Shot In The Dark

Citgo?

While the likes of Al Sharpton may slip Hugo Chavez a little tongue, religious figures in Venezuela are less enthusiastic:Cardinal Castillo accused Chavez of despotism and called him a "paranoid dictator." Chavez, in turn, has blasted the cardinal, calling him...

How Long Do You Suppose...

...it will be until he gets booked...Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called President Bush "the devil" in a speech to the United Nations on Wednesday, making the sign of the cross in a dramatic gesture and accusing him of "talking as...

I've Said It Before

I've said it before - there are times I'm glad my first career was radio. Let's flash waaaay back. I got whacked from my first radio job when I was...18, I think. Not for cause, by the way - new...

Oh, Great

Via the Dogs, more great news:Cramped housing conditions and air pollution in Athens have given rise to a "super breed" of mosquito that is larger, faster and more adept at locating human prey, a Greek daily has reported. Athens-based mosquitoes...

Throwing Crude Oil On A Fire

Jonah Goldberg on the "gas price crisis":At a time when a) the second-largest oil producer in the world — Iran — is engulfed in nuclear messianic nationalism; b) Iraq is, shall we say, a somewhat unstable oil producer; c) we...

Three Cheers for Wang Wenyi

At least something interrupted the sham of the visit of Chinese president Hu Jintao - the world's biggest surviving communist, debaser of capitalism, and driver of China's current massive self-genocide....

Sacked

The deeply dim Steve Sack touches on an issue...: ...in the same sense that Prussians touch on funk. It's true; in a perfect world, I'd be all for sending troops to Sudan to stanch the bleeding in Darfur - or,...

A Saying For Our Times

From Katie @ Yucky Salad:...no one ever said life was gonna be all rainbows and barfing only during prime time.This should go in Bartlett's....

Export Sanity Now

Nat Hentoff notes the NYTimes' odd juxtaposition - running an editorial condemning the government of Sudan for the atrocities in Darfur...: "After the Holocaust, the world vowed it wouldn't stand back and allow genocide to happen again. Bosnia, Cambodia and...

Pianka Pianka Burnin' Hate

It takes a lot to make me angry, Really, really angry. The guy in this story succeeds with flying colors. There was a Tom Clancy novel - Rainbow Six, I think - where a group of supremely arrogant domestic ecoterrorists...

Vilkommen in de Nederlande

Holland comes in for a lot of crap. Much of it is justifiable; their brand of socialism leads Europe in going bankrupt; their welfare state is more comprehensive than most, leading to the acceptance of some practices that'd make all...

Kannitverstann

Heather from Dooce and her husband are over in the Netherlands. Heather is talking about her run-ins with the Dutch language. Now, I get around in Dutch; I speak German moderately fluently and I get around OK in English (note...

Mutually-Assured Insensitivity

Iran launches a contest to find and publish a dozen cartoons lampooning the Holocaust:IRAN'S largest selling newspaper announced today it was holding a contest on cartoons of the Holocaust in response to the publishing in European papers of caricatures of...

Let Me Get This Straight

In light of the growing carnage in relation to the Danish cartoons, I was interested in seeing New Mexico's "moderate" Democrat governor, Bill Richardson, on Today this morning. He said (among other things) that the whole thing is related to...

Travelogue

Sheila's been in LA for like a week. 22-part travelogue? Check. Hilarious? Natch....

Timeline

Yesterday: Ariel Sharon names his breakaway party "Kadima" (Hebrew for "Forward"). Today: Ashton Kutcher and other Hollywood starlets are prowling Beverly Hills looking for Kadima centers and those little yarny wrist thingies....

Fearless Predictions

The indictments against Tom Delay will get thrown out of court faster than Colin Farrell getting tossed from a Young Life meeting.The tossing of the indictments will make page C-24 of the NYTimes and the WaPo.Patrick Fitzgerald's got nothing on...

Rationalization Smashed

Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Cisco are making deals with the devil - helping the Communist Chinese government extend its total control over the Internet, to prevent it from being used as a means to undermine its total control over Chinese...

Schröder: Perspective

After Gerhard Schröder's remarks - scolding the US for not embracing the smothering balm of Mother Government, blaming that attitude for the havoc of Hurricane Katrina - commenter Chriss notes something I'd missed completely:Horrific hurricane strikes the Gulf Coast and,...

Die Staat Is Unsere Mutter!

Gerhard Schroeder leaves office in full hissy:"I do not want to name any catastrophes where you can see what happens if organised state action is absent. I could name countries, but the position I still hold forbids it, but everyone...

Earthquake

Like all too many such events in parts of the world where people are too busy feeding themselves to worry about things like building codes and engineering, the death toll in Pakistan's earthquake is ghastly:In the shattered streets of Muzaffarabad,...

Hpp Brthd, Vclv Hvl! (N Czch!)

Two of my heroes of the eighties and nineties (after Reagan, Thatcher and the Pope) were Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel. It's Havel's birthday today. Red has a great post on his significance, and her reaction to him as a...

Fabelhaft!

The Good News: Angela Merkel of the "Christian Democratic Party" (CDU - a "conservative" party by European standards; think Kennedy Democrats) has apparently defeated Gerhard Schroeder: BERLIN - Exit polls showed conservative challenger Angela Merkel's party in the lead and...

Where Their Mouth Is

You'd think they have enough trouble to deal with on their own. But a group of Iraqi troops made a good-sized donation to New Orleans' flood victims:Iraqi soldiers serving at Taji military base collected 1,000,000 Iraqi dinars for victims of...

Root Causes of Irrationality

Via the Bear Pit (visit!), the British Independent newspaper has embarked on a comprehensive program of national self-loathing after the 7/7 bombings. It's the victim's fault. Did you know that?...

Walesa

One of the most interesting parts of the new Power Line News site is their world news map - a point and click widget for finding key newspapers around the world. One of my favorite discoveries has been the Warsaw...

Musta Got It From Jane

Ted Turner is visiting North Korea:"Robert Edward Turner, chairman of the Turner Foundation INC. of the United States, and his party ... arrived here," said the Korean Central News Agency, monitored here. South Korean officials said Turner was visiting the...

Entente

Via Powerline, I read Lawrence Kudlow's new piece on the emerging US alliance with India:In what could become the world's most significant 21st-century strategic alliance, a strengthened partnership is forming between the two largest English-speaking democracies: the United States and...

Some Good News

The Russian submariners are OK:Seven submarine crew members trapped for nearly three days under the Pacific Ocean were rescued Sunday after a British remote-controlled vehicle cut away the undersea cables that had snarled the vessel. The seven crew members, whose...

Rescue In The Works

The Russians - with Brit and American help - are going to take a shot at rescuing their mini-sub, currently trapped in 600 feet of water somewhere in the Pacific. Swiftee knows more than the average bear about the subject....

Ugh

Few things seem more nightmarish than this scenario, currently unfolding in the Pacific:A Russian mini-submarine carrying seven sailors snagged on a fishing net and was stuck 625 feet down on the Pacific floor today with only enough air for crewmen...

Government By Department of Transportation

Paul Johnson is one of the world's great treasures - one of our great historians and analysts of history and what it means to the present. A former Labourite and now a classical liberal (read: libertarian conservative), his classic Modern...

Symptom Of Decay

So many people I know on the left gaze wistfully at tokens of their various times in Europe; "I wish I were there", they whisper longingly....

Anti-Americanism Of Convenience

Victor Davis Hanson on the convenient anti-Americanism of the international "elite"....

An Immodest Proposal

Wonder of wonders, I actually had a decent discussion a few weeks ago in comment thread over at New Patriot re a post on Norm Coleman's mano a mano with George Galloway in the Senate. The discussion was largely about...

Steyn On Bolton

Mark Steyn on the Bolton nomination:John Bolton's sin is to have spoken the truth about the international system rather than the myths to which photo-oppers like the Canadian prime minister defer. As a consequence, he's being treated like a container...

The "M" Word

When lefties start pleading "McCarthy", you know they're out of ideas. George Galloway would seem to be out of ideas....

I Thought The Deadlines Were Getting Closer...

Tsunami shortens days:NASA scientists say the undersea quake at Sumatra, the fourth-strongest ever experienced on the planet, was strong enough to disrupt the Earth's rotation and shaved 2.68 microseconds from the length of a day....

Stability

My little college in the middle of North Dakota was like a little Middle-East for a while in the 1980's. Most of the Iranians left during the hostage crisis, of course - there had been dozens, a major source of...

Madness

My mother lived in Turkey for several years. She's told many fascinating stories of a place about which I knew little since about 1920 and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, when Turkey more or less checked out of history....

Unintended Consequences?

When you make prostitution legal, only non-prostitutes will be criminals?:A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.You're an American. You...

Humanizing the Beast

Keirón Allen is a photographer and journalist working in Afghanistan. Humanising a beast - the American military, from the less-than-propitiously named "Opendemocracy" site, is a fascinating photo-essay, with an equally-fascinating narrative:I was keen on this visit to Afghanistan to avoid...

Dead Terrorist Bounce

My NARN homie King Banaian from SCSU Scholars isn't as sanguine as I came across this morning in re the Iraqi economy:First, even if the 52% number was hit for 2004 -- a figure over which there should be some...

Speaking For So Many Of Us

Varifrank, by his own account, said something to a room full of Euros that a lot of us have had on our mind lately. If this story is true, then please add my attaboy to the chorus. (Via Red)...

Tsunami Aid: The Big Push

Captain Ed's Tsunami Relief effort is wrapping up. He's blown his original goals to pieces, but they can aways use more! Please help out any way you can....

Lipstick On A Pig

The Strib gets behind the Palestinian election:Hope walks on tiptoes in the Middle East, but it took a giant step on Sunday when Palestinians went to the polls and elected a new president, Mahmoud Abbas. Polling was fair and orderly,...

Dilbert, Writ Deadly

Why does the UN's imprimatur lend any legitimacy to anything, much less disaster relief? On the ground, they appear to be ripped straight from Scott Adams' imagination: A close reading of the UK's Department for International Development's (DFID) brilliantly detailed...

If You Think It's Scrappleface, But It's Not...

From the UK's Independent:As the international aid effort grows and George Bush launches a fresh appeal, we ask politicians and commentators if 2005 might see a new determination to tackle global poverty.It's interesting, I suppose, that the pool of commentators...

Missed Opportunity

Via Powerline, we see this AP story on the the relief effort, with emphasis added:U.S. helicopters yesterday rescued dozens of desperate and weak tsunami survivors — including a young girl clutching a stuffed Snoopy — as the American military relief...