Was September 11th America’s fault? Well if you believe that, then was the recent bombing of a Bali nightclub Austrailia’s fault? As of now, 30 Austrailian citizens died in that bombing and 160 are missing. 190 compared to the Austrailian population (19.5 million) is roughly proportionate to the 3,000 who died on 9/11 compared to America’s population. (And the 9/11 deaths were not all U.S. citizens.) So the Bali bombing could be considered Austrailia’s 9/11.

Prior to this, as Clive James notes in the Guardian, Austrailia pundits blamed America for the 9/11 attacks, because of our behavior in the rest of the world. Now, (not so) amazingly, they’re starting to change their tune.

It’s so easy to pontificate from the outside, isn’t it? And from the inside, I wonder if the ‘blame America first’ crowd is ready to blame Austrailia now. (Answer: Hold not thy breath.)

In the Sore Loser department, supporters of Cynthia McKinney (D-Saudi Arabia) are filing suit in federal court to have the Democratic primary that she lost voided, and have her declared the winner. Given that, consider this:

• Where do you think McKinney stood on the Supreme Court ruling that halted the Florida recounts in 2000? Those recounts that were, you may recall, taking place contrary to Florida law, which is what the Supremes were reacting to. Dollars-to-doughnuts she considered that ruling flawed. And now here are her supporters trying to do something similar, except they’re trying to have a legal act (voting in whatever primary you want) declared unconstitutional. as opposed to having an illegal ruling overturned. (And I wonder what her position is on the Toricelli/Lautenberg switcheroo, another judicial ruling that defies the law.)
• The folks bringing the lawsuit claim that the crossover voting denied African-American voters their right to elect the candidate of their choice. This is, of course, given the false assumption that the 48% of the vote that went to Denise Majette was lilly white. It also comes with the suggestion that only the votes of African-Americans should count in Georgia’s 4th district.
• McKinney’s supporters claim that 37,500 Republicans (legally) crossed over and voted against her. That would be over half of the votes cast for Majette (68,612). However, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution could find no more that 3,118 votes where the voters clearly identified themselves as registered Republicans. (And remember, in Georgia the term “registered” is meaningless, since we don’t register for a party. Hence the legality of “crossover” voting.) Are they making these numbers up? (Answer: Most likely.)

Yes, these are just her supporters, not Cynthia herself, but the silence as to whether or not she supports this endeavor is deafening. (Cybercast News Service could raise neither McKinney herself nor the Congressional Black Caucus on this issue.) And playing the blame game is nothing new to the McKinneys anyway, who have blamed the Democratic Party, Georgia Governor Roy Barnes, and of course J-E-W-S.

Speaking of “mob rule”, Neal Boortz has a great column on how that relates to the New Jersey switcharoo. The NJ Supreme Court has decided, and the NY Times agrees, that the wishes of the mob (voters (read: Democrat party members) who want a “genuine election”) is more important than the law (the “51 day” rule). We’re not a democracy, we’re a republic. And that makes all the difference. Boortz notes that not a single founding father ever uttered the word “democracy”, and for good reason.

We don’t have mob rule. Well, we’re not supposed to have it.

Whites and Asians have been removed from an anti-racism conference.

I’ll pause a moment to let the irony sink in.

Citing the idea that slavery was too painful a subject to discuss in the presence of non-Africans, a vote was taken, and the result was that all whites and Asians were voted out. Most walked out in protest anyway. Chairwoman Jewel Crawford of the United States defended the vote by saying, “the motion of exclusion was the will of the majority.”

I’ll pause another moment to let the irony sink in again.

I’m betting that at some point in our history, you could have said something similar about the issue of slavery, at least in some states. “The motion of exclusion [from the restaurant/bus/club/school] is the will of the majority.” But that doesn’t make it right, then or now.

Given the New Jersey court’s decision to replace Torricelli with Lautenberg by judicial fiat, actions that should logically follow include:

• All uncontested races should have court-appointed challengers (i.e. The Miranda Rule of Elections: If you cannot afford a challenger, one will be appointed for you).
• Any parties other than the Republicans or Democrats don’t count as parties and/or challengers (because since the court said that the public should have a choice, obviously those other parties aren’t actual choices). In New Jersey, other (now legally unimportant) parties include the Green, Libertarian, Socialist Worker and New Jersey Conservative Parties.
• Once campaign finance reform kicks in, parties can surrepticiously replace their candidate within 60 days of the election, and then be forbidden by law to announce that change (since the McCain-Feingold gag rule will have kicked in).

Is this really how elections should be run? What ever happened to judges interpreting the law and legislators enacting it? It’s the same situation as in the 2000 Presidential election in Florida. The Florida Supreme Court said that the deadline wasn’t a deadline, regardless of what the law actually said, and that “the will of the people” should prevail. The people of NJ have already spoken, as they did in Florida, through their legislators and via the law, that within 51 days of an election you can’t change horses. Now the NJ judges have said that that’s not what they meant.

The same liberals who call the Constitution a “living document” (i.e. subject to the whims of activist judges) are playing fast & loose with state law now.

Now here’s an interesting thing to consider: The ozone “hole” over Antarctica, that place where the ozone is thinner than other places, has shrunk and split. It’s total size is at about its circa 1988 area. Well that’s good to hear, but here’s where it gets interesting. According to NASA, the main reason this is happening is…warmer air! The warmer temperatures reduced the formation of clouds that harbor the ozone-zapping clorine and bromine, and thus the ozone recovered.

Now, if you want to believe that global warming is happening (and caused primarily by man) then you have to see this as good news. Global warming isn’t the problem, it’s the solution! OK, maybe that sounds silly, but at the very least one must add this to the list of items that show that the planet can, in fact, deal with oddities thrown at it. Where it’s warmer, the foliage grows faster, taking even more carbon dioxide out of the air, and cooling things down. It happens naturally all the time. And now we have more observable evidence that the earth isn’t such a passive, fragile system some environmentalists make it out to be. It’s pretty sturdy and durable.

Make sure to watch the broadcast news this week to get more information on this wonderful news. As in-depth as they cover it when the ozone “hole” expands, they’ll certainly devote at least as much time to when it shrinks, right?

Right?

George Will hits the nail on the head (as usual). The “peace in our time”-“give peace a chance” crowd has got to have their eyes firmly shut, their hands over their ears, and must be singing “La la la la I can’t hear you la la la” at the top of their lungs if they believe anything said emminating from Baghdad. Will points out that Kofi Annan, “who was last seen doing his Neville Chamberlain impersonation”, actually believed the Iraqis when they said they’d welcome weapons inspectors without restrictions (a day or so before they added restrictions), and 2 Democrat representatives (McDermott of Washington and Bonior of Michigan) are saying we should take Iraq’s words at face value, while casting aspersions on the truthfulness of their own President. Aren’t they paying attention.

Oh, and a note for Al Gore. If President Bush is allegedly “playing politics” with the war situation, what are those 2 representatives doing with their “believe Saddam, don’t trust Bush” talk? Positively slinging mud! And lets not forget, as George Will reminds us, that Gore and many other Democrats support the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which called for…regime change! Thus we see once again the modus operandi of the garden-variety liberal: Sound and fury without actually doing anything, because intentions are more important than actions

Remember all the “what did he know and when did he know it” talk from Democrat Congressmen about Bush’s foreknowledge of 9/11? Turns out Congress had 9/11 information as recent as 2 months before the attack. I wonder if Cynthia McKinney will now add the members of the House Intelligence Committee to her alleged “conspiracy of silence”. (Current members are comprised soley of Bush and his cabinet.) Again, hold not thy breath.

The U.N. has become the crutch of governments with no stomach for doing what’s right if no one else is doing it. Saudi Arabia is now saying they’d be “obliged to follow through” and let their bases be used in an attack against Iraq if the U.N. gave the go-ahead. Obviously, if there were any principals involved in the original denial of base usage, they have fallen by the wayside, and now they’re hoping to at least be able to hide behind a U.N resolution and use the excuse “They made me do it!” with Saddam.

The “emporers” of the U.N. have no clothes, and any resolution they may come up with is see-through. Bush nailed them to the wall when he framed his argument in the context of the many resolutions that Saddam broke. Either those resolutions meant something, or the U.N. doesn’t mean anything. Either way, the folks too timid to take action had nowhere to run once their timidity (which was masquerading as “thoughtful deliberation”) was exposed.

Way to go, W.

Sorry, no September 11 retrospective or anything. I spent most of the free time I had the past couple of weeks working up a PowerPoint(tm) presentation of before, during and after 9/11, with images culled from everywhere and music from Michael W. Smith’s “Freedom” CD. They liked it at church, and other churches may be using it this coming Sunday. 🙂

In other news, however, two days ago the other McKinney lost. Billy McKinney’s, Cynthia’s dad, blamed “J-E-W-S” for his daughter’s loss, and then blamed white racists for his loss, saying they wanted a Klansman instead of him. There is a 9/11 connection here: If terrorists hadn’t attacked, Cynthia McKinney wouldn’t have had the opportunity to put her red sneakers in her mouth up to the heel when she became an apologist for them. If she hadn’t done that, she’d probably still have won. If she had won, Billy would’nt have had the opportunity to eat his own foot on national TV while reacting to a hotly-contested race. (He’d still have said such stuff, but it wouldn’t have been covered so extensively.) If he hadn’t been seen doing that, he probably would have won.

Two things: Once again, one wonders what kind of voter keeps these kinds of people in power (racists, anti-Semites, anti-American, and boldly so on all three counts). I mean, Billy was in power for 30 years! Secondly, it is nice to know that the terrorists and their sympathizers are feeling the results of their actions, even if it is a little late in coming.