sorry jim morrison...no disrespect.......this is what an american poet looks like!
Saturday, August 26, 2006
Friday, August 25, 2006
almost a year later...idiots in the white house still have no clue
Immigration Reform...this from gop site from november of 2005
Presidential Action:
Today, President Bush Outlined The Strategy To Enhance America's Homeland Security Through Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Addressing the Customs and Border Protection agents stationed in southern Arizona, the President discussed the strategy to secure the border, prevent illegal crossings, and strengthen enforcement of immigration laws. The President also proposed to take pressure off the border by creating a Temporary Worker Program that meets the economy's demands while rejecting amnesty for those who break America's laws.
- Securing The Border Is Essential To Securing The Homeland. Since he took office, the President has increased funding for border security by 60 percent. Border agents have apprehended and sent home more than 4.5 million people coming into the country illegally – including about 350,000 with criminal records. The U.S. border must be open to trade and tourism – and closed to criminals, drug dealers, and terrorists.
The President Will Work With Congress To Pass And Sign Into Law Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Comprehensive immigration reform is a top priority for the Administration. Already, Congress is making great strides and has a chance to move forward on a strategy to enforce immigration laws, secure America, and uphold the Nation's deepest values. The President will continue working with Congress so that he can sign a comprehensive immigration reform bill into law in 2006.
The President's Strategy For Comprehensive Immigration Reform
Comprehensive Immigration Reform Begins With Securing The Border. To secure the border, the President is pursuing a three-part plan.
- First, The U.S. Will Return Every Illegal Entrant Caught Crossing The Southwest Border – With No Exceptions. More than 85 percent of apprehended illegal immigrants are from Mexico, and most are immediately escorted back across the border within 24 hours. To prevent them from trying to cross again, the Federal government is using interior repatriation whereby Mexican illegal entrants are returned to their hometowns, making it more difficult for them to attempt another crossing. This approach is showing great promise. In a West Arizona desert pilot program, nearly 35,000 illegal immigrants were returned to Mexico through interior repatriation, and only about 8 percent turned up trying to cross the border in that sector again. The Administration is working to expand interior repatriation to ensure that when those who violate the country's immigration laws are sent home, they stay home.
- The Administration Is Ending The Practice Of "Catch And Release." Because detention facilities lack bed space, most non-Mexican illegal immigrants apprehended are released and directed to return for a court appearance. However, 75 percent fail to show. Last year, only 30,000 of the 160,000 non-Mexicans caught coming across our Southwest border were sent home. Addressing this problem, the President has signed legislation increasing the number of beds in detention facilities by more than 10 percent over the next year. The Federal government is also using "expedited removal" to detain, place into streamlined judicial proceedings, and deport non-Mexican illegal immigrants in an average of 32 days – almost three times faster than the usual procedure. Last year, more than 20,000 non-Mexicans caught crossing the border between Laredo and Tucson were deported using expedited removal. The use of expedited removal is now being expanded across the entire Southwest border. When illegal immigrants know they will be caught and sent home, they will be less likely to cross illegally in the first place.
- The Administration Is Taking Further Steps To Accelerate The Removal Process. The U.S. is pressing foreign governments to take back their citizens more promptly, while streamlining bureaucracy and increasing the number of flights carrying illegal immigrants home. Testing these steps, "Operation Texas Hold 'Em" along the Rio Grande Valley of the Texas Border recently resulted in Brazilian illegal immigration dropping by 90 percent in the Rio Grande Valley – and by 50 percent across the entire border. These efforts are helping change a policy of "catch and release" to a policy of "catch and return."
- The Administration Is Ending The Practice Of "Catch And Release." Because detention facilities lack bed space, most non-Mexican illegal immigrants apprehended are released and directed to return for a court appearance. However, 75 percent fail to show. Last year, only 30,000 of the 160,000 non-Mexicans caught coming across our Southwest border were sent home. Addressing this problem, the President has signed legislation increasing the number of beds in detention facilities by more than 10 percent over the next year. The Federal government is also using "expedited removal" to detain, place into streamlined judicial proceedings, and deport non-Mexican illegal immigrants in an average of 32 days – almost three times faster than the usual procedure. Last year, more than 20,000 non-Mexicans caught crossing the border between Laredo and Tucson were deported using expedited removal. The use of expedited removal is now being expanded across the entire Southwest border. When illegal immigrants know they will be caught and sent home, they will be less likely to cross illegally in the first place.
- Second, The Administration Will Work With Congress To Reform Immigration Laws. The President is seeking to eliminate senseless rules that require the government to release illegal immigrants if their home countries do not take them back in a set period of time. Among those the government has been forced to release are murderers, rapists, child molesters, and other violent criminals. The President is also working with Congress to address the cycle of endless litigation that clogs immigration courts, rewards illegal behavior, and delays justice for immigrants with legitimate claims. Lawsuits and red tape must not stand in the way of protecting the American people.
- Third, The Federal Government Will Act To Stop People From Illegally Crossing The Border In The First Place. The Administration is increasing manpower, technology, and infrastructure at the Nation's borders, and integrating these resources in innovative ways.
- Increasing Manpower. Since 2001, 1,900 Border Patrol agents have been added, and the President has signed legislation allowing the addition of another 1,000 agents in the year ahead. When the hiring is completed, the Border Patrol will have been enlarged by about 3,000 agents – from about 9,500 when the President took office to about 12,500 next year. This is an increase of more than 30 percent.
- Deploying New Technology. The Administration is giving Border Patrol agents the tools to expand their reach and effectiveness including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and infrared cameras. In Tucson, agents using UAVs to patrol the border have improved their interception of illegal immigrants and drugs on the border. Legislation signed by the President is providing $139 million to further upgrade technology and bring a more unified, systematic approach to border enforcement.
- Constructing Physical Barriers To Entry. The President has signed legislation providing $70 million to install and improve protective infrastructure across the border. In rural areas, the government is constructing new patrol roads to give agents better access to the border and new vehicle barriers to keep illegal immigrants from driving across. In urban areas, the government is expanding fencing to shut down human smuggling corridors. The Administration recently authorized the completion of a 14-mile barrier near San Diego. Once held up by litigation, this project is vital to helping border agents do their jobs and make those who live near the border more secure.
- Increasing Manpower. Since 2001, 1,900 Border Patrol agents have been added, and the President has signed legislation allowing the addition of another 1,000 agents in the year ahead. When the hiring is completed, the Border Patrol will have been enlarged by about 3,000 agents – from about 9,500 when the President took office to about 12,500 next year. This is an increase of more than 30 percent.
Comprehensive Immigration Reform Requires Improved Enforcement Of Immigration Laws Within The United States. Catching and deporting illegal immigrants along the border is only part of protecting the American people. Our immigration laws must be enforced throughout America.
- The Federal Government Is Improving Worksite Enforcement. The President has signed legislation that more than doubles the resources dedicated to worksite enforcement. The government is placing a special focus on enforcement at critical infrastructure. This year, Operation Rollback – the largest worksite enforcement case in American history – resulted in the arrest of hundreds of illegal immigrants, criminal convictions against a dozen employers, and a multi-million dollar payment from one of America's largest businesses. Worksite enforcement is critical to the success of immigration reform.
- To Help Businesses Comply With Immigration Laws, The Government Is Addressing Document Fraud. Even the most diligent employers find it difficult to spot forged employment documents and verify workers' legal status. So the Administration is expanding the Basic Pilot program enabling businesses to screen the employment eligibility of new hires against Federal records. Since 2001, this program has expanded from only six states to now being available nationwide. The Administration will work with Congress to continue to improve employment verification.
- The President Has Committed The Resources Necessary To Enforce Immigration Laws. Since 2001, the Administration has increased funding for interior enforcement by 44 percent; increased the number of immigration and customs investigators by 14 percent; and new funding will allow for an additional 400 immigration enforcement agents and 250 criminal investigators. These skilled officers are getting results. In Arizona alone, 2,300 people have been prosecuted for smuggling drugs, guns, and illegal immigrants across the border. Operation Community Shield has resulted in the arrest of nearly 1,400 illegal immigrant gang members – including hundreds of members of violent gangs like "MS-13." Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), agents have apprehended nearly 27,000 illegal immigrant fugitives.
As Part Of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, The President Has Proposed The Creation Of A New Temporary Worker Program. To match foreign workers with American employers for jobs that no American is willing to take, temporary workers will be able to register for legal status for a fixed time period and then be required to return home. This plan meets the needs of a growing economy, allows honest workers to provide for their families while respecting the law, and relieves pressure on the border. By reducing the flow of illegal immigrants, law enforcement can focus on those who mean this country harm. To improve worksite enforcement, the plan creates tamper-proof I.D. cards for every legal temporary worker.
- A Temporary Worker Program Would Not Provide Amnesty. The program does not create an automatic path to citizenship or provide amnesty. The President opposes amnesty because rewarding those who break the law would encourage more illegal entrants and increase pressure on the border. A Temporary Worker Program, by contrast, would promote legal immigration and decrease pressure on the border. The President supports increasing the annual number of green cards, but for the sake of justice and security, the President will not sign an immigration bill that includes amnesty.
By Reforming Immigration Laws, The United States Will Preserve The Promise Of America. Immigrants play a vital role in strengthening American democracy. This is a land in which foreigners who respect the laws are welcomed as contributors to American culture – not feared as threats. The United States has been strengthened by generations of immigrants who became Americans through patience, hard work, and assimilation. Like generations of immigrants that have come before them, every new citizen has an obligation to learn this Nation's customs and values. At the same time, America will fulfill its obligation to give each citizen a chance to realize the American dream. By enforcing immigration laws, the Federal government is protecting the promise of a tolerant, welcoming America and preserving opportunity for all.
