Author: VD

Most Americans now say that sending U.S. troops to Iraq was a mistake, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll finds. For the first time, a majority also says that the war there has made the nation less safe from terrorism. The survey taken Monday through Wednesday shows a turnaround in views toward the war in less than a month. Continued violence in Iraq and questions about the war’s justification apparently are eroding support even as the U.S. moves to turn over sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government next week.

It is the first time since Vietnam that a majority of Americans has called a major deployment of U.S. forces a mistake. When the war in Iraq began last year, the public by three-to-one said sending troops wasn’t a mistake. Just three weeks ago, 58% still held that view. Now, 54% say it was a mistake.

I’m not the least bit surprised. The Iraqi War has been over for some time now and the return of the troops is long overdue. Military force should be used wisely, judiciously and only for the purposes for which they are created. The armed forces went in, took out Hussein, captured him and so accomplished their mission. At that point they should have either been given a new military mission or brought home. Nation-building is a foolish and doomed enterprise in which we should never have engaged. The administration’s decision to engage in it will have the net effect of severely weakening the war on method and is unlikely to help the coming war against the jihad.

Now, I actually agree with the basic position Blondesense is attempting to articulate here. But a particular paragraph leaped out at me, as I happened to have translated Benito Mussolini’s Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle only an hour before.

Well, hell no, Mr. Smith. It’s still up to the parental units to decide what their kids watch and if it’s questionable, don’t bring the stuff into the house or turn on the TV if they are not sure if a program is appropriate. If the government wants to do something about the media, how about rolling back all the fascist deregulation of the media and allow independent companies to own some of it thus allowing democracy to flourish, duh.

Fascist deregulation. A fascinating phrase! Not only were the Fascists not exactly known for deregulating things, but to the contrary they demanded regulation – and often outright nationalization – of almost everything in Italy. In addition to demanding a National Council of experts from a variety of fields and creating a General Commission with cabinet-level power, they sought a national policy of furthering Italian culture, a sort of National Endowment for the Arts combined with the FCC and the US Olympic Committee. Mussolini famously declared: “Tutto nello Stato… nulla contro lo Stato.” Everything in the State, nothing against the State. And by “the State” he meant the government.

Now, it certainly would be desirable for more independent companies to own elements of the media. And what prevents this? Primarily government ownership and regulation of the airwaves, as well as the many government restrictions relating to investment and the management of capital. The only answer is more deregulation, not less, still less the government seizure and control advocated by the historical Fascists and their modern descendants. National Public Radio is the epitome of a modern facist institution; the giant media corporations are only quasi-fascist by comparison, their Third Way corporatism notwithstanding.

Finally, democracy is not freedom and the two should never be confused. How is a more independent media likely to bring about the near-term demolition of the tri-partite structure of government and the replacement of the constitutional republic with a national referendum-driven system? Unless, of course, by democracy you mean a system of proportionate representation designed expressly to limit democracy, which we already have, in which case it has presumably already been flourishing for, lo, these past 215 years.

As the argument finally stumbles towards its corrrect conclusion that the government has no responsibility to ensure that all visual entertainment is child-friendly, the fact that the resident blonde would never make such asinine and ignorant statements forces me to conclude this is simply another case of attempted thinking while liberal.

Grant Wahl writes on CNN/SI: Strange but true: Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo was named for Ronald Reagan, a favorite of his parents. Wonder what the Gipper would think?

If the Gipper saw him play, he’d love it. I’d rather have C. Ronaldo on my team than his more famous counterpart. He was the most dangerous player on the Portuguese side yesterday, and if Ashley Cole hadn’t a) showed incredible stamina and b) played an excellent game, he probably would have scored at least once. The entire game was a battle between the two players but you could tell what tracking Ronaldo was doing taking out of Ashley, as he stopped making his trademark runs up the left side before the end of the first half.

To paraphrase Space Bunny on Ronaldo, “doesn’t that kid ever get tired?” Even at the end of the game, he looked ready to play another 90 minutes. I just wish he didn’t play for bloody United.

Cliff Kincaid writes of Pat Buchanan: It was shocking news that Patrick J. Buchanan, Ronald Reagan’s communications director, is getting $500,000 to write a Bush-bashing book to be titled, Where the Right Went Wrong…. there are disturbing indications that Buchanan, who left the Republican Party in 2000, may even back Ralph Nader for president. Buchanan’s American Conservative Magazine featured a front-page article, “Ralph Nader: Conservatively Speaking. The long-time progressive makes a pitch for the disenfranchised Right”….

Yet Buchanan’s magazine sounds increasingly like a left-wing publication with its constant talk of America’s “empire” around the world. This is a variation of the old Soviet line that the U.S. wants to dominate and control the world. It’s disconcerting to see conservatives who played key roles in fighting communism using such noxious terminology.

First, Pat Buchanan is never going to endorse Ralph Nader, who is a neosocialist egomaniac. However, there is a real point of connection between a leftist like Nader, true conservative like Buchanan and a libertarian such as myself. All three of us are diametrically opposed to the sacrifice of national sovereignty embraced by the Democratic Party and the dominant Bush-worshipping faction of the Republican Party.

What Kincaid and many other economically-illiterate Republicans fail to understand is that America does have an empire. It is a shadow empire, to be sure, but it weighs more heavily and is felt more strongly than the Roman or British empires ever were in their dominions. Ironically, the empire of the Imperial Dollar has never been more fragile or more in danger of collapsing than today, and with its inevitable collapse will come the reduction of America’s stature on the world stage.

Nader’s solutions are likely to prove disastrous than helpful, but unlike Bush and Kerry, he is neither invested in the present system of interlocking globalist institutions nor interested in sacrificing American interests to them. Pat Buchanan realizes this, and in the very fact of the two distinctly different men finding common ground, demonstrates how the most deadly danger to the long-term existence of America lies within.

There is a bitter joke in South Africa: what is the difference between Thabo Mbeki and Robert Mugabe? About ten years. As Mugabe drives Zimbabwe ever deeper into socialist nightmare by murdering the nation’s only productive class and confiscating their property in order to turn it over to feckless squatters, Mbeki gives South Africans clear warning of his long-term intentions to transform that country into yet another Left-wing African hellhole.

“In this climate taxation is depicted as the confiscation of what is properly our own — an intolerable burden that should be reduced. The social, the collective and the public realm are portrayed as the enemies of prosperity and individual autonomy… and worse are opposed to the moral basis of society grounded as it should be in the absolute responsibility of individuals to shoulder their burdens and exercise their rights alone.”

He [Mbeki] noted that [UK columnist Will] Hutton argues that Western democracies had been characterised by “one broad family of ideas that might be called Left — a belief in the social, reduction in inequality, the provision of public services, the principle that workers should be treated as assets rather than commodities, regulation of enterprise, rehabilitation of criminals, tolerance and respect for minorities — and another broad family of ideas that might be called Right: An honouring of our inherited institutional fabric, a respect for order, a belief that private property rights and profit are essential to the operation of the market economy, a suspicion of worker rights, faith in the remedial value of punitive justice and distrust of the new.”

Mbeki emphasised that there could “be no doubt about where we stand” with regard to this “great divide”. It is to pursue the goals contained in what Hutton called ideas “that might be called” Left.

At least Mbeki, unlike the majority of American Democrats who should more properly be termed Democratic Socialists, understands what it is he is rejecting in turning his back on law, order, private property, and age-old institutions. He is the more intelligent form of political evil, whereas the American “liberal” is, by comparison, evil’s idiot cousin, always deluding himself that he is honoring the past by defecating on the present and “fighting” to destroy the future.

I have long loathed referees. From my childhood, when a zebra cost the Vikings one of their best chances to win a Super Bowl in handing the Dallas Cowboys a victory by allowing not one, but two blatant push-offs by Drew Pearson. Almost thirty years later, I don’t think there’s a Viking fan who regrets the bottle with which somebody clocked the ref responsible.

Basketball refs are the absolute bottom, as they haven’t made a correct travelling call in decades and hardcore NBA fans like the Sports Guy openly joke about the corruption of David Stern’s personal referee, Dick Bavetta. Need to get the Knicks or Lakers into the next round? Don’t bet against them if Bavetta is on the floor.

