Wright - Moyer Love Fest

I forced myself to watch the Wright-Moyer¹ love fest last night on PBS. Here's the transcript. Knowing Moyer, and his talent for partisan obfuscation, I didn't expect much. My expectations were not exceeded.

If the purpose of this interview was to rehabilitate Pastor Wright for those whose only knowledge of him was based on "snippets" of his sermons "run in an endless loop," the interview failed.

Here's the Moyer-Wright argument, in a nutshell:

1. Pastor Wright is a good guy, and really smart.²

2. The "snippets" were taken out of context.

3. And besides, you wouldn't understand them anyway.³

When I first heard the audio of Pastor Wright's vitriolic sermons, the first thing I thought was "this guy shouts like a fascist." If you've ever heard recordings of Hitler or Mussolini at the crescendo of an oration, the tone is eerily similar.

I've since heard the context, and not only do I understand what he was trying to say, it's no different in context than it is out of context. The man is full of hate. Just because you can construct an elaborate argument to justify your hatred doesn't mean you don't hate.

I don't mean to equate Pastor Wright with Hitler or Mussolini, but their methods of proselytization are similar. It boils down to this: Out there you're a victim; in here you're safe because I will tell you the truth.

Many people naturally want to hear that they're victims, because it explains life's inherent unfairness in a way that relieves them of any responsibility. And many people are naturally attracted to conspiracy theories out of ego-gratification. I know the "truth" -- you believe the "lies." Therefore I'm smart and you're a fool. That's all it is.

So what if Wright's ministry did good work in the community? So does my church, and without all the race-baiting hate speech. It is possible to preach the gospel without dividing people into us and them. But perhaps not as profitable.

One passage from the interview stood out for its absurdity.

[A]fter every revolution, the winners of that revolution write down what the revolution was about so that their children can learn it, whether it's true or not. They don't learn anything at all about the Arawak, they don't learn anything at all about the Seminole, the Cheek-Trail of Tears, the Cherokee. They don't learn anything. No, they don't learn that. What they learn is 1776, Crispus Attucks was the one black guy in there. Fight against the British, the- terrible. "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal while we're holding slaves." No, keep that part out. They learn that. And they cling to that. And when you start trying to show them you only got a piece of the story, and lemme show you the rest of the story, you run into vitriolic hatred because you're desecrating our myth. You're desecrating what we hold sacred. And when you're holding sacred is a miseducational system that has not taught you the truth.

I don't know what schools Pastor Wright went to, but I was taught all that stuff in every single history class I ever had. In a good number of law school classes too. Pastor Wright, if he knew what he was talking about, should have no problem with the history curriculum of today's students.⁴ In that sense, Obama was right when he said that Wright's profound mistake was thinking that America hadn't changed. We have changed, and we can do even better.

In his Farewell Address, Ronald Reagan addressed the same question, with a very different take, and one that I think is superior and unifying in contrast to Wright's divisiveness.

But now, we're about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren't sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven't reinstitutionalized it. We've got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom -- freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It's fragile; it needs protection.

. . .

And let me offer lesson number one about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven't been teaching you what it means to be an American, let 'em know and nail 'em on it. That would be a very American thing to do

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1. I know there's supposed to be an "s." I omit the "s" because that's what LBJ did.

2. See, he uses the word "hermeneutic" in a sentence to show how smart he is. Even Bill Moyer doesn't know that word, which proves how smart the Pastor really is.

3. Wright said, "The persons who have heard the entire sermon understand the communication perfectly." Again, he divides people into us and them. If you were there, you understand and presumably agree. If you disagree, well, you weren't there so you couldn't possibly understand and you're opinion has no value. Interestingly, Obama would have it both ways. He agreed, but only with the stuff he heard when he was there. He disagreed, but only with the stuff he didn't hear because he wasn't there.

4. A recent poll of 2000 High school students asked them to name the top ten "most famous Americans." The top three were: Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman. Oprah Winfrey came in 7th. And check this out, "when the researchers polled 2,000 adults in a different survey, their lists were nearly identical."

It's The Slickness, Stupid

Hugh Hewitt asks:

Given all the hits Huckabee has taken in the last four days, the question becomes: Where will the folks who drop him move their allegiances?

That's a funny question to ask, because I can think of several more appropriate questions at this stage of the game. For instance:

1. How can Romney fans expect their guy to win the nomination, let alone the general election, when he's going backwards in the polls? In what possible spin universe is a slip from third to fifth in the national polling a good sign for the Romney campaign?

2. Why should I believe that Romney will catch fire once America gets to know him when three weeks ago nobody knew who Huckabee was and they both used the same forum to introduce themselves to us, i.e. the debates? Isn't it time to admit that Romney just isn't able to sell himself to Republicans?

3. If Romney can't sell himself to Republicans, even with the right message, how can we expect him to win the middle third of voters, the independents, whose votes win and lose elections?

4. How is it that Romney, the management genius, can spend so much time and money in Iowa and yet be in a statistical tie with a guy who's spent next to nothing, whose campaign team is supposedly third rate, and who's supposedly not even a real conservative?

5. When will Romney fans stop crying about "religious bigotry" and admit the real reason Romney is such a dud: The Slick Factor?

Romney is in trouble. And no, I don't believe religious bigotry has anything to do with his apparent collapse. Sure, there's people out there who won't vote for a Mormon just because he's a Mormon, but I can't believe they're more than a handful. I certainly haven't met any. I have much more faith in the goodness and good sense of the majority of Republican voters than those who are so quick to ignore Romney's obvious lack of appeal and pin the blame on some non-existent anti-Mormon hysteria.

If Romney still aspires to be anything beyond a one term governor he's going to have to do more than tell us his views on "religious liberty." I don't really care about his opinion on that subject. What I care about is this: can Romney present himself as anything other than the consultant robot he's been in every debate I've seen so far.

We know Romney can buy and sell corporations. Can he sell himself? So far the answer has been a definite no. He says the right things, he's right on the issues, but nobody's buying it. Like Hillary, he's got a perception problem. But unlike Hillary there are still a lot of people, like myself, who are open to being convinced. Romney just needs to figure out how to sound genuine, instead of an overly focus-grouped consultant's idea of what a conservative candidate should sound like.

It's important that Romney figure this out, and soon, because he may just be our only hope. As much as I love Rudy, I have serious doubts about his electability, because there are just too many vulnerabilities in his past. And I'm sure Hillary's team has already mapped out their narrative against Rudy for next fall. They'll leak a scandal a week to their buddies at the New York Times and CNN. It won't matter if the scandals are real or imagined, as long as they reinforce the narrative they will have created. Tough as Rudy is, I don't know if he can survive the onslaught that's waiting for him.

Romney's squeaky clean image, in theory, should immunize him from any Clintonian Swift Boat strategy. Hopefully Romney can learn how to fight back against the Hillary machine without committing the Lazio error, and without curling up into a ball like he did when McCain dressed him down the other night. But the most important thing Romney needs to do is figure out how to make himself likable, and he needs to do that now.

More On The Debate

All the buzz this morning on talk radio and the blogs is about the planted questioners from last night's debate. I'm not as outraged at the individual questions — a question is a question — as I am at the fact that they were all designed to perpetuate a Democratic stereotype of Republicans and conservatives. And not only that, since the planted questioners all came from the activist left, yet were only identified by CNN as ordinary citizens, they gave the false impression that ordinary Americans are united against conservative principles. That's simply not true; eight years of Republican presidency prove that it is not.

Questions designed to place the candidates on the defensive have their place, but such questions are fundamentally unfair when the background of the questioner is hidden, and especially when the same tactic is not used against the Democrats in their own debates. Bryan at Hot Air said it:

Last time, the debate was for Democrats and the plants were all Democrats. This time, the debate was for Republicans…but the plants were still all Democrats.

YouTube Debacle

First off, I pray that the candidates of both parties have the guts never to allow this format ever again. But I know they won't. The format is worse than a joke, it's destructive. Just look at the type of people asking the questions and ask yourself how many people you know in your everyday life who are that weird.

Somebody at CNN chose these questions and that person was not a friend of the Republican party or conservatives in general. It seemed many of the questons were specifically chosen to portray conservatives in a bad light. I certainly saw nothing like that during the Democratic YouTube debate. But not only that, there were too many irrelevant and undignified moments. There is no excuse for Yankees/Red Sox questions or confederate flag questions or questions about biblical inerrancy in a presidential debate during wartime. That said, I do have some impressions of how the candidates did.

I've been a Romney skeptic since I first began hearing about him. It's not that I'm dead set against him, I just want the guy to prove himself to me. I've listened closely to him and he fails to sell himself every time. Up until now I've had trouble putting my finger on why. But tonight I realized that the man just doesn't come across genuine. Every time he gets a hard question he dodges it by saying he'll consult the appropriate people when he's president. I know that's what presidents do, they consult advisers, but when I hear a candidate say it I have to wonder if he has any core beliefs that he can draw upon.

The most famous example of this Romney dodge was when he said he'd consult "the lawyers" before deciding if he would get congressional approval before responding militarily. Just about the worst thing he could have said. Tonight Romney did it twice. On the torture question he said he'd consult McCain, but McCain would have none of it. And looking at Romney's face, I could tell he was embarrassed. I disagree with McCain on the torture issue, but I loved the way he called Romney out on his Hillaryesque refusal to commit to anything. The third time Romney played the "I'll consult" card was on the "don't ask don't tell" question, and it drew boos.

I'm still willing to be persuaded by Romney, because I'm afraid he might be the only winning option against Hillary. But he's not convincing me to feel good about that. The one thing I like about Giuliani the most is that when he says something I can feel his conviction. And that's exactly what Romney is lacking. To my ears, Romney seems passionless and convictionless, even while he's saying the right things. I know it's a perception problem, and maybe I should listen more to what he says rather than how he says it. But a perception problem is an electability problem too. So there's your reason Romney's way behind in the national polls. I'm not the only one who has trouble believing in him.

Regarding the other candidates, I thought Thompson did really well. And I'm the biggest Thompson basher out there. I wish Anderson Cooper had granted him the amount of time his second place position deserved. I'm willing to be convinced by Thompson too, though running him against Hillary would be 1996 all over again.

Giuliani was Giuliani. I know his story, I like him, I don't think he hurt himself tonight. In contrast to Romney citing Bill Cosby, Giuliani's answer to the black on black violence question was spot on. Giuliani reduced black on black violence by reducing violent crime, drastically. Even Romney had to admit that Rudy got results.

Paul has no business being in these debates. He's not a Republican and he's only a distraction who wastes minutes that should go to the real candidates. Everybody knows that, but the media hates Republicans so much I wouldn't be surprised if they invited Paul to participate in the general election debates.

Huckabee's answer on the Bible question was excellent, but he is a preacher.* I'm still leaning Huckabee, but the guy who really rose in my opinion was Duncan Hunter. He's good on all my issues as far as I could tell. No chance to win, but he may be the most solid conservative on the stage. McCain, as always, was great on Iraq and the War on Terror. I'm glad he reminded people that he was the only one who was right on Rumsfeld and the new Petraeus strategy. Tancredo was bumbling and innefectual, as always.

Did anybody miss Brownback, Gilmore or Tommy Thompson? I didn't.

Update: Iowa and Florida Polling shows Huckabee the clear winner.

Also, some good stuff at The Scratching Post, including shoes!
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* Giuliani's rambling answer came close to an approximation of liberal Catholic doctrine as I was taught by Jesuits. The actual Catholic doctrine is codified in the Catechism as follows:

The inspired books teach the truth. "Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures."

Still, the Christian faith is not a "religion of the book." Christianity is the religion of the "Word" of God, a word which is "not a written and mute word, but the Word which is incarnate and living". If the Scriptures are not to remain a dead letter, Christ, the eternal Word of the living God, must, through the Holy Spirit, "open [our] minds to understand the Scriptures."
[emphasis added]

But I prefer St. Augustine's answer :

For I confess to your Charity that I have learned to yield this respect and honour only to the canonical books of Scripture: of these alone do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error. And if in these writings I am perplexed by anything which appears to me opposed to truth, I do not hesitate to suppose that either the manuscript is faulty, or the translator has not caught the meaning of what was said, or I myself have failed to understand it.

wwmrd?

The new bumper sticker for people who can't go five friggin' minutes without pimpin' their third place guy.

Who's Next?

Gigantic rock concerts are good for hearing crappy live renditions of old songs, seeing the backs of a lot of people's heads, getting wasted and dehydrated, and later on wearing a t-shirt so you can say how fun it all was.

But if they couldn't even get Kerry elected, how can they be expected to save the world?

Daltrey and Geldof, veterans of just about every big charity concert in history, apparently believe as I do.

THE WHO's ROGER DALTRY has blasted the big Wembley gig Gore is organising to raise awareness of global warming.

The huge concert - which features performances from the likes of MADONNA and RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS - is taking place at Wembley on July 7 and in other countries around the world.

But Roger, who played with U2 at Live Aid and Live8, reckons the whole thing is a waste of time.

Speaking exclusively to Bizarre, Roger said: "Bo***cks to that! The last thing the planet needs is a rock concert.

"I can't believe it. Let's burn even more fuel.

"We have problems with global warming, but the questions and the answers are so huge I don't know what a rock concert's ever going to do to help.

"Everybody on this planet at the moment, unless they are living in the deepest rainforest in Brazil, knows about climate change.”

The rocker, who used to sing about my g-generation, added: "My answer is to burn all the f***ing oil as quick as possible and then the politicians will have to find a solution.”

Actually, that last one is a brilliant idea. In a sense, that's why I no longer complain about high gas prices. They're the only way to truly motivate people to conserve and find alternative energy sources.

Here's what Geldof said:

Roger's comments come hot on the heels of SIR BOB GELDOF’s equally scathing views.

Last week the Live Aid hero lashed out, saying: "Why is Gore actually organising them? To make us aware of the greenhouse effect?

"Everybody's known about that problem for years. We are all f***ing conscious of global warming."

Roger Daltrey earned even more respect from me, by recognizing that these mega-benefit boondoggles have become exercises in musical back-slapping.

Again Roger complains that unlike the original Live Aid in 1985, where the money went directly to famine relief, the follow-up 20 years later had no achievable aims.

Roger moaned: "What did we really achieve at Live 8? We got loads of platitudes and no action.

"Who were we kidding there?"

I think what he's saying is, "The sixties are over dudes." It's time to start trusting people over 30. Or at least stop believing music can change the world like you did when you were 18.

h/t Cranky

If She Can't Even Choose A Campaign Theme Song...

...how can we expect her to make the life-or-death decisions concerning national security?

Hillary wants you to pick a song for her.

Update: I just realized there's a write in spot at the bottom of Hillary's voting list. Go stuff the ballot box with The Bitch Is Back!

h/t 6MB

Scott Card On GW

From Orson Scott Card's* recent column, "Civilization Watch," on the global warming debate:

How many thousands do you want to spend this year on preventing global warming? And after you find out that there's no proof that humans even cause it, or that it's even a bad thing, how many thousands do you want to spend "just in case"?

Two thousand? Surely you can afford two thousand. What about five thousand?

You're not writing your check. I guess you're not such a true believer after all.

[GW advocate and columnist Andrew] Brod also ignores the fact that the British government report was issued in support of policy changes that are, by any rational standard, pathetic. The changes they are making are ludicrously inadequate to change the levels of greenhouse gases to any significant degree. Given that the results will be near zero, any costs, however divided, might seem exorbitant.

Brod likens this to insurance, but it is not. Insurance is designed to pay you money after a loss. It does not prevent a loss. The valid comparison is to protection money: Somebody comes to you and demands you pay money "or you might have a fire." You pay the money so that they won't burn you out of business.

That's what the global-warming protection racket is about: Hey, we can't prove anything is actually happening, but look how many people we've got to agree with us! You'd better make a whole bunch of sacrifices which, by coincidence, exactly coincide with the political agenda of the anti-Western anti-industrial religion of ecodeism -- or global warming will get you!

Regarding proof, it should be obvious that there can be no proof of a theory that is designed to predict future events. Predictions of future catastrophe can only be proven by waiting to see if it happens. Computerized models that purport to project future events are not proof that those events will take place.

At the most basic metaphysical level, we are all ignorant of the future. I can predict that the earth will continue to revolve as it did today, and thus the sun will come up tomorrow. But to a metaphysical certainty, I have no idea whether I will be proven correct until it happens. If I look out my window, I can't even say for certain that the earth is spinning, or even that it is round. For those facts, I rely on the scientific consensus and my blind faith in the research and observations of others. I have enough confidence in those observations that I don't worry if they are wrong.

But global warming predictions are not based on observations. They can't be, because no one can observe the future. Therefore, when I make a judgment that global warming science is right or wrong, metaphysically speaking, I have no idea what the truth is. Whatever my opinion is, it can only be based on the observations of others, since I have not done the research. But the important point is that nobody has made the relevant observations necessary for proof. Not even the scientists. The data cannot be collected or observed, since the data does not yet exist.

For hundreds of years, Newton's laws were considered to be truth for two simple reasons. First, they accurately described the observed motion of objects and second, they accurately predicted the motion of objects as observed in the future. Based on the technology that existed to detect the necessary proof, Newton's laws were reliable.

Now, of course, we know that Newton's laws are wrong — or at least incomplete. Einstein has superceded them. Only advances in technology have allowed us to see that descriptions of reality based on Newton's work could only approximate reality. Newton gets us close enough for most purposes, but metaphysically speaking, it is not truth.

Yet for hundreds of years, Newton's laws were indistinguishable from the accepted version of reality. (Einstein blew a hole in that by showing us that reality itself is relative.) But the point I'm trying to make is that scientific consensus does not equal truth — even if the scientific consensus, as with pre-Einsteinian physics, conforms to observed reality and appears to predict future observed reality. Global warming theory, since it seeks to predict catastrophes that are far off in the future, doesn't even have those things going for it.†

h/t protein wisdom
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* A science fiction writer. I read his most famous book Ender's Game, and thought it was creepy and over-rated.

† Which is not to say that GW science is wrong, only that we can not presently know whether it's right or wrong. This is why there's such an emphasis on "consensus." But the media, who don't understand the scientific method, continue to misrepresent "consensus" as truth, when in fact it is not. Without the ability to obtain proof, consensus is about the best people can do, but it is still something short of proof.

Draft Thurl Ravenscroft!

I feel the need to disabuse you all of the myth that is Fred Thompson.

Fred Thompson is not the savior. Repeat. Fred Thompson is not the savior. He does not ride a white stallion. He does not wear a white hat. Thus, he can not ride to the rescue of a Republican party that has lost its way. Stop expecting him to.

I'm not convinced that Fred Thompson will enter the presidential race. Neither am I convinced that if he runs he will win the nomination. He's currently polling third. Third is not first. Third is third. And right now that means he's in the low teens. Despite the fact that a lot of otherwise reasonable people think he's a viable candidate, polling in the teens does not indicate a huge groundswell of support.

I think a lot of people are projecting their own hopes on Fred, unreasonably. Sure, none of the top candidates are perfect conservatives. Sure, George W. Bush has been a disappointment for those of us who idolize Ronald Reagan. But wishing Fred Thompson is another Ronald Reagan does not make him so. And wishing Fred Thompson is another Ronald Reagan does not make him electable.

I've accepted this fact and you should too: We will not see another Ronald Reagan in our lifetime. The best we can hope for is that our presidents try to emulate him, but they will never duplicate him. The man was that great.

Please also remember the following (those of you who know a lot about Reagan should already know this): Reagan was a great man and a great president because above all, he was a great thinker. He thought big things, and he thought about them all his life. Before he entered politics he had his own idea of how the world should work. When he entered public life he put his ideas into practice. But make no mistake, the thinking part came first.

Fred Thompson has it exactly backwards, and too many people are forgetting that. Reagan left acting to enter public service. Fred Thompson left public service to become an actor. That should tell you something about their comparative priorities.

And don't tell me people aren't attracted to Thompson in large part because he is an actor. I'm sure the theory is that his acting experience should give him the ability to connect to the average voter. Reagan was an actor and he was "the great communicator." Therefore all actors who run for office should make great communicators. It sounds silly when you say it out loud because it is silly.

"But," you say, "Fred Thompson agrees with me on all the issues." Yah well, so do I. Why don't you write my name in? Being right on the issues is not enough, and never has been. Running for president is a huge, difficult job and I don't think Fred has what it takes to win.

First, you gotta have the right contacts, and lots of them. What contacts does Fred have? Contacts get you donors, and volunteers, who in turn get you money. You need a lot of money to run for president, and this time around you need a lot more than during past elections because the big states have all moved their primaries up front. Name recognition is not enough.

You still need money because you have to pay big staffs, and consultants, and they all have to travel, and you have to buy ads and computers and cell phones and pay rent on offices in fifty states, and spend your money on countless other expenses that eat it up like crazy. At this late date, Thompson's rivals have too big a head start.

Besides that, all the most experienced consultants are spoken for. Who's going to guide Thompson's campaign? Will he have to settle for some amateur? If you think these things don't matter, you're dreaming. Bush got half his contacts from family and business connections. The other half Karl Rove brought with him.

I'll always remember something I heard Phil Jackson say to his team in a huddle during one of their losing playoff runs. "I know you guys want to win, wanting to win is not enough." I know lots of people want Thompson to win, but it's not enough. He has to have the resources, the money, the people, the contacts, the ideas and the fire in the belly. I don't see him having any of that stuff. All I see is a relatively likeable conservative, who's been flattered way too much for anyone's good.

And as for qualifications, I have as much executive experience as Fred Thompson. What has he ever run in his life? A few months ago I explained one reason why I prefer candidates with executive experience over former legislators.

Theoretically, executives must work in the real world where results are expected. Therefore, they should be more results oriented. Legislators on the other hand, work in a world of theoretical projections, possibilities and imaginary outcomes. When they fuck up, they're rarely held to account because they simply blame the other party, the executive, or both.

Even giving him the benefit of the doubt, Thompson only had eight years experience in the Senate. What are his accomplishments? If you can name any, how do they match up with Rudy's, or Romney's or Huckabee's records as executives. Even more than running for the post, being president is also a huge, difficult job. Thompson would need on-the-job training. I don't care how solid he is on the issues. I'm really not sure I want someone who's never run an organization running the executive branch of the most important organization on the planet.

"But, he's got a great speaking voice..." Okay. He does have a pleasant baritone. But if that's all it takes to get your vote, why stop at baritone? Why not draft a bass? If vocal timbre is all it takes to be president, we should have had a President Thurl Ravenscroft!

Technorati: fred thompson

Republican Primary Update

On one issue, I am not a "big tent" Republican. I don't think there should be room for pro-abortion candidates in the Republican party. But I think abortion is a great moral evil, so it follows that I don't think there should pro-abortion candidates in the Democratic party either. Nevertheless, I don't live in a perfect world. Much as I am confounded by his illogical position on the abortion issue, Rudy Giuliani is still the front-runner for my party's nomination.

But the same can't be said of Mitt Romney, who even after getting rave reviews for his debate performance last Thursday night, still remains mired in fourth place. Gallup even has him losing ground after the debate.

What's the difference between Romney and Giuliani? Both have flip-flopped on abortion. (So did I, by the way. Although I came over from the dark side much earlier than Romney, who "says" he switched in 2004). Giuliani donated to Planned Parenthood three times. Romney's wife donated $150 only once, back in 1994.

Both men supposedly have an impressive record of accomplishments. Rudy's is better known to me. He fixed an unfixable city, I watched him do it. Romney did something or other with the Olympics and as far as I know he was a successful governor of Massachussets.

One might say it's anti-Mormon prejudice. It might be, there certainly is some of that going on. But I don't think that explains all of it. I personally don't have any problem with Romney's religion, yet I don't like him at all. What's up with that?

I think one reason I don't like him is that he polls so badly, and I badly want to win. Would I like him better if he were a stronger candidate? Perhaps. I'm open to voting for Romney in the primary (which is more than I can say for Rudy or McCain), if Romney could somehow prove that he can beat Hillary, but so far he hasn't proven that.

Then there's the intangible slickness factor. Romney seems slick. I'll admit that's a silly reason not to vote for somebody, but I doubt I'm the only one who has noticed it about him. I also doubt I'm the only one who's slick-averse after eight years of Clinton. Would America vote for slick over shrew? I don't know. But I do know Romney's got a lot of work to do if he's going to get my vote.

For now, I'm leaning towards Mike Huckabee. He impressed me* during last week's debate, although he's not good on tax policy from what I understand. He has zero chance in hell of winning the nomination and Hillary would crush him like a bug anyway. But I always vote my conscience in the primary, and save my pragmatism for the general.
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* And a lot of people.

A's J Healthcare Survey

Just out of curiosity:

Free polls from Pollhost.com

Do you have health insurance?

Yes. No.

Battle Royal

Memo to Republican candidates: here's one way to get Hillary's goat. Be polite. That was what Rick Lazio got wrong, when he did his famous "space invading" gesture during the 2000 NY senate race.

For more than two hours, France's presidential front-runner needled his challenger during a debate Wednesday, wrapping it in a veneer of chivalry and always addressing her as "Madame."

Finally, Segolene Royal snapped. The woman seeking to become France's first female president erupted in anger toward the end of the prime-time duel with conservative Nicolas Sarkozy.

It was surprising -- and potentially damaging -- that Royal, not Sarkozy, proved quick to anger. During their bitter election campaign, the Socialist has sought to portray her conservative rival as too unstable, too brutal, to lead the nuclear-armed nation.

In front of millions of television viewers, Sarkozy turned the tables. Royal got furious when he started talking about disabled children, saying he was "playing" with the issue. "I am very angry," she said.

"You become unhinged very easily, Madame," Sarkozy said. "To be president of the republic, one must be calm. . . . I don't know why Mrs. Royal, who's usually calm, has lost her calm."

Smooth move, Sarko!

Hey does anybody speak French? I think this is the video.

By the way, I know nothing about French politics, except that Royal is a hottie, and she's a socialist. Sarkozy, I remember, got in trouble during the recent "youth" riots for stating the obvious: that the rioters were thugs.

Romney's Book

Does Romney want to be president or not? Because naming Battlefield Earth as his favorite novel was probably not the best choice he could have made. It's not enough that he has that "Mormon problem," now he's got to add a "Scientology problem" to it.

Lessons From The Iraq Experience

Allow me to recommend two essential articles from Armed Forces Journal that I think are necessary reading for those of us not on the fringes, who strive to understand rather than shout slogans back and forth. I find little to disagree with in either piece.

The first is "A Failure In Generalship," by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling. Colonel Yingling places blame squarely on Rumsfeld and his generals, for the failure to achieve our goals in Iraq.

The intellectual and moral failures common to America's general officer corps in Vietnam and Iraq constitute a crisis in American generalship. Any explanation that fixes culpability on individuals is insufficient. No one leader, civilian or military, caused failure in Vietnam or Iraq. Different military and civilian leaders in the two conflicts produced similar results. In both conflicts, the general officer corps designed to advise policymakers, prepare forces and conduct operations failed to perform its intended functions. To understand how the U.S. could face defeat at the hands of a weaker insurgent enemy for the second time in a generation, we must look at the structural influences that produce our general officer corps.

My only criticism of Yingling's article would be against his proposal that Congress assert more control over the selection and promotion of general officers. On the contrary, while Congress has a role, it's the executive's job to select military leaders who can get the job done. I believe Yingling is correct to criticize the culture of conformity that produced sub-par generals at the war's outset. But that's common in every major conflict. War is a results-oriented game, and typically the dross is burned away after the first few months of battle.

In the case of Iraq, we had an unusual tendency towards inertia that can only be blamed on Bush and Rumsfeld's management styles. Whether you want to call it admirable loyalty or excessive stubbornness, neither Bush nor the SecDef were willing to change horses when necessary to get results. Of what other successful wartime administration can this be said? Not Lincoln's, not FDR's, not Truman's.

