We didn't lose the game; we just ran out of time. - Vince Lombardi

Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Regular readers of this blog might remember a flame war I had a couple of months ago with a reader named Calliope.  Tonight I got an email from the fine folks over at Anti John Kerry who emailed me to tell me that Calliope’s 13 year old daughter is missing, and an Amber Alert has been issued.

If you are a blogger, please do all you can to publicize this.  You can see the original Amber Alert PDF here.

French troops have come under fire.  It’s a quagmire!

French peacekeeping troops exchanged fire with gunmen who attacked them as they traveled in a convoy of armored vehicles in northern Ivory Coast on Tuesday, a French army spokesman said.

Some of the group of about 15 gunmen were wounded before they fled the scene of the attack, about 30 miles south of the city of Korhogo. No French troops were wounded or killed during the incident, the spokesman said.

We can expect France’s unconditional surrender any minute now.

Evil fascist Zionist Jew Israeli warmonger Ariel Sharon has won approval for his plan to pull out of Gaza and the West Bank.

The Israeli parliament—in a historic decision—voted Tuesday to back Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to pull Israeli troops and settlements out of Gaza and a tiny portion of the West Bank.

The vote was 67 for, 45 against and seven abstentions. ...

Sharon entered parliament Tuesday afternoon, surrounded by 16 bodyguards, an unprecedented number. Outside, police cordoned off the building, restricting entry, as thousands of settlers gathered in a nearby park to protest the plan.

Protection for Sharon has been beefed up in recent weeks amid growing concern he could by attacked by right-wing extremists.

The withdrawal plan has bitterly divided the nation, and solidified Sharon’s transformation from long-time patron of the Jewish settlers to their No. 1 nemesis.

Undoubtedly Hamas and the rest of the Islamist vermin will step up their attacks against innocent Israeli civilians in response to this latest attack on their reason for existing.

This guy must be part feline, because he seems to have nine lives.

Yasser Arafat has a large gallstone, a Palestinian hospital official said Tuesday, as the weakened Palestinian leader broke his Ramadan fast and underwent more medical tests at the urging of his doctors.

The gallstone is not life threatening and can be easily treated, the official told The Associated Press.

What a shame.  Personally I cannot wait to live in a world where this vermin is not in it.  Castro, too.

If you ever wanted to see how completely out of it the left is, check out David Sirota’s blog.  (Sirota is a regular guest on Franken’s show on Err America.) Here’s the issue:  In the run-up to the Iraq War, when Bush was still trying to build a coalition and win UN approval, he was presented with a few opportunities to take out Zarqawi, which he opted not to do.  Why?  Because he didn’t want to piss off the allies he was trying to get on his side.  Sirota writes:

Notice this part of the article in which it now is clear Bush refused to go after one of the world’s most deadly terrorists because he was trying to pass the same kind of “global test” he has attacked Kerry over.

Now, given that Zarqawi is currently the guy coordinating the attacks against us, what are the lessons to be learned here?  First, that the whole idea of a global test is a dismally bad idea, and second, that preemptive action is the appropriate course of action to deal with terrorists.  Had Bush taken him out beforehand the insurgency that we are now battling would have had to find a new leader, and the coalition would not be one iota different from what he ended up getting in the end.  Sirota is basically pointing to an example of when Bush acted like Kerry, which is shown to be a dismal failure, and using it to criticize Bush because now he’s doing the polar opposite.

Thanks, Dave.  You just bolstered my belief that the Bush way is correct and the Kerry doctrine is incredibly dangerous and foolhardy.

You wanna know why California has the coolest governor in the country?

``I always like to make jokes about Teddy Kennedy. I think it’s always fun to do that. He’s one of my favorite relatives. He comes to my house and he eats away all the cake and all the desserts that we have.’’

Never let it be said that arnie is afraid of speaking his mind.

Monday, October 25, 2004

Once again the UN demonstrates to the world its gross incompetence at, well, just about everything.

The mystery surrounding the disappearance of 380 tons of powerful explosives from a storage depot in Iraq has taken a new twist, after a network embedded with the U.S. military during the invasion of Iraq reported that the material had already vanished by the time American troops arrived.

NBC News reported that on April 10, 2003, its crew was embedded with the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division when troops arrived at the Al Qaqaa storage facility south of Baghdad.

While the troops found large stockpiles of conventional explosives, they did not find HMX or RDX, the types of powerful explosives that reportedly went missing, according to NBC.

The International Atomic Energy revealed Monday that it had been told two weeks ago by the Iraqi government that 380 tons of HMX and RDX disappeared from Al Qaqaa after Saddam Hussein’s government fell.

In a letter to the IAEA dated October 10, Iraq’s director of planning, Mohammed Abbas, said the material disappeared sometime after Saddam’s regime fell in April 2003, which he attributed to “the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security.”

Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003. According to NBC, troops from the 101st Airborne arrived the next day to find that the material was already gone.

So, it seems that we have one of two options to choose from.  The first is that the IAEA doesn’t know its ass from its elbow; the second is that Mohammad Abbas is trying to directly interfere with a US presidential election.  Either way, this is just reason #53,211,571 to totally abandon the United Nations.

The Koreans would shit a canary if they could see our border.

South Korea’s military is investigating signs that North Korean agents might have infiltrated the world’s most heavily fortified border on the day America’s top diplomat is visiting the nation.

South Korean border guards reportedly found a hole in the wire fence that forms the southern boundary of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating the two Koreas.

The hole, which measured about 40 cm by 30 cm (16 inches by 12 inches), was found near Yeoncheon, a border town 60 kilometers (37 miles) north of Seoul.

Alerts in the DMZ are taken seriously in the South and the military tightened roadblocks and set up checkpoints in the area on Tuesday, looking for possible infiltrators.

It is considered unlikely that civilians could have made their way past guards and land mines in the heavily patrolled DMZ.

See, this is what we need on our southern border: a De-Mexicanized Zone; a thousand mile fence, combined with a mile-wide minefield.  We need border security.  I love the fact that the Koreans are coming unglued at a hole in our fence.  There are parts of our southern border that are more hole than fence, and one day, when terrorists detonate a nuke in a major American city, the subsequent Congressional commission is going to determine that spending a few million on border security might have saved a couple hundred thousand American lives.

I got home from work tonight and found that my TiVo has recorded about 15 episodes of South Park, including my alltime favorite, where Mr. Garrison puts Lemmiwinks the gerbil up Mr. Slave’s ass.  I’m sitting here eating dinner with tears in my eyes.  This is one of the funnest damn things I’ve ever seen.

After remaining silent during most of the electoral season, the National Organization for Women has sent representatives out to support their candidate.

John Edwards stands up for the electoral process.

Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards assured mostly black churchgoers Sunday that a record turnout would render meaningless a federal court decision that limits where some votes can be cast.

A federal appeals court ruled Saturday that provisional ballots Ohio voters cast outside their own precincts should not be counted, overturning a lower court decision that such ballots are valid as long as they are cast in the right county. ...

“We know that there are some voices that would stand in the way of your voices being heard—stand in the way here in Ohio of you being able to vote,” Edwards told the congregation at Allen Temple AME Church.

“We’re going to make sure you get to the polls, we’re going to make sure you get to vote and we’re going to make sure your vote is counted and we’re going to counter those forces with a record turnout.”

“Rest assured that no matter how many states we lose, no matter how many electoral votes Bush gets, we will not rest until we have finished the job that Al Gore could not do and use our army of lawyers to successfully steal the election!”

I wonder if his recollection of this meeting is as seared—seared—in his memory as his illegal Christmas in Cambodia.

U.N. ambassadors from several nations are disputing assertions by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry that he met for hours with all members of the U.N. Security Council just a week before voting in October 2002 to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

An investigation by The Washington Times reveals that while the candidate did talk for an unspecified period to at least a few members of the panel, no such meeting, as described by Mr. Kerry on a number of occasions over the past year, ever occurred.

At the second presidential debate earlier this month, Mr. Kerry said he was more attuned to international concerns on Iraq than President Bush, citing his meeting with the entire Security Council.

