saturday december 31, 2005
remember the hippo and the tortoise?
Snopes updates the story of the duo brought together by the tsunami.
live local, see global
Earthcams around the world.
hoops
by Burt Prelutsky
I used to love basketball when I was a kid. First, my dad attached a basket to our garage, and I would spend hours at a time practicing my shooting. Then, when I was eight or nine years old, while one of my older brothers was attending UCLA, John Wooden came out from Indiana and taught fast-break basketball to the Bruins. And that clinched my devotion to the game.
Although most people remember the championship teams anchored by the likes of Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton, I recall the earlier teams I first started rooting for with players named Stanich and Sheldrake, guys who were all well under six and a half feet tall, but who could run the legs off the opposition.
When I entered junior high, all that practice paid off. In the seventh grade, I set the record for kids my age and size in the two-minute basketball test. In this phys ed event, you took your first shot from the free-throw line, recovered the ball, dribbled outside the key, took a shot, recovered the ball, dribbled outside the key, and so on and so forth for 120 seconds. I made 24 baskets, or one every five seconds. Frankly, I’m still amazed. It’s not as if I sank every shot, and some of the bounces were rather erratic. But I am also amazed that I can still remember how many baskets I made after 50-odd years, when I can barely recall what I had for lunch today.
The following year, I sank 27 shots. But by then I was older and a little bigger, so I was in a different classification. As luck would have it, some kid in that particular group held the record for the entire school. He’d made 29. Or so he claimed. Back then, I figured he’d cheated. Half a century later, I still think so.
Over the years, I found my interest in the game waning. It wasn’t just that I preferred playing tennis and watching baseball. I came to feel the game, itself, had become tacky. Players began to take more pride in their trash–talking ability than in dribbling or passing.
I came to think that the NBA should start drafting their referees from the boxing fraternity, guys experienced in warning fighters to break cleanly and not punch in the clinches. At the same time, the refs stopped calling such obvious fouls as traveling and double-dribbling -- anything, in fact, that might discourage fan-favorites from showboating to their hearts content.
I don’t blame the players or the coaches, the owners or the league. Charging the prices they do, they have to give the fans what they want, the same way as any other form of lowbrow entertainment, from soap operas to wrestling. And, clearly, what the fans want, actually demand, is a lot of scoring -- and for a lot of that to come in the form of dunking.
Fans are so excited by the sight of a player dunking the ball that at the annual all star game, they set time aside for a dunking competition. What makes it a particularly moronic activity is that nobody is even guarding the participants. They just go out there and ham it up -- like the Harlem Globetrotters, but without their class, humor or memorable theme song, “Sweet Georgia Brown.”
What, I wonder, is it about guys seven feet tall dunking a basketball in a hoop 10 feet off the floor that thrills these ninnies? All that these giants have to do is lift their arms over their heads, and the ball is already at hoop level. The basket, in fact, has remained at the same level since the day the game was invented back in the 19th century, back when the men playing the game were about five and a half feet tall. Isn’t it time they raised the basket a tad? Heck, the day they get it up around 13 feet, even I’ll be impressed if some yutz dunks it.
A few months ago, I was in a local delicatessen. When I sat down with my friends, I noticed there were three elderly people in the next booth. One of them, I saw, was John Wooden.
When they finished their meal and were getting up to leave, I noticed that Mr. Wooden was having trouble getting out of the booth. I rose quickly and rushed over to lend him a hand.
“Thank you,” he said.
“It’s a privilege, Coach Wooden. It was thanks to you that I became a basketball fan.”
He nodded. Then he gave me a look, and he asked, “Are you still?”
What a strange question, I thought. I knew what my honest answer was. But I also knew I was speaking to a man in his 90s who had devoted his entire life to the game, both as an All American player and as a Hall of Fame coach, and I didn’t wish to offend him.
Then I figured that with his reputation for ingraining ethics and integrity in his players, I would be doing him no favor by lying. So I sucked it up, and said, “No, Coach. Not for a long time.”
Then he nodded and smiled before walking away.
It was a very sad smile.
top five ignored stories of 2005
American Thinker has its list.
bengali buddha and the rickshaw
Hand-pulled rickshaws will soon be disappearing from Calcutta's streets because they're getting in the way of progress.
friday december 30, 2005
gateway pundit
...shows how Iraqi deaths have tapered off dramatically.
dana priest: why won't bush heed me?
MSM arrogance on parade:
The effort President Bush authorized shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to fight al Qaeda has grown into the largest CIA covert action program since the height of the Cold War, expanding in size and ambition despite a growing outcry at home and abroad over its clandestine tactics, according to former and current intelligence officials and congressional and administration sources.
To which clear headed Americans say: Right on!
The broad-based effort, known within the agency by the initials GST, is compartmentalized into dozens of highly classified individual programs, details of which are known mainly to those directly involved.
GST includes programs allowing the CIA to capture al Qaeda suspects with help from foreign intelligence services, to maintain secret prisons abroad, to use interrogation techniques that some lawyers say violate international treaties, and to maintain a fleet of aircraft to move detainees around the globe. Other compartments within GST give the CIA enhanced ability to mine international financial records and eavesdrop on suspects anywhere in the world.
Good, good...
Over the past two years, as aspects of this umbrella effort have burst into public view, the revelations have prompted protests and official investigations in countries that work with the United States, as well as condemnation by international human rights activists and criticism by members of Congress.
Burst? Y'mean they showed up on the front page of your newspaper, written by you?
Still, virtually all the programs continue to operate largely as they were set up, according to current and former officials. These sources say Bush's personal commitment to maintaining the GST program and his belief in its legality have been key to resisting any pressure to change course.
And despite all your best efforts, Bush is still determined to protect the nation? Oh, the horror!
open letter to "euroeunuchs"
From Jeff at Beautiful Atrocities.
bold predictions for 2006
Some things we all know about the coming year: a poor soul in Nigeria will require our help, our PayPal accounts will be on the verge of being shut down and the New York Times will further degrade.
Here are our bold predictions:
1. GRATE AMERICAN
A caller to Sean Hannity's radio program will call him a "great American" and Hannity will reply "you're a great American." Millions of Americans will suffer a wave of nausea. A minor scandal will erupt after an Al Franken-Air America investigation determines that the caller was in fact, merely a good American.
2. EYE BALLS GO AIRBORN
During a news conference, Nancy Pelosi's eyeballs will completely leave their sockets, much like Jim Carrey's in The Mask. It will also be revealed that the author of recent Democrat slogans such as "arrogant abuse of power" and "culture of corruption" moonlights from his full-time job writing fortune cookies.
3. "MENOPLAY" DEBUTS
After years in the laboratory, the long awaited female Viagra (developed under the code name "Hot Pants") will become available. A splashy Superbowl commercial will feature before and after moments: an annoyed wife with a "get lost" grimace that morphs into a randy come-hither. The tagline: "Turn MenoPause into MenoPlay." Sales of Viagra and Cialis go through the roof.
4. BRAT TAX GOES INTO EFFECT
Everyone knows brats are painful to be around. But new studies showing that brats, when grown, generate massive social costs (increased criminality, incessant whining and demands for public services) lead to a nation-wide movement for a brat tax. With "Make Perp Parents Pay" as their campaign slogan, advocates of the new tax garner bipartisan support. Millions of supermarket checkers and waiters are deputized as enforcers.
5. SPORTS FANS CELEBRATE THE "DE-BLABBERIZER"
A device that hooks up to equipped TiVo units and cable boxes uses waveform recognition technology to filter out annoying sportscasters from broadcasts. Sports fans jump at the chance to download filters for such notorious blabbers as Bill Walton, Dan Dierdorf and Brent Musberger. The nuclear option eliminates "color commentators" completely.
6. MALLS GET FAST LANES
In a desperate attempt to draw male shoppers back to shopping malls, owners will institute striped pedestrian lanes, like on highways. Dawdling, gawking shoppers will be segregated from brisk walking, point-to-point shoppers. "Men are used to point and click Internet shopping," said Mike Glick of RDL Properties. "They become frustrated by pokey women walking four abreast, especially when they're a wide load." For further appeal, users of the fast lane will be allowed to "hockey check" dawdlers who drift into the fast lane.
7. THIN THE HERD HIT LIST
The paranoid left will circulate rumors that President Bush plans to solve the impending Social Security disaster by selectively eliminating vast numbers of Baby Boomers. Bush's secret hit list will be leaked to the Daily Kos and will echo within the fringe for several months before Howard Dean lends the conspiracy theory credence with a slip of his tongue. Millions of suggested names for the list will be emailed anonymously to the White House.
8. EVERYTHING BAD BECOMES GOOD
Every food or chemical that was bad for you in 2005 will be found beneficial in 2006. Once again, the diet industry will suppress the secret to weight loss (eat less, more around more) in order to sell hope to hopeful suckers.
9. FOX LAUNCHES MISSING WHITE GIRL CHANNEL
After determining there was insufficent air time to adequately cover the disappearance of Nattalee Holloway in Aruba on Fox News Channel, Rupert Murdoch will launch a 24/7 "Missing (White) Girl Channel." Ratings among Alzheimers patients will soar.
10. MEL BROOKS DEBUTS "THE EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS"
Not content to repurpose the same concept three times, Brooks brings a gloomy, serious drama to Broadway. The story hinges on a Willie Loman-like writer (with nothing more than a "high concept and a smile") who turns a cult movie into a blockbuster Broadway musical and back into a lame movie.
Jim Bass
making book on daniel
by J.C. Phillips
I received an email petition urging me to contact my local NBC affiliate and ask them not to air their new hour long religious drama, “The Book of Daniel.”
The series, set to begin airing on Jan. 6, depicts the life and family of an Episcopal priest named Daniel Webster. Webster has an alcoholic wife, a 23-year-old homosexual son, a 16-year-old drug-dealing daughter and a 16-year-old adopted son who is having sex with the bishop's daughter. At the office, Father Webster’s secretary is a lesbian who is sleeping with his sister-in-law. NBC calls the new series “edgy” and “courageous”. Many Christians call it offensive. After viewing the commercials, it is not a program I intend to watch, however, nor am I going to write my local NBC affiliate. I prefer a different kind of activism.
I think few people object to the portrayal of a religious family dealing with emotional and spiritual trials. What insults is the absolute disdain Hollywood shows for the religious community. There is a sizable Christian audience that is begging the networks for programming that is not only wholesome but that also reflects their sensibilities and values. To that the network executives thumb their nose. They know better than the audience and instead serve-up a priest that pops pills, an alcoholic wife, homosexuality and adultery, drug dealing and all manner of dysfunction sold as NORMAL.
Daniel’s supporters argue that the program’s message is about having compassion and learning to love all people. The arrogance of Hollywood constantly fascinates me. The very people who show contempt for religion at every opportunity now want to preach to Christians about the true meaning of Christianity. Hollywood’s real message is that those claiming to be Christians are hateful hypocrites that do not love all people, proof of which is in our rejection of the normalization of homosexuality and sexual promiscuity.
It is an odd kind of projection Hollywood is engaged in. Hate and intolerance do not come from the Christian right, but from the Hollywood left. It is Hollywood that rebukes complaint by referring to average Americans as religious fanatics, zealots and right wing crazies. It is Hollywood that maligned Mel Gibson for making “The Passion of the Christ.” It is Hollywood that describes offending the sensibilities of a large portion of their audience as courageous and edgy.
What many Christians have done is demand programs like “Daniel” be taken off the air and on this point I disagree. I want Americans to view first hand what Hollywood thinks of them and their faith. After a few episodes of “The Book of Daniel”, I am betting America will continue to use the power of the remote control and abandon network programs in search of something better. The Christian community can offer them something better.
If, as the media is fond of writing, the nation is awash with evangelical Christian influence, why must we beg Hollywood executives to give us anything? If we are convinced their vision is bankrupt, let us challenge it with a vision that is more robust, more vibrant and in the end more profitable. Let us create the wholesome, values rich programming Hollywood refuses to provide and invite the network audience to spend time with us. There is more than enough Christian creative talent, more than enough money to finance projects and there are more than enough cable networks looking to fill programming time with well-written, family friendly entertainment. All we need to do is stop putting our energies toward stifling Hollywood and get to work on offering a better product. That is not only the American way, it is Christian activism at its best. It is also the kind of movement I could really get behind.
thursday december 29, 2005
la times channels emily litella
From their corrections page:
Religion and government: A Dec. 18 article defending the separation of church and state stated that the Rev. Jerry Falwell claimed that Ellen DeGeneres played a role in the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina because she was the host of the Emmy Awards before both events. He made no such claim.
as it ever was
Reading Ron Chernow's excellent biography of Alexander Hamilton, I came across a passage than rang familiar. Hamilton was working as George Washington's chief of staff, with duties that included corresponding with the Continental Congress:
"Like Washington, Hamilton was scandalized by the dissension and cowardice, the backstabbing and avarice, of the politicians in Philadelphia while soldiers were dying in the field."
fascinating interview
Author Robert Kaplan on Hugh Hewitt's show, transcript courtesy of RadioBlogger:
RK: Yes, we are. Keep in mind that throughout the Earth, there are all these regional separatist movements with barbaric techniques. And a good deal of them have some kind of like overlapping, strategic affinity with the goals of al Qaeda. It doesn't mean they have the same objective. It means their interests overlap. So think of al Qaeda as kind of a loose, post-modern organization that's weak at the center, strong at the edges, that doesn't demand absolute affinity of views with a lot of its allies. So the U.S. military is in this position of going to the Afghan/Pakistan border, where North Waziristan is, going to the southern Phillipines, going to the Colombian/Venezuelan border, and kind of efficiently using an economy of force, force multiplication strategy, of just a few teams of special forces training the host country military to do the lion share of the work.
HH: But the host country militaries...are they capable of absorbing the sort of training that the special forces are willing to give them, in as short of a period of time as we have?
RK: Yes, they are, because what we do is we don't train just recruits. We train their best units. And not only do we train their best units in Colombia or the Philippines, we train the trainers of the best units, so that our methods can be replicated and carried on within these countries. And it's important to keep in mind that we have U.S. military training missions throughout the world. There are so many of them that the Marines are taking the burden from special forces in many cases. As we speak, Hugh, the United States Marines are training...retraining the entire Georgian military to kind of consolidate the gains of the Rose democratic revolution in the former Soviet republic. And in every single case, we're dealing with legitimated democracies. We're not around the world propping up dictatorships. You know, that may have been true thirty or forty years ago. But the reality today is there was an explosion of democracies in the 90's, and you cannot have an age of democratization without an age of military professionalization. If we don't professionalize these militaries, they won't stay democratic for long.
...
HH: ...that really interested me in the civilian/military divide that he worried about. Do you see that growing or narrowing?
RK: I see it growing, because this is the first time in history where you have an intellectual media governmental elite, where people don't have anyone...where have very few people who've served in the military within their own social circle. One of the things you see in Iraq, you see all these soldiers, Marines, private contractors, and they're all from the South, the greater South, the Mid-West, the Great Plains. And they all e-mail their families every single night about what's going on. And so people in other parts of the country are far more cosmopolitan and sophisticated about what's going on in Iraq now, than people on the two coasts of California and New York.
Read it all.
nice try
Another lawyer joke:
The United States should free Saddam Hussein if it wants to end its problems in Iraq and earn the friendship of Arabs, the former Iraqi president's lawyer wrote in a letter to U.S. President George W. Bush.
The chief lawyer for Saddam at his trial for crimes against humanity in Baghdad told Bush that Iraqis who supported their former leader were waiting for a bold decision from the world's most powerful statesman to free him.
"I call on you (President Bush) to release Mr. President (Saddam) immediately to allow the Iraqis to decide his fate. Only then will you get out of your predicament in Iraq and truly become an advocate of justice," Khalil Dulaimi wrote in a letter obtained by Reuters.
Meanwhile, television ads are running in Southern California for a horror film called Hostel. They depict a chamber of horrors, with toes being lopped off, electric drills raised menacingly etc. Awful stuff.
One wonders: do the filmmakers know that Saddam ran such torture chambers for real?
wednesday december 28, 2005
the da'mage done
Being a committed capitalist requires being neither a materialist nor a sap. But saps abide. Today at Costco I found $65 "handmade" jeans sold under the Da'mage label. Damage indeed; they were purposefully worn in strategic places to achieve some stylistic goal. (Being a fogey, this is probably stale news, so humor me.)
No doubt the hands doing the hand-making live in the Third World. What goes through the mind of factory workers who are asked to take perfectly nice jeans and turn them into, well, the worn out jeans people give to charities, who in turn bundle them off to the Third World?
French is a handy tongue for making the ordinary seem sophisticated. You probably know that Evian spelled backward is Naive. Was this a gallic prank on gullible yanks? Will we be seeing products sold under the name GU'LLIBLE? or GAR'BAGE?
Oui.
Jim Bass
corruption in plain sight
Claudia Rosett on the UN scandal beat.
chicago tribune: bush did not lie
This is only news to news organizations, but better late than never. Next up: will the Los Angeles Times, which is owned by the Trib, publish or report on this story? Excerpt:
After reassessing the administration's nine arguments for war, we do not see the conspiracy to mislead that many critics allege. Example: The accusation that Bush lied about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs overlooks years of global intelligence warnings that, by February 2003, had convinced even French President Jacques Chirac of "the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq." We also know that, as early as 1997, U.S. intel agencies began repeatedly warning the Clinton White House that Iraq, with fissile material from a foreign source, could have a crude nuclear bomb within a year.
das kapital redux
From Der Spiegel:
It is sometime in the near future. The world is dominated by a handful of corporations. Taxes have been abolished; schools are sponsored by McDonald's or Mattel; and people take the name of the company that employs them.
Hack Nike has been assigned a contemptible task by marketing head John Nike. To boost sales of the new, ludicrously expensive Mercury shoes, he has been dispatched to murder over a dozen young shoppers. The message: People will do anything to lay their hands on these shoes.
