Haiti Earthquake Aftermath Montage from Khalid Mohtaseb on Vimeo.

Jammie Wearing Fool:

Not content to show Obama with a halo, the New York Times is now creating images of him with a cross in the background.

Good grief. I guess the separation of church and state no longer applies when it comes to The Sainted One.

Well, it is Sunday.

What’s the most e-mailed article right now on Al-Jazeera’s English language web site?

It’s an opinion piece about Iraq’s elections, headlined “Iraq: An example for the region.”

Someone out there is very interested in that proposition — actually, a great many someones are so interested that this article (which conveys praise of Bush, and a faith in democracy, that are both much at odds with a lot of Al-Jazeera’s usual coverage) has been the #1 most emailed article on Al-Jazeera for five straight days.

True, this is Al-Jazeera’s English language web site, not the Arabic — nonetheless, folks inclined to log on to Al-Jazeera (this will give you an idea of its huge TV footprint) are clearly taking a good look at this piece, and sending it around.

The author is Richard Grenell, who served during the George W. Bush presidency as spokesman for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations –working under four ambassadors, including John Bolton. Grenell makes no apologies for Bush’s 2003 ouster of Saddam Hussein. Rather, he celebrates it as ushering in an era of “free and fair elections” in Iraq, and says that while Iraq’s young democracy is “messy, incomplete and imperfect,” it is also “currently the envy of the Arab world.” He argues that Iraqis are lucky they had the backing of Bush, and that if Obama had become president earlier, with his wish to cut and run, it would have been a disaster for Iraq.

Today, writes Grenell, Iraq’s March 7 election reminds us that “Bush’s vision for democracy in the Middle East is beginning to unfold with the consecutive democratic elections in Iraq and Afghanistan.” He closes with the questions: “Which Arab country will be next? Who will start the long, expensive and bloody process of bringing freedom and democracy to their people?”

If Al-Jazeera’s web site readers find that commentary and those questions interesting enough to make them the most emailed on the site for five straight days, sounds like one more sign that Bush was right about that craving for democracy –yes, even in Al Jazeera’s main stomping grounds of the Middle East.

For context, see below:

She’s got her work cut out for her.

An overflow crowd turned out Wednesday at 9:45 AM to attend the “Kill the Bill” rally today in St. Charles, MO. On Wednesday night, 2,300 patriots turned out to protest Barack Obama, the Carnahans, and liberal Senator Claire McCaskill at their fundraiser in downtown St. Louis.

Today, local liberals held their second Coffee Party to push for more socialism. 30 people turned out… Including the people who were already at the restaurant and the tea party infiltrators.

“On the very day Toyota was making a high-profile defense of its cars, one of them was speeding out of control,” said CBS News–and a vast number of other media outlets worldwide. The driver of a 2008 Toyota Prius, James Sikes, called 911 to say his accelerator was stuck, he was zooming faster than 90 miles per hour and absolutely couldn’t slow down.

It got far more dramatic, though. The California Highway Patrol responded and “To get the runaway car to stop, they actually had to put their patrol car in front of the Prius and step on the brakes.” During over 20 harrowing minutes, according to NBC’s report, Sikes “did everything he could to try to slow down that Prius.” Others said, “Radio traffic indicated the driver was unable to turn off the engine or shift the car into neutral.”

In fact, almost none of this was true. Virtually every aspect of Sikes’s story as told to reporters makes no sense. His claim that he’d tried to yank up the accelerator could be falsified, with his help, in half a minute. And now we even have an explanation for why he’d pull such a stunt, beyond the all-American desire to have 15 minutes of fame (recall the “Balloon Boy Hoax” from October) and the aching need to be perceived as a victim.

The lack of skepticism from the beginning was stunning. I combed through haystacks of articles without producing such needles as the words “alleges” or “claims.” When Sikes said he brought his car to a Toyota dealer two weeks earlier, recall notice in hand, and they just turned him away, the media bought that, too. In Sikes We Trust. Then the pundits deluged us with a tsunami of an anti-Toyota sanctimony .

Where to begin?

Well, the patrol car didn’t slow down the Prius; the bumpers never touched. The officers used a loudspeaker to tell Sikes to use the brakes and emergency brake together. He did; the car slowed to about 55 mph. Sikes turned off the engine and coasted to a halt. He stopped the car on his own.

There wasn’t anything wrong with the transmission or the Prius engine button either.

Over a 23-minute period the 911 dispatcher repeatedly pleaded with Sikes to shift into neutral. He simply refused and then essentially stopped talking to her except to say that he thought he could smell his brakes burning.

