You know how the scene goes, be it a motion picture or a Road Runner cartoon. The camera focuses on a long line of gun powder which snakes right and left around different obstacles until it reaches its destination – 10 tons of TNT.
Well, Moxie lit the match and touched the powder. Now there’s no stoppin it.
Trying to find the perfect gift for your honey? Well, look no further.
UPDATE: OK, that’s a drag. The link is dead now. I hate when that happens.
EVEN MORE: The dead link was caused by a problem with Typepad, which hasn’t been righted yet. All Typepad blogs have been dark since yesterday evening.
MORE, MORE: The link is back up.
I’m sure most of us have read about the buzz surrounding the movie “Brokeback Mountain”. Hollywood and homosexual advocacy groups have hailed the film as ground breaking in its portrayal of two sheepherders who fall in love with each other. And even more recently, the film garnered additional attention by being nominated for a Golden Globe.
Today I was reading this from Tammy Bruce…
Hollywood honchos continue to wring their hands over why you’ve stopped going to the movies. They blame ticket prices and DVD availability. They had better start considering the fact that filmmakers are so disconnected, so nihilistic, that the hopelessness and hostility they feel toward the world now permeates their work. Americans will no longer go see movies which are nothing more than the manifestation of the backwash of malignant narcissists. We’re also sick and tired of listening to actors lecture us about how awful the US is, and more recently, why a cold-blooded mass murdering gang founder should have been given clemency. Enough is enough.
Not only will we not go see films which insult us, we refuse to support an existential worldview. We happen to think life does matters, that decency is a good thing, and that people are inherently good, not bad. We also have stopped believing the lie that Americans are bad people. We looked away for 4 decades as that lie was spread, but that time is over.
So you can take your gay sheepherder, noble communist supporting reporters, big-business is evil, Americans are hopelessly and inherently corrupt and violent and unfaithful movies and go to Cannes where at least the Parisian set will love you. But that won’t exactly pay the bills, will it?
It used to be whichever movie won the top awards guaranteed boffo box office. Not any longer. The Golden Globe (the ‘foreign’ press contingent) and the Oscar people are going to find that their nights of orgiastic self-congratulation won’t get them much, if anything, any more.
She’s dead on.
Now, if you need evidence that Hollywood is willing to do anything to get people to buy tickets to their movies, consider this. Forget about the shout outs from pro-gay groups and the mainstream media who are promoting Brokeback Mountain as a long-deserved nod of acceptance toward the homosexual community. The film’s distributor, Focus Features, knows where they make their money. They make it from “joe public”, the every day types who like to head out to the theatre on weekends. Focus understands that while a certain segment of the viewing public is pro-gay, a larger majority isn’t, and they won’t go to see Brokeback Mountain because it helps homosexual advocacy groups. The larger majority will see the movie if it is entertaining and well made. This might explain why Focus Features released a new ad for Brokeback Mountain that obviously deemphasizes the whole “gay” thing.
First, here’s the original movie poster:
Now, here’s the new ad promoting the movie:
Gee, notice anything different?
Pro-gay movies won’t bring in the hundreds of millions of dollars needed by distributors like Focus Features. But, a love story which ends up unifying the good ‘ol American family unit sure will. That’s money in the bank, and that’s why Brokeback Mountain has been de-gayified. It just makes good ‘ol American economic sense.
h/t Steve Pond
Iraqis – speaking their mind without fear of retribution.
An earlier report by the New York Times claiming that an Iranian driving a truck with Iranian license plates was held by border agents in Iraq after fraudulent voter ballots were discovered is now being denied, by the Iraqi border agents themselves.
Various media outlets followed the NYT and reported the story like this:
CNN – With the country’s parliamentary elections slated for Thursday and early voting already under way, a truck carrying what are believed to be fake ballots was detained in the Iraqi border province of Wasit, the U.S. military said Tuesday.
U.S. investigators were being sent to examine the ballots in Wasit, located on the Iranian border southeast of Baghdad.
The truck’s driver was Iranian, as was the truck’s license plate, said an Iraqi Interior Ministry source. Authorities are investigating reports that other vehicles with possible fake ballots have been trying to cross the border into Iraq.
Then, Reuters sent this story out:
The head of Iraq’s border guards denied police reports on Wednesday that a tanker truck stuffed with thousands of forged ballot papers had been seized crossing into Iraq from Iran before Thursday’s elections.
“This is all a lie,” said Lieutenant General Ahmed al-Khafaji, the chief of the U.S.-trained force which has responsibility for all Iraq’s borders.
“I heard this yesterday and I checked all the border crossings right away. The borders are all closed anyway,” he told Reuters.
Iraq’s frontiers are closed for the period of the election.
“I contacted all the border crossing points and there was no report of any such incident,” Khafaji said.
Interior Minister Bayan Jabor also denied the reports, which the New York Times ran prominently, quoting a single unnamed Interior Ministry source, and said it was an attempt to discredit the election process.
So, New York Times – what’s the deal?
Did an overzealous reporter write a story based on a rumor and present it as fact in the hopes that the election process could be discredited?
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeated a claim made last week that the Holocaust was a myth.
Last week Ahmadinejad first aired his doubts on the veracity of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were killed by the Nazis. His comments drew a rebuke from the U.N. Security Council.
“They have fabricated a legend under the name ‘Massacre of the Jews’, and they hold it higher than God himself, religion itself and the prophets themselves,” he told a crowd in the southeastern city of Zahedan on Wednesday.
The speech was broadcast live on state television.
European countries called the remarks unacceptable and said they could undermine plans for talks with Tehran on its controversial nuclear program.
Israel said the comments showed Iran’s “rogue regime” was acting outside acceptable international norms.
Ahmadinejad, a former Revolutionary Guardsman who was elected president in June, in October called Israel a “tumor” which must be “wiped off the map”, provoking a diplomatic storm and stoking up fears about Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Holocaust denial is interesting to me, only because I can’t figure out how someone can reach the conclusion that millions of Jews didn’t die during World War II. From what I’ve read, most individuals who deny the Holocaust use a scientific approach in an attempt to “prove” that the Nazi regime could not have used gas chambers to carry out an extermination program against Jews and Gypsies.
Via The Nizkor Project:
The “Leuchter and Rudolf reports” purported to demonstrate that there was not enough cyanide residue in the Auschwitz gas chambers to be consistent with mass gassing.
Friedrich Paul Berg, in his paper “The Diesel Gas Chambers: Myth Within a Myth,” claims to show that it would be improbable at best and nearly impossible at worst to use diesel engine exhaust to kill people in the manner and time described by eyewitnesses to the gas chambers at Belzec and Treblinka. Both papers cite experiments, laboratory analyses, chemical compositions, etc.
The danger of this new denier approach is that few people have the technical background to analyze the papers and understand their fundamental flaws. Too many people glance at the arguments, see “science,” and immediately their eyes glaze over. They figure that since it’s “scientific,” there must be something to it. Thus Holocaust denial gains scientific credibility.
Other examples of Holocaust denial theory include:
1. The Holocaust Did Not Occur Because There Is No Single “Master Plan” for Jewish Annihilation.
There is no single Nazi document that expressly enumerates a “master plan” for the annihilation of European Jewry. Holocaust-denial propagandists misrepresent this fact as an exposure of the Holocaust “hoax”; in doing so, they reveal a fundamentally misleading approach to the history of the era. That there was no single document does not mean there was no plan. The “Final Solution” the Nazis’ comprehensive plan to murder all European Jews – was, as the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust observes, “the culmination of a long evolution of Nazi Jewish policy.” The destruction process was shaped gradually: it was borne of many thousands of directives.
2. There Were No Gas Chambers Used for Mass Murder at Auschwitz and Other Camps.
Oh, really?
