U.S Contributions to Tsunami Victims

Some U.N. worker from Norway says the U.S. is being stingy with our assistance to the victims of the Tsunami. This criticism came only 36 hours or so after the disaster and our total contribution is increasing steadily, but I agree we can surely give more. Congress should immediately designate 50% of our U.N. dues to the effort and simply cancel the other half.

From IBD

On Dec. 22, 1944, almost 60 years ago to the day 22 people died in a mess tent in Mosul, Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe of the 101^st Airborne, surrounded in Bastogne, Belgium, by a German offensive that was not expected, responded to a Nazi surrender demand with the famous one word response: “Nuts!”
Things don’t always go as planned in war. We certainly found that out in World War II, when our first encounter with the Nazi Wehrmacht, at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, in February 1943, using outdated tanks and tactics, was a disaster.
As Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld put it recently: “You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have.” We learned from our mistakes at Kasserine, and we went on from there to victory. Yet there were more surprises to come.
One wonders how today’s press would have handled getting bogged down and taking heavy casualties on Omaha Beach or plodding through hedge row country. Yet nobody said the D-Day assault on Hitler’s Festung Europa was badly planned or mismanaged. Our eyes remained on the prize.
On Dec. 16, 1944, Allied forces were surprised by Hitler’s last great offensive, and found themselves in the single biggest engagement in which U.S. troops have ever fought. Yet no one demanded Eisenhower resign because he didn’t expect the Battle of the Bulge.
Allied intelligence had reports of a transfer of German troops from the Russian Front to the Western front in the fall of 1944, and there was evidence they were regrouping in the Ardennes. But six months after the invasion of Normandy, the war seemed won. The information was not forwarded up the chain of command. In today’s vernacular, nobody had bothered to connect the dots.
The battle would involve three German and three American armies and three British divisions, more than a million men. Americans would suffer 80,000 casualties and 19,000 dead — 500 a day. Yet few demanded to know why our intelligence failed. There were no hearings, no demands foe Eisenhower’s scalp.
The Nazis had taken everything into account except the sheer determination of the American GI and a nation that knew victory would be worth the price being paid. Operation Iraqi Freedom should be no different. Patience and courage won the day in the Ardennes. It will again in Iraq.
Among the dead in Mosul were members of the 276th Engineer Battalion, a Virginia-based unit that traces its lineage back to 1652 and once had George Washington as its commander. Its motto is Patrick Henry’s passionate “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death.” It is up to us to ensure they have not died in vain.
John F. Kennedy once pledged that America would pay any price, bear any burden and meet any hardship to ensure the success and survival of liberty. He spoke of a long, twilight struggle with the enemies of freedom and democracy.
Let us keep that pledge and respond to the cowardly killers in Mosul and to Zarqawi and to Bin Laden and the terrorism they represent: “Nuts!”

A first person account of the Mosul Bombing

The following was submitted by a Chaplain on the scene at Mosul. Every one should read the entire blog.

"Mark" was put on a stretcher and laid along a wall. A small monitor on his hand would tell the nurses when he was dead. Even a cursory glance said it was inevitable. Mark had a head wound that left brain matter caked in his ear and all over the stretcher he was lying on. I knelt next to Mark and placed a hand on his chest. His heart was barely beating but it was beating so I put my face close to his ear to pray with him. If you've never smelled human brain matter it is something unforgettable. I had something of an internal struggle. He's practically dead so why stay? He probably can't hear anything! A prayer at that point seemed of little value. But I couldn't risk it. I prayed for Mark and led him in the sinners prayer as best I could. There are few things in this life that will make you feel more helpless. After that, I needed some fresh air.

Cold Weather in Iraq

I am still not sure why our military in Iraq continues to write home asking for clothing to keep warm. I have written about this before and some of the reasons seem to be a) they were given allowances to buy clothing before they left and didn't plan correctly, and b) they had clothing, but it was lost or stolen when sent to the laundry. Some of our troops who have just arrived seem to be in need of warm clothing as indicated by this E-mail from a Marine in Iraq. You can respond to this web site.

