Barrel Strength

Many have thought Chavez was merely imitating his idol, Fidel Castro. With this week’s news out of Havana, the truth comes out: Hugo’s been carrying Castro’s katra. Just pray that they don’t pile into a Trabant and hightail it for Monte Saleya to bring back the old butcher.

An Obamaniac flunks a pop quiz on His legislative achievements.

Meanwhile, Bill Clinton’s stump speech gets a tepid reception.

Lawrence Eagleburger, former Secretary of State under Bush the Elder,  predicted last night on television that ”there will be blood” in Kosovo, the break-away province of Serbia. Kosovo was originally Serb but became ethnically Albanian, and Muslim, over time.

Eagleburger and John Bolton wrote:

 ”We believe that an imposed settlement of the Kosovo question and seeking to partition Serbia’s sovereign territory without its consent is not in the interest of the United States. The blithe assumption of American policy — that the mere passage of nine years of relative quiet would be enough to lull Serbia and Russia into reversing their positions on a conflict that goes back centuries — has proven to be naive in the extreme. We believe that American policy on Kosovo must be reexamined without delay, and we urge the Bush Administration to make it clear that pending the results of such reexamination it would withhold recognition of a Kosovo independence declaration and discourage Kosovo’s Albanians from taking that step.”

 Too late, it seems.

One might ask, why is American policy so pro-Muslim in the Balkans? Or is it merely anti-Serb? And why are we gratuitously angering the Serbs? Conflicts in the Balkans, which are at the intersection of the Orthodox, Catholic and Islamic worlds, predate the foundation of the United States. When sensible conservatives like Eagleburger and Bolton question US foreign policy, we should take notice.

Because the bearded evil twin of Rafa Benitez in ours has turned Anfield into one giant Agonizer booth.

UPDATE: What weird badge of honour is there in coming back against Inter after losing out to Barnsley — 29 places below them in the League — and before that equalizing at half-time with a side 129 places below?

The only thing close to Mohamed Fayed’s heart that has been murdered is the fate of Fulham Football Club in the Premiership. And that’s no conspiracy theory: just look for the crazy rich merchant perched at Harrod’s.

A well-conceived comparison of John McCain and Winston Churchill in careers, strategic thinking and temperament. While the Greatest Briton remains in his own class, McCain could lend to our times some of the badly needed grit of the old bulldog himself.

Victor Davis Hanson reminds us that the US Presidency is the seat of leadership for the Free World and not another of Oprah’s Favourites:

With Hillary, Obama looks youthful and invigorating. But beside the scarred old veteran McCain, he will appear inexperienced and wet behind the ears. Putin’s comment that Hillary didn’t have a head reminds us that the problems in the world are not, pace Obama, due to misunderstanding or miscommunication, but because thugs like Ahmadinejihad, the Chinese apparatchiks, Assad, Putin, Chavez, etc. profoundly dislike the impediments the United States poses to their respective carnivorous agendas. McCain gets it, the others don’t (cf. his Putin KGB quip compared to Hillary’s ‘duh’ redundant remark that Putin didn’t have a soul.)

These creepy leaders are more like beady-eyed wolves that wish to break into the global hen-house and prey on the European, African, Asian, and Latin American chickens inside - and so pace back and forth, eyeing the trigger finger of the farmer with the shotgun at the door. They know exactly what they want, and how to get it, and can’t wait for the guardian to sit down, discuss their hunger, and invite inside them for discussions - and some lunch

I bet you have forgotten this, if you ever knew of Ron Brown’s death, the Secretary of Commerce in the Clinton regime. 

 If you take the time to read this, the story of Ron Brown’s death aboard a US Air Force VIP transport  in 1996, you cannot fail to be disturbed. It seems to come out of the darkest imaginings of leftie Hollywood script writers, only this time the villain is not right-wing but possibly Bubba Bill. I have always wondered how a jet the size and capabilities of Air Force 2, which had carried Hillary Clinton weeks before, could crash, how stories could circulate that the only observed survivor was delivered to a hospital in a helicopter with her neck broken, how Ron Brown, Bill’s Secretary of Commerce,  might have had a bullet in his head, how no autopsies were performed, how the Air Force skipped its usual procedures to conclude it was an accident, and how the whole story disappeared into the oubliette. Forgotten. Not the object of compulsive, pursuing, avenging journalists dragging this out for years, as would have occurred if it had been a right-wing assassination conspiracy and cover-up. Gone. It makes me wonder whether there are some stories so ugly in their implications, that national security and public confidence in our institutions requires people not to discuss them.

 http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/CRASH/BROWN/brown.html

I confess this story has persistently nagged me since I first came upon it.

There are thousands of useful sites that go for and against the notion that man is principally responsible for global warming. Some of us at Barrelstrength have written elsewhere about this phenomenon. Chiefly the consensus among us crusty reactionaries is that:

1) Global warming and cooling are principally natural phenomena related to solar output, albedo (earth’s reflectivity), ocean current heat transfers to arctic zones, influenced by the shape of continents, and many other attributes of the earth’s wobble, tilt, magnetic fields, as well as cosmic rays and possibly even the location in the local galaxy as the sun circles around it and goes through the galactic plane.

2) Opinion differs on rational grounds as to how much of the post-1970 global warming trend has been caused or increased by man, but the range of difference in this group would probably be from zero (no human influence) to some, in the 5-10% of increase, which are themselves trivial compared to fluctuations which have been recorded in human-recorded and in pre-human history.

3) Global warming as it is currently understood by most people is religious and not scientific, insofar as its function is to provide the sin for which humans must atone. The deity is Gaia, the religion is ecology, and the sin is ours, for breathing, heating, and all forms of energetic transformations, whose inevitable output is carbion dioxide and water. (That is the chemical truth, and cannot be avoided). 

Read the rest…

In the truly goofiest of efforts at ecumenism, Dutch Catholics try to rebrand Lent as the “Christian Ramadan“.

Indeed. And Daniel Pearl got an Islamic Glasgow Kiss.

Eh?  David Suzuki, a real science guy, or the evidence of your own lying eyes?  Eh?

The ‘Icebox of the Nation’

The temperature falls to a record 40 below zero in Minnesota.

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The world’s most ubiquitous and ruthless Marxist adventurer leaps from T-shirts onto the campaign office walls of America’s electoral heartthrob.

Given the current debate on global warming one would assume anybody with the title of Environment Minister would be suspect to faulty logic. Phil Woolas, a Labour Member and Minister of State in the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, belies that assertion with facts in linking British Muslims, and their propensity for marrying first cousins, to birth defects.

The linked articles states that “Medical research suggests that while British Pakistanis are responsible for 3% of all births, they account for one in three British children born with genetic illnesses.” Although the article only references British Pakistanis, the practice of first-cousin marriages is widespread in other Muslim communities as well with associated problems.

And they want to do this, this and this?

… aka 2008 Democratic Nomination.

Paul Kane crunches the numbers and comes to the conclusion that the candidates “need to win more than 1,100 of the remaining 1,400 delegates to win the nomination”.  This realization has already dawned on the candidates who are aggressively attempting to woo the superdelegates.

Read the rest…

Doris Lessing, inexplicable winner of a Nobel Prize in literature and scribbler of tendentious leftist fiction, predicts President Obama would be assassinated.

Lessing, who won the 2007 Nobel Literature Prize, said it might be better if Obama’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton were to succeed in her bid to become the first woman president of the United States.

“The best thing would be if they (Clinton and Obama) were to run together. Hillary is a very sharp lady. It might be calmer if she were to win, and not Obama,” she said.

Riiiight, because nothing can happen when Hillary’s covering your back.

Besides, Dave Chappelle already proposed a solution to help protect Obama: