American Gigolo

The Weekly Standard's Noemie Emery on the man Aunty Sullivan's wants to be the next POTUS.

Granted staggering wealth on the basis of marriage, Kerry seems to believe he deserves it, and perhaps always has. Such, at least, is the popular perception among the voters who know him best. "One of the surest ways to get the phones ringing on any Massachusetts talk-radio show is to ask people to call in and tell their John Kerry stories," says Howie Carr, the Boston Herald columnist and radio host. "The phone lines are soon filled, and most of the stories have a common theme: The junior senator pulling rank on one of his constituents, breaking in line, demanding to pay less (or nothing), or ducking out before the bill arrives. The tales often have one other common thread. Most end with Sen. Kerry inquiring of the lesser mortal: 'Do you know who I am?'" Just For Kerry is a common Bostonian take on what his initials stand for; and a possible insight into his priorities could be inferred from his tax records for the year 1993 (when he was between wives), in which he earned $130,345 and gave exactly $175 to charity, while indulging in an $8,600 Italian-made mountain bike for himself.

Throughout his career as an officeholder, John Kennedy gave his salary away to various charities, and lived on his trust fund. In this respect as in so many others, John Forbes Kerry is no JFK. "Kerry tosses around quarters like they were manhole covers," Carr jokes, while maintaining a fondness for luxuries. According to the Boston Globe, between 1990 and 1995 (when he married John Heinz's widow), Kerry earned a total of $724,042 and gave $4,869 to charity, or a grand total of 0.7 percent. (In the same years, William Weld, Kerry's blue-blood opponent in the Senate race of 1996, earned $1,082,875 and gave away $164,928, or 15.2 percent.) In this six-year span between his two marriages, the most Kerry ever gave to charity was $2,039 in 1994. Two years, he gave nothing at all. In the years between his two marriages, Kerry leaned heavily on friends and constituents to cushion the stresses of living on a salary, receiving generous favors of condos and cars. In his new status of billionaire's consort, he hasn't stopped asking for favors. A fire hydrant that prevented him and his wife from parking their SUV in front of their Beacon Hill town house was removed by the city of Boston. The lawn at the imported ski chalet in Idaho is kept fresh and green by a water pipe laid down and maintained by the state.

Summary: John Kerry is a gigolo who lives like an Austro-Hungarian prince, disdains charity, and treats the common folk like the peasants we are.

Post to LGF on Same Sex Marriage

Which sums up exactly how I think about it:

The "right" to marry just isn't up there with free speech, freedom of religion, right to bear arms, and that. Those to me are basic inalienable rights.

Marriage is a social contract, which logically falls within the rights of people and legislators to construct in the way they wish. Saying marriage is a basic human right is a bit like saying getting an automobile loan at a good interest rate is a basic human right.

If it is elevated to the status of basic right and the gender of the individuals who seek to be married is deemed irrelevant, how can one then go on to say that numbers and biological relationships are also irrelevant? You can not declare same-sex marriage a basic right and then, say polygamy is not, because you can no longer argue that marriage is a contract that has been historically "between two, and only two" people because historically, those people also had to be man and woman. You can not say incestuous marriages are illegal because of the implications for offspring because marriage between two people incapable of producing offspring within the limits of the marital relationship voids that argument. And you can not argue that people should be able to decide that polygamy and incest are wrong, but they can not decide that same-sex marriage is wrong, with and intellectual integrity at all.

Boy Divorces Father

A 14-year-old boy in the United States is seeking to become the first child to divorce his father.

I mention this only because, as a foster parent, I had one or two neglectarinos with similar circumstances. It's not as rare as one would think ... or hope.

Patrick Holland is not taking this action lightly. This is no spat about pocket money or homework. Patrick Holland wants to divorce his killer father
Patrick's mother, Liz, was murdered by his father, Daniel Holland, in October 1998.

Old Man Simpson Sullivan Endorses Kerry

According to the corner, Old Man Simpson, a.k.a Andrew Sullivan, has endorsed Kerry as "The Conservative Choice." (No link, sorry, but I've been boycotting Sullivan ever since his "Daily Dish" high-fived Kos the day Kos looked at brutally murdered Americans and said "Screw 'em").

How a guy who gets his knickers in a knot because he thinks same-sex marriage rights are more important than preserving western civilization ever got to be known as "the Gay Conservative" is beyond me. Not to mention, he supports a massive increase in the gasoline tax (being a non-driver, he thinks taxing everyone else is great), and thinks that as long as the courts legislate his morality, he's okay with it.

The Honored Dead

This came across my desk this morning. I don't know its source, but it shows the number of killed in Iraq by state. No Red/Blue divide here.

Democrats Against Free Speech, Part I

OT: Look who's crushing free speech. (Hint: It ain't Ashcroft).

Democrats try to squelch small business owner's Pro-Bush Sign

The 24-foot-long sign at Halftime Pizza across the street from Boston's FleetCenter isn't exactly welcoming to the Democratic National Convention: "Say!!!!! D.N.C. Thanks for Nothing!!! Go Bush."

On Friday, WRKO-AM's Peter Blute and Scott Allen Miller reported how Pasquale has been confronted by city inspectors who have threatened to fine him unless he takes the anti-Dem sign down!

Pasquale told Blute and Scotto that while he doesn't want any trouble, he will continue to exercise his First Amendment rights by keeping the sign up in spite of any fines.

The Black Widow Returns

No, this has nothing to do with deranged Georgia congressthing Cynthia McKinney. The only link I have for this is at Flight International and it is subscriber-only, but it seems Northrop Grumman has busted its YF-23 Black Widow II out of mothballs as a potential contender for the Air Force's regional bomber requirement.

The company recently retrieved the second of the two YF-23A "Black Widow II" prototypes (PAV-2) from the Western Museum of Flight in Hathorne, California, ostensibly for repainting for display at a forthcoming Northrop Grumman-backed air fair in August. However, the restoration is also thought to include several changes, including new cockpit displays and other possible cosmetic modifications.
Northrop Grumman confirms restoration of the General Electric YF120-powered PAV-2 is taking place, but declines to comment on whether the revived YF-23A is linked to any USAF proposal. But sources close to the studies, which were kicked off by the USAF's recently issued request for information, say Northrop Grumman now includes a YF-23-based "regional" bomber concept among its raft of proposals and that the USAF "is interested".

The genesis of the regional bomber requirement was for the USAF to find a post-Cold War mission for the F/A-22, in which considerable investment has already been sunk. OIF and OEF have shown that our current enemy is not well-equipped for air-to-air combat, and the primary value of aircraft is to 1.) find the enemy and 2.)render death from above. New build B-1's would fulfill this requirement adequately, but they are hard to base, and most of the production equipment has been dismantled. A bomber variant of the F/A-22 still has pole position if this requirement comes to fruition (Doubtful in the current spending environment, not-gonna-happen if Ace and Gary are elected) since its production facilities and air base support facilities are already in place.

The Why of Bush Derangement Syndrome

Politics isn't enough to explain the derangement of the left in this country. By the standards of common sense, logic, and simple decency, the left should just accept that they are temporarily out of power (not to mention, getting pretty much everything they want from Bush's domestic agenda, whose middle initials should be 'LBJ'), and be good sports about it until that which is going around, comes around, and they are in power again.

The derangement of the left is more akin to a religious fanaticism. Part of it is the perma-adolescence of narcissistic boomers who believe the world must revolve around them, and any political view that opposes theirs is heresy. Bush is their Galileo. And since Bush is pretty much center-left domestically, his crimes have to be exaggerrated to Hitlerian proportions in order to justify the hate they feel.

9-11 Commission Report: Michael Moore's Pants Are On Fire

Until it is translated into his native Huttese, it will probably be inscrutable to Michael Moore, but The Final Report of the 9-11 Commission is completely at odds with Lumpy Riefenstahl's thesis in "Fahrenhate 911."

1. Michael the Hutt claims that the war in Afghanistan was fought so that Unocal could build a pipeline in Afghanistan. (Which would require time-travel, since the pipeline was cancelled in 1998, but, hey, it worked in "Timecop") The Commission Report says, no way.

“In Afghanistan, the State Department tried to end the civil war that had continued since the Soviets’ withdrawal. The South Asia bureau believed it might have a carrot for Afghanistan’s warring factions in a project by the Union Oil Company of California (UNOCAL) to build a pipeline across the country. While there was probably never much chance of the pipeline actually being built, the Afghan desk hoped that the prospect of shared pipeline profits might lure faction leaders to a conference table. U.S. diplomats did not favor the Taliban over the rival factions. Despite growing concerns, U.S. diplomats were willing at the time, as one official said, to ‘give the Taliban a chance.’”

This was in 1998. Who was president in 1998? Hint: Not Bush. Additional Hint: Think Harridan wife, interns, and complete indifference to terrorism.

2. Michael the Hutt claims that Bush flew out bin Laden's Saudi relatives after 9-11. Report says, Nunh-Unh.

“We found no evidence that anyone at the WH above the level of Richard Clarke participated in a decision on the departure of Saudi nationals.”

None of which matters. The deranged moonbats who fill the ranks of the Democrat Party, the Left Coast Hollywood Elite, and Academia would rather believe the lies of Michael "the Human Landfill" Moore because they define truths as "clever slogans that reinforce our existing prejudices."

Robots at War

Article on the use of unmanned vehicles in Iraq in Afghanistan. This is the future of warfare, but obviously, the technology is still maturing. (Think television circa 1954).

DARPA dangled a $1 million prize to entice people to build vehicles that could drive themselves across a 142-mile course of sandy switchbacks and rocky plateaus in the Mojave Desert in March. But none of the contestants came anywhere near the finish line. The pre-race favorite, Sandstorm, a 1986 military surplus Humvee-turned-robot fielded by Carnegie Mellon University engineering students, went farthest - more than 7 miles - before catching fire and nearly going off a cliff.

So, unless you can herd the enemy at the bottom of the cliff, it's not quite at the weapon stage yet.

Launch

Everybody's got to have a blog. Well, at least everybody who is vainly deluded enough to think people are interested in what they have to say. This is mine. And I'll use my web-pseudo, Matthias J. Kurlander, because it has served me well lo' these many years.