The Judge on the Oil Spill

Here's Judge Andrew Napolitano blowing up the statists again.



By the way, how many Congressmen does it take to stop the oil spill?

Only three or four, if they're wedged in just right.

Somalian Gun Stupidity

I just happened to find that video on Youtube. Did you hear what he said? The cause of anarchy was being able to buy a gun so easily. Right. He clearly has never been to the famously stable State of North Carolina. Anyone 18 or older can stroll to a gun show and buy an AK-47, M-16, Uzi, and any other non-explosive gun you can think of. I even saw a .50 caliber machine gun for sale. That's right, the big guns you put on tanks and armored cars. Also, genius guy, there's this country called Switzerland. Nearly everyone there has a military-grade assault rifle in their home. Last I checked, there wasn't violence in the streets.

The cause of Somalia's trouble is a combination of Islamic culture, an inept government, and other factors too numerous to name here.

So, Youtube guys, I appreciate your bravery walking into what amounts to a war zone, but you have it all wrong. Like the NRA says, guns don't kill people, people kill people. The Somalis would kill each other with swords and spears if they didn't have guns.

*EDIT

I'm sorry the video won't show all the way, just click it to watch on Youtube.

Oh, Goody...

Tensions between North and South Korea are heightening. Apparently North Korea torpedoed a South Korean warship, and the two Koreas are starting up with more irritating saber-rattling.

At this point, US citizens reading this will likely ask, "Does this really matter to the United States?" Well, no, but if there's war, we'll probably get involved anyway. Heck, why don't we just go ahead and simultaneously attack North Korea and Iran? It's glaringly obvious that Peace-Prize Obama is hungry for war with these two nations.

Some Thoughts on Iran and Nukes

The guy above is a psycho dictator who is disarmingly likable in interviews. That's well established. However, this post is not about psychotic mini-Lincolns.

Alright, we've all heard how a nuclear Iran is BAD. In my opinion, a nuclear ANYONE is BAD, but that's another topic. The thing is, how do we know that the 2 tons of uranium that Iran has is for weapons? I somehow doubt that what borders on a third-world country has the technology to refine the stuff to weapon capacity. Anyway, here's what really bothers me. Tehran (Iran's capital) is on the verge of agreeing to ship half of its uranium to Turkey and have it refined into fuel rods for treating cancer patients. That would leave Iran just one ton of uranium, not exactly a huge stockpile. This is almost identical to a proposal by the Obama administration last year, but now they're up-in-arms about this. Huh? It seems glaringly obvious that the Peace-prize winner is hungry for war. It's funny, but there's nothing like a pointless war to boost your approval ratings as president.

The following is an excellent article by Pat Buchanan.

Take the Deal, Mr. President
by Patrick J. Buchanan




If Barack Obama is sincere in his policy of "no nukes in Iran – no war with Iran," he will halt this rude dismissal of the offer Tehran just made to ship half its stockpile of uranium to Turkey.

Consider what President Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah himself have just committed to do.

Iran will deliver 1,200 kilograms, well over a ton, of its 2-ton stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU) to Turkey. In return, Iran will receive, in a year, 120 kilograms of fuel rods for its U.S.-built reactor that produces medical isotopes for treating cancer patients.

Not only did Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and President Lula da Silva of Brazil put their prestige on the line by flying to Tehran, the deal they got is a near-exact replica of the deal Obama offered Iran eight months ago.

Why is President Obama slapping it away? Does he not want a deal? Has he already decided on the sanctions road that leads to war?

Has the War Party captured the Obama presidency?

If Iran ships the LEU to Turkey, she would be left with only enough low-enriched uranium for one test explosion. And as that LEU is under U.N. surveillance, America would have a long lead time to act if Iran began to convert the LEU to weapons grade.


How is the Iranian program then an "existential threat" to anyone?

Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons – America thousands.

Critics say Iran still refuses to shut down the centrifuges turning out low-grade uranium. But if Iran stops the centrifuges, she surrenders her last bargaining chip to get sanctions lifted.

Critics say Iran is trying to abort Hillary Clinton's campaign to have the Security Council impose a fourth round of sanctions. Undeniably true.

But if the purpose of sanctions is to force Iran to negotiate its nuclear program, they are already working. Tehran's latest offer represents real movement.

Critics say Iran will weasel out if we take up the deal. Perhaps. Internal opposition caused Ahmadinejad to back away from Obama's original offer, after he had indicated initial acceptance.

But, if so, Iran will be seen as duplicitous by Turkey and Brazil.

To the world today, the United States appears enraged that Iran is responding to America's own offer, that it is we who do not want a peaceful resolution, that we and the Israelis are as hell-bent on war and "regime change" in Iran as George W. Bush was on war and regime change in Iraq.

While the Brazilians and Turks have surely complicated Hillary's diplomacy, their motives are not necessarily sinister or malevolent.


Lula may be trying to one-up Obama and win a Nobel Prize as he leaves office. But what is wrong with that? Bill Clinton had a Nobel in mind when, in his final days, he went all-out for a Palestinian peace.

And Erdogan leads a country that cannot wish to see Iran acquire nuclear weapons. For Shia Iran shares a border with Sunni Turkey, and the two are rivals for influence in the Islamic world and Central Asia.

Moreover, an Iranian bomb would force Turkey to consider a Turkish bomb. Erdogan thus has every incentive to seek a resolution of this crisis, to keep Iran free of nuclear weapons, and avert a war between yet another neighbor and his NATO ally, the United States.

If Obama refuses to take the Iranian offer seriously, it would appear a sure sign that the War Party has taken him into camp and he is departing the negotiating track for the confrontation track that leads to war.

Months ago, Time's Tony Karon asked the relevant question: "What if Ahmadinejad is serious?"

And there are obvious reasons why he might want a deal.

First, Iran runs out of fuel this year for its reactor that produces medical isotopes. And despite Tehran's braggadocio about making fuel rods itself out of its existing pile of uranium, there is no evidence Tehran is technically capable of this.

Iranians dying of cancer because Ahmadinejad failed to get those fuel rods would create enmity toward him, as well as hatred of us for denying them to Iranian cancer patients.

Second, as the U.S. intelligence community yet contends, there is no hard evidence Iran has decided to go nuclear. For this would instantly put Iran in the nuclear gun sights of the United States and Israel. And what benefit would Shia and Persian Iran, half of whose population is non-Persian, gain by starting a nuclear arms race in a region that is predominantly Arab and Sunni?

Third, Ahmadinejad leads a nation that is united in insisting on all its rights under the Nonproliferation Treaty, including the right to enrich. But his nation is deeply divided over his regime's legitimacy after last June's flawed, if not fixed, election.

If the United States were to accept Iran's counter-offer, it would be a diplomatic coup for Ahmadinejad.

Maybe that's the problem. The powers that be don't really want a deal with Iran. They want Iran smashed.


May 21, 2010

The Gulf Oil Spill

I know, I know. This is fairly old news. I'd like to share my thoughts on it, though. First, I've noticed a disturbing tendency in articles about the spill. It's almost always in this vein: "Oh, no, the animals! Oh, no, the environment! Oil is evil! Oh yeah, some people got killed in the blast, too. But the ANIMALS!" Please tell me I'm not the only one who finds this disturbing. Why is the massive economic damage ignored? Why are the lost lives drowned out by cries of "OH MY GOSH, THERE ARE PELICANS GETTING COVERED IN OIL!" You know, those are some pretty stupid pelicans. Question: Does anyone actually care about a bird that's stupid enough to land on an oil spill? Natural selection at work.

By the way, I wouldn't be too concerned about the fish. They will be almost completely unharmed by the spill. Also, NOAA estimates that one third of the spill has already evaporated. Go figure.

Something else that bothers me: I have now seen several people attacking our use of oil. Okay, great! Now go get rid of your car and halt all electricity use. Geez. Oh, yeah, and Obama and co., in their infinite wisdom, have decided to halt all future coastal drilling indefinitely. I usually don't say things like this, but only an economic moron would do that. Dang it, there's oil reserves abounding in Alaska, and likely some in Antarctica, but drilling is not permitted in those areas. In fact, I've read that there's oil off the Carolina coast. Wouldn't more drilling provied more, um, JOBS? Yeah, aren't we trying to fix the unemployment problem? Halting expansion of an industry ain't gonna do that.

By the way, global warming caused the Iceland eruption.

Happy Earth Day!

Oh, wait, it's not Earth Day, it's Vladimir Lenin's birthday. Wait, no, it IS Earth Day. Hold on, it appears to be BOTH! Yes, folks, Earth Day is on Lenin's birthday. You know, Communist, mass-murderer, all that good stuff? If this wasn't so disturbing it would be hysterically funny. Apparently, when Earth Day was started, the ones who started it said, "What better day than Lenin's birthday, since capitalism destroys the environment?"

Riiiiiiight. And Communism has such a sterling track record. Frankly, I don't feel like going on a long rant (I know what you're thinking: "Drake doesn't feel like ranting?! Take cover, the world is ending!") so I'll just recommend a great book.

The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You To Know About-Because They Helped Cause Them

If you just want quick proof of socialism's environmental record, Google "Aral Sea Dried Up."

Defense of the Confederacy is racism

At least according to this guy.

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Southern Discomfort
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CloseLinkedinDiggFacebookMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalink By JON MEACHAM
Published: April 10, 2010
IN 1956, nearly a century after Fort Sumter, Robert Penn Warren went on assignment for Life magazine, traveling throughout the South after the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decisions. Racism was thick, hope thin. Progress, Warren reported, was going to take a while — a long while. “History, like nature, knows no jumps,” he wrote, “except the jump backward, maybe.”

Last week, Virginia’s governor, Robert McDonnell, jumped backward when he issued a proclamation recognizing April as Confederate History Month. In it he celebrated those “who fought for their homes and communities and Commonwealth” and wrote of the importance of understanding “the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War.”

