Well, it's a real relief that George Clooney is demanding immediate action in the Sudan. One presumes he is now more than happy to project American force.
Oh, he wants international force. Never mind. That won't happen.
Clooney should stick to what he knows: making leftist propaganda and being a jerk.
An Egyptian blogger arrested for protesting for freedom of the courts in Egypt? This is not something any of us in the blogosphere should be willing to tolerate. Every single one of us should be screaming about this, left, right or center. This is wrong and should not be tolerated. I know I get classed as a right-winger, but I call on everyone, left, right, center or any other flavor, to start protesting this right now.
Right now, folks. Support freedom.
The Embassy of the Arab Republic of Egypt
3521 International Ct. NW
Washington DC 20008
Phone (202) 895 5400
Fax (202) 244 5131
(202) 244 4319
Email: embassy@egyptembdc.org
(H/T Instapundit for the address.)
To miss an opportunity? Did Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership make a really big error today? By appearing to gloat and count chickens did they actually derail themselves?
Time will tell, but The Influence Peddler seems to think this was a really bad idea. I tend to agree. I think it works more against the Democrats than for them.
Plus, the Pelosi agenda obviously includes a fatal flaw - the investigations. Undecided voters are sick and tired of the partisanship of Washington, and the inability of Republicans and Democrats to work together. When the Republican Congress impeached President Clinton in 1998, it soured enough middle-of-the-road voters that they handed the GOP an almost unprecendented (sic) loss of House seats in the 6th year of a Presidency. To promise to unleash a raft of investigations, possibly leading to impeachment, may excite the base, but it is anathema to the undecideds. This will get huge play, and expect Democratic candidates to get lots and lots of questions about whether they agree with Pelosi that impeachment of the President may be warranted. For Democrats running in swing seats - trying to mollify the base while winning moderate votes - there is no good answer to this question. This is a very, very foolish move.
I think this is a pretty good analysis. The middle really does make up the majority in this country. The far fringe elements make a lot of noise, but they actually have no real power. There's a lot of demonization going on right now that honestly does not sit well with a lot of people. I think this show of confidence on the part of Nancy Pelosi will not sit well with the middle.
I had the unfortunate experience of living though the years of Jimmy Carter's presidency. Or perhaps the correct expression is managing to exist through it. It was, without a doubt, the worst administration I ever experienced. People who wail the loudest about Bush either did not live through those years or have a very selective memory indeed.
I hasten to add I did not vote for him either time. I'm quite glad I do not have to apologize for that.
America rose up at the polls and turned the execrable excuse for a president out in an almost unprecedented landslide. There's a reason for that, folks. He was a horrible president. Frankly, he's even worse as a human being at this point. Carter never met a dictator he could not embrace. He seems to revel in sitting next to propagandists. He's never found a slimy, rigged election he couldn't endorse. His few good works with Habitat for Humanity and the project to end that horrible water-borne parasite aside, he's pretty much been a total waste of oxygen his whole miserable life. And he started the trend of being unable to pronounce the word nuclear.
Now he's kissing up to Hamas. And of course, damning the country that failed to reelect him. You know what? I think he should go over to Palestine and live with his pals. I'm sure they'll get along just fine.
Today I visited Holy Coast as part of my project to visit each member of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists. Rick Moore has a, shall we say, less than flattering review of Markos Moulitsas (aka Daily Kos) and his piece in the Washington Post. It's always 2003 for the angry left, indeed.
101st Blog of the Day | Gaius | 
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That's the title of an op-ed in the LA Times today. Well, aside from the fact that virtually none of the Hollywood types could hope to be smart enough or fit enough to actually serve in the military, Andrew Klavan has actually hit on something. We really do need some films that aren't leftist tirades pretending to be entertainment. I've mentioned before that if Hollyweird wants to get out of the box office doldrums, they need to make films people want to see. I think people want to see films that treat heroes as heroes, not as villains.
Guess what? Audiences don't want leftist indoctrination. That should be obvious from the lame numbers the majority of movies are bringing in these days. But Narnia did rather well, didn't it? United 93 looks like it will be (percentage wise at least) a huge winner. Generally covering the cost of making the film in less than a week is an indicator that a film is going to be very profitable, right?
Anyway, Armed Liberal over at Winds of Change is having a ball laughing about this op-ed's effect on leftists. Judging by the love he's getting from some commenters, I 'spect he's pretty well dead on.
Blogosphere, Left Wing, Media | Gaius | Comments Off
George Will quotes Samuel Johnson in his column today on United 93. Sometimes it's like columnists are reading Blue Crab Boulevard since they make many of the same points I have made about the movie. Will notes that it is doing rather well at the box office, as I have done twice, most recently last night. Will also notes that this movie has very different demographics in play than the normal audience makeup in recent years. People over 30 are seeing this movie.
Will includes this quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.:
"In this snug, over-safe corner of the world . . . we may realize that our comfortable routine is no eternal necessity of things, but merely a little space of calm in the midst of the tempestuous untamed streaming of the world, and in order that we may be ready for danger. . . . Out of heroism grows faith in the worth of heroism."
I think that one sentence hits it exactly right. People need to be reminded of that.
UPDATE: It occurred to me that this would be an excellent place to remind people about heroes.
Hugo Chavez wants to pull a Castro and become president-for-life of Venezeula. While the bicker and squabble of internal partisan politics keeps American attention focused inwards, the old evils rise again. While the party out of power counts chickens, the world is not standing still waiting for us to settle our differences. It looks more and more like we are rapidly sowing the wind.
Harvest time is going to be very bad indeed.
Politics, War, World news | Gaius | Comments (2)
I doubt that our media will take time out from reporting on Tom Cruise long enough to notice this story. From the Times of London comes this horrifying story of the last moments of a woman journalist in Iraq. This story is not for the weak of stomach.
Nobody but her killers knew just how much she had suffered until a film showing her death on February 22 at the hands of two musclebound men in military uniforms emerged last week. Her family’s worst fears of what might have happened have been far exceeded by the reality.
Bahjat was abducted after making three live broadcasts from the edge of her native city of Samarra on the day its golden-domed Shi’ite mosque was blown up, allegedly by Sunni terrorists.
It gets much worse very quickly from there. The author, Hala Jaber, draws a few conclusions that I don't fully agree with. He blames this on death squads and sectarian strife. But killings like these exactly follow the strategy al Qaeda has been following all along. They are trying to provoke civil war and sectarian violence. So these murderous monsters may not even really be Iraqi at all. There are a lot of conflicting facts listed in the story that point to both Sunni and Shi'ite elements. That makes me suspect it is really neither of those, but agents trying to provoke the two sides.
This is the face of evil itself. That the monsters choose to hide behind masks shows how deeply depraved and cowardly they really are. We must remember we are at war. Or that face will show itself again and again.
UPDATE: My thanks to The Moderate Voice for the link.
UPDATE: My thanks to The Jawa Report for linking this. Hopefully visitors will take a look around while they're here.
UPDATE: My thanks to the Asylum for linking here as well.
UPDATE: Thanks to Chez Diva and Vital Perspective for linking.
Civilization, War | Gaius | Comments (6)
A glimpse of what dental care will look like if universal health care comes to the United States. Britain has a terrible shortage of dentists in the national health service. So people are, more and more, resorting to pulling out their own teeth.
"I snapped it out myself," said William Kelly, 43, describing his most recent dental procedure, the autoextraction of one of his upper teeth.
Now it is a jagged black stump, and the pain gnawing at Mr. Kelly's mouth has transferred itself to a different tooth, mottled and rickety, on the other side of his mouth. "I'm in the middle of pulling that one out, too," he said.
Sounds fun, doesn't it? Quite frankly, this is a scary, scary scenario. While some argue that America will, of course, do it better, one wonders how any rational person can look at the mess in countries that use socialized medicine and believe there is any way the system can work.
"You could argue that Britain has not seen lines like this since World War II," said Mark Pritchard, a member of Parliament who represents part of Shropshire, where the situation is just as grim. "Churchill once said that the British are great queuers, but I don't think he meant that in connection to dental care."
