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Posted by On the Right on Saturday, July 26, 2008 6:43:46 PM

Ahmadinejad: We have 5,000 centrifuges up and running, or maybe 6,000

The precise number’s in dispute. What’s not in dispute: (a) If he’s telling the truth and they’re running proper cascades, then per the “3,000 centrifuges = 1 bomb per year” rule, Iran’s now capable of producing HEU sufficient for one weapon in six or seven months or considerably sooner if the centrifuges they’re using are the new IR-2 model; and (b) he’s certainly learned the right lesson from Bush’s willingness to meet face to face without preconditions. In his own words:

“The West wanted us to stop,” he was quoted as telling a group of scholars. “We resisted, and now they want to resume negotiations.”

Who knows what tasty concessions further resistance might win?


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The End Of The Ride

Posted by On the Right on Saturday, July 26, 2008 4:35:10 PM

Barone: $4 gas hits the Nuke the Caribou button


Michael Barone says that the American people have begun to turn against the environmentalists after having a dash of cold water — or expensive gasoline — splashed in their faces.  They have awakened to the overblown catastrophe fantasies and have started demanding common sense policy from Washington.  And those politicians who stand it the way may find themselves looking for a new job

Liberals wanted the change to be so gradual that it wouldn’t alert Americans to the folly and cost of radical environmentalism. The cause suited their purposes perfectly, not for environmental reasons, but to gain control of energy production from the private sector. They wanted to produce so much regulation on the industry that it would all but grind to a halt, providing a rationalization for major government intervention — which Maxine Waters and Maurice Hinchey both explicitly demanded. And if gas prices hadn’t shot up so rapidly, they would probably have succeeded.Now that the cost has come home to a wide swath of Americans, environmentalism doesn’t sound as uplifting as it once did.  When the kangaroo rat kept one man from using his private property as he saw fit, only a few people objected to it.  When Congress and then Bill Clinton blocked exploration of ANWR, Americans shrugged.  Who needed American oil, which would have produced American jobs, when we could buy oil cheaply on the world market, providing price supports for countries like Iran and Sudan, and dictators like Saddam Hussein?  It was much better to have that feeling of self-congratulation for keeping this area pristine!

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One World? Obama's On A Different Planet

Posted by On the Right on Saturday, July 26, 2008 4:28:22 PM
Radical and naive: Obama’s on a different planet

Perhaps Obama needs a remedial course in Cold War history, but the Berlin Wall most certainly did not come down because "the world stood as one." The wall fell because of a decades-long, existential struggle against one of the greatest totalitarian ideologies mankind has ever faced. It was a struggle in which strong and determined U.S. leadership was constantly questioned, both in Europe and by substantial segments of the senator's own Democratic Party. In Germany in the later years of the Cold War, Ostpolitik -- "eastern politics," a policy of rapprochement rather than resistance -- continuously risked a split in the Western alliance and might have allowed communism to survive. The U.S. president who made the final successful assault on communism, Ronald Reagan, was derided by many in Europe as not very bright, too unilateralist and too provocative.

The successes Obama refers to in his speech -- the defeat of Nazism, the Berlin airlift and the collapse of communism -- were all gained by strong alliances defeating determined opponents of freedom, not by "one-worldism." Although the senator was trying to distinguish himself from perceptions of Bush administration policy within the Atlantic Alliance, he was in fact sketching out a post-alliance policy, perhaps one that would unfold in global organizations such as the United Nations. This is far-reaching indeed.

Tearing down the Berlin Wall was possible because one side -- our side -- defeated the other. Differences in levels of economic development, or the treatment of racial, immigration or religious questions, are not susceptible to the same analysis or solution. Even more basically, challenges to our very civilization, as the Cold War surely was, are not overcome by naively "tearing down walls" with our adversaries.

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Only Slightly Demented?

