Competency Test

I like this idea of a presidential game show of sorts to test a candidate's ability to actually be president.

I think the comments are more to the point (as is sometimes the case) and they present better features than the original post.

My ideal presidential game show would include at least these two features: the knowledge test jeopardy, containing questions on the american founding, constitution, laws, basic economic savvy, stuff everyone should know. This was suggested on the site by poster "Christina":

Since Celebrity Jeopardy routinely humiliates its participants by exposing their ignorance on basic knowledge, I think a kind of Presidential Jeopardy would be equally useful.

Ha, guess who would lose that round?

and a war game as suggested by a "PH":

A virtual war game. Make them play-out one of those Pentagon war game scenario games in front of the public, and then be questioned on their decisions.

Maybe Matthew Broderick could provide some occasional voice-over play-by-play from the a room in the back - like in Celebrity Poker. Each week you could have a guest co-host: Schwarzkopf, Powell and Berger etc...

Much more entertaining and enlightening then lame debates. Can you imagine Democrats fighting a war game? Me neither. They'd try negotiating with enemy tanks. Not like some of the Republican front-runners would pass the economic questions either.

"It's not that liberals are ignorant, it's what they know that is wrong."

A short clip and a cartoon for your entertainment and enlightenment:

Romney on why liberal philosophy has got it all wrong. (click on "Romney: Philosophy of strength")

Obama As President
Most people I know would make a better president than this guy.
And I love how Castro is on life support and Kim Mentally Unstable Jong II is uber short.

I know I have been remiss in posting but as the school year commences, posts may be few and far between.
I think the site will take a new format: one post a week. This way I will organize my thoughts better, and give you a more quality post. We'll see how that works for a while and go from there.

Coming up:
- A series on global warming/climate change as I have just discovered notes from a conference I went on the issue. Very interesting stuff, prepare for a solid challenge to the conventional wisdom (which is almost always wrong, it's pretty safe to assume that).
- An update on my PBS exploits.

A Headline You'll Never See

Citizens oust terrorists from mosque, help uncover weapons cache

This is as news worthy as 4 Americans Killed in Bombings...

In fact I think it is more news worthy because lives being lost in a war is not really news.

Now do not get me wrong, I am not minimizing the sacrifice made by our servicemen and women, or downgrading the seriousness of an American death.
What I am criticizing is the media's ardent dedication to spewing bad news only from Iraq, painting their ideological picture of a civil war, rather than the very real occurences of increasing stability and terrorists on the run.

Crumbling Logic

Ex-Clinton Official Ties Minneapolis Bridge Collapse to Global Warming

This is hysterical. The global warming hype has reached new levels if we are now tacking bridge collapses to tempature increases. Increases that have always occurred and are hardly a new phenomena.

Read the comments on that article, quite funny. A few people suggested selling the gullible government heat resitant paint to protect the bridges. Here's one comment's take:

Painting the bridge? I dunno, that sounds like an awful lot of work. Wouldn't be easier to just blame it on climate change and spend billions of dollars trying to make it 1 degree cooler over the next century?

Here is another favorite:

Common sense 1 if "climate change" brought this bridge down why are not the 4 other bridges like it or the thousands across Minnesota older not falling into the creeks.

Common sense 2 if "climate change" brought down the bridge why is it other much older buildings in Minnesota from Court Houses to historic homes are not falling down.......as you know bridges do not have the extremes houses do in being 80 degress inside while it is 20 below outside.

Common sense 3, Paul Douglas is the resident WCCO weather boy and contrary to the the NTSB, Minnesota in Minneapolis has been very mild the past years. It has been quite balmy in fact with Douglas last year whining about no snow for his snowmobile. Minneapolis does not get that cold like the Canadian border regions.

Common sense 4, this bridge when it fell HAD BOTH MAIN STRUCTURES COLLAPSE. It fell evenly and there is no logical reason for it to have behaved perfectly. It should have twisted and sagged and yet one side dropped and the other end of this section dropped only at a slightly higher angle. That is not infrastructure nor climate change. That is something man made.

And since we are discussing climate change, one cannot continue without mentioning the great High Priest of the Environmentalist Religion: Al Gore.
Here's an interesting list of Inconvenient Facts Mr. Gore must have a hard time explaining:

An Inconvenient Fact - Occidental Petroleum & the Gore Family go way back!

