I'm over here now: www.alarmingnews.com
# Posted 4:40 AM by Karol

Dean Esmay, to whom a massive thank you is in order, is setting up this site on Movable Type. There may be some interruptions until that is done. If you link to me at http://kashei.blogspot.com, please change it to www.alarmingnews.com as that will be the only url for this website from now on.
# Posted 12:27 PM by Karol

Who is spending the most dough to try and win the presidency in 2004? The answers will surprise you (especially #2 on the list).

Via Right Moment.
# Posted 11:38 AM by Karol

From BOTW:

Who Says the Dems Have No Ideas?
"Bush Should Fire Someone Over Iraq, Democrats Say"--headline, Reuters, Sept. 16
# Posted 12:37 AM by Karol

That's pretty weird:

Howard Dean's grandmother asked George Bush's grandmother to be a bridesmaid at her wedding.
# Posted 2:50 PM by Karol

Pledge: If these people see one dime, I'm moving.
# Posted 3:05 AM by Karol

Speaking of multiculturalism....I was taught that there are many different cultures doing many different things and yet I still had to say ewwww when I saw this.
# Posted 2:41 AM by Karol

Andrew Stuttaford links to this article in The Corner and calls it 'GREAT MOMENTS IN MULTICULTURALISM.' Pretty funny.
# Posted 2:02 AM by Karol

Jonah Goldberg is tired of hearing about how America has 'blown it':

But the most obvious evidence that the Arab world is a mess is that they are the ones who have been blowing it since 9/11.

If I try my best to convince a homeless drug addict to get help, I may fail in my efforts to help the guy. But, if I do fail, who really blew it? If I come to him with a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee, in the hopes of persuading him to get cleaned up so I can give him a job and a fresh start and he freaks out that I'm a Cannibalistic Human Corpse Disemboweler (a relative of CHUDs no doubt) and runs away, sure you could say that I blew it. But surely he blew it worse. I can go home to my nice house. He goes home to squalor. And, should the man ever come to his senses, he'd agree that his mistake was far greater than mine.


# Posted 1:59 AM by Karol

Mark Steyn on Europe's culture of passivity and the idea that it is always the government that should 'do something'. I would love to quote from it, but the whole thing is incredible and a must-read.
# Posted 2:47 PM by Karol

I read this interesting article yesterday in Campaigns and Elections magazine (sorry no link), by one of my professors, about the trend toward the Republican party by people under 30. Turns out, there are more Republicans, aged 18-29 and 30-40 then there are aged 50-60. In fact, the 50-60 age group is the one place where there are many less Republicans than Democrats.

The article doesn't mention 9/11, which, in my humble-just started my Masters program-opinion, is the main reason for the shift rightward among people in their 20's. Our parents (well, not my parents, but parents born in the US) had a break from history. There were no attacks on American soil in their lifetime. They don't understand the unfortunate necessity of war, especially when provoked to it. I think young people were shook by 9/11 in a way that older people weren't. The Republican party has a reputation of being realistic, and lately hawkish, and this appeals to many younger people who watched symbolic retaliations throughout the 90's and felt that they weren't enough.

With all of this in mind, I direct you to the New York Young Republican Club blog which lists right-leaning events in NYC. I've been more motivated lately to meet new people and attend more events and it's been really great. I've met a bunch of interesting people through the meetup site that aren't part of the established rightwing 'scene' in NY. This is the only way to grow the party and affect changes that we'd like to see. Get out there, meet people, vent about all the liberals in your life, be organized for 2004, have a good time. This doesn't only apply to New Yorkers. There are Bush2004 and Republican party meetups going on around the country. If there is not one going on near you, email me and I'll tell you some ways to start one and attract people to it.

This matters to me. I've thought many times about how I would've felt post-9/11 if Gore had been president. 'Terrified' springs to mind. Don't like the thought of a Dean presidency? Get involved.
# Posted 12:56 PM by Karol

Che Guevara t-shirts are amusing at the best of times, but this just kills me.
# Posted 12:39 PM by Karol

Headline: Arab Rulers Leery of New Iraq Role Model

Comment: Psha! Ya think?
# Posted 5:09 PM by Karol

Urg. I hate these dumbass celebrities that look solemnly into the camera for any cause that even remotely criticizes the president. This is just the latest. I bet that should they be criticized for their one-dimensional opinions, the irony of the fact that they're doing ads for freedom of speech will entirely escape them.
# Posted 12:19 PM by Karol

Wow.

Via The Corner
# Posted 5:39 PM by Karol

I have a friend who is a headhunter in NY and she is looking for someone to fill an interesting Executive Assistant position at a well-known foreign affairs organization. The pay is very good and if I wasn't in school full-time, I would be tempted to interview for it. The person they are looking for should know a good amount about what is going on in the world and be very professional and polished. If you're interested, drop me an email and I'll put you in touch with my friend.
# Posted 4:10 PM by Karol

Quote of the Day (and yes I do realize I'm a few days late):

Don't let anyone tell you that we're back to normal or anywhere near it.
As I got up out of the subway at Rector street, it looked normal: time to go to work. But come up on the streets, the the Trade Center is encircled with people who have stopped normal to remember when normal died.
-Jeff Jarvis
# Posted 4:05 PM by Karol

The photographer of the famous 'falling' picture of one of the WTC jumpers writes about his photo in the LA Times. It's a beautifully written piece (worth registering for access to read it):

Watching the tragedy unfold messed me up for a long time. I still take note of every plane I hear flying overhead, wondering if it's friend or foe. But neither the photograph nor the initial reaction to it disturbs me. People ask how I could coldbloodedly photograph someone dying. I never saw it that way. I made a photographic record of someone living the last moments of his life. And every time I look at it, I see him alive.

I have photographed dying. As a 21-year-old rookie photographer on a supposedly routine assignment, I was standing behind Robert F. Kennedy when he was assassinated. That time, there was no telephoto lens to distance me. I was so close that his blood spattered onto my jacket. I saw the life bleed out of him, and I heard Ethel's screams. Pictures that, shot through my tears, still distress me after 35 years. But nobody refused to print them, as they did the 9/11 photo. Nobody looked away.

I can't be the only one asking: My G-d. How is anybody over this?

Via Instapundit
# Posted 1:57 AM by Karol

WHY WE SUPPORT REVEREND AL SHARPTON FOR PRESIDENT

# Posted 1:52 AM by Karol

Powell rejects French timetable for Iraq

France has set up a 'timetable' by which the U.S should run Iraq. French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin has stated that a provisional government should be established in Iraq in a month, a draft constitution by the end of the year and elections next spring. The words 'who the hell do they think they are' spring to mind. Fortunately, Colin Powell seems to have picked up a thing or two since our last dealings with the Frenchies. Calling the plan "totally unrealistic", Powell, sounding positively 'neo-conservative', then reminded them "We've done a lot of liberation in Europe after other Europeans had occupied parts of Europe." Finally.

Israel Shrugs Off Criticism Over Arafat

"They're asking us to do nothing against Yasser Arafat. Has the world turned on its head?"-Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom
# Posted 1:24 AM by Karol

Mark Steyn on the quagmire-Vietnam-'but where is bin Laden' contingent:

Meanwhile, in Europe, the tinfoil-hat brigade has gone mainstream. Of course America hasn’t been attacked again. That’s because 9/11 was a neocon conspiracy to give Washington a pretext to grab Iraq’s oil and Afghanistan’s, er, rubble. The conspirazoids now include the Rt Hon Michael Meacher, MP, a man who until a few weeks ago was one of Her Majesty’s ministers of state, a fellow who sat at the Cabinet table with Tony Blair and discussed troop deployments. But now, with time on his hands, he’s frolicking merrily on the wilder shores of the Internet. In the Guardian on Saturday, he demanded to know whether US air-security operations had ‘been deliberately stood down on 11 September’ in order to facilitate the attack. Who would do such a thing? Why, Rummy, Cheney, Wolfie and the other sinister graduates of the Project for a New American Century.

Meacher is late to the Mad Hatter’s tea party. I’ve had a gazillion emails a day about this for almost two years. Condi Rice apparently warned all kinds of people not to fly on 11 September. If that’s true, it seems odd that Don Rumsfeld, one of the architects of the conspiracy, didn’t warn himself not to go to the Pentagon that morning. You’d think, being in on the plot, he’d warn himself not to be sitting at his desk as the plane sliced through the building. If Michael Meacher had had advance warning that a plane was going to slam into the Department of the Environment that day, would he have had the cojones to be sitting there dictating a memo to Miss Jones as the nose cone ploughed into the photocopier? Or maybe that’s just how well planned the conspiracy was: Rumsfeld knew the plane would hit the other side of the Pentagon well away from his office, so, if he coolly went to work as usual, he’d throw even expert conspiracy-sniffers like Meacher off the scent. Or maybe there was no Pentagon plane at all; it was a pure invention of the administration, as that French bestseller argued. Or maybe the Pentagon itself is just a thought-form generated by the microchip implanted in Meacher’s brain when he sat next to Dick Cheney at a G7 buffet lunch. Or maybe....

