Ken Berwitz

Did you see South Park, the movie?

If so you probably laughed and laughed at its intentionally ridiculous production number (if you can use that term for animation) "Blame Canada".  As the title suggests, the gag was that Canada is to blame for everything that ever goes wrong. 

As lowbrow comedy, blaming a country for everyone else's ills is very funny.  But suppose this were done seriously instead.  It wouldn't be funny at all, would it?

With that in mind, here is Jeff Jacoby's latest column from today's Boston Globe.  See if you can find any humor in it:

AT THE U.N., THE ISRAEL-BASHING GOES ON

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, November 30, 2008

     The president of the UN General Assembly, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann of Nicaragua, last week denounced the policies of a certain Middle Eastern nation. They are “so similar to the apartheid of an earlier era,” he said, “that the world must unite against them, demanding an “end to this massive abuse of human rights” and isolating the offending nation as it once isolated South Africa: with a punishing “campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions.”

 'A campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions:'

UN General Assembly President Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, Nov. 24, 2008

    Of which country was he speaking?

     Was it Saudi Arabia, where public facilities are segregated by sex, and where a pervasive system of gender apartheid denies women the right to drive, to dress as they choose, to freely marry or divorce, to vote, to appear in public without a male “guardian,” or to give testimony on an equal basis with men?

     Was it Jordan, where the nationality law explicitly bars Jews from citizenship and where the sale of land to a Jew was for decades not only illegal, but punishable by death?

     Was it Iran, where homosexuality is a capital crime -- at least 200 Iranian gays were executed last year -- and whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, asserted at Columbia University that there are no homosexuals in Iran?

     Was it Sudan, where tens of thousands of black Africans in the country's southern region, most of them Christians or animists, have been abducted and sold into slavery by Arab militias backed by the Islamist regime in Khartoum?

     It was none of these. The General Assembly president, a radical Maryknoll priest who served as Nicaragua's foreign minister during the Sandinista regime in the 1980s, was not referring to any of the Middle East's Muslim autocracies and dictatorships, virtually all of which discriminate against ethnic and religious minorities. He was speaking of the Jewish state of Israel, the region's lone democracy, and the only one that guarantees the legal equality of all its citizens -- fully one-fifth of whom are Muslim and Christian Arabs.

     D'Escoto's call for Israel to be shunned as a pariah and strangled economically came on the UN's Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, an annual occasion devoted to lamenting the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in the 20th century, denouncing the national liberation movement -- Zionism -- that made that rebirth possible, and championing the cause of the Palestinian Arabs. The event occurs on or about Nov. 29, the anniversary of the UN vote in 1947 to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. There are impassioned speeches, in which Israel's sins are enumerated and condemned, and the statelessness of the Palestinians is bewailed. Unmentioned is the fact that Palestine's Arabs would have had their state 60 years ago had they and the Arab League not rejected the UN's decision and chosen instead to declare war on the new Jewish state.

     Like so much of what takes place at the UN, the obsession with demonizing Israel and extolling the Palestinians is grotesque and Orwellian. More than 1 million Israeli Arabs enjoy civil and political rights unmatched in the Arab world -- yet Israel is accused of repression and human-rights abuse. Successive Israeli governments have endorsed a “two-state solution” -- yet Israel is blasted as the obstacle to peace. The Palestinian Authority oversees the vilest culture of Jew-hatred since the Third Reich, and wants all Jews expelled from the land it claims for itself -- yet Israel is labeled an “apartheid state” and singled out for condemnation and ostracism.

     Make no mistake: In likening Israel to apartheid-era South Africa, the UN is engaged not in anti-racism but in anti-Semitism. In the 1930s, the world's foremost anti-Semites demanded a boycott of Jewish businesses. Today they demand a boycott of the Jewish state.

     “No good German is still buying from a Jew,” announced Hitler's Nazi Party in March 1933. “The boycott must be a universal one . . . and must hit Jewry where it is most vulnerable.” Seventy-five years later, the president of the General Assembly urges the world to throttle Israel's 6 million Jews with “boycott, divestment, and sanctions.” There is no significant difference between the two cases -- or the animus underlying them.

As usual, Jeff hits the nail on the head.  The UN long ago gave up any claim to legitimacy.  This is just one of many examples.  But it is a particularly egregious one.

Simply stated, the UN is dead.  Morally, ethically and spiritually dead. 

In the absence of these values, maybe I should be relieved that it seems to be trying its hand at comedy.  Consider the alternative.

Ken Berwitz

This time we almost made the pieces fit, didn't we?
This time we almost made some sense of it, didn't we?
This time I have the answer right here in my hand,
Then I touched it, and it has turned to sand.
This time we almost sang the song in tune, didn't we?
This time we almost made it to the moon, didn't we?
This time, we almost made (almost made) a poem rhyme
And this time we almost made that long hard climb.
Didn't we almost make it this time... this time.

I love that Jimmy Webb song.  What great lyrics.

Too bad it also describes a three time Pulitzer Prize winner who just cannot go all the way and give President Bush credit for the good he has done.

Here is Thomas' Friedman's column from today's New York Times.  Read the title, read it through, and then see if the last paragraph makes any sense to you:

Obama’s Iraq Inheritance

Obama can end the war?  Obama can salvage something from it?  It would give Democrats security credentials?

Hello, Thom....anybody home?  President Bush brought us to this point.  Not the junior senator from Illinois, but President George Bush. 

It was Bush who ordered a troop surge, in the face of an opposition so hate-filled and vicious that a name actually was invented for it (BDS:  Bush Derangement Syndrome). 

It was Bush who rode it all out and got us to the point where Iraq is a functioning (if tenuous) democracy with enough military capability so that we can safely reduce troop strength.

And Friedman wants to hand the credit off to Obama?  To Democrats?

That's like giving credit for for a 50-0 football win to the bench players who are sent in at the end to complete the game.

This time you almost made it, Thom, didn't you.  You only missed by one paragraph.

Ken Berwitz

He was well intentioned, but (along with Representative Oakman and President Eisenhower), wrong.

I am referring to George M. Docherty, who more than any other non-politician was responsible for the addition of "under God" to the pledge of allegiance.

Here is the story, from the Associated Press:

Pastor who helped get "under God" in Pledge dies

Nov 29, 3:17 PM (ET)

ALEXANDRIA, Pa. (AP) - The Rev. George M. Docherty, credited with helping to push Congress to insert the phrase "under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance, has died at 97.

Docherty died on Thanksgiving at his home in central Pennsylvania, according to his wife, Sue Docherty.

She said her husband of 36 years had been in failing health for about three years.

"George said he was going to live to be a hundred and he was determined," she said in a telephone interview Saturday. "It's amazing that he was with us this long."

Docherty, then pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, just blocks from the White House, gave a sermon in 1952 saying the pledge should acknowledge God.

He was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and was unfamiliar with the pledge until he heard it recited by his 7-year-old son, Garth.

"I didn't know that the Pledge of Allegiance was, and he recited it, 'one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,'" he recalled in an interview with The Associated Press in 2004. "I came from Scotland, where we said 'God save our gracious queen,"God save our gracious king.' Here was the Pledge of Allegiance, and God wasn't in it at all."

There was little effect from that initial sermon, but he delivered it again on Feb. 7, 1954, after learning that President Dwight Eisenhower would be at the church.

The next day, Rep. Charles G. Oakman, R-Mich., introduced a bill to add the phrase "under God" to the pledge, and a companion bill was introduced in the Senate. Eisenhower signed the law on Flag Day that year.

Ken Berwitz

As you will see, my use of the term "abettors" is pretty harsh.  But what else would you call the Indian police in this situation?

Here are the particulars, from John Hinderaker at www.powerlineblog.com.  Please also read the link it refers to for further context.

Somebody Get Me A Gun

This post should be read in conjunction with the one immediately below. It describes a microcosm of India's failure to defend itself aggressively against Islamic terrorism. The hero of the story is Sebastian D'Souza, a picture editor at the Mumbai Mirror, who took one of the most famous photos of the terrorists in action:

D'Souza describes his experience at the railway terminal where many innocent Indians were murdered:

"I first saw the gunmen outside the station," Mr D'Souza said. "With their rucksacks and Western clothes they looked like backpackers, not terrorists, but they were very heavily armed and clearly knew how to use their rifles.

"Towards the station entrance, there are a number of bookshops and one of the bookstore owners was trying to close his shop," he recalled. "The gunmen opened fire and the shopkeeper fell down."

But what angered Mr D'Souza almost as much were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. "There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything," he said. "At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, 'Shoot them, they're sitting ducks!' but they just didn't shoot back." ...

As the gunmen fired at policemen taking cover across the street, Mr D'Souza realised a train was pulling into the station unaware of the horror within. "I couldn't believe it. We rushed to the platform and told everyone to head towards the back of the station. Those who were older and couldn't run, we told them to stay put."

The militants returned inside the station and headed towards a rear exit towards Chowpatty Beach. Mr D'Souza added: "I told some policemen the gunmen had moved towards the rear of the station but they refused to follow them. What is the point of having policemen with guns if they refuse to use them? I only wish I had a gun rather than a camera."

If Mr. D'Souza ever wants to emigrate to the United States, we'll take him.

I wondered earlier today how a mere ten terrorists could bring a city of 19 million to a standstill. Here in the U.S., I don't think it would happen. I think we have armed security guards who know how to use their weapons, supplemented by an unknown number of private citizens who are armed and capable of returning fire. The Indian experience shows it is vitally important that this continue to be the case. This is a matter of culture as much as, or more than, a matter of laws.

They could have stopped it.  They could have stopped it.  And they didn't.

That's how 10 terrorists can inflict this kind of mass murder.  All it takes is for no one to fight back.

Maybe the Indian police were waiting to have a a no-preconditions discussion with them.

Ken Berwitz

Christopher Booker of the UK's Daily Telegraph has written about Barack Obama's "understanding" of the global warming issue.

It is exactly the kind of column people in the USA should see.  Not surprisingly, therefore, it is also the kind of column they will not see in almost any USA mainstream media.  

Here it is.  Please read it all, but pay special attention to the paragraphs in bold print:

President-elect Barack Obama proposes economic suicide for US

By Christopher Booker
29/11/2008

If the holder of the most powerful office in the world proposed a policy guaranteed to inflict untold damage on his own country and many others, on the basis of claims so demonstrably fallacious that they amount to a string of self-deluding lies, we might well be concerned. The relevance of this is not to President Bush, as some might imagine, but to a recent policy statement by President-elect Obama.

Tomorrow, delegates from 190 countries will meet in Poznan, Poland, to pave the way for next year's UN conference in Copenhagen at which the world will agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. They will see a video of Mr Obama, in only his second major policy commitment, pledging that America is now about to play the leading role in the fight to "save the planet" from global warming. 

Mr Obama begins by saying that "the science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear". "Sea levels," he claims, "are rising, coastlines are shrinking, we've seen record drought, spreading famine and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season."

Far from the science being "beyond dispute", we can only deduce from this that Mr Obama has believed all he was told by Al Gore's wondrously batty film An Inconvenient Truth without bothering to check the facts. Each of these four statements is so wildly at odds with the truth that on this score alone we should be seriously worried.

It is true that average sea levels are modestly rising, but no faster than they have been doing for three centuries. Gore's film may predict a rise this century of 20 feet, but even the UN's International Panel on Climate Change only predicts a rise of between four and 17 inches. The main focus of alarm here has been the fate of low-lying coral islands such as the Maldives and Tuvalu.

Around each of these tiny countries, according to the international Commission on Sea Level Changes and other studies, sea levels in recent decades have actually fallen. The Indian Ocean was higher between 1900 and 1970 than it has been since. Satellite measurements show that since 1993 the sea level around Tuvalu has gone down by four inches.

Coastlines are not "shrinking" except where land is subsiding, as on the east coast of England, where it has been doing so for thousands of years. Gore became particularly muddled by this, pointing to how many times the Thames Barrier has had to be closed in recent years, unaware that this was more often to keep river water in during droughts than to stop the sea coming in.

Far from global warming having increased the number of droughts, the very opposite is the case. The most comprehensive study (Narisma et al, 2007) showed that, of the 20th century's 30 major drought episodes, 22 were in the first six decades, with only five between 1961 and 1980. The most recent two decades produced just three.

Mr Obama has again been taken in over hurricanes. Despite a recent press release from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration claiming that 2008's North Atlantic hurricane season "set records", even its own release later admits that it only tied as "the fifth most active" since 1944. NOAA's own graphs show hurricane activity higher in the 1950s than recently. A recent Florida State University study of tropical cyclone activity across the world (see the Watts Up With That? website) shows a steady reduction over the past four years.

Alarming though it may be that the next US President should have fallen for all this claptrap, much more worrying is what he proposes to do on the basis of such grotesque misinformation. For a start he plans to introduce a "federal cap and trade system", a massive "carbon tax", designed to reduce America's CO2 emissions "to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 per cent by 2050". Such a target, which would put America ahead of any other country in the world, could only be achieved by closing down a large part of the US economy.

Mr Obama floats off still further from reality when he proposes spending $15 billion a year to encourage "clean energy" sources, such as thousands more wind turbines. He is clearly unaware that wind energy is so hopelessly ineffective that the 10,000 turbines America already has, representing "18 gigawatts of installed capacity", only generate 4.5GW of power, less than that supplied by a single giant coal-fired power station.

He talks blithely of allowing only "clean" coal-fired power plants, using "carbon capture" - burying the CO2 in holes in the ground - which would double the price of electricity, but the technology for which hasn't even yet been developed. He then babbles on about "generating five million new green jobs". This will presumably consist of hiring millions of Americans to generate power by running around on treadmills, to replace all those "dirty" coal-fired power stations which currently supply the US with half its electricity.

If this sounds like an elaborate economic suicide note, for what is still the earth's richest nation, it is still not enough for many environmentalists. Positively foaming at the mouth in The Guardian last week, George Monbiot claimed that the plight of the planet is now so grave that even "sensible programmes of the kind Obama proposes are now irrelevant". The only way to avert the "collapse of human civilisation", according to the Great Moonbat, would be "the complete decarbonisation of the global economy soon after 2050".

For 300 years science helped to turn Western civilisation into the richest and most comfortable the world has ever seen. Now it seems we have suddenly been plunged into a new age of superstition, where scientific evidence no longer counts for anything. The fact that America will soon be ruled by a man wholly under the spell of this post-scientific hysteria may leave us in wondering despair.

I can only hope that what Obama is doing is lying to his LAMB (Lunatic-left And Mega-moonbat) base.  Given his propensity for lying during the campaign, that possibility certainly cannot be discounted.

But what if Mr. Obama means it?  What if he is serious about these proposals (most of which would probably pass, given the Democratic majorities in both houses of congress)?  Then, no matter how bad off we are now, we may be in for a lot worse.

I was very thankful that Al Gore didn't run for President this year.  Who knew we'd elect him anyway?

Ken Berwitz

Here is what George Bush hopes to be remembered for, courtesy of Agence France Presse, via www.breitbart.com:

Bush wants history to see him as a liberator of millions Nov 28 02:53 PM US/Eastern

George W. Bush hopes history will see him as a president who liberated millions of Iraqis and Afghans, who worked towards peace and who never sold his soul for political ends.

"I'd like to be a president (known) as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace," Bush said in excerpts of a recent interview released by the White House Friday.

"I would like to be a person remembered as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process. I came to Washington with a set of values, and I'm leaving with the same set of values."

He also said he wanted to be seen as a president who helped individuals, "that rallied people to serve their neighbor; that led an effort to help relieve HIV/AIDS and malaria on places like the continent of Africa; that helped elderly people get prescription drugs and Medicare as a part of the basic package."

Bush added that every day during his eight-year presidency he had consulted the Bible and drawn comfort from his faith.

"I would advise politicians, however, to be careful about faith in the public arena," the US leader said in the interview with his sister Doro Bush Koch recorded as part of an oral history program known as Storycorps.

As his second term in office draws to an end, Bush joked he would miss some of the trappings that come with the presidency such as trips on Air Force One, never being stuck in a traffic jam, and the president's residence at Camp David.

But he said he was glad to be stepping back into the shadows.

"Frankly, I'm not going to miss the limelight all that much. It's been a fabulous experience to be the president ... But it will be nice to see the Klieg lights shift somewhere else."

The interview, which Bush recorded with First Lady Laura Bush, will be stored in the library of Congress and a museum devoted to the Bush presidency.

Ken Berwitz

Rich Lowry of National Review has written an excellent piece about the terrorist actions in Mumbai this week.  Here are the key excerpts.  The bold print is mine:

New India in the Crosshairs
Terror in Mumbai.

By Rich Lowry

They were young and cleanshaven, wearing Western T-shirts and carrying rucksacks. They could have fit in easily with the cosmopolitan and robustly growing “New India.” If that weren’t exactly the India they had come to destroy. Mumbai had been bit in 1993, in car bombs placed at public landmarks (the toll: 257 dead), and in 2006, in bombs targeting the city’s commuter trains (183 dead). In the main, these acts of terror victimized ordinary Indians. Using armed attackers in a tactic associated with Pakistani militants in the disputed territory of Kashmir, the latest assault more precisely targeted Westerners and India’s affluent. They shot up the Leopold Cafe, a restaurant where foreigners enjoy the cheap beer and food, and held hostages at two luxury hotels, the Taj Mahal and the Oberoi. They searched out Americans and Brits in particular. Together with their attack on a Jewish community center, this meant that they had taken aim at each element of the jihadist’s unholy trinity of Americans, Brits, and Jews — symbols to them of unapologetic Western power and its Zionist spawn. The most memorable image of the “spectacular” was the iconic Italianate dome of the Taj, licked by flames as Indian security services battled the terrorists holed up inside. Once a bastion of Westerners, the Taj is now within reach of India’s growing elite, a venue for wedding receptions and business meetings. The terrorists want to trash that progress, to keep out Westerners and cut India off from globalization. Coming just weeks after Barack Obama’s election, the massacre explodes the Left’s most reductive explanation of Islamic terrorism: that President George W. Bush and his provocations, including the Iraq War, dangerously inflamed Muslims and fueled terror. With a security agreement setting a goal of a U.S. exit from Iraq by 2012 and Bush leaving office, jihadists are still at their monstrous handiwork. They have an ideological goal larger than any one conflict or any American president. And the absolute malice of the Mumbai terrorists is a reminder of a piece of supposed Bush/Cheney alarmism: that should these as-yet low-tech killers — armed with guns and grenades — ever acquire weapons of mass destruction, they will use them without hesitation. The Indian government will point a finger at Pakistan. The Pakistani security service, the ISI, has long fostered anti-India terror groups, but it’s hard to believe that the Pakistani government — warming up to India of late — had a direct, official role in the attacks. ISI alone can’t be blamed for India’s terrorism problem. Side by side with the New India of Bollywood and a lunar probe is an India of Hindu-Muslim communal violence and anti-Muslim discrimination. Young Muslims now score more poorly on literacy tests than the Hindu “untouchables.” A disaffected Muslim population of 150 million in India is an inevitable breeding ground for militancy. The war on terror is fundamentally a global counterinsurgency that depends on implementing stern security measures — of the sort the current Indian government has eschewed — and on reaching out to Muslim communities to keep their fringes from extremism. The Indian government will have to do both, while carefully managing tense relations with its fellow nuclear power, Pakistan. The fate of the New India hangs in the balance.

I have just one key area of disagreement with Lowry - his statement that "the fate of the New India hangs in the balance". 

I only wish it were that limited.

In reality, the fate of the entire western world hangs in the balance.

Any nuclear action by either country, or by lunatics operating within either country, has the potential to set off a chain of events that would end civilization entirely.  Theirs and ours both.

Lowry correctly states that Indian governments have not acted effectively in protecting itself from radical Islamists.  Maybe this will finally get them to see the light.  Maybe it will get some others who are in the same boat to see that light also.

Who knows?  It might even wake up a few fatuous airheads in the USA.

Ken Berwitz

Are you going to Barack Obama's inauguration? 

If you're staying home, please do your friends and neighbors a favor, and watch the rest of the city for them.  To read media reports on the expected crowd, you might be the only one there.

And why not?  The glitz and glamour of Mr. Obama's inaugural is going to be unprecedented in scope - and in cost.

Which brings me to the following column written by Michelle Malkin. 

It reminds us of how the same media which are gushing over how great this is going to be, felt about George Bush's big day:

Where are all the Anti-Inauguration activists now?

I assume Ms. Malkin was being rhetorical about wondering where the anti-inauguration critics are now.  I doubt that she wonders at all, any more than I do.

Here's one other thing neither of us wonders about:  In this country, with this media, it's good to have a -D after your name. 

Ken Berwitz

Throughout the presidential campaign, I pointed out how many anti-Israel people populated Barack Obama's "brain trust".

Two of them became embarrassing enough so that Barack Obama had to remove them altogether.  

Malley, we were told, had virtually no role in the first place (strange that you would need to get rid of someone who wasn't there). 

Power resigned because, in addition to her overt distaste for Israel, she didn't like Hillary Clinton and made abrasive comments about her (including calling Ms. Clinton a "monster").  It is likely that the Clinton comments, not her attitudes about Israel, were what forced Power out.  But regardless of the reasons, it was one less Israel hater on the Obama campaign staff, right?

Well, now the election is over.  And guess what?  Both of them are back.  Last week Malley traveled to Syria on behalf of Mr. Obama.  And this week, according to the Associated Press:

A former adviser to Barack Obama's presidential campaign who once called Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton a "monster" is now working on the transition team for the agency that Clinton may lead.

State Department officials said Friday that Samantha Power is among foreign policy experts the president-elect's office selected to help the incoming administration prepare for Clinton's anticipated nomination as secretary of state.

The operative thinking seems to be that "The votes are in, exit polling indicates about 4/5ths of all Jews voted for Obama, so we know they're suckers and we can do whatever we want.  No matter how much we screw them over, they vote for us anyway"

A little like Black voters and Democrats, wouldn't you say?

If you're wondering just how bad a Samantha Power presence might be for Israel, consider the following excerpts from this January 2008 article in Commentary Magazine's blog, written by Noah Pollak:

Obama and Israel–It Gets Worse

Noah Pollak - 01.27.2008 - 2:56 PM

That same Samantha Power - the one who said what you just read - will again be at Barack Obama's side, advising him.

According to the exit polls, 78% of all Jews voted for this man.  Presumably, most of them support Israel. 

Speaking as one of the other 22%, let me say to them that this is what you wanted, and this is what you got.  I hope you're happy about it. 

Ken Berwitz

Victor Davis Hanson has written a terrific article, detailing seven reasons we should be thankful this (and every other) year.  His title?  "Some Random Politically-incorrect Reasons to Be Optimistic on Thanksgiving Day"

I urge you to click on the above link and read them all.  But I've picked out two of my favorites to post here:

Who’s illiberal? So far the likes of Hugo Chavez, al Qaeda’s Dr. Zawahiri, the mullahs in Iran, and Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have all in varying degrees commented, in racialist fashion, on the African ancestry of President-elect Obama. More of such insensitive slurs by foreigners about our President’s skin color, the legacy of slavery (as in “house slave”), etc. will follow. And Americans will take note of the vast divergence between an American electorate easily and without bias voting for an African-American as their Commander-in-Chief, and a supposedly multicultural world leadership abroad snickering about it. In the past Michelle Obama has called her country “mean” and until recently not worthy of her own pride. But now as we watch the reaction abroad to Obama the next four years (once the mass hysteria of crowds dies down), I think a number of those on the Left will confess that the “other”—whether in Europe, the Middle East, South America, or Asia—will prove a lot less liberal about our President than the much-caricatured American public. This will be a positive development and remind critics here at home just how different their country is from the alternative. It really is an exceptional place, and I doubt very seriously that China will soon have a German-Chinese Prime Minister, or Germany an African-German Chancellor, or Japan a Congolese-Japanese Prime Minister, and so on. The point is not, again, that mere racial diversity brings with it automatically wisdom, only that our critics abroad, who fault America’s often tense experiences with a vibrant multiracialism, are themselves decades behind the object of their vituperation.

Callous Health Care? For all the demagoguery, about the uninsured, I am not sure that such charges of callousness are altogether accurate. I just returned from visiting an ill relative at Fresno Community Hospital in downtown Fresno. The majority of visitors (about 75%) in the lobby tonight seemed to be speaking Spanish, or Hmong. I would wager that many did not have health plans in the sense of employer-provided HMOs. But someone was giving them health care, and sophisticated surgery as well.

Most who denigrate American medicine know nothing of the alternative. I have had the dubious distinction of having become ill in a lot of awful places during the last 35 years. I once spent 30 days in Greek hospitals first with E. coli food poisoning, and then with kidney problems that led to a partially-severed ureter and an impacted stone (that finally required 11th hour emergency surgery back in the US). The treatment in Athens was barbaric to say the least. One bought everything with cash, from toothpaste to food. The carelessness was astounding (from missing medications to unattended IVs to almost deliberate lack of simple antiseptic procedures.) Care was predicated entirely on money; suites on top, the inferno on the bottom—under a utopian socialist system. I once got what I was told by a local Egyptian doctor was merely a “light case” of malaria in southern Egypt while visiting the Valley of the Kings in 1974, and spent 7 days with a high fever in a dismal infirmary in Luxor. One was on their own there—not figuratively, but factually. I found hygiene nonexistant (cf. the old reusable steel needles). No need to go on about an emergency operation two years ago for a perforated appendix and peritonitis in Gaddafi’s utopian socialist and oil-rich Tripolis (mandatory AIDs test for all who enter the clinic; those with positive results are denied surgery and supposedly headed for quarantine—and so also apparently Paradise).

Our health care is flawed, but each day, by hook or crook, even if it be by emergency room, we try to treat the uninsured. (I confirm that by breaking an arm a few years ago, and spending a morning in the Selma emergency room, the only English speaker during some three hours among dozens of other patients, and the only one with private health insurance and the last to see a (skilled and compassionate) doctor; all there received humane, free care, interpreters, and left satisfied, and aware that there was nothing comparable in Oaxaca).

True, it is dangerous and scary to get sick in America—but far scarier and more dangerous to get sick in any other similarly-sized country. We should remember that in our hysterical demand for utopian perfection, and cheap slurs that we are an uncaring people with millions denied simple health care. For the most part our doctors, like our pilots, are better than those abroad, and, especially in the case of general practitioners and emergency room physicians, should be paid far more than they receive. One good abdominal surgeon or oncologist is worth ten investment managers at Bear-Stearns.

Many thanks to Mr. Hanson.  And a happy Thanksgiving weekend to all.

Ken Berwitz

I admit that, for years and years, I have laughed at the silly showmanship of a President "pardoning" a thanksgiving turkey and then reading that the same President sat down to a "traditional turkey dinner" on thanksgiving day.

Every President in my lifetime has done this.  There are no exceptions I am aware of.

However, the current President is George Bush.  And media have been in a chronic state of Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) for almost 8 years.

So, fresh from ridiculing Sarah Palin for pardoning a thanksgiving turkey while other turkeys were being slaughtered in the background (and never asking whether the TV crew deliberately positioned her so the slaughter would be visible), media are now going after Mr. Bush for his turkey pardon too.

Here are the particulars (or given the significance level maybe I should call them particulates), courtesy of excerpts from an article by Kerry Picket, writing for www.newsbusters.org.

WaPo And Others Attack Bush Turkey Pardon '08, Clinton Turkey Pardon '98 Treated With Biblical References

By Kerry Picket (Bio | Archive)
November 28, 2008 - 20:44 ET  

Unlike Governor Palin, President Bush did not need to be interviewed in front of a turkey slaughter for the media to attack him over turkeys. As part of an annual tradition at the White House, President Bush pardoned two fortunate turkeys, Pecan and Pumpkin, on Wednesday.

 Media outlets like MSNBC, ABC, and the Washington Post used the opportunity to make the Bush look not only clownish but also useless and heartless. ABC actually titled this year’s turkey pardoning coverage: “White House Turkey Pardoning Scandal? President Forgives Turkey, Then Eats Turkey”

When the reader looks further into the article, Bush did not eat the two turkeys he just “pardoned” but simply ate turkey for Thanksgiving like the rest of the United States did.

Washington Post staff writer Manuel Roig-Franzia among others used the annual event as an opportunity to take a shot at the president(my emphasis throughout:)

President George W. Bush leaves office in 54 days with a sterling legacy.

He has improved living conditions and made innovations.

He has shown real commitment to gender equality.

He has presided over unprecedented growth.

Stay calm. We're not talking about his leadership of the country. We're talking about his stewardship of the National Turkey.

Dubya's approval ratings stink, the economy stinks, being at war stinks, but man, does he have this National Turkey thing down. During eight years in office, Bush has set new standards of quippy, turkey-pardoning glee while saving eight national turkeys -- 280 pounds of potentially mouth-watering deliciousness -- and eight alternates, sometimes called Vice Turkeys.

Compare Roig Franzia’s description of the event to Washington Post writer Libby Ingrid Copeland’s November 25, 1998 article titled “Lucky Turkey at The White House.” Copeland’s uses of biblical references were just as ridiculous as Roig Franzia using the event as an opportunity to attack President Bush.

It is important to keep in mind two things.  This article was written at the time of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and President Clinton was about to be impeached by the Republican Congress one month later. (my emphasis throughout:)

A fate hung in the balance at the White House yesterday, and this time it was not Bill Clinton's.

Instead, our president lifted his own repentant hands and offered pardon to one you might call his spiritual brother.

In response, the saved one sank slowly on his tail and let drop a single white feather, as if surrendering to a force far greater than his own ponderous self. It was enough to make even an agnostic weepy.

He was 45 pounds of white-ruffled, gizzarded glory -- photogenic and a touch graceful in his turkeyish way. He was a Minnesotan named Jerry. But in honor of the presidential reprieve that was granted shortly before 1 p.m. -- fraught, perhaps, with certain biblical connotations -- we might call him Isaac.

This is the season of second chances.

Yesterday, for the 51st year in a row, a token turkey was allowed to live. The tradition has been going on since the Truman administration, thanks to the largess of the National Turkey Federation. Over the decades this yearly pardon has taken on ritualistic import -- a sort of parable of the prodigal turkey.

But this year the act had special significance. O President, in the 23 weeks since this year's turkey was born -- a darling even as a tiny poult, fresh and downy from the egg -- we thought for quite some time that your metaphorical goose was cooked.

Accuse us of reading too much into the presidential demeanor, but it seemed that yesterday Clinton sensed this parallel -- even felt a comradeship with the lucky bird. Witness Clinton's fatherly pats and his proud words. He spoke of the turkey's future life on the Kidwell Farm in Herndon, where Jerry might frolic "among friends -- not peas and sweet potatoes."

Clinton placed a sure hand on the turkey's back and smiled. But Jerry seemed largely indifferent to the presidential caress. If the angel of mercy hovered above his caruncle, he did not notice it. Borrowing a page from the president, the turkey took the whole thing in stride, as if to say, "Of course I'm going to survive -- I always do."

Part of being President of the United States is being part of traditional amusing photo ops. Presidents from both parties have participated in this type of fare, but depending on the political party in the White House, the mainstream media will frame the event accordingly.

BDS takes many shapes and forms.  As you can see, sometimes it even comes with cranberry sauce and yams.

What will these poor souls do after January 20, when Bush is gone and, instead of daily open season on the President, they won't be able to say a bad word about the new guy because he's Democrat and Black?

Maybe someday they'll remember that journalism used to be reporting evenhandedly regardless of who was being reported on.  But I doubt that we'll see a return to that ideal any time soon. Maybe never.

Ken Berwitz

The record books will show that Minnesota beat Iowa, 55-0.  But here, courtesy of the Pioneer Press, is a score that won't show up on the stat sheet:

Couple has sex in bathroom as crowd cheered them on and their significant others watched Minnesota-Iowa game

A couple of University of Iowa fans took a break from Saturday's game at the Metrodome against the University of Minnesota to have some illicit sex in a Dome restroom, police said.

To review:  He was at the game with his girlfriend.  She was at the game with her husband.  They wound up engaging in some form(s) of sexual activity in a handicapped bathroom with a cheering crowd looking on.

At least they used a bathroom designated for the handicapped.  Because, mentally speaking, this pair had every right to be there.

Like the police chief said, "It's a long ride back to Iowa".  I wonder what each of these couples was talking about on the way.....

Ken Berwitz

I bet some people really did believe that Iraq just wanted US troops to go away - maybe in the 16 months "no-matter-what-the-conditions-are" time frame proposed (and apparently now in the process of being forgotten) by Barack Obama.

This being the case, I thought you might want to see the real situation.  So here it is, straight from the American Forces Press Service:

Bush Hails Passage of New U.S.-Iraq Security Pact By Gerry J. Gilmore American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Nov. 28, 2008 – President George W. Bush and other seniorU.S. officials hailed the new U.S.-Iraq security pact that was approved by Iraqi lawmakers in Baghdad yesterday.   The two-part security pact consists of a strategic framework agreement that establishes the foundation of a long-term bilateral relationship between the United States and Iraq, as well as a status-of-forces agreement that stipulates how U.S. forces are affected by Iraqi laws.   A majority vote of Iraqi legislators in attendance approved the new security agreement. The passage of the pact "affirms the growth of Iraq 's democracy" as well as its "increasing ability to secure itself," Bush said in White House statement issued yesterday.   "Two years ago, this day seemed unlikely - but the success of the surge and the courage of the Iraqi people set the conditions for these two agreements to be negotiated and approved by the Iraqi parliament," Bush continued in the statement. "The improved conditions on the ground and the parliamentary approval of these two agreements serve as a testament to the Iraqi, Coalition, and American men and women, both military and civilian, who paved the way for this day."   Both agreements take effect Jan. 1, 2009. They replace a UN mandate authorizing the U.S. military presence in Iraq that's slated to expire Dec. 31, 2008. The new security pact is slated for review and final approval by Iraq's Presidency Council, Bush said.   "As the two agreements move to Iraq's Presidency Council for final approval," Bush said in the statement, "we congratulate the members of the Council of Representatives for coming together to approve these historic agreements that will serve the shared and enduring interests of both our countries and the region."   The strategic framework agreement establishes principles of U.S.-Iraqi cooperation in the realms of politics, defense, diplomacy, security, culture, economics, energy, health and environment, law enforcement and judiciary functions, and information technology and communications.   The 30-article status-of-forces agreement, known by the acronym, SOFA, acknowledges that the U.S. troop presence in Iraq is temporary and at the request of the sovereign Iraqi government. Article 24 of the SOFA requires U.S. forces to withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than Dec. 31, 2011. U.S. combat forces in Iraq also are required to withdraw from Iraqi cities, villages and localities no later than June 30, 2009.   The U.S.-Iraq SOFA agreement also stipulates that U.S. forces may not search Iraqi homes or other real estate properties without an Iraqi-government-issued search warrant, except during the case of combat operations.   The two security agreements "formalize a strong and equal partnership between the United States and Iraq ," U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker and Army Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, commander of Multinational Force Iraq, said in joint news release issued yesterday.   The pact also provides "the means to secure the significant security gains we have achieved together and to deter future aggression," Crocker and Odierno continued. "They establish a framework for cooperation in the fields of defense, political relations, economics, trade, culture, education, the rule of law, health, the environment and science and technology."   Crocker and Odierno congratulated the Iraqi government and its elected representatives "for making these agreements possible," according to the joint release.

Please note that the withdrawal agreements go 36 months into Mr. Barack's presidency. 

 And please also note that they are feasible because of the success of our troop surge - the one Barack Obama said the following about in January, 2007:

"I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence.  "In fact, I think it will do the reverse."

Still waiting for Mr. Obama to admit that he was wrong?  Well, keep waiting.

And keep waiting for the same media that skewered George Bush for not admitting mistakes to notice this about his successor.

Ken Berwitz

You can't help thinking back to Munich, 1972, when PLO terrorists took the Israeli olympic team hostage. 

Media happily reported that there had been a daring rescue and the olympians were safe.  Except it was all a lie, and virtually the entire olympic team was dead.

Now, in Mumbai, India, we have this, which comes to us from www.israelnationalnews.com :

5 Dead in Mumbai Chabad House Terror Attack

(IsraelNN.com) After more than 40 hours and a day-long siege by Indian commandos against Islamist terrorists holed up in the Mumbai Chabad House, the operation ended with the discovery that five of the Jewish hostages had been murdered by their captors, including Chabad-Lubavitch emissary, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka.

Ken Berwitz

During the presidential campaign Joe Biden, demonstrating his characteristic trait of talking without thinking, told us that Barack Obama would be "tested" with some major event within the first six months of his presidency.

Well, he hasn't become President yet, and he's already been tested. 

How could this be?  Because while running for the office he stuck his nose into foreign policy and made a mess of it.

Warner Todd Huston, writing for www.conservablogs.com, explains:

U.S. Media Ignoring Obama Mistakes With India/Pakistan

November 28, 2008

-By Warner Todd Huston

Naturally, the U.S. media is following the terrorist crimes in Mumbai, India, as well they should. But, the attacks seem to be the Old Media’s only interest where it concerns India and Pakistan, of late, for they’ve completely ignored the several mistakes that Barack Obama has already made with his attempts at foreign policy with the two embattled nations.

Back on November 11, I noted that Obama had made his first mistakes with both India and Pakistan by mishandling early talks with their leaders (or not having them at all, as the case may be). During his first major effort to contact foreign leaders as president elect, Obama called Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari but neglected to call India’s Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. This short shrifting did not sit well with the Indian government.

Then, Obama appointed to his transition team a woman named Sonal Shah whom the Pakistanis say has ties with a violent Hindu Nationalist Party in India that they claim is responsible for a rampage in Gujarat, India that killed many Muslims and Christians.

Worse, during his outreach to Pakistan’s Zardari, Obama promised that he’d help settle the trouble between India and Pakistan over Kashmir and he did this without asking India if his help was wanted by India. As a result, India got its nose out of joint and immediately said that Obama’s “help” with Kashmir was not wanted.

Well, more on Obama’s unwanted offer with the Kashmir problem has been reported by various Indian and Pakistani news agencies. An Indian official has reiterated that Obama’s help with Kashmir was neither asked for nor wanted. External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee refused Obama’s offer again at a recent press conference held with Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi.

The Indian Express news group reports that on Wednesday Mukherjee “shot down US President-elect Barack Obama’s suggestion that former US President Bill Clinton could prod India and Pakistan into making peace over Kashmir.”

The remarks were also reported at KashmirWatch.com.

On Jammu and Kashmir, Mukherjee rejected any third party interference, when asked to comment on the reports that the US president-elect was moving to appoint Bill Clinton as his emissary to settle Kashmir issue. “There was no question of the intervention of third party. Kashmir is a bilateral issue between India and Pakistan. It is part of composite dialogue process,” he stressed.

These are some embarrassing stumbles on India and Pakistan and shows that Obama won’t be able to flash his dazzling smile and have the world’s leaders just fall at the feet of The One happy to follow his policy ideas.

Curiously, I can’t find this news reporting Obama’s thus far failed attempts at diplomacy in any American news source. Why do you think that is?

How many times do we have to be reminded that Barack Obama has NO foreign policy experience and NO executive experience? 

He also seems to have no concept of when he is President and what the proper actions of a man not yet in the office should be.

There has been a lot of talk in recent years about how diminished the influence of the United States is in world events (most of it absolute baloney).  But if you want to see a real diminution of our influence, a few more talk-before-you-know-what-you're-talking-about incidents like this and you'll have your wish.

Maybe Barack Obama, who is certainly an intelligent man, should stop reading his press clippings and start acting like he's not President already.  And will never be God. 

Not even if the New York Times and MSNBC report about him as if he came to us from heaven in a chariot of fire.

Ken Berwitz

I think I have to give Harry Smith the benefit of the doubt on this one.

Here, courtesy of Mark Finkelstein of www.newsbusters.org, is what Smith said about the Islamic terrorists in Mumbai, India this morning, on CBS' Early Show:

HARRY SMITH: When they, as they were perpetrating their attacks in the beginning, they were clearly, they said, were looking for British citizens, were looking for American citizens. Sadly, so many of the people were killed were Indians.

I remember a bit that Mad Magazine did many years ago on funerals.  One of the gags was someone standing over a coffin wailing "Why him, why him" and someone else saying "Who else did you have in mind?"

Smith managed to take this black-humor joke and make it part of his broadcast today.  His comment reads as if he's sad that Indians were killed instead of British and USA citizens. 

He couldn't have meant it that way.  Could he?

But it sure would have been nice if someone, maybe Smith himself, restated the thought in a more acceptable way.

Ken Berwitz

When Rosie O'Donnell was on The View, and the audience enthusiastically looked forward to her angry left wing rants (as they do with Joy Behar's and Whoopi Goldberg's to this day), things were, well, rosey. 

But like other gigs in her strange, checkered career, Ms. O'Donnell managed to wear out her welcome and eventually was gone.

Too bad, because since her afternoon talk show (until she destroyed it by becoming abrasive and political that is), The View appears to be the only appreciable success Rosie O'Donnell has had in the entertainment business. 

You would think this might cause major networks to think twice before using Ms. O'Donnell for future projects.  But, then again, there's always NBC - no stranger to the left wing itself (think MSNBC).  Its brain trust, such as it is, decided that Rosie is still a star.  So they gave her a variety show.  "Rosie Live" debuted last night. 

Here's how it made out, courtesy of www.thrfeed.com:.

How ironic that "Rosie Live" equaled a show called "Pushing Up Daisies" as the lowest rated among major broadcast offerings. 

Since "Pushing Up Daisies" now is pushing up daisies (ABC recently cancelled it) Rosie has the honor of being #1 - albeit from the bottom, not the top.  And she did it right from her first show. 

How long do you figure it will be before "Rosie Live" is pushing up daisies too.  Maybe they should rename it "Rosie Dead".

When a fawning media were still calling Ms. O'Donnell "the queen of nice" (yep, so help me that's what they called her) she was a huge success. 

Maybe nice would still work today.  She should reinstall some and find out.

Ken Berwitz

There is a major Islamic fundamentalist terrorism episode in progress.  This time it is taking place in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India.

Two major hotels have been ravaged.  The death toll approaches (or by this time may have exceeded) 100, with many more injured.  Innocent travelers are hiding in locked rooms praying they will not be taken hostage, or worse.

Additionally, with the due diligence that is a hallmark of well planned Islamic terrorist acts, a Jewish venue was found (yes, in Mumbai) and there are deaths and injuries there as well

An entire country is terrorized, Jews in particular are reminded of the terrorist goal that they be singled out for slaughter and the western world is scared - with good reason - that Mumbai is only part of the current attack.

Yesterday's news reports told us there was a credible threat to Penn Station in New York City as well.  The indications pointed to a massive strike in that hub of transportation, supplemented with bombs to be detonated in train stations and on moving trains throughout the city.  So far it has not happened.  But that doesn't mean it wasn't about to, and it doesn't mean that it won't in the near future.

The lesson to be learned here is hugely frustrating, because it is at once so simple, and so easy for intelligent people to unlearn in a matter of months or just a few years. 

The lesson is that the free world, especially western civilization, is engaged in a war.  The war we are engaged in is ongoing.  It takes place every day.  The fact that weeks, or months, or years go by without a terrorist act like this does not mean the war is over, it means the next attack is being planned.

How fast do we forget?  Think about our awareness of this reality after 9/11.  Now think about the tiny number of voters indicating terrorism was a major issue in the last presidential election.  Do you have any doubt that the same poll would show different results today? 

My fervent hope is that the horror in Mumbai is an irrevocable wake-up call for people everywhere.  But especially for Barack Obama and some of the people around him in congress.  The ACLU and moveon.org are not going to protect us from radical fundamentalist Islam. Fighting it successfully is our only chance. 

For years, mainstream media have taken pains to assure us that fighting is not the answer, that we have to somehow "understand" the perpetrators of these attacks. 

I partially agree. 

I agree we have to understand that if we do not fight them they will eventually take over, eradicate our culture and put us under shari'a law.

That is the lesson we must learn from the Mumbai terror.  How I hope that we, as a country, learn it well, and - this time - don't quickly forget it.

Ken Berwitz

This article is, uh, passed along, without further comment (or further anything else):

Florida boy, 12, arrested for farting in class

By staff writers

I love the source of this story:  "The Smoking Gun".

To say the least, that's not all that was smo...ah, forget it.  You can't say anything about this story without some kind of double entendre, can you?

Ken Berwitz

It has been said that the definition of a conservative is a liberal who gets mugged.  (In the interests of fairness, I also believe that the definition of a liberal is a conservative who is accused of the mugging).

The point is that people behave differently depending on circumstances.

This brings us to Michelle Malkin's latest column, which explores the sudden level of respect for Guantanamo displayed by Barack Obama and some of his cronies, now that he, rather than George Bush, will become responsible for our safety:

Playing games at Gitmo
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2008

Funny how things change when you have to do more than just campaign.....

Maybe we'll be very lucky and the Guantanamo epiphany will be the first of many for Mr. Obama.

Ken Berwitz

I'm embarrassed that I didn't think of this angle regarding where Barack Obama was born.......but grateful that Joseph Farah of www.worldnetdaily.com did. 

Interested in seeing what I'm talking about?  Well, here it is:

Where was Obama born?

Posted: November 26, 2008
1:00 am Eastern

© 2008 

I've heard various different explanations for why Barack Obama has steadfastly refused to show us the original "vault copy" of his birth certificate.  Not one of them makes any sense to me.

But I hadn't considered the fact that he also won't tell us what hospital he was born at - which might enable someone somewhere to check something.

I challenge anyone to tell me what reason Mr. Obama would have for concealing this information, other than that there are things he does not want us to know about.

Farah alludes to the fact that in 1961, the year Barack Obama was born, Hawaii allowed foreign births to be registered.  Not only is he correct, but the practice continued until 1972.  The certificate of live birth (COLB) which Mr. Obama has offered as proof, could have been derived from that type of registration.  Without the hospital information there's no way to tell.  Therefore, it is not  proof that he is a natural born citizen of the United States.

This also explains Mr. Obama's birth announcement in the Honolulu newspaper.  Barack Obama's parents could have registered him and put that notice in the paper for entirely innocent reasons --- because his mother was a US citizen and his grandparents lived in Hawaii, so they wanted him to be registered in their home country.  But it does NOT mean that he was physically born on the Island.

Why won't Barack Obama show us his actual birth certificate?

Why won't Barack Obama tell us what hospital he was born at?

What does Barack Obama have to hide, and how does it affect the legality of his impending presidency?

Ken Berwitz

Well, we've done it. 

For decades we have insisted that schools teach our children just about everything but fundamental facts.  And over this time we've seen it catch up with us in many different ways.  One of them is that the USA has fallen so far behind other countries in math and science. 

And, if that weren't bad enough, look at how many of us don't have the slightest idea of what the country is all about - how it runs, what our rights are, etc.  Basic civics.

Here are excerpts from an article by Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post, which spell it out in grim detail:

Voters Fail the Test
By Kathleen Parker
Tuesday, November 25, 2008; 7:56 PM

WASHINGTON -- So much for the wisdom of The People.

A new report from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) on the nation's civic literacy finds that most Americans are too ignorant to vote.

Out of 2,500 American quiz-takers, including college students, elected officials and other randomly selected citizens, nearly 1,800 flunked a 33-question test on basic civics. In fact, elected officials scored slightly lower than the general public with an average score of 44 percent compared to 49 percent.

Only 0.8 percent of all test-takers scored an "A."

The multiple-choice ISI quiz wouldn't deepen the creases in most brains, but the questions do require a basic knowledge of how the U.S. government works. Think fast: In what document do the words "government of the people, by the people, for the people" appear? More than twice as many people (56 percent) knew that Paula Abdul was a judge on "American Idol" than knew that those words come from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (21 percent).

Only 17 percent of college grads understood the difference between free markets and centralized planning.

Then again, we can't blame the children for what they haven't been taught. Civics courses, once a staple of junior and high school education, are no longer considered important in our quantitative, leave-no-child-behind world. And college adds little civic knowledge, the ISI study found. The average grade for those holding a bachelor's degree was just 57 percent -- only 13 points higher than the average score of those with only a high school diploma.

Most bracing: Only 27 percent of elected officeholders in the survey could identify a right or freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment.

Forty-three percent didn't know what the Electoral College does. And 46 percent didn't know that the Constitution gives Congress power to declare war.

I urge you to click on the link I've provided and read the entire article.  It is guaranteed to make you think about what's going wrong with our educational system.

Too bad Ms. Parker couldn't have stayed on message, though.  But she couldn't resist working in a BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) comment: "Civics courses, once a staple of junior and high school education, are no longer considered important in our quantitative, leave-no-child-behind world".

There you have it.  The reason adults - not kids in public schools but college students and adults out of school - don't know squat about civics is President Bush's "leave no child behind" initiative. 

FYI, No Child Left Behind was signed into law January 8, 2002 (less than 7 years ago) and, obviously, has been implemented for less time.

Maybe Ms. Parker could use a refresher course or two herself.  I suggest starting with "Remedial Common Sense and Logic", followed by "Journalism Without Mindless Bias".  That should do the trick. 

Ken Berwitz

Here, from Pablo Guzman of New York's CBS-TV news, is vivid proof that even smart people sometimes come up with dumb ideas:

Nov 26, 2008 6:16 am US/Eastern

NYC On Ticket Blitz; 200 Traffic Agents Added

Better Be On Your Best Behavior With Your Car Because Cash-Strapped City Is Out To Raise $66 Million

Manhattan To Get 100 Agents; Staten Island Spared ... For Now

Reporting
Pablo Guzman

NEW YORK (CBS) ― You may have begun to notice more traffic tickets being written. And you may have guessed -- correctly -- that it has to do with getting New York City more money. Well, brace yourselves, the city is putting 200 more ticket-writing traffic agents to work.

The city's latest move to close the budget gap is annoying New Yorkers to no end. Soon, you may not be able to avoid the police no matter what you do. Approximately 100 of the agents will be in Manhattan; the other 100 will be spread out across the other boroughs.

"You get stuck out there in the middle; not because you're not paying attention," driver Rob Frangavilla said. "People walk across; you're stuck there. I just think it's a crazy way to raise money."

"No more tickets, because they're so aggressive," driver Ephraim Kaufman said. "It's unbelievable. Like, you go to pay the ticket -- for machine -- but while you put in the money to buy the ticket they give you a ticket!"

NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly laid out the plan on Tuesday.

"[We will put them] in Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. We will not deploy them right now in Staten Island," Kelly said.

The agents will be looking primarily for drivers who "block the box" at intersections. That ticket will cost $115.

However, Mary Jo Albanese thinks it's a good idea.

When asked if she'd be annoyed if the traffic agents came up to her and ticketed her instead of putting the notice n her car, Albanese said, "Well if I was doing the right thing, I wouldn't get a ticket."

The city thinks it can raise an extra $66 million this way.

An extra $66 million?  Really?  Is that estimate before or after:

-Deducting all the cars that won't come into the city because of these 200 extra ticketers - the ones filled with people who spend money on goods and services, on restaurants and plays? 

-Deducting the business that will be lost to retail merchants, which not only hurts the merchants themselves but lowers tax revenues? 

-The cost of the 200 ticket-givers themselves?  Since the "profit" on a ticket is only a fraction of the penalty, and not all tickets are paid anyway, how many have to be written per day just so the city will break even?

What a great idea. 

Branch Rickey, the great baseball executive, used to talk about "addition by subtraction".  This meant that sometimes a team could improve by getting rid of a player.

My congratulations to Mayor Bloomberg for giving us the corollary:  Subtraction by addition.

Ken Berwitz

Here, from Scott Johnson of www.powerlineblog.com, is an excellent update of the effort to steal Norm Coleman's senate seat:

Minnesota Senate Recount, Update VIII

The Franken campaign and its allies such as Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman are now focusing on rejected absentee ballots. In today's Star Tribune Kevin Duchschere shows that Ritchie is now improvising in advance of the state Canvassing Board meeting today which will consider the treatment of rejected absentee ballots:

Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman proposed a process for reconsidering rejected absentee ballots that would partly skirt the Canvassing Board: Have local elections officials review such ballots and identify those possibly improperly rejected.

Freeman, a DFLer who backed Franken, said that he and Anoka County Attorney Bob Johnson worked on the plan after Secretary of State Mark Ritchie asked them and other county attorneys for ideas to improve the process.

In a statement, the Coleman campaign said: "This is a back-door effort by both the Franken campaign, and Mr. Freeman, to try to gain influence on the eve of the discussions by the Canvassing Board, and there needs to be further explanation for why the Hennepin County Attorney is using his office in such an overtly partisan manner."

But Freeman disagreed with that assessment. "This is trying to count all the ballots. How the hell is that partisan?" he said.

The vast majority of rejected absentee ballots appear not to raise such issues. Duchschere comments:

The Star Tribune has analyzed the reasons absentee ballots were rejected in 28 counties, and only two counties -- Ramsey and Itasca -- specifically cite election officials' error. In Ramsey County, it appeared that 53 rejections were tied to administrative error.

Elsewhere the Journal reports that the Franken campaign has purportedly obtained information from 66 Minnesota counties on 6,432 rejected absentee ballots. The Franken campaign concedes that most of those ballots were properly rejected, but has forwarded an affidavit containing examples of improperly rejected ballots to the Canvassing Board. (Duchschere also reports on the mysterious appearance and disappearance of ballots during the recount in Becker County and in Crystal.)

As we suggested earlier this week, John Fund shows that the batlle for Minnesota is just getting started. Fund picks up on the question of rejected absentee ballots:

The problem with adding absentee ballots is state law. According to an advisory opinion issued last week by the office of Democratic state Attorney General Lori Swanson, "Only the ballots cast in the election and the summary statements certified by the election judges may be considered in the recount process." A recount manual prepared this year by the office of Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, also a Democrat, makes clear that the canvassing board only supervises "an administrative recount" that is "not to determine if absentee ballots were properly accepted."

But Mr. Franken's attorneys are now arguing that Minnesota law also requires that each county's election report include "the complete voting activity within that county." They are also invoking the Equal Protection arguments cited by the Supreme Court in Bush vs. Gore, as well as rulings from Washington State's disputed 2004 governor's race -- that contest was decided for Democrat Christine Gregoire by 133 votes after an initial count and two subsequent recounts.

Intent on harvesting absentee ballots, the Franken campaign has presented affidavits from four voters who claim their ballots were improperly rejected. It hopes to find more, now that a Ramsey County judge has agreed to a Franken demand that it have access to data from that county on whose absentee ballots had been rejected. After initially saying rejected absentee ballots shouldn't be part of the recount, the secretary of state's office now says the information should be made public.

If the absentee names are made public, a mad scramble will ensue to contact those voters and get them to demand their ballots be counted. That's just what happened in the 2004 governor's race in Washington State after King County Judge Dean Lum allowed local Democrats access to the list of provisional voters that hadn't been counted because either there was no signature or no match between the signature and the voter registration on file with officials.

It should be noted that the Attorney General's opinion to which Fund refers was actually provided by Assistant Attorney General Ken Raschke, who specializes in Minnesota election law. As Politics in Minnesota observed last week, you don't mess around with Ken.

Fund then turns to the ominous Washington state connection to the Minnesota recount courtesy of the Franken campaign:

Democrats with experience from the Washington recount are now advising Mr. Franken. Paul Berendt, a former chair of the Washington Democratic Party, was in Minneapolis this month. "What I bring to this effort," he told Oregon Public Radio from the Minneapolis recount office, "is that I understand every single step of this recount process and the things that you need to look for in order to make sure that every vote is counted."

At the conclusion of his column Fund cites some troubling history:

If the strategy of adding previously rejected ballots to the Minnesota Senate recount is successful, a final outcome could be months away. In 1975, the U.S. Senate refused to accept New Hampshire's certification that Republican Louis Wyman had won by two votes. The seat was vacant for seven months, with the Senate debate spanning 100 hours and six unsuccessful attempts to break a filibuster and vote on who should be seated. The impasse ended only when a special election was agreed to, which was won by Democrat John Durkin.

I trust we won't be holding a do-over of this election, but the Washington connection adduced by Fund provides a nightmare scenario by itself.

They are desperately trying to steal this election.  Right in front of our faces.  In the middle of town.  On the 50 yard line. 

And it stinks.

Ken Berwitz

This just came from my friend Bob.  He read it and now he understands things better.  Same here.  See if it moves you forward too:

.

Ken Berwitz

It's all falling apart for hugo chavez (or, as I usually refer to him, yugo chavez, since his performance so closely resembles the car of that name). 

Now that oil prices have fallen back from the ionosphere, suddenly he can't buy off the poor people of Venezuela with as many giveaways.  And quite possibly because those goodies are not dropping out of the sky anymore, he just sustained a major loss in national elections.

What to do, what to do........

Well, here is what he's trying, courtesy of www.rigzone.com.  Please pay special attention to the paragraph I put in bold print:

Venezuela's Chavez Eyes OPEC Oil Price Band
AFX News Limited      Tuesday, November 25, 2008

President Hugo Chavez said he is proposing that OPEC countries consider setting a price range for oil of $80 to $100 a barrel to stabilize the global market. Chavez raised his proposal for an oil price band Monday night, along with other proposals Venezuela is promoting among fellow oil exporters. "Let's look for a band between $80 and $100; we're thinking about that," Chavez said. "We think that price would be a fair price for oil." He called it a "stabilization band to avoid those jumps to $150, suddenly to $50 -- a terrible uncertainty." Chavez suggested in September that oil producers should look to keep prices between $90 and $l00 a barrel. Venezuela has said it will urge the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to cut production by 1 million barrels per day at its informal meeting in Cairo Saturday, and carry out those cuts before the end of the year. Last month, the oil cartel cut output by 1.5 million barrels a day to boost prices. Venezuela depends on oil for 94 percent of exports and roughly half the government's budget. The socialist leader said Venezuela is evaluating the effects of falling oil prices, but has plenty of international reserves and other funds to weather the financial storm. Venezuela will not cut high levels of social spending, he said. But Chavez said Venezuela could make some unspecified changes if prices stay at their current levels or lower throughout next year. By mid-afternoon in Europe on Tuesday, light, sweet crude for January delivery was down $1.70 to $52.80 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices were trading in a range between $50.79 and $54.66.

How touching.  yugo chavez is worried about oil spiking higher.  I'm sure he loses lots of sleep over that prospect.....

And all the money he claims he has for social programs -- money that the rest of his comment suggests has a year or less before it runs out (which he's probably lying about)?  Not good for someone who stays in power through pacifying poor people by giving things away to them (in addition to rigging elections, of course.  Even that didn't help him this week).  

To me, this looks like the "hugo" variety of a hail mary pass. His desperate attempt to bluff the world markets into higher prices.  To look those markets in the eye and tell them to act out of synch with reality.

I can almost hear Don Ameche's voice from Trading Places (with a Venezuelan accent, of course) yelling into the empty stock market floor.  "Turn those machines back on!  Turn those machines back on!

It ain't gonna work.

Ken Berwitz

hu·bris

Pronunciation: \ˈhyü-brəs\

Function: noun

Etymology: Greek hybris

exaggerated pride or self-confidence

Did you ever hear of "The Office of the President-Elect"?  I didn't either.

But suddenly there is Barack Obama, standing in front of podiums with a seal and those words underneath (see picture below, followed by the story from www.foxnews.com).

Despite Bells and Whistles, 'Office of President-Elect' Holds No Authority

The props that decorate the stage for the Office of the President-elect serve as just that, since Barack Obama will hold no actual authority in the Executive Branch until Jan. 20.

FOXNews.com

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Ok, let's get two things straight:

-There is no such thing as an "Office of the President Elect".  It doesn't exist;

-Even if it did exist, contrary to popular opinion and the ignorance of countless journalists, Barack Obama is not the President elect yet.  He achieves that status only after the electoral college meets and a majority of electors vote for him.

First we had that ridiculous "presidential seal" with his name on it during the campaign.  Then we had him remove an American Flag from the tail fin of his campaign plane and replace it with that same phony "presidential seal".  Now we have an idiotic invented "office".

At the beginning of this blog, I put up the word "hubris", along with its etymology and meaning.  After seeing Barack Obama in action, I think maybe Merriam-Webster should insert Mr. Obama's picture next to it.

Ken Berwitz

Here's an unpleasant reminder, from Connecticut's Hartford Courant, that racism can come from just about anywhere:

Probe Sought Against Judge Who Allegedly Used Racial Epithet

By CHRISTINE DEMPSEY | The Hartford Courant

November 25, 2008

Well, I didn't see the video so I don't know 100% for certain.  But it sure seems that the only person who would gain from lying would be Judge Cofield.

Now the big question:  Assuming she made those comments, is the fact both she and the officer are Black a mitigating circumstance?

The answer is that while the circumstances are obviously different - i.e. it seems clear to me that Judge Cofield's comments were meant as demeaning insults rather than racial epithets - the fact remains that they are racial epithets.  Even if you eliminate the racial component you're left with the demeaning insults. Sgt. Washington should no more be expected to take that kind of abuse from a Black person as he should from a White person.

If the video bears out this account of what happened, Ms. Cofield should immediately apologize to Sgt. Washington - and be impeached for the purpose of removing her as a judge.

Ken Berwitz

Here is part of a larger article by Jane Porter of www.worldnetdaily.com, enumerating specific issues regarding whether Barack Obama's facsimile birth certificate is legitimate. 

Within it, there is a link to a 6 1/2 minute video in which someone named Ron Polarik, who claims to be an expert on this subject, details the discrepancies he imputes to Mr. Obama's facsimile document:

Rathergate II: Certification of Live Birth a clear forgery

Posted: November 25, 2008
1:00 am Eastern © 2008 

The media bought it. The voters bought it. And now some in Congress are resisting the idea of congressional hearings because they believe that Barack Obama's "birth certificate" has been posted online.

Not so.

What was posted was not a birth certificate, but something that resembles a "Certification of Live Birth" or COLB, which, even if authentic, does not prove "natural born" U.S. citizenship. You see, in Hawaii, a Certification of Live Birth is issued within a year of a child's birth to those who register a birth abroad or one that takes place outside a hospital.

It's Rathergate all over again with more amiss than a 1970s Selectric typewriter. But before I tell you what the experts found, let me ask you a few questions:

1. If you were a natural born American citizen and had it within your means to quiet all the lawsuits and questions with proof, would you do it?
   
2. If you were a natural born American citizen, would you spend thousands of dollars to fight the legal cases against you, or would you simply answer the legitimate question of whether you meet the constitutional requirements for office?
   
3. If you were a natural born American citizen, would you forge a document called a "Certification of Live Birth" and tell the public it was a real "birth certificate"?

If someone were to violate the law by manufacturing a forgery in order trick the public, would that be enough evidence for members of Congress to conduct hearings and for a court to issue an order for the critical records, including the original long-form birth certificate (signed by the doctor) to ensure that the U.S. constitutional requirements for office were not violated? After all, Congress is sworn to uphold and defend that Constitution, and the justices on the U.S. Supreme Court are "guardians" of the Constitution. That's their job, isn't it?

Ron Polarik, who holds a Ph.D. in Instructional Media and specializes in computer graphics with over 20 years experience with computers, printers and typewriters, has come forth with more definitive evidence than the word processor that tried to simulate a 1970s Selectric typewriter.

Polarik has submitted a signed affidavit and has now released his findings on video at www.ObamaForgery.com with his identity masked and voice altered to guard against the carrying out of threats, which he has already received.

The Summary: The Certificate of Live Birth documents posted on Mr. Obama's website www.fightthesmears.com, Daily Kos (a pro-Obama blog) and factcheck.org, (a pro-Obama political research group), were found to be altered and forged.

1. The problem of the pixels: When you have a green patterned document such as this, there should be a lot of green pixels from the background showing up between the letters that appear on the certification. But in this case, instead of green pixels, there are white and grey pixels between the letters, which result when you replace existing text with other text.
   
2. There is no second fold line. The pictures show two folds – necessary to fit any COLB into an envelope for mailing, but the document itself shows only one fold. This is another indication of document alteration.
   
3. There's a blurred border. The border has a lower resolution than the rest of the document, which is another indication that it has been altered.
   
4. The border is one that is used in 2007 COLBs. As a security measure, Hawaii changes their borders every year. This is when the Obama campaign claims the certificate was obtained. That is fine except for the problem that …
   
5. The seal and signature stamp are from a 2008 COLB. As revealed by a process called edging, the Hawaiian seal and signature stamp on the back of the document are revealed to be from the wrong year!

Like with Rathergate, when you're creating documents, make sure you use only a typewriter that was invented at the time you report the document was manufactured. When posting a "Certification of Live Birth," make sure you "borrow" only from documents used in the same year!

Be sure to sign the petition demanding evidence of Barack Obama's constitutional qualifications.

But beyond the birth certificate issue, there's the matter that Obama traveled to Indonesia, Pakistan, Southern India and Kenya in 1981. He said he went to Indonesia to see his mother. This seemed plausible, except for the fact that his mother returned to Hawaii in August of 1980 to file for a divorce from her second husband, Lolo Soetoro. Unless she went back to pal around with the man she divorced, she wasn't there at the time of Obama's visit.

There's another problem. No record of Obama holding an American passport prior to the one he received once becoming a U.S. senator has been found. If he traveled to Pakistan with an American passport, he wouldn't have been allowed in – since Pakistan was in turmoil in 1981 and under martial law. It was also on the State Department's travel ban list for U.S. citizens.

If he couldn't get into Pakistan with a U.S. passport, perhaps he went there with an Indonesian passport. But the only way you can get one of those is if you are an Indonesian citizen.

That's quite possible since under Indonesian law, when a male acknowledges a child as his son, it deems the son – in this case Obama – to be an Indonesian state citizen, which was also recorded by Obama's school record.

So, if he didn't go to Indonesia in 1981 to visit mom (who had returned to Hawaii by then), might it have something to do with the fact that Indonesian passports expire every five years and it was time for renewal?

Why does that matter?

If Obama would have been a U.S. citizen, 8 USC §1481(a)(2) provides loss of nationality by native born citizens upon "taking an oath or making an affirmation or other formal declaration of allegiance to a foreign state ... after having attained the age of eighteen years," in violation of 8 U.S.C. §1401(a)(1). Simply put, since Indonesia did not allow for dual citizenship, if Obama got that passport in 1981, when he was 20 years old, he effectively renounced any U.S. citizenship he may have had.

So, if the experts are right, Obama forged a Certification of Live Birth to fool America. In addition to the automatic Indonesian citizenship granted to a child acknowledged as a "son" by an Indonesian male citizen, and the Indonesian citizenship listed in Obama's school records, Obama then traveled to a place where Americans weren't allowed to go, but citizens of Indonesia were. If he obtained an Indonesian passport on his trip

in 1981, he effectively renounced any American citizenship he may have had and cannot serve as president (or "rule" as president, as members of his campaign have stated). These are serious questions that must have answers.

Does this prove to my satisfaction that the document is a forgery and Barack Obama is ineligible for the presidency? 

No it does not. 

I don't know who Ron Polarik is, and I am no expert on this stuff so I don't know if the claims which are made here actually prove a thing.

But it does convince me that, to be sure, we need more than Mr. Obama's smiling face and a questionable non-original document. 

The people have a right to know if they have been defrauded into electing a man ineligible for the office he ran for. 

The people have a right to demand in no uncertain terms that the original "vault copy" of Barack Obama's birth certificate be produced and reviewed.

Ken Berwitz

Is it an earthquake, or simply a shock?
Is it the good turtle soup, or is it merely the mock?
Is it a cocktail, this feeling of joy?
Or is what I feel the real McCoy?

Is it for all time or simply a lark?
Is it Granada I see or only Asbury Park?
Is it a fancy, not worth thinking of?
Or is it at long last love?

From "At Long Last Love", written by the great Cole Porter

So I'm checking the St. Paul (MN) Pioneer-Press, and I come across this article:

Franken losing ground to Coleman on DFL turf - Minneapolis

I don't know what to think about this.  Is it possible that al franken will not steal Norm Coleman's senate seat?  Or is it that this movement in Coleman's favor is meant to lull us into complacency, so the franken people to be able to say "see, it worked both ways" after the magical new votes materialize that give him a victory? 

Is it Granada I see, or only Asbury Park? 

Let me end by apologizing to Asbury Park, New Jersey for the comparison to al franken.  Neither Asbury nor franken is Granada, of course.  But even though al franken sounds more like the Alhambra, Asbury Park is classier.

Ken Berwitz

I just looked at the invaluable web site www.littlegreenfootballs.com, and it referenced a story from Michael Ledeen of National Review.  It is about a major military success in Iraq.  It has drama, it has valor and it has plenty of blood (though not USA blood).  In short, it is perfect for a lead story, even in the "if it bleeds, it leads" world of contemporary journalism.

The problem?  It is good news for the USA, not bad.  And therefore I'm betting that, unless you're a subscriber to National Review, this is the first you'll be seeing of it -- despite the fact that it was originally written up by Corporal James. M. Mercure for the Marine Corps News, and published a week ago:

Monday, November 24, 2008

Hero of the Day   [Michael Ledeen]

Marine Makes Insurgents Pay the Price November 18, 2008 Marine Corps News

by Cpl. James M. Mercure

 

FARAH PROVINCE, Afghanistan - In the city of Shewan, approximately 250 insurgents ambushed 30 Marines and paid a heavy price for it.

 

Shewan has historically been a safe haven for insurgents, who used to plan and stage attacks against Coalition Forces in the Bala Baluk district.

