neoconservative hawk Paul Wolfowitz, the Pentagon’s architect of the US invasion of Iraq, is dating a Muslim!
While battle lines have hardened over President Bush’s nomination of Wolfowitz to become president of the World Bank, what many say is really fueling the controversy is concern within the bank over Wolfowitz’s reported romantic relationship with Shaha Ali Riza, an Arab feminist who is the acting manager for External Relations and Outreach for the Middle East and North Africa Region at the World Bank.
[…]
But Wolfowitz, a married father of three, is said to be so blinded by his relationship with Riza, that influential members of the World Bank believe she played a key role in influencing the Pentagon official to launch the 2003 Iraq war.
There are many things of interest in this, but what struck me was the idea that Arab News is reporting that there exists at least one Muslim who strongly favored the invasion of Iraq. Here I thought it was supposed to be a resurgence of the Crusades, but it turns out to be the brain child of a Muslim woman? What’s up with that?
Mugabe is in substantial breach of every election protocol of the Southern African Development Community, of which Zimbabwe is a member; he has failed to implement the recommendations of the African Union’s Commission on Human and People’s Rights; he flouts international law, and he has banned the presence of observer teams from all countries and nongovernmental organizations that might conclude that the elections might not be free and fair (China qualifies, the European Union does not).
Rather than rebuke Mugabe for his crimes against his own people, South Africa assists in their persecution. When Zimbabweans, desperate for food and work, sneak their way into South Africa, they are incarcerated in the Lindela Repatriation Center, a prison that would put any apartheid-era prison to shame.
Sadly, black South Africans seem to have forgotten that all of Africa took them in and championed their cause, often at risk to themselves.
All of Africa championed the cause of kicking whites out of power in South Africa. That was always the fundamental purpose, not relieving the political oppression of blacks (as noted by the lack of outcry over other, contemporaneous regimes that were far more oppressive). Well, Mugabe has made sure that whites aren’t in charge in Zimbabwe, so what’s the problem?
A lone U.S. ambassador compromised America’s hunt for Osama bin Laden in Pakistan for more than two years,The New York Sun has learned.
Ambassador Nancy Powell, America’s representative in Pakistan, refused to allow the distribution in Pakistan of wanted posters, matchbooks, and other items advertising America’s $25 million reward for information leading to the capture of Mr. bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders.
Instead, thousands of matchbooks, posters, and other material - printed at taxpayer expense and translated into Urdu, Pashto, and other local languages - remained “impounded” on American Embassy grounds from 2002 to 2004, according to Rep. Mark Kirk, Republican of Illinois.
[…]
Mr. Kirk discovered Ms. Powell’s unusual order in January 2004 and, over the past year, launched a series of behind-the-scenes moves that culminated in a blunt conversation with President Bush aboard Air Force One, the removal of the ambassador, and congressional approval for reinvigorating the hunt for Mr. bin Laden.
[…]
A single matchbook helped lead to the capture of Mir Amal Kansi, who gunned down several CIA employees at the front gates of the agency’s Langley, Va., headquarters in 1993. Kansi was arrested in Pakistan in 1995 when a local fingered him for the $5 million reward. Mr.Kirk pointed out the similarities between the Kansi and bin Laden cases. “Both are cases gone cold in Pakistan,” he said.
In response to Kirk’s direct question, the ambassador apparently replied that she was very busy with a number of different priorities, of which bin Laden was only one. Why ordering the halt of the distribution was more work than not issuing the order isn’t clear. And of course, one wonders about an organization where managers feel free to simply disregard policies they don’t like.
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The Sydney Morning Herald reports that a prisoner expected to give evidence in the Schapelle Corby smuggling case in Bali fears for his life if he is identified by Australian drug gangs:
A senior member of Corby’s legal team, Vasu Rasiah, said the prisoner, John Patrick Ford, could face retribution when he returned to Australia after testifying that the former Gold Coast beauty student had been wrongly accused.
“We are worried for his safety and if the cameras are going to flag his face all over Australia, by the time he gets back he will be a dead man,” Mr Rasiah said. “We will apply [to close the court].”
