For the first time since they roamed the high seas in the 1700’s, pirates are back in the news on a regular basis. However, these are not the romantic swashbucklers of generations past. Modern pirates are operating in a professional and efficient manner off the African coast near Somalia, and this year they are set to make more than $50 million dollars from hijacking ships and holding them for ransom (most recently capturing a ship with 33 Russian tanks onboard which they are demanding $8 million dollars to return).
So in honor of the day when children all over the U.S.A. will be dressing up as Jack Sparrow, here are two enthralling articles about the modern day pirates who have revitalized this once dead occupation.
Now that smoking has been banned in hospitals, offices, public places, and even entire countries (India), most folks who can no longer light up whenever they want are looking for an alternative–or someone to punch in the face.
Before you take your anger out on the stranger sitting next to you at the bar, here’s some good news: the fine folks at United Drinks and Beauty Corporation have come up with a product just for you, Liquid Smoking.
Powered by a South African herbal extract, Liquid Smoking is said to mimic the effects of cigarettes complete with a feeling of relaxation and slight euphoria, but without the emphysema and hacking cough. The manufacturers of this wonderful product are hoping to begin sales in the UK in December of this year, and it will only be a matter of time before this product becomes a huge success and makes its way across the pond to the U.S.
Any loyal readers of Rebel (specifically you, Eli) know that we have a healthy respect and affection for Charles Krauthammer. The Kraut Hammer, as we like to call him, is an extraordinarily intelligent foreign policy analyst who just happens to be a staunch conservative, putting him at odds with the general philosophy we enjoy.
But The Kraut Hammer is a good guy overall, and we enjoy taking him to task for the many lunacies he injects into his columns. Take today’s piece in The Washington Post for instance. Chucky K. enumerates why he is still voting for McCain even though many of his conservative colleagues have already “jumped ship.” And he doesn’t disappoint those of us looking for him to mention something utterly ridiculous.
“Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man…who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as “the tragedy of 9/11,” a term more appropriate for a bus accident?”
This is possibly the weirdest argument against Obama since the whole Flag Pin thing, but before we get into it, let’s take a look at the definition of tragedy.
So what is Chucky K. getting at here? Obama isn’t qualified to be President because he refers to 9/11 as a tragedy? And tragedy is a term more fitting for bus accidents than an attack which killed 3,000 U.S. citizens? Really?
And what if Obama switched to one of the many synonyms of tragedy? Would that be better? If Obama called 9/11 a calamity, a catastrophe, a disaster, a blight, a curse, a catclysm; if Obama characterized 9/11 as disastrous, cataclysmic, lamentable, calamitous, woeful, or deplorable would Chucky K. give Obama his support?
Of course not. The Kraut Hammer is a die hard conservative, and he would never support a liberal like Obama. But–as he is wont to do–in his zeal to make the case for John McCain, Charles Krauthammer crosses the line into the world of ridiculousness. And although it might be sad for an intelligent person to degrade themselves by printing such a stupid argument, don’t call it a tragedy.
We spend a fair amount of time in this forum railing against Reupublicans for various transgressions and for general stupidity, so this post serves to pay lip service to the whole fair and balanced thing.
The saying goes that Democrats snatch defeat from the jaws of victory time and time again. But this year the deck is stacked against Republicans in so many ways that it’s not even funny anymore. The economy. The war in Iraq. George W. Bush’s dismal job as president. Sarah Palin. The list goes on and on.
Democrats throughout the land are planning their inauguration parties; Obama and Biden are imagining all the wonderful things they will accomplish as leaders of the free world.
But the election ain’t over yet.
So Democrats, take a breath and relax, because you could still fuck this thing up very easily. Don’t act like pompous assholes and start gloating about a Republican loss. James Carville and Paul Begala, this means you.
And for God’s sake, stop with all the columns about racism. Not everything said about Obama is racist, some of it is just good ol’ fashioned Republican wedge tactics, like calling Obama a socialist. Socialist is not a term for black people, it’s a term Republicans use for Democrats. Lewis Diuguid from the Kansas City Star, relax, it’s ok for the GOP to toss around socialist, it shows that they don’t know what they’re talking about.
But bringing a monkey to a Palin rally, now that’s racist:
There’s about two weeks of campaigning left, Democrats. At this point, you can’t do anything to help; all you can do is hurt your cause (John Kerry). So until the results come in on Nov. 4th, relax and shut the fuck up.
Don’t know if this will be a new feature on Rebel in the same vein as What’s Wrong With America? or Spin of the Week, but James Kirchick, Associate Editor of The New Republic, has written a column for the NY Daily Newsthat can only be described as a crybaby whine-fest.
The title of the piece is “Who are left-wing haters to point fingers at John McCain?” One can only hope that this heading was supposed to be ironic, as Mr. Kirchick spends the entire article pointing fingers back at “left-wing haters.”
Take this quote for instance:
“What about the left’s conspiracy theories? A not insignificant portion of liberals in this country believe that a small group of Jews, er, the “neocons,” took control of the government following 9/11 to fight wars on behalf of Israel. Is not this slander as odious as the Internet rumors about Barack Obama?”
Quite simply, yes that slander is as odious as rumors about Obama, but this is not an apt comparison. While this could be a serious topic to bring up, it makes no sense in this context as crowds at Barack Obama’s rallies are not shouting about killing the neocons. This example is merely a conspiracy theory, like bringing up Lee Harvey Oswald’s “magic bullet.”
Nice try, Mr. Kirchick, but this argument could have been found on any playground in this fair country of ours. It’s never attractive, convincing, or mature for that matter, to accuse someone of pointing fingers–while simultaneously pointing your finger at them.
Tonight is the last chance for McCain to turn around a campaign which looks to be staring defeat in the face. Most pundits and talking heads are falling all over themselves speculating about how nasty tonight’s debate will get. “How many times will McCain bring up William Ayers?” “Will he bring up Rev. Wright? ACORN?”
I may be putting myself out on a limb here, but I believe tonight’s debate will not be the bloodbath many are breathlessly anticipating and expecting.
One simple reason leads to this conclusion: If McCain goes too far in this debate and still ends up losing, then that will be his legacy. Tonight’s debate will be the final impression for many voters and for many historians. It would be unbecoming for a presidential candidate to spend this final moment in front of the public sifting through his opponent’s dirty laundry–decades old dirty laundry at that.
But more than that, the subject of tonight’s debate in Long Island is the economy. If McCain were to begin blowing off economic questions to make more time to discuss pseudo-outrages he would seem horribly out of touch, but also, in many ways this entire debate schedule has been stacked against McCain.
McCain could have possibly gone completely negative in the first debate, but that was supposed to have been focused on his strength, foreign policy. In addition to that there was the onset of the financial crisis, the confusion surrounding the bailout plan, and the confusion regarding whether there would actually be a debate. There was just too much else going on for McCain to go nuclear, and at that point he had not yet fallen so far behind in the polls.
The second debate is where McCain should have been able to take Obama to task without much fallout. Sandwiched in between the other two debates, and coming on the heels of Sarah Palin’s surprisingly competent performance in the VP debate, McCain could have come out swinging and then returned to a hopeful message for the final match-up with Obama, but because the format was a town hall forum with no back-and-forth between the two candidates, McCain had no chance of even flirting with that strategy. To turn on the opponent when he is not allowed to respond would have done more harm than good, not to mention the appearance of ignoring questions from actual voters.
McCain has been painted into a corner pretty much all debate season long, and tonight’s debate is no different. The confluence of events over the course of the past few weeks have added to the general disdain the country feels toward the government, the President, and his Republican party, and has conspired against John McCain’s bid for the White House. If McCain were to put everything on the table tonight and throw mud at Obama in the hopes that what Hillary Clinton couldn’t get to stick in the primaries would suddenly catch the nation’s interest, he will come off as a cranky, disingenuous old man whose desperation has gotten the better of him.
And, quite simply, McCain is too honorable a man to degrade himself by personally turning the debate into a referendum on Bill Ayers, Rev. Wright, Tony Rezko, and ACORN. He doesn’t have the stomach for the tactics his campaign has embraced, maybe because he remembers being the victim of those same tactics in 2000, but more likely it is because McCain has spent most of his career at odds with the perpetrators of dirty campaigning. It is beneath him and he’s always known so, but only recently has he let his distaste show.
Even though it may cost him the election, McCain’s basic sense of honor and decency hinders him from embracing tactics others would have jumped at, and for that he deserves credit.
The NY Times published an article today about the man behind the anti-Obama whisper campaign. You know, those crazy emails about how Obama is a muslim, wasn’t born in the U.S., and actually hates everything America stands for.
His name is Andy Martin, and he’s batshit crazy. You can find the article here.
Now some interesting facts and quotes about Mr. Martin from the Times article:
“He is a law school graduate, but his admission to the Illinois bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of ‘moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.’”
“He prepared to run as a Democrat for Congress in Connecticut, where paperwork for one of his campaign committees listed as one purpose ‘to exterminate Jew power.’”
“A motion he filed in a 1983 bankruptcy case called the judge ‘a crooked, slimy Jew who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.’”
