Category: Uncategorized

James Robbins sees no problem with the Louisiana Guard:

So is the war in Iraq causing troop shortfalls for hurricane relief in New Orleans? In a word, no. A look at the numbers should dispel that notion. Take the Army for example. There are 1,012,000 soldiers on active duty, in the Reserves, or in the National Guard. Of them, 261,000 are deployed overseas in 120 countries. Iraq accounts for 103,000 soldiers, or 10.2 percent of the Army.

That’s all? Yes, 10.2 percent. That datum is significant in itself, a good one to keep handy the next time someone talks about how our forces are stretched too thin, our troops are at the breaking point, and so forth. If you add in Afghanistan (15,000) and the support troops in Kuwait (10,000) you still only have 12.6 percent.

So where are the rest? 751,000 (74.2 percent) are in the U.S. About half are active duty, and half Guard and Reserve. The Guard is the real issue of course — the Left wants you to believe that the country has been denuded of its citizen soldiers, and that Louisiana has suffered inordinately because Guardsmen and women who would have been available to be mobilized by the state to stop looting and aid in reconstruction are instead risking their lives in Iraq.

Not hardly. According to Lieutenant General H. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, 75 percent of the Army and Air National Guard are available nationwide. In addition, the federal government has agreed since the conflict in Iraq started not to mobilize more than 50 percent of Guard assets in any given state, in order to leave sufficient resources for governors to respond to emergencies.

In Louisiana only about a third of Guard personnel are deployed, and they will be returning in about a week as part of their normal rotation. The Mississippi Guard has 40 percent overseas. But Louisiana and Mississippi are not alone in this effort — under terms of Emergency Management Assistance Compacts (EMACs) between the states, Guard personnel are heading to the area from West Virginia, D.C., New Mexico, Utah, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Alabama, Washington, Indiana, Georgia, Kentucky, and Michigan. Thousands have already arrived, and more will over the next day or so.

The first flaw in Mr. Robbins’ point is that not all soldiers are created equal, trained equal or supplied equal. The 183rd Overweight Women Cooks division is not going to be airlifted to Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion because the Marines are occupied in Iraq. It would be more informative to know how many first-line combat troops we have, and how many are currently serving in Iraq.

The second flaw should be apparent from his own words. If the Guard personnel were needed immediately, as it appears they were, then there was no way those thousands of Guardsmen from Utah and Michigan could possibly have helped when they were needed most. Now, given the incompetent nature of the Louisiana leadership, it is extremely doubtful that the presence of the one-third of the missing LA National Guard would have been used anyhow, but as it stands, it was impossible.

The problems of New Orleans are not of the federal government’s creation – except perhaps for the levees, but I don’t know who was ultimately responsible for them – and the tendency to blame the president is indicative of the socialist sickness that infects this country. But the disaster still serves as a powerful reminder that even the most powerful government has its limits, that not all things are possible through it and that a nation’s responsibility to its own citizens must supersede any desire to do something for those who are not citizens.

Defenders of the administration can dance around the reality all they like, but the fact is that President Bush and his administration did not impress anyone with their response to the hurricane and even if their actions were reasonable, they still looked pretty bad to most of the public.

Peter sends a link to an MSNBC clip of New Orleans police protecting and serving a Walmart the day after the hurricane.

Aroused by an elderly man’s death, Amanda makes a vow:

One thing I vow here and now–you motherfuckers who want to ban birth control will never sleep. I will fuck without making children day in and out and you will know it and you won’t be able to stop it.

There are few things more unintentionally amusing than an “empowered” woman. Although I suppose I should be careful about upsetting darling Amanda. The next thing you know, she’ll be threatening us all with blow jobs.

Three things. First, the Supreme Court will never overturn Roe vs. Wade regardless of who is appointed. Bush is not a social conservative, his appeal to the genuine conservatives is a carefully constructed fraud and his nominees will reflect that. Second, it’s not the banning of female contraception that women should fear, it’s the introduction of dependable male contraception. That will have serious social ramifications that may rival the introduction of The Pill.

Third, demographic concerns about declining birth rates are not a conservative plot, but a genuine threat to Western civilization. In Italy, which has gone from a birth rate of nearly twice the US rate to one-half in thirty-five years, even the Communist Party is now beginning to be concerned about them.

NOW President Kim Gandy puts out a press release:

“Make no mistake. The passing of Chief Justice William Rehnquist creates a crisis unlike any in my 30-plus years in the women’s movement. While we send condolences to Justice Rehnquist’s family, this is a crisis for our movement and we must act now.

“This second vacancy creates double jeopardy for women. We are now in the fight of our lives, but it’s a fight we’ve won before and we will win again. Senators must oppose every nominee who opposes our rights, for as long as it takes – and we must demand no less.”

So, I’m guessing that I’m not on their short list of acceptable candidates. And yet, I’ll bet I can invent emanations and penumbras with the best of them.

After a courageous bout with cancer during which he continued to serve as U.S. Supreme Court chief justice, William H. Rehnquist died tonight at his Arlington, Virginia, home, surrounded by his three children.

From Drudge:

Reeling from the chaos of this overwhelmed city, at least 200 New Orleans police officers have walked away from their jobs and two have committed suicide, police officials said on Saturday. Some officers told their superiors they were leaving, police officials said. Others worked for a while and then stopped showing up. Still others, for reasons not always clear, never made it in after the storm.

The absences come during a period of extraordinary stress for the New Orleans Police Department. For nearly a week, many of its 1,500 members have had to work around the clock, trying to cope with flooding, an overwhelming crush of refugees, looters and occasional snipers….

A Baton Rouge police officer said he had a friend on the New Orleans force who told him he threw his badge out a car window in disgust just after fleeing the city into neighboring Jefferson Parish as the hurricane approached. The Baton Rouge officer would not give his name, citing a department policy banning comments to the news media. The officer said he had also heard of an incident in which two men in a New Orleans police cruiser were stopped in Baton Rouge on suspicion of driving a stolen squad car. The men were, in fact, New Orleans officers who had ditched their uniforms and were trying to reach a town in north Louisiana, the officer said.

Only a few bad apples. Right. Thirteen percent of the force simply quit and that likely doesn’t count those who were witnessed joining in the looting of the stricken city while in uniform.

No wonder even other policemen are disgusted. The behavior of their New Orleans counterparts may have finally laid to rest the Norman Rockwell portrait of the policeman as someone on your side, on whom you can depend in an emergency. It hasn’t been particularly valid since American police began to fancy themselves as a law-enforcing paramilitary instead of humble keepers of the peace, but now the self-serving, self-protecting reality has been exposed for the world to see.

After I quoted the Sports Guy to kick off my column on Why Women’s Rights are Wrong, I received a few emails informing me how they were going to tell Simmons on me – oh please, no! – how he was a Kerry voter and would publicly disown any connection with me – not hard since there is none – and made a number of other, similarly whacked-out comments that I can only assume were supposed to pass for threats.

I don’t know if anyone actually followed through or not, all I know is that Simmons dropped this one a few days ago:

Let’s end the ongoing charade that this is a mainstream sport. For the past nine years, the WNBA has been given countless chances, endless promotion, mainstream coverage and truckloads of capital. Has it helped? Absolutely not….

Of course, after nine years of failed promos and cushy television coverage, there needs to be a P.C. reason for the league’s failure that goes beyond something as simple as “it’s just not that much fun to watch.” Hey, let’s turn it into a social issue! As the logic goes, the WNBA needs to stick around because the future of women’s sports is at stake.

How dare he, the sexist bastard! Still, if the teetering WNBA means the future of women’s sports is at stake, then I’m afraid that I, in company with the hundreds of NCAA men’s programs murdered by Title IX, won’t be shedding too terribly many tears when David Stern’s successor drops a lighted torch on it.

