Jan 20th: Buy Gasoline Day…

Dizzy Girl Gennie notes an effort on the left to boycott Gasoline sales on the day President Bush is inaugurated.

Aside from the idea that they still can’t get over losing and move on, the connection here of course is the left thinks Mr. Bush is somehow still profiting from oil ales, Iraq is all about Oil and so on.

Well, I’m with Gennie. Screw them.
I’m filling my (Twin tanks on my) custom van…(~60 gallons) and the SUV, too, in celebration of the election of the right man for the job.

(Lessee, here… at the usual 21mpg, that means about 1260 miles of cruising range. Hmmm. Sounds like I’ve got a fun weekend coming up.)

Remember we were supposed to open up shipments of Canadian beef again? Well…. Maybe Not.

Check out the flying fur at Snugg Harbor.

The Greatest Jeneration points out that while the death toll on the Sunami business keeps getting higher, the bright spot is Amerca’s bellying up to the bar… so far there’s on the order of 80 million in PRIVATE donations…. a figure that leads the world… as usual. Shocked? Amazed?  Jen isn’t. I’m not, either. Nor, I suspect, are you.

So when you hear people screaming about the small amounts donated to deal with the issue, remember this one. And remamber…what they’re really on about is we’re not falling in line behind the UN having totall control.

And ask them; is this about helping the people who need it, or giving the corrupted UN greater control?

They won’t answer directly. But, the annoyed spluttering should tell you VOLUMES.

Jump to Boortz’s site.Here. Scroll down to the photo.  check the guy in the black T-shirt behind the body on the stretcher. 

See what he’s wearing?

Now, do you understand why I ask about how all this aid we’re doing is going to play on the GWOT?

OTOH, consider Mr. Bush’s action of bypassing hte UN and helping directly. This may be a stroke of Genius.  Think, now; when the US shows up and is *directly* helping those in need, as opposed to bowing to the UN, it’s a little harder for the terrorists like BinLaden to argue we’re the Devil incarnate.

Hmmm?

Ed over at The Captain’s Quarters has noted a little steam coming out of the ears of the “one-world” crowd. Apparently, the problem is that while being very generous indeed toward the goal of helping the stricken, the President has opted to, in large measure, bypass the ocrrupted United Nations. He quotes an article posted to The Scottsman today in which British minister Clare Short says, in part:

“The president has announced that the US, Japan, India and Australia would coordinate the world’s response.
But former International Development Secretary Clare Short said that role should be left to the UN.

“I think this initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to coordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN when it is the best system we have got and the one that needs building up,” she said.

“Only really the UN can do that job,” she told BBC Radio Four’s PM programme.

“It is the only body that has the moral authority. But it can only do it well if it is backed up by the authority of the great powers.”

And Ed, in a model of restraint, says:

“Short’s anti-American bias shines through in this ludicrous and blatantly stupid assertion. The notion that the UN has any moral authority, let alone be the sole sanctuary of it, should have been universally dismissed in the Oil-For-Food corruption that Kofi Annan has tried to cover up all year. As I recall, that also started as a massive relief fund for victims of the UN’s unwillingness to give Saddam the boot instead of starving the Iraqi people to death. The Sole Bastion Of Moral Authority managed to put billions of dollars into Saddam’s pockets while enriching the member-states that made sure no one unseated Saddam. “

Correct, Ed, and well put.

It was actually NZ Bear’s breakout of this that first caught my eye.

And just in case you’re unaware, The Bear is no conservative…. not by ANY stretch.

Given the corruption in the UN, the president is doing the right thing, here. Thus are efforts to compare the already over-generous giving to the UN against other countries… whose only response is to write the UN a check and bend over, made irrelivant.

Bravo, President Bush. Well done.

Dizzy Girl notes that “Buy Blue” site has it wrong about Starbucks.

“So here’s the deal: the information listed on BuyBlue.org is wrong. The company does NOT send money to political organizations or candidates. People who work for the company may contribute, but as a whole, the company has no policy in which money goes towards one or all parties. I was also told that Starbucks has notified BuyBlue about the error and has requested that they take them off the site. So far, no-one has responded. Starbucks is now talking to it’s legal team about it. Kerry thanked me for taking the time to call them and finding out for myself whether the information was correct or not. He said that the company has received a lot of nasty emails due to their name being on the “blue list”.

Hrm…interesting, is it not? That’s two companies out of the five who’ve actually responded back. Both claim that BuyBlue is wrong. Let’s see if the other three respond back. This is getting good. I had no intention whatsoever to stop buying Starbucks, but I feel a little better now knowing that they aren’t playing politics with my money”

Good for Gennie. Keep it up, Girl.

This is something I should have thought of when I wondered earlier today how the Islamofacist angle was going to play in SriLanka.

Michelle Malkin points out there are Islamofacists out there operating groups rasing money ostensibly for Tsunami victims. But, beware who you send your money to, gang.

Here’s a link you want to check out for helping over there.

There seems a pretty fair amount of confusion over the scope of this Tsunami thing. I’ve found a map of the event over at PoliBlog you want to see… it should explain a lot. Note the scale of the map.. the distances involved.

Note also at the bottom of the map…. Jakarta… where Billy Beck is currently blogging from.. is around 2000 klicks from the center of the initial quake, and is sheilded from the waves, pretty much by the Indonesian mainland.

I’d be interested to see what the damage looked like along the eastern Indonesian coast, however. My guess is they didn’t get hit too badly, given the angle of the resulting wave, but that’s speculation, and hope.

