The war must be over

I mean I never hear about it. To think that only six months or so ago Harry and Nancy P were declaring the war lost and condemning the thought of a new strategy... well... I hardly know what to say....

Actually I do. What we have here is not a failure to communicate, but a wonderful display of media bias and the Demo's belief that politics trump everything and the objective is to win at all costs, not the war, but political office.

Try this, and it isn't original with me.... Note that almost any news article you read that is negative about the person will identify their political party in the first few lines if Repub, not at all or much later if Demo.

But back to my point. I think this says it very well.

If you wanted to see the perfect example of the ethical and moral collapse of the Mainstream Media, you could not do better than a long article in the New Yorker of May 23, 2005. The article is entitled, "The Spy Who Loved Us." Written by a teacher at the University of Albany, named Thomas Bass, it's about a man named Pham Xuan An. Now very old, An was -- among many other things -- a correspondent in Saigon during the Vietnam War for Time magazine. He was apparently considered a particularly brilliant and well-informed correspondent and very well liked by his colleagues in the Western press corps during the war.

He was also a Communist spy, working for the North Vietnamese informing them of what he knew about American military plans, troop movements, political agendas.

He even helped the Communists win large battles by directing Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops against American and South Vietnamese forces. He helped plan the Tet Offensive of 1968, including helping the man who planned the attack on the U.S. Embassy. This was the offensive where thousands of innocent civilians were massacred by the Communists.

If the New Yorker is one of the flagships of the Mainstream Media fleet, they are sailing in maddeningly disloyal, contemptuous waters and obviously have been for a while. Small wonder the media gloried in Mark Felt and Watergate last week. In those days, Americans actually trusted the Mainstream Media. The New Yorker piece by Prof. Bass makes it clear how wrong we were. He's a fine writer but a man whose piece lacks any moral compass at all. And what of the fellow journalists in Saigon cheering him on? Now we know a bit more about why the war turned out as it did.

Link to article.

This time around the MSM has tried, but they haven't quite made it. This time we have the Internet, cable news and Talk Radio.

Talk Radio, of course, is under attack by the Left, and the Demos by claiming that it is unfair, and we must have a "Fairness Doctrine" in which a station must provide equal time to opposing views. That sounds great until you realize that it would just kill the shows because the stations wouldn't want to be involved in the complaints, lawsuits, government investigations that would be sure to follow,

Think about that the next time Obama says he wants "change." Think about that the next time Hillart wants "fairness."

Think about a world where the MSM controls what you see, hear and read. Think about this:

I don't Think US should be the Leader of the World

Link to article.

Dave sends me great games

Try this one if you really think you know geography!

Every now and then I convince myself that

I don't believe in executing murders. Then I read something like this:

Authorities allege that Chandler spent the last weeks of his life locked in a closet without food or water. Defense Darren Cantor and Ann England claim he died of a previous medical condition.

If the perps are convicted, and being the inventive type, you can guess what method I would use.

Back a few years ago I seem to remember the Repubs in Florida taking it on the chin, and rightly so in my opinion, for letting "excuses" like the one below exist.

"I pushed his hair back and saw that his ear was completely black, with no flesh tone," she (teacher's aide) said while tearing up. "So I asked him how it happened.

"He said, 'My dad (which he called Phillips) clobbered me'. I asked him if he was ever punished by 'time out' or by not watching television. He said his 'mom' and 'dad' (Berry and Phillips) would put him in a hot shower and turn it up as hot as it would get," she said, crying again.

Holm Elementary officials reported the bruising but the Denver Department of Human Services later called the report "unfounded," according to state Human Services records.

It appears that the school did its job and the bureaucrats did not. The Gov is a Democrat.

Watch this story disappear as fast as Denver snow when a down slope wind follows the bad weather.

Link to Denver Post

Of Vice and Men

More years ago than I like to remember I smoked. And, at that time, airliners had smoking and no smoking sections... On one fine day I was in First Class on a flight from Anchorage to Seattle and I indulged in my habit. Yes, I did. I smoked.

A few rows away sat two guys who also indulged in their habit... they knocked back about four or so drinks each before dinner, guzzled numerous glasses of wine with dinner and several after dinner drinks. In a word, about an hour out from Seattle, they were wacked, blotto, zapped, smashed. I know all this because they had had enough in the airport bar to believe they knew everying about everything, and should speak loud enough for everyone to hear their words of wisdom, and were giving us this as the boarded. Clowns are hard to miss.

They then ordered more. Which they received. Now, you may be getting ready to hear how I chastised the Flight Attendant for serving them. Wrong. I, who had a VO before dinner and a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, said nothing. In fact, I was nodding off when I glanced up to find a drunken oaf standing in the aisle at my row. (I was in a window seat and the aisle was empty.)

I don't remember what he said, something to the effect that my second hand smoke was giving him cancer.

"No," I replied, "you won't die of cancer. You will kill yourself and some other driver in an car wreck on the way home because you will be too drunk to drive."

(Actually I said something like: "You idiot. You're drunk. Sit down and shut up."
But that doesn't sound nice.)

At that point the Flight Attendant arrived and gently escorted him back to his seat and noted that he should remain there. Fortunately he did.

Whether or not he killed anyone on the way home, or caught lung cancer from my second hand smoke is not known by me.

I dredged that memory up while reading my "hotel/motels stayed at list." The hotel, if you are interested, was the Sheraton Anchorage which had a wonderful location almost across from the street from the Alaska Bush Club, a den of inequity where North Slope workers were known to spend huge amounts of money for the company of delectable looking young ladies... But I digress....

Years later I figured out that smoking was not made socially unacceptable by the thought that people where developing lung cancer, but because it stinks. It smells bad.

Now this isn't a defense of smoking. I quit 16 years ago and wish I had never started and wish that no one smoked and consider it THE most dangerous drug known. My problem is, if nicotine is bad for you, so is alcohol. So why tolerate, even celebrate one and not the other?? Why don't we demand drinkers take their drinks outside the restaurant?

The answer is simply this. They don't want to suppress drinking because it yields huge tax dollars and doesn't easily intrude into anyone's space. Tobacco also yields huge tax dollars, but it does easily intrude, and generates complaints from the "I'm a whiner generation." Ergo. All can drink in comfort, but not smoke.

So forget about the health issues. Forget about the carnage on the highways.... It was, is and remains, all about "me."

Internet courtesy

is mostly an oxymoron, especially on many of the blogs. But sometimes I think some people go out of their way to be insulted. And, considering today’s society that’s to be expected. We have people who don’t want the score kept in Little League, and heaven forbid that their school papers have red ink used in grading.

All of this leads to an unhealthy amount of self esteem. At some point we need to start telling children that their team lost because the other team played better and they made a 70 because they didn’t know the answers. As the old saying goes, rough seas make good sailors.

Perhaps that is why when you send an email to some people you get a response to fill out some form so that they can recognize who you are and accept your message. Look folks, if these people are so busy and so important that they demand I fill out a form, they obviously don’t have time for my message, so I just ignore them.

Now I know that these folks will plead that all they are doing is protecting their computer from spam, and from X rated spam at that. And they don’t want their children, who they share the email with, to see. With them I say sign up with an ISP that will let them use multiple screen names (AOL is one such), set up a screen name for the kid(s) and then use parental controls that will let them screen out who the kid(s) can receive emails from, IM with, and what websites they can visit. As for their email, Spam Filters do a good job, and if you don’t recognize the sender, then delete or open with care. Deleting, btw, takes about zero time.

Beyond that there are people who send group emails. Two or three reply and now you have three emails to the same people.. Two or three reply to the reply and now you have emails dribbling off the side of the hard drives…. If the replies have been snarky, then the situation becomes worse.

This happened recently to me. A friend copied me, I responded, etc., etc. Since I thought someone wanted to talk, and being a fan of Joan Rivers, I offered the use of this blog. And then I started getting emails telling me to take them off my mail list. And despite telling them that I didn’t have them on a list, several continued. (See above. Paragraph two.) I even made the point that we could discuss the issue on the blog with those not interested, not copied. Still did no good. One even got snarky about my writing ability. Besides the fact that he must like easy targets, I saw no evidence of thought displayed.

So as far as I am concerned, it works like this. If I get an email with my name and “30” others on it, and if I want to reply, then I will reply to “all.” Why? Because if the sender thought they should get the original, then they should get all the responses.

Up up and away....

I just got a look at my 2008 health insurance rate.... And guess what, it is up another 10%. I called the insurance commission and complained and they assured me that my company had exceeded its stop loss ratio (again) and that.... are you ready for this news flash.... health cost are up again... And here I had been thinking that all the Doctors were going broke..

I got news for all you folks who think you are getting it for free from your employer, and who will get it for free from Medicare when you retire... Aint so people. Me and my spouse's "free" insurance is near the $11,000/year mark and it aint gonna come down under the current management.

So what we need is National Health Care paid for by a sales tax. That way everyone uses, everyone pays. That would include the illegal alien, drug dealers... everyone..

Why the UN sucks

NEW DELHI (CNN) -- An Indian car manufacturer unveiled its much-anticipated $2,500 "people's car" on Thursday -- a four-wheel passenger vehicle which it hopes will provide a much-needed transportation option for the poor.

Sounds great, eh??

Chief U.N. climate scientist Rajendra Pachauri, who shared last year's Nobel Peace Prize, said last month that he was "having nightmares" about the prospect of the low-cost car

Don't want the huddled masses to be able to travel around, eh?

Heck, they may find their way to Bali..

Link to CNN