 

The city is home to several major insurgent leaders. Reports indicate that more than 250 full time fighters reside in the city and in the surrounding villages.

 

Shewan had been a thorn in the side of Task Force 2d Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force Afghanistan throughout the Marines' deployment here in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, because it controls an important supply route into the Bala Baluk district. Opening the route was key to continuing combat operations in the area.

 

"The day started out with a 10-kilometer patrol with elements mounted and dismounted, so by the time we got to Shewan, we were pretty beat," said a designated marksman who requested to remain unidentified. "Our vehicles came under a barrage of enemy RPGs (rocket propelled grenades) and machine gun fire. One of our 'humvees' was disabled from RPG fire, and the Marines inside dismounted and laid down suppression fire so they could evacuate a Marine who was knocked unconscious from the blast."

 

The vicious attack that left the humvee destroyed and several of the Marines pinned down in the kill zone sparked an intense eight-hour battle as the platoon desperately fought to recover their comrades. After recovering the Marines trapped in the kill zone, another platoon sergeant personally led numerous attacks on enemy fortified positions while the platoon fought house to house and trench to trench in order to clear through the enemy ambush site.

 

"The biggest thing to take from that day is what Marines can accomplish when they're given the opportunity to fight," the sniper said. "A small group of Marines met a numerically superior force and embarrassed them in their own backyard. The insurgents told the townspeople that they were stronger than the Americans, and that day we showed them they were wrong."

 

During the battle, the designated marksman single handedly thwarted a company-sized enemy RPG and machinegun ambush by reportedly killing 20 enemy fighters with his devastatingly accurate precision fire. He selflessly exposed himself time and again to intense enemy fire during a critical point in the eight-hour battle for Shewan in order to kill any enemy combatants who attempted to engage or maneuver on the Marines in the kill zone. What made his actions even more impressive was the fact that he didn't miss any shots, despite the enemies' rounds impacting within a foot of his fighting position.

 

"I was in my own little world," the young corporal said. "I wasn't even aware of a lot of the rounds impacting near my position, because I was concentrating so hard on making sure my rounds were on target."

 

After calling for close-air support, the small group of Marines pushed forward and broke the enemies' spirit as many of them dropped their weapons and fled the battlefield. At the end of the battle, the Marines had reduced an enemy stronghold, killed more than 50 insurgents and wounded several more.

 

"I didn't realize how many bad guys there were until we had broken through the enemies' lines and forced them to retreat. It was roughly 250 insurgents against 30 of us," the corporal said. "It was a good day for the Marine Corps. We killed a lot of bad guys, and none of our guys were seriously injured."

During World War II, they made movies about incidents like this.  There would be actors like William Bendix, Robert Ryan and Barton MacLane.  People would leave theaters proud of the bravery and heroics of our men in uniform.

But don't expect to see a movie about this incident coming to your local theaters any time soon.  

Today, our successes in Iraq (and they have been legion over the past year) are an untidy inconvenience for mainstream media, whether print, broadcast or motion picture.  They are something to look away from, while waiting for and hoping that soon a car bomb might go off in a Baghdad market.  Then they'd have a story to report.

How sad and dispiriting that we are denied information like this by the same people who claim to keep us informed.

But listen to them squeal like stuck pigs if you call them biased.

Ken Berwitz

The ex-President of Mexico is miffed.

He feels that it is an affront to his country that the United States built a border fence (and, presumably may build additional fences and take other actions to minimize the tidal wave of illegal aliens into our country).

Here, courtesy of Penny Starr writing for www.cnsnews.com, are the particulars.  The bold print is mine:

Former Mexican President Calls Border Fence ‘Offensive’
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
By Penny Starr, Senior Staff Writer

Thomas R. Pickering, former U.S. Under Secretary of State, and former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo (Photos by CNSNews.com/Penny Starr)

(CNSNews.com) – Former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo said he and his countrymen “regret” and “resent” the construction of a security fence on the border between the United States and Mexico and called for more “intelligent” security between the two countries on Monday.
 
Zedillo also blamed drug violence largely on Americans’ use of illegal drugs
 
“I personally find (the fence) profoundly offensive,” said Zedillo, co-chairman of the Brookings Institution’s Partnership for the Americas Commission, which released its report “Rethinking U.S.-Latin American Relations” on Monday.
 
Zedillo told CNSNews.com that the United States needs to have a “frank discussion” about the role domestic drug consumption plays in the ongoing violence on both sides of the border.
 
“The point we are making in this report is that the present strategy to combat drug trafficking is failing,” said Zedillo, who appeared at the panel discussion with the co-chairman of the commission, former U.S. Undersecretary of State Thomas R. Pickering.
 
Pickering noted that 90 percent of the guns seized in drug law enforcement operations in Mexico can be traced back to the United States, a statistic also cited by officials from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in testimony before the House Foreign Affair Committee’s subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere in February 2008.

Former President of Mexico Ernesto Zedillo (Photos by CNSNews.com/Penny Starr)

In a report issued in April by the National Drug Intelligence Center, federal, state, and local law enforcement data revealed that major Mexican drug trafficking operations, or DTOs, operate in at least 195 cities in the United States and that 129 of those cities have DTOs that are linked to four of the principal Mexican drug cartels that supply illicit drugs in the United States.
 
In its National Drug Threat Assessment for 2008, the National Drug Intelligence Center described drug distribution from Mexico into the United States.
 
“The Southwest Border Region is the most significant national-level storage, transportation, and transshipment area for illicit drug shipments that are destined for drug markets throughout the United States,” the report said.
 
“Mexican DTOs have developed sophisticated and expansive drug transportation networks extending from the Southwest Border to all regions of the United States,” it added.
 
It also cited the flow of weapons between the two countries.
 
“Mexican DTOs and their associated enforcement groups generally rely on firearms trafficking from the United States to Mexico to obtain weapons for their smuggling and enforcement operations,” the report said.
 
“Drug traffickers, firearms smugglers, and independent criminals smuggle large quantities of firearms and ammunition from the United States to Mexico on behalf of Mexican DTOs, who then use these weapons to defend territory, eliminate rivals, enforce business dealings, control members, and challenge law enforcement,” the report added.
 
“The ATF estimates that thousands of weapons are smuggled into Mexico every year,” reads the Drug Threat Assessment report.
 
“Firearms are typically purchased or stolen from gun stores, pawnshops, gun shows, and private residences prior to being smuggled into Mexico, where they are often sold for a markup of 300 to 400 percent. Moreover, large caches of firearms often are stored on both sides of the Southwest Border for use by Mexican DTOs and their enforcement groups,” it added.
 
At the Brookings Institution event, organizers billed the commission’s report as part of the new direction the United States will take in foreign policy and other areas under a Barack Obama administration.
 
Its recommendations included a path to legal status for illegal immigrants; the lifting of all restrictions on travel to Cuba; taking communist Cuba off the U.S. State Department’s State Sponsors of Terrorism List; and establishing a Renewable Energy Laboratory of the Americas “to promote hemispheric cooperation on developing solar, wind and cellulosic-biomass technologies.”
 
“The report is about identifying those issues that we believe require a collective work,” Zedillo said.

Unbelievable.   Zedilla's point seems to be that Mexican drug smugglers illegally transport their wares to the USA because there are buyers here and, by the way, firearms are smuggled back from the USA to Mexico. 

Is it just me or do both of these facts argue FOR a security fence rather than against it?

In any event, a few other points to be made here:

-The Mexican government literally publishes and distributes pamphlets for illegals trying to cross the border, helping them to do so.  The pamphlets tell them, among other things, what to do and say if they're caught.  Mr. Zedillo doesn't appear to have a problem with that, only with the fact that we try to prevent them from breaching our sovereign borders.  For that reason alone I couldn't care less what he thinks;

-Mexico has an illegal immigration problem too - on its southern border.  But Mexico heavily guards its border and when illegals are caught coming in from Guatemala or Belize, they are immediately detained and tossed back.  No human rights issues, no health care services, no drivers' licenses and no free college. To say there is a hypocrisy problem here is to grossly understate;

-Finally, take a good look at that summary of immigration policy which we might have for the next four years, if the Brookings Institute and others have their way.  How do you like it?

Barack Obama has spent years mesmerizing people into thinking he is what he isn't.  I can only hope that the geniuses over at Brookings are among the ones who will be disappointed by his reality.

Ken Berwitz

Joseph Farah either runs, or is instrumental in running, www.worldnetdaily.com .  He is as troubled as I am by the stonewalling of Barack Obama's birth certificate (the REAL one, not the facsimile foisted on a public which Mr. Obama evidently hopes is gullible enough to just accept it and move on).  Maybe even more so.

Here is his columm, complete with a petition you can sign if you wish:

Insufficient public interest?

Posted: November 24, 2008
1:00 am Eastern

© 2008 

Frankly, Mr. Farah isn't getting any million signatures.  The way things like this work is that the true believers immediately sign up and then there usually is a rapid dropoff.  But he could get six figures' worth.  And that is pretty impressive too.

Continuing my frankness, let me also say that I could live without the reference to Christmas card lists (as if the only people interested in Mr. Obama's eligibility are exclusively Christians).  And I am, to say the least, no fan of "Andy Martin", who has, over the years, made a number of dumb, ignorant anti-Semitic comments. 

However, neither of these things change what is necessary from Barack Obama.  It is entirely appropriate that he be made to prove conclusively he is legally eligible to hold the office of President.

If anyone, even Andy Martin, can force him to do so, that is fine with me.

Ken Berwitz

The simple truth is that if Barack Obama had shown us his ORIGINAL birth certificate - not the facsimile Certificate Of Live Birth that he produced instead - this matter would have ended a long time ago.

But Mr. Obama has never done so and, instead, has engaged a team of lawyers to fight every court challenge to his presidential eligibility

If you're a guy from the boroughs of New York like I am, that sets off buzzers, alarms and sirens.  Red flags pop up in front of your eyes.

If you're Caleb Howe of AOL news (or a multitude of other supposedly curious journalists), however, it apparently gets little more than a shrug and an "ok".

Howe has written an article supposedly debunking the people who question Obama's legitimacy.  I've read it (and so can you by clicking here).  But for brevity's sake I'll just post the part that is supposed to put this issue to rest:

Now that the campaign season is over, we can stop hearing all this nonsense.
Or can we?

Some, it seems, haven't quite made up their minds. As Forbes reports, lawsuits still abound regarding the legitimacy of Barack Obama's election. The suits specifically call for the President-elect to produce his birth certificate from the State of Hawaii. The certifcate was released electronically but met with some skepticism, and since that time, the State of Hawaii has issued an official press release stating in no uncertain terms that they have the certificate on file. Although a number of such suits persist, the chief face behind the allegations is clearly Phillip Berg, an attorney and Democrat from Philadelphia. Berg is not only filing in court, he has run advertising in major newspapers and put out youtube videos and a website, all regarding the authenticity of Obama's birth certificate and alleging that he was born in Kenya. As noted at Forbes, Berg is unmoved by debunking of the issue by sites like FactCheck.org and noted myth-busting website Snopes.com.

What are my problems with this? 

-The "birth certificate" presented to us is not the original.  It is a facsimile - and one that may very well have been written over, as I showed in an August 4 blog .  Where is the original?

-Saying they have the original on file is nice.  But what they don't say is what is on the original.  Why is Mr. Obama so desperately trying to prevent us from seeing it?

-Invoking www.factcheck.org and www.snopes.com doesn't impress me.  They're not the last word on anything.  I've read both their pieces and neither addresses what I just pointed out. 

-Snopes.com is run by two people in LA, a husband and wife team named Barbara and David Mikkelson.  What are their politics?  Who did they vote for?  Most importantly, who died and made them the last word on Barack Obama's ORIGINAL birth certificate?  Do they claim to have seen it?  If not, how would they know what it does or doesn't say?  (I would ask those last three questions of the pompous oracles over at factcheck.org too).

Mr. Howe does have an answer for us regarding the snopes.com claim of legitimacy.  Here it is in its entirety:

Well, for starters, as Snopes points out, there is something silly about the idea that a major party, with so much to lose, would stake their entire reputation on a forgery so lame that internet snoops could pick it apart in a day visiting a public website. The McCain question was a matter of law regarding a matter of record, silly though the matter was. The Obama question isn't a matter of law, unless the campaign lied and produced a forgery to cover something up. In other words, the McCain story was actually about eligibility, while the Obama story is about the Democrats and the Obama campaign willfully committing a series of crimes and coverups in an attempt to defraud the entire nation. It's hardly the same thing. Put in terms of the impact, you can have one of two reactions. You can go into panic/attack mode like Berg, thinking that it's such a huge deal someone must do something fast. Or you can think that, well, how dumb would the Democrats have to be to pin their great Presidential hopes on someone who wasn't born here and cover it up with an electronic forgery? It simply doesn't seem like a rational theory, in other words. Furthermore, contrary to Berg's assertions, the so-called smoking gun questions about the electronic version of the certificate are easily explained. Lastly, Hawaii says they have the certificate, which should be case closed.

This is proof?  About 4/5ths of the entire commentary tells us it would be stupid if Obama wasn't eligible (I agree).  That, however, doesn't explain a thing about his birth certificate.  All Howe offers us is that it is "easily explained" (without benefit of any explanation) and that Hawaii has the certificate (which they won't show to us because Barack Obama won't let them).

Let's just say that Woodward and Bernstein are not looking worriedly over their shoulders at Caleb Howe.

My personal opinion?  I don't know if Mr. Obama is or is not eligible to be President because what we have been shown does not prove it one way or the other.

But when someone who can easily show you proof fights tooth and nail to hide it, the Brooklyn comes right out of me.  Instead of just shrugging and saying "ok", I assume there must be something he does not want me to see.

Maybe Caleb Howe should too.

Ken Berwitz

I like Alan Colmes.  He's a better debater than Sean Hannity and, though certainly leftward in his views, less ideological than Hannity as well. 

He'll be missed.

It turns out that, after 12 years of battling it out with Hannity, Colmes wants to move on.  Here are the particulars, from www.breitbart.com:

Alan Colmes to Depart Top Rated Hannity & Colmes

Nov 24 02:26 PM US/Eastern

FOX News Channel’s (FNC) Alan Colmes will relinquish his role as co-host of Hannity & Colmes at the end of the year.

In announcing his decision, Colmes said, “I approached Bill Shine (FNC’s Senior Vice President of Programming) earlier this year about wanting to move on after 12 years to develop new and challenging ways to contribute to the growth of the network. Although it’s bittersweet to leave one of the longest marriages on cable news, I’m proud that both Sean (Hannity) and I remained unharmed after sitting side by side, night after night for so many years.”

Colmes will continue to have a presence on FNC as he will serve as a liberal commentator on a variety of FOX News programming, including Foxnews.com’s The Strategy Room and continue hosting his radio program, The Alan Colmes Show on FOX Talk, a division of FOX News Radio. He will also begin developing a weekend program.

Shine said, “We’re very sorry to see Alan reach this decision but we understand his desire to seek other creative challenges in his career. We value his incredible hard work in making Hannity & Colmes the most successful debate program on cable news and we’re going to miss him on the show. Thankfully, he will begin developing a weekend pilot for us.”

FOX News Chairman & Chief Executive Officer Roger Ailes added, “Alan is one of the key reasons why FOX News has been such a remarkable success. We’re sad to see him leave the program but we look forward to his ongoing contributions to the network.”

Hannity & Colmes is the only FNC program which has remained in the same timeslot for 12 years, catapulting to number one in 2003 and never relinquishing the top spot. The second highest-rated program in cable news behind only The O’Reilly Factor, Hannity & Colmes averaged 3.3 million viewers nightly for the Nielsen month of October and is poised to mark 60 consecutive months at number one at the end of November.

Hannity added, “Not only has Alan been a remarkable co-host, he’s been a great friend which is rare in this industry — I’ll genuinely miss sparring with such a skillful debate partner.”

Throughout his 12 year tenure on Hannity & Colmes, Colmes has interviewed numerous key political figures, including: President Elect Barack Obama, Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), DNC Chairman Howard Dean and former Vice President Al Gore.

Ken Berwitz

They sure know how to punish 'em in Fort Lupton, Colorado:

Personally I like Barry Manilow.  And I especially like the Platters -- even though Tony Williams admittedly goes overboard with that "ah-AHHH" when he re-sings the last part of the song. 

But Barney?  Count me among the millions and millions (I'm guessing) of people who would punch that insipid purple brontosaurus right in his snout if any of us could get close enough.  When it comes to annoying, Barney leaves them all in the dust.

Besides, I've read that the brontosaurus may never even have existed and what was thought to be a bronto was, in reality, a variation of the apatosaurus.  With this in mind, I would pay Barney's producers if they would banish him forever and give us an apatosaurus with a different personality.

Maybe it could do a couple of Manilow songs.  I figure the Platters would be covered by a group of platypusses.

Ken Berwitz

If (when) Norm Coleman is unseated as the senator from Minnesota, it appears that Somali immigrants who came to this country under wholly fraudulent circumstances will account for substantially more than al franken's "margin of victory" (I use quotation marks because I don't consider the term realistic in this instance).

Here are the specifics, from Diana West, writing for the Washington Times, via Scott Johnson of www.powerlineblog.com:

From Mogadishu to Minneapolis

The Twin Cities is home to the largest population of Somali immigrants in the United States. In her latest Washington Times column, Diana West reports the discovery of immigration fraud involving the P-3 family designation in the current United States Refugee Admissions Program:

Within the last week...the State Department confirmed that massive immigration fraud has been perpetrated overwhelmingly by Africans claimed as close kin (parent, spouse, minor child) by legal residents in the United States. (According to a report in the City Pages in Minneapolis, this scam has been netting some unknowns along the food chain up to $10,000 per head.) Given that Somalis form the largest bloc of African immigrants to the United States, this becomes another story with Somalis playing a starring role.

West's column cites this City Pages article and this State Department fact sheet on the fraud. West concludes her column with a look at the ramifications on Minnesota politics:

Rep. Keith Ellison, Minnesota Democrat, who famously swore his 2007 oath of office on the Koran as the first Muslim elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, routinely declares that his 7,000-vote margin of victory came from Somali Muslims. Last month, Mr. Ellison was campaigning for that same Somali Muslim vote on behalf of Mr. Franken.

And what's newsworthy about that? In this case, the point is not that Mr. Ellison was campaigning for the Somali vote, but rather with whom he was campaigning. According to AsianTribune.com, after Mr. Ellison made a standard, if Somalii-oriented campaign pitch on behalf of Mr. Franken before a gathering of Minnesota Somalis, another speaker appeared before the crowd.

Described in the report as a "highly regarded prominent Somali traditional leader" -- i.e., a Somali leader from Somalia, not Minnesota -- Abdullahi Ugas Farah spoke on behalf of the Ellison-Franken cause. "In order for Keith to be helpful to the situation in Somalia, you must also elect Al Franken to the Senate," he said.

Now, there's something new on the American hustings: a "Somali traditional" leader. Curious, I Googled Mr. Farah and came up with one news story, a 2003 brief from the Asia Africa Intelligence Wire headlined, "New Islamic court opens in Mogadishu." The story reported that Mr. Farah was one of two speakers who presided over the opening ceremony for a new Sharia court in Mogadishu's Shirkole area. From Sharia courts in Mogadishu to an Al Franken rally in Minnesota.

Only in ... America?

West notes that the State Department is punting the question of what to do with fradulently admitted Somalis over to the Department of Homeland Security. And what is DHS doing with it? My guess is that the fraudulently admitted Somalis have about as much to fear from DHS as does President-elect Obama's deportable auntie Zeutuni. Help is on the way!

There you have it.  Large numbers of somalis who have come to this country illegally, and were exhorted to vote for al franken by a proponent of shari'a law. 

This election is being stolen right in front of our faces.  In the middle of town.  On the 50 yard line. 

And it stinks.

Ken Berwitz

I have a couple of reasons to root for Northwestern University.  My mother graduated from the school (class of 1940!) and it is close to Chicago, which is a city I love and which has a business I am President and co-owner of.

But, reading a story like this one from www.frontpagemag.com, makes it awfully hard:

Horowitz Speech on Radical Islam Has Repercussions at Northwestern

By Frontpagemag.com
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, November 24, 2008

Less than a week after defaming David Horowitz by claiming that he spreads “blatant lies about Islam” and criticizing the College Republicans for “bringing such an offensive and divisive speaker” to campus, the Muslim-cultural Students Association (McSA) at Northwestern has announced plans to bring infamous Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers to campus.

In her letter to the Daily Northwestern, McSA co-president Dana Shabeeb criticized Horowitz for attacking the Muslim Students Association (which was founded by the Muslim Brotherhood) as supporters of jihad. “Let me make clear that Muslims vehemently reject the use of violence in the name of our religion and don't support the killing of innocent civilians for any reason,” she stated. Yet the McSA has now chosen to spend a vast sum of student government funding on a speaker who dedicated a book to the Muslim assassin of Robert Kennedy and is best known for being a co-founder of a terrorist organization and has publicly stated that he does not regret setting bombs and in fact “we did not do enough.”

The McSA plans to spend its entire Fall speakers budget of $21,000 to fund the event which features Ayers along with his wife and fellow Weather Underground member Bernadine Dohrn and Muslim radical, Imam Zaid Shakir, who co-founded the Islamic fundamentalist mosque Masjid al-Islam in Oakland, California. The honorariums offered the speakers are so large that the contract must be approved by the University’s General Counsel and its Vice President for Student Affairs. Horowitz, of course, was provided no student funds for his speech, which was underwritten for a fifth the cost by Young Americas Foundation.

“It is ironic that the McSA which expended considerable effort in an attempt to discredit my speech about the jihad on campus and the Muslim Students Association’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood is now dedicating their entire fall speakers’ budget to bringing two notorious terrorists to campus,” said Horowitz. “This is a more eloquent link between the Muslim Student Association and the agendas of Islamo-fascism than I could provide. Bill Ayers was setting bombs during the Jimmy Carter Administration. He and his wife have dedicated their lives to attacking America, and are supporters of the jihadist enemies of the West.”

Horowitz’s speech also sparked considerable debate on the website of the Daily Northwestern, the main student paper on campus where real discussion over issues of radical Islam was disrupted by a flurry of hoax comments posted by a student or students claiming to be David Horowitz, Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes, Horowitz Freedom Center staffer Reut Cohen, and others. The comments appear to have been intended to discredit Horowitz and others by ascribing them false motives for their warnings about radical Islam. One post claiming to be from Horowitz states that “we need to make sure that Americans are afraid of the Muslim world—that’s the only way we can get them to keep tying up their foreign policy in the Middle East with Israel.” This is the propaganda line of al-Qaeda, and hardly something Horowitz would write.

Once notified about the hoax comments, the Daily Northwestern shut down the comment feature for the article about Horowitz, preventing further discussion. Campus police have been notified about the hoax comments but did not see any need to respond, despite the fact that this is a form of identity theft. It remains to be seen whether the University will launch an investigation and take action against the student(s) who posted these fake comments, but it does not appear likely. Last year the authorities at George Washington U. were exercised during Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week over a similar hoax – until they discovered that it was indeed a hoax perpetrated by the left.

David Horowitz is president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Through its Islamo-Fascism Awareness Program (IFAP), the DHFC has organized events to combat radical Islam and terrorism on hundreds of American campuses. More information on the program can be found at www.terrorismawareness.org.

Ken Berwitz

From an article in today's New York Times:

U.S. Approves Plan to Help Citigroup Cope With Losses

By ERIC DASH

Federal regulators approved a radical plan to stabilize Citigroup in an arrangement in which the government could soak up billions of dollars in losses at the struggling bank, the government announced late Sunday night.

The complex plan calls for the government to back about $306 billion in loans and securities and directly invest about $20 billion in the company. The plan, emerging after a harrowing week in the financial markets, is the government’s third effort in three months to contain the deepening economic crisis and may set the precedent for other multibillion-dollar financial rescues.

Citigroup executives presented a plan to federal officials on Friday evening after a weeklong plunge in the company’s share price threatened to engulf other big banks. In tense, round-the-clock negotiations that stretched until almost midnight on Sunday, it became clear that the crisis of confidence had to be defused now or the financial markets could plunge further.

Whether this latest rescue plan will help calm the markets is uncertain, given the stress in the financial system caused by losses at Citigroup and other banks. Each previous government effort initially seemed to reassure investors, leading to optimism that the banking system had steadied. But those hopes faded as the economic outlook worsened, raising worries that more bank loans were turning sour.

Under the agreement, Citigroup and regulators will back up to $306 billion of largely residential and commercial real estate loans and certain other assets, which will remain on the bank’s balance sheet. Citigroup will shoulder losses on the first $29 billion of that portfolio.

From an ACORN press release, September 20, 2004:

September 20, 2004

New York-Citigroup and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) today announced a landmark partnership that advances the goals of both organizations in promoting homeownership in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods, especially in immigrant communities, increasing the availability of affordable credit, and promoting financial education. The partnership also reinforces Citigroup's position as a key industry leader in responsible and innovative lending practices.

As part of the partnership, announced today at an event in New York City, Citigroup and ACORN have agreed to collaborate on several initiatives, including to:

• Form an affordable mortgage-lending program between Citigroup and ACORN Housing Corp. (AHC) to develop a specialized mortgage product for all AHC's homeownership centers, and make mortgages available to immigrants who have previously been shut out of credit markets.
• Work together to expand access to the Earned Income Tax Credit, and, in immigrant communities, expand access to Citibank's Access Account and low-cost remittance program.
• Expand financial education to assist low- and moderate-income consumers in saving, obtaining credit, and using credit wisely.
• Focus on community-development lending to increase affordable housing in areas where the Citibank Community Development and ACORN footprints coincid
• Provide borrowers with access to the best combination of loan product, price, service, and attributes.
• Establish a net-benefit test for real estate secured loans.

"Citigroup is excited to announce this historic agreement," said Marge Magner, Chairman and CEO of Citigroup's Global Consumer Group. "By joining forces we can make great strides in building stronger communities and fostering a new generation of proud homeowners."

"With this agreement, ACORN will be able to expand our mission of strengthening communities by helping low- and moderate-income families, including new immigrants to this country, become homeowners," said Maude Hurd, National President of ACORN.

Through the alliance, Citigroup and ACORN will work together to reach out to low- and moderate-income, underserved consumers across the country. In addition to real estate loans, Citigroup's affiliates are offering their breadth of products and services, including Citibank's Access Account, designed as a starter account for consumers who have not traditionally had banking relationships; Citipro, the bank's complimentary financial needs checkup; free online banking; and affordable money remittance services, among others.

A few questions, only one of which is tough at all:

-Do you see any connection here?

-Should this inform future policy?

-Do you think the incoming administration sees any connection here?

Like I said, two are easy.  It's the third one that should have us worried. 

Ken Berwitz

Days ago I blogged that hamas calls truces when it needs to re-arm, and ends them when it is strengthened enough so that it feels able to fight effectively and kill lots and lots of Jews.

Here, from www.pajamasmedia.com, is Michael Sharnoff's analysis.  As you will see, we have a lot in common:

Gaza Powder Keg Set to Explode

Posted By Michael Sharnoff On November 23, 2008 @ 12:00 am In . Column2 02, . Positioning, Israel, Middle East, World News | 13 Comments

How many times must this happen before Israeli President Ehud Olmert catches on and acts decisively?  Apparently the number is limitless. 

How many times do you think it would happen under someone like, say, Benjamin Netanyahu?  Trust me, the number is a tad more finite.  My best guess is somewhere in the neighborhood of once.

Now the key question:  Which of these two philosophies will keep Israel safer?  With elections coming up months from now, Israelis better think long and hard about the answer.

Ken Berwitz

The New York Times is scared.  Its stock has fallen through the floor, its financial health is nearly on life support and electronic media are fast overtaking whatever else is left.

So, suddenly, it isn't ok to just reflexively spout all those slogans that please the paper's leftward stalwarts. 

Here is a piece in today's paper, by Tyler Cowen, that you just don't expect to see in the Times.  Partly this is because it isn't what passes for logic in today's left, and (sad to say this about the Times).  And partly because it makes sense -- which hasn't always been a valued commodity during the years "Pinch" Sulzberger has run the show:

The New Deal Didn’t Always Work, Either

By TYLER COWEN

MANY people are looking back to the Great Depression and the New Deal for answers to our problems. But while we can learn important lessons from this period, they’re not always the ones taught in school.

Enlarge This Image

David G. Klein

The traditional story is that President Franklin D. Roosevelt rescued capitalism by resorting to extensive government intervention; the truth is that Roosevelt changed course from year to year, trying a mix of policies, some good and some bad. It’s worth sorting through this grab bag now, to evaluate whether any of these policies might be helpful.

If I were preparing a “New Deal crib sheet,” I would start with the following lessons:

MONETARY POLICY IS KEY As Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz argued in a classic book, “A Monetary History of the United States,” the single biggest cause of the Great Depression was that the Federal Reserve let the money supply fall by one-third, causing deflation. Furthermore, banks were allowed to fail, causing a credit crisis. Roosevelt’s best policies were those designed to increase the money supply, get the banking system back on its feet and restore trust in financial institutions.

A study of the 1930s by Christina D. Romer, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley (“What Ended the Great Depression?,” Journal of Economic History, 1992), confirmed that expansionary monetary policy was the key to the partial recovery of the 1930s. The worst years of the New Deal were 1937 and 1938, right after the Fed increased reserve requirements for banks, thereby curbing lending and moving the economy back to dangerous deflationary pressures.

Today, expansionary monetary policy isn’t so easy to put into effect, as we are seeing a shrinkage of credit and a contraction of the “shadow banking sector,” as represented by forms of derivatives trading, hedge funds and other investments. So don’t expect the benefits of monetary expansion to kick in right now, or even six months from now.

Still, the Fed needs to stand ready to prevent a downward spiral and to stimulate the economy once it’s possible.

GET THE SMALL THINGS RIGHT It’s not just monetary and fiscal policies that are important. Roosevelt instituted a disastrous legacy of agricultural subsidies and sought to cartelize industry, backed by force of law. Neither policy helped the economy recover.

He also took steps to strengthen unions and to keep real wages high. This helped workers who had jobs, but made it much harder for the unemployed to get back to work. One result was unemployment rates that remained high throughout the New Deal period.

Today, President-elect Barack Obama faces pressures to make unionization easier, but such policies are likely to worsen the recession for many Americans.

DON’T RAISE TAXES IN A SLUMP The New Deal’s legacy of public works programs has given many people the impression that it was a time of expansionary fiscal policy, but that isn’t quite right. Government spending went up considerably, but taxes rose, too. Under President Herbert Hoover and continuing with Roosevelt, the federal government increased income taxes, excise taxes, inheritance taxes, corporate income taxes, holding company taxes and “excess profits” taxes.

When all of these tax increases are taken into account, New Deal fiscal policy didn’t do much to promote recovery. Today, a tax cut for the middle class is a good idea — and the case for repealing the Bush tax cuts for higher-income earners is weaker than it may have seemed a year or two ago.

WAR ISN’T THE WEAPON World War II did help the American economy, but the gains came in the early stages, when America was still just selling war-related goods to Europe and was not yet a combatant. The economic historian Robert Higgs, a senior fellow at the Independent Institute, has shown in his 2006 book, “Depression, War, and Cold War,” just how much the war brought shortages and rationing of consumer goods.

While overall economic output was rising, and the military draft lowered unemployment, the war years were generally not prosperous ones. As for today, we shouldn’t think that fighting a war is the way to restore economic health.

YOU CAN’T TURN BAD TO GOOD The good New Deal policies, like constructing a basic social safety net, made sense on their own terms and would have been desirable in the boom years of the 1920s as well. The bad policies made things worse. Today, that means we should restrict extraordinary measures to the financial sector as much as possible and resist the temptation to “do something” for its own sake.

In short, expansionary monetary policy and wartime orders from Europe, not the well-known policies of the New Deal, did the most to make the American economy climb out of the Depression. Our current downturn will end as well someday, and, as in the ’30s, the recovery will probably come for reasons that have little to do with most policy initiatives.

When you're the one suffering the consequences, you stop being clever, theoretical and ethereal.  You start getting real.  Maybe this article is the start of The New York Times' crossover.  At the very least, it's a nice change from the months of Obama worship at all costs, isn't it? 

I'll keep watching, to see if this is a trend or a one-day aberration.

Ken Berwitz

Sad news from the world of important people who media ignore.  Ms. Betty James passed away. 

Here is a short piece on who she is and what she did, from www.allheadlinenews.com:

 Betty James, Co-Founder Of Slinky Dead At 90

November 23, 2008 6:30 a.m. EST

Unlike media darlings such as Hillary Clinton, whose paths were eased every step of the way by a powerful, charismatic man, Betty James really was a true ceiling breaker for women.  And countless women who never knew her name (and never will unless they read allheadlinenews.com or this blog) owe much of their ability to compete in business today to her.

May she rest in peace.

Ken Berwitz

Ed Morrissey, late of www.hotair.com, writes an unsettling account of a) who is trying to talk sanity to robert mugabe, Zimbabwe's murderous thug "head of state" and b) why it is a waste of time:

Zimbabwe to “Elders”: Get lost

posted at 10:30 am on November 22, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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Zimbabwe has refused entry to Jimmy Carter and Kofi Annan for a humanitarian mission intended on estimating the amount of intervention needed to stave off a famine in the breadbasket of Africa.  Along with human-rights actvist Graca Machel, the so-called “Elders” assembled by Nelson Mandela failed in their opening mission to solve world hunger and “foster peace”:

Zimbabwe has refused to let Kofi Annan and two eminent colleagues visit the impoverished African country for a humanitarian mission, the three said Saturday.

The former U.N. secretary-general, ex-U.S. President Jimmy Carter and rights advocate Graca Machel had planned to assess the country’s needs. They are members of The Elders group, formed by former South African President Nelson Mandela to foster peace and tackle world conflicts.

Zimbabweans are suffering from disease and hunger while political crisis over a power-sharing government occupies its politicians. A current cholera outbreak has killed nearly 300 people in Zimbabwe, the United Nations said.

But the three were told Friday night by former South African President Thabo Mbeki, who is mediating the political crisis, that efforts to secure travel visas for the a two-day trip had failed.

There is no small amount of irony in this snub.  Robert Mugabe began his tyranny with the assistance of the Carter administration, as James Kirchick reported at the Weekly Standard last year.  Without Carter, Mugabe would likely have been just another terrorist thug chased around in the wilderness for a while until murdered by his own people.

Kofi Annan provides a different kind of irony.  The last humanitarian mission Annan led was the Oil-for-Food program at the UN.  That led to the worst corruption in history, with everyone getting paid off while enriching Saddam Hussein beyond the dreams of avarice.  The only people to suffer in that arrangement were the Iraqis that were supposed to get fed through direct aid, bypassing Iraqi sanctions.

