I’m always puzzled when American news outlets report this kind of story with a straight face:

Fidel Castro said Wednesday he is not yet healthy enough to speak to Cuba‘s masses in person and can’t campaign for Sunday’s parliamentary elections.

“I am not physically able to speak directly to the citizens of the municipality where I was nominated for our elections next Sunday,” the ailing 81-year-old wrote in an essay published Wednesday by state news media.

In other news

• Kim Jong Il was criticized for missing his precinct caucus meeting.  “This is where the People’s Democracy in North Korea starts”, said Noh Chuk Tae, spokesperson for the Ward 2, Precinct 45 Central Committee of the North Korean Communist Worker’s Party.
• Robert Mugabe reportedly failed to register to vote in his district’s upcoming elections.  “In our one-man, one-vote system”, said Lester Mkangangwe, precinct election judge, “the one man that votes had better register, for the good of democracy in Zimbabwe”.
• Thousands of HAMAS gunmen put down their AK47s and picked up stacks of campaign literature in the Gaza Strip today.  “We’d hate to lose the election”, said one masked gunman. 

That is all.

Malkin: Mexican military, cops routinely cross the border to aid drug and human traffickers:

fiscal year 2006 alone, there were 29 confirmed incidents along the U.S.- Mexican border involving Mexican military and/or law enforcement personnel, 17 of which involved armed Mexican government agents. Moreover, between 1996 and September 30, 2006, there were 253 confirmed incursions into the United States by Mexican government personnel.

The recipe for the border, once again for those who weren’t paying attention for the past thirty years:  a high fence.  Wide, well-lit gates with instructions in all the world’s languages on how to get in legally (and learn English) posted prominently, to welcome those who come legally.  But not without the high fence.

Israel is confronting the notion of the Iranian Bomb, as well as being surrounded by hostile neighbors with WMDs:

If a nuclear war between Israel and Iran were to break out 16-20 million Iranians would lose their lives – as opposed to 200,000-800,000 Israelis, according to a report recently published by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which is headed by Anthony H. Cordesman, formerly an analyst for the US Department of Defense. The document, which is largely theoretical due to the lack of verified knowledge in some areas – specifically in terms of Israel’s nuclear capability – paints various scenarios and attempts to predict the strategies of regional powers, as well as the US.

The report assesses that a nuclear war would last approximately three weeks and ultimately end with the annihilation of Iran, due to Israel’s alleged possession of weapons with a far larger yield. Israel, according to the assessment, would have a larger chance of survival. The report does not attempt to predict how many deaths would eventually be caused by possible nuclear fallout.

Israel – which has had to fight for its very survival four times in the past sixty years, and that was after the Holocaust – takes survival fairly seriously, at least officially. They’re launching an ad campaign…:

One of the commercials features Gadi Sukenik, until recently anchorman for Channel 2 News. The campaign’s slogan is “Being ready means being protected.”

“The campaign is one of the main lessons we learned from the Second Lebanon War,” a senior HFC officer said Sunday. “This is our way of helping the public get ready for the possibility that war will break out in the future.”

The brochure provides details about potential conventional and nonconventional threats. It recommends that civilians prepare basic supplies – water, flashlights, batteries and plastic sealing paper – now, ahead of a possible missile attack on Israel.

…and a website (Hebrew and English).

I’m trying to picture the response to such a campaign in the US, even in the face of an imminent, mortal threat like Israel may face:

LIBERAL: “If someone bombs us, we probably deserve it.”

NEW YORKER: “Pffft.  There’s nothing worth bombing west of the Hudson.”

TWIN CITIES DFLER/HIPSTER:  “Tape?  Tape?  Hah!  They said tape!  Hahahahaha”
RESIDENT OF NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY:  “There’s nothing worth bombing west of the Hudson”

UTAHAN: “Self-sufficient for two weeks?  Jeez, I carry that in my golf cart!”

NORTH DAKOTAN: “Batteries…candles…food…OK, limpd**k, what do you think this is, a blizzard?  Where’s the guns?”

And so on.

