Looks Like Hillary Ticked Off the Wrong Guy This Time

HillCAP is a new site you should be paying rapt attention to.

“Peter Paul’s extensive evidence, which we will organize and present on this site, shows clearly that Hillary Clinton knew of the actions taken by her finance director, and that she orchestrated those actions and others in violation of federal campaign statutes and regulations”

Yeah, it’s gonna be an interesting summer.

That information from Joel Mowbray Confirm Bolton, which is a new resident in Bit’sBlogroll.

OK, after that smackdown I applied to Michelle yesterday, I feel I must be fair and give her props for her output today. She quotes John McCandlish Phillips, a former reporter for the New York Times:

I have been looking at myself, and millions of my brethren, fellow evangelicals along with traditional Catholics, in a ghastly arcade mirror lately — courtesy of this newspaper and the New York Times. Readers have been assured, among other dreadful things, that we are living in “a theocracy” and that this theocratic federal state has reached the dire level of — hold your breath — a “jihad.”

In more than 50 years of direct engagement in and observation of the major news media I have never encountered anything remotely like the fear and loathing lavished on us by opinion mongers in these world-class newspapers in the past 40 days. If I had a $5 bill for every time the word “frightening” and its close lexicographical kin have appeared in the Times and The Post, with an accusatory finger pointed at the Christian right, I could take my stack to the stock market.

He goes on from there, pointing at the large number of op-ed bits (some passing as news), which attempt to strike fear against ‘The Christian Right Jihad”

You’d have to be living in a cave someplace to have not noted the full-court press on thisthe last month or two. And I have to wonder if this was not a co-ordinated effort on the part of the left over that period.

I think, however, that their efforts have backfired on them just a bit.

I also have to wonder if the comedy routine the other night from Laura Bush wasn’t a stroke of (unintentional) outright genius.  No, I’m not losing my mind… think about this. Consider the reaction she’s getting from some on the right. Consider too, the derision of the leftists and the press (A redundancy).  She certainly imparted the idea that the Bushes are not the right-wing monsters the left holds them as… and amazingly enough, they got the left to make that argument FOR them, as they derided the far right for their reaction. Hard to claim the Bushes are Christian Jihadist prudes, after so vocally defending them on that very point over this past few days, eh?

Oh… in the same article, McCandish sounds an interesting note:

The fact is that our founders did not give us a nation frightened by the apparition of the Deity lurking about in our most central places. On Sept. 25, 1789, the text of what was later adopted as the First Amendment was passed by both houses of Congress, and subsequently sent to the states for ratification. On that same day , the gentlemen in the House who had acted to give us that invaluable text took another action: They passed a resolution asking President George Washington to declare a national day of thanksgiving to no less a perceived eminence than almighty God.

That’s president , that’s national, that’s official and, alas, my doubting hearties, it’s God — all wrapped up in a federal action by those who knew what they meant by the non-establishment clause and saw their request as standing at not the slightest variance from it. It’s a pity our phalanx of columnists cannot crawl into a time machine to go back and reinstruct them.

Doesn’t stop ’em from trying, though, John.

Update:

Now, I said ‘almost’ coordinated. A lot of this attacking has been driven by the election of a Pope who is (gasp!) Catholic!. 

Eternity Road brings an interetsing idea to the table… that the attacks on Christianity are driven by a fear they won’t name.. But Fran does:

The Left’s characteristic rages over conservative ideas are precisely because the calm articulation and defense of those ideas are all it takes to defeat the Left. Whenever it controls the State, it bans the expression of those ideas because it cannot prevail against them on the field of argument. Today, with the world steadily turning away from Leftist convictions and back toward freedom and traditional moral standards, leftists everywhere can see a black cloud hanging over their future. Scant wonder that their annex in the Old Media have loosed all the guns of slander and defamation against Pope Benedict. Despite their still-formidable powers, that one, frail old man with his miter and staff, speaking from his convictions, is enough to defeat them.

And I presume by extention, the whole of Christianity.

Colorado Conservative is on FIRE today.

He points to a story on Metro Networks:

Deliveries of world food aid sagged by 30-percent in 2004 despite rising numbers of hungry people and record levels of money from donors.  The UN’s World Food Program says it’s disturbed by the trend that’s seen total food aid delivered from all sources decline from ten-point-three-million tons in 2003 to seven-point-five million tons last year.

Darren says:

Allright…let me get this straight…despite record levels of donations, food aid is sagging…isn’t that the UN World Food Projects fault?  Why are they having trouble getting food to needy folks if they’re receiving plenty of money?  I would be less suspicious if the UN weren’t already neck deep in the Oil For Food scandal. 

