Cinco De Mayo: Just Another Day In Mexico, Except in Puebla

That's right, friends. Cinco de Mayo in Mexico is a regional celebration of the victory over France at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. Outside the capital city and state of Puebla, today is pretty much just another Saturday. For Mexicans, the big national celebration is September 16, Independence Day.

In the United States, Cinco de Mayo is something else entirely. What originated in 1862 as a local celebration of the victory by Mexican gold miners in northern California has spread across the United States as a celebration of Mexican culture. Like many American holidays, official and otherwise, Cinco de Mayo has grown in popularity in recent decades due to heavy commercial promotion, especially by the alcoholic beverage industry.

Whatever the reason for its popularity, it's a great time to enjoy a small portion of the rich Mexican cultural  contribution to the American experience:

A Species Of Insanity

The writers at Powerline are wonderful with words, so on point, just enough copy, faultless logic, and a nice diversity of interesting topics, among other positives. Today, John Hinderaker writes about how Iran, as a newly "elected" member of the UN Commission on Women's Rights, has faced the stoning sentence of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani. If anything can drive a stake through the heart of multiculturalism, this post and its link should do it.

"From Every Kind Of Man Obedience I Expect ...."

By protocol, American presidents don't bow to heads of state, but the message still hasn't reached Obama, as the picture below shows.














Yesterday's bow to Japan's Emperor Akihito elicited this response from Scott Johnson at Powerline:

Obama's breach of protocol is of a piece with his foreign policy. He means to teach Americans to bow before monarchs and tyrants. He embodies the ideological multiculturalism that sets the United States on the same plane as other regimes based on tribal privilege and royal bloodlines. He gives expressive form to the idea that the United States now willingly prostrates itself before the rest of the world. He declares that the United States is a country like any other, only worse, because we have so much for which to apologize.

Read the whole thing here.

Title courtesy of W.S. Gilbert, from The Mikado

Multi-Culti Political Correctness And Our "Don't Ask, Don't Kill" Policy In The Military

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley blames the Fort Hood assault on our love of guns. President Obama says it's a matter of cracking over stress. The state-run media talking heads provide deep cover for the counter intuitive blather from the leftists about the "alleged" gunman, the "suspect" Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a "purported" Muslim.

Thanks to the British journalists, we're getting an ever clearer picture that this event was closely linked to radical Islam. Unfortunately, our love of multiculturalism and political correctness has prevented us from seeing what has become a dangerous reality. That this policy infects our military has likely led to the killing and wounding of fifty American soldiers and civilians inside a domestic military base. Even policies have tipping points, and I believe we're rapidly approaching one that will realign our thinking about the PC insanity swirling about us. Perhaps most of us could have lived reasonably with "Don't ask, don't tell," but there is no way we can tolerate "Don't ask, don't kill." For more on the Fort Hood story, read this at Blue Crab Boulevard, this and this at Gateway Pundit, and this from Victor Davis Hanson at NRO.

Will Scandinavia Be Next?

We've established here in this blog that meanings reside in people. For the most part, we share our perceptions and meanings in terms of common understanding. Sometimes, those meanings both define and confine people into the narrow corridors of obsession and paranoia. Unfortunately, threats to the self can translate into national illness, especially when we stray from reason into the netherworld of political correctness and multiculturalism. Here is a classic example from Penn State of what happens when reason is no longer part of the intellectual equation.

The Internet is full of this story. My source: Moonbattery

Who Is Victor Davis Hanson And What Does He Know?

This is a few days old, but it's a priceless - could say timeless - demonstration of how little the Obama White House knows about history. Western, eastern, American, whatever, the ignorance is profound. Forty years of turning history into social studies and injecting it with multiculturalism and political correctness has brought us to this sad and potentially dangerous situation.

If Victor Davis Hanson is new to you, go here for a profile.

A Short Trip

Have some chilling laughs today by checking out Diversity Lane, the product of artist/cartoonist Zack Rawsthorne. Love the music on the homepage; perfect for the lefty mindset.

I'm so happy only one of my distant neighbors has a serious infection of "progressive" thinking.






















Just a mild sample of Rawsthorne at work.