Posted by On the Right on Saturday, July 26, 2008 1:45:45 PM

The Impugnment Hearings


When the Republicans held the majority in the House, the Democrats held a mock-impeachment hearing against George Bush in which John Conyers presided as a pretend committee chair.  Dana Milbank famously skewered Conyers and the nuttiness that surrounded the June 2005 basement meeting, calling it “a trip to the land of make-believe”.  Almost two years after gaining the majority, Democrats continue to live in fantasy, but this time at least Conyers doesn’t have to pretend that he’s a committee chair, as the Los Angeles Times reports on the so-called “impugnment hearings” against Bush

In 2005, Milbank chronicled the insanity that surrounded the pretend committee meeting Conyers chaired. The air of conspiracy paranoia led to several embarrassing sequences. 9/11 Truthers used it as a rally to hand out their materials, and at least one witness, Ray McGovern, explained to the committee how Bush was being run by the Jooooooooos. While the LAT/AP report doesn’t explicitly report these kinds of antics at the Impugnment Hearings yesterday, one witness was moved to try to bring Conyers and Kucinich back to Planet Earth:

One witness, law professor Jeremy Rabkin of George Mason University, said he was “astonished at the mood in this room.”

“The tone of these deliberations is slightly demented,” Rabkin said.

“You should all remind yourselves that the rest of the country is not necessarily in this same bubble in which people think it is reasonable to describe the president as if he were Caligula.”

Shh! Don’t wake them from their fantasy, Professor Rabkin. It’s dangerous to confront the “slightly demented” with reality ….





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Painter Fined For Smoking In [His] Van

Posted by On the Right on Saturday, July 26, 2008 1:38:41 PM
Man in Britain fined for smoking in his own car
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Tax Debates Make Him Sick

Posted by On the Right on Saturday, July 26, 2008 11:20:38 AM

Video: Reid says taxes “voluntary”


Via McQ, we present a mind-bender of an interview of Harry Reid by Jan Helfeld.  It appears to be a few years old, but it’s worth a flashback only to see Reid get outboxed in almost every way possible by Helfeld on a simple point: taxes are extracted from taxpayers by threat of force.  Helfeld objects to redistributionism, but instead of answering that point, Reid tries to argue that taxes are voluntary

Reid reveals himself to be a clueless fool in the course of less than five minutes. He argues that European systems use force by withholding all of their income taxes through the employer … which the US does as well. Reid senses defeat on this point, albeit belatedly, and then tries to argue that deductions make the system voluntary.  Helfeld asks him several times what treatment Americans can expect if they start treating their tax obligations as voluntary, and Reid tries to insist that it doesn’t necessarily lead to prison — the government could just fine the hell out of them. 

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Sanctuary For Citizens

Posted by On the Right on Saturday, July 26, 2008 2:01:21 AM
Just how many Americans need to be murdered, killed, robbed, assaulted and raped by illegal aliens before San Francisco's Gavin Newsome and other sanctuary-city mayors protect them as well?

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The theory is that by providing sanctuary to those who've entered the U.S. illegally and not notifying federal authorities, the police get cooperation and intelligence from the illegal alien community in fighting crime.

Never mind that certain crimes would never happen if the illegals committing them weren't here in the first place.

"I will not allow any of my department heads or anyone associated with this city to cooperate in any shape or form with these raids," Newsome declared.

This year, the mayor launched an $83,000 "public awareness campaign" to let illegal aliens everywhere know they're safe in the sanctuary by the bay.

Sadly, the same cannot be said for its American citizens.

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Put ACLU On Watch

Posted by On the Right on Saturday, July 26, 2008 1:57:55 AM
Forced to defend its growing terrorist watch list, the FBI let slip a chilling fact that should silence ACLU grumblers: America is teeming with 20,000 terrorists.

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But never mind all that. The ACLU and its allies on the Hill want to scrap the terrorist watch list and take law enforcement's eye off these potentially dangerous suspects.

In a perfect world, the ACLU might qualify as a terrorist facilitator deserving of its own spot on the list.

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Bombers In Cuba, Bases In Venezuela

Posted by On the Right on Saturday, July 26, 2008 1:54:43 AM
As Barack Obama luxuriated in the adoration of Europeans, a less charming leader was also making his way across the Continent, seeking arms and military bases to direct toward the United States.

