Is this the proper attitude?

I just noticed this in the paper and it seems a bit strange to have a major legal entanglement arise within a religious denomination like this.

Virginia Episcopal Bishop Peter J. Lee is threatening to sue conservative Episcopal churches that soon will vote on whether to leave his diocese, saying individual members of each congregation's governing board will be liable.
In a four-page letter released late Friday, the bishop of the country's largest diocese, with 90,000 members, sent a letter to parishes conducting a 40-day period of discernment on whether to leave the Episcopal Church.
Thousands of Episcopalians already have left the 2.2 million-member denomination over arguments about biblical authority and the 2003 consecration of New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson, an active homosexual.
"I believe your successors in the future will regret that decision and its destructive consequences to the whole church," the bishop wrote of congregations threatening to leave the diocese. Any congregation attempting to leave without a negotiated settlement with the diocese "will have repercussions and possible civil liability for individual vestry members."

Liberal Compassion

The always insightful Thomas Sowell has skewered the liberals with solid evidence that despite their constant call for forgiveness of loans to 3rd world countries, a living wage for the poor, and a safety net for all, these are all governmental acts of compassion. How about situations where the actual help for someone or something comes out of their own pockets? Not so caring, it seems. You can read his essay here, but at the end you may be reminded as I was that when the press looked at Al Gore's tax information while running for President, they found his charitable contributions for an entire year was $768.00.

The Kyoto Price Tag

There is every indication that carbon dioxide emissions will become an international concern which almost matches the attention currently being paid to Britney's crotch. IBD has an editorial reporting that 90% of Europeans believe that man is responsible for the current warming trend. Even more interesting is the poll showing that 68% of them would be in favor of lifestyle restrictions to help address this "problem". The question now is how much in favor they really are. If the Kyoto accords are actually met by Europe, it is estimated the EU would lose from 1.5 to 4% of their GDP and millions of jobs. This would be 4 million in Spain and 1 million jobs a year in Britain from 2008 to 2012. The Clinton administration correctly concluded that the Kyoto Treaty should not even be submitted to the Senate because it would cost us $400 BILLION a year and nearly 4.9 million lost jobs. Maybe this would be acceptable to the Europeans since they aren't all that crazy about work in the first place, but someone should consider the calculation that each one- billionth if warming avoidance will cost $100,000. So, in order to reduce the global temperature by about 1 degree Celsius, it would cost $100 TRILLION.
As IBD points out, the loony environmentalists bemoan the cost of doing nothing (which is at least as theoretical as the calculations above), but Europeans should at least consider the cost before getting in line for a dubious remedy to a nebulous problem. The same admonition should be made to the newly empowered Dems in the U.S. Congress who will be inclined to follow everything European.

Bush needs to take another look

When they first met, President Bush said he looked into Vladimir Putin's soul and liked what he saw. As Putin continues on his current path to destroy all semblance of democracy in Russia and eliminate his critics by whatever means necessary, Bush needs to reconsider what a proper soul looks like.

Diversity Anyone

The loony left is quite insistent on society providing for diversity unless that includes ideas which come from anywhere this side of Marxism. Witness the reaction on college campuses when speakers who are invited which have ideas that do not comport with their extreme ideology. Such violent demonstrations have been directed toward Ann Coulter , John Bolton, and now Tom Tancredo.

Stephen Hawking says get of here

"The long-term survival of the human race is at risk as long as it is confined to a single planet," Hawking said. "Sooner or later, disasters such as an asteroid collision or nuclear war could wipe us all out. But once we spread out into space and establish independent colonies, our future should be safe.

"There isn't anywhere like the Earth in the solar system, so we would have to go to another star.

"If we used chemical fuel rockets like the Apollo mission to the moon, the journey to the nearest star would take 50,000 years. This is obviously far too long to be practical, so science fiction has developed the idea of warp drive, which takes you instantly to your destination. Unfortunately, this would violate the scientific law which says that nothing can travel faster than light.

"However, we can still within the law, by using matter/antimatter annihilation, and reach speeds just below the speed of light. With that, it would be possible to reach the next star in about six years, though it wouldn't seem so long for those on board."

The science fiction series Star Trek has used matter/antimatter annihilation as an explanation for the warp drive. But, in reality, he said that scientists believe that the flash of radiation produced when matter and antimatter are brought together and destroy one another could in fact one day be used to drive craft to close to the speed of light.

Over-rated

Ankle-Biting Pundit has a good list of things which they consider "overrated" in our culture. Many of them are right on. Some additions I might suggest are Britney Spears, Michael Vick, Dick Vitale, and European golf "analysts". The latter are as worthless as the female sideline commentators which seem to be essential for every football broadcast. On the other hand, if it keeps females out of the booth itself, go for it.

Everyone knew this was coming

A lesbian couple "married" in Massachusetts has filed for "divorce" in Rhode Island, setting up a legal conundrum for judges in a state where the laws are silent on the legality of same-sex "marriage."

Read the article here.

The Coburn and DeMint Spending Obstacle

This is a good description of how two of the finest politicians in the United States are saving you and me money. These Senators are going to need bodyguards if they keep standing in the way of needless pork spending.

Good Times Here Again

From Instapundit:

For three years, pay increases haven't kept pace with the rising cost of living. Then came this year's housing slowdown, which has further squeezed family finances.

Those setbacks, however, are now being offset by rising income. Four percent may not sound like much, but you have to look back to 1997 to find a calendar year with a gain that big.

Equally significant, tamer energy prices mean that the "real" wage gains, after inflation, are above 3 percent for the past 12 months. That, too, hasn't happened since the 1990s, even though the economy has been expanding over the past five years.

"Less than 2 weeks after the Democrats gained control of Congress, wages are increasing. Imagine how much upward wage pressure there will be after the labor pool is cut by a million men due to Rangel's draft."

Wal*Mart

The loony left can't seem to stand the very existence of Wal*Mart. The complaint seems to be they don't pay enough to their workers and the benefits are not sufficient. This doesn't seem to bother the millions who willingly work there, but the liberals are really carrying water for the labor unions who have not managed to break into the workforce there and them like they did the steel industry, the auto industry, and so forth.
Since the company must be vilified, John Edwards must be part of the chorus, but he was embarrassed recently when one of his volunteers went to Wal*Mart management trying to break into the line and get Edwards a Playstation 3 when others were sleeping in lines outside the store. Of course, Edwards says his volunteer was doing this without authorization and was excercising excessive enthusiasm. Whatever. My question, however, is why a man who is so concerned with the poor worker's wages at Wal*Mart using volunteers instead of paying those who work for him?

Ecosexuals????

I just ran across the term "ecosexual" and was thus interested to learn just what one is. Naturally, the best examples seem to come from California and the following is a description of one....probably not an extreme example.

San Francisco designer Rachel Pearson, 33, owns a successful line of children’s clothing made of organic cotton that also meets international fair-trade rules. For herself she favors clothing from thrift stores—“Not buying new,” she says, “eases the toll on the earth.” A vegetarian, she recycles religiously [ed: of course] and loves to pamper herself with yoga and meditation.

There’s another arena in which Pearson upholds green values, and it can create a bit of an etiquette problem. “I won’t date a guy who doesn’t recycle,” she says. “He doesn’t have to wear nonleather shoes, but he has to get it.” And woe betide the guy who doesn’t.

For a while she was happily dating a film producer from Los Angeles who, she thought, was definitely on her eco-wavelength. But one morning they went out for breakfast, and Mr. Right ordered an all-meat meal and doused his coffee with several packets of Equal. “I was dumbstruck,” says Pearson. “I think I ate my entire meal in silence. Pork plus NutraSweet? That was definitely our last date.”

Political Equality

It would be hard to make the case that either of our major political parties have the foggiest idea of how to govern. One would think they have made some sort of suicide pact to see which could self-destruct the fastest.

China has big problems

This is a most fascinating glimpse into the most basic of problems being faced by China. With billions of people and diminishing water and clean air, it is easy to predict a calamitous upheaval there in the fairly near future.

Ethics Legislation? Not so fast!

The new Congress controlled by Demos is having second thoughts on ethics reform. It must be so if you can read about it in the New York Times.

Here comes infiltration

From the Islamic Voice.

Muslim Brotherhood Office in US

Washington DC

The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (SMB), in alliance with the ex-vice- president of Syria, Abdul Halim Khaddam, a staunch Ba’athist, have opened an office in Washington DC. The aim of the office is to infiltrate the US government and influence its apathy towards political Islam. Ammar Abdul Hamid, a Syrian intellectual who works at Brookings Institute, will be running the office for the National Salvation Front. His duties are to sell political Islam and Ba’athism to reluctant US government officials and to give the Muslim Brotherhood a platform in the Think Tank community of Washington from which they can preach democracy.

