And Harry Reid Hasn't Lied In The Last Hour

Army Desertion Rate Highest Since 1980

A headline meant to evoke negative thoughts. Gee, about our military? About our miltary involved in Iraq? Nah, not our media.

If you actually read the story, the story is different than you would think. The military is actually very competent and evolving in positive ways.

Not Harry.

Columbia University Throws Down The Limp Wrist

Columbia University Faculty Action Committee Statement of Concern
We speak for a growing number of faculty members at Columbia
University who believe that President Bollinger has failed to make
a vigorous defense of the core principles on which the university is founded,
especially academic freedom. Academic freedom lies at the heart of what we do as faculty members: teach, generate new knowledge, and sustain the critical
capacities of the society at large. It encompasses, among other values, the
autonomy of the University in the face of outside threats and pressures, a
determining role for faculty in the governance of the University and especially
in the shaping of its research and teaching programs, the insulation of tenure
and promotion decisions from outside interests, and the creation of an
environment that enables the fullest and freest exchange of ideas. The events of
the past few years have created a crisis of confidence in the central
administration's willingness to defend these principles.

We note, in particular, the following issues:

1) In the face of considerable efforts by outside groups over the past few years to vilify members of the faculty and determine how controversial issues are taught on campus, the administration has failed to make unequivocally clear that such interventions will not be tolerated. When outside groups attempted to sway tenure decisions, the President of Barnard issued a forthright statement rejecting such efforts; the President of Columbia has failed to do so.

2) Decisions on key issues like the "globalization" of the university,
the establishment of satellite campuses in other countries, the enlarged size of
the undergraduate student body, the reduction in the size of the graduate
student body, the hosting of controversial speakers, the relative diminution of
the humanities, and other issues at the heart of the university's mandate, are
made with no apparent consultation with faculty. We learn about these decisions
only when they are announced after the fact.

3) The president's address on the occasion of President
Ahmadinejad's visit has sullied the reputation of the University
with its strident tone, and has abetted a climate in which incendiary speech
prevails over open debate. The president's introductory remarks were not only
uncivil and bad pedagogy, they allied the University with the Bush
administration's war in Iraq, a position anathema to many in the University community.

4) In the name of the University, the president has publicly taken
partisan political positions concerning the politics of the Middle
East in particular, without apparent expertise in this area or
consultation with faculty who teach and undertake research in this area. His
conflation of his own political position with that of the University is
unacceptable.

We believe that the time has come for the faculty to reassert its
commitment to academic freedom and University autonomy, and for the President to make it clear that the administration will no longer compromise these principles or tolerate interference with them.

Signed:Nadia Abu El-Haj, Lila Abu-Lughod, Qais Al-Awqati, Paul Anderer, Mark
Anderson, Gil Anidjar, Zainab Bahrani, Akeel Bilgrami, Richard Billows, Elizabeth
Blackmar, Partha Chatterjee, Lewis Cole, Jonathan Cole, Elaine
Combs-Schilling, Susan Crane, Jonathan Crary, Julie Crawford, Hamid Dabashi, Patricia Dailey, Tom DiPrete, Brent Edwards, Eric Foner, Aaron Fox, Katherine Franke, Victoria de Grazia, Page Fortuna, Steven Gregory, William Harris, Andreas Huyssen, Rashid Khalidi, Alice Kessler-Harris, Marilyn Ivy, Brian Larkin, Lydia Liu, Sylvère Lotringer, Mahmood Mamdani, Peter Marcuse, Reinhold Martin, Mark Mazower, Mary McLeod, Brinkley Messick, Rosalind Morris, Keith Moxey, Frances Negron-Muntaner, Mae Ngai, Bob O'Meally, Neni Panourgia, John Pemberton, Richard Peña, Julie Peters, Pablo Piccato, Sheldon
Pollock, Elizabeth Povinelli, Wayne Proudfoot, Bruce Robbins, David Rosner, George Saliba, James Schamus, David Scott, Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, Mark Strand, Paul Strohm, Michael Taussig, Kendall
Thomas, Nadia Urbinati, Marc van de Mieroop, Karen van Dyck, Dorothea von Mücke, Gauri Viswanathan, Gwendolyn Wright

What the above really means:

Academic freedom - The right to teach what we want with the biases we want. The Hell with balance.

University autonomy - The right to remain in our bubble, never facing reality and to remain detached from the world in which we are charged to prepare our students. That world remains unwantable by any "educated" person anyway.

Will no longer compromise these principles or tolerate interference with them - Dear Mr. president, Screw with us and you'll be forced from your cushy job with all of its perks and you'll be lucky to find work at Parsons, if it ever reopens. Love, your lofty minded peers

P.S. Ever mention Bush again, even when speaking of the landscape, and we will purse our tiny blue lips until the breath of our intellect is no more.

"Good" Kids, Hate Crimes And Murder

In today's world if you break a law or commit a crime it must be someone else's responsibility. The good Lord knows it ain't the criminal's responsibility and everyone can see all the family and friends saying it can't be their fault, they were just doing something innocent. Really, like trying to buy some marijuana. Buy it from someone who they don't know. In a town they've never been to. From a person they've never met. Otherwise he would have left the door open for them. Right? They were good kids. With baseball bats.

Rare Robbery Case Brings Cries of Racism
Three young black men break into a white man's home in rural Northern
California. The homeowner shoots two of them to death - but it's the surviving
black man who is charged with murder.

In a case that has brought cries of racism from civil rights
groups, Renato Hughes Jr., 22, was charged by prosecutors in this overwhelmingly white county under a rarely invoked legal doctrine that could make him responsible for the bloodshed.

"It was pandemonium" inside the house that night, District Attorney
Jon Hopkins said. Hughes was responsible for "setting the whole thing in motion
by his actions and the actions of his accomplices."

Prosecutors said homeowner Shannon Edmonds opened fire Dec. 7 after three young men rampaged through the Clearlake house demanding marijuana and brutally beat his stepson. Rashad Williams, 21, and Christian Foster, 22, were shot in the back. Hughes fled.
...

Hughes' mother, San Francisco schoolteacher Judy Hughes, said she
believes the group didn't intend to rob the family, just buy marijuana. She
called the case against her son a "legal lynching."

"Only God knows what happened in that house," she said. "But this I
know: My son did not murder his childhood friends."

Ranato must be innocent. He and his life long friends only wanted to buy marijuana. For the marijuana they drove 2 hours out of San Francisco (marijuana must be scarce there), broke into a house and beat a 19 year man with a baseball bat so now he can't even feed himself. Yep, Ranato is getting a legal lynching. And it's a racist one. Three black guys drive 120 miles to a small town, break into a white family's house and terrorize them, threaten them and beat them, that's racism.

Ranato's schoolteacher mother is right, Rashad shouldn't get a legal lynching. He should get a legal lethal injection. Unfortunately, the prosecution is not asking for the death penalty in this hate crime trial.

Appalachia Gets A New Bully - Nurses

The families of patients can be scared, worried, anxious about bills, but also calmed by a first class medical system taking care of their love ones. Unless the nurse is caring a coal axe to grind.

Nurses' Strike Drags on in Appalachia

Labor strife is as familiar in these Appalachian hills as poverty and poor health. Blevin's own Harlan County, home to several century-old coal-mining communities, has a history of violent labor fights. Attempts to organize miners in the 1930s drew national attention to "Bloody Harlan."

The contract rejected by the nurses would have increased insurance
premiums for families, eliminated a policy of paying nurses 40 hours of pay for
36 hours of work and reduced holiday pay from double-time to time- and-a-half.

The pay range for ARH nurses is $47,000 to $65,000 - far above
the $39,000 median household income in Kentucky. In Appalachia, more than a
quarter of the population lives below the federal poverty level. Few other jobs,
beyond coal mining, offer better wages or compensation, Troske said.