Update: I should have mentioned; they’re apparently having trouble getting into the areas to the north east of the country, so we may not know for a while how bad things are up there.

Yippee-Ki-Yay! says by way of link to Baldilocks, that they had one down there Tuesday night.

Funny; I never heard that.

Billy Beck, who is blogging from Jakarta this morning, notes with some annoyance:

“I note a story from this morning’s Asian Wall Street Journal.

Headlined “China Makes Awkward Aid Efforts”, it reports on the sheer can’t-get-out-of-their-own-way horseshit of bureaucracy. Two days ago, Beijing announced that a team of Chinese doctors would be on their way to Sri Lanka. They wait, yet, in Beijing, because, as the story reports, “The Chinese embassy in Sri Lanka told us the situation there is very unstable and they could not ensure the team’s safety.”

Now Billy’s point, of course is the massive level of BS that any government goes through to actually create motion of any sort. Of course, that’s a valid concern.

But the question of the team’s being safe comes up in that statement from Bejing, and cannot be blamed, I think on government, per se’. The team’s safety, particularly considering the response to the IDF’s attempt to help, is a valid concern, I think. And all this raises, full on, a question I had only alluded to, yesterday. I wonder how the question of SriLanka’s muslim population is going to play out here. Already, the government there rejected a team from the IDF because they were Jewish. (Which to my mind, reduces their legitimacy to fly squeeze.) But their nation is about to be decended upon by peoples from every corner of the globe. How will they react, in the end? 

Will the world-wide spirit of aid and good will turn their heads away from Muslim extremism? Or will this tragedy be the opening the Islamofacists been looking for to set up shop, there?

An opportunity is here, I think to defuse much of radical Islam’s usual nonsense. If we’re in there, giving humanitarian aid, the BinLadens of the world can hardly argue we’re the great Satan anymore, and get away with it.

On the other hand, radicals seldom need an excuse to attack, logical or otherwise. So, comes the question: Will we find ourselves two years from now, being attacked by those we aided in their time of need?

I wonder.

OK, I know you’ve gotta take BBC News with a pound of salt, but.. a mother at 67?
And twins, no less?

One of my favorite writersMona Charen belts one out of the park today.

” In 2004, the United States provided $826,469,172 — almost a billion dollars — to the United Nations World Food Program. The next largest donor, the European Union, contributed $187,102,068. This, despite the fact that the European Union has a total population of 453 million, compared with the USA’s 281 million, and a gross domestic product that is larger than that of the United States.

Japan was third on the list, giving $126,906,097, and the United Kingdom was fourth, with donations totaling $109,247,050. Iran gave $40,000. The Saudi Kingdom gave $3,345,325 — about the cost of one trip to Paris for the Crown Prince. And Kuwait, the OPEC fund and the Russian Federation gave nothing. “

Let’s stick those in a column so we’re not losing the flavor here.

$826,469,172 United States
$187,102,068 EU

For those without calculators handy, that’s a ratio of 4.4172 to 1.

And that’s just the government based work, which ignores the charity giving.
Let’s not have any more of this ‘we’re not giving enough’ crap, OK?

Interesting.
As of just now, Adsense tells me my account has made a grand total of $14.72. Since I started running AdSense ads in September, that comes out to $3.68 per month, average. Since, by Adsense policy, I won’t get paid until the payable total comes out to $100 or better, I figure I should get my first payment for ads on this blog about December of 2008… Four years from now.

Whoopty-freakin’-dooo.

Ah, what the beep. Let it stay there. If the blog really takes off, that clickthrough vector will change, too, I guess.

This blog’s only been around for a year and a half and already Michele Malkin is telling me it’s toast. Along with the rest of blogging, of course, Vid Blogging says our girl Michele, is the next big thing. Maybe so, Michele, but I’ve been writing a weekly column for around a quarter century, now, (only recently putting it up on Blogspot) and I’m not likely to stop anytime soon.

Speaking of Blogs and their uses, Reynolds notes a column in DER SPIEGEL suggesting blogs are quite useful in the relief efforts around that Tsunami of the other day… Which they’re now saying claimed 100,000.

I mentioned hitcounts being up a bit, yesterday. One thing I’d not noticed at that point is actually kinda funny; I’ve been getting a fair amount of hits recently from the Err America site, from Al Franken’s blog. (And of course I do not plan to link them). You know you’ve made it when the moonbats start targeting you, I suppose. (Shrug)

Samizdata notes the effort of the “Spaceship One” folks to go with more than one person on Spaceship two… Possibly as many as EIGHT. Sounds like they’re looking for commercial tourism ventures a little ahead of schedule.

Update from Tomas Kohl; Apparently the new hosting situation is a temporary one. I gather he was on BlogHosts. That, I did not know… And that explains THAT. Good luck, Tomas.

I’ve had many good comments in E-mail, in response to my Christmas and New Year’s BITs. Thank you, those who wrote.

Dale Franks is on vacation, and has posted some rather stunning digital photography over at Q&O..

Speaking of Q&O, Jon Henke (Who I don’t really dislike, by the way…grin) notes with some satisfaction another mail in the argument from the tinfoil hat crowd over on the left about how Iraq was all about Haliburton getting control of the oil. Seems Iraq has granted it’s first contracts… And guess what?” Americans aren’t in the mix.  Won’t stop the Alcoa Chappeau crowd from screaming, but now they have even less credibility than before…. if that’s possible.

Happy birthday,Ace of Spades HQ