Pelosi Intelligence

BestView can't wait to see if Nancy Pelosi succumbs to an inclination to play racial politics and puts a corrupt and impeached Alcee Hastings as the head of the Intelligence Committee. I doubt she is that stupid, but......

Republican Minority

The newly minted minority of Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to keep Boehner and Blunt as their leaders for the next session. Evidently they decided that rather than looking at fresh faces and new ideas, it would be smarter to keep those who helped create the minority in the first place. (James Taranto)

Borat

There aren't many movie reviews here since I only see about 2 movies a year, but I went to see "Borat" last evening. The main feeling I left with was one of mild depression. I must be getting old since the exception of a few chuckles scattered about, the thing was mainly just lame. Scatological humor is not my forte, I guess.

Things are tough at the top

Washington, DC – Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) questioned soon-to-be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) commitment to eradicating corruption with her endorsement of one of the most unethical members in Congress, Rep. John Murtha (D-PA), to be Majority Leader of the House of Representatives.

Rep. Murtha was listed in CREW’ report Beyond DeLay: The 20 Most Corrupt Members of Congress (and five to watch). As reported in the study and by the news media, Rep, Murtha has been involved in a number of pay-to play schemes involving former staffers and his brother, Robert “Kit” Murtha.

Eight incumbents in CREW’s report lost their races to ethics issues.

CREW’s report can be found at www.beyonddelay.org.

Minority Leader

The next big hill for the House Republicans to climb is the election between John Boehner and Mike Pence for Minority Leader. The choice will indicate whether or not the remaining Republicans understand how much trouble they are in. If they stand with the old team represented by Boehner, it will not be a good sign. Pence opposed the Bush prescription drug boondoggle during a one-on-one meeting with the President in the oval office by telling him he didn't come to Washington to add new entitlements. He also opposed the No Child Left Behind fiasco that Bush crafted with Ted Kennedy on the basis that we should not be federalizing education. With the prospect that Bush might be inclined to join with the dems to show how bipartisan he is, we need someone who can keep the Reaganesque principles in view when Bush leaves the reservation as he often does.

What we should do in Iraq

This is a very fine analysis of what we should do in Iraq. This is offered willingly since it follows almost exactly what I have been thinking.

George Will Wisdom

At least Republicans now know where the "Bridge to Nowhere" leads: to the political wilderness.

Read the whole thing. Entertaining and astute.

A one sentence summary of the election

"The Republicans lost and the Democrats won for the same reason -- they distanced themselves from their base. "

Political Observations

It seems to me the Republicans lost their way when they lost such leaders as Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey. After that, the House of Representatives shifted from trying to enact legislation based on their core beliefs to stuff which they felt would keep them in power. Conservatives don't add entitlement programs like Part D of Medicare and then belly up to the pork trough to spend so much money that nobody could accuse them of not bringing home bacon. In other words, the Republicans started acting like Democrats in an effort to retain power. This week, they learned that the Democrats recruited candidates which campaigned on basic Republican principles in order to win. If this were a legal situation, George W. could be indicted as a co-conspirator since he permitted and even abetted this behavior.

Interesting Election Fact from Opinion Journal

It was not a referendum on Iraq. One of the most pro-Iraq lawmakers in Congress, Sen. Joe Lieberman, ran as an independent and trounced anti-Iraq Democratic nominee Ned Lamont. Meanwhile, of the five remaining Republican members of Congress who voted against Iraq's liberation, three lost: Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R.I.), Rep. John Hostettler (Ind.) and Rep. Jim Leach (Iowa). Only two anti-Iraq Republicans will return to the 110th Congress: Reps. Jimmy Duncan (Tenn.) and Ron Paul (Texas).

Election Post-mortem

Random thoughts:

Larry Sabato and Bill Kristol were almost on the money with pre-election predictions and the polls did a pretty decent job of showing the situation in most races.

With few notable exceptions like J.D. Hayworth of Arizona, most of the House losers were replaced by someone at least as conservative. Even the loss of Santorem didn't seem tragic to me since he supported Specter in the last election instead of Toomer.

It is Wednesday morning after the election and I can't wait to hear Rush Limbaugh counter the allegation that he lost the Talent seat with his reaction to Michael Fox. Should be fun.

Hastert has to go. Good riddance to Frist. Both were terrible leaders.

The inside word I get on Pelosi is she will smile sweetly as she cuts your heart out.

Up until now the worst campaign in recent memory was run by John Kerry. This honor now belongs to George Allen of Virginia. He could have won if he had simply gone to a remote island for the duration of the campaign.

It will be interesting to see if the Republicans can work better with Democrats than they have with each other over the last 2 years. They might since much of their agenda seemed pretty liberal to me.

Mark Steyn on John Kerry

Sometimes life is not fair and when a political figure does something sufficiently stupid to warrent the attention of someone like Mark Steyn or Ann Coulter, the result is brutal. Here is a portion of Mark Steyn's take on the latest John Kerry episode. You need to read it all, however.

A vain thin-skinned condescending blueblood with no sense of his own ridiculousness, Senator Nuancy Boy is secure in little else except his belief in his indispensability.......Whatever he may or may not have intended (and "I was making a joke about how stupid Bush is but I'm the only condescending liberal in America too stupid to tell a Bush-is-stupid joke without blowing it" must rank as one of the all-time lame excuses), what he said fits what too many upscale Dems believe: that America's soldiers are only there because they're too poor and too ill-educated to know any better.

Why polls are flawed

From Powerline.

The most difficult challenge for every pollster is figuring out which poll respondents will actually vote, i.e., are "likely voters." Pollsters try to get at this by first asking respondents whether they are registered voters. If the respondent claims to be registered, the pollster asks whether he intends to vote in the coming election, and whether he has voted in the past.

In this particular ABC/Washington Post poll, 80% claimed to be registered voters. (Question number 905.) But this undoubtedly exaggerated the number of registered voters in the pool, since as of 2002, only 66% of eligible voters were registered.

Next, take a look at question number three in the ABC/Post poll: no fewer than 70% of those who answered the telephone, and claimed to be registered voters, said they are "absolutely certain" to vote, while another 11% said they "probably" will vote and 5% said they already had voted. Those numbers add up to 86% of registered voters, and, if 80% of respondents really were registered, 69% of eligible voters.

That's not all: the 70% who said they were absolutely certain to vote were asked whether they always, usually or sometimes vote in off-year elections. The result? 95% said they either "always" (71%) or "nearly always" (17%) or "usually" vote in midterm elections.

Pity the poor pollster. An overwhelming majority of his respondents tell him they surely will vote tomorrow, and, indeed, always do. But the pollster knows that over the past twenty years, the percentage of eligible voters who actually voted in a midterm election has never topped forty percent, while the turnout among registered voters has never exceeded 72%.

Which means that in this particular poll, probably around a quarter to a third of the respondents who assured the pollster that they will vote, won't. (Here's where I need a mathematician like Dafydd ab Hugh to check my calculation.)

So how can the pollster know which of his respondents will in fact show up at the polls tomorrow? He can't know, actually. But one thing we do know from experience is that Republicans tend to turn out and vote more reliably than Democrats, no matter how much enthusiasm for the process Democrats express to pollsters. Based on experience, what a pollster really should do is weight his poll results in favor of Republicans. But I doubt whether any of them do that.

In short, we really don't know what will happen tomorrow. The election will be decided by those who show up, and somewhere up to a third of those who claim they are going to vote--and always do!--won't.

Power out in Germany

This was found on Instapundit and is pretty funny.

Remember when the lights went out in New York? The reaction at "Der Spiegel" was outrageous yet predictable. The outage was described as evidence that America was a faltering superpower with a third rate power grid.

The New York outage was simply further evidence for German media elites that America was in decline and Raubtier capitalism and privatization were all to blame. German media consumers were assured that such a massive failure could never happen in statist Europe.

In fact, the lights did go out just a few weeks later in Italy and Switzerland and Scandinavia, but the reaction in German media was neither sensationalist nor alarmist. There were no scandalous covers deriding the failures of the European economic model or way of life.

Now the lights have gone out again in Europe. This time Germany is in the midst of the outage. . . . But how could that be possible in the wonderful land of social-democratic Oz? How could a nation that has rejected brutal capitalism and amerikanische Verhaeltnisse suffer such an outage? Where are our beautiful windmills when we need them? It just isn't fair. Oh yeah, by the way: Could Bush be to blame? Maybe this is CIA sabotage...