Soccer refs run the gamut, from Collino to the pink-clad Brazilian league prancer who has to be seen to be believed. But all of them, from the world-class FIFA level on down to the local high school have a terrible, terrible habit that probably reduces global scoring at least 5 percent. If the ball is loose in the goalie’s six-yard box and the referee can’t see what is going on, he will always blow the whistle and call a phantom foul on the attacking team.

That’s precisely what happened to England this afternoon, as they scored in the 90th minute to go up 2-1 just before the final whistle against Portugal. They hadn’t played well and Sven showed his Italian roots by trying to go into a defensive shell for 70 minutes after Wayne Rooney got hurt, but they did score. Except, according to the referee, who was some 20 yards away from the action and in no position to see, John Terry committed a foul on the Portugese keeper as Sol Campbell was heading the ball in.

It was a horrible, horrible call and I wouldn’t have blamed Sven if he’d pulled his squad off the field in protest. The linesman, who was standing right there, signaled goal, but was overruled by the idiot referee. One thing soccer refs should learn from basketball refs is to let play go on in the last minute of the game, especially when they can’t even see what is happening!

A lot of fans hate penalties, but I quite like them. It’s always interesting to see who chokes under pressure. For all that he’s possessed of the golden foot, Beckham shouldn’t ever be allowed to take penalties as they are primarily about psychology, not skill. He missed, unsurprisingly, as did Rui Costa – another midfielder, for some reason highly skilled midfielders are quite often bad at taking penalties – and then, the almost completely useless Vassell managed to take a lousy one that put England out.

Portugal was the better team once Rooney went out, but it’s ridiculous that a stupid Swiss ref should be responsible for knocking England out of the tournament. At this point only the Swedes look like they can play with France, although you can never rule out the headcases from Holland, who can look awful against a weak team and great against a strong one.

I’m working on creating some web forms. I understand the HTML tags, what I’m not sure about is where to call the executable action. Is this something that has to be done by the hosting server, or is it more like Java where you just put out the call and it simply runs? The examples I’ve seen tend to suggest the latter, but I need to understand this better before I can move on.

From the Sun: FORMER President Bill Clinton is having a passionate affair with a wealthy divorcee behind wife Hillary’s back, a US magazine claims. The allegation comes in the wake of the publication of Mr Clinton’s autobiography My Life, in which he talks about his infamous fling with Monica Lewinsky.

But the National Enquirer alleges that Mr Clinton, 57, has been seeing a beautiful blonde for more than a year at a hideaway in Westchester County, New York. The magazine does not name the woman, but says she has several young children and got millions in a divorce settlement a few years ago. She is allegedly the daughter of a wealthy Clinton supporter.

An insider tells the Enquirer: “Bill Clinton has been sneaking off to the home of this woman for late-night trysts after her kids are in bed.”

You just can’t keep a bad man down. Or in Bill’s case, shut him up. I thought the whole idea was to move on?

Mark 1:10-11

Authorized version: “And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him. And there came a voice from the heaven saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

New: “As he was climbing up the bank again, the sun shone through a gap in the clouds. At the same time a pigeon flew down and perched on him. Jesus took this as a sign that God’s spirit was with him. A voice from overhead was heard saying, ‘That’s my boy! You’re doing fine!'”

Matthew 26:69-70

Authorized version: “Now Peter sat without in the palace: and a damsel came unto him, saying, ‘Thou also wast with Jesus of Galilee.’ But he denied before them all, saying, I know not what thou sayest.”

New: “Meanwhile Rocky was still sitting in the courtyard. A woman came up to him and said: ‘Haven’t I seen you with Jesus, the hero from Galilee?” Rocky shook his head and said: ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!'”

In keeping with the times, translator Henson deftly translates “demon possession” as “mental illness” and “Son of Man,” the expression Jesus frequently used to describe himself, as “the Complete Person.” In addition, parables are rendered as “riddles,” baptize is to “dip” in water, salvation becomes “healing” or “completeness” and Heaven becomes “the world beyond time and space.”

It sounds to me like someone has been hitting the bong very, very hard.