Thursday, August 24, 2006
Wang=Awesome!
| Wang picks up Bombers' beat
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| Righty rocks as Yanks rebound
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Wang had it last night. After the Yankees had their five-game winning streak snapped on Tuesday, Wang turned in a virtuoso performance to help the Bombers begin a new one, tossing seven strong innings in a 9-2 victory over the Mariners.
Robinson Cano was 2-for-4 with three RBI while Johnny Damon, Jason Giambi and Jorge Posada drove in a pair of runs apiece, but Wang's performance overshadowed the others. The righthander methodically worked through the Mariners lineup, allowing two runs and scattering nine hits. He did not walk a batter and struck out five, getting 12 of his outs on ground balls.
That meant his trademark sinker was diving. The pitch is the key to Wang's success and it dictates the pace of his outings; when it's on, the game feels like a steady procession of hitters coming up, beating a ball into the ground and then trailing off at first base before heading back to the dugout.
"He's been special," Damon said. "I didn't get a pop fly in the outfield all day. It's almost like a day off when he pitches."
"The sinker was better than the last time," Wang said.
Through the first six innings, the Mariners got just one runner as far as second base. Wang's only hiccup was in his final frame, and even that was hardly egregious; he gave up a one-out infield hit to Richie Sexson, who went to second on Nick Green's throwing error. After a groundout that moved Sexson to third, Jose Lopez was called safe on a slow roller to second that appeared to be a bad call at first base. Instead of being out of the inning, Wang was still on the mound, and he gave up two more hits - the second of which scored Lopez - before finally getting the third out.
Wang did not look happy as he walked off the mound, but he has high expectations. Last night's victory was his 15th, only one behind AL leader Roy Halladay; he's won seven of his last eight decisions.
Mariners starter Felix Hernandez (10-12) wasn't nearly as good, getting roughed up for seven runs and nine hits in 3 2/3 innings. A year ago, Hernandez dueled valiantly against Randy Johnson but gave up two solo homers in eight innings and lost to the Yanks, 2-0.
This game wasn't nearly as good.
Hernandez had only one smooth inning - the third, in which he retired the side in order with two strikeouts - and struggled with his control all night. Issuing a pair of two-out walks in the first was a harbinger for Hernandez, who gave up a two-run single to Cano that put the Yanks in front before Wang even took the mound.
"We made him work hard," Joe Torre said. "You look up there and it's 20-something pitches after the first inning. We like to do that."
The Yankees missed a chance to add to their two-run lead in the second when Derek Jeter grounded into an inning-ending double play, but they blew it open with a five-run frame in the fourth. Walks were again the catalyst, as Cano worked a free pass from Hernandez leading off.
"King Felix," as Hernandez is known, seemed frustrated. Following Cano's walk, Melky Cabrera laced a single up the middle and Green singled sharply to right two batters later to load the bases with one out.
That brought up Damon, who is the reigning AL Player of the Week and entered the game on a 12-for-29 tear that includes two homers, four doubles, a triple and eight RBI. On this occasion, he delivered a two-run single to right that scored Cano and Cabrera, then scampered to second when Chris Snelling's throw to the cutoff man bounced away.
That made it 4-0, and the Mariners managed to keep the score there for a moment when Yuniesky Betancourt cut down Green at the plate on Jeter's subsequent grounder. But Hernandez promptly walked Bobby Abreu to load the bases again, and Giambi cracked a scorching liner over first base that kicked up chalk as it rolled toward the corner. A fan reached down and grabbed it, giving Giambi a two-run ground-rule double that pushed the Yanks' edge to six.
Posada finished off the frame with an RBI single up the middle that ended Hernandez's miserable night. Wang, on the other hand, was rolling. He had found his familiar cadence and was giving the Yankees exactly what they needed.
"He was back to his old self today," Torre said. "To have this kid come in here and do what he's done for us the last year and a half? It's great for us." |
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Monday, August 21, 2006
screwed at seemingly every turn....we are
The "Fuel Surcharge" ScamThe latest corporate trick to hide price hikes.By Daniel GrossPosted Monday, Aug. 21, 2006, at 5:23 PM ET
DHL trucks
When higher costs squeeze them, most companies face two choices. They can raise their prices, risking the wrath of consumers and the loss of market share to cheaper competitors. Or they can sacrifice profits to keep prices steady and retain market share. But these days, some companies have found a third way: fuel surcharges.
At first blush, fuel surcharges seem like transparent, mathematically determined means for companies to recoup their expenses for the unexpectedly high price of gasoline. But as they spread into other industries, fuel surcharges more and more seem as if they're just an au courant way of raising prices, while duping customers into thinking they're not paying more.
placeAd(5,'slate.business/slate')
The surcharges appear to have a reassuring precision. The companies lay out exactly how fuel surcharges are determined. UPS notes that its surcharge, based on an index of fuel prices, changes monthly and kicks in only when the price of "on-highway diesel" is more than $1.50. As of early August, the surcharge was 4.75 percent on ground packages and 16 percent on air and international deliveries. FedEx's fuel surcharges, which kick in when diesel is $1.50 and jet fuel is 82 cents per gallon, are the same. DHL has fuel surcharges of 4.8 percent on ground service and 18 percent on air and international services. All rely on data provided by the Energy Information Agency, which shows that the price of gasoline, at $2.92 a gallon, is up 31 percent from a year ago, while diesel, at $3.03 a gallon, is up 44 percent from a year ago. It sounds pretty unobjectionable. UPS's most recent results, which show the company struggling with higher energy prices, make it seem as if surcharges aren't even recouping the higher costs.
