died of his injuries. Fellow students say that the girl later committed suicide. Another girl who was severely beaten around the head lost her sight. Far from disavowing the attack, senior al-Sadr loyalists said that they had a duty to stop the students� �dancing, sexy dress and corruption�.

�We beat them because we are authorised by Allah to do so and that is our duty,� Sheik Ahmed al-Basri said after the attack. �It is we who should deal with such disobedience and not the police.�

After escaping with two students, Ali reached a police station and asked for help. �What do you expect me to do about it?� a uniformed officer asked."

Tell me again how many of our soldiers died so these pieces of shit could have freedom. Freedom to impose shiria law is what the Muslim religion is all about.

Once again rampant racism harms Blacks, only it is the Blacks who are behind the entire sordid situation. Cutting to the chase, we have a "hospital" (under other circumstances Blacks would call it a "killing field") here called Martin Luther King Hospital---known locally as "Killer King". This morgue is murdering black patients at a rate not seen since the lynching days in the old South. Despite the revelations of horrid staff and a sex crazed and corrupt administration; the doctors and nurses regularly ignore patients, mistreat patients, actually misdiagnose bullet wounds, and just plain killing them, the Black politicians will not close the place down, claiming it is needed. This "it is needed" campaign is led by a race card playing Black LA County Supervisor named Yvonne Braithwate Burke---go here for some details on this Black winner, and she is backed up by a slave ship filled with other Black politicians. There is not a single big mouth Black with a dollar left on a credit card who will go there. The Black doctors rape the system for insane wages, the latest being a doctor who was billing the county for 22 to 24 hour days of work over a four to six month period of time. (Here is a virtual encylopedia of links regarding this Black run horror chamber) What follows are excerpts from just one article in the totally PC LA Times about a tiny child taken to Killer King....

Dunia's injuries were minor: some scrapes, some bruises and two broken baby teeth. The teeth would have to be pulled.

"They told me to relax," Sulma recalled. "Everything was fine."

At least, it should have been.

What the Tasejos didn't know was that King/Drew, a 233-bed public hospital in Willowbrook, just south of Watts, had a long history of harming, or even killing, those it was meant to serve.

Over the last year, reports by journalists and regulators have offered stark glimpses of failings at King/Drew: Nurses neglecting patients as they lay dying. Staff failing to give patients crucial drugs or giving them toxic ones by mistake. Guards using Taser stun guns on psychiatric patients, despite an earlier warning to stop.

Patients have fled ambulances to avoid it, according to paramedics and one ranking fire official. And police officers say they have an understanding among themselves that, if shot, they will not be taken there.

In the seven hours after Dunia's arrival, the hospital would commit a series of medical errors in treating her, each compounding the one before.

By the middle of that night, the couple were standing outside the pediatric intensive care unit, bewildered and increasingly frightened. Alarms were ringing and doctors were running by. The Tasejos tried to catch the eye of a physician who had reassured them earlier.

"He looked at me," Elias Tasejo recalled. "He kept walking."

Here is an account of Dunia's care, based on her medical records, a state health department investigation, a medical expert consulted by The Times and interviews with her family:

To keep her still during a precautionary CT scan, her 65-pound body was pumped with enough drugs to sedate a grown man.

Paralyzed by the medications, she had to be hooked up to a ventilator to help her breathe. Its settings were wrong; a blood test showed she was being starved of oxygen.

The settings were adjusted to give her more. But inexplicably, an emergency room doctor ordered a trainee physician to pull out Dunia's breathing tube 20 minutes later. No one checked to see whether she could breathe on her own.

For the next two hours, Dunia's nurses failed to monitor her vital signs or breathing, records show. By the time she was transferred to the pediatric intensive care unit, she was flailing from lack of oxygen and calling, "Mama."

The medical resident who admitted her to the ICU was unable to operate a machine to check her oxygen levels, and didn't seek help for at least 15 minutes.

By then, Dunia's heart and lungs had stopped working. Doctors resuscitated her, but later that day she was declared brain dead.

After two days, she was removed from life support.

And of course this is all Whitey's fault; nobody on this production line of death was charged with murder, manslaughter, or jaywalking. LA County Supervisor Yvonne Braithwaite Burke led the move to keep on killing by stating loudly to her Black racist supporters in South Central LA, that if it isn't broke don't fix it.

Why isn't Jessie Jackson here? How about the Reverend Al? Mfume? Charlie Rangel? Why aren't their two racist Congress Persons here? You know why they aren't here. The only way to get publicity is to blame the white doctors and administrators, and there is not a single white who works there, except for a janitor or two.

Must be the Hip Hop music.

Once again, big union money pours into a state election. To those of you not smart enough to live in California, here's the current picture on Arnold's "reform" of the state. We are being inundated---flooded, drowned by, battered with---a string of anti-Arnold reform media commercials. This campaign is paid for by the Government Employees Labor Union. There are huge dollars involved here, a hell of a lot of it from out of state hoping that reforms will not "spread east" and spoil their cushy rackets in places like Michigan. Since everyone has to identify themselves when they run a commercial we all know the source is the people who want to continue sacking the state. This little excerpt is from the giant public employees labor union website

......concerned groups throughout America are preparing to head West and help their Golden State allies defeat his proposals with the hope of preventing them from ever having a chance to spread East.

Schwarzenegger wants to amend the state constitution to change the way Sacramento manages money, pays public school teachers, draws political districts and provides for the retirement of its workers. But opponents -- from labor unions to education advocates -- are vowing to partner with their California affiliates and defeat what many Democrats call a "Republican, Bush-Schwarzenegger" agenda.

This expensive campaign is aimed at killing any education reform in the state AND to continue the open border with Mexico because unions see illegals as future members of their dying union movement. Stay tuned.

Stop reading----------this blog is much better than mine. Start at the beginning, learn about a moral dictatorship that has already taken hold outside of a University. This is good writing, literate content, although he lacks the education to say "fuck." Hopefully he will evolve into it. PC is a moral dictatorship, yet our PC clowns talk about Christians. Go there, I promise you will learn something. BTW have you ever heard of a better title than "Rashomon All Over Again?" For those of you too young to remember this great Japanese movie, go to this picture of a fantastic Republican babe.

I rarely link to anything on Reynold's site any more because I either know everything there or don't give a dam. But this link is terrific, we all should bone up on this stuff.

New political party on the way?????????

I didn't have to fight off the dinosaurs on my way to school as a kid, but I've been around the block a few times. During these sojourns I've never seen anything like the current political situation on illegal immigration. Here we have a hot issue that neither political party will address. Worse, the leadership refuses to obey the Congress as Bush avoids any funding to the border, the jails, or the tools to stop the illegal tide.

My prediction: there will be a strong anti-illegal political party by 2008---or sooner---that will defeat Republicans across the Southwest and sweep Democrats into power, OR this Third Party will actually win seats outright. GWB has led the GOP down this open border path and he will be remembered for it. Should this Third Party pick up thirty seats, it is they who will hold the balance of power in Congress.

The near spectacular decline in FOX News ratings will be interpreted to death, with the MSM concluding that the viewers are moving Leftward, just as they predicted. Let me offer something more fundamental to the "entertainment" busines. FOX and their anchors have become boring. There have been no changes for years and the formats are tired. Hannity, O'Reilly, and Greta for three or four years running is enough. Even "Friends" and "Seinfeld" ran out of gas. Ailes is a very sharp guy but can he kill his own children? We will see, because the ratings decline is going to hurt the bottom line. Either Ailes gets new blood on the Network or Ailes will be replaced by someone who will.

Why I never give PBS a dime.....

The BBC News--not to mention a ton of other BBC "entertainment" broadcasting---is televised on every PBS station in the country. 100% of the money to pay for this commie agit prop BBC News is U.S. taxpayer money. Every American contribution is written off the donor's taxes and Congress keeps handing them more of our money. The other day the news broke that the BBC was in the business of planting their own people at Conservative political rallies and then broadcasting them. The purpose was to make the Conservatives look as bad as possible....and they are using U.S. tax dollars given to them by PBS to do it.

LONDON: The BBC was on Sunday, unwittingly, dragged into the heat of the British general election campaign after being accused of planting hecklers at a meeting addressed by the Conservative Party leader, Michael Howard.

PBS and BBC are mirror images of each other, neither can survive competition---PBS is a ratings joke---and if allowed to function without any supervision they will run to the Commie Left.

People are praising this piece in NRO about kids and smut. These are two irresponsible parents who ignore everything their kids do and then blame society for putting stuff on TV that is easily available to kids. They also gave a twelve year old an I Pod and did no supervision of downloading. WTF, it's the parents, not the media that is bad.

These guys need money---take a look because most of you will send them some. Be sure you go HERE. This a real billboard in LA paid for by an American Company; North Carolina legislature passes a law granting illegals lower tuition at State Colleges is HERE; and then there is this as "Free??? Republic bans all speech opposing illegal immigration.

Members and readers of Free Republic would be surprised to know that many members of their community have fallen silent on the discussions about illegal immigration lately because free speech is an illusion on FR.com. They are silent because they have been banned from the Web site without warning, cause, or explanation in most cases. For weeks the moderators have been suspending and banning new members that chimed in quickly on the immigration debates.

Now this trend has broadened as the first groups of long-term users were suspended or banned this past week. Although Robinson and his staff removed many members of the Free Republic community in the first few days of the purge, those that religiously support President Bush�s immigration plan, open borders and approve of public benefits for illegal aliens remain on the forum. Those that were banned were the members that wanted more done to control illegal immigration and a strict observance to the President�s Oath of Office.

Like I said, it's worth a look. BTW: for some sanity on race be sure you read the Sowell piece in the WSJ

There are people on the Right who are calling for the impeachment of "the traitor George Bush." It's all about the illegals which are no longer the 800 pound gorilla in the room. I don't generally link to this stuff but my emails reflect a hell of a lot of anger about illegal immigration. When the loony Right gets going, reason takes a back seat.

I usually read George Will when I have time by using the Sacramento Bee website. I read him today and he quotes entirely from the Wilson Quarterly--an impossible to get mag---regarding the unquestionable demise of MSM on every level: magazine, newspaper, network news. Nobody, and I mean not a soul, at work reads the LA Times. There was a time when all the guys through the age of 65 read the sports section, sometimes they'd fight over it. No longer. Nobody reads it.

We are making a mistake to continually savage the MSM, because there is no main stream media. The really young get their news via the internet or some magazines (porn is not considered), as they get older the Internet becomes their main news source, only in the geriatric group is the MSM the source of news. Read George's column HERE.

"You cannot stay on the summit forever. You have to come down again
. . .
One climbs and one sees; one descends and one sees no longer, but one
has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself . . .
by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one no longer
sees, one can at least still know."

There's more at "Whiskey River," one of my favorite sites

Absolute proof that abortions are about what a woman does with her body.

Twin survives abortion
25/04/2005 07:56 - (SA)

London - A 20-year-old Scottish woman is suing a hospital where she had an abortion in 2001 after one of her twins survived the operation.

Stacy Dow, who is raising her now three-year-old daughter Jayde with her parents, said late on Sunday she is seeking �250 000 (nearly R3m) to cover the costs of raising the child.

Dam! Meant to kill it. Now I'll make somebody else pay.

An emailer has characterized my failure to recognize immediately the Times hate piece on Catholics for what it is. OK, so I�m not all that smart all the time. I rarely read everything with a super critical eye, especially an editorial about a leader of a religion that is none of my business published in a paper like the Los Angeles Times that poses as a literate journal.

The Times was clever, using a technique as old as civilization to smear Catholics and the Catholic Church. William Shakespeare used the same method in Julius Caesar. Mark Antony is allowed to speak on condition that he not rouse the passions of the populace with lies. He agrees and then proceeds to call the assassins dishonorable men while seeming to praise them :

The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it�.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest,
(For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all; all honourable men)
Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral�.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man�.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome,
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.