An Inconvenient Fact - Gore owns a company that sells carbon offsets to suckers who believe his lies.

An Inconvenient Fact – Gore drives a Cadillac Escalade and not a Prius. Gore's daughter drives a v12 Lamborghini.

An Inconvenient Fact – Gore’s 10,000 square foot estate in Tennessee with an indoor swimming pool uses more energy per month than you do in one year. His other two homes use lots of energy too!

An Inconvenient Fact – Gore flies in private jets, lecturing us to reduce our carbon footprints by flying and driving less.

An Inconvenient Fact – Gore’s home in Carthage, Tennessee sits on a zinc mine receiving $20,000 a year in royalties from Pasminco Zinc – a company that pollutes the nearby Caney Fork River.

An Inconvenient Fact – Mars and Pluto are also warming up without any SUV’s and crude oil.

An Inconvenient Fact – Gore served endangered Chilean Sea Bass at his daughter’s wedding last month in Beverly Hills. He demanded a recount of the fish to learn if they really are endangered. Florida surfer Dude “Hangin’ Chad” is in charge of the recount. Then Gore bought “fish offsets” to feel less guilty from the company that sells “carbon offsets” – the one he himself owns.

An Inconvenient Fact – Gore dropped out of Divinity school, Journalism school and Law school – but he is now an expert in environmental studies with no degree?

Hm, it seems as if someone's green halo is a bit tarnished. Any more digging into his personal habits and we just might expose the presidential loser for the farce that he is.

Absolute Relativism

On the way to work today I overheard a conversation on the train that was rather bothersome. No I really don't make it a habit to listen to other people's conversations but these were the only people speaking in the whole train (it was like 7:30 after all) and they were right next to me.

So now that I've justified my eavesdropping, here's what they were talking about. One was decrying the Louvre (famous art museum in France) saying they would never go there, but oh the glories of the Centre Pompidou! So in one sentence they slammed some of the greatest works of art (Mona Lisa, housed in the Louvre) while showing deep appreciation for the utter crap in the Centre Pompidou.

Ok, ok, bear with me, I know discussing French museums is slightly uncharacteristic but really, elevating the Centre Pompidou over the Louvre? If you haven't seen the Centre, look up some pictures. Not only does it look absurd, but its contents are equally ridiculous.

Modern art is based on the contradictory presumption of absolute relativism. That is, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Ok maybe you don't think this picture of two colored dots that took zero talent to produce isn't beautiful, but I do. So there is no absolute standard in the light of which art is evaluated, except for that of relativism. Anything is allowed except for some antique notion of quality criteria.
Throw it all out the window and put a urinal on display and call it art.

Ridiculous.

In other (unrelated...well maybe not) news, my favorite green, wet-behind-the-ears Democrat is severely damaging our reputation abroad. My man Obama is now calling for an invasion of our ally, Pakistan. This shows he knows absolutely nothing about a) conducting a war, especially the current one, and b) how to not tick of a sovereign country, especially if we allied with them.

The balance is delicate enough with members of Congress calling for military strikes in someone's backyard because of what you think you know. As this article describes and critiques, we already do that Mr. Obama. In fact recently we have taken out several top Al-Qaeda leadership.

Here is Pakistan's response, effectively putting the ignorant senator in his place. Not my favorite country, but they do a nice job of putting Dems in their place.

This is simply a taste of the incompetency we would experience with a Democrat in office. The perceived diplomatic failures of President Bush will pale in comparison.

We Fund Our Own Demise

So you know all those evil countries out there, Iran, Sudan, North Korea? I know I am being simplistic like the President by calling them evil but let us be real here: they hate Americans, they hate freedom, they hate liberty, they love power. Iran and NK would jump in a moment if they had the opportunity to obliterate the US, and all 300 million of its inhabitants. Call me simplistic if you want but that sounds evil.

But these despotic states get their support from somewhere and despite supposed sanctions from the UN and international pressure to behave, they continue their belligerent quest for nuclear weapons and spit on any notion of behavior standards by kidnapping sailors, hosting terrorists and the like.

So where does this support come from you ask? Well surprise surprise some of it comes from the pockets of Americans. How? Because the companies we invest in have ties with terror sponsors.