22 Dec 2004:
Our Deployment started out as the 31St MEU, Then We were tasked in short notice that we would be leaving for Iraq, Though we are now begining to adjust to life in Iraq, it is still hard to adjust to the cold weather, the best possible things that could be sent are, warn gloves, any type of warm clothing, thermo socks. thank you for your selfless acts to support what we are doing.

P.S. anything of entertainment value is always welcomed.

Sincerly,
Sgt "Slim" Schroepfer

I

A Fascinating Blog

I am amazed every day when I discover how hard some really clever people work to contribute to the blogosphere. I ran across this most entertaining blog today by John Hawkins. Evidently this is the third year that he has published a list of the 20 most annoying liberals and goes on to describe how they achieved status on this list. You need to read the whole thing and see how well done it is, but here is an example. This is for AlGore and he was only number 13 on the list.

When he's not acting all "angry and stuff," Gore spends his time claiming he was cheated in the 2000 elections. For example, here's a joke from his speech at the Democratic National Convention -- undoubtedly fed into his memory banks by Democratic programmers trained to handle wooden robots -- about the 2000 election...

"Friends, fellow Democrats, fellow Americans, I'll be candid with you. I had hoped to be back here this week under different circumstances, running for re-election. But you know the old saying: You win some, you lose some. And then there's that little-known third category."

Here he is again in the same speech,

"And let's make sure that this time every vote is counted. Let's make sure not only that the Supreme Court does not pick the next president, but also that this president is not the one who picks the next Supreme Court.

Gore's like a guy you beat at foosball who's still complaining about it four years later, "I said 'time out so I could get a soda' and you said 'after the game, let's go' and I really wasn't ready because I was thirsty and it was unfair and..."

GET OVER IT CRYBABY, YOU LOST! There were two machine recounts and you even got one unconstitutional recount and you didn't win any of them. That whining was annoying way back in 2001 when Gore started it and ain't like wine, it doesn't get any better with age...

Defining Quote For The New, Angry, Al Gore: "The (Bush) administration works closely with a network of rapid response digital brownshirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors for "undermining support for our troops." -- Al Gore

Good News from Iraq

Arthur Chrenkoff has a summary of good news from Iraq .Here is an example:

Also in Sadr City, soldiers from the First Cavalry Division's First Brigade Combat Team "teamed up with local children and cleaned a trash-covered area in the middle of an eastern Baghdad neighborhood, converting the land into a park. Infrequent visits from the city's trash trucks and no trash bins for people to use had resulted in what was turning into a trash dump, threatening the health of those living nearby":

Seeing U.S. vehicles entering the area, local children ran to meet the soldiers and ask for candy, which soldiers often bring for them. This time, however, the soldiers distributed tools that the children could use to help in the cleanup. "Kids always approach us and want candy, but this time we had something for them to do. We wanted to encourage the local children to help themselves by using the rakes and shovels we provided to help clean up," [First Lt. Gerald] Kubicek said. "Since there were a lot of kids out there, we gave school supplies as a token of our appreciation after the work was done."

Kubicek said getting the neighborhood energized was essential to the success of the project. "We tried to draw the community together by getting different families to help us with this project," he said. Since trash disposal had been the problem that made the field unusable in the first place, a trash pit was constructed so families have a centralized place for refuse.

The following day, a local contractor delivered two swing sets and other playground equipment, giving local kids a place to hang out and play soccer, the Iraqi national pastime. "Now we have a nice, open park, two swing sets, and a place for them to deposit their garbage, instead of having it laying all over the place," Kubicek said. "We have a vested interest in giving something back to the Iraqi people. Projects like this one are a reminder that the American people are here to help."