The vicious piece in the Times isn�t as good as the Mark Antony�s hit piece on Brutus but it did the dirty work. Statements that the new Pope was not a Nazi, not a part of the holocaust, not party to the murder of Jews in Hungary was too clever a hit piece for me to recognize unless I�d had my thinking cap on while reading it. The style worked for Mark Antony, but because bloggers much sharper than I were alert, it didn�t work for the LA Times, which is now exposed for all who choose to know.

Mass education has resulted in an army of educated criminals capable of lucid perversities couched in literate journals, adroit answers to questions never posed, and painless injections of false doctrines into the bloodstream of the body politic. I guess we all have to be vigilant when reading anything these days. It was after the Wall Street mega scandals of the 80s began to be exposed that someone observed that the crooks were all from Harvard Business School. Al Capones with Ph.Ds. Fits The Times.

As an add on to this post about Schussel's review of The Interpreter, I must point out to the semi-literate attacks on the movie from sites like Town Hall and the rest of the usual suspects. To criticize a movie or play on the basis of what you would have put into it or written is an excercise in narcissm. If you think you're so good, write a fucking movie, produce it, and see what happens when nobody goes to see it. The only way you can make a "truthful" movie is to make it cheap as hell, a real possibility these days with the Apple equipment. None of these Hollywood gazillionaires intends to make a movie that won't make the next hundred Ferrari payments, keep their girlfriends in private splendor somewhere, and allow them to pose for Holy Pictures at Hollywood parties. A movie is what it is and criticize it on that basis. Right wing critics are as awful as Left Wing critics. All the rest of us care about is whether it's good or bad.

You guys looking for Ms. Totally Wrong so you can just get laid and split don't know what's in store for you. The good thing about Suicide Girls is that they actually let you know who they really think they are by writing little journals. Some that are up today are scary.

I know the NYT is to the Left of Castro and not to be trusted, but they have some terrific reporters. This piece may define the Pentagon incompetence, which is no different than their incompetence when I served. Our guys are being murdered by the suits. Period.

On May 29, 2004, a station wagon that Iraqi insurgents had packed with C-4 explosives blew up on a highway in Ramadi, killing four American marines who died for lack of a few inches of steel.

The four were returning to camp in an unarmored Humvee that their unit had rigged with scrap metal, but the makeshift shields rose only as high as their shoulders, photographs of the Humvee show, and the shrapnel from the bomb shot over the top.

"The steel was not high enough," said Staff Sgt. Jose S. Valerio, their motor transport chief, who along with the unit's commanding officers said the men would have lived had their vehicle been properly armored. "Most of the shrapnel wounds were to their heads."

The tail lays out the inadequacy of equipment and the lack of men.

The experiences of Company E's marines, pieced together through interviews at Camp Pendleton and by phone, company records and dozens of photographs taken by the marines, show they often did just that. The unit had less than half the troops who are now doing its job in Ramadi, and resorted to making dummy marines from cardboard cutouts and camouflage shirts to place in observation posts on the highway when it ran out of men. During one of its deadliest firefights, it came up short on both vehicles and troops. Marines who were stranded at their camp tried in vain to hot-wire a dump truck to help rescue their falling brothers. That day, 10 men in the unit died.

It gets worse and worse. Do any of us doubt that this war was launched without any concern for the guys who had to fight it? Now that you have the Times, go HERE to Iraq now and read what some soldiers and marines have to say about the things described in the article.

There is an old article about Dick Lamm that is now making the rounds as if it were fresh. If you haven't read it, go HERE. The site is called The Jeff Rense Program and is HERE. This guy goes after EVERYBODY but the site is loaded with anti-Semitic stuff, which is why I never link to him. The essay was published back in January. It details what was said at an immigration-overpopulation conference.

.......filled to capacity by many of American's finest minds and leaders. A brilliant college professor named Victor Hansen Davis talked about his latest book, "Mexifornia," explaining how immigration - both legal and illegal - was destroying the entire state of California. He said it would march across the country until it destroyed all vestiges of The American Dream.

Moments later, former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm stood up and gave a stunning speech on how to destroy America. The audience sat spellbound as he described eight methods for the destruction of the United States. He said, "If you believe that America is too smug, too self-satisfied, too rich, then let's destroy America. It is not that hard to do. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time. Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and fall and that 'An autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.'"

Read the whole thing. Really late add: I am becoming more and more suspicous of this piece due to the vicious racism of Pense and the understandably hysterical ravings of Ms Ebbers, whose son was murdered at the border, who seems to be raising this speech.

NOON ADD: Malkin has it up too.

Larry Kudlow's new show on CNBC should be called "Echo Chamber," one of the most boring collection of "yes men" ever gathered in one place. When he was paired with Jim Cramer, the show was good--in fact the best financial show on the air---but in true corporate burlesque, fourth place NBC promoted Kudlow til he arrived at the point of cluelessness; a man completely untrained, either by experience or education, to do sixty minutes of television.

Jim Cramer's new show is tough to take because listening to him scream for 60 minutes is like listening to a speech by Fidel Castro---in Yiddish. He has also been promoted to the point of maximum incompetence, but he, at least, is not afraid of other POVs.

Doing an Ask Jeeves on Voinovich yields this "abuse of power" from 1996; then we have this one about Voinovich missing the Torricelli hearings

Members of the six-Senator panel - Inouye, Roberts, Jack Reed (D-R.I.), Craig Thomas (R-Wyo.), Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and George Voinovich (R-Ohio) - are not expected to be on hand today.

But the real reason for the Voinovich challenge to the Bush administration is the usual: local pork for Ohio. NASA is cutting back but there is no way they are going to cut back one dime in Ohio if Voinovich has anything to say about it. So it's this way: either the White House caves to Ohio demands or Bolton sleeps wit' duh fishes.

Because I have a real job, and the fact that Blogger is down almost once a week, I missed this Rosett piece in the Journal last week. Rosett is a serious reporter with years of hounding this story, so her columns are a must read.

Exclusive
Oraculations has learned through anonymous sources that both Cardinal George of Chicago and Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles are also Catholics. I'm telling you these stinking Catholics are everywhere. Stay tuned. As many of us warned, appointing a Pope who is a Catholic was just a start down a slippery slope.

Mark Roberts, a Presbyterian pastor, really takes apart the vicious anti-Catholic editorial of the disgusting Los Angeles Times. He is theologically sound and he spots all the vicious stuff. Why should we care? Because the viciousness of the editorial is a broadside attack on all of Christianity and the values of Christianity from the establishment Left. Roberts is a permanent link to Faith Based sites and is absolutely worth a read once a week because he goes deeply into issues. The LAT editorial was a pure hate piece, filled with lies and misrepresentations and Mark gets to the heart of it.

Steve Nash, the probable NBA MVP is somebody I had never heard of as a collge player. That's because he went to Santa Clara, is from Canada, and originally from South Africa. The NCAA big schools ignored him. He was a near legendary high school player in Canada(?) and everybody knows that white guys from Canada can't shoot hoops. He was also an all star soccer player and lacrosse player. As Howie Long told his sons, "Don't worry about where you go to school. Go to get an education. If you're a good player the NFL will find you." Same for the NBA.

In response to many emails asking what the word "Graffitik�nstlerin" used to describe Leni Reifenstahl in my post about Debbie Schussel HERE actually means. This is one of those German words that can't be exactly translated because it is actually a phrase. It means an artistic wall graffiti labeled as art, or a sort of acceptable "tagging." But as a noun it means a person who creates a type of fake art scrawled on walls.

Does anybody but me think that the only way Zacarias Moussaoui met bin Ladin was when they were both trying to sneak 12 items through the ten items only express line at the al Qaeda SuperMart in Kabul? Every two bit punk says he met the El Terrorista Supremo just before leaving Afghanistan.

RightWing Babe of the week is here, and it makes me proud.... And you gotta see this one, hot.... super hot.

Immigration has another awful side, one that cries out for a relaxation of Immigration rules. Nobody knows how many women are serving as "sex workers"---the latest PC term to legitimize whoring---after being kidnapped in Eastern Europe and sent to the west as prisoners. You may have to blow up the link, but read it.

The trade in people for forced sex has mushroomed into a $12 billion industry to rival drug trafficking and gun-running. Because the victims are locked in rooms or moved around in secret, it is almost impossible to trace them.

The HBO series "The Wire" had as a part the murder of thirty smuggled women who had been locked into a container.

I ate my third pint of coffee ice cream yesterday. God, it feels good. I know it will just be days before the fat police force the government to recant on their new findings, but til then---I may try strawberry today.

Hillary Clinton is innocent of any wrongdoing in raising funds. If there was anything to these charges, the big newspapers and TV nets would be all over it. To think otherwise is simply a ploy to take attention away from the criminal activities of Tom Delay and John Bolton. Jesus, can't the envious people leave the smartest woman in the world alone?

Notes on a Zig Zag paper: Peter Lynch, one of the all time stock pickers, has said that you can check a stock by walking into a retail outlet and seeing how much business they do. On this basis---short Blockbuster---I know it's a part of Viacom, so watch Viacom carefully. I went into our local Blockbuster yesterday and found at least ten movies out of stock. I went to the manager and complained. He promptly pointed to a large pile of movies on a stand and said they "were in there someplace." Trust me, Blockbuster is out of business.

As soon as I read the new government report that said being fat ain't all that bad, I ate a pint of coffee ice cream in one sitting. I'm going to do it again today. I'm going to keep doing it. I have to make up for lost time.

Many have abused Hollywood for ignoring the movie �Hotel Rwanda� at Oscar time because it actually dealt with something. I disagree, Hollywood ignored it because it directly accuses our lazy white Left (UN, Belgians, French, and American) of looking at the horror on TV, saying things like, �isn�t that awful,� and then going out to dinner. That is our Left�and far far too much of our Right.

I once had a professor who was too gentle a man by half. He had somehow managed to escape Heidelberg University during the Hitler years and then ended up teaching drama in the U.S. This sweet man, even though he was 6'4" and 230 pounds or so, couldn�t kill a fly if he sat on it. He was a good teacher and a brilliant guy who couldn�t possibly earn a living outside of Academia. One day he looked me in the eye during a class and said, �The only purpose of art is to increase our understanding. Everything else is entertainment. But, if the entertainment can�t put you in a frame of mind so that you seek to increase your understanding later, then the entertainment is pornography and you demean yourself by participating in it.�

I was reminded of the words of this gentle man as I watched �Hotel Rwanda,� a movie that will increase your understanding of both yourself and too many others should you choose to rent it. This movie is everything that Michael Moore and the PBS establishment is not. The story is human, very moving, and clearly will increase your understanding should you choose to rent it. A story of the typical guy who goes along to get along so he can have friends later when he might need them, and who keeps loads of �their� cash on hand �just in case.� One day when the modern day SS comes a calling and slaughtering he turns to his �friends� for help and finds that his friends actually think of him as �lower than a nigger; an African,� and nobody will really help. It�s a hell of a movie on a lot of levels; the UN is a joke, the Belgians and the French care nothing about anything other than saving their own skins, and the Americans are invisible.

This is a tale of the Left becoming exposed as useless, fraudulent, and weak; the genocide goes on while they decry it with tears and ads in the New York Times, and then they go on with their dinners. A �Cherry Orchard� of our time. Hope you rent it, you won�t be sorry.

