Update: Something Strange here: The poll has registered another 69,063 votes (an increase of 27%) as of this morning yet the percentages haven’t moved a bit. In fact you will note that the yes vote is the same today as it was at 4:445 yesterday when the Daily Kos crowd tried to take the poll over. Something seems broken here although nothing is outside the realm of possibility. (The maybe percentage has dropped by 1%)

Original Post:
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The Daily Kos Crowd is Attempting to Skew MSNBC Poll on Islamofascism

Oh oh, MSNBC has the following poll that seemed to catch the eye of the Lost Kos crowd after they found out that thier point of view was getting its ass kicked.

Do you agree with President Bush when he likens the struggle against Islamic fundamentalism with the fight against Nazis and communists?

That prompted the following rallying cry on moonbat central:

*ACTION ITEM*Wingnutz are kicking your ass right now in this poll
by irishamerican
Thu Aug 31, 2006 at 04:42:33 PM PDT

This is a short action Item. The Right wing is kicking our ass right now (4:45pm) at a poll on MSNBC. This is the question:

Do you agree with President Bush when he likens the struggle against Islamic fundamentalism with the fight against Nazis and communists?

Please vote here:
http://msnbc.msn.com/…

Please vote now!
44% are agreeing with: Yes. Bin Laden and others are the Hitlers and Stalins of our times.

Last I checked Daily Kos gets approximately 4,248,827 pageviews a week (that’s millions for all you batties out there).

Thus the lefties pulled ahead as follows:

Typical of the left they completely miss the point on how stupid they look here. Let me sum it up for them:

• They could only pull ahead by 10% (approx 25,000 votes) despite the fire power of approximately 606,975 hits a day and a predominately liberal audience at MSNBC
• The left can never stand for an honest poll because that would uncover how unpopular their views are.
• They don’t recognize islamofascism even in the face of Nick Berg, Iran, 9-11, the stoning of gays, multiple attacks across the world, train bombings in Spain and India, the London subway bombings, the killing of soccer fans for wearing shorts, and most importantly, the islamofascists themselves who have stated their goals quite clearly!
• MSNBC can’t bring themselves to say islamofascism

These people want to run the country. I think the poll speaks for itself.

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Yesterday, I heard on NPR that at least one of the soldiers charged with murdering an Iraqi man will not be subject to the death penalty. It was an interesting story in that it talked about the evidence, or lack thereof. At the heart of the case is a body so badly decomposed nothing can be discovered from it. It yields no clues. On one side of the body are Marines who confessed to a murder, but now claim that their confessions resulted from coercion. On the other side are claims from some Iraqis that these Marines seized this Iraqi man, killed him brutally, and tried to cover it up. The Iraqis refuse to give their statements in court. From a legal point of view, with no physical evidence, no witnesses, and confessions that may be the result of coercion, it’s not much of a case. As always, what’s more interesting is how the media handles it.

First off, I suspect without actually knowing that, during WWII (the last of the wars people believed in), the Press wouldn’t have reported this stuff at all. Wherever you have vast numbers of young men with guns and high stress levels, you’re going to have some crime, and some of those crimes are going to be awful ones. The Press would have understood the normalcy of this fact, and would either have ignored the stories altogether, or would have made the considered decision that reporting these inevitable outbursts of ugliness would be bad for morale. News focused on (a) battles and (b) bravery.

The paradigm is so different nowadays. Reporters are obsessed with death: how many of our soldiers have been killed and how many “innocents” our soldiers have killed. When our troops successfully route bad guys, it gets covered and forgotten. When a minute fraction of our troops are accused of having killed civilians the news keeps being regurgitated like a bad meal. (And keep it mind that it’s not always easy to tell whether the dead are, in fact, civilians. Witness the Hezbollah fighters who, upon death, were magically transformed into Lebanese civilians for body count purposes.

In any event, you don’t need to listen to the NPR story I listened to; you just need to read this little NPR summary:

U.S. military prosecutors in California have begun to lay out their case against seven Marines and a Navy corpsman. The servicemen are accused of committing murder while serving in Iraq.

The incident in town of Hamdaniya was one of several that has called attention to the conduct of American troops in Iraq. (Bolded emphasis mine.)