Yeah, well it takes a lot of payoffs to keep the silence, ya know…

Outside The Beltway links to Thomas Friedman this morning. Now, usually, I don’t bother linking to the Times, and longtime readers will know why; I think my local penneysaver is a more credible source, plus the registration system is a pain in the ass, and far too instrusive.. why should I use my blog to send them traffic?

That said, Freidman says, in part:

In part the Arab-Muslim world is reaping something it sowed. Way too many Arab intellectuals and religious and political leaders were ready to extol suicide bombing when it was directed against Israelis. Now they are seeing how this weapon of nihilism – once sanctified and glorified – can be used against their own societies. It was wrong when it was used against Jews, and it is wrong when it is used against Muslims. You can’t build a decent society on the graves of suicide bombers and their victims.

But these bombings are also signs of the deeper struggle that the U.S. attempt to erect democracy in Iraq has touched off. My friend Raymond Stock, the biographer and translator of Naguib Mahfouz and a longtime resident of Cairo, argues that we are seeing in Baghdad, Cairo and Riyadh the modern incarnation of several deeply rooted and interlocking wars. These are, he said, the war within Islam between Traditionalists and Rationalists, which dates back to Baghdad in the ninth century; the struggle between ardent Sunnis and Shiites, which dates back to succession battles in early Islam; and the confrontation between Islam and the West, which dates back to the Arab conquests of the seventh century and the Crusades.

In the modern incarnation of each of these struggles, members of the Sunni-Traditionalist-jihadist minority are losing. And the more that becomes evident, the more violent they will become – because their whole vision is in danger of being repudiated by fellow Arabs and Muslims

And there, my freinds is the point I’ve been making all along.

Yes, the violence is higher, for the moment. But this is not a sign of our having lost, but of our having WON.

Outside The Beltway has the details. Go see.

Speaking of Darren, he’s got a real gem today, here:here.

A man arrested in Arizona for extreme DUI has avoided jail, because authorities say he was too drunk.  The Yavapai (YAHV-uh-pie) County Sheriff’s Office says 48-year-old Kevin Larremore was stopped by deputies earlier this week and admitted to drinking heavily.  His blood alcohol content registered at .379

We better let Foxworthy know about this… we’ve got a new one for “You might be a redneck.. if you’ve ever been too drunk to go to jail…”

Darren Copeland over at Colorado Conservative points up that today is “”International Respect for Chickens Day” whch is, accoring to their website…

a day to celebrate the dignity, beauty, and life of chickens and to protest against the bleakness of their lives in farming operations,” says UPC president Karen Davis. “Chickens are lively birds who have been torn from the leafy world in which they evolved. We want chickens to be restored to their green world and not be eaten.”

Darren suggests tonight is Chicken night. I agree.

KFC original for Donna and I.

The kids like those ‘popper’ things.

From Scott Fybush at NorthEast Radio Watch

“*A RHODE ISLAND talk host is off the air because of election-law issues. Cranston mayor Steve Laffey was doing three hours of talk every Friday morning on WPRO (630 Providence) – until city council president Aram Garabedian (a Democrat, who lost to Republican Laffey in a mayoral race) asked the state Board of Elections for an opinion. The board ruled that the airtime constituted a tangible donation to Laffey from the station, and so WPRO’s pulled him off the air for now.”

(Chuckle)

It can’t be Garabedian lost the last time because people didn’t LIKE him, eh?

AP has a report, as well.

“The Board of Elections has turned free speech on its head,” he said. “I have a right as a U.S. citizen to speak my views.”

Laffey said his show, which ran from 9 a.m. to 11:45 a.m., was no different from when other public officials appear on television or radio shows or write an opinion piece for a newspaper. He said he was not using the show as a political platform, and said he would appeal.

Channel 10 in Hartford, has a report up also, that includes this interesting line:

Though former officials have hosted radio shows — former Attorney General Arlene Violet currently hosts a talk show on WPRO competitor WHJJ, and former Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci hosted a show between his two stints as mayor — Laffey is different because he’s currently in office.

Yeah… they’re also Democrats, in case you’ve not guessed. Which is why this was never an issue with THEM. Interesting how Channel 10 doesn’t mention that.

AP quotes the father of the Groom of the Willbanks fiasco as saying, in part:

Asked if he would be concerned if the couple heads into another big wedding, Claude Mason said: “I have mixed emotions about that. I think the wedding plans got a bit out of hand, but I couldn’t say a whole lot.

Well, now we know where half hte problem came from.
A LITTLE out of hand?

That’s like calling the Space Shuttle Booster engines, a cigar lighter.
Sounds to me like the kids have got things together better than the parents do.

