Fresh Tasty Ideas

Here’s a perfect example of how the left views Christians as the primary religious threat to this country. The author is scared silly at the thought of Focus on the Family organizing outings to baseball games for Christian youth groups.

The same people who insist Islam is a religion of peace, and who routinely shill for terrorist organizations like Hezbollah or Hamas, will in the same breath lash out at any Christian organization that stands for pro-life, pro-family, traditional American values.

Focus on the Family, The Nation, Dobson, Islam, Christianity

Iran’s great leader has banned all foreign words… because that’s the problem there.

Ahmadinejad, Iran, pizza

Hezbollah wants peace.

Hezbollah wants war.

Lebanon, Israel, Hezbollah, terrorism

A paper in the journal Science is arguing that the recently noted increase in hurricane strength may be due to newer, more accurate measurement methods and technology rather than global warming:

Studies that link a spike in hurricane intensity with global warming are spotting “artificial upward trends” because they rely on bad historical data, a paper suggested today in the journal Science.

Hurricane intensity is measured by the storms’ surface winds. Sometimes those winds are estimated by looking at satellite pictures, using a subjective technique invented in 1972.

Better technology since then, including greater satellite coverage, has led inevitably to higher wind-speed estimates for more recent storms, the authors suggest.

global warming, Inconvenient Truth, hurricane

Littlegreenfootballs.com has a video shot by Reuters in which Palestinian terrorists use a UN ambulance to facilitate an attack on an Israeli Defense Force ambulance. The vehicle is used to move the terrorists around while they swarm about the IDF ambulance.

The US, UK and Canada (plus Israel) all oppose an immediate ceasefire combined with UN peacekeeping troops for numerous reasons. This is just one of those reasons: the UN positions and vehicles have been and are being used against the Israelis.

Palestine, Israel, United Nations, terrorism

Israeli Extremism

Islamic Extremism

terrorism, Palestine, Israel, suicide bombing

Leave it to the New York Times to lament the downsizing of the Internal Revenue Service under the Bush administration. Approximately 174 IRS employees will be let go, 157 of which are lawyers who deal with the estate tax (or referred to as “death tax”). Since fewer people pay this estate tax these days under Bush, it is not necessary to keep the employees who deal with the details of that tax. You would think that shedding lawyers who collect taxes would be well-recieved, but the left-leaning NYT obviously doesn’t approve of the decision, nor does it approve of a slimmed-down estate tax.

New York Times, IRS, taxes, Bush

UN and Hezbollah flags fly side-by-side.

Israel is taking flak for shelling a UN position. The reality is that Hezbollah fighters have been using the UN posts as cover to launch more rockets into Israel. It is well known that Hezbollah also attacks from heavily-civilian areas in order to sustain as many casualties as possible for use as propaganda.

terrorism, Hezbollah, Israel, war, UN

Depending on who you talk to in America these days, you’ll get a very different idea about why the world is going to hell. At the risk of generalizatioin, it seems that there are two competing theories — that of the conservatives and the liberals. Each camp is thoroughly convinced that the future isn’t exactly too bright, and that the opposing party is completely oblivious to the oncoming freight train.

Over in the blue corner (that is, liberal) we have the global warming crisis. A near consensus among the scientific community, so we are told, is warning us that if we don’t do something real quickly, hundreds of millions of people will drown or be made homeless along the world’s coastlines from rising sea levels. For those of us lucky enough to live inland, temperatures will get hot enough to cause food shortages and famines. I’m sure Mr. Gore could provide even more details on what our globally warmed earth will look like. Aside from this global climate catastrophe, liberals also have an exceptional fear of fundamentalist Christians usurping political power in America to create a WASP-ocracy: abortions would be illegal, homosexuals would be drawn-and-quartered, immigrants would be tossed into the sea, and unskilled workers would toil for pennies an hour in sweatshops. It seems these two fears are paramount for any true progressive in America. If we are counting then, perhaps there is a third great fear in the liberal community: the inability to convince the other half of America that the previous two dire problems are actually dire problems.

Conservatives look at the world differently; so differently in fact that sometimes it seems necessary to check and make sure it is the same world we are looking at. Conservatives are strongly focused on terrorism and the decline of traditional Christian morals in the West. 9/11 galvanized a new breed of conservatives who see radical Islam as a primary threat to national security, even on par with traditional threats from established nation states. In a way, the two fears are part of a greater phenomenon — the decline of a post-modern Christian society leaves a cultural vacuum which is being quickly filled by Islam. This certainly is true in Europe, where Western European nations can compensate for their sagging birth rates with copious amounts of immigration. Europe is quickly becoming Islamicized, and American conservatives are genuinely worried about the global consequences that will have. But, like liberals, conservatives have an even more difficult time persuading the other side to see eye-to-eye on these issues.

It should be said that each party acknowledges the threat posed by the other party’s issues. The kerfuffle arises when trying to prioritize the issues. In other words, conservatives will admit it is probably not a good idea to wantonly pump CO2 into the atmosphere, but, given a choice between fighting Islamic terrorism, and cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 20% over 10 years, it’s not really a question. Similarly, liberals contend that terrorism may kill thousands a year, but global warming could potentially kill millions and displace even more peoples. So, there is no doubt which cause is greater on the left side of the aisle.

Unfortunately, only time will reveal which issues we should have spent more time, money, and effort on. At that time, half of America will point and say “I told you so.”

liberals, conservatives, terrorism, global warming, Christian, Islam, West

To deride supporters of the war in Iraq and also the war in Afghanistan, the anti-war left uses the phrase “chicken hawk.” This pejorative term posits that if you have not served in the military, you have no right to support the war. However, Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe shrewdly points out that this new requirement cuts both ways:

If only those who served in uniform during wartime have the moral standing and experience to back a war, then only they have the moral standing and experience to oppose a war. Those who mock the views of “chicken hawks” ought to be just as dismissive of “chicken doves.”

Turnabout is certainly fair play. Thanks to Ex-Donkey for the link.

terrorism, war, chicken hawk, liberals, anti-war