Live by the Car Bomb, Die by the Car Bomb

Hezbollah’s main terrorist, a certain hoople by the name of Imad Mugniyah has assumed room temperature. Funnily enough, it looks like he was killed by a car bomb.

This is the guy who was one of the TWA hijackers in addition to various kidnappings of Americans and his involvement in the Marine barracks bombing.

He won’t be missed other than by people like Code Pink, Russ Feingold and other enemies of America.

Weak Dollar Brings Some Good News

Against the weak dollar, which makes imports more expensive and helps exports, comes some good news of some fairly significant US$ investments in the U.S.

“Forget about China; the United States is the new hot spot for global companies looking for lower production and transport costs, increased supply-chain flexibility and a crack at wooing the world’s most demanding customers.”[...]

There are some other factors, including the need for foreign firms to diversify their own foreign exchange positions.

Although the recent decline of the dollar has exacerbated the need for some European and Asian companies to diversify their currency exposure to remain competitive, some observers argue it’s not the whole story.

“I think the exchange rate issue is gravy on the Excel sheet,” said Todd Malan, president and chief executive of the Organization for International Investment, a trade association for foreign companies doing business in the United States.

“No one is going to build a plant with a 30-year capacity on the basis of an exchange-rate anomaly,” he said. Malan said global firms are investing in the United States because of the country’s highly skilled work force, expansive infrastructure and reliable legal environment. It also gives them access to a very large market.

Other key factors are the reliability of the U.S. legal system in terms of patents and copyright law, innovative workers as well as the size of the U.S. market. A cheap dollar makes the investment “affordable” at this point.

Squirrels Arrested for Spying in Iran

Like they say, you can’t make this stuff up.

Iranians arrest 14 squirrels for spying

“Iranian intelligence operatives recently detained over a dozen squirrels found within the nation’s borders, claiming the rodents were serving as spies for Western powers determined to undermine the Islamic Republic.

“In recent weeks, intelligence operatives have arrested 14 squirrels within Iran’s borders,” state-sponsored news agency IRNA reported. “The squirrels were carrying spy gear of foreign agencies, and were stopped before they could act, thanks to the alertness of our intelligence services.”

Iranian police commander Esmaeil Ahmadi-Moqadam confirmed the report, saying that a number of squirrels had been caught bearing foreign spy gear within Iran’s borders.

“I heard of this but I have no specific knowledge on the subject,” he said. He refused to give further details.

Recently, Iran has increased its efforts in combating espionage by the West. The use of rodents has not been documented in the past.”

Sounds to me like Reid/Pelosi defected and are running the Iranian intelligence services.

Chiquita in a Tough Spot

Chiquita Banana under fire for funding terrorists.

“What do you do when you develop and sell “quite possibly, the world’s perfect food” to the world? Why you fund terrorism of course. Or at least that is what Chiquita Brands International, Inc. will face charges of on Monday.

Chiquita Inc. - best known for their bananas - is expected to face charges from making payments of more than $1.7 million to the United Self-Defense Forces of Columbia, also known as the AUC. The U.S. Government first designated the AUC as a terrorist organization on September, 10, 2001; making it illegal for any U.S. citizen or organization to provide support or resources. The AUC has been well known for its large percentage of Columbia’s cocaine exports as well as brutal massacres during Columbia’s civil conflicts.”[...]

[...]“Chiquita acknowledges that they made the payments, and did so to ensure the safety of their employees that work in Columbia. Columbia is well known for their banana growing regions, and with the violence that takes place, many companies take extra precautions to protect their employees. According to Chiquita, one of its Columbian employees was killed. However they would not say who the victim was or when the person was killed.”[...]

Chiquita is in a tough spot, here. While the group they paid does have terrorist connections, at least in Columbia, the alternative was to either watch their workers get killed or give up on the crop entirely. Another, more costly and probably less effective solution would be to hire a mercenary army.

When you come right down to it, Chiquita was part of a shakedown scheme very similar to what is going on in Madison today albeit with less sophistication.

This Takes the Cake

I have seen my share of moronic ideas in my time; hell, I’ve even come up with a few of my own. But California has come up with the the most moronic idea, ever. What’s even worse, it looks like it has a chance to pass.

“California already ranks as one of America’s five most taxing states, but if liberal activists have their way the Golden State will soon be competing for Number One. Having voted to raise the top income tax rate on the rich two years ago, Californians are this year being confronted with a slate of new ballot propositions to raise levies on motorists, smokers and property owners.

The jewel in this liberal crown is Proposition 87, which would raise taxes on oil extracted from California by 1.5% to 6%, depending on the price per barrel — all in the name of reducing energy consumption and dependency on foreign oil. Let us run that by you again: The idea here is to tax California oil in order to get Californians to use less Saudi oil. Brilliant.

If approved, the law would raise costs on California’s oil producers by as much as $4 billion over the next 10 years. California would overnight become the state with the highest tax on oil producers in the U.S. — which makes as much sense as Vermont levying the highest tax on maple syrup. Not one penny, by the way, would go to close Sacramento’s enormous government debt burden — which may rise by another $40 billion if the multitude of bond initiatives for new public spending are also approved by voters this November.

Instead, the revenue would finance a new state agency, the Energy Alternatives Program Authority. The new energy authority would be responsible for passing out multi-million dollar checks to projects researching alternative energy. If you think corporate welfare is out of control in Washington, wait until Sacramento politicians start passing out these billions in subsidies.[...]“

Now, does it really come a surprise as to who is in favor of this lunacy? Pretty simple, just look up the usual suspects and we get the following a little later in the piece.

[...]“Former President Bill Clinton is starring in a pro-87 TV ad that began running last week. Al Gore is raising money for the initiative, alongside Hollywood economists Geena Davis and Julia Roberts. Its main financial supporter is Hollywood producer Stephen Bing, who is also rich enough not to care about any increase in energy prices; his $40 million contribution is believed to be the largest individual donation to a ballot initiative in history. One co-chairman of the initiative, Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist, has contributed $1 million to the campaign. Mr. Khosla happens to own an ethanol plant outside of Fresno — just the operation that, who knows, might be eligible for funding from this new energy welfare fund.

The biggest impact of Proposition 87 would be to make California oil relatively more expensive to produce than Saudi, or Venezuelan, or Canadian oil. So if 87 passes, Californians will be approving the equivalent of a tariff on their own oil. So the tax would actually make America slightly more, not less, dependent on foreign oil. This is an energy plan that only Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez could love.

Emphasis mine

I hope the local Dems don’t read this or they’ll get the idea to raise taxes on Wisconsin’s dairy output.

Nice to See China Stepping Up

Nice to see China accepting a more responsible role the joke that is North Korea. Although I’m not really sure what effect the banning of luxury goods will have on a country that more and more is resorting to cannablism in order to survive.

The real punishments can come from financial crackdowns and the search of all vessles leaving and enetering North Korea.

One thing that I haven’t seen mentioned in too many places is why China is stepping up into a more active role. I think the answer is simple…they lost great face. China has assured the world (in private talks) that it had a grip on things in Pyongyang. When the dog-eating despot set off the nuke, the Chinese lost face and are now, I believe, truly angry with Kim Jong Il.

China’s U.N. Ambassador Wang Guangya told reporters that the council must give a “firm, constructive, appropriate but prudent response” to North Korea.

“I think there has to be some punitive actions but also I think these actions have to be appropriate,” he said.

In diplo-speak, this is pretty strong language. Looks like the Chinese like their money more than a pot-bellied has-been on their southern border.

Now Pyongyang has a pretty high opinion of their own missile capabilities but given past tests of both the 4th of July bottle rockets and the fact that it now appears the nukes fizzled, you have to wonder just what kind of death wish Kim Jong Il has.

More From the Religion of Peace

Well, once again the boys and girls from the “Religion of Peace” show just how tolerant they are of diverging views. Michelle Malkin has this covered pretty well. It’s really just disgusting. It seems a certain Robert Redeker, wrote an op-ed piece in Le Figaro, an alleged “center-right” newspaper based in Paris. (In France, a center-right view means you’re just a Socialist surrender monkey, not a full-fledged Communist surrender monkey.)

Anyway, the op-ed piece pissed off the Muslims so badly that he’s had to go into hiding due to death threats.

You can read a translation of the entire piece here. Here’s a little excerpt: Go read the whole thing.

[...]As in the past with Communism, the West finds itself under ideological watch. Islam presents itself, like defunct Communism, as an alternative to the Western world. In the way of Communism before it, Islam, to conquer spirits, plays on a sensitive string. It prides itself on a legitimacy which troubles Western conscience, which is attentive to others: it claims to be the voice of the oppressed of the planet. Yesterday, the voice of the poor supposedly came from Moscow, today it originates in Mecca! Again, today, western intellectuals incarnate the eye of the Koran, as they have incarnated the eye of Moscow. They now excommunicate people because of Islamophobia, as they did before because of anti-communism.

This opening to others, specific to the West, is a secularization of Christianity that can be summarized thus:the other person must come before myself. The Westerner, heir to Christianity, is the that exposes his soul bare. He runs the risk of being seen as weak. With the same ardor as Communism, Islam treats generosity, broadmindedness, tolerance, gentleness, freedom of women and of manners, democratic values, as marks of decadence. They are weaknesses that it seeks to exploit, by means of useful idiots, self-rigtheous consciences drowning in nice feelings, in order to impose the Koranic order on the Western world itself.

The Koran is a book of unparalleled violence. Maxime Rodinson states, in Encyclopedia Universalis, some truths that in France are as significant as they are taboo. On one hand: “Mohammed revealed in Medina unsuspected qualities as political leader and military chief (…) He resorted to private war, by then a prevalent custom in Arabia (….) Mohammed soon sent small groups of partisans to attack the Meccan caravans, thus punishing his unbelieving compatriots and simultaneously acquiring the booty of a wealthy man.”

There is more: “Mohammed profited from this success by eradicating the Jewish tribe which resided in Medina, the Quarayza, whom he accused of suspect behaviour.” And: “After the death of Khadija, he married a widow, a good housewife, called Sawda, and in addition to the little Aisha, barely ten years old. His erotic predilections, held in check for a long time, led him to ten simultaneous marriages .”

A merciless war chief, plunderer, slaughterer of Jews and a polygamist, such is the man revealed through the Koran [...].

Seems pretty accurate to me. Of course, Mohammed was probably just upset because he made a law that prohibited him from enjoying a tall, cold one in the desert.

The MSM in the form of the New York Times was forced to cover the threats to a free press as well.

Now here’s the really disgusting part. Le Figaro apologized to the Islamofacists for running the piece!

Make sure you read the apology. That’s what we’ll be hearing from Washington if the moonbats gain the majority after the next election. Apologies to Islamofacists from the the U.S. Congress.

If you want to support Redeker, you can sign a petition, here. Something tells me we won’t ever see the signatures of Feingold, Pelosi, Reid, J.Carter, et. al.

Finally, an Intelligent Commentary from the Left

 

Christopher Hitchens is a lefty. Unlike most of them, he thinks before he acts. He’s actually a liberal I would like to meet since he argues his position with intelligence. In a column entitled “Solidarity, Our first duty is to stand together against bin Ladenism” in the 9/11/06 edition of The Wall Street Journal, he gives some good food for thought for EVERYBODY. He’s supporting the above picture.

[...]Never mind where I was standing or what I was doing this time five years ago. (Because really, what could be less pertinent?) Except that I do remember wondering, with apparent irrelevance, how soon I would be hearing one familiar cliché. And that I do remember hearing, with annoyance, one other observation that I believe started the whole post-9/11 epoch on the wrong foot.

The cliché, from which we have been generally but not completely spared, was the one about American “loss of innocence.” Nobody, or nobody serious, thought that this store-bought phrase would quite rise to the occasion of the incineration of downtown Manhattan and 3,000 of its workers. It might have done for the Kennedy assassination or Watergate, but partly for that very reason it was redundant or pathetic by mid-day on September 11, 2001. Indeed, I believe that the expression, with its concomitant naïve self-regard, may have become superseded for all time. If so, good. The beginning of wisdom is to recognize that the United States was assaulted for what it really is, and what it understands as the center of modernity, and not for its unworldliness. [...]

But it’s his last two paragraphs that sum it up very, very, well.

[...] Anyone who lost their “innocence” on September 11 was too naïve by far, or too stupid to begin with. On that day, we learned what we ought to have known already, which is that clerical fanaticism means to fight a war which can only have one victor. Afghans, Kurds, Kashmiris, Timorese and many others could have told us this from experience, and for nothing (and did warn us, especially in the person of Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance). Does anyone suppose that an ideology that slaughters and enslaves them will ever be amenable to “us”? The first duty, therefore, is one of solidarity with bin-Ladenism’s other victims and targets, from India to Kurdistan.

