Will this politician stay bought?
With the Atlanta Journal reporting that a Senate moderate may quit the GOP, I decided to take a jaunt over the OpenSecrets.org to see what his campaign finance reports say. It is interesting.Mr. Lincoln Chafee was elected in the 2000 election season. In his 2000 reports we can see the kind of distribution that you would expect for a Republican -- he gets the bulk of his PAC money from Finance and Insurance ($136,129) with only a smidge coming from Labor unions ($1,125).
But this is 2002, you say? Well, let's look at his 2002 reports. Hmm. No reporting from finance -- someone isn't paying thier bills. But what is this? $36,850 from Labor? There must be some reason for that 3,275% increase in campaign contributions in a a non-election year. I guess it is never too late to buy a politico.
Lies, damned lies and statistics
I love the way environmentalists like to spin things. Take a look at the first and last paragraphs of this CNN story on a study that claims People use 83 percent of land surface:Humans take up 83 percent of the Earth's land surface to live on, farm, mine or fish, leaving just a few areas pristine for wildlife, according to a new report this week.What kind of statistic is that?!? Humans use 83% of the land that they use? This is supposed to be a shocking statistic?
Antarctica and a few Arctic land patches were not included in the study because of the lack of data and near absence of human influences, said Malanding Jaiteh, senior staff associate at CIESIN.
Communist Hypocrisy
With the "revalation" that The Pentagon gassed American soldiers and civilians in 1960s tests, the Communists seem to think that they have discovered hypocrisy. Well, I think they have, but only thier own.Saddam Hussain intentionally killed hundreds of his own people in an attack with poison gas. The US tested delivery methods by using carefully measured less-than-lethal doses, mostly to military personel. There is supposed to be some kind of moral equivilence here?
The true revalation here is that there is no difference to a communist between testing a device on your people because it is convenient or murdering a few hundred of your own civilians because it is convenient.
Protect Stupid People From Themselves
With the announcement that the FDA Battles Unapproved Contact Lenses have begun, we have another instance of an unconstitutional federal agency wielding unconstitutional force to protect people from themselves. This is mission creep at its worst. Even the FDA itself agrees that it has no mandate to pursue this police power, but decided to do it anyway -- for our own good.Do we really need to protect people who are too stupid to know not to put things on thier eyes without asking a doctor first?
WorldNetDaily: Russia to start coup in Iraq?
This is a pretty interesting article, especially in contrast to the "Bush is just after money from Big Oil but everyone else is acting from altuism" crowd.Russia and France have major oil interests in Iraq; guess who is the big opposition on the UN Security Counsel. Norway is the third largest oil producer in the world and would be dinged if the price of oil dropped in a major way; the Norwegian Nobel Proze committee gives Carter the Peace Prize (putting him in league with Yassir Arafat) to rebuke Bush's attempts to invade Iraq. Coincidences? No more than the coincidence of Bush having worked in the Oil Patch in West Texas (like nearly everyone in West Texas.)
No one in this political fight has clean hands -- not Iraq, not Russia, not France, not Norway, and not the US.
Common Sense
Sometimes, I have to remind myself that most other people haven't read Common Sense and probably think that Thomas Paine was the Major that Damon Wayans played. I guess that is why we need articles like Sorting tax facts from fiction every once in a while.WorldNetDaily: Mother rejoices in son's suicide bombing
The only conclusion that I can come to is that she hates Jews more than she loves her own son.True Genocide
In Iraq's last Jews wait in fear for war we see the true face of genocide. There are no calls for a "Right of Return" for these people. There were no sappy stories on CNN when these people were run off or killed. You don't see the Israeli government claiming Iraq as a the "rightful homeland" of the Jewish people, even though there is more support for it in thier holy books (given the original grant of Israel to Abraham) than there is in the Quran for Jerusalem as an Islamic holy site (given that it is never even referred to by name.)I don't think you will find many Christians today who will deny that the Crusades and the Inquisition were evil acts in the name of Christ, or that the majority of Christianity supported them at the time. Islam is in that stage now, and no Muslim seems to be willing to stand up and do anything about it.
Another Recap of the Evidence Against Iraq
In an interview with Laurie Mylroie, she details some of the evidence that Iraq has had an active part in terrorism against the US, including the original attack on the World Trade Center:The key evidence revolves around the identity of the bomb’s mastermind, Ramzi Yousef. He entered the United States as Ramzi Yousef, Iraqi citizen, but left as Abdul Basit Karim, Pakistani national. In fact, both names are aliases.Much of the same sort of pattern emerges when investigating the Oklahoma City bombing and the downing of Flight 800. The government of the United States decided -- in the Clinton Administration, for what that is worth -- that if at all possible, a domestic or accidental explaination will be given for any act of terrorism inside the United States.We know that Abdul Basit Karim is a real person. We know that he was born and raised in Kuwait, studied in Britain, and then returned to Kuwait. He was in Kuwait when Iraq invaded, and he probably died then. As a permanent resident of Kuwait, his records were on file at the Ministry of the Interior in Kuwait City. We also know that his file was tampered with.
* What was done to the file, and why is that significant?
There are things that should be in the file but aren’t. For example, copies of the front pages of Abdul Basit Karim’s passport, with his picture and signature, should be there. But they were removed.
There are also things in the file that shouldn’t be there. For example, a notation that Abdul Basit Karim and his family left Kuwait on August 26, 1990, traveled from Kuwait to Iraq, and crossed into Iran on their way to Pakistani Baluchistan, where they live now—that information shouldn’t be in a Kuwaiti file. There wasn’t a Kuwaiti government in August 1990. Iraq was occupying the country. Moreover, that’s not the kind of information you give authorities when you travel. You tell them where you came from and where you’re going. You don’t give them your whole itinerary.
But the clincher is that the fingerprint cards in Abdul Basit Karim’s file have Ramzi Yousef’s fingerprints. Yet Yousef is definitely not the same person as Karim. Yousef is tall, and Karim was of medium height. That can only mean that someone took Abdul Basit Karim’s fingerprint card out of the file and substituted a card with Yousef’s prints on it. The only reason for doing that and making other changes was to create a false identity for Yousef. And the only party that reasonably could have done so is Iraq, while it occupied Kuwait.
"Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." -- Sherlock Holmes
