A nation finally rolled out a red carpet … albeit, a thread-bear, ratty looking one … for the Olympic torch today, giving the Beijingoists a welcome relief from demonstrations that marred the torch’s progress around the globe.

What country?

Here’s a hint: Celebretory crowds were waving artificial bunches of the national flower, kimjongilia.

As in Kim Jong-Il-ia.

Yes, NoKo’s torch relay started off with a leg run by Pak Du-Ik, who symbolized North Korea’s greatest international sports triumph: their 1966 World Cup soccer team, which advanced to the quarter-finals. As in, here’s a nation that’s gone 42 years since falling far short of winning.

Of course, there would have been protests in NoKo, too, if people were free to protest. China routinely sends North Koreans who flee Li’l Kim’s cesspool nation back to NoKo, where they face imprisonment if they’re lucky, death if they’re not.

But if they’d protested the torch, they’d face imprisonment if they’re lucky, death if their not. So, hey! Welcome China! Cool torch!

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Lessons In New Politics From Barack

Barack Obama is leaving the old politics behind, supplanting it with a new, cleaner style that leaves the smarminess behind. Here, courtesy of The LA Times (which provides a darn good compendium of Obama-smashing news, in its usual blatant favoritism for Hillary objective style), is a tutorial in how Obama approaches politics the new, clean way:

1. Need money after your first unsuccessful campaign for Congress? Then get a sweet job from a big campaign supporter to supplement your state senate income. (Obama got a $112,000 job from Robert Blackwell Jr., about double his state senate salary of $58,000.)

2. In return for the favor, urge the state legislature to grant a Blackwell company, table tennis promoter Killerspin, a $50,000 tourism grant. (Pingpong tourism is such an important tourist market, and so deserving of state subsidies!) ((Shall we make, or avoid, the devilishly clever connection between the name “Killerspin” and the Obama PR machine?))
3. Then, to show that a cash-stuffed paper bag the system really does work, land $320,000 in state subsidies for Killerspin tournaments.
4. Finally, get new political contributions from Blackwell as soon as the grants go through.

There are business people who feel it is their responsibility to run a profitable company, and there are business people who feel it is the people’s responsibility to make their company profitable. There are politicians who believe in the former, and politicians like Obama who, despite all their fine talk about new ways of doing things, definitely believe in the latter.

Islamist Horror Stories

Bubba, of What Bubba Knows, has put together a list of stories for Sabine, a gal who apparently doesn’t get the threat posed by Islamist thought and action. Here’s his intro:

For Sabine’s education, today’s stories of atrocities by Muslims.

May you come to realize who and what is the real threat to peace, may you learn to recognize the face of the real enemies of your peaceful, tranquil world.

And here are the story links:

¤ Please Let Me Marry Her and Then Kill Me
¤ The criminality against children in the koran
¤ German Charity Helps Turkish Women Escape Forced Marriages
¤ Europe or Eurabia?
¤ Home-grown ‘champion of Islam’
¤ Saudi women ‘kept in childhood’
¤ Not Child’s Play: The Teddy-Bear Intifada

The first link one tells of a particularly heartless murder carried out by an al-Qaeda in Iraq thug, who is now in prison, awaiting his death sentence. Another prisoner wanted to identify the thug’s victim:

So, he asked the killer to give him the name of the victim.

The killer replied he didn’t know, he asked from what tribe? The killer didn’t know, he asked from what sect? The killer didn’t know, he asked him from what province? The killer didn’t know.

Then he asked him, then why you killed him? The killer said he cannot remember, whether it was the victim’s haircut or the way he was dressed or the music pouring from his car.

This is the enemy we’re fighting, and this is why we’re fighting this enemy. Islamist terrorists are the vilest villains we have ever fought, a fact the Left is quick to forget, despite unforgettable stories like this one.

