Bill’s Blog

“Not for the politically correct.”

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DrudgeReport.com

War Powers | Al Sharpton | Terror Hysteria | Sharon Legal Threat | Columbia Space Disaster | “Timid” Air War

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The people who have sued are pro-Saddam, but they are performing a valuable public service. We need a definitive answer from the courts on the legality of the war on terror. Bush should ask Congress for a declaration of war so the country and world will know the will of the American people. It would also help in sharply defining the line between legitimate dissent and treason.

The representatives joining the suit, all Democrats, are John Conyers of Michigan, Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, James McDermott of Washington, Jose Serrano of New York, Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas and Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois.

Question 1: why does anyone take this anti-Semitic hate-monger seriously?

Question 2: why does anyone take a purveyor of falsehoods seriously?

Question 3: how does an anti-Semite hater like Sharpton qualify as a “Christian?”

Question 4: if the Democratic presidential candidates don’t have the moral fortitude to do right and denounce Sharpton, why would anyone want them in the White House?

Question 5: why is the Racial Left tail being allowed to wag the American dog?

Ever since Democrats gathered in Washington Jan. 21 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of legalized abortion, the party's deep thinkers have been brooding. The Rev. Al Sharpton, who preached before he could read or write, made five white opponents for the presidential nomination look prosaic. In the three weeks since, more prominent Democrats have come to regard the 48-year-old Pentecostal minister from Harlem as their worst nightmare.

How could the world's oldest political party be threatened by a professional troublemaker accused of not paying his taxes and found guilty of defaming innocent public officials? The answer is found in two independent polls. Zogby shows Sharpton with 20 percent of the African-American vote for president, and InsiderAdvantage gives him 28 percent. These startling numbers come in advance of Sharpton’s campaign to extend his presence beyond the boundaries of New York City.

This is a problem waiting to happen for the Democratic Party thanks to reliance on black voters, particularly in the South. Democrats dodged the bullet when the Rev. Jesse Jackson ran for president (and succeeded in ruining young Al Gore's 1988 bid aimed at sweeping Southern primaries). This reliance is much stronger 15 years later, and a black candidate promises to distort an already confused contest for the nomination.

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The NARAL Pro-Choice America dinner Jan. 21 was an eye opener. All six declared presidential hopefuls delivered dutiful but uninspired affirmations (with Sen. Joe Lieberman, treasuring his social conservative credentials, enshrining abortion as an American tradition). Sharpton stirred the audience by declaring: “'It is time for the Christian Right to meet the right Christian.'”

Who will cut down Sharpton and expose his flaws? Not major Democratic players, and certainly not the other presidential candidates. Former Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun, defeated for re-election from Illinois in 1998 after a scandal-scarred single term, is suggested as a second black presidential candidate. It is too transparent a ploy to dilute Sharpton's vote to succeed.

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Like contemporary Britons, Americans are showing that their forbearers were made of sterner stuff.

The irony here is that Washington, D.C., along with Massachusetts, voted for that advocate of the Vietnamese Communists, George McGovern in the presidential election of 1972. The Vietnamese Communists committed every form of terrorism.

 Where is our citizen war footing?

Sixty years ago, enterprising and patriotic Americans saved tinfoil and bacon grease to help defeat Hitler during World War II, heeding the old Office of War Information motto, “Use it up. Wear it out. Make it last.”

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They were not making a run on the local supplies of bottled water and duct tape in a hysteria somewhere between snowstorm panic and the last shopping day before Christmas.

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U.S. officials deployed Avenger anti-aircraft missiles and extra radar around Washington following President Bush's decision Friday to raise the alert status from yellow to orange, the second-highest level. The Air Force has stepped up its combat air patrols over the capital, defense officials said.

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Three problems here:

1) The Belgian court’s arrogation of the right to try foreigners violates the sovereignty of other nations.

2) The court is allowing itself to be used by the Left to persecute politically incorrect regimes. Don’t expect them to be prosecuting more notorious war criminals like General Giap or Yasser Arafat any time soon. They should track down Osama bin Laden and prosecute him.

3) The Palestinians are citizens of a terror-sponsoring “state.”

The case against Sharon and Yaron dates back to 2001, when survivors of the 1982 massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut filed a criminal complaint, holding the two Israelis responsible for the deaths of their relatives. Christian militias, backed by Israel, did the killing, but an Israeli commission of inquiry in 1983 concluded that Sharon, then the defense minister, had a personal responsibility for the events.

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WASHINGTON -- A NASA engineer weighed the possibility of a "catastrophic" failure resulting from extreme heat on the shuttle Columbia's tires despite assurances days earlier that possible damage to insulating tiles near the landing gear wouldn't imperil the crew. In internal e-mails released by NASA on Wednesday, one safety engineer, Robert H. Daugherty, warned that extreme temperatures during a fiery descent could cause the wheel to fail and the tire to burst inside Columbia's wheel well.

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Another way in which Bush seems to be imitating LBJ, making military decisions on the basis of media coverage. He should put the lives of American servicemen first.

The Bush administration's desire to spare dual military-civilian targets in Iraq has produced an air war plan that is too timid and does not properly prepare the battle space for ground troops, according to interviews with military officers.

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OpinionJournal.com

Doris Day | Iran

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Yes, the youth of the Sixties were a “destructive generation.” Actually, only half of them rejected their parents’ values, which included patriotism.

Ms. [Doris] Day's name has been evoking sneers since the late '60s, when the boomers hijacked the culture and jettisoned as irredeemably lame everything their parents had valued. Prominent on that list were chastity and its foremost exemplar. Nowadays the boomers are themselves the parents of teenagers, and they no longer frown on chastity with the same vigor. But they are not yet willing to bring Ms. Day in from the cold.

It's odd that “Doris Day” remains a byword for the opposite of sex. Her period of stardom coincided almost exactly with the baby boom, when exuberant procreation was the national pastime. She presided over this fecund era like a freckle-faced fertility goddess, exuding pheromones that lured men into matrimony.

Saddam invaded Iran during the Hostage Crisis, probably because they thought that the fall of the Shah had fatally weakened it. The whole thing, and the troubles that followed, might have been averted had Carter stuck behind the Shah, whose rule wasn’t nearly as oppressive as that of the Ayatollahs.

Saddam is, for Iranians, a different kind of enemy. He struck at their state when the new theocracy had begun to consolidate its rule. A whole Iranian generation was decimated in the trenches of that primitive, senseless war. Saddam had the temerity to claim Islam in that war as a racial, Arab, inheritance. He dismissed Iranians as “fire-worshipping Persians,” feeding off the atavisms in the Arab-Persian divide. Desert Storm--the spectacle of the tyrant's armies surrendering to Americans, fleeing for their lives--had in it elements of divine retribution. There was the catharsis of a Persian passion play, the wicked getting his comeuppance. So what if the avenger was himself unjust?

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FrontPageMag.com

Hollywood “anti-war” | Noam Chomsky | Hollywood Boycott | German Appeasement | N Korean Missiles | Zimbabwe

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A refreshing alternative to the Pope’s pro-Saddam stance.

Some people argue (as I do) that, under the original Catholic doctrine of jus ad bellum, a limited and carefully conducted war to bring about a change of regime in Iraq is, as a last resort, morally obligatory. For public authorities to fail to conduct such a war would be to put their trust imprudently in the sanity and goodwill of Saddam Hussein. Should Saddam violate their trust by a biological attack on a Western city, public authorities who made themselves hostage to his moral reliability would have inexcusably ignored his record.

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The aim of a just war is the blocking of great evil, the restoration of peace and the defence of minimum conditions of justice and world order. For both Sts. Augustine and Aquinas, just war does not "begin with a presumption against violence," but rather with a presumption that addresses first the duties of public authorities to charity and justice and, second, takes seriously a sinful world in which injustice and violence against the innocent will continue for all time.

No one today denies that international terrorism is a deliberate assault on the very possibility of international order, or that public authorities have a duty to confront this terrorism, and to defeat it. Either the world community now upholds international order or it backs down from its own solemn agreements. In the latter case, individual sovereign nations will refuse to be complicit in the policy of appeasement. To do otherwise would be to join Saddam's conspiracy against international order, and to accrue responsibility for anything he might do.

The usual suspects: Barbra Streisand, George Clooney, Kim Basinger, Richard Gere, Dustin Hoffman, Madonna, Kate Moss, Janeane Garofalo, Sean Penn, Teddy Kennedy

A good definition of pre-McGovern liberals. Note that they advocated a strong central government.

As loathe as I am to give advice to the liberals who have just been so badly routed in the recent election, my sense of Christian compassion makes me feel a twinge of pity and a desire to at least prevent their total destruction. So here's my advice: the left has to rediscover cold war liberalism or it is finished. The cold war liberals were the leaders of the early and mid 20th Century, men like JFK, Lionel Trilling and Norman Podhoretz, who advocated social programs, racial tolerance and a safety net but where fiercely pro-defense, anti-communist and unapologetically patriotic.