From Military News about Iraq

December 21, 2004: Suicide car bombs in the last three days have left nearly a hundred dead. Most shocking were several attacks in the Shia holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. These attacks in southern Iraq caused Shia leaders to call for peace between Sunni and Shia, and for the use of armed volunteers to guard polling places for the upcoming elections. The bombings also brought forth many tips from citizens, and over fifty people have been arrested as suspects in these attacks, and earlier ones. There are over a million Sunni Arabs living in southern Iraq, but they have not encouraged terrorist attacks in order to avoid retaliation from the much larger number of Shia in the area. Abu Musab al Zarqawi and his al Qaeda killers are believed to be responsible for most of the car bombings. Zarqawi wants a religious dictatorship in Iraq, and believes that if he sets off bombs in Shia areas, he can trigger retaliation from Shia and cause a civil war in Iraq. While nearly all the current violence in Iraq is committed by Sunni Arabs, it's only a minority of the Sunni Arab community. Zarqawi knows that unless he can get more people fighting (either the Americans, the government or just other Iraqis), then the new democratic government might succeed. This would be a major defeat for al Qaeda. However, Zarqawi's tactics are not popular inside al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden apparently does not approve, as bin Ladens latest taped message made no mention of Zarqawis operations (he encouraged attacks on oil facilities instead, something Zarqawi is not keen on.) Bin Laden believes that it's all about money, and that if you destroy the oil income, the current Arab governments will fall, and Islamic dictatorships can take over.

Bush Spending

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article outling the problems President Bush is going to face as he responds to those in both political parties who have criticized his supposed lack of discipline in controlling spending during his first term. As a man who seems to keep his promises and be a man of his word, the goal of reducing the federal deficit in coming budgets will be loudly renounced as he goes about reaching that goal. Anytime the entrenched factions in Washington are forced to actually make choices and prioritize spending, there will be squeals about how unfair it is to hold some program to last years levels. We can expect the ones to complain loudest will be those who ran to the microphones to decry deficits in the past. I say "Go George".

Social Security Facts and Figures

By 2018 the amount of money going into the Social Security fund will fall below the amount going out.

The only money in the fund now is IOUs. The fund will then have to start cashing in these IOUs and by 2042, these IOUs will run out.

The hole in the fund is estimated to be $24 to $27 trillion over the next 75 years. The only way to fill that hole is to cut benefits or raise taxes or both. That would and should set off an intergenerational war. Reckon our laws regarding euthanasia will change?

The government estimates that those starting to work today can expect a negative return of -0.87% a year on the money they put into Social Security as opposed by a 6.5% increase on contributions to a stock market fund over the next 50 years.

There has never been a 30 year period with negative returns in the market.

The Heritage Foundation estimates that if Americans take 2-4% of their taxable payroll and put it into investments, the funding gap will drop to $7 trillion, a savings of some $20 trillion. The so-called transition cost of this is said to be $1-2 trillion, so this is a pretty good return.

Finally, private savings accounts will mean $91 billion in increases in the savings by Americans each year. Since the total savings by Americans last year was $110 billion, the increased amount available for research, building factories, and other GDP - enhancing activities will be a considerable benefit to our economy.

The opponents of this, mainly Democrats will say it is too risky to do this, but the status quo is much riskier.

Food Police

Something called the Center for Science in the Public Interest has decided that Hardee's Monster Thickburger is beyond pornographic. "If the old Thickburger was food porn, the new Monster Thickburger is the fast-food equivalent of a snuff film". It is true that the new burger is an amazing 1420 calories --200 more than the original-- and I am no longer allowed to indulge in such snacks, but the CSPI doesn't want to let my wife make that decision for me. It is pushing for "programs and policies" that would ban such offerings by restaurants.

How long will it be before the fast food industry is sued by these zealots in the name of public health? It would be a mistake to conclude that it won't happen.

Battle of the Bulge vs. Iraq War

Here is an excellent account of how the Battle of the Bulge would be written by the main stream media if it occurred today.

