U.S. Threatens to Abandon Saudis And Their Oil

WorldTribune is reporting:

“The United States has sent a tough message to Saudi Arabia that did not rule out abandoning of the kingdom’s oil sector.

U.S. officials said the Bush administration has warned that Americans would not stay in Saudi Arabia unless the kingdom takes significant steps to protect them. The officials said the warning came in wake of the Al Qaida execution of Lockheed Martin engineer Paul Johnson on June 18.”

One wonders how this will play on the argument that our activity in the Middle East is all about the oil.

I’m already on record as projecting this farce’s demise by no later than mid-summer. Looks like I got it right; Boortz notes this morning:

“The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that several employees still have not been reimbursed for their costs of attending the network’s launch.  Investors and executives say they thought the network had taken in $30 million….But it turns out they have only raised $6 million.  All of that money was spent in the first six weeks, and now they’re $2 million in the hole.  That’s what happens when you pay radio stations to carry your shows…Something most real radio stations would never do to pick up a brand-new show.  Those are called infomercials, and they run in the middle of the night or on weekends.

It won’t be long before Air America goes off the air…And it will happen, because they have no idea what they’re doing.  The question I have is this: how long is Al Franken going to keep working for free?”

The answer is, The spotlight hungry Franken will continue to work for free so long as he’s got a channel to be heard on. The bottom line, here, though, is that nobody wants anything to do with paying for the idiot ramblings available on that net, Franken included.

Air America’s failure is not, as Boortz claims, simply because of Air America management not knowing what the hell they’re doing in a commercial radio sense, though I agree that factor does add to their problem… Particularly, Air America’s mismanaged because they actually believe the tripe they put on the air. Air America has not been well-managed because they don’t think like Capitalists… They think, rather, like Socialists, and thereby have no concept of how to run a successful commercial business.

But the other half, indeed, the majority of the problem, is the ideology being expressed on their air, turning listeners off.  Without listeners, I don’t give a woodchuck how well the place is managed, it’s going bye bye. With Listeners, the ownership may not last, but usually, the concept and indeed the company will be snapped up by investors looking to capitalize (note the use of the word) on the niche that’s been stumbled over by the failing management.

I speak from some hard won experience, here. I spent nearly two decades as a commercial broadcaster, and can tell you that even when the station… Or for that matter the network… is grossly mismanaged, such mismanagement doesn’t prevent the operation from being at least a marginal success. If there’s people listening, someone will come along and buy the place, replacing the current mismanagement. I’ve seen it time and again over the years… and I suspect Boortz has, too, in his early years in the business. (though I suspect given Cox Radio being the fine outfit it is, he’s been somewhat insulated from this for the last decade, or so.)

Shorter version; Err America suffers from it’s own ideology in two ways:

1: It’s ideology is turning listeners off, which starves off it’s income

2: It manages within it’s socialist ideology and thereby is doomed to economic failure before it even hit air even if the first point weren’t true.

We’ll see their being offline within the month.

PS; Lying to the investors, as they’re on record as doing, doesn’t help their case for getting more operating capital, either.

You will have seen the ad; Good milk comes from happy cows, says the ad. Implication being that the weather is gentler so the cows are happy and therefore…. You get the idea.  Here’s an example. Look around a bit; they actually have the ads in streaming vid, and they are actually kinda cute. (WMP required)

Well, the
ContraCostaTimes appears on the scene today to point out there’s another reason those cows are so happy; they’ve been drinking Rocket Fuel. Or, so the enviro-wackos will hvae you think.

“The study released today by the Environmental Working Group comes as state and federal regulators prepare new standards to regulate perchlorate, the explosive ingredient in missile fuel that has been linked to thyroid damage.

“Perchlorate exposure is more widespread than we have been led to believe,” said Bill Walker, vice president for the Environmental Working Group’s West Coast office. “We hope that state and federal regulators will look at this information and take it into account when setting perchlorate standards.”

Now, they DO say that:

“He said the group is not calling for Californians to stop drinking milk or feeding it to their children, but does advocate tougher chemical standards.”

However, isn’t it interesting that they wait until the California Dairy Groups start running nationwide ads for their product, before this ‘study’ comes out? Almost as if their objective was to destroy yet another industry, huh?

The New York Post is reporting today:

“June 22, 2004 — Fake circulation reports by Newsday and the Chicago Sun-Times have sparked questions about the entire newspaper industry and the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the group responsible for monitoring the numbers. ”

Now you’ll be hearing about how this all adds up to money… ad revenue… and I don’t deny that figures into these fake numbers. But I would also point out that this fraud has much to do with the papers doing what they can to fight the perception that their influence is being reduced… by online sources such as what you’re reading right now.

I’m still annoyed in the extreme at Christopher Hitchens for his bit on Ronald Reagan. But when such a liberal as Hitchens goes after Rotundo Moore with both barrels, you know at least it’ll be a good read:

“To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of ‘dissenting’ bravery.”

Hitchens then takes Moore out on a point by point basis.

An example of this:

“He prefers leaden sarcasm to irony and, indeed, may not appreciate the distinction. In a long and paranoid (and tedious) section at the opening of the film, he makes heavy innuendoes about the flights that took members of the Bin Laden family out of the country after Sept. 11. I banged on about this myself at the time and wrote a Nation column drawing attention to the groveling Larry King interview with the insufferable Prince Bandar, which Moore excerpts. However, recent developments have not been kind to our Mike. In the interval between Moore’s triumph at Cannes and the release of the film in the United States, the 9/11 commission has found nothing to complain of in the timing or arrangement of the flights. And Richard Clarke, Bush’s former chief of counterterrorism, has come forward to say that he, and he alone, took the responsibility for authorizing those Saudi departures. This might not matter so much to the ethos of Fahrenheit 9/11, except that—as you might expect—Clarke is presented throughout as the brow-furrowed ethical hero of the entire post-9/11 moment. And it does not seem very likely that, in his open admission about the Bin Laden family evacuation, Clarke is taking a fall, or a spear in the chest, for the Bush administration. So, that’s another bust for this windy and bloated cinematic “key to all mythologies.””

It’s a longish read, but it’s worth the time. RTWT

AP Newswire is running along with everyone else the story of a private concern putting a space plane up, and getting it back safely:

“MOJAVE, Calif. (AP) – A rocket plane soared above Earth’s atmosphere Monday in the first privately financed manned spaceflight, then glided back to Earth for an unpowered landing.
SpaceShipOne pilot Mike Melvill was aiming to fly 62 miles above the Earth’s surface and he just exceeded that goal, reaching 62.21 miles, according to radar data.”

Read the whole thing.

Keep this in mind as you read it.

The project was funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who would only describe the cost as being in excess of $20 million

Quotes I’m getting from other sources suggest it was a $44Million price tag.
Which sounds like quite a lot, until you consider it took the government near $44Million to do essentially the same thing.

An object lesson, dear reader, in the mechanics of government, versus private, enterprise.

Jeff Jacoby says:

“TO HEAR the media tell it, virtually nothing in Iraq is going right. Suicide terrorism, Abu Ghraib, sabotaged pipelines, swelling anti-American sentiment — the coverage has focused on almost all bad news, almost all the time.”

He then goes on to list several good things going on there, that you’ll not hear about from CNN or Dan Rather

AP: Kerry Took Money From Arrested Korean:

“John Kerry’s campaign collected a maximum $2,000 check from the recently arrested son of South Korea’s disgraced former president, and some of its fund-raisers met several times with a South Korean government official who was trying to organize a Korean-American political group”

The Kerry campaign of course claims that it didn’t know about the $2,000 donation from Chun Jae-yong or his background until the AP told them.

So, extra-legal campagn contributions is the order of the day for the Deomocrats again, huh?

Is anyone shocked?

New York Post Online Edition is reporting:

“June 18, 2004 — Sen. Ted Kennedy, one of America’s most prominent Catholic politicians, has ripped into Pope John Paul II over threats to deny Communion to his close ally, Democratic nominee-to-be John Kerry, a new report claims.
‘This pope gave Communion to Gen. [Augusto] Pinochet,’ the brutal Chilean dictator accused of murders and human-rights violations, Boston magazine quotes Kennedy as saying. ”

The Democrats are now faced with a choice.
They can support Kerry and thereby label Kennedy as the idiiot everyone else has always known he is, or else they can claim Kennedy’s comment is valid. Either way, they remove support from one or the other.

