Lawyers, guns and money

I'm trying to learn the late, great Warren Zevon's "Lawyers, Guns and Money" on the guitar, so I was browsing YouTube for guitar versions of the song (Zevon's original recording on Excitable Boy is a piano piece) when I stumbled upon this. I figured I'd post it because (1) it's good political commentary (with some obligatory gratuitous cheesecake) and (2) it's a great tune.

By the way, if you're looking for a guitar version of LG&M, here you go. Performed by the man himself.

The left, in a nutshell

Spotted over at No Pasaran. This one clip tells you everything you need to know about the left.

Content warning for language.

Worst President Ever to meet with terrorists

One might think that if objections from the State Department aren't enough, then objections from Barack Obama might be. Even world-class idiotarians Kofi Annan and Nelson Mandela decided the "timing was wrong". But so far, Worst President Ever Jimmy Carter shows no sign of canceling his visit with Hamas terrorist-in-hiding Khaled Meshaal in Syria.

What makes Jimmy Carter so tone deaf?

Now do you understand the difference?

Passed along by my brother Mark today...kinda says it all, doesn't it?

John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barak Obama were walking down a Washington D.C. street when they came upon a homeless person.

The Republican, John McCain, gave the homeless person his business card and told him to come to his office for a job. He then took $20 out of his pocket and gave it to the homeless person.

Hillary was very impressed, so when they came upon another homeless person, she decided to help. She walked over to the homeless person and gave him directions to the welfare office. She then reached into John McCain's pocket and got out $20. She kept $15 for her administrative fees and gave the homeless person $5.

When they came upon yet another homeless person, Barak told the homeless person to 'have hope...change is coming...' and gave him nothing.

Now do you understand the difference?

Laws for thee, but not for me

Convicted Muslim sex offenders in Britain are demanding that they be exempted from a treatment program required for early release. Why? It seems that talking about their crimes is against Islam.

Muslim sex offenders are asking to be let off a prison treatment programme on religious grounds.

Rapists, paedophiles and other dangerous attackers are expected to discuss their crimes with other inmates as a condition of release.

But Muslim prisoners complain that criminals should not have to talk about their offences - a "legitimate Islamic position", according to Ahtsham Ali, the Prison Service's Muslim adviser.

Do they just make this shit up as they go along and as convenience dictates?

More piracy off African coast

Another ship, this time a 288-ft. luxury cruiser, was taken by pirates off the coast of Somalia.

Fears were growing last night for the crew of a luxury yacht hijacked off the African coast, as the British former girlfriend of one crewman revealed that he had been worried about a pirate attack.

Le Ponant, a 288ft cruise ship, was spotted sailing south after the hijack and was believed to be headed for the Somalian coast.

[ ... ]

The pirates have yet to make demands, but Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, did not rule out paying a ransom.

"We've made contact and the matter could last a long time," he said. "We have to do everything to avoid bloodshed."

It's understandable that they want to avoid bloodshed, especially in the case of a pleasure craft with passengers on board. The problem though, as I posted last August, is that this piracy continues unabated because it's profitable.

Absolut Aztlan

I saw something about this the other day over at Hot Air, but didn't have time to really read it. Vodka maker Absolut had this ad running in Mexico, presumably in the hopes that nobody outside Mexico would see it. Absolut issued a typical non-apology:

"As a global company, we recognize that people in different parts of the world may lend different perspectives or interpret our ads in a different way than was intended in that market, and for that we apologize."

I'm not a vodka drinker, so a personal boycott of Absolut would be meaningless. But I hope a real boycott of Absolut products gets some traction in the US.

'Green is the new red'

In a column in the Daily Mail, Nigel Lawson articulates much of what I've been thinking on the global warming/climate change scam, namely that a group of hucksters have founded a new religion on the basis of at best questionable science. A few excerpts:

First, then, what is happening? Given that nowadays pretty well every adverse development in the natural world is automatically attributed to global warming, perhaps the most surprising fact about it is that it is not, in fact, happening at all. The truth is that there has so far been no recorded global warming at all this century.

The world's temperature rose about half a degree centigrade during the last quarter of the 20th century; but even the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research - part of Britain's Met Office and a citadel of the current global warming orthodoxy - has now conceded that recorded temperature figures for the first seven years of the 21st century reveal there has been a standstill.

True. Global temperatures have remained static since 2000, and have actually declined since 1998. During that same time, CO2 emissions have increased at an unprecedented rate. This runs completely counter to the fundamental basis of the global warming/climate change theory; that increased CO2 raises global temperatures.