Don’t you love that insouciant language? It’s an “incident” that “called attention” to ” conduct.” That’s all. But cast your mind back to the press’s savage coverage of Abu Ghraib and Haditha. It’s as if, to the American Press, every member of our military would have cheerfully participated in the My Lai massacre. That’s it, guys and gals: you’re all mass civilian murderers, every one of you. There are no bad guys (aside from the American military, of course), there are only innocent civilians.

Related:
Wizbang: Nevermind - Article about the press and the forgotten correction in media reports.

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Now this simply pisses me off.

Death of a President: a fictional documentary looking back at the October 2007 assassination of George Bush.

Digital channel More4 will court controversy once again this autumn with a fictional piece, shot as a documentary, about the assassination of the US president, George Bush.

Death of a President seems certain to cause a furore on the other side of the Atlantic when it is premiered at the Toronto Film Festival next month.

In the UK the 90-minute film will be broadcast first on Channel 4’s digital service in October.

When Mr Bush arrives in the city he is confronted by a massive demonstration against the Iraq war and is gunned down by a sniper as he leaves the venue. The hunt for Mr Bush’s killer focuses on a Syrian-born man, Jamal Abu Zikri.

The filmmaker snuck it in under the covers by shortening the name to the phonetically self describing acronym “D.O.A.P.,” Gabriel Range (U.K.) as shown on the film festival lineup. Yup, the sniveling piece of crap is too scared to list the full name so he does the typical liberal thing and hides behind an acronym.

The following quote lays out the premise for the film:

Death of a President also looks at the differing viewpoints of the pro- and anti-Iraq war lobbies and the impact of Mr Bush’s war on terror on the US.

“I’m sure there will be people who are upset by it. But when you watch it, you realise what a sophisticated piece of work it is,” said Peter Dale, the head of More4.

“It’s not sensational or simplistic, it’s thought provoking.”

Death of a President has been made by Borough Films, the independent producer responsible for two similar BBC2 fictional pieces in the style of retrospective documentaries.

It has been produced by Gabriel Range, Simon Finch and Ed Guiney.

The only thing I find thought provoking here is how anyone manages to give these people any credibility. Friends of a feather explains it all.

Curt over at Flopping Aces went through the newspaper comments and caught the following little gem that is typical of so many lefties.

The hopes of six billion people across the world were raised by the first three words of your headline - then dashed by the next four.
- Kate, Southampton, Hampshire

Her comment refers to the title of the newspaper article, “President Bush ‘assassinated’ in new TV docudrama”

I wonder if Kate would feel the same if our country refused to lift a finger to help her sorry ass when the islamofascists come to force her to wear a burqua or stone her for showing leg under her skirt?

This is simply more proof that being an asshole and being a liberal isn’t necessarily mutually exclusive. Especially if you are one in film. I am so irritated right now that I can’t even bring myself to comment anymore.

Update: Jeff Goldstein has a much more tempered response in “Assassination chic returns”. I love the part about Bush Derangement Syndrome:

this is a piece designed to exploit BDS, and as such, it strikes me as cynicism trying to pass itself off as “art.” Let the feverish lefties lap up such unpasteurized agitprop. Hopefully it’ll give ‘em a fine case of the Bangs.

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It was interesting to see the New York Times run an editorial that called for a change in the way patients insurers pay for health care without explicitly advocating universal health care. Especially considering that the solution in the editorial would ultimately result in higher health care costs for everyone.

But then I decided to do a bit of research on the author and everything made sense.

The editorial, Care by the Hour, was written by medical doctor-novelist Robin Cook who just released a novel called “Crisis“. It was through a concept in that book and its connection to the phrase “concierge-style practices” that the pieces of the New York Times puzzle came together.

What are “concierge-style practices”? I thought you’d never ask.

You need go no further than the first sentence of the Amazon.com synopsis of Cook’s book to find out.

Bestseller Cook’s latest medical thriller focuses on a timely topic—the new and controversial “concierge” medicine that caters to the affluent willing and able to pay for special attention.

Ah, now it is all clear; this is all about limiting choice! We are talking about a certain rich-man poor-man tug-of-war that is central to liberal politics. Thus we now have some insight into the New York Times love tap.

But Cook’s editorial is more misleading than simply hiding behind simple catch phrases. It paints a picture of a failing primary health care system where doctors are swamped with too many patients, pay is low and the patient suffers from a glut of alternatives. The implication is that rich people are hoarding all the good doctors to themselves and the old style general practitioner is leaving the poor in the dust for more fruitful endeavors.

Cook’s solution on the onset would not relieve the problem unless you did one thing that is unmentioned in the article; limit choice. Canada did such a thing when they made private insurance illegal as an alternative to government provided insurance (provincial plans). The socialists in the Canadian government basically cut out private insurers who pay better than the government provided health care plans. You can still pay out of pocket but there is a catch. You can only pay out of pocket if you go to a doctor that has opted out of the provincial public plans. The net result was a thinning out of doctors who provided such care since they were not allowed to service the majority of Canadian patients who were insured by the government. No patients, no pay.

This is a neat little trick that allows the socialists to say that they didn’t make paying for medicine out of your own pocket illegal. Well yes, that is true. Instead they attacked the source in an effort to eliminate “concierge-style” doctor shopping. They simply made it impossible to find such doctors.

Cook’s deception by omission doesn’t end there. Go back to the first paragraph as a reminder of what sets the stage. [emphasis mine]

A PRIMARY care doctor I’ve known since we were residents 30 years ago recently described for me his typical day as foisted on him by current economic realities. He rises at 4 a.m. to make a dent in his avalanche of paperwork before dashing off to make rounds at the hospital and arrive at his office before 8. For the next 10 to 11 hours, he races through a series of patients so long, he cannot talk to any one of them as much as he believes he should, and he constantly worries he’ll miss something. Worst of all, he admitted, he no longer enjoys practicing medicine.

This is pretty bleak picture. One that I experienced first hand before I understood what was going on.
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Dan over at MoveOnandShutUp.org has taken umbrage with one of my recent posts. Dan is a firm supporter of Judy Baar Topinka and considers her a pragmatic politician. Dan also deals in wide and sweeping generalizations about people like the examples below:

The Christian Right or the South of I-80 Right is equally as disenfranchised as the Progressive Left. They don’t know much….believe me…they don’t know much at all. What they do know is that they ‘don’t want none-a-dem gays or illeeeguls coming up here to Illinois’. They always try to forcefeed some bigot politician like Jimmy ‘The Milkman’ Oberweis to the state which works anywhere south of Joliet, but in the jewel of the state (Chicago) that crap stays on the shelf. The majority of their thinkers and public faces are hate mongers. I don’t caste that idea around often because so many others toss the word ‘racist’ on me simply because I vote Republican. When I do, I mean it. Don’t like it? Prove me wrong.

How about proving you’re right Dan? Hate mongers? That’s pretty strong talk with no back up. Opposing gay marriage does not mean one hates gays and taking issue with gate crashers does not make one a racist or suggest that they are anti-immigrant. You have painted with a pretty broad brush here.

So Judy Baar Topinka, the official Dan L pick for governor got hammered by the South of I-80 Right in the primaries for not hating queer folks enough, which was apparently the only campaign platform the mouth breathing right could possibly cook up in hopes of sniffing out enough votes to put the weak Milkman on top.

Again, a pretty presumptious supposition that assumes people are single issue voters and implies bigotry where there is no real proof. People like Teri O’Brien and Tom Roeser supported Jim Oberweis and have come out against Topinka so according to Dan they are mouth breathers? While Dan thinks 37% to 31% is a veritable ass-kicking, it hardly shows a groundswell of support behind his favorite Republican Gubernatorial candidate. If you add in the 18% of the vote received by Bill Brady then the mouth breathers received 49% to 37% of the total Illinois Republican primary vote, a swing that could be problematic for Topinka in the general election. She will have to draw her support from disenchanted Blagojevich voters and that is a tough route to go.

We can argue the gambling to fund schools issue unitil the cows come home and Dan makes solid points that are nonetheless wrong but at least they merit discussion. Where he really stretches it is ruling out any part of the state south of I-80 as worthy of attention and calling the Chicago and Cook County combine Democrats pragmatic.