Scientific Truth from IBD

During the campaign, Democratic vice-presidential candidate John Edwards promised voters that if they voted for running mate John Kerry, “people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”
Kerry himself pledged to end President Bush’s alleged “ban” on stem cell research — the only thing, it seemed, standing between us and a series of medical breakthroughs. Not so.
The same day, studies were published showing umbilical cord blood — and the stem cells it includes — could save the lives of many adults with leukemia who can’t find bone marrow donors.
Song Chang-Hoon, professor at South Korea’s Chosun University’s medical school, told of Hwang Mi-Soon, a 37-year-old paraplegic who, after being paralyzed for 20 years, was able to rise from her wheelchair and take a few halting steps with a walker. Six weeks earlier she had a transplant using umbilical cord blood stem cells.
Using cord blood could improve the odds of getting a transplant for the 16,000 U.S. adult leukemia patients each year who can’t find a compatible marrow donor, according to Dr. Mary J. Laughlin, the U.S. study’s leader. There are 4 million births a year in this country and most cord blood, which contains stem cells capable of developing into every type of blood cell, is thrown away.
Liberal media have made this an ideological rather than scientific debate by ignoring the demonstrable promise of and progress made in adult stem cell research. They’ve overhyped “good” embryonic stem cell research vs. “bad” adult stem cell research.
Truth is, most progress in stem cell research is being made using the adult rather than the embryonic variety. Yet the media largely ignores that fact, while portraying opponents of embryonic stem cell research as heartless Bible-thumpers prolonging human suffering.
Adult stem cells have been used therapeutically since the 1980s, and there are almost 80 therapies using them — actual treatments, not theory or research. More than 250 adult stem cell clinical trials have taken place using adult stem cells. There are zero treatments using embryonic stem cells and there have been zero clinical trials.
Yes, more research needs to be done and such research needs to be peer-reviewed and replicated. But you can bet that if Hwang Mi-Soon had been treated with embryonic stem cells, we’d have heard about it.

The Bush Doctrine

For some time now, I have be wondering to what extent the Bush Doctrine seems to have been abandoned. It is comforting to be joined by Bill Kristol. This essay focuses on Syria, but there are other countries like Iran and Saudia Arabia that I would add to the discussion.


"WE WILL pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime."
George W. Bush, Address to Congress,
September 20, 2001

ScrappleFace

One of my favorite Blogs is ScrappleFace . Here is an example of their offerings which give me a chuckle.

NARAL Outraged at Peterson Death Sentence

by Scott Ott

(2004-12-13) -- A California jury today sentenced Scott Peterson to death for the double murder of his wife and unborn son. The sentence sparked outrage from the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL).

"We decry the inhumanity of the death penalty for a man who simply exercised his choice to end a pregnancy and to end the woman who was harboring an unwanted fetus," said an unnamed NARAL spokesman. "This emotional jury decision shows no respect for Mr. Peterson's reproductive rights. It's a sad day for America and may have a chilling effect on the hundreds of physicians nationwide engaged in similar work."

In related news, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC announced they would "go on indefinite hiatus due to a lack of meaningful news stories now that the Peterson trial has ended."