“I thought about” shifting into neutral, Sikes said at a televised press conference the day after the incident. But “I had never played with this kind of a transmission, especially when you’re driving and I was actually afraid to do that.” Sikes, who has driven the car for two years, also said “I figured if I knocked it over [the gear knob] the car might flip.”

All across the country there were demonstrations on March 4 by students (and some faculty) against cuts in higher education funding, but inevitably attention focused on California, where the modern genre originated in 1964. I joined the University of California faculty in 1966 and so have watched a good many of them, but have never seen one less impressive that this year’s. In 1964 there was focus and clarity. This one was brain-dead. The former idealism and sense of purpose had degenerated into a self-serving demand for more money at a time when both state and university are broke, and one in eight California workers is unemployed. The elite intellectuals of the university community might have been expected to offer us insight into how this problem arose, and realistic measures for dealing with it. But all that was on offer was this: get more money and give it to us. Californians witnessing this must have wondered whether the money they were already providing was well spent where there was so little evidence of productive thought.

The content vacuum with filled with the standby language of past demonstrations, and so there was much talk of “the struggle,” and of “oppression,” and—of course—of racism. “We are all students of color now” said Berkeley’s Professor Ananya Roy, and a student proclaimed that this crisis represented “structural racism.” (Why not global warming too?) Berkeley’s Chancellor Birgeneau called the demonstrations “the best of our tradition of effective civil action.” Neither Chancellors nor demonstrations are what they used to be. The nostalgia for the good old days surfaced again in efforts to shut the campus down by blocking the entrance of UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that the old “shut it down” cry was somewhat misplaced when keeping it fully open was what the present demonstration was about, but then this was not an occasion when anyone seemed to have any idea of what they were trying to achieve.

One group at UCLA stumbled into the truth, though it was a truth they did not understand. At Bruin Plaza a crowd chanted “Who’s got the power? We’ve got the power.” In its context this was just another slogan of a mindless day, but the reality is that those people do indeed have the power, and routinely use it in a way that makes them the author of their own troubles. Let me explain.

Unemployment in California is still rising. It just went up from 12.3 to 12.5%, nearly three points above an already bad national average. This horrendous figure is the source of California’s budget problem. The huge loss of tax revenue is compounded by greatly increased unemployment outlays. If we look at the few other states that have unemployment figures well above the national average, there are obvious explanations. Michigan is at 14.6 because employment in its major industry (automobiles) has collapsed. Nevada, at 13.0, is dependent on discretionary cash at a time when there isn’t any. But California is too big to be dominated by one industry, and its plight can only be explained by the state’s having grossly mismanaged its affairs.

In 2007 Raymond Keating formulated a Small Business Survival Index, which is a composite of various aspects of the climate for business in a particular state: business and personal taxes, regulations, mandates, and so on. In that index California ranked 49 among the 50 states. Rhode Island ranked just above California, and its unemployment rate is 12.7. At the bottom of the Index is D.C., and its unemployment rate is 12.1.

In the component parts of the SBSI index, California ranks worst of 51 (including D.C.) on top personal tax rates, worst on top capital gains tax rates, 42 on corporate taxes, 43 on health insurance mandates, 46 on electric utility costs, 47 on workman’s compensation costs, rock bottom again on state gas taxes, 45 on state and local government five year spending trends, and 47 on state and local per capita government spending. It also ranks 49 among the states on the US Economic freedom index, and it has the highest state sales tax rate too: where some states have an income tax but no sales tax, and others have a sales tax but no income tax, California has both, AND it has the highest rates in both.

In short, California is a disaster for business. The state has piled up so many taxes, regulations and mandates that businesses are leaving the state. Just this week I learned that a spare part order for my Lennox fireplace is delayed because Lennox is moving this division of its business to Tennessee. Wealthy individuals are also fleeing the state to avoid the country’s highest tax bracket. When both wealth and wealth creation leave the state, tax revenues leave with them.

Last Easter, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, a 31-year-old mom with a $30,000-a-year job as a medical assistant, announced to her family that she had converted to Islam. A few months later, she began posting to Facebook forums whose headings included “STOP caLLing MUSLIMS TERRORISTS!”

On Sept. 11, she suddenly left Leadville, Colo., a small town in the Rocky Mountains, for Denver, then for New York, to meet and marry a Muslim man she connected with online, her family says. Ms. Paulin-Ramirez, who is 5-foot-11 and blonde, phoned her mother and stepfather in Leadville, providing them with an address in Waterford, Ireland, they say.