But the more you delve into the fuel surcharges, the less sense they make. In theory, the basic price a delivery company charges covers operating costs—labor, supplies, insurance, energy, etc.—plus a profit. The fuel surcharge, we're told, is needed to pay for the marginal increase in costs due only to the higher cost of gasoline or diesel. If you weren't shipping the package, the company wouldn't need to buy the gas.
If you pay $21 to ship a document overnight with FedEx, the surcharge comes out to about $1—or about the extra cost associated with buying a gallon of diesel this year compared to last year. The implication is that it takes FedEx a gallon of diesel to process your package through its immense, technologically advanced logistics network.
No way.
Remember, these companies do huge volumes of business. Their trucks, planes, and vans are in motion every day of the week, regardless of whether you are sending one, two, or 10 packages. Let's say you send three packages from your New York office to three offices in Washington on the same block. You'll get hit with the fuel surcharge on each package. You pay the surcharge whether you live two blocks from a UPS station or 15 miles from one. And if you take steps to save the delivery company money on fuel—sending it from a storefront, where it gets picked up on rounds every day instead of forcing them to come to your house—you don't seem to get any benefit.
Something else is fishy about these fees. FedEx and UPS essentially argue that their current rate schedule works only if the price of diesel is $1.50 or less. Otherwise, they have to start tacking on fuel surcharges. Hello? The EIA notes that the price of diesel hasn't been below $1.50 since December 2003. In most other industries, when the cost of a key input rises (or falls) to a new level and stays there for awhile, the base price of the end product adjusts. The base prices of personal computers and flat-screen televisions get lower every year; Dell doesn't keep the same retail price and slap a rebate on every product to reflect lower manufacturing and assembly costs in China and Taiwan. A simple look at the futures markets or trends in global fuel consumption should convince UPS, DHL, and FedEx that we all need to adjust our business models to account for a higher price of gas. Fundamentally, they're imposing the surcharges instead of raising prices and are hoping customers are too dim to notice. (But the first signs of rebellion have appeared. Read about how shippers are fighting back against fuel charges by railroad companies.)
More recently, fuel surcharges have been spilling over into other services where they're even more absurd. Today, I sorted through a month's worth of bills from the service providers who visit my slice of suburban heaven each month. The company that fertilizes my lawn charges a $2.50 fuel surcharge every time it visits, but the tick-control sprayer (this is Connecticut, where fear of Lyme disease runs rampant) doesn't. Both are based in the same town. The landscaper, whose Ecuadorean employees arrive each week in a gas-guzzling pickup trick and then spiff up our lawn with gas-guzzling mowers and blowers, imposes no fuel surcharge. Neither does the pool guy or Peapod. But the garbage carter does—$3 per month. Does it really require that much extra gas for the truck to travel the extra 200 feet from our neighbor's house twice a week?
back to top
DHL trucks
When higher costs squeeze them, most companies face two choices. They can raise their prices, risking the wrath of consumers and the loss of market share to cheaper competitors. Or they can sacrifice profits to keep prices steady and retain market share. But these days, some companies have found a third way: fuel surcharges.
At first blush, fuel surcharges seem like transparent, mathematically determined means for companies to recoup their expenses for the unexpectedly high price of gasoline. But as they spread into other industries, fuel surcharges more and more seem as if they're just an au courant way of raising prices, while duping customers into thinking they're not paying more.
placeAd(5,'slate.business/slate')
The surcharges appear to have a reassuring precision. The companies lay out exactly how fuel surcharges are determined. UPS notes that its surcharge, based on an index of fuel prices, changes monthly and kicks in only when the price of "on-highway diesel" is more than $1.50. As of early August, the surcharge was 4.75 percent on ground packages and 16 percent on air and international deliveries. FedEx's fuel surcharges, which kick in when diesel is $1.50 and jet fuel is 82 cents per gallon, are the same. DHL has fuel surcharges of 4.8 percent on ground service and 18 percent on air and international services. All rely on data provided by the Energy Information Agency, which shows that the price of gasoline, at $2.92 a gallon, is up 31 percent from a year ago, while diesel, at $3.03 a gallon, is up 44 percent from a year ago. It sounds pretty unobjectionable. UPS's most recent results, which show the company struggling with higher energy prices, make it seem as if surcharges aren't even recouping the higher costs.
