Not out of the woods yet

This needs to be kept in mind: though it’s good that Kathryn Johnston’s killers are going to prison, and it’s even better that Alex White is going to lay bare as much of the surrounding rot behind her death as he can, true justice will come the day that the “War on Drugs” is called off once and for all, not a day before.  This cannot be written off as a few bad apples, no matter how badly the authority pimps out there want it to be.  The first domino in the process that killed her was the idea that adults of sound mind could be punished for what they do to themselves w/o the result being a bloody trail of liberties & lives destroyed in the wake of the State, end that diseased concept or there will be more.

“I’m the Patron Saint of Irony, and I approved this message”

Incumbency-Protection — uh, I mean “Campaign Finance Reform” is before the Supreme Court again:

Members of the U.S. Supreme Court signaled a willingness to give interest groups more power to air advertisements in the weeks before an election, an approach other justices suggested would gut a vital part of a 2002 federal campaign finance law.

The court today heard arguments on a law that says interest groups can use only regulated money, subject to contribution limits and disclosure rules, to run ads that mention federal candidates in the two months before a general election. The intent was to outlaw so-called sham issue ads run by unregulated organizations to hurt or help candidates. […]

Wisconsin Right to Life Inc. says its radio and television commercials must be exempt from the ban because they were “grassroots lobbying ads” and weren’t directed toward Feingold’s ultimately successful re-election bid. The group, which also opposes euthanasia and embryonic stem cell research, pulled its ads after three weeks because of legal concerns.  An appeals court in Washington, voting 2-1, sided with the group […]

As we all know by now, the Court has been thoroughly politicized.  The main question at hand is no longer whether or not a certain measure violates the intent of the Constitution, but “which decision on this would best benefit my team?”.  So to hear political arguments from a body that is in principle supposed to be immune from the winds of pop opinion is nothing new.  The brazenness of it, though, never ceases to amuse:

The group’s lawyer, James Bopp, said the ads were intended to lobby Feingold, not to influence voters. Feingold had supported filibusters to block President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees.

Souter bristled when Bopp said voters didn’t see the ads as a call to vote against Feingold because the commercials didn’t directly say that the senator supported the filibusters. Bopp argued that “there’s absolutely no evidence that anyone in Wisconsin knew his position on the filibuster.”

“You think they’re dumb?” Souter asked. “Nobody’s paying attention to what the senator is doing?” (emphasis mine)

Leave aside the merit of the specific argument (that potential voters were unaware of Feingold’s position); it’s ridiculous, and also completely irrelevant, the sole reason this defense is being offered is because that’s what the Court now demands, in violation of their positions.  Souter thinks that ads mentioning candidates by name somehow warp our minds, overriding the opinions we already hold, and we need to be shielded from them for our own good.  Yet the opposition thinks people are dumb?

When asking is an insult…

In the mainstream media, “balance” means consideration of an absurd viewpoint as equal merely because it’s the opposite of a consensus view.  For example:

Sgt. Patrick Stewart […] of the Nevada Air National Guard was shot down in his Chinook helicopter [over Afghanistan] September 25, 2005. Ever since, his gravesite has been marked with a plain old rock and a few small American flags. His wife says that’s because the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs refused to recognize their religion and allow them to express their faith in a military cemetery.

The Stewarts practiced Wicca, a pre-Christian religion wrongly criticized as being associated with devil worship. […] Earlier this week, the VA announced that as part of a settlement of a lawsuit, it will allow 11 families to display the Wicca pentacle, a religious symbol whose five points represent earth, air, fire, water and spirit, at their gravesites. The pentacle will be provided by the military.
This case raises some interesting questions: Do you think it took too long for the military and the VA to agree to place the Wiccan pentacle on gravesites? Should service members and their families have complete control over which symbols are displayed on their gravesite? Or is it important for the VA to maintain some restrictions on religious symbols? (emphasis mine)

Call it assuming of me, but far as I’m concerned if you’re buried on a spot of land your kin implicitly own it until they say otherwise. Besides, you gave your life, isn’t that enough?  How sick are we as a nation that we’re imposing political correctness on people beyond the grave?

Exactly!

In case people don’t get it when I say that our current behavior towards Iran risks turning the howls about developing nukes into self-fulfilling prophecy, Cunning Realist has a helpful analogy.

See-Saws (and not the fun for children kind)

Nope, no surprise here:

The U.S. troop buildup in Iraq has yielded modest progress but a rise in suicide bombings helps make the ultimate success of the security crackdown uncertain, the top U.S. commander in the country said in remarks published Sunday.

Gen. David Petraeus and other senior U.S. officers in Iraq told The Washington Post in interviews that the increase in U.S. and Iraqi troops since February had improved security in Baghdad and the restive Anbar province but that attacks had risen sharply in other regions.

They said it was critical that Iraqi leaders make the political compromises needed to ensure long-term stability.

President George W. Bush has committed almost 30,000 additional troops mostly to Baghdad, the center of violence between minority Sunnis and majority Shiites, for a major U.S.-Iraqi offensive aimed at halting a descent into all-out civil war. (emphasis mine)

Improved security in Baghdad = worse security elsewhere?  Gee, what’s next, is someone going to tell me water is wet?

This same thing has been happening for the past few years.  A “major offensive” is launched in one area, and attacks go up elsewhere; that operation ends, and attackers come right back to that area.  Far as I can recall, the only time where attacks didn’t go right back up after a major troop movement was in Fallujah, and that one was basically an indiscriminate purging…so what’s that tell you?

This needs to end, ASAP.  It can’t even be argued that the occupation is about going after the foreign jihadis that streamed into Iraq after the invasion, because the latest indications are Iraqis are turning against them.  These people want nothing more than for the foreigners in their country — whether US or the jihadi kind, they don’t care — to get the fuck OUT, how hard is that to comprehend?