The day before Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his damning report on Iraq to the United Nations, the most despicable America-hater in all of academia— Noam Chomsky— gave an interview to the Guardian, in which he lowered his political crosshairs not on the deadly regime of Saddam Hussein but on members of the Bush Administration, whom he views as evil warmongers intent on world domination. To those familiar with Chomsky, these anti-American assertions concerning Iraq were predictable.

The best way to fight the disloyal Hollywood types—stop going to their movies. If enough people do this they won’t be able to get any parts. The fear of boycott in the 1950s was the reason for the “blacklist.” The lifting of the “blacklist” is why Hollywood is so disloyal.

Prager might not know it, but he's not alone. According to a poll in The Hollywood Reporter, one of the two primary entertainment industry trade papers, 44 percent of Americans say they might not pay to see a movie that stars a politically active celebrity whom they disagree with.

Among the Hollywood Left, Jane Fonda, Alec Baldwin and Barbra Streisand have the most to worry about in regard to offending their audience, according to the poll, which was taken in May.

And, before Hollywood's activist celebrities dismiss talk radio as insignificant, they should understand just how large the medium's audience is: up to 47 million people over the age of 18 tune into talk radio each week, according to industry analysis.

That makes talk radio the No. 1 format among adults. Some of those adults even buy movie tickets.

Beyond Prager, others with national talk-radio shows are also seeking ways to counter Hollywood's endless, leftist babble.

“Any chance we have to ridicule them, we’ll take it,” Laura Ingraham said about the Hollywood Left, just before the industry's Academy Awards nominations were made public.

Oliver Stone, Madonna and Richard Gere might even make good “human shields” for Saddam Hussein, Ingraham joked on her show.

Stone earned the mention for his “wet kiss” to Fidel Castro via the new documentary film Comandante; Madonna for an upcoming music video that reportedly is an anti-war statement containing scenes of wounded Iraqi babies; and Gere for his anti-Bush diatribe in Germany recently.

An interesting twist on the 1930s—Germany as the appeaser.

At the annual Wehrkunde conference held this past weekend, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld urge Europeans not to repeat the mistakes of the 1930s when the democracies and the League of Nations failed to deter fascist aggression. According to press reports, the lectures about the lessons of Munich did not only come from the United States. Portuguese Defense Minister Paulo Portas reminded Germany's Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer of the failures of European pacifism of the 1930s beginning with its inability to counter the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. Fischer responded brusquely , “You don't need to talk to me about that” and noted he, Fischer, had supported the use of force in Kosovo and Afghanistan. Yet Portas, and others, certainly do need to talk to Foreign Minister Fischer and many other Germans “about that.” For despite the fact that “coming to terms with the Nazi past“ has preoccupied Germans in recent decades, this discussion has not included extensive discussion of the issues of appeasement, the breakdown of collective security and the absence of preemptive war in the late 1930s. The Schroder government's unequivocal opposition to American policy concerning Iraq has now brought this feature of German political culture to the fore.

WASHINGTON (AP) - North Korea has an untested ballistic missile capable of reaching the western United States, intelligence officials said Wednesday.

The North Korean missile is a three-stage version of the Taepo Dong 2, said Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. It has not been flight-tested, Jacoby said, leaving some questions about the North Korea's capability to successfully launch the missile.

CIA Director George J. Tenet, who joined Jacoby in briefing the Senate Armed Services Committee, also acknowledged the North Koreans have the capability to reach the western United States with a long-range missile.

Previous U.S. intelligence reports have said such a missile probably could carry a nuclear weapon-sized payload across the Pacific Ocean.

One of the agreements that ended the war in Rhodesia was that the white farmers would be allowed to keep their land. Now Mugabe has effectively taken the land from them and turned it over to Communist China.

It seems unlikely that the Chinese will be able to bring in a crop before a famine starts in Rhodesia.

Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe, has awarded a contract to grow food crops on more than 100,000 hectares to a Chinese company in a desperate attempt to avert an unprecedented farming crisis.

The land was mostly seized from white farmers and is now lying derelict after its new black owners failed to take it up because no agricultural equipment was available.

Mr Mugabe's decision to approve the land allocations to the China International Water and Electric Corporation, a state-owned company, contradicts his claims that he wants to empower black Zimbabweans by giving them land seized from white farmers.

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Jewish World Review.com

Islam | O.J. Simpson | Apocolypse | Racial Left

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Rhetoric about ‘religion of peace’ leads to tunnel vision about Islamist terror

Bush is showing a lack of leadership here. Islam is only a “religion of peace” for those who submit to Allah. Those who don’t are considered to be in the “house of war.”

Bush should stick to the truth. If we’d wanted a dishonest president Gore would have been elected.

One wonders if the denial of the facts of the Islamic faith began as a form of appeasement of the Elijah Mohammed Black Muslims. Another possibility: Yasser Arafat being taken under the Soviet wing circa 1967.

While taking a resolute posture towards the terrorists, those aligned with them and those “allies” who seek to protect them, Bush seems to go positively weak at the knees at the very thought that America’s war on terror is aimed at Islam or its adherents in general.

Of course, he's right about that. But the lengths to which the administration has gone to make this point have become almost comical. Indeed, Bush has recited the mantra, “Islam is a religion of peace,” so often that the expression has become something of a standing joke on popular Web sites, such as the Wall Street Journal’s “Best of the Web” on their opinionjournal.com site.

He isn’t alone in this respect. In the general rush to educate Americans about our enemies in the war on terror without succumbing to stereotyping an entire faith, a new level of political correctness has been achieved.

The female octopus treats visitors at the Hellabrunn Zoo to daily displays of her dexterity and has learned to discern between empty jars and those containing her favorite snacks of shrimp, crabs and clams.

Zoo attendants taught the octopus the skill by repeatedly opening a jar underwater where she could see it and eventually she tried it herself.

He should have thought about this before he killed Nicole.

About three years ago, my husband came home from work and said, “O.J.’s kids are gonna kill him one day.” He just happened to be thinking about the whole situation, and that was all he said. So when the news item about Simpson's daughter's 911 call came across the AP wire a week ago, my husband's portent returned to me.

Anyone who understood the Colonel Holmes letter could see this train wreck coming.

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That is how one acts on holiday: Mortal enemies are dealt with not as combatants, but as defendants. Clinton flattered himself as looking beyond such mundane problems to a grander transnational vision (global warming, migration and the like), while dispatching American military might to quell “teacup wars” in places like Bosnia. On June 19, 2000, the Clinton administration solved the rogue-state problem by abolishing the term and replacing it with “states of concern.”' Unconcerned, the rogues prospered, arming and girding themselves for big wars.

Which are now upon us. On Sept. 11, the cozy illusions and stupid pretensions died. We now recognize the central problem of the 21st century: the conjunction of terrorism, rogue states and weapons of mass destruction.

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JWR

So much for the Clinton “education plan”

Note: In his autobiography, Radical Son, David Horowitz’s Communist mom told him that Rosa Parks was “one of us” when Parks was arrested in 1995.

One wonders what the high school graduation rate for blacks was in Little Rock in the segregation days.

One of the truths the Left refuses to recognize: disproportionate black crime. The result of the belief that “antisocial behavior is a legitimate expression of black culture.”

News item: Jesse Jackson attacks the commercially successful “crossover” black film Barbershop. In a brief scene, one of the characters argues that other blacks refused to surrender their seats on Jim Crow buses before Rosa Parks famously did so in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955. Even though another character immediately calls the remark disrespectful, Jackson demands an apology from the studio, and requests that the studio edit out the “offensive” scene in the DVD and VHS versions. No justice, no peace!

Real news item: Nationwide, only 55 percent of black kids graduate from high school, while whites pass at 76 percent. According to The Wall Street Journal, “Three years ago in New York, the percentage of black students who did not graduate from high school was 54 percent. In California, 41 percent. In Tennessee, 54 percent didn’t graduate. And in Wisconsin . . . 59 percent. . . . Across the nation, the average non-graduation rate for black students is 45 percent (versus 24 percent for whites). These numbers are surely the same year in and year out, which means that every June in America, largely unnoticed and unremarked upon, almost half the nation's black kids wash over the falls of our urban school systems.”

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Real news item: “Mortal Wounds: The Unseen Agony of Black-on-Black Murder,” headlines a recent Los Angeles Times front-page story. In 2002, 40 percent of Los Angeles’ 659 killings involved black victims, although blacks comprise only 11 percent of the population. “Authorities say most black homicide victims die at the hands of other blacks,” according to the Times. “Witnesses often are afraid to step forward. Few killers are caught.”

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