The Election

It is going to be interesting to see how the election results compare to the polls. If the polls are right, it will be a really big democratic swing in both the House and Senate. As a scientist, however, I am dubious. In order for a scientist to have any confidence in the results of an experiment, he must be comfortable with the methodology. I am not there yet on polls. At 3PM on election day in the most recent Presidential election, we were facing the certainty of a President Kerry. This remained a certainty until 9PM when it became obvious that all the polls at the exits were wrong and they were wrong in the same direction. Why was this? Here is one thought. If you call a conservative and a liberal on the phone, is one more likely than the other to take several minutes to answer questions? If you stop a liberal after he or she has voted, is that person more or less likely to take the time to participate in your exit poll than a conservative? I have no idea, but I do know that if you call me, I will hang up before the first question is asked. We do not have caller I.D. on our land-line phone, but many people do. If someone does have caller I.D. and pays extra for it, I have to conclude many of them do not even answer if they don't recognize the number. Does this situation apply more frequently to Democrats or Republicans?
Like most people, I am about sick of all the election blather and remain firm in my view that the Republicans deserve to lose but the Dems don't deserve to win. I will vote and in each case my choice is going to be a vote for the Republican and each of them will win. After that, I will sit back and see how well the results conform to the polls and the pre-election predictions of the liberal press that this will be a democratic victory.

Extreme Environments

At one time I had a research project being conducted in my lab which involved organisms which were able to grow at low temperatures. This was some 3 decades ago and there was a prevailing interest in such organisms since we had space probes to Mars, for example, which were attempting to discover if life existed elsewhere in our universe. Since that time, we have found numerous examples of life in such places as oil reservoirs, solid rock, acidic waste from mining operations, and many other places once considered too inhospitable for life. There have been bacteria found at the bottom of an Alaska pond which were frozen 30,000 years ago. When thawed, they proliferate nicely.
This has been known to microbiologists for years, but I recently read about the discovery of organisms being discovered in rocks 2 miles below the earth's surface which are able to live and reproduce using the radioactivity in uranium, and other substances to exist. Basically, the radioactivity breaks down water and sulfur to produce sulfate which the bacteria use to grow, metabolize, and reproduce. The significance of this is that these orgainsms are able to exist and reproduce in the complete absence of sunlight, which has been previously assumed to be required for all life on earth. Since this is no longer the case, life on Mars and other planets is not now considered such a remote possibility and we should perhaps go back and look at the earlier conclusion that no life can be found on Mars.

Not surprising

CRAWFORDSVILLE, Ind. Oct 27, 2006 (AP)— A teenager who decided to get her breasts pierced for her 18th birthday faces reconstructive surgery after a flesh-destroying infection forced doctors to remove her left breast.

Doctors diagnosed Edington, who had the piercings on Aug. 29, with necrotizing fasciitis, or gas gangrene a rare condition that results from rapid bacteria growth and leads to tissue destruction. It is only the third documented case in the world of gas gangrene in the breast area, Goulet told The Paper of Montgomery County.

The Iraq Solution

Conservative supporters of President Bush are rapidly coming to the conclusion that support for the current Iraqi government in general and Maliki in particular is rapidly coming to a halt. The Prime Minister has no heart for the task of confronting the Sadr and other militias and the situation can't be allowed to continue. There are two solutions as far as I can see. The first is for our military to take off the politically correct gloves and use our resources to eliminate the Sadr problem as rapidly and as brutally as necessary. This would mean we would have to stop worrying about how others see us and what the Europeans think.
The other positive suggestion is to hand oil-rich Kirkuk to the Kurds, establish military bases in Iraqi Kurdistan, and let the Sunnis and Shias fight it out. In order for the mess in Iraq to be resolved, the Iraqi people have to want freedom from Islamic domination as much as we want freedom for Iraq. Right now, that is not the case.

Water from air

There is a small private company called Aqua Sciences which has developed a way to extract drinking water from the air. FEMA now has two of these systems which in their case come in 40 foot trailers and cost $1 million each. The trailers can be brought to the site of a disaster and quickly produce 2500 gallons of pure fresh water a day at a cost of 15 - 30 cents per gallon. This compares to a cost of $15 per gallon to have water trucked in. This means that FEMA can pay off the cost of each trailer in 4 days of a single disaster.
The systems work like your salt shaker in absorbing moisture from the air. Salt is hygroscopic in that it is highly attractive of water and the water, unlike ground water is pure and can be used directly. Each trailer, however, comes with a reverse osmosis system which can also produce water from brackish or contaminated water sources at the site of a hurricane, for example.
Naturally, the military is very interested in the technology since each soldier in Iraq, for example, requires 3 gallons of water per day and water convoys are common targets for our enemy over there.
It is estimated that 1 billion people around the world lack a steady source of potable water. It would be nice to have a market like that to target with a novel technology like this. I wish I could buy stock in the company.

More from Opinion Journal

Debbie Stabenow, Michigan's junior U.S. Senator, says President Bush and Vice President Cheney don't follow the law when it comes to national security issues, and the Republican-controlled Congress has failed to hold them accountable. "The reality is, both the president and Dick Cheney don't believe they are hampered by the law," Stabenow told the News-Review editorial board. "They believe the general powers of the presidency allow them to do whatever they need to do to keep us safe.

It is hard for BestView to find a negative with her conclusion.

A view from Iraq

This letter from a sargeant in Iraq makes a lot of sense to me and it confirms my long-held thought that the U.S. should not be using its military to build a nation or a democracy. It is trained and should be used to kill people. This came to James Taranto at Opinion Journal.

There's been a lot of discussion back home about the course of the war, the righteousness of our involvement, the clarity of our execution, and what to do about the predicament in which we currently find ourselves. I just wanted to send you my firsthand account of what's happening here.

First, a little bit about me: I'm stationed slightly northwest of Baghdad in a mixed Sunni/Shia area. I'm a sergeant in the U.S. Army on a human intelligence collection team. I interact with Iraqis on a daily basis and I help put together the intel picture for our area of operations. I have contacts with friends, who are also in my job, in every are of operations in the Fourth Infantry Division footprint, and through our crosstalk I'd say I have a pretty damn good idea of what's going on in and around Baghdad on a micro and intermediary level.

I wrote heavily in favor of this war before I enlisted myself, and I still maintain that going into Iraq was not only the necessary thing to do, but the right thing to do as well.

There have been distinct failures of policy in Iraq. The vast majority of them fall under the category "failure to adapt." Basically U.S. policies have been several steps behind the changing conditions ever since we came into the country. I believe this is (in part) due to our plainly obvious desire to extricate ourselves from Iraq. I know President Bush is preaching "stay the course," but we came over here with a goal of handing over our battlespace to the Iraqis by the end of our tour here.

This breakneck pace with which we're trying to push the responsibility for governing and securing Iraq is irresponsible and suicidal. It's like throwing a brick on a house of cards and hoping it holds up. The Iraqi Security Forces (ISF)--a joint term referring to Iraqi army and Iraqi police--are so rife with corruption, insurgent sympathies and Shia militia members that they have zero effectiveness. Two Iraqi police brigades in Baghdad have been disbanded recently, and the general sentiment in our field is "Why stop there?" I can't tell you how many roadside bombs have been detonated against American forces within sight of ISF checkpoints. Faith in the Iraqi army is only slightly more justified than faith in the police--but even there, the problems of tribal loyalties, desertion, insufficient training, low morale and a failure to properly indoctrinate their soldiers results in a substandard, ineffective military. A lot of the problems are directly related to Arab culture, which traditionally doesn't see nepotism and graft as serious sins. Changing that is going to require a lot more than "benchmarks."

In Shia areas, the militias hold the real control of the city. They have infiltrated, co-opted or intimidated into submission the local police. They are expanding their territories, restricting freedom of movement for Sunnis, forcing mass migrations, spiking ethnic tensions, not to mention the murderous checkpoints, all while U.S. forces do . . . nothing.

For the first six months I was in country, sectarian violence was classified as an "Iraqi on Iraqi" crime. Division didn't want to hear about it. And, in a sense I can understand why. Because division realized that which the Iraqi people have come to realize: The American forces cannot protect them. We are too few in number and our mission is "stability and support." The problem is that there's nothing to give stability and support to. We hollowed out the Baathist regime, and we hastily set up this provisional government, thrusting political responsibility on a host of unknowns, each with his own political agenda, most funded by Iran, and we're seeing the results.

In Germany after World War II, we controlled our sector with approximately 500,000 troops, directly administering the area for 10 years while we rebuilt the country and rebuilt the social and political infrastructure needed to run it. In Iraq, we've got one-third that number of troops dealing with three times the population on a much faster timetable, and we're attempting to unify three distinct ethnic groups with no national interest and at least three outside influences (Saudi Arabian Wahhabists, Iranian mullahs and Syrian Baathists) each eagerly funding various groups in an attempt to see us fail. And we are.

If we continue on as is in Iraq, we will leave here (sooner or later) with a fractured state, a Rwanda-waiting-to-happen. "Stay the course" and refusing to admit that we're screwing things up is already killing a lot of people needlessly. Following through with such inane nonstrategy is going to be the death knell for hundreds of thousands of Sunnis.

We need to backtrack. We need to publicly admit we're backtracking. This is the opening battle of the ideological struggle of the 21st century. We cannot afford to lose it because of political inconveniences. Reassert direct administration, put 400,000 to 500,000 American troops on the ground, disband most of the current Iraqi police and retrain and reindoctrinate the Iraqi army until it becomes a military that's fighting for a nation, not simply some sect or faction. Reassure the Iraqi people that we're going to provide them security and then follow through. Disarm the nation: Sunnis, Shias, militia groups, everyone. Issue national ID cards to everyone and control the movement of the population.

If these three things are done, you can actually start the Iraqi economy again. Once people have a sense of security, they'll be able to leave their houses to go to work. Tell your American commanders that it's OK to pass up bad news--because part of the problem is that these issues are not reaching above the battalion or brigade level due to the can-do, make-it-happen culture indoctrinated into our U.S. officers. While the attitude is admirable, it also creates barriers to recognizing and dealing with on-the-ground realities.

James, there's a lot more to this than I've written here. The short of it is, the situation is salvageable, but not with "stay the course" and certainly not with cut and run. However, the commitment required to save it is something I doubt the American public is willing to swallow. I just don't see the current administration with the political capital remaining in order to properly motivate and convince the American public (or the West in general) of the necessity of these actions.

At the same time, failure in Iraq would be worse than a dozen Somalias, and would render us as impotent and emasculated as we were in the days after Vietnam. There is a global cultural-ideological struggle being waged, and abdication from Iraq is tantamount to concession.

Puzzlement

Last week an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll reported the lowest public approval rating for Congress since 1992. The mystery is where do you go to find the16 percent who approve?

Liberals getting loopier and loopier

BestView loves to point out the idiotic antics of the loony left, but this may be the one that tops them all. This was in the Wall Street Journal this morning so there is no link that readers can follow to read it themselves, but here is an accurate summary of the latest liberal obscenity. It should be no surprise that this comes from San Francisco. It seems there is a section of that fair city called the Tenderloin. An owner of an architecture firm decided she would move there and try to improve and revitalize the area. She wanted to plant trees, clean up the streets of garbage and that sort of thing. Well, she soon found herself the subject of pamplets being circulated which thoroughly disparaged her efforts. It turns out that the neighborhood is populated by pimps, drug addicts, transvestites and transgenders, prostitutes, etc. Those opposed to changes maintained the residents give the Tenderloin its special personality and any clean-up efforts would destroy the atmosphere that welcomes this fringe of society who, if their world were cleaned up, would have no other refuge. One irate resident summed up the situation thusly---"This was a place where people who don't fit in, the ostracized and cast-off, could find a place of their own". The guy who was behind the objections is named Matt Bernstein Sycamore , a former prostitute and member of the gay activist group called Gay Shame. Mr. Sycamore is also known by his drag queen name, Mary Hedgefunds.
Beam me up, Scottie.

Liberals never learn

The latest example of liberal idiocy comes from California where many such examples originate. Consider Proposition 87 on the ballot for the upcoming election. This would raise the tax on all oil extracted from California by 1.5% to 6% depending on the price of oil. The logic? Well, they want to reduce energy consumption and dependency on foreign oil. In sum, they want to tax California oil so consumers will use less oil from Saudia Arabia. This is stupid enough, but they go further. This measure would cost California oil producers an estimated 4 billion dollars over the next 10 years and there is a separate section that would prohibit oil companies from passing the increased cost of the higher taxes on to consumers. So the logic is that consumers will use less of something when the cost does not increase. In fact, the net effect will be a tariff on our oil which will actually make America more rather than less dependent on foreign sources. Amazing.

The bottom line

As Thomas Sowell has said, the Republicans are disappointing and maybe even bumbling, but the Democrats are dangerous. The liberals who control the Democrat party say they "support the troops", but their actions give them away. Consider:
1. Missile defense of America---Democrats voted against it
2. Patriot Act---Democrats voted against it
3. Intercepting terrorist messages into the U.S.---Democrats voted against it
4. Tracing terrorist money flow between foreign banks---Democrats voted against it
5. Interrogating captured terrorists---Democrats voted against it
6. Reinforcing our southern border with Mexico to at least slow down infiltration of terrorists, dope dealers and other criminals---Democrats voted against it
7. Telling the world and our enemy the timetable for withdrawing from and deserting Iraq---Democrats are all for it.

If you go back and study the foreign policy failures of Carter with respect to Iran, Afghanistan, and Korea combined with the missed opportunities brought about by Clinton's insistence on a legalistic approach to terrorists like Al-qaida in the 1990s, you should see just how dangerous a return to the liberal Democratic political agenda could be.

Election Fraud

One of the things to look for in the coming elections is fraud. In the past few elections when the democrat loses, it is easily explained by those cheating republicans--even when it occurs in counties where democrats operate the machinery. Someone scared all the old black people away from the polls or made the ballots so difficult that the stupid voter couldn't understand it. If not that, there were crooked election officials like Katherine Harris, the voting machines had been rigged, or something. Efforts to have someone show a picture ID to vote like you have to show to get on a plane is just another case of intimidation, and the liberals can't stand the idea of a fair election. It is as predictable as the sunrise.

That brings me to the current election. All the polls show the democrats will win big and take over the House of Representatives and maybe even the Senate. My focus on election day will be on how many close races will be challenged by Democrats and how many by Republicans. I can assure you that if the dems don't actually retake the House, it will be because of fraud. We wuz robbed! There will be many close races and I am almost sure we will have weeks of suspense before the results are actually known. Should be fun.

Republicans to the woodshed

...the Republicans deserve to lose, though alas the Democrats don't really deserve to win, either. I realize that you go to war with the political class you have, but even back in the 1990s it was obvious that we had a lousy political class. It hasn't improved, but the challenges have gotten greater. Can the country continue to do well, with such bad political leadership? I hope so, because I see no sign of improvement, no matter who wins next month.

This is a summary of the reasons the Republicans have alienated their base. It can be read here.
I agree with every point and especially the Harriet Meirs and the William Jefferson debacles. The Foley matter is really the least of the offenses.

Stop the presses

Some one must have screwed up badly. The Nobel Peace prize this year actually seems to have gone to someone who deserves it (contrast Jimmy Carter and Yasser Arafat).

Sex and Politics

Here is the lead paragraph from a Reuters article yesterday.

President George W. Bush and Republicans are sinking under the weight of the Iraq war and the Capitol Hill sex scandal, according to a flurry of polls, endangering their control of Congress in the November 7 elections.
Bill Clinton engaged in what later came to be declared non-sex since it was just oral. We now have a sex scandal on Capitol Hill because a gay Congressman sent E-mails about oral sex or whatever it was. I am getting so old I am confused about what sex is anymore.

Election Results

If you are interested in the coming elections and are dubious about such things as polls and pundits, you can get a great idea how they will come out from TradeSports. This is a futures site where you can buy and sell futures on any number of things, but one is whether or not the Republicans will retain the House and Senate. The advantage of this site is the participants are risking their actual money on the trade, so they tend to be very accurate. Each of the past two general elections have been correctly predicted, for example. Right now, the Republicans have a 42% chance of retaining the House and a 71% chance of retaining the Senate. The latter sounds a little high to me, but am I willing to go the other way with real money?

