The Rant

___________________ by Nickolas D. Kristof (N. Y. Times) KIEV, Ukraine — Here's a suggestion for President Bush from the protesters behind the democratic "orange revolution" here: Wear an orange tie. "If he wore an orange tie, people here would be crying," said Yuri Maluta, a protester from Lviv. "It would show that the American president supports democracy here." The request says something about the lighthearted and pro-American spirit on the streets. Since my father grew up in what is now southwestern Ukraine, I decided to come here to join my people - and I found that waging revolution has rarely been such fun. Young people enveloped in orange scarves, hats and ribbons alternately chant slogans for freedom, boogie to rock music, eat oranges, warm up and flirt at McDonald's, and disappear into their downtown "tent city" to make love, not war. The protest organizers have placed gorgeous young women in the vanguard of ...

Mount St. Helens Is Washington State's Top Polluter Washington state's top polluter isn't a pulp mill, a power plant or refinery. It's the newly awakened Mount St. Helens. Since the volcano began erupting in early October, it has been pumping out 50 to 250 tons a day of sulfur dioxide, the lung-stinging gas that causes acid rain and contributes to haze. At peak, that's more than double the amount from all the state's industries combined. Normally, the state's No. 1 polluter is a coal-fired power plant owned by the Canadian firm TransAlta. The plant churned out 200 tons a day of sulfur dioxide until regulators demanded $250 million worth of renovations, bringing the level down to 27 tons a day. Tough to get those kind of results from a volcano. "You can't put a cork in it," said Greg Nothstein of the Washington Energy Policy Office. Because the area around St. Helens is so sparsely populated, officials say they haven't hea...

The other day I saw a rebroadcast of a Catholic program that originally aired right before the election. Satellite has too many channels to choose from at 3 AM. Apparently, the interviewer, a lay woman and a priest were calling upon all Catholics to vote. While they never stated "Vote for Bush", it was clear from the issues they chose to make central to a Catholic's decision to vote, this was a call to vote for Bush. I remember when Catholics were largely democratic, not because of religious issues, but for their perception that social issues such as social equality, welfare, minimum wage, a fairer tax system, etc. were paramount. This was despite the fact that abortion has been legal here for decades. It appears that the Republican spin machine has successfully convinced many Catholics to abandon the teachings of their saviour in favor of the word of mortals like the pope and his bishops. Below is a commentary about an appearance by Jerry Falwell on Meet th...

________________________ by Mathias Döpfner Chief Executive of German publisher Axel Springer AG A few days ago Henryk M. Broder wrote in Welt am Sonntag, "Europe – your family name is appeasement." It’s a phrase you can’t get out of your head because it’s so terribly true. Appeasement cost millions of Jews and non-Jews their lives as England and France, allies at the time, negotiated and hesitated too long before they noticed that Hitler had to be fought, not bound to agreements. Appeasement stabilized communism in the Soviet Union and East Germany in that part of Europe where inhuman, suppressive governments were glorified as the ideologically correct alternative to all other possibilities. Appeasement crippled Europe when genocide ran rampant in Kosovo and we Europeans debated and debated until the Americans came in and did our work for us. Rather than protecting democracy in the Middle East, European appeasement, camouflaged behind the fuzzy word "equidistanc...

By Michael Ledeen I'm not surprised to see people leaving the CIA. Their work for the past decade and more has been exposed by a long series of congressional committees and presidential commissions as a significant failure. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that it has taken so long. I recommended a thorough housecleaning of the CIA, FBI and other agencies engaged in counterterrorism on Sept. 12, 2001, when their errors and shortcomings were so tragically demonstrated. Some of these failed analysts and operatives complain — in leaks and “anonymous” books and essays — that we have somehow lost our focus in the war against terrorism. What did they think the interminable presidential campaign was all about, anyway? They support this odd contention by claiming that some of our most vigorous anti-terrorist actions — notably in Iraq — have actually made things worse by killing large numbers of terrorists and destroying two tyrannical regimes that supported them. This, they...

___________________ by Bob Clasen ______________________________ Saturday night we watched the opera "Turandot." Beautiful music by Puccini, but an odd story. Turandot is a beautiful Chinese princess who does not like men and does not want to get married. Her excuse is that one of her distant ancestors was mistreated. She comes up with a series of three riddles that any suitor must successfully answer before they may marry her. Her further decree is that if any question is answered wrong, the suitor is beheaded. Many suitors come and many suitors die. This does not seem to discourage the suitors, but I wonder why anyone would want to marry a woman, no matter how beautiful, who had killed dozens of innocent young men only guilty of the crime of wanting to marry her. A woman who dislikes marriage that much should be left alone. The opera is also made difficult by the fact that the star singer, who is supposed to be young and beautiful enough to lure dozens...

_________________________ by George Will writing for Newsweek and the Washington Post CENTRAL COMMAND HEADQUARTERS, Tampa: By following the movements, updated every eight minutes, of blue icons on a screen here displaying a satellite photograph of Fallujah's streets, a four-star general could monitor, in real time, the movements of a squad through an intersection in that city. He could, but Gen. John Abizaid does not, having many more worries. As commander of Central Command, he is director of the military responsibilities -- especially the war on terror -- in 27 nations from the Horn of Africa to the Middle East, and through South and Central Asia, including Afghanistan and Pakistan. But operations in Fallujah, and perhaps in three or more other Iraqi cities, may determine whether elections scheduled for late January midwife the birth of a viable state. And as the operations began, there was an expectation here that of the eight Iraqi military units collaborating with U....

__________________ by Jeff Jacoby Boston Globe YASSER ARAFAT died at age 75, lying in bed surrounded by familiar faces. He left this world peacefully, unlike the thousands of victims he sent to early graves. In a better world, the PLO chief would have met his end on a gallows, hanged for mass murder much as the Nazi chiefs were hanged at Nuremberg. In a better world, the French president would not have paid a visit to the bedside of such a monster. In a better world, George Bush would not have said, on hearing the first reports that Arafat had died, "God bless his soul." God bless his soul? What a grotesque idea! Bless the soul of the man who brought modern terrorism to the world? Who sent his agents to slaughter athletes at the Olympics, blow airliners out of the sky, bomb schools and pizzerias, machine-gun passengers in airline terminals? Who lied, cheated, and stole without compunction? Who inculcated the vilest culture of Jew-hatred since the Third Reich? Hum...

_____________________ by Ralph Peters New York Post November 11, 2004 -- IN the Second Battle of Fallujah, military operations are ahead of schedule. Our casualties have been blessedly light. The terrorists who haven't fled are being killed by the hundreds. Our troops will soon achieve their goal of eliminating Iraq's key safe haven for terrorists. Our Marines and soldiers have carried the ball inside the 10-yard line. The media's response? Move the goalposts. The legions of pundits ("Will talk for food") now suggest that a win in Fallujah will be meaningless because we failed to kill or capture the terrorist leadership, because some of the thugs ran away and because Fallujah won't resemble Darien, Conn., by next Sunday. On Tuesday, as our troops handily pierced the defenses terrorists had spent months erecting, The New York Times carried two front-page stories implying that our forces were facing possible defeat. The Times' military analysis...

____________________________ by Christopher Hitchens in Slate The left apologizes for religious fanatics. The president fights them. By Christopher Hitchens Posted Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2004, at 7:34 AM PT Many are the cheap and easy laughs in which one could indulge at the extraordinary, pitiful hysteria of the defeated Democrats. "Kerry won," according to one e-mail I received from Greg Palast, to whom the Florida vote in 2000 is, and always will be, a combination of Gettysburg and Waterloo. According to Nikki Finke of the LA Weekly, the Fox News channel "called" Ohio for Bush for reasons too sinister to enumerate. Gregory Maniatis, whose last communication to me had predicted an annihilating Democratic landslide, kept quiet for only a day or so before forwarding the details on how to emigrate to Canada. Thus do the liberals build their bridge to the 20th century. Who can care about this pathos? Not I. But I do take strong exception to one strain in the ...

by John Hood Reason Online ______________________________ Few reporters or commentators appear to have gone back to examine the 2000 exit polls, which would seem to be necessary if one wishes to assert a trend. I did. I found that the percentage of voters sampled who said they attended church at least weekly was the same—42 percent—in both 2000 and 2004. The percentage never attending church was also the same, at 15 percent. The middle group, those attending occasionally, was, you guessed it, 42 percent each time. Interestingly, while Bush slightly improved his standing among frequent churchgoers, by about a point in 2004, his support grew by 3 to 4 points among those attending seldom or never. Yep, it was the atheist vote that really put Bush over the top in 2004. http://www.reason.com/hod/jh110804.shtml hee hee _________________________________

by Mark Steyn Daily Telegrah (UK) We weren't dumb enough to vote Kerry (Filed: 09/11/2004) Last week, you may recall, I quoted Bob Kerrey - not the Kerry who was running for president, but a fellow senator and Vietnam veteran and a big backer of his near-namesake. This Kerrey was on television a couple of days before the election and claimed to have the pulse of the man in the street. "I was in Gallia, Ohio, down in the southeastern part of Ohio," he said. "They don't give a damn about the war in Iraq. They're terrified about the loss of their job, health care, their pensions. That's what's bothering them." I begged to differ: "In fact," I wrote, "the people - in Gallia, Ohio and many other places - understand the relevance of Iraq and Afghanistan to their well-being rather more clearly than the Democratic leadership do." Just for the record, on Tuesday, in Gallia County, Ohio, George W Bush won 62 per cent of...

