A bit of a post-script to the Kennedy myth:

…The documents include a December 28, 1961, State Department memo describing a tour of several Latin American countries taken by then-Assistant District Attorney of Suffolk County Kennedy. This document as it was originally made public was almost completely redacted. After an initial challenge by Judicial Watch, a version with fewer redactions was released. Judicial Watch continued to argue that the blackouts were baseless and, after six more months, the FBI relented. Among the statements previously withheld but now made available to Judicial Watch:

* “While Kennedy was in Santiago he made arrangements to ‘rent’ a brothel for an entire night. Kennedy allegedly invited one of the Embassy chauffeurs to participate in the night’s activities.”…

Shows two things – there are still plenty of people willing to go a long way to protect the Kennedy family. It also shows how utterly debased and nauseating the whole thing is. This it the liberal hero – the liberal Lion of the Senate; the fighter for the working man…

Ted Kennedy, of course, is not the first man to visit a brothel. Nor is he the first politician found to be less than moral. But it is high time we knocked the Kennedy family off the pedestal – they never deserved to be there. At best, John Kennedy was a mediocre President; being killed was what made him in to a liberal icon…and his younger brother Ted milked that for an entire career. A career in which he did nothing but advance the cause of a corrupt Ruling Class while also poisoning our political discourse with hateful attacks.

The best lesson we can draw from this is that no politician is to be entirely trusted – and any politician who gives evidence of serial lapses of judgment must be put out to pasture. What is most astounding is that Ted Kennedy was a Senator when he died – nearly a half century after the events now related from 1961, and 40 years after he drove a car off a bridge, resulting in a woman being killed. Its not like the Kennedys lived in a closet…but people protected them and burnished their image. Some, no doubt, out of fear (the Kennedys have a reputation for getting revenge), but others out of a misguided loyalty to a flawed vision.

No surprise – from the AP:

…Larson did say his hotel room Monday was paid for by the State Senate Democratic Campaign. He said the group might pay for more nights depending on how long he stays.

Others have donated food, he said, but he declined to name them.

“Let’s just say the senators have friends over here who’ve been more than generous in sharing with us,” Larson said…

Democrats just don’t know how to do it on their own – they always need Other Peoples Money in order to get by. What needs to be looked in to is whether or not shelling out for an elected official on vacation is legal under Wisconsin campaign finance laws. Some how, I doubt that it is.

The real answer to this is the growing recall effort – if we can get even one Democrat to face the electoral music on this then there will be enough Senators in Wisconsin to conduct business, even if the rest of the cowards stay in Illinois…though you can bet that if one them goes, the rest will come back for fear of losing their taxpayer-funded feed bag.

Read over at Instapundit that the 27th of February is being marked at the 2nd anniversary of the TEA Party – but I have my first TEA Party entry from February 20th, 2009:

Seems the spirit of rebellion is spreading:

Hundreds of people turned out on a cold and windy Saturday morning for an anti-tax protest outside U.S. Rep. Dennis Moore’s office in Overland Park.

The rally, which was promoted by Americans for Prosperity’s Kansas chapter and other groups, was directed at Moore for his vote for the $787 billion stimulus package.

Just imagine how angry people will be when the actual Obama plan makes a mess of everything…this flame of liberty could end up becoming a wildfire of freedom spreading across the country in 2010 and 2012.

The odd thing is that with Obama being the semi-socialist we all feared he would be, he’s actually setting up a situation where we really will get change we can believe in…it just won’t be from him.

And what did our liberals have to say about it way back when?

Hundreds showed up? Funny how you don’t think it is that important when thousands show up to listen to our president. Heck, we get hundreds showing up for a new Wallmart opening here in Wyoming.

The glory days of Obama seem a very long time ago now, don’t they? The TEA Party changed all that – and its going to keep on fighting for America.

From the Washington Post:

Police and security officials displayed a massive show of force here and in other Chinese cities Sunday, trying to snuff out any hint of protests modeled on the uprisings in the Middle East. In Shanghai, several hundred people trying to gather were dispersed with a water truck…

As China’s government is really no more than a criminal conspiracy – think of them as a Mafia which has got control of a nuclear-armed nation – they are being very swift in cracking down on the ripples of dissent flowing in from the rest of the global revolution. The grievances of the Chinese people revolve around economic matters, for the most part, but those are swiftly turning political…the reason why, after all, there is economic stress in China is because of the corrupt political system.

I know we’ve all been told by just about every bankster and bureaucrat out there that China is experiencing massive economic growth, but that is just so much utter BS. What has happened in China is that China’s gangster rulers have given out licenses to steel on the part of some Chinese (and some non-Chinese, too…especially western banks which are willing to sink a lot of money in to China). This has allow an appearance of growth which masks the continued, grinding poverty of most Chinese…and the Chinese are getting rather angry about it (you would, too, if your ancestral farm was seized in order to make a golf course for rich people to play on).

We’ll see how well the thugs who run China manage this. My bet is that they will maintain control until the Chinese economy completely collapses (it is inevitable – they are nothing but a mountain of fake money and bad debt). But, I could be wrong – and, indeed, I hope I am.

Is to remember that with our economy teetering on the brink of disaster, inflation eating up the food of the poor and revolution spreading around the world, you have to be one complete loser if you really care about which over paid prima dona gets a little, gold statue…

And I mean that seriously – who cares? Next year they’ll have another crop just like this year, and it will all mostly be garbage massively hyped by movie industry executives who’s only real goal in life is to separate people from their pay…so they can lavish it on people who could be replaced by CGI and, of course, themselves.

From Rasmussen:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 68% of American Adults view being a teacher as one of the most important jobs in our country today…

…Thirty-seven percent (37%) say, in terms of its impact on the nation, it’s a good thing that most teachers belong to public employee unions. Forty-six percent (46%) disagree and say it’s a bad thing that most teachers are unionized. Seventeen percent (17%) are not sure…

Which is pretty much as one would suspect it to be – we like teachers, don’t like the unions. Not too long ago I was doing a little research on the Clark County (NV) school system and discovered that about half of the district’s employees are not teachers. That, actually, is the result of having teacher’s unions…the massive and steady increases in education funding we’ve provided over the years (rising, in inflation-adjusted dollars, from $3,101.00 per student in 1960 to $8,682.00 per student in 2007) hasn’t gone for teachers, but for piles of flapdoodle which has little or nothing to do with teaching kids. This is because, for the unions, it is irrelevant whether or not the kids learn.

You see, for the unions, the whole point of existence is to obtain the highest number of unionized employees making the highest amount of pay possible (and thus providing the highest possible union dues) for doing the least work possible. This is what all unions do, all the time – not one of them is actually interested in providing a superior product at a lower cost; there is no upside for a union in doing that. In fact, doing such would be negative for a public sector union because greater efficiency means less employees needed. As long as teachers have to belong to a union, things will never improve – for teachers or students.

It would be better if we just did it with individual contracts – start off with a 1 year contract renewable for five years. If the teacher does well, then make a new 5 year contract renewable for 15 years. That gets a teacher to 20 years at which time the teacher can either retire, or just keep on with additional five year contracts – and all renewals dependent upon both the need of the school district and the performance of the individual teacher. There would still be room for corruption and failure, but no central union making back room deals which eventually have half the staff being made up of non-teachers – at massive monetary cost and to the detriment of actual education.

It is time for a change – and getting rid of the public sector unions, especially in education, is the vital first step. In this, Wisconsin is leading the way – and if the GOP wins there, we can start to at long last really address education reform.

I volunteer for this effort – from ABC:

After playing such a pivotal role in the November elections, Tea Party activists vowed they would keep a close eye on Congress. They weren’t kidding.

The Tea Party Patriots, one of the largest organizing groups of the movement, want to assign personal bloggers to track every member of Congress, not just the ones they supported…

I’m in. Of course, for me it would be easy – the Donk of my District is just a back bencher who hasn’t had an original idea, ever. She just votes as she’s told. Unfortunately, I also live in a district which was deliberately crafted to be impervious to Republicans – though we also have routinely failed to nominate a credible challenger. Maybe if someone is exposing Berkeley all the time there will be a better chance of a strong challenger?

At any rate, it would be a good thing for there to be a blogger per congresscritter – just someone who can do a weekly update on what the person did, how they voted, who they fund raised with, that sort of thing. It allows us to see patterns and build up a record of either accomplishment or corruption…and it would be just regular folks keeping tabs on the Ruling Class. I like it.

Just another in a long line of such stories:

More than 300 Muslims set fire to a town in Bangladesh in order to strip indigenous Christians, Hindus and Buddhists of their property.

The group of Muslim settlers set fire to the town of Rangamati in the Diocese of Chattagonag, Bangladesh on Feb. 17. According to the Fides news agency, news that the body of a missing Muslim man had been found was the pretext for carrying out what the Muslims called “an expedition to punish the town where indigenous peoples live.”

Other attacks on indigenous towns were reported in the region of Gulishakhali.

An eyewitness told Fides that recently, Muslim colonists have been expelling non-Muslim ethnic groups in order to take possession of their farmland…

Non-Moslems cannot live under Moslem rule – that becomes ever more clear. Christians and other religious peoples in the Moslem world must be given, at the least, local autonomy in compact territorial locations where Moslem authority is forbidden to enter. Better, of course, if the Christians of the Islamic world are given full independence (this would, most importantly, work out to freeing southern Sudan, southern Lebanon, southern Egypt and Assyria from Moslem rule; but there are other areas to be dealt with). Moslems have yet to attain a level of civilization which allows a non-Moslem to live in peace and security under Moslem rule.