So what does the Sydney Morning Herald do? It immediately runs a picture of Ford (and a smaller shot on the front page of the SMH site). So does Brisbane’s Courier Mail, and presumably several other papers in their print editions.
UPDATE. Also in the Daily Telegraph.
Sadly, I think this kind of things falls under the hueristic “never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity”. If only these people had editors!
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Binga, Zimbabwe — The hungry children and the families dying of AIDS here are gut-wrenching, but somehow what I find even more depressing is this: Many, many ordinary black Zimbabweans wish that they could get back the white racist government that oppressed them in the 1970’s.
“If we had the chance to go back to white rule, we’d do it,” said Solomon Dube, a peasant whose child was crying with hunger when I arrived in his village. “Life was easier then, and at least you could get food and a job.”
Mr. Dube acknowledged that the white regime of Ian Smith was awful. But now he worries that his 3-year-old son will die of starvation, and he would rather put up with any indignity than witness that.
[…]
Nearly every peasant I’ve spoken to in Zimbabwe echoed those thoughts
[…]
When a white racist government was oppressing Zimbabwe, the international community united to demand change. These days, a black racist government is harming the people of Zimbabwe more than ever, and the international community is letting Mr. Mugabe get away with it. Our hypocrisy is costing hundreds of Zimbabwean lives every day.
I wonder how many people who reported on this could even hold the idea in their heads that there were worse forms of government than the old regime in Zimbabwe. Of course, it’s of a piece with all the concern over South African blacks not getting to vote when South Africa was far from unique in that regard.
One is also tempted to consider how regime change in Iraq, run by the Right Wing Death Beasts, is turning out compared to that encouraged by the Modern American Left.
P.S. The author also writes:
The West has often focused its outrage at Mr. Mugabe’s seizure of farms from white landowners, but that is tribalism on our part. The greatest suffering by far is among black Zimbabweans.
It’s not like those things are unrelated. I objected to the seizure precisely because it was obvious that it was going to severely degrade food production in Zimbabwe and that the alledged beneficiaries (poor blacks Zimbabweans) were going to be much worse off afterwards.
A £1m campaign to promote quality food has been scrapped after the government refused to support it, claiming a picture of Jersey cows in rolling green fields was “too British” and thus broke European regulations.
One photograph, headlined One Day with Daisy, was deemed to be too obviously of a British landscape and thus risked breaching articles 20 and 28 of the Treaty of Rome, designed to curb illegal state subsidies.
Shouldn’t this also mean the banning of such highly regional terms as “Parmesian” and “Champagne”?
In a two-pronged legal attack, the parents of a young American activist killed two years ago while trying to block the demolition of a home in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip have filed lawsuits in Seattle and Israel, seeking compensation for their daughter’s death.
[…]
The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle asserts that Caterpillar Inc. violated state and international law by selling specially designed bulldozers to the Israeli military knowing that they would be used to demolish homes and endanger civilians.
p, Wouldn’t this lawsuit, if successful, effectively ban foreign sales of American weapons? Or just weapons sales to Isarael? After all, the use of weapons almost always involves demolishing houses and endangering civilians.
Hundreds of young rioters from poor Paris suburbs disrupted the demonstration on March 8, beating teenagers to the ground and stealing mobile telephones and cameras.
Le Monde newspaper carried disturbing interviews with attackers and victims in last week’s trouble - both sides agreeing that the violence was exclusively carried out on white boys and girls by black and Arab teenagers.
“If I went, it was not to demonstrate but to take telephones and beat people up. There were groups of people running about stirring things up, and in the middle these idiots - these little French people just asking for it,” an 18-year-old of Tunisian origin called Heikel said.
“We came to demonstrate against inequalities and we got beaten up. It’s as if they thought that we - the ‘white Parisians’ - had plenty of money, that we could buy a new mobile phone tomorrow,” said Tristan Goldbronn, 16, who was badly hurt.
Heikel, who attends a secondary school in the area, told Le Monde that the mainly white Parisian students who took part in the march - known in street parlance as “bolos” - were seen as spoilt and privileged, and therefore fair game.
I love reading heart-warming stories like this. The only downside is that the bolos will likely never understand why the actual poor don’t see things as the bolos do.