…what’s funnier; that someone apparently hacked a computer in orthodox-puritanical Iran, to display pornograhic images on an LCD billboard…

…or listening to the Iranian guys filming the display (pretty much NSFW) hoot and holler like a bunch of junior high kids who just found a Playboy in the alley.

Over at David’s Medienkritik – a bilingual blog about the European, mainly German, media – David (or Ray?) writes:

Imagine you are an American correspondent in Germany. You are encouraged by your editors to report only the most extreme, outrageous, strange and dark sides of German society. Your publication chooses to ignore the 97% of issues that bring Germans and Americans together and instead focus on the 3% that most divide the two nations – such as attitudes towards prostitution, social welfare, guns, etc. This seedy sensationalism sells – and that is exactly what your editors are after. For that reason, they also strongly encourage you to write whatever you can on Neo-Nazi violence – not because the issue is genuinely troubling – (and it is) – but because it brings good ratings and reaffirms your readership’s dark stereotypes of the Vaterland.

Beyond that – your editors oblige you to bring stories only on a narrow band of pet issues that they have predetermined are of “interest” to the readership. (In fact, you may have been specially selected for your job because you have a an ideological propensity to dislike Germany and favor stories that make Germany look bad.) When you arrive in Berlin, you discover that Germany isn’t quite the awful place you expected and – because you are a free spirit – the urge is great to report on the many complex aspects of German society. Predictably, however, your editors discourage any independent ideas that might shed a different (you might say balanced) light on things.

The pet issues and big politics are all they want. In particular, the editors want to demonstrate that Germany is a nation infatuated with pornography, cursed by extreme alcoholism and blighted by racist attitudes towards non-Germans…The editors supplement your work by sprinkling-in stories cut-and-pasted from news wires on Germans behaving badly worldwide. You eventually realize that intellectual honesty takes a distant backseat to the pet-issue template devised by your editors…Not surprisingly, the most “self-critical” Germans – those with a particular talent for shamelessly bashing their own nation and people – are held up as heroic dissenters and showered with awards by your publication and others like it.

[Hm.  Sort of like how the only Republicans that the Strib paints in a decent light are the ones that vote like DFLers?  This is sounding familiar]

Finally – because quite a few other publications share the same general ideology of your own and follow the same pattern of reporting – it is not beyond the pale for your editors to proclaim that you represent the “mainstream” of American media and that you are largely fair and unbiased in reporting on Germany.

It’s a trick question, natch:

Turn the mirror around…

Now let us turn this script around. The above is a reflection of how certain influential segments of German media have operated for years now. The latest Amerika-Korrespondent for Stern magazine – Jan Christoph Wiechmann – offers an excellent example. One of his more recent articles is entitled: “Weapons Trade in the USA: An AR-15 with your Coffee?” The opening paragraph reads:

“In Europe one usually receives a cookie with their coffee. In the USA it is an assault rifle: In the Texan solitude, waitresses with highly teased hair offer the things for sale in weapon shops camouflaged as cafes. Normal daily life in Bush-Country.“

The article paints a picture of daily life in the USA that is neither typical nor normal

Read the whole thing.

(Auf Deutsch, wenn Du willst…)

A correspondent and Shot In The Dark reader writes from Kabul, Afghanistan with comments on my post on the pork-averse WalMart checkout girl (link fixed – thanks, Flash):

I’m an aid worker in Kabul, where I’ve been based for the past [nunber of] years. I’m writing to comment on your post about the Muslim woman who didn’t want to touch the pork at the supermarket. I thought that you might be interested to know that here in Afghanistan, one of the most fundamentalist of all Islamic countries, you can quite easily buy pork products in what is affectionately known by the locals as the “Bush Bazaar”, where all sorts of imported goods (often obtained through mysterious means from the US base at Bagram) are available. The Afghan shopkeepers have no qualms about keeping it in their shops or handing it to you if you wish to purchase it. If you’re happy to buy it they’re happy to sell it. I’ve seen both pork and alchohol openly for sale in a number of countries in the part of the world. Based on my fairly extensive experience in the Muslim world the controversy in MN seems to be to be entirely contrived.

That, of course, is the part that puzzles me, and bumfuzzles some friends of mine who either are, or are familiar with, moderate Islam; the puritanism about pork, alcohol and seeing-eye dogs is the result of decrees from a small number of fundie Somali imams in the Twin Cities.