Lessons In Environmental Hypocrisy

If you like the splendor and quiet, hot solitude of the desert, Anza Borrego is your state park. It’s the state’s largest park, stretching across most of eastern San Diego County almost all the way to the Mexican border, with 500 miles of dirt roads, 12 separate wilderness areas and untold miles of hiking trails.

Somewhere in that vastness, a long line of wooden power poles stretches from horizon to horizon, lost in the vastness, hardly noticed by most park visitors. Call the power lines the Maginot Line of the war between the Greenies and the rest of us.

San Diego Gas & Electric, in order to meet a state mandate that 20% of its power come from alternative sources by 2010 (that’s less than two years away!), proposes to convert the current power corridor to a new Sunrise Powerlink, which would carry renewable power from the sun, wind and geothermal facilities to be built in the Imperial Valley.

The environmentalists, who demand that we stop using oil and go with renewable resources, are furious, of course. Here’s Elizabeth Goldstein, prez of the California Parks Foundation, quoted in the LA Times:

“The idea that we’re going to sacrifice critical pieces of our environment to protect other pieces of our environment seems a little ironic. That’s an irony I cannot accept. We have to find a way to do both.”

I think she means “protect both,” not “sacrifice both,” but the sentence’s structure is a little hazy. The Sierra Club makes it more clear, talking about a “powerline juggernaut:”

Fare thee well, big skies and open vistas. To feed the energy demands of the West’s inland megalopolises and crowded coasts, public lands in 11 Western states may soon be crisscrossed by a web of power lines and pipelines. These “energy easements,” up to three-quarters of a mile wide, are slated for every sort of public property: national forests, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) holdings, state parks, even national parks. Since they’ll be “preapproved,” the easements will be ready to go at the energy companies’ convenience.

Note that they don’t say a word about these easements being required to comply with the alternative energy mandates they themselves demanded. So like a Kennedy attacking windmills, they attack the infrastructure required to make their alternative energy dream come true.

But you see, having 20% alternative energy isn’t their dream, not if it means conventional power solutions. They wanted growth to stop, grids to be ripped out, and Americans to change the way they live. Nothing less will do.

So they will fight this power line, even though there really isn’t a good alternative route. They would rather condemn private land than use public land for a public use. And the public, I hope, will see the Greenies for what they are: Demanding and totally inflexible, demanding the world without giving up a square inch, and self-righteous but thoroughly hypocritical.

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New technology has brought me great joy this week, specifically my new Kindle and the Web site Pandora.

I have my wonderful step-dad Bill to thank for my Kindle. In his 80s and still an early adaptor, he had his in tow when he and Mom passed through in March. I ordered one immediately, and it finally arrived late last week.

In a nutshell, Kindle is an electronic book, about the size of a publishers paperback, that can hold a couple hundred titles. But that’s just the beginning.

• It’s astonishingly easy on the eyes, letting you read for hours with no strain at all.
• Besides books, you can subscribe to any of a couple dozen daily newspapers, and magazines and blogs.
• It lets you annotate pages, save pages as clippings, look up words you don’t know and change font sizes in a jif.
• While it costs $399, it lets you buy new hardbacks like Douglas Feith’s new War and Decisions (list $27.45, Amazon $18.45) for much less, $9.99 in this case.
• You can email a document to Amazon, and it is quickly downloaded into your Kindle for reading.
• And the technology is simply amazing.

Kindle (as in kindle a fire or kindle the imagination) uses a built-in cell phone to put the searchable Kindle Store onto the screen, with its approximately 150,000 book titles. Once you pick one, it’s downloaded in seconds, using the same cell phone connection — but I don’t pay a cell bill or even know the cell number; it’s just part of the deal.

Because of this easy technology, book purchases become very impulsive. I heard Doug Feith on Hugh Hewitt last week, looked up the book at one stop light and bought it at the next.

Pandora, Radio from the Music Genome Project was interjected into my life by Incredible Daughter #2. Here’s what the Web site says about itself:

We believe that each individual has a unique relationship with music – no one else has tastes exactly like yours. So delivering a great radio experience to each and every listener requires an incredibly broad and deep understanding of music. That’s why Pandora is based on the Music Genome Project, the most sophisticated taxonomy of musical information ever collected. It represents over eight years of analysis by our trained team of musicologists, and spans almost a century of music (and soon several centuries!).

