Say Anything Blog

By J.R. Dunn, in The American Thinker:

Things are getting positively biblical in the War on Terror’s African front.
According to Agence France Presse, Ethiopia is about to attack the Somali Islamists single-handed, on their own hook, and with assistance from nobody. On Thursday Prime Minister Meles Zenawi told the Ethiopian parliament that the Islamists represented “a clear threat to Ethiopia” and that the government had “completed the preparations” for full-scale war. The Islamists, who triggered the crisis by declaring Jihad on the Ethiopians, have (of all possible moves) turned to the United States for mediation.

The interesting thing here is the fact that Ethiopia, though one of the remotest and most isolated nations on earth (it was considered a candidate for the mythical lost kingdom of Prester John during the late medieval period), played a serious role in both of the long wars of the 20th century – the battles against fascism and communism.
In 1935 Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in order to fulfill his grandiose vision of a modern Roman empire, along with avenging the 1895 defeat at Adowa, where the Ethiopians annihilated an invading Italian army. With the help of poison gas and carpet bombing, he succeeded in a swift campaign that scattered Ethiopia’s peasant army and forced Emperor Haile Selassie to flee the country.
Nearly forty years later Ethiopia became the first of many nations to fall to communism’s final surge of conquest when in 1974 the government was overthrown by a Marxist clique led by army officer Mengistu Mariam. The emperor, by then a very old man, was murdered in his bed. The regime went on to kill another million and a half Ethiopians over the next decade.
In neither case did the world at large do much of anything in response. In 1935, the League of Nations expelled Italy, but no more. In 1974, the world neither noticed nor cared.
But in both cases, Ethiopia was a harbinger of coming defeat for the ideologies. Mussolini, until 1935, was widely considered a great man, his fascism a kind of magic formula for solving the problems of a modern economy. After Ethiopia, he was an international pariah, left with nowhere to turn but Hitler’s Germany. When war came, Ethiopia was in 1940 the first nation liberated from fascism.
In the 1970s, the takeover of Ethiopia marked the start of the dramatic expansion of communist influence that led in turn to overextension and collapse. The Soviets wasted massive amounts of resources fighting wars and propping up regimes across southern and central Africa, Central America, and Asia. When the West rebounded in the 1980s, the Soviets were caught short, and never did recover before the historical curtain fell in 1989.

Read the whole thing.

It looks like little Ethopia is braver and more courageous than the entire American Left, the Dem Party and the MSM.  They realize the threat of Islamofascism and are willing to fight for their freedom from the threat of it.

Reports of burning mosques, like this one from Reuters remain unconfirmed, and may have been fabricated by Sunni militants.

Also, sensationalized accounts of Sunnis being dragged from prayer and burned alive by rampaging Shiites are unconfirmed, and all appear to come from the same source, police Captain Jamil Hussein, whose entire career appears to be issuing statements about Shia violence against Sunnis. Curt at Flopping Aces has researched Hussein and found a remarkable number of atrocity stories for which he is the source.

Curt also reports that he has received an email from CENTCOM that is very skeptical of the media accounts:

We are checking with the Iraqi Government to verify that Capt. Jamil Hussein is a legitimate Iraqi Government spokesperson. We haven’t heard back yet. Unfortunately, people posing as government officials often do call the media to make statements.

From the Multi-National Force’s Iraqi Freedom website:

BAGHDAD — Contrary to recent media reporting that four mosques were burned in Hurriya, an Iraqi Army patrol investigating the area found only one mosque had been burned in the neighborhood…

...An alleged attack on a fourth mosque remains unconfirmed. The patrol was also unable to confirm media reports that six Sunni civilians were allegedly dragged out of Friday prayers and burned to death. Neither Baghdad police nor Coalition forces have reports of any such incident.

This is all uncomfortably reminiscent of the Reutersgate/fauxtography scandal during the Israeli/Hezbollah war, and once again brings into question just how much Western news agencies have compromised their integrity by depending on unvetted local stringers and sources.

If these incidents were embellished, as they now seem to be, they show a frightening level of sophistication about Western media. The stories all broke toward the end of the weekly news cycle so that even if they are eventually corrected, they will have at least the weekend to sink into the American psyche.