To be fair, one reason for this President's inertia was the withering and omnipresent criticism from the left, whether by Democrats or internationally. Bush, rightly or wrongly, made the decision that sticking to his original plan and personnel was better than adapting midstream to the changing situation on the battlefield. His enemies so vehemently accused him of being wrong, that he overcompensated in an effort to prove that he was right.

I don't give Bush a pass on this. It's no excuse to say that he did what he did because the left made him do it. It's the commander-in-chief's job to husband the souls of those men and women serving our country as wisely as possible. I'll grant him the best of intentions; I know the President feels every loss of life personally and deeply. But, good intentions are not enough. As I've said many times before, what we need is results, and the responsibility for getting results lies ultimately with the president. If Franks, Casey and Abizaid were not getting the job done — and I don't think they were — Bush should have been quick with the hook. (Bush knows baseball; he should have taken a lesson from old Sparky Anderson.)

The essential constraint that the entire war team missed is the constraint of time and patience. In a democracy, this constraint is strict and onerous, especially now in our hyper-political environment where the opposing party turns every issue into a power-play. Time and patience are part of the battlefield, and Bush's advisors were negligent in failing to stress that fact. Success in Iraq, if it was/is to be had, must be had quickly, with sufficient force and resources to get it quickly. Unfortunately, Bush and Company acted like they had all day long. Instead, time has now nearly run out.

The second article, by Lt. Col. Ralph Peters (ret.), is called "Wanted: Occupation Doctrine." His point of view is decidedly Machiavellian, but in a good way. Peters catalogues some lessons we should take heed of when planning for the next counterinsurgency campaign.

Consider just a few essential rules for successful occupations — all of which we violated in Iraq:

• Plan for the worst case. Pleasant surprises are better than ugly ones.

• All else flows from security. Martial law, even if imposed under a less-provocative name, must be declared immediately — it's far easier to loosen restrictions later on than to tighten them in the wake of anarchy. This is one aspect of a general principle: Take the pain up front.

• Unity of command is essential.

• The occupier's troop strength should be perceived as overwhelming and his forces ever-present.

• Key military leaders, staff officers, intelligence personnel and vital civilian advisers must be committed to initial tours of duty of not less than two years for the sake of continuity.

• Control external borders immediately.

• Don't isolate troops and their leaders from the local population.

• Whenever possible, existing host-country institutions should be retained and co-opted. After formal warfare ends, don't disband organizations you can use to your advantage.

• Give local opinion-makers a stake in your success, avoid penalizing midlevel and low-level officials (except war criminals), and get young men off the streets and into jobs.

• Don't make development promises you can't keep, and war-game reconstruction efforts to test their necessity, viability and indirect costs (an occupation must not turn into a looting orgy for U.S. or allied contractors).

• Devolve responsibility onto local leaders as quickly as possible — while retaining ultimate authority.

• Do not empower returned expatriates until you are certain they have robust local support.

• The purpose of cultural understanding is to facilitate the mission, not to paralyze our operations. Establish immediately that violent actors and seditious demagogues will not be permitted to hide behind cultural or religious symbols.

• Establish flexible guidelines for the expenditure of funds by tactical commanders and for issuing local reconstruction contracts. Peacetime accountability requirements do not work under occupation conditions and attempts to satisfy them only play into the hands of the domestic political opposition in the U.S. while crippling our efforts in the zone of occupation.

• Rigorously control private security forces, domestic or foreign. In lieu of a functioning state, we must have a monopoly on violence.

Many of the above precepts have been adopted by Gen. Petraeus and his staff, now in charge of the war effort. For that reason, I'm hopeful that success is not yet beyond our grasp.

In the article, Peters uses the word "occupation," but he doesn't apologize for it.

The first step in formulating usable doctrine is to sweep aside the politically correct myths that have appeared about occupations. Occupations are military activities. Period. An Army general must be in charge, at least until the security environment can be declared benign with full confidence. Historically, the occupations that worked — often brilliantly, as in the Philippines, Germany and Japan — were run by generals, not diplomats. This is another mission the Army doesn't want, but no other organization has the wherewithal to do it.

It's obvious that Colonel Peters has a distinct pro-military, anti-Foggy Bottom bias. I share that bias.

Consider the prevailing claim that an occupation is a team effort involving all relevant branches of government: The problem is that the rest of the team doesn't show up. The State Department, as ambitious for power as it is incompetent to wield it, insists that it should have the lead in any occupation, yet has neither the leadership and management expertise, the institutional resources nor the personnel required (among the many State-induced debacles in Iraq, look at its appetite for developing Iraqi police forces and its total failure to deliver).

The military is the default occupier, since its personnel can be ordered into hostile environments for unlimited periods; State and other agencies rely on volunteers and, in Iraq, the volunteers have not been forthcoming — even when the tours for junior diplomats were limited to a useless 90 days and dire warnings were issued about the importance of Iraq duty to careers.

These two articles deserve wide readership. Print them out and read them on your lunch hour.

Skadefryd Part 2: Rosie O'Donald Is Out

According to TMZ. Good news, I guess, but why don't they just cancel The View? While she was there it was easy to blame Rosie, but the show sucked long before she arrived.

Rosie hasn't announced yet, but how much you wanna bet she's going to spin it as "her decision," to "pursue other interests," blah blah blah. It won't be the fact that nobody likes a bully and she's a bully.

Rosie is the left's equivalent of Michael Savage — a loud, bigoted, egotistical, ignorant clown. The only reason Rosie gets away with it on tv and Savage is relegated to after-hours radio is that tv execs agree with Rosie's bullshit.

via Hot Air

Update: Rosie said, "my needs for the future just didn't dovetail with what ABC was able to offer me."

I was close. She just left out the "blah blah blah" part.

Skadefryd: Kiki On The Ropes

From The Philadelphia Enquirer, rumor has it that Kiki Couric, "an expensive, unfixable mistake," may get the boot next year.

[T]he former star of NBC's Today has failed to move the Nielsen needle on No. 3 Evening News since her debut seven months ago.

In a bottom-line business like television, that's a cardinal sin. Already-low morale in the news division is dropping, says a veteran correspondent there.

"It's a disaster. Everybody knows it's not working. CBS may not cut her loose, but I guarantee you, somebody's thinking about it. We're all hunkered down, waiting for the other shoe to drop."

Seven correspondents, producers and executives at CBS and other networks interviewed for this story spoke on condition of anonymity, given the sensitive nature of the Couric situation.

Couric and CBS were a bad fit from the start.

"From the moment she walked in here, she held herself above everybody else," says a CBS staffer. "We had to live up to her standards. . . . CBS has never dealt in this realm of celebrity before."

Media experts predict Couric's ratings won't improve anytime soon, given that news viewers tend to be older and averse to change.

Couric, 50, draws fewer viewers than did avuncular "interim" anchor Bob Schieffer, 20 years her senior. Much of the feature-oriented format she debuted with is gone, as is her first executive producer, Rome Hartman.

"The broadcast is an abject failure, by any measure," says Rich Hanley, director of graduate programs at the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University.

"They gambled that viewers wanted a softer, less-dramatic presentation of the news, and they lost. It's not fair to blame Couric for everything, but she's certainly the centerpiece and deserves a fair share."

CBS Evening News this season averages 7.319 million total viewers, down 5 percent from the same period a year ago, according to Nielsen Media Research.

Couric's viewership has dropped nearly 30 percent since her Sept. 5 premiere week, when she averaged an inflated 10.2 million viewers and led CBS News to its first Nielsen win since June 2001.

"A bad fit from the start" is an understatement. To be absolutely fair, I would also use the descriptors "lightweight" and "clueless bimbo."

Have you watched Couric lately? Talk about deer in the headlights, she makes Kathleen Blanco look like the embodiment of "confidence" by comparison.

Bradford Wiles Update

Remember a few posts ago, I quoted from a prescient op-ed by VT grad student Bradford Wiles, published eight months ago?

Well, somebody did track Wiles down for his comment on this week's horrific event. Here's what he said:

On Tuesday, Wiles stood by that opinion in the wake of this week's massacre, telling Cybercast News Service that "the only way to stop someone with a gun is somebody else with a gun."

"The entire campus was a place where someone knew they could inflict the most damage with the least amount of armed resistance, and that's what you get with gun control," Wiles said. "If you let people like myself carry a gun legally ... then you have the possibility of stemming the tide."

Wiles, who wasn't near the campus buildings where Monday's shootings took place, said he doesn't believe an armed student could have prevented all of the bloodshed. But, he added, "even if just one person is not shot by that gunman because somebody had their legally licensed concealed firearm on them, isn't that enough?"

h/t Buckeye Firearms Association News

NBC Completely And Irresponsibly Throws Standards Out The Window

In pursuit of $ensationalism and the almighty ratings point, NBC proves that there is no longer any such thing as responsible media. Oh, Brian Williams made a big show about "not wanting to make Cho into a hero," even while holding up the pictures Cho intended to cement himself into the popular mythology.

NBC should have shredded the entire package immediately, not even handed it to the police, just burnt it as surely as Cho is burning in hell right now. Do they really think there aren't future sickos who will idolize Cho and memorize every word in his multimedia manifesto? Do they really think there's any possible journalistic justification that outweighs the virtual gaurantee that someone will idolize and imitate Cho the same way Cho idolized and imitated the Columbine murderers? Do they not understand that publishing the pictures and airing the video only gives the next mass murderer something to outdo?

Fucking assholes! But when the next mass murderer cryptically references the VT killer in his manifesto, you won't hear NBC or their ilk pointing the finger at themselves for creating the "cult of Cho." No, next time it will be "lax gun laws" all over again, and "easy availability of weapons," and "the incredible firepower of the nine millimeter," and "the NRA lobbyists," etc.

Clinton Is In Trouble

I still think she'll win the nomination, but clearly Senator Clinton is in a dogfight. The RealClearPolitics average has her leading Bronco Bomber by only 6 points!

Update: More at Wizbang. Hillary's favorable/unfavorable rating is in freefall too.

More Thoughts On VA Tech

Here are some more random thoughts on the shooting, which occurred to me throughout the day.

The touchy-feely methods of preventing this type of violence failed miserably yesterday. For instance, one oft-cited preventive measure is for faculty members to watch for signs of a troubled loner with possible violent tendencies, then send him to counseling. This was done in Cho's case, by one of his English professors, to no avail.

After Columbine there was no end to the re-education and awareness-raising on the dangers of bullying. Kids were taught not to make fun of outcasts, but to be nice to them. Again, in Cho's case, members of his peer group tried to befriend the loner during sophomore year. One said they invited him to lunch, tried to get him to laugh and come out of his "funk." Again, this was done, to no avail. He apparently did laugh during the lunch, but it didn't change anything.

Time Magazine, perhaps the most ridiculously out-of-touch major news source in America today, professes to know "how to make campuses safer." Frikkin joke. Here's the best they came up with:

Some schools like Princeton train professors how to spot signs of depression, and access to mental-health services is a big part of preventive efforts on many campuses. Students, faculty and staff are encouraged to tell someone if they see suspicious or troubling activity. Says Gene Burton, public safety director at Ball State University: "You need to get everyone on board." But as colleges and universities learned on Monday, it often takes a tragedy to expose just how many weaknesses there are in the system.

As I wrote above, they did that! It didn't work! Time Magazine... clueless fukkin idiots.

More: OMG, not to be outdone, CNN is just about as clueless as Time Magazine. No wonder they're joined at the hip.

Watch this video, which contains the absolutely hilarious warning that a semi-automatic handgun can fire bullets "as fast as you can pull the trigger!"

Dun-dun-dun duuuunnnh!

If anyone knows of a gun on the market that does not shoot bullets "as fast as you can pull the trigger," please let me know. I will make sure I don't have any of the manufacturer's stock in my portfolio.

Update: The anti-American New York Times reports that "officers also found several knives on Mr. Cho’s body." Will there be calls for stricter knife control? It's not unheard of.

Tech Shooting

The point has been made over and over again, and I'm sure I don't need to mention it on this blog, but I'll do it anyway.

It's ironic that some people who are criticizing the school for its response to the initial shootings this morning are the same people who will be calling for tighter gun control in the future.

If we learned anything from Katrina, it's the same thing we learned again today:

You cannot rely on the government to protect you from every harm!

In a land where the citizenry is unarmed, the government is the only thing that stands between a criminal and his victim. Thus, the one thing these types of shooters know is that all they need to do is outsmart the government in order to accomplish their evil.

Government, specifically the police, do certain things well, but preventing random acts of violence is not one of them. They can only respond after the fact. And the difference between that first 911 call and the arrival of SWAT (usually after the shooter has killed himself) today was measured in 32 innocent lives.

So when people ask "why didn't the school officials shut down the school right away?" the answer is, "well, I guess they fucked up." (Even though on a campus the size of Virginia Tech, I'm not sure that was practical, or that it would have even prevented the tragedy. Who's to say he wouldn't have found some other populated place to go on his rampage?)

Yes, government fucks up sometimes. Recognize this reality. Embrace it. Own it. Because the sooner we realize that government cannot gaurantee our safety, the sooner we'll stop willingly handing away our right to protect ourselves.

More: KG at Crusader Rabbit has a partial list of recent school shootings worldwide. And John Hawkins correctly identifies the deadliest school mass murder in U.S. history, the 1927 Bath School bombing.

Still more: I wonder if anyone in the MSM will contact VT grad student Bradford B. Wiles, just to see if his opinion has changed any by the events of today. My guess would be no on both counts.

Mr. Giles wrote the following in an op-ed published last August, after he had been evacuated from a campus building in the previous on-campus incident.

I am licensed to carry a concealed handgun in the commonwealth of Virginia, and do so on a regular basis. However, because I am a Virginia Tech student, I am prohibited from carrying at school because of Virginia Tech's student policy, which makes possession of a handgun an expellable offense, but not a prosecutable crime.

I had entrusted my safety, and the safety of others to the police. In light of this, there are a few things I wish to point out.

First, I never want to have my safety fully in the hands of anyone else, including the police.

Second, I considered bringing my gun with me to campus, but did not due to the obvious risk of losing my graduate career, which is ridiculous because had I been shot and killed, there would have been no graduate career for me anyway.

Third, and most important, I am trained and able to carry a concealed handgun almost anywhere in Virginia and other states that have reciprocity with Virginia, but cannot carry where I spend more time than anywhere else because, somehow, I become a threat to others when I cross from the town of Blacksburg onto Virginia Tech's campus.

Of all of the emotions and thoughts that were running through my head that morning, the most overwhelming one was of helplessness.

Read the whole piece here.

h/t Dymphna at Gates of Vienna

Update: Anti-American AP reports the following:

Two law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information had not been announced, said Cho's fingerprints were found on the guns used in both shootings. The serial numbers on the two weapons had been filed off, the officials said.

One law enforcement official said Cho's backpack contained a receipt for a March purchase of a Glock 9 mm pistol.

Did anyone think to ask why Cho would go through the trouble of filing off the serial numbers, then carry the receipt around with him?!?!!? Something is not right with that story. Why would somebody take the receipt with him on a shooting rampage? Especially after filing the serial numbers off (which isn't easy by the way)? Gun receipts are multi-page documents, at least mine is. If you ask me, it would be real convenient for the gun-grabbers if they could say this gun was bought legally just a few weeks ago.

Must-read: Publicola deconstructs the incident in his inimitable way.

[I]t has been preached from every rooftop of every school that resistance is bad. We even had a politician proposing using books as bullet proof shields as a solution to school violence. Not too long ago a teacher in Texas was "re-assigned" because he dared teach his students to fight back even if unarmed. For a number of reasons political & cultural we simply do not on the whole wish to face the idea that violence is an acceptable option in any situation.

That, & not the school's reaction (or lack thereof) contributed to the deaths & injuries at VT. [links omitted]

My friend Publicola says he can't take credit for my becoming a gun owner. That's wrong. It was he and Katrina that made me take the leap. Unfortunately, in California, the gun laws are designed to prevent self-defense. But as my sidebar quiz shows, if somebody busts into my home, I won't be jumping out the second story window.

Annika Asks Her Readers 2.0

What do you think? Will the Don Imus auto da fe, recently concluded, have the unintended result of making it easier to execute Rosie O'Donald when she makes her inevitable next outrageous statement?

In other words, is the threshold of firable offenses now so low that Rosie will no longer be able to get away with the shit she's been pulling for months on The View?

Or does the Imus controversy have no relevance to Rosie, since the culturally designated Torquemadas, Sharpton and Jackson, are unlikely to be offended by anything Rosie might say?

Bill Whittle's Newest

If you're like me, who waits impatiently for each great essay by Bill Whittle to come out, wait no more. The newest one is up! In it, Bill hits upon the motivation I've always suspected was the driving force behind the popularity of conspiracy theories: self-esteem. Or rather, the lack of it.

[M]ost normal people do not look at life from within a pit of failure and despair. Our lives are measured by small successes -- like raising children, serving in the military, doing volunteer work at your church – or just doing the right thing in a thousand small but important ways, like returning money if someone makes you too much change.

These are simply the small, ordinary milestones of a life of value. They give you a sense of identity.

But if I didn’t have that sense of identity rooted in my own small achievements, I wonder how likely it would have been for me to grab onto that sense of sudden empowerment, of being an initiate in some arcane club of hidden wisdom. I wonder what might have happened to me if being the Holder of Secret Knowledge had been my only source of self-esteem…the one redeeming landmark in a life of isolation and failure. Indeed, I wonder what power such a worldview would have over me if I could believe that behind the scenes lurked vast and unknowable dark forces – forces that could topple a president and perhaps even explain why a person of my deep, vast and bountiful talents was not doing a whole lot better in life?

When I uploaded my footage of the Truther at Ground Zero on YouTube, I intentionally checked the "no comments" box. For some reason, YouTube still submits comments for my approval and sure enough some idiot upbraided me for not drinking his particular flavor of kool-aid. I don't remember his exact words, but it was something like, "stop watching American Idol and do some research." I had to laugh at the irony of that.

To paraphrase Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller, "and where did you do your hard hitting data research... in your ass?"

My First And Only Duke Lacrosse Related Post

Now that the Duke Lacrosse thing is over, I think it's an appropriate time to review what did not happen in Durham. So here's Mary Katharine Ham to remind us, in a video she did way back in December.

Latest LA Times/Bloomberg Poll

The latest LA Times/Bloomberg poll on the Iraq War contains a real surprise, which might explain why nobody is reporting it. The poll is dated April 5th through April 9th. The key question is this:

Generally speaking, do you think setting a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq hurts or helps U.S. troops serving in Iraq right now, or doesn't it affect the troops one way or the other?

And the responses, no doubt highly disappointing to the LA Times and other anti-American news organizations, were as follows (emphasis mine):

Hurts: 50%
Helps: 27%
No Effect: 15%
Unsure: 8%

The really crazy thing about the poll is that the next question asks whether the President should sign a funding authorization that includes a timetable for withdrawal, or veto it. The poll found 48% of respondents favoring such a timetable! Even though 50% believe it would harm the troops! Not only that, 45% believe Congress should "refuse to pass any funding bill until Bush agrees to accept conditions for withdrawal." Again, even though it harms the troops.

So much for Americans supporting the troops, if you believe the poll.

Predictably, the only news story I found on Google that even mentions the poll is selective in its coverage — i.e. they're incredibly biased. Here's the link. As of this writing, E&P completely failed to mention the first question I highlighted above, instead focusing on the second question. That's not just biased reporting, it's fucking propaganda.

Thank Don Imus

I have a somewhat different take on the whole Imus debacle. I've always thought he was totally overrated and I never understood his appeal or influence. Happily, living in California, I don't have to listen to him.

However, I think the huge uproar surrounding Imus's recent unfunny racial jokes, his subsequent apologies, public bitchslapping and two week suspension have shown us just how far we've come as a society that is unwilling to tolerate such insensitivity.

It is right and just that Imus be brought low, a-hole that he is.

I also firmly believe that this controversy has brought us closer to that glorious day, which will occur soon and possibly within our lifetimes, when no one will ever be insulted ever again. By anyone. At any time. In any way.

Hallelujah!

Update: It's official. Wikipedia now refers to "Imus in the Morning" in the past tense.

Rhetorical Answer

Captain Ed asks the rhetorical question on a lot of conservatives' lips these days:

[H]ow can we expect these [Democrat] candidates to face off against America's enemies when they can't bring themselves to face Fox?

The answer, of course, is that nobody expects them to face off against America's enemies either.

Kiki On WWI

Here's Kiki Couric on today's anniversary of the American entry into World War I.

Did you catch that?

Listening between the lines, Kiki's message is this: If not for advances in modern medicine, over 413,000 Americans would have died fighting the Iraq war.

Am I reading too much into it? If it was anybody else, I might be, but this is the anti-American CBS News.

A Non-Issue For Me

I am in complete agreement with Jim Geraghty on the Pelosi head-scarf non-controversy.

I enjoy whacking around Nancy Pelosi as much as the next guy, but as far as I can tell, the photos of her in a headscarf are all of her while visiting a mosque. . . . There are a million and one reasons to object to Pelosi, but wearing the headscarf while in the mosque isn't one of them. It's akin to dressing appropriately while visiting a church, or a man wearing a yarmulke in a synagogue. It's something you do when you're a guest. It's not submission, it's respect.

I, too, looked through the entire Yahoo News photos slideshow to find a picture of Pelosi wearing the scarf outside the mosque, and there isn't any. Remember, she visited the tomb of John the Baptist, and made the sign of the cross. Before Vatican II all Catholic women covered their heads in church. I have zero problem with this and I think it hurts our credibility when we make a big stink over a non-issue and try to turn it into something it's not. Pelosi followed the same custom you and I would have done if we were in the same place. In fact, I think American women (myself included) dress far too immodestly in houses of worship. I was impressed when I visited Portugal, and saw young female tourists covering their shoulders before entering a church. So anyways, stick to hating Pelosi because she's an idiot.

Truth Kook Caught On Video By Yours Truly

When I heard crazy Rosie O'Donald shooting off her ignorant bullshit about WTC Building 7, I was reminded of my trip to Ground Zero in July 2003.

As my friend and I walked around the site, we saw a guy standing next to a sign with a bunch of literature. He kept talking about how the WTC was really made up of seven buildings, not just the towers. I thought, "How nice, he's not political at all, he just wants to give people a little history while they tour the site." He kept repeating the exact times that the buildings came down with special emphasis on Building 7. I thought that was odd, but it wasn't until recently that I remembered him and realized that he was a friggin Truther, defiling the scene with his craziness.

On the video I shot, you can't really see him until the very end. In the last frame, I think he's to the right of center, half hidden behind the dude in the white shirt.

Capitulation Works

I suppose we should all be happy that the crisis over the kidnapped Royal Marines looks like it's coming to a peaceful end. But something doesn't feel right about the way this thing has turned out.

I mean, Britain was patrolling the Gulf for a reason, right? And whether the Marines were kidnapped outside of Iranian waters or inside, the Iranians have quite forcefully demonstrated their power to win a showdown, anytime, anywhere.

The British could have won this confrontation, gaining the marines' release, without showing the world what a bunch of groveling patsies they've become. But instead, they've given the world another reason for a false hope: that you can deal with the Iranians as long as you avoid making them mad.

And don't think I'm letting President Bush off lightly in my scorn. Sure he talked tough while it was the Brits in captivity. But this administration has done nothing except pusue diplomatic impotence, while the Iranians built more centrifuges, and yanked our chains. Where is the Iranian Lech Walensa? Where is the Iranian Solidarity movement? Does anyone think the Iron Curtain fell on its own? We pushed it over. Reagan pushed it over. The means he used weren't always open and obvious, but by this time in Reagan's second term, we could see the effects. I've been hearing about Iranian dissidents and how sick the people are of the mullahs for years now. If that's so true, we should be seeing some actual dissent over there, demonstrations, labor strikes. Again I ask, where are President Bush and Secretary Rice on this issue?

Great Britain just made the likelihood of eventual military confrontation between Iran and the West more likely. What are we doing to prevent it by toppling the dictatorship before that happens?

Update: A comment by Cruiser at The Belmont Club made the following very cogent point:

We always hear that acting aggressively towards Iran shores-up the hardliners. This is an good example of why the opposite can be true.

Cruiser reacts at his own blog, here.

Update 2: In 2005, after the London bombings, I asked, "Where is this Britiain?" I'm now sure of the answer. It no longer exists. Blair has made a mockery of James Thomson's stirring poem, and it should never be sung again, except in sarcasm.

Yes the Britain of Lord Nelson is dead. And so is the Britain of Lord Churchill who, in 1940, said:

[B]e the ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley; we may show mercy—we shall ask for none.

Yes, that Britain is dead as dead can be. Mourn it.

McCain Loses First Primary

John McCain just lost his first primary this season: the "fundraising primary."

Sen. John McCain today announced a disappointing $12.5 million fundraising total for the first three months of 2007.

The total, which would have been impressive in past election cycles, finds McCain trailing GOP rivals Mitt Romney and Rudolph Giuliani in the crucial early money sweepstakes.

Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who has struggled in the national polls, reported $23 million in primary election contributions, including more than $2 million of his own money. The Federal Election Commission allows candidates to collect money for their primary and general election campaigns simultaneously.

Giuliani, the Republican frontrunner in national surveys, took in more than $15 million in primary cash, including more than $10 million last month. He also transferred about $2 million from another campaign account for a total of $17 million.

This is not good news for McCain, but it's good news for America.

Memo to Senator McCain: The mainstream media is not a constituency. You pissed off the wrong people with your Gang of 14 - anti-free speech - dumbing down the definition of "torture" - Democrats are people too, views. Money flows to candidates that can win the nomination. You can't win. It's time to leave the field to Giuliani and Romney and stop sucking up attention that should be going to the legitimate candidates.

Key Quotes From VDH Column

Here are two key quotes from today's Victor Davis Hanson column at NRO.

Confrontation can be avoided through capitulation, and no Western nation is willing to insist that Iran adhere to any norms of behavior.

. . .

Why put European ships or planes outside of European territorial waters when that will only guarantee a crisis in which Europeans are kidnapped and held as hostages or used as bargaining chips to force political concessions?

Indeed. Why do the Europeans bother pretending that they have any spine at all?

Royal Marines don't apologize. Not willingly. But so what? They don't need to, eventually their government apologizes for them.

What we need here is not "de-escalation" rhetoric. The Iranians are playing the same hand they played in '79, because they know it works. Somebody needs to look them in the eye and say "not this time." But nobody is willing to do it. And so if nobody has the guts, why bother pretending? They should all just go home.

McCain Was Almost A Democrat?

Who knows if this story is true? The source is two former Democratic lawmakers, who say that McCain's chief of staff approached them in 2001 about McCain switching parties. The chief of staff denies it, although he's now a Democrat himself, which is bad enough for McCain. Of course in these types of things, it doesn't really matter if the story is true, all that matters is that the story is out there, and it fits the narrative.

McCain may be done.

My prediction for the next big Republican drama: H. Ross Thompson. Will he or won't he? (Fuck everything up, that is.)

Bronco Bomber Polling

Is it racist for a liberal to say "I like Obama, but I'm supporting Hillary because America's not ready to elect a black president?"*

Whether or not it's racist, that kind of attitude betrays a characteristic pessimism and contempt for America that many liberals hold but won't admit. The psychological term is called "projection," where a person attributes one’s own unacceptable or unwanted thoughts and emotions onto another. Liberals are famous for projecting their own faults, so it wouldn't surprise me if there were a few closet racists in the Democratic party.

I know it's early, but Hillary still isn't beating Giuliani in head-to-head matchups, and I can't understand why Obama isn't gaining traction with Democrats. In almost every aspect, he's a better candidate for the liberals. Consistent on the war (despite the latest Clinton lie, he never flip-flopped), more likeable, a better speaker, less political baggage, got more integrity, etc., etc. And because he's from a new generation, nominating Obama over Hillary represents a step forward, not a step back.

Plus, if Giuliani gets the Republican nomination, I think Obama is the tougher matchup. Let's look at the polling.

