Read Iowahawk

And for once, you will not laugh.

How many thousands across Africa die every year because someone decided DDT was thinning bird egg shells and killing bees? It does neither. The replacements for it, on the other hand,do kill bees.

Of course, those are all African bees, the eradification of which would have been a net positive.

But without the more effective DDT, uncontrolled mosquitoes spread malaria to thousands of Africans, many of whom then die of the disease.

But to the radical environmentalists, that may be the net positive.

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FAO Schwarz: Retail Lunactivism

Lunactivism, my faithful readers know, is some protest, statement, or direct action in support of a cause that does the cause more harm than good. Terrorism is an extreme example. The fear-mongering Prop 8 commercial portraying Mormons as home invaders is another.

In a commercial venture, companies have over the last several years begun touting their environmental friendliness. It's thought that appearing green enhances corporate image, which is especially important to retailers and consumer-facing businesses.

Now, hardly anybody or anything has more good will than Santa Claus, and most people have a fixed image of Santa Claus involving, on some level, a red suit.

So F.A.O. Schwarz, struggling retailer, decided that turning Santa's suit green to push a children's book was the right way to go. Lunactivism? I report, you decide.

w/t Debbie Schlussel

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Giving Thanks

I started out to write about Pilgrims and Indians, Mayflowers and Compacts, and how we really ought to be thankful for their courage, their cooperation, and above all, for their faith. But I realized that's been done, and overdone, and deconstructed, and reconstructed already. I mean, we've had Captain John Smith and Pocahontas, and this very year, it seems every blogger and pundit has some kind of message today.

For instance, Ken Taylor does a fine work writing at The Minority Report.

And it occurs to me why there is so much blogging about this holiday: despite its origins as a government-approved religious observance, everybody likes Thanksgiving.

Even angry vegetarian Pagans can grit their strident, protesting teeth and get behind the idea of a feast at the end of a harvest. Usually in North America the summer grain crops are all but totally harvested by now, though this year cool, wet weather has delayed that in some areas.

But it would be very difficult to plan the start of the Christmas marketing season if we had to wait until the crops were actually brought in before we were to give thanks. Cynicism aside, Thanksgiving itself remains remarkably uncommercialized. Only the NFL, Macy's, and Ocean Spray have had any real success with it, though the people who make turkey friers are giving it a push.

The politically incorrect holiday is Christmas, with its parallel traditions of Christian Virgin Birth on the one hand and elvin, reindeerish images evoking the diversity-challenged Northern Europe of the Little Ice Age on the other.

On Thanksgiving, everyone seems to take a step back, reflect, and exhale a bit. We see siblings, or not, gorge on big, slow birds, or not, and watch the Detroit Lions lose a football game, or not. The Lions will lose, that is, but not everyone will force themselves to watch them do it.

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What Year Is It

in your world?

According to Jonah Goldberg, the geniuses and mere honorees who think they are geniuses on the left are now changing their tune. Instead of calling for a new New Deal now that evidence is piling up that it made the Great Depression worse instead of better, they're saying we need another World War II.

There are at least two problems with that line of thinking.

First, World War II was caused by Hitler's ascent, which was caused by -- wait for it -- The Great Depression. If we're in an economic crisis of that magnitude, then a solution will present itself forthwith.

Or, if we listen to those who say that terrorist Islamicism is caused by economic conditions in the Middle East, perhaps a solution already has presented itself in the form of commercial jets colliding with New York skyscrapers.

Secondly, doesn't the left constantly complain about the amount of money spent on the war in Iraq? Or perhaps the problem is merely that they didn't get the money.

Just because a solution presented itself for the Great Depression, that doesn't mean it was the only possible solution, or that a solution would require government action. We had an economy before the Depression, and it's quite possible that we could have had an economy again without resorting to all-out war.

Simulating a war, as implied by a WWII without the fighting, implies that we don't have an enemy worth fighting right now.

Finally, the point I set out to make: the conditions now are not the same as in 1929, nor even 1941. We lack excess capacity of resources such as oil and steel. The resources we have are largely tied up productively, except where environmental laws keep them out of production. In particular, many of the "green" technologies the left hopes to create will require recycling items that currently have value, destroying that value (taking it out of the economy).