From First Coast News:

Homegrown Terrorists Recruited to Attack America

By Jackelyn Barnard
First Coast News

It’s a video showing a room full of children sharing their dreams. They are not excited about being doctors, lawyers or teachers. Instead, the children shout, “We are the nation of Hezbollah. I shall sacrifice my life for Allah.”

A group of children in training to be a mujahideen, or holy warrior.

Online there are videos of those warriors. One suicide bomber announces he is readying himself to blow up a group of American soldiers.

The video goes on for eight minutes and even shows the explosion. In the background are cheers from those taking the pictures.

The video is just some of the many the First Coast News I-team found on the internet from sites like Youtube and Myspace.

“I think right now we are a ticking time bomb,”
says Tom Hayden, a retired Lt. Col Marine, who is also a counter terrorism expert.

Hayden says some of the videos, while disturbing, are online for a reason.

“Something like myspace, probably the most well known, popular website right now, it’s even being used to transmit messages,” says Hayden.

He says there are messages left on the internet for those recruited to carry out another 9/11 type attack. Hayden says those Jihad soldiers are getting messages in chat rooms and on message boards.

“There is a specific time that a message is coming. Then it’s on there and then it is taken off,” says Hayden.

Read the whole thing.

Maybe we should think twice before patronizing those sites.  YouTube is already censoring conservative content, and this is another nail in the coffin.

Joel Wendland, in politicalaffairs.net(Marxist thought online):

“The right-wing stranglehold on Congress has been broken,” declared Joelle Fishman, chair of the Communist Party USA’s (CPUSA) political action commission, to a meeting of its 81-person National Committee this past weekend.

Fishman noted, “This is a victory being celebrated around the world.”

Fishman delivered her report to the committee as it discussed the results of the election and prepared to move the struggle for democracy, peace, and economic justice forward in the new Congress, and to build the size and influence of the Communist Party.

Overwhelmingly, the committee claimed victory for the US working class, the world, and for democracy as a result of the landslide that swept the Republican Party from power in Congress.

“Our Party gave its heart and soul to the struggle,” declared CPUSA’s Executive Vice-chair Jarvis Tyner.

Sounding a caution that the right is already “working to ease the impact of what happened on November 7th,” Tyner urged the Communist Party’s leadership body to push forward with its progressive agenda.

Fishman argued that the results of the election were a mandate to withdraw from Iraq, pass health care and labor reform legislation, and to control political and corporate corruption.

The key forces that enabled the victory, Fishman stated, were part of what she called the “All Peoples’ Front.” This united collection of forces were led by the labor movement and included at its core the women’s equality movement and the African American and Latino communities.

Other democratic forces such as the peace movement, the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, environmentalists, and other public advocacy groups lent a large hand to the victory as well.

According to the data Fishman provided, labor union members and their families may have comprised as much as 25 percent of the voter turnout and voted about 3-to-1 for union-endorsed candidates, unanimously Democrats.

Read the whole thing.

Birds of a feather…
If anyone has any doubt about what the Dems really represent, this should eliminate it.

Brent Baker, in The American Thinker:

Army Corps of Engineers Chief: Iraq Infrastructure Progress ‘Maligned by News Media’

In his “Grapevine”segment on Monday night, FNC’s Brit Hume picked up on how the Pentagon executive who oversees the Army Corps of Engineers lashed out at the news media, charging that on infrastructure progress made in Iraq “it’s quite a heroic story maligned often by the news media.” Hume relayed how “Dean Popps tells the Washington Times that when the Army Corps of Engineers arrived in Iraq, none of Baghdad’s three sewage treatments worked, few towns had clean water, the 1950’s era electrical system was falling part, and there were no primary health care facilities.” But now, “Popps says three years later the sewage system capacity increases by almost half a million cubic meters a day, power and water are much more widely accessible, and there are six new primary care facilities in the country with 66 more being built.” Yet, “Popps says reporters are often brought to some of the sites where this is happening, but he says positive stories rarely materialize.”

Hume’s item quoted from a Monday Washington Times story, “Rebuilding in Iraq tops 4,000 projects,” by Rowan Scarborough who quoted Popps, the Principal Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisitions, Logistics and Technology. An excerpt:

  Not counting the deteriorating security situation, no facet of the Iraq war has received more negative press than the U.S.- and Iraqi-financed reconstruction. The Washington Times, along with other newspapers, has published a series of articles on setbacks and corruption. But, the Pentagon contends there is another storyline.

  “It’s quite a heroic story maligned often by the news media,” Mr. Popps said during an interview in his E-Ring Pentagon office. A nearby multicolored map designates hundreds of projects started and completed, from Mosul to Basra....

Read the whole thing.

Lots of good stuff happening there; all unreported by our beloved MSM.  Our money is not being wasted.  The MSM lies by omission.  What about the “public’s right to know”?  When it’s about revealing top secret surveillance of terrorists, it’s one thing, but when it comes to what we are accomplishing in Iraq, they choose to be silent.  Why the double standard?

From The American Thinker:

For those who are whining about increasingly expensive college tuition, here’s a clue.

Cluelessness in higher education

It seems that the higher educators are surprised that government tax credits often lead to universities raising tuition by the amount of the tax credit. Welcome to the real world of business and filthy lucre, professors! A guy selling towels at a street fair could have told them as much. From Inside Higher Education:

  A Finance Committee spokeswoman confirmed late Thursday that in one of their last acts while their party still controls Congress, the panel’s Republican leaders would hold a hearing “that looks generally at whether tax breaks for tuition and universities’ efforts to help low- and middle-income families are helping in an era of ever-increasing tuition.”

  That statement was generally consistent, though somewhat vaguer, than what one Washington higher education official was told the subject of the hearing would be: “a look at the relationship between federal tax provisions and tuition increases.” In other words, do federal policies that give taxpayers a deduction or credit for money they spend on college tuition — like, for instance, a proposal by the new Democratic majority in Congress to “make college tuition deductible from taxes, permanently” — lead colleges in turn to raise their tuition?

Read the whole thing.

My favorite comment: “A guy selling towels at a street fair could have told them as much.”

Clarice Feldman, in The American Thinker:

From the most recent report from the Congressional Budget Office:

  1. Corporate income tax revenues almost doubled over the last two years, from $189 billion in 2004 to $354 billion in FY 2006.

  2. Corporate income tax receipts rose by 27.2% from FY 2005 to FY 2006.

  3. Individual income tax revenues increased by 12.6% in 2006 to more than $1 trillion, the highest level in US history.

  4. The budget deficit, as a percent of GDP, fell to 1.9% in FY 2006, the lowest level in 4 years, and well below the average of 2.3% since 1965.”

Go to the link to get the whole report.

Those who believe that taxpayer money is the key to the success of this country should be worshipping the Bush economic policies.

By Mark Trumbull | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Pay rose faster than the cost of living for the first time in years.

American paychecks are rising again at a pace not seen since the 1990s.

The pay increase amounts to 4 percent on average over the past 12 months, and it comes at a very helpful time for millions of households.

For three years, pay increases haven’t kept pace with the rising cost of living. Then came this year’s housing slowdown, which has further squeezed family finances.

Those setbacks, however, are now being offset by rising income. Four percent may not sound like much, but you have to look back to 1997 to find a calendar year with a gain that big.

Equally significant, tamer energy prices mean that the “real” wage gains, after inflation, are above 3 percent for the past 12 months. That, too, hasn’t happened since the 1990s, even though the economy has been expanding over the past five years.

“The striking feature of this expansion has been that ... real wages for the typical worker haven’t risen that much,” says Richard Berner, US economist at the investment bank Morgan Stanley in New York. But with real incomes rising, he says, “you get a picture of an economy that can weather this housing storm.”

The risk of recession hasn’t disappeared, he and other economists say. But with a fairly tight job market and low unemployment, many expect that paychecks will keep rising solidly in 2007.

Sandy Nelson has seen the strength of rising incomes first hand this year.

She runs Mulberry Road, a children’s store near Boston’s trendy Newbury Street, and says traffic has been increasing.

More customers means more income for her - and more money to keep investing in her young business.

“I have more of what people are looking for,” she says, pointing to racks of colorful clothing for toddlers.

In other words, Ms. Nelson is ready for the vital holiday season.

“I’m just hopeful that it will be as good as what they’re saying,” she says, citing retail forecasts that New Englanders will spend more than $700 on gifts this season, on average.

The average private-sector paycheck is now $573 per week, according to Labor Department figures that cover about 8 in 10 workers - those in production or nonsupervisory jobs.
(Graphic) SOURCE: LABOR DEPARTMENT (2006 DATA ARE FOR 12 MONTHS ENDING IN OCTOBER)/RICH CLABAUGH - STAFF

As recently as this past October, weekly pay adjusted for inflation was below where it was when President Bush took office in 2001. In effect, rising prices for things like healthcare, college tuition, and especially for energy ate up all the wage gains of an expanding economy, and then some.

The spike in energy costs was extreme, but the pattern was a common one. Wages generally rise fastest when the economy is strong and inflation is low.

That’s why this moderation in fuel prices is so important.

[...]

Another positive sign: Companies are laying off fewer people this year, says John Challenger, who heads the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas in Chicago.

Read the whole thing.

They choose to tell us this news after the election.  Wonder why?

Maybe they think we will all believe this is due to the Dems taking Congress, even though they haven’t done anything yet.(except to threaten the oil companies)

Insurgents on the streets of Ramadi, the city that has been their stronghold for two years. US troops have now moved in to what was a no-go area, with the support of local Iraqi police, whose ranks have swelled from 35 to 1,300 recruits with the backing of tribal chiefs (Reuters)

Fighting back: the city determined not to become al-Qaeda’s capital

A power struggle is taking place in the Sunni triangle, with tribal leaders and coalition forces aligning against a common enemy

A convoy of five US military humvees, each with radios crackling and a machine-gunner poking through its roof, sped The Times to a large compound on the northeastern edge of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province and most dangerous city in Iraq’s infamous Sunni triangle. The surrounding land had been cleared of trees and brush.A tank stood sentinel beneath the reinforced walls and watchtowers. Inside the heavy steel gates stood a fleet of Iraqi police vehicles bristling with weaponry. It was not your everyday interview.

We halted beside one of the three mini-palaces in the compound, and there on a shaded verandah, dressed in a long black dishdash and white headdress, was the beneficiary of all this protection: Sheikh Abd Sittar Bezea Ftikhan, a Sunni tribal leader on whose unlikely shoulders rest American hopes of reclaiming Ramadi and defeating al-Qaeda in Iraq.

While the world’s attention has been focused on Baghdad’s slide into sectarian warfare, something remarkable has been happening in Ramadi, a city of 400,000 inhabitants that al-Qaeda and its Iraqi allies have controlled since mid-2004 and would like to make the capital of their cherished Islamic caliphate.

A power struggle has erupted: al-Qaeda’s reign of terror is being challenged. Sheikh Sittar and many of his fellow tribal leaders have cast their lot with the once-reviled US military. They are persuading hundreds of their followers to sign up for the previously defunct Iraqi police. American troops are moving into a city that was, until recently, a virtual no-go area. A battle is raging for the allegiance of Ramadi’s battered and terrified citizens and the outcome could have far-reaching consequences.

Ramadi has been the insurgency’s stronghold for the past two years. It is the conduit for weapons and foreign fighters arriving from Syria and Saudi Arabia. To reclaim it would deal a severe blow to the insurgency throughout the Sunni triangle and counter mounting criticism of the war back in America.

Sheikh Sittar and US commanders believe that the tide is turning in their favour. “Most of the people are now convinced that coalition forces are friends, and that the enemy is al-Qaeda,” the 35-year-old Sheikh claimed in his first face-to-face interview with a Western newspaper.

“Al-Qaeda is now on the run,” Colonel Sean MacFarland, commander of the 5,000 US troops in Ramadi, told The Times at his headquarters just outside the city. But the four days The Times spent embedded with US forces in Ramadi last week suggest that al-Qaeda and its Iraqi allies are far from defeated, and that this is a battle with a long way yet to run.

From The Daily Times:

The United States could discredit Al Qaeda in the Muslim world by challenging its violent Islamist ideology and muzzling its leading proponents, an independent report released on Thursday said.

