'Post-racial'
apologies for the
race-hate hustle

by Mark Steyn
O.C. Register

"I'm sure," said Barack Obama in that sonorous baritone that makes his drive-thru order for a Big Mac, fries and strawberry shake sound profound, "many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed."

Well, yes. But not many of us have heard remarks from our pastors, priests or rabbis that are stark, staring, out-of-his-tree, flown-the-coop nuts.

[continue]

When Harry Met Vegas

by Peter Waldman
CONDÉ NAST PORTFOLIO

Harry Reid, the Democrats’ Senate leader, is a darling of national environmentalists. But in his home state of Nevada, where runaway growth portends a ruinous water crisis, Reid is an enabler for developers and pit miners — and a desert ecosystem is at stake.

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Financial rape: How hot Vegas Strip clubs do it

By Jeff German
Las Vegas Sun

Come with John and Tina Henderson as they take you through the powerfully expensive night they spent last month at LAX nightclub in Luxor. Warning: It is not for the faint of wallet. Henderson, 53, is a businessman who has lived in Las Vegas with his family since 1989. He and his wife took their daughter, Marissa, and her friends from Santa Clara University to LAX to celebrate her 21st birthday. He summed up the experience in an interview with the Sun on Thursday: “I was insulted. I felt financially raped.”  [continue]

Reid a poor excuse for a national leader
Birmingham Press-Register

LEAVE IT to Joe Lieberman.

Amid the howls of justifiable outrage over Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's declaration that America has "lost" the war in Iraq, Sen. Lieberman said it best: "This is exactly the wrong time to question our strategy in Iraq or say that our new strategy has failed." The Connecticut senator -- an independent who caucuses with the Democrats -- is exactly right. When U.S. soldiers and Marines are fighting and dying on foreign soil, it is outrageous for a high-profile political leader to make such an irresponsible statement. [more]

In the US Civil War, 'Copperhead' Democrats in the North nearly defeated Lincoln's effort to save the Union. Today's Democrats are similarly guilty.

What? Wait a minute. The entire mantra of the war critics has been  "no WMDs, no WMDs, no threat, no threat", for the past three years solid. [more]

The Reid Family Brothel
Los Angeles Times

By Emily Green
Las Vegas Sun

The raw glory of the Mojave and Great Basin deserts is difficult to imagine from the paved fantasyland of Las Vegas. As the road wends north of the city, past sun-soaked bluffs into Pahranagat Valley, there is what looks like a river but are in fact four spring-fed lakes running for some 40 miles. Audubon himself would weep at the birdlife working this watering spot on the Pacific flyway. Bald eagles ride the breezes. Herons skid across the water. [continue]

Earlier in the same series:
Reid names his legacy: 'the
rape of White Pine County'

To save his family’s livelihood from a Las Vegas water scheme that could reduce his land to dust, a White Pine County rancher joins forces with Utah [continue]

Why the Hollywood left, first harnessed to Stalinism in the '20s, still labors for that cause today

Lying for the truth: Münzenberg & the Comintern

On October 22, 1940, not far from a tiny French hamlet near Grenoble called Montagne, two hunters out with their dogs stumbled across something gruesome hidden in a small stand of woods. At the foot of a fine old oak sat, upright, the decomposing body of a man. The man had been dead for a long time, and he appeared to have been hanged.

What the hunters found that day would become more than a legend of their town; it would take its place among the enduring mysteries of modern politics. For this was the body of a man named Willi Münzenberg, and Willi Münzenberg had lived and died as one of the unseen powers of twentieth-century Europe. When the hunters found it, his corpse was almost entirely covered with fallen leaves. Only the vile face and the popped stare of strangulation were visible—that and the noose. The reek was awful; the body had plainly been there for months. The knotted cord around its neck seemed to have snapped, probably quite soon after he had been hanged, and when it broke, the body had apparently dropped to the base of the tree. There it had stayed, knees up, all through that summer of the French defeat, sitting oddly undetected until October began to cover it with the drift of autumn and the hunters’ dogs, yelping and whining, discovered the thing.

The French villagers knew nothing about Willi Münzenberg. Münzenberg was and is not a famous name, though this man’s power had given him a potent grip on the workings of fame. Since his radical youth in 1917, Willi Münzenberg had been a largely covert but major actor in the politics of the twentieth century. As a founding organizer of the Communist International and a leader in the structure of Marxist–Leninist power outside Russia, Münzenberg had played an especially influential part in the conspiracies, the maneuvers, the propaganda, the secret policies and actions that had led to this very spot: here to the fall of France; here to Hitler’s war on the West; here to these woods, and this death. [see#1] [see#2] [see#3]
 

"Democratic leaders smiled and cheered as the last votes [to deny funding for U.S. troops in Iraq] were counted. What were they celebrating? Defeat? Surrender?"  asked Sen. John McCain. "In Iraq, only our enemies were cheering. A defeat for the United States is a cause for mourning, not celebrating. And determining how the United States can avert such a disaster should encourage the most sober, public-spirited reasoning among our elected leaders, not the giddy anticipation of the next election." McCain was speaking Wednesday in the chapel of the Virginia Military Institute before several hundred VMI cadets -- some of whom have already served in Iraq.  [read the full text of McCain's address to VMI cadets]

[cartoon by Eric Allie, http://www.cnsnews.com

Reid boast: "We killed the Patriot Act." "We killed the Patriot Act," boasted Minority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, to cheers from a crowd of Democrats at a political rally after the vote. "The motto of the Democrat party might just as well be something like this: 'It would be better for thousands, or tens of thousands of Americans to die in a terrorist attack, than for one terrorist to have his privacy invaded by a telephone tap as he chats with an Al Qaeda operative overseas.'" -- Aussiegirl   Who Is Lying About Iraq? By Norman Podhoretz Commentary magazine Among the many distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed. The (Very)  Big Lie By Michael Barone US News & World Report It is said that a big lie can work if it is repeated often enough. For weeks, leading Democrats have been hammering away at the Big Lie that George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.  more What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up, or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what. [more]

Conspiracy Theories By David Brooks New York Times Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m., writing important notes in crayon on the outside of envelopes. It's been four weeks since he launched his personal investigation into the Republican plot to manipulate intelligence to trick the American people into believing Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.  [more]

[cartoon by Eric Allie, http://www.cnsnews.com