Sorry for the lack of posts. I’ve flown to Texas to visit with the parents and brothers for Thanksgiving. I thought I would get a little weblogging in but I fogot my laptop’s power supply (doh!).
What I am thankful for this Thanksgiving is the work, sacrifice, blood and tears of all of those who have gone before and left me in a situation where my big problem is that Frye’s doesn’t stock the correct type of power supply. That kind of wealth, that kind of ease, wasn’t and isn’t bought cheap. For all who have helped build this shining city on a hill, my deepest thanks.
The anniversary of the Hollywood blacklist against the Hollywood Ten and other communists in Hollywood has brought an outpouring of sympathy and apologies to the “victims,” along with incessant moral lessons from the media about this “dark” period in American history.
This much is true: Morality and justice are at issue. But the story has been twisted and the characters grossly miscast. The screenplay as written by politically correct Hollywood should be titled “Three Big Lies.”
Lie Number One: By requiring them to testify and then jailing them for refusing, the House Un-American Activities Committee violated the First Amendment, free speech rights of the Hollywood Ten. The truth: No one interfered with their freedom of speech. In fact, freedom of speech was not even an issue. HUAC was investigating a question of fact, the fact being membership in the Communist Party. The Committee did not ask anyone whether he believed in communism, but asked only whether he had joined the Communist Party. By joining the Party (an undisputed fact), the filmmakers were not merely making an ideological statement but were agreeing to take orders to commit actions — criminal and treasonable actions, since the Party, and the Soviet government it served, was openly dedicated to the overthrow of the U.S. government. Therefore, there was a national security reason for the Committee to determine membership in the Party. […]
Lie Number Two: The Hollywood Ten were persecuted by being refused jobs. The truth: They were denied employment by executives who were exercising the right to hire whom they wished — a fundamental right in a free society. […]
Lie Number Three (the biggest lie): The blacklisted writers were humanitarian idealists. The truth: Their “ideal” was the sacrifice of the individual to the collective, a moral viewpoint endorsed by Marxism and put into practice by the Soviet government. It was an “ideal” that destroyed millions of human lives. The Communist Party championed by the Hollywood Ten was the same Party that — under the leadership of Joseph Stalin — exterminated millions of peasants in the Ukraine. […]
Free speech doesn’t mean speech without consequences.
President Bush’s spot on next year’s Illinois ballot was threatened Friday after the state Senate killed a Democratic bid linking next year’s presidential race with a controversial plan to forgive steep election fines against scores of Democrats. […]
In order to be on the Illinois ballot, state law requires that President Bush certify his candidacy for president in late August. But he won’t be nominated by his party until Sept. 2, the last day of the Republican convention in New York City. The bill would have waived that filing deadline for Bush.
Let’s see if I have this straight. The Democratic state senators in Illinois want to cancel their own fines for violating election laws, which protect democracy, while at the same time denying the current US President a spot on the ballot. I hope they do it - President Bush isn’t going to win in Illinois anyway and it would be a truly wonderful issue for use elsewhere in the nation.
When Welsh farmers start a new line catering for West Africans’ desire for a taste of home you’d think they’d get a nice write-up in the local paper praising their enterprise and multi-cultural awareness, wouldn’t you? But the BBC seems to regard it as a problem - indeed, a whole new category of crime, “meat crime”:
Mafia-like criminal gangs are making huge profits from the illegal meat trade with little risk of being caught and punished.
Could the huge profits be because of the illegality and the smallness of the risk be because nobody but a few busybodies cares?
Wales is becoming the centre for the illegal production of so-called smokies - a delicacy made from carcasses which are primitively blow-torched.
Mmm, smokies sound pretty tasty to me, and I don’t see what’s so primitive about the carcasses being blowtorched; a thoroughly modern culinary technique if ever there was one. (How exactly does one blowtorch meat sophisticatedly, anyway?) It is odd to see the BBC, usually so careful to avoid any association of Africa with primitiveness, throwing in the word merely as insult, and illogical insult at that.
The final horror is yet to come:
Julie Barratt, CIEH director for Wales, said people resorted to meat crime - in particular producing smokies - as a means of “supplementing their incomes”.
Evil, evil. We must put a stop to that immediately.
Imagine, people in this day and age living in the UK are trying to supplement teir incomes without state approval. Truly the kind of horror the British government thought they’d gotten past.
On to happier subjects. I was delighted to hear today about an Australian report, Greening farm subsidies, which is the result of an alliance between free-market economists and the Australian World Wildlife Fund, aimed at ending harmful agricultural subsidies.
The full report points out that 80 percent of farm subsidies are perverse: they are costly to both the economy and the environment. The alliance, therefore, makes sense. Both the free market and environmental interests are served by abolishing these perverse subsidies. And it can be done with little cost. The example of New Zealand shows how slashing these subsidies (to the extent that farmers used to receive 40% of their income from the government, but now receive about 1%) was beneficial for the economy, the environment and the farmers themselves. This really is an opportunity, as the report says, for a win-win situation.
Direct government intervention like agricultural subsidies are almost inevitable harmful to the recipient and the citizenry at large. The only real beneficiaries are the rent-seekers who set themselves up as gatekeepers to other people’s money.
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Germany and France have avoided the threat of sanctions from the European Commission, despite breaching strict rules on budget deficits.
Both countries look set to break deficit limits for the third year in a row in 2004. Under the agreed rules, this should result in European Commission recommendations on budget management and heavy fines if the terms are not met.
But eurozone finance ministers have reached a compromise which requires Germany and France to give a political commitment to bring their budgets in line. Ministers also laid out budget cutting targets for both countries but these are below the cuts the Commission had wanted in place.
As the masters do, so do the servants.
Last week, the European Court of Auditors in Luxembourg released a 400-page report that found “systematic problems, over-estimations, faulty transactions, significant errors and other shortcomings” in the EU’s budget. EU’s auditors could only vouch for 10 percent of the $120 billion the EU spent in 2002. It was also the ninth successive year the auditors were unable to certify the budget as a whole.
Europeans are yet to face such “serious underlying issues,” Klaus said, because “they are still in the dream world of welfare, long vacations, guaranteed high pensions, and cradle-to-grave social security, and which obviates the imperative need to face” reality.
The biggest challenge for the Czech republic, Klaus said, is how to avoid falling into the trap of “a new form of collectivism.” Asked whether he meant a new form of neo-Marxism, he said, “absolutely not, but I see other sectors endangering free societies.”
“The enemies of free societies today are those who want to burden us down again with layer upon layer of regulations,” president Klaus explained. “We had that in Communist times. But now if you look at all the new rules and regulations of EU membership, layered bureaucracy is staging a comeback.” The EU’s 30,000 bureaucrats have produced some 80,000 pages of regulations that the Czech republic and the other European applicants for EU membership would have to adopt.
The EU is making sure that 10% of the budget is actually spent on what it’s supposed to be spent on. That’s about that same as the Soviets, isn’t it?
Oh, Teddy boy, here’s what an “attempt to stifle dissent” actually looks like [source, source, source]:
A Latino group at Glendale Community College in Arizona wants the administration to forbid a professor there from ever expressing his opinions on university Web pages because he sent out an e-mail saying the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, or MEChA, is racist, reports the Arizona Republic.
MEChA also wants Walter Kehowski to apologize publicly for stating in an e-mail that the group fosters racism by praising racial separatism. He was alluding to a recent Dia de la Raza event on campus.
Note the “forbid” bit in there. MEChA doesn’t want to say nasty things about the professor, they want to have the professor legally restrained from saying things. See, that’s “stifling”. In your view, Senator Kennedy, it would be the professor who’s doing the “stifling” here, eh?
Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle is demanding that Republicans stop showing their first television ad of the 2004 presidential race, which he called “repulsive and outrageous.”
