The Sundries Shack

For my money, there hasn’t been a soul singer to rival the power and passion of Bill Withers. Interestingly, he didn’t come from stereotypical soul stock. He was born in a West Virginia coal-mining town and lived much of his early life in Beckley, WV. He served for nine years in the US Navy. When he returned, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career making music. Over the course of 14 years, he released ten albums, which was definitely behind the pace of more prolific musicians of his time. He won three Grammys in his career, the latest in 1987 when his “Lean on Me” was covered by Club Nouveau.

Though he only recorded ten albums - not prolific by the standards set by other R&B singers back in the day - his music was solid and different. To that point, R&B had been almost completely full of high-energy music from people like James Brown and the Isley Brothers or lead singers backed with tight harmonies like Smokey Robinson and the Miracles or Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. Withers’ music was quieter and more contemplative by comparison. It was personal music made more for your living room than an arena.

Bill is still alive and kicking by the way. Maybe some time he’ll pick up his guitar and give us one more album. It’d be nice to hear.

Below the jump you’ll find live performances of my two favorite Withers’ songs: “Use Me Up” and “Ain’t No Sunshine (When She’s Gone)”.

Keep on reading…

I ran across a couple interesting articles (here and here) that seems to be saying that the “Religious Right” is heading over to vote for the Democrats this November.

I don’t buy it. A few young Christians who have been duped by emotional pleas or who actually believe in something called “social justice” does not a movement make. It’s really easy to get a bunch of 20-somethings to rally for your cause with a couple sob stories about a sick person who couldn’t get health care. Young people live on emotion. Drama is an integral part of their lives. They long to be part of something big and if you can promise them that big thing, they’ll be right with you.

Right up to the point where they grow up and learn that public policy built on knee-jerk emotional decisions have only led to disaster. Witness the 60 years of our “War on Poverty’ that has wrecked our inner cities and blasted holes in the very foundation of our society by replacing the family and the local neighborhood with corrupt and incompetent bureaucracies.

Notice how many times the phrase “social justice” comes up in these articles. Whenever you see it, you can bet that the person using it has abandoned rational thought and is floating happily toward a fantasy land where their gentle fascism can cure all ills and they can make the world act they way they want it to act. That’s not a Christian belief. It’s not a grown-up belief. It’s the same belief that little kids use when they push their action figures around the sandbox. It’s the belief that they must be in charge because they know what’s best. Just like the action figures won’t move themselves around he sandbox, you and I won’t make good decisions unless we’re educated sufficiently and then gently prodded toward the right way of thinking. But, like the action figures’ owners, those who subscribe to “social justice” will throw a tantrum the very second someone comes in and moves one of their toys in a way they don’t like. That’s not a Christian value either. That’s the selfishness of youth and the arrogance of progressivism. Neither of those things are particularly unusual, especially in the average American 20-something.

I don’t see the so-called Religious Right flocking to the Democratic Party, not based on a few quotes from a few young people who are charmed by the hip buzzwords being shoveled at them by their universities and the MSM. I do see young people doing what young people have done pretty much since the dawn of time. That’s not news.

Four years ago, during another Presidential election, Newsweek’s Evan Thomas said this:

There’s one other base here: the media. Let’s talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win. And I think they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards — I’m talking about the establishment media, not Fox, but — they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and all, there’s going to be this glow about them that some, is going to be worth, collectively, the two of them, that’s going to be worth maybe 15 points.

From the looks of this Newsweek article, written by Thomas and Richard Wolffe, they’ve found someone else who they can portray as “young and dynamic and optimistic” and put “this glow about them”. Karl from Protein Wisdom and Robert McCain have ought to say about Newsweek’s shameless tongue bath and excerpt heavily from the response from McCain’s campaign. Both posts are worth reading today, if for no other reason than to remind you that the MSM has very plainly chosen a side in this election. This weekend, they’ve made it abundantly clear that there’s nothing they won’t print to make their vision of the United States come to pass, no matter whether their stories are true and no matter the cost to their dignity and integrity.

It looks like the MSM has shifted into high gear on the behalf of Barack Obama, the Candidate of Inevitability and they’re going to make damned sure that the Inevitable happens. This weekend, the New York Times, which has already published two thinly-sources smear jobs against John McCain in the past couple of months, has sallied forth to lie for the Obamessiah.

Here’s the article’s claim:

Susan E. Rice, a former State Department and National Security Council official who is a foreign policy adviser to the Democratic candidate, said that “for political purposes, Senator Obama’s opponents on the right have distorted and reframed” his views. Mr. McCain and his surrogates have repeatedly stated that Mr. Obama would be willing to meet “unconditionally” with Mr. Ahmadinejad. But Dr. Rice said that this was not the case for Iran or any other so-called “rogue” state. Mr. Obama believes “that engagement at the presidential level, at the appropriate time and with the appropriate preparation, can be used to leverage the change we need,” Dr. Rice said. “But nobody said he would initiate contacts at the presidential level; that requires due preparation and advance work.”

Yes, well. That might look good in an article but it is not only wrong, but so ludicrously wrong as to constitute a baldfaced lie. Allah nails Obama’s minion and the Times:

Not only did the Prince of Peace say at the YouTube debate last July that he’d meet personally and without precondition with Iran, he reaffirmed that position in November in an interview with — ta da — the New York Times, a fact, incredibly, that’s omitted from today’s article

Not only can you find it there but, as Allah notes, you can find it in a debate where it was criticized by both Hillary Clinton and John Edwards and on the Obamessiah’s own website. I do need to provide that quote, because it is unequivocal:

Obama is the only major candidate who supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions.

Dr. Rice either doesn’t know what he guy’s position is, or she knows and she lied about it. The New York Times has no such alibi of ignorance.

I’m sure this is being blogged by everybody and their brother, but I can’t let it pass me by. It made me laugh way too hard. Back in mid-April, The Obamessiah decided that the United States should go back to where it was, say, about 1958 or so.

And I’ve now campaigned in 47 states, actively. And I think South Dakota is the last state that I have not had a campaign event in.

Now that doesn’t mean that I expect that I will win all 50 — or 48 states and Alaska and Hawaii — all 50 states.

It was a slip, sure. Anyone who’s a bit tired and has been hitting the campaign trail hard could forget that Alaska and Hawaii are actually states. I mean, they sit way out there, forlorn and alone, on our maps, in their own little blocked-out areas like the kids who missed school the day they took the class photo and had to have an older picture clipped into the year book.

Yesterday’s gaffe from Obama is better than that one in so many ways. Take a peek below the jump to see what he’s done to our fine national geography now.

Keep on reading…

The tyrants in Burma are at it again.

Myanmar’s military regime distributed international aid Saturday but plastered the boxes with the names of top generals in an apparent effort to turn the relief effort for last week’s devastating cyclone into a propaganda exercise.
…
State-run television continuously ran images of top generals — including the junta leader, Senior Gen. Than Shwe — handing out boxes of aid to survivors at elaborate ceremonies.

One box bore the name of Lt. Gen. Myint Swe, a rising star in the government hierarchy, in bold letters that overshadowed a smaller label reading: “Aid from the Kingdom of Thailand.”

“We have already seen regional commanders putting their names on the side of aid shipments from Asia, saying this was a gift from them and then distributing it in their region,” said Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, which campaigns for human rights and democracy in the country.

“It is not going to areas where it is most in need,” he said in London.

It’s not going there because the junta needed the extra goodies to help them win an obviously rigged election that will help cement their power. They’re using the aid packages that caring people have generously supplied not to save lives but to buy votes.

And so they murder more of their people. Again.

At what point will we decide to do something concrete about this? Obviously, Burma needs help, and a lot of it. That help won’t come so long as the greedy tyrants there maintain control. We need to find some way to get them to relent. Then, when their people are fed and in safety, we need to drop the hammer on the junta, once and for all. The situation over which they lord ought to be intolerable to any decent civilized human being. It has to end.