Now, she is in the custody of the Irish police, along with six other individuals, arrested as part of an investigation into a conspiracy to commit murder, according to officials familiar with the case. The nature of the authorities’ suspicions about Ms. Paulin-Ramirez couldn’t be determined on Friday.

Ms. Paulin-Ramirez’s interest in Islam “came out of left field,” said her mother, Christine Holcomb, in an interview at her home Friday, wearing a blue sweatsuit with a silver cross around her neck.

“I’m angry with her right now,” Ms. Holcomb said. “I’d like to just choke her. But I’m worried about her, too. I love my daughter.”

Sometimes, when we’re out in public and I begin talking about the personalities and policies of various liberals, my wife Yvonne will start looking around to see if anyone is staring or throwing daggers in my direction.  Such is life for a conservative in Los Angeles.

I’m sure that in other parts of the country — Texas in particular, if I may judge by my email — people on the right can speak more freely.  What that suggests to me is that one-size-fits-all political litmus tests don’t work.  So, as much as I embrace the spirit of the Tea Party movement, I don’t want to see it hindering Republicans from regaining control of the House and Senate in 2010.  I don’t want to see the Democrats winning elections next November because right-wing voters have been divided and thus conquered.

            I very much wish to see the most conservative candidates winning primary elections, but if it happens that moderates win in June, I’d hate to see any conservatives sitting home in November, nursing their piques while liberals high-five each other.

            To a certain extent, we must make allowances for geographical differences.  A Republican in the northeast is not going to be a clone of one in the southwest.  Not if he or she expects to be elected.  I am delighted that Scott Brown deprived Obama of his magical 60^th vote, but not in my wildest dreams do I expect Sen. Brown to be as staunch a conservative as, say, John Cornyn.

            The main order of business next November should be electing people dedicated to undoing all the dangerous mischief that Obama, Pelosi and Reid, have done.  In fact, at the 2012 national convention, along with honoring Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, I think the RNC should pay a special tribute to Barack Obama for having done so much to unite the party.  The fact is, after the 2008 elections, it appeared that the GOP was ready to go the way of the Whigs, the Bull Moosers and the dodo bird.

            On a personal note, I was recently gratified to find one of my quotes being widely disseminated on the Internet.  It was the line about the last time that most people have encountered the likes of three women such as California’s Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi, was when the curtain went up on “Macbeth.”

            Those words did appear in an article I wrote a while back, “The New and Improved Iron Curtain,” but, just to set the record straight, the article did not appear in the L.A. Times.  Although I did write a humor column for the Times for 11 years, the relationship ended in 1978.  These days, the rag exists mainly as a propaganda machine for Obama.  They won’t even run my letters to the editor, let alone my articles.

            Also, on a personal note, I wish to announce that I plan to run for president or at least vice-president in 2012.  I always knew that one of the best ways for a conservative to get a book published and sold was to host a radio or TV show, but not only don’t I have my own show, but nobody who does have one, aside from San Francisco’s Lee Rodgers, seems the least bit inclined to have me on as a guest.

            The other way to get on the Best Seller lists is to be a former president.  But I didn’t want to be a politician and have to spend my life hanging around people like Charles Rangel, Robert Byrd, Arlen Specter, Barbara Lee or Henry Waxman.  Would you?  It’s one thing, after all, to sacrifice your life for America, as members of our military do every day, but quite another to sacrifice your sanity.

            But when I saw how many copies of “Going Rogue” Sarah Palin sold compared to my shorter, wittier and far more readable “Liberals: America’s Termites (or It’s a Shame That Liberals, Unlike Hamsters, Never Eat Their Young)” I realized I wouldn’t actually have to win an election; I’d merely have to run.

            Getting back to my second favorite subject — namely, liberals — doesn’t it seem odd that left-wing big wigs keep getting their political ambitions caught in their zippers?  A short list includes Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson and John Edwards.  Even Jimmy Carter embarrassed himself in a Playboy interview by announcing that at times he had had lust in his heart.  Of course only a sanctimonious phony like Carter would suggest that lust lurks in the heart when everyone knows that it’s love that resides in that particular organ.  Lust, as even a dunce like Carter should know, hangs out in the lower regions.

            Unlike his left-wing cronies, apparently Al Gore only lusts after money, adoration and cheeseburgers.

            Finally, we should all acknowledge that people can manage to live exemplary lives without being religiously observant.  But when one looks back over the past several months, a period that includes the elections in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts, along with the passing of Ted Kennedy and John Murtha, it’s pretty tough for any honest conservative to deny that God not only exists, but that He’s been working overtime.