The Oasis for
Rational Conservatives

Monday, February 16, 2026

Member Menu

The Amazon's Pantanal

Serengeti Birthing Safari

Wheeler Expeditions

Member Discussions

Article Archives

Archives

L i k e U s ! ! !

FROM TINY SEAPORT TO WORLD FINANCIAL GIANT


Hong Kong.  How did this small city-state of 7.3 million people go from having a per-capita income of only a few hundred dollars per year to a per capita income that is equal to that of the United States in only 50 years?

Hong Kong became a British colony in 1842, and the adjacent "New Territories" were leased for 99 years in 1898. In 1997, Hong Kong was returned by the British to China, with an agreement that it would become a Special Administrative Region (SAR) -- "one country, two systems."

Hong Kong retained the British legal system, most individual liberties, and a high degree of local autonomy, except for foreign policy and defense. The amount of democracy has been limited -- with the British serving as the ideal benevolent dictator and the Chinese as a somewhat less benevolent dictator for the past 17 years.

Hong Kong is about as close to the ideal free-market capitalist model that you can find on the planet -- which came about largely by accident.

Read more...

PUTIN IS A BRUTE WHO MUST BE SHACKLED


ramirez_bloody_hands.png

News of the destruction of Flight MH17 and the appalling murder of 298 people gave Russia's president Vladimir Putin a chance to step back from a precipice.

He could have stood up before the world and denounced the crime; endorsed a full investigation and punishment of the guilty.

Instead - yet almost inevitably, given the nature of the man - he presented his stone face. He asserted, against all logic and evidence, that Ukraine and its rulers were the guilty parties.

He lied, as he has lied all his life since he was first schooled in deceit and brutality by those masters of the art, his old employers at the KGB.

Putin probably felt that no path was open to him save denial, because the facts point blame for this huge tragedy squarely at the Kremlin.

Putin has acted throughout his tenure of power on the assumption that European leaders are marshmallows, to be defied with impunity.

It is time, and beyond time, to prove him wrong.

Read more...

THE POGO PRESIDENCY


Ever hear of a guy named Walt Kelly?  He was born in Philly in 1913, moved to California in the 30s to draw Donald Duck cartoons for Walt Disney, and started his own newspaper comic strip in 1949.  It featured anthropomorphic animals in Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp, with the main character named Ponce de Leon Montgomery County Alabama Georgia Beauregard Possum - a dig at the South's pretentious aristocracy.

Kelly titled his comic strip after Ponce's nickname - Pogo.  If you grew up in the 50s or 60s, you grew up with Pogo, along with an innumerable cast of lovable animal characters (there were almost 1,000 over the years), all poking gentle fun at the human condition.  In 1971, two years before his death from diabetes, he published the cartoon for which he is best known.

pogo.png
This is more frighteningly relevant today than 42 years ago - and the "us" is all of us.  There are varying degrees of complicity.  At the top, of course, is an Anti-American President who hates his own country. 

Zero is an affirmative action baby, handed everything on a platter without earning it because of his race and made-up bio.  He's our #1 security threat because he doesn't want to defend us, and worse, doesn't know how if he did want to.  Bad combo.

Which bring us to the real security threat beyond our shores.  It isn't Russia, with its one-trick pony economy that can't even get itself above water with oil at $100 a barrel.  Putin is all bare-chested bluster, all hat and no cattle.  No, the real foreign threat we face is China.

I've been going to China since 1979, and as you know, just got back from there again last week.  Here are three pictures of the spectacular places we visited that I took with my Panasonic DMC-TZ5 compact camera.  There is a particular reason for me to show them to you.

Read more...

YOU HAVE TWO YEARS TO LIVE


[This letter is in lieu of the Half-Full Report this week, as the HFR glass today is totally empty. I'd like to encourage all TTPers to both email and fax a printed copy of this letter to the District Office of any nearby GOP Congressman or Congressman-elect, and ask any patriotic friend of theirs to do the same.]

An Open Letter to the Incoming Republican House Members of the 113th Congress

Dear GOP House Members and Members-Elect -

Congratulations to you all for surviving the absurd calamity of November 6th.  You need to know what's in store for you.

To put it bluntly, you have two years to live.  Politically live as the House Majority, that is.  You are going to be demonized and destroyed by the Chicago Gangsters who run the White House and the presstitutes of the CorruptMedia.  Your chances of retaining your majority in 2014 are 0%.

The question is:  what are you going to do with these two years?  Realize that the political outcome will be the same no matter what you do.  While many of you may individually survive and be reelected in 2014, collectively your majority will be gone and you'll all be just minority schmucks.

So if you plan to cringe, compromise, and cooperate with the gangsters just to be reelected as a minority schmuck, why not just quit now, resign and collect your pension - rather than continue a charade in order to keep your perks of power for a little while longer, and all that while you'll have to look into the mirror every morning and see a coward?

Why not, then, see someone of courage in that mirror instead?  There is a power that only you - a majority of members of the House - have that neither the Senate, the President nor any of his agencies, nor even the Supreme Court has.  If you choose to exercise it, you will be feared and respected, instead of being Obama's poodles. 

But far more importantly, you will have done your patriotic duty to protect your country from the lethal damage Obama is poised to inflict upon it. 

Read more...

WHAT DO YOU WANT?


(Note: next week's Teleclass will be closed on Sunday this weekend, sign up now to hold your spot)

Sometimes we can have a sense that things aren't working well, or we'd like something to be different in our lives, and we can try to take steps to change.  But without an idea of what isn't working well, what we'd like to have different, or what we would like to change, we can end up wandering aimlessly through life. That's what I'd like to help you to avoid today.

There are three questions that I'd like you to consider :

Read more...

MOOSE SHOOTIN’ MAMA


Country singer Pat Garrett has the hit song of the year.  It is can't-sit-down, gotta-get-up-and-boogie, real deal rock and roll.  And while you're jumping and dancing for joy, tears will also be streaming down your face from the beauty and truth of the lyrics.

For it is a tribute to America's Sweetheart, the woman who is destroying the Left's stranglehold on our culture, who will give us our country back so that America can be America again:  Sarah Palin.

Liberals can eat their hearts out while we dance our hearts out to Moose Shootin' Mama.  Be sure and crank up the volume.

{youtube}xZcdTI53mLA{/youtube}

Read more...

MODOGGIES: THE LATEST MOSLEM FREAK-OUT


The latest event in what is surely one of the world's most fun sports - Moslem Enragement - is the Modoggy Cartoon Contest taking place in Sweden.

It started out so innocently.  A group of Swedish artists in the small town of Tällberg decided to hold an exhibition entitled "The Dog in Art," and invited submissions.  A famous (and famously eccentric and mischievous) artist, Lars Vilks, exhibited a large cartoon drawing entitled "Mohammed as a Rondell Dog."

A Rondell Dog or Rondellhund has been a harmless art form in Sweden for the last several years.  Anonymous artists have set up plywood or plastic sculptures of dogs in traffic circle roundabouts (rondells) throughout the country.  Here's a typical one:

modoggy-r

So Vilks puts up this cartoon sketch:

modoggy

Read more...

THE INVISIBLE HOSTAGE CRISIS IN IRAN


Rarely have so many journalists, politicians and commentators so totally missed a headline. There are now five American hostages in Iran.

Each case has been largely treated by itself, almost as if it were an oddity, something requiring a special explanation, instead of another piece in a luminously clear pattern whose meaning should be intuitively obvious to us all.

Iranian and Iranian-supported terrorists have been trying unsuccessfully to capture armed Americans in Iraq for some time (a hostage-taking operation failed last September, for example), but they found that the Americans fought back.

They have now snatched unarmed Americans within Iranian borders.  The five American hostages are:

Read more...

GEEK HUMOR

I was sitting at Aroma Café this morning when another geek sat at the table next to me and booted up his laptop.  A woman, also a regular with a laptop, sat nearby, and another customer made a joke about Aroma becoming an internet café.

The three of us traded a few geek jokes.  There are so many funny computer stories and anecdotes out there, it's a wonder some headliner comedian/comedienne hasn't come up with a related routine.

Something like - "Did you hear the one about the computer programmer who gets shipwrecked on a desert island with a gorgeous blonde?

Read more...

STALIN, MOHAMMED, AND OBAMA


Pundits agonize over President Obama's resistance to calling Islamist terror "Islamist terror." How can he not see the obvious? How can he ignore the overwhelming and ever-increasing evidence?

How can he insist that his subordinates continue their buffoonish insistence that Islamist terror has nothing to do with Islam and that they-secularized Christians and non-observant Jews-know Islam's character better than Moslems themselves?

It's easy. President Obama and his commissars fit the longstanding pattern of behavior (insistence, denial, castigation) that the hard left has embraced for generations.  Just as Obama's ideological predecessors could never criticize Stalin, so their successors today can never cricize Mohammed.

Read more...

HALF-FULL REPORT 10/17/14


Lots of uplifting news this week, but first a trio of questions.  Are you a big fan of Eric Holder?  No?  Well, how would you like an Eric Holder on steroids?  No again?   Lastly, why is Sarah Palin answering Yes! to these questions instead?

Because that's precisely what she is doing in Louisiana. 

Zero intends to nominate Tom Perez, a racist fascist far worse than Holder for AG, should the Pubs fail to win the Senate.  And that's just for starters.  Harry Reid running the Senate for the next two years will allow Zero to run completely amok.

Yet Sarah, rather than telling the Louisiana Spoiler - Rob Maness - to stand up like a man for his country and bow out, has doubled down on her support for him.  This is ludicrously mistaken and here's why....

Elsewhere, things are looking pretty good.  This week has seen an amazing number of October Surprises - all of which have screwed Zero and the Dems.  Bad Karma has finally caught up with them.

*In Texas, hero-to-baby-killers Wendy Davis drove her gubernatorial campaign straight off a cliff with her wheelchair attack ad on Greg Abbott.  After a deluge of disgust, she doubled-down with her ridicule.  Abbott was already ahead by 14 points before Wendy's hara-kiri ads.  Wendy gives the term "politics of personal destruction" a new meaning.  Here are more examples...

Yet all of that is merely the tip of the Bad News Iceberg for the Dems this week.  Beneath that tip is...

Read more...

THE POLITICAL CLASS IS DETERMINED TO MAKE OUR ECONOMY WORSE


Do you think government has grown or contracted during the past seven years?

If you listen to the political class and many of their lackeys in the news media, you would think there have been massive cuts in government spending. The truth is the opposite both in the United States and Europe.

According to Keynesian orthodoxy, the massive government spending binge of 2009 was supposed to result in a rapid recovery, high growth (the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration had predicted several years of approximately 4 percent growth in the U.S.), and big increases in employment. It didn't happen.

The Democrat Party and one of its gurus, New York Times economist Paul Krugman, blames the poor result on the "stimulus" being too small.  One little problem for the Krugman crowd is...

Read more...

RUSSIA MUST END THIS WAR


ramirez_good_cop_pathetic_cop.png

[This is the statement of US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power delivered to the UN Security Council on Friday, July 18]


Yesterday, we were all shocked by the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17. All 298 people aboard - 283 passengers and 15 crew - were killed. As we stared at the passenger list yesterday we saw next to three of the passengers names a capital "I." As we now know, the letter "I" stands for infant.

To the families and friends of the victims, it is impossible to find words to express our condolences. We can only commit to you that we will not rest until we find out what happened. A full, credible, and unimpeded international investigation must begin immediately. The perpetrators must be brought to justice. They must not be sheltered by any member state of the United Nations.

Let me share with you our assessment of the evidence so far.

Read more...

FROM THE BEST TO THE WORST IN ONE GENERATION


103 years ago on this day, February 6, 2014, Ronald Reagan was born.

I wish I had the capacity to describe adequately what it was like being in Ronald Reagan's presence. I have met many extraordinary people in my life, from Hollywood's most famous stars to presidents of countries.  But Ronald Reagan had a magic that was unique to him alone.

There was a depth of character to his charisma that seemed bottomless. There was a solidity of integrity and humanity behind the dazzling charm that was matchless. You loved Ronald Reagan for his ideals and his complete fearlessness in advocating them - and you loved Ronald Reagan for the man, the human being, he was.

On March 30, 1961, as a spokesman for General Electric and well before he entered politics, he gave a speech to the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, which he entitled "Encroaching Control."  In it, he delivered one of his most famous quotes:

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it and then hand it to them with the well thought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free.

It is one thing to read these words.  It is another to listen to him actually say them:

{youtube}SDouNtnR_IA{/youtube}

The power of his voice makes you cry, doesn't it?  Because his words have so devastatingly come true. 

Read more...

WHERE’S THE F-WORD?


Conservatives quite rightly denounce our culture's continual descent into degradation.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the crudity of public discourse.  The omnipresence of four-letter words in music, movies, books, magazines, websites, cable television, and every other form of public and private discourse is inescapable. 

Today, we learned that our current President of the United States has sunk to such a level of complete lack of class that he not only described his opponent, Mitt Romney, with gutter language, he put it in the mouth of a six-year old girl.

We'll have a president with class soon, for whom gutter language is anathema.   Note that the New York Times pokes fun at this, and dreams of dragging Mr. Romney "linguistically into the 21st century."  No, sorry, libs, Romney is going to drag America's culture back into decency.

However, there is a four-letter word that Mitt refused to utter in his debates with Zero, and it is a real shame he didn't, especially in the third debate last Monday (10/22) when it would have been particularly apt.   It is the F-word as it applies to Zero's presidency in general and his foreign policy specifically.  That word is...

Read more...