The Democrat Legacy

If anyone is interested in the history of how we got where we are today, it might help to review the presidency of Jimmy Carter, the President who has destroyed the credibility of the democrats in foreign policy. Here are some of the reasons he is widely considered the worst president we have ever had.
1. Made human rights the central focus of his foreign policy and thought the U.S. had an inordinate fear of the Soviets. So, he stopped production of the B1 bomber, lifted the travel bans to Cuba, North Korea, Viet Nam and pardoned draft evaders.
2. He withdrew support for our primary ally in the Mid-east, the Shah of Iran and thought the Ayatollah Khomeini would be better because he was a religious man and the Shah was mistreating the Soviet spies who were trying to take over Iran so they could get their oil and warm water ports. This lead to the declaration of Iran as an Islamic nation and executions followed which were carried out by Palestinian hit men so the mullahs wouldn't be blamed. So much for human rights.
3. The byproduct of this blunder was the creation of the Hezbollah, a terrorist organization which bombed the barracks in Lebanon and killed 241 Marines and sailors. More recently they attacked Israel and started a war which damaged much of Lebanon infrastructure.
4. In 1979 the Iranians including their current puppet president stormed the U.S. embassy and held 52 U.S. personnel hostage for 444 days. The Carter response was a bungled rescue attempt which was conducted in a sandstorm because the pilots were forbidden to meet with the weather forecasters for security reasons. The result was a loss of 8 aircraft, five airmen, and 3 Marines.
5. Shortly after Carter kissed Brezhnev on both cheeks the USSR invaded Afghanistan. Carter was shocked. " I can't believe the Russians lied to me", he said. But, during Carter's administration the communists took over Ethiopia, South Yemen, Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Grenada, and Nicaragua.
6. Compared to the pre-Viet Nam war defense budget in 1964, the 1982 Carter defense budget request was for a 45% decrease in fighter aircraft, a 75% reduction in ships, an 83% reduction in attack subs, and a 90% reduction in helicopters. As a percentage of the total government spending in 1980 our defense spending was less than before Pearl Harbor.

Credit IBD for most of these facts and Ronald Reagan for pulling us out of this morass.

Another education failure

I just ran across an interesting study and survey. The study quizzed 14,000 randomly selected students at schools of higher education nationwide and tested them on such things as the Monroe Doctrine and the Declaration of Independence. Seniors failed this exam with an average score of 53%. In 16 of the 50 schools (like Brown, Georgetown, and Yale) there was negative learning. This just means that the seniors scored worse than freshmen.
Here is a snippet from the study:

Seniors lack basic knowledge of America's history. More than half, 53.4 percent, could not identify the correct century when the first American colony was established at Jamestown. And 55.4 percent could not recognize Yorktown as the battle that brought the American Revolution to an end (28 percent even thought the Civil War battle at Gettysburg the correct answer).

So, even though students arrive on campus with inadequate knowledge of America's history and institutions and in great need of improved civic literacy, institutions of higher education in America do little to facilitate this learning. On average, three years of higher learning adds a dismal 0.2 percent to students' already limited knowledge of American history and a meager 0.9 percent in government and political thought. Colleges and universities fared little better in teaching about "America and the World," adding 1.7 percent in average student learning.

My theory is the liberals who dominate the "liberal arts" are content to send their students into the world with scant ability to discern the fallacies inherent in the campaigns of demogogic politicians and the bias of the main stream media so they can orient the curriculum around the politically correct courses such as women's and ethnic studies.

Weather Forecasts

If anyone is still out there with an IQ over their hat size who still believes those who are predicting a temperature rise of some specific amount over the next 100 years, they should go back a few months and re-read what these weather experts were saying about how bad the hurricanes were going to be this year.

Understanding Islam

There is a book being recommended by William F. Buckley that goes a long way in his opinion to clarify what we need to know as we confront the actions of militant Islamists. The article can be read here. The book is authored by Mary Habeck. She is a scholar at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins, and her book, "Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror," is published by Yale University Press. A sample chosen by Buckley.

"The question of offensive jihad is ... complex and controversial," writes Habeck. "The most widely respected Islamic authorities ... all assume that Muslims have a duty to spread the dominion of Islam, through military offensives, until it rules the world. By the 'dominion of Islam' these authorities did not mean that everyone in the world must convert to Islam, since they also affirmed that 'there is no compulsion in religion,' rather that every part of the Earth must come under Islamic governance and especially the rule of the sharia.

"Azzam's definition of offensive jihad (Azzam is the principal modern theorist of militant Islam) follows this traditional understanding of jihad, noting that it is a duty for the leader of the Muslims 'to assemble and send out an army unit into the land of war once or twice every year.'" The jihadist is obliged to perform with all available capabilities "until there remain only Muslims or people who submit to Islam."

Toleration of Intolerance

Robert Sowell captures the situation once again. Read it all here.

The drive to extend Geneva convention protection to terrorists who are not covered under the Geneva convention is one of a number of dangerous self-indulgences by people who seem to think that being morally one-up is the ultimate and survival is secondary.

Senator Lindsey Graham's comment that we are going to win in our struggle with terrorists "because we are better" was all too typical of this mindset.

It would be hard to know which would be worse -- if he said it as just some offhand political rhetoric or whether he is really fatuous enough to believe it and irresponsible enough to gamble American lives rather than extract murderous secrets from captured cutthroats.

The National Intelligence Estimate

Once we get close to an election, the President's enemies in the CIA begin leaking classified material and this time it is part of an NIE which in itself is really just a summary of opinions by various intelligence agents or agencies. The hot item this time is the one which says the war in Iraq is increasing the radicalism of Islam. There are many questions regarding the validity of this conclusion, but the interesting thing is how the liberals like Ted Kennedy have latched onto this as if it were biblical. Obviously President Bush is causing us to be less secure by his actions in Iraq and we have a classified intelligence report generated last April to prove it. Someone needs to point out to morons like Kennedy that the NIE of October 2002 warned of Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction. The NIE immediately preceding 09/11 virtually ignored Osama bin Laden and never even mentioned al-Qaida. Give me a break.

Clinton Lied???

I am shocked.

“The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn’t do that is just flatly false - and I think the 9/11 commission understood that,” Rice said during a wide-ranging meeting with Post editors and reporters.

“What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years,” Rice added.

The secretary of state also sharply disputed Clinton’s claim that he “left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy” for the incoming Bush team during the presidential transition in 2001.

“We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda,” Rice responded during the hourlong session.

First, identify the problem

Something called the Education Schools Project recently issued a report called "Educating School Teachers" and the conclusion after a review of the nations 1,206 university level schools of education don't have what it takes to produce excellent teachers. As a matter of fact, the report concludes that they have the lowest admission standards of any other school and the "least accomplished" professors. This would be bad enough, but there is consensus on neither how long teachers should study nor the nature of their preparation (theoretical or practical, for example). As opposed to law or medicine the education schools do not have a universally accepted body of knowledge and set of skills before graduates are allowed to practice.

Things are not likely to improve since the study found that many universities use the education schools as cash machines to admit and graduate everyone for the tuition dollars. The education establishment opposes any effort to improve the situation with more rigorous standards because that would deprive many people of the chance to become teachers. So, the whole enterprise seems to be rotten to the core. Sad.

Say it ain't so

The following from Mark Steyn concludes with a prediction which if it comes to pass will really decrease the number of air passengers in the future if my recent appraisal of young women during a recent trip to Las Vegas or our local mall is any indication. Very few women are walking around with that which God gave them.

Meanwhile, Birmingham Airport in England has banned passengers from boarding with “gel-filled bras”. People have been demanding for years now that we need to start profiling. Well, they’re profiling in Birmingham: they’re profiling women with padded bras, which is one great profile; their highly trained staff can spot gals who really stand out. I know I feel safer knowing that unusually curvaceous women are being subject to extra security screening. So gel-filled bras are out, and presumably in another year or two we’ll be preventing gel-filled breasts from boarding.

Common Sense

Everyone needs to read this and decide if John McCain and his stance on Article III of the Geneva Conventions makes sense. I'll go with Thomas Sowell almost everytime.

Unions for the working man???

I have long felt labor unions were primarily for losers. There was a time when they were a positive improvement for workers who let themselves be exploited, but since the workers were unable to perceive their situation correctly and respond accordingly, they were doomed to become exploited again by a different group. This has happened with modern unions. The Wall Street Journal recaps some of the ways in which the various unions spend the dues paid by the membership who actually work. The Bush administration a few years ago passed laws requiring unions to detail how they spend their money. Previously, they would lump big slugs of money in a category called "sundry expenses". As might be expected, the unions were not happy with this requirement. Now, the AFL-CIO is forced to report that $82 million of discretionary disbursements from July 2004 to June 2005 was divided in such a way that 36% went to represent its members in negotiations and 60% went to political activities and lobbying. The National Education Association spent only 33% on improving members working lot. Of course, most of the political money goes to losers like John Kerry and to such groups as Citizens for Tax Justice which works to raise taxes. Kinda sad, really.

Pelosi as Speaker??

Jonah Goldberg has a good essay today about how it might not be the end of the world if the dems won the House this election. He makes some sense. Here is a sample, but you can read it all here.