Assuming of course the Democrats have any intelectual honesty.
And THAT, of course, is, I suppose, too much to ask.

The New York Times has decided to slam Clinton’s book. Well, someone had to, I suppose, but do they really think this way? Given the long, leftist history of the Times, we can’t assume that they do.

The tactic of the NYT here is fairly clear. No appriciable damage will be done by a poor review, to the sales of the book… the only ones who would ever buy the thing, regardless of what the review says, would be slavering Clintonites. But what it buys the NYT for that very minimal cost, is a sheild against the claim that the Times is a left-wing mouthpeice. Oh, I grant, nobody will buy the argument, but there it is.

Further comments at, and a hat tip to Captain’s Quarters

Rochester’s Chronic Democrat here in my hometown, reports the local Democxrats are offering free beer as a bribe for votes.

“That’s the plan at today’s East End Festival. Monroe County Democrats have teamed up with High Falls Brewery to offer two free 2-ounce beers to those who register to vote at the festival.
Then the new voter can go into a real voting booth and pick the brew they liked the most. The promotion is called “Register Your Taste.”

The goal is to encourage people older than 21 to register to vote and to simulate the experience of voting. But alcohol treatment counselors fizzled on the idea, saying organizers shouldn’t link drinking with the civic duty of voting.

“I think there are other ways to motivate people to vote other than give them alcohol,” said Elaine Milton, director of the chemical dependency clinic at the Family Service of Rochester Inc.

Molly Clifford, head of the Monroe County Democrats, stressed that the event is not aimed at encouraging alcohol consumption and that the samples are small.”

But they ARE a big BRIBE, Molly…

Imagine Republicans doing this. What kind of reaction would you think this would provoke?

Yes, I know about Paul Johnson.
I don’t have anything factual to add to what everyone else has been saying, except, this will NOT cause the US to back down… so long as there’s a leader in the WH.

NewsMax:

“Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission Lee Hamilton blasted the mainstream press yesterday for distorting the Commission’s findings on links between Iraq and al Qaida, saying those findings actually support Bush administration contentions.

‘The sharp differences that the press has drawn [between the White House and the Commission] are not that apparent to me,’ Hamilton told the Associated Press, a day after insisting that his probe uncovered ‘all kinds’ of connections between Osama bin Laden’s terror network and Iraq. ”

When a Democrat comes out and says the news media is slanted against Mr. Bush, do you suppose anyone will listen?

James Joyner over at Outside the Beltway cites the BLS:

”
* Over the past year, the unemployment rate has fallen in 46 states.
* Non-farm payroll employment increased in 36 states in May.
* Over the past year, employment has increased in 44 states.
* 37 states now have unemployment rates at or below the national unemployment rate of 5.6 percent.
”

So sit back and watch how much of this filters though the suppsoed mainstream ‘news’ media.

Ron Reagan Jr. apparently inherited not smart one from his father. Or, at least, one wonders if he’s still not grown out of the rebellious stage most kids go through.  In looking at him we have a practical example of the acorn falling too far from the tree, and thereby not becoming a tree, and in fact never becoming anything more than a nut.

(Shrug) Look, I could let slip, without comment, his slight at President Bush, and the supposed ‘religious right’ at his father’s service, as a misread on my part.  I’ve delivered a couple eulogies in my time and understand a small part of what he was going through.

Thing is, that’s not all we have to go on, here.  In reviewing the tapes of that service, I found something interesting; Not once during the service did he actually participate in any of the prayers. Almost as if he were wearing his unbelief on his sleeve, just as he charged others were doing with their belief. His comments and his actions during that service tell the story.  He obviously has no clue about, and thinks foolish, what his father understood quite clearly. 

And finally, there’s the attacks he issued on Matthews show last night, which cements the observation; he didn’t benefit at all, in terms of thought processes, or core values, from his father, that much is certain.

Here is someone who was an embarrassment to his father through his life, and who apparently had to use his chance at a eulogy for his father, for one last slight against what his father stood for. I thought he might have grown up. I’d rather hoped he would. I suppose that was a blind hope, however.

Were The Gipper alive and aware, he would be embarrassed by his kid once again. As it is, Dutch is beyond embarrassment. So too, apparently, is his kid.

Dutch, at least, has the excuse of being dead.