The 364-page study, published by the RAND Corp think tank, described Al Qaeda’s Islamist ideology of violent resistance as a “global revolutionary creed” akin to the Marxism-Leninism philosophy that the West defeated with “a robust political warfare” campaign during the Cold War. “If the ideology is countered and discredited, Al Qaeda and its universe will wither and die,” concluded the two-part study, entitled “Beyond Al Qaeda” and funded by the Air Force. “It follows that a comprehensive US strategy needs to move beyond the boundaries of conventional counterterrorism theory and practice, and address these ideological and political factors,” it said.

The study’s authors recommended the Bush administration expand “decapitation strategies” to include ideologues, holding up as examples decisions by British and Indonesian authorities to either jail or deport hard-line Muslim clerics. “Preventing Al Qaeda’s ideological mentors from continuing to provide theological justification for terrorism could expedite the movement’s ideological deterioration,” they concluded. Much of the research in the RAND study was completed in 2004 but has never been released. The authors updated the data to reflect developments in Iraq, the Middle East, Chechnya, Southeast Asia and Somalia. “The importance of ideology has become even more evident. The passage of time has only reaffirmed and reinforced it,” said lead author Angel Rabasa, RAND senior policy analyst.

A separate study released this week by the US Army’s West Point military academy said the most effective counter arguments could come from Saudi clerics who subscribe to the Salafist theology from which Al Qaeda draws its legitimacy. CIA Director Michael Hayden told a Senate panel on Wednesday: “As a Western nation, we have limited tools to counteract that kind of propaganda. We need to make sure our own message is clear, but we also need to work with our Muslim allies.”

[...]

The RAND study said the ever-expanding library of Islamist tracts could be vulnerable to ideological challenges. It recommended both overt and covert information operations to make clear the gaps between Al Qaeda’s global vision and the local priorities of Islamist guerrilla groups in places such as Southeast Asia, South Asia and North Africa.

Such operations could also exploit ethnic differences by emphasizing Al Qaeda’s Arab core in non-Arab Muslim countries, and highlight the elevated socio-economic status of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, scion of a wealthy Saudi family, and his second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri, an Egyptian physician. Reuters

Read the whole thing.

I am convinced that our way of life is far superior to anything violent Islam has to offer, and disseminating that information is the ultimate solution to terrorism.  Apparently, the RAND corporation has come to the same conclusion.

Patricia Balsom: Diary of my final days

How one cancer patient suffered at the hands of the NHS

Like most people, Janet Street-Porter had read about the problems engulfing the National Health Service. But it wasn’t until her sister was diagnosed with terminal cancer that she came face to face with the stark reality of our debt-ridden hospitals. And it is all spelt out in the diary that Patricia Balsom has kept as she seeks the care she so desperately needs

Wednesday 25 October

It’s eight months since I collapsed and was taken to hospital, where I was diagnosed with lung and brain cancer. Because of my age - 57 - I was told that very little could be done for me, and that I had up to six months left to live. I then discovered that because of the cash crisis in the NHS, treatment is rationed to those who are most likely to recover, and if you suffer from more than one form of cancer, you don’t fall into that category. It’s particularly the case at the primary care trust that I come under - Hillingdon in west London - which has one of the biggest deficits in the country. Thanks to my sister, I was able to go private and received gamma knife treatment on my brain at the Cromwell Hospital in London at a cost of £15,000. It was after this that the NHS offered me a course of radiotherapy on my lungs, which I had in July. In September, an MRI scan showed that the cancer in my brain was in remission, and I was then offered a bone scan by the NHS to see if the lung cancer had spread further. Two weeks ago I had a pain under my ribs, and my oncologist thought I had either cracked a rib or that the cancer might have spread to one of my bones. I had an X-ray on 12 October but had to wait two weeks for the bone scan at Hillingdon Hospital even though I was in pain. I felt sick on the morning of the appointment, when Mick (my husband) took me to the hospital by car. Once inside the foyer I felt faint, but luckily an ambulance man put me in a wheelchair and took me to A&E where I was checked over and put in the observation ward. That evening I was transferred to a ward. I was breathing with the help of oxygen.

Friday 27 October

I was seen by doctors who slightly changed my medication and told me I could go home on Monday, once a specialist nurse had sorted out what I’d need at home - a hospital bed, a commode, and an oxygen machine. I was told that a carer from an agency would come in every day and help us. No one mentioned whether I would ever get a bone scan. No one explained what we could ask the carer to do and how long we could ask them to work for. The four-bedded wards at Hillingdon on my ward are mixed (men and women), and on Saturday night I was woken up twice by the man opposite. He was standing stark naked at the end of his bed masturbating.

