Keyes Anounces

Harald Stassen, err Alan Keyes announces for the presidency.

[yawn]

Wesley Clark has recieved his endorsement check from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.  Celeste Katz, New York Daily News:

Hillary Clinton picked up the endorsement of retired four-star general and one-time presidential candidate Wesley Clark yesterday before proceeding to skirt questions about ads attacking both her and the current commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.

Clark praised Clinton as “a remarkable person” who would be “a great leader [and] a great commander in chief.”

“She’s smart, she does her homework, she’s decisive, she’s strong,” said Clark, a decorated former NATO supreme allied commander and sharp critic of the Iraq war.

So who wrote Wes’ endorsement?

Ed Morrissey, Captain’s Quarters, pins his finger on al Qaeda’s problem:

The leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq will never run short on enemies, mostly because they hate everybody. Today they issued a statement declaring war on the Sunni tribes of western Iraq, a move that will undoubtedly underscore the folly of believing them to be liberators in the post-invasion, pre-surge period:

Too many Moslems hate too many ideas and people.

Greg Gutfeild, posts one I wish I’d thought of.

You say that the Republicans are fear mongers, what with their inconvenient reminders that terrorism is rampant in the world. But it seems to me that the real fear mongers are on the left, as amply demonstrated here with this list I made after reading a week’s worth of Huffposts, all while sitting in my underwear under a sun lamp:

(Edit)

…

Fear of a loss of individual liberty in response to the war on terror.
Fear that the paranoia over terrorism will erode everything this country was founded on.
Fear that liberals haven’t degraded the education system enough so most people still know that Abraham Lincoln and FDR suspended many liberties to deal with similar crises

…

Fear of George Bu$H
Fear that Bu$h is to blame for everything
Fear that Bu$h isn’t to blame for everything
Fear that if you continue to blame everything on Bu$h, you won’t actually figure out who really is to blame for your problems
Fear that your spelling of Bu$h reflects your intellectual prowess, in a nutshell.
And for that, you still blame Bu$h
And your parent$

Fear of Walmart
Fear of people who shop at Walmart
Fear that you might actually save money if you shopped at Walmart
Fear that Walmart has done more to help the poor than any social program ever created by our government.

Addendum: (David L) The ‘rats simply are the party of fear.  We have LBJ’s Daisy ad.  Senator Oldmobile’s Robert Bork’s America and the New York Times September 14, 2002 editorial:

On Sept. 14, 2002, The New York Times’ Frank Rich warned of another al-Qaida attack in the U.S. if we invaded Iraq, noting that since “major al-Qaida attacks are planned well in advance and have historically been separated by intervals of 12 to 24 months, we will find out how much we’ve been distracted soon enough.”

While Johnson infered that Barry Goldwater was the war monger, it was Johnson who gave us a phoney Gulf of Tonkin and escalated a war in Vietnam that he refused to win.  All the ‘rats know is fear.

It is utterly inane to use foodstuffs for motor fuel.  Yet we do.  Rick Moran, American Thinker:

Fallout from the ethanol scam continues to hit the economy. Not only has the rise in the price of corn due to diverting part of the the crop for fuel made much of the food we buy in the grocery store more expensive, now the drive to plant more corn for ethanol production has caused a shortage in wheat:

Cecilia Kang, Washington Post,  report on serious ethanol problems:

First it was corn. Now wheat is getting the blame.

Earlier this year, corn began getting pricey because it was in high demand to make ethanol. That sent prices rising for other corn-dependent products, including milk and meat. Now wheat is costing more and more because of poor harvests and greater global demand, sending grocery bills still higher.

Corn is fer drinking, and eating, not driving.   Let end our use of food derived ethanol now.

I’ve gotten some good responses from these repostings… particularly if they have a tie-in to today.  I think you’ll agree, this one does indeed, have such a tie-in.

