Compare and Contrast
One is a blogger’s fake, and one is a full-page ad in USA Today.
One cost nothing, and one cost $100,000 of taxpayer money.
One says what it means, and one uses a lot of weaselly feel-good boilerplate.
One made me laugh, and one made my lip curl with contempt.
Which is which?
Somebody Threw A Shoe At Bush — Hooray!
An Iraqi cameraman threw his shoes at President Bush at a Baghdad news conference, literally hurling a deadly insult at him. Apparently he’s being hailed as a hero by “thousands” of protesters around Iraq. (Of course, “thousands” of Iraqis will seemingly turn out at a car crash, so I’m not particularly impressed by the numbers.)
It seems to be lost on him, and them, that it’s entirely due to George Bush that he can commit assault on a visiting allied foreign head of state and not find himself being slowly fed into a wood chipper*, and that demonstrators can protest that his free speech should be protected without their families being rounded up and thrown in a dungeon.
So my response isn’t really anger or disgust at his behavior.
It’s more like you’re welcome.
* He’s in jail for the time being, just like I’d expect an American protestor who threw something at al-Maliki on a U.S. visit would be.
More Of This, Please
Mumbai killers to be denied a muslim burial (The Scotsman):
A MUSLIM graveyard today refused to bury nine of the gunmen who terrorised Mumbai.
The men were not true followers of the Islamic faith, according to the influential Muslim Jama Masjid Trust, which runs the 7.5-acre Badakabrastan graveyard in central Mumbai.
“People who committed this heinous crime cannot be called Muslim,” said Hanif Nalkhande, a trustee. “Islam does not permit this sort of barbaric crime.”
And this: Muslims speak out against terror online (Times of India):
NEW DELHI: Muslims protesting online against violence and fundamentalism find themselves cornered by radical elements in their community. Posts by on online communities like ProgressiveIslam.org express fear of retaliation against Muslims after the Mumbai terror attack.
One member writes: “I’m sure there will be an anti-Islamic backlash in the country.” The internet has brought liberal Muslims together allowing them to voice their opinions in blogs and websites that encourage change within their community, analyze how the media represent them and show ways to counter the biases Muslims find themselves up against.
“Now is the time for Muslims everywhere to march in the streets and speak out for peace, and let the public know that we do not support this type of butchery and hatefulness,” says a post on the site.
An online post says that the only way to avoid bigotry “is for the Muslims in India to police their own. All too often, it’s an ‘open secret’ in our communities as to which elements among us support such things, and unless we clamp down on our own extremists, I think it’s awfully hard to cry foul when the backlash begins.”
Since 9/11, we in the West have heard an endless number of Muslim spokespeople telling us how terrorism is against the principles of Islam. But as long as the Salafist/Wahhabi/jihadi strain of Islam can collect adherents and turn even a tiny minority of them into human missiles, we will have a terrorism problem.
I don’t want to hear about the terrorists’ “grievances” or their “oppression” or their “despair.” I don’t want to hear it from Muslims and I especially don’t want to hear it from Westerners. Fuck that. Terrorism is evil,
period.
We in the West consider it to be evil, and don’t tolerate it in our own culture. If the “silent majority” of so-called “moderate” Muslims considers it evil, too, then they need to step up and not just say so but actively root it out of their community.
That’s the only way it’ll end in any even vaguely peaceable way.
Continue reading >>
Well, Good, ‘Cause He’s Kind Of An Idiot
Biden will be given nothing to do.
Aides say Mr. Biden and Mr. Obama sometimes rib each other in private meetings, and they maintain that Mr. Obama was not unduly angry at Mr. Biden for his gaffe predicting that Mr. Obama would be tested by a world crisis in his first six months in office.
Since then, however, Mr. Biden has not had much to say to the news media. Through a spokeswoman, he declined to be interviewed for this article, itself a break from his voluble past.
Obama: “Oh, Joe, you kidder, you… (aside, to aide) Don’t let him ever speak to anybody ever again.“
Legislate In Haste, Repent At Leisure
Fed Pledges Top $7.4 Trillion to Ease Frozen Credit
Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, to rescue the financial system since the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.
