August 2007 Archives

Recall the strictest of codes.

Add the following: "Do not under any circumstances assume a wide stance."

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Update: And let's not forget the out-takes.

Since Fred's officially jumping into the presidential race next Thursday, it's time to commit the following nugget of priceless information to memory.

Just refresh your browser to see another amazing Fred Thompson Fact.

Get on with it already.

8/31 Update: You hafta chuckle.

... then you'd better sit down.

Imagine you're in the military and your unit is in Iraq, facing an angry mob made up of both civilians and terrorists ... and you can't tell one from the other. Would it be better to disperse the crowd by using a non-lethal heat ray, or would it be better to open fire and risk civilian casualties? Which approach would cause the western media to scream the loudest? Would the career-conscious/prison-averse commander be wise to retreat rather than try to break up the mob?

Discuss.

Blue Öyster Cult never imagined this new Air Force drone:

The Reaper packs a wallop. Sleep soundly, Mr. Terrorist.

Hat tip: Hot Air

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee couldn't resist pandering to the crowd at Lance Armstrong's recent "War on Cancer" get-together:

Huckabee committed to sign a nationwide smoking ban in public places, should such a measure win approval in Congress.

...

Huckabee described feelings of horror and helplessness when doctors diagnosed his wife several decades ago. She was diagnosed in 1975 with a spinal tumor doctors said were inoperable. She survived, but Huckabee said the experience left him "scared to death" of cancer.

What scares me to death is the prospect of the federal government becoming even more of a nanny state. I'm perfectly capable of deciding whether to smoke on my own, thankyouverymuch. If I want to fire up a celebratory cigar on the patio at the local watering hole some fine evening, the last thing I need to hear is a huffy "tut-tut" from some mincing bureaucrat in DC, followed by the sensation of my wallet getting lighter. I'm a big boy. Leave me be.

I take back what I said about possibly supporting Huckabee.

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Update: Mary Katharine Ham sees things like I do. Sheesh.

Update 2: Oh, for goodness' sake. The event was videotaped, and you can see that Huckabee wore a Livestrong bracelet ... and made a point of flashing it. Sound the Pander Alert.

1/12 Update: Former Huckabee research director Joe Carter asks for evidence that Mike Huckabee is liberal. I offer the information above as fodder for the conversation.

OK, how did I miss this stupid law when it passed in 2005?

I'm glad I'm buying a gun this month (and I'm not alone). If this keeps up I might be in the market for an RPG by around 2012 or so. Or maybe a MK48. Don't laugh ... the 2nd Amendment isn't as restrictive as you think it is.

Michael Vick oh Michael Vick.  Some enormously paid pro-football quarterback set his mind to dog fighting in his spare time with his disposable income.  Gross.  Someone revoke his license to own pets...if only such a thing existed.  Rather this fool is slapped with federal felony charges.  So he pled to some random marginally related charge and may face time in prison.

So let me get this straight...abortionists run amok in this country; pro-choice supporters are hailed as American heroes.  Baby killing OK.  Dog killing worthy of ruining a career and sending the offender to prison. 

So goes arbitrary values in our society....

Please help me extend a hearty how-do-you-do to my new co-blogger, The Spider Slayer!

She's one twisted co-blogger. Make her feel welcome!

Lest the Puddle Pirate be allowed to run amok and call people members of a  "far right lunatic fringe"  I should have a forum to offer my perspective.  Albeit, my mind is far right, it is still more moonbat-ish than my just-right-of-atilla-the-hun friend the Puddle Pirate.  Who is the Puddle Pirate to accuse one of being a lunatic hailing from the far right....sounds more like the far left to me! This is just the beginning of my brain shavings!!!!! Let the party begin

In order to finish the upgrade to Movable Type 4.0, I'm updating the design of this site today. The kinks ought to be ironed out soon.