Death camp gas chambers were the primary means of execution used against the Jews during the Holocaust. The Nazis issued a directive implementing large-scale gas chambers in the fall of 1941 but, by then, procedures facilitating mass murder, including the utilization of smaller gas chambers, were already in practice. Before their use in death camps, gas chambers were central to Hitler’s “eugenics” program. Between January 1940 and August 1941, 70,273 Germans – most of them physically handicapped or mentally ill – were gassed, 20-30 at a time, in hermetically shut chambers disguised as shower rooms.
3. Holocaust Scholars Rely on the Testimony of Survivors Because There Is No Objective Documentation Proving the Nazi Genocide.
Another frequent claim of Holocaust “revisionists” concerns what they describe as the lack of objective documentation proving the facts of the Holocaust, and the reliance by scholars on biased and poorly collected testimonies of survivors. However, the Germans themselves left no shortage of documentation and testimony to these events, and no serious scholar has relied solely on survivor testimony as the conclusive word on Holocaust history. Lucy Dawidowicz, in the preface to her authoritative work, The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, wrote, “The German documents captured by the Allied armies at the war’s end have provided an incomparable historical record, which, with regard to volume and accessibility, has been unique in the annals of scholarship…. The National Archives and the American Historical Association jointly have published 67 volumes of Guides to German Records Microfilmed at Alexandria, VA. For my work I have limited myself mainly to published German documents.” The author then proceeds to list 303 published sources – excluding periodicals -documenting the conclusions of her research. Among these sources are the writings of recognizable Nazi policy makers such as Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hoess and Alfred Rosenberg.
4. There Was No Net Loss of Jewish Lives Between 1941 and 1945.
Another frequent “revisionist” assertion calls into question the generally accepted estimates of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. In attempting to portray the deaths of millions of Jews as an exaggeration or a fabrication, Holocaust deniers wildly manipulate reference works, almanac statistics, geopolitical data, bedrock historical facts and other sources of information and reportage.
For example, “revisionists” commonly cite various almanac or atlas figures – typically compiled before comprehensive accounts on the Holocaust were available – that appear to indicate that the worldwide Jewish population before and after World War II remained essentially stable, thereby “proving” that 6 million Jews could not have died during this period.
The widely cited “6 million” figure is derived from the initial 1945 Nuremberg trial estimate of 5.7 million deaths; subsequent censuses, statistical analyses, and other demographic studies of European Jewry have consistently demonstrated the essential accuracy of this first tally. After nearly 50 years of study, historians agree that approximately 6 million Jews perished during the course of the Nazi genocide.
And…
5. The Nuremberg Trials Were a “Farce of Justice” Staged for the Benefit of the Jews.
Yet another centerpiece of “revisionist” propaganda attacks the objectivity and legal validity of the postwar Nuremberg Trials, where much information about the Holocaust first became public, and where the general history of the genocide was first established.
The actual process of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice was a lengthy and complicated effort involving the differing legal traditions and political agendas of the United States, England, France and the Soviet Union. As the historical record shows, the allied victors, if anything, erred on the side of leniency toward the accused Nazis.
Regardless of the history behind Holocaust denial, the fact is this sort of revisionism continues and becomes even more prominent when a public figure stands up and proclaims support. This is why Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is so dangerous. A world leader can incite people to react in a variety of ways, and if the Iranian President is actively pushing his personal Holocaust denial theories, his influence is, without a doubt, taking root.
The best thing that can be done to combat Holocaust deniers like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is public condemnation. It is good that other world leaders are standing up and speaking out against his beliefs. They are outrageous. We all need to do everything we can to stop this historical revisionism from catching on world-wide.
Others
Websites denying the Holocaust or parts thereof
Websites criticizing Holocaust deniers
Audio testimony of Holocaust survivors
I’m on a press release distribution list that is delivered by email from Fenton Communications, the PR company who represents MoveOn.org and other leftist organizations. I don’t know how I got on the list, as I certainly didn’t sign up nor did I misrepresent myself to them in the hopes that I would receive ‘insider’ info designed for only the most serious moonbat. In fact, I’ve tried to unsubscribe a number of times, to no avail. You’d think they wouldn’t want someone like me receiving their bloviations. Perhaps it’s an orchestrated effort to brainwash convert me into moonbat-lite or a little moonybat or something? Who knows…
Anyway, today I received yet another email from my Fenton friends. This one comes from Jessica Smith.
Just wanted to bring to your attention this column about MoveOn’s actions tomorrow (delivering 400,000+ “Out in ’06” petitions to 248 congressional districts) which represent EXACTLY the kind of anti-war energy that the Republican leadership is worried about. They know that Republicans are vulnerable because the majority of Americans are NOT on their side concerning the President’s failed Iraq policy. And, the heat is on. It’s evidenced in the RNC’s latest memo, prepping members about MoveOn’s events tomorrow. Just wanted to give you a heads up. Best, Jessica 202-822-5200.
And Jessica was kind enough to “give me a heads up”. Isn’t that thoughtful?
Jessica links to Chris Cillizza’s WaPo blog, The Fix. Chris talked with MoveOn.org’s Washington Director Tom Matzzie, and quoted to him the statement from a GOP circular alerting congressional members to anticipate MoveOn.org’s intentions to conduct various Anti-war protests in the coming weeks and months.
I probably don’t have to remind you of the fact that Fenton Communications in March 2003 published a book of tips for “navigating media in wartime,” in which they advised…
“DON’T bash Bush. 2 out of 3 Americans approve of Bush’s handling of the confrontation with Saddam Hussein. In times of war — especially the early stages — the public’s instinct is to stand behind its leader. You won’t win any allies by alienating yourself with harsh attacks.”
Oh, that’s so 2003 Jessica! That was then and this is now. And America is behind you right? If that’s true, then why does MoveOn.org have to resort to dirty tactics like this? Really now Jessica, do you sincerely believe that Americans stand with MoveOn.org when they manipulate television ads which disrespect our fighting men and women in Iraq? Does MoveOn.org really even know what a U.S. soldier looks like? Do you?
Can’t wait for your next email Jessica.
I voted for Mardi Gras before I voted against it.
This time, it’s the president of the American Red Cross.
American Red Cross President Marsha J. Evans, who oversaw the charity’s vast and sometimes criticized response to Hurricane Katrina, is resigning effective at the end of this month because of friction with her board of governors, the organization said Tuesday.
Red Cross spokesman Charles Connor said the board was not unhappy with Evans’ handling of the hurricane response, “but had concerns about her management approach, and coordination and communication with the board.”
Jack McGuire, the executive vice president of the charity’s Biomedical Services, was named to serve as interim president and CEO while a search for a permanent successor to Evans is conducted.
You’ve got to have the right people doing the right job. Sometimes you stumble upon the good ones, but most of the time you don’t. Disasters like Katrina have a way of weeding out the bad ones and as far as I’m concerned, that’s a good thing. Marsha Evans will be just fine, and it’s likely she already has job offers, any one of which will maintain a six figure income lifestyle.
We need the right people doing the right jobs in Washington, and hopefully a new American Red Cross president will be better prepared to deal with the immediate actions necessary in the wake of a natural disaster, while simultaneously having the ability to manage and lead the volunteers who execute those actions.
Former President Gerald R. Ford, has been admitted to a hospital to treat what is being described as “a horrible cold”. At 92 years of age, even a mild cold can quickly turn into full-blown pneumonia, and that can kill.
Ford, 92, was admitted to Eisenhower Medical Center late Monday and was expected to be released Wednesday, spokeswoman Penny Circle said from Ford’s Rancho Mirage office about 110 miles east of Los Angeles.
“He’s in for medical tests, routine tests,” Circle told The Associated Press by telephone. “He’s had a horrible cold and he still hasn’t gotten over it.”
While staff members are minimizing this little episode and calling it routine, etc., don’t be surprised if we learn before the month is out that Ford has died from whatever ails him. Reality is what it is, and he’s an old man. You can be sure that whatever is going on with the former president, there are those around him who are well prepared to deal with worst case scenarios, and for a 92-year-old, a ‘common cold’ can be the case that kills.