Month: December 2004

Incredible Idea

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We’ve got a coalition in Iraq. They’re the Coalition of the Willing.

Not all of the Coalition members sent combat troops. (To be fair, not all of the members have combat troops that can be deployed outside of their borders.) But they all contribute vital support, and they all are helping us and the Iraqi people out in a dark time.

Persnickety of Ordinary Galoot has a great suggestion. Since they’re showing their support for us, why doesn’t the individual US citizen show their support for our allies?

How can we do that? Why, simply buy a few Christmas gifts from businesses that are from countries that belong to the Coalition!

I think one of the best ideas is one of these food hampers from England. Pick through their selection of fine foods in order to get the right stuff for your favorite picnic partner.

People think that former Communist countries only produce low-tech, inelegant, ugly crap, similar to the (well deserved) reputation that Taiwan suffered under in the 1960’s. This is simply not so! Persnickety found this lovely set of wine goblets with the Amtrak logo tastefully etched into them. Just the thing for the train enthusiast on your list. (She forgot to mention CZ firearms, which are very fine guns at competitive prices.)

She also found this lovely (and expensive) hand cut vase from Poland. For something less pricey but still elegant and classy, check out the mustard museum from Azerbaijan. They have a great selection of mail order items available at their online gift shop, but don’t forget to check out the sidebar on the left side of the page. Plenty of individual items for sale that aren’t featured on the gift shop page.

Even if you don’t support our presence in Iraq, you have to admit that promoting capitalism and economic growth in former Warsaw Pact states is something that’s worth doing. Just buy something from them in order to help them keep Communism from re-emerging and you can be assured that your dollars are doing good in the world.

Obvious

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There’s vending machines in many schools across the United States. The kids can buy sodas, candy, chips. The school gets a cut of the profits. Works out well for everyone concerned.

Lately, though, school administrators have been worried about public pressure. Parents have been complaining about the high calorie snacks that the kids have been buying while at school. They wanted the selection to be changed to a more healthy mix. (Why this is the school’s problem instead of an example of lax parental supervision is something I can’t answer.)

So the schools got rid of the really tasty stuff and replaced it with, I dunno, organic fruit and soy energy bars. You know, stuff that no one buys for the taste.

And the obvious happened. The kids stopped buying stuff from the school vending machines.

Now the schools are upset. The money they got from the sales of all that sugary stuff has dried up. In some areas the loss is staggering, with schools in the San Fernando Valley losing $100,000 USD a month from soda sales alone! (There can’t be that many paper routes, so the parents there must really pass the cash out every morning. I wonder if they’ll adopt?)

Supporters of the junk food bans say that they knew that there was going to be a loss in revenue for awhile, but that sales would pick up eventually. I suppose they figure the kids will get used to the crappy taste or something. Looks like they aren’t parents who ever had to convince a child to eat their carrots.

When the People of Europe Speak

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Over on Belgravia Dispatch poster ZF made this observation:

“It suddenly occurred to me the other day that the influence of the MSM on public opinion is much greater in European countries than in the US, while the current influence of blogs there is far less developed. This has to mean that the biggest impact of the blog phenomenon still to come will in due course be seen in Europe.

Europe has the bigger ‘popular democracy deficit’, and is thus more exposed to this phenomenon even if it is going to take a while longer to mature, non?”

I think ZF is really on to something here.

Read more

Last Night

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I went to see a discussion between Abner Mikva and Arthur Schlessinger, hosted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. In spite of his age and accompanying frailty, Schlessinger wove some interesting tales, and was generally entertaining. The group assembled here was a wide-ranging one to say the least, from a few who looked as if they hadn’t had a bath lately, right on up to Christie Hefner and Bill Marovitz, two of Chicago’s glitterati.

Anyone who recognizes the four preceding attendants can imagine the tone of the discussion; let’s just say it was fairly partisan Demo-speak, not surprising. I was taken aback, however, at the behaviour of much of the audience. Schlessinger deftly picked up Mikva’s leads, and proceeded to administer a light, verbal spanking to Bush and The NeoCons, accompanied by a steady chorus of tsks, sighs, and harrumphs from this head-bobbing peanut gallery. At one point, Schlessinger touched on the Bush Lied subject, refuting the very idea that he had lied, adding, “I don’t think he is capable of lying,” which brought about a raft of chortles from the all-knowing, intellectually superior audience. They nearly choked on their pretzels when the next words out of his mouth were that he views Bush as a man of integrity. This clearly was not a line the audience was expecting.

The evening then proceeded to a Q & A session, where the audience competed to see who could insert their nose the furthest into Professor Schlessinger’s hindquarters while still being able to ask a puffball question. Through some miscalculation, the microphone got passed to a man who challenged Schlessinger on his notion that the U.S. incurred no damage to its standing or interests by pulling out of Vietnam in the way we did, and the same would go for Iraq if we were to just up and leave. Heads spun round to find the rabble-rouser, and looks of horror were all over the audience. To his credit, Schlessinger responded rather graciously, basically agreeing to disagree.

I walked out of the Millennium Knickerbocker hotel thinking to myself, “Where have the adults in this world gone?” The people upstairs had conducted themselves at roughly the level of my kids’ grade-school assemblies, maybe less respectfully. Here before them sat a man who had rubbed elbows with more than a handful of U.S. Presidents, had witnessed and written about 80-plus years of the most dynamic world history, and all they could do was snicker, roll eyes, feign aggrievement, and then jockey to line up for a book-signing. They deserved to be at an Oprah taping.

Good News for Conservatives

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In the last election, the Democrats had exactly what they said they needed to win. They spent more money per candidate than the Republicans in the Presidential and Senate races, they managed to motivate youthful voters in great numbers, and the national media was so biased that they were actually willing to fight for an obvious fraud if it meant damaging the Republicans.

Yet they still lost the Presidential election, as well as some more seats in both the House and the Senate.

I think one of the main reasons for this incredibly poor showing were the loud, bitter groups that the Democrats courted as a big part of their support. I think most Conservatives would agree with that.

I just came across this news item, which reports that MoveOn.org, the odious Left-wing organization that saw nothing wrong with comparing Bush with Hitler, is trying to re-invent itself.

How are they going to survive after they’ve failed so completely in getting their candidate elected? By expanding the list of issues that they want to become involved with. (The article is very well written, and should be read all the way through.)

I was very curious to see how the mid-term elections were going to come out in 2006. If the Democrats didn’t change their message (Republicans are murdering Fascists), and if they didn’t change the way they presented it (BUSHITLER!), then I figured that they were going to lose even more seats in Congress.

But if MoveOn manages to expand and keep at the forefront of Democratic politics, then I don’t have any doubt as to the outcome.

UPDATE
Fellow Columbus, Ohio blogger Citizen Keith has sent me an Email, pointing out that the ads which compared Bush to Hitler weren’t endorsed by MoveOn.org. Instead they were merely two of 1,500 ads that were submitted and placed on MoveOn’s website during a contest , and they were removed due to complaints. So far, MoveOn hasn’t ever directly compared Bush to Hitler.