Each song in the Music Genome Project is analyzed using up to 400 distinct musical characteristics by a trained music analyst. These attributes capture not only the musical identity of a song, but also the many significant qualities that are relevant to understanding the musical preferences of listeners. The typical music analyst working on the Music Genome Project has a four-year degree in music theory, composition or performance, has passed through a selective screening process and has completed intensive training in the Music Genome’s rigorous and precise methodology. To qualify for the work, analysts must have a firm grounding in music theory, including familiarity with a wide range of styles and sounds. All analysis is done on location.

Here’s how it works. Incredible Daughter #2 brought up the Pandora home page on my computer and asked me to name a musical artist I liked. I said James Taylor, she typed it in, and now I have my own radio station that plays music with high genome matches to Taylor.

Some of today’s selections have been: Oh Baby, Don’t You Loose Your Lip On Me and Everyday by James Taylor; I Thought I Was A Child by Jackson Brown; Nothing I Can Do by Ben Taylor; Lonestar by Nora Jones and Stop This Train by John Mayer.

If I ask it why a certain song was selected for this mix (a two-click request) it says:

Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features rock accoustic arrangement, folk influence, the subtle use of vocal harmony, mild rhythmic syncopation and acoustic piano.

Or some such thing. It changes a bit depending on the song that’s playing.

You can give Pandora feedback by voting thumbs-up or thumbs-down on songs, and can purchase any song you like with quick pop-ups of your preferred music buying site.

And of course you can have multiple playlists. As much as I like the music that’s playing now, I’m going to go back to the home page now and create an entirely new radio station for myself; this one keying off another artist I like a lot, Fryderyk Chopin.

Ahh … that’s nice.

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Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson is readying a bill for Senate consideration that would freeze US biofuel mandates at their current level, ending the mandated increases in biofuel production through 2030.

The reason for Hutchinson’s bill — a bold one, given the amount of grain production in Texas — is simple: Artificial, government-set mandates for biofuels are a key component of food staple price increases that have driven people to hunger around the world. Writes Hutchinson in IBD,

Nearly all our domestic corn and grain supply is needed to meet this [biofuel] mandate, robbing the world of one of its most important sources of food.

We are already seeing the ill effects of this measure. Last year, 25% of America’s corn crop was diverted to produce ethanol. In 2008, that number will grow to 30%-35%, and it will soar even higher in the years to come.

Furthermore, the trend of farmers supplanting other grains with corn is decreasing the supply of numerous agricultural products. When the supply of those products goes down, the price inevitably goes up.

Subsequently, the cost of feeding farm and ranch animals increases and the cost is passed to consumers of beef, poultry and pork products.

Since February 2006, the price of corn, wheat and soybeans has increased by more than 240%. Rising food prices are hitting the pockets of lower-income Americans and people who live on fixed incomes.

The UN has called the current situation a global food crisis, and this time they just might be right.

So let’s see what happens to Hutchinson’s bill. Two predictions:

First, despite the extremely negative fall-out of yet another poorly conceived government mandate, the farm lobby can be expected to fight it.

And second, the obvious companion piece to this legislation, opening up North Slope lands for production, will go nowhere.

Hutchinson begins her piece with a quote that’s a good wrap-up for this post:

hat-tip: RCP

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I heard it the other day, checked it out, but only posted it in a comment. Let’s make a bit more hay of this and use Mr. Political Almanac, Michael Barone, to carry the message, via Real Clear Politics:

One thing many people haven’t noticed about Hillary Clinton’s 55 percent to 45 percent victory over Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary is that it put her ahead of Obama in the popular vote. Her 214,000-vote margin in the Keystone State means that she has won the votes, in primaries and caucuses, of 15,112,000 Americans, compared to 14,993,000 for Obama.

If you add in the votes, as estimated by the folks at realclearpolitics.com, in the Iowa, Nevada, Washington and Maine caucuses, where state Democratic parties did not count the number of caucus-attenders, Clinton still has a lead of 12,000 votes.

With four primaries to go, Obama can count on big numbers in North Carolina. RCP’s polling averages have Obama ahead by a tad in Indiana, but I think Hillary might pull out a squeaker, based on Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania and the downspin Obama’s currently in.

I can’t find any current Kentucky polling data, but I’m calling it close because the black and redneck populations pretty much balance themselves out and other populations will split between the two. Puerto Rico? Obama has fared poorly with Hispanic voters and who in Puerto Rico isn’t Hispanic?

However the ultimate tally tilts, its obvious that the Dems are horrifically split and have no clear front-runner. In the end, Barone thinks it will be Obama who walks away with the nomination. But you have to ask, who would want this stinkin’ nomination. As Bob Herbert puts it:

The share of Clinton voters who have been telling exit pollsters that they will not vote for Senator Obama if he wins the nomination is inching toward the red zone. At the same time, there is growing resentment of the Clintons’ tactics among Obama partisans, especially the young and African-Americans.

I’ve felt since early in the campaign that Hillary would be the easier candidate to beat, but now I’m not so sure. Obama isn’t projecting the strength that’s needed to be president (and Hillary is showing bulldog tenaciousness, if not strength), and given that Rev. Wright has utterly trashed the cause d’etre of the Obama campaign — newness, reconciliation — what possible reason would anyone have to vote for him?

The only thing about the Dem race that isn’t too close to call is that whoever emerges when the dust settles will be damaged goods. Thank you, Mike Huckabee, for effectively splitting the GOP vote so we didn’t have to suffer a similar fate!

Hillary composit: Danz Family

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The Chinese Olympic torch ran into more trouble today as it passed through the Japanese city of Nagano.

BBC has a good video here. It’s impressive to watch because it shows the level of security needed to protect the torch — a phalanx of runners that look like it’s out of 300 encircle the runner, with a row of policemen outside that, and motorcycle police scattered here and there.

Here’s BBC’s print report:

The Olympic torch has met with more protests and scuffles on the latest leg of its troubled relay in the Japanese city of Nagano.

With security tight along the route, two demonstrators tried to seize the torch and a third threw eggs at the flame. All were arrested.

But correspondents say the relay passed off without serious disruption.

The streets were lined with thousands of Chinese supporters, as well as dozens of protesters. …

More than 3,000 police officers were brought in to guard the event after demonstrations had plagued the flame in some other cities on its route.

In a last-minute change, the Nagano leg of the relay began in a parking lot rather than a 1,400-year-old Buddhist temple.

The temple was withdrawn as the starting point after objections over China’s crackdown in Tibet.

It’s obvious from the video that most of the crowd was out for a good time to see an Olympic torch go by, and that the protesters were the minority. Still, it was another international embarrassment for the Beijingoists, and hurrah for that.

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This evening, Rev. Jeremiah Wright breaks his silence before a sympathetic interviewer, PBS’ Bill Moyers. Bobby Seale and Louis Farrahkan apparently were unavailable to interview him.

Wright’s big point is that he was wronged. Here’s his exposition:

Wright defended his sermons, telling Moyers, “the persons who have heard the entire sermon understand the communication perfectly … those who are doing that are communicating exactly what they want to do, which is to paint me as some sort of fanatic.”

Actually, I didn’t need Wright’s help to come to this point; I’ve thought about it quite a bit because I’ve seen my fair share of out of context quotes, so fairness mandates that I consider the “out of context” question here. As an example, let’s look at this infamous Wright quote:

” … and then [America] wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”

I would actually like to hear a pastor say this, if the context around the quote is that God is within his rights to withdraw his favor from America because of the millions of his little ones we have suctioned and cut into oblivion in America’s abortion mills.

