In a Washington Post article out today titled, “Europe’s Runaway Prosecutions,” former Justice Department members David Rivkin and Lee Casey do an excellent job of addressing the legal issues surrounding extraordinary renditions, including the absurd legal attacks being waged against us by supposed allies. The entire article is worth reading, so head over and check it out.

Britain’s dead need living wages too!

More than ?57m in benefits were paid to dead people last year, government figures have shown.

The junior work and pensions minister James Plaskitt said 98% of overpayments happened when death occurred too late to stop an automated payment.

The most overpayments - ?34.4m - were made for pensions, with ?13.3m paid in income support.

The Tory work and pensions spokesman Philip Hammond said it was “more evidence of chaos” at the department.

Some people think we need more systems like this in America. Bah to them.

For anyone who’s been observing the absurd fads in education and parenting that have taken place over the years, and bothered to think about how they might affect society, this should come as little surprise:

College students think they’re so special

Today?s college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

?We need to stop endlessly repeating ?You?re special? and having children repeat that back,? said the study?s lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. ?Kids are self-centered enough already.?

Twenge and her colleagues, in findings to be presented at a workshop Tuesday in San Diego on the generation gap, examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006.

The standardized inventory, known as the NPI, asks for responses to such statements as ?If I ruled the world, it would be a better place,? ?I think I am a special person? and ?I can live my life any way I want to.?

. . . Campbell said the narcissism upsurge seemed so pronounced that he was unsure if there were obvious remedies.

?Permissiveness seems to be a component,? he said. ?A potential antidote would be more authoritative parenting. Less indulgence might be called for.?

. . .Yet students, while acknowledging some legitimacy to such findings, don?t necessarily accept negative generalizations about their generation.

I do. As a member of this self-indulgent generation, I can say very easily that these results match quite well with my own observations. A student in the article goes on to claim that being “politically active” means these students are not “overly self-centered”. The problem is that most of their “activism” is little more than an extension of their need for attention. For instance, rallying against “sweat shops” in poor countries makes these people feel good about themselves as well as look good in front of their contemporaries. But it does absolutely nothing to help anything. In fact, it isn’t even supported by the people they claim to be concerned about, the workers. They just want jobs, and they sure as hell don’t want a bunch of self-absorbed, spoiled Americans to take away their rare opportunities at a better life in the name of “compassion”. Such “activist” students might understand this if they occasionally thought about something other than their need for attention.

It seems that the Taliban took a shot , so to speak, at Vice President Dick Cheney. But they missed - a fact which seems to trouble many on the left.

Here’s the reaction from the Huffnuts:

“Cheney’s spokeswoman said he was fine” F**k.

So Cheney is personally responsible for the deaths of 14 innocent people…and then he waddles off to lunch!! What a piece of sh**!

They missed! Too bad.

To bad they missed!!!!!!!!!!!!

If at first you don’t succeed …

Better luck next time!

What a different world we would be living in today if they had succeeded.

Dr Evil escapes again…damn.

Sounds like a bullsh** attempt. The VP is inside some sort of compound and they blow up a bomb at the front door? Christ, at least lob a few grenades INTO the compound. [ed. Can you beleive this? They’re unhappy that the terrorists didn’t launch a broader attack upon our forces. If this isn’t treason, treason no longer exists.]

They missed?? Dammit. I hope they try again before he leaves.

Who’d have thought that Afghanistan would make such a valiant attempt to save the United States of America? [Once again, the left showing itself to be united with the terrorists in a common cause]

It’s good to see this asshole living in the world he has created. All I can say is “better luck next time”. [Right. Cheney created Islamic extremism. I thought Afghanistan was the war everyone supported? Not the case?]

Bush and Cheney have enough blood on their hands. We don’t need to lose credibility by behaving like Republicans and using hyperbolic bullsh** that makes us FEEL good but is false. [They’re not behaving like republicans, they’re behaving like crazed liberals.]

Just can’t get good bombers any more!

[Here someone dares to criticize the others for showing such sadistic delight in an attempt on the duly elected VP of the U.S., and is quickly shot down.]

Sinkablehail55 says:

“C’mon guys lets have a little bit of honor, no one deserves to die in a bomb blast. Yes, even Cheney. You may have many reasons to hate this man and he is pretty repugnant, but that’s hardly the reason to wish that he would die, which might I add is equally repugnant.”

F#$% Cheney. It’s called poetic justice. This no good MF is complicit in sending thousands to their deaths via bomb blasts and you expect sympathy for the cretin. Karma’s coming to get that rat basturd.

