Muslims have been going ape-shit over the most minor slights for freaking ever. The most minor cartoons, references in books, these things somehow earn riots and death threats for those who dare to put them out for public consumption. These things have been going on all the way back to the Reagan era and Lebanon, and it's happened sporadically ever since.

But a new phenom is you-tube and the fact that internet and smart phones have become more common and widespread than ever before in history in the countries where these islamic morons reside.

When a simple cartoon gets riots and a death decree, an actual movie shot in the US that graphically depicts their prophet as a child molester and worse that spreads across their sects through previously mentioned smart phones and laptops gets an absolute uproar anywhere and everywhere these extremists may live. It brings them out of the woodwork, literally.

Was this (over)reaction propagated and planned by enemies of the USA? No doubt. Were the flames of insane over-reaction flamed by radical islamists and timed to coincide with the 9-11 anniversary? No doubt.

But is this the reaction of an extreme minority that doesn't represent the majority opinion in the region? Probably if not certainly. To use this as some kind of indictment or indication of weakness or failed foreign policy is purely political opportunism in the months before an election, nothing more and nothing less. And such politicization cheapens the deaths of the victims.

Romney was smacked down for his first attempt to politicize this and he immediately went quiet as far as I know, because they realized it would backfire badly if they pursued it.

Were mistakes made? No doubt. Were the victims left underprotected? No doubt, and a lot of that was their own misjudgement of the potential and they paid dearly. They were warned by local officials and evidently they disregarded those warnings. Are the details of the Libyan foreign mission something the president directly oversees? No, but the buck does stop at his desk. No doubt they're agonized over what happened under their watch and they're scrambling to identify and correct security for foreign missions. But for the party that was at the wheel when 9-11 happened to try to make political hay over this is pretty damn low brow.

MtFan wrote:Muslims have been going ape-shit over the most minor slights for freaking ever. The most minor cartoons, references in books, these things somehow earn riots and death threats for those who dare to put them out for public consumption. These things have been going on all the way back to the Reagan era and Lebanon, and it's happened sporadically ever since.

But a new phenom is you-tube and the fact that internet and smart phones have become more common and widespread than ever before in history in the countries where these islamic morons reside.

When a simple cartoon gets riots and a death decree, an actual movie shot in the US that graphically depicts their prophet as a child molester and worse that spreads across their sects through previously mentioned smart phones and laptops gets an absolute uproar anywhere and everywhere these extremists may live. It brings them out of the woodwork, literally.

Was this (over)reaction propagated and planned by enemies of the USA? No doubt. Were the flames of insane over-reaction flamed by radical islamists and timed to coincide with the 9-11 anniversary? No doubt.

But is this the reaction of an extreme minority that doesn't represent the majority opinion in the region? Probably if not certainly. To use this as some kind of indictment or indication of weakness or failed foreign policy is purely political opportunism in the months before an election, nothing more and nothing less. And such politicization cheapens the deaths of the victims.

Romney was smacked down for his first attempt to politicize this and he immediately went quiet as far as I know, because they realized it would backfire badly if they pursued it.

Were mistakes made? No doubt. Were the victims left underprotected? No doubt, and a lot of that was their own misjudgement of the potential and they paid dearly. They were warned by local officials and evidently they disregarded those warnings. Are the details of the Libyan foreign mission something the president directly oversees? No, but the buck does stop at his desk. No doubt they're agonized over what happened under their watch and they're scrambling to identify and correct security for foreign missions. But for the party that was at the wheel when 9-11 happened to try to make political hay over this is pretty damn low brow.

Nice post, MtFan

I just didn't like the Administration's first attempt to hang blame on the movie.

I also get tripped on remembrances of the 2008 Presidential debates when our current President and his campaign took a stance that he was ably prepared to effect change with world leaders and citizens of other countries because he could and would "go sit down and talk with them" and they would accept him and listen.

Thus far that has not worked out with success, it seems.

But he did get a Nobel Peace Prize. Still can not figure that one out.

The Nobel Peace Prize has always been crap, even before Obama got one that made so sense whatsoever.

Yeah, a peace prize for a guy who directs and oversees Seal Team/Drone assassinations, go figure. Not that I'm against such things in most of the situations they've been used in... they don't bode well for the future if you ever end up on the wrong side of the drone for who knows what reasons. A bit scary for the future precedent.

From a Stock Market Blog site:

OK, I've just figured out the solution to the whole problem of those from the Religion of Peace rioting, burning, and killing all over the world. It's brilliant, if I may say so myself.

I was inspired by reading this article about how a French weekly paper is deliberating publishing cartoons that insult "the prophet". Reading this merged with my knowledge of Star Trek to yield the idea.

Those of you with the good sense to be acquainted with Star Trek's Original Series are probably knowledgeable of Charlie X, which is the second episode with Kirk. It is the story of a teenaged boy who has powers to change matter and the behavior of those around him, and he easily takes over the Enterprise.

The crew of the ship seems doomed, but near the end of the show, it occurs to Kirk that if they turn on every single instrument on the bridge, Charlie will be so overwhelmed that he'll lose the ability to control them. Spock and McCoy scamper about the bridge, flicking on all the machines that go beep, boing, and boop, and - as with all Kirk's plans - it works.

This, my friends, is how to deal with all this rioting. The idea is simple: for a solid week, every newspaper, magazine, billboard, and other media willing to participate put up images that are deliberately provocative to our Islamic friends. They don't have to be completely obnoxious - - I'm not sure where they draw the line, but I believe any image at all is considered offensive, so put him on a bicycle, a trampoline - - you name it. One solid week. All over the world.

See, the problem with the current situation is that ONE publication does something "offensive", and then they target the poor bastards at that place. With a coordinated effort, the level-headed people of the planet can provide a united middle finger to all this rioting nonsense.

I see some of you are calling this insensitive. Excuse me for a moment while I consider that point.

Hmmm.

OK, I'm done. My response: they abdicated their right to being treated with velvet gloves by torching everything in sight. I would also add the following: how about you folks grow a pair of nuts and not worry so much about sensitivity to a very specific group?

I don't demand sensitivity. I'm a good suburban Christian, and if the Islamic world decided to put up billboards all over the planet with pictures of Jesus pracing around in a tutu or making out with Buddha, I couldn't care less. I'd probably think it's funny. As I've said before, the higher power I believe in really doesn't give a flying crap. He's not that neurotic. So Jesus told me to tell you to tickle his nut sack and get a life.

Anyway, that's my idea. It'll never happen, and anyway, I've got to go into hiding now. Genius is rarely understood in its own time.

I love it, Loufla!

I was out and about town yesterday afternoon and struck up a conversation with a big guy in a biker shirt as we were entering a local beverage store. I'm not a big guy, and I've never owned a biker shirt, but we still managed to chat.

He mentioned he was irritated with the latest politics. I asked him if he planned to vote for Obama in November?

"Hell no." "I'm voting for the Mormon, not the moron."

I didn't ask him if he had claimed rights to the shirt or bumper sticker slogan.



Come to think of it, I do own one quasi biker shirt. It came from a coastal California bar in between Los Angeles and San Francisco in the little unpretentious seaside town of Cayucos CA.

It was a bar that featured poker, legal in California under certain circumstances.

The t-shirt back has the name of the bar, "Old Cayucos Tavern" with a sketch of cowboys in horses with guns and rifles in firing mode.

It further states, "Liquor in the front, Poker in the rear."

When I saw it for sale in the bar on a visit over a decade ago, I had to have it.

My wife doesn't support me wearing that one often, though I do wear it in the gym occasionally.


I've since learned the "Liquor in the front," Poker in the rear" thing is more common than I knew at my moment of purchase.

