A close reading of the Eleison Group's analysis of McCain's "The One" versus the ad itself shows that the Eleison Group brought all of the bad faith and deception of which they complain to their analysis.  They lied, and they lied and they lied.

For those of you who don't know, the Eleison Group is a political ad agency whose Web site www.eleisongroup.com advertises its services as getting strongly religious people to accept the Democratic Party's agenda. (Getting Catholics and Evangelicals to vote for Obama should be tough - his votes against requiring abortion clinics not to kill babies who survive abortion procedures in the Illinois State Senate are a matter of public record.)

According to co-founder Eric Sapp, "Eleison Group is going to be a group that works with Democrats and progressive non-profits to engage the faith community, help people communicate their values in an authentic way, and push forward on the notion that the best way to engage faith in the public square is from a place of religious humility instead of one of religious arrogance." 

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 10:34 PM MDT

Updated: Sunday, 10 August 2008 12:53 AM MDT

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Mood:  incredulous

I am stunned.  A shooting war has broken out between Russia and Georgia and until just now, CNN has been talking about some sex scandal involving John "Senator Gone" Edwards.

I managed to get Email to my contact list before CNN as much as mentioned the Russian-Georgian War.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7549594.stm

Trouble between Russia and Georgia has been brewing for some time - minor skirmishes on their border and in the South Ossetia region of Georgia which wants to break away and become part of Russia.  There's been a lot of major harassment - dead animals thrown in rivers running through both countries, Internet warfare against the Georgian government, minor armed actions.

Since Georgian troops are serving in Iraq alongside our own, they have urgently requested that we airlift their troops back home to help in the defense of their homeland.   The US also has troops in Georgia training their army; we have civilians working in the oil industry there as well.

The precipitating event seems to have been breach of a ceasefire between South Ossetian separatists and Georgian government forces - the separatists attacked the Georgian government, provoking a harsh response from the Georgian internal security forces.  Russia has used the death or injury of Russians serving as peacekeepers in the South Ossetia region as an excuse to invade Georgia.

So far, only delays in the admisssion of Georgia to NATO have kept this from being the first shot in another European, possibly a World War.

It's as I've been saying - Russia has been arming for an aggressive foreign policy which will almost inevitably lead to war.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 3:49 PM MDT

Updated: Sunday, 10 August 2008 12:51 AM MDT

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While playing with Muckety.com (which specializes in interactive Java-based maps of personal and corporate relationships among the nation's powerful) I discovered a bit of news that got past me while I was having surgery and recuperating from it in late June and early July:

James A. Johnson, head of the Vice-Presidential Search Team for Barack Hussein Obama's 2008 Presidential Campaign, resigned from that post in June 2008.

http://news.muckety.com/2008/06/11/johnson-resigns-from-obamas-vp-search-team/3361

According to the muckety.com article,

"Obama appointed Johnson last week to a three-member team to vet possible running mates. But the longtime Washington insider became a lightning rod for criticism after the Journal reported last weekend that he had been the recipient of at least five real-estate loans totaling $7 million from financially beleaguered Countrywide Financial, as a friend of chief executive Angelo R. Mozilo.

At least two of the mortgages were at rates below market averages, though the Journal wrote that is difficult to predict a market rate without access to nonpublic information about a borrower’s credit history.

Johnson, who vetted vice-presidential nominees for John Kerry in 2004 and Walter Mondale in 1984, was the chief executive of Fannie Mae from 1991 to 1998. The government-sponsored shareholder-owned company is the biggest buyer of Countrywide’s mortgages.

Johnson’s ties to Mozilo became a campaign issue after Republicans pointed out that Obama had been critical of the mortgage lender in campaign speeches.

During his years at Fannie Mae, Johnson reportedly worked closely with Mozilo - naming him chairman of Fannie Mae’s national advisory council in 1996. An American Banker article in 1999 said the two men had a “close friendship.’”

Criticism mounted after the New York Times reported today that Johnson was involved in several controversial executive compensation decisions, serving on the boards of five companies that granted lavish pay packages to their executives - and, in some cases playing a key role in approving them.

One of the better-known cases involved UnitedHealth Group, a Minnesota company, where Johnson was a board member and later headed the compensation committee, according to Times reporter Leslie Wayne. The company came under fire after chief executive William McGuire was granted more than $1.4 billion in stock options - some $618 million of which was returned as a result of settlements with federal regulators and shareholders.

McGuire resigned, but kept $800 million from the package.

That and cases like it led Obama to introduce legislation last year that would give shareholders an advisory role in executive compensation packages. The measure, called “Say on Pay,” passed the House and is still pending in the Senate.

Johnson was also criticized by oversight groups for the number of corporate boards on which he served while holding a full-time position at Fannie Mae. Besides United Health, he was a director of Goldman Sachs, KB Homes, the Gannett Corporation, Temple Inland and Target.

Johnson said in his statement today that he had done nothing wrong, saying “blatantly false statements and misrepresentations” were written about him.

“Jim did not want to distract in any way from the very important task of gathering information about my vice presidential nominee, so he has made a decision to step aside that I accept,” Obama said in an e-mailed statement.

Obama said he is “confident” his vice presidential search process will produce “a number of highly qualified candidates” in coming weeks.

The remaining members of the vetting team are Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the late President John F. Kennedy Jr., and former deputy U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder."

The New York Times article which Muckety.com cited above led with a summary that seemed to dismiss the problem with Johnson as being a partisan smear, but the following paragraphs tell a different story.

I'll let you decide whether this is just politics as usual, or whether or not Obama is the shag toy of the big national banks:

"Republicans and their presumed presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, have criticized Mr. Johnson, the former chairman of Fannie Mae, accusing him of getting favorable rates on three home mortgages totaling $1.7 million as a friend of the chief executive of the Countrywide Financial Corporation, the troubled mortgage lender that has became a symbol of the excesses that led to the crisis in subprime mortgage."

That was the second paragraph from the top, and given what comes next, I wonder whether or not typical journalistic practice - the "inverted pyramid" style of reporting in which the facts are trotted out first, then the speculation and editorializing (if any) are presented - would have called for this paragraph to be placed dead last in the article.

Here's what came afterward:

"Mr. Johnson was also involved in some of the more controversial executive compensation decisions in recent years, serving on the board of five companies that granted lavish pay packages to their executives — and often playing a key role in approving them.

One of the more well-known cases involves UnitedHealth Group, a Minnesota company, where Mr. Johnson was a board member and later head of the compensation committee.

The company came under fire after the chief executive was granted more than $1.4 billion in stock options — some $618 million of which was returned as a result of settlements with federal regulators and shareholders.

The executive, William McGuire, resigned, but he kept $800 million from the package.

Because of cases like UnitedHealth Group, Mr. Obama, Democrat of Illinois, introduced legislation in the Senate last year to restrict runaway compensation.

The measure, informally called “Say on Pay,” would give shareholders an advisory role in setting executive pay packages. It passed the House and is pending in the Senate.

In introducing the measure, Mr. Obama said it was intended to “force corporate boards to think twice before signing over millions of dollars to C.E.O.’s.”

He added that “the rate at which executive pay has grown, as compared to stagnating wages among American workers, is rightfully frustrating shareholders and employees alike, especially given the lackluster performance of many of the companies paying these high salaries.”

Now, shouldn't all of that have come first? 

This is the news - that Obama has been very cozy with the same investment bankers and executive board members who got us in the foreclosure crisis in the first place, and who have been giving each other multi-million dollar "golden parachutes" even when they screw up, while ordinary employees don't get raises for years and years, and sometimes have to take pay cuts.  These are the people who run his campaign, who tell him what to do and what to say.

And if you have to have political commentary, instead of blaming John McCain for Obama's cluelessness (or even Obama's collusion with the big banks), this is what the lead paragraph should have been:

“Jim Johnson is an unusual choice for Obama to have heading up his vice-presidential selection committee,” said Charles M. Elson, head of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware.

“Johnson found himself in the middle of the controversy that spurred the introduction of the Say on Pay bill,” Mr. Elson said. Given that Mr. Obama is leading the effort to rein in such excesses, “that makes it more strange,” he added.

Say on Pay is directed at the kind of decisions that led to enormous compensation packages at UnitedHealth Care and at four other companies where Mr. Johnson headed the compensation committees. One of them was Goldman Sachs, where Mr. Johnson defended a pay package granted to Henry Paulson, now the treasury secretary, that allowed Mr. Paulson to keep an extra $26 million in stock options.

At some of the companies where Mr. Johnson sat on the board, controversy erupted after packages were approved that included the backdating of options — or the practice of granting options to corporate executives on dates when the company’s share price was low, to guarantee the maximum profit when the options were exercised.

UnitedHealth Care reached a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission and shareholders over the issue in December.

In return for his work on the UnitedHealth Care board, Mr. Johnson received more than 3.1 million stock options, with an underlying value of about $175 million. He also received a director’s fee of $400,000 a year.

Oversight groups have also raised questions about the number of boards on which Mr. Johnson served while holding a full-time position at Fannie Mae. Besides UnitedHealth and Goldman Sachs, he served on the boards and compensation committees of KB Homes, the Gannett Corporation and Temple Inland. He was also a board member at Target.

“He was on the boards of five companies at the time we had flagged him in our reports,” said Paul Hodgson, senior research analyst at the Corporate Library, a company that analyzes corporate governance issues. “Two of those were involved in the backdating of stock options, and the levels of executive compensation at four of them were considered excessive.”

In other words, Obama went out and got himself one of the biggest corporate robbers in history as chairman of his vice-presidential selection team.  He says one thing on the floor of the Senate and before the microphones and cameras, but does the exact opposite when no one's paying close attention.  The people who are paying for Obama's Presidential run are, mostly, the people who are profiting from the bind that so many American citizens are in these days.

If Obama and his team are as bright as they and their friends in the press tell us they are, how did this get past them?   If they care so much about the common man, couldn't they be bothered to pick up a newspaper or search the Internet for information about their new, rich friends?

Or am I missing the point here?  Will the Obama campaign will take ANYONE'S money?   Dirty or clean?

 -

And what does the Obama campaign have to say about all this?

"The Obama campaign did not directly respond to questions about Mr. Johnson, nor did it provide additional information about the terms of the mortgages that he received from Countrywide.

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama responded by saying, “I am not vetting my V.P. search committee for their mortgages.”

Because if you did, BO, you'd discover a fetid rat's nest of sweetheart loans, golden parachutes, and other ways of picking the pockets of corporate shareholders (a group which includes any citizen with an investment account, and any member of a mutual fund or IRA). 

These people are the real bank robbers of the 21st century - the real home invaders, and the real world-class thieves.  They suck money out  of private corporations in return for very, very little - business decisions which more often than not turn out very badly for the corporations involved - and walk away with MILLIONS in company shares and cash.

And Obama doesn't check up on their finances before he lets them run his campaign.  Could it be because his job is to cover up for them?

He's done it before, with the "Class Action Reform Act," a rapacious piece of legislation against which almost every other Democratic senator voted - but not Obama.  He anchored that bill in the Senate, made sure it passed through the Senate. 

So now, thanks in part to Senator Obama, corporate thieves and crooks must be sued through the already overburdened Federal court system, not at state or local levels.

And he'll do it again.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 1:37 PM MDT

Updated: Sunday, 3 August 2008 1:49 PM MDT

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The Teamsters Union officially announced their support for Barack Obama on February 20th, 2008.

http://www.teamster.org/08news/nr_080220_6.asp

According to the big boss Teamster, James Hoffa, Jr., 

“Senator Obama will stand with the Teamsters when it comes to fighting for working families,” Hoffa said. “This endorsement begins a partnership to change America. Together we will reinvent the political process and give a voice to those who have been ignored by the Bush administration for the past eight years.” Hoffa emphasized Obama’s commitment to rebuilding and strengthening the national transportation infrastructure, a key priority of the Teamsters Union.

“Senator Obama will fight to rebuild our transportation infrastructure,” Hoffa said. “He will work with us to address critical issues from our ports to our highways, rails and airports. We need a president who is focused on rebuilding America and Barack Obama will be that president.”

That was then.  This is now.

According to the Denver Post, August 3, 2008 Sunday edition, page 10K:

"Union objects to Frontier deal"

The Teamsters union is trying to block bankrupt Frontier Airlines' new $75 million financing agreement with private equity firm Perseus LLC, objecting to labor-cost cuts required by the deal.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents 435 Frontier workers, including its mechanics, filed a motion Friday in bankruptcy court asking a judge to reject the agreement.

The Teamsters said Frontier is illegally trying to throw out existing labor contracts."

The Web site muckety.com is a wonderful tool for digging out information on who's connected with whom:

http://www.muckety.com/2008-Barack-Obama-VP-search-team/5030085.muckety

for example, shows the membership of Barack Obama campaign's Vice-presidential search team:

James A. Johnson, Eric A. Holder, and Caroline Kennedy.

As we can see from THIS muckety.com map,

http://www.muckety.com/Perseus-LLC/5001487.muckety

Mr. Johnson has many fingers in many pies, but his butt is firmly in the Vice-Chairman's swivel recliner at Perseus LLC.

However, James A. Johnson is no longer affiliated with the vice-presidential search team for Barack Obama's campaign, owing to a Wall Street Journal article that uncovered the possibility that Johnson got sweetheart loans (in other words, loans on much better terms than ordinary mortals can get) from Countrywide Financial Services.

You'd think that if Obama were all that concerned with making things better for Teamsters, he wouldn't take help or money from Perseus LLC after they just tried to invalidate Teamster contracts with Frontier Airlines - wouldn't you?

The result of support for Obama for the Teamsters at Frontier Airlines is that a huge investment bank which has Obama in their pocket has told Frontier that these particular Teamsters... well, that they lose. 

The Teamsters at Frontier Airlines lose money if the labor cost cuts in Perseus' financing agreement with Frontier survive court challenges, and they lose that wonderful influence that Obama promised the Teamsters before they decided to come down from the fence on his side instead of Hillary Clinton's.

BS walks, money talks.  Look at the results so far before you cast that vote in November, people.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 12:23 PM MDT

Updated: Sunday, 3 August 2008 2:00 PM MDT

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Mood:  incredulous

Disgust with the wide gulf between Obama's carefully cultivated image as a populist who, if he does say so himself, is too pure and honest to take money from registered lobbyists and what he really does is spreading across all political persuasions. 

Counterpunch magazine has been unsparing in shining the light of day on Barack Obama's willingness to take money from anyone with a pulse.   In fact, they've been unsparing in criticizing everything and everybody - if you need to raise your blood pressure, just spend some time surfing their Web site.  They have something to offend everyone.

Counterpunch correspondent Pam Martens has written a two-part article on exactly how much money Obama's taken, and from which lobbyists' political action committees (PACs).  I ran the first part of Ms. Martens' article a week and some days ago; here are some excerpts from the second part:

 http://www.counterpunch.org/martens05062008.html

"Bankrolling a Presidential Campaign

The Obama Bubble Agenda

by Pam Martens

The Obama phenomenon has been likened to that of cults, celebrity groupies and Messiah worshipers. But what we’re actually witnessing is ObamaMania (as in tulip mania), the third and final bubble orchestrated and financed by the wonderful Wall Street folks who brought us the first two: the Nasdaq/tech bubble and a subprime-mortgage-in-every-pot bubble. 

To understand why Wall Street desperately needs this final bubble, we need to first review how the first two bubbles were orchestrated and why.

In March of 2000, the Nasdaq stock market, hyped with spurious claims for startup tech and dot.com companies, reached a peak of over 5,000. Eight years later, it’s trading in the 2,300 range and most of those companies no longer exist. From peak to trough, Nasdaq transferred over $4 trillion from the pockets of small mania-gripped investors to the wealthy and elite market manipulators.

The highest monetary authority during those bubble days, Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, consistently told us that the market was efficient and stock prices were being set by the judgment of millions of “highly knowledgeable” investors.

Mr. Greenspan was the wind beneath the wings of a carefully orchestrated wealth transfer system known as “pump and dump” on Wall Street.  As hundreds of court cases, internal emails, and insider testimony now confirm, this bubble was no naturally occurring phenomenon any more than the Obama bubble is.

First, Wall Street firms issued knowingly false research reports to trumpet the growth prospects for the company and stock price; second, they lined up big institutional clients who were instructed how and when to buy at escalating prices to make the stock price skyrocket (laddering); third, the firms instructed the hundreds of thousands of stockbrokers serving the mom-and-pop market to advise their clients to sit still as the stock price flew to the moon or else the broker would have his commissions taken away (penalty bid). While the little folks’ money served as a prop under prices, the wealthy elite on Wall Street and corporate insiders were allowed to sell at the top of the market (pump-and-dump wealth transfer).

Why did people buy into this mania for brand new, untested companies when there is a basic caveat that most people in this country know, i.e., the majority of all new businesses fail? Common sense failed and mania prevailed because of massive hype pumped by big media, big public relations, and shielded from regulation by big law firms, all eager to collect their share of Wall Street’s rigged cash cow.

The current housing bubble bust is just a freshly minted version of Wall Street’s real estate limited partnership frauds of the ‘80s, but on a grander scale. In the 1980s version, the firms packaged real estate into limited partnerships and peddled it as secure investments to moms and pops. The major underpinning of this wealth transfer mechanism was that regulators turned a blind eye to the fact that the investments were listed at the original face amount on the clients’ brokerage statements long after they had lost most of their value. 

Today’s real estate related securities (CDOs and SIVs) that are blowing up around the globe are simply the above scheme with more billable hours for corporate law firms.

Wall Street created an artificial demand for housing (a bubble) by soliciting high interest rate mortgages (subprime) because they could be bundled and quickly resold for big fees to yield-hungry hedge funds and institutions. A major underpinning of this scheme was that Wall Street secured an artificial rating of AAA from rating agencies that were paid by Wall Street to provide the rating. When demand from institutions was saturated, Wall Street kept the scheme going by hiding the debt off its balance sheets and stuffed this long-term product into mom-and-pop money markets, notwithstanding that money markets are required by law to hold only short-term investments. To further perpetuate the bubble as long as possible, Wall Street prevented pricing transparency by keeping the trading off regulated exchanges and used unregulated over-the-counter contracts instead. (All of this required lots of lobbyist hours in Washington.)

But how could there be a genuine national housing price boom propelled by massive consumer demand at the same time there was the largest income and wealth disparity in the nation’s history? Rational thought is no match for manias.

That brings us to today’s bubble. We are being asked to accept on its face the notion that after more than two centuries of entrenched racism in this country, which saw only five black members of the U.S. Senate, it’s all being eradicated with some rousing stump speeches. 

We are asked to believe that those kindly white executives at all the biggest Wall Street firms, which rank in the top 20 donors to the Obama presidential campaign, after failing to achieve more than 3.5 per cent black stockbrokers over 30 years, now want a black populist president because they crave a level playing field for the American people. 

The number one industry supporting the Obama presidential bid, by the start of February, -- the crucial time in primary season -- according to the widely respected, nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, was “lawyers/law firms” (most on Wall Street’s payroll), giving a total of $11,246,596. 

This presents three unique credibility problems for the yes-we-can-little-choo-choo-that-could campaign: (1) these are not just “lawyers/law firms”; the vast majority of these firms are also registered lobbyists at the Federal level; (2) Senator Obama has made it a core tenet of his campaign platform that the way he is gong to bring the country hope and change is not taking money from federal lobbyists; and (3) with the past seven ignoble years of lies and distortions fresh in the minds of voters, building a candidacy based on half-truths is not a sustainable strategy to secure the west wing  from the right wing.

Yes, the other leading presidential candidates are taking money from lawyers/law firms/lobbyists, but Senator Obama is the only one rallying with the populist cry that he isn’t. That makes it not only a legitimate but a necessary line of inquiry. 

The Obama campaign’s populist bubble is underpinned by what, on the surface, seems to be a real snoozer of a story. It all centers around business classification codes developed by the U.S. government and used by the Center for Responsive Politics to classify contributions. Here’s how the Center explained its classifications in 2003:

“The codes used for business groups follow the general guidelines of the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes initially designed by the Office of Management and Budget and later replaced by the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS)...”

The Akin Gump law firm is a prime example of how something as mundane as a business classification code can be gamed for political advantage. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Akin Gump ranks third among all Federal lobbyists, raking in $205,225,000 to lobby our elected officials in Washington from 1998 through 2007. The firm is listed as a registered federal lobbyist with the House of Representatives and the Senate; the firm held lobbying retainer contracts for more than 100 corporate clients in 2007. But when its non-registered law partners, the people who own this business and profit from its lobbying operations, give to the Obama campaign, the contribution is classified as coming from a law firm, not a lobbyist. 

The same holds true for Greenberg Traurig, the law firm that employed the criminally inclined lobbyist, Jack Abramoff. Greenberg Traurig ranks ninth among all lobbyists for the same period, with lobbying revenues of $96,708,249. Its partners and employee donations to the Obama campaign of $70,650  by February 1 --  again at that strategic time -- appear not under lobbyist but the classification lawyers/law firms, as do 30 other corporate law firm/lobbyists. 

Additionally, looking at Public Citizen’s list of bundlers for the Obama campaign (people soliciting donations from others), 27 are employed by law firms registered as federal lobbyists. The total sum raised by bundlers for Obama from these 27 firms till February 1:  $2,650,000. (There are also dozens of high powered bundlers from Wall Street working the Armani-suit and red-suspenders cocktail circuits, like Bruce Heyman, managing director at Goldman Sachs; J. Michael Schell, vice chairman of Global Banking at Citigroup; Louis Susman, managing director, Citigroup; Robert Wolf, CEO, UBS Americas.  Each raised over $200,000 for the Obama campaign.)"

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 12:10 AM MDT

Updated: Monday, 14 July 2008 12:15 AM MDT

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Barack Obama has stated that the "surge" in Iraq is not working. 

Although you wouldn't know it from the so-called "mainstream media's" failure to cover the story, this is just another in a pathetic series of lies from Obama.