“This president hasn’t listened. I went to meet with the members of the Security Council in the week before we voted. I went to New York. I talked to all of them, to find out how serious they were about really holding Saddam Hussein accountable,” Mr. Kerry said of the Iraqi dictator.

Speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in December 2003, Mr. Kerry explained that he understood the “real readiness” of the United Nations to “take this seriously” because he met “with the entire Security Council, and we spent a couple of hours talking about what they saw as the path to a united front in order to be able to deal with Saddam Hussein.”

But of the five ambassadors on the Security Council in 2002 who were reached directly for comment, four said they had never met Mr. Kerry. The four also said that no one who worked for their countries’ U.N. missions had met with Mr. Kerry either.

The former ambassadors who said on the record they had never met Mr. Kerry included the representatives of Mexico, Colombia and Bulgaria. The ambassador of a fourth country gave a similar account on the condition that his country not be identified.

Kerry also stated, for the record, that he had consulted a 7’ tall carniverous rabbit named Boom Boom, and that the latter had expressed reservations about the president’s Iraq policy.

Update: It seems that Johnny Boy has a penchant for claiming he was places that he never was.  Look, folks, there is absolutely no way you can have a memory of being at the World Series when you were not.  You canot remember being in Cambodia when you were not.  And you sure can’t remember talking to the United Nations Security Council when you did not.

Wel, everyone can’t be accurate at the same time.  Take a look at the Weekly Reader.

The students who read Weekly Reader’s magazines have made their preference for President known: they want to send President Bush back to the White House.

The results of this year’s Weekly Reader poll have just been announced, and the winner is President Bush. Hundreds of thousands of students participated, giving the Republican President more than 60% of the votes cast and making him a decisive choice over Democratic Senator John Kerry.

Since 1956, Weekly Reader students in grades 1-12 have correctly picked the president, making the Weekly Reader poll one of the most accurate predictors of presidential outcomes in history.

President Bush was a strong winner in the student poll; the only state Senator Kerry won was Maryland. Senator Kerry was also in a statistical dead heat with President Bush in New York, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C. and Vermont. President Bush won most grades, although Senator Kerry did win among tenth-graders.

But don’t tell that to the kids at Nickelodeon.  Their presidential poll showed Kerry winning.

What can we deduce from this?  That kids who watch Nickelodeon are dumbasses.  (Unless your kids watch Nickelodeon, they’re the exception.)

I think just about everyone is missing the point here

The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq’s most sensitive former military installations.

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man’s land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year.

The White House said President Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was informed within the past month that the explosives were missing. It is unclear whether President Bush was informed. American officials have never publicly announced the disappearance, but beginning last week they answered questions about it posed by The New York Times and the CBS News program “60 Minutes.”

Administration officials said Sunday that the Iraq Survey Group, the C.I.A. task force that searched for unconventional weapons, has been ordered to investigate the disappearance of the explosives.

What is the point everyone is missing?  It’s simple.  Since these weapons can’t be accounted for now, that means that they never existed in the first place.  I mean, that is the standard that we used on Saddam’s WMD, right?  We all know that they were there at one time, but since they’re not there now, then we can logically deduce that they never existed.

Let’s hear it for freedom of religion.

The British Armed Forces has officially recognised its first registered Satanist, according to a newspaper report.

Naval technician Chris Cranmer, 24, has been allowed to register by the captain of HMS Cumberland.

The move will mean that he will now be allowed to perform Satanic rituals on board the vessel.

According to the Sunday Telegraph, Mr Cranmer realised he was a Satanist nine years ago.

At the time he stumbled across a copy of the Satanic Bible, written by Church of Satan founder Anton Szandor LaVey.

He said: “I then read more and more and came to realise I’d always been a Satanist, just simply never knew.”

Mr Cranmer, who is from Edinburgh, is now lobbying the Ministry of Defence to make Satanism a registered religion in the armed forces.

A spokesman for the Royal Navy said: “We are an equal opportunities employer and we don’t stop anybody from having their own religious values.”

Do you know what this means, in practical terms?  That if this sailor is injured in battle, the chaplain on his ship will have to administer the Satanic last rites, such as they may be.