 ***

1-11-03, Rochester NY… It’s snowing tonight in Rochester. About everything is shut down. So, I’m spending some time, drinking a bit of Irish Coffee, and warming myself in front of a roaring computer. Looking outside, we’ve got a fresh snow measuring a good foot on the ground, and it’s showing no signs of stopping. A practically dry Christmas, and now this. It’s metephoric, I think for what I see going on in the political world of late. Take these last few days for an example…

Democrats, we are told, are looking for a new voice, one who shares the vision of the American people for their future.. someone who doesn’t represent big money, and who represents fairness. So, who comes to the front of the line? Who do the Democrats claim is the answer to their quest?

None other than (drum roll, please) Sen. John Edwards, the Multi-multi millionare lawyer.  Edwards, as you may know, made all his money, being a professional ambulance chaser.

He was on all three national TV morning shows, all at the same time, the morning after his announcement. You couldn’t escape it, if you had the TV running. That they have this timing suggests a willing press being used as campaign fodder by the Democrats who are struggling to get back into the spotlight, after the voters kicked them out last November.

That rather obvious point aside, the Democrats will tell you with smiles on their faces that Edwards largely funded his own Senate campaign with a $20-50 million fortune. What they don’t say, what’s hidden behind the smile, is that he got all that money as a trial lawyer, winning huge medical malpractice and products liability
claims.

Back in the day of the debate over the Tobacco settlement, many Republicans, including then House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., singled out the multibillion-dollar contingency fees contained in the proposed tobacco settlement for “enriching a small group of trial lawyers” rather than aiding children’s health. Newt was right, too… and Edwards is one such person.

In 1997, a suit leveled by Edwards, gathered a state record $23.5 million award. Edwards went on to break his own record later that year with a $30 million award. In an area of practice where the mouth piece gets around 30% fees, one can easily see the attraction.

However; that amount of money, and that kind of voting history comes with a cost, assuming the the Republicans are willing to extract such a cost… we know full and well the press won’t. That cost is simply described. Edwards is going to be hard pressed to sell himself to the public as ‘Joe Everyman’, given his millionaire status. His vote record certainly doesn’t reflect the desires of the average American, either, further eroding his chances. While the so-called mainstream news media calls edwards a moderate, let’s consider they did that with Bill Clinton, as well.

Since they won’t tell you about this, I will.

Edwards voted NO to partial birth abortion ban
Edwards voted NO to eliminating the marriage tax penalty.
Edwards voted NO to repealing the estate tax
Edwards voted NO on the confirmation of Interior Secretary Gale Norton
Edwards voted NO to the bipartisan tax cut plan
Edwards voted NO to temporarily suspending the gasoline tax.
Edwards voted NO to limiting the social security tax to 50% of total benefits (it had been 85%).

Edwards was backed by Bill Clinton, who raised around 400,000 dollars for him.
Edwards voted NO to stopping the use of federal funds to distribute the “morning after pill” on school grounds.

Is there any doubt that this is the record of a far-leftist?

This… this is supposed to be new, and refreshing?
This is not supposed represent big money?
This is supposed to represent fairness?

Sorry, but this is nothing more than the same often criminal tripe the DNC has been pushing for decades.

Clearly this support of a rich lawyer is nothing new for the Democrats, who have been in the hip pocket of the American Trial Lawyers Association (ALTA) for decades. Thing is, for all Edwards’ blowing smoke about healthcare as an issue, and for all the noises form the DNC that this will be an issue come next Presidential election, has anyone seriously looked at the role Edwards and his ilk have played in the worsening healthcare situation in this country?

Perhaps we should do so here, since again, the so-called mainstream News Media won’t. And certainly Edwards the ATLA and the Democrats won’t.

The biggest problem with doctor fees right now, are insurance costs. Malpractice insurance is driving good doctors out of their practice. ATLA falsely blames insurance companies. So does Edwards. But wait! Ask the question: Where are the doctors going? They’re retring, but the ones that aren’;t ready to retire yet are leaving for states that have Tort reform on the books… you know.. the tort reform the ATLA and their puppets, Democrats, are against, and are lying about, while
states without tort reform are losing doctors to the exodus. As a result, the United States increasingly faces a health care crisis.

This is not the fault of the insurance companies, but rather of the kind of outrageous lawsuits that we’ve seen. Trial lawyers like John Edwards are the biggest reason why. The ‘get all the money you have coming to you’ commericals we’re all assulted with daily of late from lawyers like Edwards have a price… and healthcare costing more in those few places you can now find it, is that cost.

The gargantuan awards in malpractice lawsuits brought by Edwards and his fellows, have caused a lot of insurers to abandon medicine altogether, and those that remain have been forced to raise premiums to rates that have been bankrupting doctors… yes, even those who have never had an insurance issue. Some of the doctors I’ve seen
reporting on such matters, say they’re getting hit with rate increases of between 20 to 400 percent in the last few years. This can get into the range of $200,000 per year, per doctor. Gee, do you suppose this might affect your healthcare coverage costs?

A report in the paper, “Roll Call”, 86 percent of the $1.39 million raised by Edwards’ recently formed political action committee came from fellow trial lawyers. Roll Call writes, “No other Congressional leader or potential presidential contender has such a heavy reliance on a single industry for their leadership PAC.”

The reasons for such PACs, along with the ATLA want Edwards in office is to gather them yet more money. Problem here is they’ll finish the job they’ve started; killing off affordable healthcare in this country. I say it again:These are the people killing off healthcare, and the people who need it.
And they’re running for office.

What I find particularly frustrating here, is the lying Edwards and his supporters have already started with: He makes lots of noise about ‘helping the helpless’, but his record is one of making a fortune and cutting a path to power, by chasing Doctors out of business, and thereby harming the helpless who are now without healthcare they need as a direct result.

I wonder; how many people have already died because of people like Edwards? This guy wants to be elected President? Like the snow outside, tonight, the level of nonsense from the Democrats constitutes a snow job that shows no sign of stopping soon. Break out the shovel.

• The BitsBlog site continues to run well…  and that’s good, because frankly I don’t think I have the strength left to do that all over again, just now.  Saturday morning was the first time I actually felt human in several days, with all of the back and forth.  Remember, I have a job, too. There have been some minor problems incidental to the reconstruction, but thankfully these events are fairly light.  One of those problems is the graphics the graphics all needed to be chased down. In the process of all of this I have found a wonderful tool called FileZilla, which I recommended in another post, earlier. Yeah, it’s not overly flashy, but boy, it gets the job done.
• I guess, Billy, what I would make out of such a plan, entirely depends on whether not I had seen the neighborhoods in question.  I can tell you, point blank, that I have.  I end up running through those neighborhoods, on the order of once or twice a month.  I’ve done so for years.  The Mayor is correct, in this at least; if I was looking to invest money someplace, it wouldn’t be in east Buffalo. The reasoning is fairly simple; the two houses pictured in the article that you link are not atypical of the neighborhoods there. Now, as to what the original problems which led to this pass… I’d say it was the policies of the Buffalo city and Erie county government, reinforcing the bad behaviors shown by those living there. But you know what kind of reaction that thought will get, don’t you, now? And yes, I know that’s a little local for this blog; we usually snipe about national concerns. But the fact is, that the Buffalo sitrep is identical in every other city in the country.
• Speaking of bad policies reinforcing bad behavior, I note some disturbing notes from Diana West, today. One thing that you should pay particular attention to is the degree to which the supposedly all inclusive left is giving Islamization… and to what degree they are using the force of government, to do it.  There are many dangers, within the concept of “government”.  None more so, I think, then using government against the existing culture in favor of another that would take over , destroying us.
• Reports are starting to come in of an attitude in the search for Steve Fossett: He may never be found.
• For the 4027th time in the last 6 months, I’ve been asked by e-mail, “Aren’t you tired of internet dating?” Why, yes, I am, in fact tired of it being in my mailbox, every time I exhale. After my most recent experience with BitsBlog I’m less than thrilled with crashing off anyone’s system, but I will admit that were I ever to consider doing it to someone, they’d be near to the top of the list.
• John Gibson says of Tony Snow, that he’s a winner, in that he served the President well, and “Even the carnivore pressies seemed to like him.” Well, you’re right, John, they did.  Then again, that shouldn’t be a surprise, on two counts; Tony’s a nice guy, and hard in the extreme to dislike. The other reason has to do with the lessons taught by Gerry Ford when he nominated Ron Nesson. With a few crackpot exceptions, such as Helen Thomas… who unquestionably qualifies for the title of “crackpot”… The press then, as now, finds it very difficult to dislike one of its own.