Get over yourself. What you see here is a spontaneous expression of rage and frustration. Perfectly appropriate, given the circumstances.

I hope he at least needed a big, painful jolt from his defibrillator.

It’s just as well they missed. We wouldn’t want to owe the Taliban such a debt of gratitude.

Hopefully you get the point so I can stop defiling this sacred place of reason and learning with this filthy liberal inhumanity. This is what I got from the first two pages. At the time of this posting, this went on for another 10 pages.

Update:

The hate fest now inhabits 18(!) pages of responses, mostly all of them dissapointed that Cheney didn’t meet his demise.

Here’s the post that takes the cake though:

I am amazed at all the hatred being Commented here except for Thalia.

These trolls and some of the other Commenters are pouring pure bile into this topic which makes everyone look like total fools. Some silly fools want other concerned citizens to go to jail. INSANE! And typical of Bush/Cheney supporters who yearn for a police state with their sad little egos in charge.

Hating is my job! And none of you are very good at it.

Punks!

By: getoffmedz on February 27, 2007 at 11:23am
Flag: [abusive]

It’s hard to tell because of his poor composition and lack of contextual continuity, but it appears that this fellow believes those who are opposing the Cheney hate speech are trolls, and that they’re the ones spewing hate and bile. In other words, hating on Cheney is justified. Anything else is unacceptable.

Incredible.

Update:

And now the Huffington Post admins are deleting posts left and right. Nearly every post I quoted above has been eliminated. They deleted so many posts that the number of comment pages have gone from 18 to 13. Can’t have these kinds of opinions attributed to the liberal base. People might get the wrong idea.

Update:

VIA Michelle Malkin, most of the comments section has been preserved to forever haunt the patriotic left here.

In addition to globe-trotting on gas-guzzling private jets, Al Gore apparently uses 20 times as much electricity in his home as most of the rest of us. In fact, Gore averages about 18,000 kWh per month. I don’t think I’ve ever even gone above a thousand in my current house even in the hot summer months and it gets pretty hot here. But we’re not allowed to criticize him for it because he purchases indulgences….er “carbon credits” to offset it. And he uses green power. Lots and lots of green power. I bet he throws out 5 times as much garbage as an average home too. Once again, he preaches conservation to all the rest of us but excludes himself.

The KOSkidz have his back on this one.

Last night, Al Gore got very favorable national press and worldwide television exposure. [ed. like it was ever any other way]

…

In the last twenty minutes, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has updated its website TWICE - both with radio interviews. The damage is being done as we watch.

But guess what? We’re going to fight back. All of us.

Why? Well, first of all, Al Gore turning his lights on doesn’t make him a hypocrite, it makes him a human. [ed. which apparently excuses him, but not the rest of us.]

Second, we’ve seen this game a few too many damn times. The trick is for them to create doubt and distraction. They need to create doubt all around the country about Al Gore. But there is no doubt.

Al Gore is a hero.

Even heroes need help - join us, add to the comments, let’s find out everything we can about these guys and stop them in their tracks. Now.

What a bunch of hypocrites.

It’s a little weird to think of Nevada as a place to reject free behaviors that harm no one, but that is precisely what state Sen. Dina Titus is proposing to do with her quest to ban “price gouging”.

People like Mrs. Titus would argue that price gouging does harm people, but they are fundamentally wrong. The single most important concept behind any free trade is that everyone wins. If a person chooses to purchase a product, it is because they have decided it is to their advantage to do so. Only when they would not voluntarily purchase a product do they find it to be to their disadvantage to pay the cost of that item. Milton Friedman once said, “underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.” What Mrs. Titus is really objecting to is freedom. She does not want individuals to be free to choose when an item is worth its advertised cost to them and when it is not. What’s more, she is the one bringing harm upon consumers in her ill-conceived attempt to “protect” people.

[In an emergency], if ice prices rise to the market, the man who needs to keep his insulin cold for his diabetes treatment will place a higher value on it than the man who wants to keep his beer cold, and will have a better chance of getting it. The man who might rent two hotel rooms for his family for additional comfort might, in the face of appropriately higher prices, inconvenience himself and only get one, releasing one for another whole family.

Mrs. Titus can afford to harm these individuals in her populist chest-thumping attack on price gouging, because they’ll never know they’ve been harmed. When disaster strikes and there are no supplies, it will be the Mrs. Titus’ of the world that insure goods take longer to arrive than they otherwise would have, but no one will notice at the time that, if it weren’t for liberal meddling, they might have had crucial supplies a little bit sooner. Thus it usually goes when people try to step in and say they know better than the market.