The RealClearPolitics average has Obama losing to Giuliani by only 2.2%, whereas Queen Hillary loses to the Mayor by 4.5%. Those numbers seem close, but remember they're averages of about 4 or 5 different polls. The key is that Obama wins two of the five polls averaged in the Giuliani/Obama matchup, with Giuliani winning the other three. By contrast all four polls in the hypothetical Giuliani/Clinton matchup swing for Giuliani.

Both Hillary and Obama run neck-and-neck against McCain, but I'd give Obama the edge. RealClearPolitics has Obama beating John McCain by 1%, while Hillary loses to McCain by 1.6%. I know, I know, margin of error. But in McCain vs. Obama, McCain has the same problems as Hillary. There's a large swath of people who will never vote for the man (myself included), and his generation represents a step back, not forward.

In other matchups, while Clinton beats Romney convincingly, Obama beats Romney going away. Obama's average lead over Romney is almost 20%, and is 7.1 points higher than Hillary's lead. Actually, even John Edwards polls better against Romney than Hillary does. There's no chance that Romney could ever beat any Democrat in the general election.

Things are changing on the Democratic side, however. In the west and the south, Obama has apparently pulled dead even with Hillary. She still retains a two to one lead in the northeast. With the new über-Tuesday election giving more weight to the big states, it's going to be anybody's race, especially if Obama can take California. Even though I'm voting Republican, I'd so love to see Obama beat Hillary. I hate coronations.
_______________

* I realize I'm vulnerable to the same criticism, since I have always scoffed at the Romney candidacy. But the reason I don't think Romney can win is not because he's a Mormon. It's because he's a nobody, he looks plastic, and the country is in the middle of an anti-conservative backlash right now. Romney's been marketed as the conservative's conservative, and that's not going to go over well in the general. By contrast, Giuliani has crossover appeal because he's the anti-conservative conservative. His liberal social views make him more acceptable to the average general election voter, who fancies him or herself more "tolerant" than the typical primary voter.

The Great Global Warming Swindle

Watch the whole thing, spread the word.

Unfreakinreadable

My mom gave me a gift subscription to Time Magazine last year. I've tried, I've really tried to read it every week, but it's damn near impossible. It's like they deliberately try to insult me every week. I know it's the thought that counts, but I think I'm going to have to cancel my free subscription.

The problem is that Time is a liberal op-ed magazine, masquerading as a non-partisan news source. I could respect them, and even read it occasionally, if they would just admit the truth. But to do so might reduce the effectiveness of the subliminal propaganda they spit out each week. There's no way to avoid it, unless you stop grocery shopping and visiting the dentist.

If I read something in the Village Voice, or Mother Jones, or the LA Weekly, saying "all conservatives are evil" I can take it with a grain of salt, it's no big deal. But when Time Magazine, in a "news" cover story starts out like this, I get mad.

George Bush's sense of humor has always run more to frat-house gag than art-house irony, so he may not have appreciated the poetic justice any more than the legal justice on display in the Libby verdict.

Or, to be more precise, the Cheney verdict.

In a mere 46 words, Time managed to call the president of the United States a lowbrow, call him stupid, then pronounce the Libby verdict as "justice" when it's actually 180° the opposite of justice. Then to top it all off, Time proclaims that Cheney was somehow convicted by the Libby jury. And that's just the first 46 words.

You know, there's a lot of folks in this country who voted for the President, and like the President. There's a lot of folks who really like Dick Cheney, and we're not stupid. We understand that there are people who don't think so, but it's insulting to read a supposedly unbiased news magazine calling the Vice President a criminal, as if I'm supposed to agree. Like saying the Dow was at 11000, or the temperature in Minneapolis yesterday was 53°.

A few weeks ago I tossed the magazine with the pro-abortion cover in the trash without even opening it. I didn't open the one that asked "Does sending more soldiers to Iraq make any sense?" either. I knew the answer to that question. I also knew their answer, and that it was different from mine. But next week's cover really takes the cake: Ronald Reagan crying. First of all, they have no right to touch, let alone re-touch that great man's picture. Second, I simply don't trust them to write about conservative discontent without it being a 3000 word essay on schadenfreude.

And it's not even well written, or well reported. Lately they've taken to using introductory phrases like "here's how..." and "here's why..." As in "With the U.S. tied down in Iraq, a new superpower has arrived. Here's how to deal with it." Or, "The Iraq Study Group says it's time for an exit strategy, Why Bush will listen." Of course, when the President rightly ignores the ISG's report, Time ignores its faulty prediction. But that doesn't stop them from continuing to use that annoying phraseology. Another example: "As the U.S. strikes al-Qaeda, a new government tries to restore order. Here's what it will take."

That phrase bugs me so much because it's like they're assuming some sort of know-it-all status, without ever demonstrating to me that they know anything. When you're wrong as often as Time's writers are, they shouldn't be so presumptuous.

The Time story intro has become so formulaic, I could probably write a script for it if I knew how to write code. All you do is take some story that is happening, insert some anti-Republican or anti-war spin, then promise the reader that you'll have all the answers in the article by saying "here's how."

Here are some examples, just off the top of my head:

A story about JetBlue delays might be introduced like this:

While JetBlue executives struggle to regain passengers' confidence in the wake of storm caused delays, experts say global warming could damage airline stocks even further? Here's how you can protect your portfolio.

A story about Valerie Plame's testimony?

With the U.S. bogged down in Iraq, new questions surround pre-war intelligence as Valerie Plame wows Congress. Here's why her testimony will doom the Bush admistration.

Nintendo's Wii?

Millions of Americans have fallen in love with the new Wii gaming platform. Here's how Alberto Gonzales intends to ruin their fun.

It's easy, you try it.

The Big Issue For Election 2008...

If anyone is smart enough to capitalize on it, the big issue that may decide the next presidential election is not the war. It's the mortgage crisis. I say this because it's a pocketbook issue that will affect every voter regardless of whether they rent, own, or live with their parents. The combination of balooning payments and falling house values has a wide ranging effect on business as well as ordinary people. It could hurt all of us because the long awaited housing crash just might bring on another recession.

And guess what, we've known it was coming for at least five years but like with the dot coms, nobody wanted to say anything because too many people were making money. Everybody and their brother wanted to get in on the housing boom, and lenders were all too happy to throw cash at them. Realtors weren't going to say anything. They were like, "don't worry man, you're equity is going to skyrocket." And the lenders just said, "hey, when the adjustable hits, you can always refinance."

But as I watched this all unfold from the sidelines, I always predicted that it couldn't go on forever. Didn't the 1929 crash happen because of easy credit? And there's no way people should be spending 50% of their take home pay on a mortgage. I thought the rule of thumb was 25%, one third tops. How is your average Californian supposed to afford $450,000 for a first home? Just because some crooked lender will give you the loan with no money down, doesn't mean you should take it. But people do, because everybody's doing it.

Sacramento is a prime example. I read somewhere that this city was second only to Palm Beach, Florida in overblown housing prices. My boyfriend, God bless him, did everything wrong. When we first started going out, he was in the process of dumping a house that he had bought at the very top of the market, when properties were selling almost the day they got listed. He put it up for sale a year later, just after everything slowed down. There were about six houses with his exact same floor plan for sale within a radius of a couple of blocks. Luckily, after four months of waiting, and hardly any lookers, he sold to an investment buyer who ended up renting the house. Christopher bought at the crest and sold at the trough. Thus ended his foray into the "get rich through home ownership" scheme.

If my boyfriend hadn't sold when he did, the value of his house was in danger of falling below the amount of his mortgage. He ended up with a tiny profit, but lots of people aren't going to be so lucky. When the adjustable rate goes through the roof, and people aren't able to sell because of falling prices, look out. A lot of folks are going to get hurt.

(I also wondered what was going to happen to all those Gulf Coast homeowners, especially in New Orleans. I imagine there are going to be a lot of foreclosures down there, if there haven't already been. What if you got screwed by the insurance company, the bank still wants their money, and they don't care if you're living out of a trailer (or not) and you still haven't got your job at the liquor store back because that place went out of business too?)

Maybe I'm being too pessimistic, but I think the mortgage crisis is going to be a real problem. Hillary thinks so too, and savvy politician that she is, she's already made it a campaign issue. This is exactly the type of issue that Democrats win elections on because the conservative response is usually to let the free market sort itself out. People don't want to hear that. If things get really bad, Hillary will score points being the first one to call for a homeowner's bail-out. Predictably, she faults Bush for doing nothing while sub-prime lenders dug us into this hole. And you know what, I can't say she's wrong about that.

WTF?

WTF?

Please please let Edwards win the nomination.

Hey Gingrich Lovers...

You know who you are.

Look, I like Newt. Don't get me wrong. But you know what I like more? A Republican in the White House.

In the latest Gallup poll, which of the top candidates from both parties is the only one whose unfavorable rating is higher than their favorable rating. I'll give you a hint. It's not Hillary.

Okay, well maybe Newt hasn't been out in public enough. He should write some books. Check. He should go on Fox News. Check. He should call Hannity's show. Oh, check.

Okay, well at least there's twenty months between now and election day. That's plenty of time for Newt to change people's minds, right?

Oh, well, except that he's decided to save money by waiting until September before he gets in the race. And with a bunch of big states moving their primaries up to February 5th, that gives Newt only five months to change his image.

Okay, well maybe Newt can use the time between now and September to ramp up his public image. Do a full court press on the public. Show everybody what a great guy he is. He should start today. Give an interview with Dobson or somebody.

Oh, he did? Ouch. That's not exactly moving in the right direction, but it's a start, I guess.

Sorry Newt lovers. Stick a fork in the salamander, he's done.

h/t Hot Air

Parker v. District of Columbia

In case you haven't heard, the big news today is that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right.

I know, it's a shock.

The language of the decision is so out of step with the type of wishy-washy "living document" bullshit theory of Constitutional interpretation I've become resigned to, I want someone to pinch me to make sure I'm not dreaming.

We start by considering the competing claims about the meaning of the Second Amendment’s operative clause: “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” Appellants contend that “the right of the people” clearly contemplates an individual right and that “keep and bear Arms” necessarily implies private use and ownership. The District’s primary argument is that “keep and bear Arms” is best read in a military sense, and, as a consequence, the entire operative clause should be understood as granting only a collective right. The District also argues that “the right of the people” is ambiguous as to whether the right protects civic or private ownership and use of weapons.

In determining whether the Second Amendment’s guarantee is an individual one, or some sort of collective right, the most important word is the one the drafters chose to describe the holders of the right — “the people.” That term is found in the First, Second, Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments. It has never been doubted that these provisions were designed to protect the interests of individuals against government intrusion, interference, or usurpation. We also note that the Tenth Amendment — “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people” — indicates that the authors of the Bill of Rights were perfectly capable of distinguishing between “the people,” on the one hand, and “the states,” on the other. The natural reading of “the right of the people” in the Second Amendment would accord with usage elsewhere in the Bill of Rights.

The District’s argument, on the other hand, asks us to read “the people” to mean some subset of individuals such as “the organized militia” or “the people who are engaged in militia service,” or perhaps not any individuals at all — e.g., “the states.” . . . These strained interpretations of “the people” simply cannot be squared with the uniform construction of our other Bill of Rights provisions. Indeed, the Supreme Court has recently endorsed a uniform reading of “the people” across the Bill of Rights. . . .

. . .

It seems unlikely that the Supreme Court would have lumped these provisions together without comment if it were of the view that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right. The Court’s discussion certainly indicates — if it does not definitively determine — that we should not regard “the people” in the Second Amendment as somehow restricted to a small subset of “the people” meriting protection under the other Amendments’ use of that same term.

In sum, the phrase “the right of the people,” when read intratextually and in light of Supreme Court precedent, leads us to conclude that the right in question is individual.

Parker v. District of Columbia at 18-19.

But here's the best part:

The wording of the operative clause also indicates that the right to keep and bear arms was not created by government, but rather preserved by it. . . . Hence, the Amendment acknowledges “the right . . . to keep and bear Arms,” a right that pre-existed the Constitution like “the freedom of speech.” Because the right to arms existed prior to the formation of the new government . . . the Second Amendment only guarantees that the right “shall not be infringed.”

Id at 20-21.

That's just beautiful. Our rights "pre-existed the formation of the new government," because they came from God, not from the government. It's so easy to forget that in this age when the mere mention of the word "God" can label you as some sort of fanatic. But you don't have to believe in God to marvel at the reasoning of the Court. All you need to know is that there's a difference between the government and your rights, and in a free society, government must bow to those rights, which preceded government itself.

"People" means people, people. That's what originalism is all about. First you determine what the Constitution says (not what you wish it said), then you determine if the law in question departs from the Constitution. If it does, then there is a mechanism for changing the Constitution, specified within the Constitution. You don't simply disregard the Founding Document and make up a lie about what it really means.

This decision will make its way to the Supreme Court, and thank George W. Bush, we'll have Roberts and Alito on our side hopefully.

Democrats Are Wimps

Why are the Democrats so afraid of Fox News? It's a live debate, what do they think will happen? It's not like Fox News might superimpose an X over John Edwards' face while she's talking. Nobody would do that.

The Way To Win, 1.0

People are making a big deal about Bronco Bomber's recent surge in the polls against Hillary, most notably among black voters. Hillary made a fool of herself in Selma, and Bomber is clearly making her scramble earlier than anyone thought she would. But she'll survive that embarrassment.

I still don't see Bronco's insurgent campaign winning the nomination in the long run. I like Bronco Bomber, I'm reading his book. I don't like his politics, but for me, he represents the end of the baby boomer stranglehold on American political leadership, which can only be a good thing. Too bad he's going up against the Clinton machine.

I'm sure that Hillary and her staff have been behind the growing list of thinly veiled attacks on the Bronco Bomber campaign. The list includes:

• Claiming that he attended a radical Islamic school in Indonesia.
• Trying to hold him accountable for the (well taken) anti-Clinton comments of David Geffen.
• The brouhaha over Bronco's pastor being dis-invited from his announcement ceremony.
• The so far unfounded allegation of a quid pro quo stock transaction.

Clinton and her/his allies are denying that they were behind the steady drip drip of opposition research against Bronco. Clinton supporters have already tried to blame Republicans for these well timed attacks against a Democratic challenger who's still polling well behind the presumptive nominee.

That's just crazy. Republicans need Bronco Bomber to mount a strong campaign. It doesn't make sense to knock him down. Every serious political observer knows that Bronco won't win the nomination unless something catastrophic happens between now and the beginning of next year. Given a choice between an establishment front-runner and a populist challenger, Democrats will always nominate the establishment candidate. I think the only modern exception to that rule was McGovern, so you can see why they wouldn't want to make that mistake again.

From my long range vantage point — almost 20 months from election day — I'm beggining to see two general strategies that each party should use to ensure victory.

For the Democrats, it's easy. Hillary will be the nominee, and she will have a fight on her hands if she goes against Giuliani. That's because she won't be able to take the big blue states for granted. But Giuliani's weakness among social conservatives can be Hillary's secret weapon if she practices a bit of political judo. All she needs is a far right third party candidate, and she will cruise back into the White House. Some say the Republicans were behind Ralph Nader's candidacy back in 2000. I don't know, but it's obvious that Gore would have been president if he'd had Nader's 2% in Florida. I think a Republican Nader, like Pat Buchanan or someone of his ilk, would be just what the doctor ordered for Hillary's ailing campaign. She needs to stop worrying about Bronco and start looking for a social conservative to funnel money to.

For the Republicans, the key is in preparing the general election battlefield by defining Hillary now. She's giving them all the help they need, as she stupidly attacks Bronco through her surrogates. Every time another sneaky negative story appears in the New York Times or some other pro-Clinton organ, the Republicans should take note and tie it to her campaign. The key is to define Hillary as a female Nixon. Devious, sneaky, mean, and unlikeable. You want people thinking these things when the general election comes around.

She'll do anything to win.

That Obama guy seemed nice, and look what she did to him.

You don't want to cross her.

She has an enemies list, just like Nixon.

Her past history fits in well with this narrative. Remember Travelgate?

I had thought that Hillary's left flank might be her undoing, but now I don't think so. Other than a few scattered hecklers, I haven't seen the unhinged protesters that I expected to follow her around. I think even the true believers know that she's their best chance if they want to avoid repeating the humiliations of 2000 and 2004. That may change as Bronco gets stronger, though. Another reason why I'd like to see him continue the charge.

Irony On Top Of Irony On Top Of Irony

A USC free speech group was fined by the university for posting flyers outside USC's free speech zone, which say "This is not a free speech zone."

Story at LAist.

Annika's Journal Now Selling Carbon Offsets

[What the hell is a carbon offset?]

SAVE THE WORLD!!!

Buy carbon offsets from me.

Even though I don't know what a carbon offset is, I know a moneymaker when I see one.

You, guilt ridden Annika's Journal reader that you are, can save the world! One book at a time. One DVD at a time. One moderately priced cheese sampler at a time.

First, a description of the problem.

All scientists agree that:

1. The Earth is warming.


2. It's your fault.


3. You can do something about it.


4. If you don't do something about it, the animals will die.


5. If you don't do something about it, the good rich people will have to move away from Malibu, Palm Beach and the Upper East Side.


6. Doing something about it should somehow involve penalizing the bad rich people like those evil corporation men.


7. Doing something about it will make you feel good, even if the world ends up getting destroyed anyway. Or not.

[N.B. Anyone who disagrees with any of the above propositions statements of incontrovertible fact will be immediately banned from this site, and your comments removed. This is not an example of censorship. No not at all. Its just that there are certain prerequisites of intelligence and knowledge that all commenters to this blog should possess. It's what my readers expect, after all. By disagreeing with what I say is incontrovertible fact, you are demonstrating that you do not possess the minimum intelligence and knowledge required, and therefore in order to maintain the credibility of this weblog — you must be smacked down sucka!!!]

Now that you understand the problem (animals dying, good people moving), I'm sure you want to know how to help. After all, Al Gore recently said that all we need in order to solve the problem is in our very own hands, except for the will to act, which we also have. Which means that we have everything we need.

But although we have everything we need, we don't have everything we want. This might seem unrelated at first but if you keep reading you'll see that the two points are very related.

When I say we don't have everything we want, what I really mean is I don't have everything I want. For instance, I don't have:

• Hawaii Five-0 - The Complete First Season. I love this show, and I've been waiting for the DVD set to come out for years! Coincidentally, Hawaii is another place that will probably be destroyed because of you and your decadent lifestyle.


• A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin. I've been working my way through Martin's "Song of Fire and Ice" series, and I'm halfway through it. This is the next book in the series and I want it. By the way, a song of fire and ice is what you'll be singing if you don't get off your ass and do something to stop global warming.


• Two pounds of Spanish cheese. This item doesn't necessarily have anything to do with global warming, but who doesn't love Manchego cheese? I know I do. It's great with just a sprinkle of olive oil on it. Of course, if we don't stop global warming, all the olive trees will die.

There are plenty of other things I want too. You can find them here.

To sum up what I'm trying to say, we have everything we need to stop global warming but I don't have everything I want.

So here's the deal. You can save the world and help stop global warming by buying me shit. Your purchases will help pay for carbon offsets that I will do, or make, or whatever. For every dollar you spend on me, I promise to reduce the carbon footprint of my apartment by turning off all non-essential electrical devices for one hour.* This could add up to some serious non-electrical usage depending on how many offsets you buy.

So save the planet — buy me stuff. If they knew how much you cared, I'm sure the polar bears would thank you. (Assuming they could talk, and wouldn't eat you first, which they probably would, but you get my point — it's for the animals.)
_______________

* Up to a maximum of 8 hours per day, weekends excluded. Non-essential electrical devices does not include refrigerators, clock radios, and any device that uses a clock or would be a hassle to unplug like my cable box.

Amendment To Earlier Pledge

I have already publicly pledged that I will not vote for John McCain in the unlikely event that he gets the Republican nomination. I stand by that pledge, but I'm adding this addendum: If the Republican Party is stupid enough to nominate McCain, I plan to write in "Preston Taylor Holmes."

Clinton, Bomber Trade Jabs Early

Presidential politics just might be my favorite spectator sport. And the Democrat league, like the AFL, is inevitably where you'll find the most action. Damn I love the Democrats.

I hope you've heard about the latest Clinton-Bomber skirmish. It's a sure sign of the even worse backbiting to come.

The latest row was sparked by music mogul and former Clinton toady David Geffen, now a Bomber groupie, whose comments were a knife in the back of Mrs. Clinton. He said:

Everybody in politics lies, but they [the Clintons] do it with such ease, it's troubling.

Slate.com cited this theory on why David Geffen might have turned against the Clintons:

The gossip passed around by those who follow Hollywood and politics holds that Geffen fell out with Bill Clinton much later over the then-president's refusal to pardon Leonard Peltier and over Clinton's subsequent allusion to Geffen's thwarted lobbying effort to demonstrate that he didn't dole out pardons as favors to certain friends.

Anyways, Hillary didn't like what Geffen said and her campaign wants Bomber to disavow the statement and return Geffen's money. Bomber, perhaps deciding it was best to draw a line in the sand early against the Clinton machine, said no.

At a candidate forum in Nevada today, Hillary played the "politics of personal destruction" card, which I think Bill invented:

I sure don't want Democrats or supporters of Democrats to be engaging in the politics of personal destruction.

She said, no doubt hiding an ironic smile.

I'm fascinated by Bronco Bomber. If I was a liberal, I'd totally jump on his bandwagon, and not just because I love making fun of his name. He's got a lot of strengths. He's very personable and yes, I hear he's articulate and clean too. I think we all want a candidate who bathes regularly, regardless of our party affiliation.

I'm not yet convinced however, that Bronco Bomber is not this season's Howard Dean. Being a media darling means nothing to the Iowa caucusers. Serious political junkies have to admit that raising a ton of money means nothing if your organization doesn't know how to use it.

People like David Geffen may represent the vocal face of the Democratic party. But they don't represent the majority of voting Democrats, who are more centrist than the press corps realizes. That's why Dean came in third in Iowa last time, even though the media kept treating him like he was the front runner. Rank and file Democrats were rightly suspicious of Dean's electability, and they went for the safer bet, John Kerry. The trouble was, they didn't inspect the goods well enough before switching to Kerry, and they got burned.

Not that I place much stock in the "Hawkeye Cauci," as Rush calls it. I don't. New Hampshire has always been a more reliable indicator of party preference, historically. And Bronco Bomber is no Howard Dean; they don't share the same negatives. That's good for Bronco. Unfortunately his poll numbers are not in a range where he should be getting the kind of press he's getting right now. The latest polls have him losing to Hillary by an average of 18.2 points. That's a lot of ground to make up, even for a media darling.

For now, Bomber's just not a credible challenger, though I love watching him make Hillary sweat.

Iran Plan

The BBC announced that the U.S. has a plan to attack Iran and they know the details. No shit, so do I. Anybody with a brain knows we have a plan, and that it would be negligence if our military did not have a plan.

The BBC seems overly concerned with this little bit too:

US contingency plans for air strikes on Iran extend beyond nuclear sites and include most of the country's military infrastructure, the BBC has learned.

It is understood that any such attack - if ordered - would target Iranian air bases, naval bases, missile facilities and command-and-control centres.

Well, duh. One of the arguments against attacking Iran's nuclear research sites is that they might retaliate against our ships in the Gulf, and threaten shipping. Therefore, it makes sense that any attack plan address that threat too, by targeting "air bases, naval bases, missile facilities and command-and-control centres."

Calm down Beeb.

Chill Wind Update

Whatever happened to Tim Robbins's "chill wind?"

It must be yet another sign of global warming, because that "chill wind" is getting downright balmy.

Social Science As The Answer

Back in August I asked this rhetorical question:

I'm sure there's lots of guys working in thinktanks and war colleges whose job it is to figure these things out, but so far I haven't seen nor heard of any effective way to fight guerrillas other than by total unrestricted warfare — which we won't do. How do you counter the weighty advantage they've claimed for themselves by co-opting the machinery of world public opinion? How do you beat an enemy that has perfected the use of civilian deaths both offensively and defensively, if your one achilles heel is the fear of civilian deaths?

By researching the bio of Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, whom I quoted in my last post, I found this essential article by George Packer in the December 2006 issue of The New Yorker. It may contain the answer to my question, namely "is there another way?"

The article is New Yorker length, unfortunately. But it's Sunday Morning, so why not print it out and read it with your coffee instead of the funnies.

Lt. Col. Kilcullen and Dr. Montgomery McFate* are two people who may provide the "new way" I've been talking about. I have read about the social sciences approach to counter-insurgency before and I was very skeptical. The New Yorker article is detailed enough to be persuasive. The anthropological approach is more than just "hearts and minds" b.s. Properly implemented, it's an integrated and adaptable strategy that includes force, coersion, propaganda, and all those other fun things I've said we need to be doing. But it also recognizes that we're in a new "information age" and we need to understand and adapt to the advantage this gives our enemy.

Another very important concept, which I've not considered before, but which makes perfect sense to me, is this:

“I saw extremely similar behavior and extremely similar problems in an Islamic insurgency in West Java and a Christian-separatist insurgency in East Timor,” [Kilcullen] said. “After 9/11, when a lot of people were saying, ‘The problem is Islam,’ I was thinking, It’s something deeper than that. It’s about human social networks and the way that they operate.” In West Java, elements of the failed Darul Islam insurgency—a local separatist movement with mystical leanings—had resumed fighting as Jemaah Islamiya, whose outlook was Salafist and global. Kilcullen said, “What that told me about Jemaah Islamiya is that it’s not about theology.” He went on, “There are elements in human psychological and social makeup that drive what’s happening. The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not ‘Islamic behavior.’ ” Paraphrasing the American political scientist Roger D. Petersen, he said, “People don’t get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks.” He noted that all fifteen Saudi hijackers in the September 11th plot had trouble with their fathers. Although radical ideas prepare the way for disaffected young men to become violent jihadists, the reasons they convert, Kilcullen said, are more mundane and familiar: family, friends, associates.

I think it's really more complicated than just saying "kill the enemy." As a spectator, I've been as guilty as anyone in believing that our problem was an insufficiency of ass-kicking. Kilcullen sees radical Islam as just a template that the terrorist assholes plug into when they decide to dedicate themselves to their particular brand of assholery. But it's social networks, i.e. their friends, family and local communities, that are the avenue towards jihad. I think about gang members here in the U.S. These are "military age males" who would probably be joining al Qaeda if they were in Pakistan. Why, because they're assholes, and gangs or al Qaeda are what their particular social networks would drive them towards.

We need a strategy that understands and targets those social networks with a flexible and multi-faceted approach. The correct strategy should work not only in Iraq but also in the "long war," which includes Afghanistan, Africa, Europe, Southeast Asia and wherever else radical Islam is making inroads. But as the article points out, not many in government understand the problem or have the expertise to tackle it. Another obstacle is the decades long antipathy of social science academics to any endeavor that might be considered patriotic.

That needs to change.
_______________

* A fellow Cal Bear.

Surge Strategy

There's a reason why I haven't written whether I think the Surge Strategy will work or whether it's a good idea. I'm not an expert in any of the disciplines necessary for my opinion to have any value. In fact, most of my knowledge regarding the Iraq War comes from secondary sources, written by other people who are similarly ignorant, i.e. the press.

The vast majority of reporters and columnists who write about Iraq and pretend to know what they're talking about are completely incompetent to do so. Not only is their journalism degree inadequate for the task (it's a glorified general ed degree) but their undisguised bias robs their output of any credibility. Yet, from my desk chair, I'm forced to rely on these people almost exclusively for my information. So, as a result, my opinions are just about as worthless.

That's why I'm taking a wait and see approach. I do consider myself an expert on another thing, though: I'm an expert on the domestic battlefield. This is why I have said over and over again that we must achieve success in Iraq quickly, because if Americans don't see progress soon, our next president will pull the plug on the whole noble enterprise.

So I was very encouraged when the President yanked the most recent generals in charge, good men though they might be, and replaced them with guys who understand the need for a change in strategy. Today is General Petraeus's first day on the job. His resume is impressive.* He's had success before.** I wish him and his new strategy well.