It is shameless that workers should have to work 40 hours to get paid for 40 hours work instead of getting a bonus of 180 - 200 extra paid hours per year. That's like only getting up to 5 weeks of paid vacation while also getting paid to do your job. Besides, it's only a piddling free $6,500.00 per year. That hardly covers tips at the Huddle House and dry cleaning. How fair is that?

Don't even talk about only getting time and a half at holidays when you deserve double over time? You must be getting cheated. Everyone should get double time. The FLSA be damned. It is your right to get twice your normal pay just for hanging around.

I can't believe you have to pay more in health premiums like everyone else, except Congress, in the country. That's like making auto workers pay the higher cost of gas today! Or coal miners having to pay more for heat because they priced the cost of labor out of sight. On the other hand, though, there are those unfeeling people that might say that not only are you letting sick people and their families down, but you might also be one of the reasons you have to pay higher health premiums. Whatever.

Bloody Harlan's new call might be "Remember the bedpans". At $31.25 per hour, you better remember the bedpan. At $62.50 per hour, it better be as warm as a chestnut this holiday.

Just Like Nazi's, Penn Nat Gaming & Cianbro Want to Control Private Lives

Companies ban smoking on work site, nearby park and public land not part of work site.

Slots construction site bans smoking
A three-page handout distributed to workers at the site last week
indicates that a $50 fine will be assessed to anyone "using tobacco products on
the site proper, the roundhouse lot, trailer row, from the Best Inn to McDonalds, and from the Penobscot River to Irving’s [including the upper Dutton Street parking lot]."

To avoid being fined, workers who smoke must leave that designated
area during their half-hour lunch break or two 15-minute coffee
breaks.

Burton said that Cianbro’s hard line on smoking is part of its
award-winning wellness program, which according to published reports has yielded measurable improvements in employees’ approaches to such health risks as tobacco use, inactivity, high cholesterol levels, pre-hypertension, stress and obesity.

Next the companies will have fellow workers policing each other or outright informing. Maybe they can also tell workers what to eat, how many children to have and what indoctrination camps the children will attend.

This is out of control. Liberals who hate corporate America are eating this up because it for "the children" or for charity or some bogus reason. Instead of a government that is a dictator, the government has created 10,000 dictators controlling our lives.

It has been called National Socialism.

Do-gooders Can Be No Good

Do-gooders can become the worst cheats
Study: Sense of moral superiority might lead to rationalizing bad behavior

Morally upstanding people are the do-gooders of society, right?
Actually, a new study finds that a sense of moral superiority can lead to
unethical acts, such as cheating. In fact, some of the best do-gooders can
become the worst cheats.

Stop us if this sounds familiar.

No, no, go ahead. Keep going, but when are you going to get to those do-gooders in Washington, DC that keep telling us they have our best interests at heart?

Don't you dare tell me that Reid and Pelosi might bend the truth just to save us from ourselves.

House Democrats Waste Time & Our Money Losing Iraq

House Passes $50B Iraq Withdrawal Bill

House Democrats pushed through a $50 billion bill for the Iraq war
Wednesday night that would require President Bush to start bringing troops home
in coming weeks with a goal of ending combat by December 2008.

The legislation, passed 218-203, was largely a symbolic jab at
Bush, who already has begun reducing force levels but opposes a congressionally
mandated timetable on the war. And while the measure was unlikely to pass in the
Senate — let alone overcome a presidential veto — Democrats said they wanted
voters to know they weren't giving up.

"The fact is, we can no longer sustain the military deployment in
Iraq," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. "Staying there in the manner
that we are there is no longer an option."

Four (4) republicans joined with Pelosi and her merry band of Murthas to once again (again and again and again) put our troops in danger by enabling the enemy and wasting millions of taxpayer dollars to mollify morons like the little corporal Kos and the I was a liberal before I was a conservative (but I'll take the money and run) Huffington.

Jones (NC)
Shays
Walsh (NY)
English (PA)

I wrote before that Reid and Pelosi probably couldn't sink any lower, but once again they prove me wrong.

PETA Smeta

I just heard about an upcoming HBO special title;

I Am An Animal
Ingrid Newkirk
The Most Important Person You Never Heard Of
Co-founder of PETA

WOW!!!!!! I don't care.

