Liz Cheney at Center for Security Policy

She gave the keynote address, and it's a good one:

And see "Americans Standing With Israel."

Exit Musing: Palin/Cheney 2012?

Bethany Dempsey Body Painting (Probably NSFW)

Americans are fired up with Team USA's advance to Saturday's game against Ghana.

And since it's Friday, let's celebrate with some babe blogging. Here's Bethany Dempsey, wife of U.S. soccer player Clint Dempsey, at Sports Illustrated:

PREVIOUSLY: "Sarah Brandner Body Painting (Probably NSFW)."

Greenpeace Fights for Last Blue Fin Tuna

I never trust the estimates of impending fish population collapse, considering how little respect for truth environmentalists so eminently demonstrate. Still, this article's pretty interesting. At NYT, "Tuna's End":

THERE ARE TWO reasons that a mere fish should have inspired such a high-strung confrontation reminiscent of Greenpeace’s early days as a defender of whales. The first stems from fish enthusiasts who have for many years recognized the particular qualities of bluefin tuna — qualities that were they land-based creatures would establish them indisputably as “wildlife” and not just another “seafood” we eat without remorse. Not only is the bluefin’s dense, distinctly beefy musculature supremely appropriate for traversing the ocean’s breadth, but the animal also has attributes that make its evolutionary appearance seem almost deus ex machina, or rather machina ex deo — a machine from God. How else could a fish develop a sextantlike “pineal window” in the top of its head that scientists say enables it to navigate over thousands of miles? How else could a fish develop a propulsion system whereby a whip-thin crescent tail vibrates at fantastic speeds, shooting the bluefin forward at speeds that can reach 40 miles an hour? And how else would a fish appear within a mostly coldblooded phylum that can use its metabolic heat to raise its body temperature far above that of the surrounding water, allowing it to traverse the frigid seas of the subarctic?

And, well, while we're on the subject of fishing ... See, "Expired Fishing License Disqualifies $1 Million Big Rock Tournament Winners."

Karen Alloy's Third Grade Assignment

Different look this time around:

General 'Betray Us'

The main entry is at Weasel Zippers, "MoveOn Scrubs “General Betray Us” Page From Website . . . Update: Flashback to 2007, Obama Skipped Senate Vote to Condemn MoveOn . . . Update 2: Rationale Page Also Flushed ..."

It's something alright, for these ads to be flushed down the memory hole. Also interesting is to watch how the useful stooges, MoveOn's Eli Pariser and Daily Kos founder Markos Moultisas, not only defend the ad, but demonize General Petraeus as a liar and the U.S. mission in Iraq as a lost cause. Couldn't have been more wrong, and of course these are the same creeps who want a cut-and-run from Afghanistan. This is your Democratic Party establishment. And amazing how President Obama, who was the biggest anti-war candidate throughout 2007, has now placed Petraeus in charge after leading the opportunistic attacks on Iraq earlier. A strange world, indeed:

LAPD Prepares for Unrest on Michael Jackson Anniversary

At LAT, "Michael Jackson's death: Police to monitor fan activity on one-year anniversary."

Avigdor Lieberman's Two-State Solution

At Jerusalem Post, "My Blueprint for a Resolution":

Large-scale demonstrations against Israel regularly appear in Arab cities all over the country, where it is not infrequent to hear the cries of “Death to the Jews” and where pictures of terrorist leaders from Hamas and Hizbullah are prominently displayed. These phenomena are a clear indication that a conflict between two peoples is the cause of friction.

The solution lies not in appeasing the maximalist territorial demands of the Palestinians, but in truly creating “two states for two peoples.”

The current demands from some in the international community are to create a homogeneous pure Palestinian state and a binational state in Israel. This becomes the one-and-a-half to half state solution. For lasting peace and security we need to create true political division between Arabs and Jews, with each enjoying self-determination.

Therefore, for a lasting and fair solution, there needs to be an exchange of populated territories to create two largely homogeneous states, one Jewish Israeli and the other Arab Palestinian. Of course, this is not to preclude that minorities will remain in either state where they will receive full civil rights.

There will be no so-called Palestinian right of return.

Just as the Jewish refugees from Arab lands found a solution in Israel, so too Palestinian refugees will only be incorporated into a Palestinian state. This state needs to be demilitarized and Israel will need to retain a presence on its borders to ensure no smuggling of arms. In my opinion, these need to be our red lines.

