ORACULATIONS

Malkin sums up why we should put Bush failures on the back burner and vote Republican while holding our noses....

The donkey party is led by thumb-sucking demagogues in prominent positions who equate Bush with Hitler and Jim Crow, call him a liar in front of high school students and the world, fantasize about impeachment and fetishize the human rights of terrorists who want to kill me.

The actual piece is quite long and deserves your attention in the event you haven't yet decided how to cast your vote.

Somehow I just discovered a new political site; very right and quite funny at times, called The Right Place and here's a short sample referring to the phony head count of 300 million Americans:

The poll was determined by first surveying various city morgues, cemeteries and Grateful Dead concerts, tallying the percentage without a pulse, multiplying it by pi, subtracting the denominator and then cubing the remainder, somehow. The study has a 2,856,421.99730% margin of error.

The increasingly unreliable Expatica is finally reporting about the "disturbances" taking place near Paris----two weeks after everyone else was reporting it.

One year later, French 'banlieues' still smoulder

AULNAY-SOUS-BOIS, France, Oct 25, 2006 (AFP) - A year after one of the most traumatic episodes in modern France, the conditions that touched off three weeks of suburban rioting remain firmly in place and there is widespread fear that a new outburst is only a question of time.

It continues with old news if you want to read it, but everything that is French tries to turn a blind eye, which is par for the course. When my aunt was a student at the Sarbonne the Chernobyl disaster occured. A professor in one of her classes pulled a roll up map down from above the blackboard. Upon it he colored most of Europe, excluding France. "Isn't this a wonderful country? Radiation is covering almost all of Europe except for France." Talk about PC press, the French invented it.

NOTE: Matt Welch is no longer Matt W., but an LA Times controlled "blog" called Opinion LA. Read for yourself, but they claim to want input and and and..... Bottom line is that this clueless bunch of Lefties are trying to figure out a way to pretend they are actually more conservative without actually "selling out" their Left Wing principals. To make matters even more stupid, opening up a blog to national commentary will not give these morons what they say is needed, which is strictly SoCal input. Give them this: they are trying a new way to deliver their Lefty bullshit dressed up in a "reasonable" dress; sort of a journalistic transvestite. I'd also comment that the current "liberal" tactic of carpet bombing every website with their own commentary dooms this probably well intentioned effort. Kos, Democratic Underground, and the rest of their ilk don't like any opinion other than their own and in Columbia University like attacks will try to shut down real diverse opinion. Interestingly their comments section reveals a remarkable similarity of opinion in that their news articles are actually agit-prop opinions, that the entire place needs at the very least a shake-out, and that the paper is out of touch with large sections of the community. That will make them change.....

That "awful" Chevy ad: it's not just me, everybody thinks it's anti-American. Even the Washington Post is blasting it.

it's unclear what association the Silverado or pickup trucks generally have with the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, Nixon's presidency, natural disasters or terrorist attacks.

Historians might also find a somewhat muddled message in the syncing of Mellencamp's lyrics with the ad's images. As the pop singer (who appears briefly in the ad) croons, "I can stand beside ideals I think are right," pictures of Parks and scenes of happy families flash by. But the next line -- "I can stand beside the idea to stand and fight" -- is accompanied by shots of Vietnam combat and Ali, suggesting approval for both the war and for the boxer who resisted being drafted into it.

Maybe the 60s radical retreads are the latest demographic.

Down $1---the highest price for the cheapest unleaded topped in SoCal at $3.33 at ARCO. Yesterday it was selling for $2.28. I realize that prices here are higher than in most places because we pay thirty six cents per gallon in taxes, ten cents of which is the result of us passing a ten cent per gallon tax to build roads, monies that have been stolen by our legislature while our MSM says nothing. I think the average driver puts forty gallons a week in his car so this means a at least ten million people are saving $40 per week (19 million vehicles registered).. It's like a tax break for everyone.

I highly recommend Clive Davis' blog as a once a week read. No, he is not that Clive who was the great record producer. This Clive was a media fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford in 2003, 2004 and 2005. He's also Oxford etc. As you might expect, his views are wide ranging and usually challenging. A couple of examples:

Western leaders, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair... have recently focused on Muslim women's veils as an obstacle to integration in the West. But to me, it is [verse] 4:34 that poses the much deeper challenge of integration.
Some argue that literalist Wahhabi translations are a major part of the problem. Or is it just down to old fashioned misogyny?

Mahmoud Shalash, an imam from Lexington, Ky., stood at the pulpit of my mosque and offered marital advice to the 100 or so men sitting before him. He repeated the three-step plan, with "beat them" as his final suggestion. Upstairs, in the women's balcony, sat a Muslim friend who had recently left her husband, who she said had abused her; her spouse sat among the men in the main hall.

At the sermon's end, I approached Shalash. "This is America," I protested. "How can you tell men to beat their wives?"

"They should beat them lightly," he explained. "It's in the Koran."

And a wider range includes this one:

All the names suggested for male children were taken from a book she possessed on the generals of antiquity, and the village was full of inoffensive little boys called Julio César, Carlos Magna (Charlemagne), Mambró (Marlborough) and Napoleón. And one luckless child was doomed to go through life bearing the name Esprit de Cor (esprit de corps), who, someone had assured the Grandmother, was the greatest commander of them all.

Entertaining, informative, and also European, but not condescendingly so.

And while I'm tramping on the high ground, here's a link to a great blog on the arts (warning: no naked girls). Mostly reviews and observations on books, movies, and plays. Part of his opinion on that play about Rachael Corrie:

It’s an ill-crafted piece of goopy give-peace-a-chance agitprop—yet it’s being performed to cheers and tears before admiring crowds of theater-savvy New Yorkers who, like Mr. Rickman himself, ought to know better....

He blends these reviews with other observations:

In art, fortunately, one is not compelled to choose sides, one poet at the expense of another. Milosz and Larkin are not mutually exclusive loves. Aesthetic love is promiscuous without being unfaithful. I feel no compulsion to be rigorously consistent in matters of artistic taste. I can love Proust and Raymond Chandler, Schoenberg and Johnny Cash. Only in that sense, I think, is art democratic….

With so many trivial things to get pissed off about, here's something that is close to being kind of "non-trivial." You can get totally pissed off about this one without feeling like you wasted a few minutes of your hate on shit like the election. At TownHall, the professor who has been denied a professorship on the most bogus of reasons. A good read and pretty funny too......

On voting: I am handicapped (no big deal--artificial hip and knee) so I cannot vote at our precinct, which is located at the bottom of one of the steepest inclines you can imagine (half the eligible voters in my precinct either vote absentee or they don't vote at all). This means I have to vote like, right now. I have decided to vote Republican because I feel, after examining Democratic candidates and positions, that even a do nothing Republican is better than the Democrats. You better cruise around and see what Congressional Black Caucus Democrats have in store for the country they really hate; many of these people will chair committees: Hastings, Conyers, Diane Watson, Maxine Waters, Charles Rangell together with a few maniacs not likely to pass muster like Barbara Lee. I happen to know Dingel from his days as CFTC oversight responsibility (now House minority leader) and he is just a horrid guy who now represents Dearborn Michigan Muslims only.

Anyway, I decided to vote Republican in self defense. There is the longest rundown on Democratic leaders right here, but I warn you it is long long long.

Media Bias, courtesy of Kaus. If this leaked note from ABC's "The Note" is really true, the total Liberal control of our news today ranks with Stalin and the old time despots like the Tsars. I think it was the Calvinists who posed that, not telling someone something is as big a lie as telling one outright; if I sell you a car with defective brakes and don't tell you because you didn't ask---I lied. Leaving out poll results is lying.

Movies The Liberty Film Fest has grown so fast that they no longer need to plead for customers. Go here for details on the upcoming fest. It will be sold out this year and most probably by the end of this week. Their list of movies shows that there are conservatives who can make movies, write them, and do everything but distribute them. This may change too. Stay tuned.....

Sports
The Bill Parcell's hype machine is finally being exposed. Had this clown never coached in New York nobody would know who he was or is. During the last ten years he has had ONE Super Bowl winner and failure after failure after failure. Patriots, Jets, Dallas, during which time he is barely over 500.

Pine tar on Reynold's hand during game one of the World Series is just one more example of the corruption of our various institutions. Cardinal manager La Rusa failing to make a stink out of it and causing the ejection of the pitcher or, at the very least, disrupting the Tiger players and staff is simply the good old boys circling the wagons to protect themselves; an admission that all baseball pitchers cheat.

UCLA players deserve better coaching than the inept Bruin bunch that allowed Notre Dame to win last Saturday. Failure to get plays in on time, having no time outs left with three minutes to go, hiding their offence hoping that they could run out the clock (impossible without at least one first down), and suddenly going into a pre-vent defense that allowed Notre Dame to move to a touchdown in three plays. UCLA coach is another example of racial PC triumphing over hiring the best available man.

Eeeeeek, suppose the Republicans win um---er---don't lose? Then what? Well first, everyone will then know just how widespread the media bias indoctrination has become. You can bet that the lawsuits and editorial screams of voter fraud, disenfranchisement, and Republican gangsterism will try to blot out the fact that the voters actually carried the election. Not that I think this is possible. It's more likely that they won't lose control of either house but lose a ton of seats. I actually believe that some polls are done correctly and that the GOP faces a tiny Armageddon of sorts. But the country will survive, the Democrats will not pull the house down. Meanwhile, rumors abound that candidate pictured on left will run against Obama. Stay tuned.

I know that 'Net Neutrality seems sort of arcane to most of us, but it is important that we all become informed. This is developing into a battle between the super-rich and the merely rich with the rest of us left to screw off. Lessig has a good post to begin your education:

I bet if the next President demanded of nominees to the FCC that they promise not to take jobs in the industries they regulated for some “limited time” (let’s say, the life of a copyright), the President would find lots of qualified nominees. Maybe then it would be easier to hear the pleas for the poor, without the echo of the interests of the “merely rich” confusing the message.