“In another motion, filed in 1983, Mr. Martin wrote, ‘I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did.’”
There you have it. Now the next time you open your inbox and find one of those emails speculating that Obama is not a United States citizen, was trained for jihad in a madrassa, or was sworn into the Senate on the Koran, you can rest assured that the message originated from a paranoid, anti-semitic loon with delusions of grandeur named Andy Martin.
Update/Correction:
While most of the emails circulating about Obama were originally created by Andy Martin, all of the questions regarding citizenship and Obama’s “forged” birth certificate are the work of Phillip J. Berg, who is also batshit crazy. To find out more about Phillip J. Berg, click here. And to find out the truth on Obama’s birth certificate, click here.
Tidbit, a female blacktip shark at the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center in Virginia Beach died about 16 months ago after living in the aquarium for eight years with no males of her species. In the course of a necropsy, aquarium officials discovered a nearly full term pup which they assumed was either the result of a virgin birth–also known as parthenogenesis or asexual reproduction–or crossbreeding between Tidbit and a male shark of a different species–which would have been equally cool as it would have been the first documented case.
At any rate, DNA testing released in the Journal of Fish Biology today has proven that the blacktip pup in fact has no father. However, because this shark only has chromosomes from the mother, it is at a disadvantage for survival and is more susceptible to congenital disorders and diseases.
We’ll update if this shark turns out to be the second coming of Christ and begins performing miracles such as walking on land.
We’ve resisted discussing Bill Ayers at Rebel for awhile, but now seems to be the time when everyone is required to turn their attention to this “unrepentant terrorist.” The McCain-Palin campaign has been bringing up the specter of Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground at every campaign stop and nearly every chance they are allowed to mention this man Barack Obama “palled around with.”
Why? Bill Ayers is ridiculously unimportant. Bill Ayers is a sell out, a yuppie college professor who served on the board of a charity dedicated to ending poverty along with Sen. Obama. Bill Ayers held a fundraiser for Obama at his housemore than a decade ago, 1995 to be exact. And Bill Ayers contributed money to Obama’s reelection campaign in 2001 (how suspicious that a democrat would contribute to the campaign of a local democratic representative).
When Bill Ayers was a radical, he helped plant bombs in protest of the Vietnam War, most notably at the Pentagon and in Times Square. Most of the bombs planted were accompanied by announcements to assure that only property was destroyed rather than lives. That didn’t always work. Some people were injured by the Weathermen, some killed. This group also broke LSD afficionado Tim Leary out of prison. Bill Ayers is an asshole, that’s for damn sure, but he is an irrelevant asshole, and he is a sell out.
If Bill Ayers were anything other than an aging yuppie, he would still be planting bombs, this time in protest of the War in Iraq. But he’s not. He’s no longer a radical, by all accounts he became a rather upstanding citizen in the 80’s. He sold out. He works with conservatives on the very same board that McCain and Palin mention to link him with Obama. It’s called the Woods Fund Board and it’s part of the Annenberg Foundation.
Maybe he figured out after he was forced to turn himself in in 1980 that he could work from the inside, infiltrate the system and “bring it down.” Or maybe he’s just like all the other activists from the 60’s and 70’s who woke up one morning, shaved the beard, took a shower, put on a suit, and became a yuppie.
Either way the link between Obama and Ayers is tangential at best, that’s why the announcers in McCain’s commercials put so much emphasis on “he held a fundraiser at this domestic terrorist’s house,” “he launched his political career at the house of Bill Ayers.” That’s all there is to go on.
The bottom line is that Obama is a liberal democrat. And Ayers is a yuppie liberal. They run in the same circles. That’s all.
So why are we discussing Bill Ayers and not Rev. Wright? The connection between Obama and Rev. Wright is far stronger than his connection with Bill Ayers, and the rhetoric from Wright is more inflammatory than anything Ayers has said in the last five years (go back to 2001 for Ayers’ quote about not regretting setting bombs and wishing he’d done more).
“McCain had his chance back in April when the North Carolina Republican Party ran a gubernatorial campaign ad that included the linking of Obama with Jeremiah Wright. John McCain in his infinite wisdom, and with his overflowing sense of personal rectitude, joined the braying mob in denouncing that perfectly legitimate ad, saying it had no place in any campaign. In doing so, McCain unilaterally disarmed himself, rendering off-limits Obama’s associations, an issue that even Hillary Clinton addressed more than once.”
Also, if John McCain started going after Barack Obama on his relationship with Rev. Wright, the Obama-Biden campaign has a ready-made response ad right here:
