I just ran across a really tastefully (ha) done article in the Wall Street Journal today written by a middle-aged guy who decides to pick up smoking… and loves it. I must admit, the reasons he offers are pretty convincing…

 After years of resisting, a friend in Shanghai gave me the perfect excuse to start smoking. China has become so polluted, he told me, that it’s better to breathe through a cigarette filter than just take in the air on its own. And if your lungs are going to get shot to hell anyway, you might as well enjoy it. So, well into middle age, I figured that it was probably a good time to take up the smoking habit. The result? I enjoy it so much that I don’t know why I didn’t take it up earlier.

And all you “smoke if you got’em” readers will enjoy his “wino-esque” descriptions:

Pandas are made with a dark tobacco and hence are woody and nutty, with hints of pine shavings and hickory. They are a bit strong, and have a very long filter to compensate. But they leave a spicy aftertaste, which perhaps is why Deng, who was from Sichuan, the land of chilies and peppercorns, loved them so much.

And finally, some sound advice for those who may meet an unfortunate end:

I would go so far as so say that, if you ever find yourself in the unfortunate position of being offered a last cigarette, make it a Chunghwa.

Over a week ago now, Nancy Pelosi proposed the adoption of a non-binding resolution to reprimand the Turkish government for the killing of thousands of Armenians by the Ottoman Government in 1915 (which makes about as much sense as you thought it did).

What is truly astounding (other than the fact that that we would need to take political action with regard to events almost a century passed)… is that even after it became evident that the Turkish Government might consider causing instability in Iraq (where we have soldiers trying to keep peace), and possibly cut off the military’s supply routes (which are currently run through Turkey), Pelosi continued to champion the bill claiming that passing such a bill would “Increase the respect people have for us as a nation (last 10 seconds of clip)“. Now, pardon me if I am wrong, but so far, the only thing accomplished by this bill is DECREASING (and practically tarnishing) whatever respect the people of Turkey have for the U.S.

One has to wonder, as Stephen Green of VodkaPundit.com concisely articulated, “Has she purposely tried to derail our soldiers and diplomats in the Middle East, or is Pelosi just plain stupid? I don’t see a third option.”

It seems clear that this resolution was nothing more than an attempt to create obstacles to our servicemen and women in Iraq. What other explanation can there be? And, for the record, I am not alone on this point. I wanted to share with you some other quotes I found while researching this topic.

• “It’s certainly not her finest moment,” – Michael O’Hanlon, Brookings Institution
• “we are no longer able to discern whether the Speaker’s foreign-policy intrusions are merely misguided or are consciously intended to cause a U.S. policy failure in Iraq” – Wall Street Journal Editorial Board
• “To pass a declarative resolution in the House of Representatives in the middle of a war in which we are inordinately dependent on Turkey would be the height of irresponsibility” – Charles Krauthammer (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
• “I have never seen a more deceptive (to the American public)–yet blatant–attempt to sabotage a US military at WAR by a sitting US Congress.”
• “[the] unintended results would be devastating.” – Bill Clinton when a similar resolution was proposed during his presidency.
• “irresponsible … dangerous” – blogger.
• “I think it’s a really bad idea for the Congress to be condemning what happened 100 years ago,” – Mitch McConnell (R)
• “she is deeply unserious about foreign policy” – unknown
  
• “It’s a good resolution but a horrible time to be considering it on the House floor” – Representative Mike Ross of Arkansas (D)
• “our military ties with the U.S. will never be the same again,” – Gen. Yasar Buyukanit

What were Pelosi’s reasons? I’ll tell you: “Because there’s never a good time and all of us in the Democratic leadership have supported [this resolution]” – Direct quote from Nancy Pelosi.

Mrs. Pelosi. I will agree with you on one thing; there are never good times for such a resolution. However, there are better times and worse times. You have chosen the worst possible time to pass such a resolution… when the security of our armed forces is at stake.

P.S.  If you have any other quotes… feel free to post them in the comments.

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, Hillary Clinton claimed she gave back over $800,000 in fundraising money donated by an immigrant named Norman Hsu.  I happen to commend Hillary for taking that course of action (although she has not yet released any confirmation such promise was kept); keeping the money in that situation would have painted too big a target on hillary for the rest of her campaign.

However, when taking such questionable donations… all from CHINESE donors… becomes a common practice of her campaign,  one must start to hold her accountable for such questionable decisions.  The L.A. Times has more:

The Times examined the cases of more than 150 donors who provided checks to Clinton after fundraising events geared to the Chinese community. One-third of those donors could not be found using property, telephone or business records. Most have not registered to vote, according to public records.

And several dozen were described in financial reports as holding jobs — including dishwasher, server or chef — that would normally make it difficult to donate amounts ranging from $500 to the legal maximum of $2,300 per election.

Where is this money coming from?  Are we to believe that these poor dishwashers are personally fronting thousands of dollars to donate to Hillary?  Who is fronting the cash?  Why are they all Chinese?

Wes Anderson… my favorite director. Anyone up for a theater run?

because I’m such a graphics nut… I just happen to recognize the background design… how often does THAT happen? You just happen to recognize a graphic on one website in the millions of sites out there?

I have been wanting to make an easy-to-administer digital web bookshelf for quite a while now. Delicious Library was a great concept and a good piece of software, but it is not a web application. To my surprise, I discovered the Delicious Library SQL Exporter on macupdate.com… allowing me to get all my Delicious information into a pre-built SQL database.

