This is the second installment in the Webloggin “View from the Left” series. The main focus of the series is to stir discussion concerning the mainstream media’s attempt to lionize and undermine the Bush administration, oppose conservative values and attack Judaeo-Christian teachings. As such I am looking for a better name for the series; please send me your ideas.

oday’s Guantanamo Diary in the Washington Post by Mahvish Khan is a must read. Everyone should understand the depth of anti-Bush and subsequent anti-U.S. sentiment that runs through one of the nations biggest newspapers. I call the WAPO article How to Spread Propaganda in the War against the U.S. Infidels.

The Washington Post is making quite a name for itself in the MSM war against the Bush administration. Today’s front page web link carries a dramatic report of the plight of Guantanamo Bay terror suspect detainees as could only be told by a University of Miami Law student who is acting as an interpreter. She is an American Muslim of Pakistani descent who feels it is her mission to expose the startling disconnect between the beauty of Guantanamo Bay surroundings and the evils they mask inside the U.S. detention centers.

She heard her calling to service after taking an international law class at the University of Miami. What else are we to expect? This is par for the course for American Universities that are inundated with leftist internationalist professors who have nothing better to do than sit in their ivory towers and come up with ways to indoctrinate America’s youth against the evil imperial U.S. They must be so proud right now.

There are two key quotes in the article that I must point out before I delve into the thick of the heartfelt portrayal of the evil U.S. versus the innocent detainees.

The first quote sets the stage for Khan’s point of view.

“The very existence of the military detention camp at Guantanamo Bay seemed an affront to what the United States stands for. How could our government deny the prisoners there the right to a fair hearing? I didn’t know whether they were innocent or guilty — but I figured they should be entitled to the same protections as any alleged rapist or murderer. – Khan in WAPO”

The second and most glaring quote is presented to us from a Ramsey Clark like lawyer for the detainees who is commenting on Khan’s earlier statement about the polite military escorts.

Over steak dinner, I comment on how nice our military escorts are. They joke and laugh with us. Primo gives me pointers on shooting pool in the CBQ lobby. Everyone brings them beer and cigarettes. I think I had expected them to be more aloof, even hostile.

But Tom Wilner, a partner in the Washington office of Shearman & Sterling LLP, quickly retorts: “Yeah, they’re nice. But this whole place is evil — and the face of evil often appears friendly.”

This is how the article should be presented instead of in the trite WAPO under the table slap we so often read. The face of evil is not of murdering Taliban terrorists but rather that of the U.S. military.

The novelette is 4 pages long so I will attempt to be as brief as possible here. The first thing that strikes me is how the article reads like a dramatic short story as opposed to a report. This is an intentional dramatization that is meant to personalize the victim detainees and tug at your heartstrings. [More...]

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To Whom It May Concern:

I recently attended a Mary Kay party and also was going to have one. I have to say that I was very disappointed to find out that all the products that I purchased were imported and not manufactured here in the United States.

I would like to know why Mary Kay doesn’t support the United States economy by manufacturing the products here. It is for this reason that I have decided to cancel my upcoming party and not purchase any more products from my local consultant.

Mary Kay, to me, spoke America; that is until I turned to the back of the products and saw otherwise.

Sincerely,
XXXXXX

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The big focus in American education from the 1960s through the present was why children can’t read (something I attribute to the new educational approach that abandoned the wonderful logic of phonics). Now, though, for parents hewing to traditional morals who have kids trapped in public schools, the question becomes, “Why should my child read this drek?”

Zabrina, of Thought You’d Never Ask, tackles this in a three part series called Great Literature in the Public Schools (part three has yet to be published). In Part One, she details her unsuccessful efforts to protect her 9th Grader from reading a book larded with profanity and violent images. In Part Two, she tackles similar material (with an emphasis on raunchy language, not violence) that her 4th grader is reading in school (and that the teacher is reading aloud to the students).

It sounds as if Zabrina’s children are sufficiently mature, sweet and innocent to learn from, without being affected by, such materials, but that doesn’t change what I take to be Zabrina’s point: Why are we using our public schools to teach down instead of up (up being more inspirational material)?

True, all teachers would (and, by Zabrina’s example, do) defend whatever raunchy material they offer on the ground that any given book teaches important life lessons, whatever the lesson in the book happens to be (triumph over racism, drug addiction, handicaps, sexual abuse — all the things people need to triumph over in today’s literature). But why can’t we teach the same lessons (presumably of courage, self-discipline, a sense of self-worth, honesty, etc.), in the old-fashioned way — by pointing to people, real or imagined, who had exemplary lives, and by writing about those lives using dignified language, not trashy language more worthy of the street corner than the classroom?