If 9/11 liberated the Bush administration to put into action its scheme to take over the world, then it also liberated the Western elites to embrace finally and wholeheartedly anti-Americanism as the New Unifying Theory of Everything. It didn’t have to be like that: the intellectual class could have sided with the women of Afghanistan or the political prisoners of Iraq. But the advantage of sour oppositionism is that whatever happens there’s always something to sneer at. If Osama pops up, see, he got away. If he doesn’t pop up, how do you know he didn’t get away? If he turns up dead, whoa, now you’ve made him a martyr, a thousand more will bloom in his dust.
# Posted 4:02 PM by Karol

For me, 9/11/03 was spent at a meeting in school, making a return at Bloomingdales, having a quick lunch with my boyfriend, going to a small dinner with Frank Gaffney, attending a NY Young Republican Club meeting, going for drinks afterward with Doug, Scott and others, meeting up with my friend who is visiting from Boston and finally heading home when it was already the 12th. I guess that it's right that I spent the day living my life but I really felt that I missed out on the rememberance side of this important day. I didn't get to read enough or think enough about it.

I caught up on a little of the writing from yesterday and, of course, Lileks has some of the best of it around:

Now I am resigned, in advance, to the loss of an American city by a nuclear weapon. The End of the World now looks like a comic-book premise, a Heston-movie conceit. We feared it would all be gone in a day, our world upended like an Etch-A-Sketch. What we never considered was a long, slow war, a conflict that burned and sputtered, skittered from one spot on the map to the other. The old wars were simple: the other side had accents, uniforms, nations, cruel habits and urbane sneers. The old wars took years. The old wars were in black and white. The old wars were monophonic, scored by Max Steiner, released by Warner Brothers, and the only proof they really happened at all was the small battered box in the back of Dad’s sock drawer, the box that held some oddly colored metal bars. The next war would be horrible, total, and short.

Two years ago today I was convinced that every presumption I had about the future was wrong. This war, I feared, would be horrible, total, and long.

Two years later I take a certain grim comfort in some people’s disinterest in the war; if you’d told me two years ago that people would be piling on the President and bitching about slow progress in Iraq, I would have known in a second that the nation hadn’t suffered another attack. When the precise location of Madonna’s tongue is big news, you can bet the hospitals aren’t full of smallpox victims. Of course some people are impatient with those who still recall the shock of 9/11; the same people were crowding the message boards of internet sites on the afternoon of the attacks, eager to blame everyone but the hijackers. They hate this nation. In their hearts, they hate humanity. They would rather cheer the perfect devils than come to the aid of a compromised angel. They can talk for hours about how wrong it was to kill babies, busboys, businessmen, receptionists, janitors, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers - and then they lean towards you, eyes wide, and they say the fatal word:

But.

And then you realize that the eulogy is just a preface. All that concern for the dead is nothing more than the knuckle-cracking of an organist who’s going to play an E minor chord until we all agree we had it coming.

I’ve no doubt that if Seattle or Boston or Manhattan goes up in a bright white flash there will be those who blame it all on Bush. We squandered the world’s good will. We threw away the opportunity to atone, and lashed out. Really? You want to see lashing out? Imagine Kabul and Mecca and Baghdad and Tehran on 9/14 crowned with mushroom clouds: that’s lashing out. Imagine the President in the National Cathedral castigating Islam instead of sitting next to an Imam who's giving a homily. Mosques burned, oil fields occupied, smart bombs slamming into Syrian palaces. We could have gone full Roman on anyone we wanted, but we didn’t. And we won’t.

Which is why this war will be long.
# Posted 1:52 PM by Karol

Banafsheh, the Iranian woman in the story with ANSWER, sends me an article from the Washington Times with the headline 'Memo shows Iraq, Iran tried to contact bin Laden'.

