Mike's Noise

God help us ... we almost elected this man President

Everyone is talking about this exchange between Bob Schieffer and John Kerry that occurred yesterday (Sunday Dec. 4) on Meet the Press (transcript from Rushlimbaugh.com):

SCHIEFFER: Democrat Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, he takes a very different view, Senator Kerry. He says basically that we should stay the course, because he says real progress is being made. He says, 'This is a war between 27 million Iraqis who want freedom and 10,000 terrorists.' He says we're in a watershed transformation. What about that?

JOHN KERRY: I don't agree with that. But I think what we need to do is recognize what we all agree on, which is, you've got to begin to set benchmarks for accomplishment; you've got to begin to transfer authority to the Iraqis, and there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the -- of -- of -- of -- historical customs, religious customs, whether you like it or not. Iraqis should be doing that.  And after all of these two and a half years, with all of the talk of 210,000 people trained, there just is no excuse for not transferring more of that authority.

Rush Limbaugh today:

He has not seen US soldiers terrorize kids and children in the dead of night in Iraq, and yet he can't help it because this is who he is -- and who he is, is a carbon copy of today's modern Democratic Party. This is how they view the American military man and woman; this is how they view their own country. We are the terrorists. We brutalize. We're the barbarians. We are cowards. We are doing things like this under cover of darkness. It is shocking to have to play this stuff for you, but I feel compelled to do it because so many people still want to have their head in the sands about all this.

But apparently Kerry believes that everything would be hunky-dory over there if the "Iraqis" were the ones doing the "terrorizing."  Well, that's what he said, isn't it?   And how deeply in denial must Kerry be in order to denounce America for not training Iraqis and not relinquishing authority to Iraqis, while at the same time admitting that we have trained over 210,000 Iraqis for police, military, and other government service.  These people are so obsessed with painting Bush as an incompetent loser that they probably wouldn't admit to seeing a nose on their own faces if they thought that Bush might benefit in some way from that confession.

I thought about suggesting that, in light of Kerry's unbelievably stupid comments, Democrats who want a clear conscience should apologize for everything nasty that they said about Dan Qualye because of his verbal gaffes; but upon reflection, I believe that Limbaugh is right.  This wasn't a gaffe.  Democrats still believe that Iraq was a better place with Saddam in charge, dropping people into plastic shredders, attacking villages with poison gas, and imprisoning and torturing children.

And we almost elected this guy president.  (shudder)

9th Circuit Court to parents - all your child are belong to us

The Ninth Circus Circuit Court of Appeals in California issued a ruling yesterday which established that parents have no "due process or privacy right to override the determinations of public schools as to the information to which their children will be exposed while enrolled as students."

In other words, you as a parent have no right whatsoever to open your ignorant mouth and question what your child learns in school.  And these jokers have the gall to call it "public" education!

Want to know why the parents sued?  The Palmdale school district began giving questionnaires to students as young as the first grade that were supposedly an early intervention tool that would help identify students with emotional or psychological problems.  Fine and dandy.  The parents were even asked to sign a permission slip in order for their children to answer the questions, but they were never told that their children -- first, third, and fifth graders, mind you -- would be asked questions involving:

“touching my private parts too much”
“thinking about sex”
“thinking about touching other people's private parts”
“can't stop thinking about sex”

Un-freaking-believable.  Maybe this kind of survey would have helped a young Bill Clinton, but honestly folks, how can a seven year old answer these questions?  And what kind of damage could be done if the answers to these questions were ever leaked or misused? 

I have shared both personally with friends and via comments on other blogs that I believe the next step liberals will take in the sexualization of our society will be the normalization of "consensual" adult-child sexual relationships.  The innocent, unwitting answers that children will give to questions like these could easily be taken out of context and used to support such twisted and dangerous pursuits.

Redstate.org reminds us of one of the goals of state education as outlined in The ABC's of Communism:

The individual human being does not belong to himself, but to society, to the human race. The individual can only live and thrive owing to the existence of society. The child, therefore, belongs to the society in which it lives, and thanks to which it came into being - and this society is something wider than the 'society' of its own parents. To society, likewise, belongs the primary and basic right of educating children.

Thanks to our comrades on the Ninth Circuit Court, that ideology has taken a giant step forward here in America.

(h/t Donald Sensing and Double Toothpicks.)

On a related note, Senate Republicans are still talking about a plan to split the jurisdiction of the Ninth Circuit Court.  This might be worth watching.

Invasion of the Jesus Freaks

This Drudge photo kinda says it all:

Only I wonder if the back side of this woman really looks like this:

Invasion of the Hippie Freaks

Courtesy of Michelle Malkin.

Make sure your mouth is empty when you view this photo album.

A sampling below the fold ...

"Millions More" insanity begins

Whenever Louis Farrakhan steps up to a microphone, you can almost always be sure that he is going to say something like this:

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan fueled a rumor that explosives, not Hurricane Katrina, broke New Orleans' dikes and flooded poor African American neighborhoods.

"A member of the Army Corps of Engineers saw burn marks on the concrete," Farrakhan told reporters, describing an e-mail he had received.

"They found two types of explosives used by the military," he said, without naming the source, adding that an eight-meter (25-foot) crater had been blown in the dike.

Farrakhan said locals had reported sounds of explosions, among other things, leading him to believe the rumors should be investigated.

"Wickedness exists in high places," he said. "The duty of the government is to prove the rumor to be false or that these suspicions are true." (emphasis added)

Actually, Mr. Farrakhan, the duty of leaders (as you consider yourself to be) is to refrain from making such idiotic and outlandish statements.  It is not the duty of government to waste its time trying to argue with stupidity.

This type of rhetoric is destructive and helps no one.

With regard to my previous post about this weekend's "Millions More March," organized by Farrakahn, I want to make it perfectly clear that I am not in any way against blacks coming together as a community or affirming one another.

What I am against, however, are meetings like this one, whose sole focus seems to be to blame President Bush and white people in general for every problem that blacks struggle with today.

I am particularly upset by the hateful rhetoric used by black leaders with reference to white Americans and the Republican party.  Go back and read any of the great speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King, or his letters and writings, and you will not find him referring to white leaders of his day as Nazis or Klansmen.  King certainly had every right to compare men like Bull Connor to Hitler, but he didn't.  Modern day civil rights leaders have become so obsessed with tearing down whites that they have lost the focus of their movement's origin, which was peace and welfare among all men.

Black leaders are also obsessed with encouraging continual animosity toward white people for acts that took place 150 years ago and longer.  Slavery was an ugly stain on humanity, but it was one that was practiced on every continent and by every civilization until the nineteenth century.  It was the white Christian Europeans and Americans who worked for a world-wide end to the slave trade.  Insinuating that I or other white Americans somehow have a price to pay for something that happened so long ago is wrong and destructive.  Germany rid itself of Naziism and Japan rid itself of its imperial warlords within a generation.  They moved on.  It's time that black leaders encouraged their people to do the same.

And it's also time that black leaders began working to end the cultural isolation of their people, particularly the inner city poor.  The dysfunctional and destructive habits of poor inner city blacks have been turned into high-dollar pop culture by the film and record industries.  They promote a lifestyle of gangs, sexual promiscuity, drugs, and broken families that is complete with its own language, clothing, and music.  A handful have gotten rich off the misery of millions.  Why doesn't the black leadership recognize this and work to stop it?

Cultural isolation also foments racism because it limits meaningful contact between blacks and whites.  The poor blacks living in the inner city rarely ever come in physical contact with whites, with the exception of interventions by white police officers, social workers, and the judicial system.  This only serves to perpetuate the stereotypes of whites as an evil menace whose systems serve only to punish and humiliate blacks.  Why doesn't the black leadership recognize this and work to integrate whites into black society in a meaningful way?  I can tell you that there are millions of whites who would jump at the chance to befriend, mentor, and love the members of the black community, especially the children who are so much at risk.  I'm one of them.  All we ask for is a real chance.

Any gathering of black leaders that recognizes these problems and works to honestly correct them will always have my undying support.

But today's mainstream black leadership makes those things seem like an impossibility.

You tell me who suffers because of it.

Bush's "God Told Me" claim is weak, weak, weak

I'm sure that this story sent the hate-Bush and Christophobe crowds into euphoria last Friday:

Palestinian: Bush Says God Guided Him On War

JERUSALEM - A Palestinian leader quoted President Bush as saying God told him to invade Iraq, but said he did not take the U.S. president’s comment literally and saw it only as a reflection of his faith and commitment.

The White House dismissed as “absurd” the remarks attributed to Bush by Deputy Prime Minister Nabil Shaath in a BBC documentary series recounting a June 2003 meeting he attended along with Mahmoud Abbas, now Palestinian president.