I’ll be out of town for a week and a half. Check in again a week from Monday. Thanks!
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I don’t know who should own Egon Schiele’s “Portrait of Wally” or whether that issue should be decided by U.S. or Austrian courts or whether the Museum of Modern Art is behaving well or badly in the case. But National Public Radio should be highly embarrassed that it apparently ‘terminated’ a reporter, David D’Arcy, for a story that, while clearly pitched against MOMA, was seemingly accurate and at least as fair as anything else you hear on NPR. NPR’s ombudsman, Jeffrey Dvorkin, has now defended the network’s pro-MOMA “clarification,” while somehow skirting the D’Arcy removal, which is the crux of the controversy. That in turn prompted this lengthy and well-informed blowback from Randol Schoenberg of the anti-MOMA side. …
Dvorkin’s piece isn’t as bad as Schoenberg says. It’s worse! Dvorkin writes:
The NPR report implied that the painting was part of MoMA’s permanent collection .…
That’s true, but according to NEXIS the only part of the report that implied this was host Melissa Block’s intro. D’Arcy’s report, as broadcast, made it completely clear that the painting was seized by the U.S. government after being loaned to MOMA by its putatitve Austrian owners. … Did D’Arcy write Block’s words? If not, why was he the one axed?
He was probably wearing the red shirt.
The Watcher’s Council has an opening. The council reviews posts and provides a weekly round up of the best ones.
THE PRESIDENT: Elisabeth.
Q Paul Wolfowitz, who was the — a chief architect of one of the most unpopular wars in our history —
THE PRESIDENT: (Laughter.) That’s an interesting start. (Laughter.)
Q — is your choice to be the President of the World Bank. What kind of signal does that send to the rest of the world?
Recall that the investigation by the blogs of the left into Jeff Gannon/Guckart began after Gannon/Guckart asked a leading question at the president’s last press conference. The rationale was that a partisan with a press pass was a suspicious thing. I don’t know who “Elisabeth” is, but her framing of her question is as partisan and leading as any that could be asked of the president. So, will the mob that went after Gannon/Guckart now be sifting through Elisabeth’s past for intriguing clues on the source of her partisanship?
Sadly, we all know the answer to that.
So the Americans decided to test the commandos in early October by sending them as part of a mixed U.S.-Iraqi force to regain control of Samarra, north of Baghdad. On the day the commandos were set to go, their headquarters was hit by a car bomb, with dozens of casualties. Adnan’s troops moved out anyway, a few hours later. They fought well in Samarra and, using their own local intelligence, captured 38 suspected insurgent leaders.
The commandos next moved into Mosul in mid-November, after local police there had been shattered by the insurgents. Coffman accompanied them into battle. On Nov. 14, he and the Iraqi commandos were caught in a well-prepared ambush. They fought for more than four hours; four of the commandos were killed and 38 wounded, but they held their ground. Coffman was shot in one hand, but with the other, he kept firing his M-4 rifle and then, when he ran out of ammunition, an Iraqi AK-47.
Coffman was still wearing a heavy bandage on his hand when we visited Adnan’s headquarters. His thumb and two joints were shattered in the Mosul fight. U.S. military doctors tried to evacuate him to Germany, but he refused. The Iraqi general looks over at his American adviser and says he’s a brave soldier. “In the Mosul battle, he stood shoulder to shoulder with my men.” It’s obvious he could not pay a higher compliment.
As one of the commentors notes, beyond the inspirational content of this story is the fact that it happened last year but wasn’t reported on until recently. Perhaps it’s a sign that Iraq is being pushed to the forgotten story department as things turn around, just like Afghanistan was.
Haven’t heard about any abuses of the Patriot Act recently? It’s not because no one is looking. The Patriot Act requires the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General to collect complaints about alleged civil liberties abuses and to put out a report every six months cataloging the findings. The first one of these reports made front-page news a few years ago when the press failed to understand the difference between allegations of abuses and actual cases of abuses; the New York Times, for example, accidentally reported the former as the latter. When it became clear that the allegations were unfounded, the story quickly fell out of the media spotlight.
These days, the DOJ OIG report comes and goes with no fanfare or press attention. Why? Because the DOJ isn’t finding much in the way of abuses, and isn’t finding anything at all related to the Patriot Act.
The biggest problem with the “Patriot Act” (a name that ranks with “Homeland Security” for fascist imagery) has always been that it was the typical “if there’s a problem all we need is more laws! : What we really needed was to fix broken agencies, not to reward their failures.
Thousands of Iraqi Shi’ites protested on Monday after hearing reports that relatives of a Jordanian suicide bomber suspected of killing 125 people in the town of Hilla celebrated him as a martyr.
I’ve always wondered what it would take for the Arab Street to start protesting against things which are actually problems instead of the USA or Israel.
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New York Senator Hillary Clinton touted the ethical standards of female leaders like herself on Monday, telling a forum at New York University that women in government are less corrupt than their male counterparts.
“Research shows the presence of women raises the standards of ethical behavior and lowers corruption,” Clinton told the Vital Voices’ Women’s Global Leadership Summit, in quotes picked up by NYU’s student newspaper, the Washington Square News.
As No Illusions notes:
A senator makes a categorical generalization about gender characteristics. No faculty members left the room in a snit, and the ‘sexist remark’ wasn’t carried by every news outlet in the country. In fact, very few (including your intrepid commentator) even picked up on it. Where’s the outrage?
The answer is, it’s only sexist if it isn’t complimentary to women. After all, women are the same as men except when they are superior.
Father-of-two Lyle Simpson admitted being a killer, DNA evidence proved he was at the scene of one murder and he tried to commit suicide a day later.
Yet after three days of legal argument in the NSW Supreme Court, Judge Anthony Whealy ruled some evidence was just too damning and ran the risk of “unfair prejudice” to the accused.
Because what’s important is the process, not the results.A “fair” trial isn’t one where the correct or accurate decision is reacted.
P.S. I will note that it’s not just the judge in this case:
Under Section 137 of the Evidence Act 1995 “the court must refuse to admit evidence adduced by the prosecutor if its probative value is outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice to the defendant.”
As conservatives well understand, once a group of voters has been given a property right by Washington, they will never allow it to be taken away. The individual rights will be a ratchet, one that can be expanded but never contracted. The pressure for expansion would be especially strong during extended bull market runs, such as during the late ‘90s, when the public (and even some economists) tends to delude itself into thinking that stocks will rise forever. This is why conservatives are so insistent upon establishing individual accounts. They have uncharacteristically volunteered compromises—even offering to violate their theological opposition to tax hikes—in order to insert their opening wedge. Privatizers understand full well that any concessions they make can be legislated away in the future, while private accounts cannot.
this is a revealing bit. Chait argues that Democrats have to stop accounts now because the public would like them and demand their expansion and liberalization
Of course, the Progressives have never thought highly of the opinions of the hoi polloi.
I spent part of last week ringing up the organizers of the anti-war events with a couple of questions. The first: Would they allow anyone from the newly-elected Iraqi parliament to address the gatherings? The second: Would the marches include expressions of support for the democracy movement in Arab and other Muslim countries, notably Iraq, Lebanon and Syria?
In both cases the answer was a categorical no, accompanied by a torrent of abuse about “all those who try to justify American aggression against Iraq.”
I’d like to be able to say that I’m surprised that anti-Americanism trumps all other concerns for these people, but I’m not. At least they’re open about it now.
The words that have some U.S. Marines in shock came from the man in charge of security at the UAW Solidarity House, on Jefferson in Detroit. For a number of years now, dozens of Marine reservists have been thankful to park in the UAW’s lot for weekend training with no problem at all - until now.
Marines at nearby Marine Corps Reserve Center say on Tuesday morning, the director of security at the UAW told them that while they support the troops, Marines driving foreign vehicles or sporting a President George Bush bumper sticker were no longer welcome to park there. [emphasis added]
Well clearly the UAW won’t allow foreign cars or Presidents in their parking lot.
During the cold war, Canada cooperated with the US on air defense, making missile defense seem a natural successor. And Canada had recently agreed to cooperate with the US at the NORAD air defense command in Colorado, tracking not only traditional threats from aircraft but possible missile launches against North America as well.
But Canadians, who have followed the American missile defense debate closely since Ronald Reagan’s “star wars” Strategic Defense Initiative, did not hear Bush’s request in such innocuous terms. They know what is in the Pentagon’s long-term plan for missile defense systems. It isn’t simply a pragmatic and modest defense against possible North Korean or Iranian threats, of the type now being deployed in California and Alaska. Although not yet formalized, it also envisions the possibility of a land-based and sea-based system that might be large enough to challenge China’s deterrent (and even make some Russians nervous). And perhaps most controversial of all, it speaks of space weapons - be they small interceptor missiles or lasers to shoot down threats from wherever they might be launched.
Beyond the inability to take this seriously because we know it’s purely posturing for the rabidly anti-American set in Soviet Canuckistanl note what is considered a key problem: challenging the growing military might of a brutal, nuclear armed Communist regime. I bet they would take back the challenge to the deterrent of the Atlantic Wall at Juno beach if they could.
Bolton’s nomination took many on Capitol Hill by surprise. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), who will preside over the confirmation hearing, declined to voice support for Bush’s choice. Lugar wants to meet with Bolton “before discussing his support,” Lugar spokesman Andy Fisher said.
Democrats criticized the choice.
“This is just about the most inexplicable appointment the president could make,” said Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.). “If the president is serious about reaching out to the world, why would he choose someone who has expressed such disdain for working with our allies?”
Actual insight from Senator Ferry!! Typically, Though, he is apparently constitutionally unable to follow through to The conclusions that
KABUL (Reuters) - Fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar has lost control of the insurgency in Afghanistan and the number of attacks has fallen dramatically, a senior U.S. general said Monday.
Taliban spokesmen have said attacks will resume once the harsh Afghan winter is over.
Now it’s the mujahadin who are unable to fight in the brutal Afghan winter? How the mighty have fallen!
Sorry, guys, it’s taking every erg of output I’ve got just to keep the red state sheeple from rising in a bloody revolution against the Rovian gaulieters who force them to vote for Repuglicans. But tell the Elders to call me after August, I might have some spare capacity then.
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You will find much more accurate coverage of many recent events involving Israel at EyeonthePost than at its target, the Washington Post. My favorite recent point: The Post consistently refers to Israel as “occupying” the West Bank and Gaza, though the only other sovereign countries to have recently held these lands, Jordan and Egypt, have disclaimed ownership. But Syria merely has a “presence” in the otherwise sovereign state of Lebanon.
But Syria said that it wasn’t an occupier. What more confirmation is needed?
In the end, the most promising (if gradual) course for promoting reform in Syria is to engage and empower [Syrian President Bashar] Assad, not to isolate and overthrow him.
[…]
The Bush administration can elicit more sustained improvements in Syrian behavior on Iraq and terrorism by using the threat of intensified criticism of Syrian hegemony in Lebanon - including Security Council action - as a badly needed stick in the repertoire of policy options toward Syria. Washington should also not be afraid to spell out for Mr. Assad the carrots it would offer in return for greater cooperation.
The embargo is broken and the New York Times comes out for appeasing the Ba’ath regime over its occupation of Lebanon.
Gene hits the right note of sarcasm when notes that this advice consists of appeasement while “holding in reserve the dreaded threat of intensified criticism”.
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Rose: (Referring to the Iraqi elections) Do you have confidence that this government, uh, will, as they write the constitution, will not be a mirror-image of the Iranian theocracy?
Clinton: Oh yeah. Yeah — the Shi’ites have been pretty smart about that. And if you look at the Iranian — Iran’s a whole different kettle of fish, but it’s a sad story that really began in the 1950s when the United States deposed Mr. Mossadegh, who was an elected parliamentary democrat, and brought the Shah back in [Rose says “CIA” in the background] and then he was overturned by the Ayatollah Khomeini, driving us into the arms of one Saddam Hussein. Most of the terrible things Saddam Hussein did in the 1980s he did with the full, knowing support of the United States government, because he was in Iran, and Iran was what it was because we got rid of the parliamentary democracy back in the ‘50s; at least, that is my belief.
I know it is not popular for an American ever to say anything like this, but I think it’s true [applause], and I apologized when President Khatami was elected. I publicly acknowledged that the United States had actively overthrown Mossadegh and I apologized for it, and I hope that we could have some rapprochement with Iran. I think basically the Europeans’ initiative to Iran to try to figure out a way to defuse the nuclear crisis is a good one.
I think President Bush has done, so far, the right thing by not taking the military option off the table, but not pushing it too much. I didn’t like the story that looked like the military option had been elevated above a diplomatic option. But Iran is the most perplexing problem … we face, for the following reasons: It is the only country in the world with two governments, and the only country in the world that has now had six elections since the first election of President Khatami. [It is] the only one with elections, including the United States, including Israel, including you name it, where the liberals, or the progressives, have won two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote in six elections: two for President; two for the parliament, the Majlis; two for the mayoralities.
In every single election, the guys I identify with got two-thirds to 70% of the vote. There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own.
Just as I was beginning to think that Clinton understood WWIV. Did HRC read this and weep?
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Sen. John Kerry is sponsoring a resolution honoring black activist W.E.B. Du Bois, who officially joined the Communist Party late in life after faithful support of the Soviet line in world affairs.
Du Bois praised Soviet dictator and mass murderer Joseph Stalin as “great” and “courageous” and defended Communist North Korea for its 1950 invasion of South Korea.
It’s like a drunk and the bottle, except most drunks have at least some idea that it’s a bad idea.
According to the ethics complaint, at the same time [ACLU attorney Kathy] Hall defended the Arkansas Child Welfare Agency Review Board (CWARB) against an ACLU lawsuit in the case of Howard v. CWARB, she also served as co-counsel for the ACLU in a case against an Arkansas school board — McLaughlin v. Pulaski School District.
The two cases were not unrelated. In McLaughlin, Hall worked on behalf of the ACLU to sue a school district for restricting a gay teenager’s freedom to speak about his homosexuality. In Howard, Hall opposed the ACLU, defending the CWARB’s policy of not allowing gay couples to serve as foster parents.
Whether Ms. Hall liked CWARB’s policy or not, her duty was to defend her client and to disclose any conflicts of interest. (James Balcom, chairman of CWARB, confirmed that he didn’t learn of Hall’s representation of the ACLU until the trial was nearly over, and only then from a witness rather than from Ms. Hall.)
[…]
Why didn’t the ACLU speak up about Ms. Hall’s likely conflict of interest, as it ought to have done? It’s not like its top brass didn’t know who she was. Two of the ACLU’s lawyers opposing Ms. Hall and the CWARB were James Esseks, the litigation director of the ACLU’s national Lesbian and Gay Rights Project, and Leslie Cooper, a staff attorney for the ACLU’s Lesbian and Gay Rights Project.
Their silence is especially curious, since Ms. Hall’s ACLU co-counsel on the McLaughlin case were…Leslie Cooper and James Esseks, of the ACLU’s Lesbian and Gay Rights Project.
NOW IMAGINE THE KERFUFFLE had a conservative lawyer, say a member of the Federalist Society, not only kept quiet about a conflict of interest, but then refused to ask her sole expert witness a few important questions that could have affected the trial’s outcome — and then lost the trial.
My respect for the ACLU is such that this story doesn’t make it any less. That organization has long since sunk in to being a purely leftist political organization with no regard for the social underpinnings necessary to support civil liberties such as honesty and integrity.
Al Jazzera focused, as part of its coverage for the “deteriorated situations in Iraq” on every single demonstration against the interim government or the American presence in Iraq even if it was 10 people that are demonstrating! But this coverage, that was missed in the official Arab media most of the times, showed the Arab street an unusual scene. “Arab” citizens demonstrating freely against their government and the supposed brutal occupiers under the eyes of police!
These days we hear every now and then about demonstrations almost everywhere in the Arab world. Excuse me, but this is far from usual! I haven’t seen any demonstration against Saddam all my life and similarly I haven’t heard of any in Syria or Saudi Arabia prior to the 9th of April. Most of us think it’s what happened in Iraq that encouraged Arabs to demand more rights, but how could Arab citizens know the details of what’s happening in Iraq if it wasn’t for Al Jazeera and Al Arabyia?
An excellent point. Apparently the Arab Street is better at discerning who is really oppressive than the Modern American Left.
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The hopelessly la-la-leftist L.A. Times published an interview Thursday with a North Korean “businessman.” This was a straight interview piece, except that there really aren’t any intelligent questions from the writer, nominally the Times’ South Korean Bureau Chief. This appalling parody of journalism offers absolutely no context or background for the statements of a regime mouthpiece, former member of the North Korean diplomatic corps, and currently hustling business for the Pyongyang government. Think I’m kidding? The interview was held at a karaoke bar in Beijing owned by the North Korean government. Want to guess what happens to ordinary North Koreans who talk to Western journalists?
It’s not just this story, as egregious as it is. It is what the internal culture at the LA Times must be that articles like this make it to the published paper.
If the European Union follows Israeli recommendations this week and places Hezbollah on a list of official terror organizations, the economic consequences of sanctions would “destroy” the Lebanese terror group, Hezbollah’s leader told Arabic language television.
Isn’t the most interesting implication of this how intrinsic European funding is to Middle Eastern terrorism?
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Bradley Smith says that the freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over.
In just a few months, he warns, bloggers and news organizations could risk the wrath of the federal government if they improperly link to a campaign’s Web site. Even forwarding a political candidate’s press release to a mailing list, depending on the details, could be punished by fines.
Smith should know. He’s one of the six commissioners at the Federal Election Commission, which is beginning the perilous process of extending a controversial 2002 campaign finance law to the Internet.
Sadly, this really does follow directly from the law. The interesting question will be “what is a link/post worth in dollars?”
The real issue remains official, Saudi-backed terrorist teaching, financing, recruitment and other support on American soil. Civic organizations examining the materials available in American mosques, as well as the textbooks used in Islamic schools, recognize that an amazingly-extensive network of such indoctrination centers exists right here, three and a half years after the horrors of 9/11.
Freedom House, based in New York, recently issued a shocking report on Muslim extremist religious literature distributed in American mosques.
According to the report, along with other evidence, day after day, Saudi-educated imams in the Saudi-owned, Saudi-constructed and Saudi-controlled mosques in the United States, and teachers in Saudi-built schools using Saudi-produced textbooks, continue to spew hatred of the freedoms that permitted them to find a place in our country to establish their evil dominion over American Muslims, and of their neighbors in our communities.
Story after story appears in our media, and Saudi subjects continue to figure at the center of terrorist conspiracies. Americans have the right to say: Enough.
The U.S. government has the duty to roll up the Saudi-Wahhabi hate conspiracy in this country once and for all, and to demand that the kingdom turn off the flow of cash that keeps it going.
I can understand wanting to put off the direct confrontation with the Saudi Entity in the Middle East (better to flank than charge straight up the middle at the enemy’s strong point) but I can’t understand why we can’t confront pernicious activity like this in the USA. On the other hand, it’s nothing new. We let the Soviets colonize most of our higher academic institutions, so why should I expect it to be different for the Caliphascists?
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On Friday, the front page at DailyKos, the blogosphere’s most visited temple of lefty latte chugging Howard Dean worshippers, featured a post by some guy calling himself Armando, positing his theory as to why John Kerry did so poorly in the South in 2004 compared to Bill Clinton in 1996. It’s a rather unremarkable analysis, except for the band-aid correction which Mr. Armando made to his carefully crafted genius a few hours after the first person to read the thing noticed that something was left out.
Update [2005-2-25 17:33:16 by Armando]: HProf points out my brain lock - the most important difference between 1996 and 2004 was the reemergence of national security as the single most important Presidential issue.
And thus, in stark relief, is revealed the problem in the Democratic Party today. Some anonymous guy takes whatever time it took to craft some big answer to a big question about the Democratic Party, and simply forgets that September 11 happened. The guy can’t even bring himself to type the characters “9/11”, prefering to call it some “reemergence of national security,” as if it just oozed out of the electorate like gay marriage or prescription drug coverage.
When you’re just barely mainting your reality dysfunction, you just can’t afford to hits from that kind of clue-by-four.