The real issue here is not one of conservative hate-mongering as Dan perceives but a single glaring fact that he is missing. That being that Judy Baar Topinka is no different than Rod Blagojevich in substantive thought and policy and her victory would assure that things never change.

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Gitmo. Abu Ghraib.

Just the names invoke a reflex of outrage that the United States would, according to the Muslims and their apologists, stoop so low as to do as much as harm one hair on the head of one poor jihadist who was captured trying to kill us.

Rage by Muslims who feel their religion offended. Rage by human rights fans who feel these inmates’ rights trampled.

Rage by every Thomas, Richard, and Harold who has a column, a mic, or a blog.

But yet these same Muslims, you may as well say the same people as the inmates; just change the person in the scene, much like a position player in sports is just a position player, no matter who you put in the uniform at that spot, they all are expected to perform the same function. And the journalists; reporters for a “conservative” (Bush friendly) news outlet. Complete role reversal of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. The inmates are the guards; the guards, inmates. The captives are mistreated, but all I hear is a scream of silence. No op-ed column of rage against this offense. No Amnesty International protest against the Palestinians. I don’t know the background of these two, but for the sake of conversation, assume they’re Christian - no sign-waving Christians flocking out into city squares to protest this high offense against their religion - the stripping away of their faith at gunpoint by savages.

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When the price of gasoline went up the Democrats were standing at street corner gas stations blaming the President and his “failed” policies for the high price of gasoline. My God, they exclaimed, people will have to shut off their cell phones and sell their big screen TVs to afford gas. These Democrats, who talked about conserving while leaving their gas guzzlers running so they could stay cool on the 2 minute ride back to work, really went to town on George Bush. He is in bed with big oil, his war caused high prices, he and the VP are oil men who don’t care about the average guy, blah, blah.

The donks are really good about blaming Bush for all the troubles in the world but somehow they seem to lose the ability to give him credit when things go well. If it is bad, according to them, it happened on his watch but if it is good some other force beyond the control of the President is responsible. I guess when a group is so frustrated at losing that they have to manufacture stories, they eventually resort to almost anything to keep from being fair with regard to the opposition.

With that in mind, do not expect the Democrats and all the other war for oil moonbats to acknowledge that President Bush lowered the average price of gas to about $2.89 a gallon (I paid $2.78 this week). Since the liberals would have you believe that President Bush has the power to control gas prices when they rise then logic extends to the reverse of that equation. The price of gas has dropped about 15 cents in the last two weeks and it is all because of the President. It has to be. If he is responsible when the price goes up then certainly it is on him when the price goes down.

Related Story:
WBAL

UPDATE:This from USA Today:

Gasoline prices are falling fast and could keep dropping for months.

“The only place they have to go is down,” says Fred Rozell, gasoline analyst at the Oil Price Information Service (OPIS). “We’ll be closer to $2 than $3 come Thanksgiving.”

Blame Bush, he is the one responsible. Oh, and gas prices falling before the election? Isn’t the high cost of gas one thing the donks said would cause revolt at the ballot box? If the prices do go down a lot, Bush will be accused of manipulating the price for politics. He can’t win so just enjoy the imploding donks as long as you can.

Webloggin Member Big Dog Appears on Wide Awakes Radio every Friday from 9-11pm Eastern Standard Time.

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Darrin Bell, author of Candorville provides us with yet another reason to shake our heads in disbelief. Equating the events that took place at the very founding of our nation with the current geopolitical situation is not only inaccurate, it is immature and simplisitc at its very root.

The strip pictured above is the latest in his series of “alternate universe” juxtapositions that miss the target by a mile. Trying to compare an America that was ruled by an imperial government, without adequate representation and where the people were taxed on the fruits of their labor to finance other entities of the empire (that provided no benefit to themselves) with a radical religion that is hell bent on jihad and the killing of all who won’t convert is not only preposterous, it is telling.

It shows us a mindset wherein the liberals haven’t moved beyond an adolescence. Can they really see the war on terror and consider it akin to the American fight for independence? Can they possibly look at George W. Bush and see Hitler? The answer is yes and it is why they must not be given control of the Government.