Don't take my word for it -  Scripps-Howard News Service's Deroy Murdock says:

"July 10, 2008, Thursday 5:03 PM EST...  "

"Al-Qaeda in Iraq's Islamo-puritanism sealed its doom


DEROY MURDOCK, Scripps Howard News Service

As al Qaeda in Iraq's fortunes wane, it has no one but itself to blame.  President Bush's troop surge indisputably has crushed al-Qaeda and other terrorists, while Iraqi soldiers have honed their ability to hammer deadly insurgents.

But much of al Qaeda's damage has been self-inflicted. Largely overlooked is the Islamo-puritanism that it inflicted on the Iraqi territories it seized.  Rank-and-file Iraqis tasted life under bin Laden-style Islam, and they gagged.  They responded by collaborating with American and Coalition forces to expel these mad zealots from their midst.

At one level, al Qaeda's religious decrees have been nearly comical.

As the Institute for War & Peace Reporting's Sahar Hussein al-Haideri revealed before she herself was murdered in June 2007, terrorists targeting what they considered pagan symbols bombed a statue of several women hauling jars on their shoulders.

"Do these statues work with police? Were they translators for the Americans or members of the dissolved Ba'ath party?" Mosul police spokesman Brigadier-General Sa'eed Ahmed al-Juburi asked the Institute. "Those terrorists are a bunch of idiots."

Al Qaeda's agenda for Mosul included a decree that clothiers cover the heads of their in-store mannequins. Some relented, and shrouded their mannequins with plastic bags.

"I don't know where these groups came from," shop owner Mutaz Ahmed told the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. "They want to take us back 1,400 years. But if you want to stay alive, you have to obey their orders."

Extremists banned soap in public baths because the Prophet Mohammed lacked it back in the 600s."

As anyone who went to school with Saudi exchange students could have told you.

"Al Qaeda took particular interest in clamping down on various food items.

"Sammoun," a type of bread popular in Mosul, also was prohibited, since Mohammed never ate it. Islamo-puritans found the sight of cucumbers and tomatoes side by side sexually charged, so they ordered produce stands to keep them apart, and told restaurateurs like Khalaf Khalid to serve them on separate plates.

'We obey them because they threatened to blow up the restaurant and kill us if we didn't,' Khalid said, back when al Qaeda was in command.

Al Qaeda also took a "Just Say No" attitude toward ice. Mohammed didn't have it, so Mosul's residents could not, either.

"They prevented production and sale of ice in Mosul from last year," Khalaf Abed Al-Hadidi, an ice manufacturer, told Agence France Presse. "Last summer was tough for us, but we couldn't use the ice factory.

As part of a general crackdown on public displays of joy, al Qaeda even banned wedding parties in Mosul."

As James Glassman, the State Department's chief of public diplomacy, observed at Manhattan's Council on Foreign Relations, "What began to turn the tide in Iraq was when Iraqis began to realize that this was a murderous ideology that was killing Muslims and justifying it by saying, 'If I think you're not a good Muslim, it's OK for me to kill you.'"

"They threatened to kill me if I used an electric shaving machine," barber Atta Sadoun told Agence France Presse. He added that al Qaeda forbade the removal of men's facial hair and forced him to install a sign saying he used scissors but no electric shaver. He said several colleagues who refused were killed. Al Qaeda also bombed women's beauty parlors."

According to restaurateur Hashim Abdullah Al-Hamdani, al Qaeda murdered two of his employees and injured his son. Why? His establishment served both male and female students from local colleges.

Episodes like these eventually led exasperated Iraqis, including Sunni imams, to work with American and Coalition forces to boot al Qaeda from Iraq. This has helped Iraq enjoy its current relative peace.

These bizarre, frightful incidents illustrate the bottomless depravity of America's chief enemy in Iraq. This is a glimpse of how Iraq could look if U.S. forces prematurely withdrew, and the bad guys returned. This also is a cautionary tale of the insanity that likely would erupt wherever al Qaeda or any of its allies gained power."

"Finally, al Qaeda's chilling tenure in Mosul and elsewhere in Iraq puts the lie to the notion that Islamofascists merely are defending themselves against America's allegedly over-assertive foreign policy and Israel's supposed anti-Muslim menace. Combating ice, cucumbers, and wedding gowns has nothing to do with the policies of the Pentagon or the Knesset. It's all about building a bridge to the 7th Century."

Mr. Murdock has the guts to speak the truth about Iraq; while it's not as safe or as peaceful as either we or the people who live there would prefer, you can say that about almost every major city in the United States.

And thereby hangs a home truth about not only Barack Obama but the entire class of politicians who make a nice living from lying to us about the origins and extent of violence in today's world - both the proximate and ultimate cause of violence is those who commit violence, not economic want or social inequity.

Murderers and muggers do what they do because they have no respect for the sanctity of other people's lives.  And the effective cure for violence isn't pouring money into social programs, or violence would have been eradicated after billions were poured into "the war on poverty," starting back in the 1960s and continuing to this day.

What we need are politicians with the audacity to speak the truth.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 6:27 PM MDT

Updated: Friday, 11 July 2008 7:30 PM MDT

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Mood:  irritated

On FoxNews' Sunday Morning show, Sen Barbara Boxer (D, CA-(ca)) once said "Nations cannot survive with foreign troops defending them."

By Boxer's reasoning Great Britain, Germany, Italy, the other countries in the military arm of NATO, Japan and South Korea should be alarmed, since their national existence has been in danger since 1945 owing to the presence of troops from the United States of America.

Germany in particular must be reeling if Senator Boxer is right, because it still has forces from several former occupying nations stationed within its borders.  Apart from economic doldrums which can be satisfactorily explained by the ravages of socialism and deficit spending, however, Germany seems to be fine. 

One of their largest multinationals, DaimlerChrysler, is not just Europe's biggest automaker (if you exclude European subsidiaries of the American-based multinationals General Motors and Ford, such as Opel, all the various national Ford operating companies, and the former passenger-car divisions of Volvo and Saab) but Europe's largest defense contractor. 

West Germany was able, based largely on its economic might, to overcome virulent threats from Mikhail Gorbachev and dire predictions and warning from politicians throughout Europe of all political leanings to reunite with its ruined Communist other half and thus eliminate Soviet Russia's strongest European ally. 

 NO ONE would have predicted as late as the mid-to-late 1980s that this would happen - that Germany would become the master of her own political destiny again, in open defiance of the Soviet Union.

Imagine, SIXTY WHOLE YEARS have passed in which all of these nations and others have been defended by American troops, and according to Barbara Boxer, their survival is in mortal danger!

The major contribution Barbara Boxer made to political discourse in the United States is that just one of her shorter public utterances can sustain many paragraphs of adverse commentary on the thinking of the knee-jerk left which she helps lead.

Seriously, would Barbara Boxer have insisted that the US withdraw from Germany, Italy and Japan on a fixed, two-year timetable after the end of World War II?  Or from the Korean peninsula by 1956?

If not, why does Barbara Boxer want to hand Iraq to Al-Qaeda, the Shia extremists and the Ayatollahs of Iran and their puppets?  Is humiliating George W. Bush and Bush's party actually so important that Boxer, Pelosi and friends must encourage the terrorists of Iraq to kill our neighbors, sons and daughters while they are at it? 

If the United States is ever balkanized - as Iraq will be if we pull out when Boxer wants to do it - it will be the crowing of chickens coming home to roost.  Barbara Boxer's cynical lies, if successful, will destroy the unity and resolve that galvanized our country into action after September 11th, 2001. 

If these people - Barbara Boxer and her friends - ever get the power they crave to the exclusion of our country's security, they will destroy our nation's will to survive as nothing has since the aftermath of the Vietnam War (another struggle against tyranny ended at the whim of the inside-the-beltway faction of the Democratic Party, with John Kerry playing a leading subversive role).

Senator Boxer made heavy weather of the fact that many of her constituents based in places like the Marine Corps air station at Twenty-Nine Palms are serving in Iraq and some of them are dying.  I'd be very interested to learn what her constituents in the US Armed Forces think of her active political support of the terrorists in Iraq (and, by extension, Al-Qaeda - which has chosen to stake their global reputation on the success of the mass murderers to destroy that country's government).

My son also died in Iraq, killed by a bomb which would probably not have been built or buried if Al-Qaeda hadn't thought they could win their war at the American ballot box (as the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese did - with the help of John Kerry and his friends in Congress).

Specialist Armand Luke Frickey, Louisiana Army National Guard and US Army privately had nothing but the bitterest contempt for the Iraqi terrorists' helpers in Congress and Big Media.  His death is directly traceable to Boxer and company's cut-throat political maneuvering and the support of the “mainstream media” to weaken our political stance in Iraq.  If nothing else, the idea that the terrorists can win if they simply kill enough Americans can be laid directly at Boxer's and her political colleagues' feet for demanding withdrawal at any cost. 

I blame Boxer and her co-conspirators for the death of my son.  They have violated the tacit agreement that "Politics ends at the water's edge" (and not for the first time).  Boxer and Company are aiding and abetting the enemy in time of war - exceeding legitimate dissent by spreading misinformation and tacitly encouraging people to murder our citizens overseas. 

There is, of course, precedent for such convictions - the handful of Japanese-Americans who collectively were "Tokyo Rose" and the pro-Fascist poet Ezra Pound were tried and convicted of such conduct.

But did ANY member of Congress during World War II utter the sort of lies and garbage that Senator Boxer and the other members of her clique routinely emit?  Constantly and publicly accuse FDR of botching the war effort?  Demand the withdrawal of US troops from the battlefront, and afterward, from occupied Japan, Germany and Italy long before genuine democracy had taken root?  Did any Congressman intrigue endlessly to stir up popular opposition to FDR or Truman with false or exaggerated charges of impropriety? 

When our military intelligence failed to predict attacks or our decision-makers botched a hard call, did the press call attention to it day and night and attribute it to malfeasance on the part of the President?  Did reporters like Michael Isikoff write inflammatory and false stories about our troops' supposedly desecrating holy objects, or highly regarded newspapers or magazines print them without fact checking and circulate them worldwide, ensuring riots in foreign countries against us? 

Were incessant and redundant Congressional investigations used to shore up innuendo against the President, then their reports ignored when no deliberate wrongdoing was found?  Did Hollywood campaign AGAINST American troops with movies that portrayed them as murderers and witless pawns during World War II?  Did movie stars constantly and with really foul mouths insult our nation's leader as a fool and a crook (again, with no hard evidence)?  Were half-wit antiwar activists elevated to the status of public celebrities and encouraged to spew obscene venom against FDR?

"Los Angeles Barbara," "Hyannisport Teddy," "Boston, Idaho, Miami and Washington John " and the others who give al-Qaeda reason to hope that they can win their war on OUR home front if they just kill enough of our troops should be tried for treason.  Their body count is much, much higher than Timothy MacVeigh's when the innocent Iraqis who have also died in terrorist activity are counted with our own dead and those of our allies. 

But on January 6th, 2005 it became very, very personal to me because of a single death.  I guess that's unfair and illogical, but that how it happened.

The anti-war extremists, especially their people in Congress, are traitors in my opinion and deserve the penalty for treason in time of war.   By law, this would be death - death at the Federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana after a proper trial and examination of that trial by appeal for legal propriety, something my son and all the other victims of terror in Iraq were denied. 