Shaath said he stood by his recollection of Bush saying he had been “driven with a mission from God” when he sent U.S. troops into Iraq and Afghanistan and also lent his support to the eventual creation of a Palestinian state.

The BBC was a bit more forceful it its description:

President George W Bush told Palestinian ministers that God had told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq - and create a Palestinian State, a new BBC series reveals.

In Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, a major three-part series on BBC TWO (at 9.00pm on Monday 10, Monday 17 and Monday 24 October), Abu Mazen, Palestinian Prime Minister, and Nabil Shaath, his Foreign Minister, describe their first meeting with President Bush in  June 2003.

Nabil Shaath says: "President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan." And I did, and then God would tell me, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …" And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, "Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East." And by God I'm gonna do it.'"

Hi-yo Silver!  Away!!

But hang on to your hats, partners, 'cause this thing ain't over yet.  Courtesy of Double Toothpicks we discover that before running this story, the press confirmed the Palestinians' claims by interviewing ... the Palestinians!

Ummm ... three sources ... independently confirmed ... does anyone even vaguely recognize these terms, much less employ them any more?

Of course the White House denies that Bush ever made such an outlandish comment, and so far no one else can legitimately confirm the Palestinians' tale, and no one else has come forward with a "me too" report of Bush saying such things in other meetings with world leaders.

By the way ... if we elect Hillary Clinton president in 2008, I hear she has a direct line to the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt.  Stay tuned for further announcements...

UNICEF exploits the Smurfs

This is just sad:

        Smurfette is left for dead. Baby Smurf is left crying and orphaned as the Smurf's village is carpet bombed by warplanes _ a horrific scene and imagery not normally associated with the lovable blue-skinned cartoon characters.

These are the scenes being shown as part of a new UNICEF ad-campaign on Belgian television.

"It's working. We are getting a lot of reactions and people are logging on to our Web site," UNICEF Belgium spokesman Philippe Henon said Tuesday.

... The video is peacefully introduced by birds, butterflies and happy Smurfs playing and singing their theme song when suddenly out of the sky, bombs rain down onto their forest village, scattering Papa Smurf and the rest as their houses are set ablaze.

The bombs kill Smurfette leaving Baby Smurf orphaned and crying at the edge of a crater in the last scene of the video and finishing of with the text "don't let war destroy the children's world."

I'm probably as annoyed by the Smurfs as the next guy, but portraying them as the victims of aerial bombing is a little extreme.

If the UN wants to educate people about the ravages of war, particularly its effects on innocent children, then I would suggest simply showing the victims of last year's Beslan terror attack.  Or maybe visiting this page.

Wait a minute -- what's that?  The US didn't kill any of those people? 

Oh, never mind.

Another thought -- does this mean that moonbats will now start chanting "Bush = Gargamel"?

Bus photos prove the ineptness of Nagin, New Orleans officials

Everyone remembers this now-famous photo of the New Orleans school buses in the flooded parking lot, and the hullabaloo that followed when we realized that the city could have used those buses to evacuate stranded refugees from the Superdome:

But if you haven't been reading WizBang, then you don't know the whole story.  Wizblogger Paul, who is a New Orleans native, first broke this story last Tuesday after poring over satellite photos of New Orleans.  It seems that the city had at least 60 school buses parked in the Algiers Bus Barn, where they remained dry throughout the storm and flood, and were only a few minutes away from the Superdome.  Here is a detail of the satellite photo:

Then on Friday, Paul posted yet another satellite photo showing 150 City of New Orleans RTA buses parked at the Poland Avenue Wharf, also high and dry, and also just a few minutes away from the Superdome.  Here is the new photo:

To put this all into perspective, here is a satellite photo that I found some weeks ago via a link from Donald Sensing.  This high-resolution photo shows most of the city of New Orleans, and it shows all three groups of buses in question.  It will also help you to understand why the failure of New Orleans city officials to even have a plan to utilize these buses to transport refugees out of the city before the storm struck should be considered a crime.  I have marked pertinent areas with red squares.  (Warning: high-res image, 3 Mb download)

Paul from WizBang says,

They could have easily put 140 people per city bus. Or, to do the math, they could have moved 21,000 people in a single trip. There were an estimated 20,000 in the Dome. Between these buses and the 60 previously found school busses in Algiers, they could have made it in 1 trip with room to spare.