For example, if the government forces everyone to use electric vehicles, or if it becomes prohibitively expensive to operate or maintain them, that will mean that a lot of value on consumer balance sheets will simply disappear.

The economy is not as bad as the news says it is. We're in a healthy cycle of renewal, in which some people are finding that they lose money, or that their investments in 401Ks and houses aren't worth as much for a while. It's normal, and no government action is needed.

But the action we're going to get -- these huge bailouts and economic "stimulus" packages -- are going to deepen the crisis of confidence into a really bad time.

And now that Obama has been elected, there doesn't appear to be anything anyone can do about it.

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Texas Prosecutor and Judge Seem Not To Be In Complete Harmony

The Texas judge assigned the corruption case against Vice President Dick Cheney signalled that he may wish to try the case before agreeing with District Attorney Juan Guerra on the Vice President's guilt. The judge's position follows State of Texas tradition that no one, not even those in power outside of the State's jurisdiction, should be presumed guilty before their case is argued.

The judge actually went so far as to entertain motions from the defense, a decision about which Guerra hinted a certain lack of enthusiasm. Guerra also appeared to dissent over being removed as prosecutor from the indictments in the case for which he is also a victim, even though Texas allows pro se legal represention:

And now all of a sudden, there is urgency. 18 months we kept this indictment, past my election. And I asked this court [to say if it would be] dismissed on a technicality. You already decided! You refused.

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Murtha Attorney: Congressman Above The Law

Legal counsel for aged Congressman John Murtha (D-PA) claimed in open court that his client is immune from laws which limit ordinary citizens.

Murtha is being sued for saying that Marines involved in an incident at Haditha, Iraq, were "murderers" guilty of "war crimes".

From the via Malkin:

Assistant U.S Attorney Darrell Valdez, who represents Murtha, argued that a member of Congress is “absolutely immune” from a defamation suit because there’s no circumstance in which speaking to the media is not within the scope of a lawmaker’s employment.

That is, a lawyer representing the United States Government asserted that his client is above the law.

It's not clear from the claims if the Congressman claims immunity for all defamation, or only that against members of the Armed Services in time of war. In particular, the question of whether members of Congress are free to say that government lawyers are guilty of malpractice will have to go unanswered.

Clearly, according to the United States Government lawyer, Murtha would be free to allege that the lawyer in question were guilty of murder and crimes against humanity, but alleging malpractice and incompetence may be a line even a Congressman must not cross.

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Ayers: Terrorism Doesn't Exist

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn continue to say that it's not terrorism unless you are the U.S. Government.

Part of me really hopes Ayers stays in the news for four years. He's a walking, partially sentient trooth machine. Here he describes the Obama victory celebration in Chicago's Grant Park:

But they were also celebrating—there was—you could kind of cut the relief in people’s feelings with a knife. I mean, it was the sense that we were going to leave behind the era of 9/11 and the era of fear and war without end and repression and constitutional shredding and scapegoating of gay and lesbian people, on and on. And there we were, millions, in the park, representing everybody, hugging, dancing, carrying on right in the spot, forty years ago, where many of us were beaten and dragged to jail.

We're going to leave behind the era of 9/11 because we voted it away.

"Scapegoating" of gay and lesbian people? When have gays and lesbians been blamed for anything, falsely or not?

Al Qaeda gets a vote, too. And they really don't like gays and lesbians, pal.

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Typical Bush Derangement Syndrome at Salon

Somehow managing to type wearing a helmet and drool bucket, David Sarota writes:

It wouldn't be the George W. Bush we all know if our shamed president didn't spend his remaining White House days in a final fit of polarization.

Wha? Talk about paranoia! Mr. Bush wants the Columbia Free Trade deal to go through, and knows that it's union opposition which makes Obama also oppose it. And why are the Democrats so in favor of an auto maker bailout? The unions want it, to keep their fat, blood-sucking lifestyle going.

But Sarota harkens back to NAFTA, managing to blame Bush41 for forcing it on Bill Clinton, which in Sirota's alternate reality caused the unions to skip voting in 1994. Those things must all be Known Facts on the Left, but having lived through that era I could have sworn I heard the centrist Bill Clinton championing NAFTA. And the 1994 elections were all about conservatives rallying behind conservatism as expressed by Newt Gingrich.

In Sarota's fantasies, George Bush is some kind of Machiavellian mastermind, rolling the dice with the world's economy in order to depress voter turnout in 2010:

Therefore, if Bush successfully uses the economic emergency to hustle a faction of Wall Street Democrats into supporting the deal, he will have potentially engineered 1994 redux: Democratic infighting, a demoralized progressive base, and these newly elected fair-trade Democrats humiliated — and thus electorally endangered — by their own party's standard bearers.

Dude. No one will vote, or not vote, two years from now based on whether there is a free trade agreement with Columbia. Lots of union members may not have jobs without one, but what do they care? They have the One.

Update: I think I like Kim Strassel's take better.

If there was a moment that highlights to what extent the Democratic Party has become captive to its special interests, this might be it. Mrs. Pelosi and Harry Reid have spent this week demanding that Washington stave off a car-maker collapse. What makes this a little weird is that Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Reid are Washington. If they so desperately want a Detroit bailout they could always, you know, pass one.

w/t Yid With Lid

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Just Because You Say It, Mr. Ayers, Doesn't Make It So.

In an interview on ABC's Good Morning America, William Ayers says:

“Let’s remember that what you call a violent past, that was at a time when thousands of people were being murdered by our government every month,” he argued. “And those of us who fought to end that war were actually on the right side.”

Ayers denied that the bombings carried out by the group amounted to terrorism.

“We tried to end that war. And in trying to end it, we did cross lines of propriety, of legality, maybe even of common sense. But we never committed terror,” he stated.

Ayers claimed that the actions taken by his group were not terrorism because they did not “target people.”

Terrorism is violence against civilian targets to effect political change. That distinguishes it from free speech (non-violent acts such as sit-ins and marches against civilian targets), war crimes (acts by military personnel against civilians, or vice versa), and mere criminal behavior (the same act minus the call for political change).

Whether the action was intended to target people, or merely ended up killing policemen by accident, is irrelevant. Targeting civilian private property to make a political point is terrorism.

Ayers is a self-righteous liar.

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Still Undecided? Where the Candidates Stand

The McCain site actually has a very good breakdown of the issues in the campaign and the reasons to vote for the hero McCain instead of the demagogue Obama.

If Obama wins, I'm not moving to Canada -- but I fear for our nation.

Barack Obama is the culmination of the 1960's radical movement. If you like that sort of thing, he's your guy.

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No, Obama Is Not The Antichrist

Of course not.

w/t Mark Steyn

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Learn The Power of the Dark Side!

Get out of my yard!

w/t NRO

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Why Saul Alinsky Would Love Early Voting

Tom Blumer at Pajamas Media nails it:

It is becoming more obvious with each election cycle that that the widespread adoption of no-excuses-needed early voting has been a big mistake.

Read the Whole Thing, as they say.

We should not know how anyone else is voting. Saul Alinsky, in his Rules for Radicals, Barack Obama's training manual, explained that to take control, the easiest thing is to first make it appear that the system is broken.

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Department of Kumbaya

Department of Peace? Please, let's strangle H.R. 808 at birth:

(a) In General- The Secretary shall--

1. work proactively and interactively with each branch of the Federal Government on all policy matters relating to conditions of peace;
2. serve as a delegate to the National Security Council;
3. call on the intellectual and spiritual wealth of the people of the United States and seek participation in its administration and in its development of policy from private, public, and nongovernmental organizations; and
   
4. monitor and analyze causative principles of conflict and make policy recommendations for developing and maintaining peaceful conduct.

The Secretary of Peace will have the authority to bureaucratically muck around with the entire government, including the judiciary. The Secretary will be on the NSC, and able to leak anything that goes on there. The Department will give a cabinet-level megaphone to every lunactivist academic kook who claims to oppose something bad, though that may be trice redundant.

Kum Ba Ya.

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Gateway Pundit: Obama Kooks Paint "Field of Hope" in Pennsylvania

I guess I'm stalking Gateway Pundit lately: Obama Kooks Paint "Field of Hope" in Pennsylvania

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Obama's ACORN Denial of Service Attack

Barack Obama knows ACORN from the inside. He trained them.


So now that ACORN is submitting fraudulent voter registration forms in over a dozen States, the reason his $800,000 campaign expense for front work went at least partially to ACORN is now clear.

The purpose of an Internet Denial of Service attack is usually not (just) to disable the particular computer or network under direct attack, but either to draw response resources (troubleshooters) to the attacked system, or to force secondary systems to be used. Sometimes the DOS attack is merely designed to create the appearance of poor performance, so that users of the system turn to competitors or in any case away from the service it provides.

And so it is with the ACORN attack.

Rather than merely registering new Democratic voters, ACORN so clogs the system with phony registrations that it becomes nearly non-functional.

This is a result of ACORN employing people of questionable character (e.g., felons) to strong-arm and wheedle ordinary citizens into registering -- whether or not they are already registered voters (in the same district or another). Further, ACORN assigns to these unvirtuous employees quotas, making it virtually certain that the employees will submit fake registrations, en masse.

So across the country in battleground States, voter registration has ground to a halt, or limps along with demoralized staff and tarnished public image. ACORN is doing direct damage to confidence in the sanctity of our electoral process, in an attempt to destroy its overall integrity. Rather than being content to register new voters, perhaps ACORN wants to make the registration process unnecessary. After all, if the system cannot be trusted, why use it?

And remember, Barack Obama trained them.

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Crying Wolf About Racism a Good Thing?

It seems that every time a criticism of the Obama campaign sneaks its way through the media blockade, the final defense it must meet is a cry of racism.

Did Obama spend 20 years attending a church with an anti-semitic, racist message? Racist.

Obama friendly with terrorists? Racist (even though the terrorist in question is white).

Using his middle name? Racist.

I won't bore you by listing more examples, of which there is a seemingly endless supply.

Because what I really think is that all of these knee-jerk charges of racism may be positive in the long run, if they so diminish the charge itself that it becomes meaningless. If everything is racist, then nothing is.

However, the labeling of every criticism as racist is only part of the Obama race strategy. The other, or perhaps an other, tine of the strategy is to announce that racist attacks, even assassination attempts, are coming.

But it's all balderdash. The people who don't like Obama don't like him because his ideas suck, not because of his melanin level.

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ACORN Fights Back

ACORN (Asinine Communists for Obama RegistratioN) have filed a lawsuit on behalf of a group of silent, powerless victims.

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Why Ayers Matters

Now that I no longer care who wins the upcoming presidential election between John McCain and Barack Obama, there are only a few reasons for me to blog on it.

One of those reasons is bad logic.

There are many who will see the McCain campaign highlighting the Obama-Ayers connection as mere guilt-by-association. We know that, logically speaking, associating with evil doesn't make one evil. Even if Ayers were evil, merely associating with him doesn't in and of itself make Barack Obama evil.

However, there is much more to the relationship than that. The two have known each other for years, perhaps since Obama was an undergraduate student. Ayers hired Obama to distribute between $50 and $150 million for selling anti-capitalism in the Chicago public schools. You don't hire someone to give away that kind of money unless the two of you are in sync and believe in the same goals. There is clear evidence that Obama and Ayers are cut of the same political cloth.

But when Hillary Clinton brought the subject up at a debate during the Democratic primaries, Obama said that Ayers was "just a guy who lives in my neighborhood." He lied about the relationship.

But here's the thing: Ayers was a terrorist as a young man, setting bombs in the Pentagon, at police stations, and in the home of a judge in the attempt to influence a trial. He has never repented of these actions, saying he wishes he'd done more. Obama should not have worked for him, but he did. And now he wants out of that decision.

So he says that Ayers was fire-bombing judges' homes with their children asleep in bed while he, Obama, was only eight years old, so it doesn't matter.

It's an exercise in non sequitur. The issue is not how old Obama was when Ayers did his evil; the issue is that Obama shares this guy's views and helped him spend money to promote those views. And then he lied about it.

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Islamabad Marriott Owner: "I am not scared."

When terrorists bombed the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, they probably thought they were striking a blow for Islam or some such crap. What they actually did was to alienate their customer base.

The idiot terrorists are going to turn the rest of Pakistan against their cause. What little sympathy they had will evaporate.

Pakistan is angry.

I am not scared. I have seen death very closely, this doesn't bother me. If I had been here I would have run after the bombers and caught them.

-- Sadruddin Hashwani, owner of bombed Marriott in Islamabad, Pakistan

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