The second point makes me queasy, but cannot be ducked. “We”–and our allies–simply have to become more ruthless and more experienced. An unspoken advantage of the current awful strife in Iraq and Afghanistan is that it is training tens of thousands of our young officers and soldiers to fight on the worst imaginable terrain, and gradually to learn how to confront, infiltrate, “turn,” isolate and kill the worst imaginable enemy. These are faculties that we shall be needing in the future. It is a shame that we have to expend our talent in this way, but it was far worse five years and one day ago, when the enemy knew that there was a war in progress, and was giggling at how easy the attacks would be, and “we” did not even know that hostilities had commenced. Come to think of it, perhaps we were a bit “innocent” after all.

(Emphasis mine.)

If Hitchens keeps writing columns like this, he’ll meet the same fate as Lieberman at the hands of the new Koz base.

This is Not Good News

I saw this little blurb in The Wall Street Journal and found more info on Ryanair’s Web Site.

Ryanair, Europe’s largest low fares airline, and OnAir, the leading onboard passenger communications provider, today (30th Aug) announced a deal that will see Ryanair’s entire fleet of Boeing 737 aircraft fitted with OnAir’s onboard mobile communications solution. The announcement will make Ryanair the first European airline to offer Europe-wide mobile telephony services during flights across its entire fleet of aircraft to all passengers via their own mobile phones and smartphones.

The deal means that from mid 2007 (subject to relevant regulatory approval) Ryanair’s passengers will be able to call, text and e-mail using their mobile phones, BlackBerrys™ and Treos™ at rates which will mirror international roaming charges. OnAir intend to fit 50 Ryanair aircraft during the second half of 2007, with the remainder of the fleet receiving installations from early 2008 onwards. Mobile OnAir will be offered on all Ryanair flights across Ryanair’s network of more than 360 routes serving 23 countries across Europe. Ryanair will be the first European airline to offer this mobile telephony to all passengers on all of its 200 plus aircraft fleet.

Just what commercial travellers need. Some clown yelling on his/her cellphone the whole flight. I’m betting “air rage” and hilarity ensues.

An Interesting Poll

From today’s Investors Business Daily.

Public Opinion: Most Americans may not think of the war on terror as World War III, but a solid majority takes the threat of militant Islamism very seriously, suspects that Iran is behind much of it and concludes that the U.S. must stop that country from getting nukes “at any cost.”

These are among the results of the latest IBD/TIPP Poll, which probed how seriously Americans view the spread of Islamofascism and whether they recognize a need to confront it sooner rather than later.

Many commentators refer to the global war on Islamic-sponsored terror as “World War III” and draw parallels with the relatively slow reaction in the U.S. and Britain to the march of Nazism in the 1930s.

Given the proliferation of terrorist attacks worldwide and Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, the West cannot afford a similar response now, these pundits say.

Responses to the IBD/TIPP Poll, however, indicate that Americans are confronting the threat of radical Islamism with eyes wide open.

The 919 adults surveyed last week may not be ready to declare this World War III. Only half (51%) of Americans believe that “militant Islamism is no less a threat in the 21st century than Nazism, fascism and communism were in the 20th century,” with 30% “strongly” agreeing and an additional 21% “somewhat” agreeing.

But five of eight (or 63%) are “very concerned about the rising tide of Islamofascism and its desire to establish a worldwide Muslim rule,” and 43% “agree strongly” and 20% “agree somewhat” with this statement. In addition:

• Nearly six in 10 (58%) doubt that diplomacy and negotiation are of much use “in dealing with Islamic fascists bent on destroying Western civilization.”

• Six in 10 concede it will take “a strong commitment by the U.S., as the world’s lone superpower, to eliminate the threat of militant Islamism.”

• Nearly six in 10 (58%) think Iran is the “main promoter of Islamic fascism in the Middle East.”

• And, most impressively, more than three in four (76%) believe Iran must be prevented from obtaining nuclear weapons “at any cost.”

The last statement, with which an equally impressive 59% agree “strongly,” suggests most Americans would back a U.S. effort to take out Iran’s nuclear plants through military means, if necessary.

Even Democrats, who were less enthusiastic with their responses in general, “strongly” agreed in this case by 52% vs. 18% who agreed “somewhat.” Other statements drew “strong” agreement from only 25% to 43% of Democrats.

Since Democrats, Republicans and Independents tended to agree with all the statements, the “agree strongly” responses are more noteworthy in this poll.

(Emphasis Mine)

It’s nice to see the U.S. public, gets it, even if the MSM and moonbats like Russ bin-Feingold don’t.

H/T Roger Hedgecock