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To me this sounds like a threat by illegal aliens who broke our laws and entered this country illegally. Illegals are not asking for acceptance they are demanding it. As far as I am concerned they can take off Monday, Tuesday or the entire week or the entire month or make that the rest of the year and let’s see how long they can last without a paycheck.

And to employers who provide goods and services …. I have made up my mind I will not buy your goods and services unless everyone speaks clear American English. This is not a bilingual Nation.

Adios Amigo!

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Update: Moving to the Top Due to Importance of Content

President Bush on Friday approved a deal for a Dubai-owned company to take control of some U.S. plants that manufacture parts for American military contractors as reported in the USA Today this afternoon.

But we are being assured that we can sleep well at night because it has been vetted by the DHS and Chucky Schumer over a 2 month period since January 28th.

What has me puzzled is that Schumer and everyone else were working behind the scenes to pass this deal while they were concurrently bad mouthing the Dubai International ports deal. Thus everything is a bit disingenuous to say the least. It is apparent that they are all speaking out of both sides of their mouths and we are viewed as unwitting idiots. Perhaps we deserve it; after all we keep putting these people back into office.

I think it’s about time for a complete change in Congressional leadership. Every single one of these representatives of the people seem to be selling the infrastructure of this country to foreign interests. I am all for open markets and a global economy but it seems to me that certain things should be off limits; namely the selling of our military infrastructure to foriegn interests. (Yes, this is nothing new. Britain, a great ally of the U.S., owned these particular companies. That fact does not necessarily make it right.)

The details involve Dubai International Capital’s $1.2 billion acquisition of London-based Doncasters Group Ltd. This acquisition includes two plants in Georgia and Connecticut that make precision components used in engines for military vehicles; specifically “engine ready airfoils,” for aircraft, helicopter and tank engines.

Here is what the people pulling the strings have to say:

• This investigation was a significant improvement over what happened before, House Homeland Security Chairman Peter T. King, R-N.Y., said in a statement. It’s been much more thorough, much more detailed. (Referring to the Dubai Ports deal)
• This was a transaction that was thoroughly reviewed and closely scrutinized. In the view of the committee, it does not compromise our national security. - White House press secretary Scott McClellan.
• House leadership aides, speaking on condition of anonymity, said lawmakers from both parties on the relevant committees had been briefed on the deal, and had agreed that necessary safeguards were in effect.
• Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., a leading opponent of the port deal, also said he did not plan to oppose the transaction. There are two differences between this deal and the Dubai Ports deal. First, this went through the process in a careful, thoughtful way; and second this is a product not a service and the opportunity to infiltrate and sabotage is both more difficult and more detectable.

I know that people are saying that a third party isn’t viable so I must ask, if not now, when?

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I have been paying close attention to the latest outage incurred by Hosting Matters and I believe we are on the cusp of mass hysteria by otherwise clear thinking individuals.

I am skeptical about a couple of things here; the first being the belief that there were two separate incidents on the Hosting Matters servers. I say this because I believe that one of their solutions may have involved re-ip’ing some servers that were within the same block as the targeted ip. This would cause more than one outage and there are likely others attributable to technical solutions being put in place by the server host.

I saw something like this in action at Captains Quarters as I needed two reconnects for each attempt to find the site through a relay. This means that I was likely getting cycled. i.e. my dns server already had the updated address while the relay did not. That may or may not be the case but it could be an explanation for multiple outages. There are no rules here.

Second, there are many types of Denial of Service attacks. The Hosting Matters attack is being blamed on cyber attackers from Saudi Arabia. A comment by AnonymousDrive on CQ hit the nail on the head in response to one of my comments (in red)

RE: Webloggin (April 28, 2006 10:40 PM)
Also, the Hosting Matters attack is being blamed on cyber attackers from Saudi Arabia. It seems a bit soon to have determined the source. The problem with DOS attacks is that the source may be quite different than what it appears at the onset. In any event we will likely see more of this in the future.

Yes on all counts.

Ths forensic signature may indicate hijacked robot servers with registered .sa netblocks, but that is not necessarily indicative of the nationality of the criminals furthering an exploit. It may be that Saudi could be unaware of the exploits or are none too eager to shut down the rogue machines because they actually agree with the mission. Or it actually could be Saudi nationals (or cohorts) abusing the net either with government permission or without it. It’s just too soon to know for sure.