Thanks for running Shot in the Dark; I enjoy it very much. I’m from [someplace in the upper midwest] so it is a pleasure to be able to read about life at home, even if the [liberals] irritate me even all the way out here.

I’m not sure if it’s the language geek in me that gets the bigger kick over this story about Hugo Chavez’ meeting with Spain’s king Juan Carlos… 

“¿Por qué no te callas?”—or “why don’t you shut up?” Adding insult to injury, King Juan Carlos used the informal form of address, which is the sort of language one would use for a child. The line has become famous throughout the Spanish-speaking world, being used in everything from mobile phone ringtones to numerous YouTube videos. By publicly scolding Chávez, King Juan Carlos essentially put him in his place, turning him from the Bolivarian Revolutionary to just another gasbag.

 …or the guy who loves freedom.

Either way, kudos to King Juan Carlos.

(Via Jay Reding)

(And after 27 years, I make no promises whatsoever about my Spanish grammar…)

Gateway Pundit notes that Pelosi’s war policy has hit…a bit of a quagmire:

Speaker Pelosi has failed to pick up any Republican backers to cut and run with the democrats from Iraq since she took over the House in January. And, 5 more democrats bailed on the party since July.

When they even lose Hegel…

This story reads like a Fawlty Towers scene; a mother in Britain books a birthday surprise for her son during the school day.  She thought she’d booked a guy in a gorilla suit. 

It’s here the Fawlty script kicks in:

The Daily Mail said the teenager’s mother had told the teacher beforehand that a “birthday surprise” would walk in during the class and requested that it be filmed.

It’d be here that Basil Fawlty would give the order to Manuel the waiter – and the hijinx would kick in:

Instead of a gorilla, an adult performer showed up at Arnold High School in Nottingham dressed as a policewoman and spanked the boy 16 times in front of his classmates, the newspaper said.

She stripped to her underwear while dancing to a Britney Spears song and asked the teenager to rub cream all over her body before the “stunned” teacher called an end to the act.

“He’s from Barcelona…”

“The teacher suddenly announced: ‘Something is about to happen’,” the student said.

“Then a woman in a very short skirt walked in dressed as a copper. She asked the lad to stand up, which he did, and told him he had been a very naughty boy because he hadn’t been doing his homework.”

The performer put on some music and had the teenager put a collar on her.

“No one could believe it,” the student said.

“Next she ordered him to get on all fours, led him around the classroom and hit him 16 times -one for each year – on the bottom with her whip.”

The newspaper quoted the student as saying that it was wehen the stripper pulled some cream out of her bag that the teacher took action.

“To be fair to the teacher, you could tell she was just stunned, and when the cream came out she told the stripper: ‘That’s it. That’s enough’.”

Of course, it’s not all laughs…

The student said the birthday boy ran out of the classroom while the stripper packed her bag.

I’m hoping Cleese buys the film rights…

Overheard on NPR; smug lefty exploits the fallen troops:

Anti-War T-Shirts featuring the names of 3,734 troops who died in Iraq  

…and wraps self as potential “victim”hood…

These shirts are illegal in five states and could soon be illegal nationwide. As seen on CNN, NPR, USA Today, and of course, FOX-News.

And while he ignores the requests of families of some of the fallen who disagree with his anti-war stance (it’d dilute the message) by wrapping himself in the First Amendment…

…the “auteur” also points out – as obliquely as possible – that he’s turning a $4-5 profit per shirt.

No, you can listen for yourself, courtesy of the Canadian taxpayer.

It’d be a shame if his business accidentally fell off the table and broke.

The essential David Warren on Bhutto:

Out of the bloody mess in Karachi — hundreds killed and maimed in Al Qaeda’s latest effort to gain power through psychopathic violence and intimidation — comes a kind of order. The position of Benazir Bhutto — the seemingly perpetual once and future prime minister of Pakistan — has been immensely enhanced by the failure of the blasts to kill her. If she can remain alive, she now has an unprecedented and almost miraculous opportunity to pull Pakistan together, and inspire her people to fight against their worst enemy in the world — not “Hindu India,” nor “Imperialist America,” but the Islamists who are feeding on the country’s entrails.

