Image Problems

From Cox & Forkum:

Furor Over Cartoons Not Funny

Welcome Malkin readers!

Michelle Malkin has more on the extent of the Muslim outrage aimed at Denmark.

Zombietime has created the fantastic Mohammed Image Archive that displays many historical renderings of the prophet, by Westerners and Muslims alike. In the Middle Ages, Muslims avoided the prohibition of depicting their prophet by leaving his face or figure blank. Such iconoclasm, ostensibly for the purpose of avoiding idolatry, has occasionally extended to Christians, including many Protestants who destroyed Catholic symbols, relics, paintings, and sculptures during the Reformation.

This current prohibition, however, challenges Western notions of freedom of speech. According to the Muslims, this is a tolerance and sensitivity issue. They argue that since they images are offensive, they should immediately be taken down. That may work under Sharia, but not under freedom of speech guarantees that, if they are to be taken seriously, should apply to everyone, regardless of their material quality or ability to offend. Ward "Shitting Bull" Churchill (see, El Presidente couldn't say that if there were no freedom of speech!) offends every decent American with his pro-terrorist rhetoric; but, being free, any American can criticize his writings, sayings, and beliefs. The free exchange of ideas, beyond any legal arguments, is the cornerstone of Western freedoms. China suppresses freedom, and Google submits. Throughout the Islamic world, blogs are discouraged (except, of course, those labeled alqaeda.blogspot.com) and dissent limited. If the right to not be offended actually existed, no one could say anything about anyone at anytime, without fear of condemnation or persecution. This is the essence of totalitarian regimes or religions. Nothing contradictory, counterrevolutionary, or blasphemous (as defined by the authorities) may be said, published, or thought. This is slavery, pure and simple: slavery of the mind.

El Presidente's top pick:



In other words, if the shoe fits. . .

Martin Niemöller's statement of Nazi oppression, updated for today:

When they came for the cartoonists,
I remained silent;
I was not a cartoonist.

When they locked up the bloggers,
I remained silent;
I was not a blogger.

When they came for the free press,
I did not speak out;
I was not a journalist.

When they came for the infidels,
I did not speak out;
I was not religious.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

---

Or try this for "outrage":


Andres Serrano's Piss Christ

Or. . .


Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary (covered with elephant dung!)

Kennedy Shows His True Colors, Jumps Into Crowd In Mexico City

Wait, that was the other story about a bull. . .

Michelle Malkin has Kennedy Unhinged

Expose the Left (The Political Teen) has the video

Of course, it was of no avail, losing 72-25-3.

Rebuking Communism, EU Style

**Welcome Gateway Pundit readers!**

File under: ABOUT DAMN TIME!

While waiting a mere fifteen years to begin dealing with the horrors that Communism inflicted upon the European continent--not to mention China, Cambodia, etc--the Council of Europe voted to condemn the "evils of Communism":

Thursday January 26, 2006
The Guardian

For some it was a vile capitalist plot aimed at rewriting the recent history of half of Europe, transforming wartime resistance heroes into villains, and denying the laudable ideals and legitimacy of a great political movement.
For others it was a long-overdue denunciation of a couple of dozen thoroughly evil regimes who wrecked their nations' economies, tortured their citizens, and between them were responsible for up to 100 million deaths.

"Laudable ideals"--by which they mean equality (of misery) enforced at the barrel of a gun?

But, by a clear majority, the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe yesterday backed a controversial motion demanding that the continent's 46-member human rights watchdog formally condemns "the crimes of totalitarian communist regimes".

So the Euroweenies' spines returned?

More than 60 members of the body's 315-seat assembly, made up of MPs from Europe's parliaments, were due to speak in a debate on a report by the conservative Swedish MP Goran Lindblad, which argued that 15 years after the collapse of the eastern bloc international condemnation of its governments' activities was "urgently necessary".
Mr Lindblad's motion also called for an international conference on the issue and urged former communist states to "revise school books to reflect what happened, establish museums documenting these crimes, and introduce a memorial day for the victims of communism".

In other words, a conference to set the record straight on the vile history of Communism, rather than one intended to deny it (the Holocaust Denial party set for Iran)?

The MP adopted the 100 million victim figure arrived at by Stéphane Courtois in his 1997 Black Book of Communism. The count includes 65m in China, 20m in the Soviet Union, 2m in North Korea, 2m in Cambodia, 1.7m in Africa, 1.5m in Afghanistan, 1m in Vietnam, 1m in east Europe and 150,000 in Latin America. (Mr Courtois puts the number of deaths due to Nazism at about 25m.)

Mr Lindblad listed communist regimes' crimes as "assassinations and executions, concentration camp deaths, starvation, deportation, torture, slave labour and other mass physical terror", saying they should be condemned like Nazis' crimes.

Exactly what anti-communists have been saying since, oh, 1917!

Council officials said 99 of the MPs present voted in favour of the motion, 42 opposed it and 12 abstained. Communist parties, mainly in western Europe, had reacted fiercely, saying the report deliberately failed to distinguish between the ideals of communism and its application by totalitarian regimes.

The old, "Communism has never been truly applied" canard that is the mental equivalent of saying that "Communism is great, except for all the Communists. . ." Of course this inflamed the passions of the unreconstructed Marxist wingnuts still festering in Europe:

The Belgian Communist party, the PCB, called the motion "a violent attack on history, present and future of communism". The Greek KKE called it "a declaration of war and persecution against all communist parties", and Germany's PDS said it was "neo McCarthyism".

There it is again, dang McCarthyism!

Mikis Theodorakis, the Greek composer, said: "In the name of our dead comrades, of those who passed through the hands of the Gestapo and the death camps ... shame on those who want to turn victims into executioners, heroes into criminals and communists into Nazis."

El Presidente agrees! Shame on those who fought nationalistic partisan actions on behalf of themselves (Poland, Ukraine, etc.) only to be "purged", sent to the concentration camps in the Gulag Archipelago, or sent to "reeducation" camps to strip away "fascist taint". Who cares about all those starved, shot, and worked to death in forced labor programs like collectivization, any number of "Five Year Plans", or Cultural Revolutions! Fie upon those who taint the good name of Communism, the very same which helped to carve up Poland as part of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, produced the killing fields in Cambodia, or one of the most repressive post-WWII police states in the form of East Germany and the Stasi.

French communists said the motion "banalises the Holocaust" and "ignores the communist role in fighting fascism".

Except when it didn't. See example above.

André Guerin, a Lyon MP, told Le Figaro that the council's idea was to "definitively bury the values of communism" and "make believe they are outmoded and that the only alternative is capitalism".

Capitalism is everywhere, especially in China, where everyone with a piece of sidewalk attempts to sell everything from tourist kitsch to electronics. Even socialist extravaganzas like Chavez's shindig down in Venezuela over the past week is characterized more by capitalism than any abiding commitment to an alternative to it--other than hating the United States. Communist/socialist regimes survive only if the population or the environment can be exploited to prop up the economy. Chavez has oil and is therefore successful. Castro has Castro and Cuba suffers, as Cuban refugees flee to the United States.

Protests were vigorous in Russia, where a survey found 50% of Russians felt Stalin had played a "positive role" in their history and 42% thought "somebody like him" would be helpful in Russia today.

Apparently, 74 years of Communist rule, NKVD and KGB oppression, famine, gulags and misery haven't cured some Russians from all things Red. Perhaps they are too young to remember, or have attached nationalist aspirations to the memories of the Soviet state. Capitalism isn't a panacea, but to paraphrase Winston Churchill, it is the worst economic system, except for all the others. El Presidente prefers the "invisible hand" of the market over the visible point of a gun. Liberals/leftists/socialists hate the monopolistic power of an "evil and greedy" corporation like Wal-Mart, and yet would have the government become a sort of nationalized Wal-Mart complete with military support. Yes, there should be no denunciation of Communism, where everyone is equal(ly miserable)!

Slitherin' Salazar Denounces Clarence Thomas

Sen. Salazar: Clarence Thomas an 'Abomination'

Sen. Ken Salazar has called U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas "an abomination" compared to the late Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Salazar’s comment came during a telephone news conference Wednesday in which the Colorado Democrat said he would not be part of any filibuster to stop a vote on Samuel Alito’s confirmation, the Rocky Mountain News reports.

He went on to say: "There are members of the U.S. Supreme Court that I very much disagree with. Clarence Thomas, for example, I think is an abomination when you contrast him to the leadership and principles of someone like Thurgood Marshall. I’ve been in front of the court and I know the justices."

Clarence Thomas bucks expectations as a thoughtful, conservative justice who also happens to be black, and Democratic wingnuts like Salazar impugn his character. No outcry, barely a blip in the media. But if a conservative/Republican lambastes Ruth Bader Ginsburg. . .

Idiots Abroad

World Social Forum in Caracas, Venezuela/Photo Roundup

Gateway Pundit has detailed coverage here.

The Political Teen has Sheehan To Run Against Feinstein If …

More from LGF.

Cindy Sheehan's (ill advised? traitorous? ignorant?) visit to Hugo Chavez's Carnival of Socialist Paradise, er, World Social Forum elicited the following exhibitions of Moonbattery:


Nothing says kissing up like. . .



Code Pink goes red. . .



Nothing says leftist protest like swastikas (even if they are backwards. . .)



Evil BusHitler makes his malevolent presence known. . .



Of course, Chimpy McHitlerBush could not be left out of the festivities. . .



Say "NO TO CAPITALISM!"



or, BUY OUR SHIRTS!



. . .or our, um, pins. . .



or this crap. . .Even the AP caption writer had the perspicacity to catch the irony:

An activist listens to the sound of talking dolls of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at a street market during the third day of the 6th World Social Forum in Caracas, Venezuela, Thursday, Jan, 26, 2006. In an ironic twist, delegates protesting the evils of capitalism at the World Social Forum are digging into their pockets to buy T-shirts embossed with the image of Argentine revolutionary hero Ernesto 'Che' Guevara and talking dolls of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

Stop The ACLU Kissing A Commie

Chinese New Year, The Year of the Lapdog

"Here, GOOGLE GOOGLE GOOGLE! Here boy!"

Their logo says it all. No need for Photoshop.

Filiblustering Alito

Welcome Sunday Funnies readers!

The Kennedy-Kerry-Clinton Axis of Filibluster has declared war on Samuel Alito.



Looks familiar--



Apparatchiks, all.

blus·ter (blstr)
v. tr.
To force or bully with swaggering threats.

n.
A violent, gusty wind.
Turbulence or noisy confusion.
Loud, arrogant speech, often full of empty threats.


More at Stop The ACLU Clinton Joins In On Alito Filibuster Efforts
The Political Teen Why Does Hillary Clinton Want To Divide Our Country?

Challenger (1-28-86): The Day They "Slipped the Surly Bonds of Earth"

Video and text of President Ronald Reagan's eulogy, which preempted his scheduled State of the Union Address in January 1986. Fine oratory, delivered by the Great Communicator.

Stop The ACLU Remembering the Challenger: 7 New Stars In the Heavens

It's In The Koran (video)

Too. Damn. Funny.

The New Face of the Campus Left

Um, they just realized this?

Sam Graham-Felsen
Thu Jan 26, 2:20 PM ET

The Nation-- When a group called Campus Progress launched its effort to promote progressive values on college campuses in the fall of 2004, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz wondered: "Isn't that a bit like pumping sand into the Mojave Desert?"

The assumption that America's campuses are impenetrable bastions of liberalism--where left-leaning faculty predominate, progressive student activism flourishes and conservatism is fiercely marginalized--still rules the day. But in reality, since the 1970s the conservative movement has become the dominant political force on many American campuses. This sea change is not simply a reflection of some students' increasingly right-wing views. Each year, conservative groups pour more than $35 million into hundreds of college campuses. They pay for right-wing speakers, underwrite scores of student papers, provide free leadership training and cushy internships, and equip thousands of new activists with talking points, discipline and missionary zeal.

Groups such as Young America's Foundation.

The Nation continues:

Today's campus right is unified, on-message and passionate--in other words, part of a genuine movement. By contrast, the campus left is disparate, undisciplined and segmented along ideological and issue-based lines. Student progressives have struggled for decades with not only a lack of cohesion but a dearth of resources. "We didn't have our act together," says Joshua Holland, a fair-trade and antiwar activist who graduated from the University of Southern California this past spring. "We tried to keep things nonhierarchical and loosely structured, but at the end of the day, there was a lot of running around in circles, and we weren't getting anything done."

Of course, any further objective treatment of the issue devolves quickly into typical liberal hand-wringing and proverbial gnashing of teeth. Liberals lament the fall from idealism to efficacy, from radical and revolutionary social change to the death-by-a-thousand-cuts incrementalism that now seems to characterize the campus left. Perhaps it is the inconsistency and incoherence of the current leftist ideology that most greatly damages any cohesive leftist presence, at least at the campus level. Conservative students (leaving the "activism" to their liberal opponents) have countered with bake sales and other "performance" activities, much to the chagrin of their lefty professors and the sycophantic students who follow them, who once cornered the market in taking "action" to highlight their political views.


CU College Republicans Affirmative Action Bake Sale, Spring 2004.


CU College Republicans Conservative Coming Out Day, Spring 2004. Conservatives at the University of Colorado at Boulder were featured not only in local media circles, but nationally as well, including the Washington Times and Rush Limbaugh's radio program.

Only so many "spontaneous" rallies, banging of drums, posters with some variation of the McBusHitler theme, chanting "Hey Hey, Ho Ho", etc. can be tolerated by the campus population at large before most students become completely disinterested in the political process.

Stop The ACLU Free on the Range

Communist Stooges-Useful Idiots

Welcome Michelle Malkin visitors!


Google caves in to Chi-Com's pressure for freedom of speech restrictions.

Michelle Malkin has other blogger's suggested logos.
And many new ones here.

When El Presidente visited China in 2001, the internet (along with internet cafes) was in its nascent boom. However, many notable American sites had already been blocked, most prominently the search engines and MSM such as The New York Times (not really a loss).
To get news from America, secondary sources of news, such as local newspapers (Rocky Mountain News, or the dreaded Fox News) still hadn't been blocked.


