Hang Ten w/Islamic wacko's ...

Unfortunately, that’s not a surfing reference. While Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got a television platform in the UK to pass along a propaganda message to the West on how to celebrate a holiday his nation abhors, the Iranians celebrated by playing Christmas Tree with ten prisoners:

Norway deplores the executions of 10 persons in Iran on Christmas Eve. Prior to the executions Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere appealed to Iran to stop in time and not go ahead with the executions. …

and meanwhile, back at the ranch ...

On Christmas Day, British television Channel 4 provided Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a platform to broadcast “an alternative Christmas message on British television to rival Queen Elizabeth II’s annual address.” In the message, Ahmadinejad said that “if Christ were on Earth today, undoubtedly he would hoist the banner of justice and love for humanity to oppose warmongers, occupiers, terrorists and bullies the world over.” The speech received widespread media attention.

Undoubtedly, He would — and Ahmadinejad and his terrorist regime would qualify under all four categories.

Interestingly, no global news agencies bothered to cover the Christmas Eve hangings, despite the worldwide attention focused on Ahmadinejad’s Christmas message. Nor has there been any significant coverage of the Christmas week closing of the human-rights center that belied Ahmadinejad’s holiday message. It seems as though the media only has an interest in acting as a repeater station for tyrants rather than hold them accountable for their actions.

BO visits Marines

Wow! Where did he find the love ? Remember this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrW4fOGIMVY

Umm. How quickly one turns from leftist pacifist to grateful CinC.

Two dear nuclear armed friends in a faceoff???

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan began moving thousands of troops away from the Afghan border toward India on Friday amid tensions following the Mumbai attacks, intelligence officials said.

The move represents a sharp escalation in the standoff between the nuclear-armed neighbors and will hurt Pakistan's U.S.-backed campaign against Al Qaeda and Taliban taking place near Afghanistan's border.

Two intelligence officials said the army's 14th Division was being redeployed to Kasur and Sialkot, close to the Indian border. They said some 20,000 troops were on the move. Earlier Friday, a security official said that all troop leave had been canceled.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.

Indian officials could not be immediately reached for comment.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met Friday with the chiefs of the army, navy and air force to discuss "the prevailing security situation," according to an official statement.

An Associated Press reporter in Dera Ismail Khan, a district that borders the Afghan-frontier province of South Waziristan, said he saw around 40 trucks loaded with soldiers heading away from the Afghan border.

Great Depression II ???

How many times have you heard that we've learned the lessons of the Great Depression and won't repeat the same mistakes?

<--- What stimulus looks like.

That statement is a bit of a false promise, since there was only one Great Depression, and many, many steps were taken and not taken, with no chance to rerun the experiment over and over to figure out what worked, or would have worked, and what didn't.

Letting hundreds of banks collapse, destroying savings and confidence, is one mistake we won't make again. But many want to insist, without evidence, that more government spending would have ended the depression. That's the direction the Obama administration is taking. Others say government did not do enough to restore business confidence, or did too much to damage it, piling on taxes, regulation and labor unions. This at least is firmer ground. Plenty of evidence from history shows that actions hostile to business tend to be related to an absence of prosperity.

But more important than these talisman like assurances about what we've learned from the Great Depression is the mistake in assuming that, even if we had a coherent view of what should be done, coherent polices would therefore be implemented.

This has little relation to how policy is made in a democracy.

(Thoughts from HotAir article)

Geneva Convention/Torture ... how do they relate?

Anyone who talks about the Geneva Conventions, as if there were some actual meaning in those goofy documents, ought to have his head examined. If we followed the Geneva Conventions, then we would have to get rid of our strategic nuclear arsenal, since it is specifically built to incinerate millions of men, women, children and pets - you know, civilians and everything else. But that’s war and that’s why war is something to avoid, if possible, and why weaker nations used to think twice before attacking nations that could crush them in a second. … Used to.

Of course, no one with a half a brain would get rid of our strategic nuclear arsenal, because they understand what the reality of the world is - unlike the Geneva Conventions, the 4th installment of which was written after the horribly draining emotional experiences of WWII, when we decided that nothing like that should ever happen again … kind of like when we called the First World War, “The War to End All Wars”, which it fell woefully short of being, to be overly generous.

Just as people wake up with huge hangovers and swear to never drink again, we always end wars by trying to tell ourselves that we will not be pushed to those same actions, brutal and ruthless as the actions of war must be, though it is never our choice. It takes two to tango, but only one to start a war. The Geneva Conventions are a utopian fantasy, just like the UN, and totally unworkable in the real world. We used to understand this, but since the fall of the USSR, Americans have gotten exponentially dumber about reality and what it requires. As things stand now, our enemies’ only defense is our own self-restraint. That’s really smart …

Anytime someone mentions the Geneva Conventions to me, I laugh in their face and ask them to tell me the last war that followed such rules. We all know the answer to that. Everybody does. One thing is for sure, any nation that would follow the Geneva Conventions is guaranteed to lose, or, at best, to have the war drag on for so long and be so costly as to leave itself with nothing but a pyrrhic victory, that will soon be eclipsed by the next leg of the same war … until we do finally lose. You know how Bernoulli trials go. And that’s just downright stupid and not the purpose of our government (or any government’s obligations to its own people).