Musings Archive July 2004
Saturday, July 31, 2004 IS THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE A NAZI DEVICE?: Boy, I know I'm going to get email over this so please remember I'm not endorsing this, merely presenting it as something interesting to read.
Rex Curry is filing a brief in a court case attempting to get rid of the Pledge of Allegiance in classrooms. Curry argues that the Pledge itself was written by a Nazi named Francis Bellamy.
Newdow fails to mention that the author of the Pledge, Francis Bellamy, was a self-proclaimed National Socialist in the U.S. and belonged to a group known for "Nationalism," published the "Nationalist" magazine and created "Nationalist Clubs" worldwide, whose members wanted the federal government to nationalize most of the American economy. Bellamy saw socialist schools (government schools) as a means to that end. Bellamy also belonged to a religious socialist movement known as the "Society of Christian Socialists."
Newdow fails to mention that the original salute did not begin with the hand over the heart but began with a military salute that was in keeping with the goal of the Pledge's author, Francis Bellamy, to create an "industrial army" (a Bellamy phrase) modeled after the military, via a government takeover of education, eliminating all of the better alternatives, to achieve the authoritarian vision portrayed in his cousin Edward Bellamy's book "Looking Backward."
Curry includes some horrifying old pictures of American children saluting the American flag with a Nazi salute.
Read it all here.
Posted by steve @ 06:33 PM EST [Link] [Karma: 0 (+/-)] [No Comments]
~ WEB SITE UPDATED: The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have updated their web site with a bunch of new information. Go check it out.
For the record, I'm not throwing down at Kerry for "only" serving four month in country during the Vietnam War. It's four more months of combat than I ever saw.
Posted by steve @ 06:19 PM EST [Link] [Karma: 0 (+/-)] [No Comments]
Friday, July 30, 2004 NO ANDREW SULLIVANS HERE: After a week of schlepping around the Democratic National Convention in my old stomping grounds, I think it is safe to say that I am unlikely to personally make the case for John Kerry anytime soon.
Posted by antle @ 10:42 PM EST [Link] [Karma: 2 (+/-)] [No Comments]
~ LESS THAN NOTHING: Lawrence Kaplan absolutely shreds John Kerry over connecting his service in Vietnam to his foreign policy credentials.
There were, in fact, three Vietnams haunting the convention hall last night. One was on the stage, which, with its "band of brothers" and "greatest generation" tributes, somehow attached World War II nostalgia to our national tragedy in Vietnam. The second was in the audience, where nine out of ten delegates view the war in Iraq through the prism of their views of that earlier conflict--that is, they would just as soon bolt--and where Kerry's Vietnam service seems to be regarded as some sort of anthropological (and heaven-sent) oddity. The final Vietnam was in John Kerry's words, which blended the stage and audience versions into some approximation of the candidate's own views about the war. None of it furthered the cause of rational discourse.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 05:42 PM EST [Link] [Karma: 0 (+/-)] [No Comments]
~ SELF-PROMO ALERT: I had a piece yesterday in Tech Central Station on John Kerry's crafty tax-hike scheme and how the collapse of fiscal responsibility creates pressure to raise taxes.
Posted by antle @ 11:58 AM EST [Link] [Karma: 1 (+/-)] [No Comments]
~ CREDIBILITY ON SERVICE: That was quite a little bio film they showed on John Kerry last night, wasn't it? All that blood and guts in The Nam. Well, maybe not. Some Swift Boat captains are questioning some of the details contained in that film, specifically Kerry saving the life of a Green Beret.
The veterans raise two objections to the story. First, they question Kerry's version of events. Second, they question the convention video's portrayal of Kerry's version of events.
First, the video. The film included what appeared to be pictures of the incident itself. But one of Kerry's fellow officers who was involved in the action that day says there is, to his knowledge, no film of what went on. "I can vouch for the fact that there was probably no way that that incident was filmed that day, in the chaos of that moment," says Larry Thurlow, who was, like Kerry, a Navy lieutenant in command of a Swift Boat.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 11:41 AM EST [Link] [Karma: -1 (+/-)] [No Comments]
~ CNN, PBS, MSNBC, NBC, CBS & ABC, MAJOR NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES, REGULAR RADIO NOT ENOUGH, SAY LIBERALS: Apparently there just ain't enough liberal media on the air! A group of "progressive media activists" (as styled by Wired News) says that CNN and Fox News were conservative in their coverage of the Democratic National Convention and they want to launch a liberal television network.
Make your own jokes up.
Seriously though, good luck to them. It is impossible to find the liberal perspective in today's media. Where as conservatives can turn on Fox News or talk radio any time they want, liberals are forced into the ghetto of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Time, Newsweek, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR...perhaps it's easier if I just stop here. I have banking I have to do today.
At any rate, doubtless it will be as successful as Air America was. It that still on the air?
Posted by steve @ 10:25 AM EST [Link] [Karma: 0 (+/-)] [No Comments]
~ WE ARE THE SUPERFRIENDS!: Sean Hackbarth says Kerry/Edwards reminded him of a famous team. Find out which group here.
Posted by steve @ 01:22 AM EST [Link] [Karma: -2 (+/-)] [No Comments]
~ LET GO OF THE HATE PEOPLE: Imagine an author writing a novel which was essentially a dialogue about one man plotting to kill Bill Clinton for the sins that character felt were necessary to be expunged from the heart of America. Imagine also the controversy that would have arose. The left would have went purple with rage. There's that vast right-wing conspiracy and their irrational hatred of Clinton!
Well, don't worry, the novel by Nicholson Baker is about a gunman clipping Bush because of the Iraq war. That means its free speech and we should all lighten up the hell up!
The 115-page novella is framed as the transcript of a conversation between fictional characters Jay and Ben at a hotel a few blocks away from the White House in May 2004. Jay claims that he wants a record of his motives for killing the president later that day "for the good of humankind."
The two men apparently haven't seen each other for several years. While Ben has been enjoying some success in life, Jay has lost his job, left his family, and grown obsessed with President Bush's actions in Iraq. He often sounds mentally unbalanced.
Through much of their conversation, Jay recounts real stories lifted from news reports about the horrors endured by Iraqi civilians in both accidental and deliberate military encounters. The book's title comes from a particularly gruesome tragedy in April 2003 when US soldiers at a checkpoint near Najaf opened fire on a family of 17 Shiites. Eleven of them in their 1974 Land Rover, including six children, were killed.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 01:17 AM EST [Link] [Karma: 1 (+/-)] [2 comments]
~ WHAT IF HE IS RIGHT?: I don't know which is more surprising, that Tom Junod wrote a piece in defense of George W. Bush (half-heartedly at any rate) or that Esquire published it.
As easy as it is to say that we can't abide the president because of the gulf between what he espouses and what he actually does, what haunts me is the possibility that we can't abide him because of us—because of the gulf between his will and our willingness. What haunts me is the possibility that we have become so accustomed to ambiguity and inaction in the face of evil that we find his call for decisive action an insult to our sense of nuance and proportion.
The people who dislike George W. Bush have convinced themselves that opposition to his presidency is the most compelling moral issue of the day. Well, it's not. The most compelling moral issue of the day is exactly what he says it is, when he's not saying it's gay marriage. The reason he will be difficult to unseat in November—no matter what his approval ratings are in the summer—is that his opponents operate out of the moral certainty that he is the bad guy and needs to be replaced, while he operates out of the moral certainty that terrorists are the bad guys and need to be defeated. The first will always sound merely convenient when compared with the second. Worse, the gulf between the two kinds of certainty lends credence to the conservative notion that liberals have settled for the conviction that Bush is distasteful as a substitute for conviction—because it's easier than conviction.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 01:11 AM EST [Link] [Karma: 0 (+/-)] [No Comments]
Thursday, July 29, 2004 HOW INSPIRING: I realize that I'm not the target audience but I have to say that John Kerry's speech tonight was, to be charitable, less than exciting. The speech itself was okay -- though it was filled with more folksy platitudes than any nominee has a right to deliver -- but Kerry's delivery was uninspired.
In many ways his speech reminded me of a character out of James A. Michener's novel Space. He's a successful politician who is running for reelection during the late 1960s, and as he has every election, dragged out his World War II record complete with platoon mate dressed up in uniform telling audiences of the politician's bravery. Nearly everything in Kerry's speech sounded dated. Peace in Vietnam? Marching for women's rights? Way to stay ahead of the modernity curve.
I'm fairly sure that Kerry is capable of doing better than his performance tonight so this was either a calculated gamble to appear down to earth or he took too much cough medicine before hitting the stage. If anything, I'd say George W. Bush has been strengthened by this speech as it hardly could have convinced undecideds to switch to Kerry.
Posted by steve @ 11:21 PM EST [Link] [Karma: 2 (+/-)] [No Comments]
~ RAPE AS A WEAPON: (Via Brothers Judd Blog) It's good to know that the Western press is finally getting off their duffs and reporting the carnage in Sudan's Darfur region. I guess when it's black people getting killed (or Muslims killing Muslims), it's not as newsworthy (or too hot button).
The Washington Post reports today that one of the weapons that the Arab Janjaweed militia is using against the Sudanese in Darfur is rape.
At first light on Sunday, three young women walked into a scrubby field just outside their refugee camp in West Darfur. They had gone out to collect straw for their family's donkeys. They recalled thinking that the Arab militiamen who were attacking African tribes at night would still be asleep. But six men grabbed them, yelling Arabic slurs such as "zurga" and "abid," meaning "black" and "slave." Then the men raped them, beat them and left them on the ground, they said.
"They grabbed my donkey and my straw and said, 'Black girl, you are too dark. You are like a dog. We want to make a light baby,' " said Sawela Suliman, 22, showing slashes from where a whip had struck her thighs as her father held up a police and health report with details of the attack. "They said, 'You get out of this area and leave the child when it's made.' "
Suliman's father, a tall, proud man dressed in a flowing white robe, cried as she described the rape. It was not an isolated incident, according to human rights officials and aid workers in this region of western Sudan, where 1.2 million Africans have been driven from their lands by government-backed Arab militias, tribal fighters known as Janjaweed.
Interviews with two dozen women at camps, schools and health centers in two provincial capitals in Darfur yielded consistent reports that the Janjaweed were carrying out waves of attacks targeting African women. The victims and others said the rapes seemed to be a systematic campaign to humiliate the women, their husbands and fathers, and to weaken tribal ethnic lines. In Sudan, as in many Arab cultures, a child's ethnicity is attached to the ethnicity of the father.
It's a shame that the Janjaweed is unlikely to taste Western steel. I hear that in many cultures, the death of a person is attached to the velocity of a steel-jacketed round.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 04:04 PM EST [Link] [Karma: -2 (+/-)] [1 Comment]
~ ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST: Pakistani officials have captured an al-Qaida member believed to be responsible for the horrific bombings of two American embassies in 1998 in Kenya and Tanzania.
Posted by steve @ 03:54 PM EST [Link] [Karma: -1 (+/-)] [No Comments]
~ KERRY'S GEEKY DUKAKIS MOMENT: The Kerry campaign is quite angry today after NASA released photos of John Kerry looking like a dork while touring the Shuttle Discovery earlier this week. As Professor Glenn pointed out, Kerry managed to take a non-story and turn it into something big.
Posted by steve @ 03:42 PM EST [Link] [Karma: 0 (+/-)] [No Comments]
~ KERRY'S HOUSE OF KETCHUP: The convention continues and so does Sean Hackbarth's encyclopedic attempt to chronicle John Kerry. Catch the latest edition here.
Posted by steve @ 01:45 AM EST [Link] [Karma: -1 (+/-)] [No Comments]
Wednesday, July 28, 2004 I DON'T KNOW WHETHER TO BE HAPPY OR SAD: The Mirror reports that Saddam Hussein's defence team is claiming that the murderous ex-dictator had a minor stroke and may die before his trial.
Mr al-Rashdan said: "Our information is that he's in very poor health. We understand from the International Committee of the Red Cross that our client has had a brain scan to discover how badly he has been affected by the stroke. We believe he could die because of his health problems."
I guess he's learned well from the lessons of Slobodan Milosevic, another sufferer of illness of the week.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 06:47 PM EST [Link] [Karma: -3 (+/-)] [No Comments]
~ PRETTY GUTSY TANGLING WITH TEXANS: (via The Shotgun) Al-Qaida may be masters of terrorism but I don't know if they should be messing around in a state that hosted The Alamo.
A South African woman picked up in Texas almost 10 days ago may turn out to be a key, high-level al-Qaida operative.
Her name is Farida Goolam Mohamed Ahmed. She was stopped at McAllen Miller International Airport on July 19 headed to New York.
Eddie Flores of the U.S. Border Patrol office in McAllen, Texas tells FederalNewsRadio.com that a review of her papers raised some concerns.
"In looking at her documents, they did not find any entry documents in her passport where she was legally admitted into the United States," says Flores.
Lucky the authorities caught her before an average Texan did.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 06:39 PM EST [Link] [Karma: 2 (+/-)] [No Comments]
~ SURE SHE JUST DIDN'T WALK INTO A DOOR?: Iran's judiciary has put forward a new theory as to how journalist Zahra Kazemi died while in Iranian custody. See, she wasn't beaten to death, she fell.
"The death of Mrs. Zahra Kazemi was an accident," according to a judiciary statement, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press.
"With the acquittal of the sole defendant, only one option is left: the death of the late Kazemi was an accident due to fall in blood pressure resulting from a hunger strike and her fall on the ground while standing," the statement said.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 03:42 PM EST [Link] [Karma: 0 (+/-)] [No Comments]
~ THE BACKLASH CONTINUES: The snide cuts aimed at Andrew Sullivan and his fundraising drive continue. Michelle Malkin has compiled a short list of new smackdowns including this one:
[P]urely out of spite, I have decided to hold my own pledge drive. My only goal is to beat Sullivan on a pro rata traffic basis. As of today, According to Sitemeter, Andrew's average daily traffic is 56,809. Mine has been down a bit, but currently averages 1,319 -- 2.3% of Andrews. Therefore, my goal is to raise 2.3% of what he does. Really it should be more, because this blog is at least 63% better than his, but the math gets really complicated that way.
I guess we could claim the same thing, including the fact that we aren't flirting with the idea of endorsing Kerry (though Jim Antle gave me a scare with his essay this week). At any rate, feel free to donate to us instead of Sullivan. God knows we need the money.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 03:30 PM EST [Link] [Karma: -2 (+/-)] [No Comments]
~ I'D BE SHOCKED IF I WAS 10 YEARS OLD OR SOMETHING: There are something like 80 UN resolutions condemning Israel for one bloody thing or another (or is it 18?) and just four condemning Arab nations. For this reason alone I am not surprised that Arab nations are trying to spike a UN resolution condemning anti-Semitism.
At a closed meeting held recently in New York, UN ambassadors from Arab and EU countries met and the Arabs made clear that they do not accept the initiative for the UN General Assembly to condemn anti-Semitism.
The blunt language used by the Arabs describing their opposition, and their plans to use diplomatic means to prevent the resolution from reaching a vote, shocked the Europeans, said a UN source.
According to UN sources, the Arab delegates were also critical of a UN seminar on anti-Semitism held last month. A senior Western diplomat said that among the Arabs who spoke with the Europeans was PLO observer Nasser al Kidwe, and he was particularly outspoken in his objections to a UN General Assembly resolution on anti-Semitism.
I have to admit I find it funny that the Europeans are shocked at the Arab refusal to vote for the resolution -- who do they think they've been dealing with for decades? Of course, the Europeans should also take a look at themselves.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 03:11 PM EST [Link] [Karma: 0 (+/-)] [No Comments]
~ BUT WHO WAS THE BIGGEST: Right Wing News has released its latest poll, with the latest theme being who made the biggest impact on history. Yours truly participated and here were my 20 choices:
Aristotle, Socrates, Hammurabi, Alexander the Great, Gaius Julius Caesar, Jesus Christ, Ronald Reagan, Adolph Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, Johann Gutenburg, William Shakespeare, Martin Luther, Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Mohammed, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin
In retrospect I'm rather surprised that I didn't include Karl Marx on the list but anyone could have easily made a list of 40 people off the top of their head and still missed some big names. At any rate, you can see the results of the poll here.
Posted by steve @ 12:20 AM EST [Link] [Karma: 1 (+/-)] [No Comments]
Tuesday, July 27, 2004 SELF-PROMO ALERT: I had a piece yesterday in NRO arguing that Dennis Kucinich's absurd presidential run puts him at risk in his House re-election race. The Dornan effect may apply to liberals, too.