The governor originally chose not to mention slavery in the proclamation, saying he “focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.” It seems to follow that, at least for Mr. McDonnell, the plight of Virginia’s slaves does not rank among the most significant aspects of the war.

Advertently or not, Mr. McDonnell is working in a long and dispiriting tradition. Efforts to rehabilitate the Southern rebellion frequently come at moments of racial and social stress, and it is revealing that Virginia’s neo-Confederates are refighting the Civil War in 2010. Whitewashing the war is one way for the right — alienated, anxious and angry about the president, health care reform and all manner of threats, mostly imaginary — to express its unease with the Age of Obama, disguising hate as heritage.

If neo-Confederates are interested in history, let’s talk history. Since Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Confederate symbols have tended to be more about white resistance to black advances than about commemoration. In the 1880s and 1890s, after fighting Reconstruction with terrorism and after the Supreme Court struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act, states began to legalize segregation. For white supremacists, iconography of the “Lost Cause” was central to their fight; Mississippi even grafted the Confederate battle emblem onto its state flag.

But after the Supreme Court allowed segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, Jim Crow was basically secure. There was less need to rally the troops, and Confederate imagery became associated with the most extreme of the extreme: the Ku Klux Klan.

In the aftermath of World War II, however, the rebel flag and other Confederate symbolism resurfaced as the civil rights movement spread. In 1948, supporters of Strom Thurmond’s pro-segregation Dixiecrat ticket waved the battle flag at campaign stops.

Then came the school-integration rulings of the 1950s. Georgia changed its flag to include the battle emblem in 1956, and South Carolina hoisted the colors over its Capitol in 1962 as part of its centennial celebrations of the war.

As the sesquicentennial of Fort Sumter approaches in 2011, the enduring problem for neo-Confederates endures: anyone who seeks an Edenic Southern past in which the war was principally about states’ rights and not slavery is searching in vain, for the Confederacy and slavery are inextricably and forever linked.

That has not, however, stopped Lost Causers who supported Mr. McDonnell’s proclamation from trying to recast the war in more respectable terms. They would like what Lincoln called our “fiery trial” to be seen in a political, not a moral, light. If the slaves are erased from the picture, then what took place between Sumter and Appomattox is not about the fate of human chattel, or a battle between good and evil. It is, instead, more of an ancestral skirmish in the Reagan revolution, a contest between big and small government.

We cannot allow the story of the emancipation of a people and the expiation of America’s original sin to become fodder for conservative politicians playing to their right-wing base. That, to say the very least, is a jump backward we do not need.
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Let's discuss this loopy idea. Let me address his, quite frankly, stupid next-to-last paragraph first. In this paragraph he acts as if the war was originally about the fate of the slaves. It was not, it was not, it was not. My gosh, how historically clueless can this man be? If it was actually about slavery somebody PLEASE explain the bizarre phenomena known as "border States." The most prominent of them is Kentucky, and these had slavery and yet sided with the dang Yankees. Also, how on earth do you explain the generals? Lee and Jackson (CSA) were both anti-slavery. Lee freed all his slaves, and Jackson helped run, illegally, a Sunday school for slaves, in which they taught them how to read. Yet these two sided with the Confederacy. Grant, meanwhile, owned slaves but fought for the freakin' Yanks.

Now let's look at his little talk about Confederate symbols. Let's see... Yes, the KKK does use Confederate imagery. They also use Christian imagery, but are clearly not representative of Christians as a whole. Mississipi putting the CSA flag into its State flag? It's called "defiance," buddy. Ever heard of it? Conquered people tend to not accept the conquerer. Also, he does not demonstrate -at all- that the flag-waving in the 60's had anything to do with racism. It was the War's centennial, for Heaven's sake. This "point" of his needs no further discussion.

Why don't we take a look at the history of Virginia and slavery now? After all, the article was inspired by its governor decreeing Confederate History Month. Let's look at the Old Dominion's past. *Ahem* Before Independence from the British Empire, the State made no less than TWENTY-EIGHT attempts to abolish the slave trade, but all were struck down by the Brits. Afterwards, in the mid-1800's, the Virginia legislature nearly passed a compensated emancipation measure, however Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion pretty much killed that. Earlier that century, Thomas Jefferson, a Virginian and a slave owner, actually created a plan for emancipation that -sadly- never made it to the legislature.

Heck, the Confederacy itself wasn't near as racist/slavery-oriented as this guy makes it out to be. Up to 8% of the Confederate Army at any given time was composed of blacks, including combat troops. I know of several stories about black Confederates, and I'll share one here. During one battle, a shotgun-wielding black Confederate cornered a Yankee cavalryman. The Yank wrote in his diary, "Here I was fighting to free this man [this was after the Emancipation Proclamation] and if I had made one false move on my horse, he would not have hesitated to blow my head off." Doesn't exactly fit the mold, does he? Also, the CS Constitution actually banned the slave trade. Sorta yanks the moral high ground from the North, doesn't it?

This entire post can be summed up in one sentence: This guy doesn't have the vaguest idea what he's talking about.