Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Biscuits and Gravy

What a gig!:
It must be nice to be Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations. You’re from Ghana, a country with an annual gross domestic product per capita of approximately $2,200, and yet you have a world-class educational background after attending college in Minnesota, graduate school in Geneva, and a Masters program at MIT. You make $227,253 per year simply for blathering against the United States and Israel, and writing perturbed letters to homicidal dictators. You get to pretend moral superiority while providing aid and comfort to terrorists. Plus you get to eat in the finest restaurants in New York.
Return of 'Slick Willie':
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — It's started all over again. The calls from visiting journalists. The requests for television interviews. The grand opening of the Clinton Library and Nostalgia Bazaar has brought 'em all out again, like the furies.

But, thank goodness, they're not really interested in me. Or, for that matter, in Bill Clinton. No, they want the inside scoop on his alter ego, his evil twin, the Banquo at this otherwise cheery banquet, the notorious, the resilient, the absolutely unkillable . . . Slick Willie.
...
By now I've seen myself credited with coining the nickname Slick Willie so often that I expect it will be noted on my tombstone. Databases generations hence will doubtless contain the entry, "Slick Willie — Nickname given 42nd pres. of U.S. by obscure Ark. newspaper editor."
"Country Joe" looks like a retired shoe salesman:
Country Joe McDonald stood in the Gazebo near Whyte Avenue, strummed his flat-top guitar and sang an antiwar protest song.

McDonald brought hundreds of thousands of young people to their feet in 1969 to jeer the Vietnam War at the Woodstock festival.

On this sunny afternoon, his presence attracted about 120 people to decry the American assault on Fallujah and the ongoing Iraq war.

Like Jerry Hill, the majority of crowd members were middle-aged. Many were admitted old hippies.
...
Thin, clean-shaven, balding and slightly stooped, the 62-year-old McDonald says he's still a socialist but confesses he's now part of the middle class.
Sounds like the plan has some flaws:
A woman who wrote books about ways to profit from government loopholes was charged Tuesday with stealing almost $83,000 from Social Security.

Dianne Holmes-Despain, 51, allegedly collected disability benefits while she was writing books and magazine articles, and teaching college courses from 2000-02, authorities said.
Europe doesn't believe in democracy:
It may sound apocalyptic, but I do believe that the democratic experiment in continental Europe, begun just over 200 years or so ago, is coming to a close.

The European Union is creating what it hopes will be a benign oligarchy. Real political power will reside once again within elite circles (as it does already in France) which will conduct their business in the corridors rather than in the assemblies.

Meanwhile, the United States will persevere with the belief, which Europe regards as crass, that giving ordinary people power over their governing class is the only hope for peace and security. Democracy, and what it entails, is not what unites us, Mr Blair. It is what divides us.
I'm surprised he remembered where it was:
On his first day back in the Senate since losing the presidential election, Sen. John F. Kerry hunkered down for hours in his aptly labeled hideaway office in the U.S. Capitol and spurned questions about how he was adjusting.
...
Kerry held a meeting to thank his staff, and aides said he spent the day making phone calls and working with staffers to prepare legislation for the next Congress. [That ought to be a novel experience - ed.] Although aides had touted a speech Kerry planned to make from the Senate floor about the national debt, it looked likely yesterday to be put off.
ENEMY PROPAGANDA:
Get set for another round of America- bashing — this time over charges that a U.S. Marine shot to death an apparently disarmed, wounded terrorist inside a mosque in Fallujah.

Emphasis on apparently, please.

Meanwhile, as the anti-American rhetoric has begun to fill the airwaves, the cold-blooded execution of a kidnapped female humanitarian aid worker by Iraqi terrorists is met with the usual, ho-hum, "ain't it just terrible" pablum.
Get the Kyoto wankers some fire extinguishers:
The recent surge in levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which made front-page headlines around the world last month, may have been caused in part by smouldering peat bogs in Borneo.
The legacy of Reed Irvine:
The passing of Reed Irvine on Nov. 16, 2004, comes at a time when his war against the Big Media has achieved some notable successes. In the 35 years since he founded Accuracy in Media, the Big Media have lost much of their stature and do not seem so big anymore.

Their loss of credibility is a testament to Reed's successful efforts to tell the truth about so much of what we see, read and hear. Reed was David against the media Goliath. Reed's stone was the pen.