Poor Canada

The flood of American liberals sneaking across the border into
Canada has intensified in the past week, sparking calls for increased
patrols to stop the illegal immigration.
The re-election of President Bush is prompting the exodus among
left-leaning citizens who fear they'll soon be required to hunt,
pray and agree with Bill O'Reilly.
Canadian border farmers say it's not uncommon to see dozens of
sociology professors, animal-rights activists and Unitarians crossing
their fields at night.
"I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a
Hollywood producer huddled in the barn," said Manitoba farmer Red
Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota.
The producer was cold, exhausted and hungry.
"He asked me if I could spare a latte and some free-range
chicken. When I said I didn't have any, he left. Didn't even get a
chance to show him my screenplay, eh?"
In an effort to stop the illegal aliens, Greenfield erected
higher fences, but the liberals scaled them. So he tried installing
speakers that blare Rush Limbaugh across the fields.
"Not real effective," he said. "The liberals still got through,
and Rush annoyed the cows so much they wouldn't give milk."
Officials are particularly concerned about smugglers who meet
liberals near the Canadian border, pack them into Volvo station
wagons, drive them across the border and leave them to fend for
themselves.
"A lot of these people are not prepared for rugged conditions,"
an Ontario border patrolman said. "I found one carload without a drop
of drinking water. They did have a nice little Napa Valley cabernet,
though."
When liberals are caught, they're sent back across the border,
often wailing loudly that they fear retribution from conservatives.
Rumors have been circulating about the Bush administration
establishing re-education camps in which liberals will be forced to
drink domestic beer and watch NASCAR.
In the days since the election, liberals have turned to
sometimes-ingenious ways of crossing the border. Some have taken to
posing as senior citizens on bus trips to buy cheap Canadian
prescription drugs. After catching a half-dozen young vegans disguised
in powdered wigs, Canadian immigration authorities began stopping
buses and quizzing the supposed senior-citizen passengers.
"If they can't identify the accordion player on The Lawrence
Welk Show, we get suspicious about their age," an official said.
Canadian citizens have complained that the illegal immigrants
are creating an organic-broccoli shortage and renting all the good
Susan Sarandon movies.
"I feel sorry for American liberals, but the Canadian economy
just can't support them," an Ottawa resident said. "How many
art-history majors does one country need?"
In an effort to ease tensions between the United States and
Canada, Vice President Dick Cheney met with the Canadian ambassador
and pledged that the administration would take steps to reassure
liberals, a source close to Cheney said.
"We're going to have some Peter, Paul & Mary concerts. And we
might put some endangered species on postage stamps. The president is
determined to reach out."

Cell Phone Puzzle

I was reading an E-mail from one of our soldiers in Iraq the other day and he mentioned that his unit had caught a man responsible for a roadside IED explosion and that he still had the cell phone used to detonated the device when they caught him. That got me to wondering about how the terrorists go about using cell phones to work well enough to time an explosion to be as effective as our news suggests they are. My cell phone is much too iffy to be used in this way, I think. When we had AT&T service, the phone wouldn't work if you were standing right under a tower. We have a second home on Edisto Beach in South Carolina and our phone works off a cell tower placed on the water tower and our phone won't work if you get past the Piggly Wiggly grocery store. This all suggests to me that Iraq has intermittant electricity, woefully inadequate sewage treatment, and numerous other infrastructure deficits, but they must have one terrific cell phone system to explode IEDs. Why must Iraq have cell phone service at all? I say shut it down all over the country. Surely our military doesn't need cell phones to function. If it does, we are in worse shape than I imagined. When the country is pacified and our troops are no longer under attack, the cell phones can be turned on again. Until then, if even one soldier can be prevented from being killed or wounded, we should make sure cell phones in Iraq don't work.

Facing one's mortality

For some time now, I have mentioned to my wife following a notice of someone's passing or in regard to some news event that I will not die like that. For example, when Sonny Bono hit that tree while skiing, I could confidently state that won't happen to me. Similarily, when President G.H.W. Bush jumped out of a perfectly good airplane with a parachute, I could readily state that I will definitely not die in a skydiving accident. The same holds for motorcycle accidents (with me driving), roller coaster accidents, and other things like that. Now I can add another. I will not die by fire, get trampled, or be shot to death in, during, or prior to a heavy metal rock concert.

More from "Any Soldier"

I have been reading more of the requests from our military here. This morning I saw the following:

From the Soldier:

07 Dec 2004:
the guys are no longer in need of food products...they are more concerned about the cold weather and keeping warm....
wool socks, waterproof gloves, heavy duty flashlights (streamline or surefire), long sleeve underarmour, coldgear tactical hood, thermal underwear, a watch, 2 way radio( 5 mile or greater!)
thanks

I probably shouldn't be writing this with smoke still coming out of my ears, but I am absolutely incensed that we would send a single soldier to Northern Iraq where the winters are known to some to be fairly brutal without absolutely everthing imaginable to protect them from the weather. Wool socks? Thermal underwear? Underarmor? Flashlights? Who is responsible for this nonsense. I am outraged. My Congressman brother-in-law doesn't like to be confronted with things like this, but that is just tough in this case.

Any Soldier

I ran across this web site yesterday and decided we could maybe participate in what seemed to me a great program. A large number of military from several theaters overseas have volunteered to serve as contacts to receive contributions from the U.S. When you go to the site, you can see what someone needs or wants to make life better, get the list and send it to the address given. The soldier or Marine then delivers the contents of the package to his or her buddies. We chose GySgt. George Harrison (presumably not a Beatle) and sent him a lot of candy, cookies, toiletries, and other stuff which we hope they enjoy and make life more tolerable in Afghanistan than it would be otherwise.

Quote from Mark Steyn, National Review

"Democrats seem to have great difficulty getting even the well-known bits right. Christmas, according to Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1999, is when those in that particular faith tradition celebrate "the birth of a homeless child." Or, as Al Gore put it in 1997, "Two thousand years ago, a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child." For Pete's sake, they weren't homeless — they couldn't get a hotel room. They had to sleep in the stable only because Dad had to schlep halfway across the country to pay his taxes in the town of his birth, which sounds like the kind of cockamamie bureaucratic nightmare only a blue state could cook up. Except that in Massachusetts, it's no doubt illegal to rent out your stable without applying for a Livestock Shelter Change of Use Permit plus a Temporary Maternity Ward for Non-Insured Transients License, so Mary would have been giving birth under a bridge on I-95."

An Editorial from Aljazeera

I have only recently started reading some stuff on the Aljazeera website to see for myself what goes on there. Today I was drawn to an editorial written by an Iraqii living in England who is calling for a boycott of the coming election in Iraq.

Senator Clinton's Facts

The Washington Times today has provided a correction to several incorrect assertions Senator Clinton made in a rare Fox News interview. One is given below.

Mrs. Clinton complained in the interview about "huge tax cuts" that are "shifting the tax burden rather dramatically away from those of us who are most able to bear it to the middle class." Again, she got it wrong.
Among other things, the 2001 and 2003 individual income-tax cuts doubled the child tax credit from $500 to $1,000; added the 10 percent tax bracket (chopping the income taxes of married couples and singles by $700 and $350, respectively); virtually eliminated the marriage penalty, saving tens of millions of married couples an average of about $1,500 per year; and reduced the quintessentially middle-class marginal income-tax bracket from 28 percent to 25 percent. Contrary to Mrs. Clinton's assertion, according to an August analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, in 2004 the share of individual income-tax liabilities of the second quintile (representing 21 to 40 percent of the household-income stream) will fall from 1.5 percent under 2000 tax laws to -0.1 percent under current tax laws. The comparable income-tax share of the third quintile (41 percent to 60 percent of the household-income stream) will fall from 6.4 percent to 5.4 percent. For the fourth quintile (61 percent to 80 percent), the income-tax share will fall from 15.3 percent to 15.2 percent. On the other hand, the income-tax share of the top 10 percent of the income stream will increase from 63.5 percent under 2000 tax law to 66.7 percent in 2004, following the 2001 and 2003 income-tax cuts.

Fog of War

The Washington Post has a long article today on the incident which took the life of Pat Tillman, the NFL football player turned soldier, in Afghanistan. It is pretty depressing, but probably not something that can ever be completely avoided in war.

Oil for Food Scandal

This commentary confirms my suspicions about the State Department and its opposition to my belief that the U.N. has long outlived its usefullness. We have already seen Bush duck and dodge when asked about Kofi the crook. Our best hope is conservative Senators and Congressmen and maybe Condi.

Another Pearl from Sowell

My main man does it again and pegs the MSM (main stream media) perfectly on Iraq coverage. Read it here.

Intelligence Reform?

The best commentary on the so-called intelligence reform measure that I have seen is this one.

Canada Doesn't Want our Whiners

By Ian Robinson -- Calgary Sun In the wake of the U.S. presidential election -- in which I cheerfully took a Sun assistant city editor, who figured Senator John Kerry couldn't lose, for $10 (a quick pause to gloat here) Americans disenchanted with President George W. Bush's re-election romp back into the White House, continue to deluge the Canadian immigration website. How anybody can be unhappy with the president's re-election is beyond me. Bush has my admiration in no small part because he manages to simultaneously annoy France and Germany, not to mention those renowned deep, geopolitical thinkers, the Dixie Chicks, Bruce Springsteen, P-Diddy or whatever he's calling himself now, Gwynneth Paltrow and Ben Affleck. (Interesting note about France: America invades Iraq without UN approval and America is portrayed as a barbarian striding across the world stage. Recently, France essentially invaded the Ivory Coast to protect its interests there ... without asking the UN squat. Just pointing out the hypocrisy.) Plus, let's face it: France deserves to be annoyed by as many people as possible, as often as possible, if only for encouraging Jerry Lewis by telling him that he was a genius. Not to mention for exporting snotty wine culture across the Atlantic so that otherwise reasonable North Americans have turned into cork-sniffing oenephiles -- although the word sounds like an exotic perversion, it just means wine-nerd -- who can actually say with a straight face: "This is a full-bodied Cabernet, rich with a full body tasting of plum, blackberry and leather cooked on an oak plank." Anyway, the day after the U.S. election, 115,628 Americans checked out the site and those numbers haven't fallen off very much. Before the election, some U.S. celebrities and numerous other Democrats vowed that they'd move to Canada if Bush were re-elected. I hope I'm not alone in gently suggesting to those considering coming to Canada: Stay home, you pathetic whining maggots. Particularly celebrities. Canada has suffered enough without having to put up with any of the Baldwin brothers or -- heaven forfend! -- Barbra Streisand. And frankly, I don't know if we can afford to feed Michael Moore. Bad enough that Canada became a haven for the gutless wonders of the 1960s who fled the Vietnam draft. I sometimes think that the draft dodgers welcomed by the Trudeau government were a political virus that invaded our body politic, and we still suffer the lingering effects of that illness. Our nation's preposterous pacifism, belief in nonsense such as "soft power" and fidelity to a morally bankrupt United Nations overrun with tin-pot dictators and other left-wing idiocies, may well be traceable back to the influx of thousands of the testosterone-challenged whose allegiance to country was superceded by their allegiance to smoking dope while trying to figure out the inner meaning of Beatles songs. We have immigrants coming to this country who have been hunted from the air by murderous Islamofascists in Sudan. Some new Canadians survived the atrocities in Rwanda or old Europe's final convulsions of genocide in the former Yugoslavia. We have physicians from some parts of the world who are willing to throw away their prestige and power in their homelands for the privilege of driving a cab in Moose Jaw. As a nation, we ought to welcome our share of people fleeing genuine oppression, and those willing to gamble everything to secure a safe and decent future for their families. But welcome a bunch of spoiled brats willing to abandon their very nation because they don't like the man elected to be their leader for the next four years? Geez, in my entire lifetime, there was maybe one prime minister I'd trust to run a street-corner hot dog stand -- the rest of them weren't fit for much more than compost -- but it never occurred to me to emigrate. If we close our borders to anybody, it should be these fools. They'll be easy to screen out. They'll be the ones who are whining.