Category Archives: Blogosphere

Sanctions for Israel? The Worm plays to the cheap seats

Posted on December 5, 2014 | 4 comments

“The world’s unrelenting focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an injustice to tens of millions of victims of tyranny and terrorism in the Middle East. As we speak, Yazidis, Bahai, Kurds, Christians and Muslims are being executed and expelled by radical extremists at a rate of 1,000 people per month.” —Israel Ambassador to the UN Ron Proser in recent speech.

So what is our all-politics-all-the-time President Wormtongue doing? (When he’s not presiding over the latest race riot?) Rushing to help some of these 1,000 people a month? Naw. He’s watching the growing American divestment movement, and seeing in it an opportunity for more domestic votes.

So, naturally, he’s mulling sanctions against Israel. While fighting against new sanctions for Iran. What a leader! What a schmuck.

Via Simply Jews, Fox News & Ha’aretz (behind paywall)

UPDATE: Forty-seven Republican congressmen are demanding clarification of his intentions for Israel and threatening revenge on any deal he makes with Iran.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Israel

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Gotta get a drone

Posted on December 5, 2014 | 2 comments

The more I think about them, the more those camera-carrying quadcopters appeal:

“Outdoor flight is made possible by advanced GPS positioning that compensates for light wind. The Phantom has a fail-safe function and can be configured to automatically fly to and land at its take-off position if connection to the transmitter is lost…With a maximum horizontal speed of 22 miles/hour (10 meters/second) the Phantom lets you capture the action of almost any sport, event or scene.”

Why? Because they’re there.

Or maybe not.

Via Instapundit.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obsessions, Science/Engineering, The Culture

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Feds Subsidizing Christianity

Posted on December 4, 2014 | Comments Off on Feds Subsidizing Christianity

Not only are the feds falling all over themselves to spend hundreds of millions on the latest wave of illegal immigrants, but they’re allowing the bucks to be administered by Christian groups, specifically Baptists and Catholics.

I can hear the howling now from the Democrat news media if the Republicans were doing this. But of course in a sense they are. The GOP establishment is just as eager as the Democrats to defy public opinion when it comes to illegals.

Advice to victims of the Democrat economy: Get yourself and your kids down to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio or Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma, forget you speak English, and cash in on the goodies.

Learning to say “I will vote Democrat” in Spanish will be a big help.

Via Judicial Watch (as Instapundit says: Doing the job the Democrat news media won’t.)

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, Obsessions, South of the Border

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Those bogus Palestinians

Posted on November 29, 2014 | 1 comment

This will seem to some like unnecessary splitting of hairs but it’s always bothered me and so I do what one does when one has a blog: write about what bothers me.

The Arabs who call themselves Palestinians have no real right to the word at all. As late as 1939, for instance, Palestine was wholly identified with the Jews. Of course it was a Roman appellation to begin with, what Rome decided to call Judea and Samaria after they kicked the Jews out because the Jews wouldn’t worship their Caesars as gods. Change the name, the Romans figured, and you erase the former occupants in world history. Worked pretty good for a while.

Now, as long ago as the 19th century, this Palestine, so-called, was home to both Jews and Arabs. Long before the State of Israel the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians are allegedly so worked up about.

So much a home for both that when the British took over after WWI, their own postal stamps reflected the fact. A 3-center of 1925, for instance, has Palestine in English and the same in Hebrew and Arabic. Not that the Arabs were pleased of course. But the Arabs are rarely pleased about anything. They were especially incensed that the perfidious Jews insisted on called Palestine The Land of Israel and so the Brits included the abbreviation for it in Hebrew on the stamp. Wowza.

And there’s more. Palestinians is especially bogus as the name for a group of Arabs because there is no letter P in Arabic. And, what do you know, in Hebrew, the word Palestine is translated as Plishtim which means, get this, invaders. Which makes the occupation, so-called, an occupation of invaders. Eh?

And when the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians get all worked up over a bunch of Jews who want to pray on the Temple Mount they conveniently ignore the fact that their mosques up there were built on top of the ruins of the holy Jewish temple. The one built by Herod and destroyed by the Romans who renamed, etc.

But these Arabs never were big on history or tolerance. Which is why Bush the younger calling Islam a religion of peace was and is so laughable.