Former Time magazine reporter and self-described liberal Matt Cooper is sticking up for rumored attorney general candidate Ted Olson, who has drawn criticism from Democrats even though he has not yet been nominated.Cooper writes on CondeNast Portfolio.com that Olson, “is incredibly well qualified, maybe the best qualified person, to take the job under a Republican president.”

Cooper says Olson was once his attorney and describes him as right wing, but not reflexively so.

He says President Bush, “has a right to appoint who he wants if they’re within parameters of integrity and competence. Olson more than meets those standards.” He writes if Democrats reject Olson, they would be setting a bad precedent for future Democratic presidents.

Indeed. That’s from The Grapevine.

Personally, I’d like to see somebody waddle up to Harry Reid, and just lay it down. “Harry, if you buzzballs are going to play this game, here’s how it will be if and when we’re ever saddled with a Democrat in the White House again: No Democratic nominee for ANY position, will ever get through again if we have anything to say about it.  None. Nada. Zero. Not one.”

Go ahead.  Let Harry Reid scream “obstructionist” and see how far that gets him, given that’s exactly what he and the Democrats are doing right now.  That’s called playing hardball for real.  And it’s about time the Republicans started doing.

If you’re doing FTP work… and who, doing website work doesn’t, may I suggest FILEZILLA?

Just grabbed it today, in an attempt to automate some of the processes of web support. One of the complaints with the GUI FTP client provided in XP is that I’ve been having a devil of a time with dropped connections, for reasons I never quite understood.

Filezilla seems to work well, however.

September 9 of 1957… A date which, apparently, will live in anonymity.

That was the date that president Eisenhower signed into effect the 1957 civil rights act.  Given that most of you are graduates of government schools, you’ve probably never heard of the 1957 civil rights act.

The 1957 Civil Rights Bill aimed to ensure that all African Americans could exercise their right to vote. It wanted a new division within the federal Justice Department to monitor civil rights abuses and a joint report to be done by representatives of both major political parties (Democrats and Representatives) on the issue of race relations.

Now the bill didn’t get all that much support from the Democrats of the day.  Any more than you’d tend to want to rip off an arm or a foot. The senate leader, one Lyndon Baines Johnson, whom you may have heard of, you may also recall was a Democrat.  Johnson realized, that the bill would cause problems within the Democratic party.  It would split the south from the west, and thus, he did not support the bill.  Johnson’s immediate response was to try to bury the bill in committee.

Perhaps the scenario of the bill and it’s travels through both houses of Congress, and those who supported it, and those who objected to it, are the reason that you don’t hear very much about the 57 civil rights act. Republicans wrote it and pushed it through and signed it into law, over the objections of the Democrats.

The problem, you see, is that the Democrats are claiming today to be the party of ‘civil rights’. .. an argument that’s a little hard to maintain when this kind of history is in the schoolbooks.

So, it’s not, anymore. Nor does the date get mentioned , even in passing, by our supposed mainstream media.

Editor’s note:  

This post was in time release,  so as to come out on September 9.  That got fouled up, when the site did.

A post under the heading CIA Wimps Hand Another Weapon to al-Quieda Misha says:

 At this rate, they’ll be suing themselves for having ever spoken harshly to a terrorist any day now.

Yeah, well, isn’t that what the current Democrat Congress wants?

The controversial interrogation technique known as water-boarding, in which a suspect has water poured over his mouth and nose to stimulate a drowning reflex, has been banned by CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden, current and former CIA officials tell ABCNews.com.

