Say Anything Blog

In Indonesia:

These locals have long viewed the dragons as a reincarnation of fellow kinsfolk, to be treated with reverence. But now, villagers say, the once-friendly dragons have turned into vicious man-eaters. And they blame policies drafted by American-funded environmentalists for this frightening turn of events.
“When I was growing up, I felt the dragons were my family,” says 55-year-old Hajji Faisal. “But today the dragons are angry with us, and see us as enemies.” The reason, he and many other villagers believe, is that environmentalists, in the name of preserving nature, have destroyed Komodo’s age-old symbiosis between dragon and man.
...
“For us, giving food to the dragons is an obligation, our sacred duty,” says Hajji Adam, headman of the park’s biggest village, Kampung Komodo.
Indonesia invited the Nature Conservancy, a Virginia-based environment protection group, to help manage the park in 1995. An Indonesian subsidiary of the group, called Putri Naga Komodo, gained a tourism concession for the park in 2005 and is investing in the conservation effort some $10 million of its own money and matching financing from international donors.
With this funding and advice, park authorities put an end to villagers’ traditional deer hunting, enforcing a prohibition that had been widely disregarded. They declared canines an alien species, and outlawed the villagers’ dogs, which used to keep dragons away from homes. Park authorities banned the goat sacrifices, previously staged on Komodo for the benefit of picture-snapping tourists.

Not surprisingly, this led to some rather tragic consequences, the dragons going for the next easiest food source…

A year ago, a 9-year-old named Mansur was one such victim. The boy went to answer the call of nature behind a bush near his home in Kampung Komodo. In broad daylight, as terrified relatives looked on, a dragon lunged from his hideout, took a bite of the boy’s stomach and chest, and started crushing his skull.
...
A few months later, Jamain’s neighbor Mustaming Kiswanto, a 38-year-old who makes a living selling dragon woodcarvings to tourists, and whose son had been bitten by a dragon, was attacked by another giant lizard after falling asleep. In June, five European divers, stranded in an isolated part of the park, said they successfully fended off an aggressive dragon by throwing their weight belts at it.
To the villagers in Komodo, the recent incidents provide clear evidence of an ominous change in reptile behavior. “I don’t blame the dragons for my boy’s death. I blame those who forbade us from following custom and feeding them,” says Jamain. “If it weren’t for them, my boy would still be alive.”

A centuries old truce, for lack of a better word, has kept the lizards mostly docile. And when they got out of line, the villagers dogs would help protect them. Without the incentive of free easy food, and the disincentive of fighting off protective dogs, the dragon has turned to vulnerable humans as an easy food source. Small children, sleeping people, anything that looks like easy prey is fair game. After all, the Komono Dragons haven’t had to get their own food for centuries. It’s not likely they’d go back to trying to hunt. Well, at least we know the liberals are sorry for their actions…

The boy “shouldn’t have crouched like a prey species in a place where dragons live,” says Marcus Matthews-Sawyer, tourism, marketing and communications director at Putri Naga Komodo. “You’ve got to be very careful about extrapolating and drawing any conclusions.”

Oh.

Despite such disbelief in the Komodo villagers’ theories, executives at the Nature Conservancy’s headquarters in the U.S. pledge to reach out and tackle local fears. “Any concern expressed by the villagers will be taken seriously and we will address it if we can,” says Chief Communications Officer James R. Petterson. “The Komodo effort is a work in progress.”

No measures have been taken as of yet, and it’s doubtful any will. Because the conservancy doesn’t care about the people, just this fantasy Utopia for the animals. For liberals, it’s never about the consequences of the action, just the action itself and how it makes them feel. What’s a dead child here and there when you’re busy saving the Earth. As the soviets used to say, you have to break a couple of eggs to make an omelet.

It’s funny that, even though Republicans are the “Racist ones”, it’s always liberal ideas that rack up the piles of little colored bodies.