Should this – getting on-the-fence Pakistan heavily involved in fighting the war on terror, especially the part that’s based on their territory – work out, it’d be a key point in the war on terror.

The story – Bhutto, a famous, and famously-corrupt, woman elected by a popular vote but removed by a military coup that led to the also-corrupt Musharraf, who has nonetheless been a key, if “nuanced”, ally in the war on terror, and then returning to power – is an amazing one.

The power-sharing agreement Mrs Bhutto’s agents have apparently hashed out with President Musharraf’s agents must certainly be vague, and constitutionally incomprehensible. That is because it is founded only on necessity — a principle that trumps all constitutional law. Pakistan’s surprisingly independent supreme court may throw spanners in Musharraf’s recent “re-election,” or in the deal to withdraw corruption charges against Mrs Bhutto and her husband (that were themselves presented in a corrupt way). But for all their self-regard, the country’s nit-picking lawyers and judges are now more likely to realize what is at stake if they try to stand in the way of necessity.

Mrs Bhutto, and not President Musharraf, has the mass appeal, without which, at this moment, no politician or general in Pakistan has a chance against the whirlwind.

Read, as they say, the whole thing. And, as I’ve been urging for years, make sure you read Warren every week.

While America seems – according to some observers, for this election cycle – to be flirting with “moderate, center” (i.e. “liberal with the patchouli temporarily showered off”) politics, it’s fun to see that much of Europe is drifting, by their standards, to the right. Merkel, Sarkozy…

…and the Swiss. Traditionally Europe’s most “conservative” nation (where “conservative” means “resistant to change”, due to a plebiscitory system of democracy that refers most vital issues to popular vote), they’ve been flirting with the left for a bit here – a flirtation that seems to have slowed with the last election:

The right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP) is set to consolidate its position as the alpine nation’s most popular grouping in a parliamentary election on Sunday, outstripping its rivals after a provocative campaign…According to the last opinion poll conducted before the election, the People’s Party are expected to win 27.3 percent of the vote, a slight increase over 2003 when they raced to the top of the polls amid accusations of xenophobia.

The SVP has again run a controversial campaign calling for the extradition of foreigners who commit serious crimes. It has been criticised by opponents and has ruffled the usually smooth waters of Switzerland’s consensus-based politics.

This last paragraph betrays a certain ignorance of Swiss politics. Switzerland is an intensely federal country; it also joins some very disparate groups – the fairly wealthy Germans in the north, the relatively poor French and Italians in the south and west – in a functioning democracy, largely by making the process of initiative and referendum extremely easy, and by constitutionally relegating an amazing amount of legislative power to the “Cantons” (states). As a result, a general consensus forms. Which is not to say that politics don’t occasionally get bumptious (by the nation’s stolid standards).

Did someone say trouble?

Opposition to the SVP’s campaign, which used posters calling for the “black sheep” of Swiss society to be booted out, spilled over into a rare outburst of violence on the streets of Berne earlier this month when police and left-wing activists clashed.

Wow. Left-wingers getting violent when they don’t get their way? Shocking, I know.

At any rate – Europe’s rejection of the far left this past few years has been heartening.  Or at least conservatives should take heart -because it was about immigration:

A nationalist party rode an anti-immigrant wave Sunday to the best showing of any party in parliamentary elections since World War I, while the Greens made gains by appealing to environmental concerns, according to projections.

In one of the most bitter political campaigns in memory in this usually tolerant Alpine nation, the Swiss People’s Party called for a law to throw out entire immigrant families if a child violates national laws.

Now, while I’m reaching for a parallel here – that American conservatives can take heart that immigration is a hot enough issue to gain them traction – let’s correct this news report; while the Swiss have a strong sense of liberty (they have a relatively laissez-faire system of government by Euro standards, and also the most liberal gun laws on the continent), they also have a very strong sense of civil order and civic cohesion.  They are “tolerant” in the same way a small town on the Great Plains is tolerant – to the point where you breach those senses.  Then, things change fast.

But I digress.

China Mulls Communist Branch for Space

China might not have a permanent presence in space yet, but the country’s rocket men are already thinking about setting up a Communist Party branch in the outer reaches.

Around these parts, we call it the “Minneapolis Green Party”.

From the better late than never department – I read this on Swanblog, a piece from last July.  John was watching a local high school graduation on cable:

… (What, you’ve never been bored?) when they decided to honor the “vast field of diversity that has found its beginnings all over the world.” There were 39 “birth countries” of the graduating seniors. They began a parade of flags, starting with the U.S., to represent each one.

And then, the last thing I’d have expected (or…was it?):

Finally, they got to the letter “v.” The mistress of ceremonies announced, “The flag of Viet Nam.” A student marched in with…get this…the flag of South Viet Nam! Perhaps it was a mistake. Perhaps the parents or grandparents were victims of the communists and held allegiance to the relic from 1975. But it was a nice irony when the school was trying to be politically correct.

Nice and refreshing. And I wonder if it’s a trend. 

In my neighborhood, there’s a Vietnamese auto repair garage.  It’s been there, at the corner of University and Pascal, forever. 

And from the flagpole at the top of the building fly two flags:  the Stars and Stripes, and the pre-’75 South Vietnamese flag.

And I gotta give the guy points for that.

Edwin Bulwer-Lytton – the man who gave us the line “it was a dark and stormy night – also lent another classic line to the English language’s stockpile of quotations; he penned “The pen is mightier than the sword“.

Of course, he never had to bet his life on it.

I’m always astounded at the naivete of so many – too many – “peace” activists; their brains marinaded in a generation of “Give Peace a Chance” and legends of non-violence resistance and civil disobedience and Martin Luther King and Gandhi (who, need it be said, flourished under liberal democracies that were fundamentally friendly to change), and spoiled rotten by the largely-peaceful fall of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, too many think that “sending messages” and symbolic actions are all it takes to put a dictator in his/her place.

Sadly, it’s untrue.

Thousands of protesters are dead and the bodies of hundreds of executed monks have been dumped in the jungle, a former intelligence officer for Burma’s ruling junta has revealed.

 

 

 

The most senior official to defect so far, Hla Win, said: “Many more people have been killed in recent days than you’ve heard about. The bodies can be counted in several thousand.”

The boot, it would seem, is right back on the throat of the Burmese people.

[Swedish diplomat] Liselotte Agerlid, who is now in Thailand, said that the Burmese people now face possibly decades of repression. “The Burma revolt is over,” she added.

 

“The military regime won and a new generation has been violently repressed and violently denied democracy. The people in the street were young people, monks and civilians who were not participating during the 1988 revolt.

 

“Now the military has cracked down the revolt, and the result may very well be that the regime will enjoy another 20 years of silence, ruling by fear.”

 

Mrs Agerlid said Rangoon is heavily guarded by soldiers.

 

“There are extremely high numbers of soldiers in Rangoon’s streets,” she added. “Anyone can see it is absolutely impossible for any demonstration to gather, or for anyone to do anything.

 

“People are scared and the general assessment is that the fight is over. We were informed from one of the largest embassies in Burma that 40 monks in the Insein prison were beaten to death today and subsequently burned.”

 

The diplomat also said that three monasteries were raided yesterday afternoon and are now totally abandoned.

No, Virginia, sometimes dictators don’t listen to reason.

Sometimes the village eats the children.

…analysis like this on NPR!

Speaking of which; if Terry Keegan’s Thursday Night Trivia ever asks “What are the words to the Dutch National Anthem”, I’m totally covered:

Wilhelmus van Nassouwe ben ick, van Duitsen blut!

Den Vaterland getrouwe, bleif ick tot in den doet.

Een Prinze van Oranjen bleif ick, vrij onverveert.

Den Konink van Hispanjen heb ick alltijd gheert!

And no, I didn’t effing Google it, either. I had to learn it 25 years ago. I can still sing the baritone harmony part, to say nothing of the words, from memory.

Bring it on, Keegan.