Two publicly-funded charter schools in the Columbus area, International Academy of Columbus and Westside Academy, are run by Islamic extremists tied to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), according to Patrick Poole:

Even though many of the new students are learning English as a new language, an essential tool for helping them integrate into their new community, the schools instead focuses on Arabic as part of their core curriculum. As a result, standardized test scores for the schools are well below state standards; and yet Ohio educrats continue to give the project new life, pumping millions of taxpayer dollars into each school every year to keep the schools open and renewing their contracts. One board member for both schools has even co-authored an article advocating an educational policy of "selected acculturation" and "accommodation without assimilation" to "encourage Somali youth to develop an adversarial identity that will put them at odds with mainstream society" - thus trapping the students in a cycle of perpetual cultural alienation and isolation.

The student population of both schools is overwhelmingly drawn from the Central Ohio Somali community, which itself is comprised of refugees who fled their war-torn country to escape from the warlords and clan warfare that have torn the country apart since 1991. Sadly, these refugees have arrived only to find the warlords and clan leaders in charge of the very public and private institutions here in the US intended to help them resettle and adjust to life in their new home.

One of the new educational warlords these unsuspecting Somali families are encountering is Ahmad Al-Akhras, CAIR national vice chairman, who is listed as one of the incorporators of both charter schools, and who is listed as the treasurer of International Academy. Joining him on the board of both schools is Abukar Arman, the Somali terror apologist who was recently forced to resign from the Central Ohio Homeland Security oversight board following my FrontPage exposé regarding his published statements of support for terrorist organizations and individuals (see, "Hometown Jihad: The Somali Terror Apologist Next Door" and "Terror Sympathizer Tossed from Homeland Security Oversight Panel"). Arman identifies himself as the board president of Westside Academy and March 2005 press release announcing his appointment to a government board lists him as "building director" of International Academy.

Students at the two schools perform badly on standardized tests. The International Academy of Columbus reports dismal scores, and the Westside Academy has no scores at all. Abysmal academic performance and shrinking enrollment aren't the only problems. Poole suggests that the CAIR members who founded these schools have skimmed profits from both operations. And how does militant Islamist proselytizing grab you?

Extremist politics, rather than education concerns, seems to be the driving factor of the schools. One of the leaders of the two schools admits to creating a program designed to keep students from integrating into the "racist" American mainstream. In a published education article, "Educating Immigrant Youth in the United States", Abukar Arman and his co-author lay out an educational plan of keeping Somali children from integrating into their new culture, and cite the experience of International Academy as the best example of their recommended "selected acculturation" educational philosophy in practice.

Another indicator of the partisan political and sectarian use of these schools is in an anti-Israel "teach-in" sponsored by CAIR-OH held at International Academy in September 2006, entitled "Palestine 101". The event was co-sponsored by a number of Marxist and extremist organizations: The Committee for Justice in Palestine, International Socialist Union, World Can't Wait-Columbus, and Not In Our Name-Columbus. CAIR national official and school treasurer Ahmad Al-Akhras served as one of the panelists.

Read the whole thing.

These aren't private schools; they're public charter schools that get bucket-loads of taxpayer funding from Ohio's educrats. And if that isn't enough to raise your hackles, Poole's article points out that the CAIR bunch just incorporated a new charter madrassa school: Eastside Academy.

To stay abreast of this mess, drop by Central Ohioans Against Terrorism, where Patrick Poole blogs (his personal blog is Existential Space). This gent deserves an invitation to join the SOB Alliance.

Also, see what the charming folks at CAIR have been up to lately in their advocacy for The Religion of Peace™.

Hat tips: Michelle Malkin for the story, and Jill Miller Zimon for the school data.

Here's the text of a message I just sent to the Ohio Republican Party: "Who (if anyone) has the Ohio GOP recruited to run against Betty Sutton in the 13th District? She's a freshman, so she's vulnerable. Please tell me you're recruiting somebody." Perhaps you could ask them the same question?

I'll bet they've recruited nobody, but hope springs eternal. In the meantime, I'll try to get Sutton to take positions on the record whenever I can (here and here, for example).

If you thought Ron Paul supporters were odd to begin with, wait 'til you see what they think of the dastardly neoconservative bogeymen lurking in the shadows. Apparently, some author from the far right lunatic fringe named Philip Atkinson wrote an essay urging President Bush to crush democracy and become "President-For-Life", all in the name of national security. His essay supposedly turned up on the Family Security Matters web site, but it's not there at the moment. Was it scrubbed? I don't know, so I just sent e-mails to Atkinson and to Family Security Matters requesting an explanation.