Australian Lt. Col. David Kilcullen is an advisor to Gen. Petraeus and an expert on counter-insurgency strategy. He's also a Duntroon grad and a veteran of East Timor. In this post at Small Wars Journal, Kilcullen outlines the two schools of thought regarding counter-insurgency.***

An illustrative anecdote:

In Timor in 1999 I worked closely with village elders in the border districts. I sat down with several of them one afternoon to discuss their perception of how the campaign was progressing, and they complained that the Australians weren't securing them in the fields and villages, that they felt unsafe because of the militia (the local term for cross-border guerrillas) and that we needed to do more to protect them. In actual fact, we were out in large numbers, securing the border against infiltration, patrolling by night, conducting 14 to 21-day patrols in the jungle to deny the militias a chance to build sanctuaries, and working in close in the villages to maintain popular support. There had not been a single successful attack by the insurgents on the population for more than two months. So, "objectively", they were secure. But -- and this is the critical point -- because our troops were sneaking around in the jungle and at night, staying out of the villagers' way and focusing on defeating enemy attempts to target the population, they did not see us about, and hence did not feel “subjectively” secure. This was exacerbated by the fact that they had just experienced a major psychological trauma (occupation, insurgency, mass destruction and international intervention) and as a society they needed time and support for a degree of "mental reconstruction". Based on their feedback (and that of lots of other meetings and observations) we changed our operational approach, became a bit more visible to the population and focused on giving them the feeling, as well as the reality, of safety. Once we did that, it was fine.

In other words, we had to shift from a more enemy-centric approach to a more population-centric approach to adjust to the developing situation. My personal lesson from this experience was that the correct approach is situation-dependent, and the situation changes over time. Therefore the key is to develop mechanisms that allow you to read the environment, to be agile and to adapt . . .

Adaptation is the key, and I'm glad to see that we're trying something new. I hope it works.

You can see how the above example illustrates the need for more troops and contact with the population. It's more than just switching to a zone defense from man-to-man. At least in the short run, our new strategy will provide the enemy with more opportunities to kill Americans. We're not going to like that here at home, and I have no illusions that the media will understand what's happening or that a different strategy is at work. The commanders in theater, and the President must realize that the home front will not cut them any slack and they have to get it right this time.
_______________

* But so was McClellan's.

** But so did Hooker.

*** The comments are especially interesting.

You Heard It Here First

I'm telling you, the secret's getting out. The latest Gallup poll reveals:

In a head-to-head matchup against McCain in a Gallup poll of Republicans and Republican "leaners" taken Jan. 25-28, Giuliani beat the Arizona senator handily in most categories: better public speaker, more likable, better chance of beating the Democratic nominee, would run a more positive campaign, would perform better in debates, would do more to unite the country, would manage the country more effectively, would be better in a crisis, better understands the problems faced by ordinary Americans, and strength of leadership.

What did I just say?

The Monitor article from which I pulled that quote also says that Giuliani's approval ratings are at 62%. Sixty-two percent! That will change as the attack machine heats up. But I ask you, can anyone name another public figure with numbers over 60%? I can't think of one. That's unheard of in this age of hyper-negativity.

On the other hand, some analysts say that McCain's recent dip in polling is due to his more vocal support of the President's Surge plan. It's possible that not a lot of poll respondents knew Giuliani's position on the Iraq War is identical to McCain's. Or maybe they do, but they just trust Giuliani more.

That's my take. Even if I liked McCain, I would always favor a guy with executive experience over legislative experience. Theoretically, executives must work in the real world where results are expected. Therefore, they should be more results oriented. Legislators on the other hand, work in a world of theoretical projections, possibilities and imaginary outcomes. When they fuck up, they're rarely held to account because they simply blame the other party, the executive, or both.

[How can I quit blogging this summer when Campaign '08 is already so interesting?]

Rudy Is In

You may have sensed that I am a fan of Rudy Giuliani. While I haven't yet decided who I'm going to support, Rudy definitely makes the short list. And it's a very short list. I've already done the math on him, and nobody has yet debunked my theory. In fact, I'm the only one I've ever heard talking about the New York factor.

In a nutshell, my theory is this: People say Rudy is vulnerable on social issues, meaning he won't win the Red States. But people forget that he has a serious shot at winning New York, even against Hillary. And if Rudy wins NY's 31 electoral votes, he can pretty much thumb his nose at the South and still win the presidency. And I say, if he wins NY, he'll probably get NJ, and possibly PA and CT, too. Let me tell you, that's a scenario that scares the hell out of a lot of people. That's why no one's talking about it.

Now that Rudy's all but announced, you're going to hear a lot of people repeating the same mantra: "He's too liberal to win the nomination." Don't you believe it. The media wants you to believe it, because they know how formidable he really is. They've seen the polling. The "three-G"* conservatives want you to believe it too, because Rudy gives them nightmares.

But before you give in to the anti-hype, read this article in City Journal, entitled "Yes, Rudy Giuliani Is a Conservative". You may not come away completely convinced, but at least you'll know he's not the antichrist, as some want you to believe.

He cleaned up New York when the rest of the world had written it off. Ask any New Yorker. Pre-Giuliani, you took your life into your hands walking in the park after dark, or just riding the subway. Broadway was a shithole. There used to be certain neighborhoods where nobody wanted to live, that are now impossible to afford. New York had a genuine Renaissance in the 1990's and it was thanks to Rudy Giuliani. New Yorkers won't forget this.

Of course Rudy led that Renaissance in the face of withering criticism from the left. He made enemies, and as his tenure was winding down, his enemies seemed to have gotten to him. The Diallo shooting didn't help, either. But then came 9/11, and people saw again that this man was a courageous, principled and born leader. Flawed yes, but that's only a reminder that he's human like all of us. Rudy's personal problems are not going to dissuade New Yorkers from supporting him. They voted overwhelmingly for Clinton too.

Don't forget also that Giuliani is an amazing speaker. He gave the best speech at the 2004 Republican Convention. His style is spontaneous, populist, and deceptively effective. While Zell Miller fired up the base and Schwarzenegger won over the pundits, Rudy's speech was the most articulate defense of the War on Terror that has ever been given to a national audience.

Giuliani has also positioned himself well, by staying out of the administration. To move forward, he will need to come up with an approach to the Iraq mess that navigates the gulf between his unequivocal support for the War and the subsequent truth that Bush and Company have fucked it all up. On that issue he may lose ground to McCain, who has also been unwavering in his belief the Iraq was the right thing to do, while at the same time he's never thought we were doing it right.

In a sense, all Republican candidates except for Hagel are hamstrung by the success or failure of the President's Surge plan. No pro-war Republican will be elected on a victory platform if victory isn't within sight. Mark my words, if the Surge fails to show progress within the next 12 months, we will have a Democratic president in 2009. I think McCain and Giuliani have the best chance of convincing independent voters to stay the course in Iraq, but ultimately I think they'd lose to a cut-and-run Democrat if we don't start winning soon.

Finally, back to Giuliani's social liberal weaknesses. To those who don't like Rudy because he's pro gay marriage, I say where have you been? Gay marriage is here. It's a reality. The only way to put that genie back in the bottle is by a Constitutional Amendment, and good luck with that one. Same goes for abortion, and I'm about as far to the right on the abortion issue as it is possible to be. Rudy does worry me about gun rights, but he made a good first step at winning my confidence two days ago when he said:

I think those are the kinds of justices I would appoint - Scalia, Alito and Roberts. If you can find anybody as good as that, you are very, very fortunate.

I'll keep watching. But as it stands now, Rudy should be the front-runner and I'm skeptical of any polls that don't have him at or near the top. His opponents in both parties will be gunning for him now. Rudy's never been shy about fighting back, so it should be a very interesting campaign whatever happens.
_______________

* Guns, gays and God.

Cold Blast Pushes Global Warming Off The Front Page

The words "Global" and "Warming" were conspicuously absent from tonight's NBC Nightly News, I'm here to tell you.

The good news, if there is any, about what's being called the Midwest Cold Blast, or alternately, the Cold Snap, is that we won't be lectured about Global Warming again for at least another week.

Long Live The Nanny State

I live in the Soviet Union.

For the record, I stopped using incandescent bulbs years ago. In my case, the free market worked. But what about photographers, who can't use flourescent bulbs? Does every single thing in the universe need to be legislated?

Hillary Said

While campaigning in Iowa today, Hillary said:

The president has said [the Iraq War] is going to be left to his successor. . . . I think it's the height of irresponsibility and I really resent it. . . . This was his decision to go to war, he went with an ill-conceived plan, an incompetently executed strategy and we should expect him to extricate our country from this before he leaves office.

It sounds as though she doesn't feel she's up to the task. One might add that Bush should resent her husband for having left Osama Bin Laden to deal with.

But in a way, I do agree with Hillary's statement, at least as far as the poorly executed strategy goes. We should expect President Bush to extricate our country from the Iraq War before he leaves office. My only qualification is that we should leave through the "victory" door, not the "abandonment" door the Democrats keep pushing us towards.

Finally, despite all the talk about the new "Rules of Engagement," I'm sick and tired of hearing about shit like this. Keep your ears open for more stories about the ROE's and whether or not they really have changed (I'm skeptical). That will tell you whether our leaders are serious about winning or whether they're just playing out the clock for Hillary.

Yet Another Bogus Study Being Trumpeted By The Anti-American Media

You may have heard recently that the United States is the world's unfriendliest nation for international travellers. I'm calling bullshit on this bogus study.

The United States is the world's most unfriendly country for international travellers, a survey suggests.

The global survey showed the US was ranked "the worst" because of rude immigration officials and long delays in processing visas.

More than half of the travellers surveyed said US immigration officials were rude and two-thirds said they feared they would be detained on arriving in the US for a simple mistake in their paper work or for saying the wrong thing to an immigration official.

Twice the percentage of travellers nominated the US as unfriendly, compared with the Middle East and the Asian subcontinent.

The survey, of 2,011 international travellers in 16 countries, was conducted by the polling firm RT Strategies for the Discover America Partnership, a business-backed group launched in September to promote travel to the US and improve the country's image abroad.

"The entry process has created a climate of fear and frustration that is keeping foreign visitors away," said Geoff Freeman, executive director of the Discover America Partnership.

"The survey shows there is more fear of our immigration officials than of terrorism or crime."

What is the premise of the survey's results? That travellers to the United States encounter more unpleasantness than in any other country in the world.

Complete bullshit.

Just look at the U.S. State Department's travel advisory for Saudi Arabia, just to pull one example of a worse country from the many that come to mind.

American citizens who choose to visit or remain in Saudi Arabia despite this Travel Warning are strongly urged to avoid staying in hotels or housing compounds that do not apply stringent security measures including, but not limited to, the presence of an armed guard force . . .

Not just a security guard, but an armed guard force!

. . . inspection of all vehicles, and a hardened security perimeter to prevent unauthorized vehicles from approaching the facility. American citizens are further advised to exercise caution and maintain good situational awareness when visiting commercial establishments frequented by Westerners or in primarily Western environments. Keep a low profile, varying times and routes for all required travel, and ensure that travel documents and visas are valid. American citizens are also advised to exercise caution while driving, entering or exiting vehicles.

And that's not just paranoid advice from a xenophobic American agency. If you want to talk about unfriendly to tourists, here's some advice from Saudi Arabia's own government website:

Important Instructions:

If a woman is arriving in the Kingdom alone, the sponsor or her husband must receive her at the airport.

Every woman must have confirmed accommodation for the duration of her stay in the Kingdom.

A woman is not allowed to drive a car and can therefore travel by car only if she is accompanied by her husband, a male relative, or a driver.

All visitors to the Kingdom must have a return ticket.

Here's more anecdotal info about the hassles one may encounter in the Saudi Kingdom, from the Lonely Planet's website:

There are NO visitor visas. It's not even possible to have a Saudi sponsor apply for the visa on my behalf. Visitors can ONLY visit to work, or for a religious visit.

Speaking of religious visits, people who do this who are muslims, can ONLY visit Mecca and Medina, and that's it. Travel to other Saudi cities is not allowed.
Anon, Canada (Mar 03)

One thing Anon from Canada didn't mention is that only those of the Islamic faith are allowed to set foot in Mecca or Medina. The rest of us are unclean or something, I guess. Not that I have any desire to get trampled to death in their crappy holy city anyway.

Back to the Lonely Planet:

WOMEN: We wear the abeyya so we get left alone. But even this doesn't work. We get stared at constantly and sometimes things are said. More so now after the September 11 disaster. I have never been barred from any establishment or had to leave because of prayer. Stealing wallets or purses out of expats handbags or backpacks as they walk around is common. We are not allowed to use the public transport.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Sure, film and cameras are everywhere. But, go and try to do a shoot around Jeddah. You will stop traffic, draw untold attention to yourself and if you are really lucky, the police will stop you and then the Matawwa [Saudi religious police] maybe will turn up which is what happened to me. You cannot take photos of people, any Palace or any government building. Now, as all three are everywhere, photography is difficult and not a delight.

. . .

MATAWWA: If they are around, they will ask all women to cover their hair and generally have the police with them, so this is enforced. I have friends who did not have their scarf with them one night in Balad and the Matawwa made them go to a shop, buy one and put it on while they waited outside until the girls did. Jeddah is not as strict as Riyadh.
Alanna Lee, Saudi Arabia (Jan 02)

It gets worse. Here's what the British Embassy in Riyadh says about travel to Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia is a Muslim country in which Islamic law is strictly enforced.

The public practice of any form of religion other than Islam, or proselytising, is not permitted.

Islamic codes of behaviour and dress are also enforced rigorously. You should respect them fully.

Homosexual behaviour and adultery are illegal and can carry the death penalty.

The penalties for the possession of, or trade in, alcohol are severe. Both result in prison sentences. The punishment for importing drugs includes the death penalty. You should not arrive in Saudi Arabia under the influence of alcohol: the consequences could be serious. You should carry with you a doctor’s prescription for any medication you have with you. The importation of pork products is also forbidden.

While the Saudi authorities say they accept the private practice of religious other than Islam, religious books (apart from the Qu’ran) and artefacts imported for personal use may be confiscated. Also, importing larger quantities can carry severe penalties as it will be viewed that it is your intention to convert (proselytise) others.

The possession of pornographic material, or of illustrations of scantily dressed people, especially women, is prohibited.

The Saudi legal system differs in many ways from the UK. Suspects can be held without charge and those detained have in the past not been allowed legal representation. The Saudi authorities have detained witnesses and victims of crimes. If you require consular assistance our staff will seek to visit you as soon as they are aware of the case. However, in some instances they have not been permitted to do so immediately or have had limits applied to access once granted. We have raised our concern about reports of mistreatment of some suspects during their detention.

Photography of government buildings, military installations and palaces is not allowed. You should avoid photographing local people. It is illegal for women to drive.

Anyone involved in a commercial dispute with a Saudi company or individual may be prevented from leaving the country pending resolution of the dispute.

Passports are often retained by sponsors or government bodies for official purposes. You should carry a photocopy of your passport. Make sure you have included in your passport details of those who should be contacted in an emergency.

It is illegal to hold two passports in Saudi Arabia: second passports will be confiscated by the immigration authorities if they are discovered.

. . .

On occasion, Saudi visas have been refused when passports have reflected travel to Israel or indicated an Israeli birthplace.

Women visitors and residents are required to be met by their sponsor upon arrival. Women travelling alone, who are not met by sponsors, have experienced delays before being allowed to enter the country or to continue on other flights.

Single parents or other adults travelling alone with children should be aware that some countries require documentary evidence of parental responsibility before allowing lone parents to enter the country, or in some cases, before permitting the children to leave the country. . . .

Foreign women married to Saudi nationals require permission from their husbands for themselves and their children to leave Saudi Arabia.

Bunch of backwards-ass dickwads. On any type of objective scale you'd want to use, Saudi Arabia has to be among the world's most unfriendly places for international travellers. I don't know about you, but I'd much rather deal with a rude customs guy than risk getting my head chopped off because I was wearing a sleeveless tee.

So how did the Discover America Partnership get it so wrong, when they decided that the United States is the most unfriendly nation for tourism? Simple, they didn't survey any visitors to Saudi Arabia.

Here's the list of Middle Eastern countries their survey compared to the United States:

1. United Arab Emirates

That's right, they only included one Middle Eastern country in their study. So when the above linked article claims "Twice the percentage of travellers nominated the US as unfriendly, compared with the Middle East and the Asian subcontinent," that's a bit misleading. Besides the fact that the U.A.E. might be the most westernized of any Middle Eastern nation besides Israel, how many respondents traveled there, compared with the the United States? Poor methodology, but you wouldn't know it from reading the headlines.

"Mahdi Militia Gettin' Their Asses Fuckin' Handed To 'Em"

Via Jawa:

Gotta love the FFAR.

Sacramento Native Was Among Executed Contractors

From the Bee:

A reserve Placer County sheriff's deputy was among five U.S. security contractors killed after their company's helicopter crashed in central Baghdad this week.

Art Laguna, 52, was working for the private security firm Blackwater USA when he was killed Tuesday.

Two Sunni insurgent groups claimed responsibility. One posted several identity cards on a Web site, including two belonging to Laguna.
Sell It Yourself

Laguna lived in the Sacramento suburb of Rancho Cordova and was a reserve deputy with the Placer County Sheriff's Department.

He helped establish the department's air wing in 1995 and spent hundreds of hours volunteering to train the department's pilots. He also assisted with rescues in the Sierra Nevada, said Capt. David Harris, who commands the air unit.

"We'll definitely miss his expertise, we'll miss his flying abilities, and of course we'll miss him as a friend," Harris told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "He was a wonderful guy."

Laguna began assisting the sheriff's department while he was flying Black Hawk helicopters on medical evacuation missions with the California National Guard out of Sacramento's Mather Field. He worked with the department for nine years and visited when he was in the U.S, Harris said.

The circumstances of the helicopter crash in Baghdad remained unclear Wednesday. The Black Hawk was headed to help a U.S. Embassy ground convoy and was flying over a raging gunfight in a Sunni neighborhood at the time it went down.

An Iraqi military official said it was downed by a machine gun, but a U.S. military official in Washington said there was no indication of that. A U.S. defense official said four of the five people on board the helicopter were shot execution-style, in the back of the head.

Whatever Else You Might Say About Hillary...

... I think she deserves a thank you from all of us, for this.

State Of The Union 2007

Wouldn't it be funny if the Sergeant at Arms announced the president with a Sling Blade voice? I think that would be really funny.

Pelosi really looked good tonight, and even though I don't like her, I was touched by the recognition she received.

When Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean Jacque Wamutombo was honored, my boyfriend and I looked at each other and simultaneously exclaimed: "Who wants to sex Mutombo!" It was a very hilarious moment.

In closing, I didn't expect much from President Bush tonight. I was pleasantly surprised. The speech was one of his most enjoyable. I sensed some genuine good feeling in the House, though I know it's only a temporary thing, but I liked it. I also thought he did as good a job of explaining his foreign policy as he's ever done. Of course, as a lame duck, there's no pressure for him to persuade anyone anymore. He either succeeds or he doesn't.

And now that's over, it's time for the biggest tv event of the night: American Idol.

P.S. Oh I forgot to mention Nancy's non-stop blinking towards the end of the speech. What was up with that?

600 Enemies Nabbed

But, as we all have learned, the trick is not in the capture. It's in resisting the inevitable chorus of idiots demanding that we release the bad guys.

In a major crackdown launched in the past few weeks against the Mahdi Army -- the militia headed by Sadr and now considered the biggest security threat to Iraq by the Pentagon -- more than 600 fighters and 16 militia leaders have been detained, the military said.

"There are currently over 600 illegal Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM) militia in detention awaiting prosecution from the government of Iraq," a statement said.

It said Iraqi and US forces had also detained 16 high-level militiamen and killed one commander in a series of operations against the Mahdi Army, known for its fierce anti-US stance.

"The detainees are responsible for attacks against the government of Iraq, Iraqi citizens and coalition forces," the military said.

Combined Iraqi and US forces have carried out 52 operations in the past 45 days focused on the Mahdi Army as well as 42 operations that targetted Sunni extremists, it said.

The operations against Sunni extremists led to the capture of 33 cell leaders in Baghdad, the statement said, charging that the detainees were mainly involved in facilitating the entry of foreign fighters into Iraq.

The US military has accused the Mahdi Army, which is believed to have up to 60,000 fighters, of being heavily involved in the sectarian killing of Sunni Arabs in Baghdad and other regions of the country.

US and Iraqi forces aim to take down these fighters as part of a Baghdad security plan announced by US President George W. Bush earlier this month to crush the sectarian fighting that killed tens of thousands of people last year.

h/t Bluto at Jawa.

Fuckin' John Warner

I never did trust that guy.

Hillary Chat

Hillary sez:

I am going to take this conversation directly to the people of America, and I'm starting by inviting all of you to join me in a series of web chats over the next few days. . . . I need you to be a part of this campaign, and I hope you'll start by joining me in this national conversation.

Okeydoke. I imagine when I log on Monday, the conversation might go a little bit like this:

hillary2008 joined the room

annikagyrl joined the room

annikagyrl: hi hillary, i mean mrs. clinton

hillary2008: Hillary is fine. How are you annikagyrl?

annikagyrl: i am fine. i cant believe im chatting with you

hillary2008: I want to start a dialogue with America about the challenges that face us after six years of failed policies. I'm glad you could join me.

annikagyrl: cool beans

hillary2008: Did you have a question for me?

annikagyrl: yes

hillary2008: Go ahead.

annikagyrl: okay, who killed vince foster?

hillary2008 left the room

annikagyrl: wtf?

vernonjordan69 joined the room

annikagyrl: hello

vernonjordan69: It has come to my attention that you have made an unsubstantiated, outrageous and untrue accusation against Senator Clinton, which is defamatory and libelous and was made with reckless disregard for the truth or falsity thereof. Further, you have published and disseminated said untrue accusation over the public internet. Your IP address has been recorded and a copy of your defamatory communication is being preserved. Your untrue accusations are actionable. I demand that you immediately cease all defamatory and derogatory remarks directed at Senator Clinton, including all statements made, written, distributed, disseminated, or otherwise published to any and all persons and/or entities either now, or in the future. I further demand that you immediately deliver to me, in care of my law firm, any and all copies of said defamatory statements, including handwritten, typewritten, or electronically digitized either magnetically or by means of any other method or data storage system for general storage and transfer of data between computers and/or electronic copies of same, and any and all unused, undistributed copies of same, or destroy such copies immediately and that you desist from this or any other defamatory, libelous, slanderous or otherwise tortious statements made about, concerning or in reference to Senator Clinton and/or any and all members of her family whether immediate or extended, including any of her successors, assigns, heirs and/or personal representatives, to wit, forthwith, and in perpetuity thereof. If I have not received an affirmative response from you by end of business, January 23, 2007, indicating that you have fully complied with these requirements, and each of them, I shall take further action against you.

annikagyrl: holy cow, you mean me?

vernonjordan69: yeeeah you bitch

annikagyrl left the room

The Audacity Of Hope (Arkansas)

This was unexpected.

Hillary says, "me too."

Not only does Hillary announce with a video, just like Bronco, she even got the AP writer to include a link to her website, just like Bronco.

Notice that the video shot is not wide enough for you to see the rug? That's because Bronco Bomber pulled it out from under her on Tuesday.

Informal Survey

Free polls from Pollhost.com

If it comes down to John McCain and Bronco Bomber in the 2008 general election, who do you vote for?

John McCain Bronco Bomber

Bronco Bomber Endorsements

I find it interesting that so many MSM web stories celebrating Bronco Bomber's formation of an exploratory committee contain a hyperlink to his campaign website. It's interesting because a cursory check of old web stories about other candidates who have formed exploratory committees in the last few months (e.g. Giuliani, Vilsack, Romney, Tancredo) do not contain such thinly disguised endorsements.

But the media is not biased.

The "Surge" Speech

The President has now outlined his new approach for Iraq. Do I think it will work? Really, who cares what I think? I don't care what anybody else thinks. The time for punditry has long passed. This is the time for results. I sense that the President finally understands this.

As I've said before, arguing about whether we should set a timetable for withdrawal is stupid. We already have one, and the deadline is January 20th, 2009. No amount of wishful thinking by war hawks can change the fact that unless there is significant and obvious improvement in Iraq, and soon, the next president of the United States will be elected on a platform of withdrawal.

Therefore, we who long for success should know that this is our last chance to succeed. We have less than two years. Those who oppose us know that this is the endgame for Iraq too. Our foreign enemies will do everything they can to embarrass U.S. forces by creating atrocities or inventing them wherever possible. Our domestic enemies will then do all they can to portray these atrocities as evidence of the failure, futility and immorality of our purpose.

Whether we succeed or not depends very little on what you or I say here at home, given those facts. Our men and women at arms will accomplish everything that is asked of them, as they always have. The question is whether the President and his generals will have the guts to keep fighting when the inevitable criticism hits fever pitch. Based on past experience, I need convincing.

This country is anti-war; our domestic enemies have already won that battle (with the unwitting help, I might add, of Mr. Rumsfeld and the commander-in-chief himself). The President's speech tonight will not magically transform the public's fatigue any more than it can change the Washington press corps into a group of people who love their country. If success is possible at this late hour, Mr. Bush will have to do it without the support of Congress, the media, or the majority of the American people.

But as President Bush explained less than half an hour ago, failure in Iraq would be a disaster. And therefore, I hope he understands above all that now is the time for results.

Technorati: iraq, bush, bush+speech

Hussein's Execution

I feel compelled to throw a wet blanket over some of the triumphalism I see in the blogosphere over Saddam Hussein's execution. I don't think it's a cause for Americans to be celebrating. I say this not because I'm ambivalent about the death penalty, but because we did not invade Iraq in order to kill Saddam Hussein.

We invaded Iraq to bring democracy to that part of the world, because doing so will in theory make us safer here at home. Not only have we not yet succeeded in that purpose, but our ultimate success (as well as the very theory our plan is based upon) is very much in doubt right now. No matter how much Saddam may have deserved what he got, I'd just rather save my celebrating for the day our troops return home victorious.

A Hero You Should Know

Imagine what this nation would be like if the media replaced all their stories about starlets behaving badly with stories about women like Sgt. Kristi J. Artigue.

“I’ve always been a risk taker,” said Artigue, 23, now a medic with the 141st Medical Company [Connecticut Army National Guard].

On Nov. 10, Artigue called upon the skills learned during her six years of National Guard service -- including a recent deployment to Iraq -- to help save the life of a man who may have drowned.

. . .

“Tom,” a middle-aged man, had suffered a seizure and fallen into a section of the West River. Unable to swim, he struggled to remain above the surface with the help of several civilians and two West Haven police officers. The chain was trying to hang on until the local fire department rescue crew could arrive . . .

Then the life-defining event happened.

“He let loose,” said Artigue, “and went under for one or two seconds. Long enough to know he wasn’t going to be coming up again. And he was moving out farther from the shore toward the center of the river.”

At that point, Artigue let her training take over. The nursing student and Iraq War veteran jumped into the freezing water and swam out about ten feet to where Tom was struggling for air.

“It was too cold to talk,” said Artigue, “but I grabbed his vest and tried to keep him above the water. He grabbed a hold of me and started to pull me down with him, but I was able to drag him by his vest to shore.”

. . . On a cold November day, coming out of cold, moving water, communication was difficult, but Artigue was able to keep Tom talking and conscious until emergency crews arrived.

I am continuously amazed at the quality of people who volunteer to serve our country. Swift water rescue is a very dangerous business. I know I wouldn't have jumped in there.

A future trauma nurse, Artigue plans to use her experiences in the Guard and in Iraq to save as many lives as possible.

“Since Iraq,” she said, “I’ve learned to adapt and overcome. I saw what was happening and I had no option but to get involved because of not only my medical training, but also because of my personal responsibility.

“I will always appreciate my military experience. It’s something I would never give up,” said Artigue.

The Iraq Study Group Report

I'm working through the recommendations now. I've approached the report with an open mind, since it's obvious that the Bush/Rumsfeld plan is not working. However, several descriptive phrases about the Iraq Study Group come to mind as I read. They are as follows:

naïve
not helpful
wishful thinking
too many carrots, no stick

I wish I could say differently. It's almost like a bunch of guys sitting around a table on Saturday night, playing Risk, or Dungeons & Dragons. The panel members imagine a world in which all the players would act rationally if only they talked to each other. With their "New Diplomatic Offensive," they've conjured a mythological universe that sounds nice, but doesn't actually exist.

The Iraq Study Group's major error was their assumption that parties with a strong negotiation position will trade away strength for promises by a weaker adversary. The kind of negotiation that the ISG envisions could only work if the parties shared mutual interests and goals, which is absolutely not the case in Iraq or in the broader Middle East.

The best example of the ISG's naïveté involves Iran:

Our limited contacts with Iran’s government lead us to believe that its leaders are likely to say they will not participate in diplomatic efforts to support stability in Iraq. They attribute this reluctance to their belief that the United States seeks regime change in Iran.

Nevertheless, as one of Iraq’s neighbors Iran should be asked to assume its responsibility to participate in the Support Group. An Iranian refusal to do so would demonstrate to Iraq and the rest of the world Iran’s rejectionist attitude and approach, which could lead to its isolation. Further, Iran’s refusal to cooperate on this matter would diminish its prospects of engaging with the United States in the broader dialogue it seeks.

In other words, ask Iran to help stabilize Iraq, even though at present Iran is actively working to destabilize Iraq — because Iran feels it is in its interest to do so. The ISG suggests that Iran will abandon a key pillar of their regional foreign policy, to avoid becoming "isolated" (though they already are) and to gain a "broader dialogue" with the U.S. (which they don't give a rat's ass about). The penalty for not doing us a favor (against the Iranians self-interest) is to continue with a status quo that the Iranians don't mind at all.

And how does the Iraq Study Group suggest that we persuade Iran to do us that big favor, which the ISG admits they are unlikely to want to do? The report is short on suggestions. But the panelists have no trouble coming up with nice things that Iran can do for us, assuming they can be magically persuaded to ignore their strong negotiating position and act against their own interest.

• Iran should stem the flow of equipment, technology, and training to any group resorting to violence in Iraq.

• Iran should make clear its support for the territorial integrity of Iraq as a unified state, as well as its respect for the sovereignty of Iraq and its government.

• Iran can use its influence, especially over Shia groups in Iraq, to encourage national reconciliation.

• Iran can also, in the right circumstances, help in the economic reconstruction of Iraq.

Again, why would the Iranians want to do any of these things when the status quo in neighboring Iraq suits Iranian purposes so well? A destabilized Iraq is an Iraq vulnerable to Iranian influence. More importantly, a destabilized Iraq also means a weakened United States especially vis-a-vis Iranian nukes.

And of course, my criticism doesn't even reach the fact that Iranian interests are also motivated by a dangerous religious fanaticism that makes their cooperation with the West even more unlikely.

I've seen many objections to the Iraq Study Group's report from several other critics. I can't address that commentary, since I haven't read the whole report. But if the rest of the ISG's recommendations are as unwise as their "New Diplomatic Offensive," and their failure to understand the Iranian problem, I think the panel might have done more harm than good.

Update: And in the "he said what I said, only better..." department, here's a must read digest of the ISG report, by Robert Tracinski. An excerpt:

We should negotiate with Iran and Syria to convince them to help stabilize Iraq, but then James Baker angrily denies that this would mean caving in and allowing Iran to continue its nuclear weapons program, and he angrily denies that it would mean caving in and allowing Syria to re-conquer Lebanon. In other words, he wants to ask Iran and Syria to help us in Iraq--while ruling out the only concessions that might induce them to do so. At the same time, the ISG also rules out any serious military threat that would force Iran and Syria to abandon their current strategy.

This is the pattern of the whole report: to stipulate the achievement of a result, while denying the actual means that might achieve that result.

When you desire a result without enacting the means for achieving it, that's called a "fantasy"which is ironic, considering that James Baker is a dean of the "realist" school of foreign policy.

I almost never say this, but read the whole thing!

h/t Chris Roach.

Technorati tag: iraq study group

Bolton Is Out, Who Should Be Next?

John Bolton was one of the best UN Ambassadors we've had. But a minority of Senators decided he was too tough for the job. So he's out.

Apparently, being tough is not an asset for a UN Ambassador. I might have thought otherwise, but we live in a different era now. John Bolton would have fit in better during some earlier time in our nation's history when standing up for his country's interests was something we wanted our ambassadors to do.

No longer. The key requirement for a UN Ambassador these days is likeability. He or she should be well thought of by the international diplomatic corps. And to be well thought of, one needs to make concessions. Well known anti-American Kofi Annan said so himself:

"I think Ambassador Bolton did the job he was expected to do," Annan said, before launching on a discourse about how important it is for ambassadors to "understand that to get concessions, they have to make concessions."

In other words, even if the UN has lost its way, our UN Ambassador should just go along to get along. We need a kinder, gentler, friendlier ambassador who will make everybody feel good.

The question now is, with the above requirements in mind, who should replace Bolton?

The White House gave no immediate signs of its plans for a successor, but people who have been mentioned both inside and outside the administration as possible successors include the American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad; Philip Zelikow, the State Department counselor; Paula Dobriansky, under secretary of state for democracy and global affairs; and [Senator Lincoln] Chafee.

I'm not sure any of those guys have what it takes to be a good UN Ambassador under the new criteria. What we need is a real wimp, somebody with no agenda, very little intelligence, and someone whose overriding concern is the need to be liked. That's the surest way to get the good old U. S. of A.'s poll numbers back on top, the way they were under Clinton, when Matt Allbright was ambassador and chief doormat.

I have been known to favor celebrities for positions at the UN. Since celebrities have been in the vanguard on the issue of U.S. global likeability, what could be more obvious than that we need a celebrity at the UN Ambassadorship? Almost without exception, celebrities possess the requisite qualities of low intelligence and a desperate desire to be well thought of.

Therefore, I suggest Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake as co-ambassadors to the United Nations. The fact that Justin was once in a boy band should be a big advantage in dealing with the hyper-sensitive international diplomatic corps. What could be less threatening than a boy band member? Plus JT is about as dumb as half a stump, so if you team him up with Cameron Diaz, you get an intellectual total that equals about... half a stump. They would make perfect ambassadors under the newer, friendlier, criteria.

Bait And Switch Number Three

#1 The most ethical Congress in history.
#2 The draft.

and now

#3 Implementing every single one of the 9/11 Commission's recommendations.

From the Washington Post:

It was a solemn pledge, repeated by Democratic leaders and candidates over and over: If elected to the majority in Congress, Democrats would implement all of the recommendations of the bipartisan commission that examined the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But with control of Congress now secured, Democratic leaders have decided for now against implementing the one measure that would affect them most directly: a wholesale reorganization of Congress to improve oversight and funding of the nation's intelligence agencies. . . .

. . .

"I don't think that suggestion is going anywhere," said Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.), the chairman of the Appropriations defense subcommittee and a close ally of the incoming subcommittee chairman, Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.). "That is not going to be their party position."

It may seem like a minor matter, but members of the commission say Congress's failure to change itself is anything but inconsequential. In 2004, the commission urged Congress to grant the House and Senate intelligence committees the power not only to oversee the nation's intelligence agencies but also to fund them and shape intelligence policy. The intelligence committees' gains would come at the expense of the armed services committees and the appropriations panels' defense subcommittees. Powerful lawmakers on those panels would have to give up prized legislative turf.

. . .

Now Democrats are balking, just as Republicans did before them.

The decision will almost certainly anger commission members, as well as families of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, many of whom have pressed hard for implementation of the recommendations.

"The Democrats pledged to implement all the remaining 9/11 reforms, not some of them," said former representative Timothy J. Roemer (D-Ind.), who served on the commission.

Carie Lemack, whose mother was in one of the jets that hit the World Trade Center, echoed that sentiment: "It wasn't a Chinese takeout menu, the 41 recommendations. You have to do all of them."

If you want my opinion, consolidation of oversight is not a good idea. I like redundancy. I was against the creation of an "Intelligence Czar," too. But the Democrats aren't backing away from this promise for policy reasons, it's more politics-as-usual, and juvenile back-scratching.

On an unrealted note, why is it that I can get no information from the media about what crawled up Pelosi's butt to make her dislike Jane Harman and Steny Hoyer so much? I know it's personal, but I've looked far and wide and there doesn't seem to be any investigative reporter willing to investigate this question.

Pelosi's beef with Hoyer goes back to her Maryland days, when she was the receptionist and Hoyer was the chief gofer for Senator Brewster in the 60's. I know there must be some interesting anecdotes, which would explain the animosity she's held onto for decades. But the media is hush hush.

And what's the deal with Jane Harman? I know she's not considered dovish enough, but I do suspect there's a personal vendetta there too. Pelosi is well known for holding grudges (and to be fair, suddenly letting go of grudges too), but nobody wants to dig into this story.

If anybody has seen anything interesting, send me a link. I'm just interested in political gossip is all.

h/t Belmont Club

A Hero You Should Know

On October 16, 2006, Army CW3 Lori Hill became the latest female pilot decorated with the Distinguished Flying Cross (the first was none other than Amelia Earhart).

Back in March in Iraq, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Lori Hill, with the 2nd Squadron, 17th Cavalry Regiment, was piloting her Kiowa Warrior when the lead chopper came under heavy fire. She drew the fire away, simultaneously providing suppressive fire for the troops engaged with the enemy on the ground.

A rocket-propelled grenade hit her, damaging the helo’s instrumentation, but instead of focusing on her predicament, she established communication with the ground forces and continued to provide them with aerial weapon support until the soldiers reached safety.

As she turned her attention to the aircraft, which was losing hydraulic power, the helo took on machine-gun fire, a round crashing into one of Hill’s ankles. Still, with a damaged aircraft and an injury, she landed at Forward Operating Base Normandy, saving her crew and aircraft.

For her actions she was presented the Distinguished Flying Cross by Vice President Richard Cheney at Fort Campbell, Ky., on Oct. 16.

“[It] was a once-in-a-lifetime thing to get the award and then have the vice president come and award it to you,” she said. “It’s just incredible for any soldier.”

Recalling that day in March, Hill reflected, “I was actually just glad I didn’t pass out and very happy I was able to help the ground guys out, and get our helicopter down safely on the ground.”

You won't see Chief Hill's face while your waiting in the grocery checkout line, and Lori Hill may not be a household name, but it should be.

Fracas At Powell

This is what happens when our Universities' social science departments are filled with former radicals.

According to an extremely biased article in the Daily Bruin,

Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a UCLA student, was repeatedly stunned with a Taser and then taken into custody when he did not exit the CLICC Lab in Powell Library in a timely manner. Community Service Officers had asked Tabatabainejad to leave after he failed to produce his BruinCard during a random check at around 11:30 p.m. Tuesday.

I think the UC police didn't handle the situation the best way possible either. They should have carried the guy outside as soon as he was handcuffed and then waited for backup. Using a taser to get him to comply with their orders was not going to work, since it was clear the guy was bent on creating a scene.

But the responsibility for this whole ugly incident lies solely with Mr. Mostafa Tabatabainejad. If you don't have your ID card, go back to your room and get it. If they call the police on you, apologize politely and leave the library. Otherwise, they might just taser your idiot ass.

Plus, when students are indoctrinated by professors who are former radicals constantly reliving the glory days of the 60's in class (I went to Berkeley, remember) it's pretty hard not to view all police interactions as if we lived in Franco's Spain. But we don't.

Update: h/t to TBinSTL for this appropriate PSA, by Chris Rock.

The Old Bait And Switch

I wonder how many people who voted Democrat knew that reinstating the draft was on the Democrat's agenda.

I consider myself pretty well informed politically, I listened carefully to all the Democratic talking points, I'm on a few Democrat mailing lists. Maybe I wasn't paying enough attention, but I don't seem to remember any Democrat mentioning that bringing back the draft was going to be their first order of business once they got elected.

Maybe I'm wrong here, but it seems to me if the Democrats had mentioned that they wanted to bring back the draft once they got control of Congress, they would not have gotten control of Congress!

I'm just pointing it out, is all.

Dutch Burka Ban?

From Reuters:

The Dutch government agreed on Friday a total ban on the wearing of burqas and other Muslim face veils in public, justifying the move on security grounds.

. . .

"The cabinet finds it undesirable that garments covering the face -- including the burqa -- should be worn in public in view of public order, (and) the security and protection of fellow citizens," the Dutch Justice Ministry said in a statement.

. . .

The Muslim community estimates that only about 50 women in the Netherlands wear the head-to-toe burqa or the niqab, a face veil that conceals everything but the eyes.

What's that? "The moslem community?" I didn't know they spoke with one voice. In fact, I always heard that the reason they never seem to denounce blowing up innocent people and chopping people's heads off is because there is no unified "moslem community." But I digress.

Dutch Muslim groups have complained a burqa ban would make the country's 1 million Muslims feel more victimized and alienated, regardless of whether they approve of burqas or not.

"This will just lead to more girls saying 'hey I'm also going to wear a burqa as a protest'," Naima Azough, a member of parliament from the opposition Green Left, told an election campaign meeting for fellow members of the Moroccan community.

Sorry, but I don't seem to remember any moslem girls protesting when Van Gogh was killed. Perhaps if they had, Dutch people would've been more hesitant to ban their backward-ass burkas.

Job Cohen, the Labour mayor of Amsterdam, said he opposed burqas in schools and public buildings, and said women wearing one who failed to get a job should not expect welfare benefits.

Makes sense to me. Nice to see Dutch Labour getting a clue.

Spin Digest

It's almost a week since the election and the punditry has coalesced into two distinct themes. I'll digest them for you right now, so you can enjoy the rest of the week without having to bother with the news at all.

The Right: Republicans lost because they didn't try to please the conservative base. It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that most Americans are pissed about Iraq, don't believe the President's "stay the course" line anymore, and think it's time to either win or get out. No, the election was really about prescription drug entitlements.

The Left: Not only is Nancy Pelosi really smart and a grandmother, she isn't liberal at all. She's actually a centrist. All Americans are ecstatic that she's in charge of the country. Except for those Republicans, who are very sad. On the other hand, George H. W. Bush is in charge of the country, which would normally be bad, except we like him now.

Take the rest of the week off, but don't forget to visit here as often as possible for more essential analysis.

Despite Recent Unpleasantness, Saddam Still Popular With Liberals

I won't dirty my blog with video of Bill Mahr, but I do want you to check out this clip, on YouTube. It's called "Farewell to Douchebags," and it's a look back at some faces we've probably seen the last of (or not).

Mahre sets it up by noting how they do the same thing during the Oscars each year, with the dead person reel. Some people inevitably get more applause than others, and sometimes there's an audible pause while people decide how much acclamation to bestow. Mar gives an example "they go, oh DeForest Kelly . . . okay we liked him"

Now watch the video and listen to the hearty applause given at Tom Delay's or Karl Rove's pictures and then compare it to the uncomfortable semi-silence at Saddam Hussein's picture. The audience was like "uh uh do we cheer? oh shit, shit whatdowedo?!" It's liberal brain lock.

h/t SharonCobb

I Blame Bush

No one loves and supports this President more than I do. But after yesterday's debacle I have to say it: I blame Bush.

It was a debacle, and don't let anybody tell you different. The voters threw forty Republicans out of office, and they would have thrown Bush out too, if they'd only had the chance. Not a single Democratic incumbent lost, and the carnage would have been much worse if it had not been for Gerrymandering.

Clinton's famous catch phrase was, "It's the economy, stupid." It's pretty obvious that the American people sent a message this year, and the message was, "It's the war, stupid." That there are Republicans out there who failed to hear this message is one of the truly astounding things about yesterday's election.

Hugh Hewitt is the prime example. Don't get me wrong, Hugh Hewitt knows more about government and politics that I could ever hope to learn. His radio show is the highlight of my listening day. And he has done amazing work for the party before, as he will again. But Hugh's Townhall column today was so clueless, I think he must need some time off.

In an essay that's 1,351 words long, Hugh failed to cite the Iraq War even once as a possible cause for the Republicans being thrown out on their asses yesterday. Instead, incredibly, he blames John McCain:

The post-mortems are accumulating, but I think the obvious has to be stated: John McCain and his colleagues in the Gang of 14 cost the GOP its Senate majority while the conduct of a handful of corrupt House members gave that body's leadership [to] the Democrats.

That's an incredible example of denial. Look, I'm no McCain fan. I've already placed on the record my vow never to vote for him, even in a general election. But what percentage of swing voters — the middle third who decided this election — do you think even know what the Gang of 14 was? Not many, I'd wager. And how many of these swing voters would eagerly admit that the Iraq War was their number one issue? I'd say virtually all of them.

Listen carefully to what I'm saying. The principled base might have been pissed off at Republican betrayals, but the base still turned out yesterday. The middle third, the independents, the swing voters, they're who I'm talking about. They're the ones who led the revolt, and their issue was the War. Any one of you can verify this for yourself by asking a few questions around the water cooler.

I'm not saying that we Republicans lost because Americans want to cut and run. Don't believe that bullshit. I absolutely do not believe that the majority of Americans think their country is engaged in an immoral war. I believe that Americans wouldn't really care whether there were WMD in Iraq, if the war was over and won by now. Most Americans want to win, and they can't understand why we haven't yet. The 2004 election was America's rejection of the hate-America crowd who believe the Iraq War was wrong, immoral, what have you. Those people are a loud but small minority. In 2004, Americans made a different choice and said to the President, "We're sticking with you, now go get it done."

And the problem this time around was that, two years later, the President still had not gotten it done.

We can blame the media all we want. We can blame the Cindy Sheehans and the Michael Moores and the Jimmy Carters and the Kos Kids and the George Soroses all we want. They deserve blame. But the fact remains, George W. Bush was handed a vote of confidence by the American people in 2004, and he did not get the job done. Not only that, he took our patience for granted.

The patience of a Democratic people is a historically fickle thing. It would be nice if it weren't so fickle, but it is. And that's part of the ground that President Bush had to fight on. You can't excuse it by saying, as we've heard for three years now, "It's hard work. Stay the course. Stay the course." Americans demand results. We're willing to sacrifice; we're willing to be patient; we're willing to trust our leaders. But ultimately, we demand results.

And 105 brave souls lost in the last month is not results.

We can say that the media is not reporting the real progess being made in Iraq, and I believe that's true. But at some point you gotta ask, "Can we stop with the building schools and the passing out candy, and just win this thing — and get our people home?"

President Bush's task is often compared by people on my side of the aisle to Lincoln's task during the Civil War. Lincoln is said to have stood firm in the face of vehement opposition. He stayed the course during the darkest days, and won through to victory. But the comparison, as it looks right now, is not an apt one. Lincoln fired a shitload of generals. Lincoln demanded results, and eventually he got results. Look, I love Rumsfeld for the way he talked back to the media. I was willing to support Rummy through thick and thin, despite what the generals thought of him. But the war plan was Rumsfeld's baby, and as soon as he stopped getting results, he should have been gone.

I understand that the enemy adapts. I get it. But to use a football analogy, we're sick of the three and outs. We need to see some first downs here, guys.

I supported the decision to go to war against Saddam. Even knowing what I know now, I still support that decision. But my support is given with the assumption that we're in it to win. We simply must win. As I said before, there is no third way in Iraq.

Victory in Iraq — let's just call it "success" at this point — should be defined like this: any situation in Iraq that would enable us to bring our troops home without everything we've done in the last three and a half years falling to pieces once we leave. I'm not sure that the Democrats have any idea how to accomplish this, but I also know that the President sure as shit hasn't gotten us there yet.

So that's why we Republicans lost the House and Senate yesterday. There's plenty of other reasons you can cite to me, and they're all valid criticisms, I'm sure. Culture of corruption, Foleygate, Delaygate, etc. Dubai Ports, Harriet Meiers, even the Gang of 14, if you like. The Bridge to Nowhere, earmarks, amnesty, Hurricane Katrina, whatever. The list goes on and on. But there's one thing I'll argue 'til I'm out of breath. The American people would have forgiven any of those things — hell, all of those things — if only we knew that our boys were coming home soon, and victorious.

Some Quick Notes On The Punditry

Here are some notes that occur to me, reading the various conservative pundits doing their various post-election stuff.

1. I keep reading about how it's the Democrats' turn to govern. Congress does not govern. Congress legislates. It takes three branches to govern. Keep that in mind.

2. I keep reading about how "we'll get 'em back in two years." Not so fast. Iraq is the biggest problem that needs to be fixed, and soon. If Iraq is fixed, to the satisfaction of the electorate, then guess who gets the credit. Not us. If Iraq gets worse, Republicans might have a chance to say I told you so, but guess who the electorate will blame. Not the Democrats. And I for one, desperately want a victory in Iraq, regardless of who gets the credit. If that means a longer time in the wilderness, so be it. Our men and women in arms deserve victory, for all they've sacrificed. I hope, hope, hope, that victory is really part of the Democratic plan, and now that they've won, I'm willing to give them a fair chance to make their case.

3. I think yesterday eliminated four sure losers from running for the Republican nomination in '08. Santorum, Frist, Allen, and Romney. These guys all had their appeal for hopeful conservatives (maybe not Frist, who was an abysmal leader from the start), but none of them, in my view, had a snowball's chance against Hillary/Obama in today's environment. I'm glad they're off the table.

Update:

4. As the day wears on, I'm more and more disappointed with most of the big name pundits on the right: from Hugh Hewitt (who blames John McCain?!?!), to Rush Limbaugh (who boasts that Republicans are better than Democrats because we're not crying about fraud after a loss, then in almost the same breath demands an ACORN investigation). The first step is admitting there's a problem, fellas.

Rumsfeld: In Or Out?

Headlines this morning reported that Rummy was staying put, but Drudge now reports he's out.

h/t Ace.

It's A New Day

It looks like I was almost spot on with my Senate predictions. If things turn out as they look like they're headed, the only race that I will not have called will be Virginia, and that only by a couple thousand votes. So I think you all better start paying attention to me. ; )

Regarding the California ballot, the news this morning is particularly disheartening. Tom McClintock lost the Lt. Governor's race to John Garamendi. I like Garamendi, but McClintock was a solid guy, and very popular. I really thought he was going to win, but this is a Democratic year and he had an R by his name.

Jerry Brown is our new Attorney General. This guy is a disgrace. His opponent had some hard hitting ads, which sounded like they were made up because they were so outrageous, but in Jerry Brown's case, the attacks were true.

Our anti-Kelo proposition went down by five points. I don't think proponents spent enough money advertising that one, though.

All the bonds won, and the parental notification measure lost. No surprise there.

The only really good California result I can point to is that Cruz Bustamonte did not win the Insurance Commissioner job. (And no, I do not include Arnold's win as a good thing.) Oh, and Prop 87, the alternative energy referendum, also went down handily.

I have a post-election post in my head, which I've been ruminating on since last weekend. It's coming, I just don't have time to write it now. The working title of the piece is "I Blame Bush," so stay tuned.

A final note before I rush off to class, and I'm sincere about this. Despite yesterday's defeat, today is a good day.

For California Voters...

I'm leaving this link at the top until polls close on Tuesday.

Click here if you want to refer to my California ballot proposition recommendations.

Open Comments For Election Day

It's open comments. Just leave your election day story here. How did it go? What do you think?

I'm voting later today, after class. I might join in the liveblogging fun at Six Meat Buffet later tonight, so check in there too.

Memo To The Disgruntled Pro-Life Voter

Along the same lines as my "Memo To The Disgruntled Independent Voter" below, I have a message for those voters whose main issue is opposition to abortion.

What are you doing thinking about staying home tomorrow? I understand your frustration at Bush, and the Republicans, and their betrayal of conservative values. But I also know that a Democratic Congress will lead directly to fewer restrictions on abortion, and more pro-abortion federal judges. Maybe you're okay with that, but I won't have that vote on my conscience.

If you say you're pro-life, your only choice is to vote — and to vote Republican. Staying home is not an option.

Memo To The Disgruntled Independent Voter

I agree that the number one issue in tomorrow's election is the war in Iraq. I also agree that things are not going well over there, and it's time for a change. I understand that a lot of independent voters want to give the Democrats a try, with the hope that maybe they can do better than Bush in what seems like a no win situation. Believe me, I share your frustration.

But remember, not all change is good. Sometimes things can change for the worse. Please read Frederick Kagan's column in the Weekly Standard. Here's a key excerpt.

The pullback of U.S. forces to their bases will not reduce the sectarian conflict . . . . It will increase it. Death squads on both sides will become more active. Large-scale ethnic and sectarian cleansing will begin as each side attempts to establish homogeneous enclaves where there are now mixed communities. Atrocities will mount, as they always do in ethnic cleansing operations. Iraqis who have cooperated with the Americans will be targeted by radicals on both sides. Some of them will try to flee with the American units. American troops will watch helplessly as death squads execute women and children. Pictures of this will play constantly on Al Jazeera. Prominent "collaborators," with whom our soldiers and leaders worked, will be publicly executed. Crowds of refugees could overwhelm not merely Iraq's neighbors but also the FOBs themselves. Soldiers will have to hold off fearful, tearful, and dangerous mobs. Again, endless photographs and video footage of all this will play constantly. Before long, it will probably prove necessary to remove the embedded U.S. troops from the Iraqi military units. The situation will become too dangerous; the Iraqis will increasingly resent the restraint the embeds place on their actions; and the U.S. military will become fearful of being implicated in death-squad activity. It is a matter of chance whether the embedded troops are pulled before any are kidnapped or taken prisoner by Iraqi military units turning bad or being infiltrated by radicals.

. . . There will be no "decent interval" here during which we withdraw in reasonably good order--the withdrawal itself is likely to occur in the midst of rising violence. Instead of pictures of Americans on the embassy roof in Saigon, we will see images of Iraqi death squads at work with U.S. troops staying on their bases nearby. And let us not forget that in the world of Al Jazeera, we will be accused of encouraging those death squads. The overall result will be searing and scarring. The damage to the morale of the military could be far greater than what will result from burdening soldiers with longer or more frequent tours of duty in a stepped-up effort to achieve victory. Those who are concerned about the well-being of the Army should fear defeat of this type more than anything.

We know these things to be possible, because they've happened before: after Vietnam.

Do you want your vote to be responsible for the reign of terror that will inevitably follow our retreat from Iraq? I know no matter how pissed I am at the mistakes and the lack of progress, I don't want that blood on my conscience.

There is no third way; there is only defeat or victory. And thus the choice tomorrow is clear, because you know what the Democrats want to do. Even if you don't believe the Democrats want us to lose, you should give serious thought to whether you want us to lose, and to what would happen if we were to begin withdrawing forces from Iraq now, when they're needed there most.

Pre Election Mental Warm-Up Suggestion

Just keep repeating to yourself:

Nancy Pelosi from San Francisco
Nancy Pelosi from San Francisco
Nancy Pelosi from San Francisco

Keep repeating until it sinks in.

I Go On The Record — Update

On Tuesday I went on the record, saying that the Democrats will pick up five Senate seats to split the upper house 50/50. I just spent the last hour re-analyzing the latest polls, and I stand by that prediction.

Democrats will gain seats in Missouri, Montana, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Rhode Island. Republicans will fail to take over Democratic seats in Maryland, New Jersey and Minnesota. Republicans will hold on to their seats in Virginia and Tennessee.

The races where I might be wrong are, of course, the hotly contested Montana and Missouri elections.

Montana perplexes me. I don't know enough about the issues to say why, but Democrat Tester has consistently polled ahead of Republican Burns since April. It might be Tester's haircut. Tester's ads portray him as a regular guy, someone you could have a beer with. By contrast, Burns seems more like, well, Mr. Burns. The race is still close. The latest Zogby poll has Burns down by a percentage point. But I'm still calling it for Tester. I think Montanans are turned off by Burns' alleged Abramoff connections, and Tester is a native who looks the part. I also think you can probably trust Montana poll numbers more than you would some other state's.

In Missouri, Republican incumbent Jim Talent is polling about three points behind Democrat Claire McCaskill. The polls have switched back and forth all year between the two candidates. If I'm wrong about any of my predictions, Missouri is likely to be the one. But I think Missouri is a weird state; it seems so evenly split between red and blue. One thing I think McCaskill has going for her is that there are large urban areas where the Democrats can use fraud to add a few unearned points to her total. Talent seems like a good guy though, and I hope he wins.

I could also be wrong about Virginia. I predict Republican incumbent George Allen will hold on to win, despite recent polls showing Democrat Jim Webb with a one to five point advantage. I'm sticking with Allen because I trust Virginia is at heart a conservative state, and I don't trust the pollsters there. When was the last time a Democrat won a national election in Virginia? Okay, Chuck Robb, but he was a centrist. Webb may have a certain appeal to conservatives, but if voting for him means handing the Senate over to the Democrats, I think Virginians will do the right thing.

Finally, I'm still sticking with my prediction that Maryland's open Senate seat will remain in Democrat hands. When was the last time a Republican won a national election in Maryland? And my fraud theory holds here too. I really hope Steele wins, though. After what they've done and said about him, Steele's Democrat critics ought to wear sheets and hoods. It's disgusting.

My best case scenario for Republicans has them maintaining a Senate majority by three seats. Santorum, DeWine and Chafee are toast. But if Steele, Talent and Burns win, there's our three seats. Of course I'm still assuming that Allen and Corker win Virginia and Tennessee, but I think they will.

The House is way too complicated for me to analyze, so like I said before: trust Gerrymandering.

Update: See how far out on a limb I am? Only one guy at the Weekly Standard agrees with me.

What Have They Done With Nancy?

Drudge has been running this story about Where's Nancy? He claims that Nancy Pelosi has been hidden from public appearances since October 21, two weeks ago. I don't doubt it. She's as bad for the the Democratic Party's PR as John Kerry, only twice as dumb.

Drudge says:

The woman who would be speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has oddly stayed out of the national spotlight in the week leading up to the big vote.

The high profile, potentially history-making democrat has turned low-key.

The last photo of vanishing Pelosi on the wires was from an October 21 fundraiser.

And since Pelosi appeared on the controversial October 22 broadcast of 60 MINUTES, national TV hits have all but been nonexistent.

[Pelosi did appear on CNBC's On the Money on 10/24 and on ABC on 10/26, as THINK PROGRESS points out. But the sightings have dramatically dwindled.]

Former Speaker of the House, Republican Newt Gingrich believes he knows one reason why the congresswoman has largely dropped out of public sight ever since 60 MINUTES.

"It seems clear that some Americans have glimpsed a future with her third in line for the presidency, and they don't like what they see," says Gingrich. "She has become largely invisible as a result."

A source close to the congresswoman explains she has been busy behind the scenes.

Pelosi made a brief public appearance with Bill Clinton this week in San Francisco.

After providing a long schedule of her weekend events, a Pelosi aide added that her favorite stop was the taping of a World Wrestling Entertainment podcast on the importance of young people voting, the WHITE HOUSE BULLETIN reports.

I'm wondering, if Nancy's the leader of her party, and she's being held out of sight, who's in charge? Did she take herself out of circulation? Or if not, who did? Who's the secret figure behind the scenes, who had the power to tell the House Democratic Leader to shut the hell up during the two weeks before the election? And what does that tell you about the Democrats in general? There's something they don't want you to know.

I Heart Varifrank

Read and understand:

If you vote for Democrats in this election, you might think youre voting for a perfectly nice centrist Democrat, but the "Anti-war" wing of leftist thought will take that perfectly nice candidate that you voted for and use it as evidence that their side in the argument is actually perferred by Americans. Not the "centrist American" side, but the loathesome "We hate America" side. Your vote will be used to prove it.

They will take that protest vote of yours to argue "America is in descent", that our sins have finally caught up with us and we need to be sorry for all the evil we have done in the world, and look at all the people who agree with us! They will argue that fundamental changes in our country are necessary to make up for our crimes of the past, that our its our military is actually what causes wars, that people in the military should be prosecuted and they are what causes other people in the world to hate us and not our lovely and socially relevent "pop-culture".

. . . If Democrats are tossed yet another defeat this time, they will learn. They will get the message. They will remove the leech of "Anti-war" from their crotch and we might start to see Democrats like Harry Truman again. Democrats who don't apologize for America or being an American.

And that will be good for all of us.

Excellent.

The Botched Senator

Sen. John Kerry:

You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.

Sen. John McCain:

If you offend somebody, whether you intend to or not, you should apologize.

Sen. John Kerry:

I apologize to no one for my criticism of the President and his broken policy.

Listen, I want to believe the argument that John Kerry didn't really mean to insult our all volunteer military servicemen and women. If it were any other guy, without John Kerry's history, I might be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

But given that John Kerry began his political career by throwing his military ribbons over the White House fence in protest over a military service which he claimed led to widespread and systematic atrocities — which he later admitted that he never witnessed, and which were later proven to have been completely made up — I sincerely doubt that his "explanation" is genuine.

If John Kerry intended to insult the president with his "botched joke," why then are the words "president" or "Bush" nowhere to be found within the text of that joke?

If John Kerry really fucked up the script so badly, why then didn't he immediately clarify himself? We've all been in that situation. When I mis-speak, and inadvertently give offense, that's what I do. It's customary, even through embarrassment, to say, "I'm sorry, what I meant to say was..." But Kerry didn't do that until the firestorm began this morning. Now that he's busted, it's a little hard to believe his denials.

Here's an instructive thought experiment. What if, instead of touching the third rail of conservative politics by insulting the troops, John Kerry's "botched joke" had imputed stupidity to African Americans? Would he then have apologized quickly and repeatedly? You bet your ass he would have, and he'd have done it based on John McCain's maxim I quoted above: "If you offend somebody, whether you intend to or not, you should apologize." The fact that John Kerry, even now after "admitting" he made a mistake, still refuses to apologize to the American military he claims to respect so much, is tantamount to insulting them a second time. He doesn't think they're worth the courtesy.

What really happened is that John Kerry had a "Dixie Chicks" moment. Like Natalie Maines in England, Kerry thought he had a sympathetic audience of liberal college students to whom he could pander, by sharing a little inside humor. "Heh, heh, I know you guys despise the military and think they're dummies. I do too. Ain't I cool? Vote for Angelides."

Should any of this matter? Probably not, since Kerry can't be voted out of office this year. (Personally, I think Kerry should be forced to resign from his seat on the Committee on Foreign Relations. Nobody with his history of undisguised contempt for American military personnel should be allowed to sit on such a committee, with that body's concomitant influence over the deployment of those same soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen.) But that's a different question from whether any of this will matter. And I hope it does. Not only because it may forestall the Democratic takeover I predicted earlier, but because Kerry's latest blunder probably and irrevocably scuttled any hope he might have had of trying for his party's nomination in '08. Democratic power brokers will never ever forgive him for this gaffe, nor should any of us.

Update: Kerry apologizes.

[Technorati tag: John Kerry; cross-posted at The Cotillion]

I Go On The Record

I've been following the polls and the elections closely, but until now I've avoided making any predictions. Now, a week out, I'm ready to cut through all the MSM's pro-Democratic propaganda and all the pie-in-the-sky optimism from the right wing press.

Here are my predictions. The Senate looks tight, but I think it will take a miracle for the Republicans to retain control. By my calculations, it will be a 50/50 split after next Tuesday. Republicans will lose in MT, OH, NJ, PA and RI. I think Corker will beat Ford, keeping TN Republican, but I could be wrong about that. In MD, Steele deserves to win, and though I mistrust polls generally, they can't be that far off. I don't think Steele will do it.

An evenly divided Senate is a de facto Democratic majority, since there are enough turncoat RINOs in the Senate to do Harry Reid's bidding. The Dems also know how to play rough and they will insist on some sort of accomodation on committee chairs. Republican Senate leaders, never known for stiff spines, will cave in to these demands.

As for the House, I have just two words for you: trust Gerrymandering. The Republicans will hold the House.

Divided government here we come. Now maybe in peacetime, a Democrat Senate was tolerable, but Kerry's despicable anti-military insults yesterday illustrate clearly why the Democrats cannot be trusted with any position of leadership.

More Tips For Voters

Don't like waiting in line? Here's an idea, idiots. Get to your polling place early.

Here's another idea. Vote absentee.

When I go to the Post Office and there's a long line, it doesn't mean I'm being discriminated against. It just means there's a lot of customers. And if I show up at the Post Office at 5:00 and they shut the door in my face, it just means that I should have got there earlier.

Another thing, idiots. If you can't figure out the ballot, fucking ask somebody to help you. Or study the sample ballot before you show up.

It ain't that hard. If voting is so important to you that you are ready to scream disenfranchisement at the drop of a hat, why not take the time to avoid problems by planning ahead.

Unless of course, crying fraud is part of your strategy for winning.

P.S. If you're one of the unfortunate voters who has to use one of these beasts, and you encounter problems, blame Florida and disregard the above. I've never trusted the idea of computer voting, its an example of knee-jerk overreaction to a nonexistent problem.

A Guide For Voters

Here are my California ballot proposition recommendations. It might be interesting to you, even if you're not from California, since it provides an insight into the workings of my political mind.

As I've said before, I have an easy way to decide on any bond issues. I vote no as a rule on every bond measure, no matter how tempting it sounds (with one exception, I vote yes on all prison bonds*). It seems to me that bond measures are a way for this state's government to spend beyond its means, even though excessive spending is its biggest problem. My philosophy is that the legislature should do its job and prioritize the budget so we won't have to rely on bonds to get things done.

I'm also sick and tired of two or three school improvement bonds every time we have an election. They generally win, because nobody (except me) wants to vote to keep kids learning under leaky roofs and without enough crayons or construction paper. Yet every election, the schools hold out their hand for more. Whatever happened to the promise that the California Lottery was supposed to solve all our school problems? I'm told that "Our schools win too" was the motto back in '84 when the lottery initiative passed. Well, I for one won't play that game anymore. Whatever they're doing with all that money isn't working, so let's cut off the spigot and force them to try something else.

Here's the propositions on the statewide ballot:

Prop 1A: TRANSPORTATION FUNDING PROTECTION This initiative would force the government to use gasoline sales tax revenues for transportation improvements only, instead of dumping that money into the general fund so the legislature can squander it as they love to do. I vote YES.

Prop 1B: HIGHWAY SAFETY, TRAFFIC REDUCTION, AIR QUALITY, AND PORT SECURITY BOND Here's an example of a bond measure with worthy goals, which I will reject simply because of my hard and fast rule about bond measures. If the legislature would do its job, cut the frivolous spending, and cut regulation and taxes to keep businesses from fleeing the state, we'd have enough money to do this kind of shit without mortgaging our future with 39 billion more in bond debt. I vote NO.

Prop 1C: HOUSING AND EMERGENCY SHELTER TRUST FUND More bonds. Hey, I'm all for helping out battered women and their kids, low-income seniors, the disabled, military veterans, and working families. But again, if this is such a priority, the legislature should find a way to do it without adding to the bond debt. Otherwise, let's encourage private charities to continue their good work in this area. I know that there are many fine non-profits that help battered women and provide shelter for their families, because I did pro-bono work for one of them last year. I vote NO.

Prop 1D: KINDERGARTEN–UNIVERSITY PUBLIC EDUCATION FACILITIES BOND Another school bond. See above. I vote NO.

Prop 1E: DISASTER PREPAREDNESS AND FLOOD PREVENTION BOND Another bond. I vote NO.

Prop 83: SEX OFFENDERS. SEXUALLY VIOLENT PREDATORS. PUNISHMENT, RESIDENCE RESTRICTIONS AND MONITORING This initiative tightens punishment and monitoring of violent sexual predators. Again, where was the legislature on this? Why is such an important public safety issue being left up to the initiative process? A definite YES vote.

Prop 84: WATER QUALITY, SAFETY AND SUPPLY, FLOOD CONTROL, NATURAL RESOURCE PROTECTION, PARK IMPROVEMENTS, BONDS All important and worthy goals, which I support — Just not by increasing the bond debt. I sound like a broken record here. I vote NO.

Prop 85: WAITING PERIOD AND PARENTAL NOTIFICATION BEFORE TERMINATION OF MINOR’S PREGNANCY This proposition would require a doctor to notify parents when a minor comes in for an abortion, with certian exceptions. If I had a kid, I'd want to know if she was going to have an abortion. I don't care if some other kid doesn't have a good relationship with her parent. I'd want to know about my daughter. It's that simple. I vote YES.

Prop 86: TAX ON CIGARETTES This initiative would add $2.60 in taxes to each pack of cigarettes. Right now, they're about $5 a pack. If this initiative passes, a pack would cost more than it does in New York City. I was shocked at the cost of cigarettes during my last trip to New York. I suppose I should favor this proposition because it might motivate me to quit. But realistically, even though I grumbled, I still paid the seven bucks when I was in New York. I generally oppose sin taxes, because they encourage the black market. We already have enough problems with drugs and illegal aliens coming across the border without creating a whole new market for contraband. I vote NO.

Prop 87: ALTERNATIVE ENERGY. RESEARCH, PRODUCTION, INCENTIVES. TAX ON CALIFORNIA OIL PRODUCERS This is the most controversial measure on California's ballot. President Clinton is doing tv spots in favor of this plan, which would create a whole new alternative energy research bureaucracy funded by a tax on oil drilling in California. The opposition ads are disingenuous because they do not say that the law would prevent oil companies from passing on the tax to the consumer. It sounds tempting, especially to those who don't understand economics. But when you do the research, this proposition reveals itself as one of the worst ideas to come down the pike in a long time. Virtually every major newspaper to opine on the issue agrees that it's a horrible idea. And I'm talking the San Francisco Chronicle, the L.A. Times, the Sacramento Bee, the O.C. Register and the Wall Street Journal. That's a pretty wide sampling of the editorial spectrum there. I'd encourage anybody undecided on this measure to read those editorials, which can be found here. As much as we'd all like to stick it to the oil companies, It doesn't make much sense to punish them for developing domestic oilfields in order to achieve energy independence. If it's no longer profitable to drill in California, guess where our oil will come from? That's right, overseas. I also have a problem with the prohibition against passing the new tax on to the consumer. In my view, the way to encourage alternative energy sources is to let the free market work. High gas prices are the best way to create a demand for the new technology, not a poorly regulated and graft ridden new bureaucracy. I vote NO.

Prop 88: EDUCATION FUNDING. REAL PROPERTY PARCEL TAX The schools got their hand out again. They're like the cookie monster, except it's not Chips Ahoy they want, it's your money. This time they want to add $50 to everybody's property tax bill. If we let them, next year it will be another $50 or maybe $100. Just say NO.

Prop 89: POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS, PUBLIC FINANCING, CORPORATE TAX INCREASE, CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION AND EXPENDITURE LIMITS Another corporate tax increase at a time when California needs to stop business from fleeing out of state. How is that a good idea? And how is it a good idea to make it harder for ordinary Californians to run for office by requiring "a specified number of $5.00 contributions from voters?" This initiative also puts limits on political contributions to state candidates, which is a free speech issue. I vote NO.

Prop 90: GOVERNMENT ACQUISITION, REGULATION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY The last ballot initiative is the Protect Our Homes Act, which I first heard about from Tim Sandefur. This is the anti-Kelo initiative. It would basically prevent the state government from using its eminent domain power to grab your property and give it to some corporation, which is what happened in the Kelo case. If you hated Kelo, vote for this. I vote YES.

There you have it. Since I encourage all my blog's visitors to be in complete agreement with me, I suggest that you Californians print out this post and take it with you on November 7th.
_______________

* The reason I vote against school bonds and for prison bonds is not because I'm a heartless bitch. I understand the argument that better schools may lead to fewer criminals. But school bonds always win, and yet we still need prisons. Insofar as my one vote can be a message, I plan to send that message. Where school bonds are concerned, my message is that the state should use the gobs of money we send them for schools each year more wisely. As for prisons, they're an unpopular but necessary part of our infrastucture, and my message is that I want them built. As the late Ann Richards said of Texas' vast prison system, when asked what kind of a message it sent to the world: "If you commit a crime in Texas, it means we got a place to put you."

Same Shit Different Day

And just in case you thought a cease fire in the north meant peace all over Israel, think again.

Just because the anti-semitic media in this country doesn't deem it news don't meant this shit ain't still happening almost every fucking day.

P.S. The comments under the article are crazy. Man, if a Kassam rocket landed in my yard, but I was only "lightly injured" do you think I would: a) say "no harm no foul," and go on with my day, or b) get pissed as hell and start screaming nonstop until I saw warplanes flying back from Gaza with empty hardpoints.

via Morning Coffee

Danish Court Dismisses Jihadi Lawsuit Over Cartoons

Score one for our side.

"It cannot be ruled out that the drawings have offended some Muslims' honor, but there is no basis to assume that the drawings are, or were conceived as, insulting or that the purpose of the drawings was to present opinions that can belittle Muslims," the court said.

The seven Muslim groups filed the defamation lawsuit against the paper in March, after Denmark's top prosecutor declined to press criminal charges, saying the drawings did not violate laws against racism or blasphemy.

The plaintiffs, who claimed to have the backing of 20 more Islamic organizations in the Scandinavian country, had sought $16,860 in damages from Jyllands-Posten Editor in Chief Carsten Juste and Culture Editor Flemming Rose, who supervised the cartoon project.

What they need to do now is get rid of the stupid law that allows people to sue for "belittling Muslims."

h/t Right Thinking Girl

My E-Mail From San Fran Nan

I got an e-mail from Nancy Pelosi today. No lie. I'm on some Democrat list, inexplicably. I thought it was a weird e-mail because it was titled "what we need to do," yet she pretty much avoided mentioning any of the key issues of the day. So much for a Democratic version of the Contract With America.

Here is the entire text of the e-mail:

Dear annika,

You know how high the stakes are -- so I'll get right to the point: there's never been a more critical time to highlight the priorities everyday Americans share.

Right now, working families suffer because corporate lobbyists write the laws. Our seniors can't get the drugs they need because the drug companies get everything they want. And President Bush continues to threaten one of our society's greatest accomplishments -- Social Security -- with his risky privatization schemes.

Congress needs to focus on an agenda that benefits the American people:

* Impose new rules and regulations to break the link between lobbyists and legislation
* Allow the government to negotiate with drug companies and fix Medicare Part D
* Stop Social Security and Medicare privatization plans in their tracks
* Raise the minimum wage to $7.25
* Cut the interest rates on student loans in half
* Roll back subsidies to Big Oil and gas companies
* Enact all the recommendations made by the independent 9/11 Commission

And that all needs to be done in the first 100 hours!

Working together, we will make that happen. Please help Americans United today:

http://www.americansunitedforchange.org/100hours

There's a lot at stake in the coming weeks, but we must never lose focus on the task at hand: building a better country. Your work changes the national debate, raising awareness about the misplaced priorities of the current leadership.

Last year, Americans United led the national media campaign against Social Security privatization -- and won.

Now, with so much more at stake, will you help us win again?

http://www.americansunitedforchange.org/100hours

Onward to victory.

Nancy Pelosi
Democratic Leader, U.S. House of Representatives

That's it?

(It's nice that the Democrats want to cut student loan rates in half, but if you can't afford 8% over thirty years with the almost unlimited deferment schemes available, something is seriously wrong with your post college career path.)

I'm sorry but that was a weird e-mail. It's weird because she said absolutely nothing about the big issues that people are arguing about — the issues that are going to get people off their ass and down to the voting booth less than two weeks from now.

She said nothing about Iraq.

Nothing about the War on Terror.

Nothing about impeachment.

Nothing about tax cuts.

Nothing about gay marriage.

Nothing about abortion.

Nothing about crime.

Nothing about North Korea.

Nothing about Iran.

Nothing about the border.

The Democrats are either a party with no agenda or a party with a hidden agenda. Either way, they absolutely cannot be trusted with a majority.

The Economy

According to today's New York Times,

In many ways, the economy has not looked so good in a long time.

Yet Republicans can't get any love when it comes to the strong economy.

“Voters overwhelmingly don’t approve of the president on the economy,” said Amy Walter, a senior editor at the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan firm that handicaps political races. “It comes down to the issue of credibility. And so many voters feel so pessimistic about the direction of the country.”

Take the unemployment figures for instance. The rule of thumb I always heard in school was that anytime you have unemployment at 5% or below, the country was doing great. Right now, unemployment is at 4.4%. That is great. Check out this graph from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for some historical perspective.

As you can see, since WWII, unemployment has been over 5% a lot more than it's been under. Yet you still get comments like this one:

Ann O’Callahan, a 64-year old Irish immigrant in suburban Philadelphia, defines herself as a social conservative. She voted Republican in 2000, but switched to the Democrats in 2004. This year she plans to vote Democratic again, mainly because of the economy. “I am very disturbed by the economic policies of the Bush administration,” she said.

Ms. O’Callahan’s district, Pennsylvania’s Seventh, is an island of relative affluence. The median income in the area, according to the Census Bureau, topped $63,000 last year, more than a third higher than the national median. According to Economy.com’s analysis, based on county data, unemployment this year in the district should average 3.8 percent, well below the national average.

But, Ms. O’Callahan said, jobs were not enough. “I work with job placement so I see up close how a lot more work is demanded of people, how benefits are disappearing, how hourly rates have been stagnant throughout the Bush administration,” she said. She said that jobs were plentiful, “but paying $8 an hour with no benefits.”

What I think Ms. O'Callahan overlooked is that in any economy there's going to be a bottom of the barrel type job. These days it's probably going to pay $8 an hour without benefits. But when 96.2% of the people in Ms. O'Callahan's district are working, I'd imagine that she's spending most of her time placing people in these bottom of the barrel type jobs. Most people with skills are probably already employed, and making more money.

We need entry level jobs. They're where most people start out. And they're good for students and retired people. Look at what's going on in France where "youths" are burning busses and attacking police because their country won't allow businesses the freedom to offer entry level jobs.

With the Dow over 12,000 and unemployment under 5%, I say the economy is doing great.

655,000 Iraqis Dead?

Is the line between intellectual dishonesty and bald-faced lying a fine line or is it a wide chasm? Whichever it is, The Lancet and those who masturbate over its latest Iraqi war dead estimate have leapt across that line with ease.

A study published in the Lancet this week estimates that 654,965 Iraqis have died as a consequence of war since 2003. . . .

. . . The researchers—led by Gilbert Burnham of Johns Hopkins University—gathered data on more than 12,000 people in clusters of houses around Iraq, and tried to figure out how many people had died both before and after March of 2003. By comparing the pre- and post-invasion mortality rates, they figured out how many deaths could be attributed to the war, and then extrapolated from their sample to the country's entire population. [via Slate.com]

655,000 is roughly the population of Baltimore, Maryland, where Johns Hopkins University is located.

Historian Gwynne Dyer (who wrote the very readable book War, which pretty much made me want to be a history major) is against the Iraq war. He predictably gushed over the Lancet's study:

Johns Hopkins University, Boston University and MIT are not fly-by-night institutions, and people who work there have academic reputations to protect.

The Lancet, founded 182 years ago, is one of the oldest and most respected medical journals in the world.

Must be true then. These people couldn't possibly make a mistake. In fact, I bet the peer review process is waived for all studies coming out of JHU, BU, MIT, or the Lancet.

Riiiiight.

The most disturbing thing is the breakdown of the causes of death.

Over half the deaths -- 56 per cent -- are due to gunshot wounds, but 13 per cent are due to air strikes. No terrorists do air strikes. No Iraqi government forces do air strikes either because they don't have combat aircraft. Air strikes are done by "coalition forces" (i.e. Americans and British) and air strikes in Iraq have killed over 75,000 people since the invasion.

Oscar Wilde once observed that "to lose one parent ... may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."

To lose 75,000 Iraqis to air strikes looks like carelessness, too.

Actually, blind acceptance of the Lancet's figures and methodology by a historian such as Dyer looks like carelessness to me.

Now, I didn't do too well in statistics, so I won't pick apart the Lancet's methodology, no matter how suspect it seems to me (it was based on interviews?!). But I do have a history background and the 655,000 number seemed wildly far-fetched to me the instant I saw it. Wildly far-fetched.

I immediately wondered why the study's authors had not considered placing the estimate into historical perspective. That would be a kind of "smell test," which I suspected the study might not pass.

Consider this. In 3½ years, the Lancet figures we have been responsible for 655,000 civilian deaths. (Not casualties, deaths. The term "casualty" includes missing, wounded and POWs.) For comparison, I simply went to two easily available sources: The Oxford Companion to World War II, and the often less reliable Wikipedia.

According to those two sources, Japanese civilian deaths in World War II ranged from 400,000 to 600,000. One generally expects the Wikipedia figure to be at the higher range, and that was true in this case. I also consulted Wings of Judgment, by Ronald Schaffer, a somewhat left leaning historian of the two World Wars. Shaffer gave an estimated range from 330,000 to 900,000 Japanese deaths (p. 148), which coincidentally is almost exactly the range that the Lancet used for Iraqi civilian deaths (392,979 to 942,636).

Looking at all three sources, the Wikipedia estimate of 600,000 Japanese civilian deaths seems most reasonable. So the obvious question to me is this:

Are we to believe that the United States has killed more Iraqi civilians in the current war than we killed Japanese civilians during World War II?

I have no doubt that there are very many anti-war kooks who would not hesitate to believe that, but it sure doesn't pass the smell test to me.

Keep in mind that we attacked Japan repeatedly with unguided incendiary bombs in WWII, while we mostly relied on precision guided bombs when bombing Iraq. Also remember that the aerial bombing in Iraq occurred in the first three weeks of the war, and thereafter was only used to support certain offensives like in Fallujah, etc.

Keep in mind that the purpose of strategic bombing in WWII was to kill civilians and that we intentionally targeted Japanese civilians for over a year. In Iraq, we make a great effort to avoid civilian deaths. In fact, Iraqi civilian deaths are counter-productive to the war effort and can be used as a propaganda against us by our enemies, as the Lancet study proves.

Keep in mind that we flattened two Japanese cities in WWII with nuclear weapons, and that those attacks weren't even as deadly as the Tokyo firebomb raid in which three hundred B-29s burned the city to the ground and killed almost 100,000 civilians in one night. We bombed the crap out of Japan so thoroughly that we had pretty much run out of cities to destroy by the end of the war.

It was a lot easier to kill Japanese civilians by firebombing than it is to kill Iraqis today. The Lancet figures that most Iraqis (56%) were killed by gunshots, which is probably the least efficient way of killing mass numbers of people. Remember that Japanese civilians lived in houses made of paper and wood, and that the population density of Iraq is nothing compared to Japan in the 1940s. During the Tokyo raid, escape was near impossible. Shaffer wrote:

The fire storm quickly roasted those who stayed in under-house shelters. Alleys and small gardens filled with flaming debris. Shifting flames blocked exit routes. Abandoning their efforts to check the inferno, firemen tried to channel people across already burned areas, and where there was still water pressure they drenched people so they could pass through the fire. Some inhabitants ducked themselves in firefighting cisterns before moving. . . .

Choking inhabitants crawled across fallen telephone poles and trolley wires. As superheated air burned their lungs and ignited their clothing, some burst into flames, fire sweeping up from the bottoms of trousers or starting in the cloth hoods worn for protection against the sparks. Residents hurried from burning areas with possessions bundled on their backs, unaware that the bundles had ignited. Some women who carried infants this way realized only when they stopped to rest that their babies were on fire.

. . . Thousands submerged themselves in stagnant, foul-smelling canals with their mouths just above the surface, but many died from smoke inhalation, anoxia, or carbon monoxide poisoning, or were submerged by masses of people who tumbled on top of them, or boiled to death when the fire storm heated the water. [p. 134]

That is what it takes to kill 655,000 civilians. Death on that kind of scale is not something that can easily escape notice, yet there have been no such stories coming out of Iraq in the last three years. I'm not trying to minimize the horrible situation in Iraq, but some perspective is definitely in order. And the Lancet's estimate is so insanely exagerrated I can only conclude that the researchers are bald-faced liars.

More: Confederate Yankee wonders, "where are the bodies?"

[cross-posted at A Western Heart; Technorati: Iraq]

North Korea Options

I chose the above picture as a reminder of what a nuclear bomb can do. That was a young boy, maybe twelve or thirteen, who was incinerated by "Little Boy" at Hiroshima.

I think it's highly irresponsible for various pundits, mostly on the right, but some on the left, to suggest that we must respond to North Korea's saber rattling with a military attack. It's irresponsible because now that Kim Jong-il has a nuclear arsenal (assuming the tests weren't faked) we can certainly expect that he will use it if attacked.

Two things are clear to me: We must use every effort to avoid war with North Korea, while at the same time we must use whatever means necessary to disarm Kim Jong-il. The little boy in the picture is the reason I believe this.

While I think diplomacy is usually a complete boondoggle, there are options that can be and should be employed before we go charging in with guns blazing where a madman controls nuclear weapons.

The North Korean situation is similar to the Iranian one, but not identical. And as you know, I don't support military action in Iran, yet. Regime change without an invasion is the least ugly of all the options in both theaters. It's probably an easier task against the Iranians, but in neither case do I see any concrete signs that the Bush Administration is doing anything to encourage internal opposition movements. As I've said before, I think that's a big mistake.

In regards to North Korea, it seems to me that we have an advantage that is not available to us against Iran. World opinion, and especially regional opinion, seems pretty united against North Korea. I think the reason China and Russia are willing to play along against Kim Jong-il is that the balance of power equation they are employing in Central Asia does not apply to the Korean Peninsula.

In other words, China and Russia have a strong interest in promoting Iran as a rival to U.S. power in the Middle East. It's the latest incarnation of the "Great Game." But the Asian powers have now realized that promoting North Korea as a balance to American Power in the Far East is a fool's game.

The goal of balance of power politics is to maintain regional stability, and a nuclear armed DPRK upsets the status quo — not a good thing for China and Russia. They know that if Japan wanted to, they could easily build their own nuclear arsenal, and each warhead would probably fit in the palm of your hand, work perfectly every time, and get great gas mileage to boot.

So if China and Russia can be persuaded to go along with a strong sanctions regime, combined with a "quarantine" of North Korea, I think that would be a great start. They might be willing to do so.

The next few months will be a major test for Condoleezza Rice. I think her tenure as Secretary of State has been pretty lackluster, but I'm much more impressed with John Bolton. If the State Department can get its act together, maybe they can forge an alliance among the regional powers. I'd like to see Australia join in too. I'm hopeful that a united front could successfully change North Korea's behavior.

Normally, I'm not a fan of sanctions. But this might be one of those rare situations where sanctions have some effect, mainly because of the unanimity of world opinion against North Korea. It reminds me of South Africa. Sanctions arguably helped end apartheid, and while that analogy only goes so far, it is interesting to note that South Africa is the only country to have developed nuclear weapons and then given them up voluntarily.

I favor an internal revolution as the best way to solve the Iranian crisis, but I don't see that idea working in North Korea. I have not heard of any opposition groups in that closed society. I think Kim Jong-il's regime is so repressive that they'd make Tian'anmen Square look like a company picnic.

I believe the best way to defuse the situation is to get China to use its influence against Kim Jong-il himself. China is the only party that can apply pressure against the dictator to get him to step down. We'll probably have to live with a nuclear armed North Korea, but if Kim Jong-il can be replaced with a moderate who won't threaten the whole region, everybody will be able to breathe a lot easier.

The North Korean dictator's latest flagrant defiance of the Security Council should offer enough cover for the Chinese to make Kim Jong-il an offer he can't refuse. China can offer Kim asylum, and they have the power to influence the selection of his successor. North Korea can then remain communist, but perhaps reform themselves along the lines of modern China. Sanctions might even eventually be lifted. Getting rid of Kim Jong-il is the key, and as I see it, China is our best hope to accomplish that end.

More: Fans of Kevin Kim know that he teaches something or other in South Korea (English I think). Here's his inimitable commentary on the scuttlebutt over there.

One student surprised me with her take on Kim Jong Il. "I sort of liked him until today," she said, "But now I hate him." I kept a poker face, but my guts were writhing and my testicles kept popping in and out of my body like turtle heads. My asshole started shrieking ultrasonically; little edible dogs screamed in response and then exploded outside our building (NB: I've decided to name any future canine pet "Yummy"). Liked Kim Jong Il?

By the way, Kevin tends to doubt that Kim Jong-il really has nukes yet. Some Koreans aren't above lying about important stuff. Look at how long Sun lied to Jin about knowing English.

Breaking News

NORTH KOREA PROVES FUTILITY OF DIPLOMACY

President Bush vows to pursue more diplomacy.

In related news, Annika takes two aspirin.

Developing.

Update: As always, I recommend you check out The Princess.

Back in 1994, we made a deal with their devil to allow them to seek out "enrichment" and nuclear technology--even to assist them in building reactors--so long as they made the Scouts Honor promise to use it for good and not for evil. We agreed to lift the sanctions that the government said was "harming" their population beyond repair, to the point where children and families were starving in the streets. We assumed that they would collapse as a government long before this moment, when a bomb equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT explodes underground. We gave them plenty of money, plenty of resources, engaged in talks with them as though they were a legitimate nation, like Germany or England, and all the while, they understood our motivations and secured themselves agains that. We were the stupid ones; they wouldn't let their regime fail, and they would certainly not allow our money to go to the projects we had designated. Instead, the international community, lifted the sanctions on their end, poured money into a nuclear program, and the results? A nuclear bomb, and a starving people. One step ahead for them, one giant step back, for us.

And Tammy Bruce says what's on my mind:

Many are suggesting this emerging situation reminds people of President Bush's strength, or at least will increase his approval numbers. I suppose this is because his numbers go up when we get a reminder that Radical Islamists are still out there and want to kill us. I'm not so sure that's the case here--what this situation actually reminds me of is the failure of the Bush administration to properly deal with North Korea. Yes, the Norks established their nuclear program under Clinton . . . but President Bush has now had six years to deal with it, and not[h]ing has been accomplished.

Yes, Bush's Korean effort has been a failure but don't start thinking that Kerry's unilateral fetish would have produced a different outcome. I think Madeline Albright proved the ultimate value of that nice piece of paper signed by a tyrant after successful unilateral negotiations.

Democrats (and some Republicans) Call For Gay Profiling

Any treatment of the Mark Foley story must include certain disclaimers, so let's get those out of the way first.

1. Foley's conduct with the pages was despicable, inexcusable, inappropriate, sickening, and in my opinion may turn out to be worse than has been alleged so far.

2. I'm glad he is gone, good riddance.

3. If Dennis Hastert or other members of the House Republican leadership knew about the masturbatory internet chats (as opposed to the e-mails sent to a different page, which they did know about), then Hastert is no better than Cardinal Mahoney and needs to be booted out.*

Now, the question before us is whether Hastert should be booted out anyway. That's what Democrats and some Republicans are saying.

An excellent summary of the story as of last Sunday can be found at American Thinker.

What do we know so far?

In the Fall of 2005, Speaker Hastert's office was first notified of "overly friendly" emails sent by Foley to a certain page (not the one from the masturbatory chats). Hastert's office was not shown the original emails.

Now, since Hastert is not the "boss" of the House of Representatives (he's barely the boss of the House Republicans) he appropriately handed off the issue to the Clerk of the House.

The House Clerk is kind of a quasi-operations officer for the whole House, and is elected by the whole House.

The Clerk asked to see the "overly friendly" e-mails in question and was told that the parents didn't want to reveal them for privacy reasons. The issue was resolved by the Clerk's office telling Foley to stop all contact with the page.

As far as I know, nobody is claiming that Hastert ever knew of the masturbatory chats before they were disclosed last week. All he knew about was the "overly friendly" e-mails, and he didn't even know what was in them.

Now, we can have a discussion about whether Hastert's office, or the Clerk should have been more vigourous in demanding to see what was in the e-mails. But even if they had seen the e-mails, what should they have done?

Look at the e-mails in question, and ask yourself why they are disturbing. I think they are, but I have the benefit of knowing about the masturbatory chats, which provide a hell of a lot of context.

In the first e-mail, Foley asks, "how old are you now?" In the second, he comments that another page is "in really great shape." In the third, Foley asks the page what he wants for his birthday. In the fourth e-mail, Foley says, "send me a pic of you as well."

In the law of defamation, there is a concept called "defamation per quod," which is used to describe a statement that is not defamatory in and of itself, but can be defamatory if one takes into account facts that are extrinsic to the statment itself.

You might say that Foley's e-mails contain statements that are "pederastic per quod." In other words, the statements themselves are not creepy unless one takes into account a fact that is extrinsic to the statements: the fact that Mark Foley is gay.

Alarm bells could not go off in anyone's mind upon reading those e-mails unless one takes into account the sexual orientation of the author. In other words, Hastert's critics are implicitly saying that Hastert should have made two assumptions about Mark Foley in general and the e-mails in particular (which he didn't even see).

1. That Mark Foley is gay, and

2. All gays want to have sex with young boys.

Assumption number two is patently untrue, and I don't know why gay rights groups are not speaking up in outrage about this. For Hastert to come down on Foley based on the text of those four emails, Hastert would have had to assume the worst about a gay man on pretty flimsy evidence. Is that fair? Or isn't that gay profiling?

Add to that the fact that Foley was not officially out of the closet until this week. There were rumors, certainly, but Foley had always denied them. If Hastert had "outed" Foley on the basis of those four e-mails alone, Hastert would have been pilloried by the same people now calling for his head.

[Cross-posted at The Cotillion]
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* As Mahoney should have been, long ago.

Civilian Contractor Attack Videotaped

Check out this report from tonight's Nightline. It's pretty disturbing. Here's the transcript, in case you can't view the video.

In a nutshell, the video was taken by a Halliburton contractor named Preston Wheeler last September with his digital camera. He was driving truck five in a convoy that got lost near Balad in the Sunni Triangle.

The video shows teenagers throwing rocks at the convoy as the trucks headed down a dead end road. When the convoy had to turn back, the enemy was waiting for them. A bullet hole suddenly appears in Wheeler's windshield. A roadside bomb explodes, a truck driver is killed and his truck overturns. Wheeler's truck is disabled, and his Humvee escort continues driving.

Small arms fire is heard. Wheeler, now alone, is eventually hit by a couple of rounds as he hides under the dashboard. Inexplicably, he is unarmed. He also witnesses another truck driver taken out of his truck and shot dead by the enemy.

The Nightline report also shows predator footage of another Halliburton driver's body being desecrated by the enemy.

After 45 minutes, helicopters arrive and the cowardly insurgents scurry off, no doubt reverting to innocent civilian status.

I don't understand why the civilian drivers were not armed. I don't understand why that village was not carpet bombed immediately afterwards. It's maddening.

Happy Birthday Google!

Happy eighth birthday Google! Thanks to you, the internet has made a great leap forward. Congratulations, comrades!

Award Winning Fauxtography

Fans of photoshopped news photography might want to check out this one, which won a Pullitzer Prize, which I suppose is a lot like Yasser Arafat winning the Nobel Peace Prize. The photographer (and I assume, the digital manipulator) was none other than terrorist associate and propagandist Bilal Hussein, now in the custody of American forces.

A commenter to The Jawa Report broke this story, so check out Howie's post for more details. The dude "sitting on air" is the clincher.

October Surprise Comes A Week Early

[Maybe it's like Oktoberfest, which is really in September.]

So now a tiny French newspaper called, get this, l'Est Républicain is reporting that Osama bin Laden is dead.

I knew Karl Rove was good, but damn.

Update: Check Jawa for some really good news.

Winning The GWOT

Yesterday my post was so pessimistic, I thought I'd lighten things up a bit today — sort of.

Two years ago, President Bush was criticized for saying that we can't win the Global War On Terror:

I don’t think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that the — those who use terror as a tool are — less acceptable in parts of the world.

In response to my post from yesterday, my friend Matt wrote:

This isn't the kind of war that either side can "win" in any conventional sense. Our enemies can't destroy us militarily, because we're far too strong. We can't destroy them militarily, because they're too disbursed and decentralized. So we'll be taking potshots at one another for a long time to come. What's the end game? I don't know. How will a permanent state of war affect American politics, our collective psyche and our liberty? I don't know. It's a frustrating and frightening thing.

Great minds may think alike, but I'm afraid I must respectfully disagree with both of these learned men. We can win this war.

Matt, of all people, should know as a boxing fan that a lot of times the winner of a bout is decided by who makes the first mistake. He's right in saying that al Qaeda can't destroy us because "we're far too strong." Therefore, no mistake on our part can end the conflict.*

But if al Qaeda, and the radical Islamist movement it has spawned makes a mistake, we can and will crush them in such a way as to end the war. What is the particular mistake that will cause our enemies to lose? I'm getting to that.

As the situation stands now, al Qaeda et al. have the initiative and the upper hand in the GWOT. As it stands now, we cannot deal them a death blow. That's because in the most basic sense, all warfare is about control of geographic areas.† The great strength of the terrorist is that there is no geographic area which we can push him off of. That's what Matt meant when he wrote that the enemy is "too disbursed and decentralized."

President Bush's big contribution to the theory of warfare is the "Bush Doctrine," which in part addresses the terrorist's strength: their lack of geographical origin. On September 11, 2001, he said that the United States, when hunting down the terrorists, "will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them." Nine days later, in his greatest speech, the President restated that doctrine in more detail:

This war will not be like the war against Iraq a decade ago, with a decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion. It will not look like the air war above Kosovo two years ago, where no ground troops were used and not a single American was lost in combat.

Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.

The administration's war planners realized very quickly that you can't win a war against an ephemeral enemy unless you can tie them down to a piece of land and then destroy them on that land. That's why we got this oft criticized "you're either with us or against us" part of the Bush Doctrine. The idea was to nullify the terrorists' advantage of not being attached to any state, by attaching them to a state.

It was a brilliant and necessary idea, but unfortunately it has not been entirely successful in practice. Geopolitical considerations have blunted the doctine's effect, as I think the war planners probably anticipated. We've seen the doctrine work beautifully in Libya, but in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia for instance, there have been mixed results. We had to make a difficult compromise with those countries because an imperfect alliance with their governments is still of great value to our interests. As a result, we have to accept that, for the time being, there will be some laxity in their efforts to control the extremism within their own borders. We can't fight everyone all at once, and especially not if Pakistan and the Saudis assure us that they are on our side.

The Bush Doctrine alone cannot win this war. So what is the mistake that the Islamists dare not make? What is the mistake that will enable us to win? It is the very thing that the enemy hopes to gain: a pan-Islamic caliphate.

Think back to the 1930's. That was a time when the democratic world looked at the growing threat of fascism and was unable to do anything to stop it. I would argue that appeasement and half-hearted reaction was inevitable then, just as it seems inevitable now. The world simply wasn't in a place where strong and united action was possible. Democracies have many strengths, but swift action is not one of them. In the 1930's there was still a system of alliances that finally mandated a response to Hitler, but the response came almost too late.

The Allies responded to Hitler only after he started taking territory by force. Now fast forward a few years. We responded to the Japanese after they started advancing across the Pacific. We responded to the North Koreans when they invaded the South. Same thing in Vietnam. Same thing when Saddam invaded Kuwait. When territory is invaded by an expansionist enemy, we never seem to have any trouble responding appropriately.

What would happen if Osama bin Laden got what he wanted — the restoration of Islamic territories to a fundamentalist theocracy under Sharia law? My thesis is this: If the Islamic fundamentalist movement were to become attached to a state, and that state were to adopt expansionist ambitions, the Western World would and could oppose them successfully.

We know that one goal of Islamic fundamentalism is to recapture territory lost to the infidel, or lost to secularist governments such as Egypt and Turkey. That is their end game. Their fatal mistake would be to actually start achieving those goals. Once the terrorists start to add nations to their idealized pan-Islamic caliphate, they will become a concrete threat that the world can unite against. Instead of being an ephemeral enemy, unconnected with any state and therefore immune from retaliation, they would suddenly become constrained by the same realities of warfare that have prevailed for centuries — and at which we excel.

The bad news is that my thesis presupposes a long period of very bad setbacks for our side. But I don't see any other way around it. The West has proven that it does not yet have the will to unite against its enemy, and even if it did, fighting insurgents and terrorists is like fighting ghosts. You can bomb a nation into submission, but I think we all know by now, it's pretty hard to bomb suicide bombers into submission. Just ask the Israelis. They've always been able to beat any nation-state with one hand tied behind their back. But they just lost their very first war, against a bunch of terrorists who were disavowed by any government.

The really bad news is that, in my view, the timeline for this caliphate solution to come about is on the order of ten to twenty years. By that time, Iran will have nuclear weapons. I think we all know that it's inevitable. So when Iranian troops spearhead the invasion of Greece, or Spain, or wherever, and the West finally gets up the gumption to oppose them, we will be firing missiles at each other.

I know this post sounds like I've been reading too many Harry Turtledove books, but if you think about it, you'll see I'm right. Countries win wars by finding a way around the enemy's defenses. Islamic terrorists hide within "neutral" states and behind innocent civilians, that is their main defense. But they lose that defense once they attach themselves to a piece of land and call themselves a nation. Therefore the seeds of their own destruction lay inside their own express goals.

I told you this would be a more optimistic post.
_______________

* I can hear the nay-sayers now. "But we're already making mistakes that will cost us the war, by being too soft on the enemy, on homeland security, on our borders, etc." I don't disagree that we're being too soft. But what is the probable result of our softness? A major attack? And the result of a major attack will be that our softness is replaced by a hardness in proportion to how bad the attack is. Bottom line is that no terrorist attack, however horrendous, will cause the United States to become part of the pan-Islamic caliphate. That is a danger that exists solely in Europe, due to their lack of moral character, their lax immigration policies, their societal decision not to reproduce, and their sixty year reliance on the United States' security umbrella, which caused them to forget how to defend themselves. But I do not see that fate happening to us. As a people we are too stiff necked and independent. And we love our Constitution too much to replace it with the Koran. (Sure we got some nutty ideas in this country. But when the Swedes are considering a tax on all men to pay for domestic violence treatment — and the idea is taken seriously — all I can say is we have a long way to go in the U.S. before we reach the European level of self-destructive insanity.)

† I know von Clausewitz said, "War is merely the continuation of policy by other means," but I'm talking in the micro sense. There's a guy standing on a piece of land that I want to stand on. He's got a gun and I've got a gun. War is how I use my gun to get him to let me stand on that piece of land. He either dies, runs away, or steps aside.

Another Warning From AQ

Perhaps many of you have seen the Abu Dawood interview transcript that's been making the rounds. If not, here it is.

It's pretty scary stuff. Dawood is supposedly some sort of al Qaeda bigwig, and he says American moslems should leave the country immediately. He also says that al Qaeda has already smuggled "deadly materials" across the Mexican border and that they can attack anytime.

I'm not convinced of this transcript's authenticity. It's supposed to have been done in person, but it reads like a written interview with short questions and long prepared answers.

Assuming arguendo that the transcript is legitimate, a couple of things come to mind. If the "deadly materials" were smuggled across the Mexican border, that suggests to me that a likely target is the West Coast, probably Los Angeles. That scares me a lot because my family lives there. I don't see the terrorists attacking anything except on the coasts. They can blend in easier in populated blue state areas than they can in say, Texas. Transporting the "material" from Tijuana to L.A. is a lot less risky than going from Nuevo Laredo to D.C. And if they want to top 9/11, they'll need to attack a major city that holds some symbolic value.

Secondly, if a big attack occurs, the Democrats won't look quite so dumb for having insisted that Iraq was a distraction and we should have been concentrating on finding Bin Laden. Just being honest here.

Thirdly, I have heard more than once from people I know, that if a major attack occurs, it will be open season on anyone with linen on their head. I think we're in for some serious backlash if there's another attack, as the interviewer acknowledes in the transcript.

I don't know about you, but I've noticed a vague sense of anger and dread rising in this country since about mid summer. I don't see it in my personal day-to-day life, but I do hear it on the radio, on tv and in blogs. I think left and right have been banging away at each other for five years and nobody's winning the debate. We're all sick of arguing and we're just waiting for some event to happen that will prove one side or the other right.

The string of foiled attacks this summer added to the feeling I'm talking about. So did the Lebanon crisis. And the Iran stalemate. And Chavez yesterday. The impending election is also a factor, though I don't think the results will change the national mood, no matter who wins. If there is a big attack on our soil before the year is out, I really think things will get ugly — much uglier than I can even imagine.

Sure, I know that there are lots of dedicated folks out there trying to detect and stop anything bad from happening. And they've been successful so far. But I also worry because it seems like it would be so easy for the terrorists to do something if they really tried. Anytime we catch somebody it seems like we got lucky. But just using my own imagination, I can think of dozens of ways they could carry out an attack without us ever catching them.

So I guess the message is pray, have an emergency kit ready, and don't fly during Ramadan (which starts two days from now).

Update: Peggy Noonan senses the dire mood too.

But the temperature of the world is very high, and maybe we're not stuck in a continuum but barreling down a dark corridor. The problem with heated words now is that it's not the old world anymore. In the old world, incompetent governments dragged cannons through the mud to set up a ragged front. Now every nut and nation wants, has or is trying to develop nukes.

He Said It

Lord Carey of Clifton just gave a speech at Newbold College in Berkshire. In it, he included an academic quote from political scientist, Samuel Huntington:

Lord Carey, who as Archbishop of Canterbury became a pioneer in Christian-Muslim dialogue, himself quoted a contemporary political scientist, Samuel Huntington, who has said the world is witnessing a “clash of civilisations�.

Arguing that Huntington’s thesis has some “validity�, Lord Carey quoted him as saying: “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.�

Lord Carey went on to argue that a “deep-seated Westophobia� has developed in recent years in the Muslim world.

In other words, Nice Religion, Assholes!

h/t American Princess

Ahmadi-Nejad Makes A Good Point About The Uselessness Of The U.N.

First of all, if anyone knows where I can find a transcript of Ahmadi-Nejad's speech please link me to it.

I've been surfing the cable news channels on TV tonight, and now I know much more than I ever need to know about that baby they found, I haven't seen a single show mention anything about half-pint's speech.

Here's a quote from anti-American, pro-terrorist Associated Press's account of the speech:

"The question needs to be asked: if the governments of the United States or the United Kingdom, who are permanent members of the Security Council, commit aggression, occupation and violation of international law, which of the U.N. organs can take them into account?," he asked.

"If they have differences with a nation or state, they drag it to the Security Council," and take the roles of "prosecutor, judge and executioner," he said. "Is this a just order?"

He pointed to Lebanese suffering during the recent Israel-Hezbollah war as an example.

"We witnessed the Security Council ... was practically incapacitated by certain powers to even call for a cease-fire," he said, referring to the fact that the conflict lasted 34 days despite calls for an immediate truce.

Ahmadi-Nejad was trying to slam the U.S. and Britain, but on the way there he made an excellent point. The structure of the United Nations has proven itself to be unworkable, if the purpose is to solve international crises. The General Assembly has never had any real power, and was never intended to have any. The Security Council has never been able to act decisively because of the veto power (with the exception of the Korean War, which was an unusual situation that proves the rule).

I say scrap the U.N. Scrap the whole thing. We don't need it, and it does more harm than good. The legitimacy it is supposed to afford is only an illusion. Witness the string of unenforced and unenforceable resolutions regarding Sudan, Rwanda, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, etc. It's incapable of producing a consensus on the really important stuff, and then the lack of consensus is used to thwart perfectly legitimate actions.

Maybe we should keep some sort of administrative body for UNICEF* and shit like that, but get rid of the rest of that utopian nonsense once and for all.
_______________

* I'm not really sure what UNICEF is, but I think it has something to do with "the children."

Iranian Supreme Leader Calls For Attacks On The United States — AP Hides It In Paragraph 20

I think it's big news when the Supreme Leader of Iran calls for "attacks" on the United States.

Lest there be any confusion about what he meant by "attacks," here's the quote. Note that the word is distinct from "protests."

Those who benefit from the pope's comments and drive their own arrogant policies should be targeted with attacks and protests.

Yet, here's how the anti-American, pro-terrorist Associated Press announced the news — in paragraphs 19 and 20!

In Iran, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei used the comments to call for protests against the United States. He argued that while the pope may have been deceived into making his remarks, the words give the West an "excuse for suppressing Muslims" by depicting them as terrorists.

'Those who benefit from the pope's comments and drive their own arrogant policies should be targeted with attacks and protests,' he said, referring to the United States. [emphasis added]

WTF? Did they not see the word "attack?"

Maybe I'm missing something, but when the real power in Iran (more so than Ahmadi-Nejad), a country actively seeking a nuclear weapon not to mention a well known sponsor of international terrorism, says that the United States should be attacked because of something the Pope said, I think it deserves to be in the headline.

And we need to start taking the Iranian problem seriously.

Update: Curiouser and curiouser.

Ahmadi-Nejad comes to the Pope's defense.

Mr Ahmadinejad said: "We respect the Pope, and all those interested in peace and justice."

He said he accepted the Vatican view that the pontiff’s words had been "taken out of context" and he was "given to understand" that the Pope had later modified them. He said Benedict had been "misinterpreted".

And Mehmet Ai Agca, the Turk who tried to kill the last Pope, warns Benedict against his planned visit to Turkey.

Mehmet Ai Agca, the Turkish gunman who tried to murder John Paul II in 1981 and is now in prison in Turkey, urged the Pope not to visit Turkey in November as planned.

"I write as one who knows about these matters very well," Agca said. "Your life is in danger. Don’t come to Turkey — absolutely not!"

The letter, published by La Repubblica, was seen in Rome as a friendly warning, not a threat.

Via the Times of London. While you're there, read William Rees-Mogg's commentary, "Why The Pope Was Right."

Westminster Cathedral

When I lived in London, every Sunday morning I would take the Circle Line four stops to St. James's Park. I loved to walk through that peaceful garden on my way to church. I loved the Duck Island, with all the geese and swans. It's my favorite of London's parks.

Usually I would go through the park to a very pretty Jesuit Cathedral in Mayfair called Immaculate Conception. But when I was running late (which was about half the time), I'd stay on the Buckingham Palace side of the park and visit Westminster Cathedral (not to be confused with the most famous church in Britain, Westminster Abbey).

So it was sad for me to see the scary pictures posted by A Catholic Londoner and taken outside Westminster Cathedral last Sunday.

Imagine having to run a gauntlet of hate-filled masked protesters, some of them quite possibly terrorists if not murderers, just to go to church.

Again, nice religion assholes.

Nun Killed By Peaceful muslims

From BBC online:

Gunmen have shot dead an elderly Italian nun and her bodyguard in the Somali capital Mogadishu.

The attackers shot the nun three times in the back at a children's hospital in the south of the city, before fleeing the scene.

It is unclear if the shooting is connected with strong criticism by a radical Somali cleric about the Pope's recent comments on Islam.

The nun, who has not been named, is believed to be in her seventies.

The nun was taken into surgery in the Austrian-funded SOS Hospital, in Huriwa district, but she died from her injuries.

A fluent Somali speaker, the nun was one of the longest-serving foreign members of the Catholic Church in Somalia, a former Italian colony.

A Vatican spokesman said the killing was "a horrible act" which he hoped would remain isolated.

Yusuf Mohamed Siad, security chief for the Union of Islamic courts (UIC) which controls Mogadishu, said two people had been arrested.

I guess that whole thing about demanding that the Pope apologize in person was just a bluff. Once you make the list, you're on it for good. And now, it seems, all Catholics are on the list.

Nice religion, assholes.