But the more you delve into the fuel surcharges, the less sense they make. In theory, the basic price a delivery company charges covers operating costs—labor, supplies, insurance, energy, etc.—plus a profit. The fuel surcharge, we're told, is needed to pay for the marginal increase in costs due only to the higher cost of gasoline or diesel. If you weren't shipping the package, the company wouldn't need to buy the gas.
If you pay $21 to ship a document overnight with FedEx, the surcharge comes out to about $1—or about the extra cost associated with buying a gallon of diesel this year compared to last year. The implication is that it takes FedEx a gallon of diesel to process your package through its immense, technologically advanced logistics network.
No way.
Remember, these companies do huge volumes of business. Their trucks, planes, and vans are in motion every day of the week, regardless of whether you are sending one, two, or 10 packages. Let's say you send three packages from your New York office to three offices in Washington on the same block. You'll get hit with the fuel surcharge on each package. You pay the surcharge whether you live two blocks from a UPS station or 15 miles from one. And if you take steps to save the delivery company money on fuel—sending it from a storefront, where it gets picked up on rounds every day instead of forcing them to come to your house—you don't seem to get any benefit.
Something else is fishy about these fees. FedEx and UPS essentially argue that their current rate schedule works only if the price of diesel is $1.50 or less. Otherwise, they have to start tacking on fuel surcharges. Hello? The EIA notes that the price of diesel hasn't been below $1.50 since December 2003. In most other industries, when the cost of a key input rises (or falls) to a new level and stays there for awhile, the base price of the end product adjusts. The base prices of personal computers and flat-screen televisions get lower every year; Dell doesn't keep the same retail price and slap a rebate on every product to reflect lower manufacturing and assembly costs in China and Taiwan. A simple look at the futures markets or trends in global fuel consumption should convince UPS, DHL, and FedEx that we all need to adjust our business models to account for a higher price of gas. Fundamentally, they're imposing the surcharges instead of raising prices and are hoping customers are too dim to notice. (But the first signs of rebellion have appeared. Read about how shippers are fighting back against fuel charges by railroad companies.)
More recently, fuel surcharges have been spilling over into other services where they're even more absurd. Today, I sorted through a month's worth of bills from the service providers who visit my slice of suburban heaven each month. The company that fertilizes my lawn charges a $2.50 fuel surcharge every time it visits, but the tick-control sprayer (this is Connecticut, where fear of Lyme disease runs rampant) doesn't. Both are based in the same town. The landscaper, whose Ecuadorean employees arrive each week in a gas-guzzling pickup trick and then spiff up our lawn with gas-guzzling mowers and blowers, imposes no fuel surcharge. Neither does the pool guy or Peapod. But the garbage carter does—$3 per month. Does it really require that much extra gas for the truck to travel the extra 200 feet from our neighbor's house twice a week?
back to top
daughters....
left to right....
Army National Guard...
U.S. Marine...
and a future president that will not send them to be in harm's way....for a bunch of godless heathens!
america's best....
let me say again......should not be sent to die for a godless bunch of heathens...
pat hits it out of the park!
August 28, 2006 IssueCopyright © 2006 The American Conservative
Patrick J. Buchanan
Home from the beach Saturday last, I picked up The Weekly Standard. Within the magazine some still regard as the parish bulletin of the Beltway Right was an essay by one Noemie Emery furiously contesting Peter Beinart’s claim to Harry Truman.
Harry belongs to us, insisted Ms. Emery. He was “heir to a great wartime president,” she wrote. Would that be the same FDR who “lied us into war,” whose regime was honeycombed with treason, who at Tehran and Yalta betrayed Poland and all of Eastern Europe to the barbarous tyrant he called “Uncle Joe”?
Freedom was “expanded by Roosevelt and Truman, who extended the welfare state,” Ms. Emery continued. Good to know.
As for Ronald Reagan, he was “an original Truman Democrat and New Dealer [who] ... brought the Truman DNA into the Republican Party with a cadre of Scoop Jackson Democrats …” To Emery, Reagan will go down in history as the Moses who led the neocons out of Egypt to the Promised Land: power. Reagan himself used to tell us Barry Goldwater was the John the Baptist of our movement.
And why is Emery “wild about Harry”? Operation Keelhaul? The defense of Alger Hiss? The loss of China to Maoism? The firing of General MacArthur? The offer to send the battleship Missouri to Russia to pick up Stalin and bring him over to respond to Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech? The “no-win war” in Korea?
No. Ms. Emery reveres FDR and Harry because they “planned, executed, and blessed a campaign so completely hair-raising that the horror remains to this day.” FDR and Truman, you see, had the true grit to do Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. And so a “conservative” magazine claims Harry for our side.
What Ms. Emery’s piece reveals is that conservatism today is as shot through with corruption as the Church of Pope Alexander VI, two of whose brood of bastards were Lucretia and Cesare Borgia.
We are in need of a Council of Trent to redefine who we are.
Still “conservative” remains a respected term and the right term for those who devote their lives to family, faith, community, and country. We ought not give up our good name to cross-dressers. As for Left and Right, they retain much of the meaning they have had since the French Revolution. And we are of the Vendée.
