June 30th 2009

NoKo’s Nuke Ship Mystery Voyage Grows Mysterious-er

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ews reports from the Pacific reveal that the Kana Nam, Li’l Kim’s mystery ship that many thought was on its way to Myanmar Burma with lots of tools of repression, has turned around and is headed back to the Glorious People’s Paradise.

The 7th Fleet continues to follow the Kang Nam and is likely now to provide it with a hostile escort all the way back to the edge of NoKo waters.  The ship’s cargo remains a mystery, especially now that it appears it may not visit any foreign ports.  Were it to tie up somewhere, we could request that nation search the vessel, and they likely would.  As long as the Kang Nam is at sea, it’s not likely to be searched.

One troubling thought:  Li’l Kim has learned that every time he sends the Kang Nam out, some 7th Fleet assets will be tasked with following it.  That’s something he might use to tactical advantage at some time.

Whatever.  Any fleeting tactical edge NoKo might gain is readily crushable … so long as we have a president who understands “big stick,” and not just “speak softly.”

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May 30th 2009

What A Twit!

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igh … Li’l Kim probably got more followers than me! But you can help - follow me @laerpearce.

Hat-tip: Aren

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May 19th 2009

A Rousing Endorsement Of Experts

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uropeans must be a happy bunch this morning because a team of Russian and American “experts” have determined that their continent needs no missile shield, and those apocalyptic Iranians and their full-bore nuclear development programs pose no risk to Europeans from Budapest to Bath.

The experts’ first finding, reported by WaPo is that the planned defense won’t be effective against the type of missiles the Iranians are likely to use. The second: It’ll be more than five years before the Iranians would be read to nuke Europe.  Two questions:  How long will it take to install the missile defense.  And why not hire some other experts to use those five years to make the system effective against the kind of missiles the Iranians would use.

The experts then analyzed the Iranians’ crappy missiles, derived from crappy North Korean knock-offs of seriously outdated Russian sub-launched missiles, and conclude it would take six to eight years for the Iranians to get a launchable bomb and put it on a missile capable of hitting a European city.  So no missile defense is needed, natch!  Especially since the experts don’t think any U.S. system could knock out an Iranian - North Korean - Russian missile dating from the 1950s.

But the entire discussion is moot because of the experts’ final point: that the Iranians won’t nuke Europe anyway because it will ensure their self-destruction.  How odd.  Saner nations than Iran - the US and Russia - pursued or feared missile defense systems, even though the doctrine of mutually assured destruction was firmly in place between them, so why should the Europeans not have an insurance policy against Iranian lunacy?

I don’t think the Iranians are likely to try to hit Europe with a missile because so many other scenarios make more sense, not the least of which is simply providing a nuclear umbrella for its operatives in the Middle East.  But if I were a European, I’d be more comfortable staking my future on a real missile defense than the opinions of experts.

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March 17th 2009

NoKo: Back Off, Or We’ll Starve Ourselves!

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orever daft - that’s Li’l Kim’s Pyongyang follies for you.  Ever the creative genius, the pint-sized tin-pot always can be counted on for another demonstration of his uncanny skill in the challenging task of running a bizarrocratic state.  Kinda like this:

Chronically hungry North Korea has refused further US food aid, the State Department and aid groups said Wednesday, as a showdown mounts over a feared missile test by the communist state. (AFP)

We promised the NoKos 500,000 metric tons of food because the Commies have mastered the fine art of making crops not grow, and in return L’il Kim agreed to act half-human, something he was able to do for about a day and a half before announcing that he was preparing to launch the world’s first peasant-fat-fueled rocket.  His plan:  launch what the U.S. military termed, quotes and all, a “satellite”.

We protested, saying, first, that the satellite was just a cover for a ballistic missile NoKo plans to really launch, trying to beat their earlier record by not blowing up for at least 41 seconds, and second, that NoKo was lying because the starvation-nation has no known supplies of peasant fat.

Or something like that.  The saga continues …

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October 19th 2008

Sunday Scan - 10/19/08

Obama’s Big Three-Year Ayres Lie

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o we know Obama and Ayres worked together and knew each other, yet Obama continues to slither away from big negatives from the association. In fact, if we’re to believe the MSM, the Obama/Ayres meme may actually have hurt McCain among some voters who merely see it as “negative campaigning” - or who may actually like the idea of having a president who likes hanging out with terrorists.

But there are two ways to tell this story that McCain hasn’t pursued. One he’s had a long time to develop - that Obama and Ayres share a radical approach to education that should raise fears with any parent. And two, a story that’s still developing, the depth of lying Obama has foisted in order to minimize his friendship with the unrepentant domestic terrorist.

The lying meme got a big boost recently from Verum Serum, which tracked down documentation that the two shared an office for three years - a level of familiarity far beyond Obama’s “guy in the neighborhood” lie.

Bill Ayers and Barack Obama shared an office. Ayers’ Small Schools Workshop, the one Obama directed all that money to is located at 115 S. Sangamon Street, Chicago, Illinois 60607 [Note the link is to a year 2000 version of their website]. Here’s a screen grab from the website’s footer:

In 1998, the address for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, where Obama presumably worked, was 115 S. Sangamon Street, Chicago, Illinois 60607. Here’s a copy of their 1998 tax return with that address:

The CAC moved to a new address sometime in 1999 or 2000, but the shared office probably persisted for at least three years. I can’t say for sure because 1998 is the earliest tax information available online. [Correction: I can say for sure that they shared the same building for the years 1995-1998. Here is a 1995 progress report from the CAC with the same address.] …

I’m going to suggest that two guys working in the same building for a period of years probably crossed paths pretty often. For all we know, they had lunch together on a daily basis. Maybe, in an effort at conservation, they were even carpool buddies. After all, Ayers is a guy from Obama’s neighborhood.

The message here is simple and devastating: You just can’t trust what comes out of Obama’s mouth.

hat-tip: What Bubba Knows

Continue reading “Sunday Scan - 10/19/08″

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June 27th 2008

Grudging NYT Bush Praise On NoKo

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he sudden turn of events in North Korea - especially its destruction of some key nuke facilities - seems to have shocked even the NYT into momentary recovery from chronic Bush Derangement Syndrome:

North Korea’s declaration of its nuclear activities is a triumph of the sort of diplomacy — complicated, plodding, often frustrating — that President Bush and his aides once eschewed as American weakness.

In more than two years of negotiations, the man who once declared North Korea part of an “axis of evil” with Iran and Iraq, angrily vowing to confront, not negotiate with, its despotic leader, in fact demonstrated a flexibility that his critics at home and abroad once considered impossible.

The compliment couldn’t be allowed to stand too long, as the NYT quickly shifted over to John Kerry, a guy you can always count on for a bit of Bush-bashing, and he came through, with bellicosity and a typical odd view of history:

“Historians will long wonder why this administration did not directly engage North Korea before Pyongyang gathered enough material for several nuclear weapons, tested a nuclear device and the missiles to deliver them.”

He’s harkening back to his stand for single-party talks and Bush’s insistence on six-party, one of the sparking points of their debates, even though he was proved wrong. And he’s ignoring how history will write of Clinton’s utterly incompetent mishandling of NoKo through single-party nativity.

More significant that Kerry’s knee-jerk are the comments of the likes of me, conservatives, who are worried that this is just another Pyongyang puppet show, and that progress on the nuclear issue comes at the expense of the NoKo people, the world champs at enduring human rights abuses.

I cannot find much hope that Li’l Kim will be honest, forthcoming or prone to continuing progress on the nuclear matter, if for no reason than he’s got little else going for him, foreign trade-wise. And it’s regrettable that part of the deal didn’t include the start of a mechanism to better the lives of his citizens slaves.

Those feelings are pretty intense here at C-SM, but even I can see that progress on the nuke front is more critical than progress on the human rights fund; if it were otherwise, I would be a Jimmy Carter/Barack Obama supporter.

Bush’s sophisticated, tenacious approach to diplomacy, backed with the big stick cred he spent his first four years building, may give him true historical significance, on two conditions: He’ll have to keep the pressure on and accomplish even more in his final six months, and the next president will have to keep up the good work - something Barack Oppeaser appears incapable of doing.

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With Obama winning the presidency by seven percent, we can't blame the media. Their laudatory coverage and refusal to extensively probe into Obama's background and [lack of] experience was at best responsible for five percent of his vote, the pundits tell us. Here is a compilation of over 100 significant instances of pro-Obama/anti-McCain bias during the 2008 campaign.

For all 'Media Bias 2008' – Click Here