For anyone wanting to see a different perspective on the whole Islamic fiasco that has been brewing this month, take a look at this article from AVAAZ (they are somewhat new - evidently an attempt at a world-wide independent reader-driven media group);



http://en.avaaz.org/783/muslim-rage-pro ... -the-clash

MtFan wrote:For anyone wanting to see a different perspective on the whole Islamic fiasco that has been brewing this month, take a look at this article from AVAAZ (they are somewhat new - evidently an attempt at a world-wide independent reader-driven media group);



http://en.avaaz.org/783/muslim-rage-pro ... -the-clash

Yep, I guess we read that Muslim anger "incorrectly".

And the 2012 Cleveland Indians with a 62-90 record are a great team that Mark Shapiro and Chris Antonetti have produced...

....with that great positive and certainly positive future.

Romney cleaned more clock lastnight than the janitor at Big Ben.

Darkstar wrote:Romney cleaned more clock last night than the janitor at Big Ben.

Yep. There's still a long way to go.


Focus, and work hard for a win.


I'm pushing 60, and this is the most important Presidential Election of my lifetime......especially with regard to my four kids and current four grandkids.

I am now approaching the end of the first 6 months of this newest portion of Florida residency, the third in my lifetime. I am asked frequently by my new neighbors here in Southwest Florida why I was possibly inclined to leave such a fine place to be as California.

Of course there are things I loved in California, most including nature and sports.

I think I may make copies of the following article to share with my new neighbors when they ask my possible motivations for leaving the wonderful state of California.


October 9, 2012


Bankrupt California
No money for crumbling roads, but billions for high-speed rail.

By Victor Davis Hanson


I thought of my fellow Californian Energy Secretary Steven Chu last week, when I paid $4.89 a gallon in Gilroy for regular gas — and had to wait in line to get it. The customers were in near revolt, but I wondered against what and whom. I mentioned to one exasperated motorist that there are estimated to be over 20 billion barrels of oil a few miles away, in newly found reserves off the California coast. He thought I was from Mars.

California may face the nation’s largest budget deficit at $16 billion. It may struggle with the nation’s second-highest unemployment rate at 10.6 percent. It will soon vote whether to levy the nation’s highest income and sales taxes, as if to encourage others to join the 2,000-plus high earners who are leaving the state each week. The new taxes will be our way of saying, “Good riddance.” And if California is home to one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients and the largest number of illegal aliens, it is nonetheless apparently happy and thus solidly for Obama, by a +24 percent margin in the latest Field poll. The unemployment rate in my hometown is 16 percent, the per capita income is $16,000 — and I haven’t seen a Romney sticker yet.


Shortly before taking office, Secretary Chu, remember, quipped that he would like to see American gas prices rise to European levels — presumably $9 or $10 a gallon — to discourage driving and thereby lower our carbon footprint. If $50 for half a fill-up is any indication, California is over halfway toward achieving Chu’s dream. If green bicycles are the ultimate aim of our central-planning regulators, then they are making headway. I’ve never seen so many new rural bike riders, though most of them out here in the San Joaquin Valley have a bad habit of riding on the wrong side of the road.

A refinery fire, a power outage, a uniquely Californian gasoline formula, years of regulating refineries into stasis — all that has finally caught up with the state, as prices soar at the pump. Yet what perplexes about California in extremis is the liberal ability for our state government simply to ignore its own regulations, which it has been using to paralyze businesses for years. For example, a panicked Governor Brown just asked the state air-resources board to suspend the law that requires gas stations to sell our special summer fuel formula through the month of October. The state asserted that a one-time suspension would increase supplies and yet not materially affect our air quality — which begs the question: Why, if that is true, would such a regulation have been passed in the first place?

California has the nation’s highest gas taxes and fuel prices, and the tightest supplies — and reputedly one of the worst-maintained infrastructures, with out-of-date, overcrowded, and poorly maintained freeways. When I head home each week from Palo Alto, I feel like an Odysseus fighting modern-day Lotus Eaters, Cyclopes, and Laestrygonians to reach Ithaka, wondering what obstacle will sidetrack me this trip — huge potholes, entire sections of the freeway reduced to one lane, or various poorly marked detours? If the nation’s highest gas taxes give us all that, what might the lowest bring?

