Brutally Honest

Not sure what to do...

... but you want to do something to give aid and comfort to victims of hurricane Katrina?

My personal recommendation would be to stroke a check to World Vision, an organization the wife and I have long had much respect for and that is rated highly over at The Charity Navigator.  They've set up a donation page here.

Mrs. BH and I are at this point going to wait a few more days to see if my company might have a matching fund program that will double the monies sent.  I'm grateful that I work for a company that does this regularly.

The Instapundit is all over this with lots of links and plenty of choices as to charitable organizations.

Vanderleun and The Anchoress are rightly pointing out how some folks who were more than willing to help with tsunami victims are horribly silent about America's victims.

And the TTLB people are doing their part with a Katrina relief aggregator page.

The pictures and stories I've seen are heart-breaking, tragic and makes one quickly ponder their personal blessings.

I pray for all those affected.  May God's presence be made manifest.  And quickly.

UPDATE:  Moments after posting, I received the following in e-mail from our very good friend Joni, a Mississippi resident with many friends and relatives affected by events.  I asked her for permission to post it and she had no problems with the idea.  It's a moving testament to what has happened and it ends on a hope-filled (and prayerful) note:

I found a link on MSNBC that took you on an aerial ride over Hancock county,
MS and part of Harrison.  There is nothing left.  I cried.

I finally got in touch with my friend Betty.  I had dinner with her and her
daughter Saturday night in Oxford.  She knew she couldn't go home so she
went to her son's house in Jackson, MS.  Betty is sure that her house is
gone.  She lived a block from the beach in Waveland (Hancock county) -- like
I said, there is nothing there anymore.  But you couldn't get there even if
you wanted to.  We have some friends who stayed in Long Beach.
They are less than 2 blocks from the beach.  They made it with minimal
damage to their house, but they are trapped.  They can't get out.  So,
Betty's son will leave Jackson on a rescue mission tomorrow to get the
them and Betty's 3 dogs (John (the son) is taking care of Betty's
dogs).  Friday, Betty's brother-in-law is coming to Jackson to pick up Betty
and her 3 dogs and take her to Florida provided he can find enough gas to
get there and back.  After that, she may go Atlanta, but she doesn't know.

Our friend Ann was supposed to go to Birmingham, but no one has heard from
her.  Her house in Long Beach is gone.

The President Casino is across highway 90 from where it was moored.
Treasure Bay casino has disappeared.  The Copa casino is now in the parking
lot of the Grand Casino in Gulfport.  The Palace casino sank.

There is no way to get from Mississippi to Louisiana from the coast.  The
twin spans in Slidell are gone.  The causeway is not stable.  I-10 IS
passable -- until you get to the twin spans.  The Bay St. Louis bridge is
gone (that takes you from Harrison to Hancock county), the Ocean Springs
bridge is gone (that takes you from Harrison to Jackson county and on in to
Alabama).  The Popps' Ferry bridge is gone (takes you from Biloxi to north
of the back bay).

I still can't reach my friends in Gulfport and Biloxi, nor do I know how the
rest of my friends in Long Beach fared.

The devastation is incredible.

We got our power back last night -- only to lose it again this morning at
0930.  It finally came back at 1200.  We still don't have cable.  But we
have air conditioning and each other (I think I said that backwards).  My
brother-in-law called again today -- he was trying to buy a generator.  He
said they may come stay with us until they get their power back -- which may
be a couple of weeks.  They have no water either.

Betty was talking about how many "refugees" there are.  People with
absolutely no place to go.  No house left, no car to take them to another
place to stay, no gas to put in the car if they had one, no road to travel
on if they had the gas ...

I feel so useless sitting here in my cool house eating hot food.

I asked God to wrap his arms around those people -- and I know he will.  The
coast people are incredible when it comes to adversity.  They will persevere
and they will build back.  Wait and see.  But in the meantime I pray for
them.

As we all do Joni.  Lord have mercy.

MORE: Chris Muir is echoing Joni:

Never know where this kinda thing will turn up…

OK, Where would you expect to read the following headline:

End the Debacle Ms. Sheehan

A-CNN
B-MSNBC
C-Brutally Honest
D- Arab News

You probably picked C, but D is also correct… The following appeared on the Arab News website, who’s home page heralds them as “The Middle East's Leading English Language Daily”

End the Debacle Ms. Sheehan
by Steve Darnell, Arab News
It is time to put an end to the “Cindy Sheehan debacle” in Crawford, Texas. Since I am not one to sugarcoat a subject I will start by simply saying: Ms. Sheehan is a liberal nut case who needs to be put in her place.

