Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “This Week's Swimmers”

« Adios, Señor Nifong | Main | Even MSM Agrees: Barely Started Counterinsurgency On a Roll! »

June 15, 2007

This Week's Swimmers

Hatched by Dafydd

This week, one of my number-one picks actually won; in the other category, I was literally the only person to vote for either of my two picks!

Here are the winners:

Among the Council:

Judging People By Their Friends and Their Enemies, by Bookworm Room.

Bookworm contrasts the people who love George W. Bush -- many of whom have experience, up close and personal, with the Evil Empire, and love America for what we did to help liberate them -- with the snide, superior, condescending Democrats who wanted to leave Eastern Europe in Soviet hands forever.

This is the one I voted for in first place; my second-place vote for the Council nominees was Something Wicked This Way Comes -- A Democrat Congress Tryin' To Fix the Alternative Minimum Tax, by 'Okie' On the Lam. It came in third on the list with one full point; my number-two vote gave it 1/3 of a point, so either one other person voted it in first place, or else two others voted it second.

The Okie post is just what it says: ruminations on the ruination that will follow a Democratic "fix" of the AMT.

Among the Nouncil:

Death or Glory Part II of IV, by Michael Yon.

I didn't vote for this one. It was good; but it just seemed like any other Michael Yon embedded piece... nothing really jumped out at me.

Instead, I voted for these here two, for which (as I intimated) nobody else bothered to vote. Or even read, I reckon. Everybody else besides the Lizard hates these two authors, and I suspect a couple of the more exuberent Council members left stink bombs on the authors' doorsteps. I'd watch my back walking near any of the other Council members besides me, if I were they! You never know what those weasels that the Watcher watches might do:

U.S. Finds Karbala PJCC Mockup Inside Iran, The Fourth Rail;

This is the piece I nominated: Using satellite photography, we found solid evidence of a mock-up in Iran itself of the target of a Qods Force raid that killed several Americans in Karbala, Iraq, south of Baghdad in (here's a surprise) Karbala province; a model in Iran of the Qods target in Iraq:

"U.S. reconnaissance spacecraft have spotted a training center in Iran that duplicates the layout of the governor's compound in Karbala, Iraq, that was attacked in January by a specialized unit that killed American and Iraqi soldiers," Michael Mecham reported in the In Orbit section of the [June 4 edition of Aviation Week and Space Technology].

A bit hard to square Iranian denials of attacking us with the existence of a mock-up of the Iraqi target right there in the land of the mad mullahs.

This is pretty clear evidence that Iran has declared covert war on the United States; in a followup piece on Big Lizards, you will recall, Sachi discussed this at greater length: She got the goods on Qods.

Originally, I tried to nominate Sachi's piece for our Council post... forgetting that, by the Council rules, only the posts of a single member of a group blog can be nominated -- and that one is I, not Sachi. I could have nominated her in the non-Council slot; but my plan was to nominate Sachi's piece for the Council slot and Bill Roggio's piece (our source) in the non-Council spot, so... well, the whole thing turned into a dog's breakfast, let me tell you, which culminated in the Watcher calling Homeland Security on me.

Frist Pushing Dem Agenda, AlphaPatriot.

Former Majority Leader Bill Frist wants to solve all of Africa's problems by throwing money at them... our money. AlphaPatriot has the skinny.

Watch... the Watcher

...Who you can find here, with his pronunciamento about the vote this week.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 15, 2007, at the time of 11:59 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this hissing: http://biglizards.net/mt3.36/earendiltrack.cgi/2177

Comments

The following hissed in response by: snochasr

I wouldn't be too hard on Dr. Frist, especially when he is among many other brilliant people pushing a surprisingly good idea. It has been said that fighting global warming would cost the world economy TRILLIONS of dollars that we don't have, and condemn millions of third world people (REAL people) to poverty, disease and death. Yet estimates are that we could provide everyone in the third world with clean water, sanitation, education and basic health care for a mere $75 billion-- half of what we spent on New Orleans after Katrina.

The theory is that, instead of fighting global warming AND terrorism, we would make more friends by giving everyone a decent chance at living, and letting them do the rest. Alpha's point about corrupt governments is well taken, and would need to be mitigated, but it isn't sufficient reason, IMHO, to scrap the whole compassionate AND sensible idea.

The above hissed in response by: snochasr at June 16, 2007 7:56 AM

The following hissed in response by: Bookworm

Thank you!

The above hissed in response by: Bookworm at June 17, 2007 9:02 AM

The following hissed in response by: Davod

Frist is well intentioned, just as everyone else is well intentioned. However, money is not the answer.

The Kenyan economics expert James Shikwati, 35, says that aid to Africa does more harm than good.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363663,00.html

In Niger, the people help themsleves. Capitalism at work. http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/11/news/niger.php

I have lost my cheat sheet for linking to web pages. I would appreciate any assistance to link the above pages (and include the simple link info so I can copy it)

The above hissed in response by: Davod at June 18, 2007 2:50 AM

The following hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh

Davod:

Have you noticed the little buttons at the top of the text area? Note that one is labeled "link".

All you need do is:

Select some scrap of text;

Click the button labeled "link" above;

When the popup box appears, type in the URL of the link (or you can copy and paste) and press Enter.

Your text will be properly linked to the URL!

Text formatting buttons are your friends...

Dafydd

The above hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh at June 18, 2007 3:12 AM

The following hissed in response by: snochasr

More correctly, Davod, is that direct financial aid is not the answer. If you give a man a fish, etc. What I'm talking about is giving these people some CAPITAL, in the form of sewage and water systems, schools, and healthy people who can work. If you can employ the people in doing the work, that is even better. Capital is a work multiplier, and the only way these third world countries will be able to do enough "work" to pull hemselves out of misery. This, of course, assumes the political and economic freedom to use capital, which is unfortunately not always a given in many nations. That doesn't mean we shouldn't start where we can.

The above hissed in response by: snochasr at June 18, 2007 7:30 AM