I hate to be harsh like that, but it just has to be. How many more people have to be killed, raped and robbed before everyone else admits to this reality? That is what I’d like to know.

And rather convincingly, too – from the Telegraph:

Early returns from Ireland’s national elections Saturday suggested the opposition had routed the ruling party, national media said.

State broadcaster RTE said exit polls indicated the Fine Gael party had a “huge” majority over the incumbent Fianna Fail party, although official results weren’t due for two days, the BBC reported…

Ireland, being inhabited by Irish people, naturally has a horrifically complex means of determining who gets how many seats in a proportional representation system, so know one knows just just how many seats Fine Gael will win, but it does look like a complete route of Fianna Fail, which has ruled Ireland for most of its modern existence as an independent nation (reports elsewhere indicate that Fianna Fail took only 15% or so of the vote; they got 42% at the last election).

This is a rejection of Fianna Fail over that party’s agreement to a bail out program which essentially would tax the Irish in to penury in order to make good banker losses – bankers who, with eyes wide open, agreed to investments in Ireland which never had any chance of being repaid. To be sure, the people of Ireland played their part in the financial meltdown – buying in to a get-rich-quick scheme, after all was said and done – but the bankers are supposed to be the wise men in the know who, with their fiduciary responsibility, steer people away from financial traps. Instead, the bankers were right there in the mix, being stupid from day one.

How this will effect the larger European Union remains to be seen. German Chancellor Merkel’s party was wiped out in a recent regional election over pretty much the same issue – and while she doesn’t have to face a national vote for a while, there are a series of other regional elections coming up this year, all of which look to be a disaster for her party. Not just the Irish, but the people of Europe are determined not to play the sucker for bankers and bureaucrats who made the mess. This could lead, eventually, to sovereign default on the part of some weaker EU nations – as the bail out funds dry up, places like Greece, Portugal and Spain might be forced in to default. That would have incalculable results on the global economy – incalculable in the sense of no one can say how bad it would be, but that it would certainly be bad.

At all events, my hats off to the people of Ireland – it was high time that people took a stand against this nonsense.

A very disturbing story by Gil Ronen over at Israel National News:

Two activists have exposed a disturbing phenomenon that they say is an open secret within the “peace camp”: female “peace” activists are routinely harassed and raped by the Arabs of Judea and Samaria with whom they have come to identify. They say the phenomenon has gotten worse lately and that many foreign women end up as wives of local Arabs against their will, but cannot escape their new homes.

Roni Aloni Sedovnik, a feminist activist, penned an article in News1 – an independent website run by respected investigative reporter Yoav Yitzchak – under the heading “The Left’s Betrayal of Female Peace Activists Who were Sexually Assaulted.”

“A nauseous atrocity has been going on for a long time behind the scenes at the leftists’ demonstration at Bil’in, Naalin and Sheikh Jarrah [Shimon HaTzaddik],” she writes. “A dark secret that threatens to smash the basic ideological values upon which the demand to end the occupation of the Territories rests.”…

According to the story, this has been going on for a while – including some women who have been kept for quite some time as the “wives” of some Palestinian men…never allowed to leave and, of course, never allowed to tell their stories. The leftist activists who are in charge of getting non-Arab women in to the demonstrations ruthlessly cover up the crimes lest the world develope a negative attitude towards the Palestinian cause. The whole thing does make sense – leftist people are often like that; willing to sacrifice everything for the cause (one remembers a woman noted in Gulag Archipelago who falsely confessed to a crime in order to prevent her children from losing faith in communism).

But, still, a crime is a crime…and that the left is covering up these crimes is just another indicator that they are utterly inimical to to our civilization. These are people who might use the words “justice” and “liberty” but they simply do not mean the same thing as they do to the rest of us. In fact, one has to go entirely Orwellian with them – to the left, justice requires injustice and liberty really is slavery.

There’s not much we can do about this – if the left continues to cover up the crimes, they’ll never be stopped. But keep this story in mind when you read and hear things about the Arab world – without great care, you’ll never know what is truth and what is false. This also buttresses my argument that none of us – not even the Arab leaders – really knows what Arabs/Moslems want. You think its only a few western women who are being abused over there? For the locals, it is probably worse…and with no genuine mechanism for expressing desires either in politics or the market place, there is no way for any one to determine what is wanted.

The only approach we can take is with our objective truths – the self-evident truths as expressed in our sublime Declaration of Independence. If someone isn’t following those precepts then don’t let them off the hook over cultural differences – barbarians are barbarians. The people of Palestine are not, as yet, measuring up to our standards, and until they do their case for an independent State will remain weak…and as Israel does work to match our standards (no one ever will completely, not even us, of course…it is an aspiration more than a goal…but you have to keep trying), all our doubts should come down in favor of Israel.