The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $2.8 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the only plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Federal Reserve lending last week was 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis.
When Congress approved the TARP on Oct. 3, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson acknowledged the need for transparency and oversight. Now, as regulators commit far more money while refusing to disclose loan recipients or reveal the collateral they are taking in return, some Congress members are calling for the Fed to be reined in.
“Whether it’s lending or spending, it’s tax dollars that are going out the window and we end up holding collateral we don’t know anything about,†said Representative Scott Garrett, a New Jersey Republican who serves on the House Financial Services Committee. “The time has come that we consider what sort of limitations we should be placing on the Fed so that authority returns to elected officials as opposed to appointed ones.â€
[Emphasis added]
Well, you guys in Congress panicked and gave the Treasury Secretary sole power and discretion to hand out all this money, and now you think maybe he needs to be reined in? Um, maybe you should have thought of that before you made him unlimited God King of Bailouts.
If there was ever a good argument for a republican form of government instead of a direct democracy, this is it. Even with representative democracy, a divided legislature, checks and balances, and all that, our government collectively acted like a flock of startled sheep and rushed into huge legislation without considering the consequences. What kind of legal monstrosities would we have if we legislated by poll? (Oh, wait, I can guess: look at late Athenian democracy. Yeesh.)
It was some time between the creation of TARP and the actual disbursement of funds — surely Congress could have taken a week or two more and thought about it and considered all the ramifications and built in a few safeguards before passing the bill.
This is just like the PATRIOT Act passed just after 9/11. All those Democratic Congressmen and Senators who have been yelling about it for the past eight years: it passed 357-66 in the House, 98-1 in the Senate, so STFU, you voted for it. You voted for it in a panic; but that’s nobody’s fault but your own.
(Oh, and by the way, If I Were Dictator I’d pass a law against cute/clever acronyms for Acts of Congress.)
Back to the article: apparently, the Federal Reserve has been responsible for $4.4 trillion of the total. They aren’t being forthcoming either:
“Some have asked us to reveal the names of the banks that are borrowing, how much they are borrowing, what collateral they are posting,†Bernanke said Nov. 18 to the House Financial Services Committee. “We think that’s counterproductive.â€
Gosh, thanks, Mr. Chairman. It’s nice to know that you don’t think we should know where you’re sending our money. No need for that. I’m sure that if your wife started writing large checks on your account you’d agree that knowing what she was spending it on would be counterproductive.
(Hat tip: Vodkapundit)
Victory in Iraq Day
Today is Victory in Iraq Day!
Originally called by Zombietime, and echoed by bloggers around the world, today is the day to celebrate the end of a long, hard-fought, and contentious war.
Let us salute the men and women — soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines — who executed the single most stunning blitzkrieg assault in the history of warfare.
Let us salute the men and women who defeated the Baathist diehards; probaby the best-financed, best-armed insurgency without a foreign sponsor ever.
Let us salute the men and women who defeated the Sadrist uprisings; who fought a battle to the death among religious monuments without destroying them.
Let us salute the men and women of the Second Battle of Fallujah, where they made clear that against a determined and angered American foe, resistance truly was futile.
Let us salute the men and women who defeated the al Qaeda terrorism campaign, who refused to merely play defense but invented new methods of information warfare to dig into a covert operation and atomize it into detectable, defeatable pieces.
Let us salute the men and women who defeated the last ditch diehards and death squads, by proving that Americans wouldn’t leave their friends unprotected.
We will undoubtedly see violence — even spectacular violence — in Iraq in the future. And we need to help the Iraqis guard and protect against Iranian and Syrian provocation. But occasional communal violence does not equal civil war.
Zombie reminds us of the words of John F. Kennedy:
“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.â€
This has been a great victory for American arms, and the for martial spirit, civic virtue, and basic American-ness of those who have fought.
Their efforts have been a success. Let us honor them by celebrating their victory.
If There’s One Sure Sign of American Declinism…
… it’s that we now seem to be okay with naming things after people who aren’t dead yet.
First it was the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) but that might be excused since he was far into Alzheimer’s at the time and wasn’t a public person anymore. But that doesn’t excuse the USS George HW Bush (CVN-77).
