U.S. Citizens protesting an out-of-control government is a beautiful thing…

Most things in Washington don’t really surprise me these days.  We’ve been arguing about the same handful of issues now for decades now… and the lines are pretty clearly drawn.  However, sometimes the standards of decency are so ignored… lowered to a point of being immeasurable that it causes one’s jaw to drop. Such was the case yesterday with the statements and actions of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California). She has decended so low, she has fallen off the gutter and into the sewer.  I cannot think of a more damaging blow to the office of the Speaker then the one Ms. Pelosi has inflicted with her unvarnished scorn directed at Gen. David Petraeus.

This from the Politico:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warned Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker on Thursday “not to put a shine on recent events” in Iraq when they testify before Congress next week. 

“I hope we don’t hear any glorification of what happened in Basra,” said Pelosi, referring to a recent military offensive against Shiite militants in the city led by the Iraqi government and supported by U.S. forces. 

The Democrats hammered two themes: The war in Iraq has stretched the military dangerously thin, and the enormous cost of the war is threatening the health of the U.S. economy. 

Underscoring the Democrats’ economic points, Pelosi asked why U.S. military in Iraq and Americans back home are paying more for gasoline than the Iraqis are. 

“Our troops in Iraq are paying about $3.25 a gallon for gas in Iraq, comparable to what we pay here, while the Iraqis are paying $1.36 a gallon,” Pelosi said. “This is a raw deal for the American taxpayer.” 

Let me get you straight here, Mrs. Pelosi… Gen. Petraeus better not “put a shine” on Iraq… OR ELSE WHAT??? or else your gonna lecture him from behind the safety of your title and elevated podium?  Spare me.  How dare you threaten the commander of our armed forces to limit himself to the message YOU obviously don’t want the American people to hear.  And why, may I ask, might this be?  What, may I ask would be SO TERRIBLE about the members of congress and the American People hearing good news from Iraq… the success of the joint coalition force in Basra?  Is it not clear to anyone listening to you that the crux of your credibility (what little you have) rests on the failure of the American mission in Iraq?

The fact that you demand a report that matches your preconceived notions of the facts shows that you have no interest in his opinion anyway and are content to believe the academic assumptions of your favorite editorialists writing from behind some Manhattan cubicle instead of the the eye-witness accounts of the person responsible for dramatic changes on the ground.  You’d probably be better off not even showing up given that it’s just going to be a waste of your time.

Oh, And one more thing. The best concern you can muster in fear of the upcoming the Patreus report is the fact that Iraqis are paying $1.36 a gallon for gas compared to the U.S. price of $3.25?  Great… insincere concern from a Representative who has done NOTHING in her 3 years as Speaker to lower gas prices one penny.  They DRILL for it, Mrs. Pelosi…  It’s that simple.  You hypocrite! You put every hurdle possible in front of oil exploration and drilling and then have the audacity to whine about how those who ARE drilling for it are getting better prices.  Just go back to California already.  You have singlehandedly energized more Republicans to vote in this election then McCain ever could.  

I recently started subscribing to the Stanford University’s itunes podcast and I just finished listening to a speech by Alan Dershowitz discussing the Mideast turmoil. My impression is that his perspective is an incredibly balanced one — one that I feel (and which he clearly points out) is missing in the larger mideast peace debate.

If I can sum up the viewpoint in one word, it would be pragobjectimatic.

I challenge any of my readers who have their ax to grind against Israel to listen with an open mind.  I think you will be surprised with his positions. 

Going to DC on thurdsay! Federalist Society Convention. Get ready for some serious schmoosing.

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

I just got back from a trip to Washington D.C. Met up with some old friends and co-workers. On Saturday, I spent all afternoon shooting photos at some of my favorite museums and other locations around the city. I wanted to share what is most likely the best of the bunch… in fact it is 6 images stitched together to capture a wider field of view. Feel free to check out the rest of the album here.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jrossol/

If you haven’t gathered by now… my blog posts usually have a high correlation to quotes from things I read or people I hear… and this post is no different. If you didn’t already know, Democratic Senator George Biden said recently about fellow Senator Barak Obama,

‘I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy’ (emphasis added)

One can only imagine Biden said this because Obama impressed this upon him–and, one could also conclude that such an opinion was impressed because of the uniqueness (in Biden’s mind) of the quality in question… namely Obama’s cleanliness.

Now, Biden is getting SOME slack for this comment, but I think it would be helpful to remember the comparative slack given to another Senator who said the following words.

“I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either,”

Trent Lott, former Senate majority leader, was forced to resign his post because of those words. Not only do they not even mention blacks in any way, but they were said in the context of wishing a very old and feeble man a happy birthday… and yet Lott was crucified for their utterance–by Democrats, by the media, by blacks across the country.

I wonder though, and perhaps you could answer the questions yourself:

• Which statement is more overtly racist?
• Has the media held Biden to the same standards as they held Lott, or have they quickly forgotten the story?
• Who behaved better, Senate Democrats in the Lott case or Senate Republicans in the Biden case? Who was more ruthless in their attacks?

These questions bring to mind another interesting quote. During the Lott fiasco, many Democrats thought that Lott should be “censured” for such a comment. The eerie silence of Democrats in this case isn’t surprising. They quickly forgive racism if its one of their own, but exalt their own moral superiority when it is convenient to do so (one needs go no farther than their tolerance of Robert Byrd). They protect and forgive for overt acts of racism but call for blood when race isn’t even uttered. The media is no better.

But all things being equal, I doubt Biden actually meant anything racist by his comments… and Lott probably didn’t either. Were it not for a troubling double standard applied to Republicans, this post might have been much different. Is “clean” really a racially charged word? Is calling someone “ghetto” or “white trash” any better? Do we not all hear those vernacular regularly without even a second thought to their racial overtones? This media episode points out the sensitivity, insecurity, and fealty to the gospel of political correctness everyone in Washington seems to suffer from–and it kinda makes mes sick!