Let's look at just two of the alleged "catastrophic" consequences of global warming: the threat to food production, leading to mass starvation; and the threat to human health, leading to disease and death.

So far as food production is concerned, it is not clear why a warmer climate would be a problem at all. Even the IPCC concedes that for a warming of anything up to 3 per cent, "globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase". Yes: increase.

As to health, in its most recent report, the IPCC found only one outcome which they ranked as "virtually certain" to happen - and that was "reduced human mortality from decreased cold exposure".

This echoes a study done by our own Department of Health which predicted that by the 2050s, the UK would suffer an increase in heat-related deaths by 2,000 a year, and a decrease in cold-related mortality of 20,000 deaths a year - something that ministers have been curiously silent about.

So, netting things out here, warmer is better than colder.

There may be a political explanation for this. With the collapse of Marxism and, to all intents and purposes, of other forms of socialism too, those who dislike capitalism and its foremost exemplar, the United States, with equal passion, have been obliged to find a new creed.

For many of them, green is the new red. And those who wish to order us how to run our lives, faced with the uncomfortable evidence that economic prosperity is more likely to be achieved by less government intervention rather than more, naturally welcome the emergence of a new licence to intrude, to interfere, to tax and to regulate: all in the great cause of saving the planet from the alleged horrors of global warming.

Lawson has a book called An Appeal To Reason coming out on 10 April in the UK which Amazon says will also be available here in the US on that date. I definitely plan on picking that one up.

Brit Muslim spared license revocation because he has two wives

When Mohammed Anwar appeared in court for driving 64MPH in a 30MPH zone, he faced immediate revocation of his driving privileges. But when he explained why he was speeding and why he needed to keep his license to drive, the court let him off with a £200 (around $400) fine. His excuse? He needs his license so that he can travel between his two homes...each of which house a different wife.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't polygamy still illegal in the UK?

Loopholes

No, I haven't taken up an illegal alternative to cigarettes. Like many places these days, Canada has banned smoking. The trouble with that in a place like Montreal is that it's frackin' cold here. So, tired of frostbitten fingers every time I stepped out for a smoke, I found this place called Stogies, a cigar bar with a special permit to allow smoking.

When the waitress saw me smoking a cigarette, she said I had to wrap it. "Wrap it?", I asked. Usually when a woman tells you to wrap it...well, never mind. Apparently, I had to wrap my cigarette so it looked more cigar-like. She was happy to sell me a pack of "GoldenWrap" for $4.50 (the Canadian dollar is trading roughly 1:1 to the US dollar now).

Secure in the knowledge that my cigarette was now producing even more pollutants, I wrapped that rascal and lit up.

Chickens ... come home ... to roost! at Obama's church

I caught a clip on CNN just now with Rev. Otis Moss, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's successor at Trinity United Church of Christ, complaining about the press and the public reaction to Rev. Wright's hate speech. I can't find anything online about Moss's remarks, but there's this item in today's Chicago Tribune.

On Thursday, Thomas will join Wright's successor, Rev. Otis Moss III, and the head of the National Council of Churches at Trinity to stress that houses of worship are not political arenas [Oh, really?? --ed.] but hallowed spaces reserved for sacred conversations with each other and with God.

"Churches are not designed for this," Moss said. "All of a sudden you inject a group of people looking for a story and some unethically looking for something salacious to report -- it heightens the anxiety."

Moss said the day-to-day business of the church cannot pause for a national controversy. During this period, families have dealt with divorce, terminal illness, a shooting and a car accident. Their pain, he said, was amplified when reporters showed up at funerals to interview members.

The press, as usual, is conducting itself abominably, but Wright and Moss have brought this upon their parishioners themselves.

Canada's Liberal party shamed

I'm still in Montreal, and spotted an item in today's Globe and Mail dead tree edition. Canada's Liberal party (their version of our Democrats) were embarrassed over their legal efforts to prevent Montreal's La Presse from publishing a list of potential Liberal party candidates for office. The Liberals ultimately called off their lawsuit, not for any concerns over a free press, but because they found that the list La Presse held wasn't what they thought it was.

Embarrassed federal Liberals called off frantic court efforts yesterday to stop a newspaper from publishing a list of Quebec election candidates after learning that the paper did not possess the potentially revealing document in the first place.

The party faced internal ridicule for wasting money and accusations of attempting to suppress press freedom before it dropped the matter on seeing the list that the paper had obtained.

How liberal of them.

Cultural diversity

Only in Montreal would you find yourself in an Irish pub eating Indian food (Tandoori chicken) watching a hockey game.