Show horses and work horses

Sen. Trent Lott (r-Miss) has the gift of gab. When he was leader of the Senate a reporter asked him why some Senators were on TV so much more than other Senators. He said the Senate has show horses and work horses. The work horses are off camera getting the people's work done. Senator Lott has that 'gentlemanly' southern accent and expression that is pleasant to the ear. He also is outspoken and candid...rare qualities in Washington. That and a moment of poor judgement at Strom Thurmond's retirement party cost him his Senate leader job.

In my career in the civil service I knew some "show horses" who looked good and sounded good in meetings but did not do the hard work and never got their hands dirty. They got promoted to management.

U.S. Senator Trent Lott

Dilbert cartoons featuring Wally

Wally is such a worthless employee he is funny. I knew some like Wally in my civil service career...it was not funny in real life.

It's a Muslim Problem, It Needs a Muslim Solution

Thomas Friedman is a Pulitzer prize author and columnist for the New York Times. He has shown insight into the Muslim terrorist problem. Here are some excerpts from his columns:

"Why are young Sunni Muslim males, from London to Riyadh and Bali to Baghdad, so willing to blow up themselves and others in the name of their religion? Virtually all suicide bombers, of late, have been Sunni Muslims. There are a lot of angry people in the world. Angry Mexicans. Angry Africans. Angry Norwegans. But the only ones who seem to feel entitled and motivated to kill themselves and totally innocent people, including other Muslims, over their anger are young Sunni radicals. What is going on?

Neither we nor the Muslim world can run away from this question any longer. This is especially true when it comes to people like Muhammad Bouyeri - a Dutch citizen of Moroccan origin who last year tracked down the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, a critic of Islamic intolerance, on an Amsterdam street, shot him 15 times and slit his throat with a butcher knife. He told a Dutch court on the final day of his trial on Tuesday: "I take complete responsibility for my actions. I acted purely in the name of my religion."

It is hard not to notice two contrasting stories that have run side by side during the past week. One is the story about the violent protests in the Muslim world triggered by a report in Newsweek (which the magazine has now retracted) that U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo Bay desecrated a Koran by throwing it into a toilet. In Afghanistan alone, at least 16 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in anti-American rioting that has been linked to that report. In the same newspapers one can read the latest reports from Iraq, where Baathist and jihadist suicide bombers have killed 400 Iraqi Muslims in the past month - most of them Shiite and Kurdish civilians shopping in markets, walking in funerals, going to mosques or volunteering to join the police.

Yet these mass murders - this desecration and dismemberment of real Muslims by other Muslims - have not prompted a single protest march anywhere in the Muslim world. And I have not read of a single fatwa issued by any Muslim cleric outside Iraq condemning these indiscriminate mass murders of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds by these jihadist suicide bombers, many of whom, according to a Washington Post report, are coming from Saudi Arabia. The Muslim worldÂ’s silence about the real desecration of Iraqis, coupled with its outrage over the alleged desecration of a Koran, highlights what we are up against...

Religiously, if you want to know how the Sunni Arab world views a ShiiteÂ’s being elected leader of Iraq, for the first time ever, think about how whites in Alabama would have felt about a black governorÂ’s being installed there in 1920. Some Sunnis do not think Shiites are authentic Muslims, and are indifferent to their brutalization. At the same time, politically speaking, some Arab regimes prefer to see the pot boiling in Iraq so the democratization process can never spread to their countries. That's why their official newspapers rarely describe the murders of civilians in Iraq as a massacre or acts of terror. Such crimes are usually sanitized as 'resistance' to occupation.

It is essential that the Muslim world wake up to the fact that it has a jihadist death cult in its midst. If it does not fight that death cult, that cancer, within its own body politic, it is going to infect Muslim-Western relations everywhere. Only the Muslim world can root out that death cult. It takes a village. What do I mean? I mean that the greatest restraint on human behavior is never a policeman or a border guard. The greatest restraint on human behavior is what a culture and a religion deem shameful. It is what the village and its religious and political elders say is wrong or not allowed. The Muslim village has been derelict in condemning the madness of jihadist attacks. When Salman Rushdie wrote a controversial novel involving the prophet Muhammad, he was sentenced to death by the leader of Iran. To this day - to this day - no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden.

Some Muslim leaders have taken up this challenge. This past week in Jordan, King Abdullah II hosted an impressive conference in Amman for moderate Muslim thinkers and clerics who want to take back their faith from those who have tried to hijack it. But this has to go further and wider. The double-decker buses of London and the subways of Paris, as well as the covered markets of Riyadh, Bali and Cairo, will never be secure as long as the Muslim village and elders do not take on, delegitimize, condemn and isolate the extremists in their midst. "

Note from Bill: There are many local and satalite TV stations in the Muslim world that stream constant propaganda that demonizes America, Israel and the non-Muslim world. Terrorist activities are overlsanitizedsanatised. Film of Americans arresting Iraqis will be shown over and over with angry commentary but innocent victims of car bombs are ignored. The Muslim public is taken in by this and the Clerics add their own lies and inflammatory rhetoric. The result is a lot of misinformed, angry people.

Muslims killing Muslims

3/25/2004 7:34 AM
Muslims: (letter to H-T)
Radical clerics have hijacked the Islamic movement worldwide and are turning their followers into murderers. Muslims are killing Hindus in India, Jews in Israel and murdering Christians all over the Middle East. These sinister Emirs preach death and destruction to the infidels (non-Muslims). The Nazis exterminated people based on race. The Communists murdered millions based on their supposed class. Now, the Emir’s are urging genocide for all people who have the wrong religion. For the (male) suicide bombers, the Emirs promise martyrdom in heaven with 72 virgins. This thinking is primitive, superstitious claptrap that should have been left behind in the middle ages. Where are the moderate Muslims? Why are they silent? Why have there been no letters in the H-T on this subject from Muslims.?

Aid to Africa...Who gets it?

Robert Mugabe is the dictator of Zimbabwe. He has ruined the country's economy and looted it for himself and his supporters. Africa has many of the most corrupt governments in the world. Nigeria is notorious for total corruption of all public services.

A reporter observed this:
On a hot, dusty road a convoy of three black Mercedes luxury cars throw up a cloud of dust onto people walking who have no transportation. The government offfcials in the cars are part of the corrupt clique that rules the country. The people on the road refer to their government as "the men of the Mercedes".

The Chinese Invasion

Interesting article on Chinese imports.
The Chinese Invasion