But that wasn’t the context behind the quote. We have the context, and it is this:

“The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law …”

And that’s why God should damn America. Any black leader who says the (white) government (deliberately) gives black drugs and passes three strikes laws as a racist tool to imprison people who should still be on the streets even though they’re three-strike criminals should expect media coverage, whether they’re Obama’s pastor or not.

In other words, we don’t have to listen to the entire sermon, or the entire 20 years of sermons when Obama (theoretically) attended the church. Rev. Wright gave us the context. And if Al Campanis can get the boot for saying blacks “may not have some of the necessities to be, let’s say, a field manager, or perhaps a general manager,” then Wright can certainly feel some heat for saying this.

Back to the interview:

He said his critics’ motives are clear: to undermine Obama. “I think they wanted to communicate that I am unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ. And by the way, guess who goes to his church, hint, hint, hint?”

Of course Wright has been used by some to undermine Obama and the story is bigger because he is Obama’s pastor. That doesn’t make the statements any less outrageous and any less newsworthy however, and a great deal of the newsworthiness of this story was the shock most of America felt upon hearing Wright for the first time. News is by definition “new,” and this language from a pulpit was new to most of us.

Besides, before he accuses others of exploiting him because of Obama, Wright would do well to ask himself if he did not, in fact, benefit more from Obama than he suffered from him. How many times did Wright use his famous parishioner to aggrandize his church? How many favors did he ask Obama to do? This cuts both ways, Reverend.

Finally:

But he added, “They know nothing about the church. They know nothing about our prison ministry. They know nothing about our food ministry. They know nothing about our senior citizens home. They know nothing about all we try to do as a church and have tried to do.” Focusing only on the snippets, he said, “was unfair. I felt it was unjust. I felt it was untrue. I felt for those who were doing that, were doing it for some very devious reasons.”

The same can be said of Hezbollah. They have “ministries” that feed and heal and educate. But they also fire rockets from Muslim civilian neighborhoods into Jewish civilian neighborhoods and send martyrs duped idiots into crowds of Jews with explosives strapped around them.

And Mussolini got the trains to run on time.

Hezbollah is not remembered for its schools; Mussolini is not remembered for his train schedules. And Wright won’t be remembered by most of Americans for his outreach because it’s nothing more than expected that a church the size of his would have numerous outreaches. Having them, then, does not exonerate him from his wrongs.

So you see, what’s unfair is not the media focusing on the “snippets;” rather, it is unfair that Wright calls them “snippets.” They are his rockets and explosive vests, so of course the media and the people will focus on them, and running crying and sniffling to broadcast’s ubber-Lib will not change that one bit.

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I recently had a run of exceptionally rude comments from Navigator, a Brit who has a decidedly anti-American POV, which is fine if it’s well articulated, but this is the kind of revisionist junk he spewed:

News flash – America didnt [sic] join WW1 and 2 out of any sort of altruistic inclination.

Remember Japan? India and Burma is on the other side of that front. British Indian troops fought on the other front in Indo- China to help rescue you guys or have you forgotten that part of the story?

No, I hadn’t really forgotten and I can give credit, not sneering abuse. Neither had I forgotten the truly decisive battles we waged Island-hopping the Pacific. Midway, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima. Rescue us? Interesting way of looking at it.

I answered his claims that America is swill in world opinion by asking why Italy and France moved towards us in their last elections, and he answered in part:

[Y]ou’re showing your ignorance and arrogance by thinking the world revolves around the US once again. Naples (thats in Italy) is buried in garbage, unemplyment [sic] is high and economic growth in Italy is restricted to the cities. In short, domestic crisis. Berlesconi is a businessman so for dosmestic interests he has been re-elected.

All I’d said is the Berlesconi is more aligned with Bush than he is with England’s pathetic government, which is hardly grounds for accusing me of thinking the world revolves around the US. But tell me a nation it revolves around more. The failure of the Italian economy is emblematic of the failure of the Euro-Socialist mega-state, a government model England has embraced and America, thank God, has thus far been able to reject.

I could go on, but why subject you? I only bring Navigator up because I thought of him when I read this in the Times of London (a name, by the way, he insulted me for using, claiming it was the Times of Great Britain):

Young women are daring to wear jeans, soldiers listen to pop music on their mobile phones and bands are performing at wedding parties again.

All across Iraq’s second city life is improving, a month after Iraqi troops began a surprise crackdown on the black-clad gangs who were allowed to flourish under the British military.

That was not written by an American reporter who thinks the world revolves around the US. It was written by a Brit about a country a big chunk of the world (including us) used to revolve around.

I have a small idea what happened in Basra and why the British command failed to adapt to the situation as well as we did, but I have a much better understanding of why the British crown failed here: arrogance, inflexibility, greed and outmoded military tactics.

I love Great Britain. I have enjoyed my visits there immensely, we love Incredible Wife’s Aston, and their culture and history are indelibly intertwined with ours. It’s a shame they also have a rude, bull-headed leftist minority full of bile and anger — but hey, that’s just another similarity between our two great nations.

Navigator would do his nation a much greater service if he would redirect his rancor against the EU, because that is the real threat to his country, not us. It threatens to homogenize Europe into a tasteless, over-regulated, PC shell of what it once was.

In closing, the Brits have re-engaged in Basra, and we all thank them for their improved effort and assistance in the recent fighting. But the victory there is the Iraqis’ — and if people like Navigator would remove their blinders and see the results of victory, perhaps they would understand that what we are fighting for is worth it.

(A note to Navigator: As a service to my readers, who prefer discourse to barroom brawls, I have blocked you from posting comments [I think I have, anyway]. You are free to send me any comments via email; my address is near the top of the right column.)

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The cyber-meltdown experienced by the Watcher of Weasels this week would have torn asunder our weekly blog-in were it not for the indomitable Joshuapundit, who rallied us and was able to get nine Council members and their non-Council entries together.

So here’s the link to some good reading.

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I just filled my beautiful German V8 (18.9 mpg) with $4.11 a gallon gasoline. That was an unwelcome first! Did it make me want to vote for Obama or Hillary?

Of course not — with their sucking up to the enviros and love of regulation and Big Gov, they haven’t a clue what to do about oil prices.

Fortunately the free market knows exactly what to do — and it looks likely a correct will come in time to keep McCain from being saddled with a deepening recession:

The roaring oil boom of the last few months may be on its last legs as economic growth slows hard across the world and a clutch new refineries come into operation, Lehman Brothers has warned in a hard-hitting report.

“Supply is outpacing demand growth,” said Michael Waldron, the US bank’s oil strategist.

“Inventories have been building since the beginning of the year. We have pretty significant projects starting soon in Saudi Arabia, and large off-shore fields in Nigeria,” he said.

The Saudi Khursaniya field has just opened with 500,000 barrels a day (b/d) of production, and the new Khurais field will start next year with a further 1.2m b/d.

The [UK] Telegraph report goes on to blame the recent price run-up on the same folks that brought us the pre-crash real estate price run-up, speculators.

Lehman Brothers said the price of oil had been pushed to inflated levels by a $40bn inflow into commodity index funds this year, much of it coming from Mid-East sovereign wealth funds.

The petro-investors may have second thoughts about gaining “double exposure” to commodity prices.

“Financial flows have been the marginal driver of prices since the onset of the credit crunch. Investors are using oil as a hedge against inflation and a falling dollar,” said Mr Widmer.

Once again, recent media reports on oil prices have sounded like prices will continue to go up and up and up with little hope for relief. This is to be expected since most MSM reporters have bought into the false Greenie belief that all resources have been exploited to the breaking point.

If the Lehman projection is correct (they didn’t call the housing crash right, so don’t file their prediction in your “guaranteed” file), it will lead to lower prices quickly enough, which in turn will lead to happier consumers, which will be good news for the GOP, come November.

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