Welcome to "Logoland," the nightmarish world of the terrorized consumer conjured up by Australian author Max Barry. Governments have long thrown in the towel. The world has been privatized. The police only pursue criminals if the victims are prepared to foot the bill. Companies have torn down all boundaries, physical and moral. Crimes are subject to market laws alone.
This is the nightmare of Eurotwits: national sovereignty subjugated to corporate overlords. Of course, Europe is the intellectual swamp that dreamt up transnational progressivism, which seeks to subjugate national sovereignty to world government.
Given the choice between bowing to Wal-mart or bowing to the likes of Kofi Annan, I'll take the former any day. Shoot, give me the whole gang at Enron over Kofi. At least with Enron, you can fire the bastards or put them in jail. Kofi just keeps tap dancing.
Of course it's a false premise: corporations derive their power by selling us stuff. We consumers vote with our dollars, practicing democracy on a daily basis.
The Euro socialist model siphons off tax dollars to bureaucrats who know how to spend your money better than you. Not so democratic.
And that's what scares the bureaucrats the most: if people are given a real choice, they'll be out of a job and might have to do something useful to get by.
UPDATE: For a great example of bureaucratic folly, read Instapundit's post on Europe's answer to the GPS systems.
two too many
by Burt Prelutsky
I don’t know how much attention, if any, sociologists have given to the study of couples, but I have a feeling the answer is, not enough. Lately, I’ve been giving couples a great deal of thought, and I believe they warrant looking into by those academic types who have government grants and way too much time on their hands.
My own preliminary observations lead me to one inescapable conclusion; namely, that it’s a wonder that couples ever have other couples for friends.
Consider any two couples you know. That’s four separate people. As individuals, they might all be just fine. Or at least acceptable. But the odds are against the four of them being compatible. For instance, let’s say that the two men are the primary friends. Perhaps they work together, maybe they’re old school chums who hunt or fish or drink together, or maybe they just root for the same football team. Any of those things could bind men, simple creatures that we are, for life. But the two women in the group might be as different as any two women on the planet. One could be a driven career type, while the other might be a dedicated homemaker. Albert Einstein and a New Guinea headhunter would have more in common, and be far less hostile to one another.
If things were reversed and it was the women who were chums, one of the men could be a member of the ACLU, while the other one could well be a fine, rational, upstanding member of the community.
With just four people involved, you might think there was a fairly good chance they’d all get along. You might even assume they’d all like each other. There is always that chance, of course, but the actual odds of that being the case are 47,000,000 to one.
For openers, not every couple is mutually devoted. So you start out with some likelihood that even the two people in the couple wish the other one was traveling at the speed of light somewhere in space.
There are exceptions, naturally, foursomes in which each person looks upon the other three with boundless love and affection. But, far more often than not, I’m betting that, at the end of the evening, at least one of the wives is saying to her husband, “I’ll never know what Agnes ever saw in Dave,” and one of the husbands is saying to his wife, “I give that marriage six more months. Sooner, if Jack comes to his senses.”
It’s an absolute wonder to me that couples ever manage to get together with other couples. Believe me, I speak from experience. I bet it’s been nearly two years since another couple has invited us to do anything with them. And, frankly, I don’t get it, because my wife seems like a very nice person.
tuesday december 27, 2005
red scare and upton sinclair
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In high school we were taught about the so-called Red Scare in the US between 1918 and 1921. It was a time of great upheaval and social change: a just completed world war, a flu epidemic that killed 20-40 million, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, socialist and communist movements in the US, labor strikes, coming alcohol prohibition, female suffrage, and suppression of civil liberties (for real, not the whining we hear today).
The US had absorbed millions of immigrants in recent decades, some of whom were anarchists. Two of them were Sacco and Vanzetti. When the Italian immigrants were convicted of murder and executed in Massachusetts, many on the left claimed their conviction was an act of political supression.
It was presented to us in high school as a stain upon our history.
On the 50th anniversary of their execution, then-Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis proclaimed, "any disgrace should be forever removed from their names."
Dukakis was joining a distinguised list of Sacco Vanzetti defenders: Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Bertrand Russell, John Dos Passos, Katherine Ann Porter, Upton Sinclair, George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. Allen Ginsberg, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger wrotes verses about them. Of late, the band Rage Against the Machine featured them in a video.
Upton Sinclair, whose muckraking book The Jungle lead to the creation of the FDA, wrote a novel about Sacco and Vanzetti called Boston that claimed they were railroaded. Now, we learn that Sinclair had been told by the mens' lawyers that the two were indeed guilty.
Yes, Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. From a story in the December 24 LA Times:
Ordinarily, Paul Hegness wouldn't have looked twice at Lot 217 as he strolled through an Irvine auction warehouse, preferring first-edition books and artwork to the box stuffed with old papers and holiday cards.
But then, he wouldn't have stumbled upon a confession from one of America's great authors. Inside the box, an envelope postmarked Sept. 12, 1929, caught his eye. It was addressed to John Beardsley, Esq., of Los Angeles. The return address read, "Upton Sinclair, Long Beach."
"I stood there for 15 minutes reading it over and over again," Hegness said of the letter by the author of "The Jungle," the groundbreaking 1906 book that exposed unsanitary conditions at slaughterhouses.
The last paragraph got the Newport Beach attorney's attention. "This letter is for yourself alone," it read. "Stick it away in your safe, and some time in the far distant future the world may know the real truth about the matter. I am here trying to make plain my own part in the story."
The story was "Boston," Sinclair's 1920s novelized condemnation of the trial and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants accused of killing two men in the robbery of a Massachusetts shoe factory.
Prosecutors characterized the anarchists as ruthless killers who had used the money to bankroll antigovernment bombings and deserved to die. Sinclair thought the pair were innocent and being railroaded because of their political views.
Soon Sinclair would learn something that filled him with doubt. During his research for "Boston," Sinclair met with Fred Moore, the men's attorney, in a Denver motel room. Moore "sent me into a panic," Sinclair wrote in the typed letter that Hegness found at the auction a decade ago.
"Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth," Sinclair wrote. " … He then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them."
So what did Sinclair -- the crusader for truth -- do with this knowledge? He suppressed it.
"I faced the most difficult ethical problem of my life at that point," he wrote to his attorney. "I had come to Boston with the announcement that I was going to write the truth about the case."
Other letters tucked away in the Indiana archive illuminate why one of America's most strident truth tellers kept his reservations to himself.
"My wife is absolutely certain that if I tell what I believe, I will be called a traitor to the movement and may not live to finish the book," Sinclair wrote Robert Minor, a confidant at the Socialist Daily Worker in New York, in 1927.
"Of course," he added, "the next big case may be a frame-up, and my telling the truth about the Sacco-Vanzetti case will make things harder for the victims."
He also worried that revealing what he had been told would cost him readers. "It is much better copy as a naïve defense of Sacco and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and they are 90% of my public," he wrote to Minor.
Sinclair perpetuated a lie that continues to be believed to this day.
Which brings to mind another supposed case of injustice, cop-killer Abu-Jamal Mumia. As noted in FrontPageMag:
N THE SPRING OF 1994, I was strolling down Philadelphia's legendary South Street. I noticed a poster in a storefront window, reminiscent of those seen in Moscow, Beijing, and Hanoi that informed passersby the latest news.
"Free Mumia," read the headline. The sign concerned efforts by the Uhuru Democratic Party, the local successor to the Black Panthers, to release the convicted murderer of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner from death row. Abu-Jamal killed Faulkner back in 1981, and a jury found him guilty only one year later. In the intervening seventeen years, however, left-wing supporters have waged a tireless campaign to exonerate their man. In April, thousands marched in Philadelphia to demand his freedom. Speakers at the rally included Ramsey Clark and Ossie Davis.
They are but two of the many celebrities on the Mumia bandwagon. Whoopi Goldberg, Ed Asner, Peter Coyote, Mike Farrell, punk-rock band Rage Against the Machine, and many others are also on board. The group is so eclectic that it’s difficult to see what it is that unites them around this particular murderer.
Read it all. History surely does repeat itself.
Jim Bass
reuters numbers game
If American police discover a man with six bodies buried in his back yard, it becomes a national story. Who were the victims? Why were they killed? Fox News's Greta Van Susteren would be all over the story.
So what about 31 corpses in a shallow grave? Does 31 meet the standard of "mass"? Here's Reuters with their quote marks:
Iraqis find "mass grave" at Kerbala
Iraqi officials said they found the skeletal remains of 31 people in what they described as a mass grave in the Shi'ite holy city of Kerbala on Tuesday.
A senior official at the laboratory to which the bodies were taken said the people appeared to have died during the suppression of a Shi'ite uprising against Saddam Hussein after the 1991 Gulf War.
"There are 31 bodies. We're still testing but it appears they are victims of the events of 1991," the official told Reuters.
There had been confusion over the scale of the find at a building site for a sewage project in the city center, with police initially saying there were 150 bodies; police spokesman Rahman Mishawi later revised that to "dozens" of sets of remains.
77 feng shui way
Isn't this precious:
Developers looking to maximize the marketability of their homes are complaining about the city's street address rules, which they say can scare off buyers who practice the ancient Chinese art of feng shui.
Under a numbering system established by Alameda County in the 1950s, addresses are assigned based on how far the homes are from downtown Oakland, a method that puts five digits on almost every mailbox in Hayward and other cities in the county.
Maybe there are practical aspects to feng shui in terms of siting buildings sensibly. But to call superstition over five digit numbers an "ancient art" is too much.
The numbers have always been hard to remember, but home builders recently raised concerns that they may decrease property values because the odds are greater that an address will carry a number considered unlucky by feng shui practitioners.
Feng shui holds that the way dwellings are designed can affect the fortunes and health of inhabitants.
"Now developers are saying, 'Why do we have to do it this way?'" said Sylvia Ehrenthal, Hayward's director of economic and community development. "There are some numbers people don't like to have in their address."
City Council members, five of whom live at addresses with numbers that start in the 20,000 range, voted unanimously last week to allow the builders of an upscale development to use shorter street numbers. In seeking the waiver, the builders cited convenience concerns as well as the potential for violating feng shui precepts, according to Richard Patenaude, Hayward's principal planner.
Where is the ACLU in this? If a tiny cross on the Los Angeles county seal commemorating its founding missionaries is verboten, how dare the Hayward City Council bow to ancient Chinese superstitions?
I have several friends who buy into feng shui. Literally. They pay consultants to analyze their dwellings. If you see crystals hanging from corners (to deflect bad energy, I believe) or an abundance of fountains, you know the joint's been feng shuied.
Amusingly, many New Agey adherents of feng shui regard themselves as members of the "reality-based community" as opposed to those religious nuts who pray to Jesus. If you ask me, believing in invisible forces (ki) is little different than believing in the Holy Spirit.
One other beef I have with feng shui is how its spelled. It is pronounced FUNG-SHWAY. Given that Chinese uses a different alphabet, why not transliterate phoneticly?
Jim Bass
monday december 26, 2005
scant political diversity on campuses
From the New York Times:
While attending a Pennsylvania Republican Party picnic, Jennie Mae Brown bumped into her state representative and started venting.
"How could this happen?" Ms. Brown asked Representative Gibson C. Armstrong two summers ago, complaining about a physics professor at the York campus of Pennsylvania State University who she said routinely used class time to belittle President Bush and the war in Iraq. As an Air Force veteran, Ms. Brown said she felt the teacher's comments were inappropriate for the classroom.
The encounter has blossomed into an official legislative inquiry, putting Pennsylvania in the middle of a national debate spurred by conservatives over whether public universities are promoting largely liberal positions and discriminating against students who disagree with them.
The encounter has blossomed into an official legislative inquiry, putting Pennsylvania in the middle of a national debate spurred by conservatives over whether public universities are promoting largely liberal positions and discriminating against students who disagree with them.
A committee held two hearings last month in Pittsburgh and has scheduled another for Jan. 9 in Philadelphia. A final report with any recommendations for legislative remedy is due in June.
The Students for Academic Freedom website is here.
It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Kwanzaa
Here's our annual Kwanzaa post --it's a tradition:
Once upon a time, a violent felon dreamed of a not-so-white Christmas. This being America, where nobody goes broke overestimating the public's willingness to patronize a minority group, his dream lead to phony obeisance, a new line of greeting cards (plus assorted kitsch) and official postage stamps.
If you don't know the origins of Kwanzaa, then gather your children 'round the fire and read this heart-burning account.
On December 24, 1971, the New York Times ran one of the first of many articles on a new holiday designed to foster unity among African Americans. The holiday, called Kwanzaa, was applauded by a certain sixteen-year-old minister who explained that the feast would perform the valuable service of "de-whitizing" Christmas. The minister was a nobody at the time but he would later go on to become perhaps the premier race-baiter of the twentieth century. His name was Al Sharpton and he would later spawn the Tawana Brawley hoax and then incite anti-Jewish tensions in a 1995 incident that ended with the arson deaths of seven people.
Great minds think alike. The inventor of the holiday was one of the few black "leaders" in America even worse than Sharpton. But there was no mention in the Times article of this man or of the fact that at that very moment he was sitting in a California prison. And there was no mention of the curious fact that this purported benefactor of the black people had founded an organization that in its short history tortured and murdered blacks in ways of which the Ku Klux Klan could only fantasize.
It was in newspaper articles like that, repeated in papers all over the country, that the tradition of Kwanzaa began. It is a tradition not out of Africa but out of Orwell. Both history and language have been bent to serve a political goal. When that New York Times article appeared, Ron Karenga's crimes were still recent events. If the reporter had bothered to do any research into the background of the Kwanzaa founder, he might have learned about Karenga's trial earlier that year on charges of torturing two women who were members of US (United Slaves), a black nationalist cult he had founded.
can't fool betsy newmark
...However, Robert Kuttner's column today, entitled "What Bush could learn from Lincoln" seems to focus mainly on how much Bush would benefit if he took his political rivals like John McCain and Chuck Hagel into his cabinet and listened more to the media. And here I thought that Kuttner was going to say that Bush could have learned much from Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus without Congressional approval and defiance of Chief Justice Taney's order to release secessionist sympathizer, John Merryman.
Or, I thought, maybe Kuttner admired the way that Lincoln instituted a draft. Or how he again suspended habeas corpus and ordered the arrest of anyone who spoke out against the draft or anyone disloyal to the Union. Or how he sent troops to arrest secessionist members of the Maryland legislature until after the election of a new pro-Unionist legislature.
plots foiled against bush, musharaff
Before he was captured last spring, Osama Bin Laden's top operational commander was solely focused on killing President Bush and Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharaff, the Daily News has learned.
The capture last May of Al Qaeda's No. 3 leader, Abu Faraj Al-Libi, apparently thwarted plots to assassinate the two partners in the global war on terror, said a senior Pakistani official, whose information was corroborated by two senior U.S. counterterrorism officials.
"Al-Libi had one mission: Kill Bush and Musharraf," the Pakistani official told The News. "He wanted to kill Bush in the White House, preferably."
not so haute cuisine
by Burt Prelutsky
I heard that a restaurant owner in Chicago found himself in a peck of trouble for posting a sign that read: “Children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices.” It seems that a certain number of doting parents took umbrage at his policy, even though by including “of all ages,” I suspect he might have had those goofy parents, and not just their offspring, in mind.
Frankly, I think, if anything, the guy was far too lenient. So far as I’m concerned, if I owned the place, I’d post one of those signs they have at the amusement parks forbidding kids under a certain height from getting on rides.
I don’t know if you could legally keep children out of restaurants, unless of course they happened to be smokers, but I think forcing the parents of crying babies and squalling toddlers to pick up everybody’s check is only fair.
Frankly, I can’t even imagine why these people want to be seen in public with these annoying little creatures. I should have imagined that the whole point of eating in a restaurant surrounded by other grown-ups would be the opportunity to get away from the kiddies for a precious hour or two.
Understand, I like children. I also like horses, ducks and alpacas, but I don’t care to eat with them, either.
Lest you think that I am being unduly harsh where the tots are concerned, I have a whole list of adults I’d like to see the restaurant police cart off in cuffs. At the top of the list are those self-important idiots who spend the entire time calling or being called on their cell phones. I have even seen tables where two of the three people never got off the phone, while the third person sat alone being ignored. I would normally feel sorry for the odd wheel except I assume anybody who’d be friends with the other two is simply someone stuck with a cell phone that’s out of commission.
The other folks I’d love to have placed under house arrest are those people, usually middle-aged men, who pontificate loudly and incessantly to a table around which are seated four or five young, well-dressed, adults. My assumption is always that the loudmouth oaf is their employer, who, like far too many bosses, assumes that his captive audience is simply enthralled by his brilliance. Having eavesdropped more times than I care to remember -- as if anyone within 50 feet of their table has a choice in the matter -- I’m here to announce that brilliance is not the word that comes to mind.
The other tables any sane person will want to avoid sitting near are those at which four or more women are seated. When they really get going, and they will inevitably get going, the shrillness is enough to make me and most dogs start baying at the moon. And if, god forbid, one of them should say something rude about a husband or a boyfriend, the shrieks of laughter are enough to give a deaf person a migraine.
Even the arrival of their bill isn’t cause for celebration. That merely means that the rest of us are now in store for 20 minutes of noisy bickering over who had the iced tea and who ordered the latte.
We’re all familiar with the age-honored caveat: “No Shoes, No Shirts, No Service.” But this is a new age, and desperate times call for desperate measures. Speaking for myself and probably millions of others, I don’t really care if you’re barefoot, just so long as you let the rest of us eat in peace. And please do us all a favor and leave the kids at home. The money you won’t be wasting on the food they throw on the floor will more than pay for the babysitter.
As for the young folks who can’t get away from their boorish bosses even at lunch time, find another job. Life’s too short. You’ll thank me later.
Christmas day, 2005
Merry Christmas
At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled shows,
But like of each thing that in season grows.--William Shakespeare, Love’s Labor’s Lost
A lovely thing about Christmas is that it’s compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.--Garrison Keillor
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead; nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail,
The right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men.”--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A good conscience is a continual Christmas.--Benjamin Franklin
Dear Lord, I've been asked, nay commanded, to thank Thee for the Christmas turkey before us... a turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird... a social being... capable of actual affection... nuzzling its young with almost human- like compassion. Anyway, it's dead and we're gonna eat it. Please give our respects to its family...--Berke Breathed, Bloom Country Babylon
christmas in senegal
Hundreds of young men decked with tinsel wander outside Senegal's mosques, hawking plastic Christmas trees. Women pray to Allah on a sidewalk where an inflatable Santa Claus happens to be hanging.
Senegal may be 95 percent Muslim, but it certainly knows it's Christmas. In fact, for this nation of 12 million it's a national holiday.
Blame it on globalization, which has turned the West's yuletide icons into a worldwide commodity. Or the Internet, or Hollywood, or the availability of travel that allows new generations of Senegalese to sample Christmas at close quarters. But mainly, Senegalese revel in the trappings of Christmas because they can and want to.
saturday december 24, 2005
good thing they weren't arguing about the dog
It was a conversation stopper. A lovers' dispute over a cell phone took a serious turn early Friday morning when the woman ended the spat by swallowing the phone whole.
"cheeky schoolboy" bites back
James Bone, recently scolded by Kofi Annan, writes:
AS A journalist, I expect my share of verbal abuse. But it is not everyday that I have my professionalism impugned by the world's top diplomat on global TV.
The advantage is that I have not felt as young for years as I do now that Kofi Annan has described me as an “overgrown schoolboy”. The disadvantage — rather more serious — is that the UN Secretary-General continues to refuse to respond to the still-unanswered questions about his role in the Oil-For-Food corruption scandal.
For months journalists were told that the UN could not answer any questions because the scandal was under investigation by the Volcker inquiry. Since the Volcker panel issued its last report in October, the UN has refused to answer any questions because it says the matter has already been investigated. Yet the inquiry raised more questions than it answered, the most important being: what did Kofi Annan know and when did he know it?
two views of "munich"
Salon and Der Spiegel joined up to defend “Munich”'s message from its detractors, claiming that the movie “dares to break the rules of post-9/11 political correctness.” (Funny, I thought the main criticism of the movie is that it embodies post-9-11 political correctness in its solicitousness for the humanity of terrorists.) Michelle Goldberg inveighs against what she perceives as unjust criticism of the film, yet she uncritically parrots its received wisdom, which is exactly what the detractors are trying to debunk. She says:
The story is full of moral ambiguities -- few would dispute that Israel had the right to retaliate, but its pursuit of revenge became an end in itself, sometimes compromising both Israel's ethics and its own security.
From Asharq Alawsatt:
It is inspired by events surrounding the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists during the 1972 Olympics and the secret hit squad assembled by the Israeli government to track down the perpetrators and assassinate them.
I intentionally chose the word "terrorist" to get your attention and because I believe the murder of the athletes was an act of terrorism.
More importantly I chose that word because I worry that discussion in the Arab world around "Munich" will become stuck on that word and therefore miss the point of the film. I worry that the Arab world will ban "Munich" as just the latest example of a Western film depicting Arabs as terrorists.
If "Munich" is banned in the Arab world, it will be just the latest example of its unwillingness and inability to join the intellectual debates of the day. Not only does the film, based on the birth of the concept of counterterrorism, ask the big questions of our time but it also challenges the Arab world to produce its own works of art that ask equally painful and pertinent questions.
Munich and Syriana savaged here:
...given the track record of Tony Kushner, the film's main writer, it was all but certain that "Munich" would posit a moral equivalence between the terrorists and those who brought them to justice. That's exactly what "Munich" does.
Just like "Syriana," this is simplistic garbage. But it's all we can expect, given how Hollywood and much of the left view the world.
Reality is a lot more complicated. In Iraq, we see an American president leading an unlikely, ambitious, Wilsonian effort to foster democracy. Meanwhile, in Israel, it wasn't the peaceniks but Prime Minister Ariel Sharon – the veteran warrior loathed as the embodiment of bloodthirsty Zionism by faculty petition-signers everywhere – who razed the Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.
These are striking, fascinating developments – except to the Hollywood left. Its mind is made up: George W. Bush is an oil-industry stooge, Sharon is a mass murderer, the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is a giant who deserved his Nobel Peace Prize and the problems in the Middle East are entirely America's and Israel's fault.
friday december 23, 2005
didgeridoo to the rescue
Playing a few hours a day chases the snoring away.
missed cinema: genghis blues
Try pitching this story as fiction: a blind blues musician (Paul Pena) in San Francisco is deeply depressed, having mourned his wife for six months. While tuning his shortwave radio one night, he hears strange singing on a Radio Moscow broadcast. Fascinated, he learns about Tuvan throat singing, teaches himself how to do it, then learns rudimentary Tuvan by translating Tuvan to Russian, then Russian to English. Via Braille, no less.
Then, because of Richard Feynman (yes, the Nobel laureate) a Tuvan singer comes to the Bay Area and Paul encounters him, throat-sings a song and gets invited to a Tuvan singing competition.
It's all true, and the subject of this odd documentary, a non-fiction cousin to Schultze Gets the Blues. The film came out in 1999 and won numerous awards, although I think mostly because of its sympathetic subject matter. The film itself is ragged, with footage recycled and some gaps in story telling, but the making of the film itself is part of the story.
jonah goldberg on time
I frankly don't understand how anyone can stomach Time's cutesy writing style, but Goldberg zeros in on it's mindlessness.
Among the proud recipients of Time magazine's fluffy end-of-year "People Who Mattered" feature, is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Here's how it begins: "He is an unlikely firebrand: the soft-spoken son of a blacksmith who still sometimes drives a 30-year-old Peugeot. But Iran's new president doesn't shrink from controversy. After winning a disputed election, he said. . . . " Now, before I finish that sentence, let's at least note that so far Time is using the same tone it might use to talk about John McCain, Joe Wilson, George Clooney or some other "soft-spoken" "unlikely firebrand" beloved by the media.
So, does Ahmadinejad have a wacky blog? Did he admit on "Larry King Live" that he voted for Ralph Nader in 2000? What makes him such a charming rogue?
Let's pick up that sentence where we left off and see: "After winning a disputed election," Time reports, "he said he would continue Iran's nuclear program, called the Holocaust a 'myth' and pledged to destroy Israel. Even some of the nation's ruling clerics are nervous about what he will do next." So even some of Iran's terrorism-supporting theocratic dictators are "nervous" about this guy.
What, one wonders, would it take for the editors to get really rough? Perhaps if Ahmadinejad offered a deeply negative review of "Brokeback Mountain"?
thursday december 22, 2005
"i'm king kong"
In connection with the latest King Kong, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) produced an original documentary ("I'm King Kong") about Merian C. Cooper, the director of the original King Kong. Cooper did not found a studio, but his influence on American movies is as big as Goldwyn, Thalberg et al.
Cooper was an adventurer, aviator, innovator, trail blazer and patriot. Read his bio on the TCM website here. Check showtimes for repeats of the documentary. Some highlights:
- Cooper flies bombers in WWI, gets shot down and captured by the Germans. After the war, he fights for Poland against Russian aggression.
- He gets into the film business as a documentarian, filming Grass in 1925. It's influences can be seen today in Himalaya.
- He makes King Kong in 1933, a technical and story telling breakthrough
- He gets behind Technicolor along with David Selznick, who went on to shoot Gone with the Wind using the process.
- Six months before Pearl Harbor, at age 49, Cooper rejoins the military and gets posted to China where he becomes chief of staff to the head of the Flying Tigers.
- Postwar, he joins with John Ford to produce some great westerns including The Searchers
- In 1952, he produces and co-directs This Is Cinerama, a valentine to America.
My dad took me to see This Is Cinerama when I was 8 (some years after the debut). The process used three projectors and a curved screen to create a very wide, immersive experience. Think of it as the IMAX of the time.
Cooper's film was a heart filled travelogue. He mounted the one-and-only Cinerama camera on the nose of a retired bomber and photographed the nation he loved. As a boy, I marveled at seeing the beauty and breadth of my country, from sea to shining sea.
While watching the TCM documentary, I realized how influential that one film had been on my sense of the United States. I was eager to go visit the Grand Canyon and appreciate all the riches America. That, of course, was exactly Cooper's intent.
Jim Bass
how about nano government for a change?
Here we go again:
California must move fast if it is to be a world leader in exploiting the next Gold Rush -- nanotechnology, the science of incredibly small machinery and molecules with a wide range of industrial, medical and environmental applications -- according to a report to be made public Monday.
Fashioned by the state's Blue Ribbon Task Force on Nanotechnology, the report represents California's second attempt in recent years to position itself at the forefront of a potential superscience, although the approach would presumably be different than in 2004, when voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 71, the $3 billion stem cell research initiative.
The state of California is here to provide police, roads, health services, schools, parks etc. It is not meant to be a venture capitalist.
We're not going to be in the forefront of anything if the Democrat-led legislature continues to follow the policies that have doomed the French economy.
say it ain't so
From the LA Daily News
For two days, people from all over Los Angeles and the world came to pay their respects to a man whose life was ended prematurely. Masses of black people filed in one after another to view Williams' body at an L.A. mortuary. Young, old, rich, poor, gangbangers, ex-bangers, teachers, students, activists and the like all came to see the man who Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger denied clemency to and executed.
The attendance at Williams' funeral was enormous. Thousands of people crowded the streets in front of Bethel A.M.E. to participate in what easily could be named the largest gathering of blacks in Los Angeles this year. The Rosa Parks Memorial, filled with all of Los Angeles' black bourgeoisie, didn't even garner the attendance - both from the public and the media - that Williams' funeral garnered.
wednesday december 21, 2005
kofi: call moveon.org
Smooth talker Kofi Annan lost his cool today, telling Times of London reporter James Bone:
"I think you're being very cheeky. Listen James Bone, you've been behaving like an overgrown schoolboy in this room for many, many months and years. You are an embarrassment to your colleagues and to your profession. Please stop misbehaving and please let's move on to a serious subject."
So, billions in corrupt dealings that (very likely) extended the reign of Saddam Hussein by a few years is not a serious subject? Get serious.
UPDATE: Claudia Rosett explains the context of Kofi's tantrum.
UPDATE 2: Just a thought: isn't Kofi behaving the way Joe Biden said John Bolten would behave?
powerline talks to the ny times
An interesting back-and-forth. The Times's final silence deafens.
caramba!
The Mexican government, angered by a U.S. proposal to extend a wall along the border to keep out migrants, pledged Tuesday to block the plan and organize an international campaign against it. Facing a growing tide of anti-immigrant sentiment north of the border, the Mexican government has taken out ads urging Mexican workers to denounce rights violations in the United States. It also is hiring an American public relations firm to improve its image and counter growing U.S. concerns about immigration.
Mexican President Vicente Fox denounced the U.S. measures, passed by the House of Representatives on Friday, as "shameful" and his foreign secretary, Luis Ernesto Derbez, echoed his complaints on Tuesday.
"Mexico is not going to bear, it is not going to permit, and it will not allow a stupid thing like this wall," Derbez said.
If the stupid Mexican government cured its incompetence and corruption, the Mexican economy would bloom and workers would not need to travel north (violating its laws) for work.
Maybe they can organize an international campaign to to accomplish that. But methinks they can't organize a fire drill, much less run a country.
baby boomer jokes
...in response to Time magazine's People of the Year. And from the same blog, Rewriting History.
just in time for the holidays
The BBC explains everything about drinking alcohol.
a genetic basis for skin color
...seems logical, despite pronouncements by some scientists that there is no genetic basis for race.
first day of winter
bawling barbara sticks foot in mouth (again)
Yesterday novelist-legislator Sen. Barbara Boxer announced she was looking into whether President Bush can/should be impeached for the NSA wiretaps. With most senators, I'd write that off to cynicism--hot talk meant to score points and nothing more. In Boxer's case, I assume stupidity and ignorance because it fits the pattern.
In any case, Barbara, should you find these pages, read this list of warrantless searches the courts have deemed legal. Or just call your in-law, Bill Clinton, for an explanation.
rocky puzzles roberts
tuesday december 20, 2005
balls of fire: bees carefully cook invaders to death
At least two species of honeybees, the native Apis cerana and the introduced European honeybee, Apis mellifera, engulf a wasp in a living ball of defenders and heat the predator to death. A new study of heat balling has described a margin of safety for the defending bees, says Tan Ken of Yunnan Agricultural University in Kunming, China.
clinton claimed same authority as bush
In a little-remembered debate from 1994, the Clinton administration argued that the president has "inherent authority" to order physical searches — including break-ins at the homes of U.S. citizens — for foreign intelligence purposes without any warrant or permission from any outside body. Even after the administration ultimately agreed with Congress's decision to place the authority to pre-approve such searches in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, President Clinton still maintained that he had sufficient authority to order such searches on his own.
"The Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes," Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on July 14, 1994, "and that the President may, as has been done, delegate this authority to the Attorney General."
"It is important to understand," Gorelick continued, "that the rules and methodology for criminal searches are inconsistent with the collection of foreign intelligence and would unduly frustrate the president in carrying out his foreign intelligence responsibilities."
That was Jamie Gorelick under Clinton. This is Jamie Gorelick quoted today:
"The issue here is this," said Jamie Gorelick, who served as deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton and as a member of the Sept. 11 commission. "If you're John McCain and you just got Congress to agree to limits on interrogation techniques, why would you think that limits anything if the executive branch can ignore it by asserting its inherent authority?"
Gorelick is responsible for writing the infamous memo creating a "wall" between law enforcement agencies that tied their hands prior to 9/11 (subsequently untied by the Patriot Act).
And the same Gorelick who refused to recuse herself from the 9/11 Commission, despite a glaring conflict of interest.
senator blabbermouths
The cartoon character Foghorn Cleghorn often comes to mind when listening to bloviating senators. Sometimes their big mouths do real damage to national security, such as tipping off Osama.
How long are we going to tolerate senators and congressmen who divulge our most closely-held secrets to the public in search of cheap political gain? We have laws that make those leaks serious federal crimes. We're spending enormous resources on finding out who leaked Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent to the press. Leaks that are vastly more important -- and which should be pursued with no less determination and resources -- are regularly ignored because the culprits are sitting members of Congress. These leakers should be thrown out of office and prosecuted.
It's been about two years since Sen. Richard Shelby blew one of our most important secrets -- that we were bugging Osama bin Laden's cell phone, a fact that could have led to the capture of America's most wanted terrorist -- by bragging about it to a reporter. Shelby's action (if it really was him) has never been prosecuted. Why not? Now, another huge leak comes in the form of the disclosure by members of the Senate of a highly-classified satellite program. Three members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have apparently committed a very serious crime by blabbing about a highly-classified satellite program to the press last week. If these men actually did what it appears they did, we ought to throw the book at 'em for divulging one of our most-protected secrets: stealthy reconnaissance satellites.
As a result of their revelations to the public and the press, three U.S. Senators -- Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who's also the ranking Dem on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) -- are the subject of a "criminal referral" made on Monday for speaking publicly about this satellite. Such referrals are made to the Justice Department by the administration when criminal conduct is suspected. In this case, it's not only suspected, it's evidenced on the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. A highly reliable intelligence community source told me that the referral had been made because senior administration officials were beside themselves that the three had taken the controversy on funding this project to the press.
It makes you understand why President Bush would not want to keep these clowns in the loop.
french ed.
Betsy Newmark notes a story about the French public educational system, and how kids get tracked early in life.
arnold terminates hometown
Stung by criticism in his hometown over the execution of Stanley Tookie Williams, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday told officials in Graz, Austria, to take his name off the sports stadium and stop using his name to promote the city.
Schwarzenegger rejected a clemency plea from Williams, a former Crips gang leader who was convicted of four murders but later renounced violence and worked to keep kids out of gangs. Two more executions are scheduled in January and February.
"In all likelihood, during my term as governor I will have to make similar and equally difficult decisions,'' the governor wrote to Siegfried Nagl, the mayor of Graz, in a letter written in German that was translated by the governor's staff.
these are serious people?
Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame ask us to take them seriously (whistle-blower, wronged careerist etc.)
and yet they pose for photos such as this in Time magazine's year end wrap up. I know from experience, this shot took time to set up. Valerie in
pajamas striking a dramatic pose. Joe in film noir shadows wearing a grim expression. Oh life
is a cabaret, my friends. Who do they think they are, Nick and Nora Charles?
Uggh.
monday december 19, 2005
playing with fire
Denying the Holocaust is one thing, but banning western music in a country with the youngest population in the world? I guess that's why mad mullahs are so named.
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has banned all Western music from Iran's state radio and TV stations - an eerie reminder of the 1979 Islamic revolution when popular music was outlawed as "un-Islamic" under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Today, though, the sounds of hip-hop can be heard blaring from car radios in Tehran's streets, and Eric Clapton's "Rush" and the Eagles' "Hotel California" regularly accompany Iranian broadcasts.
No more - the official IRAN Persian daily reported Monday that Ahmadinejad, as head of the Supreme Cultural Revolutionary Council, ordered the enactment of an October ruling by the council to ban all Western music, including classical music, on state broadcast outlets.
clinton eavesdropped via nsa
During the 1990's under President Clinton, the National Security Agency monitored millions of private phone calls placed by U.S. citizens and citizens of other countries under a super secret program code-named Echelon.
On Friday, the New York Times suggested that the Bush administration has instituted "a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices" when it "secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without [obtaining] court-approved warrants."
