Sunday Afternoon Cigar

Another Santa Damiana burns as we open the first pages to our latest book, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, by Robert Conquest. A little story about the million or so murdered in Stalin's 1937-1938 purges.

Amazon Link

Karl's Weekend Reading

Karl Rove frames the socialized health care issue extremely well in his WSJ Opinion piece, Obama Can't Be Trusted With Numbers. The first half is a review of false promises and other propaganda that has helped Obama push 'change' in the past few months that would normally be rejected by most Americans. The second half is devoted to that same MO as it is being applied to the so-called health care debate. No quote will do this article justice - you must read it in full - but we'll share his concluding paragraph:

Mr. Obama has already created a river of red ink. His health-care plans will only force that river over its banks. We are at the cusp of a crucial political debate, and Mr. Obama's words on fiscal matters are untrustworthy. His promised savings are a mirage. His proposals to reshape the economy are alarming. And his unwillingness to be forthright with his numbers reveals that he knows his plans would terrify many Americans.

As of this post, Honduras remains free. The communists are circling, and pressure is coming from both the North and the South for the commie president's reinstatement. Cliff Kincaid, of Accuracy in Media, shares information not seen in elsewhere on just what level of coordination exists between Chavez and his like-minded friend in DC. Leading "Progressive" Describes Obama-Chavez Axis:

According to eyewitness sources, under the apparently blind eye of the global media, the two leaders had lengthy conversations. The media covered the friendly photo of the initial handshake between the two leaders, then made much ado about an apparently-impertinent Chavez handing Obama a book in Spanish by Eduardo Galleano. What has not been reported is that Obama, leaving his advisers behind, held lengthy private conversations with Chavez where only an interpreter was present."
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But why would Obama be appeasing Chavez? Could the "appeasement" reflect the fact that Obama and Chavez are ideologically in sync and see events in Latin America through the same Marxist lens?
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The communist paper [The Militant] reported that, before there could be a revolution in the United States, Marxist forces would have to take control of Latin America. "Another idea frequently expressed by speakers from the floor and by a few panelists was that 'change has to come from the South,'" referring to Latin America, the paper said.

Almost two years later, that "change" has come to America and is threatening Honduras.

UPDATE 7.11 10am. The risk of posting a Weekend Reading post on a Thursday is that Friday brings a brilliant article.

Charles Krauthammer discusses Obama's anxious deal-making in Russia, the new START treaty (or memo of understanding).

Once again, a Democrat president pursues an arms treaty for the purpose of a photo-op. And once again a Democrat president weakens our national security - this time by offering missile defense as a negotiating chip. Treaties are meant to strengthen national security. Other than the IMF treaty (Reagan), can one think of a treaty that benefitted the US?

Plumage - But at a Price:

Obama says that his START will be a great boon, setting an example to enable us to better pressure North Korea and Iran to give up their nuclear programs. That a man of Obama's intelligence can believe such nonsense is beyond comprehension. There is not a shred of evidence that cuts by the great powers -- the INF treaty, START I, the Treaty of Moscow (2002) -- induced the curtailment of anyone's programs. Moammar Gaddafi gave up his nukes the week we pulled Saddam Hussein out of his spider hole. No treaty involved. The very notion that Kim Jong Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will suddenly abjure nukes because of yet another U.S.-Russian treaty is comical.
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Obama doesn't even seem to understand the ramifications of this concession. Poland and the Czech Republic thought they were regaining their independence when they joined NATO under the protection of the United States. They now see that the shield negotiated with us and subsequently ratified by all of NATO is in limbo. Russia and America will first have to "come to terms" on the issue, explained President Dmitry Medvedev. This is precisely the kind of compromised sovereignty that Russia wants to impose on its ex-Soviet colonies -- and that U.S. presidents of both parties for the last 20 years have resisted.

ERROR 404

It is doubtful Ushanka.us readers noticed the cyber attack against the White House and Treasury Department websites this past week. Those sites don't offer the objective information that we, and our blogrolled blogs, do.

Further, Ushanka.us was spared attack.

Do you rearry think the single North Korean hacker would attack a site with a hammer and sickle in the header? HA! The commies will hack every other site, then hang themselves with the one site they can't bring themselves to hack. The collapse of the North Korean communist regime will be for the greater good!

From today's WSJ Front Page:

U.S. and South Korean computer networks were besieged for days by a series of relatively unsophisticated attacks, possibly from North Korea, that were among the broadest and longest-lasting assaults perpetrated on government and commercial Web sites in both countries.