Leaving us only with the tried and true “no sugar for your tea unless you talk, Habib”, “pretty please?”, “pretty please with a cherry on top?” and “if you don’t talk right now, I shall have to ask you to talk AGAIN! Wewy wudely!” methods.

Terrorists all over the world, upon hearing the news, vowed to kill themselves rather than be taken captive. “No sugar with my TEA?”, Ahmed Falafel, a terrorist with al-Qaeda in Iraq, exclaimed when he heard about it. “What ARE you Americans? ANIMALS?” He then went back to sharpening his bread knife for an upcoming beheading of a captured Iraqi kindergarten teacher.

Misha goes on to remind us that the only reason Khalid Sheikh Mohammed talked, was water boarding. And just so you know… Waterboarding is the latest arrow in the quiver.

Look, let’s call this what it is; ;llet’s focus on what this is all about… the reason such methods should be used: Survival.

Don’t bother me with morality arguments… in this situation, they mean little, because war is, in fact the absense of morality. Morality only gets re-established once the war has been settled… and that morality gets defined exclusively by the winners.

Don’t bother trying to tell me about how if we use torture, they will.  I defy the reader to tell me in what war in this nation’s entire history of the Geneva conventions were actually followed by the people we were fighting against.  You cannot.  They never were.

Let me also remind you, that the British considered that the American revolution was not fought according to the laws of civilized warfare and spoke of the American army has a band of guerrillas.  Do we give up our independence, on that basis?

Finally, let me remind you that were we to actually follow the Geneva convention in the matter of al-Quieda, we would have been summarily executing terrorists.

Survival …as a people, as well as survival as individuals… is the focus, here.

If we give that up, and we give up control of the situation, what good is any of the rest of it? What possibility do any of those “high ideals”, this morality we hold, have, to survive in the world? If we are unwilling to do what’s necessary defend ourselves by whatever means, then what it comes down to is we don’t deserve to survive.

Which, seems rather handy, since we probably won’t.

Survival is the highest priority, my friends. Everything else is secondary to that ideal, since everything else you and I  hold dear DEPENDS on it.

I say again: It is the winners, you see, are the ones who get to decide what constitutes morality… and they won’t pay what YOU or I consider moral, any mind whatever… as they have repeatedly demonstrated.

The CIA, I fear, has lost sight of all of this. They’ve forgotten what they’re doing and why.

Tony Leys at the DesMoins Register says, in part:

 MoveOn.org should not have labeled Gen. David Petraeus “General Betray Us” in a controversial newspaper ad, Elizabeth Edwards said in Des Moines Friday.

“Someone who’s spent their life in the military doesn’t deserve ‘General Betray Us,'” said Edwards, wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards.

Elizabeth Edwards spoke in an interview after a Des Moines campaign appearance. She noted that her father was a career naval officer, and she grew up on Navy bases, so she said she respects military service.

Look, all the obvious allusions to Sister Souljah having another event aside, for the moment, along with the rather obvious points that they had she refers to was just plain stupid, in short what you would expect from MoveOn…  this seems to me yet another example of the John Edwards can trying to have it both ways.  You’ll recall, that not so very long ago she came out for homosexual marriage, and he was against it?

There is a risk here, it seems to me, of having the candidate  seem rather weak.  (Gee whiz, John Edwards looking weak? Who’d have ever thought THAT?

This comment from Mrs Edwards is a recognition that the Democratic party of today is dramatically split, and the Edwards camp cynically  trying to have it both ways.  It’s not a bad strategy, given that most Democrats have the attention span of a sugared up 8 year old on Holloween. It may very well, turn some primary numbers.  Trouble is, he’s got to make it past the general election.  And in the general election, the memories tend to be a little longer.

To whit: If on the small chance that he actually makes it to the general election, Mr. Edwards will be hard pressed to avoid hearing the strains of “I feel pretty”.

Addendum:  (David L)    She is still Lying Lizzy.   Howeer I give her credit for being the only ‘Rat presidential canidate or spouse thereof with the intestinal fortitude to take on MoveOn.org.   Kudos to Liz.    I fully expect that none of Liz’s courage will rub off on her husband.

OK,gang, here’s the lowdown.

Last week, we had  an attack on the core SQL database that runs BitsBlog. The most obvious result of that attack was four instances of an HTML FRAME callout showing up showing up on the header of every page on the site.

(  http://usuarios.arnet.com.ar/alvarezluque/morgan.html” width=”0″ height=”0″ frameborder=”0″></iframe)

(Take my advice, don’t go there… in investigating the site and doing soem cross checking, I find there’s a bunch of real weirdos, there.)

Once I went through all my PHP coding by hand, I realized that the callouts were in none of them, and that the code must have been injected into the database. A database restore from my end was out of the question for several technical reasons. The backup design assumed that the site would be available. Dumb, yeah, but there it is.

So, I got on with the ISP, and had the do an full wipe and restore.

Once that was done, and assuming that because my site was a little behind the WordPress current release, I then changed all my heavy passwords, and  upgraded to the most recent version.

Two days later, we’re back in the soup, same stuff, different day. Logically, whatever the security hole was, was not directly a part of WordPress, but WHAT WAS IT? Simply having the ISP go to tape again, still left the Blog vulnerable.

At this point, I started  asking around. I went to the WordPress support forums. Let’s just say they’re Linux snobs, and leave it at that, shall we?  I mean, I like Linux, too, but telling me my biggest problem is the thing is an ISS server isn’t helping. I was dealing with applications issues when we went the Windows Server route anyway.

Still, they had a point that the Windows environment isn’t nearly as secure, so some rather pointed questions were fired at the ISP.

UNlike the folks at WordPress who couldn’t get past the word “Windows”, the IX folks  actually investigated, and found that there was indeed a problem with the WordPress installation:

We’ve restored your site from our backup. Also after investigation of our system administration team, we’ve found that your WordPress installation is vulnerable to remote file inclusion attacks. Please refer to following link for more information regarding that security hole:

http://www.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/securityfocus/bugtraq/2007-05/msg00010.html
Please upgrade/fix your software ( wordTube plugin ) as soon as possible, and update this ticket once it’s done.

Should you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us 24×7.

Well, what do you know. An ISP actually willing to help, when the pressure is on. I’ve done a rebuild to the most recent versons, changed out my passwords again,  and blown away the YouTube plughin… it wasn’t working well anyway.

Kudos to IX Web hosting, for a job well done.

And a raspberry or three to the WordPress Support forums, and to the denizens of their IRC room, who were even worse.  (Well, OK, the guy in the forum was apparently trying to warn me of the bias, but the fact remains the help forum was anything but… even there, he decided it wasn’t a wordpress issue.

 It appears BlackFive has decided to fight fire with fire…

 Guess what I did at lunch? That’s right, I petitioned my government for redress of grievances, specifically illegal political advertising practices by the New York Times and MoveOn.org. We are all well aware of the sorry political advertisement calling the General a traitor.

OK, on what legal basis?

Ya’ see in order to be fair newspapers and TV aren’t allowed to discount political or advocacy ads so they cannot favor one side

Black Five has a point, I think.   Say what you will about McCain / Finegold… I will likely agree. but clearly, the law isn’t being followed, here.  I would think that Rudy Giuliani would be following the same path….

 “We are going to ask The New York Times to allow us tomorrow to print an ad that will obviously take the opposite view,” Mr. Giuliani said. He said The Times gave a “discounted” rate to MoveOn.org, which had expressed the “very excessive left-wing side of this dispute.”

Thereby, hangs a tale; my guess is that the New York Times will turn it down for the reasons cited  by Black Five.  At that point, it becomes an argument of equal application of the law… abomidable as it is, would not, underthose conditions be applied equally, which, in turn will doubtless go before the Federal Elections Commission.  We can expect a ruling on that, on or about August 20th of 2012.

This again reveals the uselessness of the Federal Election Commission.  It also reveals, I think, the overriding leftist bias at the New York Times, once and for all.  Did you notice, that nobody was recoiling in surprise when the news came out of this discount being given to MoveOn?