I know these are strong words to use against a “grieving mother”, but the time for grief is over. Ms. Sheehan’s own hateful words ended her grievance.

Cindy Sheehan ... has since become the poster child for the anti-war wackos

Read the rest here

Or you could just stick with A or B…….

... Nick

Fiddle-sticks

School starts up in my neck of the woods tomorrow.  I've always thought that schools are a reflection of society.  Here's a glimpse of where it's at:

A secondary school is to allow pupils to swear at teachers - as long as they don't do so more than five times in a lesson. A running tally of how many times the f-word has been used will be kept on the board. If a class goes over the limit, they will be 'spoken' to at the end of the lesson. 

High schools, in Canada at least, usually have four 80 minute lessons a day.  4 lessons x 5 swears means the teacher is sworn at at least 20 times per day.  Actually, he or she is probably sworn at more than that, only after the 21st time they are rewarded with the pleasant job of "speaking" about it.

My question is, do the teachers get to swear too?  Perhaps at the principal?  After a day of listening to such eloquence, the shine might be wearing off my smile.

Sometimes it seems that all the world's a pantry and the people in it are full of beans.

...Leslie

Just in case I'm deleted...

... and because I think some liberals ought to read my response, I thought I'd post here what I left as a comment over at Waving or Drowning?, where Robert is opining that perhaps Pat Robertson was right in wanting to see Hugo Chavez assassinated and then lists a litany of liberal perfidy to back up his assertion that I simply couldn't leave well enough alone. 

Knowing that I've had a history of being deleted when I make a smashing point or two over there, I thought I'd post the reply over here for posterity.

Enjoy:

The more I read about Chavez, someone who had escaped the Brutally Honest radar quite frankly, the more I'm thinking that what Robertson had to say may, in fact, and to quote Robert, be "absolutely right".

But there are some logical holes there or least some problems with Robert's musings as I see them (and I'm assuming that Robert is being serious).

Simply assassinating Hussein, though helpful, would not have been enough. There were his sons to contend with (arguably more brutal and heinous than their father) and there was a political apparatus in place that did not tolerate dissent (much like some liberals here only a tad bloodier).

The assertion that 1900+ US soldiers would still be alive is offset by the numbers I reported here a few days ago from the serious people at PowerLine:

The media's breathless tabulation of casualties in Iraq--now, over 1,800 deaths--is generally devoid of context. Here's some context: between 1983 and 1996, 18,006 American military personnel died accidentally in the service of their country. That death rate of 1,286 per year exceeds the rate of combat deaths in Iraq by a ratio of nearly two to one.

That's right: all through the years when hardly anyone was paying attention, soldiers, sailors and Marines were dying in accidents, training and otherwise, at nearly twice the rate of combat deaths in Iraq from the start of the war in 2003 to the present. Somehow, though, when there was no political hay to be made, I don't recall any great outcry, or gleeful reporting, or erecting of crosses in the President's home town. In fact, I'll offer a free six-pack to the first person who can find evidence that any liberal expressed concern--any concern--about the 18,006 American service members who died accidentally in service of their country from 1983 to 1996.

Robert, might be some chance there for you to get some beer, for nothing, except some substantiated rhetoric, rather than the empty stuff.

You go on to quote 40,000 Iraqis might still be alive, which of course ignores the documented deaths that took place under Hussein. But of course, that would take us back to the PowerLine quote only with a spin. Deaths mean little to many liberals unless those deaths can, in some way, be used as a political bludgeon.

The rest really isn't worth the time to rebut. To suggest that Bush is responsible for the beheadings that took place in Iraq is to practice Sheehanisms, saying that which moonbats and their sycophants in the media will be quick to quote, quick to repeat, and just as quick to be unable to substantiate. In other words, it's hot air, enough to float the Hindenburg (with equal effect).

One day, sadly, we will all look back at the words we've said, especially in print, and wonder. In fact, I'll let Christopher Hitchens say it.

If the great effort to remake Iraq as a demilitarized federal and secular democracy should fail or be defeated, I shall lose sleep for the rest of my life in reproaching myself for doing too little. But at least I shall have the comfort of not having offered, so far as I can recall, any word or deed that contributed to a defeat.

UPDATE: David Limbaugh has related wisdom that per chance Robert (and his ideologues who do much less waving than some of us would rather they do) might also want to read in their entirety. Here's a snippet:

The antiwar Left has finally succeeded in turning public opinion against the war in Iraq with their endless assaults and distortions. The war's supporters, in our defensiveness, have unintentionally taken on a greater burden of proof than, by rights, we should bear.

The truth is that we were morally and strategically justified in attacking Iraq, based on the information we had available at the time of the attack. Conversely, the wisdom and propriety of our decision to remain until our mission is complete -- which we must -- and the president's conduct of the war, depend on facts now in existence. But by all means, let's keep the issues separate.

That is, even if we conclude we were wrong to have attacked Iraq -- which we certainly were not -- our decision is done and can't be retracted, even by withdrawing. Our decision to remain or withdraw must be based on what is going on today and the likely consequences of remaining or withdrawing

Go read it all.

Please.

Leader of the pack

Mrs. BH and I set off this morning on what we thought would be a short ride on the Harleys to take her work back to the doctor's office and to run a few errands.  The weather was calling for a 30% chance of rain and so we didn't think we'd be out but for the few minutes it would take to complete our to do list.

On the way to the office, we spied a gaggle of bikers congregating at the local biker bar.  I hollered over the sound of our rumbling iron steeds that we ought to check them out on the way back, that it looked like the beginnings of an organized ride.

We stopped there about 15 minutes later and by then at least a hundred riders had gathered and more were pulling in.  We checked with a biker parked to our right and found out that indeed a ride to raise funds for disadvantaged kids would soon be leaving the parking area under a police escort.  We hurried in, paid the required fees, registered successfully and within 10 minutes were on our way.

We rode along, Mrs. BH ahead of me and roughly 20 to 30 bikes from the lead riders.  We passed gawking bystanders and motorists held up by the biker traffic.  All were friendly and waving.  It's what riding a Harley is really all about.

Roughly 30 minutes later, we pulled into a second biker bar, what we found out later was roughly the half way point on what turned out to be our roundtrip.  Bikes were parked all along either side of Route 10 and many folks were heading in to wet their dried and parched throats.  We were unsure at this point how far the ride was going to be and given that it was completely unplanned on our part, we thought it might be wise to break off and head back home.  The Jamestown Ferry, taking us to the Colonial Parkway, a most scenic and familiar ride to both of us, was roughly 10 minutes away and so we parted ways and took off.

Arriving at the ferry, we pulled into the short line of vehicles that were waiting and enjoyed the few minutes we had before the arriving ferry pulled in. We chit chatted about the ride and the sights and the fun we'd just had.

About this time we heard the rumbling sound that many motorcycles make in the distance.  Apparently, the quick rest at the biker bar was over and we were now going to be joined by the roughly 125 to 150 bikes on the ferry. 

The ferry people were very accomodating and moved to get us all on the same boat.  They did so successfully only at this point, Mrs. BH and I were at the front.

The ferry ride is no more than 10 minutes (maybe 15) and we shot the bull with a small group of riders we were parked behind at the front.  We determined that these guys were going on toward Richmond which meant that as we pulled off the ferry, Mrs. BH would be the lead bike for the posse of riders heading back toward home.

And so there we were.  Mrs. BH, with a grin as wide as the bike parade behind her was long, leading well over 125 bikes on the 20+ mile trek back up the Colonial parkway toward home.  It was the neatest 30 minutes of our Harley careers.

And Mrs. BH did a heckuva job.  In only her second group ride (the first being a toys for tots ride nearly a year ago involving 1000 bikes or more), she had become the tip of the spear, the leader of the pack.  If only we had thought to pack our camera.

It was an awesome day and a ride we'll remember for a very long time.

Sooner rather than later

Equal Time

I'm hard on liberals (in case you haven't noticed).  Lots of reasons but  none are all that important at this particular moment because the idiots I'm about to unleash on are hardly leftists.  They are, beyond doubt, right wing wackos, who deserve our scorn:

Small, pitiful groups of perverse traitors cloaked in a warped, hate-filled and degraded version of Christianity are tirelessly traveling across America, cruelly protesting at the funerals of American soldiers killed in Iraq.

They are scheduled to stop in Middle Tennessee today, in Smyrna and Ashland City, to dishonor the solemn services and add to the horror and grief of those who mourn Staff Sgt. Asbury F. Hawn of Lebanon and Spc. Gary Reese Jr. of Ashland City. The Army National Guardsmen served together in the 278th Regimental Combat Team and died in an enemy attack Aug. 13 in Iraq.

Members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., will be there, not to spread the comforting Gospel of Jesus Christ, but to spew a disgustingly vulgar and crude message of gay hatred while celebrating the death of U.S. soldiers.

This evil little congregation, led by Fred Phelps, gained infamy for showing up at the funerals of homosexuals to taunt family and friends and to promote their own unique brand of hatred. This summer they started picketing the funerals of soldiers killed in battle with placards that say, "We hate gays" and "Thank God for dead soldiers."

Their Web site, www.godhatesgays.com, promotes the protests in crude press releases that say, "They turned America over to fags; they're coming home in body bags."

Sick bastards.  I will never understand the mentality.  Never.  In fact I can't help but wonder how it is that people like this are allowed by God to exist.  That's putting it pretty bluntly but I'm simply being honest.  I don't understand it.

A grieving family at a funeral will have to deal with these complete buffoons while they lay their loved ones in the ground.  It's appallingly unkind and cruel.  These are the true right wing nuts the left ought to be concerned about while they decry Pat Robertson's idiotic statements.  In this regard, there'd truly be unity.

How about some good news?

In the least, it's some seriously promising news:

LifeStraw™ is a simple device, still in a prototype phase, designed for those unfortunate people in the third world who do not have access to clean drinking water. The pipe is composed of two textile filters, followed by a chamber with beads impregnated with iodine:

Functionallity and use of design:

What first meets the water when sucked up is a pre-filter of PE filter textile with a mesh opening of 100 micron, shortly followed by a second textile filter in polyester with a mesh opening of 15 micron. In this way all big articles are filtered out, even clusters of bacteria are removed. Then the water is led into a chamber of iodine impregnated beads, where bacteria, viruses and parasites are killed. The second chamber is a void space, where the iodine being washed off the beads can maintain their killing effect. The last chamber consists of granulated active carbon, which role is to take the main part of the bad smell of iodine, and to take the parasites that have not been taken by the pre-filter or killed by the iodine. The biggest parasites will be taken by the pre-filter, the weakest will be killed by the iodine, and the medium range parasites will be picked up by the active carbon. The main interest to everyone is the killing of bacteria, and here our laboratory reading tells us that we have a log. 7 to log 8 kill of most bacteria. This is better than tap water in many developed countries.

H/T to the Reverend Sensing at One Hand Clapping.

Unmasking Cindy Sheehan

Dave Kopel wants us to know the real Cindy Sheehan, the Cindy Sheehan the MSM decides not to quote:

For example, on Aug. 16, Sheehan held a media conference call during which she declared "The person who killed my son, I have no animosity for that person at all." Yet her statement was reported only in the National Review Online weblog. In an interview with Mark Knoller of CBS News, she explained that the foreigners who have to come to Iraq to battle the U.S. military are "freedom fighters." (Video). Conversely, she described last January's vote in Iraq as a "sham election," in her Tuesday entry on her weblog on Michael Moore's Web site.

Sheehan hopes that her strong words will get people off the fence, yet the mainstream media fails to report them. And until Friday's profile in the Rocky Mountain News, the only Denver daily articles to quote Sheehan's provocative words at even modest length were editorial page columns in the News - two by Mike Rosen and one by George Will, for a grand total of four paragraphs' worth of quotes. The Denver Post continues to shield its readers almost completely from Sheehan's fiery language and radical policy beliefs, as did a 25-paragraph profile of Sheehan in Friday's News.

In an Aug. 16 interview with Chris Matthews on Hardball, Sheehan explained that the invasion of Afghanistan was just as wrong as the invasion of Iraq, and she would be equally angry if her son had died in Afghanistan: "Why do we send in invading armies to march into Afghanistan when we're looking for a select group of people in that country?" Yet the news stories in the Denver papers never mention her belief about the immorality of the Afghanistan war.

Sheehan has explained that the real global terrorist problem is the United States. Speaking at San Francisco State University on April 27, she announced, "The biggest terrorist in the world is George W. Bush." Rebuking people (such as the Post editors who created the "Portraits of Valor" series) who claim that serving in the military is patriotic, she stated: "I'm going all over this country telling moms: 'This country is not worth dying for.' " She denounced the idea that soldiers should "defend this morally repugnant system we have." (Transcript)

At the Veterans for Peace rally, Sheehan called George Bush a "lying bastard" and a "maniac." She showed her path to peace: "You get America out of Iraq and Israel out of Palestine and you'll stop the terrorism." (The Crawford "Peace" House, which Sheehan has used to coordinate her protest, has a photo on its Web site depicting "Palestine" as including the entire state of Israel. That Sheehan urges the extermination of the Jewish state does not necessarily mean that she is anti-Semitic; there are some extreme-left Jews who agree with her position.)

In an Aug. 11 blog conference call, Sheehan stated, "Thank God for the Internet, or we wouldn't know anything, and we would already be a fascist state." Even if one does not entirely agree, the last several weeks do show that that the mainstream media sometimes mislead the public by refusing to print statements that sharply challenge the status quo.

The grieving mother schtick has worn it's course.  We now need to know more about the woman and her motives.  And perhaps we can understand her family's decision to keep her at arm's length and her husband's decision to seek a divorce.

I'm just saying.

H/T to The Spoons Experience.

Iraq - Another Vietnam Quagmire?

Not according to Art Fougner of Flushing, New York:

Iraq is just like Vietnam except: We occupy Hanoi. We've captured Ho Chi Minh.
The North Vietnamese have just held a free and democratic election. The North Vietnamese are working on a new constitution. Yes, Iraq is just like Vietnam.

Touche.

Of course, Art's bit of wisdom falls on deaf ears in the MSM where they continue to print the news that fits their Vietnam Quagmire template even when good news is out there to be reported.  Just ask Colonel Thomas Spoehr:

Spoehr is the director of materiel for the Army staff. He had a good news story to tell Moss [reporter for the New York Times - ed.], which Moss converted into a bad news story.

Here is the story as Spoehr tells it:

Last year, senior leaders of the Army became aware of technological developments which make it possible to improve the "Interceptor" body armor worn by our troops.`

The "Interceptor" consists of a vest, two SAPI (small arms protective insert) plates worn in the front and the back, and "backing" material around the plates. The plates are made of boronic carbide, the second hardest substance known to man (only diamonds are harder) but fairly light weight.

The plates will shatter a standard rifle bullet, and the backing catches the bullet fragments to prevent injuries from shrapnel.

...

"Making one of these plates is like making one of those tiles that protects the (space) shuttle from heat," Spoehr said.

Yet though the specifications weren't set until early in January, new plates were being manufactured — and delivery begun to U.S. troops — in March. Those familiar with the Pentagon's procurement process recognize this as lightning speed.

The process was speeded up in part because in this instance the Army departed from the normal Pentagon practice of telling contractors not only what the Army needed, but how the contractors were to build what the Army wanted.

This time, Spoehr said, the Army told contractors what the Army needed, and let the contractors figure out how best to meet the need.

"It's our belief that we put the specifications out there, and then we let good old American ingenuity go to work," he said. "We have realized improvements in our own system from innovations contractors have come up with."

The new plates are a little thicker, but they weigh just two lbs. more than the ones currently in use. The new SAPI plates cost $1,300 a set, up from $1,000 for the older set.

Here's how the story was presented by Moss in the New York Times Aug. 14th: "For the second time since the Iraq war began, the Pentagon is struggling to replace body armor that is failing to protect American troops from the most lethal attacks of insurgents.

"The ceramic plates in vests worn by most personnel cannot withstand certain munitions the insurgents use. But more than a year after military officials initiated an effort to replace the armor with thicker, more resistant plates, tens of thousands of soldiers are still without the stronger protection because of a string of delays in the Pentagon's procurement system."

Anecdotal evidence for the continued attempts by a partisan main stream media to portray the truth falsely (or ignore it altogether) while trumpeting the bad news.

News thats fit to print... as long as it fits the template and if it doesn't, make it fit.

With kudos to Reynolds, The Anchoress and Gerard Vanderleun for bringing these stories to our attention.

UPDATE: Gary at Both Worlds has his own anecdotal evidence to add to the mix:

My 28-year-old nephew has been on duty in Iraq for over a year. He's neither a hawk nor a crusader nor particularly political. The Army is simply his job and he does it well. . Recently he was commendated for locating an explosive device and saving the lives of innumerable people. Before Iraq he was stationed in Bosnia.

He visited home this summer. Sitting around my sister's pool, he told me clearly and firsthandedly that our media distorts the true story of what is going in Iraq. He said they focus on all the bad things and ignore a lot of the good stuff. He said they simply don't present an accurate picture of the situation over there. Period.