Crossposted

Yahoo News reports:

On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, used his weekly radio address to make some of his most pointed attacks yet on Barack Obama’s abortion record, ending a summerlong d�tente on a hot-button culture war issue that still deeply divides many voters.
...
Many political experts do not agree with McCain’s characterization of Obama’s views as extreme. According to polls conducted this summer, nearly two thirds of likely voters continue, like Obama, to support Roe, while almost 40 percent believe, like McCain, that abortion should be illegal in most or all cases.

Every “political expert” who disagrees with McCain is wrong. As Carville noted in his last book, something like 96% of Americans are against Partial Birth Abortion. Barack Obama is not. That would indeed make him an extremist. Michelle sent out a letter criticizing the ban as unconstitutional. Hardly a “normal” view.

We also have Barack Obama’s ridiculous opposition to the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. This act was so uncontroversial that 100% of liberals in the Senate, 100% of pro-choicers voted for it, 98-0, the 2 missing later also supporting it. Barack Obama was against it, claiming that it put additional hurdles in front of a mother who wanted an abortion.

How are these views not extreme? Many Americans do indeed support abortion. But apparently Barack Obama is the only person in America who supports partial birth abortion and letting infants die without medical care.

Thank God it was clarified that he wasn’t an extremist. Whew.

From ABC:

First, Gardasil’s long-term effectiveness is unclear. Because cervical cancer takes years to develop, critics say the current information is insufficient to determine whether Gardasil works.
“The overall effect of the vaccines on cervical cancer remains unknown,” Dr. Carolyn J. Haug, the Journal of Norwegian Medical Association’s editor, wrote in the New England Journal editorial. “The real impact of HPV vaccination on cervical cancer will not be observable for decades.”
...
“Most of the information people have right now leads them to believe that if they’re vaccinated with Gardasil, they’re protected for life, and that’s just not true,” said Dr. Diane Harper of Dartmouth College.
There is also the issue of side effects. FDA records reveal that, since Gardasil’s approval, nearly 9,000 girls had “bad health events” after receiving their shots. These included 78 reported outbreaks of genital warts, 18 deaths and six cases of Guillain Barre Syndrome, which can result in paralysis. It is unknown whether there are unseen side effects, like decreasing the body’s ability to fight off other strains of the HPV virus.

To compare this against an unsafe drug…Fen Phen had less than 200 negative side effects, and 1 death, when it was pulled from the market. Guardasil has about 4500% more health problems related and 1700% more deaths than the “unsafe” Fen Phen. Far from being considered a health risk, it is potentially going to be forced on young girls by several different states. By any objective standard of risk, this drug qualifies. The lead toy, and date rape drug toy scandals of last Christmas claimed no lives, and injured few, yet they held the headlines for days. This drug has killed almost 20 and has maimed thousands, and yet may be forced upon unwilling teens?

Where the hell is the FDA?

Crossposted at LFTL

In not firing consistantly missing employees:

Via ABC:

The federal government has 2.6 million civilian workers, making it the nation’s largest employer. But, it turns out a growing number of these workers are not working.
“People have just flat not shown up for work,” said Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. “My question is: If people aren’t showing up for work, why are they still employed by the federal government?”
Coburn commissioned the report “Missing in Action: AWOL in the Federal Government,” which tracked the number of absent workers without leave, AWOL workers, across 18 government agencies from 2001 to 2007.
It found that federal workers missed nearly 20 million hours of work in the last six years, not including vacation time or sick leave. On average, 2.8 million hours of work are lost per year because of AWOL absences.
The numbers show the formation of a growing trend: Forty-five percent more workers are absent without leave throughout different government agencies than in 2001.

A massive government agency not noticing if some of it’s employees are absent? Say it aint so!

How could this happen?!? Let’s hear the explaination:

“To me it’s a scathing indictment of the Bush administration, their total incompetence and mismanagement and disdain for government and running government,” said Mark Roth, general counsel of the American Federation of Government Employees/AFL-CIO. “Apparently, they are so asleep at the wheel that they’re letting people go for months without any consequences.”

The head of these people’s union passing the buck? Astonishing!