Republican control of the White House and Congress hasn't resulted in lights being turned off in Cabinet agencies or enormous garage sales of office furniture. Instead, Uncle Sam is still looking like Marlon Brando at the end of his career: bloated, sweaty and slow-moving. The GOP has become a Brando-like parody of its former self, reading its lines about cutting government without plausibility or passion.

I finally understand

Islam is a peaceful religion and if you say differently we will kill you.

Pity the Poor Pope

Well, the Pope quotes someone from centuries ago that seems to indicate Islam has a streak which seems to advance violence and a lack of tolerance. The reaction of the Islamists around the world is to protest this thought by acting to confirm it. It is obvious these illiterates have no ability to understand and act rationally since they are irrational and deluded losers.

As someone pointed out, it is akin to the situation whereby a white DC bureaucrat used "niggardly" in his speech to describe how seriously he took his responsibilities for the benefits of the taxpayers. Some illiterates misinterpreted that to be the dreaded "N" word. The poor guy apologized again and again for the following weeks, and finally lost his job.

ABC Mini-series

As we all anxiously await the airing of the controversial docudrama about 9/11, I can't help wondering if others find it strange to have Clinton lecturing one and all about how important it is for the network to tell the truth.....by ignoring his lies, I presume.

Clinton in crisis mode

The upcoming ABC docudrama about 9/11 evidently has something in it that suggests the Clintons did not do enough to capture and kill Osama in the 90's. Well, how dare they say his administration had any deficiencies in this regard. So, the pressure is on ABC to change its program and there is some evidence that the network is doing just that. Do they protest too much?

Newt nails it again

"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. . . . As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves."

--Abraham Lincoln
Annual message to Congress
Dec. 1, 1862

Newt Gingrich used this quote from Lincoln to introduce his brilliant analysis of our current situation with respect to the war on terrorism and in Iraq. It is a must read and I find it terribly sad that one of the most critical thinkers in our political arena has been brought to a point where his brilliance will not be given the deference it deserves. It is also sad that our current President is no Abraham Lincoln. Read the entire essay here.

Election Season

The election season is now officially underway since we have Labor Day behind us and the concensus seems to be that the Democrats will take over the House of Representatives and probably the Senate if all the stars align correctly as the liberal media seems to think they will. As much as I think the Republicans deserve to lose, the best thing they have going for them is the extreme unliklihood that conventional wisdom will come to pass. It seldom does in anything and especially in politics.

Katie's Debut

I didn't watch it, of course, but it was hard to avoid the critiques of Katie's first effort on the internet today. Most were fairly neutral, but this one was pretty funny. Here is a sample:

For her very first night as CBS News diva, Katie spent a half-hour looking as if she desperately had to go potty. Her back was so stiff as she looked into the camera, pop-eyed and self-conscious, I feared it would snap.

Her face was Botoxed beyond normal human endurance, proving that even pampered, overpaid news babes possess the courage to suffer for their art.

And later.....

The best that can be said about Katie Couric was that she did not trip over her 5-inch stiletto heels when she toddled across the floor of the set, crossing her bare legs like some ridiculous tramp.

Santorem/Casey Debate

Here is the Democrats answer to the Iraq situation as expounded by Bob Casey on Meet the Press last Sunday in a debate with Senator Santorem.

Russert: Let's go right to it: the war in Iraq. Mr. Casey, you're the challenger, you told the Philadelphia Inquirer August 2005 the following:

"Casey said he would have voted for the war considering the evidence at the time, and supported the spending bills that funded the effort." Knowing what you know today, would you still have voted for the war?

Casey: Tim, before I begin my answer I just want to make a note of a loss in Pennsylvania. Mayor Bob O'Connor, in the city of Pittsburgh, passed away. We want to express--I think we share that here today--we want to express our condolences to his family.

Tim, on the war in Iraq, if, if, if a lot of Americans knew now--if they knew then what they know now, they would, they would have thought that this war was the war that shouldn't have been fought based upon the misleading of this administration.

Here's what I think has to happen in Iraq today.

Russert: So you would not vote for it today.

Casey: Based upon the information that we have now, I think that, that a lot of Americans would have serious doubts. I'm not sure there would have even been a vote on Iraq that early in the--

Russert: But in '05 you said you'd vote for it. Would you today in '06 vote for it?

Casey: Based upon the evidence that was presented then, yes, which I think has been--was misleading, and I think it was faulty. The intelligence was faulty.

Russert: But today, today is no. Today you would vote no.

Casey: Today--if we knew then what we know now, sure. I think there wouldn't have been a vote and I think people would have changed.

After all that, the only thing we know for sure is that Casey is sorry the mayor died.

Republicans Care

As the Republican-lead House of Representatives returns from a month long vacation and with a limited schedule before they adjourn to ask us to send them back to "represent" us; I read that they have decided that they will not even try to pass anything which will address the illegal immigrant problem and the porous borders both parties have tolerated for decades. What then, is on the schedule? The major legislation on the floor in the House this week is a bill that would ban trading in horses to be slaughtered for human consumption. Now, there is a problem we have all been clamoring to be addressed

The Steyn take on Centanni/Wiig conversion to Islam

While in captivity by the Palestinians a few days ago, the Fox News employees appeared in a video and claimed they had converted to Islam. Upon their release, they said they did this to appease their captors and Mark Steyn in an essay gives his take on the matter as it relates to current events. Read the whole thing here.


In the Muslim world, they watch the Centanni/Wiig video and see men so in love with the present, the now, that they will do or say anything to live in the moment. And they draw their own conclusions... It doesn't matter how "understandable" Centanni and Wiig's actions are to us, what the target audience understands is quite different: that there is nothing we're willing to die for. And, to the Islamist mind, a society with nothing to die for is already dead.

An easy prediction

The following item appeared in the news recently. The liberals in Congress from the America is always wrong party have opposed the concept of us having the ability to repel a missle attack since the Reagan years and I predict it will not be long before the Democrats again resume their call for a reduction in funding for this endeavor which "won't work" even though it did. The North Koreans will be pleased.

North Korea Saturday called a U.S. missile defense test a threat and vowed to strengthen its defense measures in response.

North Korea's Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland released a statement saying the U.S. test, which was conducted Friday over the Pacific Ocean, "was aimed at attacking us and intercepting our missiles," the BBC reported Saturday.

Pluots

I am not sure where they have been all my life, but I just discovered these things which are supposedly a genetic cross of plums and apricots. Find some which are still pretty firm and cool them in the fridge. Great.

No Child Left Behind

Our area just reported its results for the SAT and evidently our scores were down relative to the national average. The apologists in our education system were not smart enough to understand that when you are down relative to others who took the same test, it is not exactly an excuse to say the exam was harder and longer this year than last year.

Critics have long complained that the compliance requirements for NCLB puts too much stress on state resources and educators, many of whom say they must teach to the test at the expense of other learning. This might be better accepted if the test scores they are teaching toward were actually increasing.

Time to wake up

I was reading a news article yesterday about a motorist in San Francisco who went on a hit-and-run spree that involved trying to run over pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists for a full hour. He injured 14 and killed 1. Press accounts centered on alleged mental illness and left out the fact that he was Muslim from Afghanistan who seemed calm, coherent and unrepentant when he was finally captured. The Jewish Community Center was a few blocks from where the rampage ended. Is this an isolated incident? Let's see.
A few months ago, a Muslim immigrant from Pakistan went on a shooting spree in a Seattle Jewish Center. The press ignored his stated religious motive (" I am a Muslim-American; I'm angry at Israel"). Again he was declared to have a history of mental illness.
In North Carolina last Spring at the University in Chapel Hill, another angry Muslim lashed out at infidels by hitting 9 people with a SUV he rented for the purpose. He was an Iranian who said he wanted to punish the U.S. for its actions around the world. The media played down the obvious angle as BestView pointed out at the time.
The Beltway snipers in Maryland were Muslim converts who stated their objective was to "terrorize" Washington. The news outlets at the time chose to ignore the fact that the leader's name had been changed to John Muhammed and instead used his previous name of John Allen Williams. Look it up.
Finally, there was the Muslim immigrant from Egypt who shot two at Israel's El Al ticket counter at LAX and the media were completely incapable to call it a terrorist attack. The FBI even demurred in that regard.
Soon we will have one which even the politically correct press will have to admit is a terrorist attack and the liberals will echo the current mantra of the Democrats that Bush has not done enough to protect America.

Common sense in the Mid-East

I ran across this today which indicates that everyone is not oblivious to the obvious in the Mid-East.