We have seen that history is moving away from attempts to accommodate competing national aspirations in a single state. The former Yugoslavia was broken up into many separate states. Czechoslovakia was split into two, and even in Belgium there are strong voices who wish to see that nation broken into separate Walloon and Flemish territories. The precedent of creating new states based on ethnic, national and even religious boundaries has been established in the international community and is becoming the trend.

With all the difficulties involved, this is the only solution that ensures long-term stability in the region.

Sounds good to me.

See also, "Lieberman Proposes Peace 'Blueprint'."

Governor Jan Brewer Letter to President Barack Obama on Border Security

I've posted this viddy before, but considering the ongoing debate, it's even more hilarious.

Check KOLD News 13 Phoenix, "Brewer to Obama: Let's See Specifics on Border Plan":

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer is telling President Barack Obama that she's anxious for details on how his administration's plans to tighten border security will apply to
Arizona.

Brewer tells Obama in a letter released Thursday that she'd like specifics on National Guard deployments and other steps to be taken in Arizona before a planned Monday visit to Phoenix by Obama administration officials to discuss his plans.

The meeting is an outgrowth of Brewer's June 3 visit to the White House where she and Obama discussed border security and immigration.

The Republican governor also renews her invitation to have the Democratic president visit the U.S.-Mexico border to get a firsthand look at conditions. And she says lunch would be on her.

The letter's at the link above, and from the Governor's office, "Letter from Governor Janice K. Brewer to President Barack Obama."

Cars and Freedom: Yeah, That's American!

Love it!

Apologies if this is down on Britain, LOL!

Saw something on this earlier, for the World Cup Go USA, I guess.

Via Blazing Cat Fur:

Thomas Ricks on the Tradition of Firing Generals Who Get Out of Line

At NYT, "Lose a General, Win a War." Not enough heads roll at the top level of the military, apparently:

Back in World War II, the Army had no qualms about letting officers go; at least 16 of the 155 generals who commanded divisions in combat during the war were relieved while in combat. George Marshall, the nation’s top general, felt that a willingness to fire subordinates was a requirement of leadership. He once described Gen. Hap Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, as a fine man, but one who “didn’t have the nerve to get rid of men not worth a damn.”

Marshall had plenty of nerve: in 1940 and ’41, as war loomed, he forced into retirement several hundred officers he deemed too old and slow to be effective. When the commandant at Leavenworth, Brig. Gen. Charles Bundel, told him that updating the complete set of Army training manuals would take 18 months, Marshall offered him three months, and then four months, to do the job. It can’t be done, Bundel twice responded.

“You be very careful about that,” Marshall told him in a telephone conversation.

“No, it can’t be done,” Bundel repeated.

“I’m sorry, then you are relieved,” Marshall said.

What's Up With David Weigel? Now We Know

About a year ago, I wrote a post called "What's Up With David Weigel?" That was when Weigel was writing at the Washington Independent, a far-left online newspaper.

It was a speculative post, but as I conclude about Weigel, "Folks need to be careful about their allegiances."

So now it turns out that Weigel's gotten himself into a bit of a jam. He's a contributor to the left wing press collective, "JournoList" (founded by hard-lefty Ezra Klein), and some his own intemperate e-mails published there have been made public. The problem's not so much what he wrote, but where. As Will Collier points out:

Weigel's personality aside, the fact that he's a contributing member of Klein's liberal propaganda-coordination clique should have been disclosed from the very beginning of Weigel's "reporting" on conservatives. It says nothing good about either Weigel or his bosses at the WaPo that none of the above thought Weigel's membership in a glorified version of Media Matters would be something worth notifying readers about.

I've given Weigel the benefit of the doubt in the past, largely because Robert Stacy McCain has vouched for him. But no more. If you're mostly hanging out with lefties (which is what a wrote about a year ago) you're mostly going to echo left-wing talking points. On occasion Weigel's bucked the stereotype, but I think this episode pretty much destroys what little credibility among those on the right who might otherwise have trusted him.

ADDED: I almost spoke too soon. If Wonkette's going to bat for Weigel ... well, the cat's really out of the bag.

Expired Fishing License Disqualifies $1 Million Big Rock Tournament Winners

Get government off our backs, or our boats.

At Jacksonville Daily News, "Rules violation costs Citation win, record, $900,000-plus in Big Rock":

The lack of a $15 fishing license cost the Citation $912,825, not to mention first place and a spot in the record books in the 52nd annual Big Rock Blue Marlin Fishing Tournament.

Ouch? You bet so.

“It hurts,” said angler Andy Thomossan, who caught a record 883-pound blue marlin Monday that he and everyone else bet would win the $1.66 million tournament. “No record. No money. No fish. No nothing. Yep, it’s a nice ending to the story, isn’t it?”