Go HERE to read it. This is the link from Reynolds.

With so many trivial things to get pissed off about, here's something that is close to being kind of "non-trivial." You can get totally pissed off about this one without feeling like you wasted a few minutes of your hate on shit like the election. At TownHall, the professor who has been denied a professorship on the most bogus of reasons. A good read and pretty funny too......

Notes on a Zig Zag paper: (Corrected due to at least ten of you commenting correctly--can't post because this post now has a different url address)
Jane Harman (Dino, Redondo Beach) is truly a Democrat in name only. She lives in a fairly conservative district and originally was elected because she is one of the wealthiest women in America---net worth over 200 million dollars---via her husband who has made sure she had all the money needed. He earned his bucks as the Harman in Harman-Karden hi fi and now CEO of Harman International Industries. She bought her way into politics TWICE. She has become the target of the left in a major way and is under assault that may end her career. I wonder about this latest gang bang upon her. She has strayed, as Lieberman has strayed, but she may be unbeatable in her district; two hundred million is tough to beat. The Tom Hayden led attack dogs are out and snarling. The GOP, showing its new found stupidity, has decided to get her also.

Books
War on the Middle Class, by Lou Dobbs, should be a must read for most of us. I have written about the income chasm between labor and business leaders before, most recently HERE with a shorter observation HERE.

The bottom line is that as we descend (rise??) into a society where there are only two significant classes, the rich and the poor (the super rich and the super poor) our democracy will come crashing down. The day is coming closer when a really good demagogue will rally the armed poor and we will have France, or even 1917 Russia. Quoting Fed Chair, Bernake:

Center-left think tanks and opposition politicians are not the only ones expressing concern about trends in income distribution. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke recently told a congressional committee, "We want everybody in this society to participate in the American dream. We want everybody to have a chance to get ahead. And to the extent that incomes and wealth are spreading apart, I think that is not a good trend."

I hope you all pay attention, because it's happening.

Movies
Flags of Our Fathers: Before I begin, let me say this is not a "review" of the movie, mainly an observation regarding the audience for this particular movie. I work around forty to forty five people who are under thirty five and to a man/woman they are simply not interested in seeing anything having to do with WWII. It's a generational thing and the WWII generation is simply not a bunch they connect with in any way other than wishing they were all dead so the VA hospitals could be turned into something useful. They have been "taught" that Truman should have been tried as a war criminal; that Ike was a raging incompetent who threw lives away in various battles, especially Omaha Beach and the Bulge (the very few who have any knowledge of those two battles); that the slaughter of our men in the Pacific was another war crime, this one committed by MacArthur (and the "planners"); and many feel that the combat vets who landed on those Pacific Islands were "stupid." Our colleges and universities have succeeded in castrating our culture; they have in fact, created another country, one in which we can have no pride at all. This audience will not attend this movie. Many of us, like me, just don't like war movies (if this is a war movie and not another Hollywood destruction of our past); many more don't want to shell out the twelve bucks per person to see anything unpleasant; and the people in my office seem to think that video games, football games, porn, and perhaps the election, are of more interest to them. For those who had relatives who fought in WWII---like now dead grandfathers and so on--- the period is of no more interest than is The French and Indian Wars. Flags etc. represents a story about a dead past, one that is of no interest to them. Any casual curiosity the younger audiences have will not translate into significant box office.

Another way of saying that this movie cannot make big money with today's audiences, young or old.

Movies
First things first: avoid "The Prestige" like it has lice. A movie that in its finality is about something too trivial to imagine told in a ponderous "when will it ever end" manner. Nobody to care about either. No applause at end on opening day in LA, a sure sign of audience boredom.

Now for most movies. I once knew a famous Hungarian still photog who was shooting the stars of a movie I had a line in. He was a delightful guy and full of stories, some true, some which might have been true, and some that were entertainingly false. I got to be really friendly with him and he discussed movies with me from his European perspective. One thing he emphasized:

"Hollywood understands what a movie star is and they know how to use them."

He went on to point out that if you put John Wayne in sack you would still know it was John Wayne, if you saw just an eye of Humphrey Bogart you would instantly know it was Bogart; same was true of the women: try to hide Betty Davis, Rita Hayworth, Joan Crawford and the like. All were not only unique, but simply one of a kind unique. Europe, he continued, has a bunch of people you can't remember and can't pick out of a crowd; the few exceptions being the young Briggete Bardot (shown at left as Mother Teresa) and Adolph Hitler (terrific in the French musical, Buchenwald).

Well that was then and this is now. What we have in The Prestige, The Illusionist, and dam near every movie out this year are interchangeable actors who all look the same and all talking in the same way with no dialogue adjustments---Hungarian accents, Cockney,----to make identification easier. Movies are becoming "A Vast Wasteland", as the late Newton Minnow called TV back in the bad old daze. In The Prestige we even have two look-alike actresses in major supporting roles; they even have the same Brit accents. When we view movies blessed with these cookie cutter personages we are always trying to figure out who they are, something that makes following a movie with a complicated plot even more difficult. So we come to the conclusion that the movie stinks thirty minutes before we might have if the actors were properly cast.

In looking at today's Hollywood output one has to come to one conclusion: they have run out of ideas. What would you expect from everyone who has the exact same philosophy, has the same educations, and the same views of the past. One case in point to consider: Roy Brewer, an exciting and tension filled story that has the Hollywood Communists as the villians, villians who were out to get everyone who disagreed with them.

He said that the party was interested in Hollywood labor because of the economic leverage it wielded. “The communists were absolutely ruthless in dominating those who they could dominate and in destroying those whom they could control,” he wrote. “They would lie or circulate false rumors of anti-Semitism or whatever. Hundreds of careers were destroyed by the communists long before the blacklist was ever heard of.”

Brewer had to get body guards for his kids, worry about being beaten up (the body count of the non-commuists were 150 in the hospital), and excommunication from all of Hollywood.

As an add here to prove a point. Do a Google search on him. You will see that Google features all the smears before running one positive site.

Drudge is wrong about oil price. See chart, it is not at low or new low. It has been trading in this range for about a week. The quote is from Rueters and they are using the expired November contract, one that any remaining players who are long are trying to exit.

Blogger is basically shut down once again. Either Google has decided to abandon any pretense of maintaining it, or they cannot. Either way, Google has no clothes.

Chuck Berry was 80 years old yesterday....a great rundown on Berry over at TCS. Really really good. And boy, am I ever getting old. Exactly what the Left Democratic leadership will enact is HERE. Keep in mind that Bush will veto.....or will he?

YOU TUBE bye bye: I had 60 music videos on favorites. I now have six. Copyright police have struck as Mark Cuban predicted. Great while it lasted.

Cardinals????? The weakest of the NL teams in the playoffs. Pitching in shreds, ditto their hitting order, and the NL hasn't done too well in the Series lately.

Get a kick out of Clintonista Shlala claiming she took a strong stand on the Miami riot last weekend. One might think she was French. Jesus.....

French version of the OJ trial. In spite of witnesses, expert testimony, the refusal of the accuser to even appear in court, and two documentary films from two different countries, the guy loses because he "insulted France." Under it all: French hatred of Jews.

More Airbus: talk is now widespread that in order to avoid a catastrophe, Airbus plants will have to be closed. Unions won't budge so there is a real problem brewing. French make headlines by selling outmoded airplanes (A319) to India and calling them new.

Productivity problems in semi-socialist France; and they lost the opportunity to create 700,000 new jobs because of their non-compeitiveness.

A sharp drop in French industrial productivity gains over the past five years has cost the economy the opportunity to create more than 700,000 jobs and risks exposing the country to a flood of low-cost imports, a report from McKinsey, the management consultants, warned. The findings surprised economists and will add to political concern over the country's efforts to fight unemployment.

And riots erupt again as French police are attacked one more time. It really does seem like the wheels are coming off all over the world.

After waiting with baited breath for the New Explorer 7...... Reviews are mixed to say the least. But look here because ZD Net says to download it anyway for reasons I don't quite understand. But I've never gone wrong taking their advice. Add: OK, I got it. Amazingly difficult to use; favorites, links, special toolbars. Short Microsoft Stock.

Adding to Things That Really Piss Me Off....
I write this totally nasty "fuck you" letter to Time Warner Cable telling them how much I hate them and their so-called broadband non-working system. I get back a "Thank you for contacting us" email. This means that a computer is the only thing that read my complaint. Pisses me off even more.

Adding to Things That Completely Confuse Me..... Why is it that Country Music videos, without exception, are all bad. No, not bad. They are insultingly terrible. I don't get it. The only Country videos worth watching are the reproductions of live performances.

Hollywood almost bit player, Dannii Minogue, (no talent sister of singer Kylie) drunk on her ass before going to a Democratic Party fund raiser where she presumably lectured one and all about our morality. Note how she loves being felt up with two hands in picture on extreme left. Hey, she has a right to be a dyke. I Don't Like You in That Way has the entire ten picture layout.

A commenter was really correct when he observed that the Dixie Chicks without Natalie Manes were going nowhere. A pre Natalie Manes take on Austin City Limits in 1999 is HERE, soon after she joined the group; terrific musicians but nobody cared. The entire 1999 show is now posted (Posted two days ago) and you will see the links to the right of the above link. Natalie's hair was very short. Good stuff but not nearly the energy of two years later. Links to every Dixie Chick TV appearance are here, some as early as 1998. Most put up two days ago.