Arab leaders wasted billions of dollars to fund a war they can never win, a member of Jordan's royal family charges.

"Arab leaders stole billions of dollars from the Arab people in order to spend them on weapons to fight Israel, which they can never defeat, instead of using the money for health and education purposes to aid their people," Jordanian Prince Hassan Bin Talal told an international conference in Kyoto, Japan, according to the Israeli Ynet news.

Once in line for the Jordanian throne, Prince Hassan spoke to the world conference of the interfaith group "Religions for Peace," attacking Iran's nuclear development program and warning against nuclear armament, especially on Iran's part.

The prince warned that it must be made certain that Iran's nuclear project does not reach the point of building nuclear weapons.

Israel is learning a valuable lesson

A poll published on Friday in the Yedioth Ahrnonoth daily shows that 63 percent of Israelis feel that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert failed in managing the war in Lebanon and should resign.

Only 29 percent believe the prime minister is fit to continue leading the country.

About 74 percent of those polled said Defense Minister Amir Peretz mishandled the war and should resign his post. A mere 20 percent said Peretz should keep his post.

This is what happens when you elect a liberal Prime Minister or President. Netanyahu is on his way in to correct this situation, I predict.

Lose an election, lose your mind

From NewMax.com

Sen. John Kerry didn't contest the results at the time, but now that he's considering another run for the White House, he's alleging election improprieties by the Ohio Republican who oversaw the deciding vote in 2004.

An e-mail will be sent to 100,000 Democratic donors Tuesday asking them to support U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland for governor of Ohio. The bulk of the e-mail criticizes Strickland's opponent, GOP Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, for his dual role in 2004 as President Bush's honorary Ohio campaign co-chairman and the state's top election official.

"He used the power of his state office to try to intimidate Ohioans and suppress the Democratic vote," said Kerry's e-mail.

Kerry, D-Mass., conceded the election when he lost Ohio and its 20 electoral votes. A recount requested by minor-party candidates showed Bush won by about 118,000 votes out of 5.5 million cast. But Kerry's e-mail says Blackwell "used his office to abuse our democracy and threaten basic voting rights."

Fox captives released "unharmed"

From the OpinionJournal.

The New York Times reports that Centanni and Wiig "were released unharmed on Sunday after being forced at gunpoint to say on a videotape that they had converted to Islam." That is a curious way of putting it. Isn't a forced religious "conversion" a form of harm?

One suspects the Times would not describe as "unharmed" the al Qaeda prisoners who supposedly have endured insults to their religion by U.S. interrogators. For secular Westerners, taking religion seriously is an act of condescension toward "victimized" groups.

Solid Science???

One of the things BestView enjoys is pointing out bad science. There are a lot of examples, but this is one that I ran across today. I haven't had the time to delve into the study mechanics to see exactly how flawed it might be, but I suspect this is junk. The article is here.

While researchers have long shown that tall people earn more than their shorter counterparts, it's not only social discrimination that accounts for this inequality -- tall people are just smarter than their height-challenged peers, a new study finds.

"As early as age three -- before schooling has had a chance to play a role -- and throughout childhood, taller children perform significantly better on cognitive tests," wrote Anne Case and Christina Paxson of Princeton University in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The findings were based primarily on two British studies that followed children born in 1958 and 1970, respectively, through adulthood and a U.S. study on height and occupational choice.

The French do it again

France pledged to supply troops to the U.N. force in the south of Lebanon in order to get the latest worthless resolution passed by the Security Council. Now, they have reneged on the numbers and it is impossible to be surprised by this. This is the slimiest country on earth and the one the liberals in the U.S. like John Kerry insist we co-operate with in order to show we care about what the rest of the world thinks about our activities. Sadly Bush and Rice have bought into this crap.

Back to the meditation, boys

For some reason, I found this amusing.

Protesters calling for an end to recent violence in Sri Lanka found themselves brawling with hardline Buddhist monks Thursday, after a rally dubbed a "peace protest" turned unexpectedly violent.

Organizers said there were around 1,000 people in a park in the capital, Colombo, listening to a range of speakers when hardline saffron-robed monks opposed to concessions to Tamil Tiger rebels mounted the stage and erected banners.

Some more moderate Buddhist monks, protesting for peace, were already on the stage when punches were thrown. Soon, monks' robes and fists were flying, although no one was badly hurt, witnesses said.

A good history lesson

One of the most brilliant men in the world has a wonderful refresher course on the Mid-east which can be found here.

Just as I suspected

Boy, the liberals won't like this. The ACLU types and Democrats like Russ Finegold who would rather see our country attacked again like it was on September 11, 2001 than be perceived by their kindred spirits in Europe as less than civilized when we question terror suspects are in for a case of the vapors. As I suggested obliquely in a previous entry, the terrorist captured by the Pakistanis who coughed up information vital to preventing the British attack on a number of planes bound for the U.S. was subjected to extraordinary interrogation techniques. He was tortured. You can read the liberal view of this here. Basically, if you think this is a legal matter, you are on one side of this and if you think we are at war, you agree with me that a few electrodes attached to testicles is justified when it saves American's lives is just fine.

Steyn's Got it Right

“You may not be interested in war,” said Trotsky, “but war is interested in you.” The Israelis have always grasped that. If war is going to come, why not ensure that it comes at a time and place as advantageous to one as possible? That’s a large part of what’s happening in the Middle East. If you try to avoid confronting Iran now, you’ll only have to confront them under worse circumstances later. Jimmy Carter, who embodied the west as a smiling eunuch, wanted to avoid confronting the newborn Islamic Republic three decades ago and now it’s a nuclear power. As I always say, there is no “stability”: behind the polite façade of the UN peacekeepers patrolling the stalemate, history is always on the move; the bad guys get new weapons, new rockets – and, as we’ve seen in Haifa, these bad guys use what they have to their full extent. So what will they have in five years’ time?

Read it all here.

Katy Couric

Well, the time must be drawing near. Katy Couric is on CBS doing promos for her coming stint as anchor for the CBS Evening News. If you haven't heard one of them, she says that they believe that you want not just the news, but also you want her to explain it to you and explain how it affects you. So, if you are too stupid to understand the news and want to hear the looney left spin, then Katy is on her way...just for you.

The Lou Holtz Philosophy

I read an article recently about Lou Holtz the football coach which profiled his philosophy of not only handling his football teams, but also life. At other times BestView has pointed out individuals who stated things in a way which greatly exceeded my limited ability to express them. Lou did this when asked about his previous dismissal of players who broke team rules. At times these players were unable to compete in important games. Lou explained that his actions were simply an enforcement of the player's own decisions. The players were told if you do this or that, you are not going to play and will be sent home. When they choose to break the rules, they choose not to play. He thinks people have to be held accountable and privileges packaged with responsibilities. He tells his players that just because they did not honor their word when they agreed to obey team rules, they should not ask him to break his word to send them home.

This is, of course, a common sense way to raise children and a great way to explain to children the way in which "punishment" is really just a consequence of choices they make. Once the child learns the validity of this concept, one might expect that later in life as a young adult, the relationship between choices and outcomes is not only understood but becomes fundamental in decisions on such things as education, job choices, marital relationships, saving for retirement, etc.

Liquid on planes

As I understand it, the response of the airline security forces to the most recent terror plot will be a prohibition against taking liquids onboard the plane. This will be done by several means including bans on bottled water, tooth paste, mouth wash, and even such things as cosmetics. I don't want to be unduly skeptical, but if someone wants to secrete liquids onto a plane it will take a complete body search to prevent them from doing it. I can think of several ways to attach non-metallic containers to my person in such a way as to avoid detection by metal detectors and visual inspection. If two or more passengers do this and then combine the components during the flight, other measures will be necessary to save that plane.

Grammar Lesson

One of my readers corrected a punctuation error in one of my offerings the other day. I admit I am often not as careful with spelling and punctuation as I should be, but this headline in an English newspaper makes me feel somewhat better. Here it is for those of you who want to actually read the article entitled "Pregnant woman arrested by terror police in her pyjamas." Don't expect to learn how the police got into them, however.

Pakistan Information

The Associated Press reports that a Pakistani intelligence official "said an Islamic militant arrested near the Afghan-Pakistan border several weeks ago provided a lead that played a role in 'unearthing the plot.' " I sure hope those intelligence officials in Pakistan were nice to the militant when they chatted with him about the plot to kill some 2,000 to 3,000 persons in airplanes.

The bomb plot

We are being told that this was a sophisticated plot and we must restrict liquids on planes to prevent future attacks. My information indicates the plot was not new or especially sophisticated. It also suggests we should have been enforcing a liquid ban a long time ago.