Although it's all a tempest in a teapot as far as I'm concerned, the comments at One Oar In The Water (a fellow SOB Alliance blogger) sure raised my eyebrows. Talk about drinking the Ron Paul Kool-Aid. The chickenhawk trope pops up early. Side question: since Ron Paul never served in combat, can a President Paul ever conduct a war without being labeled a chickenhawk? Just, y'know, wondering.

I'm no neocon. I'm just a plain old conservative, and I've been one ever since I began to follow politics in high school eons ago. It's amusing to see the nutty losertarians libertarians going weak in the knees over a crank like Ron Paul, while accusing the sane majority of conservatives of worshipping George W. Bush as some kind of messianic savior of America. How blinkered and paranoid must one's outlook be to lump all conservatives into two camps, either Ron Paul Groupies or Neocon Bush-Worshippers?

Ah, well. Even loons have a right to say patently silly things.

This is just silly:

The U.S. Coast Guard will fire lasers -- not live ammunition -- at its own boats this morning in a sort of war-games training demonstration on Lake Erie.

...

Coast Guard personnel on the defender boat will be armed with machine guns and rifles loaded with blank ammunition and fitted with laser beam emitters.

The attack boat will have laser sensors on board that will reveal if it has been "hit" by the weapons aboard the defending boat.

The Coast Guard late last year dropped its proposal to conduct training exercises with machine guns loaded with live ammunition in 34 zones in the Great Lakes, including four in Lake Erie.

Rear Adm. John E. Crowley Jr. called that plan unsatisfactory after widespread complaints about safety and potential damage to the environment.

U.S. environmental groups and the Canadian Foreign Affairs minister said they were concerned that the bullets, which could dump some 7,000 pounds of lead compounds a year in the lakes, could be a health hazard to humans and wildlife.

Puh-leeze. This is just another example of the Coast Guard's tendency to kowtow to environmentalist wackos. Trust me on this. I spent 2 1/2 years at USCG Headquarters in the office that oversees vessel traffic management in major ports. Ever since the Exxon Valdez spill, the environmentalist movement has been the 400-lb. gorilla in the room when it comes to the Coast Guard's marine safety missions.

Has anyone demonstrated that the ammunition expended in true live fire exercises would actually cause the horrible environmental damage alleged? I'd love to see it, but I won't hold my breath. These days all it takes to spook the federal government is an alarmist press release about impending environmental doom. Gathering facts is so tedious and dull, especially when you can use sexy computer models and glitzy ad campaigns instead.

Further, which is more important: preventing expended ammunition from entering the water, or preventing waterborne terrorists from attacking our northern shores? Those nice jihadist fellows would love to blow up a tanker or ore carrier, and given an opportunity they'd light off a dirty bomb near a major coastal city too. I invite the assorted Gaia-worshippers to consider the environmental damage attacks like these would cause (since the human death toll probably matters much less to them). Isn't prevention of a true disaster worth the cost of small amounts of expended ammunition entering the lake?

One of the opponents of the original live fire training sees the foolishness in this laser tag exercise:

Dan Thomas, president of the Great Lakes Sport Fishing Council, one of the groups that had criticized the initial plan, had a mixed reaction to today's planned demonstration.

"It sounds reasonable at first, but there's also no substitution for the real thing," Thomas said by telephone from his Chicago office. "Our group is not opposed to them using live ammunition, but we want them to be better at communicating to all interested parties when it is going to be conducting its exercises."

Thomas said his group and others have also wanted the training to be done farther out in the lake if live ammunition will be used in the future. Today's demonstration was supposed to take place from three to five miles from Cleveland.

A little more common sense would be nice, but alas, this is the Coast Guard we're talking about.

Are you a blogger who's weary of scrambling to keep up with the news cycle online? Don't like proprietary software or your My Yahoo page? Try this.

Conventional wisdom holds that America's manufacturers have been declining for ages, yet the facts don't support this assumption. Tom Blumer wonders why:

The powerful "manufacturing is in decline" meme won't go away soon, but it should.

It apparently isn't enough that the Institute for Supply Management's Manufacturing Index has read "expansion" in 48 of the past 50 months. It has become an article of faith among reporters and opportunistic politicians that American manufacturing has been, and continues to be, in a long-term decline.

The fact is that government reports also show the exact opposite. Why apparently no one, including the sector's supporters, has done, or at least published, the simple math involved to debunk the myth of "deindustrialization" is indeed a mystery.

Pay close attention to Tom's description of manufacturing's share of the economy. It's a smaller chunk of a much larger pie. Refer to the concepts of tax cuts or baseline budgeting for more illustrations.

Since cities like Dubuque, Houston, Seattle and Charleston support robust manufacturing sectors, I'm forced to ask: what's Cleveland's excuse?

Liberals have nothing to fear, naturally.

Jim Geraghty poses a hypothetical:

Suppose you're an undecided Republican voter, with mixed feelings about the big-name Republican presidential candidates. You respect John McCain, but he doesn't look like a viable option -- which is just as well since he bugged you with his crusade for speech-limiting campaign finance reform, and lost you with the immigration deal with Ted Kennedy.

Mitt Romney's wowed you in the debates, but you can't forget that while you agree with all his positions, he had strikingly different ones not too long ago. And you would prefer a nominee who has won more than just one political race in his life.

You love Rudy Giuliani's crime-fighting record and 9/11 leadership, but the thought of a non-pro-life Republican nominee gives you pause, and the messy home life troubles you a bit.

You were very excited about Fred Thompson, and nearly fainted with anticipation when you saw his smackdown of Michael Moore. But lately you feel like you're playing a character in Waiting for Godot, and you're wondering if he got lost somewhere on the way to the announcement.

Those still shopping for a candidate could do a lot worse than former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who with the second-place finish in Ames is not merely now a "top tier" candidate, as Newt Gingrich recently declared, but arguably belongs in the middle of that first tier.

That describes me to a tee.

Huckabee's record on taxes gives me cause for concern, yet he seems to be on solid ground when addressing national defense and The Long War. He's unabashedly pro-life, and he's an ordained Baptist minister. Thanks to his solid performances in recent debates and in several interviews (like today's with Michael Medved), and also due to his second place finish in the Iowa Straw Pool, I'm giving him a second look.

I'm eager to see whether Huckabee does well in the Texas GOP Straw Poll, especially if Fred Thompson jumps into the race and they go head-to-head. Some say Huckabee's already stolen Thompson's thunder. I suspect that Fred still has time to win the nomination, but he can't wait much longer.

Fred or Mike? Mike or Fred? Hmmmm ...

The Texas Republican Party will conduct a straw poll on Labor Day Weekend with the help of the conservative folks at TownHall.com. That's supposedly the weekend when Fred Thompson will officially declare his candidacy. What a great opportunity for Fred to make a big splash!

One thing's certain: if Fred keeps delaying his entry, I'm going to switch my allegiance to Mike Huckabee (who just got $50 from me yesterday).

I'm upgrading the back end of Brain Shavings to the newest version of Movable Type today. I apologize for the inevitable glitches that will turn up during the process.

2:15 PM Update: Looks OK so far. Testing the installation ...

3:38 PM Update: ... and everything looks good behind the scenes. Interesting. The user interface for Movable Type 4.0 is radically different (dare I say improved?), and the upgrade was surprisingly easy. Maybe I won't have to switch to WordPress after all. Time will tell.

While I was in a questioning mood, I threw these into the mix:

I have two detailed questions.

1) Are America and political Islam (a.k.a. "sharia") at war? If so, should America seek to achieve anything more than dismantling al Qaeda and capturing/killing Osama bin Laden?

2) Should America forcibly crush and discredit political Islam (a.k.a. "sharia") while preserving individual Muslims' right to worship peacefully? If so, how? If not, what will the consequences be for America?

How about it, Betty?

I just submitted the following question to my Representative, Betty Sutton (D-OH):

Should unions be allowed to make financial contributions to a politician or organization using funds from a union member's dues if he/she objects? Why or why not? For the purposes of this hypothetical, assume that no court has ruled on the issue.

We'll see how (or if) this labor lawyer responds. I suspect she'll send a canned reply with no specifics.