There are a slew of links today that should interest you.
1. Rodger Schlong has this one on Ike and Rob't E. Lee.
2. Warning about EU attempt to take over TV blogs. Malkin too.
3. DuToit has this terrific take. Makes me think before I don't vote.
4. Liberty Film Fest, deserves your attention today
5. Then there is this one from Tammy Bruce:

“If we lose, I will destroy the world,” said Kim Jong Il, supreme leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Kim’s regime insults all of us. Its very existence is an affront to humanity’s sense of decency and challenges accepted notions of politics, economics, and social theory. More important, North Korea threatens us. The Great Leader, as Kim now calls himself, can change the course of history with an act of unimaginable devastation.

From a part of her book review; worth a read
5A. Also from Tammy, her interesting essay:

The Democrat Party is under the control of leftist extremist George Soros, and should simply admit it's the Socialist Worker's Party. And the Republicans, with the way they spend and their faith-based obsession with controlling private society, should rename itself the Democratic Party.

A Democratic Party control of the U.S. government would mean that we cannot be trusted to enforce treaties negotiated by prior administrations if such enforcement involves any sacrifice.

If you were PM of Japan knowing what we all know about "our" Left, would you depend on America to "defend" you as promised in the 1951 treaty? Wouldn't you be sure that the Democratic party, which is much different than the Democratic party that won WWII, would abandon treaty obligations at the first sign of war?

It is obvious to everyone in the world that the Democrats are now the increasingly cowardly "Ignore it and Hope it Will Just Go Away" crowd; a crowd that includes the college elites, the "artistic" community, and the rest of the sniveling Left. Wouldn't you see that they would join one another to disseminate lies (as they do now), demonstrate in the streets, and effectively paralyze our government? Our Left has no intention of honoring a 1951 treaty with Japan, nor will we honor our 1954 defense commitment to Taiwan. Our Liberals, who practice situational ethics each and every day, will never agree to defend those countries no matter what our treaty "obligations" are. They will claim that "our generation" does not have to enforce agreements made before "we were born." A view they also take toward our own Constitution.

Precedent for articulating the view that calculated violations of trust are as American apple pie? Well during WWII when Roosevelt refused to recognize the "Free French" under de Gaulle after agreeing to do so, the French leader regarded the refusal as a violation of our promise to him. And he got even when he came to power in France in 1958; he cut France loose militarily from NATO, sought detente with the Soviets, formed a separate French force, and caused France to become a nuclear power. Why? Because he "didn't trust the USA to honor any treaties in Europe." This view was duly noted everywhere.

Then there was the French diplomat who, in 1983, told the Atlantic Monthly in a much ballyhooed article, that a particular change in U.S. policy "makes us wonder whether we can count on American administrations."

Want a current example of Left Democrats in power and their twisting of their actions and people so as to look strong? Take a look at how Miami University president, Democrat Donna Shalala, former Secretary of Health and Human Services under Clinton (that name again) "handled" the mob riot that occurred during the Miami vs FIU football game last Saturday. In true Clintonian style, Shalala (shown at left after winning a spelling bee in the fourth grade) is pretending that the rioting players were actually students and not hired thugs put on the payroll to commit mayhem each Saturday in the fall; she would have us all believe that these thugs were actually future scientists, doctors, lawyers (OK, lawyers were out there), teachers, and other professionals. She pretends to stand up and be strong over her reaction to the "disturbance"--an "incident" that included attempted murder, assault with deadly weapons, criminal mayhem, and pushing.

Oh, she got tough all right, Democratic Party tough; she suspended one future Nobel Prize winner out of the mob for the rest of the year and suspended for one game the rest of the future doctors and mobsters. One game? That's it? Miami plays Duke next Saturday, a football girls school that has one of the weakest teams in the country; Miami could beat them with their band; they don't need their first or second stringers to win. But she carefully makes sure that all of them (save one) remain eligible for the next week when Miami plays a tough Georgia Tech team. She then postures to a fawning boot licking Liberal press that she has taken strong action to assure this never happens again.

A meaningless one game suspension isn't even a slap on the wrist. It's a pat on the back and a wink. That's how liberals handle things. That's how they handled North Korea.

She perfectly represents today's Democratic Party. Pretend to do something decisive about pretend people and then pose for the sycophantic Liberal press. Every country thinks she is a typical representative of American leadership and who can blame them? Would you depend on us if you knew that eventually the Democrats like her would come into power?

No, and that's why Japan will pursue the bomb. How close are they? The conviction among many experts is that Japan was very close to having the bomb in 1945, perhaps closer to it than Nazi Germany, and all that research will not go to waste. Currently they operate 55 nuclear reactors in power plants, so we assume they have centrifuges or a large supply of heavy water. They ain't got no uranium mines so they have to import uranium or the U 235 itself, no big deal these days.

Who will act to stop the North Koreans from going crazy? America? Not a chance. We will join in a cowardly "multi-lateral" phony effort to defang the beast. What about other countries? The poor fucking Philippines, who used to think that they had a mutual defense treaty with us, know that we'll let them fry. We will justify our abandonment by falling back on the clause in the treaty that says only communist aggression will be opposed and that North Korea is not really a communist country. Philippinos are all reduced to being "surrender monkeys.: Nobody can depend on us. Anywhere.

Welcome to the club, all you squints. Just leave us alone.

NO POSTING til Time Warner fixes their ISP. They are the very worst. Since they have taken over from Adelphia and promised no changes and improvements instead---you guessed it, they took the NFL channel off, have been completely down for days at a time---twice in three months meaning no email either. We have no alternative if we cannot use Direct TV. And with no email I can't even send them a "fuck you" letter.

John Fund has a piece up that lays out today's political realities in a clear and simple manner.....and he is correct. Go HERE

If voters are unhappy with Republicans, it's because the party hasn't lived up to its own principles. In the Capitol, in Ohio, and in plenty of places between and beyond, the party that promised to reform government has become the party of government.

The FBI has raided all officers connected with Weldon, Weldon's Russian business connections, and his corrupt daughter. It's not enough to point to the Democratic Past. What we are looking at is the Republican present. Think of all the legislation they haven't past while choosing to steal money instead; think of all the legislation promised while they piled on the pork intead, think of what can happen if we clean the entire party out and re-elect different people in '08.

John Fund spares neither Democrats nor Republicans.

Dixie Chicks: PBS is reshowing their 2001/02 concert at Staples Center in LA. It is a sensational show, made before they became nasal. Check site of your local lefty PBS station. Two caveats: PBS does it on one of their "begathons" and each beg lasts nearly 20 minutes; and there are two interviews with Duh Chicks which serve to establish their liberal credentials as far back as their childhoods (boring). If you tune in you will see that as far back as their 2002 shows that they appealed mainly to lesbians, as the frequent shots of groping hugging excited "women" in the audience shows. Out of a packed house you will see fewer than ten men. I don't think they set out to do this; all are married with kids. These rug munchers just adored the song, Goodbye Earl (Link to their Austin City Limits show) which spells out the murder of a nasty man by a couple of women (great song and tune). The song got a standing when they announced they were going to sing it, and after they sung it. An audience that wanted to kill men for sure.

Nothing can say what is “wrong” about and with the LA Times better than the Times Lead article by Jennifer Delson this AM (from Drudge). Once again propaganda masquerading as News. The LAT graciously makes sure that all illegals are given all the good news about illegals being totally safe getting instructions on how to apply and receive food stamps. Totally pisses me off and it will sit inside my tiny brain til a picture of a naked super model intervenes. The money paragraph:

The Orange County strategy has been lauded throughout the state as a way to reach immigrants who are reluctant to get help from the government.

“They won’t come on their own,” said Jerry Sanders, food bank manager of the nonprofit Community Action Partnership of Orange County in Garden Grove. “They come from countries where they think the government isn’t to be trusted. They figure there’s a catch to free food.”

Advocates say immigrants, if here illegally, are also worried about being deported if they apply for food stamps. Or they fear jeopardizing a pending application for residency or citizenship. Illegal immigrants can apply on behalf of their minor children here legally.”

Isn’t that just precious? Sign me up for three year subscription, amigo.

From their very first ACL appearance, again before Natalie fell head over heels in love, with herself. Y0u can see that the Dixie girls were "can't miss." Then they went into Left Wing politics and bluegrass or something...... But this is a hell of a first appearance......Takes ten seconds to load.

What performing artists fear most is proliferating on You Tube. It's not the retransmission of some of their TV appearances, all of which are high quality. The fear is that some asshole will sneak into a venue, record them without their knowledge, and then post very poor reproductions of their art. You Tube is fucking them royally, and you have to read carefully to discern actual recordings and illegal bootlegging of a concert with a pocket sized camcorder. To be fair, the bogus stuff is being stripped out, but allowing this stuff on line sucks. Here is a bogus Willie Nelson "Pancho and Lefty" shot from God Knows Where in the audience.

Patterico is reporting that the LA Times is soliciting input on how to improve their bird cage liner. Patterico further tells us to get on over there and give them suggestions. Well, la dee da, there isn't any place set aside to offer advice over there. Then, like number dos (that's number two, for you stupid tax paying gringos who only speak English), today's lead article, under the guise of a news article, offers advice to illegal aliens on how to get food stamps easily. And note that the agit-prop piece never calls them illegal til the very end.

The Orange County strategy has been lauded throughout the state as a way to reach immigrants who are reluctant to get help from the government.

"They won't come on their own," said Jerry Sanders, food bank manager of the nonprofit Community Action Partnership of Orange County in Garden Grove. "They come from countries where they think the government isn't to be trusted. They figure there's a catch to free food."

Advocates say immigrants (criminals from Mexico), if here illegally, are also worried about being deported if they apply for food stamps. Or they fear jeopardizing a pending application for residency or citizenship. Illegal immigrants can apply on behalf of their minor children here legally.

Isn't that just precious? Sign me up for a three year subscription, amigo.

E.D. Hill, last post on the subject. I sent the below letter to Roger Ailes (at her suggestion) and got a thank you from Hill. She was sodomized without lube for sure.