But in fact, the NSA had been monitoring private domestic telephone conversations on a much larger scale throughout the 1990s - all of it done without a court order, let alone a catalyst like the 9/11 attacks.
Also...
clinton used echelon for economic espionage
In 2000, former Clinton CIA director James Woolsey set off a firestorm of protest in Europe when he told the French newspaper Le Figaro that he was ordered by Clinton in 1993 to transform Echelon into a tool for gathering economic intelligence.
"We have a triple and limited objective," the former intelligence chief told the French paper. "To look out for companies which are breaking US or UN sanctions; to trace 'dual' technologies, i.e., for civil and military use, and to track corruption in international business."
60 minutes about echelon
From March 2000.
charlie brown and the football
Not recognizing the political ground had shifted beneath their feet, Democrats continued to press forward with their offensive against the President. They’ve now foolishly climbed out on a limb that Rove and Bush have the real potential to chop off. One would think that after the political miscalculations the Democrats made during the 2002 and 2004 campaigns they would not make the same mistake a third time, but it is beginning to look a lot like Charlie Brown and the football again.
wit in chief
Thanks to The Corner for transcribing this from today's news conference. For all his shortcomings as a communicator, Bush is probably the funniest president in recent memory.
REPORTER: Sir, the other...
BUSH: You asked a multiple-part question.
REPORTER: Yes, I did.
BUSH: Thank you for violating the multiple-part question rule.
REPORTER: I didn't know there was a law on that.
(LAUGHTER)
BUSH: There's not a law.
(LAUGHTER)
It's an executive order.
(LAUGHTER)
In this case, not monitored by the Congress.
(LAUGHTER)
Nor is there any administrative oversight.
(LAUGHTER)
REPORTER: Well, without breaking any laws, back on domestic spying. Making the case for that, can you give us some example...
BUSH: Oh, I got you. Yes, sorry.
No, I'm not going to talk about that, because it would help give the enemy notification and/or perhaps signal to them methods and uses and sources. And we're not going to do that.
java is health food
Says US News & World Report.
pot holes
The cost of marijuana prohibition.
civilian war tolls: a graph
See it here. The toll for Rwanda conflicts with most estimates which peg it at 800,000.
mullah calls for tolerance, sorta
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust is a matter for academic discussion and the West should be more tolerant of his views, Iran's foreign ministry spokesman said on Sunday.
Ahmadinejad last week called the Holocaust a myth and suggested Israel be moved to Germany or Alaska, remarks that sparked international uproar and threaten diplomatic talks with Europe over Iran's nuclear programme.
If he's feeling untolerated, he can always book a seat for next year's Palestinian Solidarity Day where Israel is absent from the map. Just call Kofi for reservations.
what a coincidence
From the New York Times
Bush delivered his remarks as he has come under new criticism from both Democrats and Republicans for ordering the National Security Agency to conduct electronic eavesdropping in the United States without first obtaining warrants.
The disclosure of that program, reported last Friday in The New York Times, has overshadowed some of the good news of the Iraq election, and has frustrated a White House that was hoping to use the high turnout and relative calm of the vote as a positive end to the president's series of speeches.
All the news that's fit to slant.
sunday december 18, 2005
we don't need another study
Progressives want a "single payer" health care system. If George Soros wants to be that single payer, I'm for it. But if the single payer is the government, get real.
Ten years ago last week, Los Angeles County supervisors received a stern warning. The public healthcare system, pushed to the brink of collapse that summer by a $655-million budget shortfall, was still in jeopardy, the county's specially appointed health czar reported. And the supervisors were advised to relinquish some control to a board of experts.
The supervisors asked for a report.
The next year, they asked for another.
They asked for reports in 1999, 2000 and 2001.
Then in January, they asked for another, after a consultant said an independent health authority might prevent dangerous lapses in care like those that killed patients at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center.
Yet today, after at least 12 reports, most of the five supervisors, who have each been in office for at least nine years, still say they don't have enough information to decide if they should change the way the county's troubled $3.7-billion health system is run.
"It hasn't been studied," Supervisor Gloria Molina said, calling the reports inadequate.
la times does emily litella
We covered this a few days ago. Now the LA Times:
The bodies of New Orleans residents killed by Hurricane Katrina were almost as likely to be recovered from middle-class neighborhoods as from the city's poorer districts, such as the Lower 9th Ward, according to a Times analysis of data released by the state of Louisiana.
No, really?
The analysis contradicts what swiftly became conventional wisdom in the days after the storm hit — that it was the city's poorest African American residents who bore the brunt of the hurricane. Slightly more than half of the bodies were found in the city's poorer neighborhoods, with the remainder scattered throughout middle-class and even some richer districts.
And just how did this become conventional wisdom? Might it have been the very same mainstream media who reported rumor and race baiting screeds in order to tarnish Bush?
Did those chiseled teevee reporters got emotional and get it all wrong? Yup.
democrats lose another election: the one in iraq
Well, that old Iraqi quagmire just keeps getting worse and worse, if only for the Democratic Party. What was the straw they were clutching at back in January? Oh, yeah, sure, gazillions of Kurds and Shiites might have gone to the polls, but where were the Sunni?
As some of us said at the time, the Sunni'll come out tomorrow. And so they did. On Thursday, they voted in record numbers, leaving Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democrats frantically scrambling for another disaffected Iraqi minority group they could use as proof that the whole crazy neocon war-for-oil scam was a bust.
Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any disaffected Iraqi minority groups left. Oh, wait, there's Ahmed at 37 Sword of the Infidel Slayer Gardens in Ramadi. Apparently, he's still rejecting the new constitution. Maybe, if we're lucky, he's got a brother who's mildly irked. Whoops, sorry, they just went off to vote, too.
Heigh-ho. The Iraq election's over, the media did their best to ignore it, and, judging from the rippling torsos I saw every time I switched on the TV, the press seem to reckon that that gay cowboy movie was the big geopolitical event of the last week, if not of all time. Yes, yes, I know: They're not, technically, cowboys, they're gay shepherds, but even Hollywood isn't crazy enough to think it can sell gay shepherds to the world.
And the point is, even if I was in the mood for a story about two rugged insecure men who find themselves strangely attracted to each other in a dark transgressive relationship that breaks all the rules, who needs Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger when you've got Howard Dean and Abu Musad al-Zarqawi? Yee-haw! And, if that sounds unfair, pick almost any recent statement by a big-time Dem cowboy and tell me how exactly it would differ from the pep talks Zarqawi gives his dwindling band of head-hackers -- Dean arguing that America can't win in Iraq, Barbara Boxer demanding the troops begin withdrawing on Dec. 15, John Kerry accusing American soldiers of terrorizing Iraqi women and children, Jack Murtha declaring that the U.S. Army is utterly broken. Pepper 'em with a handful of "Praise be to Allahs" and any one of those statements could have been uttered by Zarqawi.
a marine's wife meets the president
Via Hugh Hewitt:
...After he spoke he greeted people in the audience. When he came near me I said, "President Bush my husband is in Iraq." He immediately made eye contact with me and came over to me.
I had a picture of Patrick in my hand and I said, "Here is my husband." He got a funny expression on his face, and I looked at my hand holding Patrick's picture and noticed that his picture was backwards (I was showing President Bush the back of the picture that was blank).
I instantly turned the picture around and President Bush took it out of my hand and looked at it. Then he turned it over and took a Sharpie out of his suit jacket and asked, "What is your husband's name?" I shouted out, "1st Lt Francescon!"
He smiled then asked, "What is his first name?" Completely embarrassed I said, "Oh, Patrick." As President Bush was signing the back of Patrick's picture, I thought to myself, Okay, here is my chance to tell the President that Patrick is honored to call him Commander-in-Chief."
But those words didn't come out of my mouth. I instead said, (and I know that Patrick would have not said this, and is going to be humiliated when I tell him I said this) "President Bush my husband loves to serve for you! He loves you!"
It was a little over the top, I know, I was just so nervous and excited that I became another person--I don't know who she was...oh, well!
After President Bush wrote "Patrick, thank you and God bless! --George Bush" on the back of Patrick's picture, President Bush then gave me a big hug and then KISSED me on my forehead and said, "Sweetie, everything is going to be alright."
stem cell bunco
Last year California voters approved a proposition to fund embryonic stem cell to the tune of $3 billion. The arguments were basically between a) those who thought lots of money was all it would take to cure the sick and b) those who thought using embryos for research was immoral.
I hated the idea because it put the state of California in the venture capital business. Bad, bad idea.
Where do things stand today?
A year after the passage of Proposition 71, the $3 billion Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative, there is no sign of any research, let alone cures, and the measure is literally on trial in Alameda County Superior Court.
Last month, Judge Bonnie Sabraw rejected a state request to dismiss lawsuits from opponents who charge that Proposition 71 is unconstitutional because it exists outside of state control. Judge Sabraw also lifted a stay on discovery in the case, but many of the measure's problems are already evident.
Proposition 71 was a triumph of political marketing by a man who is neither a scientist nor a medical researcher. The ballot measure, which created the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, was the brainchild of Robert Klein II, a Bay Area real-estate millionaire.
At Stanford law school, Klein worked for a legal aid society on housing-rights cases. At age 27, the California Legislature hired him to draft bills that created the California Housing Finance Authority. Son of the former city manager of Fresno, Klein went on to become a deal-maker with experience in bond issues.
A 1984 Fresno Bee report describes how, in 1981, Klein arranged for Fresno County to issue $27.8 million in low-interest loans to companies with which he was closely associated. Some of the money was then lent, according to The Bee, "at advantageous rates to development partnerships headed by Klein." In 1982, the Fresno Board of Supervisors would hire one of those partnerships, the Tomar Klein Financial Group, as a consultant on a bond issue.
Klein did not enjoy the scrutiny of his actions and said that, from then on, he would stay out of government work. He didn't, but he did learn a lesson. When he wrote Proposition 71, he made sure to keep politicians, critics and even the public at bay. The measure remains off-limits to amendment for three years. After that, legislators can only make changes if 70 percent of the state Senate and Assembly approve.
Klein also wrote the law to require that the chairman of the CIRM oversight committee have a background in advocacy of stem-cell research and experience in state government and bond issues. Sure enough, he got the job he essentially wrote for himself, becoming chairman of the Independent Citizens Oversight Committee, a 29-member board appointed by the governor and other elected officials.
saturday december 17, 2005
an egyptian's envy
...watching the Iraqis vote in a meaningful election.
president bush:
To fight the war on terror, I am using authority vested in me by Congress, including the Joint Authorization for Use of Military Force, which passed overwhelmingly in the first week after September the 11th. I'm also using constitutional authority vested in me as Commander-in-Chief.
In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on our nation, I authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. Before we intercept these communications, the government must have information that establishes a clear link to these terrorist networks.
This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security. Its purpose is to detect and prevent terrorist attacks against the United States, our friends and allies. Yesterday the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk. Revealing classified information is illegal, alerts our enemies, and endangers our country.
As the 9/11 Commission pointed out, it was clear that terrorists inside the United States were communicating with terrorists abroad before the September the 11th attacks, and the commission criticized our nation's inability to uncover links between terrorists here at home and terrorists abroad. Two of the terrorist hijackers who flew a jet into the Pentagon, Nawaf al Hamzi and Khalid al Mihdhar, communicated while they were in the United States to other members of al Qaeda who were overseas. But we didn't know they were here, until it was too late.
The authorization I gave the National Security Agency after September the 11th helped address that problem in a way that is fully consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities. The activities I have authorized make it more likely that killers like these 9/11 hijackers will be identified and located in time. And the activities conducted under this authorization have helped detect and prevent possible terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad.
the art of the steal: henry moore sculpture swiped
...by two blokes, one of them driving a Mini Cooper. Sculpture worth $5.3 million, but may get sold for scrap. Ouch!
ny times' december surprise
One day after Iraqi elections repudiated much of the biased reporting from the Gray Lady, the New York Times chose to splash a story about President Bush spying on Americans.
The Times has been sitting on this story for a year. Why break it yesterday? Inquiring minds already know.
But what of the story? Michelle Malkin has plenty to say. Note this, 1,100 words deep into the Times story:
What the agency calls a "special collection program" began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, as it looked for new tools to attack terrorism. The program accelerated in early 2002 after the Central Intelligence Agency started capturing top Qaeda operatives overseas, including Abu Zubaydah, who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2002. The C.I.A. seized the terrorists' computers, cellphones and personal phone directories, said the officials familiar with the program. The N.S.A. surveillance was intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible, the officials said.
In addition to eavesdropping on those numbers and reading e-mail messages to and from the Qaeda figures, the N.S.A. began monitoring others linked to them, creating an expanding chain. While most of the numbers and addresses were overseas, hundreds were in the United States, the officials said.
Needless to say, the New York Times and their amen chorus, will spin this story as Bush acting like J. Edgar Hoover.
Will the Times demand an investigation into the leaker that brought them the story?
And will the Times note that vigorous anti-terror work by our government has prevented any further attacks on US soil?
life in the undergrowth
Top Ten science videos chosen by the BBCs editors. Watch Asian honeybees do "the wave" and much more here.
big day
From Alaa at the Mesopotamian:
Today was a tremendous moment of our history, a turning point and a real milestone. Say what you like; things are not perfect; there are countless problems; the “insurgency” is not going to disappear; the reconstruction effort is in shambles; there is corruption and thieving everywhere; errors and mistakes in everything. Yet despite all that, the political process is proceeding like a dream and the tree of freedom is taking roots, and that tree will continue to grow and grow and grow.
The Iraqis are again confounding all the "pundits" and "experts". But some just cannot understand the true soul of a people. That this most profound revolution initiated by an act of liberation, by the daring praxis of the Americans, driven by some mysterious hand of the Providence, has touched the innermost womb of a nation, and that the present agonies of this nation are those of giving birth and new life. Oh no, that they cannot understand. Well then, let them witness surprise after nasty surprise that will confound their logic and demolish their arguments. But the word mongers will always find something to say, as wild dogs are always wont to bark all the more hysterically as they are irked.
The word of truth has a life of its own; it seems to perpetuate itself and spread in the consciousness and subconscious of peoples and generations like some incurable virus, that may remain dormant for a while but will manifest itself in the most dramatic way sooner or later.
friday december 16, 2005
supercool
Watch supercooled, but still liquid, water instantly turn to ice after being stirred. The science behind it, here.
HT: Museum of Hoaxes
swedes unmask digital beauty secrets
A step-by-step demonstration of how advertisers and magazines make someone look better than they do. Click the picture to open a pop-up window, then click Unveil the Fraud.
bubble heads, part two
Maureen Dowd, aka the Whining Spinster, sure has bad timing. Her column today is all about George Bush living in a bubble, cut off from the wisdom of his betters. Her complaint isn't even original--she swiped it off the cover of Newsweek.
There's something rich in this, though. Just yesterday Iraqi citizens turned out in massive numbers to elect a government. Even the sourpuss Sunnis saw the light and decided to play. Just 33 months ago Iraq belonged to psycho killer Saddam and his cabal. Now it belongs to the Iraqis.
Just as Bush predicted. Just the opposite of what the media elites predicted. So, who lives in a bubble?
Bush could escape the bubble charge if he just knew his place and listened to media more often. Bill Clinton was never accused of being out of touch. That's because Clinton's style of leadership was to see where the crowd was headed, scoot to the front and say, "follow me."
Clinton made policy based on opinion polls, which meant the media elites could help steer the ship of state. How intoxicating it must be to have one's wisdom received as such. Why, they got to imagine themselves as the co-co-president. Co-president, you may remember, was reserved for Hillary.
Ah, but Bush, he don't play that. Bush listens to his counsel, makes decisions and sticks to his strategy. That's called leadership. The drumbeat for months is that Bush stubbornly "stuck with the status quo" in Iraq. Like twitchy kids, the Demomediacrats demanded a change. Any change, as long as it was a change.
But Bush's strategy was clear and simple: get the Iraqis strong enough to handle their own security, then leave. Tactics have been changing all along. Anyone who follows Iraq must marvel at the flexibility and adaptability of our military. Likewise the diplomatic efforts inside Iraq.
Strategies take time and patience. Is 33 months from zero to 80 percent voter turnout really such a long time in a region that, aside from Israel, had no true democracy?
Far from being stuck in a bubble, Bush sees the big picture. After 9/11, there would be no more nibbling around the edges in fighting terror. The mideast swamp, where terror festers, had to be drained. Afghanistan was step one. Iraq was step two.
Victor Davis Hanson notes:
For some time, a large number of Americans have lived in an alternate universe where everything is supposedly going to hell. If you get up in the morning to read the New York Times or Washington Post, watch John Murtha or Howard Dean on the morning talk shows, listen to National Public Radio at noon, and go to bed reading Newsweek it surely seems that the administration is incommunicado (cf. “the bubble”), the war is lost (“unwinnable”), the Great Depression is back (“jobless recovery”), and America about as popular as Nazi Germany abroad (“alone and isolated”).
But in the real adult world, the economy is red-hot, not mired in joblessness or relegating millions to poverty. Unemployment is low, so are interest rates. Growth is high, as is consumer spending and confidence. Our Katrina was hardly as lethal as the Tsunami or Pakistani earthquake. Thousands of Arabs are not rioting in Dearborn. American elderly don’t roast and die in the thousands in their apartments as was true in France. Nor do American cities, like some in China, lose their entire water supply to a toxic spill. Americans did not just vote to reject their own Constitution as in some European countries.
The military isn’t broken. Unlike after Vietnam when the Russians, Iranians, Cambodians, and Nicaraguans all soon tried to press their luck at our expense, most of our adversaries don’t believe the U.S. military is losing in Iraq, much less that it is wise now to take it on. Instead, the general impression is that our veteran and battle-hardened forces are even more lethal than was true of the 1990s — and engaging successfully in an almost impossible war.
Nor are we creating new hordes of terrorists in Iraq — as if a young male Middle Eastern fundamentalist first hates the United States only on news that it is in Iraq crafting a new Marshall Plan of $87 billion and offering a long-oppressed people democracy after taking out Saddam Hussein. Even al Jazeera cannot turn truth into untruth forever.
peter drucker interview
From 1984, and still fascinating.
saddam moved wmd to syria
Saddam Hussein moved his chemical weapons to Syria six weeks before the war started, Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom says.
The assertion comes as President Bush said yesterday that much of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was incorrect.
The Israeli officer, Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, asserted that Saddam spirited his chemical weapons out of the country on the eve of the war. "He transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria," General Yaalon told The New York Sun over dinner in New York on Tuesday night. "No one went to Syria to find it."
From July 2002 to June 2005, when he retired, General Yaalon was chief of staff of the Israel Defense Force, the top job in the Israeli military, analogous to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the American military. He is now a military fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He made similar, but more speculative, remarks in April 2004 that attracted little notice in America; at that time he was quoted as saying of the Iraqi weapons, "Perhaps they transferred them to another country, such as Syria."
wrong side of history
Mark Steyn on Hugh Hewitt's show, commenting on John Murtha:
If I was the Republican Party, I'd be praying they keep that guy on TV every minute of the day, because he's a classic example of how the Democrats have got themselves on the wrong side of history. And I don't care whether he was...did a great job in the last war. I don't care, anymore than I would've cared about the fact that in the second World War, Marshall Petain had done a great job in the first world war. It's important that you're on the right side of the war we're fighting now.
And if he is saying that Zarqawi blowing up weddings in Amman, Jordan, and Zarqawi's guys blowing up buses in shopping markets in Iraq isn't terrorism, he's on the wrong side, not just of the Iraqi people, but of the Sunni people. The fact of the matter is now, the so-called insurgency, the so-called holdouts against Iraqi democracy, come down to basically these buffoons from the Democratic Party...shame on them, because they have nothing constructive to offer...these buffoons from the Democratic Party, and Zarqawi and his suicide bomber goons. Zarqawi and his idiots, his death cult idiots, are walking the walk. And this ridiculous fellow Murtha is talking the talk.
But shame on them. They're regarded as a party that's weak and pitiful on national security, because they got the last twenty years of the Cold War wrong. And they're making the same mistake all over again.
thursday december 15, 2005
from foreign correspondent to marine
A Wall Street Journal reporter explains why he gave up journalism to join the Marines.
A year ago, I was at my sister's house using her husband's laptop when I came across a video of an American in Iraq being beheaded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The details are beyond description here; let's just say it was obscene. At first I admit I felt a touch of the terror they wanted me to feel, but then I felt the anger they didn't. We often talk about how our policies are radicalizing young men in the Middle East to become our enemies, but rarely do we talk about how their actions are radicalizing us. In a brief moment of revulsion, sitting there in that living room, I became their blowback.
purple finger celebration
A great day in Iraq as an estimated 15 million people turn out to vote. For coverage from the grassroots, Iraq the Model has coverage from all over the country. Bill Riggio has a report from Barwana, with photos.
From National Review:
As Iraqis queue up at polling stations, some of the scenes look more like a series of regional block parties than what most Westerners would associate with an election day. Children can be seen waving flags or playing soccer. Adults are cheering, clapping hands, beating drums, singing, dancing, and waving at passing U.S. and Iraqi military vehicles. There simply seems to have been more energy in the run-up to this election than in previous ones. And why not?
December 15, 2005, is a day of "national celebration, a day of the national unity, and of victory over the terrorists and those who oppose our march toward democracy," announced Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.
WHAT OUR SOLDIERS ARE SEEING
Though bracing for any vote-disrupting violence, U.S. troops in Iraq are witnessing firsthand the celebration phenomenon.I spoke with some of those soldiers and Marines Wednesday evening as they returned from routine street patrols and other duties, and prepared to move into the wings — just behind Iraqi Army and police forces — for what may prove to be one of the most important parliamentary elections in modern history. All say the festive atmosphere of the elections stems from a variety of factors, including the Iraqis' pride in their new nation, newfound freedoms, and trust in their Americans allies.
"On this side of the world, saying something and coming through and doing it means a great deal," U.S. Marine Maj. Neil F. Murphy Jr., spokesman for Multi-National Force West at Camp Fallujah, tells National Review Online. "Iraqis know that we mean what we say by staying and helping them get on their feet."
dribbles from tehran
Iran is a beautiful country with beautiful people. I've seen this with my own eyes. And they've produced some excellent contemporary films, which I have also seen with my own peepers. What's more, they have a young, westernized (in many ways) population that longs to shed the clergy-clowns running the country.
Alas, the clowns abide, busy fouling the economy, denying the Holocaust and scrambling after nukes. They also censor the media, producing "thought pieces" such as this from Tehran Times, that attempts to explain the differences between French and American politics. It's a laugh. Reading it, I felt like an civics teacher, ready with my red pen to start scrawling notes in the margin.
wednesday december 14, 2005
a marine speaks his mind
A Marine Corps major, embarking on his third tour of duty in Iraq writes:
It is this false impression that has led us to a moment of national truth. The proponents of the quagmire vision argue that the very presence of U.S. troops in Iraq is the cause of the insurgency and that our withdrawal would give the Iraqis their only true chance for stability.
Most military officers and NCOs with ground experience in Iraq know that this vision is patently false. Although the presence of U.S. forces certainly inflames sentiment and provides the insurgents with targets, the anti-coalition insurgency is mostly a symptom of the underlying conditions in Iraq. It may seem paradoxical, but only our presence can buffer the violence enough to allow for eventual stability.
bluetooth vs. the burka
Riyadh, Asharq Al-Awsat- Modern technology has once again facilitated the breaking of taboos in Saudi Arabia thanks to Bluetooth the short range wireless technology that is now available on most mobile phones. Saudi's youth can confidently exchange messages between the sexes free from the familiar prying eyes of family in particular and society in general and without using the phone's network service
Nasreen Hamd, a young Saudi woman praises Bluetooth technology saying, "After searching for another device that shares this service, you can send photos, or messages that express an interest in friendships, relationships or simply for entertainment! Personally, I use it to have fun at university."
Of course, that has certain elements ticked off.
on the eve of history
Mohammed writes on election eve:
With joy, worry, fear and hope I await tomorrow. Our hearts beat fast hurrying the clock to bring us faster to the other shore.
Tomorrow it’s going to be us who decide and I can feel the greatness of the responsibility because the result will draw the shape of our future and will determine how long it will take till we can announce victory in this war; our war against the past, against the past’s illusions and the past’s mistakes; with our hands we can make this war last shorter… with our own choices.
...
In a matter of one year questions and answers changed a lot; less than a year ago the question was “will you vote?” But now the question is “who are you going to vote for?”
We are making progress, definitely we are!
quote unquote
"Anybody who doesn't appreciate what America has done, and President Bush, let them go to hell!" said Iraqi voter Betty Dawisha.
As the Arab saying goes: "The caravan marches on and heeds not the barking of stray dogs." Or moonbats.
gebran tueni, rip
Claudia Rossett writes a fitting tribute to the Lebanese patriot, murdered two days ago by a car bomb that killed another 22 people. An account of his funeral, here.
For more on Tueni, we repeat our post from last March:
Why Words Matter
 |
Gebran Tueni: ...we think that this is the first time that an American president is speaking clearly about democracy and is serious about implementing
democracy in the Middle East.
|
More Americans watched American Idol than President Bush's State of the Union address. But millions of others around the world were all ears. Jennifer Griffin's interview with a Lebanese newspaper editor on Fox News Thursday made that clear. The transcript:
Jennifer Griffin: In his State of the Union address, President Bush vowed American help in spreading freedom throughout the Middle East. A leader of Lebanon’s opposition, Gebran Tueni, editor of Lebanon’s largest newspaper says that was a turning point for their movement to get Syria out of Lebanon.
Gebran Tueni: Huge impact. People were very happy when President Bush was reelected. Believe it or not. We had headline that day, which was on 8 columns, one word: Bush. Know why? Simply, because we think that this is the first time that an American president is speaking clearly about democracy and is serious about implementing democracy in the Middle East.
Really, the Lebanese were always cautious about American policy in the Middle East. The Lebanese always thought that the Americans bartered them with the Syrians. We are still cautious that one day or another, we’ll have a Syrian-American agreement, you know and Lebanon will pay the price. What helped a lot, I think, really that for the first time, maybe, we felt we are not going to pay the price alone. Because at the time, we were outspoken, but we were killed.
Jennifer Griffin: Lebanon is not the only place in the Arab world where people once too scared to express themselves are speaking up. The gun is quickly being replaced by the ballot box and free speech. Iraqis and Palestinians just voted in their first free and fair elections. And now the Lebanese are throwing off the yoke of Syrian occupation.
Gebran Tueni: If President Bush is serious about talking about democracy in the middle east, you have a democratic state here. Just help us preserve democracy. We are not asking for the Sixth Fleet or Marines. We don’t need it. We know how to deal by ourselves.
Jennifer Griffin: But they need a little help from their friends.
watch iraq campaign commercials
Subtitled in English by MEMRI. Cool.
punishing "old europe"?
Le Figaro looks at US troop deployments.
whiners and ambulance chasers
From Maggie's Farm:
The reason I cannot get any more flu shots this winter is because American drug companies no longer wish to make them. Why? Fear of law suits and side-effects. If a company is sued and hassled out of existence, they won't make anything for us, will they?
When the whiners, hypochondriacs and con-artists team up with the trial lawyers for their mutual enrichment, watch out.
The reason I can no longer prescribe an excellent drug, Vioxx? Law suits. Same with silicone breast implants, now finally available again after driving Dow Corning bankrupt (because the whole legal case was a con job). My list goes on and on. Oh - and for a really big one - Tamiflu. Who's making it? Not one of the great US pharmaceutical innovators, no - Roche. Buy some, if you can - good luck.
priority crimes and police states
All over the United Kingdom, right now, real crimes are being committed: mobiles are being nicked, front doors are being kicked in, bollards are being lobbed through bus shelters - just to name some of the lighter activities that add so much to the gaiety of the nation. None of these is a "priority crime", as you'll know if you've ever endured the bureaucratic time-waster of reporting a burglary.
So what is a "priority crime"? Well, the other day, the author Lynette Burrows went on a BBC Five Live show to talk about the government's new "civil partnerships" and expressed her opinion - politely, no intemperate words - that the adoption of children by homosexuals was "a risk". The following day, Fulham police contacted her to discuss the "homophobic incident".
A Scotland Yard spokesperson told the Telegraph's Sally Pook that it's "standard policy" for "community safety units" to investigate "homophobic, racist and domestic incidents" because these are all "priority crimes" - even though, in the case of Mrs Burrows, there is (to be boringly legalistic about these things) no crime, as even the zealots of the Yard concede. "It is all about reassuring the community," said the very p.c. Plod to the Telegraph. "All parties have been spoken to by the police. No allegation of crime has been made. A report has been taken but is now closed."
...
But, on balance, that has the merit of at least being more obviously outrageous than the weaselly "community reassurance" approach of the Met. As it is, Lynette Burrows has been investigated by police merely for expressing an opinion. Which is the sort of thing we used to associate with police states. Indeed, it's the defining act of a police state: the arbitrary criminalisation of dissent from state orthodoxy.
...
Hollywood stars are forever complaining about the "crushing of dissent" in Bush's America, by which they mean Tim Robbins having a photo-op at the Baseball Hall of Fame cancelled because he's become an anti-war bore. But, thanks to the First Amendment, he can say anything he likes without the forces of the state coming round to grill him. It's in Britain and Europe where dissent is being crushed. Following the murder of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands, film directors and museum curators and all the other "brave" "transgressive" artists usually so eager to "challenge" society are voting for self-censorship: "I don't want a knife in my chest," explained Albert Ter Heerdt, announcing his decision to "postpone" a sequel to his hit multicultural comedy Shouf Shouf Habibi!
But who needs to knife him when across Europe the authorities are so eager to criminalise him? No society with an eye to long-term survival should make opinion a subversive activity. Here's a thought: we should be able to discuss homosexuality, Islam and pretty much everything else in the same carefree way Guardian columnists damn Bush's America as "neo-fascist".
tuesday december 13, 2005
season's greetings
Club for Growth celebrates Festivus with Airing of Grievances against Republicans. James Lileks reviews the doings in 2005. Lots of fun, both.
all hail the gap between rich and poor
While discussing the healthy American economy with a friend, she noted an NPR report asserting that the benefits were going mostly to the rich. It was another "growing gap between rich and poor" story.
The Gap is always cited as evidence that the little guy is being screwed. Why, if taxes are not raised and raised soon, America is going to look like London in the time of Charles Dickens!
To which I always reply: if you want a society with a razor thin gap between rich and poor, go to Cuba. The wealth gap in Cuba is tiny because wealth there is miniscule. Why's that? Because the economic system--Castro's brand of communism--stifles creation of new wealth. They're still divvying the same pie that was baked in the 1950s.
Cubans freed from Castro's shackles are quite enterprising and prosperous. I know, because I lived in Miami for ten years. Many of Miami's bankers, architects, politicians, artists etc. are Cuban exiles and their offspring.
Wealth creation is an alien concept to many liberals. That's the number one reason I abandoned liberal politics some 25 years ago. To the liberal mind, the economic pie is static, and its government's job to slice it fairly. To libs, anyone who has more than "their fair share" obviously exploited someone to get it.
The United States is a dynamic nation, not a feudal society where lords hoard the limited wealth. One need only look at the example of Google to see how two humble grad students created billions in new wealth. Before them came two other grad students who created Yahoo. Those are splashy examples; there are thousands of humbler cases of entrepreneurs creating wealth. Naturally, those who take risks to create wealth get wealthy when they succeed, and thus the gap between rich and poor grows. This is good, not bad.
Paul Graham is another high-tech entrepreneur who, with partners, started a software company from scratch, which was eventually bought by Yahoo. Graham is also a gifted writer who wrote Hackers and Painters and who publishes essay on his web site.
One gem is Inequality and Risk. Here's an excerpt:
Suppose you wanted to get rid of economic inequality. There are two ways to do it: give money to the poor, or take it away from the rich. But they amount to the same thing, because if you want to give money to the poor, you have to get it from somewhere. You can't get it from the poor, or they just end up where they started. You have to get it from the rich.
There is of course a way to make the poor richer without simply shifting money from the rich. You could help the poor become more productive-- for example, by improving access to education. Instead of taking money from engineers and giving it to checkout clerks, you could enable people who would have become checkout clerks to become engineers.
This is an excellent strategy for making the poor richer. But the evidence of the last 200 years shows that it doesn't reduce economic inequality, because it makes the rich richer too. If there are more engineers, then there are more opportunities to hire them and to sell them things. Henry Ford couldn't have made a fortune building cars in a society in which most people were still subsistence farmers; he would have had neither workers nor customers.
Read the whole thing.
Jim Bass
the iraqi poll in pie charts
katrina killed more white folks
"People were allowed to die," [Katrina] storm survivor Leah Hodges told a House panel, adding that black residents of New Orleans had been victims of "genocide and ethnic cleansing."
Wrong. With a population that is 75 percent black, you'd expect the majority of deaths to be black. But in fact, just 48% of victims were black and 41% were white. Read the stats yourself here (PDF) .
terminator vs. "transformer"
Rev. Jesse "Where's the Camera?" Jackson gave Tookie the bad news from the Terminator.
Jackson said he broke the news on Monday afternoon that Schwarzenegger had denied clemency as Williams met several supporters in prison.
"He said 'Don't cry, let's remain strong,'" Jackson told Reuters. "He smiled, you know, with a certain strength, a certain resolve."
"I think he feels a comfort in his new legacy as a social transformer," Jackson said.
Yeah, yeah.
monday december 12, 2005
bubble heads
Newsweek declares that President Bush lives in a bubble and asks, "Can he change?"
Change what, the Washington press corps? Talk about living in a bubble, how about that cabal of like-minded media twerps who concoct such stories, and then generate news stories based on the assumptions they've spewed as news? Such as this from AFP:
Embattled US President George W. Bush denied that living in the White House "bubble" of security, policy advisers and political strategists had left him out of touch.
Embattled? Says who? Who's the enemy?
Asked whether he read weekly news magazines, Bush replied: "I really don't."
"I'm interested in the news, I'm not all that interested in the opinions," said the president.
Nice jab, Mr. President.
murtha's tender feelings
From Newsweek:
...when Murtha tried to write George W. Bush with some suggestions for fighting the Iraq war, the congressman's letter was ignored by the White House (after waiting for seven months, Murtha received a polite kiss-off from a deputy under secretary of Defense). Murtha, who has always preferred to operate behind the scenes, finally went public, calling for an orderly withdrawal from Iraq. In the furor that followed, a White House spokesman compared the Vietnam War hero to "Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic Party."
When that approach backfired, President Bush called Murtha a "fine man ... who served our country with honor." The White House has made no attempt to reach out to Murtha since then. "None. None. Zero. Not one call," a baffled Murtha told NEWSWEEK. "I don't know who the hell they're talking to. If they talked to people, they wouldn't get these outbursts. If they'd talked to me, it wouldn't have happened."
So Murtha would not have called for immediate withdrawal of troops a few weeks before the Iraqis vote on their government, if only Bush had stroked him by returning his phone call?
Whither statesmanship?
Murtha is also a world class porker or "earmarker." Read this for balance.
beautiful atrocities' essential guide to meth
Funny stuff. Jeff should launch Tweaker Magazine.