El Presidente in China. August, 2001.

The Political Teen Google Jumps For China

Losing Freedom One Step At A Time

Firstly--in the interest of honesty, El Presidente wears a seatbelt over 90% of the time he drives, especially when on the highways, or making long cross-town jaunts; in the summer and winter, day and night. But this just takes the cake (or your freedom):

DENVER - A group pushing for a tougher seat belt laws will stage a dramatic display at the Colorado State Capitol Tuesday morning.

Two hundred and eighty two empty pairs of shoes will line the west steps. The shoes represent people who died in car accidents in 2004 and were not wearing seat belts.

"We can show that you more than double the chances of surviving a serious injury crash, if you simply wear a seat belt," said Colorado State Patrol Major Jim Wolfinbarger.

The Colorado Seat Belt Coalition organized the demonstration. The group is made up of law enforcement agencies, automobile and insurance businesses.

Right now in Colorado, not wearing a seat belt is a secondary offense. That means law enforcement officers can't ticket you for not wearing a seat belt, unless you get pulled over for breaking another law. The Colorado Seat Belt Coalition wants to toughen the law, so people can be ticketed for not wearing a seat belt alone.

So bikers have the freedom--to be fearless or stupid or both--and not wear helmets, but the silent majority of Coloradans must now buckle up or face fines and points as a result of a primary offense?

Bikers are organized as a political entity, a minority if you will, and demonstrate on their own behalf to have noisome (in their opinion) Nanny-state restrictions lifted. Drivers do not generally organize around such ideas. They simply get in their cars and drive.

"If it could save one life. . ."

The Colorado Seat Belt Coalition (they actually have a coalition?!?!) argues that 282 of 502 traffic deaths in 2004 were from people that did not wear seat belts, which presumably exacerbated the accident in question through ejections from the vehicle. That is a good argument, but does not tell the whole story.

230 deaths in Colorado in 2004 occurred while wearing seatbelts. So 46% of those who died were in fact buckled up. Presumably, a great majority of the remaining 54% of drivers who died while not buckled up would have survived had they taken the 2 seconds to protect themselves with a seatbelt.

So what? No one argues that Americans stop driving in order to reduce the number of traffic related deaths (though they use this argument to call for bans on handguns). No driving would mean no deaths as a result of private use of vehicles. There might still be accidents on public transportation, but that's another story for another day.

So the solution is to mandate, by governmental regulations, that every citizen buckle up or face the scrutiny of law enforcement who would ostensibly divert their attention from more important factors that result in accidents likely to cause death: drunk driving, reckless driving (road rage), speeding, driving while tired, and distracted drivers. These are followed by those drivers who fail to signal, run red lights, change lanes erratically, U-turn anywhere, etc. This fundamentally, in addition to taking more freedom, misses the root cause of accidents.

Wearing a seatbelt does not predispose you to be less accident prone, or non-seatbelt wearers more so. Bad drivers and bad driving habits make every driver susceptible to accidents, some of which may result in death. As mentioned before, of the 502 deaths in Colorado, 230 occurred while the victim was wearing a seatbelt, or 46%. That is nearly a 50-50 chance of death in those cases. How many lives were saved? Many, many more. That is why El Presidente chooses to take the time to buckle up. It is a wise and rather inconvenient precaution.

But should the state force otherwise law-abiding citizens comply? Not if you value freedom. This is not dissimilar to the arguments laid out for gun control initiatives, or even the case reported in the English media on samurai swords, that one saved life makes the Nanny-state all-important and correct. In other words, protecting us from ourselves. This could be accomplished far easier by simply enforcing the laws against bad drivers and bad driving, upholding fines and other penalties, and actually requiring the citizens to know what the heck they are doing when they get behind the wheel. Driving is a right, not a privilege, but with rights come responsibilities. Reducing the overall accident rate would reduce the number of potentially fatal accidents and therefore, less people would die on the streets. But making police, who would be the primary intermediaries dispensing this new "corrective" legislation peer into every car simply to check if a person is wearing a restraint smacks of overbearing bureaucratic liberalism and Nanny-statism, and should be opposed on principle. Let the people decide whether or not they would chance their lives by avoiding seatbelts. That is the essence of freedom of choice.

Stop The ACLU Open Post

Galloway and the Teletubbies

Uh-oh!

Inspired by the video at The Political Teen and the link to Ed Driscoll who said that George Galloway's recent performance on a British reality show reminded him of Teletubbies, may we humbly offer the photographic proof of this connection:



Trackback at The Political Teen
Ace of Spades HQ

Crazy Samurai-Wielding Maniac Leads to Call For Ban On Ceremonial Swords

More looney Moonbattedness from our pals in England:

The Express & Echo in Exeter is calling for samurai swords to be banned, after a local man was stabbed to death in the street.