Although the state is facing a $16 billion annual budgetary shortfall, Governor Brown is determined to press ahead with high-speed rail — estimated to cost eventually over $200 billion. Such is his zeal that he intends to override the environmental lawsuits that usually stymie private projects for years. The line is scheduled to pass a few miles from my farm, its first link connecting Fresno and Corcoran, home to the state prison that houses Charles Manson.

Yet a money-losing Amtrak line already connects Fresno and Corcoran. I often ride my bike near the tracks and notice the half-empty cars that zoom by. Most farmers here are perplexed about why the state would wish to borrow billions and destroy thousands of acres of prime farm land to duplicate this little-traveled link. Support for high-speed rail is strongest in the San Francisco Bay Area, but there is no support for beginning the project where the noise and dirty reality might be too close to home for green utopians.

California schools rate among the nation’s lowest in math and English, but our shrinking numbers of teachers are among the country’s highest paid. One-third of the nation’s welfare recipients live in California, and 8 out of the last 11 million people added to the California population are enrolled in Medicaid, but we are also the most generous state in sending remittances to foreign countries — we contribute a third to a half of the estimated $50 billion that leaves the U.S. each year for Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. It is puzzling in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley to see both federal and state medical centers and nearby offices that specialize in cash transfers to Mexico. But no one seems to see any disconnect between the public need for free health care and the private desire to send money to Mexico.


California has built the nation’s largest prison system, but there is no room left in either state or county facilities for an increasing number of dangerous felons. The same day last week that I emptied my wallet for gas, my 15-hp ag irrigation pump simply quit during the night. Nocturnal copper-wire thieves had come into the vineyard and yanked out the electrical conduit. That’s the third theft of pump wire I’ve had this year — and it costs $1,500 each time to repair the damage. I’m told that Mexican national gangs go down to Los Angeles with their stolen copper to sell it to mobile recyclers. No one calls the sheriff any more. Instead, we swap stories about protective wire cages, spikes, cameras, lights, and booby traps. Barack Obama once thundered, “Rich people are all for nonviolence. . . . They don’t want people taking their stuff.” I plead guilty to his writ, at least for a while longer. But I don’t agree that copper conduit is mere “stuff” or that stealing it counts as social protest or that the thieves are necessarily poor.

The criminals have a sophisticated modus operandi, with lookouts who drive around and report by cell phone when the coast is clear — green-lighting comrade thieves who in a matter of minutes ride into the farm alleyways on bicycles, cut and pull the wire, and pedal out with little noise and no headlights. Two nights ago, when I returned to my farmhouse, an odd couple was sitting in a car — each one on a cell phone — next to my mailbox. They claimed they did not speak English, but after some harsh words they left — surprised and angry that I had dared to ask them to leave my property.

It’s a veritable war these days in rural central California — as copper-wire thieves, gangs, drug lords, and fencers run amuck in a bankrupt state that can no longer afford to keep its felons incarcerated. President Obama soars with talk of amnesty and the DREAM Act. But if we are going to waive federal statutes for each illegal alien who we feel may some day become a neurosurgeon or an experimental chemist, can’t we at least enforce the law against those not in school and up to no good in the here and now, like the two sitting in my driveway phoning directions for local thieves to yank out copper wire?

Open borders, redistributionist socialism, therapeutic and politicized public schools, and public-employee unions finally are proving a match even for Apple, Google, Facebook, the Napa Valley wine industry, Central Valley agribusiness, Hollywood, Cal Tech, Stanford, and Berkeley. In California, it is a day-by-day war between what nature and past generations have so generously bequeathed and what our bunch has so voraciously consumed.

On any given day, beautiful weather, the Pacific Coast, and the majestic Sierra Nevada are trumped by released felons, $5-a-gallon gas, and a 1970 infrastructure crumbling beneath a crowded 2012 state.

There are many lessons from California. One is that the vision of the present administration is already here — and it simply does not work.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.

Sorry for the bad news guys.


I will now return to the minor leagues.