The 30-second ad, featuring clips of Bush during his State of the Union address last January, portrays the president as a fighter of terrorism as Democrats retreat from the fight. […]
Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy called it an “attempt to stifle dissent.”
Ted, buddy, I’m still reading your inane comments in the national press so obviously the attempt failed. If there were any hope of curing your reality dysfunction I’d explain that stifling dissent involves, you know, stifling, and not just criticism.
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Howard Dean has secured the vital Ted Rall endorsement, reports Eye on the Left. And Dean is actually proud of this.
After some reconsideration, a bit of the bloom is off the rose.
New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark was frisked at Sydney Airport for explosives in an incident that has embarrassed the Australian Government.
Despite having a NZ security officer with her, Miss Clark was pulled out of a queue on October 28 and given a body scan with a new explosives detection device to make sure she was not a bomb-carrying terrorist. […]
A senior adviser to Miss Clark said the NZ security officer accompanying his Prime Minister was “a bit upset” that she was being scanned for explosives.
Yeah, embarassed, that’s the ticket. We here at the Australian Government are deeply embarrased about this incident. Yep.
”They’re not debates,” Paul Begala, one of the party’s leading debate strategists, said. ”You have a collection of people with their canned lines, some of them good and some of them not good, and they just recite them in random order. In fact, maybe we should just do that. ‘Senator Kerry, could you please give us your line on Medicare?”’
Begala said the best way to fix this mess would be to somehow winnow the field, giving a smaller number of candidates more time to answer each question. When I repeated this suggestion to Sharpton, who has clearly been the most agile debater thus far, he scoffed. ”What are we really talking about?” he asked. ”A minute or two? It’s not like some of them were on the verge of brilliance and then somebody cut them off!”
It’s the night of the long knives and we’re still over a year out from the election. And think about the fact that the most articulate and interesting Presidential candidate in the Democratic Party is a lieing, race baiting scum who despite his association with murder by arson is considered a legitimate candidate. Makes the Peltier / Mumia thing [via CommieWatch] a bit less surreal.
The Cato Institute’s 21st annual monetary conference Thursday, on the future of the euro, achieved more or less unanimous consensus: the euro can be expected to be very strong against the dollar in the next two years, soaring to $1.50 or more, but is in severe danger of disintegration in the long term. […]
[According to] Jose Pinera, Chilean health minister 1978-1980, and instigator of the world’s first privatized pension system, […] [t]he long term solution [to the pension crisis for core EU states] is for these countries to move to a privatized, fully funded pension system, similar to that now found in 23 countries, and abandon the pay-as you go system, originally invented by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who now “threatens to damage Europe in the 21st Century by this invention as much as he damaged it in the 20th by his other invention of a militarized German super-state.”
That’s just cold, man.
The Vienna-based European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) decided in February not to publish the 112-page study, a copy of which was obtained by the Financial Times, after clashing with its authors over their conclusions. […]
Following a spate of incidents in early 2002, the EUMC commissioned a report from the Centre for Research on Anti-semitism at Berlin’s Technical University.
When the researchers submitted their work in October last year, however, the centre’s senior staff and management board objected to their definition of anti-semitism, which included some anti-Israel acts. The focus on Muslim and pro-Palestinian perpetrators, meanwhile, was judged inflammatory.
Apparently the researchers weren’t instructed that the goal was a politically acceptable report, not an accurate one.
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Eric Canuteson, whose real estate investment company is registered as a Los Angeles County vendor, reports receiving the following notice the other day from Joe Sandoval, manager of purchasing and contract services at the county’s Internal Services Department:
The County of Los Angeles actively promotes and is committed to ensure a work environment that is free from any discriminatory influence be it actual or perceived. As such, it is the County’s expectation that our manufacturers, suppliers and contractors make a concentrated effort to ensure that any equipment, supplies or services that are provided to County departments do not possess or portray an image that may be construed as offensive or defamatory in nature.
One such recent example included the manufacturer’s labeling of equipment where the words ”Master/Slave” appeared to identify the primary and secondary sources. Based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, this is not an acceptable identification label.
We would request that each manufacturer, supplier and contractor review, identify and remove/change any identification or labeling of equipment or components thereof that could be interpreted as discriminatory or offensive in nature before such equipment is sold or otherwise provided to any County department. Thank you in advance for your cooperation and assistance.
Best comment - ‘Well, there goes my Master’s Degree!”.
A group of Italian anti-war militants is raising funds to support the armed Iraqi resistance, the BBC has learned.
Reader Raymond Sauer emails: “How can a BBC reporter say ‘anti-war militants’ with a straight face?”
I think they have classes for that.
They may be militant but an actual war gets in the way of the kind of peace crimes they’d like to commit.
A letter from a weblogger in Iraq that he sent to the New York Times.
My family has a property in the green zone in down town Baghdad on Abi-Nuas street. The New York Times rents the adjacent property. For several weeks now my brother Ali Al Ali has been denied automobile access to our property by security guards. Until two days ago we thought this was a coalition security measure. Now we known these guards are not coalition personal but are instead the private security force employed by your news paper.
The family property has two store fronts. Yesterday (Saturday November 15, 2003) my brother and two hired men were in one of the stores installing shelves. My brother lost his livelihood in the war and needs to open this store to make a living. His efforts were interrupted by several of the security guards employed by your paper. He was knocked roughly to the floor and threatened. Your guards pointed there AK-47 rifles and my brother and his work men and told them they would be shot if they did not leave immediately.
I feel sure if learned the United States Army was responsible an incident such as this you would feel obligated to publish the story and condemn the act.
In this his case I respectfully suggest you have an obligation to do somewhat more.
Well, if they’re hiring former Ba’ath thugs like many other journalists this isn’t a surprising result.
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San Francisco has surpassed Detroit as the city with the highest per-capita rate of syphilis in the United States.
With a 127 percent increase in syphilis cases last year, San Francisco jumped from sixth place nationally to first, ahead of Detroit, Atlanta, Newark, Baltimore and Oklahoma City.
Actions have consequences.
Well, instead of posting I fiddled around with the format this morning. Some of you may notice that the post font is a little bigger. It used be to set at 80% but I took that out. I also removed my preferred fonts so you may see the font being a bit different as well. The result of these and other tweaks is that the webpage is looking good in Opera as well as IE. Just some more value add for your browsing dollar.
Poland’s Foreign Minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz said proposed new voting rules risked turning the EU into a “unipolar” club, and that it was essential for Europe’s balance of power that countries like Poland and Spain did not lose their influence.
London’s Financial Times said his use of the term “unipolar” is likely to infuriate France, which uses the word to express its fears of a world order dominated by the United States.
Ooooh, that’s gotta hurt!
A textbook on Islam that preaches the value of “holy war” and “martyrdom” for all Muslims is being reprinted by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority for use in schools in the occupied West Bank.
Entitled Islamic Culture, it was originally published in 1994, but has been reproduced this year, despite undertakings from Palestinian leaders - following international pressure - that new books would be introduced.
The book, intended for 17-year-olds, explains: “Jihad is an Islamic term that equates to the term war in other nations. The difference is that jihad has noble goals and lofty aims, and is carried out only for the sake of Allah and for His glory.”
Silly Palestinians, who don’t even know their own religion! Why, the smart people in the West know that it just means “exerted effort” and not “war”.
The current energy bill contains a provision to shield companies supplying MTBE, a federally mandated gasoline additive from liability, because MTBE is highly toxic. This, of course, was well known at the time it was federally mandated. Now some Senators want to reward trial lawyers at the expense of private companies for the federal government’s mistake in federally mandating the additive.
MATTHEWS: This half-hour: Is Al-Jazeera telling the truth about the U.S. occupation in Iraq? MSNBC’s Bob Arnot takes a look.