The newspaper wants the government to stop the sale of the swords, with an exemption for licensed groups.

It is not currently illegal to buy a sword, only to carry it in public.

And a day after Sidmouth man Bradley Moran admitted killing 33-year-old Matthew Stiling by stabbing him through the heart with the 18-inch blade of a samurai sword, an Echo reporter discovered how easy it is to buy one unchecked from an Exeter shop.

Journalist David Edbrooke paid £120 for a sword with a 2.5ft sharpened blade, and said it was "as easy as buying a lotto ticket".

Echo editor Marc Astley said: "It is incredible that our reporter was able to buy such a terrifying weapon, no questions asked. I was shocked at just how sharp and heavy the blade is.

Okay, so some random dude goes into a store and buys a samurai store and kills a man. Now they want to ban swords...doesn't surprise me.

You know, God forbid someone should go out in public and strangle another with a bra. Lord knows there would be a huge ban on bras. (not that hippies would mind, they love their Amazonian tatas) I mean, the only way to prevent people from killing one another would to basically bubble-wrap everything and change human nature.

It sucks for us sane people who end up being treated like children from these liberals who are on this endless quest to "protect us." Thanks guys, due to the overwhelming problem of maniacs wielding samurai swords everywhere, it's nice to know that I can sleep better at night knowing that I won't be shish-kabobed while buying groceries in the future.

Come on now, not only is banning samurai swords completely pointless (I'm sure there is someone out there who could think up a creative way of murdering others with a spoon) but it's an insult to those who just want to own a samurai sword for decoration or a way to show off their pride in their heritage.

They conclude:

"The Echo accepts that some martial arts groups use such weapons innocently.

"We hope they will accept that calling for their sale to be restricted is sensible and reasonable.

"We will pursue this campaign to the bitter end and will be calling on Echo readers to play their part too.

"If that means that together we help prevent a single death or injury, it will have been worth it."

Yeah. RIGHT.

Chief "Shitting Bull" Earns Straight A's

From 9news:

BOULDER, Colo. (AP) - University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, who is being investigated for alleged plagiarism and other academic offenses, was given straight A's by his fall semester class on the "American Holocaust," the Boulder Daily Camera reported Sunday.

The newspaper said the evaluations were posted Friday.

"I am not surprised. Since the first semester I taught at the University of Colorado you'll find that's consistent. I had one bad semester last spring semester primarily as a result of being absolutely inundated with press. We had reporters sitting in the classroom," he said in a telephone interview Sunday morning.

Neither is El Presidente. Classes filled with sycophantic acolytes such as this fine specimen--



leave little reason to doubt the "accuracy" of his ratings. Of course, it is easy enough to woo even strong critics (it is doubtful any would actually endure such torture) given there are less than 20 people in the class. (Let's see, that over $90,000 to teach--indoctrinate--a handful of students each year.) What a job!

Stop The ACLU Sunday Funnies
The Political Teen SNL Spoofs Nagin, Clinton, Jesse Jackson, And Anderson Cooper (VIDEO)

Funny--Yes, Surprise--NO

More at the Gateway Pundit.

With all the comments made recently be lefties like washed-up singer Harry Belafonte, is it a surprise one might find Muslims parroting his attacks on Bush?

ELF Update-Terrorism is Terrorism-11 Indicted

ELF terrorist suspects sniffed out--very likely as the use of deodorants among this group is quite infrequent--

WASHINGTON -- Eleven people were indicted in a series of arsons, claimed by the radical groups Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front, in five Western states including Colorado, the Justice Department said Friday.

The 65-count indictment said the suspects are responsible for 17 incidents in California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming, including sabotaging a high-tension power line, in a conspiracy that dates back to 1996. The indictment was returned Thursday by a federal grand jury in Eugene, Ore., and unsealed Friday.

"The indictment tells a story of four-and-a-half years of arson, vandalism, violence and destruction claimed to have been executed on behalf of the Animal Liberation Front or Earth Liberation Front, extremist movements known to support acts of domestic terrorism," Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said at a news conference Friday.

Read Prepared Remarks.

Appearing with Gonzales, FBI Director Robert Mueller declared, "Terrorism is terrorism, no matter what the motive."
"There is a clear difference between constitutionally protected advocacy ... and violent criminal activity," Mueller added.
"It is one thing to write concerned letters or to hold peaceful demonstrations," Mueller said. "It is another thing entirely to construct and use improvised explosives to harass and intimidate victims by destroying property and to cause millions of dollars in losses by acts or threats of violence."

Slitherin' Salazar Says No To Alito

"Moderate" Senator Ken Salazar, D-Colorado, plans to vote no on Alito's confirmation:

saying Alito would move the court "outside the mainstream of American law."
Salazar said in a written statement that Alito's philosophy would give the president too much power, weaken constitutional checks and balances and roll back civil rights protections.
He said he arrived at his decision after "a careful review of his record."

