Mobombed

Remember the Mohammed cartoon controversy?

Well, that inspired this guy to new heights of Halloween creativity:


That is so steak sauce.

Mayor Street's Answer: More Bureaucrats

Apparently, there are 32,000 students truant each day in the Philadelphia school system and Mayor John Street - a man who in the face of a rising murder rate won't fully fill the Philadelphia police force - thinks the answer is to hire more parents as truancy officers.

Street said in an interview that he wanted to increase the number of parent truancy officers from 100 to 500.
...
The district projects a $73.3 million deficit. Librarians, counselors, and outside managers who run some schools are among those whose positions could be cut to balance the budget.

Yep, a typical nutter proposal from the city's top anti-thinker: lay off the people who make the school system work and hire more people to force the kids to go. Somewhere deep in Street's mind is the conclusion that if he can pull that off, the school's will get better.

Magically.

Open Mouth, Insert Foot, Slam Troops

Why won't this raving, delusional nutbag just fade from the national scenery?

Somehow, I'll bet he's out there today trying to explain this away as not a slam on the troops. This is John Kerry's patriotism on display in true form.

UPDATE: Much, much more on this over at Hot Air.

UPDATE 2: Here we have some audio and video of Kerry opening his mouth about the troops in the past. Typical slams and smears.

The Fear

For Some, Death is the Scary Part

You don't even need to read this WaPo article beyond the sub-headline to know it's a biased bit of journalism that won't inform you and seeks to scare you:

When the War Comes Home

For a Marine Reserve Company That Saw Death in Iraq, Returning to Life in Ohio Is an Unexpected Battle

You know, you'd think that Marine company would be in a joyous, happy mood to be back at home, and if you've read any reportage from non-MSM sources, you know that they are. But the MSM constantly portrays the transition from deployed to returned status as some sort of traumatic experience, when it's not. Oh, sure, maybe for some, but not for the vast majority. But you know the reporter and editors don't know anything when they bother to note the Marines "saw death in Iraq" and are somehow different people as a result: broken, disheartened people being the inference. The MSM portrays the Iraq operation so dishonestly it's a wonder anybody bothers with them.

You Only Think You Need A Full-Time Government

The Czech Republic is living the Libertarian dream: life without an activist government:

The Czech Republic, which held general elections in June, still has no government.

If only the same could be said here in the USA.

The Pa. 8th Race

A not very interesting or insightful article into the race for the 8th District House of Represenatives' seat, featuring incumbent Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick (R) and challenger Patrick Murphy (D). The article posits the notion that the stabilization and occupation of Iraq post war - "the ar in Iraq" to newspaper writers - is the dominant issue in the race. How writer Brian Scheid knows this is hard to figure out, since he only bothered to ask the candidates and a couple of political science professors. Predictably and understandably, the two candidates weigh in on the issue along party lines, with Fitzpatrick wanting to keep the troops in place until a stable democracy with a functioning military is up and running, and Murphy wants to pull out of the place as quickly as possible, thereby allowing the Jihadists to topple the government.

For me, this is the dominant issue in the election, and, as noted below, my inclination is to win. Our troops are doing just fine, they are not babies in need of over-protective legislators. The HMMVs have all been upgraded to perform a job they were never intended to perform; and, the troops all have the body armor they were never intended to have. Politicians and the news media need to stop portraying the occupation as a lost cause over-filled with violence and hatred: twelve of the 18 Iraqi provinces are essentially violence-free, with the living conditions there better than they've ever been.

Iraq is the new version of what we did in Germany after World War II, and the Republicans should be selling it that way: as a decades-long commitment so that the people of Iraq won't have to fear falling into a civil war along sectarian lines. If all the Iraqis knew for certain we were going to be there en masse for a very, very long time, they'd realize no one faction could take control and abuse the others and they'd get to the hard work of building a functioning democracy.

The Global Warming Conundrum

Walter Simpson is a complete and total idiot:

Was surprise snowstorm caused by global warming?
By WALTER SIMPSON
This snowstorm caused a lot of grief. Lost lives. Flooded basements. Countless trees destroyed. The trees still had their leaves, and the weight of as much as 2 feet of wet snow caused giant branches to come crashing down. Call it the "October Surprise" or "Our Katrina," it was pretty bad - a storm we won't ever forget.

Was this Mother Nature's dark side or something we brought on ourselves? What if there was a connection between this awful snowstorm and global climate change - and thus with all the fossil fuels we burn and carbon dioxide we are releasing into the atmosphere?

Un-hunh: the more we cause global warming, the worse winter will get.

It's the Demography, Stupid

The Europeans who realize what's going on are voting with their feet: "Europe as we know it will no longer exist 20 years from now ... The number of emigrants leaving the Netherlands and Germany has already surpassed the number of immigrants moving in. "

They should be voting with their beds and deporting immigrants like crazy.