Only Nelson Mandela would have thought to send these two on a mission to Harare.  Not even Mugabe wants to see these two frauds.

Ed is 100% right.  What we have here is two frauds - both lionized by international media, of course - begging a man indifferent to his own people's suffering and death to be nice. 

How pathetic.  How useless.

The world has demonstrated that the last thing it wants to do is save the people of Zimbabwe.  Sending carter and mandela to beg mugabe, as if he cared one little bit what they say, is conclusive proof.

Ken Berwitz

Here is the must succinct opinion I've seen so far of the bailout.

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Ken Berwitz

George Bush is now a lame duck President.  But if you think that effectively ends Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS), think again.  We have the lame duck variety of that too.

This example comes to us from CNN, via Noel Sheppard of www.newsbusters.org:

CNN Corrects Its Pathetic 'Bush Snubbed By World Leaders' Story

It's nice to see these hate-filled jerks looking like, well, like hate-filled jerks.  Again.  For a change.

George Bush may have had his deficiencies as a President (along with his successes).  But as a gentleman, he towers above BDS driven boobs like Sanchez.

Ken Berwitz

How can Gail Collins be this ignorant?  She's a columnist for the New York Ti.....oh, never mind.

Here is the beginning of Ms. Collins' piece in Today's New York Times.  I'm asking you to overlook the Bush hatred in the interests of assessing Ms. Collins' understanding of presidential succession:

Time for Him to Go

Ken Berwitz

What is going on here?

Last week I blogged about a vicar who had a potato surgically removed from his anal cavity (he claimed, so help me, that he was hanging drapes in the nude, fell backwards and landed on the potato in a way that shot it up there).

Now we have this, which comes to us courtesy of the UK's Saturday Metro:

Man blames penis iPhone gaffe on glitch

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Yeah, I've been having real problems with it - somehow it has managed to obtain photos of my genitals

A man who was caught by his wife sending pictures of his genitals to a lover via iPhone claimed it was caused by an Apple bug.

The incident has become an internet sensation after the wife, named Susan, made a posting on Apple's discussion forum asking for technical support.

She was trying to find out whether her husband had a genuine excuse, even though she had already caught him making late night phone calls and sending messages to other women.

New Jersey, eh?  I live in New Jersey.

That being the case, I want to take this opportunity to assure my beautiful wife of 39 years that I would never take a cell phone picture of me pleasuring myself. 

Of course, at this stage of my life that could mean I got a good night's sleep or rid myself of a gas pain by burping - or worse. 

But those are the only examples I'll give.  I definitely want to approach this subject genitally.....I mean gently.

Ken Berwitz

Don't take this as any endorsement of Ted Stevens.  Because it isn't.  Stevens lost his senate seat to Ted Begich and it's just as well. 

I have little doubt that, at the very least, Stevens bent the rules to get that work done on his home in Alaska.  And even if he didn't, the man  is 85 years old and has been the state's senator since Methusaleh was in diapers.  Enough.  Get some new thinking in there.

That said, however, it turns out that one of the key witnesses in his trial is now claiming, just weeks after Stevens' conviction, that he was given immunity to testify and was helped with the answers.  Here are excerpts from the Associated Press article which fleshes this sordid little story out.  Please pay special attention to the paragraph in bold print:

Witness against Sen. Stevens says he hid the truth

WASHINGTON—One of the government's witnesses against convicted Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska says he didn't tell the truth on the stand about an immunity deal with the Justice Department in exchange for his testimony. But federal prosecutors said Friday that his current story is the false one.

As you can see, the prosecutors vigorously deny Mr. Anderson's claims.  But suppose he was given immunity and coached.  Is it hard to conclude, as he did, that the trial would have gone much differently?  That there would have been a hung jury or even an acquittal?  And if so, is it hard to conclude that voting would have been affected in Stevens' favor?

We'll never know, will we?

Again, please do not take this as any endorsement of Ted Stevens.  But it has consequences that are more far-reaching than you might realize.

As Norm Coleman's senate seat appears well on the way to being stolen, and Democrats go full-force against Saxbe Chambliss of Georgia in the hopes that he will lose his runoff next month, it could be the difference between Democrats having or not having a so-called "filibuster-proof" 60 seats in the senate.

I will discuss Republican culpability  - and media culpability - regarding this potential one-party situation in a future blog.  Both have plenty of it.

Ken Berwitz

We've already gotten Rerun Emanuel and Eric Holdover....er, sorry, Rahm Emanuel and Eric Holder.....from the Clinton administration.  Can it be we're getting Clinton's "don't ask/don't tell" military policy too? 

When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he made it clear that one of his very first acts would be to accommodate gays in the military.  But instead, he acceded to the "don't ask/don't tell policy which doesn't seem to please anyone fully, least of all gay people who are in the military.

Now, if the Washington Times is correct, on this issue Barack Obama is going to be Clinton: round 2.  Here, from today's article, are the key excerpts:

Celie Johnson, the character played (beautifully) by Whoopi Goldberg in The Color Purple, said it well.  She said "the more things change the more they stay the same".  Maybe Mr. Obama should name Ms. Johnson an aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff because, unlike his LAMB (lunatic-left And Mega-moonbat Brigade) supporters, she demonstrated a level of common sense and reality that they seem unable to attain.

Besides, anyone who could make a pair of pants that fits both Barack Obama and the 1985 version of Oprah Winfrey must have something on the ball......

Ken Berwitz

This blog is not about the New York Times' value as a source of news (although I do reference it at the end).  It is about the New York Times' actual monetary value.  And the numbers are not pretty.

Please read the following piece, which is written by Paul Tharp of the New York Post (with the caveat that there is absolutely no love lost between these two newspapers).  See for yourself:

TIMES IN A PINCH, SLASHES DIVIDEND By PAUL THARP November 21, 2008 -- The Sulzbergers who control The New York Times are drastically slashing their family's dividend checks by nearly 75 percent to preserve their dwindling cash. Chairman Pinch Sulzberger alone will see his nearly $441,000 personal dividend check from last year shrink to about $115,000, according to filings. The company yesterday blamed the cutback on a 16.2 percent dive last month in advertising revenue amid the economic slump. Sulzberger said the company was forced to make the "difficult but necessary" decision to "conserve cash" and cut its quarterly dividend to just 6 cents from 23 cents. The smaller checks will start Dec. 15 for all shareholders, including outsiders. Overall, the cut reduces dividend payments to just $34.6 million a year, down from $132 million, based on 144 million Class A and Class B shares outstanding. The Times had just $46 million in cash and cash equivalents on its books as of last month. Times stock toppled to a new low for the year of $5.69 before closing at $5.72, off 63 cents, or 5.8 percent. In the past 12 months, family members and their trusts collected a total of more than $8.6 million on their 9.4 million shares, according to filings. This year, if the quarterly dividend remains 6 cents, the annual perk will drop to about $2.1 million for its dozens of beneficiaries. The Times said the cash squeeze is also forcing it to review assets that it might sell, which could include The Boston Globe. As of October, the Times had about $1.1 billion of debt on its books. The Times yesterday said operating revenue fell 9.4 percent to $296.8 million.

No one is saying the New York Times is going broke.  Yet.  But those are not what you'd call encouraging numbers, are they?

I get the Times delivered each morning.  I've started looking at that box in the upper left corner of the front page to see if they've changed the wording from "All the News That's Fit to Print", to "As Much News As We Can Afford the Ink to Print"

Congratulations to publisher "Pinch" Sulzberger.  Under your stewardship the once-great New York Times has abandoned any pretense of neutral journalism.  And, in no small part for that reason, it has gone from being "the paper of record" to "the paper of wreckage". 

You're certainly leaving your mark.

Ken Berwitz

All my life I've been told what a great job Franklin Delano Roosevelt did to end the depression.  From the "bank holidays" to the work projects to kingdom come. 

Since this is a subject that is starting to come up again because of our hard-and-getting-harder economic times, I know I'll be in for it when, as I have in the past, I disagree with the idolizing of FDR as some kind of economic savior.  This is based on previous reactions, which have ranged from overt disdain to suggestions that I might need professional help. 

Hey, everyone knows FDR got us out of the depression, don't they?  What kind of an idiot are you to say otherwise?

Well, I'm the kind of idiot that doesn't just accept things that are spoon-fed to me by media.  I've actually looked at the FDR years to some degree.  And while the depression did lesson in degree for several years during the 1930's - in relative terms - it remained a depression every one of those years, right up until World War II. 

The lowest yearly unemployment rate under FDR before 1941 (when we entered WWII) was about 14%.  How'd you like that as a "recovery" today?

Bottom line:  WWII, not FDR, ended the depression.

With this in mind, I am exhilarated by this academic analysis of the FDR years which, through much greater research than mine, came to the same conclusion.  And it was done, of all places, at UCLA.  Take a look at Meg Sullivan's article, at www.newsroom.ucla.edu,  and see for yourself:

FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate

I can only hope that someone shows this to Barack Obama, and that he reads it.  Every word.  Because if he does what FDR did in these times, we are going to be in huge trouble.

Frankly, though, his first few cabinet selections - left wing Democrats and mostly D.C. insiders - give me little hope of any such ephiphany on his part. 

Ken Berwitz

Here is the latest chapter in the stealing of Norm Coleman's senate seat on behalf of al franken.  It comes to us from www.twincities.com:

COLEMAN CAMPAIGN NOT HAPPY WITH FRANKEN'S GAIN IN RAMSEY

Mike Roman, Coleman's lead representative in Ramsey County, says he remains unsatisfied with the apparent emergence of 12 new ballots in a St. Paul precinct, but that the campaign's only recourse might be to take the issue to court — a step that would be made by campaign officials superior to him.

The issue could be important because, as of Thursday afternoon, Franken had picked up at least 13 more votes than he did Election Day.

The concern arose late yesterday when the total number of ballots sorted in Ward 3, Precinct 9 was discovered to be 1,759 — 12 more than the 1,747 that Roman said was tallied on Election Day. The precinct was recounted this morning with the same results.

But, unlike the process being done in other counties, Ramsey County Elections Manager Joe Masnky is not attempting to reconcile such differences in total ballots cast.

"I'm confident that these numbers are accurate," Mansky said of today's results. He had no explanation for the discrepancy in total ballots.

Roman said, "We're not satisfied at all. It's very difficult to challenge this situation because they're limiting this to voter intent on each ballot."

This election is being stolen right in front of our faces.  In the middle of town.  On the 50 yard line. 

And it stinks.

Ken Berwitz

Here is the piece from www.llittlegreenfootballs.com, which not only shows william ayers to be a liar, but also an idiot, whose idea of social justice is to just eliminate all prisons.

See for yourself:

"we ought to abolish the prisons, that's what I believe" (broad smile). 

This is an "educator" who teaches, thus influences, our children.  And Chicago mayor Richard Daley is a big fan.

Well, not to worry.  We have a brand new President, right out of the Chicago machine that gives us both ayers and Daley. 

Aren't we the lucky ones?

Ken Berwitz

joy behar is a co-host on The View. She is one of the liberal/left majority there and the most vicious, nasty and obnoxious of the bunch.

behar has a history of making stupid, offensive comments aimed at her many, many bogeymen and other assorted targets.  The latest?  Homeschooled children.

I'll let Tom Blumer of www.newsbusters.org explain:

Behar: 'A lot' of Homeschooled Kids Are 'Demented'

Michelle Malkin did a story on this too.  She was a tad less kind than Mr. Blumer in her description of behar:

“Demented:” Joy Behar disses homeschool students

Sadly, behar's mindless rants are almost always cheered on by the studio audience.  To the casual observer this might suggest that women (who vastly outnumber men in The View's audience) enthusiastically support her attitudes. 

Well, women in that audience do.  And little wonder.  Who do you think attends this show?  People who DON'T agree with the panelists?  Realistically, audience members, many of whom sent away months in advance to get their tickets, are fans.  They come to cheer, not to jeer.

Maybe that's what makes a joyless boor like this think her opinions are far more popular than they really are. 

Anyway, that's my view.

Ken Berwitz

Here is another story from www.chicagobreakingnews.com.  It's one that you don't come across every day, I assure you:

Woman gets to keep expensive ring she found

Somehow I don't foresee a happy ending here.

The story indicates that for the next few months people can lay claim to a ring that has largely been described in the story.  Call me a cynic, but I can't help thinking this is going to encourage a few "owners" to come forward.

And what if the real owner comes forward?  What's he going to say?  "Uh, it's a diamond and emerald pinkie ring and it's worth about $25,000"?

I hope he has a sales slip laying around somewhere.

Ken Berwitz

It never fails.

We enact laws that have good intentions, and within about three seconds there are people using those laws in an exploitative way. 

The king of the hill in this regard is Medicaid and Medicare.  Nothing even comes close.  But there countless other examples.  And here, courtesy of the LA Times, is one of them:

 U.S. Supreme Court refuses to hear Jarek Molski's appeal, letting stand a federal judge's ruling barring the disabled man from filing any further litigation.

The worst part is that any other disabled person who has a legitimate complaint or even makes a reasonable request for accommodation at one of these places might be seen as another jarek molski and treated accordingly. 

Is it fair?  No.  Is it understandable?  Yes, because molski made it so.

Merchants and restaurateurs should not have to spend their days cringing at the possibility that someone like this shows up to take them for whatever he can. 

Ken Berwitz

I guess the operative position here is that what Penny Pritzker did for Superior Bank of Chicago she can do for the entire country.

Here are the specifics, from www.chicagobreakingnews.com, which is run by WGN and the Chicago Tribune:

Chicagoan Penny Pritzker has emerged as President-elect Barack Obama's choice for commerce secretary, The New York Times is reporting.

Pritzker, who was the national finance chairman of the Obama campaign, was in the final stages of vetting for the post, according to the Times.

A longtime friend of Obama, Pritzker was a chief architect of his record-breaking fundraising efforts during the presidential campaign.

She is one of three cousins who manage their family dynasty's financial empire, which includes the Hyatt hotel chain, casinos and many other ventures.

But some of her business dealings may also raise tough questions during any confirmation process. She was involved in running and overseeing Superior Bank, an Illinois institution co-owned by her family that was at the forefront of turning subprime loans into securities, the risky practice at the heart of the financial crisis. The bank collapsed in 2001 after regulators discovered accounting irregularities that overstated its assets.

Are you kidding me?

She is a fund raiser.  A very successful one who benefitted Barack Obama tremendously.  Lucky for him.

But her efforts in banking were a DISASTER - and a shady disaster at that.  This is going to head our commerce department? 

We finally get an Obama appointment that isn't a rehash of the Clinton years, and this is our prize? 

God help us.

Ken Berwitz

Somehow I think a nice, new Playtex or Maidenform bra would have cost her less....

Mass. senator resigns after bribery charges

By STEVE LeBLANC, Associated Press Writer

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

(11-19) 12:45 PST BOSTON, (AP) --

A Massachusetts state senator photographed while allegedly stuffing thousands of dollars in bribe money into her sweater has resigned.

Dianne Wilkerson's resignation was announced Wednesday by state Senate President Therese Murray. Wilkerson was indicted a day before on eight counts of attempted extortion.

The Democrat had faced increasing pressure to step down and possible expulsion by her Senate colleagues since she was arrested last month.

The 53-year-old Wilkerson issued a statement saying she would have no further comment. She was in her eighth term on Beacon Hill.

If convicted, Wilkerson could face up to 20 years in prison.

Ken Berwitz

This just came to me from my pal Russ.

It is stupid, it stereotypes and it has no business in civil conversation....

but.....

it's clean (mostly) and funny as hell.  So up it goes:

NINE WORDS WOMEN USE:

(1) FINE : This is the word women use to end an argument when they are right and you need to shut up.

(2) FIVE MINUTES : If she is getting dressed, this means a half an hour. Five minutes is only five minutes if you have just been given five more minutes to watch the game before helping around the house.

(3) NOTHING : This is the calm before the storm. This means something, and you should be on your toes. Arguments that begin with nothing usually end in fine.

(4) GO AHEAD : This is a dare, not permission. Don't Do It!

(5) LOUD SIGH : This is actually a word, but is a non-verbal statement often misunderstood by men. A loud sigh means she thinks you are an idiot and wonders why she is wasting her time standing here and arguing with you about nothing. (Refer back to # 3 for the meaning of nothing.)

(6) THAT'S OK : This is one of the most dangerous statements a women can make to a man. That's okay means she wants to think long and hard before deciding how and when you will pay for your mistake.

(7) THANKS : A woman is thanking you, do not question, or faint. Just say you're welcome. (I want to add in a clause here - This is true, unless she says 'Thanks a lot' - that is PURE sarcasm and she is not thanking you at all. DO NOT say 'you're welcome' .. that will bring on a 'whatever').

(8) WHATEVER... : Is a woman's way of saying F-- YOU!

(9) DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT, I GOT IT : Another dangerous statement, meaning this is something that a woman has told a man to do several times, but is now doing it herself. This will later result in a  man asking 'What's wrong?' For the woman's response refer to # 3.

* Send this to the men you know, to warn them about arguments they can  avoid if they remember the terminology.
* Send this to all the women you know to give them a good laugh, cause they know it's true!!!

.

Ken Berwitz

How much does the Secretary of State earn in a year?  I don't know for sure.  But I'm pretty confident it is less that $7.6 million dollars.

Why would that number come to mind?  Because if Hillary Clinton is offered, accepts, and is confirmed as the US Secretary of State, that's how much money she is likely to get over and above her salary.

Here are the specifics, from Kenneth P. Vogel, writing for www.politico.com.  And if they don't outrage you, you are immune to outrage:

State: HRC’s ticket to debt forgiveness?
By: Kenneth P. Vogel
November 18, 2008 08:17 PM EST

If Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes Barack Obama’s secretary of state, she could wipe away her lingering $7.6 million presidential campaign debt.

As the nation’s top diplomat, she would be barred by tradition and ethics rules from partisan political activity, including raising cash to pay off debt from her unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

And that could give her a powerful case to make to the Federal Election Commission about why it should forgive her campaign debt through a settlement process not unlike filing for bankruptcy.

“Her ability to raise money would be ended by going into the administration,” said former FEC chairman Michael Toner, who recently served as the top lawyer on Fred Thompson’s failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

In deciding whether to grant a so-called “debt settlement agreement” and close out a campaign committee, Toner explained that commissioners “look at whether you have ability to raise funds, the length of time that’s passed and whether you are otherwise eligible to terminate.”

That means ensuring that there are no pending FEC complaints against her campaign – which is tough to determine since the commission doesn’t publicly list complaints it’s investigating – and that the vendors still owed money agree to forgive their unpaid bills.

Clinton’s outstanding invoices are almost entirely with Washington-based allies and political firms less likely to clamor for cash than mom-and-pop businesses outside the Beltway.

Firms that do a lot of work for campaigns understand that complaining to the press or suing over lingering bills are big no-nos, likely to get them blacklisted, David Louis Plevan, an official with Electrum Productions, told Politico after Clinton bowed out of the race in June.

At the end of September, his firm, which staged more than 500 events for the Democratic senator from New York, was owed more than $300,000 by her campaign. It also owed $5.3 million to pollster and strategist Mark Penn’s firm, $830,000 to her direct mail firm, $250,000 to the company of top spokesman Howard Wolfson and $235,000 to strategist Minyon Moore’s firm.

The Obama transition team declined to say whether Clinton’s debt was a factor in her vetting for secretary of state. And her spokesman, Philippe Reines, deflected a question about whether she would pay back the debt if she was tapped.

“Senator Clinton has said that paying off her campaign vendors is a priority for her, and she remains committed to that goal,” said Reines , adding that the campaign, which reported $7.9 million in vendor debt at the end of September had paid back about $300,000 in the last six weeks.

Overall, though, Clinton has had a rough time raising cash to retire her debt since dropping out of the presidential race. She already missed a deadline to recoup any of the $13.2 million in personal loans she made to the campaign, and her campaign hasn’t paid any of its outstanding bills to Penn or Moore, while it paid back only $17,000 to Wolfson.

It’s common for big campaigns, particularly losing ones, to let unpaid bills linger, sometimes for years (This year, for instance, Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign reported $219,000 in debts, though all of it was disputed).

Still, the size of Hillary Clinton’s vendor debt is unprecedented, and it likely would be the largest debt settlement in FEC history, eclipsing the $2.7 million debt that John Glenn’s ill-fated 1984 presidential campaign carried for more than 20 years before the FEC forgave it.

If Clinton remained in the Senate, she could “just keep reporting the debt and whittling away at it as she can,” said former FEC commissioner David Mason.

“But if she does go to the State Department, obviously that’s off the table, so she may have more incentive to get the debt taken care of right away,” he said, though he stressed that Clinton could petition the FEC for debt settlement regardless of whether she takes a Cabinet post.

There’s not a whole lot of precedent for forgiving the campaign debt of an incoming Cabinet member.

When Bruce Babbitt became secretary of the interior under Bill Clinton in 1993, the FEC forgave $128,000 in debt he had carried from his 1988 presidential campaign. And Mason recalled the case of a former House member who lost his seat and took a Cabinet post in his home state’s government, which forbade him from engaging in political activity.

“The commission took that into consideration in the debt settlement agreement,” said Mason, who posited that Clinton’s debt likely won’t play a role in her decision about whether to join the Obama administration. “It’s not really a problem for her, so going to State is not really a solution, because it’s not a problem in the first place.”

If Clinton became secretary of state, she’d also have to empty her leadership political action committee,  which had nearly $700,000 in the bank in mid-October, and her Senate reelection committee. It had nearly $6 million on hand at the end of September – a lot of which was rolled over from general election contributions to her presidential campaign, which could not be used to pay back her debt. She could give the cash from both committees to the Democratic National Committee, charity or dole it out among candidates.

Ken Berwitz

My very dear friend Bob just sent me this.  I am passing it along to you in the hope that you feel the same way about it that he and I do.  And that you pass it along as I have. 

Navy Petty Officer Mike Monsoor 
 
  PO2 (EOD2)(Explosive Ordnance Disposal) Mike Monsoor, a Navy EOD Technician, was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously for jumping on a grenade in Iraq , giving his life to save his fellow Seals.
 
 During Mike Monsoor's funeral in San Diego , as his coffin was being moved from the hearse to the grave site at Ft. Rosecrans National Cemetery, SEAL's were lined up on both sides of the pallbearers route forming a column of two's, with the coffin moving up the center.  As Mike's coffin passed, each SEAL, having removed his gold Trident from
 his uniform, slapped it down embedding the Trident in the wooden coffin . 
 
  The slaps were audible from across the cemetery; by the time the  coffin arrived grave side, it looked as though it had a gold inlay from all the Tridents pinned to it.  This was a fitting send-off for a warrior hero .
 
 This should be front-page news instead of the crap we see every day.
 
 Since the media won't make this news, I choose to make it news by forwarding it onto you guys. I am damn proud of our military. If you are proud too, please pass this on.  If not then rest assured that these fine men and women of our military will continue to serve and  protect.

Keep in mind that this act of bravery occurred OVER TWO YEARS AGO (September, 2006).  And I'm betting you never heard of him.

Pass it along.  Please.

Ken Berwitz

Yesterday I did the short form on who and what Barack Obama's choice for Attorney General, Eric Holder, is.

Today we have National Review's more extensive analysis of Mr. Holder - his unseemly past actions and his then and current views.

Here it is, without any bold print from me:

Confirming Fears
By the Editors

I would love to have a one-on-one sitdown with some of the people who have claimed that the Bush administration didn't make us safer (some claim it made us less safe - fascinating since we haven't been hit since 9/11).  I would like to ask them what effect an Attorney General like Eric Holder might have on how safe they feel.

I saw a clip of Holder on the Today Show this morning, telling a panel that if he knew then what he knows now, he would not have given a favorable opinion on Bill Clinton's pardon of the despicable international criminal marc rich. 

That sounds like a complete lie to me.  What do we know now about rich that we didn't know then, besides nothing?  But don't expect to see mainstream media nailing Holder for the lie.  They're too busy drooling over his boss-to-be.

Incidentally, is Mr. "Change We Can Believe In/Change We Need" intending to appoint anyone who wasn't in the Clinton administration?

Ken Berwitz

Read this piece from www.yahoo.com and see how well or poorly you think al qaeda ingratiated itself to Barack Obama:

Al-Qaida No. 2 insults Obama with racial epithet

Play Video AP  – Al-Qaida No. 2 insults Obama in new tape

 

CAIRO, Egypt – Al-Qaida's No. 2 leader used a racial epithet to insult Barack Obama in a message posted Wednesday, describing the president-elect in demeaning terms that imply he does the bidding of whites.

The message appeared chiefly aimed at persuading Muslims and Arabs that Obama does not represent a change in U.S. policies. Ayman al-Zawahri said in the message, which appeared on militant Web sites, that Obama is "the direct opposite of honorable black Americans" like Malcolm X, the 1960s African-American rights leader.

In al-Qaida's first response to Obama's victory, al-Zawahri also called the president-elect — along with secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice — "house negroes."

Speaking in Arabic, al-Zawahri uses the term "abeed al-beit," which literally translates as "house slaves." But al-Qaida supplied English subtitles of his speech that included the translation as "house negroes."

The message also includes old footage of speeches by Malcolm X in which he explains the term, saying black slaves who worked in their white masters' house were more servile than those who worked in the fields. Malcolm X used the term to criticize black leaders he accused of not standing up to whites.

The 11-minute 23-second video features the audio message by al-Zawahri, who appears only in a still image, along with other images, including one of Obama wearing a Jewish skullcap as he meets with Jewish leaders. In his speech, al-Zawahri refers to a Nov. 5 U.S. airstrike attack in Afghanistan, meaning the video was made after that date.

Al-Zawahri said Obama's election has not changed American policies he said are aimed at oppressing Muslims and others.

"America has put on a new face, but its heart full of hate, mind drowning in greed, and spirit which spreads evil, murder, repression and despotism continue to be the same as always," the deputy of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden said.

He said Obama's plan to shift troops to Afghanistan is doomed to failure, because Afghans will resist.

"Be aware that the dogs of Afghanistan have found the flesh of your soldiers to be delicious, so send thousands after thousands to them," he said.

Al-Zawahri did not threaten specific attacks, but warned Obama that he was "facing a Jihadi (holy war) awakening and renaissance which is shaking the pillars of the entire Islamic world; and this is the fact which you and your government and country refuse to recognize and pretend not to see."

He said Obama's victory showed Americans acknowledged that President George W. Bush's policies were a failure and that the result was an "admission of defeat in Iraq."

But Obama's professions of support for Israel during the election campaign "confirmed to the Ummah (Islamic world) that you have chosen a stance of hostility to Islam and Muslims," al-Zawahri said.

al qaeda's mission is to either convert the people of the world to lunatic-asylum quality radical Islam or kill them.  Short of joining the movement, nothing Barack Obama can do will make al qaeda any happier with him than they were with George Bush.

The people who thought a Black, leftward President who is willing to act in a friendlier way to Palestinian Arabs at the expense of Israel would be attractive to these subhumans were wrong.  The ones (including, I am sure, a lot of the same people) who thought al qaeda would be less threatening to us if George Bush were out of the picture?  Wrong again.

It's a little late for this learning curve, but there it is. 

Personally, I hope Mr. Obama thinks long and hard about what being called a "house Negro" means to him -- and then thinks just as long and just as hard about how he feels towards groups who are in any way supportive of or sympathetic to the ones calling him this offensive, dismissive insult.

If we're very fortunate, it will affect his presidency.

Ken Berwitz

When you were a kid and got into a jam because of something you did, your mother probably told you that "you made your own bed, now lie in it"

Well, for months media in this country have protected Barack Obama from fallout regarding his association with USA hating terrorist scumbag william ayers.  Part of the effort has been to suppress the extent of their relationship.  And part of it has been to "rehabilitate" ayers by positioning him as a wonderful, dedicated educator and a pillar of the community.

Now that the election is over, however, ayers has unleashed himself on the public and we're seeing a bit more of what he is.  For one, he just published a book in which he refers to Mr. Obama as a "family friend".  This, of course, puts the lie to Mr. Obama's claim that ayers was just some guy he knew from the neighborhood, who (coincidentally) served on a couple of boards with him. 

Fascinatingly, after publication of the book, ayers denied the closeness of their relationship while being interviewed on Good Morning America.  But hey, why not?  If the election of 2008 proved anything it proved that there is a large segment of the public who will believe whatever they're told, even if today contradicts yesterday which contradicted the day before.

And ayers is also suddenly a lot more public about how radically leftist his views remain.  As an example, the final part of this post is a swatch of ayers' writing, which I came across at www.littlegreenfootballs.com.  Try to stay awake reading it - long enough to read Charles Johnson's funny and pointed comment at the end.

Ken Berwitz

The following full page ad appears in this week's Washington Times National Weekly:

I give credit to Barack Obama and his people, who have successfully stonewalled every attempt to force Mr. Obama to show his actual birth certificate.  Not the facsimile which proves nothing to anyone(and which may well have been doctored).

I also give credit to our wonderful "neutral" mainstream media, which was far more invested in learning how much Sarah Palin's clothes cost than in finding out if the Democratic nominee is legally able to serve as President.  If media wanted a legacy that really lasts, this will almost certainly give it to them.

And I ask again, as I have been asking for months:  A call to Hawaii and a processing fee of $10 will get the birth certificate that proves whether or not Mr. Obama is legally able to serve as President.  But instead of producing it, Mr. Obama and the Democratic party instead hired a small army of lawyers to prevent every attempt to see that birth certificate.  How do you not conclude that there is something on it that Mr. Barack does not want you to see?  Something really significant.

I wish Mr. Berg and the others who are demanding proof of Mr. Obama's eligibility every success. 

And I condemn the major media that have intentionally looked the other way, suppressing virtually all news of the lawsuits filed to force Mr. Obama to produce the "vault copy" of his birth certificate (filings in about 10 states now) and the progress of those lawsuits.

But listen to them squeal like stuck pigs if you call them biased.

Ken Berwitz

Subject to confirmation (which should be a piece of cake in this senate) Eric Holder will be Barack Obama's Attorney General.

Holder is that wonderful fellow who ran interference for Bill Clinton and gave him a favorable opinion on pardoning the international criminal marc rich - after rich shtupped Clinton with tons of donations channeled through his ex-wife denise (who, it was rumored, was being shtupped by  Clinton).  Lovely, just lovely.  And so "clinton", wouldn't you say?

But that isn't the fascinating little factoid.  The fascinating little factoid is that Mr. Holder was also George Bush's first Attorney General. 

Yes, you read that correctly.  He was acting AG for a few weeks between the time Mr. Bush took office and John Ashcroft was confirmed.

I have no idea what any of this means, but I thought it was interesting.  I hope you do too.

Ken Berwitz

Readers of this blog know my position that the United Nations is dead.  Ethically, morally and spiritually dead.  But maybe you disagree.

Well, if so, consider this Associated Press story, which I picked up at www.newsmax.com:

U.N. Unveils New 23 Million Dollar Ceiling

Tuesday, November 18, 2008 1:00 PM

A $23 million ceiling painting featuring hundreds of dangling icicle shapes that has been criticized for its hefty price tag was unveiled Tuesday at the United Nations. The 16,000-square-foot (1,500-square-meter) elliptical dome full of bright colors and torn aluminum took over a year to produce. Spanish abstract artist Miquel Barcelo used more than 100 tons of paint with pigments from all over the world, and worked with architects, engineers and even particle physics laboratories to develop the extra-strength aluminum for the dome. "On a day of immense heat in the middle of the Sahel desert, I recall with vivacity the mirage of an image of the world dripping toward the sky," Barcelo says. "Trees, dunes, donkeys, multicolored beings flowing drop by drop." The Spanish Foreign Ministry says the government is funding 40 percent of the costs, with the rest footed by private-sector donors. Of the public money, 500,000 euros (US$633,000) comes from a budget for overseas development aid and international organizations like the United Nations. Spain's conservative opposition Popular Party complained that this means money was diverted from projects to alleviate poverty and boost health care in poorer countries, but the ministry insists the funding for Barcelo's work was separate. The dispute reached Parliament last week, with Popular Party lawmaker Gonzalo Robles asking "how many thousands of children could have been looked after" with the money spent on the artwork. The ruling Socialists accused him of twisting the facts. A Tuesday news conference with Barcelo and Spain's foreign minister was canceled in Geneva. The government also has not said how much it paid the artist for the commission. The Spanish mission in Geneva declined to comment. At a ceremony with Spain's King Juan Carlos, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon thanked Barcelo for putting his "unique talents to work in service of the world." "The artwork you have created for this room is innovative and radiant," the secretary-general said. "I have no doubt that people will come to see it whether they have business here or not."

When I was growing up we used to fool around with those picture puzzles, the ones where you had to find some number of frogs, faces, cars, fish, etc hidden in a drawing.  The paper at that time cost 5 cents. 

Now, for the bargain-basement price of $23,000,000, UN diplomats can take time out from talking themselves silly, parking their cars illegally and expense-account dining at Manhattan's finest restaurants, to see how many trees, dunes, donkeys and multi-colored beings they can come up with while they walk under the dome.

And no complaints please.  I mean, really, can anyone honestly say the UN could have found a better use for $23,000,000? 

Ken Berwitz

Here is a blog from P.J. Gladnick, writing for www.newsbusters.org, complete with a video that will either make you laugh hysterically or send you into a deep depression. 

Either way it is a classic example of how media mis-, dis- and un-inform voters.

Obama Voters Demonstrate How Their Views Shaped by MSM

On November 4th, 2008 millions of Americans were shocked that a man of Barack Obama's limited experience, extreme liberal positions and radical political alliances could be elected President of the United States. For many of these Americans, the explanation was rather simple... the news media, completely enamored with Obama, simply refused to do their job.

On Election day twelve Obama voters were interviewed extensively right after they voted to learn how the news media impacted their knowledge of what occurred during the campaign. These voters were chosen for their apparent intelligence/verbal abilities and willingness to express their opinions to a large audience. The rather shocking video below seeks to provide some insight into which information broke through the news media clutter and which did not. 

The dozen Obama voters were asked the same 12 questions. Here are the results when they were asked which political party currently controls Congress:

ADARSHA: Umm.. Currently? Like? ...I don't know actually.

MELINDA: The Republicans.

NICK: Uh, Republicans.

JANAN: Probably Republicans because the President is Republican. That's my honest answer. 

The rest of the Obama voters either didn't know or thought the Republicans controlled Congress. These voters were then asked about Barney Frank and Harry Reid but none knew who they were. Andree had heard of Nancy Pelosi but didn't know if she was a Democrat or Republican.

Despite this complete lack of information about Democrat congressional leaders, all of those interviewed in the video knew that it was Sarah Palin who had a pregnant teenage daughter and whose party spent $150,000 for clothes. They also "knew" that Palin "said" she could see Russia from her door even though it was actually Tina Fey doing a Palin impression on SNL.  None of t