Dangerous Dan

I can't even get past a simple movie review without the writer including his biased political opinion. An excerpt from CNN's review of The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which I plan on seeing – I just got done reading the six part trilogy):

And then there's Sam Rockwell, playing the incompetent galactic president, Zaphod Beeblebrox, in a way Adams couldn't have imagined back in 1978. Rockwell is doing an impression of President Bush — or he's doing an impression of a parody of Bush, with his breezy jokes and smug twang — but he's dressed like the lead singer of a '70s glam-rock band.

Michelle Malkin has this post up about a book assigned to a Kindergarten class as part of a diversity reading bag. The purpose of the book, Who's in a Family?, is to teach kids about different types of families. This includes households with two gay or lesbian parents, which is irritating the conservative family folk. I think they have a point, but I want to look at something else.

Looking at a couple of pages of the book on Amazon, I paid special attention to the back cover, which says:

Who's in a family?
The people who love you the most!
Chances are, your family is like no one else's -
and that's just fine.

What struck me about that is that reminded me of what I had read about Al and Tipper Gore's 2002 book Joined at the Heart. In it, the Gores basically define ‘family’ as that which is bound by emotional ties and not by any sort of structural norms. Sound like that back cover quote? Then I found the introduction to the book which includes this line: "There are all kinds of families — and no one has the right to tell you that your family isn't the right kind." Again, sound a little familiar?

I'd have to read fully both books to make a more definite comparison, but given this brief reading, it sure sounds like the kid's book is modeled off of the Gore book's ideology. I don't find that very comforting.

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This largely praising San Francisco Gate article discusses a book made by committed communist Bob Avakian. This is what you need to know to get a measure of the man:

In the book, Avakian is at his most provocative when he assesses Stalin and Mao. He applauds Stalin for leading the first historical experience in building socialism, the Soviet Union, under difficult circumstances. Although he refers to Stalin's mistakes, he makes no mention of the millions who died under the Soviet dictatorship and insists upon a balanced view.

"If the bourgeoisie and its political representatives can uphold people like Madison and Jefferson," he writes, "then the proletariat and its vanguard forces can and should uphold Stalin, in an overall sense and with historical perspective."

Let's see, Madison and Jefferson preached freedom as a human right and talked of pursuing life, liberty and happiness. Stalin on the other hand took freedom, life, liberty, and happiness and thoroughly ground them under the heel of his boot. Yeah, sure, I suppose they're about the same. This sort of moral equivalence is b.s. on stilts.

I recommend visiting Sunsara's World and scrolling down to the comments sections which has a rather entertaining debate on the piece.

MRC has a selection of loaded questions reporters asked President Bush at the press conference last night. Here's my favorite:

Sir, you've talked all around the country about the poisonous partisan atmosphere here in Washington. I wonder why do you think that is? And do you personally bear any responsibility in having contributed to this atmosphere?

This would be like asking an environmentalist, "Sir, you've talked a lot about greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide leading to global warming. Do you personally bear any responsibility in having contributed to this atmosphere?"

The answer, of course, is yes. He's a CO2 emitting lifeform, after all. Likewise, with Bush, the answer is yes. He's a Washington politician. Of course he's contributing to partisanship. The point, though, isn't just whether he's doing so since that answer is so obvious as to be useless. The real question is to what degree he's doing it comparable to others. There are other things out there producing far more and consequential amounts of CO2 than the environmentalist and there are other politicians contributing much more to partisanship than is Bush. So, essentially, the reporter asked a catch-22 question, along the same lines as "When did you stop beating your wife?" Real fair.

England to plead guilty in Abu Ghraib abuse

Turns out that Great Britain isn't copping to anything, but Lynndie England is.

Speaking of effective protest techniques of leftwing moonbats, here's another one I came across, exemplified here by WTO protesters.

I honestly don't know how they can even take themselves seriously. I'm sure there were many who thought to themselves, "Man, I was all for globalism and capitalism, but those mud-covered naked people really made me question that."

The true masters of the art of papier mache are the protesters. Only they have been able to take a 4th grade form of artistry and put it to purposes that are somehow even more juvenile. One example is this fine bulldozer used to protest Caterpillar for selling equipment to Israel.

You see, the idea is that they're protesting Caterpillar by making this mock up of a bulldozer they say is used by the Israelis to kill Palestinians and destroy property. It's a death dozer. Which got me thinking. If this is how the left protests the Israelis, then surely the right must protest Palestinian tactics by making up protesters in fake bombs, carrying guns, and the like. I found plenty of pictures of these pro-Israeli protesters:

Yeah, those right-wing nuts making fun of Palestinaian militants by exageratin… eh, what's that? Those are actual Palestinian protests?

Hmmm… so while the lefties in the West are protesting Israel with creative art class projects, the people they're supporting, and with whom they are co-protesters, are marching through the streets brandishing nasty guns and rockets. Nice. Clearly, some folks from International ANSWER need to get to the West Bank and start administering papier mache lessons, 'cause those folks are way behind the modern conventions for protest theatre spectacle.

At the same time as innumerable people are wringing their hands over the treatment of Arabs and Muslims in the West, at least of a few of these civil liberties… ummm… crusaders should well spend some of their time observing how Islamic Arab countries treat non-Islamic religions. Saudi Arabia is likely the worst of them. Churches are banned there and merely converting away from Islam to another religion earns you a government-imposed death sentence. Let me reiterate that. It’s not some angry lynch mob or extremist lone enforcer who will kill you for being apostate. It’s the government itself that will do the honors per the legal code.

So observe this account from Saudi newspapers about 40 Pakistanis who were arrested by the Saudi religious gestapo for practicing Christian rites. Some were apparently Muslims being proselytized to and others were doing the preaching. Both are in big trouble. The Muslims, if they converted, and the preachers since evangelizing a non-Islamic faith in Saudi Arabia is also illegal. What's remarkable is that the religious police actually performed a sting operation on the group. It appears they either did some extensive surveillance or even had a spy on the inside.

And let's be clear about why they were arrested:

A Saudi religious police source explained the reason for the arrest: "These people tried to spread the poison and their beliefs to others, by means of distributing pamphlets and [missionary] publications."

Yikes, not PAMPHLETS! I think I may faint.

I await the public uproar from the ACLU and Amnesty International… if they can break themselves away from the catering tables at seminars on all the American abuses, that is.

The newspaper even a included a photo of a few of the poor bastards who were arrested for exercising religious freedom.

And, just to be clear where our government stands, here's a picture of our president being all lovey-dovey with the man in charge of such oppression.

"Say, Abdullah, now that we've gotten to know each other, I thought it might be good if we could you know… just talk for a change. Maybe about the religious oppres…"
"No, George, shhhh… don't ruin the moment, darling."

The Giuliana Sgrena incident keeps popping in and out of the news. Recall that she is the Italian reporter who was taken hostage by insurgents in Iraq before Italy shelled out millions in ransom money (which is undoubtedly being used by terrorists to kill American soldiers) for her release. As the car in which she was traveling approached a U.S. checkpoint, it was warned to slow down, failed to do so, and was fired on by U.S. soldiers. An Italian intelligence chief was killed while Sgrena and her driver were injured. Sgrena immediately started spinning several different accounts of what happened and has claimed that it was an assassination attempt.

I've posted previously about the inanity of her story and how it requires some true Rube Goldberg machinations and a healthy suspension of disbelief. Now the U.S. and Italy have produced their respective reports and they don't agree. According to this story, they agree on the facts, but not on the conclusions, which means that there's either spin happening or they don't really agree on the facts. If the latter, one of the things on which they may disagree is that the U.S. says Sgrena's vehicle was traveling in excess of 60 mph towards the checkpoint and failed to heed warnings. Sgrena says they had slowed down to about 30 mph. This new report says that a satellite over the area has shown that the 60 mph figure is more accurate. Oh, but I'm sure Sgrena is telling the truth about everything else, though.

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I've stated before that the real threat to academic censorship is inside the academy, not outside. Here we have yet another instance at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. History professor Jonathan Bean has been getting the ugly treatment from a small cadre of his liberal colleagues. I suggest reading the whole thing.

I've been busy the last few days and didn't get to post. Today I've had plenty of opportunity, but I haven't come across a blessed thing that I care to comment on. It's an unusual situation. Let's hope it doesn't carry over into tomorrow.

Wow, the extent of corruption in Canada's Liberal Party is stunning. Just when things can't seem to get any worse for them, they do. Read this article all the way through.

There's too much to easily summarize, so I'll try to note the main points:

One of the principles of terrorism is that it declares one side the ultimate enemy that must be killed wherever its representatives are found, and that it is to help and empower an oppressed people who are being victimized by the enemy. In the case of Islamist terrorism, the enemy is, of course, the West, while it proposes to benefit Arabs and Muslims.

The odd reality, though, is that terrorism kills and injures far more of the people it claims to benefit than those it ostensibly seeks to harm. In Iraq, for example, far more Iraqis have been killed and maimed by the insurgents than Americans have. It victimizes those it claims are victims. Thus, I am going to start keeping a running list of stories that illustrate this. First up:

Nine die in Baghdad mosque bombing

ABC News has an article up about Henry Hyde (who's retiring) admitting that the Clinton impeachment was in part a payback for Nixon getting run out of the White House. I think this would be news to many conservatives who couldn't currently give a flip about the Nixon scandals and would think the Nixon vengeance squad would have been small. But then again, I wasn't a senator at the time.

Far be it for a reporter, though, not to inject a little bias into the story. Here's the last sentence:

Hyde's style will be missed in Washington, as well as his sense of civility, even though a lot of people will not miss his rigid ideology.

Now take a moment, get in your Zen pose, and imagine that line being said about a retiring Democrat. Good luck with that.

Update:
Well, this is interesting. They've changed the story. They've backed off slightly on the Nixon-Clinton connection and they've removed the biased line I noted above. I tried to find a Google cached image, but can't.

Quite funny.