Realistically though, it’s assinine to expect any one man to actively monitor 2.6 million people. It can’t be done. Even if that person had no other responsibilities, it would be impossible to keep track of that many people with any real accuracy. Even expecting 535 people (Congress) to do it would be a daunting task. And since these people live lives and have other responsibilities, expecting the federal government to take care of problems that these agencies won’t is unrealistic. If the agencies themselves aren’t cracking down, and they have full legal power, what is any Congress or President to do? If these problems were being widely reported…they would be taken care of now wouldn’t they?

The simple problem here is that the bigger any agency gets, the harder it becomes to micromanage. It’s easy to look at one office with 10 people and determine waste or laziness. When that becomes 500 offices with 50,000 people that becomes harder still. If the company is not reporting the problems they know about to the higher ups, it becomes impossible to determine the problems. Ridiculously, the article quotes the biggest offender, the VA, as to what the solution is:

Also, the State Department and independent agencies don’t monitor the number of AWOL workers, which could increase the number of lost work hours considerably, according to the report.
The Department of Veterans Affairs, the worst violator according to the report, has asked for more employees.

Of course the solution is to replace the people who don’t work with people who do. Not simply to add more workers. Unfortunately, putting the people at fault in charge of the solution is more than a little like putting the Fox in charge of the Henhouse.

Of course this is nonsense. Would a parent accept “Well if my allowance was higher, the grass would get mowed better” as an excuse? Of course not. They’d demand the lawn was done or no allowance would be tendered. If you took your car to a mechanic and paid 100 bucks for a new tire, then found the tred worn bare…would you pay more money for a different tire? Of course not. You’d demand a new tire since you paid for a new tire. We should hold these agencies accountable like we would any business.

Crossposted at Looking at the Left from the Left

Via Michelle Malkin.

DENVER, Aug. 20 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Colorado Right to Life and American Right to Life will stand with black leaders from around the country at their Power in the Park rally and press conference on August 25, 2008, 8:30 am at Martin Luther King Park, one block from the largest Planned Parenthood abortuary in the nation.
The killing center, dubbed Auschwitz, by local opponents of the racist organization, is situated in north Denver’s minority neighborhood - consistent with the patterns of targeting minorities noted by Blackgenocide.org.
...
Black leaders, including Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King have recently been asking why black Americans are being targeted by Planned Parenthood for abortions and demanding that the killing stop.
“The number one taker of black life is abortion, and it’s time people woke up to that fact. The location of this latest Planned Parenthood facility in yet another minority neighborhood is a part of the continuing fulfillment of the racist, eugenicist dream of their founder, Margaret Sanger, but it is a travesty of the American dream. Planned Parenthood’s agenda discards the principle that we are all created equal, which is the basis of liberty for all Americans.” - Alan Keyes

The fact that the black community is traditionally Democrat continues to puzzle me, especially when the major pillar of the Democrat party is Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood was founded on getting rid of all those pesky blacks and other people of color. By embracing Sanger’s intellectual child, the Democrats are embracing institutionalized racism. Even today, the organization still targets blacks, as evidenced by the recent racist call controversy that has given Planned Parenthood so much grief. I don’t know what it’ll take to convince blacks to abandon the party that still supports eugenics (Planned Parenthood), the KKK (Robert Byrd), genocide (The UN and refusing to help Rwanda) and supports criminals over innocent citizens. But we’ll all be better off when it finally happens.

From the Associated Press:

VENTURA, Calif. (AP) — The family of a gay teenager who was fatally shot in class blames the school district for allowing their son to wear makeup and feminine clothing to school — factors the family claims led to the death.
The parents and brother of 15-year-old Larry King of Oxnard filed a personal injury claim against the Hueneme school district seeking unspecified damages for not enforcing the dress code.

Chances are if the school had enforced the dress code…they would’ve been sued just like the federal government, the prisons, the army, City Halls, and even Fema.

Even if you do what they want, you can get sued by transsexuals.