Country Music Question

Has anyone heard any lately? If so, where?

Around here all I can get are people imitating country and singing like out of work pop singers.

Please Pass This On

From Dinah Lord

How many anti-jihadi websites have you seen this at?

Well, if something's not done - it will be GONE.

Please ask your readers to contact the following companies with a short polite e-mail clearly stating that The Religion of Peace -(include the url in the e-mails) is against violence, not racist and should be categorized appropriately under labels such as General News, Politics and Religion. To the best of our knowledge the e-mail addresses are correct.

If anyone encounters problems please contact The Religion of Peace:

Secure Computing e-mail: mailto:sites@securecomputing.com

SonicWall e-mail: cfssupport@sonicwall.com

SurfControl e-mail: customerservice@surfcontrol.com

This is the scumbag causing problems:

Go read the rest of this.

God: End Is Nigh. Clinton: Need More Money To Fight Back

In looking back to Hillary's Dukakis debate debacle to clarify a point on Hillary's pointlessness, I saw the obvious. The type of obvious that sometimes slips by one because they are so used to seeing it.

Below is what most people have reported on which is Hillary's answers that seem to be bereft of any questions. That Hillary is scripted seems to be obvious. That she is badly scripted is more obvious.

Campaign call reveals Clinton debate concern
In a memo from the Obama campaign, spokesman Bill Burton said Clinton
“offered more of the same Washington political calculation and evasion that
won’t bring the change America needs.”

“The ‘politics of hope’ doesn’t mean hoping you don’t have to answer
tough questions,” Burton wrote.

Burton wrote that Clinton dodged questions on Social Security, Iran and
the National Archives issue. And on one of the more talked-about moments from
the end of the debate, Clinton’s position on a move by New York Gov. Eliot
Spitzer (D) to grant driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, Burton said, “Twelve
hours after the debate ended, the American people are still waiting for an
answer on Sen. Clinton’s position … She didn’t answer the question in the debate
and her campaign couldn’t answer it afterwards.”

What I glossed over was:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) top advisers, doing damage
control after the candidate’s debate performance Tuesday, told supporters on a
conference call Wednesday that the campaign needed more money to fight
back.

Huh, "more money to fight back"? Hillary's campaign, at a bazillion dollars raised, needs more money? How much mascara and other men's wives must Warren Beatty fore go to make sure this "seasoned" politico has enough money to be elected president of the free world? On the bright side, Hillary and team can't raise taxes to fund her campaign. If she could, we'd probably be looking at a 90% rate across the socioeconomic board, but it would be for the good of the people which makes it palatable. To Hillary.

Voters are to believe that Hillary has put together the best campaign staff since the plumbers fixed watergate. But:

Mark Penn, Clinton’s senior strategist and pollster, and Jonathan Mantz, the
campaign’s finance director, told the supporters on the call, which The Hill
listened to in its entirety, that they expect attacks from Clinton’s rivals to
continue, and she will need the financial resources to deflect their
attacks.

Mark Penn and staff are just now picking up on the fact that Hillary's opponents might attack her again? This is the crackerjack team, the best that money can buy, but not quite enough money is had, that is going to get her elected? Why not rent Dukakis' tank (and helmet) to just blast her opponents out of the water? It worked for Mikey didn't it and Mikey will try anything.

Money. Will the Clintons ever get enough? At least Paris Hilton shamelessly gets and spends money on herself for prurient reasons. Hillary will get or take money from anyone or anyplace to try to buy herself the power and respect she believes she deserves.

It doesn't matter if you are schlepping Egg Fu Young, Hollywood fantasy, birch boards or bullsh*t, you're going to feel a Clinton hand in your pocket. To a Clinton, money solves everything. Money can buy anything. Money is everything because once they have all the money, then, just then, they can begin to do all the good they believe they can. Nannies cost a lot of money.

BTW, that Clinton hand you feel in your pocket has nothing to do with love.