10/12/06

Roger Ailes
1211 Ave. of the Americas
NY NY 10036

Re; Hill on F&F

Dear Mr. Ailes

Regular viewer and fan, and especially a fan of yours for the incredible job you have done. But your latest move got to me. I cannot understand why E.D. Hill lost her job on Fox and Friends.

Which would you rather watch: Don Imus with Dwight Yoakam live or F&F without E.D. Hill? Another way of saying that she was the only reason I ever watched, but I don't watch now. Almost everyone I know who tuned in to F&F with Hill, doesn’t any more. I bet your ratings are dropping like rain drops. Personally I now watch/listen to Mike and Mike on ESPN2 instead.

BTW, she was the only female on FOX with actual brains. It was obvious. You have some air heads doing “shows” (especially the stock stuff on Saturday) and you might look at that. Her replacements are like high school basketball players going in for Michael Jordan; cute (love the lip gloss, really helps the jump shot) but not ready for Prime Time.

Put her back on.

ATTN SPORTS FANS, there is a very interesting and comprehensive editorial in today's journal about the hypocrisy of the NCAA. Example: since the NCAA is paid over five hundred million for the NCAA basketball tournament, where does the money go? Good piece.

Duke fake rape case: Roberts tells 60 Minutes the following:

....the remarkable item came in Roberts’ assertion that until Bradley sat down with her, she never had been asked about the accuser’s April 6 version of event

You can read all of the sordid revelations HERE. How DA Nifong avoids indictment himself is beyone me. BTW it actually looks like the ACLU is entering the case, on which side is not completely clear

Killer whale whacks kayak I swear not photo shopped, and how the guy lived is beyond me.

While the Foley "thing" dominates media---because it makes the Republicans look bad---the real stuff is happening, and it ain't good. First, Democrat leader Harry Reid is up to his arm pits in a scandal that features his mob pal who is also a lobbyist. Of course the MSM is covering it up, but I doubt they will get away with it. Then there is another RE deal called Coyote Springs that involves Reid getting special treatment for the developer, Harvey Whittemore. There was a seemingly perfectly normal land swap, one that netted Harry $700,000 in just six years but Harry had to work for it. He got the government to drop an endangered species hold on the development, he supposedly made the government grant right of way to the project, and further tried to get the government to actually give more land to Whittemore. The AP reported this story first but I was paying much too close attention to the latest Paris Hilton naked butt photo to read it. What's your excuse? Read the AP thing because there is no doubt that Reid is involved in major "irregularities" (that's what it's called when a Democrats commit crimes) that may end up really tarring the Democrat Party. Captains Quarters spells it out in a complicated way HERE. He is following up with more scandal we will never understand because Reid didn't take out his dick and try to stick it into a piece of property, like somebody's wife or one of Foley's pages. Late Add: Hugh Hewitt is all over this and in a big way. Unusual for him, but I think he is a Republican finally realizing he has to take the gloves off and do some hitting. Even later add: Malkin has a comprehensive piece, HERE

Nobody seems to give a shit that the last critic of Putin in Russia has been murdered. Hey no biggie, let's talk Foley.

And then there is France, where the Washington Times reports an intifada against the police in Paris is close to unreported Civil War.

Radical Muslims in France's housing estates are waging an undeclared "intifada," or uprising, against the police, with violent clashes injuring about 14 officers each day.

As the Interior Ministry announced that nearly 2,500 officers had been wounded this year, a police union declared that its members were "in a state of civil war" with Muslims in the most depressed "banlieue" estates. Banlieue, which means outskirts, is the commonly used euphemism for the low-income housing projects heavily populated by unemployed youths of North African origin.

Expatica has nothing, which usually means that the French press is covering this up.

But the really big news comes from I Don't Like You in That Way---sit down tit fans. It seems that poor Tara Reid (I'm checking if she might be the bastard daughter of Harry) has a boob job that is just horrible, and I mean just really bad, and all her friends--she has three--are concerned.

And The Bastardly is holding a "Top Five Ugliest Woman" contest, a perfect time to get that old girl friend or ex-wife some face time.

Several weeks ago I posted about a Dixie Chicks concert that featured the current boring nasality of Natalie Manes. Several of you commented that the old sound was not commercial and is not available anywhere. Yes it is, from Austin City Limits in 2001 before Manes fell in love with herself. Hit the link and you'll find ten or so cuts from that long ago appearance. Link here, better cut.

I surfed the blogs and stuff for the past several days listening to the "podcasts" and looking at their TV output. First things first: there is a reason that no network or local news outlet puts overweight balding middle aged men with rotten teeth into your living room. Ugh, yuk, and poo. It's repulsive, yet that is what is populating these video bloggers. To top it off they seem to have no script, just some outline so they can bloviate around a theme. Forget it; I was an actor for a long time and I did a TV show on commodities for several years and I know how to look good: makeup to cover the blemishes, teeth whitening to cover the yellow and brown, a toupee if you're too bald, and being in shape helps. Then to sound good I knew that the attention span to look at a static image is never more than 15 seconds so I was fast, I was excited, but most of all I STUCK TO THE SUBJECT. When I talked about cattle dying in the midwest heat, I had pictures of poor little cows lying on their backs with their poor little legs in the air while I explained the horrible diseases we'd all catch if we ate these maggot drenched dead bovines. I then had a shot of the maniacs on the floor of the CBOT while I colorfully described the money that would be made by people holding cattle futures.

Now for the podcasts: fat middle aged men with bad teeth and a cheap toupee can do radio, in theory. The truth of the matter is that in radio, more than in any other medium, you are putting images into the minds of the audience. There ain't no "plane crashed into an apartment building." That's called boring and the audience turns to something else.

"While most New Yorkers were peacefully having their lunches, never expecting disaster to happen----it did." That is radio.

"A lone single engine private plane that was lurching through the sky seemingly out of control, exploded into the 72nd floor of an apartment building, detonating a firestorm of flaming gasoline into occupied apartments and sending debris crashing on to unsuspecting pedestrians five hundred feet below."

Get it? That's radio. Period.

Pictures into the mind. Some people do it naturally, most of us need to write it down. That's why Rush talks about those "liberals" in a tone of voice and with inflections that will create an image of menace and evil in our minds. Pus literally oozes out of our radios as we drive down the freeway in terror:

"Is there a liberal hiding behind that stop sign?"

These pod casters are all talk radio wannabees with nary a clue.
The media blogosphere will collapse from its own mediocrity.

Oh, and did I mention the sexless old and not so old ladies with badly colored hair and glasses together with their bad teeth and....well, you get the picture. Ugly women should stay in the bedroom doing suction excercises so they can hold onto their boyfriends. They should not turn themselves loose on helpless men who innocently surf the web looking for really nice girls doing hot sex.

ATTN E.D. HILL FANS......as most of you know she was "promoted" to a one hour time slot doing news at 11AM. The rumor was that some lower level producers didn't like her, but FOX said nothing. So I wrote F&F

Which would you rather watch: Don Imus with Dwight Yoakam live or F&F without E.D. Hill? Another way of saying that she was the only reason I ever watched, I don't watch now, and almost everyone I know who tuned in to F&F with Hill, don't no more. I bet your ratings are dropping like rain drops.

So she answered, praising her new one hour but the subtext was that she got royally fucked. Suggest writing to
Roger Ailes
1211 Ave. of the Americas
NY NY 10036
Just the messenger, but they fucked her.

Why Katie Couric suks: watched her last night for the first and last time. Her problem? She is boring. Like in totally uninteresting, flat delivery, and to top it off she looks like an older woman trying to look younger, and failing. But mainly she is a walking sleeping pill. I never watch AM TV but there is no way she appeared like this on the Today Show since 1991. I guess nobody could anticipate a professional like her not understanding energy; I mean all you have to do is listen to Rush for twenty minutes. Energy is everything. BTW, Rush would own the network news were he to do it. Dare I suggest E.D. Hill, who got shitcanned by Fox and Friends, she has all it takes if you must hire a woman for any reason other than that she gives impossibly good oral penile massages.

Blogger, the suckiest piece of shit on the planet is down AGAIN. This is the third time in four days.

And Why "You Tube" doesn't suck....used it for many hours yesterday for the first time. On the basis of music alone it is sensational, and the ad revenue from the record companies that allow people to post their product must be huge. Google paid less than what it's worth. Barring copyright problems, this is the proverbial pot of gold and then some.

Add at 4:20PM PDT:
Looks like Mark Cuban was right. Since last night I'd say 20% of the content was forced by copyright to discontinue. It looks like a general raid and the result could be "no more You Tube."

Clinton's new glow job is the title of Coulter's new essay for Town Hall out this AM. It lays out the Clinton 1994 "agreement" with North Korea as well as has anyone. A dam good read. Might get you to re-think voting Democrat in a few weeks----then again, maybe nothing can get you to re-think.

ENERGY: Crude is trading at $57.80 overnight (May not trade there tomorrow) This is the lowest price since early in the year. However, this is the November contract which expires in nine days. Therefore almost all of the trading is now taking place in the December contract which is trading at $59.20.

Joplin: Me and Bobby Mcgee.

Even better: is the Kris Kristofferson (he wrote it), Wylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, and Willie Nelson doing it better than anything.

Everybody is saying the NK "bomb" was a dud. That is simply not possible. Setting one off is like finding ice in Greenland. It's so simple that we didn't even test our first one (Heroshima bomb). IF there is no radio active fingerprint I'd say that they tried to set one off with partially enriched uranium as in 75% instead of 90% or they failed because they were trying to explode a plutonium bomb, something that is very hard to do. However, if you have the 90% enriched uranium all you have to do is slam two balls of it together.

There is always the chance that this guy may be pulling a Saddam, fooling everyone into thinking he had the bomb when all he can get is a partial hard on for America.