But wait, I thought Saddam was secular and Osama was religious and there was no way they would ever work together......
# Posted 1:12 PM by Karol

Sad news: Johnny Cash, dead at 71

Via Ken Wheaton
# Posted 12:35 PM by Karol

Howard Dean calls Hamas 'soldiers' in the 'war going on in the Middle East'. You know things are bad when Europe (who just recently discovered Hamas is a terrorist group) is to the right of the probable Democrat candidate for president.

Via LGF
# Posted 11:49 PM by Karol

Urg. It's just my luck that after my biggest blogging day, hits-wise, I would have some major problem with my domain server. If you're reading this this morning then you are probably one of the few that knows that you can reach this site by both www.alarmingnews.com and http://kashei.blogspot.com. Hope to be back online soon under the alarmingnews.com name.
# Posted 11:01 AM by Karol

I just want to say a quick welcome to all the readers I've had today. I'm nearing 5000 hits, up from my 100 or so a day, and its been really great. Thanks so much to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit and James Taranto at Best of the Web (and maybe others I don't know about because my counters don't give me that info-so please email me if you've linked here) for linking the below post. I really feel that it is a necessary one for everyone to read. If any of the new visitors are in NY, or the surrounding areas, and would like to get involved with the democracy in Iran group, please drop me an email.
# Posted 3:58 PM by Karol

I mentioned a few months ago that I met with some people (including Ken and Yevgeny) who are interested in supporting the democratic movement in Iran. We've been in touch since then and have slowly begun thinking of some things we can do. Today I got an email from one of the guys in the group. He forwarded an email from an Iranian girl who is very involved in the democracy movement. The email literally took the wind out of me. I realize that I should not be surprised by the unbelieveable hypocrisy of the biggest anti-war group, ANSWER, but somehow the below disgusted me to no end.
This is the email:

Hi Everyone,

I've been working VERY hard on getting the word about the plight of the people of Iran, out, as you know.

Recently I contacted a group called A.N.S.W.E.R. COALITION which organizes marches. After having introduced myself and explained to them the situation in Iran (after 4 phone calls and messages) I was told that they won't help the Iranian activists and their friends in organizing marches against the Islamic Republic as they're afraid the Iranian student movement might be run by IMPERIALIST!!!!!

They claimed to be "intelligent" and very well informed though essentially they had NO IDEA what on earth I was talking about. They were not only unaware of the crimes committed by the Islamic Republic, they had never even heard that an organized group of hoodlums, called the BADR Brigade, trained by the KGB and Palestinians, armed and bankrolled by the Islamic Republic's ruling theocrats, were infiltrating Iraq to run a muck in killing American soldiers and destroy the future of Iraq! When I explained that the people of Iran are acting on their own but that encouragement from the PEOPLE of the west was crucial in holding anti-Islamic Republic demonstrations etc. (that's all I had asked them for: help in organizing demonstrations) the woman basically said that they won't help because their cause was to eradicate Imperialism! I explained that Iranian oil was being pilfered by member nations of the EU and other countries such as Japan, at which she replied: since we don't live in Europe or Japan, I cannot help! I guess imperialism is concentrated only in the U.S.!!!!! AND that Mullahs can't be "Imperialists!"

I then explained that Hossein Khomeini (Khomeini's grandson) is now one of the biggest opponents of the Mullacracy in Iran...She told me that he was probably being bought by Americans!!! In other words, she was convinced that there could be no dissent among the Mullahs themselves!!!!!

I told her about my father and other political prisoners in Iran (not to mention the number of people stoned to death, hung, assassinated, raped...), she thought for a moment and said that my father is probably a dissident and that the Islamic Republic was possibly justified in putting him in prison!!!!! I don't know, but doesn't that seem oxymoronic coming from someone working at an "activist/protestor" organization?????

Please contact these people and let them know how unbelievably misguided, tyrannical and hypocritical their attitude is and that in order to do the right thing, they must embrace the entire picture and not some random corner of it. Please help educate and properly inform these self-proclaimed defenders of humanity. Their phone numbers and e-mail are:

DC: 202/544-3389
NY: 212/633-6646
e-mail: info@internalionalanswer.org

Thank you.

Banafsheh
# Posted 12:25 AM by Karol

Looking for music blogging? Click here.

Looking for right-leaning events around NYC? Click here
# Posted 12:23 AM by Karol

Latest link to the blogroll: Slantpoint
# Posted 12:03 AM by Karol