A Dutch politician, leading perhaps more with his heart and his rage, takes on militant Islam at its’ heart – and maybe more:

Writing in Dutch daily De Volkskrant on Wednesday, [Dutch parliamentarian Geert] Wilders said: “Ban this wretched book just like Mein Kampf is banned. Send a signal … to Islamists that the Koran can never, ever be used in our country as an excuse or inspiration for violence.”

Hitler’s Mein Kampf, published in 1925, outlines the future Nazi dictator’s racist ideology. It has been banned from sale in the Netherlands since the end of World War Two.

No, I don’t ever advocate banning books.  Indeed, I recommend reading things like Mein Kampf and The Turner Diaries, just so one knows what one is up against.  I’m planning on finding a Koran someday soon, here, in fact.

But back to the story:  while I don’t endorse Wilders’ solution, it’s a sign – along with the rebounding electoral fortunes of the CDU in Germany and the Sarkozy victory in France – that maybe, just maybe, Europe is starting to get serious about defending its culture in the face of a “multicultural” assault.

Wilders, whose new party won nine seats out of the 150 in parliament in last November’s elections, is well known for his firebrand remarks on Islam.

He has warned of a “tsunami of Islamisation” in a country home to 1 million Muslims, and has lived under heavy protection since receiving death threats from Islamist militants in 2004.

Wilders said an attack over the weekend by two Moroccans and a Somali on a young Iranian-born politician who heads a Dutch group for “ex-Muslims” had spurred him to write.

The attack on Ehsan Jami, 22, caused an outcry in the Netherlands, where the November 2004 murder of Theo Van Gogh, a filmmaker critical of Islam, by a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim militant led to an anti-Muslim backlash and exposed social tensions.

I’m a lot less worried about the Dutch than about much of the rest of Europe; the Dutch still have a sense of nationalism; they are among few people in Europe that actually treat their National Anthem the way Americans do.  That means little in and of itself, but it’s a hint that maybe the Dutch will give up their national identity a little more dearly than some of the rest of the continent.

(Via Miss O’Hara)

Words fail me.

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.

Words?

Yep.  They still fail me. 

I’m not one of those conservatives who are giddily ostentatious about driving a leather-plated Hummer with high-drag wheels while smoking cigars made from the pelts of endangered species. 

Neither, naturally, am I one of those groaningly over-earnest Greens who’ve elevated “environmentalism” into an aescetic religion.  Far from it. 

I doubt I’d even call myself a “crunchycon”, because human beings should never be referred to as “crunchy”, unless you’re an M-1 Abrams driver and a carful of Al Quaeda have rounded the corner in front of you.  No, I merely happen to like a cool house, and I bike to work, not out of any contrived whinging about global warming and its probably-fictional human causes, but because I, myself, happen to enjoy biking.  A lot. 

But after seeing Nih[i]list’s recreation of Algore’s footprint – 140 metric tons of carbon a year, compared to the average American’s roughly 9.5 tons – I decided to go check out Yahoo’s “Carbon Footprint Calculator“. 

My – actually, the Berg Family’s – results? 

You create 5.7 metric tons of CO₂ per year.

Your impact is BELOW AVERAGE

Hm.  Who’da thunk it? 

(Although the only way, it seems, to really be acceptable is to stay childless and  live in a tent in Hawaii, without a car, and reaching the mainland only via outrigger canoe.  But only an outrigger made from a tree that died of natural causes, since chopping down a tree will increase your carbon footprint).

Maria Cantwell thinks the American people “deserve better” when it comes to energy:

“America deserves more fuel efficient cars,” said Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington. But she added “the only way consumers are going to get more out of a tank of gas is if the president and his party help deliver votes in a narrowly divided Congress.”

It’s widely expected the Senate will approve some sort of increase in auto fuel economy as part of an energy bill it hopes to finish in the coming weeks.

Senator Cantwell; leaving aside that the market will inevitably provide that mileage vastly faster and more efficiently than any government regulation, I’m glad to see that you’re on the side of freeing this nation from oil imports. 

So how about doing something that’ll matter; pushing nuclear power?

Plentiful nuclear power, delivered at a fraction of the cost of coal, gas or oil power, will free up fossil fuels, provide ample power to generate “alternative” fuels (the energy cost of refining ethanol is its biggest drawback), and lower the cost of energy across the board:

Cheap, plentiful, safe energy will ensure our economy keeps humming along, and best of all will slash our dependence on the House of Saud and the House of Chavez – altering the geopolitical landscape in a way that’ll benefit the entire western world. 

We want that, right?

Have your people call my people.

I always like Cuban/Venezuelan actress Maria Conchita Alonzo.

I mean, duh:

She was the most bearable part of Moscow on the Hudson, among a bunch of other movies.

But best of all?  She’s got a jones for beating on Hugo Chavez!

From Hannity and Colmes, live from the protests over Chavez’ imposition of the Venezuelan version of the “Fairness Doctrine” via shutting down Venezuela’s last independent TV station:

ALONSO: Of course Chavez doesn’t listen. He’s not going to listen. So something drastic is going to happen, sadly. You know, I know that the students are being very peaceful. I know that they have been few very incidents with certain students outside of the capital.

There are a few students that are in critical condition. But, you know, they don’t talk about that. They are demanding what was taken from us, which was the closure of Radio Caracas Television, because the government said that, you know, it was doing a lot of propaganda against the government. And it has done a lot of bad things through the years.

You know, it seems that is what they know how to say best, which is lies.

COLMES: As we all know the hallmark of a democracy is a free press, and this is the worst thing you can do in a government that was elected. — He got 60 percent of the vote. People question the veracity of the election, but nevertheless, he was democratically elected.

So the question is can he retain power if he continues this kind of action?

ALONSO: We go again with you! He was not democratically elected .

And on life in a “populist” dictatorship, where the “village” wants to raise your child…:

ALONSO: People hate each other — we have never had that before. If you’re white, the blacks hate you. If you are black, the whites hate you. If you’re an Indian everybody hates you, and you hate everybody. People live in fear of speaking out.

All the students are amazing for us to follow what they are doing because, you know, when you are that young, you feel you are invincible.

So right now we all have to feel with our hearts and spirits, our mind as we — like the youngsters are fighting, really, for the freedom of our country.

(Via Margaret at Anti-Strib)

John Hinderaker at Powerline – my long-time NARN colleague – on the ironic “anti-killing” protests by Palestinians – who’ve been raised in a culture that for 40 years has been entirely formed, with the active moral connivance and financial assistance of neighboring Arab governments (who could at any time in the past four decades have absorbed the Palestinians easily into their own societies, or urged them to accept Israel’s offers of peaceful assimilation) on the premise of killing Jews and extincting Israel:

It’s a little late in the day for Palestinians to decide they’re opposed to killing. They’ve been desperately trying to sow the wind of mass murder for a couple of generations now, and if they’re finally getting concerned about reaping the whirlwind, they’ll have to look somewhere else for sympathy.

Put another way – Palestinian leadership has created a society based entirely on death (not only of Jews, mind you, but of any Palestinians who’ve espoused peace with Israel, who’ve been murdered or driven into exile).  One might be forgiven for observing that fact.

Jeff Fecke – who is to “cartooning” and “writing” what he is to “Journalism” and “Feminism”, and who is unfit to carry Hinderaker’s gym bag as a writer, thinker, or human being – assumes Hinderaker’s voice to “write“:

I really hope that a whole bunch of Palestinian children die.

Amusing side note – he constantly calls Powerline “Hacks”.

In a blogging “career” characterized by silly statements self-excused with a giggle and a wink as “snarking” (like his determination of guilt in the Duke rape case, which he excused with perhaps the most juvenile abnegation of personal responsibilty I’ve read this side of an eighth-grade TP raid, “some of us–myself included–jumped the gun in this case.  It happens.  Write enough, you’ll be wrong sometimes” – in other words, the dog ate my homework), this may be his nadir.

Anyone who can’t tell the difference between “I think a society that has trained itself to be a killing machine is ironically ill-advised to plead for peace” and “I hope the children die” needs to be sent to remedial moral grounding.

The best news?  Every dime of deep-pocketed-liberal-pressure-group money spent on Fecke’s “journalism” over at the Minnesota Monitor is a dime that won’t go toward anything remotely useful, and will give the rest of us a wealth of material. 

Moral: Carry on, moral carrion!

UPDATE:  Another NARN colleague, Michael Brodkorb at MDE, notes that Jeff has moved from petty defamation (no, not in a legal sense, yadda yadda) back to his usual turf, crummy reporting:

If you visited Minnesota Monitor in the last 24 hours, you would see a post on the front page titled “Bachmann Personal Financial Report Still Not Available.”  The post, written by the notoriously sloppy and inaccurate blogger Jeff Fecke, makes the claim that Congresswoman Michele Bachmann has not filed her legally required Personal Financial Disclosure Report (PFD).   

“The Personal Financial Report for Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., was still unavailable Saturday morning, one day after the House deadline for filing reports.

Bachmann was not one of the 385 representatives to file a report, nor was she one of the 52 to request an extension, according to Congressional Quarterly.” Source: Minnesota Monitor, June 16, 2007

The reality is that Bachmann’s PFD is available online.  Contrary to the reporting of Minnesota Monitor, Bachmann’s PFD report has been filed.

This is the second post that Fecke has written in the last 24 hours that will need to be corrected.  Earlier today, Fecke wrote that Congressman Tim Walz’s PFD listed two credit card debts, when Walz’s PFD actually listed three credit card debts. Fecke’s oversight did move Walz’s debt below the level of Congressman Ramstad, who Fecke claimed had the most credit card debt.  Fecke corrected the post after I pointed out his error.  

I guess when you write lots of stuff, you’re going to make mistakes – when your fundamental driving force is ideology, not accuracy. 

Or as Jeff himself might write, “Why Does Jeff Fecke Hate The Facts?”

Kenyan Economist James Shikwati sums up his view of western food aid, in an interview in Der Spiegel:

Shikwati: … for God’s sake, please just stop.

Why?

Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.

This, of course, has a parallel with much other western aid – economic, military and so on – to the Third World.  Paul Johnson in Modern Times chronicled the awful effect that western economic aid had on the Third World, spurring immense, wasteful, un-needed developments (the Aswan Dam, the Bangladeshi military, immense government works projects) that served as monuments to sitting dictators in countries that needed simple things like education and better farming practices.

Shikwati notes that the international food aid bureaucracy isn’t, at its heart, a whole lot different than the Minneapolis Public Schools:

Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

He also explains the paradox – aid causes starvation, because international aid is run by groups that act just like governments and bureaucracies always act:

SPIEGEL: Even in a country like Kenya, people are starving to death each year. Someone has got to help them.

Shikwati: But it has to be the Kenyans themselves who help these people. When there’s a drought in a region of Kenya, our corrupt politicians reflexively cry out for more help. This call then reaches the United Nations World Food Program — which is a massive agency of apparatchiks who are in the absurd situation of, on the one hand, being dedicated to the fight against hunger while, on the other hand, being faced with unemployment were hunger actually eliminated. It’s only natural that they willingly accept the plea for more help. And it’s not uncommon that they demand a little more money than the respective African government originally requested. They then forward that request to their headquarters, and before long, several thousands tons of corn are shipped to Africa …

SPIEGEL: … corn that predominantly comes from highly-subsidized European and American farmers …

Shikwati: … and at some point, this corn ends up in the harbor of Mombasa. A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unsrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the UN’s World Food Program. And because the farmers go under in the face of this pressure, Kenya would have no reserves to draw on if there actually were a famine next year. It’s a simple but fatal cycle.

Which is not to say that one shouldn’t feed the hungry – merely be aware that merely sending food has unintended consequences that are hidden from you, the donor. 

The parallels with American welfare are obvious, of course; subsidizing poverty, like corporate welfare, is inherently debilitating.

Freedom advances in that craziest of places:

Conservative Nicolas Sarkozy won France’s presidential election on Sunday, beating his Socialist rival Segolene Royal by a comfortable margin and extending the right’s 12-year grip on power.

Last week – in between bleating that Sarkozy was a hatemonger – Royal noted that her supporters were getting ready to hit the streets and smash things.

So far so good.

Now there’s the little matter of governing his virtually-ungovernable country.

But Sarkozy’s victory is a sign that maybe France isn’t dead yet.

Perhaps we should be so lucky in ’08.