Sunday 29 October

An elderly lady was placed in her bed next to a hot radiator to sleep, but as her bed only had one protective side on it, if she’d fallen out she would have burnt herself. When I mentioned this to a nurse they eventually moved her next to a wall. That evening at visiting time, Mick and I noticed that my left leg had became extremely swollen. We told a nurse, who telephoned for a doctor to come and see me at 8.30pm. At 2am I still hadn’t been seen. By now I was crying and extremely distressed. They had already told me I had blood clots on my lung and now I was worried they might be in my leg. A nurse tried to tell me that the doctor might have come while I was asleep. At 2.30am I was so upset that I called Mick at home. Eventually a doctor came to see me while he was visiting another patient, and said he thought the swelling was caused by a blood clot. I was really frightened.

From the London Evening Standard, as reported in the Gulf Times:

LONDON: Almost 200 drug-addicted convicts will share an astonishing compensation payout of almost £700,000 after the government caved in to claims that stopping their use of drugs breached their human rights. The settlement - worth a staggering £3,500 each - provoked fury.

Once legal fees are added to the payout, rubber-stamped at the High Court yesterday, the total bill to the taxpayer is likely to smash through the £1mn barrier.

The Home Office said it had “reluctantly” agreed to pay up to minimise costs to the public. If the case had reached court, the inmates could have been granted even more cash, officials said.

[...]

“Proper, effective and sustained rehabilitation programmes are vital to ensure that prisons have a purpose and can actually help prepare offenders for a life free of crime and the misery of drugs.

“If the government continues to fold in this way the drug situation will only deteriorate. The home secretary must explain to the public why he is prepared to waste so much taxpayers’ money and sacrifice such a worthy cause.”

The compensation scandal centres on 198 prisoners who were receiving treatment to help them kick hard drug addictions.

They had been receiving drugs such as methadone, paid for by the government. But a decision was taken by the prison service that - rather than continue to be given drugs - they should be made to go through “cold turkey” detox instead.

The criminals - funded by legal aid - argued this was unlawful under Labour’s Human Rights Act and should count as “torture” or “degrading treatment”.

Even though all the drugs the offenders were addicted to were illegal, they argued that the prison system had no right to make them stop, or to put them through detox programmes without their consent.

Read the whole thing.

This kind of crap is coming here soon, especially under Dem values.  Notice the bit about “torture”; wonder where they got that?

Noel Sheppard, in The American Thinker:

At roughly 11:00AM Eastern Time Wednesday, the National Ocean & Atmospheric Administration announced that for the second straight month, America saw below-average temperatures. As a result, regardless of how warm July was, it now appears unlikely that 2006 will surpass 1934 as the hottest year on record. Yet, a Google News search suggested that not one news agency bothered to report this announcement. Not one.

For those not in the media who might be interested (emphasis mine throughout):

  For the second consecutive month, temperatures across the continental United States were cooler-than-average, according to scientists at the NOAA National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. Drought conditions improved in some areas, but large parts of the nation remained in moderate to extreme drought. October ranked as the 12th wettest October when compared with historical precipitation records for the month.

The announcement continued:

  The October 2006 temperature for the contiguous United States (based on preliminary data) was 0.9 degrees F (0.5 degrees C) below the 20th century average of 54.8 degrees F (12.7 degrees C). After a record warm January through August period, this was the second consecutive month of below average temperatures.

  The combination of a cooler-than-average September and October dropped the year-to-date national temperature from record warmest to third warmest for the January through October 2006 period. The record warmest January through October occurred in 1934.

Hmmm. So, let me get this straight. The globe supposedly has been warming for decades as a result of man-made greenhouse gases. Yet, the warmest year on record is still 72 years ago. That doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, does it?

[...]

Alas, this shouldn’t surprise us, for it has always seemed obvious that the same people that buy into global warming are the ones that also believe the economy is just as bad today as during the Great Depression. What is it about radical liberalism that destroys a person’s math and science skills?

The NOAA report is here.