That is why there is a movement to divest in terror sponsoring countries and thus cut off their lifeline, sending a clear signal that we mean business (literally) and they need to get in line.

Michael O'Brien from NRO writes about this new terror divestment phenomenon.

And Candace de Russy also writes on the new push for terror-free funds.

Check out this 'Dirty Dozen' list of top companies embroiled in supporting terror-coddling and genocidal regimes. Recognize any of those names? Hyundai? Siemens? Bad folk.

But how does this apply to the everday American? Or say the college student?
Well, college endowments represent a significant segment of the market, $340 billion to be exact (in 2006, according to that NRO article). And:

The top 20 of these campuses represent close to 50 percent of the total of all reporting institutions.
...
The magnitude of these 20 endowment funds is such that a large percentage of them, like pension funds seeking broad diversification, are almost certainly investing, to some greater or lesser degree, in firms benefiting the Iranian regime (and the other states on the terror watch lists).

It is imperative for these universities to re-evaluate their investment policies and in the light of the threats facing this nation, eliminate all companies that have ties to terror-sponsoring nations. It's not hard: they are the bad guys so we shouldn't be putting money in their back pockets while our troops are giving their lives to fight them.
Doubt the connection between Iran and terrorism? Don't be naive.

While universities may be demonstrating resistance to reforming their investment policies, they cave relatively easily. All it takes is some public outcry. Once they realize the parents, students, alumni, and donors are all calling for terror divestment they will be forced to make adjustments, or risk losing endowment dollars: a terrifying prospect.

So all those student groups out there protesting Darfur and genocide and Faces for Darfur and all that, even those protests about the loss of life caused by the American invasion of Iraq (which pales in comparison to a single action by a single one of these terrorist regimes), should all shift their focus to their own backyard and a university endowment that in many cases directly supports such evil.

"Here's my strategy on the Iraq War: We win, they lose."

(Ok I borrowed that from Reagan, and he actually said Cold War...)

Pandora Radio - Listen to Free Internet Radio, Find New Music

I highly reccomend this website, very handy for lots of free streaming music. No downloads, no lag.

Here are some good bullet points from a New York Post article on why we are winning in Iraq. All of these advances are examples of how we are throwing our enemies off balance. It is up to Congress to decide whether or not we will finish the job. Seems like a simple decision but apparently not for politicians.
Observe the facts and decide for yourself:

* Al Qaeda lost the support of Iraq's Sunni Arabs. The fanatics over-reached: They murdered popular sheiks, kidnapped tribal women for forced marriages, tried to outlaw any form of joy and (perhaps most fatally, given Iraqi habits) banned smoking. In response, the Arab version of the Marlboro Man rose up and started cutting terrorist throats.

* Since the tribes who once were fighting against us turned on al Qaeda, our troops not only captured the senior Iraqi in the organization - which made brief headlines - but also killed the three al Turki brothers, major-league pinch-hitters al Qaeda sent into Iraq to save the game.

* Al Qaeda has been pushed right across Anbar, from the once Wild West to the province's eastern fringes. The terrorists are still dug in elsewhere, from the Diyala River Valley to a few Baghdad neighborhoods - but, to quote that senior officer again, "our forces have been taking out their leaders faster than they can find qualified replacements."

* It isn't only al Qaeda taking serious hits. After briefly showing the flag, Muqtada al-Sadr fled back to Iran again, trailed by his senior deputies. Mookie's No. 2 even moved his family to Iran. Why? Though he's been weak in the past, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is now green-lighting Iraqi operations against the Jaish al Mahdi, the Mookster's "Mahdi Army."
In Mosul, Iraqi army and police units stuck to their guns through a series of tough combat engagements, with the result that massive arms caches were seized from the terrorists and insurgents. In Kirkuk, Iraqi police reacted promptly to last week's gruesome car-bombing - in time to stop two other car bombs from reaching their intended targets.

* In Baghdad, the surge isn't only about American successes - Iraqi security and intelligence forces conducted a series of hard-hitting operations against both al Qaeda and Iran-backed Special Group terrorists.

This is also an excellent perspective, even if it is a retired general. This article discusses the differences between this year and last year and how that indicates that we are poised for success in Iraq.

Leave it to Congress to screw it up though.