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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: D. Long who wrote (38472)4/8/2004 6:57:27 AM
From: LindyBill  Respond to of 793916
 
Isn't it fun to watch the French lose?
Here is the latest from Ann





Deliver Us From Democrats
April 7, 2004 Ann Coulter

Sean Hannity's latest book, "Deliver Us From Evil," is even better than his last. It hit No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list the week it came out and stayed there for at least five weeks. This explains the huge cover story on Hannity in the latest New York Times magazine, as well as that big NPR profile on him – wait, neither of those happened. Indeed, not a single major mainstream newspaper has reviewed it.

That's unless you include the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which briefly mentioned Hannity's book in order to say that it compared unfavorably with another book and to call Hannity an "angry conservative" (redundant in liberal-speak).

The reviewer, Harry Levins, Post-Dispatch "Senior Writer," complained that Hannity's book "reads like a long, long transcript of his television and radio shows." Inasmuch as Hannity's TV show is the second-most-watched show on cable news and his radio show is the No. 2 radio show in America, only a liberal would consider that an insult. Levins is hoping for a book that would read more like a transcript of Al Franken's listener-free show on Airhead America.

Hannity's book is chock-full of something that frequently makes liberals uncomfortable – history. He begins by reciting historic evils such as the Holocaust and the 9-11 terrorist attacks and contrasts those with everyday stories of evil culled from the newspapers: A suicidal woman is poised to jump from a bridge in Seattle and, after a few hours, someone from the crowd below yells out, "Jump, b----, jump!" The woman jumps.

Hannity says we face moral choices between good and evil every day. If we make excuses for evil – Hitler was a "madman," a pedophile priest was "weak" or, as philandering actor Ethan Hawke recently advised us, Bill Clinton "suffered from" infidelity – soon we cease being able to distinguish good from evil at all. (I would add to the excuses for evil, "It's just about sex.") With each choice we make, large and small, we take a step closer to the devil or a step closer to God.

The leaders of the modern Democratic Party, Hannity says, have made excuses for evil for so long that they cannot recognize evil anymore. The closest thing to it in their vocabulary would be "someone who wears fur." And of course, they recognize evil in the person of "George W. Bush," whom they see as the very essence of evil. In fact, Bush may be the only force of evil in the world liberals haven't wanted to appease.

"Deliver Us From Evil" runs through an enormous amount of history that's fun to hear again. Hannity quotes Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich, a few years before German warplanes began ravaging Britain, promising the British "peace in our time" and advising them, "Go home and get a nice quiet sleep." (This was just after Chamberlain's "national malaise" speech, if memory serves.)

Chamberlain's proud boast that he had removed "those suspicions and those animosities that have so long poisoned the air" sounds eerily like today's Democrats so eager for the rest of the world to love us. Sen. John Kerry has condemned Bush's "belligerent and myopic unilateralism," and called for a "progressive internationalism." To reprise an old joke from the Cold War, if Democrats aren't on al-Qaida's payroll, they're being gypped.

And speaking of old jokes from the Cold War, Hannity turns to Jimmy Carter next. Carter could see evil in the world; he just mistook it for a rapidly moving bunny rabbit. Reacting to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, Carter exclaimed on ABC News: "This action of the Soviets made a more dramatic change in my own opinion of what the Soviets' ultimate goals are than anything they've done in the previous time I've been in office."

Hannity then runs through a few other incidents that might have caught the president's attention – Stalin's and Mao's mass murders, genocide in Cambodia, the Berlin Wall, Soviet tanks crushing uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the personal testimony of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – before concluding: "The evil of communism was no secret." Well, yes, but Carter was distracted by that rabbit.

In his defense, there has not been a documented rabbit attack on a U.S. citizen since Carter left office.

And of course there was Carter's masterful handling of the crisis in Iran, leading America to betray our ally, Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi. Even as Carter was back-stabbing this loyal U.S. ally, the Shah was assuring those around him, "The United States has always been our friend, and it won't let me down now." Sadly, there was no one to warn him: "Run for your life! A Democrat is in the White House!"

In addition to covering Carter's accomplishments in Iran, which taught Islamicist animals that Westerners can be made to grovel before terrorism, Hannity reviews what Democrats in Congress have done about brewing trouble in the Middle East over the last 20 years: i.e., nothing.

After Saddam Hussein's forces invaded Kuwait in 1990, torturing men and raping women, Rep. Nancy Pelosi took to the floor of the House to say, "I hope the point will be made that we take very seriously the environmental consequences of our actions." Rep. Dick Gephardt said: "History shows that even brutal dictators have been toppled and defeated by sanctions." And so it was again after 9-11. Sixteen months after the attack, John Kerry gave a speech saying, "Mr. President, do not rush to war."

According to the latest polls there's at least a fair chance that an amoral appeaser and foreign suck-up like John Kerry could be our next president. Now everyone go home and get a nice quiet sleep.



To: D. Long who wrote (38472)4/8/2004 12:11:13 PM
From: LindyBill  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 793916
 
I think Rutan, with Allen's money, is our best hope for future space flight. This 10Mil prize is perfect. From the "Scaled Composites" Web site.

Our goal is to demonstrate that non-government manned space flight operations are not only feasible, but can be done at very low costs. Safety, of course is paramount, but minimum cost is critical. We look to the future, hopefully within ten years, when ordinary people, for the cost of a luxury cruise, can experience a rocket flight into the black sky above the earth's atmosphere, enjoy a few minutes of weightless excitement, then feel the thunderous deceleration of the aerodynamic drag on entry.

Our plan involves flight in a 3-place spaceship, initially attached to a turbojet launch aircraft while climbing for an hour to 50,000 feet, above 85% of the atmosphere. The spaceship then drops into gliding flight and fires its rocket motor while climbing steeply for more than a minute, reaching a speed of 2,500 mph. The ship coasts up to 100 km (62 miles) altitude, then falls back into the atmosphere. The coast and fall are under weightless conditions for more than three minutes. During weightless flight, the spaceship converts to a high-drag configuration to allow a safe, stable atmospheric entry. After the entry deceleration which takes more than a minute, the ship converts back to a conventional glider, allowing a leisurely 17 minute glide from 80,000 feet altitude down to a runway where a landing is made at lightplane speeds.

Our concept design work began in 1996 and some preliminary development began in 1999. Our full development program began in secrecy in April 2001. This extensive experimental research effort is a complete manned space program. It consists of all new hardware including a launch aircraft (the White Knight), a three-place spaceship (the SpaceShipOne), a hybrid rocket propulsion system, a mobile propulsion test facility, a flight simulator, an inertial-nav flight director, a mobile mission control center, all spacecraft systems, a pilot training program and a complete flight test program. All our hardware components are full-scale, full space-capable performance, not mockups or interim vehicles.

The hardware, technical descriptions and a flight demonstration of the White Knight were revealed to the press on April 18th. We are now back into hiding, to complete the rocket development and flight tests. We will provide progress reports monthly via test reports posted in the "test updates" section of this site. We will again invite the press when we fly the first flight above 100-km altitude. This milestone will be significant in that it will represent the making of the first non-government Astronaut, and it will be flown on a system that shows the level of affordability needed for future space tourism.

I strongly feel that, if we are successful, our program will mark the beginning of a renaissance for manned space flight. This might even be similar to that wonderful time period between 1908 and 1912 when the world went from a total of ten airplane pilots to hundreds of airplane types and thousands of pilots in 39 countries. We need affordable space travel to inspire our youth, to let them know that they can experience their dreams, can set significant goals and be in a position to lead all of us to future progress in exploration, discovery and fun.

Burt Rutan