Salazar has sacrificed any "independence" garnered as a result of joining the wishy-washy Gang of 14, and committed himself to elitist-East Coast Liberalism of Kennedy, Leahy, etc. What a shame, though not completely unexpected. More here.

The Political Teen links to other Democratic weasels saying "no".

Blowing Smoke

At the top of the list of unimportant things to accomplish on the state level, Colorado appears ready to join at least ten other states in expanding the liberal nanny-state mentality that government knows best, and should therefore control the habits of the citizens.
No freedom of choice in education (government monopoly), a growing trend to dictate what we should eat, attacks on the 2nd amendment, etc. all in the name of statism disguised as self-help. This should prove interesting, as Denver recently passed Initiative 100, allowing for the possession of marijuana. You can have pot, but don't let the government catch you smoking it!
Ironic.
El Presidente would prefer a chain-smoking coworker or patron to the average consumer of alcohol, some of whom become immediately lethal behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. (NO Prohibition here!) Like drinking, one should smoke responsibly. Moderation is good (except in politics). Second-hand smoke, like inhaling the smoke from a fire is probably, over time, a harm to one's health. But for the state to regulate businesses and prevent them from choosing whether or not their business offers accomodations to one or both smoking preferences smacks of overbearing liberalism at its best. If a customer does not want to smoke or inhale smoke, do not patronize a business. Similarly, if one dislikes smoke, do not accept a position at a business that allows smoking. This is akin to traveling to Las Vegas and complaining about the gambling. If you don't like it, don't do it, but don't prevent your fellow Americans from choosing to do it. Legislative bans, bureaucracy, and the drain on law enforcement personnel to deal with infractions are at best, cumbersome and a hindrance to freedom (as was Prohibition), and at worst, simply ridiculous.

Sen. Clinton Stump Speech Disguised as MLK Speech

The Political Teen has the video.

Aside from the "plantation" comment, Sen. Clinton stumped for herself and fellow Democrats for the 2006 elections. Her claims that the Democrats provided the bulwark for the progress on civil rights over the last century manages to overlook the fact that it was southern Democrats that opposed much of the legislation (as they controlled both houses of Congress at that point), including the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Other noted successes for Democrats include the War On Poverty (which compared to the War On Terror has lasted nearly 8 times as long, and has not been as successful).

Other Clinton claims:

Since 2001, Democrats have had NO say in the direction of the country.

Democratic economic policies were responsible for the 1990s economic boom. (umm, Reagan. . .)

Hillarycare would be, again, a focal point of her 2008 Presidential campaign.

In other words, MOTS.

Sen. Joseph R. McKennedy

So true, it is scary (and hilarious!):

Historical Nonsense

From History News Network:

In a pointed response to the growing campaign to pressure universities to hire more conservative professors in the humanities, historians meeting in Philadelphia today said the effort smacks of McCarthyism and vowed to oppose it. They passed a resolution to put the American Historical Association—the nation’s oldest and most revered historical society—on record against the effort.

Conservatives, led by David Horowitz, have long claimed that universities are dominated by left-wingers. To correct this perceived political imbalance they have proposed to reform the system by persuading state legislatures to pass an “Academic Bill of Rights” to help conservatives win positions in the academy. The historians, at their annual Business Meeting, admitted that most humanities professors are liberal but insisted that is not because conservatives are discriminated against. Rather, liberals simply are more drawn to the humanities than conservatives, who often dominate faculties at business schools.

Nothing quashes the conservative position faster than the "McCarthyism" canard. Or so they think.
Full text of the Academic Bill of Rights here:

1. All faculty shall be hired, fired, promoted and granted tenure on the basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in the field of their expertise and, in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives. No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs.
2. No faculty member will be excluded from tenure, search and hiring committees on the basis of their political or religious beliefs.
3. Students will be graded solely on the basis of their reasoned answers and appropriate knowledge of the subjects and disciplines they study, not on the basis of their political or religious beliefs.
4. Curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social sciences should reflect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge in these areas by providing students with dissenting sources and viewpoints where appropriate. While teachers are and should be free to pursue their own findings and perspectives in presenting their views, they should consider and make their students aware of other viewpoints. Academic disciplines should welcome a diversity of approaches to unsettled questions.
5. Exposing students to the spectrum of significant scholarly viewpoints on the subjects examined in their courses is a major responsibility of faculty. Faculty will not use their courses for the purpose of political, ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination.
6. Selection of speakers, allocation of funds for speakers programs and other student activities will observe the principles of academic freedom and promote intellectual pluralism.
7. An environment conducive to the civil exchange of ideas being an essential component of a free university, the obstruction of invited campus speakers, destruction of campus literature or other effort to obstruct this exchange will not be tolerated.
8. Knowledge advances when individual scholars are left free to reach their own conclusions about which methods, facts, and theories have been validated by research. Academic institutions and professional societies formed to advance knowledge within an area of research, maintain the integrity of the research process, and organize the professional lives of related researchers serve as indispensable venues within which scholars circulate research findings and debate their interpretation. To perform these functions adequately, academic institutions and professional societies should maintain a posture of organizational neutrality with respect to the substantive disagreements that divide researchers on questions within, or outside, their fields of inquiry.