Then it was travesties like renaming Anchorage International Airport to “Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport” in 2000.
But now a Long Island elementary school has renamed itself for Barack Obama. Not only isn’t he dead, he isn’t even President yet.
I don’t care that “most of the 440 students there are black or Hispanic, and Obama’s victory is a source of great pride;” we have traditions in this country, and one of those is you name schools for dead Presidents, either great ones (Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington) or assassinated ones (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy).
Normally I don’t buy into American declinism much, but are we next to clamor for the Senate to declare Obama, like Augustus, a living god?
(hat tip to Hyacinth Girl)
One Nuclear Bomb Can Ruin Your Whole Day
Iran Said to Have Nuclear Fuel for One Weapon, says the New York Times:
The figures detailing Iran’s progress were contained in a routine update on Wednesday from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has been conducting inspections of the country’s main nuclear plant at Natanz. The report concluded that as of early this month, Iran had made 630 kilograms, or about 1,390 pounds, of low-enriched uranium.
Several experts said that was enough for a bomb, but they cautioned that the milestone was mostly symbolic, because Iran would have to take additional steps. Not only would it have to breach its international agreements and kick out the inspectors, but it would also have to further purify the fuel and put it into a warhead design — a technical advance that Western experts are unsure Iran has yet achieved.
“They clearly have enough material for a bomb,†said Richard L. Garwin, a top nuclear physicist who helped invent the hydrogen bomb and has advised Washington for decades. “They know how to do the enrichment. Whether they know how to design a bomb, well, that’s another matter.â€
Nuclear weapons are 1940s technology. Hell, for a simple gun system, I know how to design a bomb, at least to a first approximation. And do we really think that they couldn’t have a secret engineering shop working on this while they tell the Keystone Kops IAEA that, no, really, these are all the nuclear sites we have, honest? Formally breaching their agreements and expelling the inspectors hardly seems like a speedbump for a regime that’s okay with, oh, invading an embassy, just for starters.
Let’s remember, too, that while I’m sure Iran would love to have their own home-built nuclear-tipped IRBM to destroy Tel Aviv threaten and deter their enemies, a big clunky ISO container bomb would do the job quite nicely.
The question, of course, is what do we do about it? Apparently, the chances of an Israeli strike have gone up, and the United States might not get in the way:
TimesOnline: Bush and Olmert to meet over Iran’s nuclear ambitions
The timing of the talks, between two lame duck leaders with only weeks to go before they leave office, is intriguing. Israel has stated repeatedly that it would be unacceptable for an Iranian regime to acquire nuclear weapons. Although Tehran insists that its uranium enrichment programme is for peaceful purposes, President Ahmadinejad has vowed to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.
…
Intelligence sources have told The Times that the prospect of Israel taking preemptive military action to knock out Iran’s nuclear facilities appears to have become significantly more likely in recent weeks. Such an operation would require at least tacit US cooperation because it would almost certainly involve Israeli warplanes flying through US-controlled airspace in Iraq.
Jerusalem Post: Israel won’t let Iran go nuclear
Israel will not tolerate a nuclear Iran, Maj.-Gen. (res.) Amos Gilad, the head of the Defense Ministry’s Diplomatic-Security Bureau, has stressed to The Jerusalem Post in an unusually hard-hitting interview.
For now, Israel is backing diplomatic and economic efforts to thwart the Iranians, Gilad added, but it doubts these will work and it is keeping all options open.
Asked about the complexities of any resort to military action, particularly since Iran has built its facilities to withstand a repeat of the IAF’s 1981 destruction of Saddam Hussein’s
nuclear reactor at Osirak, Gilad replied, tellingly, that domestic critics 27 years ago said the Osirak raid “couldn’t be done. And the fact is, it succeeded.”
President-Elect Obama has said that “Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon I believe is unacceptable. We have to mount an international effort to prevent that from happening.” Is an Israeli strike with tacit US cooperation and a heavy sigh of relief from all the neighboring countries “international” enough?
I can see Obama and company breathing a heavy sigh of relief themselves if Israel does something to stop Iran before the Inaugural. That way, he can cite a fait accompli and avoid having to see if his “forceful diplomacy” passes the world laugh test.
Auto Industry Bailout — Patty Murray Responds
After writing the No Auto Industry Bailout post, I attempted to contact my Senators and Congressman through their website contact forms (Senator Cantwell’s contact form was broken and would not accept my submission), giving them my opinion that government funds should only be used to facilitate simultaneous Chapter 11 bankruptcy for the Big Three.
This morning, Sen. Murray responded:
Dear Mr. Lovely:
Thank you for writing me regarding the possibility of federal loans being granted to certain automobile companies. I appreciate hearing from you about this important issue.
As you know, three American automobile companies, General Motors (GM), Ford, and Chrysler, have recently asked the federal government to provide them loans to help them through the current credit crisis. It is projected that without federal loans, each company will be in danger of failing in the near future. Like you, I am frustrated that management at these companies have allowed their finances to deteriorate to this point, and are now requesting taxpayer assistance.
Whether or not to grant federal loans to GM, Ford, and Chrysler is a difficult question. Millions of Americans are employed directly or indirectly by these companies and their related businesses, such as auto parts manufacturers and dealerships. If these Americans were to lose their jobs due to their employer’s bankruptcy, it would have a devastating impact on the financial stability of millions of families at a time when many people are already struggling to pay their bills. However, using taxpayer dollars to support struggling businesses is seen by some as inappropriate government intervention in the private sector.
I want the auto industry to remain viable and continue to support the millions of jobs around the country which depend on its success. However, I cannot support providing funds without assurances that the automakers have a strategy to restructure and become viable, competitive companies. The auto industry cannot continue to follow a failed business model and then ask for help. I will need to be convinced that the loans will not only save jobs, but that industry leaders will take restructuring seriously and work to reinvigorate their industry. If the federal government- funded by working and taxpaying families- is expected to explore financial aid to these corporations, then I expect to hear about sacrifices that industry management will make during these tough times. Thank you for sharing your views with me about this important issue, and I will keep your comments in mind. Please do not hesitate to contact me again in the future.
I hope all is well in Seattle.
Credit to Sen. Murray and her staff for replying in an at least semi-responsive manner, and for her antipathy toward a conditions-free bailout. Nevertheless, she does not respond to the question of bankruptcy reorganization but rather puts all the blame on the companies’ management for “following a failed business model.”
Granted their business model has failed, but that is in large part because of their legacy costs and over-generous union contracts. Management by itself can only sacrifice so much — as one commenter elsewhere pointed out, even $100 million in egregious management salaries would cover the pre-tax losses on only a hundred thousand cars (<1% of production). Without addressing the union or the dealers either by fiat or by bankruptcy, no amount of management “restructuring” will make any significant difference to the Big Three’s impending collapse.
Unstated in my previous post was this: even if the Big Three undergo bankruptcy restructuring and come out with everything on the wish list, there’s no way the bankruptcy court can make them design better cars that Americans will want to buy. The best that can happen is to make them viable and hope they get a clue. Failing that, they should disappear.
Victory in Iraq Day, November 22, 2008
Blogger Zombietime says what most of us have been thinking for some time: the war in Iraq is over. Major combat operations, the Baathist insurgency, the al Qaeda jihad, the Sadrist uprisings, the Sunni holdouts, the sectarian death squads. All beaten.
There is no serious fighting still going on. What is left is a few diehards (like those Japanese soldiers in the jungle who refused to surrender), criminal gangs, and Iranian infiltrators. There will continue to be suicide bombers, a nagging low level of insurgent violence, and an occasional flareup, but as Zombie points out, similar things are happening today in India, Mexico, Thailand, the Philippines, and lots of other places we would never consider to be “at war.”
The Bush Administration, the Obama Administration, and the media will never declare a victory for their own separate reasons. That doesn’t mean it’s not true.
It’s time to celebrate another victory for American arms, and the defeat of a large number of very very bad people. Zombie arbitrarily chose November 22 to be Victory in Iraq Day.
Go read the whole thing. Really.
Gen-X, Goth, Geek, Gamer
Classical Liberal, Atheist, Father-to-be
Rantings and commentary from Bryan Lovely, a reddish guy in a sea of blue, coming to you from the Democratic People's Republic of Seattle.
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