In 1994, Yousef and Khalid Sheik Mohammed started testing airport security...The two had already converted fourteen bottles of contact lens solution into bottles containing nitroglycerin, which was readily available in the Philippines. Yousef taped a metal rod to the arch of his of foot in place of the detonators...

The Bomb

The "Mark II" "microbombs" had Casio digital watches as the timers, stabilizers that looked like cotton wool balls, and an undetectable nitroglycerin as the explosive. Other ingredients included glycerin, nitrate, sulfuric acid, and minute concentrations of nitrobenzene, silver azide (silver trinitride), and liquid acetone. Two 9-volt batteries in each bomb were used as a power source. The batteries would be connected to light bulb filaments that would detonate the bomb. Murad and Yousef wired an SCR as the switch to trigger the filaments to detonate the bomb. There was an external socket hidden when the wires were pushed under the watch base as the bomber would wear it. The alteration was so small that the watch could still be worn in a normal manner.

The U.N. Again

I have long wondered if there was even a scant use for the United Nations. Certainly this has been a difficult search, but I finally have one. With Israel needing time to finally finish a war in an era when even the U.S. fails to pursue one to a logical conclusion, we are using the U.N. perfectly. By trying to construct a way to bring about a "cease fire" or an end to "hostilities", we are working with the French of all people to develop a Security Council resolution which can pass. This is perfect in terms of assuring that Israel gets all the time it needs. Then if they finally do get one sufficiently wishy-washy for the French, we can all be certain that it will not produce the desired result if it is acted upon at all. Perfect.

Blatant Thievery

Our beloved Congresswoman from Georgia was defeated in her bid for re-election last evening and she has a very specific explanation for her loss. You see, the election was stolen by the poll workers, the voting machines, and so forth. There was a plot to negate her votes and count only those of her opponent. All of this is just blather, of course, but once again we have a Democrat politician blaming Democrat county and district poll workers for incompentence which resulted in a loss. In Gore's case, the defeat attributed to defects in the Florida process in 2000 was close. Cynthia lost by 20%, so evidently the Georgia Democrats are better thieves.

The no job policy

Liberals from such blue states as Maryland and Illinois have lately decided that WalMart doesn't pay enough to push union wages up artificially so they are trying to force them up with idiotic laws. In Maryland they tried to construct a law which would force WalMart to pay more for health insurance, but it was batted down by the courts since it was only aimed at WalMart.

More recently the city of Chicago has tried to force WalMart to pay not what the job was worth but what they thought a person should make according to his lifestyle and size of family. When WalMart was told of these new rules they built a store two blocks away from Chicago in Evergreen Park and there were 10,000 applicants for 350 jobs. Now Evergreen Park gets the tax revenue from the store, but Chicago is not through by any means. Liberal democrats on the Chicago City Council recently voted 35-14 to force stores 90,000 square feet or larger to pay workers what their lifestyle requires....not what the labor is worth. As a result Target just announced that they would pull out of a planned 32 acre shopping center being developed in the depressed Southside and will likely cut out the 160,000 square foot shop underway on the Northside as well.

These big box opponents need to realize that zero is not a living wage. They should also consider that the average WalMart store saves families $2300 a year by slashing prices and forcing other retailers to do the same. The big lie of democrats is they represent the working man. If they did, they would subsidize the building of WalMart stores in urban areas where groceries, for example, cost more than anywhere else in America.

Women's Lib in Islam?

In the Islamic countries of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan and Pakistan women who are raped face incarceration or execution. There are evidently laws called "Hudood" which legalize the prosecution of women for fornication if she can't prove a crime was committed. In Pakistan, the woman must have four Muslim men as witnesses who will testify she was raped in order to avoid conviction. If she can't produce those 4 men, she is charged with falsely alleging a crime. Penalties include stoning to death, lashing or prison. Stoning and lashing are not common, but more than 2000 women are in prison in Pakistan for Hudood crimes.

There is a women's lib protest going on in Pakistan to repeal these laws and considerable international pressure is being exerted on Musharraf to do this, but it hasn't happened yet.

The 9/11 tapes

This article in Vanity Fair is the first publication of the communication tapes from NORAD and civilian controllers of air traffic on 9/11. Very interesting.

More on the U.N.

As should be evident by now, I am not a big fan of the U.N. One of my very favorite columnists, Mark Steyn, being a brilliant and insightful fellow agrees with me on its worthlessness. He, however, is able to bring specifics from numerous directions to back up his opinion. Here is a really good one. Read it all.

Two years ago, you may recall, Sudan was elected to the UN Human Rights Commission at a time when the government’s proxies were busy slaughtering and gang-raping their way round Darfur. The last thing one needs when one’s got a hectic schedule of mass murder on one’s plate is a lot of tedious paper-shuffling committee meetings in New York, but Sudan’s ambassador, Elfatih Mohammed Ahmed Erwa, gamely rose to the occasion by announcing, upon joining the Commission, that he was very concerned about human rights abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

Let me see if I have this right

Six years ago the U.N. passed something called Resolution 1559 that called for Hezbollah to disarm, leave the area next to Israel, and defer to a "peace keeping" force put there 28 years ago by the U.N. Well, they did not disarm, did not leave, did not hesitate to invade Israel, and kidnapped the Israel soldiers and killed others. The response by Israel was "excessive", disproportional, caused the expected civilian casualties, and is now drawing the howls of cease-fire from nearly all countries. So, what is the solution to this "crisis"? Go back to the U.N. for another but differently numbered resolution. Give me a break.

Losing or not winning?

This is the summary paragraph of a pretty good editorial in National Review Online.

President Bush said on Monday morning that Syria and Iran “must” stop their support for terror. When a president of the United States uses such a strong word he has to back it up, or else he renders it meaningless and discredits himself. The fight has to be taken to Syria and Iran, which doesn’t mean imminent military action, but does mean more serious pressure on all fronts. Iran’s agents in Iraq currently don’t fear us — they should. And our patience with the current round of ineffective nuclear diplomacy should be wearing thin fast. As for Syria, there are still sanctions that can be levied against it, and Israel should make it clear that it considers Syria’s continued arming of Hezbollah a hostile act. The downward drift of events in the Middle East is eventually going to force the Bush administration either to tacitly admit defeat in the region or to accept the confrontation that its regional antagonists are forcing. And defeat is too awful to contemplate.

Cause and Effect?

The bias of the L.A. Times as it relates to the "conflict" in Lebanon is illustrated below. Here is something which might be related to their approach to news.

Anti-Israel Bias

The blog by the name of Patterico's Pontifications has a really good illustration of the daily bias exhibited by the L.A. Times against Israel. Read it here. Liberals seem to know exactly what they consider war crimes and abuses by the Bush administration as it relates to the Geneva Conventions. The media whine incessantly about our treatment of terrorists at Guantanamo, but they gloss over the fact that it is a war crime to target civilians with things like rockets lobbed indiscriminately into cities. It is a war crime to involve civilians in war activities by hiding among them and yet we read not a word about this on the part of Hezbollah in the L.A. Times and other liberal media. All we see is the result of inadvertant bombing by Israel. Keep in mind what Lebanon would look like if they INTENTIONALLY targeted non-military assets and individuals.

As I have said in a previous entry in this blog, if you are going to war, you need to pursue it to a point where one of the participants is utterly defeated and sues for peace via surrender.

Modern Warfare

Best View has opined on this subject before, but now is as good a time as any to repeat my theory of warfare. World War II ended when the Japanese were convinced by 2 atomic bombs that continuation of a war they started was not tenable. So, they surrendered and they are now an ally. Germany had cities like Dresden carpet bombed to oblivion and they too got the message. They also surrendered and now they too are allies of sorts. The thing to remember is civilians in both countries were killed in large numbers. There was no call to "play nice" and use proportionate measures and all the baloney we are hearing now. If you are going to war, go to war to win and to win quickly. We did not do that in Korea and it lingers as a problem 60 years later. We did not fight to win in Viet Nam and that is now widely viewed as a tragic experience. In Iraq, we are left with a festering mess because Bush I did not want to press Saddam to actually surrender. Now we are also just sitting there hoping all sides will play nice.
I think the reason for this is found in the widely expressed opinion of those on the left that if such and such happens the "world" opinion will turn negative and we must respect that. I say screw the opinion of those who will do nothing and are not affected by terrorism at the present. Until Israel eradicates those who have an expressed intention to wipe them off the map, there will be no peace and there might as well be an unpopular level of war by-product--civilian deaths and the destruction of infrastructure.