Yep, sounds McCarthyesque (highlights mine). Funny how the demand to respect all points of view, even those that the conservatives would ostensibly oppose, results only in the defamatory statements of the American Historical Association, and the resolution proposed by the prominent American historian, Joyce Appleby.
Usually liberals in the "liberal" arts claim that in addition to conservatives being drawn to business and not the humanities(as seen above), the conservative students are at worst, simply not intellectually up to the task. In other words, conservatives are dumb. At best, they are anti-intellectual, which is more insulting, since the first attack is simply name-calling. Conservatives are not anti-intellectual, as much as they are anti-Intellectuals, such as Zinn, Chomsky, Singer, etc. Conservatives do not agree with their conclusions and are, therefore, fostering a McCarthyesque "chilling" effect on academic pursuits.
If this is true, why do they continue to enjoy the attention of the MSM? Wouldn't the Bush-controlled, "corporate" media shut them down? On the contrary, any time the likes of Ward "Shitting Bull" Churchill opens his "conservatives are Nazis, little Eichmanns, fragging is good" mouth, the media is there to soothe the Moonbat heart. Reality, it seems, once again escapes the liberal mind.

CU Joins "Whiteness Studies" Guilt-Fest

"Whiteness Studies" has finally crept in among the other academic fads and established its place at the University of Colorado at Boulder, joining hundreds of other similarly misguided colleges nationwide:

BOULDER, Colo. (AP) - People stare when University of Colorado student Maren Gauldin wears her "Black is Beautiful" T-shirt.

That's because she's white.

The shirt, Gauldin says, is like a tag that forces her to engage in conversations about race, forces her to feel a tiny bit like black and Latino students on an overwhelmingly white campus.

"Every time I put it on, I feel uncomfortable," Gauldin told students at a white-privilege symposium last month that filled an auditorium and spilled into a hallway. "It helps me think about the kind of activist I want to be."

Ahh, the unmistakable stench of liberal white guilt.
So how is this supposed to inform, educate, or indeed contribute anything of value to the college experience? The instructor explains:

"Whiteness studies is not about white-bashing, and it's not about white supremacy," said Duncan Rinehart, who will teach CU's fourth whiteness-studies course this semester.

"As long as whiteness is invisible, it's contributing to inequality and injustice. There is a fair amount of just flat-out denial, not malicious, but denial nonetheless."

Feminist scholar Peggy McIntosh, whose essay on white privilege often is required reading for students in whiteness studies, defines it as an "invisible weightless knapsack."

"I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was 'meant' to remain oblivious," she says.

The secret code--do not reveal "white privilege" to others lest you be forced to commit self-flaggelation in atonement for your sin--the sin of being white that is. "Invisible knapsacks"? "Unearned assets"?
Hmmm El Presidente is curious. How does one sign up for this privilege? He must have missed the memo. Of course, despite his Hispanic heritage and last name, he was once told that he was not "ethnic" enough to understand, and was an inadvertent beneficiary of white privilege.
Opposition, of course, draws the attention of the likes of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which does much great work monitoring the few crazy white supremacists running around dropping leaflets and practicing paramilitary operations in remote compounds. But much reasoned opposition remains, opposed to the false establishment of more divisive academic fads designed to critically interpret, in Marxist or multi-culti diversity fashion, the liberal-left desire to instill guilt for anything sexist, racist, religionist, or whatever that might have occurred in the past at the hands of Euro-Americans, anywhere in the world. According to this view, nothing from Western culture has any redeemable value, and therefore must be criticized or expunged.
Thankfully a few keep tabs on these academic navel-gazing guilt-fests:

Outside of academia, not many have heard of whiteness studies, said Matthew Spalding, director of the Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation. He called it an abstract, "invalid category of education" based on the "assumption that you should teach according to racial categories."

"Things like this show the increasing divide between the outer reaches of the academy and the average American," Spalding said. "Not only do they not know about these things, my guess is the average American couldn't come up with this if they tried."