This -perhaps better than any other example- shows why local officials are in charge of first response and not the feds. Local officials (ahem, the Mayor) should have known who to call. Once they knew there were busses on the wharf, they should have known they were just minutes from the Dome and the areas around the river never floods. (The convention center is also on the river and everyone knew it was fine) Locals know their area (or should) and -in any other city- can manage the response better than some bureaucrat flown in from Washington. Instead of trying to find a solution, Nagin whined that he was a victim.

If Nagin had used the resources available to him properly, he could have had the Dome evacuated by Tuesday at noon and much of the chaos that broke out in the city would have been avoided. But he didn't.

Exactly.  And if either Ray Nagin or Kathleen Blanco run for re-election, they are fools.  Period.

Stuck on Stupid - Bill Bennett

Wednesday, on Bill Bennett's radio show, he took a call from a woman who suggested that legalized abortion had contributed to the insolvency of Social Security.  I'll let Bennett describe what happened next:

""On Wednesday, a caller to my radio show proposed the idea that one good argument for the pro-life position would be that if we didn't have abortions, Social Security would be solvent. I stated my doubts about such a thesis, as well as my opposition to such a form of argument (the audio of the call is available at my Website: bennettmornings.com).

"I then stated that such extrapolations of this argument can cut both ways, and cited the current bestseller, Freakonomics, which discusses the authors' thesis that abortion reduces crime.

"Then, putting my philosophy professor's hat on, I went on to reveal the limitations of such arguments by showing the absurdity in another such argument, along the same lines. I entertained what law school professors call 'the Socratic method' and what I would hope good social science professors still use in their seminars. In so doing, I suggested a hypothetical analogy while at the same time saying the proposition I was using about blacks and abortion was 'impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible,' just to ensure those who would have any doubt about what they were hearing, or for those who tuned in to the middle of the conversation."

Here's Bennett's "absurd argument:"

CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about the loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social Security, and I was curious, and I've read articles in recent months here, that the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund Social Security as we know it today. And the media just doesn't -- never touches this at all.

BENNETT: Assuming they're all productive citizens?

CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them were, it would be an enormous amount of revenue.

BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don't know what the costs would be, too. I think as -- abortion disproportionately occur among single women? No.

CALLER: I don't know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are, yeah.

BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don't know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don't know. I mean, it cuts both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well --

CALLER: Well, I don't think that statistic is accurate.

BENNETT: Well, I don't think it is either, I don't think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don't know. But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky. (end of transcript - emphasis added by Media Matters).

There is nothing in Bill Bennett's career that remotely connects him to racism.  He became a punching bag for liberals a few years ago when it was revealed that he had an addiction to legalized gambling -- certainly ironic, since Bennett's claim to fame in the '90's was his writings on virtue and morality, but also a perfect example of the hatred of today's "compassionate" political Left, which takes delight in kicking their enemies when they are are down.  Bennett is highly educated, a skilled debater, and quite frankly, argues above the heads of most people who have only a hit-and-run encounter with him.

Today, though, we live in a world that includes organizations like Media Matters, who monitors what it considers to be "conservative media" and issues daily press releases listing what it considers to be "outrageous" or "inaccurate" statements made by conservatives.

Bill Bennett gets my first "Stuck on Stupid" entry because he should have had the foresight to realize that any comment that anyone could take out of context with regard to racial issues, particularly pertaining to blacks, should never be uttered.  It's just the world that we live in.  And Bill Bennett should have been smart enough to have realized this before he opened his mouth and said, "but I do know that it's true...", regardless of what statistics or anything else might seem to indicate.

Liberals are demanding that Bennett apologize for what he said.  Bennett defended himself well on Hannity and Colmes, and if you read his own remarks and the transcript of the Hannity and Colmes interview, it is obvious to me that he was simply trying to illustrate the absurdity of one hypothethical argument with yet another argument that was even more absurd.

And quite frankly, I don't see how Bennett's arguments were any more offensive than the recent rhetoric comparing President Bush to Bull Connor, directly blaming him for a century of poverty in New Orleans, and accusing him of deliberately delaying government rescue efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina just so blacks could die because they vote Democrat.

On a related note, Planned Parenthood is offering real, free abortions to hurricane Katrina refugees.  Of course most of the New Orleans refugees are black.  And Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Sanger, was a noted proponent of white supremacy and eugenics.  Anyone see a pattern here?