China's Governmental Terrorism Is So Cute

China porn police dressed in anime
They might appear mere anime characters, but these two virtual police officers have been created by the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau to combat online pornography and other Web activity considered illicit.

Buffett Flunks Basic Econ 101 Again

Buffett backs estate tax, decries wealth gap
"In a country that prides itself on equality of opportunity, it's
becoming anything but that as the gap between the super-rich and the middle
class is widening."

Buffett must have something else going on that he flunks basic math and statistics. Like it's time to retire.

As "Redacted" will not be watched here in this country because it is crap, but will be highlighted in the press of our enemy, most people will think, "Warren, shut up you fool", but liberals will run through the streets tearing their flesh and screaming, "Finally, a rich pig is telling the truth".

Warren, we don't need that. Nor do we need you to keep babbling.

I addressed Buffett's earlier comments before. Here

Denison Univ. Finds Way To Stop 'Isms, Violence And Rape

Denison president wants dialogue to filter into life
Knobel says Denison needs to sustain awareness, continue diversifying
...
During Wednesday's forum, students asked the university to consider
tougher penalties for those who commit hate crimes and to revisit its decision
several years ago to cut women's, black and homosexual studies as required
courses.
...
He said he also holds students responsible for monitoring their own
behavior and that of their friends. "We have cross-cutting expectations," Knobel
said. "We need to remind ourselves of the responsibility we have. I would like
them to look one another in the eye and say those aren't the values we espouse
at Denison."

Required courses and "monitoring" others who fail the Denison code. Those that fail will face a jury of faculty, staff and students?

Another way of putting it would be to say - Submit or face a stacked jury.

GroupThink 101 will stop all 'Isms except Socialism and PCism.

UPDATE: Students have shaken up the old and false world and replaced it with a real world in which they now study, live and plan their and everyone else's future.

What have we learned?
We've shaken up the status quo on campus by picking up Denison and
turning it on its head.

Doane Administration Building can no longer sustain its safe haven
image it has exuded for so long, that quieted students by showing them
everything is okay.

We've extracted the administrators from behind their desks of Doane,
their ivory tower, and brought them down to eye-level at the flagpole. And we
told them what we want to see change.

For those of you students who still think that Denison is bubble - an
isolated, rural sanctuary of academia that will protect you from the omnipresent
evil in the "real world" - then we feel pity for you. For those of you who think
that Denison embraces a "Camp Denidoo" mentality and denies any real-life
experience by shoving you into a dorm, making you eat in a dining hall and never
having to see a consistent bill, we hope you are reading this: because if
there's one thing we can take away from this entire situation, even if you were
sitting in your room playing Halo for the past two weeks, it's that Denison is
the real world. There's no way around denying that you had any idea of what has
been going on for the last two weeks.

There are real, actual tangible human beings that have spoken out
against an institutionalized marginalization and now the healing process has
begun.

Let's see this process through and not let Thanksgiving break or the
winter breaks wear us down. Activism is a lifetime commitment, not a short-term
tactic to get what we want.

Expressing our emotions and the need for sympathy have been very
important first steps but we need to realize that true change happens when we
engage in the issues on more than the surface.

That may mean something different for us all. It might mean joining one
of the many student activist groups, researching the issues in a scholarly
manner or thinking about your privilege and how can you best help other
people.

Bush Killed The America

The world hates us. That is fact. It is fact if you wear tin foil and attend MoveOn.org fascist rallies.

Another Pro-American Leader Wins Re-Election in Denmark
Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a staunch supporter of President Bush and the War on Terror led his party to a big win in Denmark today.

Just like France, England and Germany, now Denmark has shown the world that Bush is wrong. Crazy. Criminal. Stupid. And that the boy do love hisself some Jooooooos.

They be wrong. As usual.

Thanks to Gateway Pundit for the heads up

Shameless Democrats Lie About Suicide To Trash Troops

Sen. Patty Murray is on C-Span giving a deeply heartfelt speech dripping with disdain for President Bush, the Republican Party and the war in Iraq. It is all based on a news story by CBS. In short, that means it is based on lies.

Patty Murray is a good choice, her father was a disabled veteran which gives her one of those unassailable liberal platforms. Patty worked in VA hospitals as a volunteer which adds gravitas to her and her position. Her heartfelt plea for common sense and common good is a shameless political ploy for liberals to get their way concerning Iraq. It is such a shameless political ploy because what they are saying is a lie. CBS knows it. Liberals know it, Democrats know it and Patty Murray knows it

Aviation Week picked up on this and has a short and sweet rebuttal called:

Doing the Math

How much longer will the Democrats, pushed by their wackjobs on the left, continue to insult us, the voters, and our troops.

They are shameless. They are liars.

Unchain My Heart

CBS NEWS WRITERS COULD BE NEXT TO STRIKE

I'm under your spell (i'm under your spell) like a man in a trance (like a man in a trance)
but i know darn well (but i know darn well) that i dont stand a chance (that i dont stand a chance) so
Unchain my heart (unchain my heart) let me go my way (unchain my heart)
Unchain my heart (unchain my heart) you worry me night and day (unchain my heart)
(ohhhhhh)Why lead me through a life of misery
(ohhhhhh)when you don't care a bag of beans for me(ohhhhhh)
So unchain my heart, oh please, please set me free

No Smoking, No 2nd Hand Smoke, Get Your Ox Ready To Be Gored

Okay, I know that I am not supposed to care about smoking anymore, but that's the point, isn't it? When I smoked, if I brought up health Nazi's and their agenda, all the anti-smokers would nod their smug looking faces and roll their eyes. After all, everyone knows that smokers are addicted, stupid and users. Not just users, but users of a disgusting, smelly and stupid habit. Geez, why didn't they throw in my rugby playing?

Oh, that's right, rugby doesn't hurt other people. Yeah, believe that and I'll know you don't even know what rugby is. I'll bet you also don't know what an scientific epidemiological study is either. I'd even bet you don't know that what you don't know can have its results massaged like a Swedish actress on retreat with her loofah salesman. Massaged as in, here's the result I want Mr. Scientist and you want your grant money so go get my results. Ergo, you got'cher 2nd hand smoke studies.

That is history.

Now, the same group of nazi do-gooders are coming for you and you can't stop them because they are your friends, peers, allies and family members. Your family member though might possibly just be your batty aunt who can hear azaleas scream when she cuts them. No matter they're baaaaccck. For you. And your kids.

Oh, and your rights. You signed those puppies away when you bought into the whole smokers are second class citizens argument that posed them as a group so reviled that they could be taxed for everything from anti-smoking programs to teaching your child the lost positions of the Kama Sutra in school. Congratulations.

Here is a good wrap up of things the do-gooders have in their sights and it is just the beginning now that you all have opened Pandora's Box.

From Samizdata

Health is the most important thing

The smoking ban was a mere tasty morsel. It has roused the appetite of the beast without bedding it back down again. The hungry beast has drawn blood and it wants more:

• Government ministers should shrug off media accusations that they are running a nanny state and introduce tougher public health measures, experts say.
• 
  The Nuffield Council on Bioethics said the time had come to consider a whole host of interventions in the UK after the introduction of a smoking ban.
  
• Its proposes raising alcohol prices, restricting pub opening hours and better food labelling to fight obesity....
  
• The report by the panel of experts, which include scientists, lawyers and philosophers, said there was a balance to be struck between individual freedom and wider public protection.

Read the rest.

Veterans Day 2007

Quite simply, I respect and pray for our soldiers, alive and dead, everyday.

The respect you have earned from the very birth of our nation has been earned by each and every one of you.

Thank you and God bless you.

Band Of Bloggers

I am watching a History Channel presentation named “Band of Bloggers” It is listed as a first hand account of combat soldiers and how blogs change the way war is seen and reported.

What BS.

They have taken all the live footage they can and selected those parts that say it was never our intent to liberate Iraq, but only an effort to keep unleaded at $2.98 for our lazy *ss’s. Once that has been established the presentation explores all the negative aspects they possibly could.