A Woman For U.N. Sec Gen

I know I've already endorsed Elton John to succeed Kofi Annan as U.N. Secretary General, but there is a new candidate who has sparked my interest.

Latvian President Dr. Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga announced her intention yesterday to run for the post. Her competition includes South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon; U.N. undersecretary-general for public affairs Shashi Tharoor of India; Thailand's Deputy Prime Minister Surakiart Sathirathai; Jordan's U.N. Ambassador Prince Zeid al Hussein; and former U.N. disarmament chief Jayantha Dhanapala of Sri Lanka.

Conventional wisdom says that Dr. Vīķe-Freiberga's chances are slim, due to Russian opposition and the informal tradition of rotating the U.N.'s top post between regions. Asia is next in line and therefore many believe Ban Ki-moon to be the front runner.

In Dr. Vīķe-Freiberga's announcement, she addressed the regional rotation issue:

[T]he member states of the UN should be able to select the best candidate for the post of Secretary General in an open, transparent process. We do not accept the principle of regional rotation as the principal and sole factor in the selection of a candidate. While I deeply respect the candidates that have already been nominated, the selection procedure should not restrict the rights and opportunities of other potential candidates. I hope that the choice made by the Security Council and the General Assembly will be based solely on the candidates’ qualifications, personal qualities and vision of the future of the UN.

I agree, especially given what I learned about Dr. Vīķe-Freiberga's qualifications after only a little bit of research.

She's very popular in Latvia, a country that has done amazingly well since declaring independence from the Soviet empire in 1990. As she told the Danish Foreign Policy Society last month:

The transformation of my own country, Latvia, has taken place at every level. We take pride in having one of the fastest growing economies in Europe. Since 2002, Latvia’s GDP growth has averaged at close to 8% (7.7%) per year. In 2005 it reached 10.2%, the highest rate of growth since the restoration of our independence. And during the first quarter of this year, it was registered at a stunning 13.1%, the highest rate in the European Union. Economic forecasts predict that this stable growth will continue in the coming years.

Dr. Vīķe-Freiberga is also proud of Latvia's progress on integration and education of its ethnic minorities.

Latvia has had to work very hard to overcome the tragic legacy of Soviet rule. One of the greatest challenges we have faced is the integration of those persons who settled in our country during the occupation, and their descendants. By the end of July of this year, nearly 114000 persons had naturalized to become citizens of the Republic of Latvia. When we regained our independence in 1991, less than a quarter of those who represent Latvia’s ethnic minorities could speak Latvian. By the year 2000, more than half could, and that percentage continues to rise. We have begun to implement an education reform that balances Latvia’s traditional respect for the rights of minority languages with the need to build a cohesive society. The motto adopted by the EU two years ago is “Unity in Diversity.� Latvia is a multicultural country that adopted one of the first laws guaranteeing education in minority languages close to 100 years ago, in 1919. Our experience with integration can serve as an example at a time when tolerance based in shared values is essential to Europe’s future. Unity and diversity need not necessarily be perceived as contradictory terms.

In regards to international policy, I'm impressed that Dr. Vīķe-Freiberga seems to understand the threat of totalitarian ideologies motivated by racism. In her July speech to a Holocaust scholarship conference in Riga, she alluded to the obvious parallel between the Nazis and today's Islamic fascists:

And this is something that is extremely important for us to study because ideologies that demarcate some human beings under a special label and anybody who belongs to that special label then being marked for extinction, are the very root cause, the very basis of murderous genocides. Elsewhere in the world we see them happening on the basis of tribal belonging, on the basis of religious differences in various parts of the world, in the name of an ideology, in the name of a religion, whatever. It is extremely important for us to understand the principles, by which racism is defined and how is it that not just oppressive regimes and totalitarian governments, but also free movements of volunteers can be seduced into following such ideologies, where the destruction of somebody labelled either as an inferior or as an enemy is part and parcel of one’s being and when the aim is so high to destroy the other that people even come to the point of destroying themselves, where the hatred becomes so deep that they literally are ready to explode themselves in that hatred in the hope of bringing others along.

Those depths of human hatred have not disappeared from the world. They are still everywhere around us. And even when they are not official policies of some totalitarian government, when they become part of seductive ideologies that actually sway young people to join them, we have to be very very concerned and we have to continue working to understand them.

Her philosophy appears somewhat conservative to me, although I am troubled by her belief that the E.U. should adopt a common foreign policy. She favors a more "flexible" approach to labor, which would lower unemployment. And she recognizes that the E.U. is over-legislated and their regulatory scheme needs to be simplified to stimulate business.

Latvian troops are currently in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Kosovo and Dr. Vīķe-Freiberga is considered an ally of the Bush administration. While that's probably enough to doom her candidacy, I can't help wondering what it would be like to have a pro-American Sec Gen for a change (or at least one who is not openly anti-American and anti-semitic).

Dr. Vīķe-Freiberga concluded her speech to the Danish Foreign Policy Society with these words:

Naturally, every nation has its own, national interests. In today’s world, however, relations between nations are not a zero-sum game. It is in every nation’s interest to overcome the mistrust that prevents the effective functioning of multilateral institutions. In today’s world, no nation can stand alone against the challenges of our era. We will only overcome terrorism and other 21st –century threats if we co-operate more closely and reform the structures that make co-operation possible.

I can easily picture a U.N. leader exhorting member states to work together with similar words. But the meaning behind those words changes dramatically depending on whether the speaker is a Kofi Annan type or someone with the type of values I think Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga holds. I'd like to see her win.

Welcome To The Next "Cartoon" Riots

I predict we're seeing the beginning of the next round of worldwide riots by the "religion of peace." This time over the Pope's remarks at the University of Regensburg.

In case you had any doubt whether the mainstream media would act to pour fuel on the fire or remain objective, here's how Reuters (via CNN) misquoted the Holy Father:

In his speech at the University of Regensburg on Tuesday, Benedict quoted criticism of Islam and the Prophet Mohammad by 14th century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, who wrote that everything Mohammad brought was evil and inhuman, "such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

Note the subtle and unnecessary use of paraphrasing. What Benedict actually said was this:

The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war. He said, I quote, 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.'

Reuters continues,

The head of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Mahdi Akef, whose organization is one of the oldest, largest and most influential in the Arab world, said the pope 'aroused the anger of the whole Islamic world and strengthened the argument of those who say that the West is hostile to everything Islamic.' [emphasis mine]

Hold it! Stop right there! As Peter Pumpkin would say, whut the fuk??

The Muslim Brotherhood is "one of the oldest, largest and most influential" organizations in the Arab World? Is it older than say.... the Catholic Church!? I don't get Reuters' point. Never mind the blatant editorialization of the statement (Reuters didn't even try to mask it by turning it into a quote by some supposed expert), am I supposed to give greater weight to Mr. Akef's objections because he's the "leader" of a religious organization that's been around a long time? If so, then I gotta go with the Pope, because they've been around a bit longer.

But that's neither here nor there. Because the organization in question, the Muslim Brotherhood, is in fact an evil organization. And I noticed also that Reuters/CNN neglected to mention that important point.

Catholic author Gary Dale Cearley:

The Muslim Brotherhood? Isn’t that the group whose last part of their motto says ‘death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations’? Aren’t they the ones who assassinated Anwar Al-Sadat, the leader of Egypt and made several attempts on the life of Ghamal Al-Nasser? Wasn’t Ayman Al-Zawahiri a long-time member of this group before joining Islamic Jihad and uniting it with Al-Qaeda? Isn’t the Muslim Brotherhood outlawed in its ‘normal’ form in several Arab countries today? Isn’t the Muslim Brotherhood one of the largest supporters and benefactors of Hamas? Isn’t the Muslim Brotherhood’s stated goal to unite the entire world as one nation under Islam? Why should we be alarmed that the Muslim Brotherhood’s leader, Mohamed Mahdi Akef, said the Pope ‘aroused the anger of the whole Islamic world and strengthened the argument of those who say that the West is hostile to everything Islamic’? The Pope was simply quoting a man, Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, who was one of the last Byzantine rulers who was very often being attacked by the Muslim Ottomans. Manuel II had seen what Islam was doing to his nation.

Here are some more perfectly ironic statements:

Indonesian protest organizer Heri Budianto:

Of course as we know the meaning of jihad can only be understood by Muslims . . . Only Muslims can understand what jihad is. It is impossible that jihad can be linked with violence, we Muslims have no violent character."

That is priceless!

From Iraq's Sheik Salah al-Ubaidi:

In Iraq's Shiite Muslim-stronghold of Kufa, Sheik Salah al-Ubaidi criticized the pope during Friday prayers, saying his remarks were a second assault on Islam.

'Last year and in the same month the Danish cartoon assaulted Islam,' he said, referring to a Danish newspaper's publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, which triggered outrage in the Muslim world.

And we all know what happened then.

In Britain, Muhammad Abdul Bari of the Muslim Council said:

One would expect a religious leader such as the pope to act and speak with responsibility and repudiate the Byzantine emperor's views in the interests of truth and harmonious relations between the followers of Islam and Catholicism.

Riiiight. Like Muslim leaders have been so very quick to repudiate the views of their most vocal representatives, Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Al Zawahiri, Hassan Nasrallah, et al.

The Pope's invitation to visit Turkey (the home of Mehmet Ali Ağca, lest we forget) is now in jeopardy.

In Turkey, . . . Ali Bardakoglu, the head of Ankara's Directorate General for Religious Affairs, . . . describ[ed] the pope's words as 'extremely regrettable.'

'I do not see any use in somebody visiting the Islamic world who thinks in this way about the holy prophet of Islam. He should first rid himself of feelings of hate,' NTV's Web site quoted Bardakoglu as saying.

Look who's talking about hate.

Bardakoglu . . . recalled atrocities committed by Roman Catholic Crusaders during the Middle Ages in the name of their faith against Orthodox Christians and Jews as well as Muslims.

Atrocities? Again, the muslims show how long their memory is. But it's a selective memory, as author Cearly points out:

I believe that Benedict touched a nerve with these people and that nerve has direct historical roots the Muslims are refusing to consider. Where does the Muslim responsibility to rid themselves of these feelings and reign themselves in begin and end? Constantly falling back on harkening to the Crusades is for their audience, which is an audience that forgets, or refuses to remember, that the Arabs forced scores of people from many nations and religions in conquered territories to convert over the centuries. In many countries these periods of forced conversion were the most bloody chapters of their history. And even more important, these Muslim leaders ignore the fact that at varying times the Muslims took their own ‘Crusades’ to Europe, pushing their way to Austria and to the Pyrenees mountains at different points in history. These pushes into Europe both pre-date the Crusades to the Holy Land by several centuries and they continued after the Crusades to the Holy Land, again for several centuries. Standing eye to eye and toe to toe, Islam has more to answer for in the West than the West has to answer for to Islam but you will never hear this from a Muslim ‘spokesperson’.

I am not one of those who thinks that publishing of the Mohammed Cartoons was "regrettable," "unfortunate," or whatever other weasely word you want to use. What Jyllands-Posten did probably needed doing, and it certainly clued a lot of formerly clueless people in to what radical Islam is all about.

That said, I do think Pope Benedict might have been better off leaving that one particular quote from Manuel II out of his speech. But what's done is done. The bell can't be unrung. What's next is for us to see once more how tolerant the "religion of peace" is towards any type of criticism. Especially in this case, when the Pope's speech was not meant as criticism.

Update: Here's another laughably ironic comment from a muslim writing in London's al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper. First he says that "there is no difference between" the Holy Father, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Regarding the Pope's speech, he goes on to say:

These are ignorant comments previously made by Adolf Hitler, who spoke of a supreme white race against all the other races, especially the African race.

(Ummm, and the Jews? Interesting that he didn't say the Jews.)

Michelle Malkin has a roundup of the unsurprising violence now beginning in the muslim world. These idiots are lashing out at anything and everything non-muslim. They're confusing Anglican and Greek Orthodox churches with Catholic ones, and they're calling the anti-war Pope a part of the Zionist American conspiracy.

Essay Exam

One of the purposes of this blog, as I have said before, is to learn from my readers. I have a theory in mind, and I'm wondering if I'm on the right track. Please help me by taking this short answer essay test. One sentence answers are best.

1. Why did the Confederacy bomb Fort Sumter?
2. Why did Germany invade the Soviet Union?
3. Why did the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor?
4. Why did Muslim terrorists bomb the World Trade Center in 1993?
5. Why did Muslim terrorists bomb the World Trade Center in 2001?
6. Generally speaking, is there a common motivator among all these acts?

Please mail your answers here.

Update: Thanks for all the great responses. Now I think my theory is not so good. And probably question number one doesn't really belong there since, as many of you pointed out, Ft. Sumter was bombed in response to Federal resupply of the island, and was not a surprise attack.

I had been thinking that all of the above actions were pre-emptive strikes by inferior forces against a superior power. And the common theme would be that each of the attackers had a particular vision of society, and in each case the attackee uniquely stood in the way of the attacker's vision.

However, the Germans and the Japanese planned to shorten a war of conquest by their surprise attacks, while the same cannot really be said of the WTC bombers. The terrorists are not capable of fighting any war of conquest, and I don't really believe they expected the response they got after 2001.

Syria, Hezbollah, North Korea Violate UN Security Council Resolution... World Yawns

From Reuters:

A ship bound for Syria from North Korea and detained in Cyprus on an Interpol alert for suspected arms smuggling was carrying air defense systems, Cypriot authorities said on Monday.

The shipment was billed as weather-observation equipment on the freight manifest of the Panamanian-flagged Grigorio 1 and officials said the Syrian government had asked Cyprus to release the seized consignment.

"To my knowledge their name doesn't appear anywhere on the manifest as the consignee, but they have got involved," a senior shipping industry source in Nicosia told Reuters.

He said the vessel had been tracked over a long period of time.

The ship was carrying 18 truck-mounted mobile radar systems and three command vehicles. "The radars on the 18 trucks appear to be part of an air defense system," a police spokeswoman said.

And to think people mocked the president when he included North Korea in the Axis of Evil.

10 bucks says the "international community" does squat about this violation.

h/t LGF

The 9/11 Coverage Replays

This morning, I tried to find CNN's replay of their 9/11 coverage, but it wasn't on tv. I did find NBC's replay, which was broadcast on MSNBC. What I saw bothered me a lot, and I waited all day to post something about it.

Now that I'm home, I was able to view the CNN coverage from that day, thanks to Hot Air. I was able to compare CNN's excellent coverage to NBC's, or I should say, contrast. I've often been critical of CNN, but all I can say is I do miss Aaron Brown.

Kiki Couric and Tom Brokaw were incredibly bad by any standard, and I can't understand why. Somewhere, somehow, the two of them got the idea that good journalism means completely divorcing yourself from all human feeling. Or, perhaps, that the "citizens of the world" ideal that today's elite media have fetishized required them to abandon any sense of horror in order not to offend those viewers who might have been happy about the deaths of thousands.

Or perhaps the two of them thought that by remaining scrupulously objective, they might win some sort of award or peer recognition for their level-headedness. Instead, Couric and Brokaw came off as more wooden than Mr. Spock. Or Al Gore. I don't know what made them think that emotionlessness was required on that day, of all days. The most memorable newscasts during tragic events have always included the broadcaster's personal reactions — and yes emotions — while simultaneously reporting the news. Think Walter Cronkite and JFK, Frank Reynolds and Reagan, or to go way back, Herb Morrison and the Hindenburg.

Amazingly, as I watched the South Tower collapse, Kiki and Tom said nothing. It was as if they didn't see it. But how could that be? It was their job to see it. Then, as Manhattan disappeared behind a thick wall of smoke they continued to act as if nothing had happened. I waited and waited, but they made no mention of the incredible scene unfolding before their very eyes. In fact, it wasn't until eight long minutes later that another correspondent said the first thing about the tower collapsing!

Which brings up an interesting point. Michael Moore made a career out of criticizing Bush's "seven long minutes." But here were two experienced and celebrated journalists, who's job it was to report what was happening, and they completely failed to mention the biggest thing either of them had ever witnessed or would ever witness in their entire careers. Eight long minutes they sat there repeating banalities while lower Manhattan was entirely engulfed in smoke and neither of them said a word about it.

Here's a clip of when the other correspondent stated the obvious for the very first time, "When you look at it the building has collapsed. That building just came down." Listen to what Kiki says at the very end. Instead of reacting to this horrific and unimaginable event, she immediately cuts the reporter off and goes to "Bob Bazell who's at St. Vincent's Hospital..." Infreakincredible.

Which is why Aaron Brown's coverage stands out. When the South Tower began to fall, he interrupted another remote immediately. He then described what we all watched, as it happened, with words like "extraordinarily frightening," which is exactly what it was.

It's a disgrace that Aaron Brown is now teaching at ASU, while Kiki Couric is making $15 million a year.

No Posting Today

In honor of the fallen.

Go here and read some of the tributes.

Today's Homily

The churches around here suck. Here's a direct quote from today's homily:

What if, instead of bombing Afghanistan, we had dropped food, medicine and ecucation?

What an idiot.

Did that priest ever stop to think that dropping food and medicine is exactly what we tried to do in Somalia? And Somalia is one of the reasons cited by Osama Bin Ladin himself for attacking us?

The problem is not the needy people in the world. It's the guys with guns that want to kill us. That priest, if he really wants to do some good, should head on over to Afghanistan himself and try to convert the Taliban. He'd either save some lives, or more likely, he'd get an education real quick.

If you want to pray for peace, try asking God to grant victory to the brave men and women fighting terrorism overseas and at home.

The Path To 9/11 Clips You're Not Supposed To See

Go and see them now, before the anti-free speech crazies find out and crash the site.

Update: Betsy Newmark explains why it matters.

Think for a moment about the concerted action by Democrats, their lawyers, former White House operatives, Bill Clinton, sympathetic historians, and lefty bloggers to stop this show. Remember that this was the same crowd that was full of praise of for Fahrenheit 9/11 for crystallizing their opposition to George Bush. Accuracy and versimilitude didn't bother them then. And they weren't saying a word about 60 Minutes "fake but accurate" story on Bush's National Guard service. Now, ask yourself. If this crowd were to control the White House, how many more of these attempts to stifle any criticism of them would we be seeing? Think of how much has been aired during Bush's tenure, even a movie depicting him being assassinated and more denials of civil liberties gets made without Bush's White House unleashing its lawyers. But, for this thing, the Democrats go to the mattresses. Are they perhaps modeling for us what their response would be to further criticism if they should gain control of the White House - or even of Congress? Don't forget those not-so-veiled threats to ABC's license. Ponder that chill wind.

Exactly. These are the anti-free speech crazies I'm talking about.

h/t Michelle Malkin

9/11 Film Controversy

I don't get this stupid controversy about The Path to 9/11. Democrats are thrashing about like a T-1000 in a vat of molten steel. What's the problem?

Is the movie defamatory? If it is then file a lawsuit. They might have a little trouble with the malice requirement, but that's one remedy.

It seems to me that the only objections Democrats have raised are that it's allegedly misleading, innacurate, and fictional. The truth is, they don't like the way it portrays Clinton. So fucking what. Since when have ex-presidents been immune from criticism? If they don't like it, why don't they do their own movie about how bad Bush is?

Oh that's right, they already did. It won the Palme d'Or.

And another thing. Isn't it government censorship when a bunch of Senators and Congressmen threaten ABC's license if they don't pull a tv show because of its political content? Isn't that prior restraint?

The DNC blog has a picture of a stack of 120,000 petitions they've printed. What they don't mention is that they're unsigned, but the picture is supposed to be impressive. I'm impressed that they think there are enough lemmings out there who care about a movie they haven't even seen yet.

And Daily Kos is now calling ABC, "GOP-TV." That is the funniest thing of all. Makes you wonder if they've ever watched ABC News. Would that it were true, it might take some of the heat off of Fox News.

A Kos writer also made the logically insupportable assertion the she "despise[d] censorship" and was in favor of "the free expression of even the most foul and erroneous ideas" except in cases when the speaker (in this case ABC) cannot be expected to "present a factual rebuttal" of its own speech.

By the same logic, Farenheit 9/11, a film that has made hundreds of millions of dollars to date, should never have been released unless Michael Moore also did a follow up film rebutting the lies in his original movie.

Jefferson and Madison would certainly have raised an eyebrow at that one.

Update: Kevin Kim have best comment.

I first read and thnk Bill Clinnton stuipd because is drama like "JFK" by Oliber Rock. "Is ONLY DRAMA BILL AND RELAX! Moreovering, you SUCK Monnica Lunski DIK is INCONTROVERTIBALLY FACT! YOU ONLY YOU!" I shoutted at moni tor.

Clik here to see.

Kiki Is Still Crappy

I took time out from watching Miami vs. Pittsburgh to catch Kiki Couric doing the nightly news. I missed her the last two nights. Tonight, I made it to exactly eight minutes before switching back to the game in anger. I had no idea how bad the CBS Nightly News had gotten. It's been years since I watched any evening news show. The first two segments of Kiki's broadcast tonight were almost total fiction. It was laughable, except for the fact that many thousands of people were watching who had no idea they were being lied to.

I don't blame Kiki so much. She's more of a master of ceremonies for this contemporary version of the Liars Club. Besides her poor posture and crooked mouth (which I never noticed before), she did a serviceable job. I find her manner more pleasant than Dan Rather's, but that ass surely didn't set the bar too high for his successor.

Kiki's show started with Jim Axelrod asserting quite unequivocally that the latest tape from Bin Laden contradicts the President's message in his recent War On Terror speeches. Anyone with a brain can see that just the opposite is true. In fact, the al Qaeda video features terrorists that are now in U.S. custody, whose interrogation led to the arrests of further terrorists. Bin Laden's video not only disproves beyond any doubt the stupid "inside job" conspiracy theories, but it shows how we've made a big dent in al Qaeda's leadership.

The second segment promised to show how support for the Iraq War has fallen among conservatives of the Bible Belt. They then showed only three people, two of whom said that they support the war! [Actually, the third guy supports the war too! See update, infra.] Now, I'm not trying to claim that support for the war has not fallen. It obviously has, but this joke of a news segment proved nothing of the sort. The one guy who said he was going to vote for Democrats was cut off just as he was about to state the reason why. No doubt his reasons had more to do with immigration and runaway spending, but CBS didn't want their audience to know that.

In the next segment, both Kiki and the reporter blatantly repeated the lie that Valerie Plame was an undercover agent. I guess they believe that old totalitarian principle about repeating the big lie often enough. Then followed an interview with Armitage, which nearly made me keel over with disinterest. This story is so irrelevant, why doesn't CBS just move on dot org?

That was when I turned it off, and to my dismay learned that I had missed a touchdown.

Update: The guy who said he was voting democratic in the second segment I mentioned above was retired Colonel Jim Van Riper, USMC. The unedited interview is here. I was wrong about his reasons for planning to vote Democratic. But CBS, very sneakily, omitted from their televised soundbites any of Colonel Van Riper's very strong pro-Iraq War statements. His objection is not that we're in Iraq, he just wants to win and he doesn't think the administration is getting the job done.

While I think it's misguided to think a Democratic Congress will do anything but weaken America, I can totally understand Col. Van Riper's frustration. We all want to win. Does anybody really think that Bush's poll numbers would be where they are now if we had already succeeded in Iraq? For most Americans — and this is the dirty little secret CBS and the elite media don't want you to know — the issue is victory, not whether the war was legal or right or wrong or unilateral or any of the other Michael Moore objections. If we had won already, nobody would be complaining. Wanting to win is patriotic, as is frustration that we might not be winning.

Future Headline

"Dems Celebrate End of Bush Security Measures"

Have you seen the America Weakly campaign ads?

If not, start here, with a satirical look at what a Democratic Congress will do to national security. Or maybe not so satirical.

A Democratic Congress will be bad, no question about it. They have no plan except opposition to Bush, and a desire to embarrass Republicans. Since they don't hold the executive branch, these goals will have to be furthered by de-funding, and endless investigations.

I think 9/11 might have been an unintended result of Ken Starr's crusade to nail the President on a "process crime." If so, what new tragedy might occur while President Bush is occupied by the latest round of political vendettas, investigations and impeachment proceedings?

67th Anniversary Of Case White

Today is the 67th anniversary of the beginning of World War Two in Europe. As you should remember, it began with the German invasion of Poland, which the Wehrmacht codenamed "Case White." (DANEgerus also reminds us that the Red Army invaded from the east sixteen days later.)

I think it's especially appropriate to pause today and think about that fateful moment in 1939, which led to the death of so many millions.

Many folks have noted that our situation now is not unlike the time before that first panzer crossed the Polish frontier. I'm one of them. I see the failure of our international institutions and the blindness of so many prominent figures and I think of the League of Nations, Chamberlain, Lindbergh, and Coughlin.

There is no cosmic law that says we can't re-ignite the horrors of World War Two for a new generation. The United States lost 293,000 brave men to the conflict, but almost zero civilians. We had it lucky. We were the saving heroes from across the water in that war. We won't be so lucky next time.

The bill from the last world war was staggering. Twenty-five million Soviet citizens, fourteen million Chinese, seven million Germans, six million Poles, two million Japanese, and on and on.

If you were a European Jew, a Philipino, a Chinese or Russian peasant, even a lowly German or Soviet conscript, your life was a hell in the 1940's. All because a handful of world leaders could not, or would not, stop the juggernaut of fascism.

The atrocities were so numerous, we've given them names: Bataan, Auschwitz, Malmedy, Nanking, Dachau, Katyn Forest, Lidice, Treblinka, the Burma Railway, and on and on.

We must also remember the unimaginably horrible deaths from new techniques of killing developed for the war by our side, and used at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Tokyo, and on and on.

There are those who say we are on the precipice of World War Three right now. Others say it started five years ago. I am not going to argue with either viewpoint. Nor will I end this post with a pollyannish "don't worry, our leaders have things under control."

Because even if we were blessed with the greatest of statesman, which we're not, I don't know that it will be possible to avoid another trial of war brought upon us by evil men.

Some people insist our current enemies are not dangerous, or if they are, they're not evil. I'm at a point now where I don't think that argument matters a whole lot. Our enemies have their own agenda, and they will settle the issue in their own time. And we will have to fight them whether we're ready or not.

I looked up at the sky last night and saw a fiery meteor burn across the horizon. It was scary, though I knew it was no bigger than a coin. It made me think about how wise we think we are, yet how much there is we don't know. I wonder if there are intelligent beings who have been watching us these past hundred years. How they must laugh at our folly.

Guardsman Beat Up By Crazy Liberals

Near Tacoma, Washington...

The Pierce County Sheriff's Department is searching for five people who allegedly attacked a uniformed National Guardsmen walking along 138th Street in Parkland Tuesday afternoon.

The soldier was walking to a convenience store when a sport utility vehicle pulled up alongside him and the driver asked if he was in the military and if he had been in any action.

The driver then got out of the vehicle, displayed a gun and shouted insults at the victim. Four other suspects exited the vehicle and knocked the soldier down, punching and kicking him.

“And during the assault the suspects called him a baby killer. At that point they got into the car and drove off and left him on the side of the road,� Detective Ed Troyer with the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department told KIRO 7 Eyewitness News.

The suspects were driving a black Chevy Suburban-type SUV.

“This is something new for us, we have not had military people assaulted because they were in the military or somebody's opposition to a war or whatever,� Troyer said.

The driver is described as a white male, 25-30 years old, 5 feet 10 inches tall, heavy build, short blond hair, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, and armed with a handgun.

The vehicle's passengers are described as white males, 20-25 years old. Some of the suspects wore red baseball hats and red sweatshirts during the attack.

The Pierce County Sheriff's Department is offering a $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and charging of the individuals involved. Informants can call 253-591-5959, and callers will remain anonymous.

That is just sick. Every time some terrorist cell gets busted we hear no end of public service announcements intended to prevent "hate crimes" against muslims. They must be very effective, since I haven't heard of a single such "hate crime" since 9/11. Maybe we should be doing the same thing to protect our military in certain sections of the country.

h/t Beth at