Revulsion, Redux

This is what the Portland Newspaper was revolted by in the editorial I linked earlier. Go watch it. Listen to the chants the people are performing. More importantly, look at the completely acquiescent crowd watching this. Bring a barf bag.

These are the people who attend anti-war demonstrations. Nice choice of associates.

Losing The Media

Nancy Pelosi and John "Unindicted Co-conspirator" Murtha may have won the battle to get their bill through the House of Representatives, but in the process, they may have lost their media support. Today, the Chicago Tribune joins the chorus of negative commentary that the Washington Post started yesterday.

The House plan puts pressure in the wrong place: on U.S. military commanders. It sets up a series of benchmarks and timetables. Even if President Bush certifies that the Iraqis are making sufficient progress, U.S. combat troops would be redeployed by Sept. 1, 2008, at the latest.

We fervently hope that U.S. combat troops have completed their mission by that date. But the House plan starts to tie the hands of American commanders just when the troop surge seems to be showing the first tentative signs of working.

The 218-212 vote on the House plan showed the deep divide in Congress on this issue. The bill likely won't survive intact in the Senate, which is set to debate a plan for a squishier deadline for withdrawing troops. Even if the House plan did pass the Senate, Bush has vowed to veto it.

A stalemate between the president and Congress on a spending bill of this magnitude–about $124 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan–is not without dangers. Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned that failure to pass the bill soon "will have a genuinely adverse effect on the readiness of the Army." He said it would force the Army to delay training of units and halt repair of vital equipment. Bush said Friday that if the spending bill is not signed into law by April 15, troops and their families "will face significant disruptions."

The politicians who abandoned their principles to vote for this bill, whether their votes were bought and paid for with pork or whether they were strong-armed by the leadership, are the ones who will end up paying for this. Without media cover, there will be fallout from this bill. By leading the party too far to the left, Pelosi has set herself up for a fall. Others who followed her lead will also find media coverage has turned on them. The media in this country is slanted very, very heavily toward the Democratic party. But I rather suspect they are much more supportive of the centrist Democrats than the far left. Pelosi has veered too far left this time.

Revulsion

When even a newspaper that is against the war in Iraq cannot stomach the antics of the "anti-war" protesters, you know there is a real problem. The newspaper in question, the Portland Tribune, tries to have it both ways by denouncing the actions of what it calls the few, while lauding the majority of protesters. What they fail to do is show that one single person in the majority actually objected to the antics of the few. One gets the impression that nobody did so at the time at all.

But then there was a smaller group of demonstrators — if they can even be called that — who engaged in numerous actions that violated the sensibilities of ordinary people and damaged the very cause the activists claimed to endorse.

This splinter group of protesters showed its support for “peace” by burning a U.S. soldier in effigy. It exhibited its supposedly pacifist nature by knocking a police officer off his bike — an action that brought out the police riot squad.

Perhaps the most disturbing scene of the afternoon, however, involved the man who pulled down his pants in front of women and children and defecated on a burning U.S. flag. This disgusting act actually elicited cheers from some members of the crowd, but we hope that the emotion it produces in the community is one of revulsion.

Offensive behavior does not advance peace and justice in the world. Rather, it undermines the moral message of peace demonstrators. It leads people to believe that it’s not possible to be both patriotic and opposed to the war in Iraq.

If the goal of peace demonstrators is to influence public opinion and encourage an end to the war, the activists must connect with their fellow citizens — not repel them.

This behavior on the part of anti-war demonstrators is not at all unusual. They are getting worse as they grow bolder, however. The burning of the effigy exactly shows the mindset of the anti-war crowd's strongest supporters. Read the comments that follow the editorial. One of the very earliest hints that it must be an evil right wing conspiracy to discredit the anti-war crowd. As someone points out farther down, there isn't any need to do that. The left can discredit themselves without any help whatsoever. I think this editorial proves that.

Call The Crimestopper’s Tip Line

Some schoolchildren in Cranberry, Pennsylvania got a heck of a surprise a few days ago. While waiting for the bus, they discovered an unusual object. The discovery touched off a criminal investigation and a flurry of police activity completely unrelated to doughnuts. It isn't every day you find one of these at the bus stop.