It shouldn’t be difficult. These guys are not exactly the most competent dictators the world has ever seen. Knocking down their regime should be child’s play, once we find the people ready and willing to help build a new free and fair government.

But we do have to start with the basic resolution that the junta must go. No more freaking tyrants, okay?

This is sad, but likely very true.

It’s a fair bet that no high-powered American law firm will lend a caring hand to the relatives of the seven Iraqis murdered last month by a suicide bomber named Abdullah Salih Al Ajmi and two accomplices. That’s too bad, seeing as how Ajmi was himself a beneficiary of some of that high-powered legal help.

Perhaps we citizens can, using the power of the pocketbook and public opinion, extract a price from the law firms for their actions.

You just knew it was bound to happen sometime.

WASHINGTON, DC—An 8,976-foot foul ball off the bat of Washington third baseman Ryan Zimmerman crashed through the U.S. Capitol Building rotunda Sunday afternoon, prompting both the Nationals and the opposing Pittsburgh Pirates to gasp, turn to each other in shock, and immediately run full speed out of Nationals Park.

“As soon as I hit it, I knew it was headed straight toward Capitol Hill—I just kept saying to myself, ‘Not the dome, not the dome, not the dome,’” Zimmerman said. Both teams, all four umpires, and the 32,457 fans in attendance winced in horror, however, as the ball kept carrying, made a loud smashing noise, and left a gaping hole in the rotunda’s neoclassical architecture.
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According to eyewitnesses in the Capitol, the ball smashed into the dome at about 3:35 p.m., tore through the Apotheosis Of Washington—a 150-year-old, 4,664-square-foot fresco painted on the inside of the rotunda—and broke the arm off of a National Statuary Hall sculpture of William Jennings Bryan. The ball then bounced into the Senate Chamber, where it interrupted a vote on a $542.5 billion defense authorization bill, and landed directly in the mashed potatoes of early-dining Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), covering him with gravy and prompting him to exclaim, “Zimmer-maaaaannnn!”

Although McConnell had no evidence at the time that Zimmerman was responsible for the damages, he was the chief suspect, as he is the only National able to hit the ball farther than 300 feet. Furthermore, Zimmerman dented McConnell’s 1998 Buick LeSabre last week when he overthrew first base by 15,000 feet on a routine grounder.

Read the whole thing. Zimmerman is right. Plonking one off the Capitol Dome shuold be an automatic home run. Same for the Lincoln Memorial.

The Anacostia is an automatic out, and you have to go get the ball.

I am finding the AP’s reporting on the war currently raging in Lebanon very interesting.

Here are two stories today. There’s one word used in common that I believe is highly deceptive and blunts the importance of what is actually happening.

(Story One)
Lebanese security officials say three days of sectarian fighting in Beirut have left 11 people dead and more than 20 wounded.

(Story Two)
Shiite Hezbollah gunmen seized nearly all of the Lebanese capital’s Muslim sector from Sunni foes loyal to the U.S.-backed government on Friday in the country’s worst sectarian clashes since the 15-year civil war.

Did you see the word?
Keep on reading…

Things are going from bad to worse to even worse in Burma. The highlights today.

1) The junta running Burma seized the first plane-load of supplies the UN sent there, which caused the UN to suspend any more shipments of aid supplies.
2) The junta then said it wanted more supplies, but no people and it didn’t want any of those supplies flown in by the organization best poised to do it in a hurry and in massive quantities - the US military.
3) The junta than made nose spew out of people’s noses when it said it was perfectly capable of deliving all the relief supplies itself.
4) The junta has still not approved a single visa for any relief worker and Burmese embassies are closed today, which means that no visas will be approved until, at earliest, Monday.
5) People are still dying in areas the junta says they can get to, but can’t because they’re a backwards tyranny with the technological know-how of a macaque monkey and a desire to help their people that’s only barely detectable with an electron microscope.