_________________________ by Bob Clasen The terrorists and anti-democratic forces in Fallujah are about to be crushed, together with the remaining opposition forces. Free elections remain on the near horizon in Iraq, just as they were successfully held a short time ago in Afghanistan. Terrorists in North Korea and Iran must look on the re-election of George Bush with a new kind of terror -- their own. As well they should. If North Korea refuses to take part in the six country negotiations, Bush is not going to follow the lead of Clinton and pay blackmail to North Korea to enable it to continue its illegal development of nuclear weapons in secret. Iran is not going to be permitted to develop the capacity to create nuclear weapons, as would undoubtedly be the case if the U.N. is allowed to decide the issue, as Kerry wanted. The continued necessary internal security created by the Patriot Act is not going to be sabotaged by people who worry more about the civil liber...

_______________________ by David Brooks NY Times Every election year, we in the commentariat come up with a story line to explain the result, and the story line has to have two features. First, it has to be completely wrong. Second, it has to reassure liberals that they are morally superior to the people who just defeated them. In past years, the story line has involved Angry White Males, or Willie Horton-bashing racists. ____________________________________________ This year, the official story is that throngs of homophobic, Red America values-voters surged to the polls to put George Bush over the top. ____________________________________________ This theory certainly flatters liberals, and it is certainly wrong. Here are the facts. As Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center points out, there was no disproportionate surge in the evangelical vote this year. Evangelicals made up the same share of the electorate this year as they did in 2000. There was no increase in ...

The rage and frustration of another Bush victory was more than many San Franciscans could take. As soon as Bush's re-election was confirmed in the middle of Wednesday, November 3, people started gathering at Powell and Market streets. By 5pm the crowd had swelled to several thousand. To see the photos, go to this site: http://www.zombietime.com/sf_rally_november_3_2004/ _________________________________

_______________ by Bob Clasen We want to help people who need help. But you want to create a system that does not encourage fraud, like the current tort system and Workers Compensation system. In the free market, the pricing of medical care is determined by the price that the supply is equal to the demand. If you drop the price below market value, the demand exceeds the supply and you have shortages. In England and Canada, I believes that there are many shortages in supply for surgeries and care (MRIs) we consider routine. If you make medical care free, the demand tends to go towards infinite. If an insurance company, or government program has to pay for my every medical whim, what motive do I have to control my whims? When you pay for your bills, your natural frugalness not to waste your money will control such inclinations. In the tort system, I see completely different behavior by people who are involved in a car accident, depending upon if they are making a cla...

Rush Limbaugh some months ago said he didn't have any health insurance and didn't see why tax payers should sign on to any universal health care proposal. Give me a break. So, who pays your health care costs. Probably for many working Americans, their employer pays all or a portion of their health insurance premiums. For many, they pay their own premiums. Finally there are two groups without insurance. The really poor and the working poor. The really poor probably qualify for government sponsored program known as Medical in this state. The working poor have nothing? They have to spend themselves down to very poor in order to qualify. They may find it makes sense to quit work to obtain medical care for themselves or their families. Is this type of rational behaviour harmful to society? Once they get to very poor, then we taxpayer's pick up the tab anyway. As a society, what is wrong with universal health care, with upgrades. Couldn't we ...

________________________________ (CNN) -- Democratic Sen. John Kerry phoned President Bush on Wednesday to concede the presidential election, a White House aide said. President Bush was to deliver a victory statement at 3 p.m. ET, Bush aides said. Kerry was expected to make a concession speech at 1 p.m. ET at Faneuil Hall in Boston, Massachusetts. Kerry's phone call came a few hours after White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card announced that the Bush campaign was convinced the president had won re-election. "President Bush decided to give Sen. Kerry the respect of more time to reflect on the results of this election," Card told GOP supporters. http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/11/03/election.main/index.html _______________________________________

________________________________ by Bob Clasen Kerry should not follow the bad example of Poor Sport Gore and delay conceding until the last possible moment. He would come across much more as a statesman if he would actually behave graciously. Are Democrats going to whine for the next four years as they did the last four years that Bush "stole" the election? I hope not. Why is every close state that Kerry won "called" for Kerry but many of the states that Bush is narrowly ahead in "too close to call" even with 99% of the vote counted? More media bias. Bush is ahead by 138,000 votes in Ohio, by 14,000 votes in the small state of Iowa, by 12,000 votes in New Mexico, etc. It's over. Get over it. I am sure that Osama Bin Laden, Kim Jung Il and the Ayotollah of Iran are disappointed that Bush won. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5653531/ _______________________________

_____________________ by Bob Clasen Bush has 269 electoral votes. He is ahead 52 to 47 in New Mexico with 82% of the vote counted. It's over. I am going to bed. Sorry, all you Democrats. Four more years. ____________________