Blogiversary-3 years

Today is my 3 year blogiversary, so here is my yearly photo.
That’s Merlin with me.

I can’t believe I’ve actually stayed with this for 3 years.
I definitely need to send appreciative thank yous to Scott at the Environmental Republican for continuing to read/link. Glenn at Instapundit for the ‘wooohoo!’ times he’s linked. And this year’s new must read JK at Three Sources who is a true lover of calf blogging.

Thanks also to you commenters. I don’t know if you realize it or not, but we bloggers live for the comments. Well, that or another John Kerry doofus moment.

I was burning out in January this year and decided to slow down. After the self imposed pressure was off – blogging came back with a vengeance!

So forward on to another year. An election year at that! It’s still a very cool ‘verse out here and I’m happy to be a part of it!

Time for some celebratory cake.

Saudi Culture

The other day I wrote about misunderstood Saudi culture, so today I just had to link to this story out of the Arab News on “How to keep your maid”.

Apparently there is a problem with foreign maids running away from their sponsored families and finding better employment.

Abdul Qader Hussein, a teacher, has seen several of his housemaids run away.

“I used all means, such as locking the maid in her room at night and securing windows with iron grills, but they were of no avail. I can’t do without a maid because my wife is also a teacher,” he said.

Yes, the man tried everything!! Locking her up!

Finally:

“Finally, a friend of mine told me the secret of keeping a maid for long term. Give her a pay hike and treat her well. From SR700 I raised her salary to SR1,200, the highest amount she is likely to earn if she runs away. It worked. She is with us now for over two years. None of the maids in the past stayed for more than a couple of months,” he said, adding that he also gives his maid occasional gifts in the form of cash or clothes.

You just have to laugh because the insanity of these situations is bizarro. Obviously some households know how to keep maids. Why on earth is it ok to lock them up?

Yeah – well my baby sister could whip your a**

I admit it. I read headlines.

I open up 12 newspapers in tabs every day, then review the headlines searching for anything interesting to read.

I click on the link to the story, then move to the next paper and click on a link to a story etc, etc all the way down the line. Then I start at the beginning and read the story. If it’s not blogable I move back to the paper if there was a 2nd story worth my time, or I close the link down.

So imagine my surprise when I got down the line to this promising story with the following headline:

France ‘could take Farc rebels’

only to find out that France has offered to take in the FARC rebels after they are freed in a potential kidnapping deal that includes swapping out FARC rebels in Columbian jails for kidnapped victims.

It’s like it’s almost April Fools day or something!

Sheesh – I thought someone had called out those rebels with a newly minted classic taunt!

Hillary’s Bosnia Lie

This column by Frank Rich is a pretty straight forward look at Hillary going a bit too far with her Bosnian fairy tale.

Up until his conclusion.

Mr. Rich is concluding that Hillary along with the right think that racism is going to make Obama unelectable. He is suggesting that these folks believe racism has remained static since 1968. This, of course, isn’t true and Mr. Rich points that out.

The noisy race wars have failed to stop Mr. Obama just as immigration hysteria didn’t defeat Senator McCain, the one candidate in his party who refused to pander to the Lou Dobbs brigades.

The myth that’s been busted is one that Mr. Obama talked about in his speech — the perennial given that American racial relations are doomed to stew eternally in the Jim Crow poisons that forged generations like Mr. Wright’s. Yet if you sampled much political commentary of the past two weeks, you’d think it’s still 1968, or at least 1988. The default assumptions are that the number of racists in America remains fixed, no matter what the generational turnover, and that the Wright videos will terrorize white folks just as the Willie Horton ads did when the G.O.P. took out Michael Dukakis.

But politically and culturally we’re not in the 1980s — or pre-YouTube 2004 — anymore. An unending war abroad is upstaging the old domestic racial ghosts. A new bottom-up media culture is challenging any candidate’s control of a message.

What he fails to mention is the racism that is inherent in Mr. Wright and by Obama’s neglect to even notice it, Mr. Obama.
The white world is accused of racism by default. We (I’m white) are used to thinking something, then re-thinking it to confirm that it’s not a “racist” reason that has guided our thoughts, but instead a real reason. ie the darker skinned teenage down the street is a punk-because he is, while my immediate white skinned neighbor is not, because he isn’t. {ps – this is just an example. I’m an unfriendly sort and don’t even know the teenagers around here!}

Mr. Obama continued to go listen to Mr. Wright and signed him up on the campaign because it never crossed his mind that Mr. Wright is a racist.

Think back to other generations of white folk who never believed they were racist because they thought some standard white person’s thought of the times. Yet they were. And yes, Mr. Wright is. And it’s a big problem that Mr. Obama sat there without saying anything.
Even as a favorite Uncle. If one of my Uncle’s spewed the venom towards blacks that Mr. Wright has spewed towards whites, I would most definitely let him know what I thought of it. Every time. Until he was so tired of the same old argument with me that he would shut up on the subject around me. {ps – none of my Uncles ever have and never would}

That’s how you handle it.

Frank Rich is loony if he thinks Obama’s only problem is with white racists. He has a problem with all colors of non racists too!
There are plenty of us and we vote!

Friday Calf Blogging

Here’s a cutie pie. She was just born on Thursday night at 6:30pm. How do I know? Because that was when I called the owners in a panic…….”Flower is delivering now!!! Where are you??”…..because I was the only human around and the last couple cows have had trouble!

Mrs Flower however managed just fine even though this was her first calf. I wish I could have gotten the picture of her surprised face after this calf was born and she jumped up and turned around. “What the h***?” Then she got right into cleaning this little one up.

Last new calf of the year….enjoy!

Those Saudis

They are so misunderstood.

I mean really – it’s a cultural thing to rape and basically imprison nonMuslim women who work for you. How can we not understand that?

Today in the Arab Times there is a story about the Shura council recommending that the US review the case in Colorado where a Saudi man, Al-Turki, was convicted of sexual assault on his Indonesian maid along theft of her wages:

Al-Turki, a former Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado, maintains that he did not sexually assault the woman, whose identity has not been disclosed due to the nature of the alleged crime, and has accused US officials of persecuting him for “traditional Muslim behavior.”

Daniel Pipes has kept up with the story that started in 2005. He notes that after jail time was set the US sent the Colorado Attorney General John Suthers to Saudi Arabia to “explain”. Excuse me? How did I miss that? Apparently he needed to explain that yes, the maid’s word counted.

“Under [Saudi] law, to prove a rape case, you need four eyewitnesses,” Suthers said during an interview at his office Monday[, Nov. 20]. “And they considered it inconceivable that an Indonesian maid was considered a competent witness in our courts.” Another significant difference is how civil and criminal courts mesh under Saudi law, making it possible for a victim or a victim’s family to come to a financial settlement when it involves a criminal matter. “They didn’t understand how that wasn’t possible here,” Suthers said.…

For all of the coverage the case has received, Suthers said Saudi officials seemed surprised at two aspects that had not been reported there. They did not know that two other women had testified at the trial as having experienced similar treatment. They also did not realize that Al-Turki did not testify during the trial. While that choice is a defendant’s right in an American court, it carries a different impact in Saudi Arabia, Suthers said. “In the Saudi system, the failure to testify is very significant. When somebody makes an accusation, you’re expected to respond,” he said.

Comment (by Daniel Pipes): It is hardly a new development that the State Department and the Colorado state government should give the Saudis such special consideration, but it remains outrageous. As Debbie Schlussel puts it, “Can you imagine the U.S. sending a state Attorney General to explain to Hitler why we allow Blacks and Jews to serve as witnesses in our courts and why enslaving and raping them for five years is a crime?”

It’s not clear why the Shura Council is back in on this now.

Things that make you go “Arghhhh!”

Let’s start with folks who are working to get information out concerning the Palestinian strategy of using fake movies of “atrocities” committed by Israelis. Otherwise known as Pallywood productions. When given to media folks, here’s the response:

I made a documentary film called Pallywood, and tried to shop it around. I figured [the network] ABC would be interested in it as rivals of CBS whom we criticized [for bad coverage]. I was wrong. The guy at ABC said, “I don’t know how much appetite there is for something like this.”

Then I ran it by somebody else, who said, “We couldn’t broadcast this unless it were balanced.”

When I asked him what he meant by that, he said, “We’d have to have something showing how the Israelis also fake it.”

Uh – and if they don’t????
……………………

Now how about a disease that’s been named and around since the 19th century called “Blackwater”. However, to the media, this old disease got it’s names from “he U.S. mercenary company operating in Iraq.”
Instapundit has links.
………………….

And back to Bloodthirsty Liberal for word on the UN.

The United Nations Human Rights Council on Wednesday appointed American Jewish law professor Richard A. Falk – who has compared Israel to the Nazis – as special investigator on Israeli actions in the territories for a six-year term.

Can’t they even pretend to act fairly???
Here is the rest of the citing used:

Falk, in his academic writing, has already stated that a Palestinian holocaust was in the making.

Yitzhak Levanon, ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, spoke against Falk’s appointment in an address to the council on Wednesday.

“In a recent article, [Falk] stated that he did not think it to be “an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with the criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity,” Levanon said.

“He has taken part in a UN fact-finding mission which determined that suicide bombings were a valid method of ’struggle,’” Levanon said.

“He has disturbingly charged Israel with ‘genocidal tendencies,’ and accused it of trying to achieve security through ’state terrorism,’” Levanon said.

“Someone who has publicly and repeatedly stated such views cannot possibly be considered independent, impartial or objective,” Levanon said.

Charity

The other day the news came out about Obama’s tax returns and the amounts he had given to charity between 2000-2004 (heavily increased in 2007)

Today George Will notes that charity giving and religion seem to walk hand in hand. With conservatives being more religious, their charity giving is also greater. 3.5% of income vs 1.9% of income. I wouldn’t find this interesting except for the reasons given.

It seems liberals believe that the govt should be the helper for those in need and so they don’t bother. What this means of course is they believe the government should coerce charitable giving. In the meantime, those in need rely on those who actually give vs fantasy give.

While conservatives tend to regard giving as a personal rather than governmental responsibility, some liberals consider private charity a retrograde phenomenon — a poor palliative for an inadequate welfare state and a distraction from achieving adequacy by force, by increasing taxes. Ralph Nader, running for president in 2000, said: “A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.” Brooks, however, warns: “If support for a policy that does not exist . . . substitutes for private charity, the needy are left worse off than before. It is one of the bitterest ironies of liberal politics today that political opinions are apparently taking the place of help for others.”

In 2000, brows were furrowed in perplexity because Vice President Al Gore’s charitable contributions, as a percentage of his income, were below the national average: He gave 0.2 percent of his family income, one-seventh of the average for donating households. But Gore “gave at the office.” By using public office to give other people’s money to government programs, he was being charitable, as liberals increasingly, and conveniently, understand that word.

Good news

The State dept has determined that some of it’s idiotic rules of immigration need some review.
In the meantime they have stopped giving out straight denials of green cards.

The catalyst for yesterday’s decision, Scharfen and other officials said, was a Washington Post article last weekend about a translator for U.S. forces in Iraq. Saman Kareem Ahmad, 38, arrived in the United States under a special visa program for those assisting the nation’s war effort, after his life was threatened in Iraq. He had received commendations from the secretary of the Navy and then-Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the top U.S. commander in Iraq, as well as strong support from Marine and Army officers with whom he had worked. Ahmad was later granted political asylum, but his application for permanent residence was denied last month on grounds he had once served with Kurdish military forces that fought against Hussein.

You know we go on and on about the main stream media, but they do serve a good purpose many, many times. This is one of those times. Great job WAPO!

Trucker’s “Strike”

No, not a union strike but an independent operators sick day sort of strike.
We need them!
What is it they want?

“What I would personally like to see is our federal and state governments, until our economy recovers, suspend federal and state fuel taxes,” the 49-year-old said. “The second thing I’d like to see is an oversight committee for truck insurance, which is part of what’s taking us down.

“The average owner/operator is paying $600 to $800 a month for truck insurance. It’s based on personal credit, which means the monthly cost is going up for a lot of truckers because their credit is going down.

I’m with Scott on this one. The government is bailing out businesses in fear of a recession. Truck drivers keep things moving in this country and without them we really could talk of a recession. They’re not asking for much.

Signed
the daughter of a truck driving man who easily predicted the last recession because he is at the very heart of American business concerns.