A human fingertip.

CRANBERRY, Pa. - A fingertip found at a bus stop by schoolchildren, touching off a police investigation, was claimed Friday by a man who injured his hand in a snowblower accident. The man contacted Cranberry police Friday, a day after the children found it.

Police said the man told them the accident happened about two weeks ago when he was trying to clear a snowblower. He didn't bother to look for the finger; he just went to the hospital for treatment, said police Lt. Jeff Schueler.

We are trying to confirm that he told officers to keep the tip.

Battered Spouse Syndrome

A court in Brazil has convicted a 52-year old woman in Brazil's most notorious "battered spouse" case  ever. Rosanita Nery dos Santos tried very hard to convince the court that the murder of her husband was justified by years of humiliation at the husband's hands. So where's the "battered" part, you ask? Oh, that's easy.

She battered - and fried - her husband's dismembered body.

SAO PAULO, Brazil - A Brazilian housewife was convicted and sentenced to 19 years in prison Friday for killing her husband, chopping his body into small pieces and frying it. Rosanita Nery dos Santos, 52, drugged her husband in his sleep, then stabbed him to death two years ago in Salvador, about 900 miles northeast of Sao Paulo, said police spokesman Idmar Bonfim.

She then hacked Jose Raimundo Soares dos Santos' body into more than 100 pieces, which she boiled and fried before hiding in plastic bags beneath a staircase in her house, Bonfim said. He said police discovered the body parts after receiving an anonymous phone call.

The court was convinced it was either a black magic ritual of some sort or possibly a scheme to collect the life insurance the husband had. But dos Santos said armed intruders killed her husband then forced her to dismember and fry the remains. If she had a real smart lawyer, she might have been able to convince the court that it was a gang of armed chickens avenging years of abuse by Colonel Sanders. Which leads to one obvious and unanswered question about all of this:

What kind of side dish do you order with the battered spouse?

Some Have Not

The vote of the 218 politicians in the House of Representatives yesterday proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that some have forgotten what support for the troops in time of war means. Despite all the promises before the vote that funds would never be cut off for troops in the field, the Pelosi-Murtha bill that passed by the slimmest of margins yesterday effectively does exactly that. And the situation will get worse in a short time as funds run out and the pork-laden abomination that the House passed goes exactly nowhere in terms of actually becoming a law. The Senate will not pass their version of the bill. They will not be able to invoke cloture. Pelosi and Murtha, along with 216 other members of the House may have forgotten how to support the troops.

Some have not.

WASHINGTON - Laura Brown, a mother with a son who fought in the Iraq war, is trying to improve conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center — one laptop computer at a time.

The 50-year-old from Cody, Wyo., was chatting on the Internet with the mother of a wounded soldier two years ago when the mother mentioned she had to print out her son's e-mails and take them to him at Walter Reed because there weren't enough laptop computers to go around.

Brown, whose own son had recently returned safely from the war, thought the solution to that problem seemed incredibly easy.

"It just kind of hit me," she said. "If one person needed one, then there's others. … I mean, my son had e-mail in Iraq. I was really stunned."

So Brown formed a group, Laptops for the Wounded, to raise money for the cause.

Since its fundraising effort began in November 2005, Brown's organization has donated 27 computers to military hospitals around the country — 24 of them to Walter Reed.

On Friday, Brown flew to Washington to deliver 10 donated laptops to the hospital in person.

Those computers, which were upgraded and refitted with new equipment, included Web cameras so soldiers could lay eyes on their families from afar.

"She basically just made it her mission," said Lisa Ramdass, a case manager at the hospital who has been working with Brown to coordinate the donations.

Ramdass said the laptops are used for more than e-mail. One soldier who worked with a donated laptop couldn't speak, and was able to communicate with his family and his doctors by typing on the computer. Others who have eye injuries use the laptops to watch movies or television up close.

This is one woman who has not forgotten or turned her back on the troops. This is not Operation Valour-IT, which this site and many others have and continue to support. This is one woman's efforts to help. This is the website for Laptops for the Wounded.