So there you have it. Chew on that for a while, if you are so inclined. Or scroll over to something else. We got a million of ’em.

Via Israel Matsav, Elder of Ziyon & Yourish.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Israel, Obsessions, War Without End

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New combat veterans deserve the attention

Posted on November 28, 2014 | 3 comments

J.D. over at Mouth of the Brazos and I traded comments not long ago about how the whole Vietnam War, combat veterans like us, refugees and all, finally are on the shelf. It’s all mothballed news at best now.

I see it in the pitiful sales of my two books on the subject, which seem to have peaked at 164 for the Vietnam War short stories and 26 for the novel. Both have been outpaced by my Civil War novel (194) alone. And this year’s new Civil War history, now at 51 sales, has outrun the Vietnam novel and is on pace to eclipse the short stories as well. Not that my work is the best indicator of a trend, but it is one.

Neither J.D. or I created the political one-year combat tour of the Vietnam War. But neither of us would have liked to be in the position of the all-volunteer combat veterans now. Many of them already have served three or four years in combat assignments and the rise of ISIS suggests they have many more ahead of them. They already match the World War II generation which served for the duration.

All that occurred to me reading this WaPo piece about the 101st Airborne Division emplaning near their barracks at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, for a recent flight to Afghanistan. The pundits are still trying to figure out what Wormtongue’s secretive administration intends to do with them. Whether they will guard facilities or patrol. If he even knows himself. He isn’t much of a planner.

It also occurred to me that nowadays when some sergeant addresses a group of soldiers as “ladies and gentlemen,” he’s not trying to be cute, as he was in our day when few women served and none were in combat. He means it quite literally. And both the ladies and the gentlemen deserve all of our attention now.

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Posted in Afghanistan, Blogosphere, Iraq, The War, Troops, War Without End

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Rule 5: Joni Ernst

Posted on November 27, 2014 | Comments Off on Rule 5: Joni Ernst

 

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Like her campaign posters said: Mother, Soldier, Former Farmer. Iowa Republican Sen. Elect Joni Ernst, a lieutenant colonel in the Iowa Army National Guard, could be the next Sarah Palin without Palin’s baggage.

Ernst wants to repeal Obamacare, cut taxes, reduce the size of government, restrict abortions, etc. Her election Nov. 9 also helped kill the War On Women meme, though the election took down four Democrat women senators with one more anticipated.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, The Culture, The War, Troops

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A public trial would have been better

Posted on November 27, 2014 | 3 comments

As much as I despise the rioters in Ferguson, and the race hustlers and news media that set them in motion and cheered them on, the killer cop going free because a grand jury said he should be just stinks. It makes the whole system look bad.

Grand juries are secret. It’s a very old story that they are manipulated by prosecutors. And cops across the country are killing too many people these days, many of them black, and we need to know why.

A trial in the Ferguson case would have helped us figure that out. Even if, as Reason magazine says, heck especially if, the cop walked free. At least there’d have been adversarial cross-examination of his and his supporting witness’s testimony. There isn’t anything remotely like that in a closed grand jury room.

Law professor Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy: “…there are strong reasons to be skeptical of a suspect’s [i.e. the cop’s] exculpatory claim to have acted in self-defense, just as there are reasons to be skeptical of a suspect’s exculpatory claim on any other legal basis. [But] all the grand jury is doing is making a probable cause determination, not ‘finding facts’ in a trial sense…”

Or as Reason’s Jacob Sullum concludes:  “A public airing of the evidence, with ample opportunity for advocates on both sides to present and probe it, is what Brown’s family has been demanding all along. [Prosecutor] McCulloch took extraordinary steps to deny them that trial, thereby reinforcing the impression that the legal system is rigged against young black men and in favor of the white cops who shoot them.”

Indeed, it looks like a corrupt system is protecting its own.

Via Reason & the Volokh Conspiracy.

UPDATE:  Likewise, New York City’s cigarette salesman Eric Garner should not have resisted arrest, but it was hardly necessary to kill him for it. Once again the local power structure (grand juries are not independent of politics) has decreed no sanctions against police for their independent decision to use capital punishment.

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Posted in Blogosphere, The Culture

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