Profiles in Anti-logic

Spotted the following argument in a story about the Texas state senate approving a bill to raise the legal age to buy cigarettes up a year:

“The further you can put this (legal age) off, there’s a much better chance that people will not start to smoke,” said Sen. Carlos Uresti, D-San Antonio.

Ponder that for a moment, then ask yourself this: if Carlos’ reasoning were taken seriously, what would be the barrier between raising the age to 19 and, say, raising it to some arbitrary higher number like 40 or 50?

Deeper cuts, please

I just got in my email a message from DownsizeDC about legislation they’re supporting at the moment.  One piece is supposed to encourage congress to eliminate the deficit by cutting their pay for any year where they run one.

My preliminary thought: noble effort, and obviously I agree with the aim.  However, this seems like the effect would depend on the personal status of the representatives in question.  Sure, you cut the pay of a congressman who has been using it to pay most of their bills while in office and you’re really making a statement, but what about the ones with money out the wazoo?  Depending on the proportion of independently rich folks in congress at any given moment, the effect could turn out entirely symbolic.

A matter of degree. And relative sanity.

Many things about the mainstream media annoy me — the habit of portraying every bit of bad news as if it’s a call for Big Brother to “DO SOMETHING!!”, the sensationalism, the following of celebrity “news” by media outlets that have more pressing matters to cover, the unfortunate tendency to take the words of all political authority figures at face value, etcetera, etcetera. The most basic issue I’ve got though is the Single-Minded Follower mentality, how when one story breaks they all run towards it and seemingly can’t take anything else seriously. The way I see it, by engaging in this the media is eroding a major benefit to having a free press.

Having said that, here’s an example of taking that beef and running into a wall with it. At 120 MPH. While juggling hand grenades. All emphasis mine:

The Virginia Tech massacre is legitimately a big news story, on the crime-and-natural-disaster beat. And I understand why those affected by this event cannot think of anything bigger and more important in their lives than the tragedy they have just suffered.

But something more is needed to explain why this story has completely dominated the national media (and even the global media) for two straight days, to the exclusion of everything else–while the president and Congress are in a showdown over funding for the War on Terrorism.

Keep in mind that this week we are already approaching the point at which the Pentagon is going to have to start diverting funds from other parts of its budget in order to keep paying for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, since the Democratic Congress has refused to pass a war funding bill that does not require the president to withdraw our troops from Iraq. In effect, Congress has already de-funded the War on Terrorism. That is the most important national news story of this week. Good luck trying to hear about it on the national news. […]

This flavor of the coverage was reflected in New York Times article that explained the ease with which reporters slipped into a familiar routine in covering the Virginia Tech story by saying “how familiar campus shootings have become.” But of course, they aren’t. It has been at least six years since the press has covered a big school-shooting story like this. If the press thinks these stories are “familiar,” it is not because of their frequency, but because the press feels metaphysically comfortable covering them. They feel like they are at home, in their proper element, relieved from the mental strain of having to deal with the uncomfortable topic of Islamic terrorism.

So that’s where we are today: a school shooting dominates the news, while the media ignores the much greater threat of Islamic terrorism. It’s a 1990s flashback.

The author here took a legitimate media problem — single-mindedness — and, amplified by his bloodthristy neo-imperialist agenda, explodes into a torrent of spin (he suggests in a sideways manner that the reason 9/11 happened was because school shootings were seen as more important than terrorism, and attempts to wrap Iraq up in the “War on Terror” blanket — which is full of holes itself) & outright lies (congress has “de-funded” jack squat). He doesn’t stop there…

The irony of the Virginia Tech case is that it is distracting our attention from the War on Terrorism, when it ought to make the need to fight and win that war all the more urgent.

The details that have emerged so far about the Virginia Tech killer ought to give us a slight shudder of recognition. According to early reports he apparently left behind a “manifesto” that consisted of “expletive-filled rants against the rich and privileged” with a “somewhat incoherent list of grievances.” Doesn’t this sound just a bit like the actions of a terrorist? The only thing missing–the only thing that differentiates this killer from archetypical terrorists like the Unabomber or Osama bin Laden–is a grand-scale ideology to tie his rambling grievances together and give him a systematic moral justification for his crimes.

The Virginia Tech killer is, in effect, a terrorist without a cause.

Surprise! Cho Seung-Hui has been retroactively & posthumously added to the Axis of Evil! See, it doesn’t matter that he seemingly did this crap for no reason, even though terrorism by its very frickin definition means violence against innocents for a political purpose. Cho was a Bad Man, and so are the insurgents in Iraq, so his actions only remind us that Jihad Is Everywhere. Oh yeah, don’t forget Iran!

Ahmadinejad has all the makings of a spree killer just like the one at Virginia Tech–but a killer who will soon be armed with nuclear-tipped missiles instead of a mere pair of pistols.

Spree killer? But I thought you said he was a terrorist?

I gotta say, if the alternative to hive-mind coverage of the latest story is Bushist warmonger propaganda, I’ll gladly stick with the current flavor.

(cross-posted to FreedomDemocrats)

Slap-worthy

Shorter Barack Obama: “Outsourcing?  Racist comments on the radio?  The Virginia Tech massacre?  Same thing!”

If THIS doesn’t get taken as a gaffe and slammed ASAP, I’m reading it as a sign that the world now works in reverse.  Gravity kinda sucked anyway.

ABC News has no dignity whatsoever

*sigh*…less than 24 hours after the rampage at Virginia Tech, and already the statist media is fast at work proposing civilian disarmament.

Let the fucking blood dry first at least, you parasites!