Hat tip: Club for Growth

This morning on the radio I heard a news update about the Appeal for Redress, the leftwing’s attempt to maintain a patriotic image while espousing their unpatriotic agenda. You see, if they can get servicemembers to echoe their views, then it relieves them of the unpatriotic stigma they have shackled themselves with. It’s patriotism by association. They want you to believe that this is a grass roots effort which occurred spontaneously amoung servicemen and women, but it just isn’t true. This is a well funded campaign backed by the left wing attack machine, including the media who will shamelessly promote this as a grass roots effort.

Here’s a real grass roots effort. The Appeal for Courage has already acheived it’s target of 1000 signatories and counting. I wonder if, when the Appeal for Courage overtakes the Appeal for Surrender in number of signatories, the media will announce it as a “milestone” in the Iraq war. We know how they like to announce milestones. Come to think of it, I wonder if the media will report the Appeal for Courage at all. So far, it’s a blackout. Only bloggers seem to be paying attention. Same as always.

Crocodile tears all around. A group of contractors constructing our new border fence accidently wandered 10 meters into Mexico. And the Mexicans are furious.

Mexican legislators said they had photographs and video, taken on Monday, of the workers and heavy-duty construction equipment that showed them about 10 metres inside Mexico near the border city of Agua Prieta and the town of Douglas, Arizona.

The Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa said she had complained to the US authorities and that the men and equipment had been withdrawn.

So where do we complain when Mexicans cross our border? We’ve got pictures and video too. The only difference is, when Mexicans invade our soil, they don’t stop at 10 meters.

Naturally, our “leaders” puckered up and kissed the Mexicans’ you-know-what.

In a statement, the US Ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza said: “The US is sensitive to Mexican concerns… [and] has the deepest respect for the integrity of the sovereignty of Mexican soil”.

Anyone ever heard the saying, “Respect is a two way street?”

The bad news is that 11 people died and over 100 others were injured in an eastern Pakistani kite flying festival. You read that correctly. The Pakistanis have managed to turn flying a kite into an activity where people are regularly maimed and killed. The machoism in that part of the world is apparently at such a deep level that men will fly kites with a string which amounts to nothing more than razor wire, dive bombing each other’s kites in an effort to snap the others’ strings. This inevitably results in numerous bystanders getting their throats slashed. Most of the other dead and wounded fell victim to stray gunfire and gravity.

My colleagues here at the C-C have quite capably shown why the multiculturalist behaviors of Europe and some of the more liberal parts of America are damaging in a fundamental, real-world way to the liberties and rights we have come to expect from society. I, however, hold the title of ‘ivory tower idealist,’ and am therefore concerned with the absolutes of things.

Unfortunately for multiculturalists, not even in purely absolute terms is ‘diversity’ necessarily a good thing.

Multiculturalism stems from an intellectually bankrupt system of ethics called ‘cultural relativism,’ which, in short, states that an individual person’s moral actions should be judged based on the culture he is surrounded by. Thus, a cultural relativist, looking at the beheadings and suicide bombings in the Middle East and the culture from which the perpetrators come from, would be forced to concede that they were not behaving in a manner that violated the moral tenets of their culture - indeed, that the Islamic focus on martyrdom and fighting the infidel would praise such behavior - and that thusly we could not, having not been raised in that culture, judge the moral correctness of such actions.

Most of you can see how ludicrous this mindset is, and how thoroughly damaging to Liberal democracy it can easily become. Because we deny ourselves the right to take umbrage at suicide bombings, we deny ourselves the ability to call them precisely what they are: immoral. Indeed, I would venture to say ‘evil.’

Not all cultures are equally moral. Not all viewpoints are equally valid. This is a difficult fact for those steeped in ‘diversity’ to accept. If I assert the viewpoint that murder is not immoral, I would have an overwhelmingly difficult time convincing anyone - if I could at all - simply because we are all well aware that there is something fundamentally incorrect and undesireable about murder. It is no different to look at the actions of a given culture and sometimes glean the moral truth of it prima facie. The barbaric practices inherent in Islamic shari’a and east African tribalism are without doubt some of the most absurd, anti-civil and cruel behaviors humans have perpetrated upon one another in the modern world, backed by the flimsiest, most irrational justifications present in any widely accepted worldview.

Yet it is difficult, if not impossible, to motivate some multiculturalists to oppose them as vehemently as they deserve.

It is time people started realizing that some cultures and viewpoints are intrinsically better than others. Multiculturalists desire a world where diversity is the rule. But they’re going to find out very quickly that the low-minded practices of the truly savage leave no room for their egalitarianism.