Faith, Beer, and Other Things That Interest Geoff

If the American people elect John Kerry, they will be placing in office a man who worked directly with the leaders of an enemy government in a time of war, to bring about the defeat of his own country: Kerry’s October surprise.

Verified documents from Texas Tech’s Vietnam Center tell the damning tale, yet mainstream media, in their Stalinesque disinformation campaign to oust Bush, completely ignore the evidence of Kerry’s illegal, seditious activity.

I'm listening to WPHT, 1210AM. Dom Giordano is interviewing PA Congressman Curt Weldon (from Pennsylvania's Delaware County). Weldon caught four women who visited a prison and they were filmed running from the prison with absentee ballots from the prisoners. It was filmed by a Philly TV station (not sure which one). Weldon caught these women red-handed, allegedly college girls, who should not have been inside and involved in this absentee ballot process. The women somehow went inside to "assist" the prisoners in filling out the ballots. These four women were untrained, they didn't know who was a felon and who was not. There was no one supervising what they were doing. The warden was filmed denying it happened and then he was shown a ballot and he put his hand to his mouth and told his prison staffer to "be quiet and not say anything". Curt Weldon and State Represetative Steve Barrar were eye witnesses to the fraud and there was a television station there. Weldon has taken legal action to [ensure] that ALL the absentee ballots from prisons be verified. But he did say that it's probably too late because most of the ballots have probably already arrived at the polling place of the criminal's hometown. This is a result of Gov Rendell's 9-page memo to all the wardens to make sure the jailed criminals get absentee ballots filled out.

Rivalry with another cat is the biggest source of feline anxiety closely followed by moving home or the arrival of a new member of the owner's family.

White liberals have been indulging their fantasies of violence against conservatives lately – physically attacking conservatives, ransacking Bush-Cheney headquarters (though not any NRA headquarters, I note). The white wife of vice presidential candidate John Edwards recently warned of riots unless Kerry is elected.

In the midst of this rash of violence by white liberals, this week Al Gore admonished a group of blacks not to engage in violence over the election. Perhaps Gore should have saved that speech for a convocation of Moveon.org members.

And Democrats wonder why they have to ask white people to hold "African-Americans for Kerry-Edwards" signs at their rallies – as happened in St. Petersburg, Fla., last Saturday. The Kerry campaign is hemorrhaging black voters like teenaged girls fleeing an R. Kelly house party. None of the Democrats' top black leaders – Jesse, Al, Bill Clinton – has been able to stem the tide.

Many of the doubts that hover over Sullivan's case for Kerry are rooted in the value system widely shared among Democrats: Most people are basically good; wars are caused not by evil motives but by misunderstandings that can be talked out; conflict can be overcome by more tolerance and examining of our own faults or by taking disputes to the United Nations. As a personal creed, these benign and humble attitudes are admirable. As the foundation of a policy to confront terrorists who wish to blow up our cities, they are alarming.

We tend to think of wine and cheese as the perfect couple, but beer and cheese is an amazingly tasty combo. In fact, some would argue that beer naturally goes better with cheese than does wine. This tasting will be conducted by Garrett Oliver, brewmaster of the Brooklyn Brewery, author of The Brewmaster's Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food, and likely the world's leading authority on matching beer with cheese.

1. For starters, it's a pretty small market. The total vaccine market (for all vaccines, that is) is about $6 billion out of a market of $340 billion for drugs of all kinds.




2. The flu vaccine business is risky: some years you sell out, but other years you make 50 million doses and only sell 20 million. That makes it fairly unattractive, especially since....



3. It's a commodity market, so profit margins are thin to begin with.



4. What's more, the biggest buyer is the government, which buys in bulk at a very low price. So profit margins are even thinner than they might be.



5. FDA regulations have gotten tighter over the years, and vaccine makers have had an increasingly hard time meeting them because it requires expensive plant upgrades.



6. But nobody wants to invest a lot of money to upgrade their flu vaccine plants because there's new technology coming down the road in a few years that will render the current manufacturing technique (which uses chicken eggs) obsolete.



7. Finally, huge awards in liability lawsuits have scared vaccine makers out of the market. About 50-70% of the cost of most vaccines is taken up by the cost of liability insurance.

Democrat Presidential nominee John Kerry delivered a speech today condemning President Bush for failing to invade Iraq in the follow-up of military action against the Talaban and Al Qaeda in Afghanastan. "Leaving this tyrant in power in contravention of numerous United Nations resolutions is unconscionable," Kerry told the Veterans of Foreign Wars. "He has left available a base of operations and a source of supply and money."

Kerry went on to criticize the war against terror as "stalled" while the real threat to America, "Saddam Hussein’s Iraq goes untouched." Kerry said, "People are murdered daily in Baghdad and throughout the country. Rape rooms are a tragic reality. Torture chambers are full as Saddam’s sons carry out their sadistic impulses on the helpless and hapless victims of this regime. President Bush has done nothing as this brutal dictator takes the money from the Oil for Food to build palaces while his people go without food...

Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about
Bush's governance, went on to say: "This is why George W. Bush is so
clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He
believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that
they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them,
because he's just like them...

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Monday that terrorists are aiming to derail President Bush's chances at re-election through their attacks in Iraq. [snip]"I consider the activities of terrorists in Iraq are not as much aimed at coalition forces but more personally against President Bush," Putin said at a news conference after a regional summit in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe. "International terrorism has as its goal to prevent the election of President Bush to a second term," he said. "If they achieve that goal, then that will give international terrorism a new impulse and extra power.

The BBC reports that the commander of U.N. peacekeepers in Haiti is complaining that remarks by John Kerry have contributed to the recent upsurge in violence there. Kerry has said that he would have sent American troops to protect Jean-Bertrand Aristide who was ousted from power in February. The U.N. commander, Augusto Helena of Brazil, contends that Kerry's words in support of Aristide, coupled with the viabililty of Kerry's candidacy, have offered "hope" to Aristide's supporters, thus helping to spark violence in areas loyal to the ousted tyrant.

Notwithstanding his criticism of the U.N. officer, Kerry's position with respect to Haiti flows from his "global test" for determining when U.S. military intervention is appropriate. When the U.S. intervenes for reasons having nothing to do with protecting its national security, that's good because it proves to the world that we are selfless. When the U.S. intervenes to promote its national security interests, that's bad (unless we can prove, in lawyer-like fashion, that we face an imminent threat) because the rest of the world will see us selfish and arrogant.

Would they prefer for Mary Cheney to be a happily married mother of five? Sure. Do they think she is a sinner? Probably. Will that keep them from voting for Bush and her father? Heck, no.

The Yankees are their Daddy for reasons unknown. As one New York fan on the Manhattan subway following Boston’s loss in Game 2 put it, “You take those players, put pinstripes on them, and they win the World Series.”

And he’s right. We don’t know why he’s right, but he is.

But what does offend me is the selective invocation of God. George Bush is basically consistent. He says God guides him in everything he does. John Kerry says that, too, but it's hard to see how he's not lying. His faith is clear on abortion. It's pretty darn murky on, say, affirmative action.

It seems to me that you shouldn't pick and choose at all. You shouldn't infringe on, say, the property rights of citizens out of religious convictions about a clean environment and then conveniently fall back on the argument that it would be outrageous to invoke religion when it comes to abortion. Either your faith informs your views or it doesn't.

Where's My Flu Shot?

A few weeks from now, when the country has run out of flu vaccine and people want to know why, we suggest they knock on the doors of Senators Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins and Lincoln Chafee. Perhaps the three Republicans can explain when they intend to honor their promise to hold an open debate about the tort liabilities facing vaccine makers.

The only two suppliers of flu shots reported Friday that supplies are running out. The Centers for Disease Control is now urging health-care providers to reserve the shots for those most at risk. That leaves millions worrying that someone in their family might be next to die from a bad case of flu.

The reason for today's shortage -- as well as seven previous preventive vaccine shortages since 2000 -- is that there are just five vaccine makers. This lack of suppliers is partly thanks to Hillary Clinton, who as first lady turned government into the majority buyer of vaccines and pushed prices so low as to make business unsustainable. (This price-control approach, we'd note, is what Democrats would now like to inflict on the new Medicare drug program.)

But just as worrying to manufacturers is an explosion of class action lawsuits. Vaccine makers are supposed to be protected from suits by 1986 legislation, but tort lawyers have found loopholes and filed more than 200 cases. The Republican leadership fixed this by including a liability provision in the Homeland Security legislation of a year ago. That is, until Ms. Snowe, Ms. Collins and Mr. Chafee objected to its "dark of the night" insertion and forced Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist into repealing it.

In return for their victory, the Senators promised an open debate on broad liability reform within six months. That would have been ... June. But the Senate canceled a markup on a reform bill in April and the Senators have gone quiet. Apparently, making sound vaccine policy isn't as politically rewarding as preening before the media by standing up to "special interests" (vaccine makers). So what's your solution for the flu-shot shortage, Senators?