Me? I've already visited Europe. In the 80s. It was nice.

Bush Speak

Bush: "Other parts of the world, and some here – and I'm not casting [aspersion], I'm just giving you a sense – I'm telling you what's on my mind. I am in disbelief that people don't take these people seriously, as if they're some kind of incompetent, and/or isolated people. They're plenty competent, they're plenty tough, and they're plenty ambitious." Full transcript starts here. Audio, here.

Me? I say "win it"

Mark Steyn: "It's not a question of whether you're "for" or "against" a war. Once you're in it, the choice is to win it or lose it."

A Good Question

Why is Moqtada al-Sadr still alive?

The Phinqy Plays Yet Another Race Card

The Phinqy puts forth an article in which it alleges that a Democratic Party candidate's "race" may be somehow important to his election bid. A-hunh. Incumbent Sen. Bob Menendez is, we're told, a "Latino." Then reporter Cynthia Burton poses the "innocuous" question to those involved that perhaps Kean is using Menendez's race as a campaign issue, because Burton is a racist who thinks a person's skin color matters because she's a racist who thinks a person's skin color determines certain things about their world-view and politics. Kean's campaign responds:

Kean's campaign press secretary, Jill Hazelbaker, said Kean is not using immigration to inject ethnicity into the race.

"To suggest that has racial overtones is something I reject vehemently," she said.

That defense comes 2/3 of the way down the article, ensuring the average Phinqy reader doesn't get to it. Nice. Way to play the race card, Cynthia Burton!

UPDATE: The reporter responds. I include her email in the comments.

The NYT Plays Yet Another Race Card

For some reason, the color of your skin and shape of your eyes matters to the NYT, especially in this oddball video news report of the first Eskimo killed in the Iraq war. Why does that matter? Who knows. Coming next: the first Vietnamese-American killed in Iraq; then, the first Sino-Scottish Evangelical Buddhist killed in Iraq. And on and on and on.

The nutters in charge of the media are truly unbelievable sometimes.

The Wolf's Answer

Lynne Cheney calls Wolf Blitzer out on CNN's broadcasting of Islamofascist propaganda and questions his patriotism. And would you believe it, he at least claims to want the USA to win the war:

WOLF: The answer of course is we want the United States to win. We are Americans. There’s no doubt about that.

Nice. Now once more, with feeling.

Setting the Stage

An article in the Phinqy sets the stage for the upcoming election: whatever the results, they will be rigged. Maybe the rigging won't work, but whatever the popular vote is in Philadelphia on election day, it won't be the actual result of voting. Philadelphia is famous for phony voting, particularly in favor of Democrats. Could a Republican ever win? It's doubtful, even if a plurality of voters in the city voted for one. I mean: John Street beat Sam Katz in the last mayoral election, after being down in the polls prior to election day and under federal investigation.

So, here we have an article warning the electorate that the feds want to watch the vote to make sure it's fair, but the article takes the side of the city: no oversight is needed. Move along, nothing to see here.

Relative Blame

Apparently, the WaPo thinks that if you did something wrong, got caught, and convicted, it means your wife is also at fault. Oh, right, sorry, that only applies to Republicans and RINOs. I keep forgetting the rules to all this.

The amount of effort the Democrats are putting out to lose this election is amazing. What will they think on the morning of Nov. 9, having not retaken either house? Will they think they didn't smear hard and often enough, or that they started smearing too early, thus diluting their efforts?

Hell, there are valid reasons to kick the Republicans out of control, but none of them are any of the reasons the Democrats have put forth. Idiots.

That said, there's just no way in hell we can put socialists in charge of the government. Again.

Suicide Watch

An article here from New Scientist Magazine which examines planet earth minus the humans. The writer suggests that all of us humans are somehow magically transported to a "re-education camp, at which I have no idea what I'd have to re-learn. On the whole, it's a boring, anti-everything lefty analysis of the supposed harm humans are doing to our supposedly super-precious planet. For some reason, folks with brains are constantly concluding that we humans are the problem that needs solved by elimination, that we are not a special kind of creature, being all self-aware and making each successive generation of humans better off than the one before it.

I have no idea who idiots like the author and believers of this stuff think they'll influence to their side, since most of us kind of like being alive, here on Gaia, drinking the water, eating the food, watching crap movies at the 36-screen multiplex and then driving home and screwing our brains out. Most people don't look at the world and conclude, well, humans are the problem and I need to tell everyone we shouldn't exist because we are inherently evil, what with all the paving, excavating, building, burning of fossil fuels and filling holes with trash.

Why people who think thusly just don't kill themselves is a mystery, since they've clearly self-identified as the problem and figured out the solution. On the face of it, it should be legal to kill these people on sight.

I mean, the inherent idiocy in this:

The humbling - and perversely comforting - reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.

[emph. mine]

Someone get writer Bob Holmes a clue. He has a death wish.