A few years ago, when called a “neo-isolationist,” I wrote,
Most of us ... are not really ‘neo-’ anything. We are old church and old right, anti-imperialist and anti-interventionist, disbelievers in Pax Americana. We love the old republic, and when we hear phrases like ‘New World Order,’ we release the safety catches on our revolvers.
As in New Deal days, our Cultural Revolution, and the high times of the Great Society, a conservative today must be a counterrevolutionary. While Bush’s judges and Supreme Court justices have been top of the line and his tax cuts conservative, his democracy crusade and his open-borders immigration policy, his Big Government conservatism and free-trade-über-alles globalism owe more to FDR and LBJ than Goldwater or Reagan.
But the returns are now coming in from the Bush experiment with a Rockefeller Republicanism that he calls “compassionate conservatism.”
The rising casualties and soaring costs of an unnecessary war in Iraq, an overstretched military, immense trade deficits that must bring down the dollar, the loss of sovereignty and economic independence, a bloated federal bureaucracy to which Bushites have added as much as LBJ, an unresisted invasion over our southern border, the selling of the party of Reagan to the money power—all are the marks of an empire at the end of its tether.
What can save this Republic is the restoration of authentic values and policies of conservatism, imposed at some cost and hardship upon a people who may have lost the capacity and belief in the need to sacrifice to save what their fathers gave them.
In 1968, in The Southern Tradition at Bay, some of the writings of the conservative philosopher Richard Weaver were published. In the foreword, Donald Davidson wrote that his friend had, upon reading John Crowe Ransom’s God Without Thunder, been taken with the idea that an “unorthodox defense of orthodoxy” might be feasible.
Weaver “was suddenly troubled by his realization,” wrote Davidson, that “many traditional positions in our world had suffered not so much because of inherent defect as because of the stupidity, ineptness and intellectual sloth of those who ... are presumed to have their defense in charge.”
Conservatives have seen their movement hijacked by ideological vagabonds and hustlers who are redefining it to mean what it never meant. We need to find who sold the pass. Before we can take back our country, we must take back our movement.
August 28, 2006 Issue
Patrick J. Buchanan
Home from the beach Saturday last, I picked up The Weekly Standard. Within the magazine some still regard as the parish bulletin of the Beltway Right was an essay by one Noemie Emery furiously contesting Peter Beinart’s claim to Harry Truman.
Harry belongs to us, insisted Ms. Emery. He was “heir to a great wartime president,” she wrote. Would that be the same FDR who “lied us into war,” whose regime was honeycombed with treason, who at Tehran and Yalta betrayed Poland and all of Eastern Europe to the barbarous tyrant he called “Uncle Joe”?
Freedom was “expanded by Roosevelt and Truman, who extended the welfare state,” Ms. Emery continued. Good to know.
As for Ronald Reagan, he was “an original Truman Democrat and New Dealer [who] ... brought the Truman DNA into the Republican Party with a cadre of Scoop Jackson Democrats …” To Emery, Reagan will go down in history as the Moses who led the neocons out of Egypt to the Promised Land: power. Reagan himself used to tell us Barry Goldwater was the John the Baptist of our movement.
And why is Emery “wild about Harry”? Operation Keelhaul? The defense of Alger Hiss? The loss of China to Maoism? The firing of General MacArthur? The offer to send the battleship Missouri to Russia to pick up Stalin and bring him over to respond to Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech? The “no-win war” in Korea?
No. Ms. Emery reveres FDR and Harry because they “planned, executed, and blessed a campaign so completely hair-raising that the horror remains to this day.” FDR and Truman, you see, had the true grit to do Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. And so a “conservative” magazine claims Harry for our side.
What Ms. Emery’s piece reveals is that conservatism today is as shot through with corruption as the Church of Pope Alexander VI, two of whose brood of bastards were Lucretia and Cesare Borgia.
We are in need of a Council of Trent to redefine who we are.
Still “conservative” remains a respected term and the right term for those who devote their lives to family, faith, community, and country. We ought not give up our good name to cross-dressers. As for Left and Right, they retain much of the meaning they have had since the French Revolution. And we are of the Vendée.
A few years ago, when called a “neo-isolationist,” I wrote,
Most of us ... are not really ‘neo-’ anything. We are old church and old right, anti-imperialist and anti-interventionist, disbelievers in Pax Americana. We love the old republic, and when we hear phrases like ‘New World Order,’ we release the safety catches on our revolvers.
As in New Deal days, our Cultural Revolution, and the high times of the Great Society, a conservative today must be a counterrevolutionary. While Bush’s judges and Supreme Court justices have been top of the line and his tax cuts conservative, his democracy crusade and his open-borders immigration policy, his Big Government conservatism and free-trade-über-alles globalism owe more to FDR and LBJ than Goldwater or Reagan.
But the returns are now coming in from the Bush experiment with a Rockefeller Republicanism that he calls “compassionate conservatism.”
The rising casualties and soaring costs of an unnecessary war in Iraq, an overstretched military, immense trade deficits that must bring down the dollar, the loss of sovereignty and economic independence, a bloated federal bureaucracy to which Bushites have added as much as LBJ, an unresisted invasion over our southern border, the selling of the party of Reagan to the money power—all are the marks of an empire at the end of its tether.
What can save this Republic is the restoration of authentic values and policies of conservatism, imposed at some cost and hardship upon a people who may have lost the capacity and belief in the need to sacrifice to save what their fathers gave them.
In 1968, in The Southern Tradition at Bay, some of the writings of the conservative philosopher Richard Weaver were published. In the foreword, Donald Davidson wrote that his friend had, upon reading John Crowe Ransom’s God Without Thunder, been taken with the idea that an “unorthodox defense of orthodoxy” might be feasible.
Weaver “was suddenly troubled by his realization,” wrote Davidson, that “many traditional positions in our world had suffered not so much because of inherent defect as because of the stupidity, ineptness and intellectual sloth of those who ... are presumed to have their defense in charge.”
Conservatives have seen their movement hijacked by ideological vagabonds and hustlers who are redefining it to mean what it never meant. We need to find who sold the pass. Before we can take back our country, we must take back our movement.
August 28, 2006 Issue
Sunday, August 20, 2006
back again...
time off coaching my daughters softball team(see pic) and remodeling the homeplace(still not finished!)..not to mention working (keep that on the downlow)..i'm back.
one day closer to el presidente bushes vision of mexamerica!
must reads for right thinking people.....
The photo op shop of horrors
By Michelle Malkin
August 19, 2006
It's the story journalistic elite would rather just go away. After Reuters' admission one of its photographers, Adnan Hajj, manipulated two war images from Lebanon after bloggers smoked out his crude Photoshop alterations, and all 920 of his Reuters photos were pulled, evidence of far more troubling photo staging and media deception in the Middle East continues to pour in. Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs (littlegreenfootballs.com) calls it "fauxtography."
One of Mr. Hajj's photos was an iconic image of a dusty dead child with a clean blue pacifier clipped to his shirt, paraded by a corpse handler at the site of an Israeli airstrike in Qana, Lebanon. Mainstream journalists have sneered at bloggers' suspicions, first raised at EU Referendum (eureferendum.blogspot.com), that some of the gruesome photos from that scene may have been staged. The Washington Post's photographer Michael Robinson-Chavez, who was at Qana, huffed: "Everyone was dead, many of them children. Nothing was set up."
But last week, a German television station aired damning video footage from the scene showing a lead propaganda director (dubbed the "Green Helmet Guy") positioning a young boy's corpse, yanking it from an ambulance, placing it on two different stretchers for the cameras and pushing aside bystanders for clearer shots.
This Lebanese version of horror film director Wes Craven was identified by the Associated Press in a softball profile as "Salam Daher," who told the reporter, "I am just a civil defense worker. I have done this job all my life." To clear-eyed readers, that's an inculpatory, not an exculpatory, statement. How many more "jobs" has Mr. Daher overseen? And how many more such media stage managers are out there?
Not all photographers overseas have their heads in the sand. Last week, Middle East-based photographer Bryan Denton, whose work has appeared in the New York Times, revealed on the professional photography Web site Light Stalkers (lightstalkers.org) that he had observed routine staging of photos -- and even corpse-digging -- by Lebanese stringers:
"[I] have been witness to the daily practice of directed shots, one case where a group of wire photogs were choreographing the unearthing of bodies, directing emergency workers here and there, asking them to position bodies just so, even remove bodies that have already been put in graves so that they can photograph them in people's arms." Mr. Denton said he witnessed the photo choreography at numerous protests and evacuations and at an Israeli airstrike in Chiyeh, Lebanon. He followed up with a report that respected photographer friends of his in Lebanon informed him "this was not an isolated incident" and "this has been something I've noticed happening here, more than any other place I've worked previously."
That is probably why bloggers have noticed so many copious examples of phony-looking scenes -- from countless pristine stuffed animals lying in the foreground of destroyed buildings (slublog.com/archives/2006/08/the?passion?of.html), to artfully placed Korans amid scenes of destruction, to a snow-white wedding dress on a mannequin standing in the middle of a street surrounded by piles of rubble, to intact cars photographed on Lebanese roadsides and dubiously labeled as having been struck by Israeli missiles (see hotair.com/archives/2006/08/14/fauxtography-amazing-new-iaf- missiles-mimic-sledgehammer-damage/).
Miscaptioning (which always makes Israel look worse, never Hezbollah, go figure) adds another dimension of faux to deception. One Associated Press image of an anguished father carrying his dead 5-year-old daughter into a Gaza City hospital last week blamed the death on an Israeli airstrike. Charles Johnson found a correction of the caption revealing the girl had been killed in a swingset accident.
I found a Reuters photo of an 18-month-old girl with two broken legs that was pulled by the wire service in late July from a photo set of hospital patients injured in an Israeli air raid. In truth, the girl had been admitted for a "routine hospitalization." Then there was the New York Times' misrepresentation of a half-naked young man sprawled Pieta-like, appearing dead, amid Tyre rubble. The original Times' Web site photo caption? "The mayor of Tyre said that in the worst-hit areas, bodies were still buried under the rubble." Turned out the "dead" man was a "rescue worker" supposedly "injured" (with his baseball cap tucked neatly in his arm as he closed his eyes and flung his head back) and photographed in several other scenes running around the bombing site.
Isolated incidents? In a rare moment of candor, CNN's Anderson Cooper revealed the routine mechanics of Hezbollywood propaganda tours last week: "I was in Beirut, and they took me on this sort of guided tour of the Hezbollah-controlled territories in southern Lebanon that were heavily bombed... they clearly want the story of civilian casualties out. That is their -- what they're heavily pushing, to the point where on this tour I was on, they were just making stuff up. They had six ambulances lined up in a row and said, OK, you know, they brought reporters there, they said you can talk to the ambulance drivers. And then one by one, they told the ambulances to turn on their sirens and to zoom off, and people taking that picture would be reporting, I guess, the idea that these ambulances were zooming off to treat civilian casualties, when in fact, these ambulances were literally going back and forth down the street just for people to take pictures of them."
"Just making stuff up." Remember that.
Meanwhile, media ostriches carry on. Joe Elbert, The Washington Post's assistant managing editor for photography, told ombudsman Deborah Howell smugly: "We don't use tools to change reality." Newsflash: You are the tools being used.
Michelle Malkin is a nationally syndicated columnist.
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TERRORISTS WIN: DEODORANT BANNED FROM AIRPLANES
August 16, 2006
Last week, British authorities arrested 24 members of a terrorist cell plotting to blow up about a dozen U.S.-bound planes simultaneously. As a result of those arrests, we learned:
1) Nothing being done by airport security since 9/11 would prevent a bomb from being brought onto an airplane; and
2) This terrorist plot — like all other terrorist plots — was stopped by ethnic profiling.
Last week marked the first official admission that everything government airport screeners have been doing until now is completely pointless — unless you're an airport security guard with a thing for women's undergarments, in which case it's been highly effective.
As we now know, all the ingredients necessary to blow up an airplane can be carried in small liquid containers. Airport security has not even been looking for small liquid containers. Judging from my personal experience, they seem to have been focusing on finding explosive devices inside women's brassieres.
After five years of submissively complying with bag checks, shoe checks and underwire bra checks, Americans have now been informed that the hell we've been going through at the airports (but which the president and members of Congress do not go through because they refuse to fly commercial air) has been a useless Kabuki theater.
The procedures that have wasted millions of hours of time cannot keep the most basic bomb materials off an airplane. This is like locking your windows to prevent burglaries, while leaving the front door wide open.
Airport security has been using metal detectors to confiscate sharp objects that could be turned into make-shift weapons, which could then be used by terrorists to commandeer control of a plane and fly it into a building.
Except the terrorists can't do that because we've seen that trick before.
After 9/11, airline passengers will never allow a half-dozen terrorists to take control of a plane again. Indeed, on 9/11, passengers on Flight 93 prevented terrorists who had already been given control of the plane from flying it into a building after hearing what had happened to the first three hijacked planes.
To pull off a 9/11-style attack now, literally half the passengers on the plane would have to be terrorists. (At least the airport screeners wouldn't have to worry about confiscating a lot of deodorants.)
I think a planeful of Arabs would attract attention — except from people who had recently completed a government training program teaching them not to notice anyone's appearance. Not even a group of liberal Democrats flying off to a Renaissance Weekend would stand for that.
The sole objective of airport security post-9/11 has been to accomplish the impossible — remove all sharp objects from a plane — in order to prevent an attack that won't ever happen again. (OK — well, that and finding out what color of lingerie Ann Coulter prefers.)
The plan seems to be to make flying so unpleasant that terrorists — like the people who write laws about airport security — will refuse to fly commercial air. On that theory, we could also keep terrorists off planes by forcing passengers to undergo root canal surgery before boarding, making them stand on their heads for an hour, or enacting an "all Whoopi Goldberg in-flight movie" policy.
What stopped last week's terrorist attack was ethnic profiling. We don't know the details of the British intelligence work that nabbed the 24 Muslims because The New York Times has not been able to obtain that classified information and publish it on its front page yet. But it is a fact that you could not catch 24 Muslim terrorists by surveilling everyone in Britain equally.
Without the ethnic profiling going on outside of airports, no security procedure currently permissible inside airports would have prevented a terrorist attack that would have left thousands dead.
Airplanes, ports, bridges, subways and shopping malls cannot ever be sanitized against every type of attack that can be dreamed up by fanatics engaged in asymmetrical warfare. We have to target the fanatics themselves. Baby formula doesn't kill people. Islamic fascists kill people.
COPYRIGHT 2006 ANN COULTER
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