A few hours later… with some custom graphics, CSS, and PHP… I was able to get the information from the database to display nicely on the web. If you want to play around with the files/code…

download the files here…

• Click image for website

The New York Times just published an article explaining how congressional Democrats are going to pass a bill extending the N.S.A. wiretapping program. Now this is certainly an oddity. The same democrats who cheered that they had “killed the patriot act” and who have claimed bush is “shreading” the constitution by turning the U.S. into a police state are now authorizing the continuation of the very program they equate with totalitarianism.

Based on such an odd move, I can think of only one explanation. It seems this fear-mongering about Bush’s police state is nothing more than a political ploy. They know the program is within constitutional limits, but are trying to scare their base into believing Bush is going to listen in on their phone conversations. They know how effective the wiretapping program is at preventing terrorists activities and know that the consequences of future terrorist activity could be placed squarely on them should they stonewall the bill.

I suppose the Democratic leadership could be so ineffective that they can’t stop anything the Bush administration wants passed–even though they are the majority party in a lame duck presidency, but I’d hate to be accused of thinking that badly of them.

American Thinker just posted an interesting article documenting many instances where the mainstream media has intentionally misled or willfully ignored relevant facts in order to run a story. I have been particularly disappointed with the media’s reporting of the Iraq war… whether it is running stories about fake atrocities or journalists drawing maps in the sand of the location of U.S. soldiers for the any enemy to see. I have edited the list to display only the relevant stories relating to the Iraq war.

4. AFP/Yahoo News (2007). Fell for hoax/lie. Ran a picture with the caption “An elderly Iraqi woman shows two bullets which she says hit her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City.” But the picture was of unfired cartridges, which could only have “hit her house” if they were thrown at it.
8. Peter Arnett, CNN, NBC, National Geographic (1999-2003). Lying, bias, treasonous behavior. CNN fired him in 1999 for his reporting the Operation Tailwind story (see below). NBC and National Geographic fired him in March 2003 for being interviewed on Iraqi TV during war, in which he stated that the U.S. war plan had failed. “It was wrong for Mr. Arnett to grant an interview to state-controlled Iraqi TV, especially at a time of war,” said NBC. Read the rest of this entry »

The recent events surrounding Rush Limbaugh’s “phony soldiers” comment have caught my particular attention this week. For those of you who are unaware, Rush Limbaugh recently said two words, “phony soldiers”, in passing, to a caller in response to a discussion about soldiers who lie about their service for either personal or partisan advantage.  He immediately followed up the phone call about on particular phony soldier, Jessie MacBeth, who’s lies about American atrocities in Iraq have been damaging our reputation in the middle east. However you choose to classify this short comment… a segway or a generalization about lying soldiers… whatever you want to call it… it certainly NOT what some have chosen to describe as an attack on all soldiers who disagree with the war. It was at most an accurate description of soldiers who lie about atrocities they never saw … while claiming to be soldiers they never were. If there is a more accurate label to describe this kind of a person, I am not aware of it.

Within days, MediaMatters.org , a liberal, media-watchgroup funded by Hillary Clinton, picked up on those words and picked up this statement and ran with it, claiming that he “called service members who advocate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq phony soldiers.” — an obvious misrepresentation.

Within days, (and without bothering to check his facts) Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid went before the floor of the Senate and called on Limbaugh to apologize for his 2 words.

REID: That’s why Rush Limbaugh’s recent characterization of troops who oppose the war as “phony soldiers” is an outrage. Our troops are fighting and dying to bring to others the freedoms that many take for granted. It is unconscionable that Mr. Limbaugh would criticize them for exercising the fundamental American right to free speech. We call on you to publicly repudiate these comments that call into question their service and sacrifice and ask Mr. Limbaugh to apologize for his comments.

Mr. Reid, who daily makes it is mission to undermine the success of our troops is trying to use the power of his elected office to silence via intimidation a public media figure by selectively pulling two words of a much larger conversation out of context and imposing his own interpretation on them.  He is claiming that Mr. Limbaugh (a host who expresses deep gratitude to every military figure who calls in to his show) is now being unsupportive of the troops because he called soldiers who lie “phony”. How ironic; the man who threatens anyone who challenged his patriotism is now challenging Mr. Limbaugh’s…. patriotism. Quite the double-standard.

And if this were not enough, Mr. Reid sent a letter to the CEO of Clear Channel Communications which calls on him to “publicly repudiate these comments that call into question their service and sacrifice and ask Mr. Limbaugh to apologize for his comments.” I’m sorry, but if this is not Government surpression of free speech, I don’t know what is. He is trying to use political force to frighten a private entity from expressing opinions (which he has to fabricate) that he disagrees with. It is clear that Mr. Reid is reverting to personal attacks on his political opponents in order to divert attention from his shameful record as leader of the Senate. His incredibly low approval rating and his failure to end the Iraq war…despite his own promises that it would end under his leadership… amount to nothing more than a record of incompetence.

Allow me to ask my liberal friends a question. Is this the kind of people you want running our country? Politicians who will slander private citizens for personal interests; politicians who use their coercive power to silence speech they disagree with; politicians on whom facts have so little impact? I hope not. Can you imagine the outrage if BUSH tried to attack Democrats for not supporting the troops? Can you imagine the hell that would ensue? How is it that such acts are acceptable… if coming from the mouths of Democrats and not Republicans? Is this not a horrible double-standard?