The hysterical anti nuclear enviros will destroy this country if we let them. We must go to nuclear power, but we are light years behind China (currently building or has plans on the board, to build 27 nuclear power facilities by 2020, 20 by 2012); spot uranium prices are up $47 in just the last six months--this is for the unenriched uranium and must be processed to be used in reactors. Even a shit country like Nigeria is building them, but here we sit, prisoners of the hysteria mongers on the left. Brazil is building four, Canada has eight up and running, the Czechs have one and are building two more; France has 58 nuclear plants up and running which supplies 75% of France's energy needs. I could go on but we have to get in the game. Nuclear power is cheap, non-polluting, and will make all our industry uncompetitive if we don't go nuclear. Go HERE for a country by country breakdown. Investment op? You must go to a mining company but the companies doing the mining have seen their stock prices go up 100% in the las year and a half. Australia is the world's largest uranium producer with almost 50% of the known supply.

Demand from China may help uranium prices double in the next two years and may triple demand for nuclear power by 2020, said Quinton George, managing director of Trinity Asset Management. The company owns 18 percent of Afrikander Lease, which holds South Africa's biggest uranium deposit.

"The supply deficit will affect this market for at least the next 10 years," Geroge said. "In the next two years we could well see uranium touching historical highs, at least doubling current prices."

Wake me in 2013 and maybe I'll get off my ass.

THE VERY FIRST R&B artist strikes........

ENERGY: This is a quote from an energy analyst at Merrill Lynch, who in my experience is the best guy there is for shorter term investing (speculating) in oil and gasoline:

The supply of this fuel (uranium) is so short that worldwide prices have already doubled in 12 months - and are soaring higher by the day.

The global gap between supply and demand of this precious fuel is already a whopping 15 million pounds - nearly 20% below worldwide demand. And this shortfall is expected to double in the coming months - with no end in sight. In fact, the demand is growing so fast that the supply chain may never catch up......

Now they are touting uranium as in investment, something that can be insanely risky. But if I were you I'd start looking it up, because nuclear energy is the only way we can go.

Hypocritical Democratic support "for our troops" continues. First, they had a Canadian soldier (in uniform) that they clearly indicated was an American. They airbrushed out the Canadian and replaced him with an American flag---BUT---the phony crowd is still there, it's just a stock photo available on line FOR FREE. I think we all know that they will not support our troops, but....... (link via LGF)

Johnny Cash singing Sunday Morning Coming Down and Me and Bobby McGee is here. Probably one of those stolen copyrights so get over there if you forget how he sounded a long long time ago..... Then if you go HERE you will see about thirty links to live stuff, some of which would be better left unseen, but HERE is one noboby has ever heard; it's a duet with Marty Robbins, not my taste but from the comments people love it.......And there about twenty pages, most with Waylon Jennings (many with total babe of all time in country music, Jessie Coulter) HERE. And they made the best version ever of "Suspicious Minds" which is here.

YOU TUBE is an official member of the left media. Charles Johnson points out today that

At YouTube, the video of David Zucker’s hilarious (and completely inoffensive, except to the ideologically obsessed) advertisement has been marked as “inappropriate content.”

But the fictional assassination of George W. Bush? No problem: YouTube - Death of a President.

I'm sure the piece is still available, all you have to do is let YouTube know you will accept all flagged pieces. It is here, just click "confirm"

A New York Times style news coverup in jolly old England, and it ain't just a small thing. Consider it together with this piece from Pipes regarding the imposition of Sharia Law by cab drivers in Minneapolis and you see the pattern City council just overturned the rule---there will be no yellow lights on Muslim cabs and if they refuse to carry a passenger for any reason they will have to go to the end of the line and wait their turn for a new fare....... Der Spiegel is waking up too as similar things are happening in Germany (translation courtesy of Melanie Phillips).

The president of the Iranian parliament was visiting Belgium where he had an appointment with a female Belgian colleague. He refused to shake her hand, so she didn’t meet with him. He left Belgium and accused her of racism. The accusation of cultural insensitivity is a weapon. And we have to neutralize it…

Libertas has a must read piece about Hollywood's current approval of child molestation, the new "civil right." Read it.

Ohhh kaaaay, due to a ton of comments via email demanding the link to the YouTube porn sites, here goes (NSFW)

Why is crude down a dollar when the towel heads just announced production cuts? Two reasons: ample supplies, which could change if the weather stays cold; and the scumbag effect. The Muslim scumbags have always cheated on their quotas before and now that they are used to the money that comes with $75 oil it isn't likely that they won't cheat now. They love that $75 times a million barrels per day. Money is addictive, too much money puts you in rehab.

More Duke Rape case revealed, and it's getting worse and worse

Joseph Neff’s Sunday N&O (News and Observer) article offered a glimpse at the concrete results of Mike Nifong’s procedural fraud—a lineup procedure that, quite beyond the three players ultimately targeted, had the accuser:

* claiming to have seen at least two players who authorities knew weren’t at the party;
* falsely identifying the player who made the broomstick comment;
* identifying players with certainty on March 16, but then not recognizing them on April 4;
* recognizing players with certainty on April 4, but not having identified them on March 16 or March 21.

There's more here. The good news is that more and more media are getting hip and talking.

Movie: Flags of our Fathers
Some of the reviews for Eastwood's Flags of our Fathers ain't too good, especially considering the way the fawning boot licking Hollywood papers slobbered all over it.

But I will say this. Flags of Our Fathers is more than a disappointment. It is a bad movie. It's not a decent, flawed film that isn't a major Oscar movie, which something like Gangs of New York might have appeared to be or small, like Good Night and Good Luck might have seemed. It's not even like Crash, in which there was a line between lovers and haters that was as clear as the structural conceit of the film.

Keep in mind that the Japanese on Iwo Jima tortured our guys to death so their screams could be heard for a mile, they actually ate some of our guys alive while they screamed for mercy, there was The Rape of Nanking, and lots worse. This movie tries to show these pricks as......

The most effective war movie here is the p.o.v. from inside the caves and tunnels. The fear factor of being buried alive, essentially, and having these waves of troops coming at you must be terrifying. The issues of cultural thinking which lead to the unique Japanese choices when they realize they are about to lose are definitive and profound.

Definitive and profound? Jesus, give me a fucking break.

Once there was YouTube, now there are several YouPorn sites up that obviously feature "real people" and not porn stars. I won't link to them from here because real real people read my stuff, but any search will put you on the trail. So many emails asked so here is a site---it might not stay up for long--- I do not understand for the life of me why young girls volunteer themselves for this stuff that will stick to them for life. I guess their opinions of themselves is too low to imagine themselves in politcs, law enforcement, or any upper level job.

Those pesky North Koreans and by extension, the Iranians. Making a bomb is too easy to think that a country can't make one. Virtually every country can do it. The only hard part is the Diffusion part.

Pure uranium is dried and filtered into coarse powder called yellowcake. The substance is exposed to fluoride gas and heated to 133 degrees F. This creates a gas called uranium hexafluoride. The gas consists of two isotopes—U-238, which is too stable for atomic detonation, and U-235, which is lighter and highly fissionable. So they have to be separated. (U-238 IS used in a truly difficult to make plutonium bomb, the one tested at Los Alamos and dropped on Nagasaki).

To separate the isotopes, the gas (uranium hexafluoride) is pumped through a succession of fine, porous barriers—centrifuges. U-235 isotopes are lighter and propel faster through the barriers and concentrate. After passing through several thousand barriers, called centrifuges, the gas contains about 2 percent of U-235—only enough for a nuclear reactor.

But an atom bomb requires nearly 95 percent purity. So we move to refinement—the sophisticated, expensive, and time-consuming part. The slightly enriched uranium undergoes magnetic separation before being fed into another centrifuge. After passing through more than 1,500 barriers, the gas is about 20 percent pure. The process is repeated for nearly a year until the purity reaches nearly 90 percent. At this point, the uranium gas is considered bomb grade. It is then converted into metal powder.

So we have to assume that North Korea has done the hard part, if they haven't they have bupkis. Same for Iran. Setting the stuff off goes like this, The metal powder is molded into a ball weighing between 50 and 100 pounds. Size matters less than the purity of the uranium. It is packed into a warhead containing a detonator (the United States used artillery shells in its early versions) and fuse, which can be remotely set.

The even easier way to explode it is called "the gun" type. In this type you just take two clumps of U-235 (not large enough to sustain a chain reaction) and bring them together rapidly inside a gun barrel so that a supercritical mass is formed, and boom.

So it's possible that the NKs had a couple of ten or twenty pound clumps and detonated that, thus producing a weaker bomb.

It seems impossible that our intel is so bad that we can't tell if NK has the 50,000 or so centrifuges necessary to refine the U-235, but then it has already been demonstrated the limits of our intel. And remember we are talking a U-235 bomb, not the much more powerful plutonium bomb which needs advanced technology.

Crude back below $60 overnight......

Outsourcing college professors and their insane wages: U.S. News has a reasonably thorough list of on line educational opportunities. It is estimated that almost three million people are pursuing their advanced education on line. Face it, we have allowed colleges to raise their tuition fees to outrageous heights with no "studies" or oversight. Joke courses proliferate, attendence for these jokes is low (most kids want a real education); phony teachers evaluate equally phony thesis papers and Ph.D. requirements (frequently PC standards apply); far too many so-called teachers never enter a classroom, preferring to turn over their classes to TAs; and countless other devices that have sent advanced education fees into the clouds. I'm in a pretty large office right now and I know of at least ten young people who say they are studying on line. But here come the lawsuits; it seems these E Learning places want to make a lot of bucks too, but don't want any competition.

Bush a liar? It looks like he's going to "pocket veto" the fence bill.... Kaus has all the goodies, go there and vomit. He has done more to destroy the Republican Party than all the lefties put together. Very late add: White House denies any thought of a pocket veto, they say Bush will sign it. He must sign it before Wednesday or there ain't no bill.

Bulletin: Ivy League scientists have announced that the worst hurricane season in a generation is now past. Stay tuned for Global Warming and the coldest winter in fifty years.