It’s very much a damned if you do, damned if you don’t type of thing. If you prevent them from doing what they want, you’re discriminating against them. If they get hurt…well, why didn’t you stop them? It’s ridiculous.

Crossposted at Looking At the Left From the Left

In who he chooses as his running mate.

BOSTON (WBZ) ― Barack Obama has yet to name a vice presidential nominee and some are wondering if he might turn to Massachusetts to round out the ticket.

John Kerry for vice president?

Don’t dismiss the notion just yet.

Some political insiders are telling WBZ it could happen.

The article goes on to ask the very first question that popped into my head:

So why would Obama reach out to Kerry as his choice?

Even Heller admits its out there:

“If you’re laughing off the idea of Kerry back on the national ticket again, I don’t blame you. While he came close four years ago, his campaign was widely derided as, to put it politely, clumsy.

Obama is already being hammered as an out of touch elitist who changes his position every 15 seconds by his Republican opponents. So yeah, lets invite Mr. Flip Flop on the ticket. That’s absolutely brilliant. Obama would be done before the end of the week. Hillary would use that to argue that Barack can’t win and that she should be the nominee. And the DNC may just buy it.

While the article goes on to list all the strengths that Kerry would bring…it neglects that Kerry LOST on all of those areas. If Obama is looking to bolster his military credentials, Kerry is worst person he could go to. It wasn’t that long ago that right wing blogs were slamming Kerry for his “get stuck in Iraq comments”. Most Democratic pundits believe the Swift Boat Vets killed Kerry the first time around. What? They won’t go after Obama too? Better to have no record than a glaring weakness. More Americans believe that McCain is better on foreign issues that Obama. Adding the dude who lost to Bush, air force memos and “dissertion” rumors and all. Will the Winter Soldier really help Obama beat a POW on war issues? Hardly.

Taking in Kerry would confirm with the public everything the Republicans have been saying, he’s an out of touch, elitist, arrogant. And it would cost Obama an election that he’s already struggling in. Obama may be superman, but John Kerry is political Kryptonite.

h/t Drudge

CrossPosted at Looking at the Left from the Left

Erm…Make that Capitalism….

Cigarette makers used menthol to lure young

WASHINGTON - Tobacco companies deliberately changed the menthol levels in cigarettes depending upon who they were marketing them to — lower levels for young smokers who preferred the milder brands and higher levels to “lock in lifelong adult smokers,” researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health found.
The researchers reviewed industry documents dating back decades on product development and on strategic plans for menthol products.
They said that the tobacco companies researched how controlling menthol levels could increase sales among specific groups. Milder brands with lower menthol levels appealed to younger smokers. The milder products were then marketed to young consumers.

The main line people are using is a variation of the above “Cigarette Companies Attract Young Smokers with Menthol.”
Though USA Today takes it one step further with their headline that Cigarette Makers use Menthol to Addict Teens!

The dishonest implication is that the evil cigarette companies are going after CHILDREN (gasp) with their nefarious menthol. But buried in the middle of a few of the articles is the following info:

In 1987, R.J. Reynolds marketed low-level menthol varieties to persuade consumers to switch from regular brands and to recruit new, young smokers, noting: “First-time smoker reaction is generally negative. ... Initial negatives can be alleviated with a low level of menthol.”
Philip-Morris USA used a two-prong strategy to increase Marlboro’s share in the menthol market by targeting young adults and older smokers, the researchers concluded. Marlboro Milds were introduced nationally in 2000 and became popular among young smokers. The entry of that product coincided with an increase in the menthol level of the regular Marlboro Menthol brand intended for older smokers. The milds were responsible for almost 80 percent of the company’s menthol-category growth that year.

So, they’re targeting young…ADULTS? The horror!

In the real world, this is what’s known as capitalism. The cigarette companies got that their product was too harsh for most people and used menthol to soften the effects. They figured out what their clients wanted and gave it to them. As even the Harvard researchers noted, they were going after OTHER companies clients, and were trying to negate the initial displeasure by new smokers (this means people were trying their cigarettes and not enjoying them). More people enjoyed the product…and they made money as a result! How….how….eeeeeevil…..

