And I’m feeling rather crusader-ish these days, here is a bit more of Lepanto:

Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,

(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)

He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri’s knees,

His turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas.

He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,

And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees;

And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring

Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.

Giants and the Genii,

Multiplex of wing and eye,

Whose strong obedience broke the sky

When Solomon was king.

They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,

From the temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;

They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea

Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be,

On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,

Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;

They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,–

They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.

And he saith, “Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide,

And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,

And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,

For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.

We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,

Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done.

But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know

The voice that shook our palaces–four hundred years ago:

It is he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not Fate;

It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate!

It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,

Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth.”

For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,

(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)

Sudden and still–hurrah!

Bolt from Iberia!

Don John of Austria

Is gone by Alcalar.

UPDATE: You can read the whole thing here – I like how it ends:

Vivat Hispania!

Domino Gloria!

Don John of Austria

Has set his people free!

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath

(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)

And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,

Up which a lean and foolish knight for ever rides in vain,

And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade….

(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)

Geesh:

A poster showing President Barack Obama as Heath Ledger’s “Joker” character from “The Dark Knight” is creating a stir on the streets of Los Angeles where the image began appearing over the weekend…

…Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable President Earl Ofari Hutchinson is calling the depiction, politically mean spirited and dangerous.

Hutchinson is challenging the group or individual that put up the poster to have the courage and decency to publicly identify themselves.

“Depicting the president as demonic and a socialist goes beyond political spoofery,” says Hutchinson, “it is mean-spirited and dangerous.”

“We have issued a public challenge to the person or group that put up the poster to come forth and publicly tell why they have used this offensive depiction to ridicule President Obama.”

I actually want to smack Hutchinson across the face – with the back of my hand, to increase the insult. Then I want to urinate on his front door. I’m calming my self down and I apologize for all that but where the bloody *&^$(* was Hutchinson over the past 8 years? Does this man remember “BusHitler”? President Bush depicted as the devil? Grrrrr!!

Look, lefties, its a bit late for you to be all offended about this sort of thing – in fact, given the way you behaved 2001-09, you should be applauding this stuff and calling it the highest form of patriotism. Or, on the other hand, you can beg forgiveness for the vile way you attacked President Bush for 8 years.

Pick one of the options as there are no others.

Poor Obama Administration:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner blasted top U.S. financial regulators in an expletive-laced critique last Friday as frustration grows over the Obama administration’s faltering plan to overhaul U.S. financial regulation, according to people familiar with the meeting.

The proposed regulatory revamp is one of President Barack Obama’s top domestic priorities. But since it was unveiled in June, the plan has been criticized by the financial-services industry, as well as by financial regulators wary of encroachment on their turf…

Funny, when I’m not cooperating with our lefties on this blog, I’m the common target of an expletive-laced critique. Is this something lefty’s consider a good idea? I mean, is it that the lefty figures if you can’t get what you want, you should just become incredibly rude in the hope that the non-rude will go along just to get you to shut up?

Won’t work with me. We’ll see how it works for Geithner and his boss.

But can they stop the crash they’ve created?

The middle-aged crowd in the packed Guosen Securities office jostle around buzzing printers that spit out receipts for their share buys, hoping to cash in on China’s stimulus-fueled stock market boom.

“The central government has to fulfill their promise of 8 percent economic growth,” said Wu Jun, 62, a retired civil servant who invested part of his life savings of 50,000 yuan ($7,300) and lives on a 2,000 yuan-a-month ($290 a month) pension. “They’ll come up with measures to keep the market in good shape.”

But while investors expect the market — up more than 80 percent this year — to keep rising, Chinese leaders are alarmed. They worry that too much of the $1 trillion lending binge by state banks that paid for China’s nascent revival was diverted into stocks and real estate, raising the danger of a boom and bust cycle and higher inflation less than two years after an earlier stock market bubble burst.

No later than March – that is when the crash will come. China increased its money supply about 26% in order to spur economic growth and the plain fact of the matter is that you can’t do that. Its like putting rouge on a corpse.

Please note Mr. Jun’s statement and the underlying set of assumptions it represents. Mr. Jun may think he’s investing with the certainty that the Chinese government – his government – simply will not let him down. He’s actually gambling – just as his government is gambling. Gambling on the unsubstantiated hope that the global economy will turn around – and turn around with sufficient vigor – to allow China to discharge the mountain of debt and fiat money currently making it appear that China is in good shape. I could be wrong on this and China’s gamble might pay off – but I really don’t think I’m wrong. I shudder to think of the coming catastrophe.

A lot of people date the Great Depression to the crash of the US stock market in 1929 – and for the US, that makes a bit of sense. More instructed people realize that the real knock-it-down, we’re-totally-broke event of the Great Depression was the bankruptcy of Creditanstalt in Austria in 1931. We seem – eerily – to be on track for a repeat…with our 2008 meltdown just being the curtain-raiser for the Chinese collapse which will put the finishing touches on our disaster.

This time over divorce rumors:

By now you have probably seen the wave of Sarah Palin rumors in the dinosaur media and the liberal blogs’ focus on the story that Sarah Palin and husband Todd are headed for divorce because of extramarital affairs by both. As you may imagine, the rumor was like a dream come true for many lefty bloggers…

…the left took up the call on this “divorce” rumor, apparently wanting desperately to take a little of her momentum away. In so doing, the left apparently found the answer for Palin and her people to the question of what might give her even greater name recognition and voter sympathy. The beauty is, she didn’t even have to lift a finger this time around. All she had to do was to answer the rumor with:

Divorce Todd? Have you seen Todd? I may be just a renegade hockey mom, but I’m not blind!

They really, really hate her.

Guess what, liberals? She’s not only a better person than the average run, but she’s also vastly smarter than you are.

Always be prepared for battle:

Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s enemies will be those of his household. – Matthew 10:34-36

Because it was never really intended to work:

The best explanation I’ve found for why the stimulus didn’t work is this graph from the GAO analysis of the stimulus act. It shows pretty clearly that the 76 percent of stimulus spending through the first four months went to fill in the gaping holes in Medicaid and state budgets. In other words, the stimulus isn’t acting like a pole vault lifting job creation above the baseline. It’s been acting like a crutch to keep state budgets and payrolls from imploding tumbling.

And I warned you liberals of this – if you send money to a State, it won’t go where you want it to go, but where that State figures it needs it. Money, as they say, is fungible…you can send a billion to NY for highway improvements, but NY might very well plug their budget hole with it. And what will you do about it? Demand the money back? Its already spent. Given that the States in the worst shape are largely liberal-governed States, its almost a certainty that any money actually used for stimulus is just pure happenstance…after looting spendulus for their own purposes, there just happened to be a little left over (or, more likely, a construction firm or union which needed to be paid off).

It won’t work: the only way to get some government money to stimulate the economy is to provide grants to people who are willing to invest their own sweat equity in opening up mines, sowing fields or starting up factories. You give that money to government, and it will be wasted. You give it to large, failed firms and it will be wasted. You give it to people who are willing to work for a living, and it will be used…and they won’t need a trillion dollars.

Michael Yon’s latest:

…Word came that a British unit from 2 Rifles was in contact with the enemy, and that nine soldiers had been wounded. Two low-flying A-10s had roared over the base—a sure indicator that soldiers were in trouble. The snarling aircraft are meant to cause the enemy to think twice before continuing, which buys our folks a little time to defend or counterattack. Shortly after they swooped in, the A-10s fired their cannons. During a different firefight last week, one that I could hear from base but was not involved in, an American A-10 swooped in and was cleared hot. The fire support team soldiers explained to me that the A-10 pilot was lined up and preparing to squeeze the trigger when he saw a child emerge from the enemy position and so the pilot flew by with cold barrels…

We know from the news that July was the roughest month for our troops and our allies – and Yon is pointing out that things are far from well in Afghanistan. Read the whole thing, remember our troops, and kick in a little for Yon’s reporting as he’s entirely reader-supported.

Really, there’s no other way to characterize this:

Fr. Frank Pavone, National Director of Priests for Life, said today that Planned Parenthood of Alaska’s lawsuit to prevent a parental notification for abortion initiative from ever being voted upon reflects the group’s anti-parent mindset.

“Planned Parenthood doesn’t want parents to know what it’s doing to their daughters or their unborn grandchildren,” said Fr. Pavone, “because it thinks it knows better than parents what’s good for young girls. This lawsuit is one more example of Planned Parenthood’s anti-parent bias.”

If there’s parental notification, then men who have impregnated minor girls won’t be able to use PP to dispose of the evidence against them…and that means PP will rake in less money off abortion. PP simply can’t allow that to happen, can it? So, they’ll trot out the extreme rarity of a father who has impregnated his daughter and use that as cover for where the real money is – aborting rape evidence.

The nauseating aspects of abortion keep coming to the surface, no matter how hard the abortionists try to hide behind words like “choice” – and because the practice is disgusting and anti-human, we’re winning the public fight against the practice. Trouble this, this means that the abortionists will simply rely more and more on the courts to enforce a pro-abortion worldview – so, we’ll have to fight them on their chosen ground: in court, likely in front of liberal judges (the left does “judge shop” in these matters). But, even with that, we’ll have them – you can’t win defending a lie.

President Bush was considered a complete idiot by the left. After six months of Obama, I’m getting very concerned that we really do have an idiot in the White House. Takes a rather major bonehead to insult the cops for no reason at all, ya know?

What do you think? Is Obama an idiot, or crazy like a fox and just trying to lull us in to a sense of 2012 security by pretending to be a moron?