Britain has too few public dentists for too many people. At the beginning of the year, just 49 percent of the adults and 63 percent of the children in England and Wales were registered with public dentists.
And now, discouraged by what they say is the assembly-line nature of the job and by a new contract that pays them to perform a set number of "units of dental activity" per year, even more dentists are abandoning the health service and going into private practice — some 2,000 in April alone, the British Dental Association says.
The problem then becomes even worse as the fewer and fewer available dentists are simply unable to keep up with demand. The poorer people who can't afford the fees of private dentists end up doing do it yourself dentistry.
Socialized medicine actually ends up making it worse for the poor, not better. (Yes, this article is about dentistry, but the exact same things are happening with all medical care. That's why Canadians who can afford it come to the US for medical treatment).
Medicine, World news | Gaius | Comments Off
Israeli intelligence broke up a plan to assassinate Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president. They warned him that the military wing of Hamas was planning to kill him at his office in Gaza. It is not clear exactly who authorized the attempt.
The murder plan is the clearest sign yet of the tensions inside the Palestinian Authority between Hamas, which swept to power after elections in January, and Abbas’s Fatah movement.
Hamas leaders, who refuse to recognise the state of Israel, suspect Abbas of obstructing their attempts to govern, which have been hampered by a financial boycott from donor nations. “Hamas considers Abbas to be a barrier to its complete control over Palestine and decided to kill him,” said a Palestinian source who was an adviser to Arafat and is a close acquaintance of Abbas.
It is understood that the attack would also have targeted Mohammed Dahlan, Abbas’s strongman in Gaza.
The sources were unable to say who in Hamas’s secretive leadership had given the order to kill Abbas. But an indication of its hostility towards Abbas came last week.
The Palestinians keep moving closer to open civil war, having failed to grasp numerous opportunities to live in peace with Israel. With their financial crisis growing every day, it remains to be seen how long Hamas can actually try to hold on to political power. There were some apologists who said Hamas would moderate once they actually had to start governing. I don't think that worked out very well, judging from this.
Update: My thanks to A Blog For All, Flopping Aces and Sister Toldjah for linking here.
War, World news | Gaius | Comments (3)
The old warning about "counting your chickens before the eggs hatch" conveys an important truth. It is not a good idea to make final plans based on expected outcomes. Life has a funny way of punishing those who do so. Today in the Washington Post there's an article reporting that Nancy Pelosi is doing just that. She is on the record saying that the Democrats have plans to investigate the Bush administration, on multiple subjects. They also have a bevy of other plans to pass various legislation.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) said in an interview last week that a Democratic House would launch a series of investigations of the Bush administration, beginning with the White House's first-term energy task force and probably including the use of intelligence in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Pelosi denied Republican allegations that a Democratic House would move quickly to impeach President Bush. But, she said of the planned investigations, "You never know where it leads to."
Democrats are happily pointing to polls that show a majority in favor of Democrats controlling congress. The problem, of course, is that those are national polls, and congressional candidates are not picked by national voters. The article does say there are fewer seats actually in play (buried toward the end of the article again).
In recent days, Democratic confidence has been buoyed by a series of polls indicating that not only is Bush growing increasingly unpopular, so are Republicans in Congress. An Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Friday found that 33 percent of the public approves of Bush's job performance, the lowest rating of his presidency. And only 25 percent approves of the job Congress is doing, a figure comparable to congressional approval ratings before the 1994 elections that swept Republicans to power.
I'm not sure how things will play out in November, there may be enough seats that change hands to give Democrats control of the house. I somehow think that crowing about victory too soon may actually work against the Democrats, though. It will energize the base to get out and vote - on both sides. In other words, it's another two-edged sword Pelosi and her fellows are wielding. The "culture of corruption" sword didn't work out so well. What makes them think they'll be better at swinging this one? Those disapproval ratings for congress are not saying that Democrats are thought of any better than Republicans. Everyone in congress is caught in that net right now.
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