More “Y2K” global warmingist thinking:  When the facts don’t agree with your hypothesis, just ignore them and keep preaching your scareology.

Michael Rule, in NewsBusters:

On Tuesday’s “Imus in the Morning,” Newsweek editor Jon Meacham opined that George H.W. Bush, the 41st president, had been vindicated by history. He suggested that Newsweek runs stories based on partisan preferences, i.e. we helped defeat President Bush in 1992, but in hindsight, George H.W. Bush was right. Meacham also revealed that journalists often make hasty judgements and treat those judgements as “infallible.” In the same segment, Meacham admitted that journalists are wrong. Meacham offers as an example the coverage of President Bush 41 during the 1992 campaign and before:

  “What’s important is journalistically, one of the mistakes we make is we kick people in the shins and we tend to make instant judgements and act as though our judgment is infallible and absolute. It’s not. See ‘wimp factor,’ see the mistakes and the misperceptions of the first Bush at the time when everybody was saying he was out of touch and was no good. Now we see with hindsight that he’d done pretty well.”

[...]

  “I think that everything he did that got him beaten in 1992, that only got him 37% of the vote, only slightly more than you or I would have gotten that year, has been proven in the light of history to have been the right thing to do.”

In January 1992, Newsweek contributor Howard Fineman suggested that Bush 41 ought to run on a platform of higher taxes and of asking the American people to sacrifice. In the August 24, 1992 issue Fineman portrayed Bush as out of touch with the American public on domestic issues. A look at the Bush 41record suggests he was out of touch with conservative voters. Bush 41 raised taxes and the economy soured. Bush 41 refused to topple Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War, and let the problem fester for future administrations. And Bush 41 gave David Souter a seat on the Supreme Court, and he has turned out to be one of the most liberal justices. So by whose historic standards is Bush 41 vindicated? Apparently the standards of liberals.

Bush 41 was attacked by Newsweek in 1992 not because he was a conservative. He was attacked to elect Bill Clinton. An objective look at the Bush record show’s the Newsweek attacks to be politically motivated.

Read the whole thing.

Well, Duh!  After 14 years of this kind of crap, he admits one of his many mistakes.
Justice delayed is justice denied.

By Jerry Kronenberg

Jesus doll’s not for Tots, charity says

Toys for Tots is taking the Christ doll out of Christmas.
    The charity has rejected a California toymaker’s gift of 4,000 talking Jesus dolls, arguing that the 12-inch action figures would offend non-Christian recipients.
    The decision has local pro-Christmas activists fuming.
  “This is just more proof that there’s a war on Christmas and Christianity in this country,” said Robert Marley of the Coalition to Save Christmas in Massachusetts.
  Toys for Tots, which is run by the Marine Corps Reserves, already bans toy guns and other gifts it believes promote violence.

  But the group has also decided to take a pass on Jesus dolls from Beverly Hills Teddy Bear Co.
  “We can’t take a chance on sending a talking Jesus doll to a Jewish family or a Muslim family,” said Bill Grein of Toys for Tots, which gives poor kids of all faiths gifts for Christmas and other winter holidays.
  The dolls - which normally cost $20 - come complete with beards, long hair and hand-sewn cloth robes and sandals. They recite New Testament passages such as, “No one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.”
  The decision doesn’t directly affect the Bay State, as each Toys for Tots chapter collects its own gifts.
  But Marine Sgt. Paul McCawley, who heads the charity in western Massachusetts, said his chapter would have “regretfully declined the offer” had it occurred here.
  Why? “Basically, political correctness,” McCawley said. “We can’t go out and give a Muslim child a Jesus doll. It’d be like giving a boy a makeup kit.”
    Toys for Tots’ move drew mixed local reactions yesterday.
  Bennie Becker of the Jewish War Veterans’ Braintree Post called the decision “a good thing.”
  An Air Force veteran who once had an offer to serve in Saudi Arabia withdrawn because he’s Jewish, Becker said he opposes mixing religion with the military.
  But Bilal Kaleem of the Muslim American Society’s Boston chapter said he had no objection to giving Jesus dolls to Christian kids. “There are many Christian children in need,” he said.

Every time they get away with this kind of discrimination, the anti-Christian lefties get bolder.  PC must go!