Debbie Schussel is not a c**t as she claims Sean Penn called her in an email. A c**t is far too wonderful a body part to call her. She is what comes out of a c**t at a certain time of the month. She picks on a rather mundane thriller called "The Interpreter," that nobody is calling a masterpiece, but having seen it I submit it's not worth getting excited about either way. Schussel knows bupkis about movies, and procedes to prove it as she tries to compare Sean Penn with Leni Reifenstahl. Just so you know, Penn is an actor, not a writer, producer or director as was the Hitler loving babe. Penn just says the words other people write, and usually does it pretty well while trying not to run into the furniture. Leni Reifenstahl was Hitler's evil genius---writer, director, producer, film editor, and over all �ber Graffitik�nstlerin, and deserves a place in the film parthenon apart from all actors. I have made a private vow never to attack people by associating them with Hitler, Stalin, Reifenstahl, Alger Hiss, or other demons from the past. We live in today, and today is bad enough. Although Schussel does remind me a little of this guy Attila the Hun who I met when I was in a mental hospital a few years ago. He didn't know shit about movies either, but he liked watching the History Channel and, like a true hun, cried like a baby every time the Germans lost a battle.

Yes, this little movie is pro U.N. but it doesn't hide it---both the trailer and TV ads praise the UN---so what?. It's so light in weight that it isn't even pro UN enough to make one do more than yawn---actually that is the problem with the movie, nobody cares if everyone in the UN drowns in Oil for Food money, child rape Peace Keeping forces, or their all around corruption. I think that those of us on the Right trod a dangerous path to extinction when we attack entertainment as some kind of Left Wing Commie plot when we don't like parts of it. Sydney Pollack, the director, has done some first rate movies ("Tootsie,"" Search for Bobby Fisher,"and the great "Jeremiah Johnson" to name but three out of thirty movies) and Pollack doesn't need me to defend him.

Just a word to the Right: Debbie Schussel deserves a separate place in the movie criticism universe somewhere between Alfred E. Newman and the Gay Men's Chorus of San Quentin. If we insist on making a real movie critic out of her, we will more than deserve all the abuse we get. She is what an extreme POV is all about. If it becomes ours, we are shit.

The fuckin' pope is a Catholic? WTF? Those fuckers are everywhere, I mean they are taking over.

Solving the education "crisis" without the bullshit:
Close all private schools and force the rich to put their kids into public schools. That would solve it.

Great Idea Howard---Bobby Mugabe
I already done that and it works---Fidel Castro
There are public schools???-----Mrs. Dave Rockerfeller
I think it would be a great idea. But would the taxpayers support building polo fields on every campus??? -----Leona Helmsly

Illegal workers...the most expensive thing in the world is cheap help-----

U.S. Census Bureau now believes there are between 10 to 12 million undocumented Hispanic aliens in the United States....

The 18th Street gang is now known as Calle 18 and is internationalized. Mexican and Colombian traffickers now reportedly use Calle 18 members to distribute narcotics in the United States.

The expense to taxpayers of this illegal surge tops 28 billion. Go Here for details. It's long. S.F. Chronicle has a better piece HERE The Republicans are so out to lunch on this one that Democrats are beginning to latch onto the issue. Local pols are the ones. Of course they are being attacked by the outlaw ACLU.

Some surprising, and not so surprising data on all local gasoline prices compared with other states is HERE, state by state prices without taxes is HERE, and a complex but true explanation of gas prices---includes the taxes, the additives, and other reasons---is HERE. A summation is impossible.

As Bush and the GOP Sleep, illegal immigration becomes the 800 pound gorilla in the room.
I happen to think that talk radio is far more influential than blogs, mainly because they can hammer a topic through callers day after day. If you were in LA right now you'd know the only topic anybody is talking about is illegal immigration. I'd say everybody, including a lot of Mexican-Americans, is really pissed off. Bush's falling popularity is due to gasoline AND illegals. When the screaming racist, Maxine Waters, starts frothing at her big mouth about Mexican gangs you wonder if Republicans can, or should, maintain control of this country.

Late Add: Hillary Clinton and Robert Byrd have proposed a Border Czar plus 600 more patrols, 200 detention beds, together with the money to fund it. Bush is killing the GOP. She has taken the issue away from the Republicans in one day. I say good for her. What isn't clear is whether they are after the northern border or the southern border. Also, funding something is an old Clinton trick; funding something for one year and then letting it drop. Remember the 10,000 cops on the street?

And the great Heather MacDonald lays it out AGAIN. But illegal immigration is like the Oil for Food in the early days. Claudia pounded away on it, named names, totaled up the damage, and nobody listened. MacBabe is been on this for ten years and nobody but Michelle Malkin has paid the slightest attention. Nobody except City Journal that has been publishing MacBabe for years the way the WSJ alone published Claudia Rosett. BTW NewsMax is all over this one too. Now.

One of the very few bloggers who actually give us new information is at it again. You might puke if you go there. And of course HERE virtually every day.

Simmons has the latest on Tsunami relief from private donors in U.S. All I can say is that we are suckers. I have a hunch we've "donated" to the
Charity Mafia.

After watching Larry Kudlow for a half hour I had to turn it off. Here's an open letter to all the Supply Siders who come off the mountain top once or twice a month. Larry never has anybody who deviates from the party line.

The core rate of inflation, excluding food and energy, is only________. What galaxy are you speaking from Larry? Food and energy are everything to most normal people. Everything. It is the main topic of stray talk at work, nobody at parties leaves out the price of gas, and the obscenities muttered at the gas pump tell the tale.

The core rate is total bullshit, good only for people who have chauffeurs, a credit card bill paid by accountants and business managers, and who can squint through smoked glass limo windows at the great unwashed; or at least they do when they can tear themselves away from the latest financial journal. The stock market IS telling you something, but you don�t want to hear it.

The true rate of inflation INCLUDES food and energy. The true rate is .06% which, if my math is right, comes to 72% inflation for most of us, even for you it is 7.2%. You ought to get people on your show who disagree with you because all you have is the usual sycophants. Everything is fine. Buy stocks.

Normal people buy stocks and us normal people are looking at hellatious inflation. Ruinous inflation. The price of gas dropped four cents today in LA so we only pay $2.56 per gallon. Core rate my ass.

Pope Ratzinger: all the Lefty liberals are appalled. I have one view: if you don't want to go along just get out. WTF? Be a Muslim, a Lutheran, a pagan, but you can't be a Catholic if you kill a "fetus," engage in sexual activity with a member of the same sex, have a sliding scale of morality separate from Catholic doctrine. If you don't like the heat you do not have to go into the kitchen. Cafeteria Catholics, choosing what little part of the faith they want today and a different one tomorrow, will probably bargain while in Hell. What these Liberals don't like is being judged regarding their drunken behaviors, their drug use, their sexual escapades, multiple marriages, neglect of their children, and so on. The Catholic Church will remain Catholic. There is nothing anybody outside the Church can do about it, other than write nasty pieces in the MSM. We will be affected by this pope if his hatred of the U.S. becomes Church policy. If he lands on the side of Muslim fundamentalism. If he refuses to do anything about the pedophilia in the priesthood.
Today's Catholic Cafeteria Specials with new low prices----
Abortion: one rosary
Little lie to my wife: two Hail Mary�s
Screw the boss: Act of contrition
Homosexual activity: free
Tomorrow's Super Special: Desert Your Family: two apologies----Only 500 will be available so arrive early
"It's great to be a New American Catholic"

The ultimate Ann Coulter photo collection is up at Schultzies place. Keep scolling cause they keep on coming. I'm sure she'd bitch about these too.....

The gutless Republicans strike again. Caving to a late charge by some woman who claims she was chased down the hall. "He said she said" months after she could have stepped forward with an allegation about something that nobody saw. Tell me again why I voted for any of them,

Jane Fonda is causing all the usual sycophants to gasp as she describes her "three ways" with one of her degenerate husbands. She leaves out the "eight way" when she fucked our POWs at the Hanoi Hilton.

I let you know what was going on with the Chinese "riots" a week ago......

Modern Drunkard Magazine is out and if you don't link here you will miss a really good piece on jazz.

A ton of emails, too long for the comments section, take me to task regarding the figure of 600 Mexican street gangs in LA County. Most point to the name similarity. Therein lies one of the problems in busting them up. All these little gangs have turf. Hoover Crips have staked out Hoover street around a certain area. There are lots of sub-sets of the big gangs. There is an 18th Street that owns Broadway & 7th Street; The 18th Street Columbia Lil Cyco; 18th Street Shatto Park controls Shatto Park area; 18th Street Pico Union dominates Pico Union; they are like terrorist cells in that if you bust one group the others simply expand into the vacuum. They are separate, but are unlike terrorist cells in that a guy can leave one territory, move to another, and then become a member of the small gang in that �turf.� The sub-sets pay tribute to the main man which apparently are the prison Mexican Mafia chiefs. The most powerful Mexican gang in LA is the 18th street gang, but it is a collection of smaller gangs. It is said that they can act in concert once in a while. The police here are hamstrung by Special Order 40, which states:...."�initiating police action where the objective is to discover the alien status of the person��is illegal and the cop is the criminal. It is estimated that 60% of the gangs memberships are composed of illegals operating with relative impunity. The Washington Dispatch published a must read piece that included this gem

The results of this Special Order 40 grow with startling speed. �In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide, at 1,500, target illegal aliens,� MacDonald said. �Two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants, 17,000, are for illegal aliens.�

The LA City Council will soon be worse, because Antonio Villaraigosa, a card carrying MEChA member, is about to become mayor. Mexifornia is here.

Even if you're a Lefty, you should read this. New York state's Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has become the Huey Long of financial oversight. He is leading a lynch mob against certain companies, ignoring due process, and convicting them in the media.

An observation while surfing all the Sunday talk shows at the same time. Every Democrat accused Bolton of "abuse of power." You are going to hear this over and over again by every Democrat who shoots his/her mouth off til people get wise. Last night several accused the entire GOP of abuse of power.

Page SixSixSix a blog of sorts, that usually uses all their space outing the sexual and drugscapades of minor sluts and fruits, has a----get ready for this---a piece praising that super hot 60ish babe, Martha Stewart. They praise some Stewart products they used. I have to echo that. When I was in the hospital I had nothing to read but her fish wrap and found it helpful as hell. I hope she has a big comeback, because she got fucked and didn't even get to enjoy it. Hot pix too. Also a Lohan "cocaine in the ladies room" piece.

Ann Coulter is pissing and moaning about her picture on the cover of Time. Why do Conservatives agree to pose for liberals? Terminally stupid or just ego driven to be in the MSM?

It looks like Australia is ready to bail on Iraq....

Chinese "riots:" Anybody but me notice that all the signs are in English?

Firefox vanished on my system. The problem was, and is now, stability. I lost every bookmark, etc. I am now using the new Mozilla.

Quick Market Note: Do not invest a dime if you are looking. Indicators are all bad. The main signal is always the indexes and they have all gone through support. Not so strangely, good stocks did not go down last week. Check IBD.

Immigration talk: I have said many times that the illegals do not want to assimilate into America. When they get to this Los Angeles "sanctuary," they join one of the six hundred Mexican street gangs. Mexican gangs have been around since the 40s but never in the volume we have today. When illegals arrive, the culture they see is a gang culture and they assimilate immediately. Just in central Los Angeles city there are:
1. Big Top Locos
2. Burlington Street Locos
3. Crazies
4. Crazy Riders 13
5. Diamond Street
6. Drifters 13
7. Easy Riders
8. Echo Park 13
9. 18th Street, Broadway & 7th Street
10. 18th Street, Columbia Lil Cyco
11. 18th Street, Shatto Park
12. 18th Street, Pico Union
13. Head Hunters 13
14. Mara Salvatrucha
15. Orphans 13
16. PlayBoys 13
17. Rockwood Street 13
18. Temple Street
19. Wanderers 13
20. Witmer Street 13

Thanks George. Keep that border open. BTW there is even a site where you can buy Mexican Gang Banger dollies for your future gangster kiddies. It's right here. I wouldn't give them my correct address if I were you. My favorite is called "Mr. Raza" translated is Mr Race.