Not for Thomossan and Co.

The Citation’s victory was initially put on hold Saturday night during the awards banquet and a day later erased by Big Rock officials because a crew member didn’t have a fishing license, said Thomossan, 63, who lives in Richmond, Va.

Also at Washington Post, "Fishing License Dispute Costs Virginia Team $1 Million Prize in Outer Banks Big Rock Blue Marlin Contest."

Paul McCartney Equates Climate Skeptics With Holocaust Deniers

I guess I won't be posting "Yesterday" any time soon, or any of the great Beatles hits for that matter.

At Fox News, "McCartney, in Interview, Compares Global Warming Skeptics to Holocaust Deniers":

Sir Paul McCartney just can't let it be.

The former Beatle predicted in an interview that the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico might expedite a move to cleaner, renewable energy sources in the world.

Sir Paul could have stopped while he was ahead, but McCartney went on to compare people who don't believe in global warming to "those who don't believe there was a Holocaust."

"Sadly we need disasters like this to show people," McCartney said in an exclusive interview with The Sun. "Some people don't believe in climate warning -- like those who don't believe there was a Holocaust."

McCartney continued, "But the facts indicate that there's something going on and we've got to be aware of it if we want our kids to inherit a decent world, not a complete nightmare of a planet -- clean, renewable energy is for starters."

Blah, blah ...

The Sun article is here: "I like Obama... and he’s right to have a go at us for polluting his country."

And recall that this is exactly the kind of stupidity that Melanie Phillips deals with in her book, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power. Worth it's weight in gold, demonstrated more and more by the day.

Tea Party Populism

Check Henry Olsen, at National Affairs, "Populism, American Style." Olsen contrasts the millenarian populism of modern totalitarian regimes to the historically moderate populism of the American case:

American populism shares with its classical cousin the use of heated rhetoric against an unjust "other," and the idea that popular control of the state is essential to the restoration of justice. But it breaks from the classical model in three significant respects.

First, successful populist movements tend to characterize the American people not as helpless victims, but as honest folk dispossessed of their right to achieve prosperity and happiness through self-improvement and hard work. As such, American populists seek not a charismatic leader who will bring them order and justice, but rather a re-opening of the avenues to self-advancement and self-reliance.

Second, the "other" in American populism tends not to be vilified as an implacable enemy without rights. Instead, he is an adversary: one who might be corrupt or acting unjustly at the moment, but still a fellow citizen who retains his basic American goodness, is capable of redemption, and is secure in his rights. Despite some reckless accusations to the contrary, today's populist movement seems no different on this front.

Third and most important, effective American populists generally do not seek to take the enemy's property to redistribute it to the people....

This passage might raise an eyebrow for folks today looking for lessons from the past:

In the '60s, many Americans grew uneasy with the course the country seemed to be taking, both politically and socially. The America of farms and small towns was giving way to a nation of suburbs; the growth of large corporations, the rise of television, and the sharp increase in internal mobility were eroding the cohesiveness of local communities. Accompanying these changes was the growth of the national government, which had continued apace even under Republican president Dwight Eisenhower. Despite increasing affluence and relative peace abroad, an ever-larger number of Americans felt their country was becoming unrecognizable — and they wanted to take it back.

So it was that intellectual conservatism and popular anxiety joined forces in Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign to create a crude populism of the right. But despite what would appear to have been a favorable political climate, this amalgam proved dismally unpopular. While the rhetoric of Goldwater's campaign was generally fairly measured, that of his backers was too often not. Much like the Populist farmers in the late 1890s, Goldwater's supporters felt themselves to be oppressed. Many railed against elites, sometimes crossing the line from battling an adversary to assaulting an enemy; they argued, for instance, that there was a conscious conspiracy between business, government, and intellectuals to end American freedom and to yield to communist ambitions at home and abroad ....

Ronald Reagan, then an increasingly political Hollywood actor, entered the fray near the end of the campaign with a nationally televised speech on Goldwater's behalf. Casting the election as a choice between "up or down — up to man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism," Reagan accused incumbent president Lyndon Johnson of spreading socialism. Johnson's administration, Reagan said, was seeking to "trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state" and engaging in "appeasement" with our enemies. Noting that he was a former Democrat, Reagan closed with a conscious invocation of Franklin Roosevelt: "You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness." The movie star's message roused the faithful, but fell flat among the voting masses.

Goldwater's crushing defeat seemed to all but the most die-hard conservatives to be the death knell of this nascent movement. Viewed against the backdrop of American political history, it is not hard to see why Goldwater lost: The tone and ideas of some of his extreme backers were viewed as odd and frightening by most voters ....