The liberal (read Democrat) failure to understand our current struggle against Islamofascism could be fatal. There is no reasoning with those who wish to separate us from our heads in the name of Allah. We cannot negotiate with people who strap bombs on their women and children and send them in to a crowded market to blow up civilians in honor of the glory of Mohammed. They have no government, though they are sponsored by some, they have a twisted morality that allows the oppression of women and the maiming and murder of innocents and they are fanatical in their mission to destroy us. The only true way to vanquish the threat to America and the west is annihilate them and to remove the Governments which harbor them. That is the reason we are in Afghanistan and Iraq and it is why we must back Israel in their struggle against Hamas and the Hezbollah. This is not a law enforcement issue and cannot be dealt with after something happens. We must be proactive in eradicating the menace.

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Isn’t it great having a national newspaper that consistently works at souring the mood of the nation? As if undermining national security isn’t enough the papers writers go out of their way to find the rain cloud in every upbeat assessment of the economy, the war on terror or life in general.

Case in point is today’s New York Times report titled “Census Reports Slight Increase in ’05 Incomes”. The report is actually from a Census Bureau news release called “Income Climbs, Poverty Stabilizes, Uninsured Rate Increases”.

The report indicates that incomes outpaced inflation for the first time since 1999, the poverty level in the United States has remained the same and that the number of people with health insurance coverage increased by 1.4 million to 247.3 million between 2004 and 2005, and the number without such coverage rose by 1.3 million to 46.6 million (from 15.6 percent in 2004 to 15.9 percent in 2005).

Never one to take a positive approach, the New York Times staffers highlight the negatives and compare them to the glory days of the Clinton administration before the 1999 dot.com bubble burst.

The article is accompanied by the “still behind 1999” graphic on the right and begins with the following downbeat assessment of the study from the second sentence.

The rise, however, had little to do with bigger paychecks — in fact, both men and women earned less in 2005 than 2004. Rather, census officials said, more family members were taking jobs to make ends meet, and some people made more money from investments and other sources beyond wages.

The glimmer of improvement came after years in which the economy slogged through the bursting of the 1990’s stock market boom, a brief economic downturn, the aftershocks from the 2001 terrorist attacks, a series of corporate scandals and growing evidence of a deepening divide between rich and poor.

Curiously, Rick Lyman and the Times editors ignore the fact that the economy suffered enormous negative repercussions as a direct result of the irrational exuberance that lead to the recession after the dot.com bubble burst. They may call it a brief economic downturn but it had lasting effects. A ton of Americans lost their jobs, the job market was in a glut, wages plummeted and the recession that began in 1999 while Clinton was in office was passed on to the Bush administration.
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It hasn’t taken long for just a whiff of potential military confrontation with Iran for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s American lawyer wannabes to come out from under their rocks. Now that Saddam Hussein’s trial (at least his first) is over and his execution inevitable, his amateur pundit defense team is free to begin their rigorous defense of Ahmadinejad.

Already we are hearing and reading about how every interpretation, accusation and perception of Ahmadinejad as a hostile, apocalyptic enemy of the United States bent on acquiring nuclear weapons for aggressive purposes is wrong, over-the-top, premature and ill-conceived. He hasn’t called for the destruction of Israel, he has rights through some sort of fairness doctrine to possess nukes, he says his nuclear interests are for peaceful purposes so they must be, Iran has over 20,000 segregated Jews living there so how could he be anti-Semitic etc. etc. I’ve even heard people on the radio talk about how they learned from Mike Wallace’s shameful propaganda sit-down that Ahmadinejad was really a thoughtful, reasonable man.

Mike Wallace - the epitome of the ‘useless idiot’.

Anyone care to take a bet that most of the people who are detailing their defense plan for Ahmadinejad are the same people who couldn’t find one thing wrong about Saddam Hussein? Unless of course, they started their defense with “sure, Saddam’s a bad man, but…”. I’m still waiting with anticipation for the first person to legitimize their defense of Ahmadinejad by claiming how bad they said Saddam was…or validate their opposition to any kind of war with Iran by stating that they supported the Iraq invasion.

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