Before this debating season is over, would someone please, please utter the words “boogie to Baghdad?”

You remember the phrase. It was written by Richard Clarke, the White House counterterrorism chief who in 1999 was so worried about the chumminess of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein that he believed bin Laden, if attacked by the United States at his lair in Afghanistan, would “boogie” on over to the Iraqi capital for protection.

The real reason for this war—which was never stated—was to burst what I would call the "terrorism bubble," which had built up during the 1990s.

This bubble was a dangerous fantasy, believed by way too many people in the Middle East. This bubble said that it was OK to plow airplanes into the World Trade Center, commit suicide in Israeli pizza parlors, praise people who do these things as "martyrs," and donate money to them through religious charities. This bubble had to be burst, and the only way to do it was to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something—to let everyone know that we, too, are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society. Yes, I know, it's not very diplomatic—it's not in the rule book—but everyone in the neighborhood got the message: Henceforth, you will be held accountable. Why Iraq, not Saudi Arabia or Pakistan? Because we could—period. Sorry to be so blunt, but, as I also wrote before the war: Some things are true even if George Bush believes them.

I'm not saying there are no good arguments against the war. I am saying that many of you don't care about the war. If Bill Clinton or Al Gore had conducted this war, you would be weeping joyously about Iraqi children going to school and women registering to vote... What disgusts me are those people who say toppling Saddam and fighting the terror war on their turf rather than ours is a mistake, not because these are bad ideas, but merely because your vanity cannot tolerate the notion that George W. Bush is right or that George W. Bush's rightness might cost John Kerry the election.

But these headlines conceal the real news in the report of Iraq Survey Group head Charles Duelfer. For the report makes it plain that George W. Bush had good reason to go to war in Iraq and end the regime of Saddam Hussein. . . .

Duelfer also reported that Saddam asked subordinates how long it would take to develop chemical weapons once sanctions ended. One Iraqi chemical weapons expert said it would require only a few days to develop mustard gas. Former Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz said that Iraq could have had a WMD capacity within two years after the end of sanctions.

If the weapons inspectors had been given more time to conduct inspections, as John Kerry has on occasion advocated, we now know they would not have found any WMDs. Nor does it seem possible that they would have uncovered Saddam's attempts to maintain WMD capability. There would have been heavy pressure then from France, Russia, and China—whose companies were given kickbacks and windfall profits from the Saddam-administered U.N. Oil for Food program, Duelfer reports—to disband U.S. military forces in the Middle East and to end sanctions. And once sanctions were gone, there would have been nothing to stop Saddam from developing WMDs.

In other words, we were facing a brutal dictator with the capability to develop WMDs and the proven willingness to use them. A dictator whose regime had had, as the 9/11 Commission has documented, frequent contacts with al Qaeda. We have no conclusive evidence that he collaborated with al Qaeda on 9/11—but also no conclusive evidence that he did not. Under those circumstances, George W. Bush acted prudently in deciding to remove this regime. He would have been imprudent not to have done so.

...Since the revisionists "honor" Scripture and tradition, they can worship, study, pray, teach, and promote their agenda shoulder to shoulder with the orthodox while holding utterly different conceptions of the faith. Conflict only arises when the church must deal with concrete issues such as revision of our language for God, sexual norms, evangelism to those of other faiths, or who is welcome to take Communion. At that point, real differences emerge...

CIA chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer may not have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but he sure found information enough to blow the lid off the simmering scandal of the United Nations Oil-for-Food program. As it turns out, Oil-for-Food pretty much was Saddam Hussein's weapons program.

As Duelfer documents, Oil-for-Food allowed Saddam to replenish his empty coffers, firm up his networks for hiding money and buying arms, corrupt the U.N.'s own debates over Iraq, greatly erode sanctions and deliberately prep the ground for further rearming, including the acquisition of nuclear weapons. As set up and run by the U.N., Oil-for-Food devolved into a depraved and increasingly dangerous mockery of what was advertised by the U.N. as a relief program for sick and starving Iraqis.

The Duelfer Report is a huge vindication for the Bush administration’s decision to remove Saddam Hussein. There can be no more doubt that Saddam was a serious threat to the security of the United States and the world, and that our so-called “allies,” specifically the United Nations, France and Russia, were rotten to the core with corruption and bribery. There’s no mystery why these entities were opposed to our plans. They were getting fat and rich off the misery of the Iraqi people.