This is no different than dozen of other companies have done, from diet coke, to vietamin water. This is simply the market. Lots of companies produce unhealthy (to various degrees) products, and aren’t the subject of witch hunts.

So how did all these news corps get the idea that cigarette companies were going after babies when they were targeting adults?

Greg Connolly, one of the report’s co-authors, said the tobacco industry was careful not to talk about adolescents in the documents he reviewed, mostly from the ‘80s and ‘90s.
“They talk about young smokers. For me, that’s just a euphemism for going after adolescent, first-time smokers,” Connolly said.

Oh. Well, that just goes to show how if you have an agenda going in that you’ll find what you want to find…even if the evidence doesn’t support it.

Cross Posted at Home of the Insane Reindeer

No racial component here folks!

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — If Barack Obama’s historic campaign to become the first black president boosts black turnout as drastically as he predicts, he could crack decades of Republican dominance across the South.
That’s a big “if.”
Still, an Associated Press analysis of U.S. Census and voting data from the past four presidential elections shows a potentially dramatic impact should Obama fulfill his pledge to elevate black participation by 30%.
That would add nearly 1.8 million votes in 11 Southern states, the analysis shows, enough to tip the balance in several that have been Republican strongholds.

And why would he expect such gains? And why only if he’s president?

The only reasonable explaination is that he expects black people to show up in droves never before seen…because he’s black. Gotta support a brother don’tcha know?

It’s nice to see the candidate of hope and change is still beholden to identity politics.

Crossposted

Cross Posted at Looking at the Left from the Left

Nancy Pelosi seemingly can’t decideon a consistant position about oil. Her bouncing around on the issue is almost a political bipolar disorder.

Last Tuesday she hammered Bush on the strategic oil reserve:

Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced to Democratic leaders Tuesday night that she has written a letter to President Bush, urging him to release a “small” amount of oil from the government stockpile to increase supply and decrease prices, a leadership aide said.
In the letter, Pelosi said the price of a barrel of oil has risen nearly five-fold during Bush’s tenure and called the effects “devastating.”
...
Pelosi’s letter noted that a release at the time of the start of the first Gulf War in 1991 brought prices down $8 a barrel. When President Clinton ordered a swap in 2000 to lower prices, she wrote, prices dropped 34 percent, to a little more than $20 a barrel.
The most recent drawdown, after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, lowered prices by about $5 a barrel, she said.

So we’d be looking at anywhere between a 5 and 10 dollar a barrel decrease, or a 3.7-7.4% decrease in crude oil. Congress has also previously blocked efforts to add oil to the reserve. The 70,000 barrels a day put into the reserve constitute .0028% of our 25 million barrels a day oil consumption.

From Michelle Malkin:

Reader Kevin B. e-mails what McClellan said in his press briefing on March 22, 2004 when asked about Richard Clarke’s book blasting the Bush Administration for 9/11 and CIA intelligence failures:

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, why, all of a sudden, if he (Richard Clarke) had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner? This is one-and-a-half years after he left the administration. And now, all of a sudden, he’s raising these grave concerns that he claims he had. And I think you have to look at some of the facts. One, he is bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign. He has written a book and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book.

Pot. Kettle.

More like at the time, McClellan was appalled by such disgusting backstabbing and called it what it was. Once he bowed out he realized he could do the same thing and get rich and loved for it.

So, we have a choice to make:
Either Scott McClellan is a liar, making this up for his 15 minutes in the spotlight to become a liberal hero, or he was a coward who had no courage to come forward and actually criticized others who did so.

With the massive paycheck, it seems pretty cut and dry to me.

And why in the hell are liberals celebrating this fool who they believe kept his mouth shut until it was too late to do anything about it?

CrossPosted at Home of the Insane Reindeer

Recently on Say Anything, Anna posted the following story about a protest to global warming. The ridiculous call was raised that a vast majority of the signatories were Medical Doctors.

The problem with this logic: none of the signatories professions or degrees were listed.

On the Savage Nation (God knows why I still flip in, even on occasion) tonight, Michael Savage opined that “at least in Vietnam, we got to see the last helicopters leaving Saigon. Thank God. When are we going to see the last helicopters leave Baghdad? Five years and we still haven’t finished this mess? When will the helicopters leave?”

It’s amazing to me that any “self professed intellectual” would yearn for a “Saigon moment” in Iraq. Our flight from Vietnam, with South Vietnamese trying to cling to our helicopters is one of the most shameful moments in American history, and the images of that day are heartbreaking. Following our departure, millions were killed, and hundreds of thousands died trying to flee the Communist dictatorships set up in our absense. Our “defeat” in Vietnam has been used by every force that we have faced since as a reason to keep killing our troops even after we have crippled their military (hoping for a civilian retreat).

That bears repeating: Our retreat from Vietnam has directly led to every dead soldier in Iraq today.

The same thing will be true if we flee Iraq. We’ll send American troops back in under the UN (that is unarmed) after real genocide and civil war take place in the middle east. And the next time we have to use the military, it’ll just give the next force we fight a reason to keep killing our troops long after defeat is certain.

Absolutely shameful. What a douche.

Crossposted from Home of the Insane Reindeer

ABC News played a story about who the troops supported this afternoon. Overwhelmingly, those soldiers interviewed supported Barack Obama, with a handful of Clinton supporters. One sole McCain supporter was shown, with the lackluster “Well, the war has paid my bills so far…why not more?” as his answer to why he supported McCain. This is the average makeup of the US military?

Is this why, by CNN’s report (hardly a conservative bastion) voted that military personelle voted nearly 3-2 for Bush over Kerry? 57%-41% a 16% lead? NPR reports that it could swing either way in 2008. IF (and even most liberals admit this is a huge if) the Democrats garner the military vote, it will be by the barest of percentages, and will be more dependant on veterans than active military. The military vote has traditionally always gone Republican. And there’s no shortage of soldiers who are not fond of Democrats, as evidenced by pictures like this.

So then, what are we to make of this nonsense report except that ABC is trying to paint a picture devoid of reality? And what of the lone soldier for McCain who sees war as a pay check? That’s the average Republican soldier? What a vicious slander. Once more the liberal media tries to pretend the military is overwhelmingly Democrat (who just want out of Iraq), while a few knuckle dragging war lovers on the Republican side cheer on the carnage.

But accusing Republicans of liking war or being warmongers is nothing new amongst leftists. Why should we expect anything different around election time?

In years past, the “blood libel” was a dispicible charge, usually against the Jews, that they were a dangerous people who engaged in human sacrifice. Today, the blood libel has reared it’s ugly head, in secular criticism of Christianity. The drum beat of anti-Christian nonsense, labeling Christians as intolerant, dangerous, violent bigots…who we are to be constantly wary of, or else…

Law and Order tonight was a full display of the New Blood Libel. It dreamed up an imaginary Church of jihad loving Christians, who were going to take up “war against the hypocrites”. A young boy is convinced to murder his mother for having an affair, with a Muslim no less, by his preacher. And an entire congregation calls him “God’s warrior”. As the police take the pastor away, you see perhaps a hundred children surrounding the police cars, threatening the cops with charges of “this is war”.

In the video they show, he asks the children, “What do we say to the Muslims who would face us? What do we say to the blasphemers who ruin God’s house?” Again the children chant “this is war!”

What point does this have other than to mock Christianity once more? The entire episode is a slander against good faithful men and women, by forcefully claiming that, not only this church, but the Christian men and women on the jury, sympathize with the pastor’s views, and agree with his inflammatory rhetoric.

The purpose of the blood libel was to convince the masses that a certain group of people were dangerous, couldn’t be trusted, and had to be removed, one way or another, from society. We see nothing less than that today in the relentless assault against Christianity.

Shameful.