Take a note of that. The interview with Bob Arnot, NBC Cheif foreign correspondent, goes on
We’ve been invited by the ayatollah. Why? He is furious at the press coverage. He says not only American television, but Arabic satellite TV, such as Al-Jazeera and the Abu Dhabi station, have misportrayed the great success that is Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
(voice-over): The people of Khadamiya tell us that the picture painted by Al-Jazeera and other Arab satellite stations is a bleak one of daily death and destruction. Khadamiya’s leaders are so eager to show Iraq’s real story that the ayatollah himself sends his top lieutenant with us, Haji Ali (ph).
we visit a new radio and TV station run by Shia, an unheard-of freedom under the old regime. At the station, everyone we talked to agrees the Arab media is not telling the truth about what’s happening here. And Al-Jazeera tops the list. […]
As we’ve seen, Iraqis themselves are angrier than the American administration about the barrage of negative stories coming out of Iraq, so angry that the ayatollah himself broke the rules and allowed to us come into this, one of the holiest sites in all of Shia Islam, right during the height of Ramadan
One has to ask - why is Matthews focusing on Arab media when the stories there are no different on US media? And can’t Bob Arnot do something about it, like handing out assignments to other NBC reporters? At least Arnot put out this report, so maybe all is not lost. But it’s kind of sad when the local media is indistinguishable from the propaganda of hostile countries.
The European Union is failing to keep track of huge annual subsidies, and 91 per cent of its budget is riddled with errors or cannot be verified, a financial watchdog said yesterday.
The European Court of Auditors refused to certify EU accounts for the ninth successive year, saying Brussels has failed to match reform rhetoric with a genuine change of culture. Abuse is said to be endemic in the Common Agricultural Policy, which still consumes almost half the £65 billion budget.
Checks on subsidy claims for suckler cows found that 50.2 per cent of animals in Portugal and 31.2 per cent in Italy were false. The “error rate” in forage and crop acreage was 89.7 per cent in Luxembourg, 42.9 per cent in Sweden, 34.5 per cent in France and 19.2 per cent in Britain, despite increased use of satellite photography to spot fraud.
I guess “accounting” isn’t one of the “core competencies” in the new EU Constitution so they don’t have to be any good at it.
The biggest question of all is the one concerning the c-word. We have little difficulty in dealing, in theory at least, with the medium-sized issues: What should be done about the World Bank? How can the anti-union laws be reversed? But we have scarcely attempted, as a movement, to tackle the big issue: what should be done about capitalism? Whenever anyone in Paris announced that capitalism in all its forms should be overthrown, everyone cheered. But is this really what we want? And, if so, with what do we hope to replace it? And could that other system be established without violent repression?
In Paris, some of us tried to tackle this question in a session called “life after capitalism”. By the end of it, I was as unconvinced by my own answers as I was by everyone else’s. While I was speaking, the words died in my mouth, as it struck me with horrible clarity that as long as incentives to cheat exist (and they always will) none of our alternatives could be applied universally without totalitarianism. The only coherent programme presented in the meeting was the one proposed by the man from the “League for the Fifth International”, who called for the destruction of the capitalist class and the establishment of a command economy. I searched the pamphlet he gave me for any recognition of the fact that something like this had been tried before and hadn’t worked out very well, but without success. (Instead I learned that, come the revolution, the members of the Fourth International will be the first against the wall, as they have “obscured the differences” between Marxism and its opponents.)
It seems to me that the questions we urgently need to ask ourselves are these: is totalitarianism the only means of eliminating capitalism? If so, and if, as almost all of us profess to do, we abhor totalitarianism, can we continue to call ourselves anti-capitalists? If there is no humane and democratic answer to the question of what a world without capitalism would look like, then should we not abandon the pursuit of unicorns, and concentrate on capturing and taming the beast whose den we already inhabit?
The surprise — this is from George Monbiot. True introspection or the millionth monkey? I live in hope but not expectation.
But if MoveOn.org succeeds in helping unseat President Bush, it would mean an unfamiliar territory for an organization that has been defined more by what it is against than what it is for.
Some wonder if MoveOn.org would be able to make that transition. Jonah Seiger, a visiting fellow at the Institute for Policy, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University, said: “There is something to be said about fighting losing battles. At least you are keeping your constituency together.”
“One of the things that killed the civil rights movement,” Mr. Seiger added, “was getting what they asked for.”
That’s a rather interesting lesson to draw from the civil righs movement. Note that Seiger thinks the movement has been “killed” even though there seems to be a lot of it around. Seems like a clear admission of its undead status to me.
One can also read this as meaning that MoveOn does not intend to win but rather to keep fighting the good fight. That’s the modern Leftist narcissism in a nutshell.
The mainstream press is still ignoring the leaked Al Qaeda / Ba’ath connection memo. It would seem very explosive stuff. One might argue that it’s not been confirmed, but doesn’t stop Big Media when it would reflect badly on the Administration.
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Calls for papers from a planned meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology on “The Political Psychology of Hegemony and Resistance:”
The failure of the Bush administration’s facile assumptions about the ease and speed with which post-invasion Iraq could be transformed into a secure democratic state and thriving free market economy was painfully apparent by late summer, 2003. […]
The long apparent ideological difficulty of European Zionism to recognize the moral and psychological requirements for a humane accommodation of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine continued to exact a costly and bloody toll on Jews and Palestinians alike. […]
The failed foreign policy of the Bush administration based on Hubris called for a major transformation in American domestic thinking on the way to enhance regional and international security through respectful collaboration with the UN and other multilateral organizations […]
This workshop invites submissions on the flawed thinking behind hegemony and the institutional political, economic and moral dimensions of a caring community of nations.
No preconceptions there! Normally this wouldn’t be worth the notice but the ISPP seems to be bleeding members. The President of the organization doesn’t understand:
It is readily understandable why reservists and Gis would decide not to reenlist, but a puzzle to me that scholars in our field would not “reup” in ISPP. We haven’t invaded anybody, searched unsuccessfully for weapons of mass destruction or kept combatants from other disciplines locked up without even access to their professional journals. I am therefore baffled that many of you have not renewed your membership, and write to urge you to reconsider.
Clearly the kind of perceptivity you’d want in the president of a “Political Psychology” organization. The summing quote is from Karl Bade:
Apparently, ISPP President Lebow thinks snide mockery is an effective method of getting people to re-up their memberships. What does this say about his grasp of political psychology?
Anti-terror, anti-Ba’ath protests in Iraq.
Picture of anti-Ba’ath protestors.
These of themselves won’t do much good, but as a statement of opposition to the Ba’ath and their supporters currently active in Iraq it is a good sign of itself and should also encourage other Iraqis to stand up. It also heartens those of us here who also stand for a self-ordered, prosperous Iraq that is a member of the civilized nations of the world. The US can help, but ultimately only the Iraqis can make it happen.
“Arguably the most important intellectual alive” - The New York Times
Blurb on Noam Chomsky’s new book
“Arguably the most important intellectual alive, how can he write such nonsense about international affairs and foreign policy?” - The New York Times
The original quote
This one is kind of amusing, but I have to say that the basic claim in the blurb quote is in fact not contradicted by the full quote, even though the latter is not very complimentary. Even there, it’s a bigger hit on the NY Times — despite the fact that the NY Times says that Chomsky writes onsense the NY Times still considers him “arguably the most important intellectual alive”.
This article by John F. Burns is good. One line in it really stuck out to me, though. People have often wondered why the news stories from Iraq still read like they were vetted by the Iraqi Information Ministry. I know I’ve observed that they still seem that way. Well, if they do - it’s because they are:
At the Palestine Hotel, where I was taunted in the last weeks of Mr. Hussein’s terror by officials of his information ministry as “the most dangerous man in Iraq” because of my articles about the regime’s brutality, some of the same Iraqis, who now work as interpreters for Western news bureaus, caution me against staying in the 16th-floor room I used to inhabit.
So our “free press” are so annoyed by and opposed to censorship that they’re employing their own minders now that Saddam is no longer able to pay them. And we wonder why the quotes they get from Iraqis - who aren’t stupid and do know who worked for the Ba’athist regime - tell the interpreters the things they do, and the interpreters then tell the reporters, who then report back to America in a certain tone. If we’ve been wondering why there is such a disconnect between what the news reports are saying about conditions and attitudes in Iraq, and what independent people who go there without hiring on ex-Iraqi Information Ministry minders to screen information for them say about Iraq, well now we know. The BBC, for example, I’ve long suspected that their “man on the street” quotes are really “Ba’athist on the street” interviews.
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Secretary-General Kofi Annan says the United Nations is preparing to play an active role in the transfer of power to a provisional government in Iraq. But, Mr. Annan admits security concerns may limit the world body’s ability to act.
Yeah, they’ll be active until someone takes a shot at them. Then the thugs will take over and the UN will once again be able to relate to the Iraqi rulers. Annan knows his planning!
On May 24, 1945, just 16 days after V-E Day, Britain’s socialists were sanguine. A Labor Party firebrand, Aneurin Bevan, anticipating the Labor victory that occurred five weeks later, said that privation would be a thing of the past, because essentials would soon be abundant: “This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.”
But socialism rose to the challenge. Two years later, the coal industry having been nationalized and food still rationed, coal and fish were scarce. There are indeed some things that only government can do.
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Re Stephen Hayes’ Weekly Standard piece on the ties between Saddam and al Qaeda, I too have wondered why there wasn’t more media attention paid to what I considered quite a blockbuster. Of course, it’s true that it doesn’t reflect at all badly on the Bush administration, so that’s one reason. But there’s another. Remember a few weeks ago a “study” was released purporting to prove that those poor benighted individuals who watched Fox News “misunderstood” some things that NPR listeners and PBS watchers understood perfectly? One of those things was that we who watched Fox seemed to believe that there was some sort of connection between Saddam and UBL… while the enlightened knew perfectly well that there was no evidence of that.
Of course, even Janet Reno knew about these connections…
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The European Union berated Israel on Monday for snubbing its special envoy over his contacts with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat […] ”We would like to have much more cooperation and much more trust,” EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
Of course, Solana has no plans to actually do anything that would deserve more trust, he would just like to have it without paying for it. We see the Palestinians have learned this lesson —
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The Egyptian intelligence chief arrived Monday to try to broker a Mideast truce, and Palestinian officials said success depends largely on Israel’s willingness to halt military operations.
Palestinian militants have told Egyptian mediators they are ready for a truce, provided Israel stops targeted killings of fugitives, incursions and arrest sweeps, according to an Egyptian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
In the past, Israel has said it will only halt military strikes if Palestinian security forces begin dismantling militant groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Of course, the chief of intelligence for a repressive regime is exactly who I would trust to negotiate a truce. Note that, according to the Palestinian side, Palestinian terror attacks on Israel have no bearing on a truce, only Israeli responses. One wonders what’s in a truce for the Israelis, since none of the previous ones have actually involved a cessation of attacks on Israel.
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A week ago there was a anti-Israel protest in Los Angeles. In addition to the demonstrators there were counter demonstrators. And beyond all of those people there was this guy. He wore a blak turtle neck with black ski mask and cargo pants, carrying a sign that said “HAMAS SAYS NO WALL”. In addition he had strings of fake dynamite tied all over his torso. The LA IndyMedia folk put up his picture as a positive comment. But there were some who saw him and thought “if HAMAS is for it, I’m against it”.
It turns out that the guy was, in fact, an anti-terrorist protestor attempting to parody the anti-Israel (and de facto pro-terrorist) demonstrators. But despite his attempt to be over the top by protesting that the wall would stop suicide bombers, IndyMedia thought that was a fine message to send and endorsed it. I strongly recommend checking out the picture and asking, what kind of people see this as a positive statement for their cause?
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The Washington Post uses the example of a cement factory in Sinjar, Iraq, to illustrate a problem with the nation’s reconstruction:
Burned and looted in the aftermath of the war, it was up and running again by mid-September.
But it was not put back together by the U.S.-led interim government and the fleets of contractors being paid billions of dollars to fix the country. In fact, had the plant managers gone the “American way,” the factory might still be in pieces.
U.S. Army engineers who came to survey the damage proposed rebuilding the plant into a shining showcase for the best in modern technology. They suggested buying a fleet of earth-moving equipment and importing machinery from Europe, estimating it would take $23 million and up to a year to complete the job.
The Iraqis had more modest ambitions—they just wanted to get the factory running again, even at minimal capacity. With the help of $10,000 from the U.S. military, and $240,000 left over in factory bank accounts, they used scrap electronics, tore up one production line to get parts for the other, and fixed the plant in three months. It was not the state-of-the-art facility that the Americans envisioned, but it got the job done.
“Members of the Iraqi Governing Council and other local leaders argue that the bureaucratic American process wastes money and time and that the country would be in much better shape if they were given a stronger voice in the process as soon as possible,” reports the Post. The overbureaucratization of Iraq’s reconstruction would seem to be a point of political vulnerability for the Bush administration. Too bad America doesn’t have an opposition party that opposes excessive regulation.
Actually, this seems an excellent example of the perfect being the enemy of the good in the third world. It doesn’t have to be up to US standards to be better than what went before. It’s unacceptable to hold Iraqis back because they can’t jump to the 21st century in one shot.
This article from Little Green Footballs has a picture that really brings home the truth of how brutal and oppressive the Israelis are. While a gunman opens fire on the IDF with an automatic weapon, a crowd of onlookers watches casually. Clearly none of them are really concerned about return fire from the IDF. It it were any other military on the planet, the whole lot of them would be paste on a wall by the time the photographer snapped the picture. But firing at the IDF with automatic weapons - that’s just a normal outdoor activity.
Armed US Secret Service agents will have the right to “shoot to kill” when they provide the bodyguard for President George W Bush on his controversial state visit to the United Kingdom this week. […]
More than 100,000 protesters will take to London’s streets on Thursday for the Stop The War Coalition’s “Stop Bush” demonstration. Organisers fear “trigger-happy US Secret Service agents” could over-react and kill protesters. Politicians opposing Bush’s visit fear over-reaction by US agents could cause “mayhem” and want the trip cancelled.
Over-reaction by the Bush people? Maybe the protestors should, you know, be non-violent and not stalk the President [via LGF].
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Despite 38 home visits, social workers didn’t realize that four children adopted by a New Jersey family were starving. The New York Times proposes a solution: regulate home schooling.
Clearly, if the state child welfare department is incompetent, the solution is to have those incompetents watch over even more people.
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein gave terror lord Osama bin Laden’s thugs financial and logistical support, offering al Qaeda money, training and haven for more than a decade, it was reported yesterday.
Their deadly collaboration - which may have included the bombing of the USS Cole and the 9/11 attacks - is revealed in a 16-page memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee that cites reports from a variety of domestic and foreign spy agencies compiled by multiple sources, The Weekly Standard reports.
The death of a thousand cuts…
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genomics pioneer Craig Venter announced that his research group created an artificial virus based on a real one in just two weeks’ time.
When researchers created a synthetic genome (genetic map) of the virus and implanted it into a cell, the virus became “biologically active,” meaning it went to work reproducing itself.
This means that these scientists constructed a living organism from non-living matter. That’s a historic first.
U.S. TV network news about Iraq as distorted as al-Jazeera? Checking in from Iraq on Wednesday’s Hardball with Chris Matthews as part of that show’s look this week at “Iraq: The Real Story,” Bob Arnot highlighted a Muslim ayatollah in Iraq who “is furious at the press coverage. He says not only American television, but Arabic satellite TV, such as Al-Jazeera and the Abu Dhabi station, have mis-portrayed the great success that is Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.”
Arnot, MRC analyst Geoffrey Dickens noticed, documented how “Iraqis themselves are angrier than the American administration about the barrage of negative stories coming out of Iraq” on Arab television.
Instapundit reader Steve Hornbeck comments
Regarding the Hardball story on Iraqis being angry over US media coverage, isn’t it way past time that the news media started looking into the possibility that some of the negative feelings that the rest of the world has about the US are the result of the US news media’s behavior? If you were an Iraqi who for years saw American reporters playing ball with the Hussein government and then saw that those same reporters had mostly negative things to say about your liberation, how would you feel about Americans?
But they preserved their access! Isn’t that what matters?
P.S. Also at Instapundit is the tale of a movie reviewer in Germany using Legally Blonde 2 as a guide to how the American government works. Gosh, those sophisticated Europeans never cease to amaze.
BA’ATHIST SYRIA IS IN TROUBLE: How do I know? The French are cozying up. That’s always a sign that your days are numbered. . . .
The first incident occured when the words “Black Bitches” was scrawled across the door of a fifth floor Village at Centennial Hall apartment on Sept. 14 or 15. Student Allison Jackson filed a report with the University Police claiming that her neighbor was a possible suspect in the vandalism. […]
Due to an ongoing and escalating feud with her roommates, Jackson wrote the words in an attempt to get relocated to another room. According to the report, when told she was a suspect, she explained why she did it.
“I was requesting a roommate move, and I was given that advice that in order for the roommate move to be taken seriously, things needed to occur … issues needed to occur, and that if I really wanted, I could go ahead and pursue those issues, so the issue was basically that I wanted a roommate change.” […]
A similar seemingly unrelated incident occured in Mary Park Hall. After a supposed hate crime involving a watermelon in early September did not receive enough attention by campus authorities, freshman Leah Miller decided to write the word ‘NIGG’ on fellow resident Brandi Parr’s door on or around Sept. 20, according to a police report. Then she wrote a note bearing the same slur and claimed to her residential adviser that it was slipped under her door.
Miller said she was pressured into doing this by an older student, who claimed that she “had” to do it in order for the University to recognize racism in the community and that things like this had been done before. […]
According to the police report, both Miller and Jackson have submitted written statements to University Police admitting to charges of vandalism and tampering with evidence to implicate a suspect.
No charges were filed, of course. Lesson - why not try it, since there’s no penalty if it doesn’t work out.
Any hope that the report produced by an independent panel headed by for Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari on the August 19 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad would lead to some rethinking of the way that the UN secretariat in New York operates is now a thing of the past.
This is the opinion of many diplomatic observers in New York, as well as of a number of senior UN staff. In his report, Ahtisaari, a no-nonsense administrator indebted to no one, not only qualified the UN security system as “dysfunctional” but also referred to major shortcomings regarding “qualified professionals … internal coordination … threat assessment .. discipline … and accountability”. It was a damning indictment, not only of the way that security threats were addressed in Baghdad, but even more so on how Secretary General Kofi Annan runs his shop.
Many at the UN hoped that, confronted with this indictment, the secretariat would rise to the challenge and launch a process that would open the door to major reforms of the institution. It was not to be. On November 4, Annan decided to appoint a “team” to determine “accountability at all managerial levels” as it regards the Baghdad bombing. Many UN staff members, well versed in the art of reading between the lines of UN communiques, had one word to describe the decision: whitewash.
Just one more piece of evidence on how much sense it makes to turn Iraq over to Kofi’s Krew.
Mr. Baur says the idea to cross-breed tomatoes and tobacco came from an episode of The Simpsons that first aired in 1999.
He grew both plants, then cut the tops of each and switched them around. Both promptly died. Undeterred, and without a source of plutonium handy, Mr. Baur grew the plants again, this time hollowing a portion of each out and grafting them together. The plant took form, and after weeks of pruning, he now has a large tobacco root that has sprouted a tomato branch. The branch has yielded one ripe fruit, and tests have shown the leaves contain nicotine — the fruit will be tested for nicotine tomorrow. The scientist says he expects the fruit will contain much higher levels of the addictive ingredient. […]
But Mr. Baur is having a Dr. Frankenstein moment, noting that nicotine, when ingested orally, can be fatal to humans at levels higher than 150 milligrams. He fears his tomacco plant contains “multiple fatal doses”. […]
“Actually, it has no peaceful purposes”.
When the first person is poisoned, can they sue Matt Groening?
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Today’s Dallas Morning News editorial page says, “We’re tired of Jessica Lynch” — which we at the DMN explain does not mean the actual Jessica Lynch, but the hyped-up creation of the Pentagon, publicists and the press. We praise her for her courageous spirit, but lament that the old-fashioned heroism of so many soldiers in that war is going unnoticed, while our culture celebrates Jessica as victim. As a military historian told the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, “We want to fight wars but we don’t want any of our people to die and we don’t really want to hurt anybody else. So Pvt. Lynch, who suffers, is a hero even if she doesn’t do much. She suffered for us.” The DMN editorial concludes:
That she did, and God bless that brave woman. But to paraphrase Gen. George S. Patton, wars are not won by suffering for your country; wars are won by making the enemy suffer for his country. It is dismaying to see soldiers who do the “dirty work” of war shunted to the side, while we immortalize a noble victim. A culture that lacks the stomach to honor its blood-stained warriors, men who do the killing necessary to defend it, is in trouble.
I think one could argue that we’re celebrating her willingness to risk that suffering, rather than the suffering itself, but I suspect that on the whole this editorial has it right.
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President Bush sketched an expansive vision last night [at his American Enterprise Institute speech] of what he expects to accomplish by a war in Iraq. Instead of focusing on eliminating weapons of mass destruction, or reducing the threat of terror to the United States, Mr. Bush talked about establishing a ‘free and peaceful Iraq’ that would serve as a ‘dramatic and inspiring example’ to the entire Arab and Muslim world, provide a stabilizing influence in the Middle East and even help end the Arab-Israeli conflict. The idea of turning Iraq into a model democracy in the Arab world is one some members of the administration have been discussing for a long time.
— NY Times, 27 Feb 2003
The White House recently began shifting its case for the Iraq war from the embarrassing unconventional weapons issue to the lofty vision of creating an exemplary democracy in Iraq.
— NY Times, 13 Nov 2003
Five years after reaching $246 billion in legal settlements against the tobacco industry, most states have failed to keep their promise to spend a significant portion of the money on programs to protect kids from tobacco and help those already addicted to quit, according to a report released today by a coalition of public health organizations. The report also finds that the limited restrictions on tobacco marketing contained in the November 1998 multi-state settlement have failed to curtail the tobacco industry’s ability to aggressively market its products, including in ways that appeal to children.
But, but, government officials are selfless and dedicated to the public good! Surely this must be the result of some VRWC plot!
Iranians under the age of 30 — who comprise more than two-thirds of the population today — express little interest in terrorist groups, anti-Zionism, and radical politics in general. In places where young people congregate, Iranians constantly question their government’s support for terrorist groups. “I see the way people look at me when I travel,” complained one young Iranian. “Immediately, they think, ‘Watch out for the Iranian, he might be a terrorist.’ I blame our government for cultivating this image by supporting radical groups.” Meanwhile, on campuses, rumors abound that Palestinian militants and Hezbollah fighters are imported from Gaza and southern Lebanon to help quell recent student unrest — tales that make the groups even more unpopular. […]
This disaffection with the Palestinian cause stems in part from many Iranians’ frustration with Iran’s economic and political problems. They see Iran’s moribund economy partly as a result of the country’s embrace of international radicalism, which has damaged foreign business ties. […] Even some older Iranians have grown weary of the Palestinization of foreign policy. At an earthquake site in northern Iran last year, a group of elderly victims complained bitterly about the government’s slow response. “If the earthquake occurred in Palestine, they would have sent money and supplies. To us, they only give empty slogans,” one said.
Lots of small but hopeful signs here. The comment on people looking suspicously at Iranians because of the actions of the mullahocracy puts the blame where it belongs, on the mullahocracy and not the West and acknowledges that if the government is reformed then Westerns will be less suspicious. The acknowledgement that the fate of Palestine counts for little or nothing towards the future of Iraq is more clear sighted than most of the US State Department.
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Support for the 230-page [EU Constitution draft] document was negligible among key states certain to hold a vote, falling as low as five per cent in Holland and three per cent in Denmark, said the EU-wide poll yesterday.
Most people with any view on the matter wanted the text “partially” or “radically modified” or abandoned, though most supported the abstract principle of an EU constitution.
Britons were the most hostile, with 35 per cent calling for outright rejection. But citizens in all of the EU’s current and future states appeared disdainful of the document.
Support for the draft stands at 11 per cent in Germany followed by France (10 per cent), Spain (seven), Austria (six) and Finland (four).
The survey, published by the European Commission, will bolster calls by the Conservatives and the French opposition parties for a referendum, showing 86 per cent support for a vote in Britain and 92 per cent in France.
Oooooh, that’s gotta hurt. But UK Prime Minister Blair is on the job:
It emerged at the weekend that Downing Street has been pleading with Paris to avoid a vote, fearing that it could create unstoppable momentum for Britain to follow suit.
That’ll show them pesky voters!
A Toys ‘‘R” Us television commercial, which features the company’s mascot, Geoffrey the Giraffe, inhaling helium from a balloon, has drawn the ire of anti-drug campaigners who say the ad sends a dangerous message to children.
Arab nations will oppose an Israeli resolution condemning Palestinian attacks on Israeli children that is awaiting a vote this week in a UN General Assembly committee, a Palestinian diplomat said on Monday.
The Israeli resolution, pending in the assembly’s Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee, mirrors an Egyptian-sponsored resolution adopted by the panel last week that demands Israel protect Palestinian children.
Palestinian envoy Nasser al-Kidwa said Arab delegates, meeting at UN headquarters, concluded the Israeli draft had been written “as a bad joke” and should be voted down.
“Frankly, we were not amused,” al-Kidwa told reporters after the meeting. “This is an anti- Palestinian resolution, much more than it is a pro-Israeli children resolution.”
“The Europeans say they will abstain. I can’t see anybody voting in favor of this,” he said. p. Not amused by the resolution. Can’t see anyone else voting for it. He’s probably right on the latter.
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The highlight of the between rally debates had to have been when a well pressed lefty came out to argue with us. After 20 minutes of shouting “You don’t understand, you don’t understand!” and “Let me finish. Stop interrupting me” most definitely deflated her ego, the cops finally came over and told her she had to go to the designated opposition area across the entryway steps or stop getting in our faces. Well she made a point of going and standing behind the barriers, which was o so laughable since as near as I can tell she was the ONLY person to ever do so. Most participants snuck out to the front steps for smokes and tried to ignore our calls for them to denounce suicide bombings. Twice more she came out to argue her side. And guess what we found out? She was a reporter with NPR! After that, we started repeatedly shouting for her to tell us her name, and she said she wouldn’t. You know, cuz journalists from NPR need to be anonymous to remain impartial.
This was from a conference at Ohio State University with topics like “Toward a Global Intifadah”. The writer above was part of a protest against the conference. It’s interesting that an NPR reporter was a fervid advocate of a specific political viewpoint. I’m sure that won’t influence her report on the conference or the protestors.
Canadian Beats World at Rock, Paper, Scissors
This, it seems, is serious stuff to the 320 competitors who shook their fists early into Sunday morning at the World Rock, Paper, Scissors Championships at a nightclub in downtown Toronto.
The man who did win — and netted himself a purse of C$5,000 ($3,825) — was Toronto’s Rob Krueger, a member of the team “Legion of the Red Fist.”
To achieve the lofty title of World RPS Champion, he threw a combination of rock-paper-paper, defeating his opponent’s offering of three rocks.
At last, an arena where Canada is competitive.
Leading government cleric Sheikh Saleh Al-Fawzan is the author of the religious books currently used to teach 5 million Saudi students, both within the and in Saudi schools aboard – including those in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
“Slavery is a part of Islam,” he says in the tape, adding: “Slavery is part of jihad, and jihad will remain as long there is Islam.” […]
Al-Fawzan is member of the Senior Council of Clerics, Saudi Arabia’s highest religious body, a member of the Council of Religious Edicts and Research, the Imam of Prince Mitaeb Mosque in Riyadh, and a professor at Imam Mohamed Bin Saud Islamic University, the main Wahhabi center of learning in the country.
Al-Fawzan refuted the mainstream Muslim interpretation that Islam worked to abolish slavery by introducing equality between the races.
“They are ignorant, not scholars,” he said of people who express such opinions. “They are merely writers. Whoever says such things is an infidel.”
One wonders how long the Saudi Entity will be able to get away with teaching that slavery is OK in Washington DC.
Muqtada al-Sadr … issued a conciliatory statement on Saturday, November 1. The young Sadr and his followers in the Army of the Mahdi have been increasingly clashing with US troops, as well as more moderate Shi’ite groups. Alarmed by US army threats that he would be arrested as a rabble rouser threatening Iraqi stability, Sadr issued a statement asking American troops to spare Iraqi lives, calling for unity and brotherhood between the Americans and the Iraqis.
He stated that Saddam Hussein was a “sinful aggressor” and that he and his backers were the real and only enemies of Iraq, not the Americans. Sadr described Americans as guests in Iraq, adding that they were “peace loving people”. He also stated that the Iraqi people only want good for the Americans (credit for translation of Sadr’s statement goes to Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan ).
These statements were a repudiation of Sadr’s earlier comparison of the IGC and the new Iraqi regime to Saddam’s government. Sadr has been lashing out at the US as a result of Pentagon threats to arrest him. Many of his followers have already been arrested and his house was searched last month after he declared a shadow government and an unarmed militia that was in fact heavily armed.
What’s surprising is not how much muscle it takes to get a change like this, but how little.
Arab terrorism against Israel existed prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948.I need better cites for this, but it’s a start.Examples of Arab terrorism against Jews during the pre-State period include:
- Anti-Jewish Riots in 1920-21, which was characterized by the brutal murder in Jaffa of the prominent Jewish author Y. Brenner
- ‘Disturbances’ of 1929, which included the massacre of the Jewish community in Hebron
- Many incidents of anti-Jewish violence during the Arab Revolt of 1936-39 On the eve of the UN Partition Resolution of November 1947, Arab terrorism against Jewish targets steadily rose until it led to the joint Arab invasion of 1948-9.
Efforts by Canada’s cable operators to get regulatory approval to offer more U.S. specialty channels over their digital services hit a wall on Friday.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission turned down the request made in June, saying the cable firms had not made a strong enough case. […]
U.S. channels that were mentioned included HBO, ESPN, Fox News and Nickelodeon Kids.
We’ll have Al-Jazeera, and probably even Hezbollah’s Al-Manar, in Canada before we’re allowed to see Fox News. They might be pro-Islamofascist and antisemitic, but at least they’re not - horrors! - “conservative”.
Living in a bubble isn’t really a viable long term strategy, but then again neither is socialism.
The technology takes any carbon based waste, and I do mean any carbon based waste and turns it into high quality oil, water and some minerals at 85% energy efficiency. 15% of the output supplies enough energy to run the process. It’s not hype and vu-graphs either. They’ve got a real pilot plant going up beside the Butterball Turkey plant in Carthage, Missouri. Oil from turkey offal.
Color me skeptical. While this isn’t a perpetual motion machine (there’s no theoretical reason that this can’t work), there are some tricky implementation details. I live in hope but not expectation.
On a side note, this process would actually be evidence for the Deep, Hot Biosphere theory by Thomas Gold, which claims that oil is produced on a regular basis by microbiological life deep in the Earth’s crust rather than in a one time event during / after the Age of the Dinosaurs.
Gun-toting police burst into a South Carolina high school, ordering students to lie down in hall ways as they searched for drugs. […]
The school’s principal defends the dramatic sweep, caught on the school’s surveillance tape. Police came into the school with guns at the ready, ordered all students to lie on the floor and then handcuffed anyone who apparently didn’t comply quickly enough. […]
Police didn’t find any criminals in the armed sweep, but they say K-9 dogs smelled drugs on a dozen backpacks. Goose Creek police and school administrators defend the draconian measures as necessary for crime prevention. […]
The paper quoted Lt. Dave Aarons of the Goose Creek Police Department as saying that the suspected drug dealers appeared to be knowledgeable about where the school surveillance cameras were. […]
“They know where the cameras are. If they stand directly under them, the camera’s don’t look directly down,” Aarons told the paper.
Obviously the only solution to the druggies being insufficiently stoned to not notice the cameras is a full live weapon commando raid. A cynic might suggest an extra camera or two that removed the blind spots or maybe some investigative work or actual hard evidence of drug use, but clearly our drug warriors didn’t listen to such naysayers before endangering school children.
The Palestinian Authority, headed by Yasser Arafat, is paying members of a Palestinian militant organisation which has been responsible for carrying out suicide attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians, a BBC investigation has found.
A total of up to $50,000 a month is being sent to members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, an armed group that emerged shortly after the outbreak of the current Palestinian intifada, a BBC Correspondent programme reveals.
A former minister in the government led by ex-Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) says that the money is an attempt to wean the gunmen away from suicide bombings. He says the policy of paying the money was not instigated by Mr Arafat but has been carried out with his knowledge and agreement.
Yeah, reducing their “dependency” on murder and suicide, that’s the ticket!
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Any movement serious about Iraqi self-determination must call not only for an end to Iraq’s military occupation, but to its economic colonisation as well. That means reversing the shock therapy reforms that US occupation chief Paul Bremer has fraudulently passed off as “reconstruction”, and cancelling all privatisation contracts that are flowing from these reforms.
How can such an ambitious goal be achieved? Easy: by showing that Bremer’s reforms were illegal to begin with. They clearly violate the international convention governing the behaviour of occupying forces, the Hague regulations of 1907 (the companion to the 1949 Geneva conventions, both ratified by the United States), as well as the US army’s own code of war.
The Hague regulations state that an occupying power must respect “unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country”. The coalition provisional authority has shredded that simple rule with gleeful defiance. Iraq’s constitution outlaws the privatisation of key state assets, and it bars foreigners from owning Iraqi firms. No plausible argument can be made that the CPA was “absolutely prevented” from respecting those laws, and yet two months ago, the CPA overturned them unilaterally.
Didn’t Iraq’s ‘laws’ allow arbitary arrest, torture and execution by the state? Maybe Bremer should be doing some of that.
— Amos
Well, from what I can tell Klien does find privitization to be more objectionable than brutal repression. After all, the former tends to prevent universal health care.
On 11 September 2001, I wrote that one of the casualties of the day’s events would be the Western alliance: ‘The US taxpayer’s willingness to pay for the defence of Canada and Europe has contributed to the decay of America’s so-called “allies”, freeing them to disband their armed forces, flirt with dictators and gangster states, and essentially convert themselves to semi-non-aligned’. ‘The West’ was an obsolete concept, because, as I put it later that month, for everyone but America ‘the free world is mostly a free ride’.
Two years on, most governments, at least officially, and most commentators, at least in the mainstream press, still don’t believe the relationship between America and its ‘allies’ is in a terminal state. […]
Europe is dying. As I’ve pointed out here before, it can’t square rising welfare costs, a collapsed birthrate and a manpower dependent on the world’s least skilled, least assimilable immigrants. […] But the idea of a childless Europe rivalling America militarily or economically is laughable. Sometime this century there will be 500 million Americans, and what’s left in Europe will either be very old or very Muslim. That’s the Europe that Britain will be binding its fate to. Japan faces the same problem: in 2006, its population will begin an absolute decline, a death spiral it will be unlikely ever to climb out of. Will Japan be an economic powerhouse if it’s populated by Koreans and Filipinos? Possibly. Will Germany if it’s populated by Algerians? That’s a trickier proposition. […]
Europe is dying, and it’s only a question of whether it goes peacefully or through convulsions of violence. On that point, I bet on form.
I think there’s a realistic possibility that Europe in twenty years will be competing with Rwanda for ugly civil violence.
On July 22, not yet three months into his administration, [C. Ray Nagin] the new mayor [of New Orleans] ordered a lightning raid on the city’s Taxicab Bureau, arresting more than 80 employees and cabbies (including his own cousin) on bribery and related charges, and shutting the agency down. Its head was led out of city hall in handcuffs. When Lilliam Regan, the director of the city agency that oversees the Taxicab Bureau, called a press conference that afternoon to defend her workers, Nagin’s men walked in front of the TV cameras, told Regan to pack up her things and get out of city hall. She was fired, and later arrested.
Ooooh, that’s gotta hurt.
Nobody expected the political neophyte to be so forceful, and so soon. Last Monday’s blitzkrieg of the Taxicab Bureau has made Nagin the No. 1 topic of conversation all over town (“There’s definitely bloodlust to see more city officials handcuffed,” says one observer), and shot the new mayor’s popularity through the roof. [emphasis added]
Sweeeeeet.
Nagin has also endorsed Bobby Jindal, a Repulican, for governor. Apparently Nagin isn’t in to fooling around with half measures.
Enter Stage Right, an e-journal where liberty, individualism and capitalism aren’t bad words, is back online.
The people of Richmond, VA—58% of whom are black—are not allowed to vote for their own mayor. (They have a city council member who acts as figurehead mayor while a city manager runs the government.) On yesterday’s ballot was a proposition that would allow them to do so, a proposition supported by nearly every former mayor, black and white. The only opposition came from currently elected black politicians like the acting mayor and a powerful state senator, Henry Marsh.
The proposition passed with an astonishing 80% of the vote, and it carried every council district, including the majority black districts. So what is the reaction of the black elected officials who represent these voters?
Sen. Marsh predicts a “race war” in Richmond if direct democracy is “forced” upon them. […]
There is universal agreement that the city government is incompetent and corrupt. One councilmember just left for the federal pen and another is currently under indictment for bribery. The only answer from the black Democrats running this once-proud city is to say “You must keep us crooks in power because we’re black! And if you don’t…watch out.”
Of course, one reason that is done is because it works, as it just did in Philadelphia.
Singapore students are the best in the world in international math tests, so some schools are trying out the island nation’s curriculum. Singapore Math was a huge success in a Maryland experiment.Of course, this is par for the course for a field that never pays attention to the results of any experiment or project.The Singapore Math curriculum relies heavily on helping students master basic math facts before moving on to more theoretical concepts.
. . . The study’s authors were unambiguous about the success of Singapore Math.
“The results from Year 2 implementation of the quarterly assessments mirror the trends seen in Year 1 implementation. For every assessment, at every grade level, students in the Singapore Math pilot schools performed significantly higher” than schools that did not have the program, the report states.
Singapore Math appeared to be “more effective at helping minority students and students from low-income families.”
Yet schools are dropping Singapore Math. Now that the experiment is over, funding for materials and training has dried up. Rather than dip into school budgets, principals are switching to the new county math curriculum, which is aligned to state tests and said to be more rigorous than the old curriculum. And it’s cheaper than funding a special program — in the short run.
By a more than 2-to-1 ratio, residents of Bolinas, Calif.—which turns out to be some sort of hippie enclave, according to our readers—approved Measure G, “for Bolinas to be a socially acknowledged nature-loving town because to like to drink the water out of the lakes to like to eat the blueberries to like the bears is not hatred to hotels and motor boats. Dakar. Temporary and way to save life, skunks and foxes (airplanes to go over the ocean) and to make it beautiful.” That’s actually what the thing says. Bolinasians voted 314 to 152 in favor of this nonsense.
They’re taking all the fun out of mockery.
Republican Sen. Pat Roberts said Democrats have undermined the inquiry he is leading into Iraq prewar intelligence by drafting a memo aimed at discrediting the Senate Intelligence Committee’s work. […]
[Democratic Senator] Rockefeller acknowledged the document after news reports quoted excerpts from it. The memo spells out steps to make the committee’s inquiry irrelevant by setting up an independent commission, and in the process attempt to “castigate” majority Republicans. It suggested “pulling the trigger” on the plan “probably next year.”
It’s not so much that the Democratic Party leaders would turn a vitally needed review of our intelligence operations into a partisan witch hunt, but that they’re dumb enough to let the memo leak. Have they gotten so arrogant that they feel no need to put up a facade? Or did this kind of thing get out before and it’s only because of the blogosphere that it becomes widely known?
Across Europe and the Middle East, young militant Muslim men are answering a call issued by Osama bin Laden and other extremists, and leaving home to join the fight against the American-led occupation in Iraq, according to senior counterterrorism officials based in six countries. […]
Intelligence officials, who base their assessment of the traffic into Iraq on surveillance of mosques and Islamic centers and on interrogations of terrorist suspects captured inside Iraq, say they have found no connections between the recruits. “Nobody is organizing this move from Europe to Iraq,” a senior European counterterrorism official said. “At least it is difficult to analyze and know who is organizing this. This may be just the beginning of a new phenomenon.”
[emphasis added] Yes, it’s quite a puzzle what connection there could be between Muslims, mosques, Islamic centers and young men going off to fight jihad in Iraq. Just one of the mysteries of our time.
Molly Ivins’ column appears each Monday in the Seattle Times. In last week’s column (ironically headlined Lie after lie after lie), Ivins told us a whopper of a lie — that the administration sentYeah, that’s a bit of a sensitive topic in Seattle.500 letters … to American newspapers in the names of serving soldiers without their knowledge or permission
This lie has been debunked here and elsewhere. […]
Today’s column repeated last week’s lie and gave us a brand new lie:
Not to wish ill on Wolfowitz, but he is the one who promised us this war would be “a cakewalk”
I have never found any evidence that Paul Wolfowitz or any other administration figure ever made such a remark. The only verifiable use of the term “cakewalk” in this sense that I’m aware of was made by Kenneth Adelman, who has never been a member of this Bush administration. See for example, Kenneth Adelman’s essay from Feb. 27, 2003
One year ago [2/13/2002], The Washington Post published my article “Cakewalk in Iraq,” which predicted that “demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.”
Though that view has been denounced, even disparaged, by nearly everyone from Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz on down, I remain as confident now as I was then.
[…] I notice that Ivins’ original column contains this other widely discredited lie:
George Nethercutt, a Republican congressman from Washington state, spent four days in Iraq and told an audience at home: “The story of what we’ve done in Iraq is remarkable. It is a better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day.”
Major oops. “Let’s ignore the dead soldiers” is not going to improve anything.
The Seattle Times had the good sense to remove the above lie from their version of Ivins’ column
A story about a private school where senior girls were kissing the restroom mirror after putting on lipstick, leaving prints that had to be cleaned every night. Finally, the principal called the girls to the restroom.To demonstrate how difficult it had been to clean the mirrors, she asked the maintenance man to show the girls how much effort was required.
He took out a long-handled squeegee, dipped it in the toilet, and cleaned the mirror with it. Since then, there have been no lip prints on the mirror.
There are teachers, and then there are educators.
I’m glad to see that that art of subtlety is not yet lost.
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On October 26, the Washington Post published a story by Barton Gellman titled Search in Iraq Fails to Find Nuclear Threat, claiming that no evidence of a nuclear program had been found by inspectors in Iraq. Gellman attributed this conclusion largely to Australian Brig. Gen. Stephen D. Meekin, described as the “commander of the largest of a half-dozen units” that report to CIA representative David Kay.
But according to these letters from David Kay and Stephen Meekin published in the WaPo today, Gellman’s report was dishonest to its core: Your story gives the false impression…
Well, it’s what he meant to say - Gellman just ‘cleaned up’ the quotes.
Apparently it’s no longer embarassing when one’s primary source writes in to say “you got it all wrong”. Meekin’s letter basically states that Meekin had nothing to do with looking for WMD in Iraq and that he made this point repeatedly to Gellman. Gellman of course then went on to cite Meekin as a source about … looking for WMD in Iraq!
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At issue was last night’s “iftaar” dinner at the White House celebrating Ramadan, the holy month for Muslims that began Monday. Participants fast during daylight hours of Ramadan, breaking their fast each day with an “iftaar” meal — beginning with dates and water— at sundown.
Although the guest list included 92 persons, several Muslim organizations who differ vastly with the White House on political and religious issues complained they were left off the list.
Passed over, Mr. Bray said, was the Muslim Students Association, American Muslims for Jerusalem, the Islamic Society of North America, Project Islamic Hope, the Coordinating Council of Muslim Organizations of Greater Washington and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
I have to agree with the Rottweiler - try unambiguously condemning terrorism and see if your invites show up in the mail. I’m actually surprised that the Bush Administration is showing this much back bone. Better late than never.
Are Louisiana’s political tectonic plates shifting? Or is there more than meets the eye here with Bobby Jindal’s steadily-increasing support among blacks.
The answers are yes, and yes. The New Orleans black political group BOLD sent a shot heard around the state last week by its gubernatorial endorsement of Bobby Jindal over Kathleen Blanco, in a vote described by its president as not close. (Which caused some consternation for one of its top officers, state Rep. Karen Carter, also a state Democrat official.)
Had this occurred in isolation, perhaps Democrats and black elected officials could have written it off as a fluke, maybe an idiosyncratic incident over a group’s perceived slight at the hands of the Blanco campaign. After all, a couple of other alphabet-soup groups have been with Blanco from the start, and others probably will follow.
But then the Baton Rouge-based CLOUT announced its backing of Jindal, followed by the endorsement of veteran Shreveport activist and former state Rep. C.O. Simpkins. Others may well follow here. The news is not that Jindal is going to pick up lots of endorsements from black political leaders (except those elected, who are all Democrats) and groups, but that he’ll pick up more than a trivial number.
Quotes and excerpts from the Saturday Evening Post in January of 1946. The contrast in tone of this critical article with those of today is interesting.
American troops have been using funds seized from the Ba’ath for on the spot reconstruction efforts through a program called “CERP”. Now, however, the money is drying up and the program is shutting down despite its successes and good works. This is a real problem and the sort of thing a loyal opposition would be headlining. Unfortunately, it’s something that can be easily corrected to the benefit of the ruling party and the modern Democratic Party can’t support something like that.
59% of Europeans believe that Israel is the world’s greatest threat to peace, according to polling data commissioned by the European Union. And yet the EU-lite sniff at the alledgedly parochialism of US citizens. Sad and pathetic.
P.S. The article also claims that the EU has been attempting to withhold this polling data, presumably out of fear of exactly the kind of mockery I’ve posted here.
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Another group of members of Congress have had a press conference after their return from Iraq. It seems quite telling how nearly every US politician, Republican or Democrat, find the ‘ground truth’ different from what they are hearing day after day from the Palestine Hotel bar.
If even a politician can see what is going on, what does this say about the intelligence of journalists?
It means that journalists have ascended to a higher plane, beyond the influence of mundanities like “facts”.