Why hiring women for high paying jobs is risky. Amanda Peet (left) "star" of the new TV show Studio 60, announced that she was four months pregnant two weeks into shooting. Since this means a major "reconception" of the series, we could see millions in losses. However, they will probably deep six both her and the series. Ratings totally suck.

The current "word" from "reliable" polls is that the Security Moms will desert the GOP in November. It is my experience in selling various things to women that they regard family as the most important thing and Foley is simply something they will never swallow. Not liking the obvious (and politically incorrect) homosexual component of the Foley thing simply leads them into other areas to find fault with Republicans (a treasure trove of incompetence) and it won't take many "family values" women to change the Congress. I'd say it's over, at least for '06.

Stock Market: the GOP loss and the real possibility of a tax hike and Bush impeachment are "in the market." What isn't in the market is the sudden rise in wheat prices, good for farmers bad for the rest of us. Prices are nearly $5 per bushel and the normal is around $3. You may not know this but wheat is used as animal feed all over the world but is less than 5% of the bread we eat. This, when coupled with rising crude prices (up $1.25) this AM, will mean higher inflation which in turn may mean higher interest rates.

Things are getting even worse for Airbus. Now think of all of OUR tax monies that have been spent to build longer runways to accommodate the now phantom behemoth. A stumbling block, although it is sort of glossed over, is the labor unions who are currently milking the company dry and jacking up costs. All may find that the corporation goes out of existence which will raise fears that parts for the existing Airbus planes may be more expensive. Meanwhile, Boeing keeps on keeping on. Main problem at Airbus was disbursing the manufacturing between four or five socialist or near socialist states. It's a mess that may get worse.

Reynolds has a long rant about the employment numbers that completely misses the mark. The numbers have always failed to recognize the people dodging taxes by working as independent contractors under fake SS#s, AND the literal ton of people who work "off the books" for cash. Consider all the auto mechanics and body work guys who work out of their yards and homes---the construction guys who work days for cash per---the people who work the phones for cash commissions, and so on. Then there is the virtual army of "Dead Beat Dads" who also beat the system by working under someone else's SS# and you have an underground economy that is quite large. However, since the same source data has been used for years, the survey is an accurate measure of the rise and fall of employment. Many years ago I found myself on the street three months before Christmas when my entire business collapsed. I went to work selling glasses out of the back of my girl friend's station wagon and consistantly made $200 per day cash (limited to a five day week) til I found another job after Christmas. The tax free $200 was like $300, which was more than I was earning at a "real" job. There are still hundreds of ways to make money like that. And then there are prostitutes, porn actresses, and drug dealers which number in the millions and there is no employment survey on them.

Read John Fund's piece in the WSJ today----he makes the point that fifteen thousand Congressional staffers now run Washington, shielding congress from everything including work. Staffers mean petty interest groups and hints that there is a "Lavender Congressional Staff" of homosexuals covering up for Foley; think the constant observation that a lavender Priesthood is running the Catholic Church and is responsible for the pedophile "problem."

The Durham Rape case heats up again as blog Durham in Wonderland juxtaposes the Soviet show trail tactics, including the airbrushing of people convicted of various Stalin era crimes from photographs, with the current "prosecution." The Duke administration as gone so far as to remove the names of the Duke "accused" from the lacrosse roster to make it seem they were never players. The New York times is complicit in this prosecutorial abuse. As an add, it seems that in true Soviet revisionist fashion the pictures of the Duke players have magically been restored. It's hard to believe that something like this could happen in America, but with MSM like the New York Times backing up the misconduct it is.

Michael Yon has a posting that represents four or five interviews he has had with high ranking officers on the ground in Iraq. To a man, they think our policy, planning, execution, and leadership in Iraq suck. A sample:

The problem thus far, as you know, has been lack of serious planning, poor selection of people in charge . . . screwed-up assessments and assumptions, no building of international and regional cooperation, trust in non-credible exiles and too much spin and ad hocery," said retired Marine Gen. Tony Zinni, who formerly headed the U.S. Central Command, with responsibility for 32 nations, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

Zinni has long been a public critic of the war and its planning, but the rest of them (unnamed because they want their careers) make for sobering reading. It looks like our military brass on the ground think we have lost it there and unless we change quick it actually WILL become another Viet Nam. Yon, as you all know, is not some tree hugging seaweed eating left liberal who wants us to fail nor are the military people he quotes, all of which makes the reading a stiff shake to many of us who have been sleep walking. Bush and Cheney come in for major hits too.

Puzzlement of the weekend: why is it that a really sexy babe who looks hot hot hot by just standing there (left) ends up looking like a Desperate Frowsy Housewife when she tries to look sexy? (far left) Pix via Hollywood Tuna Should you think she is just a porno goddess with no brains, check this out:

(AP) - Playboy Enterprises Inc. said Thursday it bought Club Jenna Inc., a multimedia adult entertainment business founded by adult entertainment star Jenna Jameson, for an undisclosed amount. Club Jenna's assets include a film production business, a video content library, a network of Web sites and a DVD retail distribution deal, Playboy said.

Stupid bitch, right?

Yankees lose, perhaps there is a God after all..... But as baseball aficionados know, all you have to do to beat the Yankees is throw fastballs high and inside, something that is easy to say when you have three guys who can throw the ball more than 100 mph. If you've never played baseball, you don't know the fear of hearing something hiss by your head and not see anything at all. It's the hissing noise that scares the shit out of you. That and the sound like a cannon shot when the ball hits the catcher's mitt. You just don't want to be up there, and even the great players acknowledge it. To make matters even worse if that is possible, all good fast ball pitchers launch a ball that changes trajectory on the way to the plate, meaning it moves up, down, and sideways making these missiles actual weapons. Trust me, it's a terrifying experience.

Movies:
Magnificently reviewed by all the usual suspects, The Departed is another effort by the now artsy craftsy and nothing else, Martin Scorsese, to give us some kind of a grand crime story complete with liberal democrat "the entire system is corrupt" social message. Like Gangs of New York and The Aviator, Scorsese has left his roots, roots that produced Raging Bull, Good Fellas, Taxi Driver and other movies of this genre whose popularity made the young Scorsese one of the few directors whose name could go over the title. He has abandoned his home turf once again in order to make another technicolor mish mash. And, like the glossy Gangs of NY and The Aviator, this effort is just a flashy phony movie without a shred of reality. Starting with the casting of Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio (outstanding performances), two actors who look so much like one another that in this saga of double spying, we often confuse one with the other sometimes thinking that DiCaprio is Damon with a fake beard. The casting of the less than ordinary looking Vera Farmiga as the "love interest" is puzzling to say the least. Farmiga is so nothing looking, a woman you would never hit on at a party, that it is hard to believe two guys could ever fall for her, much less one (I was thinking that this movie would actually be about a face lift). Lastly there is the casting of Jack Nicholson who reprises his role as The Joker in Batman.

Now we get to story. I can hardly recall a more confusing meandering tale made by a front line director, if Scorssee is still a front line director. Violent? Sure, enough for five movies. Tension? Sort of, if only you could believe in the characters and story. We have an aging Jack Nicholson (70 years old and looking it) as the leader of a murderous criminal gang, a part in which he is so hopelessly unbelieveable he'd be just as well off playing Desdemona; ocasionally "over the top" and totally at sea as an old fart running a gang, this excercise in tedium could be his swan song as a big time actor. Never do we believe he could possibly run a gang, especially after we are informed that he pays his murderous band next to nothing. The continual intercutting, (the new fad among arty directors) designed more to cover the lack of story continuity than to advance the plot, acts to tire and confuse the audience. I'll leave out the ending, a moronic one that is just tossed in because a weak story has no ending; forgetting the antiseptic "love scenes;" ignoring the frequently fraudulent violence, particularly a scene where old fart Nicholson beats up on a wounded DiCaprio; we cannot forget trying to remember who is who; and we cannot ignore the fact that we don't give a shit how it ends. After almost two hours of confusion we just hope it ends soon.

I saw it on opening day before a nearly full theatre. In LA a movie that the audience really likes gets at least twenty or thirty seconds of applause when it is over, a literal standing ovation when it is Star Wars or something the audience really likes. This movie got a tiny smattering of applause from an audience that is sure to spread the bad word. Virdict: Big opening weekend followed by nothing.

BTW: the trailers for upcoming movies makes me hope for a great basketball season and exciting football playoffs. However, one observation about the decidedly under thirty audience: apparently they never have seen the Rocky movies because they applauded the trailer for Rocky 72. Who knows?

To the class that is sodomizing the electorate anyway, possible sodomy of individuals can't mean much. The Foley "thing" happened in the middle of a climate of questionable activities by the Republicans; not crimes, but not so questionable either. Earmarks, non-competitive bidding, cronyism, horrible appointments to administration positions that most of us figure can only be political payoffs, the corporate cash that most of us think are nothing more than bribes, sexual activities with women, sexual activities with boys, and the general overall lying common to the entire political class is part and parcel of the government. When you consider the content of this panoramic scene of corruption, a case of child molestation goes unnoticed unless the entire tapestry is examined with a magnifying glass. It doesn't even come to the level of consciousness when you are focused on taking bribes, bribing voters, looking the other way over non-bid contracts, getting your unqualified friends jobs in government, trying to control the media, making deals with other representatives so both representative's "earmarks" will fly through the process, and other deal making that happens every day makes a guy lose his focus. No wonder a story about a "club member" possibly molesting young people of the same sex is shrugged off with a curse and a head shake. To the class that is sodomizing the electorate anyway, individual acts of sodomy upon other willing participants can't mean much. After all, "old enough to bleed old enough to butcher," is a locker room saying we have all used from time to time, never really believing it or thinking anyone else would really believe it. Til now.

"So many temptations and so little time" about covers it.

Simple bias, incompetence, or just plain left wing partisanship? Something must explain the "reporting" of oil prices over the past few days. Oil is DOWN or flat. Period. What the hell is with everybody? Currently it is well below $60 ($58.84) and fluctuations of a dollar or two mean nothing. The only surprise is that crude didn't go up about $5 as a result of the intention of OPEC to reduce output.

Local retail: the low around here is $2.51 the high that I've seen is $2.87 with most stations still selling gasoline at $2.61 to $2.69. Explain that to me. All of them get their crude from the same place, all must refine to the same local requirements, but a spread of more than twenty cents from high to low?

I posted a few days ago about the "sources" for a lot of stories carried by newspapers being phony. These sources must be looked at whenever something "breaks," particularly against GOP. So join with me as we stroll through the Daisy Chain of sources for this Foley "story." First, it is no accident that they are all "progressive" blogs or News Services. Their function is quoting other "progressives" that publish hit pieces against GOP; they will claim that these "progressives" are news services. When you begin to examine the sources you will see that they are hidden; will lead investigators into a maze that will confuse and obfuscate both sources and groups; and in many cases make that awful Ann Coulter sound like St. Anne curing the sick.

It is claimed that the main "source" for the Foley story is CREW, the acronym for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. This org is now claiming they turned the emails over to the FBI in May and the FBI did nothing---the FBI is saying the group sent them emails that were "redacted"---information in the original deliberately withheld----- meaning that they were altered second hand documents. When the FBI asked CREW for complete emails, CREW refused. CREW claims the FBI is lying (what else is new?) and that the horrible FEDS refused to investigate on the basis of the redacted emails. CREW also refused to reveal when they got them and how they got them---evidence gathered illegally is not admissable in court, and cannot be the basis for an FBI investigation. Another "progressive" org called, Common Dreams, is a source for CREW. Common Dreams is as far left as you can get and from their website I conclude that it is devoted to "hit pieces" against Republicans. They have a "news" org as part and parcel of their existence, it is on their "news" page that you can find an entire daisy chain of so called sources that they quote. They then quote themselves as a source.

Worse, they list as a source---citizens for ethics--- which is actually a link back to Common Dreams. So their "news" link that is actually themselves. Common Dreams lists as sponsors: uber leftist Barbara Ehrenreich, FAIR founder Jeff Cohen, Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, WBAI's Deepa Fernandes, noted author Lewis Lapham (former editor of Harpers now currently working for the impeachment and conviction of Bush) and many more friends of FAIR. Other sources are Progressive News Wire, Democracy Now, Max Speak, then there is the Committee to Protect Journalists and not to forget Working for Change....I could list a hundred of these basically unknown "progressive" sites that spews out hit pieces by the hour which refer to sources that are part of their network.

Exhausted yet? I am.

Spell checker is down.

NRO reports on the Drudge "scoop" regarding the Democratic involvement in "Foleygate." No surprise, says NRO, because it was "obvious" there was Democrat Party involvement from Day One. Um OKaaay, but nobody is reporting it.

If Republicans had decided to spy on Foley for sending overly friendly e-mails to pages, Democrats would have been screaming about a Republican witch-hunt against gays. But if they don't, they're enabling a sexual predator.

The left's "la distgusta," Ann Coulter makes some good points today.....Isn't she just awwwwfuullll?

Dem Paul Begala opens fire on the Republicans:

ABC News reports that as long as five years ago, key Republican staffers knew that Foley was a potential danger to children, so they warned pages to stay away from him. And as we’ve all learned in the past few days, House GOP leaders from Dennis Hastert (R-Fat Hypocrite) on down knew something about Foley’s inappropriate behavior and did nothing.

GOP Congressional Campaign Chair Tom Reynolds (R-Soon-to-be-Minority) learned that Foley had been sending inappropriate emails to an underage boy who had been a page in the spring of this year. He did not call the cops. Did not call the FBI. Did not even call the toothless hounds at the House Ethics Committee. But he did take $100,000 from Foley for the NRCC,

Washington Monthly via The New Editor..... This is not going away in spite of what GOP bloggers and pundits say.

AIRBUS MAY NEED 15 YEARS TO CATCH UP WITH BOEING.....Boo hoo, but not to worry, the Socialist fucks will stay in business even though they're basically out of business.

PARIS, Oct 5, 2006 (AFP) - European plane-maker Airbus said Thursday it may need 15 years to catch up with and overtake US rival Boeing, while the co-chief executive at parent company EADS said plans for the new mid-size A350 jet might have to be scrapped.

"This is such a long-term business," Airbus chief executive Christian Streiff told the Financial Times after EADS announced further production delays to the development of the A380 superjumbo, a key component in the competition with Boeing, as well as the prospect of heavy losses.

"We must catch up. In 15 years I hope we are ahead of Boeing again." Streiff said another high-profile Airbus venture, the A400M military transport plane, was also under pressure.

"The timetable is exactly on the edge. It is a tense situation with a number of suppliers internally. We are exactly on track but without any reserves."

The co-chief executive of EADS, Thomas Enders, meanwhile told the Financial Times Deutschland that the future of the planned A350 XWB extra-wide bodied passenger jet could be in question.

This is a major business win for both Boeing and the U.S. But make no mistake, when government owned companies compete with private companies the private companies will eventually lose. This is because of the political impossibility of closing plants that are "employing" hundreds of thousands of people in the socialist countries. Losing money? Not us.......

Two Detroit young pitchers throw over 100 mph. Jesus, if you've ever played baseball you know how impossible it is to hit that stuff because it breaks too. Even on TV you could hardly see the balls in the air.

If the Pope says I can't masturbate during Lent, I'll become a Democrat.....

Research in Europe is showing that CO2 has almost nothing to do with climate change. The research is showing it correlates with certain types of cosmic rays hitting the earth. The Science Channel did an entire hour on huge gamma ray outputs, but they connected them with a distant black hole. Melanie has a long piece that you are far too stupid to understand but she spells it out pretty well.

.....have been implicating cosmic rays and water vapour, rather than carbon dioxide, as the main drivers of climate change. Indeed, they have put down 75% of climate change to these drivers.

There's a lot there

Their results suggest that temperature fluctuations over the past 550 million years are more likely to relate to cosmic-ray activity than to CO2. By contrast, they found no correlation between temperature variation and the changing patterns of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Check it out before the Thought Police close her down.....

Worse than bias---a full 45 minutes after Drudge reported the IMs were a hoax all news services still reported" that the Republicans were guilty. How bad? I was driving home and turned Rush on at 11:45 PDT and he broke the below Drudge report. Fifteen minutes later, the station that carries his program reported the corruption within the GOP.

CLAIM: FILTHY FOLEY ONLINE MESSAGES WERE PAGE PRANK GONE AWRY
**World Exclusive**
**Must Credit the DRUDGE REPORT**

According to two people close to former congressional page Jordan Edmund, the now famous lurid AOL Instant Message exchanges that led to the resignation of Mark Foley were part of an online prank that by mistake got into the hands of enemy political operatives, the DRUDGE REPORT can reveal.

According to one Oklahoma source who knows the former page very well, Edmund, a conservative Republican, goaded Foley to type embarrassing comments that were then shared with a small group of young Hill politicos. The prank went awry when the saved IM sessions got into the hands of political operatives favorable to Democrats. This source, an ally of Edmund, also adamantly proclaims that the former page is not a homosexual. The prank scenario was confirmed by a second associate of Edmund.

The news come on the heels that Edmund has hired former Timothy McVeigh attorney, Stephen Jones, and that former FBI chief Louis Freeh has been named to investigate the entire mess.

Developing...

Google News continues the sliming; FOX, continuing the proof that their people are just as lazy as anyone elses, also slimes Hastert....it goes on. At 12:40, a full hour after Drudge breaks story, there is not a word on MSM.

FOLEY, or "Hey Congressman! Wanna suck my dick? Please...." Another way of saying that I don't think these "pages" are innocent at all. They were willing---dare I say hopeful---they would be asked to participate in hot sex with the congressman. They led Foley on big time. Are any of us to believe that two of them went to his house years after serving as pages because the feared being molested? Bull Shit. As most of you know, I was a total piece of shit as a lad---still am from time to time----and there were times I was solicited, times when I engaged in faggot smashing, and times that I was just looking for any trouble that might be out there hoping against hope that I'd find some. Never was I an innocent babe in the woods even though I lived in the woods. I was hip to all that stuff in a so-called "innocent" time, a time that was never as innocent as now described; a time of every vice we see right now; a time when all of us kids knew the score by the time we were juniors in high school. I don't for a second believe that any urban young man over the age of fifteen can be molested without being a willing participant in this day and age. No chance. Foley is a piece of shit, but those young men are toilet paper. They knew dam well he was weak. Knew that he couldn't resist temptation for very long.

"Hey, Congressman, if I got naked in front of you would you get a stiffy?" You all know dam well that was the name of the game. Foley is a guy who cannot resist temptations of the flesh, and those pages knew it.

Anybody but me noticing the repeated links each day to Pajamas Media by co-owner/founder Glenn Reynolds? Ever wonder why? Couldn't be his share of the ad money, could it? I mean while we are all on an integrity binge why not divulge commissions from Amazon referrals too? Ain't honesty a bitch? More and more "bloggers" are collecting fees for links, which is OK if the fees are disclosed; like Drudge bribed me for this link? Or I share ad revenue from this link? If these people worked in the too maligned MSM they would have to.

Energy note: the price of crude as reported for Saudi oil is correct. It is much lower than the West Texas Intermediate delivered to Oklahoma. That's because Saudi oil ain't the greatest oil anymore and must sell at a discount and it costs moola to deliver to Oklahoma.

The price of Opec’s crude oil on Wednesday fell to $55.27 while Brent oil futures traded in London slipped 33 cents to $58 a barrel, 26 per cent below their July peak. WTI in New York settled at $59.76 at the 3PM EDT close.