Just sixty-five miles down the road in Buffalo comes news of a recovery from a state worse than what Terry Shaivo was in. CNN is among the reportage

ORCHARD PARK, New York (AP) — Ten years after a firefighter was left brain-damaged and mostly mute during a 1995 roof collapse, he did something that shocked his family and doctors: He perked up.

“I want to talk to my wife,” Donald Herbert said out of the blue Saturday. Staff members of the nursing home where he has lived for more than seven years raced to get Linda Herbert on the telephone.

It was the first of many conversations the 44-year-old patient had with his wife, four sons and other family and friends during a 14-hour stretch, Herbert’s uncle, Simon Manka said.

“How long have I been away?” Herbert asked.

“We told him almost 10 years,” the uncle said. “He thought it was only three months.”

Good thing the leftists so keen to kill off Terry Shaivo, didn’t know about THIS chap, eh?

But…. they stammer… there was no hope… this can’t happen….

“It’s almost unheard of after 10 years,” she said, “but sometimes things do happen and people suddenly improve and we don’t understand why.”

In short, we’ve just had a reminder that they’re not God.

H/T to a pal over at Buffalo’s WYRK for the tip….

Mr. Minority points out there are still Syrian ‘intel’ people in Lebanon.

Big shock, eh?

Orson Scott Card puts up an LA TIMES screed today about the end of the StarTrek saga… for now… called Strange New World: No ‘Star Trek’

As science fiction, the series was trapped in the 1930s ? a throwback to spaceship adventure stories with little regard for science or deeper ideas. It was sci-fi as seen by Hollywood: all spectacle, no substance.

Which was a shame, because science fiction writing was incredibly fertile at the time, with writers like Harlan Ellison and Ursula LeGuin, Robert Silverberg and Larry Niven, Brian W. Aldiss and Michael Moorcock, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke creating so many different kinds of excellent science fiction that no one reader could keep track of it all.

Little of this seeped into the original “Star Trek.” The later spinoffs were much better performed, but the content continued to be stuck in Roddenberry’s rut. So why did the Trekkies throw themselves into this poorly imagined, weakly written, badly acted television series with such commitment and dedication? Why did it last so long?

Here’s what I think: Most people weren’t reading all that brilliant science fiction. Most people weren’t reading at all. So when they saw “Star Trek,” primitive as it was, it was their first glimpse of science fiction. It was grade school for those who had let the whole science fiction revolution pass them by.

Low and outside for a ball.
I would point out it was hardly the first. Everyone alive prior to the Trek pilot, doubtless saw several examples of the genre of the day.. the Sci-Fi movie. … or read the sci-fi book… Say, “War of the Worlds”…”The day the earth stood still” and so on.

James over at Outside the Beltway has a thing or two to say to Card, as well…

Episodic programming has to step outside its genre. “Star Trek” would have worked just as well, with rather minor changes, as a Western. A novel can subsist mostly on plot. A television serial depends on characters that the viewer wants to spend hour after hour with. Can anyone imagine “Eternal Sunshine” as a series? About two hours with Joel Barish and Clementine Kruczynski is about all I could take.

As a Western? Why sure… What do you think Roddenberry MEANT by “Wagon Train to the Stars”. anyway? (A hint for those who don’t know their Television History…. Wagon Train was among other things a TV Series.. and a quite popular one, at that.) Star Trek, as Roddenberry envisioned it was the Wagon Train series without the spurs and the Cowboy hats.

In any event, James points up precisely why the other forms of Sci-Fi Card holds in so great a regard, wouldn’t make it in TV the way Trek did; The Episodic nature of the TV series. “War of the Worlds” for example, was rather final in it’s ending… not much series potential there… Something perhaps H.G. Wells and his editors never considered. How many times can one cause the end of the world before you run out of series potential?  (OK, Planet of the Apes is a possible avenue for that, but I digress)

As for Card’s complaint of Trek having little regard for science…. That’s the living breathing definition of Sci-Fi…. Is Card really proposing limiting Sci-Fi to mere Sci- reality? Science fiction is by definition, fantastic and incredible. It is the offspring of the more fertile imagination? imagination, of course is of course where ideas come from. To try and limit Sci-Fi to mere reality is to remove it?s soul.

Needless to say, I think Card way off the mark here, and I wonder if his disappointments that his own writings didn’t receive a Trek-Phenom-Like reception isn’t the bug up his backside. If so, Card is engaged in mere grave dancing.

Sorry Orson… I’m not impressed.
Mork signing off.

Sorry, Michelle Malkin, but for the first time in memory, I’m going to apply a slapdown.

You’re on the wrong tree, here.

The leftist MSM delights in creating contoversy among the right, and your thowing gasoline on the fire that they started is not helping the matter.

Lighten up.

Google Video Search

‘Nuff said.