That'll work: France marks 100th day of Iraq reporter kidnap:
France showed its support for a French reporter and her Iraqi interpreter taken hostage in Baghdad 100 days ago with torch-lit rallies, messages of support in the media and balloons. They should have tried little pink ribbons, that always does it. Full sorry piece is here.

GET PISSED: all sources are DOE unless otherwise stated; trading data from Investors Business Daily, Margins from NYMEX.

The price of unleaded gasoline delivered to NY Harbor on the 14th of April was $1.38 per gallon, down more than thirty cents per gallon in ten days. Saturday, the 16th of April, as I was driving around LA, I found that the price had gone up another cent per gallon and was selling between $2.69 and $2.62 per gallon. One station had it for $2.57. We pay $.36 per gallon in taxes so the price at the pump (2.62-.36=$2.26 per gallon) is $.88 cents over the cash. The usual spread over the years has been between five and nine cents. We are getting fucked. We don�t have free market capitalism in the fuel market. Even though there are 24 oil companies in the U.S. There are fewer than ten retailers, all owned by a parent refining company. Consider that our consumption of gasoline is about four hundred million gallons per day. Multiplying that by $.88 means the companies are making around three hundred and eighty million dollars per day, or around 11 billion per month. BUT we have to keep in mind there are transportation costs, taxes, profit margins, the demands of mistresses to be considered. Now I don�t know what a normal profit should be but I repeat: the normal spread between cash and pump is between five and ten cents, not eighty eight cents.

Pissed enough? If you ain',t you're a Communist hoping the oil companies will teach capitalism a lesson it will never forget.

So, to the Markets

Question: does the cash follow the futures or do futures follow the cash? The answer is that futures follow the cash, USUALLY. This means that on occasion the futures markets can cause cash prices to soar---or collapse--- for no other reason than the contagious quality of fear, which is to speculation as lying is to the MSM.

First, we need to take a look at crude oil, which has been up on pure speculation. How is this possible with all the exchanges having position limits, which means you cannot hold more than a specific number of contracts; in theory this rule that means that nobody can corner a market. Question then arises, and one I have asked over and over on this site, how the hell does this speculation happen?

Could God be involved?

First let us look at how easy it is to rig the futures markets---if you have enough money---and it doesn't take much in these markets. Stocks trade in excess of two billion shares per day; gasoline futures trades under 80,000 per day and crude oil about 300,000 contracts per day. The value of stocks traded each day is said to be in excess of two trillion dollars, gasoline and crude together have a value of just six hundred million dollars. Futures are a joke. The argument is often made that you have to multiply each oil or gasoline contract by the number of units within the contract: 1,000 (bbl or 42,000gallons) to get the correct amount of product traded. I disagree. You trade what is there. You cannot make the argument that a futures contract on the S&P 500 has to be multiplied out, or treasury bonds have to be multiplied out. You trade the unit that is there. The margin required (cash you put up to trade each contract) is the biggest joke going: $3,500 controls $500,00 $1,200,000 worth of crude oil (at $50 per barrel). This allows these guys to go crazy. The �rumor� per Larry Kudlow is that the margin for large speculators is $1,400.

So here we sit with a small market, ready for picking by big money.

Enter the force called �Managed Futures.� These are like mutual funds in that they have huge amounts of money for trading, not in the two billion share Stock Market, but in these small futures markets. All of the managed funds will gobble up the maximum number of contracts allowed by law; 350 crude contracts and 150 gasoline contracts. Consider that there are around 2,100 managed futures funds, but the NYMEX reports indicate only around 131 large specs with a hundred more not reporting in unleaded gas; plus at least 222 (times the limit of 350 equals 77,000 contracts) sum in crude and you can see the potential. [below is the crude Commitment of Traders report from the CFTC] The problem arises because all of managed funds trade on the same technical data. They all get the same signals at the same time as well as the same info. As a result you have these massive movements. (Go here for hedging) A note here: the futures traders are really sharp, not like the Mutual Fund dopes. There is no way they are going to stay in a market that is going south.

What has happened over the past ten days is that all of the managed futures funds reacted to the same signals and shorted the market. Once the market started to fall they dumped everything and went short the entire market.

Unleaded gasoline has a total volume of 80,000 (136,000 contracts total open interest). This means that 80,000 times the contract spec: 42,000 gallons; this means that only 336 million gallons of gasoline is traded on the NYMEX in New York each day [vs consumption of four hundred million]. The total number of contracts outstanding on all months stretching out to December of 2009 is 850,000 contracts. I don�t have data for London, Frankfurt, Paris, and Tokyo but seems logical to infer similar volume, but it is said that the U.S. uses 40% of the fossil fuels consumed right now.

The total open interest (contracts either long or short) on both crude and unleaded gasoline at the New York Mercantile Exchange was just over 600,000 contracts. I didn�t calculate beyond four months because those distant contracts represent hedges against God only know what.

Consider that the NYSE and NASDAQ are trading in excess of two BILLION shares each day; consider most trades are in 100 lots, and you are left with twenty million contracts buys and sells. Big difference between 130,000 gasoline contracts and 20,000,000 hundred lots. AND---You cannot buy stocks by putting up .007 the value of the stock as you do in crude. You have to put up 50%, and that is what stops the really rich from doing in the market. The low margin plus a gang of rich funds is how this energy speculation could take place. Too much money chasing too few contracts. Will it happen again? Would Paris Hilton make a porno?

Reply to many emails: The May futures is higher than the cash right now and that is normal. Eventually the cash and the futures will be the same on expiration; either the cash rises to meet the futures or the reverse. May contracts expire at the end of April.
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Some Right Wing bullshit exposed: Refinery capacity has gone up since 1991 not down; capacity per operating refinery increased by 28% over the 1990 to 1998 period. The number of refineries has dropped from 324 to 149 since 1981 BUT all of those were smaller or inefficient refineries, had serious pollution problems, or were so old that maintenance costs were prohibitive without price the price supports described below. Additionally, in 1981 the refineries were operating at 67% capacity and most were losing money on their operations. However refinery capacity has increased 28% since 1990 as the majors expand operations. Refineries now operate at 90% capacity. Something we have all forgotten is that there were price controls in place until 1981. These price controls acted as a subsidy for both good and bad refineries. No subsidy means that no inefficient business can exist.

There are 24 major energy companies that refine product. They include Kerr McGee Marathon, Frontier, Holly, Devon Energy, ConocoPhillips Citgo/PDV America, Utramar, Diamond Shamrock, Koch Industries, Premcor Tesoro Petroleum, Valero Energy, Phillips Petroleum, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, ARCO, Unocal and a few others. Even so, the suspicion exists that they fix prices and there is no true competition.

Go here for details on traders in market. LOL reading the Goddam thing.
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Movies: Saw previews for coming summer movies. This year's bad guys are not Islamic terrorists, Republicans, our own government, nor creatures from the depths of the Left. We await breathlessly for a ton of horror movies with unseen ghosts, serial killers, and evil forces that look scary as hell. I must admit that "Amityville" looks great in trailer form, as does "House of Wax." The Nicole Kidman Sean Penn movie, "The Interpreter," looks like a phony, and "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy," a terrific book from the 60's or 70's seems like zero. The movie that all insiders think is THE blockbuster for summer, "War of the Worlds," looks boring as hell in trailer form. The Hollywood idea of spirituality contines to be murdering ghosts, the Devil, and a picture about Crusaders called "Kingdom of Heaven" a Ridley Scott picture and therefore a must see for me. The preview makes the movie look ordinary as hell; if it wasn't Ridley Scott there is no way I'd want to see it. From all reports, 45 minutes has suddenly been cut from the movie and everything has been done to make the Muslims look as good as possible. And Orlando Bloom as the strong lead???? Is there a masculine young actor in the world? I'm betting the bad guys are the Christians. Late add from emailer R. M.:...... a close friend of mine works for a test screening company and he tested Kingdom. says it's awful. Ridley Scott attempting to remake Gladiator with a limp-wristed girly boy in the lead. total shit.

I think this site passes the smell test for a great blog, one that does real research and then reports fairly. Of couse a site titled "Counterterroism" ain't Left so nobody knows about it, but this should be a daily read. See if you don't think so. Look HERE for something you don't know.

The Chinese "riots"----Think about it. China is a totalitarian state, one that is deep doo doo. The real riots are taking place over lack of drinking water and levels of pollution that are the worst in the world. You can bet that these riots are being staged so the gangster cops of the regime can kick the shit out of the real protestors around China without anybody knowing about it. Whenever an authoritarian state gets in any kind of domestic trouble they must create an outside devil. In most cases the devil is America, but with the Chinese it is more convenient to create Devil Japan. This is a thugocracy, if they wanted to stop these "riots" they would cease in a nano-second. Details on the scope of pollution are featured in this week's Economist

Water and waste pollution is the single most serious issue. Pan Yue, deputy head of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), the country's environmental watchdog ministry, calls it �the bottleneck constraining economic growth in China�. Per head, China's water resources are among the lowest in the world and concentrated in the south, so that the north and west experience regular droughts. Inadequate investments in supply and treatment infrastructure means that even where water is not scarce, it is rarely clean. Around half the population, or 600m people, have water supplies that are contaminated by animal and human waste.

In late July an environmental disaster occurred on the Huai river, one of China's seven big rivers. A 133km-long black and brown plume swept along the river killing millions of fish and devastating wildlife. According to Mr Pan, the catastrophe occurred because too much water had been taken from the river system, reducing its ability to clean itself. Others say that numerous factories dump untreated waste directly into the water.

There is a book out called The River Runs Black that the Chinese government would cause to disappear if they could that is shocking a lot of people, not just the environmental whack jobs. The Yellow River now dries up for 200 days per year before it reaches the sea. There are real riots in big parts of China, but Japan has nothing to do with them.

Bad Hair Blog links to this still shocking BBC news report of the first people to walk into Belsen Belsen, complete with pictures. Even after all these years it is awful. This blog is also doing a great series on the Oil for Food without the fancy writing and speculation. This is a good site that I don't visit often enough.

And be sure to visit The Counter Terrorism Blog where they have a story about Coni Rice covering up a huge story. They have the facts HERE

For Secretary of State Rice these numbers are a disaster. It is tough to argue we are winning the war on terrorism when the numbers in the official Government report will show the largest number of incidents ever recorded since the State Department started reporting on terrorist incidents.

Read it.

Markets: I posted the following on Kudlow's site just as Blogger broke down.

Market coming down: I seriously believe that psychology has as much to do with ups and downs as facts do. These gasoline prices are bumming everyone out. The clerks in the office don't know what they will do. Most don't know that unleaded gasoline has been dropping on the close for ten straight days and is now down more than 36 cents while retail prices have gone up seven cents in LA, with another penny rise at most stations today. People know they are being screwed and they don't feel good about it, and many mention the silence of all the Republicans. Then, don't forget that all these big moves are commission generators for the big firms, and I think jumping on and off bandwagons is a great way for them to make commissions and have an excuse. And even bigger: the MSM is now running stories about the impending bankruptcy of GM and Ford. Even a little dumpy paper like the Rock River Times is talking about it. Rock River Times? We're talking small town here. This kind of story has to affect the market. BTW, read the whole story because they've done one hell of a job. Rockford is in Illinois.

Firefox now has no popup protection at all. I am getting pop ups while I'm writing this. Bye bye Firefox....

Late add: gasoline prices dropped for nine straight days --close only---while the price at the pump has risen another five cents here in LA. A few stations added a cent today.