Aside from the fact that only guilt-ridden liberal trust-fund college kids sporting Che t-shirts and grousing about global-warming attend these classes taught by the likes of Ward Churchill (that still is his department) and other 1960s radical leftovers, who cares about these intellectual tin-foil hat wearing moonbats? Everyone should, because intellectual fad becomes liberal dogma, and liberal dogma becomes Democratic talking points. The Alito hearings this past week bear this out, as the distinguished nominee withstood bloviating attacks by the Democratic senators spouting off the latest in doublespeak, hoping to trip up Alito and pin him to the racist-sexist-etc epithet. They attempted to imply that Alito, at best, was a closet bigot, and at worst, a bigot who was now disavowing past affiliations. (This, of course, required them to forget about Democratic Sen. Robert "Sheets" Byrd, himself an actual member of an explicitly racist organization, the Ku Klux Klan)
And this guilt-laden feeling has already spread to other liberal arts departments (not to mention the business community, who must institute "diversity" plans on all levels to avoid boycotts from the likes of Rev. Jesse Jackson):

The course is popular at CU, though, and it's mostly white students who take it, said Eleanor Hubbard, a retired CU professor who taught it.

Professors had to turn away students, capping the class at about 60 a semester. But the concept of white privilege is infused in many sociology and ethnic-studies courses.

To fight racism, whites need to see they have advantages that are a "result of them being white, not for any other reason like they are smarter or have a better education," Hubbard said.

"It's not about feeling guilty," she said. "That doesn't help anyone. What is helpful is to use those privileges to make changes so that equality is possible."

Right, "equality through guilt." El Presidente can see the bumper stickers now.

Stop The ACLU Weekend Open Trackbacks

Iran's Holocaust Revision Conference

Deep in Hell, Hitler cracks a smile. . .

Tehran, 5 Jan. (AKI) - Iran has decided to rewrite and revise the history of the Holocaust. Following the repeated declarations by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and other senior government officials on the need to re-examine the history of the genocide of the Jews during the Second World War, the association of Islamic Journalists of Iran has been tasked with quickly putting together an international conference on the Holocaust.

Holocaust denier and lawsuit loser David Irving, currently jailed in Austria for the aforementioned "historical" hopes to be chosen keynote speaker. (OK, that we made up, but will no doubt feel vindicated once he finds out.)

Organizers feel the need to examine the "truthfulness of the version that Europe and the Zionists have imposed on the world on the murder of Jews during the years of the great war":

"We want to offer a free and democratic platform to the historians to examine in-depth this myth, seeing that in different European countries there exist laws against democracy and freedom that to do not allow intellectuals who believe in a version distinct from that which is officially pronounced on the Holocaust," added Afzali.

"We will invite those who believe in the imposed version as well as all those who have spent years of their lives in the study of documents related to the Holocaust and have come to the conclusion that the history books in schools and universities do not correspond to the truth," said Afzali, who however refused to supply the names of the revisionist historians who have been contacted to appear in the conference in Tehran.

Never. Forget.

Okla. Gov. Calls For Prayer During Fires

Oh my God! (El Presidente wants to be sued by the ACLU!)

Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry actually asked the state to observe a statewide Day of Prayer!
Heaven forbid! Asking God to help with the fires? Why, that's worse than the fires themselves...

Meanwhile, somewhere in the bowels of the ACLU there is much clenching of fists, furrowing of brows, and rending of clothes as they decry the invocation of God in seeking an end to the wildfires.

Stop The ACLU Sunday Funnies

King George?

I won't mention the site this came from as I don't want to send them any additional traffic, but it seems like I've seen something like this before:

Andrew Jackson (1830's)




Theodore Roosevelt (Puck, 1904)

How. Original.

Newsweak gives us this pathetic offering (for the moonbats, Cheney looks really sneaky!):



Memo to Newsweak: their powers are enumerated in the Constitution and federal statutes. The "crisis" of wiretapping, the scandal du jour of the MSM moonbats, will remain the story only as long as it takes to put forth new terms like "imperial presidency" and the like. There really isn't much of a story here, just a warning to those who might be inclined to make frequent calls to, say, a cave in Afghanistan. Look, limit the calls to Al-Qaida, alright!

Stop The ACLU Weekend Open Trackbacks

If You Haven't Already. . .

You Should!
Read it. Think about it.
Sad, but perhaps a wakeup call.

The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler sums it up best:

He is absolutely dead on correct. Having grown up in EUnuchistan, I witnessed the beginning of the Decline of Western Civilization and it took place exactly like Steyn describes. Since I made good my escape, it has only gotten worse.

Civilizations aren’t murdered, they commit suicide.

Birth. Consolidation. Expansion. Affluence. Decadence. Apathy. Death.

Look at the Roman Empire.

Historian Will Durant said:

Be vigilant.

Back For The New Year

Let's start the New Year with a golden oldie: Democrats=Zombies.
Here's the video.

Thank you again, Bob Hope.

Stop The ACLU Weekend Open Trackbacks