In the U.S., the main effect was to disrupt the public's ability to access Web sites temporarily.

From our friends at The Nose on Your Face:

Brothers at War

Our movie recommendation: Brothers at War, by Jake Rademacher.

Karl and Zhukov traveled to Dayton yesterday to see this movie. Filmed by non-military brother Jake who travels twice to Iraq to understand why his brothers, both Army Rangers - Issac and Joe, do what they do.

The amateur nature of this film seems to add to its authenticity. It starts with family history - a large, typically-American family of five brothers and two sisters. A who's who, and why they are who they are today.

The war footage is real in the sense that it is mostly boring, but deadly otherwise. The movie is politically neutral (thank you Jake), with candid talk among soldiers ranging from shooting the enemy to cheating girlfriends.

You will come away from this movie with a renewed respect for our nation's fighters, and with the rare, personal connection to their families.

We've been told this movie will go straight to DVD. No sign of it yet at Amazon.

Link to YouTube trailer.

Link to Brother At War Website.

Link to IMDb Movie Database.

U/T: Dale

Sunday Evening Cigar

A CAO Brazilia burned as we started our latest book, Alexander Solzhenistyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Our last quote from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, page 272:

Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

1984 Amazon Link

Day in Life Amazon Link

Liberal Bias in the Media, Part CXXVII

Three good pieces came across our desk this week. We wouldn't normally comment, but these three, taken together, justify a post.

Doug Ross continues to raise the bar for the rest of us bloggers (Damn him!) with his recent post: Jennifer Loven of the AP: Barack Obama's Personal Publicist. A LONG list of headlines with the unmistakable liberal bias.

I'd call Jennifer Loven of the AP a useless sycophant and a slavish mistress of the Obama administration, but that would understate her remarkable lack of journalistic ethics. She is, to be sure, a publicist disguised as an objective reporter.

Poetic.

James Taranto, of WSJ Best of the Web fame, also detects a shift in AP reporting:

Have you noticed a change in the economic news over the past year or so? It's a deliberately ambiguous question: The actual news has gotten worse, but the coverage of it has changed in tone. Today, reporters are eagerly looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. A year ago, and for a long time before that, they couldn't wait to get into the tunnel.

What changed? Yeah, like you need to ask. It has been fascinating, though, to observe the way reporters have tried to make bad news look like good. We noted a prime example last month: a dispatch by Jeannine Aversa of the Associated Press titled "US Loses Just 345,000 Jobs in May, Raising Hopes".

And forwarded to us by Ushanka.us's field operative "Dale", Cliff Kincaid at Accuracy in Media writes earlier this month about the effort to fund media with tax dollars rather than have them compete in a commercial environment where they must deliver value or die... The Plan for Government-Funded Socialist Media.

Meanwhile, the Ford Foundation is a major underwriter of the Center for Social Media of American University, a project headed by left-wing activist Patricia Aufderheide, who says that "Taxpayer funds are crucial..." to creating new "public media." This group got money under a $50 million Ford Foundation program to create and strengthen "public media."

This is the direction many of the "progressive" groups are going. In fact, a socialist-oriented "media reform" group with ties to the Obama Administration has called for new federal programs and the spending of tens of billions of dollars to keep journalists employed at liberal media outlets and to put them to work in new "public media."

The group, which calls itself Free Press, is urging "an alternative media infrastructure, one that is insulated from the commercial pressures that brought us to our current crisis."

Karl's Weekend Reading

Happy 4th! Hurry and read these top picks before you start blowing stuff up!

L.E. Ikenga, a "first generation born West African-American woman whose parents emigrated to the U.S. in the 1970's from the country now called Nigeria" finds a disturbing comparison between our new president and a common trait among African leaders. American Thinker, Obama, the African Colonial.

Obama has been living on American soil for most of his adult life. Therefore, he has been able to masquerade as one who understands and believes in American democratic ideals. But he does not. Barack Obama is intrinsically undemocratic and as his presidency plays out, this will become more obvious.

Kyle-Anne Shiver, also at American Thinker, comments on our 'Wimp in Chief's' position on the crisis in Honduras in, Obama's True Colors Shine in Honduras.

Obama's response to the Honduran military removing a dictator-wannabe from office (at the behest, it must be noted, of the Supreme Court and the Honduran Congress), and escorting him to the border, was sure and fast. He declared the military action an "illegal coup" faster than you can say Fidel Castro. And just as quickly the rest of the region's socialist gang chimed in too. The real Castro brothers. Hugo Chavez. Daniel Ortega.

Birds of a feather do tend to flock together.

Careful Ms. Shiver. We don't want to be rash and label Obama a Communist!

Another from American Thinker, America's Socialist Past by Ryan Siefert, is a short but necessary historical review of the damage from socialist inspirations.

There seems to be a need in American society to have to relearn the same hard lessons over and over again, regardless of whether the results were seen on the other side of the planet or suffered through by our own people.

We're living in a country that elected a President that believes in redistributing wealth. He's mentioned this himself, from the "Joe the Plumber" incident[i] to his critique[ii] of the failures of the civil rights movement. Whether you call it Socialism, Communism, Marxism, or by its simpler name, theft, they are all part of the same economic system that destroys private property and puts everything in central control of the state.

"Russian media are now abuzz with speculation about a new war in Georgia, and some Western analysts are voicing similar concerns" - so reports Cathy Young in the WSJ Opinion section on Thursday. She asks, "What would the Kremlin gain" from a war with Georgia:

A crushing victory in Georgia would depose the hated Mr. Saakashvili, give Russia control of vital transit routes for additional energy resources that could weaken its hold on the European oil and gas markets, humiliate the U.S., and distract Russians from their economic woes. Mr. Piontkovsky also believes the war drive comes from Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who is anxious to reassert himself as supreme leader.

YES! That was our response when reading Gordon G. Chang's WSJ Opinion, How to Stop North Korea's Weapons Proliferation. He writes about that N.K. ship, Kang Nam, that has been trailed by US warships (as if trailing is a foreign policy). Chang explains a legal way to board or sink the Kang Nam, refering to the North's May 27 rejection of the armistice that ended the fighting (not the war) in 1953. When you read this, remember how Clinton turned down a chance at Bin Laden for a lack of legal justification...

...an armistice as a legal matter cannot remain in existence after one of its parties, a sovereign state, announces its end. Today, whether we like it or not, there is no armistice.

Furthermore, there has never been a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War. This means the U.S., a combatant in the conflict, as leader of the U.N. Command, is free to use force against Pyongyang. On legal grounds, the U.S. Navy therefore has every right to seize the Kang Nam, treat the crew as prisoners of war, and confiscate its cargo, even if the ship is carrying nothing more dangerous than melons. Because the Navy has the right to torpedo the vessel, which proudly flies the flag of another combatant in the war, it of course has the right to board her.

Did the North wait for Obama to replace Bush before setting sail with illicit cargo? If so, pretty smart. The only way Obama will get tough is if the criticisms of his pathetic foreign policy migrate from here to the nightly news...

Friday Evening Cigar

We started with a Rocky Patel Cuban Blend maduro...

It wasn't enough, so we continued with a Rocky Patel Edge.

From page 208 of Nineteen Eighty-Four:

Socialism, a theory which appeared in the early nineteenth century and was the last link in a chain of thought stretching back to the slave rebellions of antiquity, was still deeply infected by the Utopianism of past ages. But in each variant of Socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned. The new movements which appeared in the middle of the century ... had the conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom and inequality. These movements, of course, grew out of the old ones and tended to keep their names and pay lip-service to their ideology. But the purpose of all of them was to arrest progress and freeze history at a chosen moment.

Fiction? Or Non-Fiction?

Amazon Link

4th of July Obama Cuss Jar Contest - WINNER ANNOUNCED!

Contest Details:

Guesses MUST consist of a dollar value (no cents) AND the name of the referrer (blog, radio show host, etc.) that sent you here.

Contest ends at 6PM EST July 5th. The closest guess wins the Hat & Leninade.

If two guesses are equal - one higher and one lower by the same amount - the tie goes to the lower.

If two guesses are the same, the first posted is considered.

The jar is 10 inches tall, and 7 inches in diameter.

The jar only contains $1 bills.

All other issues will be decided by the Minnesota Supreme Court.

Link to the Commie Obama Hat Store.

Our thanks to the following referrers: SondraK, Doug Ross,

UPDATE 6:35PM - WE HAVE A WINNER! B.... from SondraK was the closest with his guess of $123. There is $124 in the Obama Cuss Jar. B...., let us know where you are!

Our thanks to all who participated. We're happy to give $10 off to those who left a guess in the comments section. Just use the Contact Us above to let us know what you want and we'll make it happen! Until the next 4th of July...

The NEW Annual Performance Review

Found at Instapundit:


Obama To Hold Job Performance Review With Every American Worker

It isn't humor unless there is a bit of truth to the joke. Right?