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Michelle Malkin is reporting that Hosting Matters is experiencing another outage from a CyberAttack on their blogs. Last week I suffered an attack on my servers and had to take drastic measures to stop the creeps. Despite my best efforts they managed to take my servers down on three separate occasions.

One of the blogs I host had 50,000 spam related comments before I could get to it. I eventually managed to block the spammers using some fairly complicated .htaccess file rules.

It is important to realize that WordPress plugins such as Spam Karma and Akismet DO NOT reduce the load on your servers. You are still taking a hit on the server, chewing up unnecessary bandwidth and filling your database up with comment spam even though it doesn’t show up on your blog pages.

Web hosts should scrupulously watch your server logs to identify and stop access by spammers and hackers. The most drastic measures involve blocking IP’s while it may be possible to block referrers with less harmful effect.

In my estimation the blog model is in serious danger of collapsing in on itself. Too many people do not understand the technologies behind blogs, syndication feeds and web hosting. Worse, services like blogrolling and many of the blogad servers out there are not scaling properly and do not have redundant backups. Blogrolling has been one of the worst culprits in my estimation.

In any event it is important to block these people before they hit your blog and not after. This means they need to be blocked at the server level.

I have implemented .htaccess blocking and it has worked for the most part. That is until they find another way around my defenses and then it will be back to the drawing board.

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I think we’ve just had the best news out of Iraq since it became clear that the Iraqis want democracy (by voting in overwhelming numbers). That is, that the Ayatollah Al-Sistani, the big shooter of the Shi’a, has endorsed new president what’s his name and has called for all militia to turn in their arms. Just because he’s an Ayatollah, does not mean he has to be evil, Truthites. In fact, this guy is one of the keys to establishing a stable Iraq.

So far, I think the Iraqis are a little ahead of the USA in post-revolution progression toward a stable centralized government. No one seems to realize that in the years between the American Revolution and the official adoption of the constitution, the US was just a motley group of pissed off, quasi independent entities called states. A couple of times, there were almost interstate military conflicts, that’s how hot things got. The news of the top holy man in Iraq staying on the democracy bandwagon is great, indeed.

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On the heels of the proposed “Day without Immigrants” boycott that is proposed for May 1 we now have the “Nothing Gringo” campaign south of the border. If you’re trying to win friends and influence people you may want to go light on polarizing the issue. In the Nothing Gringo proposal, organizers are calling for a boycott of American Stores and products on the same day as their illegal northern bretheren. You can read more in this CNN.Com article.

The plan is shortsighted and hurts some of their allies in the battle for legal guestworker programs in the U.S.

And ironically, the protest targets the U.S. business community, which is one of the strongest supporters of legalization or guest-worker programs.

I say help them, let some of those companies shut down for a week, or maybe a month. Let’s make sure they stay true to their word and keep all our Gringo money away from them lest we offend. Make sure they see not a dime. Let the workers go without pay for that period. I’m sure the Mexican retail industry will pick up the slack and proivide the stores, products and jobs the citizenry needs to get along. Hell, maybe we can divest all financial interest from Mexico altogether.

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This is a dreadful story, with grotesque pathologies bursting out all over the place:

A woman charged with killing eight of her newborn babies has gone on trial in a case that has shocked Germany. The bodies were found buried in a fish tank and in flower pots and buckets in her parents’ garden in a village near the Polish border.

The woman, a jobless dental assistant known as Sabine H, 40, faces eight counts of manslaughter. She could be jailed for up to 15 years if convicted.

A ninth baby also died, but too long ago to allow prosecution. It is thought the babies were born and died between 1988 and 1998.

At Thursday’s hearing, the woman’s lawyer said she would not give evidence at the trial.

She previously told investigators she did not harm the babies, but let them die after giving birth alone. She told them she could only remember properly two of the births because, in the other cases, she got drunk when she went into labour.

We already had three children, and my husband didn’t want any more children, she said, according to a transcript read out in court. She added that I always hoped my husband would notice the pregnancies of his own accord.

We’re not talking abortion here — we’re talking the murder of nine living babies. One of them is ignored entirely because Germany apparently has a statute of limitations on murder and, as for the other eight, she might conceivably receive almost two years in prison per murder for a fifteen year total.

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