They should be tried for treason in time of war and their venality and disloyalty to the rest of us exposed minutely, with all the attention, effort and frenzy the media devoted to Dan Rather and Mary Mapes' forged Texas Air National Guard documents.

Even were they convicted by some strange chance (for their behinds are covered as Ezra Pound's and Tokyo Rose's never were - members of Congress are immune from arrest until they are impeached or Congress out of session, and their remarks considered non-actionable), the executions of Boxer and friends would still stop far short of justice. 

They would not die in an armored vehicle while hundreds of rounds of ammunition were going off around and through them, and their last moments would not be the agony of being burned alive or dismembered by explosions or bullet impacts.  No, their deaths would involve only the prick of an intravenous needle and leave much more presentable corpses than my son's.  His face was burnt off, requiring a closed casket funeral.

And I wonder how many people would attend these traitors' funerals, and what sort of people the mourners would be.  I suppose Cindy Sheehan, Dan Rather and Bill Moyers would be leading the cortege.

My son's funeral and those of his comrades in that Bradley on January 6th were outpourings of love, respect and gratitude.  His mourners were people I was proud and grateful to have met, the sort of people who will guarantee that our opponents in this struggle will fail and that the terrorists' cause be forever known as a waste and an abomination against God. 

When the time of reckoning finally comes for the paymasters of these terrorists, it will be people like my son and his comrades who level their cities and salt the ground that remains so nothing ever grows there again.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 5:51 AM MDT

Updated: Friday, 11 July 2008 6:28 PM MDT

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The Obama campaign has a Web site called "Fight the Smear," devoted to the premise that all the bad news about their candidate is smear campaigning.

Everything? 

Here is a list (not all-inclusive, by any means) of Barack Hussein Obama's accomplishments - things which are in the Congressional Record, mostly, and can easily be confirmed over the Internet:

* He voted against banning partial birth abortion.  In fact, in the Illinois State Senate, he went beyond the wishes of the abortion lobby by opposing a law they said they could live which would have required Illinois physicians to not kill babies which survived the abortion procedure.

* Obama voted "no" on notifying parents of minors who get out-of-state abortions.

* He supports affirmative action, long after this method of correcting injustices against minorities has outlived its usefulness - or even its legality, according to the Federal Civil Rights Acts (which flatly ban discrimination, period).

* Obama says he will deal with street level drug dealing as minimum-wage labor.  (So much for drugs being something Whitey invented to keep the black man down, eh?)

* He supports and has actually traveled to Africa to show his support for Raila Odinga, the man who ran on a radical Islamist platform for the presidency of Kenya, and whose supporters have murdered over 700 people after he lost that election - 70 of those lives were lost when Odinga supporters burned a church down while services were being held.  During his campaign Odinga had promised Muslim organizations that he would enforce sharia law on all Kenyans, make instruction in Islam mandatory for all school children, require all women in Kenya to wear Muslim dress... generally turning Kenya into Darfur.

Obama took time from his campaign tour in New Hampshire during the primaries to call Odinga on the phone and show support for him. 

Why hasn't the press called him on this?

* Obama has stated that he is willing to meet with left-wing despots Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jung Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

* Opposed renewal of the PATRIOT Act, despite its undeniable success in preventing a recurrence of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001.

* The first bill Obama signed that passed was campaign finance reform - the same "reform" which allows foreigners to dump millions into American campaign finance while limiting donations by American citizens.  Obama has the foreign donors - George Soros among them - to take advantage of that "feature" of McCain-Feingold.

* Obama voted "no" on prohibiting nuisance law suits by city governments against gun manufacturers (a law which allows individuals to continue to bring lawsuits against gun makers for defective merchandise, and which also had a rider banning sale of armor-piercing ammunition to private citizens).

* Supports granting driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, many of whom do not take the trouble to learn how to operate motor vehicles safely or purchase liability insurance as required by law, and who have a disconcerting habit of fleeing the country after causing traffic accidents.

* Supports extending welfare to illegal immigrants.

* Voted "yes" on comprehensive immigration reform. (which is similar to "campaign reform" in that it would allow a massive influx of illegal immigrants, and once they're in country, they're IN - no getting rid of them under this kind of "reform.")

* Voted "yes" on allowing illegal aliens to participate in Social Security.

* Wants to make the minimum wage a "living wage" (thus placing small businessmen who are already strapped by the welter of Federal, state and local labor laws closer to being out of business).

* Opposed to any efforts to privatize Social Security (thus increasing the money available to pay benefits) and instead supports increasing the amount of tax paid. (Gotta pay for the medical care and retirement of those illegal immigrants somehow, huh?)

* He voted "no" on repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax

* He voted "no" on repealing the "Death" Tax on money people inherit.

* He wants to raise the Capital Gains Tax (penalizing people who want to lower inflation and grow the nation's economy by making their savings available for investment by taxing these savings not once, but twice).

* Has repeatedly said the surge in Iraq has not succeeded, which is an outright lie (our forces have just turned Anbar province back to the Iraqi Army, after the "Sunni Awakening" has turned local sheikhs and clergy against Al-Qaeda, or as they now refer to them, "the accursed foreigners.")

Yeah, we NEED a President who does Al-Qaeda's public relations for them.

Of course, Osama, er, Obama took millions of dollars in a "home loan" from a shadowy Iraqi living in Great Britain. 

Could this be why Obama's bad-mouthing the job our troops have done in Iraq?

* He is ranked as the most liberal Senator in the Senate today and that takes real effort. 

This isn't some tag Rush Limbaugh put on Obama - it's a rating by the Americans for Democratic Action, a group of people who agree with Obama's stances on the issues.  They like him.  And they're welcome to him.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 4:35 PM MDT

Updated: Friday, 11 July 2008 7:22 PM MDT

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Mood:  mischievious

My wife just sent me this:

Senator Barack Obama was invited to address a major gathering of the American Indian Nation two weeks ago in upstate New York.  He spoke for almost an hour on his future plans for increasing every Native American's present standard of living, should he one day become the President.  He referred to his career as a Senator, how he had signed 'YES' for every Indian issue that came to his desk for approval.  Although the Senator was vague on the details of his plan, he seemed most enthusiastic about his future ideas for helping his 'red sisters and brothers'.

At the conclusion of this speech, the Tribes presented the Senator with a plaque inscribed with his new Indian name - Walking Eagle.  The proud Senator then departed in his motorcade, waving to the crowds.

A news reporter later inquired to the group of chiefs of how they came to select the new name they had given to the Senator.  They explained that Walking Eagle is the name given to a bird so full of shit it can no longer fly.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 3:37 PM MDT

Updated: Monday, 7 July 2008 3:48 PM MDT

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Mood:  not sure

Physical chemist Irving Langmuir (1881-1957) spent most of his career in the research laboratories of General Electric.  He won the Nobel prize for Chemistry in 1932 for or his discoveries and investigations in surface chemistry, which evolved into the field of thin film physics.

Four years before his death, Langmuir gave a talk at General Electric's Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory on what he called "pathological science" - things like perpetual motion (most recently asserted to have been achieved by a Mississippi inventor named Joseph Newman ), Kirlian photography, Trofim Lysenko's theory of environmentally-induced hereditary changes in plants and animals, René Prosper Blondlot's "N-rays," and many other "discoveries" which turned out to be self-delusions on the part of the scientists reporting the phenomenon in question.

Langmuir, after reviewing a colleague's upcoming talk on something called the "Davis-Barnes Effect," found that he got the same results whether or not his apparatus was working properly, or at all...  it was not a case of fraud, but of honest self-delusion and observational errors which were systematically - but unconsciously - made by otherwise highly professional, careful researchers who were so excited by what they thought was a new phenomenon that they overlooked alternative explanations for their results and miscounted events in a way which affirmed their hypothesis by making allowances for data which denied their hypothesis as being due to problems with their experimental gear.

Looking back at earlier examples of such incidents, Langmuir analyzed the work of René Prosper Blondlot's reports of "N-rays," shortly after Roentgen announced his discovery of X rays, and found remarkably similar sources of experimental error.  Langmuir studied the errors of his colleague, Blondlot and other researchers who'd made similar errors, and found that there were significant common features in these experiments.

These Langmuir called Symptoms of Pathological Science:

1. The maximum effect that is observed is produced by a causative agent of barely detectable intensity, and the magnitude of the effect is substantially independent of the intensity of the cause.
   
2. The effect is of a magnitude that remains close to the limit of detectability; or, many measurements are necessary because of the very low statistical significance of the results.
   
3. Claims of great accuracy.
   
4. Fantastic theories contrary to experience.
   
5. Criticisms are met by ad hoc excuses thought up on the spur of the moment.
   
6. Ratio of supporters to critics rises up to somewhere near 50% and then falls gradually to oblivion.

Reader, does this remind you of something?  A certain climate change theory, perhaps?

"Global warming" exhibits several of the symptoms Irving Langmuir described:

- while there have been recent changes in world climate, they don't correspond to carbon dioxide levels (the claimed causative agent) in any fashion that can be described with consistency;

- statistical analysis of the relation between climate change and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not reveal a relationship that is significant by the standards of science;

- while proponents of global warming claim predictive power for their theories, so far reality isn't cooperating with them;

- the predictions of future climate trends fly in the face of what has been observed about behavior of the Earth's climate until now;

- the ability of proponents of global warming theory to rationalize counter-intutitive developments such as the sharp DROP in world temperatures while the Earth is supposedly warming is truly remarkable.

So far, the only missing symptom is the sharp fall in the number of supporters of global warming theory.  There is no shortage of people who profess to agree with this theory despite its troubling inconsistencies, and it has become popular with politicians at the national and global level, as evidenced by Al Gore's having won the Nobel Peace Prize for espousing global warming and having promoted it as tirelessly as he has.

Of course, we've seen things like this before - eugenics was once universally accepted as received wisdom.  Compulsory sterilization was once promoted not only for those who were assessed as being mentally or physically subnormal, but those who exceeded the intellectual norm by too high a degree ("excessively high" intelligence was considered to indicate a tendency toward mental instability).  Supreme Court decisions were based on eugenics theory, state laws written based on it, and history shows how the Nazis abused it to justify murders (passed off as "euthanasia") - killings which may have happened in other countries, even the United States, as eugenics enthusiasts began trying to emulate the German example before World War Two.

After the war, the Nuremberg Trials tore the veil away from the atrocities committed by Nazi doctors in the name of eugenics; suddenly very few people outside Nazi Germany believed in eugenics any more, and papers on work done here in America involving those unfortunate enough to be considered "defective" suddenly were put away, spiked by scientific journal editors.  But it took not only years, but a catastrophic world war and grisly excesses committed by a psychotic regime run by a madman to overthrow the hold of eugenics on the world's intellectuals.

So it may well be with global warming.  As long as people are willing to squint a little when they see data that disagrees with the consensus that the Earth is inexorably getting warmer, and believe that a hundredth of a degree increase in temperature worldwide (the rise predicted by most global warming models) will have the catastrophic effects predicted by the people who have hitched their professional and political wagons to the global warming star - then it will be fashionable, perhaps even mandatory in the future to parrot the global warming credo.

But eventually the world will stop squinting.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 3:16 AM MDT

Updated: Friday, 11 July 2008 1:05 PM MDT

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