Larry Kudlow has a terrific piece on the overall rosy economy from an economists POV. But economists are always wrong, eventually. While Larry looks the other way, and we all sleep, we are getting fucked and we know it.

What Kudlow is missing are perceptions about the economy, and the perceptions are that gas prices are killing us. Limbaugh and Hannity, together with most of the Right lemmings, would have us all believe that the current run up in gasoline prices while the futures prices are coming down is no big deal; it�s just the markets. Well I know a hell of a lot about markets, and in particular the energy trading pits in New York and London. Every owner of a commodity shorts in the futures markets so their losses are eliminated. Let me explain in an overly simplified way.

Once you own a commodity but not yet sold it (crops in the ground, oil in ground or on tankers) your biggest fear is that you may have to sell it for less than it costs to produce----or what you paid for it---unless.
1. You can rig the retail market and maintain prices by selling the oil at pre-defined high prices. To do this you have to own everything from the tanker to the retailer. The oil companies own everything from the tanker to the retailer.
And/or 2. You sell the oil the second you buy it for delivery at a time in the future when the oil tanker hits port and the oil is delivered. Then you buy the futures contract back for whatever the price of oil is upon delivery. You cannot lose.

To understand how shorting the futures when you actually own the commodity so you can�t lose money�known as hedging---here�s a simple step by step:

Sheik Abu Ginsberg of Arabia sells me oil for $2 a barrel and I sell it right away in the futures markets for $2 and put the $2 cash in my account. When I get to New Orleans the price of oil has dropped to $1. Theoretically I�ve just been ruined. However, at the same time that I sell for the market price of $1 I buy back my futures contract that I sold for $2 for $1. I have lost $1 in the cash market and made it all back on my futures contract that I sold for $2 and now buy back for $1 (remember this is a simplified example).

So these oil companies that own every production and marketing step once oil is pumped from the ground continue to rip us off as oil drops more than $8 and gasoline more than thirty five cents in the futures market. People are pissed. They don�t know what is happening but they know that the major oil companies are making record profits while charging record prices for something that should be much cheaper. This price gouge of the past ten or so days is obscene. Every company hedges in the futures market, the oil companies, the oil users (refineries), and the wholesalers. The companies own all the gas stations so they can rig prices.

Larry leaves out the sure knowledge of the great unwashed that we are being fucked while we sleep and have to pay for the resulting baby. This awareness can kill the economy and the stock market.

I could get a lot more complicated about the hedging---Texas hedges, option hedges, strangle hedges---but just understand that nobody in business assumes risk if they can avoid it.

What if the prices go up after you sold a futures contract? So what. You bought the oil for $2 and sold it for $3; you lost a dollar in the futures market but made a dollar in the cash.

Late Add: the unions have just told GM to fuck off regarding any cuts in health care costs.
Markets No, this ain't about the DOW, oil, China, or anything else the MSM will talk about tomorrow. It's this little item buried in a news report about the headed for bankruptcy General Motors.

Bob Lutz, vice chairman of General Motors, recently told a Denver audience that the greatest business challenge for GM is the cost of health care for employees and their families.

There are further yelps from both Ford and Chrysler that can only mean that the UAW and GM are going to call for Socialized Medicine as the way to bail out both the UAW and their millions of pensioners. Same for Ford. There is no way in hell the unions will give back a dime and no way in hell that either company can survive the current (anywhere from $1,300 to $1,700 per CAR) health care costs. The government cannot allow GM to go under---remember the Chrysler bailout---because a million or so people on the unemployment lines will destroy this country. You better pay attention.

The Right and GOP hatred toward Hillary will destroy the GOP in '08 as the Bush hate destroyed the Democrats in '04. Hate loses every time. This "Bitch Hillary" stuff is too stupid for words. The Right better have a program, and right now they don't, other than spend and spend. They will deserve to get wasted.

Want a quickie on China's real problems?

Officials in Beijing have warned that a third of China's rural population - an estimated 360m people - lack access to safe drinking water. They also said that more than 70% of China's rivers and lakes were polluted. The vice minister for water resources, Zhai Haohui, told a symposium on water management that the provision of clean drinking water should be a priority. This is yet another sign that China is struggling to deal with the impact of its breakneck economic development.

China's waterways are dying, and its rivers are running black from industrial effluent and untreated sewage. The China Daily newspaper said that about two million people had suffered diseases caused by drinking water with high arsenic content, including cancer. In the nation's cities, the situation is just as dire. There, ground water is the major source of drinking water. Yet in one recent survey, 95% of the samples tested were polluted, some with sewage. An official from the environmental watchdog openly blamed the crisis on improper policies and poor government administration. Decades of rampant economic development have taken their toll on China's environment.

Those now tasked with cleaning up face opposition from polluting industries and local governments. The current leadership has stressed the need to conserve the environment, but these latest figures show just how much damage has already been done.

There are pages of links on Google. This rioting could spread, and in China that is bad news.

Can't blog today BUT when you have time take a look at this site, called the Exquisite Corpse. Some of the best writing on, or off, the web. Very good site and the writing is both Left and Right. There's good factual stuff like this

(Panspermia: here understood as "all things semen") "When two men are fighting and the wife of one intervenes to save her husband from the blows of his opponent, if she stretches out her hand and seizes the latter by his private parts, you shall chop off her hand without pity."
--Deuteronomy 26:11-12

The word "Testimony" comes from the ancient belief that life was engendered by men alone, so when swearing to tell the truth in a modern court of law only the Bible replaced the scrotum as the oath-taking vessel,
for testicles, being the source of all life, the testicles were king, and wombs for millennia were just baby carriages.

There's stuff like "The Passion of the Budda," there's a deconstruction of Saddam's novel, even the now unknown Xaviera Hollander graces the site with a tale of fellatio with some carpenter from Equador. Mostly left but one or to righties too.

PUBLIC SERVICE: As the feared bird flu threatens the world population, it is important that you bcome acquainted with the symptoms of this potentially fatal disease. They are:

Laying eggs while vomiting
As fever hits 105 patient begins to chirp stupidly
Patient complains that his wings hurt
Three day erection�disappears after canary is removed from room
Patient begins to recover after being declared an endangered species.

Here to help....info from the NIH

In keeping with the drive toward blogger diversity I will now reveal my identity: I am a 70 year old HIV positive bi-polar Muslim Puerto Rican Lesbian single mom, with one leg, a speech defect, and no college education. Susan Estrich is my role model. I lust for her. Please don't kick me off the web, I promise to be good.

Shhhhhhh......crude oil is down $7 in ten days. Unleaded gasoline is down $.30, not at the pumps but it dropped a dime in LA today.

A few weeks ago Dr. Demcarche invited me to contribute to a section or series on China. I told him I knew jack about China and couldn't contribute. He now has a bunch on China and it is terrific reading. You can thank your lucky stars that I didn't join up because all you'd read about are the whore houses in Hong Kong, miracle cures for the latest STD, and how to bargain with whores.

OK, I'll join in. These guys are holding a bunny hostage and will kill it if you don't donate......

I don�t want to eat Toby, he is my friend, and he has always been the most loving, adorable pet. However, God as my witness, I will devour this little guy unless I receive 50,000$ USD into my account from donations or purchase of merchandise. You can help this poor, helpless bunny�s cause by making donations through my verified PayPal account by clicking on any of the Donate buttons on this site, or by purchasing merchandise at the Savetoby.com online store.

PETA, as you might expect, is really pissed off.

Animal lovers around the world have expressed outrage at a website whose owner has threatened to butcher, cook and eat a pet bunny called Toby unless he receives $50,000 (�27,000) in donations by the end of June.

There is even a Rabbit Welfare Association. And another reason to stop using Pay Pal

PayPal, the on-line payment service the website was using to get donations, decided last month that the site violated its "offensive-materials" standards.

I hope you will join millions of others and help kill this little piece of shit.

Here's why the French sold 44 tons of gold for dollars and announced the future sale of 400 tons---the French lie all the time and everybody knows it---for dollars. Why they want a lower Euro....

April 11 (Bloomberg) -- Industrial production in France, Europe's third-largest economy, unexpectedly fell in February, adding to evidence of a slowdown among the dozen nations sharing the euro.

French companies and consumers, squeezed by record oil prices, are curbing spending, crimping sales at businesses such as Pernod Ricard SA.

All of "old Europe" is seeing stagnation. Bad news for the election in five weeks.

If you don't believe that the thrust of MSM "reporting" on our war in Iraq is to make our military seem like thugs and bastards just check this rundown from LGF Their purpose is to lower the opinion of our military among the young resulting in lower enlistments so that we cannot have an effective military. The pattern, of first the reporting, and then the awards for the hit jobs, can lead to no other conclusion. This prick....

Several TV stations aired a video showing a U.S. marine shooting an unarmed wounded Iraqi man in the head inside a Fallujah mosque as he was laying down next to the wall.

The U.S. marine who shot dead the wounded Iraqi had been detained and could face prosecution, according to TV networks.

The dramatic footage was taken Saturday by pool correspondent Kevin Sites of NBC television, who said that three other prisoners wounded a day earlier inside the same mosque were also shot the next day by the marines.

The marine involved in the crime was reported to have been wounded in the face the day before the killing but was returned back to duty at once.

CBS News broadcast a still photo from the footage showing the marine standing above the wounded helpless man, and pointing his rifle at the man�s body, then a rifle shot could be heard.

The video showed the bullet hitting the already wounded man in the head. Blood splatters were seen covering the wall behind him and his body goes limp.

....set up the chain of lies. But he gets a big time award. And Claudia Rosett? Heather MacDonald?

Scientists Create Remote-Controlled Flies........

Now we know the origins of Barbara Boxer. Per Drudge

Anti Japanese attitudes in China reveal the real hate most of Asia feels toward the Japanese for what they perpetrated in WWII. I've lived over there and most of the people who never experienced the Japanese occupation hate them as if they had experienced it yesterday. The Rape of Nanking is still fresh and if you haven't read the late Iris Chang's book you are missing something nearly great. Chang committed suicide a few years back.

Can't blog today.

Shocker link to Danny Glover's Cuba. Most of us who think we've seen a little of Cuba are in for an awakening. Many of us have only seen the Cuban music movie titled The Buena Vista Social Club, which didn't show too much of Havana. The pix at the link above show shocking squalor, but we don't have any Samoza era pictures of the same area to compare. (link via no pasaran). Here's a link on the site that does show comparisons with pre Castro Cuba. Jesus. Then for a view of the free medical care, go here. And here for some comparisons. You will re-hate all those Castro loving Hollywood bastards.

Notes on a Zig Zag paper: Let's all get together and thank Glenn Reynolds for posting a link to hard core porn so all our kids can become "enlightened." What an asshole. Now we have to block InstaPundit.

Iraqis marching in the streets protesting U.S. "occupation." No surprise. In the honor/shame dialectic of all Muslim countries, our presence there shames them and sullies their "honor." I have posted many times here on both the honor/shame dialectic and the power/challenge process in the Middle East. Add to that the natural resentment that grips everyone taking help or charity. Nothing is more shameful than being helpless when you know you should be standing on your own feet. Don't look for Iraq to praise us when we leave.

Once again the bloggers have called attention to the dishonesty of the MSM through our exposure of their awards system. The Pulitzers are a total political scam. Not just because Claudia has been denied---and Heather MacDonald---but the AP photos are also a fraud. Now we all know. As for the CBS camera/terrorist read Mudville, Roger Simon who links, and Chris Muir who draws. Power Line has a long piece on the "staged" killing.

Good roundup on Iran and their abandonment of Nuclear research, HERE. At least that's how the Euro-weenies see it. Will anyone ever believe our intel again? It'll be a long long time.

I have pulled Jerry Brown from my referrals. He never posts, so what's the point.

Add on to my view of Sin City....

Both Left and Right wing movie reviewers think the movie, Sin City, is simply too low to recommend. Violence for its own sake, blah blah blah. At least many seem to think a movie should aim higher than just killing and rape. I ask, "Why?" I think movies should have some really good rape scenes, dismembering scenes, and woman beating scenes, combined with truly bad dialogue so you know they're only pretending. That's what true art is. And by that definition this is great art, great because there are ton of vicious lesbians too.

I walked out after about an hour because the movie was all style...the babes are the best in any movie I've seen in years...and the presentation of the story is brand new. AND it was great to see Micky Rourke once again in great form. It's also a movie that aspiring producer/writer/directors should see. The form, which is almost animation, or mixed animation, removes reality from the movie. The result is that all the dialogue is stream of subconscious, meaning the people are saying exactly what they really mean without any pretense. Like a man never does the "Hey baby, you look cute," when he really means "I want to fuck you right now." He just walks up to the chick and says, I want to fuck you right now. It's very interesting from that standpoint. I liked it til it ran completely out of gas. Should you take your little kiddies to see it? No; but encourage any teens you have who may be interested in visual arts to see it.

An old Hollywood pro said something to me when I was just starting to produce movies: �Never fight with an actor,� he intoned. �You can�t win, they can get all the papers and magazines to blast you for years. If you have to bust up one, bide your time, and then destroy him.�

Correction: Slate did NOT say the LAT would fold. Most everyone else has.
A bunch of others are predicting that the LAT is going to cave into GM's advertising boycott or risk losing everything. BULL F***ING DOO DOO. GM claims that it is pulling advertising from LA Times in response to the editorial content of the paper. I doubt it, and I wrote about GM�s serious problems HERE a few days ago. It's my take that GM is the producer who thinks he has power, and the LAT is the actor who can blast away.

Keep in mind that GM has decided to hurt a newspaper that prints every day. The LAT has reporters they can turn loose on the company who will look up the backgrounds on every executive in the corporation all over the world; they can hire private detectives; get awful information from disgruntled sources inside GM; in short, the LA Times can destroy GM. They can do it with �news.� They smeared Nordstrom�s for years because Nordstrom�s didn�t advertise. They didn�t need to advertise, but they caved. Once Nordstrom�s started running a small ad once a week the attacks stopped. GM is going to regret this action. Wait for the negative "news" to start appearing within articles and hit pieces will be featured in the Business Section. For the rest of you, never fight with the media; you can't win.

I was once involved with New Age Guru, the now vanished Werner Erhard, AKA Jack Rosenberg, through EST. This was a quasi-cult in that recruitment was always a priority in every contact with everyone, continuing "education" through courses called seminars were a requirement, and retreats that lasted anywhere from a few days to ten days were always said to be worth while. The people involved either left or became adoring acolytes of the "leader." Women were particularly affected. Werner was right about everything.

This evening, because there were no games on TV I roamed through some mags on the net. I happened to read Hewitt's piece in Weekly Standard regarding Opus Dei, an organization I felt was unfairly attacked in the fiction best seller "Di Vinci Code." When you have time I urge the Catholics among you to read this link (supplied by Hewitt) which lays bare the American version of Opus Dei. The piece appears in a Catholic mag called America and as you read it I think you will see the similarity with Erhardt's "work." People who have been involved with Erhard say that he lifted his entire "schtick" from Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard.

I have no idea regarding the purposes of Opus Dei other than getting converts into the fold. Their separation of women and men seems almost Muslim---sexes were never separated by Erhardt----and their methods of reacting to attacks seem right out of Scientology, without the law suits. Read the piece and see what you think.

I assume you all read Little Green Footballs. Soros is using his billions to change the Constitution. This is one dangerous dude.

The much maligned Richard Clarke is now revealed as someone who knew his shit, and nobody listened. National Archives has just released his early report on terrorism.

January 25, 2001 Richard Clarke Memo:
"We urgently need . . . a Principals level
review on the al Qida network."

Clarke's memo requests an immediate meeting of the National Security Council's Principals Committee to discuss broad strategies for combating al-Qaeda by giving counterterrorism aid to the Northern Alliance and Uzbekistan, expanding the counterterrorism budget and responding to the U.S.S. Cole attack. Despite Clarke's request, there was no Principals Committee meeting on al-Qaeda until September 4, 2001.

The January 25, 2001, memo, recently released to the National Security Archive by the National Security Council, bears a declassification stamp of April 7, 2004, one day prior to Rice's testimony before the 9/11 Commission on April 8, 2004. Responding to claims that she ignored the al-Qaeda threat before September 11, Rice stated in a March 22, 2004 Washington Post op-ed, "No al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration."

Clarke knew his stuff, nobody bothered til it was way too late. The report also notes that the Clinton people were sleeping as well. The 9/11 attack WAS another Pearl Harbor in the sense that we should have been prepared for something (not planes crashing into the Trade Center Towers) and been acting against Bin Ladin. What the report neglects is the refusal of the Left to endorse any kind of action without PROOF. Even the World Trade Center attack wasn't really enough proof for many. The Ivy trained "Deconstructionists" attacked the Bush speech and policy immediately

"In four short months, our nation has comforted the victims;

And, tragically, created still more, including thousands of Afghan civilians.

. . .begun to rebuild New York;

It would indeed be wonderful if the federal government were really beginning to rebuild New York and other decaying urban areas, where public health, mass transit, schools, housing, and basic infrastructure are notably inferior to those of other Western industrialized nations; this is largely the result of decades of excessive military spending and fiscal policies favoring the wealthy, trends being accelerated by the Bush administration. Unfortunately, the rebuilding of New York is largely limited to areas of the financial district in lower Manhattan near where the World Trade Center once stood.

One other example of the "deconstruction"

. . .captured, arrested and rid the world of thousands of terrorists;

While U.S. forces have indeed "captured, arrested, and rid the world" (the final piece a euphemism for killing) of thousands of people in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the number who could actually be considered terrorists, even by a very liberal definition, is probably only in the hundreds. Most of the others were Afghan soldiers and civilians, most of whom were neither terrorists nor supporters of terrorism.

So if you think Clinton or Bush could have possibly rallied any support til after the planes hit you must be in a different galaxy; lucky you. We have a hate the government Left that is in full agreement with the goals of the ACLU (see the red piece at the top of this blog).

The Right is trying to get us to believe that Bush had the freedom of Iraq and the subsequent "domino effect" of freedom throughout the Arab World as the real reason for the Iraq invasion from the start. I don't think we should confuse the word idea with the term main idea. He certainly mentioned it immediately after 9/11 when he announced that we would end state sponsorship of terrorism........

we will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them

and he did mention replacing tyrannical regimes with democracy. This was a radical departure from the old Roosevelt through Clinton policies of "He may be an SOB, but he's our SOB." Since FDR we had always replaced a strong man with another strong man (dictator) that we could "handle." The Bushies didn't talk about freedom much, and we all forgot about it. Sometime in early 2004 somebody in power got a hold of the gallies from Sharansky's book. Bush and his staff read it----everyone in the Administration read it----and suddenly they made establishing a democracy in Iraq and the entire Middle East our main policy as if it had always been thus. The reality is that Sharasky showed the Administration how to sell the policy. The actual Iraq war was begun on false intel. Period. A look at the 2003 State of the Union address mentioned no policy of freeing the oppressed, even as an afterthought.

In fairness, Paul Wolfowitz DID have the idea as far back as 1992

In 1992 he and Lewis Libby wrote Defense Planning Guidance for Dick Cheney. This was a classified document but excerpts were leaked to the New York Times. Senator Joseph Biden was horrified, and described the documents as a prescription for "literally a Pax Americana."

Wolfowitz's notions about freedom being contageous have a long tail. He has been public about it since 9/12. As you all know, I have never been in the Bush is a moron camp, always thinking that he is smart as hell, so I don't think that the one lone voice of Paul Wolfowitz shaped Bush's thinking on Iraq. He, Rice, Cheney, and most everyone was sure the bad intel was in fact correct before the war; the freedom as a beacon for all oppressed peoples was only in the back of Bush's mind---at first. The shift into making freedom the main goal came out of political necessity, and the White House has done a good job of making everyone think that this was always a primary goal. There's a good old piece HERE. Bush made this shift in his State of the Union Address in 2004 and we are just now coming to realize it. Wolfowitz clearly articulated the idea of freedom of peoples as opposed to governments becoming "liberal" back in '02.

To win the war against terrorism and, in so doing, help shape a more peaceful world, we must speak to the hundreds of millions of moderate and tolerant people in the Muslim world, regardless of where they live, who aspire to enjoy the blessings of freedom and democracy and free enterprise. These are sometimes described as "Western values," but, in fact, they are universal.

I think that Bush had his fall back position way back then.

Markets and economy: The dollar is poised for a breakout over the key 55.44 mark. Why? Well if you ever check with Jake Bernstein, the developer or recognizer of cycles in markets, you know that for reasons unknown, currencies trade in long term cycles of three years or more. The down cycle has been over since November. French banks have sold 47 tons of gold for DOLLARS and intend to sell 400 tons more over the next four years. Why? To help the trend and weaken the Euro which most feel is too high and is the economy killer. Then there are rising rates, a sure dollar boost as well. This PM three major brokerage firms also gave a buy signal on the dollar. You should have been in the buck for a while now, but it's not too late.

Firefox has no pop up protection at all and the "new and improved" add-on doesn't work. My prediction? We will all leave Firefox as we get fed up with it.

Was in emergency ward yesterday due to accident as Tiger Woods hit the pin with a shot and the ball bounced into a trap. One Black says to another: "They'll never let him win. Never." I think us whites are the "they." Feels good to be so powerful.

New Yorkers boo the great relief pitcher, Mariano Rivera for "blowing" a save. This in spite of the fact that a sure game ending double play ball was mishandled allowing the shit to happen. Wanna bet he's "lost it?" Just wait, he'll find it and fast.

Tatum O'Niel is NOT a dyke........Is too.

Hypocrisy to the MAX: According to Page Six, author Joe Lelyveld left out one dishy detail in his new memoir, "Omaha Blues"� he is having an adulterous affair with Times reporter Janny Scott."....It gets better. Little Times slut is also married, but to Channel 7 anchorman Bill Ritter. Now here's the kicker...."Bill and Janny have been together for 19 years. Their marriage is changing drastically because of this, obviously. But they are both committed to doing what is best for the kids." BEST FOR THE KIDS? BEST FOR THE KIDS IS TO STOP FUCKING----at least til the Pope is buried. Media whores are media whores. Worse, they actually believe that shit.

U.S. Catholic Church is dead. The "in your face" placement of Pedophile Preditor Cardinal Law as the center piece of Pope John's funeral will be the final straw. My extended family is 90% Catholic and to a person they are all pissed off. Many no longer attend mass at all and the rest are disgusted. The Church has lost all moral authority, which means it no longer means anything to the flock. I don't know what this means for the country as a whole, but it ain't good. The church schools have been a rock for centuries, now they are but clots of dried mud on a diseased and dying institution. Those hoping for a rescue will just give up, keeping in mind that Law is now choosing bishops; and the dirty jokes just keep on coming. The confessional is now rated R and altar boys are openly accused of being gay.

Major Correction in this piece, originally posted yesterday....
We are facing monumental problems with our economic system--health care costs and pension costs---with GM and Delta leading the way to huge corporate bankruptcies. Socialized Medicine will be here within five years as will brand new pension plans.

Oil and the "bubble" price....Seems a little off to me. We import 11 million barrels of oil per DAY. That comes out to 300 mil per month and we have 270 million 700 in SPR. I don't think that is a lot of oil. Three months and we are toast. The reality is that the Bush Administration has done nothing to encourage R&D into hybrid or fuel cell development. Therefore only Toyota and Ford are in the game. GM is facing bankruptcy, a disaster for our economy and a shock to Europe's as well. Everyone can piss and moan about the UAW and their greed at the bargaining table---which is a huge factor in GMs problems----but unattractive cars that up until a year or so ago were not as reliable as many Japanese or American cars are a real problem. Now with the European cars suffering from terrible quality---even Mercedes Benz is in the toilet---it is so bad that there is even a pissed off Mercedes owners site; GM has nothing they can use to fill the gap. We may be looking at a two car future: Ford and Toyota, if there will be anyone left who can afford them.

To give you an idea of the GM situation consider this:
the average cost of providing health-care and pension benefits is around $1,360 a car. That�s more per car than General Motors spends for steel. At Honda Motor�s (HMC, news, msgs) U.S. operations, the health-care and pension-benefit cost is only $107 a car.
There is no way for GM to overcome this gap other than bankruptcy. See HERE for major article. All the other car companies are in Socialized Medicine countries so individual companies don't have to pick up those costs. There are big changes coming and the Republicans will not be able to solve them

Late correction: the total in SPR is 700 million barrels. A lot of oil to be sure, but only three months worth. This is a weapon that gets weaker every day that it is used.

Michelle Malkin has posted something with filthy language, totally filthy. Either she is trying to build traffic or she is pretending to be hurt by such "attacks." She will think twice about posting language like that when she discovers the low life perverts who will search for those words and link to her.

Restaurant Explodes After Cockroach Control Snafu is the headline of the day. The actual story is not that good

Crazed California high school teacher violently rapes three innocent students.....

As the WSJ sinks further and further into the moral swamp of MSM. Tell me you wouldn't get ten years for the same crime Berger committed. And the WSJ wouldn't give you so much as one sentence.

SPIRITUAL COMMUNISM

The Pope, Catholics, and the forgiveness business........... I once dated a Catholic girl who was so sweet she�d give you diabetes if she kissed you and was so pretty you just knew you weren�t good enough for her, that she was meant for a God or a starting quarterback on a really good football team. This girl would forgive and forgive every murderer, every liar, and almost everyone for everything except taking false gods, missing mass on Sunday, and being mean to animals. She was maddening. �It�s all right, Howard, God forgives you,� drove me fucking nuts. I don�t know what happened to her. I hope she had a happy life, but I have this sneaky suspicion that she drove at least two men to suicide. She forgave them to death.... The only thing about her type of forgiveness was that it only meant something to her, not to the Howards of her life. What happened between us? You can't dump a sweet girl like her. She dumped me, for a sick fox or something that she found on the beach.

One of the great lessons Pope John supposedly taught us was forgiveness. The Pope can afford to forgive everybody because that�s what a Pope is supposed to do. The Pope isn�t living real life. He is cloistered, doesn�t have to earn a living, get re-elected to office, keep a business from falling into the ocean, or work for a boss who is an all time prick. Most importantly he doesn�t have a bitch of a wife who wants a new sofa, car, better apartment, a toilet seat left down, and three orgasms per night every night, or else. He isn�t shackled to some slob who may beat him up any time he steps out of line, or who gets drunk twice a week and comes home and pukes all over the bed, or is having sex with someone else behind your back. So he kisses the guy who tried to blow him away and we�re all supposed to learn from that. What I learned was that the Pope stuff wouldn�t work for a poor old lady on the street who got mugged. She�d just get mugged again by the same guy.

The problem with all great philosophies is that none of that stuff works at street level. But this particular Pope connected with every level. He presented a consistent Catholic doctrine to millions of people. Catholicism, like many religions when practiced totally, will work; meaning you will be successful, you can make good money, have nice things, but you always donate huge amounts of your money to charities. When you look at Catholicism in its totality as presented by the Pope, it not only means no abortions, stem cell research, gay marriage, or a million other things; it also means helping the poor, providing health care for everyone, no war in Iraq, and an accountability to God for failure to provide for others less fortunate�around the world. It doesn't mean you set up a phony tax deduction or a foundation. It means that you give.

I choose to call Catholicism, Spiritual Communism. Because the Pope wasn�t kidding.

It is forgiveness that this Pope is most noted for and it is this facet of Catholicism that most affects people. When forgiveness is passed down through the parishioner class we have some real problems in the real world. The endless misapplied forgiveness of the Catholic Church that kept those child molesters roaming free for twenty or more years. It also explains how the Mafia thugs and various international terrorists can claim Catholicism. The key to Catholic forgiveness is confession, and then penance. As a Catholic, I know (wrongly) that no matter what I do I can go to confession and be forgiven; ten Hail Mary�s and a few Our Fathers will fix stealing, lying, and cheating on my wife. Murder will take a couple of dozen rosaries, two Apostles Creeds, and a visit to the sick in some hospital. People piss and moan about the rigidity of the Catholic Church when what we should piss and moan about is the endless pardons for egregious sins that a forgiving Church always seems to supply to the sinner.

This idea is taught to Catholic kids in a little book called Catechism that is a simplified version of the faith. There is a little segment in the Catechism that goes

There is no offense, however serious, that the Church cannot forgive. "There is no one, however wicked and guilty, who may not confidently hope for forgiveness, provided his repentance is honest. Christ who died for all men desires that in his Church the gates of forgiveness should always be open to anyone who turns away from sin

Of course in the pure spiritual sense of the Church a �bad confession� is no confession at all; that�s because God knows what you�re trying to pull and he�s going to fuck you when this is all over unless you are really sorry, seek forgiveness, and don�t repeat the sin forever. The really cool and super hip sinner doesn�t begin to understand that part of it, so he just goes to confession in order to feel good about himself for a week. Til the next crime/confession/penance cycle. It is the cycle of sin, repeated over and over again, that the American Catholic bishops didn�t recognize as unforgivable sin.

She, like the priests and flocks, have forgotten one thing about confession and forgiveness: you can�t be forgiven if you haven�t asked for it, and a phony confession means nothing.

'Whosoever shall eat the bread and drink the cup of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.'" Cyprian, To the Clergy, 9 (16):2 (A.D. 250).

That means a fake confession is killing Jesus all over again; you ain't going nowhere but down. Doctrine further states that,

God is not mocked.' God cannot be mocked, nor deceived, nor deluded by any deceptive cunning. Yea, he sins the more, who, thinking that God is like man, believes that he evades the penalty of his crime if he has not openly admitted his crime....

Which means you won�t get away with it. In the Catholic religion there is also something called �retention.� The priest can retain certain sins and you ain�t been forgiven. This little goodie is unknown to most lay Catholics and may not be practiced by a lot of priests.

Perhaps child molesting priests thought that if they confessed they�d be cleared and the bishops to whom they confessed would actually have the power to forgive them. They are wrong. They are going to hell for molesting those children. Catholics who murder are not necessarily forgiven. They may repent, but the redemption lies above the clergy.

So while the Pope is in the forgiveness business, he did not forgive Mugabe, Hitler, or the rest of the serial criminals in our midst. He �retained� their sins. So the next time you hear about forgiveness remember both �retention,� and that a fake confession is killing Christ all over again. Some people are not forgiven, no matter how much they give to the Church, how many times a day they go to mass, or how many confessions and penances they do.

So that phony Catholic son of a bitch down the street? He will get his. Feel good now?

# posted by Howard : 4/06/2005 12:57:00 AM   

Dollar: must break 85.44 on the close to confirm upward trend. Those of you who are long will stay long for a while. It could be that the shrinking money supply is taking hold in the market. Makes no difference, stay in the trade.

Having ISP problems this AM. Will post later.

What he really meant.....the libs on the nets and in the fish wraps are twisting the late Pope's words even before he is buried. He did not mean homosexual behavior was OK, he did NOT really mean he wanted women to be priests, he did not actually mean that oral sex was OK before marriage, or that divorce is OK, or any of the liberal drivel going on right now is OK. People who want to change a church should get the hell out of the church. Form another one. Or don't go at all. The Catholic Bible will not be re-written, the Ten Commandments will remain the same, there will be no women priests, nor will any Pope care about what American liberals want. I think it means that Cardinal Law will remain free, which is a disgrace; I think the Church will refuse to obey the New York Times, which is good; nor will the new Pope issue an encyclical favoring The Big Dig in Boston, which is too bad.

Being a good Catholic is very hard. Any commitment to spiritualism is extremely difficult as any Twelve Step person will tell you. I've been to a hundred Twelve Step Meetings where people wanted to re-write the Big Book; always they disappear----or quit drinking and keep hanging around. I remember the first time I told a difficult truth after lying my entire life. What a surprise. The world did not end. I wasn't sent to jail. Nor was I sued. The guy appreciated my honesty and re-wrote our agreement.

A lesson learned. Doing things in an ethical or moral way seems impossible until you actually try it. Bad Catholics can learn to be good atheists.

No Pulitzer for Claudia. What did you expect from the UN loving Bush hating liberals on the committee? Lots of blogger rabid dog frothing about something that only means something to the Pulitzer people. Who won any categories last year? See what I mean. We all know the best reporting of the year was done by Claudia.....that will have to be her reward until The Catholic Church approves gay marriage AND pigs fly.

I really didn't know my views about many things were those of Pope John until I read this editorial in today's WSJ. Perhaps I am more Catholic than I thought. He addressed a society adrift in fuzzy morals and ethics. He viewed the carnage of the 20th century thusly:

Western humanism had gone off the rails, collapsing into forms of self-absorption, and then self-doubt, so severe that men and women had begun to wonder whether there was any truth at all to be found in the world, or in themselves.

Which is what many post Enlightenment philosophers feared.

The false humanism of freedom misconstrued as "I did it my way" inevitably leads to freedom's decay, and then to freedom's self-cannibalization.

I won't post any more today. I hope you all read the piece.

I discuss here the often stated premise: �What the Arab world needs is an Enlightenment.�

Why? Well, all the usual suspects tell us that the Enlightenment �worked� in Europe and freed them from the iron grip of Catholicism, Calvinism, and the other religious isms that had controlled thinking and politics for centuries. It got rid of the inherited aristocracies that had dominated for almost a thousand years. So �The Problem� in the Middle East is religion. And if they would get Enlightened like the EU and American Left, why they would be just like us: Religion Free.

Religion is bad because people blindly follow it and religious states are by nature tyrannical; just like the university states we have in this country today. Therefore, mankind--�whoopsie, I meant humankind; bad boy Howard---must be free FROM religion as well as hereditary aristocracy. However, Certain Dictatorships, Communist States, and tribal thugs seem to be OK without any Enlightening at all, as long as they are so poor they will obey all the same usual suspects and not get too snotty. China is getting snotty but God is dead over there so they will come around, eventually.

Most of us who didn�t major or minor in philosophy don�t have a clue about the Enlightenment. Many of us who actually took the courses were given the usual Leftist Marxist propaganda that we spent at least a decade un-learning if we cared at all. "I think, therefore I am" really means that when you really think, what you think about is the exploited masses of peasants and workers being crushed by the forces of Capitalism. After you are taught to think like that, you are clearly am.

So we got Enlightened. Some of us acted in the musical version of Das Kapital or danced in one of Engel�s ballets in college; we all hum a little Voltaire and rock to some Rousseau now and then just to stay hip at the right parties; and we all know people who have smoked a little Locke and ended up in jail thank you very much.

To be �enlightened� is to free from religion. We gotta somehow make those Islamic MF�s get enlighted. Toss that shit-for-brains God and the Bible into the sewer. But getting people to enlighten themselves isn't easy. Even though it seems easy when you don't think about it.

The Enlightenment didn�t just happen. In 18th century England, due to the Magna Carta back in twelve something or other, just before Aquinas started blabbering, the Brits were well on their way to a democratic government long before the Frenchies started Enlightening one another.

The seed of the European Enlightenment had to be planted first and that seed was planted when Aristotle�--the man, not the wine---was rediscovered by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 1300's, and for a while all the smart guys were using Aristotelian logic exclusively to defend the faith. But that didn�t last long, because just as Aristotle basically brought down the Gods of Greece, the smart guys used Aristotle to bring down the world as they knew it. I have no idea why the smart guys aren�t blabbering that what Islam needs is an Alexander the Great since Aristotle was Alexander�s tutor but I�m not one of the smart guys. It was by thinking stuff not in the course that earned me an incomplete in �Marx and Socialist Pornography" a popular course way back when.

The �seed� of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas led to �Humanists,� who were a bunch of guys who thought that God as then interpreted by clergy was not really a vengeful God. They thought that human life was to be glorified and loved by God. Their aim was to restore to Christianity the creative glories of Greece and Rome. Original sin didn�t exist. So everybody was getting jabbed by humanism before being KO�d by the Enlightenment.

When Galileo emerged to �prove� that the earth was not the center of the Universe as the Pope said the Bible demanded, the Vatican rapidly filled with shredded human waste, a waste that eventually landed on Galileo thus shutting him up. However there were others in Northern Europe, who were out of the reach of the Church, who kept thinking.

Humanist questions kept popping up, usually posed by people like monks or very religious types. They were led further astray by a guy by the name of Fran�ois Rabelais who openly labeled lots of Church doctrine as absurd; he said shit like, "Jonah wasn�t swallowed by no whale," and "maybe two of every animal in the world couldn�t fit on a shitty little boat." The actual bridge to the �Enlightenment� was built by a French guy with the fruity name of Michel de Montaigne, who asked the BIG question: "What do I know?" Meaning, know without a doubt. He was the first moral relativist, the first with a sliding scale of ethics. He further asked: �Who are we to say that the natives in Brazil are immoral when compared to us?� Even worse, this French prick asked: �If we cannot be certain that our values are God-given, then we have no right to impose those values by force on others. Inquisitors, popes, and kings alike had no business enforcing adherence to particular religious or philosophical beliefs.� Sound familiar? We can�t impose freedom, democracy, kindness toward others, or human rights for those in disagreement; we must drift on a sea of relativism. Europe and the American Left have been �de Montaigned,� not enlightened.

If only Islam would do that. They could then be relativists too.

Ren� Descartes��I think therefore I am�---in the 17th century, attempted to use reason to shore up the Faith. While he did a great job, he made a lot of logical mistakes which were demolished by later Enlightenment thinkers.

And it is here that we need to stop with the Enlightenment stuff. The Enlightenment came after Humanism. It's very possible that Islam needs some humanist questioning more than anything else. They �need� their own guys like a Rabelais and a de Montaigne because Islam is frozen in the 11th century, spiritually and economically. Man is subservient to God--�and woman is subservient to man�--and they must surrender completely to the faith. Many say that Islam means surrender. Or else.

The mind set in Islam right now is to kill anybody who remotely sounds like a Humanist. And they mean it. Nobody asks the big questions like: �Where in the Koran does it tell me how to build a bridge?� �How can an imam without any knowledge of civil engineering issue a fatwa regarding sewage treatment?� Anyone who dares ask is killed. Islam absolutely has the right to dictate ethics and morals to the rest of the world. Islam has the duty to kill those in disagreement.

I don�t see any Muslim clerics or men in power who ask questions. Do you? As Saddr once again spreads terror in Bashra we can see what happens to those who ask anything. And the supposedly, sort of, "enlightened" Sistani sits on his ass and watches the murders.

No questions are asked that we can hear. Even though there are quiet �buts and howevers� hovering about. A guy named Naipaul wrote a book that earned him a Nobel Prize (you know, the same one that Arafat and Mikhail Gorbachev won), a book that told us plenty about real people and real Islam. The main thing Naipaul focused upon was the fact that there were good Muslims, bad Muslims, and indifferent Muslims; plenty of Muslims who think �out of the box�. The bad and indifferent pretend to be good just like lots of Baptists and Catholics pretend to be good. We must be aware that plenty of Muslims are thinking in private, asking questions to the ceiling in the middle of the night, have snotty wives who are sick of keeping their heads down and their intellects shrouded, in short there are bad and indifferent Muslims who are ready to break out. Sharansky calls these types of people who live inside a totalitarian state the double thinkers; people who exist in every controlled society and who must pretend fealty to stay alive, and it�s the double thinkers who may come up with something. It�s not likely that there will be an enlightenment or a humanist movement; what it looks like is that democracy may come before anything else. �I am free therefore I am.� But the enlightened in Europe and America know democracy can�t happen, you can�t have God and freedom. It�s impossible.

Another reason to hate those goddam Jews in Israel.

There is a powerful message about the state of women in Afghanistan HERE.

So imagine this: Your name is Sonali. You're a middle-aged widow in Herat. You can't read or write. You have tuberculosis, and one of your children is missing a foot. Your oldest son died when he was four, and you have already sold off your 13 year-old daughter. What is your next move?

Tade a look, she has plenty to say.

The Pope is dead, and what is my reaction? He was in his dotage, unable to function properly, unable to run the Church, and ethically crippled long before yesterday. The mechanism of the Vatican is too outdated to talk about. He was a great man til about 1995, and he's still hiding Cardinal Law inside the Vatican where he is safe from American Law Enforcement. Think his successor will turn him over? Did Hitler attend temple?

Before his decline, his actions, his speeches, and his evangelizing were amazing. There is no doubt that in his prime he was a great man. A terrific eulogy for him comes from Larry Kudlow. Take a look.

And thank God CBS televised the basketball games instead of droning on about a dead man. Although Michigan State did look sort of dead. Michelle Malkin reveals her demands for orthodoxy from everyone, or else she will brand them as spirtually bankrupt HERE. Michelle is good, but she is a right wing extremist as a reading of the link will attest. A Christian Taliban. Conform to her way of thinking or no sex for three days.

Notes on a Zig Zag paper: Sunnis are now supporting their government and encouraging Sunnis to join the security forces...more from Omar.

A new Taliban is rising in Iraq, according to Healing Iraq.

Students of the Basrah and Shatt Al-Arab universities in Basrah city have been on strike for the last three days as a reaction to the attack last week by Sadrists and Mahdi Army militiamen on tens of students organising a field trip or a picnic at Al-Andalus park, downtown Basrah.

Hooded men assaulted the students with rubber cables and truncheons which resulted in the death of a Christian girl, Zahra Ashour, and another student who came to her rescue after militiamen had tore off her clothes and were beating her to death. He was shot in the head.

Read the rest here. Very scary. And it's Saddr AGAIN.

And it looks like Van Steenwyk of Iraq Now hasn't read or heard of the Intel report. I wonder about the guy sometimes.

Hope you read the new heading at the top of the page, a direct quote.

Intel Report, without the bullshit. Many in the GOP wanted Tenet out the moment Bush took office, thinking that he was flat NG. Bush -1. After 9/11 which proved the CIA was useless as tits on an ice pick and that the FBI had a problem finding sand in the desert, Bush retained Tenet and continued to listen to him. Bush -2. Then Bush accepted the CIA reports on Saddam, which proved totally false. Bush -5. We went to war with Iraq on completely false premises: no WMD and no mobile chemical labs. Bush's failure to punish incompetence quickly has resulted in 1,500 (and counting) U.S. Military deaths and 5,000 + wounded plus another 20,000 Iraqi dead---I know, there would have been a lot more under Saddam during the same period---and a loss of our international credibility. And God knows what else.

In political terms, Bush has successfully transferred the Iraq war into one of freedom for the Middle East masses and a weakening of terrorist influences that threatened us, but this entire episode may make it impossible to defend ourselves in the future. Both The Left and the Right will almost certainly block any action, no matter the CIA and other intel.

This is a very bad Intel Report for our future.

Part of what Schavio hath wrought is a formal campaign against euthanasia and abortion. The Left feminists, with Hillary as their standard bearer, will now hit the streets---and TV---frothing at the mouth and sweating from all their hair covered orifaces that a woman's "right to choose" is the only thing that counts. This from the Boston Globe...

A priest who comforted Terri Schiavo's parents and siblings says he's starting the Roman Catholic Church's first society of priests devoted exclusively to ''the Gospel of Life," fighting against euthanasia and abortion.

The Diocese of Amarillo will provide a vacant Catholic high school and dormitory to house the male-only Missionaries of the Gospel of Life, the society founded by the Rev. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life.

This will be a war, but the discredited Catholic Church ain't the one to lead anything right now til they have cleaned up their own house. A slate of Papal candidates is presented HERE.

Chris Hitchens, the nihilist supremo, has a take on the now dying Pope that is pretty nasty---surprise---but a large part of it is on target. He points out that the pedophile of pedophiles, Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston

......would have to face trial for his appalling collusion in the child-rape racket that his diocese had been running. The man had knowingly reassigned dangerous and sadistic criminals to positions where they would be able to exploit the defenseless. He had withheld evidence and made himself an accomplice, before and after the fact, in the one offense that people of all faiths and of none have most united in condemning.

Anyway, Cardinal Law isn't going to face a court, now. He has fled the jurisdiction and lives in Rome, where a sinecure--actually he's been given sanctuary, there is no way of knowing if he's being paid---(my insert)---at the Vatican has been found for him. (Actually not that much of a sinecure: As archpriest of the Rome Basilica of St. Mary Major, he also sits on two boards supervising priestly discipline�yes!�and the appointment of diocesan bishops.)

I think there is more to this: his age. This is a systemic problem within the Church. The Pope, when a younger man, had moral clarity at all times, but as he got older---and finally much too old---he lost it. The Pope will be remembered for a lot of good things as well as this one very bad thing. There will be no moral authority from Rome until this crime has been cleaned up and Law returned to this country for prosecution.

Ya gotta read this: According to Dean Logan of the King County Elections Department some 700 missing ballots from the 2004 Governor's Election were found in the belly of a shark that was caught in Elliott Bay close to polling places. Logan stated, "While these ballots are too bloody to discern which candidate was selected, they were found close to a voting district that went heavily for Gregoire by 100% so we must give effect to the intent of the voter by counting them for Gregoire." The rest is HERE. The true non-satirical and disgustingly true post is HERE. 9AM add: Michelle is all over this too.

Markets: You trading guys who think you have the balls to trade if only you had the money, should check this daily chart on the Dollar today. You would have had to have faith in your system to stay in the trade on the downward spike even though the dollar did not touch the blue line. Keep in mind that every point is $1,250. Real trading is a very tough game, and the most difficult thing about it is training yourself.

Las Tiempo de Los Angeles---AKA Los Angeles Times--- has sold out again. For those of you in SoCal who are looking for guidance regarding the illegal alien crime wave here, Go to Kaus and then link away. Today's LA Times---seeking to become "Las Tiempo de Los Angeles"---does a pathetic piece. How pathetic? They only quote Heather MacDonald, the absolute EXPERT on gang crime here and around the country, one time. The policies in Los Angeles give these terror gangs a police free island from which to plunder LA and the rest of the country; so no matter where you live IT IS YOUR PROBLEM.

An emailer sent me a really nasty Schavio cartoon from the SF Chronicle by a guy named Assmussen that is not on line and I cannot reproduce. So I went to the cartoon section of Slate and found these. MSM political cartoons are glad she's dead, wish she had been killed sooner, and so what. Right to Life has no currency whatsoever in MSM country. For the first time in a long time, MSM probably represents the POV of most of the country who think that 1. Congress had no business sticking their noses in, 2. Bush ditto, 3. She should have been killed years ago, 4. That the media should just drop it and report more important things.