Mark Steyn on the U. N. Gee, he has a way with words...

Hillsdale College offers a great publication for free, Imprimis. The main article is usually taken from a speech given by some honored guest or another, and the February 2006 issue features Mark Steyn, who spoke at Hillsdale's sixth annual Churchill Dinner.

His topic was "America and the United Nations," and one of his points is that the U. N. is a mixed bag of countries. Here's just one line...

"It’s a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice cream and a quart of dog mess and mix ’em together, the result will taste more like dog mess than ice cream. That’s the problem with the UN."

A little later in the article he has a nice tie-in to Batman, Paris Hilton, and Australia's Alexander Downer. A good read.

Hillsdale, btw, has an interesting history.

"One of only 119 American colleges awarding four-year liberal arts degrees in 1850, Hillsdale was the first American college to prohibit in its charter all discrimination based on race, religion, or sex. That is, Hillsdale was the first American college to be chartered on the principle of nondiscrimination. Hillsdale's Founders shared a devotion to the principle of equality with the Founders of America who had declared in 1776 that 'all men are created equal.'"

And they don't accept any federal money.

Word of the Day: Duplicitous

From thefreedictionary.com,

Adj. 1. duplicitous - marked by deliberate deceptiveness especially by pretending one set of feelings and acting under the influence of another; "she was a deceitful scheming little thing"- Israel Zangwill; "a double-dealing double agent"; "a double-faced infernal traitor and schemer"- W.M.Thackeray

Andrew McCarthy, at National Review Online, on the ports...

"Especially precious in this regard is Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s newfound passion for port security. Fresh from throwing in her lot with partisan efforts to derail the Patriot Act and frame the NSA’s surveillance of wartime enemy communications as a crime, the ’08 stars in Mrs. Clinton’s eyes have suddenly twinkled with a fond memory: namely, how her husband managed to win the 1992 election, in large part, by getting to the right of the first President Bush on what was that era’s great global menace — post-Tiananmen Square China. So here she is, trying to elbow her way to the right of the current Bush administration on the scourge of al Qaeda … and hoping the rest of us are struck by amnesia.
You may recall, however, that, upon election, President Clinton proceeded to get tough with Beijing for, oh, about ten minutes. After that, there was no transfer of precious technology and no national security secret that couldn’t be had for the right price. Oh, and guess who now controls several port operations on the West Coast? And has for years? Well, whaddya know? It’s China.
Indeed, Chinese infiltration of U.S. ports would have been even more pervasive if Senator Clinton’s husband had had his way. In 1998, the Republican Congress (led by Senator James Inhofe (OK) and Congressman Duncan Hunter (CA)) had to stop him from turning over management of a 144-acre terminal at the former U.S. Naval Station in Long Beach to the Chinese Ocean Shipping Company — a subsidiary of the People’s Liberation Army linked to arms trading to Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, Pakistan, Cuba, and even the street gangs of Los Angeles."

I have many of the same questions about whether it's a good idea, or not, to let the UAE run the company that manages the ports, and I guess I shouldn't be surprised that some folks suddenly get a wedgie over it, purely for what appears to be political expediency, but...

Iraq Civil War? Maybe not...

24 Steps to Liberty, a blogger in Baghdad thinks the cooperation between the Sunni's and the Shiites isn't getting the attention it should. He opens with,

"I was shocked today when I read the news in the foreign newspapers. No one emphasized the marvelous cooperation and solidarity between the Shiites and the Sunnis in Iraq yesterday after the bombing of one of the most respected and visited holy sites in Islam, the Askariyah shrine, which is in Samarra city north of Baghdad."

And then he ends with,

"All expect civil war in Iraq, which might happen although I don’t believe it would. Therefore, they want to contribute to the civil war’s first step. Shame on you all! Shame on the “free and honest” press!"

HT Hugh Hewitt

update: