June 12th, 2007


Some things never lose their impact

I was reminded by Hugh Hewitt and Joel Rosenberg that today is the twentieth anniversary of Ronald Reagan's speech at the Berlin Wall. Hearing it all over again on Hewitt's show yesterday was like being 27 again and knowing, as if you could see the dawn breaking in the eastern sky, that we had won, that the Cold War was coming to a close and it was just a matter of time before it was all over.
Collapse )
A little over two years later, the East German government gave up trying to stop people fleeing to the West through Czechosolvakia, and the Minister of Propaganda accidentally "brought down the Wall" on November 9 by announcing unrestricted direct travel to the West. People flooded the crossing points, and nobody in the GDR regime was willing to use deadly force to stop them. Over the following days and weeks, Mauerspechte ("Wall woodpeckers") brought sledgehammers and began to chip away at the Wall, demolishing long sections of it, and the East German military began demolition of the Wall in June 1990. They eventually finished the job as members of the Bundeswehr in November 1991, thirteen months after the formal reunification of Germany.

It's hard to explain to people, that surge of emotion on hearing that speech again and the flood of memories that it sparks in me. Maybe that's part of getting old.

an awkward start to the morning

I probably should have gone out to do laundry last night, but EVE ate my brain. :(
With any luck, the programming meeting tonight will end early enough to give me time to race home, grab my dirty laundry, and hit the laundromat before the doors lock.
Collapse )
Get the message

Cobb on immigration

And all any of the Republican candidates needs to promise right now (meaning any of them but McCain), is that the first order of business when they get to the White House will be to build the goddamned fence. DHS is fast losing credibility on the issue because exactly 11 miles have been built out of 850. 150 miles are promised by December, but the land hasn't even been purchased yet. This is bullcrap of the highest order and everybody knows it.
As the NRO said a month ago, the conservatives have gone from 'trust but verify' to 'verify' on immigration law. That movement is not going away.
The second thing the new president has to promise is a pardon for Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean. And the third thing he needs to do is deport all illegal alien convicts. Patterico has the details.

As Laura Ingraham said this morning, passing a new law when you haven't bothered to enforce the ones already on the books is stupid and counterproductive. Get the damn wall built, put a few brigades of (armed) National Guard grunts on it, and let's turn this mother out. At this point nobody much cares about W's legacy but W, but everybody cares about fixing this extremely broken situation.

i r moron

What good is having a $300 PDA if you can't even use the damn thing to keep your schedule straight? For some damn reason I got it stuck in my head that the programming meeting was tonight. It's actually tomorrow night. Just like it says on my TX. *bangs head on table*

Well, at least I won't have any problem getting the laundry and the kitchen cleanup done.
*packs up laptop and heads home*