I understand that the people still stuck in New Orleans need food, shelter and the rudiments of civilization, such as an absence of armed predators roaming the new canals. But the one thing that’s confused me is how the networks keep talking about how the people don’t have any water. Is all that water covering the streets too briny to boil, perhaps? If it’s merely filthy, as I assume it is, isn’t the whole point of boiling water to purify it in the first place?

I have no point here, I was just curious.

Army of Mom cries about women crying:

This guy makes me sick. It is more than just his haircut , too. Apparently, a female leader crying at the tragedy her state just experienced is just another sign of how pathetic us women are.

I swear to God that I’m not making this up. Even though Haley Barbour cried while doing an interview that I saw with a national news channel, this jerk somehow thinks that the Louisiana governor’s tears during a press conference renders her incapable of running the state….

Ok, yeah. Whatever. Women do, indeed, cry and get emotional, but I challenge anyone to look at the glue that holds this country together and tell me that women are too weak to handle it. Look at all the military wives running their households, look at all the corporations succeeding under women. *shaking my head*

You’ll notice that AOM skips right over the tiny fact that nearly every commentator, left and right, has concluded that the leadership of Louisiana Governor Kathleen “Weepy” Blanco has been absolutely pathetic from the start and has contributed greatly to the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of people living in the state for which she is responsible. As for Haley Barbour, it’s not just the tears, it’s the fact that Governor Blanco’s first public response to the disaster was crying, blaming others and then failing to take any initiative. It is the combination of these things that has made her such a contemptible figure to so many people. Don’t forget that public crying put both Pat Schroeder and Edmund Muskie out of political contention either.

And sure, let’s take a look at all those corporations “succeeding” under women. There’s a grand total of two Fortune 500 companies with female CEOs, and here’s a portrait of the Wonder Women of corporate America. I particularly enjoyed reading about the way they’ve successfully balanced their careers and their multiple marriages.

The most amusing thing is how Carly Fiorina is cited as one of these ten wonder women when her short-lived spell at HP’s helm is generally accounted a disaster. From the same purportedly laudatory article:

“When Fiorina took over HP in 1999, she was hailed by the media as a star who would rescue the ailing high-tech giant. But her initial success at Hewlett-Packard began to falter with the $19 billion acquisition of Compaq Computer in 2002, referred to by some as “Fiorina’s Folly.” The deal was vehemently opposed by the heirs of HP’s founders. Fiorina prevailed, but most industry analysts considered the acquisition a mistake, and HP’s stock stagnated in the two years following the merger. Fiorina was also faulted for not fostering HP’s long tradition as an innovator. In Feb. 2005, her six-year tenure at Hewlett-Packard ended when she was abruptly ousted.”

Now, I am an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, who governed in such an impeccably female manner that I can recall a notable feminist who’d been invited to speak at my university declaring: “Margaret Thatcher is not of the gender woman!” But despite her unique courage and successes, even Thatcher ultimately ended a failure, as she admitted in her memoirs that she’d been taken in by the sweet promises of the European Union advocates and sold out her nation’s sovereignty.

Imagine that, a woman believing men’s lies and trading independence for promises of security. The main problem with female leadership isn’t that women aren’t intelligent or capable, it is that they typically demonstrate a lack of resolve when action is required, apparently in the hope that enough talking will somehow solve things. Some of AOM’s readers cited childbirth as a proof of women’s toughness, but that’s a different form of toughness. Childbirth requires endurance, not resolve, because the pain of childbirth is coming whether the incipient mother accepts it or not.

As for the fearsome “Barbara fucking Jordan”, I’m relatively confident that I can take a dead, wheelchair-bound lesbian even on an off day. Bring her on! Cage Match: Vox Day versus Barbara Jordan and the corpse of Ann Richards! Or is it the other way around? It’s so hard to tell these days.