But check this passage on the prospect for upcoming elections:

Those who believe that the aggressive, angry pitch of the Tea Partiers' rhetoric will automatically alienate independent voters should think again. As we have seen, successful populist movements define adversaries in stark and often abrasive terms. Skilled political leaders in a democracy — figures like Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan — know what pundits and academics often overlook: that they must move the heart before they can persuade the mind. In our modern mass democracy especially, this often requires a simple narrative: an easily identifiable "good" hero, a "bad" villain, and an unambiguous moral arc — one that shows how society can be redeemed from its current, fallen state, and how average Americans can flourish under the reformed regime. Such an appeal obviously requires sharp rhetoric and clear divisions.

Critics of the Tea Partiers and other conservative populists are right, however, in their concerns that aggressive rhetoric can go too far. William Jennings Bryan lost because he painted a portrait of his time that voters didn't recognize, and because he made a majority afraid. Some libertarian populists, with their rejection of every facet of the modern welfare state, are likely to do the same — because even this center-right nation does not want to see the welfare state dismantled. And just as some of Barry Goldwater's supporters tainted his campaign with their accusations of communist conspiracies reaching even to the presidency, the conspiracy theorists who insist that President Obama was not born in America risk damaging conservative populism today.

Sound statements.

A skilled conservative/libertarian might do well to ponder them as we head into 2012's "invisible primary," which launches almost as soon as the votes from this November midterms are counted. But who might be that skilled, that is, "Reaganesque"?

PHOTO CREDIT: An enthusiastic tea party patriot at Irvine's tax day tea party, April 15, 2010.

Obama's Statement on McChrystal and Afghanistan

As promised yesterday, here's the clip of the Rose Garden announcement:

Plus, at Glenn Reynolds, "VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: McChrystal’s Tragedy."

Human Remains Found at WTC's Ground Zero Site

At London's Telegraph, "Remains of 72 People Found at World Trade Center Site."

And to think, Islamists are on the verge of building a mosque before all the 9/11 bodies have been recovered (if they ever could be).

Vanderleun writes, "It. Is. Not. Over."

Pictures from Looking at the Left:

Defining 'Blogger'

Great post from Melissa Clouthier, especially if you're just starting out, "Define Bloggers: On Matt Lewis’ Blogger List":

Lot's of people have a blog, does that make them bloggers?

I don't think so. Bloggers have, as their primary focus, blogging. They specialize in the sort of short-form journalism and commentary that is blogging. Most of the people on the list started blogging but to call them bloggers now would be to strain the definition of the word.

Maybe the blogging world has so transformed that the people listed should be called New Journalists. I don't know. Just because someone hasn't attended J-School does not mean that they're not journalists. And just because they work at the Weekly Standard, or National Review Online, or some other paid conservative online weekly doesn't, by definition, make them non-journalists.

RTWT.

Melanie Phillips on McChrystal's Firing

I'm just posting the conclusion, so be sure to RTWT:

McChrystal shouldn’t have given that interview. But whether or not he is sacked will make little difference to the real issue here. For what the article has confirmed is that the American prosecution of the Afghanistan war is flawed, chaotic, and incompetent and will hit the buffers unless someone gets a grip. And that means fighting this war as if it really is a war and not a ‘nation-building’ exercise; and saying unequivocally that America is there for as long as it takes because, however awful and bloody this conflict is, the alternative – a jihadi-boosting defeat for the west and the Talebanisation of Pakistan – is infinitely worse.

RELATED: For once, a decent editorial at the Los Angeles Times, from yesterday:

Unfortunately, McChrystal's remarks are distracting attention from the graver question of whether this country's increasingly costly involvement in Afghanistan is stabilizing that country and neutralizing the threat posed by terrorists to the United States. The best reason to bring McChrystal home for consultations Wednesday is not to upbraid him about his loose tongue; it's to press him on whether the strategy he sold the president is working.

Too late for that now. Obambi had to look tough.

More at Memeorandum, especially, Right Wing News, "Fish Wrap Says Decision To Remove McChrystal Shows His Decisiveness."

A Little Old Fashioned But That's All Right...

Holding off again on the SoCal punk roundups for a bit. Haven't seen ace commenter Kreiz for a while, so maybe some vintage Rod Stewart will bring back out a bit. Enjoy Stewart and The Faces, "You Wear It Well" and "Maggie May":

Inequities of American Farm Policies

Via Left Coast Rebel:

And check the website, at Cato Institute.