So. Osama Bin Laden is dead. Good. If there’s an afterlife, he’s moved on to a place where his ideas about Jihad will be warmly received.
A few points:
Give Our Regards to Hitler and Stalin
May 2nd, 2011When The Levee Breaks
May 1st, 2011Rains have been so heavy (at least and north of here; in Austin, we’ve gotten squat in the way of rain the last two months) that the Army Corps of Engineers is planning on blowing the levee at Bird’s Point, Missouri, to prevent Cairo, Illinois from flooding. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has refused to issue an injunction against demolishing the levee.
More here.
The issues are complex and daunting. However, that won’t prevent me from using that as thinly-veiled justification for posting the late Blues guitarist John Campbell’s version of “When the Levee Breaks.”
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
May 1st: Victims of Communism Day
May 1st, 2011Today I join forces with The Volokh Conspiracy and others in proclaiming May 1st as Victims of Communism Day. The fact that communism killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 million people is not acknowledged nearly as often as it should be.
And given that communists are still in charge of North Korea, Vietnam, China, and Cuba (which launched a crackdown against dissidents today), Communist repression is still ongoing, with more victims every day.
(Hat tip for Cuba: instapundit.)
Having My Gun And Eating it Too
April 29th, 2011Last Saturday, I had a combined movie viewing/birthday party for Dwight and myself. Here’s Dwight’s report on the event, and here’s a picture of the cake, and the object depicted on the cake, which should seem familiar:
One is a beautiful object filled with things that will kill you if you don't treat them with respect. The other is a gun.
Important Day Coming Up May 1st: Victims of Communism Day
April 25th, 2011Every year on May 1st, there’s a single day set aside for the little guy, the poor, unfortunate common man ground beneath the boot-heels of faceless oppressors.
I am speaking, of course, of Victims of Communism Day.
Just like last year, we should take a day in memory of communism’s victims, especially given that there were somewhere between 85 million and 140 million people killed by communism.
There are a few memorials to those victims sprinkled around the world. Here’s the statue of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism in Washington, D.C.:
Here’s the online museum to the victims of communism, created by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
Here’s a memorial to the victims of communism in Prague:
There’s also a Memorial to the Victims of Communism and the Resistance in Romania. One of the statue groups found there is called “Cortege of the Sacrificial Victims.”
This wall of photos is from the same museum:
Here’s a memorial in Rakowicki Cemetery in Krakow, Poland:
And here’s a statue called “Crucified Again” in Ottawa, made by Czech artist Josef Randa.
And Cambodia features fairly dramatic reminders of the toll of communism at Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek:
To the best of my knowledge, there are no memorials to the victims of communism in China, Vietnam, North Korea, or Cuba. But one day there will be.
Texas 2012 Senate Race Update: Elizabeth Ames Jones Pulls In Paltry $122,185
April 21st, 2011FEC Reports for the Texas Senate Race continue to be posted for the fundraising period of January 1—March 31. (Indeed, they’re being posted so slowly that I wonder if a single arthritic temp is doing all the data entry.) The reports of Ted Cruz (over $1 million announced) and Michael Williams (over half a million announced) are not up yet, Tom Leppert’s $2,690,081 ($1.6 million of which was Leppert’s personal loan to his own campaign) was already announced, and Roger Williams raised $598,470.
But Elizabeth Ames Jones’ report is finally up, and it’s disastrous: $122,185. Raising less than one-quarter what the other major declared candidates have in the same period of time isn’t going to get the job done. Moreover, it’s a major step back from her previous 2010 fundraising total of $989,765.
Jones already had the most difficult path to victory of the major declared candidates, a path some were already saying was non-existent. Ted Cruz and Michael Williams were battling in the Tea Party Primary for the movement conservative vote, while Tom Leppert and Roger Williams are competing for the “who gets the establishment nod if David Dewhurst skips the race” slot. Jones, on the other hand, has, what? Unless she can magically pick up a disproportionate share of the woman’s vote (which seems doubtful), it’s impossible to see how she remains competitive when she’s been so heavily outgunned in the fundraising arms race. I’m far from an insider, but as far as I can tell, the groundswell for a Jones candidacy has been all but non-existent.
There’s a long way yet to go before the primary, but unless Jones can, at a minimum, quadruple her fundraising totals in the second quarter, she’s toast. She made be toast already.
Obama Doesn’t Know Jack. Or Texas.
April 20th, 2011An interview that Brad Watson of WFAA-TV in Dallas conducted with Obama has been getting a lot of attention. A lot of it has centered on Obama’s visible testiness at the questions, but I’d like to point out his baffling ignorance of Texas history:
The overall thrust of the interview is why Obama isn’t more popular in Texas. “Too big a spender, too liberal, too incompetent, too prickly, and too out-of-touch” all cover it rather nicely, but you can add “appallingly ignorant of basic historical facts” to that list…
Texas LinkSwarm for Tuesday, April 19, 2011
April 19th, 2011(Hat tips: Texas Iconoclast, Smart Girl Politics)
Fail All the Way Around
April 19th, 2011Dwight and Ann Althouse (among many others) are reporting on the vandalizing of a photographic print of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ in France. (I’m not going to go into a history of the piece itself, whose heyday of controversy was before most of today’s college seniors were born; I suspect my readers can Google as well as anyone.) The attackers have not been apprehended, but there has been much speculation that they were disgruntled Catholics, though the proof of that is entirely conjectural. Assuming this is true (and not, as Althouse suggests, an inside job), this is like a perfect storm of fail for the attackers:
So whoever did was either a very stupid religious believer, or a very smart guerrilla marketer…