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If Things Are So Bad . . .

Posted by On the Right on Saturday, July 26, 2008 1:19:39 AM
If the economy is in recession, why are business durable-goods orders and shipments booming? Non-defense capital goods (capex) excluding aircraft rose 1.4 percent in June, or 19 percent at an annual rate over the . . . Go
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Checking Out Obama's Claim Of Europe's 'Serious Losses' In Afghanistan

Posted by On the Right on Saturday, July 26, 2008 1:14:41 AM
Obama to Brian Williams: “Americans have a tendency to characterize Europeans as effete or unwilling to shoulder the necessary burdens for freedom when you’ve got a lot of coalition forces in Afghanistan who have taken serious losses,” Obama said. Every soldier’s death is tragic, but if . . . Go
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Will Democrats Support Our Troops And Fix Boumediene?

Posted by On the Right on Saturday, July 26, 2008 1:10:53 AM
Congress needs to act to fix Boumediene. “Avoiding ‘CSI Kandahar’”
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A Modest Dissent To The Citizen Of The World

Posted by On the Right on Friday, July 25, 2008 2:43:12 PM
I don’t believe the world did anything to save Berlin. “It’s America, Obama”

Perhaps conflict-resolution theory posits there are no villains, only misunderstandings; but I think military history suggests that culpability exists — and is not merely hopelessly relative or just in the eye of the beholder. So despite Obama’s soaring moral rhetoric, I am troubled by his historical revisionism that, “The two superpowers that faced each other across the wall of this city came too close too often to destroying all we have built and all that we love.”

I would beg to differ again, and suggest instead that a mass-murdering Soviet tyranny came close to destroying the European continent (as it had, in fact, wiped out millions of its own people) and much beyond as well — and was checked only by an often lone and caricatured US superpower and its nuclear deterrence. When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no danger to the world from American nuclear weapons “destroying all we have built” — while the inverse would not have been true, had nuclear and totalitarian communism prevailed. We sleep too lightly tonight not because democratic Israel has obtained nuclear weapons, but because a frightening Iran just might.
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Feeling The Love For Obama In Paris

Posted by On the Right on Friday, July 25, 2008 2:34:46 PM
What reason could there possibly be for Barack Obama not to be the next president of the United States? “President of the World”

I’m having lunch with an Obama supporter at La Coupole, the venerable brasserie in Paris’s Montparnasse neighborhood. The woman who asked me that question, along with her fiance, has come to discuss something else, but the talk inevitably comes round to the U.S. presidential race. And the question here, as all across Europe, is:

What reason could there possibly be for Barack Obama not to be the next president of the United States?

Put another way, why would anyone vote for John McCain?

In the European mind, Guantanamo is one of the centers of evil in the world, a dungeon where George W. Bush commits unspeakable acts on innocent Muslims who just happened to be on a battlefield in Afghanistan or Pakistan when U.S. troops captured them.

She says the prisoners in Gitmo have been denied their constitutional rights.

I say they are enemy combatants; they have rights under international treaties, but not American constitutional rights.

But they have “global rights,” she insists.

What are “global rights”? I ask.

There’s no precise definition, but as far as I could tell, “global rights” appear to be American constitutional rights applied to the entire planet. It’s an astounding notion, given that American constitutional rights definitely do not apply across the entire planet — not even in places like, well, France.

She told me that in France there isn’t the racial segregation one finds in the United States.

And what about politics? A recent article in the New York Times discussed how there is “one black member representing continental France in the National Assembly among 555 members; no continental French senators out of some 300; only a handful of mayors out of some 36,000, and none from the poor Paris suburbs.”

So here in France they are very, very excited about Barack Obama, but have made it somewhat unlikely that an Obama of their own will emerge.

Whether Obama wins or loses, he will still be a hero here in France.

Just as long as he doesn’t try to run for office.
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Can't We All Just Get Along

Posted by On the Right on Friday, July 25, 2008 2:20:23 PM
UN human rights chief to Britain: Be nicer to Muslims
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