Stockton / Modesto: As Napa is to Chardonnay, the Central Valley is to meth, turning out a product with E-cup personality & a caustic yet delicate bouquet with flavors of battery acid, lighter fluid, Maximum Strength Dristan, chloroform, Mountain Dew, pine tar, MSG, & a whisper of balsamic vinegar. The ammonia finish lingers forever. Literally.
slide show from bbc
Iraqis expressing their thoughts and feelings.
these are the times that try men's souls
The New York Times. The Los Angeles Times. Time magazine. Bada bing! But seriously folks, Norman Podhoretz writes:
Like, I am sure, many other believers in what this country has been trying to do in the Middle East and particularly in Iraq, I have found my thoughts returning in the past year to something that Tom Paine, writing at an especially dark moment of the American Revolution, said about such times. They are, he memorably wrote, “the times that try men’s souls,” the times in which “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot” become so disheartened that they “shrink from the service of [their] country.”
Given the Democrat/media gloom over Iraq ("unwinnable" etc.), this poll of Iraqi citizens should raise eyebrows.
...Iraqis are generally optimistic about their lives, in spite of the violence that has plagued Iraq since the US-led invasion.
...
Interviewers found that 71% of those questioned said things were currently very or quite good in their personal lives, while 29% found their lives very or quite bad.When asked whether their lives would improve in the coming year, 64% said things would be better and 12% said they expected things to be worse.
However, Iraqis appear to have a more negative view of the overall situation in their country, with 53% answering that the situation is bad, and 44% saying it is good.But they were more hopeful for the future - 69% expect Iraq to improve, while 11% say it will worsen.
This last paragraph is noteworthy. It recalls similar findings in a poll about race conducted a few years ago. Young black Americans were asked whether racism was a big problem in America, and 70% (I'm going by memory) said yes. But when asked whether racism had ever affected them personally, the number was in the low 20s. This the affect of media doomsaying.
The BBC News website's World Affairs correspondent, Paul Reynolds, says the survey shows a degree of optimism at variance with the usual depiction of the country as one in total chaos.
The findings are more in line with the kind of arguments currently being deployed by US President George W Bush, he says.
Get that, willya. Bush is in tune with reality. The various Times' that try men's souls are not.
how dumb are people?
Megan McArdle writes:
Here's a fun fact for you: I was watching a documentary about Pearl Harbor the other day, and according to the nice folks who made it, 60% of Americans thought that Hitler was behind the attacks. This, despite the fact that it was Japanese planes who attacked us, and the Japanese government we declared war on. Why did they think this? I'm going out on a limb here, but it might have had something to do with the fact that FDR made the war in Europe his priority.
I am one of those loony conspiracy theorists who think that FDR basically herded us into World War II, by deliberately provoking the Japanese into attacking us. I am of the opinion that he did this because he wanted to fight Hitler, not because he particularly cared whether a bunch of yellow people invaded countries inhabited by other yellow people.
And I am of the opinion that he was correct to do this, even though I, personally, care whether Southeast Asian countries start invading each other about as much as I care about invasions in places where paler people live. Of cours, the Holocaust has done a lot to vindicate FDR's judgement, which is strange, because he also didn't seem to particularly care about the concentration camps. But nonetheless: I think FDR deceived the country into war, and I'm okay with that.
...
But the American people, by and large, don't pay much attention to the world. They didn't realize that we'd been harrying the Japanese for more than five years, despite acts from Congress forbidding us to do just that. On the other hand, they had been reading a lot about Lend-Lease. So they put two and four together and concluded that Hitler must have gotten his friend Tojo to strike us in order to keep us from helping Britain. Just as Americans who knew that Saddam Hussein hated America, gave money to terrorists, and plotted to assassinate George Bush concluded, from their very cursory supply of information, that he probably had something to do with 9/11. In both cases, they were aided in this conclusion by the fact that their government rapidly turned from teh source of the actual attack to the "more important" target.
I'm not trying to justify the War in Iraq, or what George Bush did, or what have you. Nor am I trying to excuse the Japanese, who were running a particularly foul Colonial empire that made the Dutch and the Belgians look like Mother Teresa. I'm just pointing out that stupidity is a longstanding and bipartisan vice, and that if your favoured political model depends on voters being well-informed, you'd better chuck it now, because it's never gonna happen.
sunday december 11, 2005
a moment of silence for palestinian suicide bombers
Nope, not a joke. Watch video of Kofi Annan and others at the UN rise for a moment of silence for "all those who have given their lives for the cause of the Palestinian people."
This took place at the UN 'Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,' November 29, 2005. Notice that the map of the region does not include Israel.
Your international community at work.
thin skins
Democrats are whining that a GOP ad, which features Democrats' actual words, is an attack ad. Why sir, how dare you quote me!
It's reminiscent of NBA great Charles Barkley, when asked about a passage in his autobiography, claiming he'd been misquoted. But Barkley said it with a grin, not a self-righteous pout.
dangerous clown
"Some European countries insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces," Ahmadinejad told Iranian TV viewers. "Although we don't accept this claim, if we suppose it is true," he added sportingly, "if European countries claim that they have killed Jews in World War II, why don't they provide the Zionist regime with a piece of Europe? Germany and Austria can provide the regime with two or three provinces for this regime to establish itself, and the issue will be resolved. You offer part of Europe, and we will support it."
Big of you. It's the perfect solution to the "Middle East peace process": out of sight, out of mind. And given that Ahmadinejad's out of his mind, we're already halfway there.
So let's see: We have a Holocaust denier who wants to relocate an entire nation to another continent, and he happens to be head of the world's newest nuclear state. (They're not 100 percent fully-fledged operational, but happily for them they can drag out the pseudo-negotiations with the European Union until they are. And Washington certainly won't do anything, because after all if we're not 100 percent certain they've got WMD -- which we won't be until there's a big smoking crater live on CNN one afternoon -- it would be just another Bushitlerburton lie to get us into another war for oil, right?)
...
So the language of international relations is no longer merely the private code of diplomats but part of the public discourse -- and, if the government of the United States learns anything from the last four years, it surely ought to be that there's a price to be paid for not waging the war as effectively in the psychological arenas as in the military one. What does it mean when one party can talk repeatedly about the liquidation of an entire nation and the other party responds that this further "underscores our concerns," as if he'd been listening to an EU trade representative propose increasing some tariff by half a percent?
Well, it emboldens the bully. It gives him an advantage, like the punk who swears and sprawls over half the seats in the subway car while the other riders try not to catch his eye.
genghis john rides again
So how did Kerry know that bands of brothers in Iraq were terrorizing kids, children and women in the dead of night?
David Wade, Kerry's communications director, responded promptly after we spoke.
Mr. Wade's e-mail message attempted to summarize the information in the four attachments. It also referenced an accusation by the virulent anti-American scold the International Committee of the Red Cross, which demands terrorists be treated as prisoners of war.
Three attachments were very old newspaper stories from The Sun of Baltimore (June 18, 2003), The New York Times (Aug. 7, 2003) and The Washington Post (Jan. 23, 2005). The fourth, a U.S. Institute of Peace report, stated that even creating a profile of the "insurgents" is "a daunting task."
The Sun story states "someone or something" struck a retired Iraqi high school teacher who walked into the street and died, and "Just who or what caused his death is a mystery." Then the story all but blames our soldiers.
The Times wrote that "The American military ... has decided to limit the scope of its raids in Iraq after receiving warnings from Iraqi leaders that the raids were alienating the public." That was just a few months after the invasion.
The Post article "is the story of how the U.S. military made an enemy of one man during a 20-minute encounter" -- a man who hates Jews and felt so violated when his stash of girlie magazines was discovered that he started to slap his own mother.
And Genghis Khan thought he knew how to terrorize kids and children, and, you know, women, in the dead of night.
last minute positioning in iraq
From Iraq the Model, which notes that one of the biggest winners in last January's elections is warning of possible election fraud:
“There were serious incidents of fraud in the January elections” said al-Hakeem, a much unexpected thing to hear from the biggest winner in that round of elections!
This could be aiming at preparing the atmosphere for future complaints and conspiracy theories if his lists loses because logically, there are less chances for fraud to happen the closer we move to the center where monitoring is at its highest and strictest level.
Well if al-Hakeem's party loses, they can always ask Sen. Barbara Boxer to come cry for them. She puts on a nice spectacle. Also:
It is noticed that so far, Allawi is the only candidate who is leading a professional campaign, and I mean really professional; the TV ads, the posters and the signs are very well produced and the words are carefully chosen and they’re attracting good attention among the people here.
photoblogging the iraq election campaign
It's always fun to see pictures.
incompetent design?
Don Wise, professor emeritus of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the nation's foremost proponent of ID. No, Wise isn't getting ready to testify on behalf of the school board in Dover, PA. Rather, he advocates for a different version of the acronym: "incompetent design."
Wise cites serious flaws in the systems of the human body as evidence that design in the universe exhibits not an obvious source of, but a sore lack of, intelligence. Seed asked him to chat about his theory, reactions he's received to it, and the anthem he penned to rally people to his cause.
the office podcast
For fans of the Ricky Gervais version of the show, weekly podcasts.
saturday december 10, 2005
bad things happening in china
Echoes of Tiananman Square.
what if saddam were still in power?
Holman Jenkins postulates:
Let's see: Sanctions have collapsed; the French and Russians are keen on rehabilitating the Iraqi dictator and his military. He benefits from the sharp increase in oil prices, whether or not he still labors under the U.N.'s corrupted and creaky Oil for Food program (most likely it would be gone). The U.S. no-fly zones still exist only on paper, because neighboring countries won't let our planes fly armed. Kurds in the North and Shiites in the South are either preparing for civil war or seeking coexistence with a resurgent Saddam.
Then Arafat dies, and Saddam, who's been promoting himself as having bested the U.S. in the long standoff, issues a stream of inflammatory rhetoric, seeking to secure his place as the renewed militant hero of the Muslim world. But he has a rival in Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who hosts a conference and calls for the destruction of Israel. Iran is close to obtaining nuclear weapons--even closer given what would be a general perception of U.S. retreat after 9-11. Iranian agents are trying to stoke a Shiite rebellion in the Iraqi south. What does the Iraqi dictator do next?
iowahawk exclusive
The prairie wit brings us another hilarious guest commentary from Zarqawi. Excerpt:
What's the fizz, homeslice?
I realize it's been long-time no-blog, but the dung continues to roll downhill here at the B-town office, and the revised budget doesn't cover pooper scoopers. My lovable 'tards keep opening the splodeygram eVites from Team Satan, so let's just say Zarkman's been keepin' it on the downlow.
Man, I swear I could almost tolerate this shit if all I had to deal with was the infidels and their local Iraqi ho's. Sure, they'll pop a tomahawk cap in your ass, but you can kinda understand where they're coming from. Upside, you have that fine-ass virgin coochie waiting for you in Paradise. But nooooo, Zarkman also has to cope with his own "team." Holy fucking prophet, with jihadis like these who needs enemies?
kerry's second slander
Appearing on CBS' Face the Nation on Sunday, former presidential candidate and Vietnam anti-war activist John Kerry accused our soldiers of "terrorizing" Iraqi women and children. In making such an absurd allegation, he did an injustice to our service members, just as his distorted congressional testimony did over 30 years ago. It would be enlightening to see how al-Qaeda-in-Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi reacted to Kerry's comments.
After finishing his evening prayers, al-Zarqawi probably retired to his personal quarters in a safe house on the outskirts of Baghdad. Being the holy warrior that he is, he put on his smoking jacket, twisted the cap off a Budweiser and lit a Marlboro. He then looked through the news clippings of the day, chuckling to himself and raising his beer in a toast to Kerry.
canadian dollar a bellwether?
Yes, they have politics up north. In fact, a key election looms in January.
...if Stephen Harper's party wants a better barometer of where its real electoral fortunes stand, they shouldn't be watching the polls - they should be watching the dollar.
Yes, the dollar. Because the money traders in the red suspenders who buy and sell millions of dollars in currencies with just a few key strokes, may just know something about the electoral fortunes of the Liberals that the pollsters don't.
Chart the value of the Canadian dollar for the last few decades against the rise and fall of the Liberal party, and a very interesting pattern develops: the periods in which the Liberals were most firmly entrenched in government were also the periods during which the loonie hit its lowest depths.
tax cuts for everybody
The Treasury department released this graph charting revenue receipts shows how tax cuts can actually increase the government's take. Keep this graph handy for the next time someone complains that "tax cuts for the rich" are responsible for the deficit. Excessive spending is the problem.
Also show this to Clintonites who claim he gave America eight years of prosperity. Note that the downward trend began in 2000, the last year of Bill's term. The slide continued well into 2001, even before 9/11. Every president inherits his first year economy from his predecessor. On that same point, although this chart doesn't reflect it, Bill Clinton inherited an economy that was growing strongly when he took the oath of office.
For a summary of tax cut benefits, read here.
friday december 9, 2005
$225 million typo
Japan's government rebuked the Tokyo Stock Exchange and one of the country's biggest brokerage firms Friday after a typing error caused Mizuho Securities Co. to lose at least 27 billion yen ($225 million) on a stock trade.
wiggy, multilateral justice
Slobodan Milosevic is on trial for genocide in Yugoslavia. His trial, an Energizer Bunny of jurisprudence, began on Feb. 12, 2002 and is still going nearly four years hence. His alleged crimes lasted three years.
If you're bored with Judge Judy, you can watch video of this trial of the century, so named because it might last that long. Meanwhile, another alleged war criminal was finally nabbed in Madrid after years on the lam. To say that he's being "brought to justice" would be a leap of faith.
This brings to mind Byron York's report on the early moments of the American anti-War on Terror movement. He quotes New York filmmaker David Pickering who watched the twin towers fall on 9/11 and thought, "It was an incredible moment in which all doors were opened and the world was seeming to come together."
The next day, Pickering drafted a petition imploring George Bush to show "moderation and restraint" and to "use, wherever possible, international judicial institutions and international human rights laws to bring to justice those responsible for the attacks, rather than instruments of war, violence or destruction."
It's an astonishing expression of naivete. Let's say Bush had taken his advice and called in NATO or the United Nations. And let's say the UN unanimously called for the Taliban to hand over Bin Laden (and there'd be many casting doubt on his culpability to prevent that from happening.)
So the Taliban gets a UN ultimatum and (like Saddam) it replies with a one-finger salute. Then what? What instrument could enforce those "human rights laws?" Remember that George Bush did give the Taliban a chance to hand over Bin Laden, et al "or share in their fate." The Taliban laughed.
War sometimes is the answer.
But suppose Bin Laden had been handed over. Most likely today he'd be sharing a cell adjacent to Milosevic and trading trial extension tips, not to mention broadcasting his jihadi message via the global media megaphone.
Pickering's naivete is more astonishing when you consider how many others share it, and share it with a passion bordering on psychosis. Within weeks, his petition became the template for the leftwing fringe, including MoveOn.org founders Wes Boyd and Joan Blades. And also for George Soros, who unleashed his millions to destroy Bush.
This disconnect with the real world was once a fascinating sociological sideshow. Recent Democrat talk about Iraq suggests it is infecting the heart of the Democrat party like a pandemic of idiocy. Alas, no cure is in sight.
Jim Bass
hot air
From Ireland online:
Bill Clinton, who as US president championed the Kyoto Protocol clamping controls on “greenhouse gases”, was scheduled to speak at the conference this afternoon – in an unofficial capacity but potentially at a critical point in backroom talks involving the US delegation.
The US envoys, representing a Bush administration that renounced the Kyoto pact, were said to be displeased by the 11th-hour surprise.
Clinton did not champion Kyoto. The Senate voted 96-0 to reject any treaty that excluded China and India, so Kyoto was dead on arrival. Clinton never even submitted it to the senate for ratification. If this rises to the standard of "championing" it's only because Clinton set the bar so low.
Hat tip: The Anchoress
thursday december 8, 2005
say it loud, say it proud
"The Democrat party is defined by diversity, not divided by diversity."
How true. Often Democrats are diverse all by themselves, with one individual espousing conflicting positions. For example, John Kerry said: 1) we need more troops to win in Iraq and 2) we need to reduce troop levels in Iraq ASAP. Then there's Congressman Murtha who called for an immediate redeployment from Iraq, then voted against a bill to do just that.
Some might define that as hypocrisy or muddle-headed confusion. But no, it's unified diversity.
the progressive dictionary
...defines hate speech as anything you hate to hear, which entitles you, nay, demands that you be a boor.
life expectancy in u.s. hits all-time high
Ain't it a wonder, with the epidemic of obestity, genetically modified food, nasty chemicals everywhere etc. that we keep living longer?
dispatch from the "quagmire"
As Iraqis nationwide prepare to go to the polls for the third time this year on Dec. 15 -- this time for a new parliament -- candidates and political parties of all stripes are embracing politics, Iraqi style, as never before and showing increasing sophistication about the electoral process, according to campaign specialists, party officials and candidates here.
"It is like night and day from 10 months ago in terms of level of participation and political awareness," said a Canadian election specialist with the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, a group affiliated with the U.S. Democratic Party that is working to ease Iraq's transition to democracy. The institute, which has provided free campaign training to more than 100 Iraqi parties and describes its programs as nonpartisan, granted a reporter access to its employees and training sessions on the condition that no one on its staff be named.
afghans optimistic
Says ABC News poll.
justifiable genocide?
Christopher Hitchens notes a comment by Ramsey Clark:
...in an interview with the BBC last week and another in the New York Times on Tuesday, Mr. Clark addressed the charge that in 1982, after an apparent attempt on his life in the Iraqi town of Dujail, Hussein had ordered the torture and murder of about 150 men and boys from the area.
Far from denying that any such horror had occurred — and it is one of the smaller elements in the bill of indictment — Clark asserted that it was justifiable. He has now twice said in public that, given the war with the Shiite republic of Iran, Hussein was entitled to take stern measures. "He had this huge war going on, and you have to act firmly when you have an assassination attempt," he told the BBC.
buy arianna a mirror
Arianna Huffington rightly condemns the greedy excesses of disgraced Congressman Randy Cunningham. But get a load of this:
But we can’t let this collective carcass picking -- as voyeuristically titillating as it may be -- distract us from the two vital issues this story raises: the corrupting role that money continues to play in our politics, and the overly cozy relationship between those in power and those in the media whose job it is to cover them.
Ahem. Does anyone remember where Arianna obtained her surname? It was from rich husband Michael Huffington, who, goaded by his social climber wife, Arianna, spent $27.5 million trying win Diane Feinstein's Senate seat in 1994.
He lost. They divorced. She became a pal of Newt Gingrich, et al. Then she divorced reality and became a tart-tongued pal of the Michael Moore crowd.
But wait, there's more in her hypocrisy pot. For one so concerned about money in politics, why was she gleefully mocking and violating the campaign finance laws in 2004?
As we noted two days ago, Byron York attended a Campaign for America's Future dinner in June 2004 where Arianna Huffington spoke. CAF is a Democrat 527 organization, which is explicitly not allowed to take money and campaign for/against candidates. But a cabal of fat cat Democrats did just that.
Arianna took the stage and acknowledged that CAF was forbidden from partisan attacks, then went on to talk, wink-wink, about "Buddy" who had "lied about WMD" and "wanted to repeal the bill of rights except for the part about guns." She went on to say that Buddy needed a long vacation, so "let's give him one on November 2... get Buddy back to Crawford, not in a squeaker, but a landslide."
Corrupt role indeed.
Of course, this is the same preachy green Arianna who scolds others for driving SUVs then flies in a private jet. The same shrill voice that condemns fat cats for paying insufficient taxes, yet paid a mere $771 in federal income tax in 2003 while relaxing in a $7 million Brentwood home when she wasn't off globetrotting.
Besides, where would Arianna be without fat cats? Probably performing A Tribute to Zsa Zsa in Florida retirement homes and dreaming of the big time.
Jim Bass
wednesday december 7, 2005
facing evil
From Free Iraqi:
There I saw an average Iraqi, who has no power or wealth, a man whom Saddam used to sign the execution order of hundreds like him without even knowing the name of one of them, standing boldly and exposing this monster's horrible crimes. He was not afraid and returned Saddam's words with stronger ones. I must admit that I saw this man as a hero and I think many Iraqis share a similar view with that of mine, as these people terrorized us for such a long time that even hearing their names used to paralyze us with fear.
...
Saddam was trying to remain calm and put a fake smile on his face but I could see through his eyes that he was going to explode. I think he couldn't believe that an Iraqi, just an average Iraqi would talk to him that way and name him as just "Saddam" not the "Mujahi leader Saddam Hussain God bless him" or any of the other crap we had to add before his name otherwise.
Saddam's brother, Barzan was in a much worse shape as everybody must have noticed. This is not strange at all and it was one of Saddam's ways of presenting himself as the best available choice by surrounding himself with insanely ignorant and barbarian people. I heard it from so many Iraqis in the past saying, "Well who would replace him if he's gone? Brazan, Izzat Il Douri or Taha Yassin Ramadan, or maybe Oday?? No it's better that he stays" thinking that all alternatives are worse and that there are no men in Iraq but those scum!
running from history
The fact that Howard Dean has come out and said that the Iraq War is “unwinnable” should not surprise anyone. It has been the unspoken position of the Democratic Party that preventing the United States from winning in Iraq is the number one political goal of the party. Allowing for victory would cement Republican majorities in the House and Senate for the foreseeable future, something that the party cannot tolerate. It is a party currently constructed for the sole purpose of exercising the power of the federal government to benefit its confusing alphabet soup of interest groups, organizations, NGO’s, and hangers’ on. Wielding power for power’s sake is the reason for its existence. And being out of power threatens to destroy it. This is the party that stood up to communist aggression in the 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s while Republicans wanted to bury their heads in the sand and pretend the threats to freedom in the world were none of our business.
They are well beyond that now, of course. For more than a quarter of a century, they have been driving loyal Americans away from the fold until all that is left are the remnants of the anti-Viet Nam coalition; media, academia, and the social misfits and anti-American galoots who continue to play the same tired, electoral hand of race baiting, class warfare, and suicidal isolationism that appeals to a narrower and narrower band of the American electorate.
Unfazed by this losing combination, the Democratic leadership has been reduced to political hackery of the worst sort – a pandering for votes and money at the expense of the national security of the United States. The problem isn’t that they want to win elections. The problem is that in their current delusional state, they believe that by turning their backs on history that they can somehow click the tumblers into place and unlock the secret of victory at the ballot box. By convincing themselves of the absolute rightness of their moral posturing on Iraq, they believe that they can convince a majority of their countrymen that cutting and running in the middle east is a policy without consequence, that retreat in the face of aggression will not be seen by the world – our enemies most especially – as a monumental defeat for the US and our position in the world.
butt-in.org
Liberals are some of the biggest busybodies in the world. (Yes, bluenose conservatives can be, too.) MoveOn.org is ticked off that the LA Times is cutting editorial staff. What really has them flaring their nostrils is that longtime looney-left columnist Robert Scheer was one of those cut. Why, even Babs Streisand herself wrote a letter to the editor about it (cue The Way We Were).
Anyway, MoveOn.org has collected some 10,000 signatures on a petition protesting the cuts. This reminds me of the many petitions I received late in the Clinton years regarding the maltreatment of women under the Taliban. Something had to be done! That something meant adding one's name to the list and forwarding it to another concerned liberal. When Bush actually did something about the Taliban, the MoveOners did not cheer, however.
What's funny about the latest outrage is the comment from Times management:
Executives at The Times and Chicago Tribune — the two biggest newspapers owned by Tribune Co. — said they took the group's campaign as a public acknowledgment of the value of their news-gathering operations.
However, they also said they did not expect the petitions to save jobs, and argued that the papers would continue to deliver strong news content.
"I think it's terrific that people care enough about the paper to do whatever they can to make sure that it has the ability to keep doing great stuff," said Times Editor Dean Baquet.
"I think it means that — at a time when people are putting papers down and questioning how relevant we are — a bunch of people are saying, 'We think you are very relevant, and keep doing what you are doing,' " he said.
Yes, the object of MoveOn's wrath is relevant. I can just imagine Saddam, after hearing trial testimony of his viciousness, noting that "It shows I'm still relevant to Iraq. The name is Saddam, spelled with two Ds."
JB
tuesday december 6, 2005
too much good news
Daniel Kulhavey, 33, completed a 50-hour training course and promptly landed a $22-an-hour job drilling for natural gas near Casper, Wyo. Now if only Christopher Manegold can find 4,999 more like him.
Manegold, president of the Casper Area Economic Development Alliance, is advertising from Oregon to Texas to find workers for Rocky Mountain energy companies. The labor shortage "is getting to be of crisis proportions," he said.
More and more regional markets are reporting similar situations. In October, 111 U.S. metropolitan areas had unemployment rates below 4 percent, up from 72 a year earlier.
Maybe we should import some workers from France.
all the news fit to ignore
Murtha, Murtha, Murtha, Murtha, Murtha, Murtha, (Lieberman), Murtha, Murtha, Murtha.
That's about how news coverage has gone the past several weeks concerning Rep. John Murtha's call to withdraw from Iraq versus Sen. Joe Lieberman's call to stand fast.
And the media wonder why newspaper circulations are dropping and why Fox News dominates television ratings over the networks and other cable programs.It's not that Murtha doesn't deserve airtime to voice a point of view many Americans share. It's that Lieberman surely deserves at least equal time for a point of view that other Americans, as well as most Iraqis, share.
Those who rely on traditional news sources other than The Wall Street Journal, which published an Op-Ed by the Connecticut senator, may not even have known that Lieberman recently returned from Iraq. Or that his conclusions were that the U.S. has to keep fighting the insurgency, and that two-thirds of Iraq is in "pretty good shape."
Hat tip: Al Scherr
devils brew
Yesterday brought news that Congressman Tom DeLay will have to defend himself against money laundering charges brought in Texas by district attorney Ronnie Earle. Earle is a partisan, crusading Democrat who once declared:
The root of all evil truly is money, especially in politics. People talk about how money is the mother's milk of politics. Well, it's the devil's brew. And what we've got to do, we've got to turn off the tap."
Earle accuses DeLay of illegally redirecting $190,000 in campaign funds. Remember that number, $190,000.
McCain-Feingold was enacted to reduce "the influence of big money in politics" by limiting the sums that rich individuals could donate to parties, the so-called soft money contributions. This hurt Democrats worse than Republicans, who, contrary to conventional wisdom, actually collect more money in smaller contributions and from a wider base of supporters.
Lost without their big bucks donors, Democrats turned to 527s -- political entities that could promote voter registration, campaign on issues etc. They can not endorse or work to defeat any specific national candidate.
As Byron York explains in The Vast Leftwing Conspiracy, these 527s became a de facto arm of the Democrat party, violating both the letter and spirit of McCain-Feingold. Limit big money? Five individuals donated $78 million.
- George Soros: $27 million
- Peter Lewis: $24 million
- Stephen Bing: $14 million
- Herbert and Marion Sandler: $13 million
For perspective consider that $75 million is the total amount of federal matching funds Kerry and Bush each received to run their post-convention campaigns. Five rich Democrats ponied that much up themselves. So much for limiting big money. So much for the little guy.
Various 527s shared that moola. Campaign for America's Future, Americans Coming Together and MoveOn.org's 527 were the biggies. They openly mocked the law against advocating for/against candidates.
York attended a Campaign for America's Future dinner in June 2004 where Arianna Huffington spoke. She acknowledged that they were forbidden from partisan attacks, then went on to talk about "Buddy" who had "lied about WMD" and "wanted to repeal the bill of rights except for the part about guns." She went on to say that Buddy needed a long vacation, so "let's give him one on November 2... get Buddy back to Crawford, not in a squeaker, but a landslide."
Har, har.
These 527s were also forbidden by law from coordinating or acting in concert with either the Kerry campaign or the Democrat party. Again, they mocked the law. During the Democratic Convention, ACT rented suites on the second floor of the Four Seasons hotel, which was (coincidence!) the headquarters for the Democratic National Committee's finance operation. There was plenty of schmoozing, but of course, they never discussed campaign strategy or how to defeat George Bush.
In the end, Democrat-front 527s spent $230 million trying to defeat Bush, two and one-half times what Republican 527s spent. That's one giant kettle of devil's brew.
One wonders what Ronnie Earle thinks about that. And the next time Democrats break into yet another chorus of "culture of corruption" remember they wrote the song about themselves.
Jim Bass
Permalink
dean goes pink
Further evidence of the decline of the Democrat party: on Sunday Howard Dean said, “The idea that we’re going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong.” Now he's posing with Code Pink t-shirts, notes Polipundit:
Code Pink is not your average, everyday collection of “peace activists.” This is, after all, the group that raised $600,000 last year to aid terrorists in Fallujah. As Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin put it at the time, “I don’t know of any other case in history in which the parents of fallen soldiers collected medicine…for the families of the ‘other side’.”
Ms. Benjamin and the other co-founders of Code Pink have been “on the other side” for quite a while.
In the 1980’s, Benjamin worked as a project coordinator for the Institute for Food and Development Policy (IFDP), which was widely credited with aiding the Marxist Sandinista regime. Upon visiting Cuba in the 1980’s, Benjamin told the San Francisco Chronicle that Castro’s paradise “made it seem like I died and went to heaven.” She is widely credited as a chief organizing force behind the 1999 Seattle riots in which 50,000 protesters did millions of dollars worth of property damage.
Code Pink spokeswoman Sandy Brim flew an American neurosurgeon to San Salvador in 1985 to operate on Marxist Revolutionary Party Commander Nidia Diaz, whose hand had been injured in combat. Diaz’s group had claimed responsibility for the murders of four U.S. Marines and nine civilians two months before. Kirsten Moller, the current executive director of Global Exchange and Code Pink, like Benjamin, worked for IFDP in the 80s.
yes, but did you feel humiliated?
I wake to NPR news everyday (no commercials). Today I learned that after female "Witness A" testified against Saddam about her torture in Abu Ghraib, his defense had two zingers: 1) were there any dogs? and 2) did anyone take pictures?
Ooooh, got us there. Equating humiliating prisoners by some hillbillies run amok at Abu Ghraib with Saddam's mass murder and torture. No one in Iraq would be impressed by such a pathetic attempt at moral equivalence. For that, you need NPR's editors.
The real meat of the trial is, of course, Saddam's evil.
Saddam sat stone-faced, taking notes on a pad of paper, as the woman, known only as "Witness A," told the court how she and dozens of other families from the town of Dujail were arrested in a crackdown after a 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam.
Two other witnesses - a man and a woman - testified Tuesday, all with their identities concealed.
"I was forced to take off my clothes, and he raised my legs up and tied up my hands. He continued administering electric shocks and beating me," Witness A said of Wadah al-Sheik, an Iraqi intelligence officer who died of cancer last month.
Several times, the woman - hidden behind a light blue curtain - broke down. "God is great. Oh, my Lord!" she moaned, her voice electronically deepened and distorted.She strongly suggested she had been raped, but did not say so outright. When Chief Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin asked her about the "assault," she said: "I was beaten up and tortured by electrical shocks."
The witness, who was 16 at the time of her arrest, repeated that she had been ordered to undress.
"I begged them, but they hit with their pistols," she said. "They made me put my legs up. There were five or more, and they treated me like a banquet."
For an Iraqi perspective on the trial, go here. I love the way Mohammed misspells Ramsey Clark as Ramzi Clark.
lieberman finally gets some ink
Former Connecticut Gov. Lowell Weicker said Monday that Sen. Joe Lieberman deserves a stiff challenge in his bid for re-election next year _ but it won't come from Weicker.
Despite some speculation to the contrary, Weicker said he would not run against Lieberman, a Democrat who ousted him from the Senate in 1988. That, however, didn't stop him from attacking the incumbent.
Speaking at a Rotary Club luncheon, Weicker sharply criticized Lieberman and President Bush over the Iraq war.
"I have seen this country propagandized into war," said Weicker, a Republican-turned-independent. "It's now a second wave of propagandizing, with the president taking the stump, joined by persons like Senator Joe Lieberman."
I never knew, until I read the 50th Anniversary edition of National Review that it was largely responsible for Republican Weicker being defeated by Joe Lieberman in 1988. Here is how they remember it:
LOWELL WEICKER, the one-time Republican senator and perpetual liberal gasbag from the state of Connecticut, was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1970. He met his Waterloo in 1988, when the September 2 issue of NR announced the formation of “Buckleys for Lieberman.” The impromptu association’s stated purpose was “to generate support for the defeat of Lowell Weicker” by endorsing his challenger, Joe Lieberman.
Lieberman, it was explained, “is a moderate Democrat, and it is always possible that he will progress in the right direction.” There was, on the other hand, “no such hope for Lowell Weicker.” The group (which came to be known simply as “BuckPac”) contained several vital organs, such as the precisely named “Horse’s Ass Committee,” the purpose of which was “to document that Lowell Weicker is the Number One Horse’s Ass in the Senate.”
This was accompanied by the “Degasification Committee,” which was “engaged in attempting to clean up the quality of public thought,” as well as in demonstrating that “the bombast, murk, and pomposity of Lowell Weicker’s public declarations are a threat to democratic ecology.” Every issue of NR leading up to the election featured a “Weicker Watch,” heralding the latest in the anti-Weicker crusade.
Under relentless attack from BuckPac, Weicker lost a 17-point lead and his seat. No wonder he's still sore.
JB
murtha v. murtha
monday december 5, 2005
petulant porky republicans
Makes you want to pistol whip them.
windfall for the dimwitted
I expect Democrats to be economic idiots: that's the reason I switched parties years ago. Last month some Republicans joined them in being stuck on stupid about a quarterly bump in oil company profits.
George Will takes them both on:
"None of us know much about what is happening with respect to pricing," said Dorgan, disclaiming a competence rarely ascribed to senators. But, quickly recovering from uncharacteristic humility, Dorgan joined Senate colleagues in exhibitionistic indignation about the fact that the five largest oil companies, led by ExxonMobil's $9.9 billion, had combined third-quarter profits of $32.8 billion.
ExxonMobil, which has more than $50 billion of past profits invested in energy development, made 9.8 cents per dollar of sales, much less than the 21.2 cents made by a company selling another fluid that lubricates American life -- Coca-Cola.
Nevertheless, another Midwestern populist, Sen. Charles Grassley, the increasingly eccentric Iowa Republican who chairs the Finance Committee, admonished the oil companies to contribute 10 percent of their third-quarter profits to augment existing federal subsidies that help some Americans pay their heating bills. Many of those Americans live in the chilly Northeast and vote for liberals who, in Congress, write this narrative:
By blocking much drilling in Alaska and offshore, Congress does nothing to lower the price of oil. Then Congress spends taxpayer dollars to soften the impact of the price, thereby encouraging consumption that raises the price. Then Grassley asks oil executives to join the moral grandstanding by squandering their shareholders' wealth -- diverting it to protect oil consumers from some consequences of their representatives' irrationality.
Meanwhile, low -- yes low -- oil prices are the concern for the future.
nbc does an al jazeera
sunday december 4, 2005
"the barking of stray dogs"
From Alaa at the Mesopotamian:
...The speach by President Bush was great. It should be clear to anyone with even minimum amount of intelligence, that if anybody has the facts it is the President; he does have more that one hundred and fifty thousand men and women on the ground to report to him.
And I am always astonished at people wondering about how the Iraqis feel about the American and allied presence in Iraq. Was not the present Iraqi Goverment elected by 8 million people at the risk of their lives?Are the more that two hundred thousand soldiers and police not Iraqis, or perhaps they came from Mars? The first formally requested that the mandate of the Multi National Forces be extended, and the second are fighting and dying side by side with Allied forces. The President spelled out very clearly who is the enemy.