And if the OPEC price includes all the shit high sulphur oil produced from all members it has to be lower.

ENERGY:
In response to many emails regarding the actual trading on the floor of the NYMEX crude oil contract. The "locals" (Floor traders) probably don't even know what the long term trend may be. They trade huge volume to scalp tenths and most use a five minute chart (if they use charts at all). A mini-mini-micro trend is what they trade. Most trade for themselves AND big commercial customers (they are no longer allowed to trade both at the same time). They may trade as many contracts as they have margin money in their accounts, which is one hell of a lot of oil. 10,000 crude contracts; 10,000 barrels which is 10,000 times 42,000 gallons. Holy shit, you might say. And you'd be right: 420,000,000 gallons of crude can be traded per person or firm, in some cases even more. But this gets very complicated and the limits in the cash month are much lower. But from this you can see that the large commercials can and do move the markets. Every penny move in the price of crude equals $10 per contract so you can see what the small player is up against. A 1,000 lot trade scalped at tenths equals ten K, a lot of money to be made in seconds. Most of the action is by the large corporate "hedgers;" the oil companies that own the oil and are "hedging their risk." Crude is traded all the way out to December 2012, and the total volume is in the millions of barrels. Having said all this, Directly below is a November Crude five minute chart. At bottom is the latest daily chart. You can see the difference.


When you check out the huge volume you can easily see how it is virtually impossible to "rig" the market. Nobody has enough money to do it. And oh, crude is traded on every exchange in the world which means.......

All Foley all the time? Not quite, but a pretty thorough trashing by right and left over at Captain's. My take remains the same as yesterday only it seems clear now that Hastert and others knew of the emails and did nothing. The doing nothing speaks volumes. These Republicans have morphed from the 1994 rebels into the 2006 inside the Beltway crooks. We have to face reality here: The Republicans are adrift in a an algae clogged inlet not knowing where they are going because they misplaced their moral compass. They have nothing to offer other than fear of Pelosi. We need change.

Great News: Lamborghini has not sold out to the tree hugging seaweed sniffing liberals. The lamborghini murcielago is twelve cylinders and goes from 0-60 in three point one seconds. Go HERE for slide show, it's number 15 and 16. First link is to test drive video; awsome.

Crude slide has no chart support before $50. November day chart below.... Keep in mind that if charts really worked there would be no markets. Price is $58.67 at close.



Note: The active contract month in energy is now DECEMBER, Why? Because that is the main winter month for buying heating oil and heating oil dominates energy trading til the January contract at the very least. Back when I was trading heating oil, the infallabile signal was the clothing being worn at the college football games on Thanksgiving Day. People in T Shirts meant a warm winter; bundled up against the elements meant a cold one. I traded on that basis for years and never missed.

Airbus delays delivery of the A380 AGAIN. Were this a private company it would have to fold, but it isn't. This is a socialist country wet dream; they can lose money forever and the tax payers will sit still for it. A private company would be sued by their stockholders, their stock price would hover around $10, and they'd be on their fourth CEO by now. Business Week:

French financial daily La Tribune reported that EADS also plans to announce drastic production changes that would see the closure of A380 cabin-fitting, paint shop and delivery centers in Hamburg, Germany, and the transfer of their workloads to Airbus headquarters in Toulouse, France -- saving on transportation time and costs.

Order cancellations are in the works. All of this is great news for Boeing. BUT because the plane is being "built" in all these countries which have also ordered it, it looks like the customers are stuck.

Congress, as usual, fucks up---and I am so glad you can't believe it. You can still gamble on line and there ain't nothing nobody can do about it. How? First, the only betting that the "law" stops is sports betting via credit card, you can still use CCs to bet on casino games. Second, who ever said you have to use a credit card to place a bet? Anyalists point out that

...they'll employ other e-wallet payment services based outside the U.S., such as NetTeller and FirePay. Frank Catania, former director of gaming enforcement in New Jersey and president of Catania Consulting Group, calls the law "a sham" that won't stop online betting in the U.S. "There are so many alternate means of payment that it is not going to stop what is happening here," says Catania. "We are going to be spending a lot of money for enforcement, and it is going to be worthless.

Some foreign governments have already accused the U.S. of having protectionist motivations, rather than prohibitionist ones. In August, 2005, representatives from Antigua and Barbuda brought a case against the U.S. to the World Trade Organization, complaining that efforts by the U.S. to stamp out online gambling unfairly keep foreign companies from competing with U.S. gambling companies. They cited exceptions for horseracing and lotteries as evidence that the U.S. was not antigambling per se, but against foreign governments taking betting dollars through online sites. The WTO initially ruled against the U.S. However, in April, 2006, the U.S. said it had addressed the concerns, prompting Antigua and Barbuda to appeal to the World Trade Organization about the U.S.'s lack of appropriate redress.

They should go back to molesting pages and secretaries.

Ramblin' around before I have to leave for the day: Be sure to check out both Captain's Quarters and Patterico for the real story about both Hastert's knowledge of the Foley emails and the deliberate misquoting of Senator Frist's remarks about the Taliban by the AP. Everyone better get hip to the fact that the AP is no longer a news gathering org but a left wing news creating org. Nobody seems to be correcting the false report.

Hastert: several bloggers are calling him a moron, I disagree. I have known about twenty politicians both in Sacramento and D.C., and have found each and every one of them to be extraordinarily bright. The only exception is Barbara Boxer, who stands out for her stupidity. Hastert is a rube, a bumpkin, a country hick, who is not ready for prime time Washington politics. He is a guy out of step with the times and doesn't seem to have a clue regarding modern instant communications and the resulting translucent state of government.

Foley the child molester: the Republicans are dead IF Hastert and the rest of the GOP so-called leadership knew anything about this. We can liken this to the Catholic leadership and the pedophile priests; the bishops and the pope circled the wagons preferring to protect their friends over cleaning out the dirt. Right now it looks like Foley's "problem" was an open secret and has been for at least two years. There is no rationalizing this one.

Barone today (on RCP) referring to our friends, the Democrats

Their pit bull attacks on Bush, their constant references to the Abu Ghraib abuses as if they were typical, their opposition to letting the NSA listen to conversations from al-Qaida suspects to persons in the United States and to letting interrogators of unlawful combatants use techniques that have helped us foil those plotting violence against us -- these amount to a strategy of rule or ruin. You must let us rule this country, or we won't regard it as "our" country anymore. So much for the first person plural.

We may long for the day of $5 gasoline
Russian oil grab 'puts western supplies at risk'

· BP and Shell face bids, says energy expert
· New UN body may be needed to police markets

Terry Macalister
Monday October 2, 2006
Full article is at The Guardian

A former government adviser has warned it is "only a matter of time" before BP or Shell faces a bid from a Russian state-owned group such as Gazprom which could threaten western oil supplies.

Professor Peter Odell, an energy economist, says ExxonMobil is also vulnerable to a Chinese takeover as the large UK and American stock-listed oil groups lose their influence in global markets.

"A Chinese bid for Exxon and/or Chevron and/or a Russian bid for Shell and/or BP, backed by funds provided by the wealthy member countries of Opec seem likely to be only a matter of time.
Russian oil grab 'puts western supplies at risk'

· BP and Shell face bids, says energy expert
· New UN body may be needed to police markets

But WSJ thinks this is a good thing:

Apart from the rough-and-ready tactics, it could prove a good match. Russian gas giant Gazprom has finally said openly that it wants to buy out BP's local partners in its Russian operation, TNK-BP. BP has first refusal over that 50% stake, which has a market value of about $20 billion. Yet it probably will have little choice but to defer to Gazprom.

True, the U.K. oil major would then have to live with a Russian state-controlled behemoth at its side instead of its current partners, a group of oligarchs

India Daily panics like hell, sees a world wide power grab:

Rosneft and Gazprom ready to give Putin his ultimate weapon – control of worldwide energy sources

Flag Patterico for the next four days because he has an in depth interview with a nurse at Gitmo. Could be very interesting, and honest (for a change).

CONSUMER ALERT: Most of you know that I've been trading commodities for twenty years and I know my shit, so it may come as a surprise that even I was roped in by a 4X Made Simple infomertial. It is a scam, go HERE to Google before you take one step in their direction. The commercial is terrific. It should be, it's a total lie. And no, I did not send them any money.

BLOGGER is malfunctioning again (since Friday) so posting will be lite. Google runs this thing and I can't see staying in the stock; these guys are not that good.

You cannot be a blog reader of any pursuation if you don't read this at Weekly Standard. We all need to pause before accepting anything, either in MSM or the so-called blogosphere. There are a lot of "hit piece" blogs appearing right now whose only purpose is to smear a candidate with false charges of one kind or another. Even if the charge is "sourced" it is likely a phony source; in fact there is likely to be a chain of phony sources in an attempt to make the attacks appear legit. BTW, "John Kerry is not a homosexual," is a type of smear. Becareful and vigilant.

Ace has the latest example.....

I guess I was wrong to criticize Malkin's responses to attacks upon her. I had no idea of the breadth or the depth of the attacks upon her. I'm sorry, not just for my blog about her, but to you for not looking further. She spells out the offences today, HERE.

NCAA football: the view from SoCal is that USC stinks and doesn't belong in the top six at all, and maybe not in the top ten. No running back, never mind no Bush, and they have feasted over the past five years with two quarterbacks who are over 6'5". The current guy is supposedly 6'3" but looks more like 6', at any rate he can't see over the pass rush so he needs passing lanes. UCLA is a joke, CAL is at best a chuckle, and only Oregon has a real balanced and strong team (in spite of the bad calls) and I'd rate them #5 or perhaps #6 behind two teams from the SEC, at least one from the Big Ten, Texas, and probably Notre Dame----then Oregon. 7th if you include Oklahoma above them. We've had five years of real excitement in college football and let's hope somebody can get better next year.