In other news, the AP is breaking the story today that the junta is just the teensiest bit xenophobic and doesn’t like letting outsiders in to Burma. Yes, well, so is every other tyranny. In fact, you can bet that the more a government beats down its people the less it allows outsiders in to see it. If you want to see where tyrants rule right now, look at countries where it’s really difficult for anyone to get in. That’ll be your first clue that the people running the place are contemptible.

By the way, you’ve probably noticed that I don’t call Burma “Myanmar”. That’s because it’s not the country’s rightful name. The military junta renamed Burma when it took over and I’ve no inclination to accede to the whims of dictators. If the people of Burma ever decide, freely and fairly, to call their country Myanmar, then so will I. Until that happens, it’s Burma.

I heartily endorse Dan Collins’ Hep Cat Lingo Revival Initiative. I think the world would groove a lot harder if you cats would find a way to sling the lingo more, dig?

Well, golly, after months of treating Barack Obama like the opponent he’d rather not fight, John McCain has sent forth his campaign to scorch him mightily. The background in a nutshell is this: Hamas said they wanted Obama to win and compared him to John Kennedy. Obama’s campaign manager responded by rejoicing that he and Hamas had such perspicacity in common while mumbling something about how bad it is that Hamas is a bunch of butchers. McCain used the Hamas quote to say, oddly enough, that Hamas wanted the Obamessiah to become Presdent.

Today, Obama took to the airwaves to cry on Wolf Blitzer’s shoulder about how unfair John McCain was being. The word “smear” was used as was the phrase “name calling”. Kleenex were, no doubt consumed backstage by the boxful.

Johnny Mac, apparently isn’t having any of that, though. He fired back through his campaign manager in a way that ought to make it really tough for Obama to sit down for a couple days. Also, he should check his manhood to see if it’s still intact. It’s quite possible that when he read the statement (well, had it read to him. People of his elite status don’t do their own reading) his genitalia retreated to somewhere around his gall bladder. The statement is below the fold.

Keep on reading…

Al Gore used to be merely a shameless shill, enriching himself while demanding that the rest of the world impoverish itself and wrapping himself in a cloak of Messianic imperviousness. Now he’s gone straight to full-on ghoul.

Former Vice President Al Gore in an interview on NPR’s May 6 “Fresh Air” broadcast did just that. He was interviewed by “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross about the release of his book, “The Assault on Reason,” in paperback.

“And as we’re talking today, Terry, the death count in Myanmar from the cyclone that hit there yesterday has been rising from 15,000 to way on up there to much higher numbers now being speculated,” Gore said. “And last year a catastrophic storm from last fall hit Bangladesh. The year before, the strongest cyclone in more than 50 years hit China – and we’re seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming.”

We have yet to begin picking up the floating corpses of some 100,000 dead Burmese and Al Gore is using their deaths to plug his book. I hope he felt at least a twinge of guilt for sacrificing the last vestiges of his human decency on the altar of his self-aggrandizement.

At any rate, he’s talking out of his nether regions. Thanks to Iain Murray, we see that this cyclone, though deadly, is likely only to clock in as the tenth deadliest of all time. Note that of the current Top 20, only one has happened in my lifetime which is when, according to Gore, global warming has been roaring like a runaway locomotive. If Gore were right, that simply would not be true. The likelihood that in 38 years, there would only be two storms in the Top 20 is not at all plausible. Gore’s increasing storm severity notion combined with rapidly-increasing populations in areas likely to be struck by such storms practically guarantee that we would have seen at least one since 1991.

Keep on reading…

If this were a world where Republicans had the courage of their convictions, Pat Toomey would be a Senator from Pennsylvania. Instead, he is the President of the Club for Growth, a conservative think-tank and advocacy group. The Club for Growth has run afoul of the Republican political machine in recent years for not holding the welfare of the party above the promotion of sound conservative principles. Today, Toomey has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal defending “RINO_hunting”, a sport that more conservatives should take up. Here’s his conclusion.

A Republican majority is only as useful as the policies that majority produces. When those policies look a lot like Democratic ones, the base rightly questions why it should keep Republicans in power. As the party gears up for elections in the fall, it ought to look closely at the losses suffered under a political strategy devoid of principle. Otherwise, it can look forward to a bad case of déjà vu.

It is, I think, impossible to look at the last four elections and come to any other conclusion. The Republican party would be wise to listen to Mr. Toomey. Michelle Malkin has a great suggestion:

Club for Growth should print that paragraph on greeting cards so we can send an avalanche of them to the GOP elite in Washington.

Instead, the Republican party has beclowned itself yet again. Read below the jump to see what new decisive action Republican leadership will take to remedy its problems.
Keep on reading…

This is utterly ridiculous:

With the death toll expected to top 100,000, Burma’s military government blocked international aid workers from delivering relief supplies yesterday as bodies floated in stagnant waters left behind by Saturday’s cyclone.

The United Nations said its workers based outside Burma had not received a single visa and that Burmese officials were demanding that official escorts accompany all foreigners.

Foreign workers based inside Burma for U.N. agencies such as the World Food Program also had not received permission to travel through the hard-hit Irrawaddy Delta, where entire villages remained submerged.

The military junta - the tyrannical fools who not even a year ago were imprisoning and executing hundreds of Burmese for opposing them - now are too afraid of losing a scrap of their own power to let the world help hundreds of thousands of their people. How selfish. How craven.

The world should not allow such a regime to continue. They are beneath contempt and do not deserve to be treated with dignity nor respect. As soon as it can be done, the tyrants in Burma should be dethroned and we all should rejoice when it happens.

I am sick and tired of tyrants and I am more sick and tired of how the so-called civlized world continues to abide such abominations as if they had a rightful place among decent humanity. I am tired of seeing the hollow eyes of survivors of years of brutality by those who are supposed to be leading them. I am sick of sending hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of aid to the same places over and over and over again because those places are led by selfish, evil men who delight in the misery they inflict.

I am tired of it and angry at it and it needs to change. Is there anyone else with me on this? Can we at the very least get together and agree that “No More Tyrants” should be the first and most important part of our foreign policy?

Victor David Hanson muses and I have a bit of an answer.

With the world’s largest reserves of coal, after creating the nuclear power industry ex nihilo, and with billions of oil still under our soil and waters, it makes no sense to produce less energy while blaming and taxing those who produce what we have, rather than drilling, digging, and saving, as we find ways to transition to the alternate energies.

It makes no sense if the goal is affordable, reliable fuel.

On the other hand, that’s not necessarily the goal of the folks protesting new drilling or using our own coal more or building more nuclear power plants. If you take their goals into account, it makes perfect sense.

For instance, if what you really want is a return to a smaller society that uses less energy, then the strategy is sound. If shrinking the population of the United States by a few million is something you’d love to see happen, then making energy as expensive as possible is a good thing. If you’re more interested in extracting billions of dollars in new taxes to line your pockets and the pockets of you favored few, then what do you care about how those new taxes affect oil companies of the regular men and women who own them? If you are more incensed by a glimpse of a distant cooling tower or a windmill fan from your backyard porch than you are the enrichment of Islamist butchers, South American dictators, and a Russian tyrant in the making, then the status quo is just fine and dandy.

All of those folks are key constituents of the leftist coalition: overpopulation fetishists, greedy and imperial politicians, rich snobs in Massachusetts, environmental alarmists, and well-connected businesses looking to make a quick and quiet fortune all the while wringing their hands over the newest looming ecological disaster (and in Al Gore’s case, they’re all rolled up into one!).

It makes you wonder whose side they’re on.

Chalk up a small victory for civilized society.

After his wife of more than two decades filed for divorce in Montgomery County Circuit Court, Irfan Aleem responded in writing in 2003, and not just in court.

Aleem went to the Pakistani Embassy in the District, where he executed a written document that asserted he was divorcing Farah Aleem. He performed “talaq,” exercising a provision of Islamic religious and Pakistani secular law that allows husbands to divorce their wives by declaring “I divorce thee” three times. In Muslim countries, men have used talaq to leave their wives for centuries.

But they can’t use it in Maryland, the state’s highest court decided this week.

The state Court of Appeals issued a unanimous 21-page opinion Tuesday declaring that talaq is contrary to Maryland’s constitutional provisions providing equal rights to men and women.

“Talaq lacks any significant ‘due process’ for the wife, its use, moreover, directly deprives the wife of the ‘due process’ she is entitled to when she initiates divorce litigation in this state. The lack and deprivation of due process is itself contrary to this state’s public policy,” the court wrote.

It’s a small pushback against the Muslim law that has been slowly insinuating itself into the United States. Let’s hope it’s followed by many, many more. We are a nation of laws, fairly derived and equally applied, though we sometimes forget that in our rush to be kind. But our laws exist so that all of us can live the best lives we can make for ourselves. That applies to the Muslims who live among us, too.

Today’s feature op-ed in the USA Today is asking why it took the MSM a whole year to report on Barack Obama’s racist anti-American friend Jeremiah Wright.

It’s really cute to see a journalist look at his fellow journalists with that gleam of idealism in his eye and ask, with a straight face, how they could be so biased. Alas, that idealistic gleam has blinded this earnest man from seeing the answer that was staring him in the face the whole column. The MSM is absolutely entranced with Barack Obama. They’re so far up his tailpipe that they could tell you what he ate for lunch yesterday without having been there. From Chris Matthews’ thrilled leg to the candid revelation that the MSM is in full-on dreamy crush mode with the Obamessiah, it’s obvious why Jeremiah Wright’s hate wasn’t an issue for a year.

In the end, the author, who is a journalism professor and a frequent contributor to the newspaper, kind of shrugs and shakes his head at the mysterious and unavoidable shame of it all. Too bad he couldn’t screw up enough courage to really answer his own question.

UPDATE: Karl, writing at protein wisdom, has a really good observation about the piece.

Campbell does say that “Obama has been ill-served by a press corps that seemingly was mesmerized by the large, frenzied crowds who turn out to see the Democratic rock star,” which partially embodies the problem — Campbell is looking at the failure of the press as not serving Obama well.

I’m not sure whether the fawning coverage of Obama is a case of dog wagging tail or tail wagging dog. Having read Karl’s take on the column, I’m not at all sure what Campbell was trying to say. Is he miffed that the media didn’t cover the story earlier, thus giving Obama more time to cover his tuckas before it blew up in his face? Is he saying that the MSM softpedaled the story which lulled Obama into beliving it was no big deal? I’m not really sure.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that a general media bias is the culprit here. I think, and I tried to make it clear in my original post, that I believe that the MSM’s incredible infatuation with the Obamessiah is why they ignored the Wright story for so long. The Obama-love has gotten to the point where it’s almost embarassing to watch, kind of like Homer Simpson fawning over Arthur Fortune right in front of Mr. Burns.

One of the great things about blogging, at least on the right, is that you can heartily agree with someone one hour and bitterly disagree with them the next. As much as I often agree with Ed Morrissey, I’m afraid on the subject of John McCain and his storied anger, we’re going to bitterly disagree.

McCain decided to harness his supposed anger and focus it on the subject of wasteful government spending. Now, that’s a good thing for we voters to be angry about and it’s high time we put and end to the officially-sanctioned bribery that our federal budget has become. Ed is pretty keen on that. Here’s how he makes the case:

However, this gives him an opportunity to display passion about the ills of federal government, especially the stupidity and corruption that angers most voters. To whom will voters relate more — someone who offers academic criticism of business as usual, or someone with an actual track record of reform who sounds pissed off about the need for more of it? [Emphasis mine]

Excuse me? John McCain has an “actual track record of reform” on government spending? Someone’s going to have to show that alleged track record to me because I’ve never seen it and, goodness knows, I’ve looked.

Keep on reading…