As long as the Americans remain pro-Iraqi, the Iraqis will remain pro-American, not matter what is said and no matter what din and noise is made. And as the famous arab proverb goes: "The caravan marches on and heeds not the barking of stray dogs"
joe wilson: bush right about iraq
"There was a lot of reason to be concerned about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein," he told WABC Radio's Mark Simone. "I always thought that he probably had chemical and biological weapons and biological precursors as well."
Wilson said his primary policy difference with President Bush wasn't over Saddam's WMDs, but rather on the question of "how to construct a policy that gets to the national security issue of disarming Saddam Hussein and does so at minimum risk to other legitimate U.S. interests both in Iraq and in the region."
But aside from that, Wilson said he cheered President Bush's decision to topple the Iraqi dictator, telling Simone: "When the president went up to the U.N. and got the [war] resolution unanimously passed at the U.N., nobody applauded louder than I did."
a scary peek into the liberal mind
This Grady Hendrix review in Slate, of a schlocky Joe Dante flick that hardly anybody will actually watch, contains possibly the most ignorant and offensive collection of sentences that I've read in the last decade::
Today, zombies are the perfect metaphor for our soldiers in Iraq: They're shell-shocked, anonymous, and aren't asked to make very many decisions. Unless you personally know a soldier, the war in Iraq has been a zombie war, fought by an uncomplaining, faceless mass wrapped in desert camo and called "our boys." We talk about them all the time—supporting them, criticizing them, speaking for them—but we don't really have a clue as to what's on their minds. They often seem like disposable units sent to enforce the will of our country. But what if they come back and they're different? What if they come back and don't want to follow orders anymore?
From Vodkapundit.
saturday december 3, 2005
how the brain filters background noise
germ maintenance
...flush with the lid down. If you flush with the lid up, a polluted plume of bacteria and water vapour erupts out of the flushing toilet bowl. The polluted water particles float for a few hours around your bathroom before they all land. Some of them will land on your tooth brush. More here.
murtha gets told off
An Army Broken?
...the conventional media has latched onto Rep. Murtha's rambling discourse about the Army being "broken" and "has done all they can."Unmitigated crap. And I don't say this out of defensiveness or service pride - I'll tell you about how far we have had to come in a bit. First, though, a little material for you to mull over.
The US Army is quite open about how it works, what it sees for its future, what it has been told to do in the future by the civilian authorities we serve. You can see its budget, strength, recruiting, retention, doctrine and philosophy. And not just official sources. US Army Soldiers tell the world about things that go right and wrong. Also, what we do on our own. We are our own strongest critics and staunchest defenders.
What really infuriates me is that someone like Rep. Murtha knows better. Ask any veteran who served between 1975-1982/3 what the Army (or the rest of the Armed Forces for that matter) were like. Drugs everywhere, low pay, morale was non-existent, equipment was falling behind or scarce, there was no great sense of mission or purpose. Only the heroic measures of a few dedicated officers and NCOs saved us from absolutely bottoming out. We needed the Reagan Era build up (hell, even Jimmy Carter, not the brightest or strongest to even stumble across the White House threshold, realized things had gone down too far, too fast, by the last two years of his miserable term in office) but almost as important, we got our elan back - we were told we mattered, we were the shield of liberty against Soviet totalitarianism. I felt that deeply, and in March of 1985 I walked straight into a recruiter's office and signed up.
...
As anyone who has read this blog knows, The Inner Prop and I served in Operation Enduring Freedom V (Afghanistan, March 2004-March 2005). We stood at the end of the longest sustained supply line in the history of human conflict. We were in war-torn Central Asia. Af-frickin'-ghanistan. We had decent food, e-mail, phone (OK, sometimes they weren't always working, but almost all the time) excellent medical support, good pay, regular (if slow) mail. We had a PXs at most of the larger bases, and coffee places sprang up too. We had so damned much ammunition that we needed to build a bigger ammunition supply point at Bagram, AF. We had so many vehicles that we were constantly squabbling over where to put them all - and we had enough up-armored ones too. Our supply warehouses were stuffed with clothing, boots, body armor and the like. "Living hand to mouth" is the worst lie of the bunch.
The constant stream of re-enlistments was a revelation to me. When I was the Executive Officer of the garrison at Bagram Airfield (a job I gladly traded away after 5 months) I had to find room to more than double the size of the Retention Office. I personally administered the oath of re-enlistment to an E-5 and an E-7. The E-5 was a mother of two young children and the E-7 was eligible to retire when we got home!
Broken? Hardly. Is it difficult work? Yes.
Do not mistake hard work for foundering. Respectfully, Rep. Murtha - you are wrong. Dead wrong.
missed cinema: schultze gets the blues
For fans of droll comedy, Schultze Gets the Blues is a treat. First-time German director Michael Schorr tells the story of a drab man living in a drab town in former East Germany. Forced into early retirement from his job in a salt mine (I visited one in Austria in 1962, so don't scoff), Schultze has little to do besides play polkas on his accordian, dust his garden gnomes and drink with his pals.
Not much happens or is said in this movie. The director frames most scenes as a still life where the characters enter and leave, and sometimes seem to do little at all. The camera hardly moves. But if you're in the mood for it, it's magic as you find yourself attending to all the details in the scene.
Magic happens to Schultze when he hears zydeco on the radio one day, and his world begins to expand. Eventually he makes his way to bayou country. The American scenes are as exotic as the German scenes: these Louisiana locales are just as foreign to mainstream America. Their locals are not like your locals. There's the bittersweet knowledge that some of the Louisiana locations were likely destroyed by Katrina.
The film won awards in Europe, which is good news because Schorr will get to make more movies. It took guts, in these days of show-off, hyper-kinetic filmmaking and ironic detachment, to make such an understated movie.
Like Goodbye Lenin, its the second German film from 2003 that I've seen and liked. I look forward to more. You can find both at Netflix.com.
Jim Bass
slow death of the gray lady
The NYT keeps getting worse. This is supposed to be a news story.
Bush tries to paint U.S. economy in best light
By Richard W. Stevenson, The New York TimesWASHINGTON - As he went before the cameras in the Rose Garden on Friday morning, President George W. Bush was aware of bad news that had not yet been made public: 10 Marines had been killed by a bomb in Iraq. But he made no mention of the attack, sticking to the sunny White House message of the day that the economy is strong and the outlook "as bright as it's been in a long time."
Bush is aware of hundreds of things that he doesn't discuss. The topic was the economy, and the economy is robust.
For an administration that has been beset by trouble, it was a classic effort to change the subject, and one that could be justified, up to a point, by the facts.
No, this is a classic effort of a snotty journalist, working for a partisan newspaper, to change the subject. The subject was the economy, stupid.
The Labor Department report on Friday morning showing that employers added 215,000 jobs in November was good news, and it came one day after the government announced that the economy grew at a very healthy 4.3 percent annual rate in the third quarter.
"We have every reason to be optimistic about our economic future," Bush said.
Exactly.
Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said Bush did not allude to the deaths of the Marines because he defers to the Pentagon over when such news should be released, out of concern for the soldiers' families.
When does the President, any president, use news conferences to announce troop deaths? He would be wrong to do so.
But Bush's attempt to shift public attention to what he characterized as the nation's strong economic foundation was also motivated by a political problem that has dogged him for some time, Republican strategists said.
How convenient: anonymous "strategists" happen to make the reporter's point for him. And "he characterized" is a way of winking at the reader, implying that Bush is BS-ing.
Even as the economy has chugged along nicely if unspectacularly for the past two years, Americans have sunk into a darker mood about the future and given the president little credit for the good news.
Well, that isn't true. Consumer confidence is high. But even if it were true, is it any wonder when you have the NYT writing such crap?
friday december 2, 2005
when churchill and twain met
Nice.
time waster
Click on #5 for AmazType.
good tidings in mideast
Because we Americans tend to gauge Middle East success by White House signing ceremonies complete with dignitaries, three-way handshakes and pages of treaty provisions, no one seems to have noticed how, in the absence of any of that, there has been amazing recent progress in defusing the Arab-Israeli dispute.
First, the more than four-year-long intifada, which left more than 1,000 Israelis and 3,000 Palestinians dead, is over. And better than that, defeated. There's no great Palestinian constituency for starting another one. In Israel, tourism is back, the economy has recovered to pre-intifada levels, and the coffee shops and malls are full again.
Second, the Gaza withdrawal was a success. On the Israeli side, it was accomplished with remarkable speed and without any of the great social upheaval and civil strife that had been predicted. As for the Palestinians, without any fanfare whatsoever, their first-ever state has just been born. They have political independence for 1.3 million of their people, sovereignty over all of Gaza and, for the first time, a border to the outside world (the Rafah crossing to Egypt) that they control.
Third, on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian line, vigorous electoral campaigns are underway. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has abandoned Likud, established a new centrist party that leads all others in the polls, effectively marginalized those remaining Israelis who want to hold on forever to all the territories, and set Israel on a path to a modest and attainable territorial solution to the century-old conflict.
As a result, Israel's regional isolation is easing, as Islamic countries from Pakistan to Qatar to Morocco openly extend or intensify relations, while anti-Israel rejectionists such as Syria and Hezbollah are isolated and even condemned by name in the U.N. Security Council.
break out the black arm bands
The economy is booming and the NY Times is depressed:
Gasoline is cheaper than it was before Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans. Consumer confidence jumped last month and new home sales hit a record. The stock market has been rising. Even the nation's beleaguered factories appear to be headed for a happy holiday season.
By most measures, the economy appears to be doing just fine. No, scratch that, it appears to be booming.
But as always with the United States economy, it is not quite that simple.
Remember when Clinton and his outgoing administration whined that the incoming Bush team was "talking down the economy?"
the cia leak war on bush
How the leak game is being played:
One [CIA] official told the Times, "I remember reading the Abu Zubaydah debriefing last year, while the administration was talking about all of these other reports, and thinking that they were only putting out what they wanted." The Times then quoted an anonymous intelligence official who warned, "This gets to the serious question of to what extent did they try to align the facts with the conclusions that they wanted . . . things pointing in one direction were given a lot of weight, and other things were discounted."
With the assistance of anonymous intelligence sources, the Times had, therefore, formulated a simple storyline: The Bush administration has cherry-picked intelligence by not mentioning Zubaydah's testimony. But, was Zubaydah's damning testimony inexcusably ignored by the Bush administration? Or, did the Times's anonymous sources misrepresent the CIA's debriefing of Zubaydah?
Read it all.
ALSO: Mona Charen: Investigate the CIA
spin becomes a vortex
I don't think the Bushies are numb to seeing their public standing dissed and downgraded. I think they've concluded this is a game that's rigged against them, something over which they have little control. Other presidencies--Nixon, Johnson--obsessed over their bad press. LBJ by legend watched the evening news about Vietnam simultaneously on three TVs, a ticket to neurosis and night sweats.
In contrast, the Bush media model has been to ignore the polls, skip the spin and govern for results. Mr. Bush's bet is that history will judge Iraq a success; the odds now suggest he's right. And if one believes in markets, as Mr. Bush largely does, sustained 4% growth is a better day's work than, like his predecessor, trying to govern to the polls.
For this White House, the mainstream media's spin is like bad weather--uncontrollable. The polls, like the bad-weather blahs, don't matter. But clinical depression does matter and the polls now reflect clinical depression. Even the president's conservative base can't snap out of it. Consider the reality standing before a movement conservative: Sen. Joe Lieberman's essay on this page earlier in the week argued compellingly that Iraq is much better than imagined. The economic growth numbers validate tax-cut theory, and they're getting pinch-me-if-it's-real justices in John Roberts and Sam Alito. And they're depressed!
A visit to our editorial offices this week by about 40 conservative think-tank leaders revealed almost universal gloom and even distrust of the president--primarily over years of pig-out spending. Not one of them uttered the word "Iraq."
When positive reality becomes irrelevant, you've got the blues. Or perhaps we have discovered a new form of brainwashing.
...
The Bush administration has underestimated the changed nature of modern media. The mainstream media alone is not the problem. All these political subjects--the war, immigration--get discussed at length, all the time, on talk shows and across the great expanses of the Web wilderness.
In this new environment, the emotional content has become stronger and even more important than the facts, such as they are. The facts have been demoted. What's more, the language, the very vocabulary of all these conversations, has been ramped way up. Shrillness has monetary value now, and it has political value. If this were traditional spin, as the White House assumes, it wouldn't matter. But in our time the spin has become a vortex.
thursday december 1, 2005
lesser burdens
In January 1942, after two-and-a-half years of fighting, there were politicians in the Conservative, Labor and Liberal parties all clamoring that Churchill had mismanaged the war. There was no end in sight, and there had been many avoidable losses: battles had “turned out differently from what was foreseen.”
Churchill also faced a hostile press, with every critic “free to point out the many errors which had been made” and newspapers offering “well-informed and airily detached criticism” -- all of which had created an “unhappy, baffled public opinion.”
...
Churchill is remembered in the popular imagination as someone who rallied a nation, vowed never to give up, and took his country to victory. Few remember that Churchill faced a crisis of confidence two-and-a-half years into the war, exploited by those “with lesser burdens to carry.”
And fewer still remember the names of the politicians and media critics who created a crisis of confidence in the midst of a war.
a soldier speaks
I watched Bush speaking on television last night. It was my first day off since arriving in theater one month ago.
Please, America, listen to the man.
No one wants American troops to keep dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. I know, because I’m one of those troops and I would prefer not to die here. On the other hand, and this is what you won’t hear from most mainstream media, if I do die over here, I’ll do so with few regrets. I wouldn’t be dying for a lie, as so many minstrels of misery and mischief keep spouting.
Americans are dying in Iraq so Americans don’t have to die at home, or so that they can die of self-inflicted things like lung cancer and heart attacks instead of having a building blow up and crush them while they are inside it. Don’t kid yourself that things are otherwise. Keeping the fight in the enemy’s home court is exactly the right thing to do.
flying with scissors
Just had to use that headline.
judicious judges
Jayson at Polipundit underscores gains in the judiciary and what they mean.
better email lieberman to your lib friends
...because they won't know what he said on Tuesday. Brit Hume notes:
Connecticut Democrat Joe Lieberman, who just returned from Iraq, defended U.S. efforts there in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal and a subsequent news conference on Capitol Hill, saying the military has "a good plan" for victory in Iraq, that progress is "visible and practical" and warning that such progress could be turned back by a premature withdrawal.
But the major media that played up Democratic Rep. John Murtha's call for withdrawing U.S. troops largely ignored Lieberman's remarks. Neither ABC nor CBS mentioned the senator in their nightly newscasts while NBC aired a short sound byte. And The Washington Post, New York Times, and USA Today ran not a word of Lieberman's praise for U.S. efforts in Iraq.
Congressman Murtha was man-of-the-moment two weeks ago. Before then it was "Murtha who?" Joe Lieberman, however, is a senator and former candidate for veep. But like the Soup Nazi, the MSM told Joe, "No news for you!"
If you missed Lieberman's oped, get it here.
cornstarch + water + science
moveon.org photoshops the troops
bifurcated brain or just tongue?
Just a few months ago, Sen. John Kerry criticized President Bush for not sending enough troops to Iraq to get the job done. Yesterday, he said:
...the huge US force in Iraq is hindering the transfer of power to Iraqis. He says the American deployment delays the "willingness and ability of Iraqi troops to stand up."
That is, Kerry was for a huge troop deployment before he was against it.
a new aesop fable
Poppa P. and his young, tart-tongued daughter Nancy set forth on a cross country trip. After an hour, Nancy demanded, "When we gonna get there?" Poppa replied "Be patient and enjoy the scenery. We will arrive in due time."
Thirty minutes later Nancy whined that they still weren't there yet. Poppa said, "We are on the right road. We just need to keep going where we're going. Here, read this comic book." Twenty minutes passed and Nancy demanded an update on their progress. Poppa again reassured her they were on the right road.
"That's the same old status quo and it's not working," Nancy pouted. "You never had a plan when you took me on this trip. You misled me. You're sticking to the same old course and I..."
"You want a change of course?" Poppa said as he swerved to the side and stopped the car. "I'll give you a change." Grasping Nancy by the neck, Poppa squeezed so hard her eyes bulged out. Poppa suddenly felt bad and stopped choking the young whiner. But to this day, Nancy's eyes still stick out like a bug.
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immigration reform
In France.
unilateral
From Best of the Web:
Meanwhile, Reuters reports from Paris that "French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, one of the sharpest critics of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, warned Washington on Tuesday against pulling out troops without regard to regional security":
Villepin, interviewed in Paris by CNN, said a badly planned withdrawal could cause chaos in Iraq, "which of course would be disastrous for the whole region."
So the cut-and-run crowd is calling for unilateral American surrender!
leaking at all costs
What is the CIA for? To offer objective intelligence to the president so he can make informed policy choices. When the CIA becomes the president's antagonist, trust is broken. Both the president and the American people lose.
THE CIA'S WAR against the Bush administration is one of the great untold stories of the past three years. It is, perhaps, the agency's most successful covert action of recent times. The CIA has used its budget to fund criticism of the administration by former Democratic officeholders.
The agency allowed an employee, Michael Scheuer, to publish and promote a book containing classified information, as long as, in Scheuer's words, "the book was being used to bash the president." However, the agency's preferred weapon has been the leak. In one leak after another, generally to the New York Times or the Washington Post, CIA officials have sought to undermine America's foreign policy. Usually this is done by leaking reports or memos critical of administration policies or skeptical of their prospects. Through it all, our principal news outlets, which share the agency's agenda and profit from its torrent of leaks, have maintained a discreet silence about what should be a major scandal.