Posted by antle @ 08:36 PM EST [Link] [Karma: 0 (+/-)] [No Comments]
~ I DIDN'T SAY IT. WAIT, I DID SAY IT AND I DON'T APOLOGIZE: Teresa Heinz Kerry, after lecturing everyone about civility, today stated she doesn't care if she told a writer to "shove it."
"I respect reporters and I respect anyone who does their job well," Heinz Kerry said in a taped interview with CNN's Bill Hemmer Monday night that aired Tuesday.
"I don't, like anybody else, want to be trapped or be misrepresented intentionally by someone. That's what happened and I defended myself," she said.
That's nice, but this comes after Kerry denied saying "un-American" and then when challenged she admitted it. The only person to trap you was yourself. I also love how Richard Mellon Scaife is described as donating millions to "right-wing causes", not "conservative causes".
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 05:02 PM EST [Link] [Karma: -4 (+/-)] [No Comments]
~ DEALS WITH TYRANNIES ARE WORTH NOTHING: While Blogopia has its attention fixated on the Democratic National Convention -- I haven't watched a minute I'm afraid -- there's some serious stuff going on elsewhere in world. The Telegraph reported today that Iran has broken the seals on its nuclear equipment that is being monitoed by the UN. Although it signed a deal with the EU to the contrary, it has resumed building and testing machines that could make fissile material for nuclear weapons.
Remember, the European/United Nations approach to solving problems always works because you can trust tyrannies that have no respect for contracts. It worked with Saddam Hussein didn't it?
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 03:30 PM EST [Link] [Karma: -4 (+/-)] [No Comments]
~ IF ONLY HE COULD RUN THE ENTIRE CAMPAIGN AWAY FROM THE CAMERAS: Mark Steyn argues that Americans aren't going to like John Kerry so much when they truly learn about him.
Crawling around on your stomach is a lousy way to hunt deer, but it's proved a smart way to campaign for president. For months now, George W Bush has been up there getting fired on from all directions. Meanwhile, down in the scrub, John Kerry was crawling forward on his stomach, a stealth candidate advancing slowly, off the radar, prone alone.
Sadly, the stealth candidacy has come to an end. This week the real John F Kerry has to stand up, and, judging from the way those Senate and House candidates in tight races are staying away from the convention, a lot of bigshot Democrats aren't too sure Americans are going to like what they see.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 02:42 AM EST [Link] [Karma: 1 (+/-)] [No Comments]
~ SURE, SURE: I don't know which is more offensive: the fact that they remade The Manchurian Candidate or the fact that everyone involved is swearing up and down that it isn't a liberal movie.
When questioned at a recent junket about the participation in the film of leftist activists such as Al Franken and Wyclef Jean, Demme, with a peace pin on his lapel, said, "We hope that this picture is as offensive to all the parties as it is to any in particular." Asked about the hawkish views of Eleanor Prentiss Shaw, the film's villain, who uses the fears of "another cataclysm, probably nuclear, on our soil" to get her military son on the presidential ticket, Meryl Streep responded, "That's strategizing. It's generic. Politicians talk that way." And as if reading from a political script, Denzel Washington, whose character is a shell-shocked Gulf War veteran, said, "[The film] reminds me to not lose sight of the fact that these kids are coming home and we all need to embrace them."
The film itself takes pains to avoid naming any political party. A corporation, the Parallax-like Manchurian Global, replaces the original's conjoined menaces of Communism and McCarthyism. But if you look past the watered-down politics and muddled coda, TV-news crawls and background radio broadcasts convey a more direct criticism of corporate influence in the current White House. As a senator played by Jon Voight warns, the country could be threatened with the "first privately owned and controlled vice president of the United States."
This from the same industry that called Fahrenheit 9/11 a documentary when even the filmmaker copped to the fact that it was an editorial.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 01:59 AM EST [Link] [Karma: -2 (+/-)] [No Comments]
~ SELF-PROMO ALERT: I have a review of Evan Wright's Generation Kill -- a non-fiction title chronicling the elite First Recon Marine's story during the Iraq War last year -- in today's Christian Science Monitor. Buy it at the newsstand or read it online here.
Posted by steve @ 12:02 AM EST [Link] [Karma: 0 (+/-)] [No Comments]
Monday, July 26, 2004 THE DEFINITION OF FASCISM: You have to love the political left. They can redefine anything they want and accept it as gospel. Laurence W. Britt tried to pull that neat trick in an article which apparently is being heavily passed around on the web. In it he defines 14 major characteristics of fascism but apparently missed one. You know...the fact that it's socialist.
In a 2002 article John J. Ray provides a proper definition of fascism while this October 2003 piece by Geoff Price discusses fascism and anti-Semitism.
Posted by steve @ 11:38 PM EST [Link]
~ IF I RAISED THAT KIND OF MONEY ESR WOULD BE A NEAR DAILY: Over at Michelle Malkin's blog there is a bit of a snark fest going on about Andrew Sullivan's current fundraising drive, particularly since he has just endorsed John Kerry as "the conservative choice - for a difficult and perilous time."
Sullivan has raised $200 000 over two fundraising drives, enough money to have turned ESR into a daily magazine for a very long time and one that wouldn't have endorsed Kerry.
Hey, make it possible...see that PayPal donation button to your left? Help us out.
Posted by steve @ 04:43 PM EST [Link]
~ KERRY'S HOUSE OF KETCHUP - CONVENTION EDITION: It's sure to be a week filled with good material so Sean Hackbarth has launched the first of his DNC editions of Kerry's House of Ketchup. Check it out here.
Posted by steve @ 04:33 PM EST [Link]
~ LET'S BALANCE OUT CANADA'S NEWS CHANNELS: To my fellow Canadians: If you're interested in adding the Fox News Channel to our digital lists, go to this page. We have until August 9 to file comments with the CRTC and you can do it via web page, email, fax or mail. It doesn't get any easier than that.
Posted by steve @ 12:35 PM EST [Link]
~ SOMETHING MAKES ME THINK MOORE WOULDN'T CARE: At her blog Amy Ridenour publishes a letter by Army Spc. Joe Roche detailing the impact that Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is having on soldiers serving overseas.
Here we are, soldiers of the 1st Armored Division, just days from finally returning home after over a year serving in Iraq, and Moore's film is shocking and crushing soldiers, making them feel ashamed. Moore has abused the First Amendment and is hurting us worse than the enemy has.
There are the young and impressionable soldiers, like those who joined the Army right out of high school. They aren't familiar w/ the college-type political debate environment, and they haven't been schooled in the full range of issues involved. They are vulnerable to being hurt by a vicious film like Moore's.
There are others who joined for reasons of money and other benefits, and never gave full thought to the issues. For them, seeing this film has jolted them grievously because they never even knew where some of these countries were that we have been serving in. Imagine the impact this film has on them.
And there are those who are hurting from being away from family and loved ones. They are burnt out, already hurting inside from 15 months of duty out here, and now to be hit w/ this film.. it is devastating.
Considering Moore called the terrorist insurgents "Minutemen" not long ago, I don't think he much cares what American soldiers have to say.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 02:41 AM EST [Link]
~ TAKE THIS CIVILITY AND SHOVE IT: Teresa Heinz Kerry shows a member of the Fourth Estate how a Kerry administration will change the tone in Washington.
Read on.
Posted by antle @ 01:28 AM EST [Link]
~ DEMS ENERGIZED: Ramesh Ponnuru takes a look at the election from the vantage point of Boston, where the DNC convention delegates are gathering, and finds the Democrats more energized than four years ago. Neither they nor Ponnuru are especially bullish on Bush's chances.
According to this piece, folks like me are part of the problem - Bush's base is not as thoroughly nailed down as Kerry's. I'm not sure I buy this, but I do think Kerry is gathering strength.
Posted by antle @ 12:57 AM EST [Link]
Sunday, July 25, 2004 CONGRATS: ESR friend James Ruhland, better known by his blog name Porphyrogenitus, has finished Basic Training and has moved on to Advanced Individual Training. Nicely done James!
Posted by steve @ 04:04 PM EST [Link]
Saturday, July 24, 2004 AIRBRUSHING THE TRUTH OUT: A couple of bloggers noticed a few days ago that certain web pages on John Kerry's web site disappeared this week, the scuttlebut being that they contained speeches with information that Sandy Berger might have passed along to Kerry. I don't buy it -- Kerry likely would have been briefed on all those topics already -- though the timing of his comments might have proven Berger's romp through the National Archives.
Well, it turns out that more pages are missing from Kerry's web site, this time a micro site that celebrated Joseph Wilson. If you visit the Restore Honesty web site, you'll notice it's gone with only a message that states: "You have requested a page that has a broken link or is not on the site.../Return to John Kerry Home Page"
What is it with the left and denying the existence of people who cause problems for you?
Posted by steve @ 07:31 PM EST [Link]
~ DUSTING OFF THE OLD L WORD: I'm in Boston this week during the Democratic Convention, though the reason for my visit is as much R&R as seeing the party of plunder up close and personal. Ryan Zempel has started something of a diary over at Townhall.com, much of which I can agree with.
One area where I think he's off-base, however, is in his assertion that the Democrats have reclaimed the "liberal" label with gusto. Yes, they have nominated a ticket that consists of two senators with high National Journal liberal ratings. But the Kerry-Edwards campaign has been tapdancing away from the characterization of their ticket as liberal.
I was recently watched a debate between Kerry advisor Tad Devine and Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd. Devine repeatedly rejected the idea that Kerry was a liberal, and in fact presented him as a moderate. He emphasized Kerry's alleged support for middle-class tax cuts, making abortion rare, the 1996 welfare-reform law. This doesn't sound to me like a campaign or a party that's ready to come embrace the old "l word," at least in rhetoric as opposed to policy.
Posted by antle @ 04:47 PM EST [Link]
~ THE ONE MULTI-MILLIONAIRE CANDIDATE WHO WON'T BE ATTENTING THE DEM CONVENTION: On Friday the Democratic Party announced that it was barring Ralph Nader from attending its convention this week.
"Given that Nader is running on the Pat Buchanan Reform Party ticket and is openly accepting both financial and organizational help from Republicans and their allies, the answer is no," Democratic National Committee spokesman Jano Cabrera said.
Buchanan, a conservative commentator, was the Reform Party's presidential candidate in 2000. The party has endorsed Nader this year.
Nader, who was informed of the Democrats' decision by CNN, said, "Is that what happened? Well, that's unfortunate."
Posted by steve @ 02:20 AM EST [Link]
~ NOT SO FAST JOHN: John Kerry recently announced that he and John Edwards had the best hair. Well, Edwards may but Americans don't agree when it comes to Kerry.
May the best candidate win, but when it comes to the most presidential hair, George W. Bush has America's vote, according to Wahl Clipper Corporation's 2004 Grooming Survey and First Ever “Index” on men's grooming habits.
Despite John Kerry's recent claim that the Kerry-Edwards ticket has the best hair, Wahl's survey found that the majority of Americans overwhelmingly voted for Bush's hair over Kerry's (Bush - 51 percent; Kerry - 30 percent; neither-10 percent; don't know- 9 percent.)
I'm not bragging but since getting my new hairstyle/cut in late June, I'm probably getting more votes than Kerry is. High-o!
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 02:03 AM EST [Link]
~ WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS...A MEMBER OF OASIS?: Clinton administration era Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary got thrown off a flight Thursday night after becoming abusive and attempting to barge into the cockpit. O'Leary also happens to be the new president of Fisk University. Very classy. I guess that sense of entitlement never leaves Clinton-ites.
The United Airlines crew told police that O'Leary was "getting loud and abusive" after the flight was diverted to Richmond, Virginia, because of storms Thursday night, said Cpl. Frank Donkle of the Richmond International Airport Police.
Posted by steve @ 01:54 AM EST [Link]
~ YOU JUST CAN'T KEEP THOSE KIDS APART!: Roger Banks, an occasional contributor to ESR, has a fine satire of letters between John Kerry and Ted Kennedy. Roger promises me that there will be more installments in the near future.
Posted by steve @ 01:48 AM EST [Link]
Friday, July 23, 2004 JACK ANDERSON ENDS COLUMN: The longtime pundit, now 81, is hanging up his syndicated column because he is seriously ill with Parkinson's disease. Although I often disagreed with Anderson's politicis, this is very sad.
Read on.
Posted by antle @ 01:09 PM EST [Link]
~ OLD RIGHT NEW: My TAC colleague Dan McCarthy has an excellent piece in LewRockwell.com looking at how some young conservatives today are reclaiming old principles.
Posted by antle @ 11:52 AM EST [Link]
~ THEY'RE STILL HEROES: The official version of what happened on United Flight 93 came out in the 9/11 Comission's report and it turns out that the passengers of that flight are still heroes, just as we all knew.
The passenger revolt began at 9:57 a.m., nearly 30 minutes after the four terrorists aboard launched their takeover of the Boeing 757 loaded with more than 11,000 gallons of jet fuel.
As passengers charged the cockpit door, terrorist hijacker Ziad Jarrah began rolling the plane to the left and right, "attempting to knock the passengers off balance," the 9/11 commission report said. Jarrah told another hijacker in the cockpit to block the door.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 10:14 AM EST [Link]
~ REPEAT AFTER ME: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH: Walter Williams had a good article yesterday about "free" health care such as that like we Canadians "enjoy".
The Fraser Institute, a Vancouver, B.C.-based think tank, has done yeoman's work keeping track of Canada's socialized health-care system. It has just come out with its 13th annual waiting-list survey. It shows that the average time a patient waited between referral from a general practitioner to treatment rose from 16.5 weeks in 2001-02 to 17.7 weeks in 2003. Saskatchewan had the longest average waiting time of nearly 30 weeks, while Ontario had the shortest, 14 weeks.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 12:23 AM EST [Link]
Thursday, July 22, 2004 SELF-PROMO ALERT: I have a piece in the August 30 issue of The American Conservative, due out on the newsstands shortly, looking at some of the nation's most competitive Senate races. I conclude that while the odds still favor the GOP, the upper chamber is increasingly in play. I will post a link if the article appears online. Or you can always subscribe.
Posted by antle @ 07:06 PM EST [Link]
~ DOES THIS MEAN EVEN MORE SPENDING?: George W. Bush began to outline his second term priorities last night, ones that include those old federal concerns of educational standards and junk lawsuits. Oh, and he'll cut taxes.
Although Bush campaign aides had indicated that the speech would provide the details about his second-term agenda, the president steered away from specifics -- a sign of some of the constraints he faces given the soaring federal budget deficit and extensive military engagements overseas. Nor did Bush's remarks spell out which programs would be his top priority, or how he would implement them, further evidence that his advisers are still sorting out his agenda platform with just over a month until the Republican convention in New York.
Bush, who ran his first presidential campaign on a set of concrete promises, has spent most of the reelection race so far repeating themes from 2000 and the first year of his presidency: national security, the economy, faith-based initiatives, the fight against terrorists. At the same time, Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and other Republican leaders have been critical of Kerry's positions and in a series of TV ads have attempted to paint the Massachusetts senator as a politician who frequently changes positions and adheres to liberal precepts.
The last thing I want to do is join the Boston Globe in bashing Dubya but it would be nice to see a concrete platform.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 02:04 PM EST [Link]
~ READ THE REPORT: You can find the 9/11 Commission's report here. Over at NRO, Andrew McCarthy says you should keep some things in mind while reading it.
Posted by steve @ 01:49 PM EST [Link]
~ ANOTHER WEEK: Another issue of Kerry's House of Ketchup courtesy of Sean Hackbarth of The American Mind. You can find it here.
Posted by steve @ 05:26 AM EST [Link]
~ THEY CAN'T BE STUFFING EVERYTHING IN THEIR SOCKS: NRO (thanks to its readers) has noticed a number of web pages suddenly missing from John Kerry's web site, specifically those related to terrorism and security issues. Could they have been removed because they contained information courtesy of a former NSA head accused of stealing documents?
Posted by steve @ 05:22 AM EST [Link]
Wednesday, July 21, 2004 WHICH KETCHUP IS BEST?: Professor Glenn reviews two popular ketchups to see which one wins. Read on.
Posted by steve @ 11:11 PM EST [Link]
~
I SHOULDN'T ANNOUNCE THIS: But I'm in the process of quitting smoking. I never thought I'd do it but here I am, tapping my foot, getting clippy with people asking me "stupid" questions and feeling like I'm missing something.
I never wanted to quit because I always thought it would be a victory for those people who want to ban smoking in restaurants/bars, the outdoors...the moon. The last thing I want to do is hand them a victory -- even if it's one so small as a proponent of smoker's rights quitting the habit.
At any rate, I have no intention of giving up the fight for smoker's rights but I have (hopefully) given up the habit.
Posted by steve @ 01:34 PM EST [Link]
~ SORRY, NO PROTESTING AT THE CONVENTION: The Democratic National Convention that is. Everyone is freaking out about the attempted limitations at the NYC Republican National Convention but I've heard nary a peep about the DNC's crushing of dissent.
Cement barriers, 8-foot-tall chain-link fencing, and heavy black netting have been installed around the protest zone outside the FleetCenter, angering protesters who say they will be penned in and closed off from Democratic National Convention delegates.
Much of the area is located under abandoned elevated Green Line tracks that slope downward. The setup, which one netting installer called ''an internment camp," will force tall protesters at the southern end of the zone to lower their heads to avoid banging them on green metal girders.
Furious that protesters are being shoehorned into an enclosed space, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Lawyers Guild said they will ask a federal judge to open up or move the zone.
''We were given every assurance that there would be an adequate space for people to assemble for purposes of protest that is within sight and sound of the convention and the delegates," said John Reinstein, an ACLU lawyer representing activists planning to protest at the convention. ``This is neither. . . . It's a pen."
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 01:25 PM EST [Link]
~ GROUNDSKEEPER WILLIE ISN'T ON THE LIST: John Blundell of the Adam Smith Institute has put together a list of the 10 greatest Scots of all time.
As Robert W. Galvin pointed out in a marvelous book a couple of years ago (that we reviewed here), the Scottish Enlightenment played a huge role in shaping the thoughts of the Founding Fathers so it's not surprising men like Francis Hutcheson and David Hume made the grade.
Posted by steve @ 01:15 PM EST [Link]
Tuesday, July 20, 2004 SELF-PROMO ALERT: I have a piece today on the misplaced priorities of college conservatives in the American Spectator Online.
Posted by antle @ 11:59 PM EST [Link]
~ THIS IS WHY ISRAEL EXISTS: The UN today voted overwhelmingly in favour of a measure demanding Israel dismantle its security wall. The vote was 150-6, with 10 abstentions. The U.S. voted against the resolution.
"Thank God that the fate of Israel and of the Jewish people is not decided in this hall," Israeli Ambassador Dan Gillerman said after the vote.
Dude, if a simple majority was all that was needed that force a nation to do something, Israel would have ceased to exist decades ago and the Jewish people would have been on trains going to 'work camps'.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 08:11 PM EST [Link]
~ AND YET THEY'LL VOTE DEMOCRAT: It's no great surprise that the left is a seething mass of interest groups that would claw each other's throats out if it meant an advancement of their principles. Of course, the right isn't that different but at least we have the 11th Commandment.
At any rate, Jews received a bit of a shock recently.
The liberal Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) declared war on Israel at is annual General Assembly meeting, approving a divestment campaign from Israel with 87 percent of the vote, casting the Holy Land as the new South Africa. The shock was doubly painful since liberal Jews believe that liberal churches are supposed to be their allies in all kinds of common fights.
Ha ha, good one. The entire left-wing movement has been opposed to Israel since the early 1970s but liberal Jews expected that they wouldn't be sold out eventually? Liberal Jews had better learn that they are very low on the grievance totem pole and as such are only useful as long as they support the left's campaigns.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 08:01 PM EST [Link]
~ CLEAR CHANNEL DOES SUCK: I freely support Clear Channel Communication's right to buy up local radio stations and turn them into formulaic garbage with much of their programming coming from regional centres but there's a limit to everything.
On July 16th, 2004, a decision was handed down from the National Arbitration Forum that took away ownership of RadioAid.com's website "ClearChannelSucks.net" and gave the website to the complaintant, Clear Channel.
It's utterly appalling that the free speech rights of Radio Aid has been infringed upon. Radio Aid is filing suit against Clear Channel to retain ownership of the domain and they need your help. Visit Radio Aid right now and donate some money in their fight for free speech. This isn't about ideology, it's about what's right. Besides, a donation not only helps strike a blow against Clear Channel's dismissive attitude towards free speech, it also gets you a sweet listener's account so you can listen to Radio Aid's streaming radio programs.
Posted by steve @ 07:36 PM EST [Link]
~ I ACCIDENTALLY PUT THINGS IN MY PANTS ALL THE TIME: I was up this morning at about 6:00am watching CNN and they interviewed their legal expert Jeffery Toobin. I have to admit that I haven't seen such a blatant and transparent attempt to excuse illegal behavior since...oh, I don't know...the Clinton impeachment. Of course Toobin acknowledged a little problem he had once: he was accused of stealing classified documents from the National Archives while he was a lawyer after Ronald Reagan during Iran-Contra. He was eventually cleared however.
At any rate, according to Toobin, this is no big deal! "Inadvertently" taking documents (and perhaps on more than one occasion at that) and "inadvertently" discarding said documents? Do you think they might have been critical of the Clinton administration's response to terrorism?
All I'll say is this: there are a little of people carrying water for Berger right now and it's an amazing coincidence that they all happen to be critics of the Bush administration. No one in the media is interested in the fact that Berger just happens to be an advisor to John Kerry.
Read on.
[Update - 7:47pm] Not only did he stuff material in his pants, but also in his socks -- at least according to an eye witness at the archives. Somewhere Fawn Hall is laughing. At any rate, Berger has apparently resigned as a Kerry aide. Hey, I thought he didn't do anything wrong.
Posted by steve @ 04:06 PM EST [Link]
~ THERE'S A SHOCK: Human Rights Watch says there is evidence that the Sudanese government is behind the genocide in the Darfur region of the country.
Duh.
Considering that Khartoum originally financed the Janjaweed why would anyone be surprised that they were continuing to arm them.
Human Rights Watch says it has secret documents which implicate high-ranking Government officials in a policy of supporting the militia.
Kenneth Roth, the organisation's director, says the notorious Janjaweed irregular force has been consistently backed up by Sudanese Government forces.
"What we have found, both through our testimony taken on the ground in Darfur as well as from these documents, illustrates that the Sudanese military is actively recruiting Janjaweed militia," he said.
"It is arming them and it is even arranging impunity for at least some of their atrocities."
The documents in Arabic dating from February and March 2004 call for recruitment and military support of the Janjaweed militia, including delivery of "provisions and ammunition" to be delivered to known militia leaders, camps and "loyalist tribes."
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 03:45 PM EST [Link]
~ IT'S NOT NICE TO CRY: It seems journalists are really bugged about the fact that some bloggers have received media credentials to the RNC and DNC. Hey, DNC, where's our invite? So much so, in fact, that the LA Times ran a cry baby piece earlier this week by Alex S. Jones the "director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government."
Yeah, I never heard of him either.
But make no mistake, this moment of blogging legitimization — and temporary press credentials — doesn't turn bloggers into journalists.
Political conventions have become festivals of faux harmony and candidate image-building, which makes them marvelous targets for blogging's candor, intelligence and righteous wrath.
However, bloggers, with few exceptions, don't add reporting to the personal views they post online, and they see journalism as bound by norms and standards that they reject. That encourages these common attributes of the blogosphere: vulgarity, scorching insults, bitter denunciations, one-sided arguments, erroneous assertions and the array of qualities that might be expected from a blustering know-it-all in a bar.
Did someone take away the baby's bottle? I'll freely grant that there are many bloggers who don't have skills in journalism if Mr. Jones admits that a good percentage of the profession he's defending also doesn't. It wasn't ESR or it's blog that was truth challenged during the Iraq War.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 01:59 AM EST [Link]
~ IT SURE IS HOT IN HERE: This appeared a couple of days ago and I'm shocked...shocked!...that few media outlets reported it.
Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research.
A study by Swiss and German scientists suggests that increasing radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes.
Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said: "The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures.
"The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently - in the last 100 to 150 years."
Dr Solanki said that the brighter Sun and higher levels of "greenhouse gases", such as carbon dioxide, both contributed to the change in the Earth's temperature but it was impossible to say which had the greater impact.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 01:21 AM EST [Link]
Monday, July 19, 2004 HOW DO YOU SLEEP?: Here are things that keep John Derbyshire awake at night.
By the way, you have read Bernad Chapin's ESR interview with the Derb, haven't you? If not, I really don't know how you sleep!
Posted by antle @ 08:26 PM EST [Link]
~ THE NEXT TARGET?: Professor Glenn has an interesting round up of links concerning Iran's purported links -- and perhaps aid -- to the terrorists of September 11, 2001. Is it possible that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were part of a plan to encircle Iran? Will Democrats support a strike against Iran if a link is proven? Will the Duke boys once again get one past Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane and Boss Hogg?
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 02:52 PM EST [Link]
~ SHUT UP: Hans and Franz popularized the phrase but it's costing Arnold Schwarzenegger some grief. On Saturday Der Governator referred to opponents of his budget as "girlie men" and some people are as mad as heck.
"If they don't have the guts to come up here in front of you and say, 'I don't want to represent you, I want to represent those special interests, the unions, the trial lawyers ... if they don't have the guts, I call them girlie men," Schwarzenegger said to the cheering crowd at a mall food court in Ontario.
The governor lifted the term from a long-running "Saturday Night Live" skit in which two pompous, Schwarzenegger-worshipping weightlifters repeatedly use it to mock those who don't meet their standards of physical perfection.
Democrats said Schwarzenegger's remarks were insulting to women and gays and distracted from budget negotiations. State Sen. Sheila Kuehl said the governor had resorted to "blatant homophobia."
"It uses an image that is associated with gay men in an insulting way, and it was supposed to be an insult. That's very troubling that he would use such a homophobic way of trying to put down legislative leadership," said Kuehl, one of five members of the Legislature's five-member Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Caucus.
Memo to Sheila Keuhl: Shut up.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 02:45 PM EST [Link]
~ JAM PACKED: The Summer 2004 edition of City Journal is now online and let me tell you, I've spent most of the afternoon reading some great articles and essays. Check it out here.
Posted by steve @ 02:42 PM EST [Link]
~ LITERARY FLAIR: Matthew Continetti has a good article up at The Weekly Standard which essentially rounds up the whole Joseph Wilson story in case you're not sure what's what.
Posted by steve @ 02:03 AM EST [Link]
Sunday, July 18, 2004 INVESTING IN THE FUTURE: (Via Brothers Judd Blog)
The act of financial investment is predicated on optimism for the future so it's nice to see the Iraq Stock Exchange is up and running.
The unofficial figures of the day's trade tell the story. Over $10 million in stocks changed hands, reflecting the movement of about 1.43 billion shares though only 27 companies are listed on the exchange.
''Iraqis have always been business savvy,'' said Abdul-Salam, the former research head at the old exchange. ''But that we have this much activity with so few companies listed shows just how much pent up frustration there was among investors under the previous regime.''
For Iraqis, these days have been a long time coming. The ISX replaces the now-defunct Baghdad Stock Exchange, which was riddled with corruption. Saddam's extended family often muscled in at will by simply issuing new shares for companies they found attractive.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 06:09 PM EST [Link]
Saturday, July 17, 2004 SEE, I'M NOT SUCH A NUT: In my piece last week for ESR, I advocated restricting federal court jurisdiction over existing laws affirming traditional marriage as an alternative to the federal marriage amendment. It is now being reported that some conservatives in the House are pushing legislation that would do just that.
Posted by antle @ 09:58 PM EST [Link]
~ SPEAK NOT THE TRUTH: Saul Singer has an informative piece in today's Jerusalem Post about the little spat that Yasser Arafat had with UN Mideast envoy Terje Roed-Larsen this week. It seems Mr. Roed-Larsen did a very bad thing: he told the truth.
What could Roed-Larsen have possibly said to fall so far from Palestinian favor? When Abu-Rudeineh accused him of being "not objective", what does that mean?
Here's what Roed-Larsen said that raised Palestinian ire: "The PA, despite consistent promises by its leadership, has made no progress on its core obligation to take immediate action on the ground to end violence and combat terror and to reform and reorganize the Palestinian Authority." Then he went further, personalizing his remarks: "Regarding the crucial area of security reforms, the president of the PA has lent only nominal and partial support to the commendable Egyptian effort aimed at reforming the ailing Palestinian security services. All those who yearn for peace have already and repeatedly argued President Arafat, in public and in private, [must] take immediate action to restore this diminished credibility," the envoy said in a report to the Security Council.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 06:39 PM EST [Link]
~ PROTEST WARRIOR ON FOX NEWS: Fox News carried a little story about Protest Warrior, the conservative group that counter-protests the anti-war protests. Check it out here.
Posted by steve @ 06:57 AM EST [Link]
~ I DON'T HAVE A PROBLEM WITH FRONTIER JUSTICE: But this might be a bit much. The Sydney Morning Herald reported today that Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, executed as many as six insurgents at the end of June in front of Iraqi police and a couple of Americans.
They say the prisoners - handcuffed and blindfolded - were lined up against a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the Al-Amariyah security centre, in the city's south-western suburbs.
They say Dr Allawi told onlookers the victims had each killed as many as 50 Iraqis and they "deserved worse than death".
The Prime Minister's office has denied the entirety of the witness accounts in a written statement to the Herald, saying Dr Allawi had never visited the centre and he did not carry a gun.
But the informants told the Herald that Dr Allawi shot each young man in the head as about a dozen Iraqi policemen and four Americans from the Prime Minister's personal security team watched in stunned silence.
Iraq's Interior Minister, Falah al-Naqib, is said to have looked on and congratulated him when the job was done. Mr al-Naqib's office has issued a verbal denial.
I'm totally for the death penalty but if this is true I think Mr. Allawi might have went a step too far in setting an example.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 06:09 AM EST [Link]
Friday, July 16, 2004 WHAT A SHAME: Slim-Fast announced that it's ditched "comedian" Whoopi Goldberg after she made some anti-Bush jokes at a recent Kerry-Edwards fundraiser.
Goldberg participated at a recent Democratic fund-raiser at Radio City Music Hall in New York, joining performers such as John Mellencamp, Jon Bon Jovi, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Jessica Lange and John Leguizamo.
At one point in a speech mocking the Bush administration, Goldberg used his surname as a sexual reference.
The rally in question raised $7.5 million for the John Kerry-John Edwards presidential ticket. Both Kerry and Edwards attended, but neither commented about the jokes made by the celebrities toward Bush.
Is it just me, or are Democratic fundraisers always filled with crude humour? A couple of years ago Goldberg friend Robin Williams did a routine of very profane jokes about "Mr. Happy" during a Democratic fundraiser while children were sitting in the front row. I guess low-brow sells over on the left.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 06:49 PM EST [Link]
~ THERE CAN BE NO SUCH THING AS AN ISLAMIST DEMOCRACY: (via Instapundit) Lee Smith had an interesting piece in today's Slate concerning the compatibility between Islamism and democracy and argues that never shall the pair meet. Even so-called moderate Islamists like Yusuf al-Qaradawi prove that the two systems are simply incompatible.
Some of Qaradawi's fans, like historian Raymond William Baker, note that the sheikh favors democracy, even writing a fatwa declaring that democracy is compatible with Islam. However, Shaker Al-Nabulsi, a Jordanian intellectual who lives in the United States, argues that Qaradawi's Islamist democracy is a ridiculous contradiction in terms. Democracy, Nabulsi writes, "is not a religious council, nor the obligation to promote virtue and eliminate vice. … Democracy is not religious tolerance, justice, or any other religious value. Democracy is a civil principle, not a religious value."
Worth reading so check it out here.
Posted by steve @ 06:42 PM EST [Link]
~ MY MOM SAYS SHE SHOULDN'T GO TO JAIL: Andrew C. McCarthy says that justice was done in the Martha Stewart case.
Much noise has been generated by fans and detractors of this case, most of it beside the point. Rabid supporters urged that the government was star searching and groused, in the now-tired refrain, that "there's no there there" — that Stewart's stock dumping may not technically have established the crime of securities fraud, so what's the big deal if she lied to cover it up? Sour critics scathed her personally, as if the humbling of a self-made, accomplished, powerful woman somehow made their little lives bigger and better. All of it was hot air, obscuring or eliding truths that were very simple.
They were these: Stewart's machinations were unquestionably worthy of a criminal investigation. Entirely independent of whether she personally was guilty of securities fraud (more on that momentarily), Sam Waksal was certainly guilty of it — indeed, he has pled guilty. No competent investigation of Waksal's stock dumping would have overlooked Stewart's.
Lying to police is always serious business, but particularly if one accepts the premise that Waksal's financial fraud was worth probing, there can be no serious doubt that making false statements to the investigators should have been treated as a felony. Not the crime of the century. Perhaps not as serious as selling a thimble full of crack — for which federal law mandates five years in prison if the thimble contains as little as five grams. But a crime nevertheless.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 06:32 PM EST [Link]
Thursday, July 15, 2004 WHAT'S THE REFRIGERATOR UP TO?: Breaking my heart, Mike Ditka announced today that he will not seek a Senate seat in Illinois.
"There was a moment when I said, God, I'd like to take this and run with it, and then I said, you know, put your head on straight and think about what you're getting into," Ditka said outside his restaurant.
Ditka said his volatile temperament could prove a drawback on Capitol Hill.
Once when he was coach of the floundering New Orleans Saints, he answered taunting fans with obscenities as he was leaving the stadium. He later apologized.
"I don't know how I would react on the Senate floor if I got in a confrontation with somebody I really didn't appreciate and maybe didn't appreciate me," Ditka said.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 06:35 PM EST [Link]
~ 16 WORDS: Oh, they were glory days for people opposed to the war in Iraq. Joseph Wilson proved...proved...that Iraq had not attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger. The media gleefully reported his accusations. Wait, that's not the end of the story? Are you telling me that Wilson actually came back with information that contradicts his public statements? Say it isn't so!
Professor Glenn has some thoughts here while Robert Novak breaks his silence on the issue here. Ann Coulter has a few thoughts as well.
Well, at least we know the media will report the collapse of Wilson's story, right? Right?
Posted by steve @ 06:29 PM EST [Link]
~ IRAN THE NEW HOME OF AL-QAIDA?: It certainly seems that way. Asharq Al-Awsat reports that as many as 400 al-Qaida personnel are living in Iran.
Hundreds of alleged members of Al-Qaeda, including 18 of its top leaders, and other terror groups are living in Iran, some under tight security, the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper reported.
"More than 384 members of Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organisations are present in Iran, including 18 senior leaders of Osama bin Laden's network," the daily said, citing a senior source in the Iranian presidency.
The Saudi-owned newspaper said the terrorist leaders were living under tight protection, some of them in villas in the Namak Abrud region, near the town of Chalous on the Caspian coast, 100 kilometres (60 miles) north of Tehran.
Looks like someone is trying to make themselves into the next target on the war against terrorism.
Posted by steve @ 05:06 PM EST [Link]
~ MICHAEL MOORE TO BE CHARGED?: I'm not sold but Canada Free Press reported today that Elections Canada will charge Michael Moore for calling on Canadians to vote against the Conservative Party before last month's federal election.
Officially, Elections Canada will neither confirm nor deny plans to lay formal charges against Moore. However, Canadafreepress.com has learned through sources that charges are imminent and expected by the end of next week.
...
Moore’s tactics encompass what legal beagles believe is a direct violation of Canada electoral law. Under the "Non-Interference by Foreigners" clause (Part 11, Division 9, section 331) of the Canadian Elections Act...
I hate Moore as much as the next truth-respecting cat but I think this is all a bit silly. In 2000 Raymond Chretien, brother of the former prime minister, openly advocated for Al Gore over George W. Bush. Seeing as how he was posted to the Canadian embassy in Washington, D.C., that made it much worse than Moore's comments. Had the Americans charged him (assuming they have a similar law) would Canadians have accepted it?
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 04:56 PM EST [Link]
~ WHEN DO WE GET SHARIA LAW?: The CRTC today approved the broadcast of al-Jazeera television in Canada. We can't get Fox News, but if it's Islamist propaganda, Canada is open for business!
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 04:48 PM EST [Link]
~ MORE BAD NEWS FOR CANADA: According to the Economic Freedom of the World, 2004 Annual Report, a deterioration in our legal structure and increasing number of business regulations combined to drop Canada a spot on the list.
The report ranks nations on 38 different factors, each out of a score of 10. Overall, Canada ranks 7th (with a score of 7.9) in this year’s report, having dropped slightly from 6th place last year (with a score of 8.1). Canada’s score in the soundness of the nation’s legal structure has fallen a full point, from 9.3 in 2000 to 8.3 in 2002, the most recent year for which data are available. That has dropped Canada’s rank from the 8th best legal structure among rich OECD nations in 2000 to 14th in 2002.
Once again Hong Kong is number one, followed by Singapore, New Zealand, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States.
Read the whole report (and download it) here.
Posted by steve @ 02:15 PM EST [Link]
~ THE BIGGEST KERRY'S HOUSE OF KETCHUP EVER?: Sean Hackbarth thinks so. Check out Kerry's House of Ketchup #18 here. It's another good one.
Posted by steve @ 02:30 AM EST [Link]
Wednesday, July 14, 2004 THERE'S ALWAYS ONE: Canadians have long been annoyed when Americans stuck their noses in our internal affairs...unless that American was some far-left activist. Then, it's okey dokey!
Kasra Nejatian, a right-wing Canadian activist going after American filmmaker Michael Moore for "sticking his face" in June's federal election, should be warned:
He'll have to get through Sarnia Mayor Mike Bradley first.
Bradley, who was featured favourably in Moore's Oscar-winning film Bowling for Columbine, released a tongue-in-cheek rebuke yesterday to Nejatian's online effort to have Moore charged under the Elections Act for urging Canadians last month not to vote for the Conservatives. Such a statement is illegal for a non-Canadian to make during a campaign.
"I am willing to declare Michael Moore a citizen of Sarnia, Ontario, therefore making him a de facto Canadian," Bradley wrote to Jean-Pierre Kingsley, Canada's chief election officer.
"(This) will give him the right to whine, bitch, moan, complain about taxation . . . and vote for the government in power."
Some of us sell ourselves so cheaply.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 04:27 PM EST [Link]
~ WHAT IS SHE, JESUS?: The former chairwoman of the New York State Democratic Party, someone with a lot of time on their hands apparently, is freaking out because Hillary Clinton has not been invited to speak at the Democratic convention later this month.
"It's a slap in the face, not personally for Hillary Clinton, but for every woman in the Democratic Party and every woman in America," said Judith Hope, a major party fund-raiser.
Hope said she would appeal to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry to "correct this omission" and would send an e-mail message to more than 1,000 New York women -- "many of them major donors to the Kerry campaign" -- complaining about the slight.
...
"It's a total outrage," Hope said. "Women all over New York state and all over America are being asked to carry a very heavy responsibility for winning this election for the Democrats."
So why is Clinton, a junior senator, their only legitimate representative? Me thinks Ms. Hope dreams of 2008.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 04:18 PM EST [Link]
~ BRITISH INTEL AGENCY STANDS BY YELLOWCAKE REPORT: The report by Lord Butler has been released and the British government still stands by its assertion that Iraq tried to obtain yellowcake uranium from Niger.
"From our examination of the intelligence and other material on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa, we have concluded that:
"a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.
"b. The British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible.
"c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium and the British Government did not claim this.
"d. The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made,and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it."
Read on.
Meanwhile, the Joe Wilson angle is being chewed over as his version of events comes under increasing attack...well, not by the mainstream media, only by those interested in the truth. Professor Glenn had a round-up of stories earlier today.
Posted by steve @ 03:06 PM EST [Link]
~ DITKA HAS THEM SHAKING: The Chicago Sun-Times reports today that Virginia Sen. George Allen, head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, flew into Chicago yesterday to talk with Mike Ditka about a possible run. There is a connection between the two men: Allen's father coached Ditka on Da Bears in the 1960s.
Also, visit Draft Ditka and show your support (if you're so inclined) for a run by Iron Mike.
Posted by steve @ 02:57 PM EST [Link]
~ TOWNSHEND SLAMS MOORE: Don't mess around with Pete Townshend. The guy swings a mean guitar. Michael Moore publicly slammed Townshend recently for not allowing the use of "Won't Get Fooled Again" in Fahrenheit 9/11.
Biting back on his Web site, Townshend said the reason the song wasn't used was not because he was for the war in Iraq (which he admits he was), but because he doesn't trust Moore's accuracy in reporting and regards Moore as a bully. "When first approached, I knew nothing about the content of his film 'Fahrenheit 9/11,' " Townshend writes. "I had not really been convinced by 'Bowling for Columbine,' and had been worried about its accuracy . . . Once I had an idea what the film was about, I was 90 percent certain my song was not right for them." The rock legend continued, "I greatly resent being bullied and slurred by him in interviews just because he didn't get what he wanted from me. It seems to me that this aspect of his nature is not unlike that of the powerful and willful man at the center of his new documentary . . . [Moore will] have to work very, very hard to convince me that a man with a camera is going to change the world more effectively than a man with a guitar."
Posted by steve @ 12:35 AM EST [Link]
~ I'M SHOCKED: A while ago the NY Times banned its newsroom employees from donating to political campaigns, perhaps because it was getting embarassing to see a super long list of Times reporters and editors exclusively donating to Democratic candidates every election year. Well, it seems someone didn't get the memo.
Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis confirmed that the newspaper was looking into the contribution by Elizabeth Stewart, a fashion editor for the Times Magazine, who made the donation on May 20, according to campaign records listed at the PoliticalMoneyLine Web site.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 12:32 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
WHO WOULD WIN IF IT WAS DA BEARS AGAINST ALL DEMOCRATS?: (Via Brothers Judd Blog) Da Bears of course. According to the Chicago Tribune, a Mike Ditka run is being embraced by increasing numbers of Illinois voters.
When the news broke last week that a group had started a "Draft Ditka" Web site urging the former Bears coach to run for the U.S. Senate, it seemed like the quirky wish of Da Coach's fans.
But Monday, a Ditka candidacy edged closer to becoming-well, a possibility. He talked on TV about running, state GOP leaders said they had discussed the opening with Ditka, and Gov. Blagojevich declared him a qualified candidate.
The commotion grew when Ditka appeared on television Monday from his Chestnut Street restaurant and said a potential run for the seat of retiring Republican Sen. Peter Fitzgerald was on his mind.
"I'm getting excited about it, and I'm just thinking about it," Ditka told WGN-TV.
Ditka, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, bristled at the suggestion his lack of political experience disqualified him as a legitimate candidate.
"If you're going to tell me I couldn't be a better senator then Ted Kennedy -- I could be," he said.
Damned straight. He did coach the greatest team in football history to the Super Bowl after all.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 06:28 PM EST [Link]
~ ONE MORE THING FOR THE ANTI-WAR CROWD TO CHEW OVER: Professor Glenn had an interesting round up of links this morning regarding al-Qaida's problems in Iraq thanks to growing anger by ordinary Iraqis over the terrorist attacks which are killing more civilians than coalition forces.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 03:21 PM EST [Link]
Monday, July 12, 2004 THE MARINE CORPS REVIEWS MICHAEL MOORE'S FAHRENHEIT 9/11: Though I doubt Moore would appreciate it. I won't quote from it so go and read it yourself. WARNING: The language used is not family friendly. Reader discretion is advised.
Posted by steve @ 04:21 PM EST [Link]
~ NICE STORY OF THE DAY: University professors across the United States are donating books to help restock the shelves of Baghdad University.
"I never thought it would get this big," Al-Hamandi said Friday.
It all began when JSU professors Bill Hug, Kelly Gregg and others joined the effort, collecting spare books off professors' shelves to ship to Baghdad University, which has been drained by decades of brutal dictatorship, war, and international sanctions.
A story about the book drive last month in The Anniston Star was picked up by other media outlets, and books started arriving from universities all over the country.
Two chemistry professors from the University of Alabama drove from Tuscaloosa, their cars loaded with 1,000 back issues -- or 40 years' worth -- of the Journal of the American Chemistry Society.
I have a pile of journals from the American Psychological Association if they want them.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 03:22 PM EST [Link]
~ THEY LIED: John Podhoretz has an interesting essay in the New York Post a few days ago about the ramifications of the Senate's report on the intel over the war against Saddam Hussein. Podhoretz says that it essentially demolishes the postition that Dubya lied about the causis beli for the war.
The basis for the war in Iraq was not that Saddam could kill us all in 2003. It was that he might be in a position to do us and the world incomparable harm in the coming decade, and that the lesson of 9/11 was that (as President Bush said in June 2002) "if we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long."
Nothing in the Senate report vitiates that terrifyingly vital set of concerns.
The report condemns the CIA for overstating the intelligence it did have on Iraq's weaponry. But it doesn't claim that the CIA actively discarded or disregarded contravening evidence. There was almost no evidence that Saddam did not possess weapons of mass destruction until after the war was won and we began looking for them.
All well and good....but what about those of us who still believe Saddam Hussein had the weapons in the run up to the invasion? Sorry, but I think those things are still hidden somewhere. There is way too much smoke for there not to be any fire.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 03:15 PM EST [Link]
~ SERIOUSLY DUDE, NO ONE HAS EVER CARED ABOUT WHAT YOU SAID: But that isn't stopping Ronald Reagan Jr. from speaking at the Democratic national convention.
Ron Reagan will speak in prime time at the Democratic National Convention on the importance of stem cell research, a senior adviser to presumptive Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry told CNN on Sunday.
The Kerry adviser, who did not want to be identified, said the appearance of the younger son of the late former President Ronald Reagan came about after "overtures were made by both sides -- friends of both."
The adviser did not say on which night Reagan, 46, will speak. The four-day convention kicks off July 26 in Boston, Massachusetts.
Ron Reagan, a self-described liberal whose political views were often at odds with his conservative Republican father, has said publicly that he does not support President Bush's re-election.
Reagan raised eyebrows during his father's burial service in June when he said in his eulogy that his father "never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians, wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage."
Proving once again that he never knew his father. Reagan regularly spoke about his religious beliefs in the same way that Bush does. Ron Jr. was too busy being a failure in life to notice.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 03:21 AM EST [Link]
Sunday, July 11, 2004 NO SURPRISE: We have an article going up in less than two hours discussing this but I figured I'd blog this anyway. According to polls, the selection of John Edwards as John Kerry's VP nominee has done little to push Kerry past George W. Bush.
Kerry strategists are trying to lower expectations for a "bounce" in the polls that presidential candidates sometimes get after choosing a running mate or attending a convention. Bush strategists were quick to raise expectations of a double-digit "bounce" for the Kerry-Edwards team by the end of the Democratic National Convention.
Tad Devine, a Kerry campaign strategist, said he does not believe Republican claims about "a double-digit" bounce of 12 percentage points to 15 percentage points.
"We've gotten the bounce already that we're going to get," Devine said. "If you look at the Democratic vote, it has already consolidated behind John Kerry."
It should be noted, however, that despite the lack of a bounce, Kerry and Bush remain in a statistical dead heat. This isn't exactly bad news for Republicans, however. The fact that Edwards didn't do much for Democratic numbers is a positive thing and incumbants usually prevail against challengers when numbers are as close as they are now. Of course, it's only July and there's still plenty of time for things to shake out.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 10:19 PM EST [Link]
~ HAPPY BIRTHDAY!: Today was my niece Alex's third birthday! God, how quickly they grow up. It seems like yesterday she just learned to run around the house. Now she's running around and punching her Uncle Steve.
Here's Alex with her mom after blowing out her candle.
And here's Alex with one of her many prizes, her first bike.
Happy birthday Alex and have many more!
Posted by steve @ 10:08 PM EST [Link]
~ HI, I'M INSANE. VOTE FOR ME!: (Via Peeve Farm) I don't know what to say about this. Some hump in Washington is running for Superintendent of Public Instruction. So? His platform consists of calling for the death penalty for George W. Bush.
I, David Blomstrom, a candidate for state office (Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction), hereby declare my belief that President George W. Bush deserves and should receive the death penalty, after the appropriate legal or quasi-legal formalities. I urge other patriotic Americans and foreign nationals alike to openly call for Bush’s execution. Furthermore, I sent my first press release announcing my position to Al-Jazeera in a symbolic gesture designed to call attention to the corruption that runs rampant in America’s media.
Let me first emphasize that this is not a death threat. Nor is it designed to encourage physical attacks. On the contrary, such an assault would probably accomplish nothing, for a number of reasons.
Obviously, I wouldn’t have the authority to take any elected official into custody, even if I was elected to the office I’m seeking. It shoud be equally obvious that my statement is therefore a symbolic gesture.
Like I said, I don't know what to say. I do think Mr. Blomstrom will get a visit from some men in suits very soon though.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 03:58 AM EST [Link]
Saturday, July 10, 2004 IDENTITY CRISIS: National Interest editor and National Review editor-at-large John O'Sullivan has the cover story in the July 19 issue of The American Conservative. The piece is about immigration and American identity, with a special focus on Samuel Huntington and his critics.
Read on.
Posted by antle @ 02:19 PM EST [Link]
~ NEW YORK TIMES' 180 IS A NO-BRAINER: The New York Times recently published an editiorial slamming the Republicans in Congress for failing thus far to renew the successful 1996 welfare-reform law, calling renewal a "no-brainer." Stuart Buck has an excellent blog entry pointing out that what the Gray Lady now calls a "no-brainer" was in fact the target of some extremely hysterical editorializing (as well as op-ed pieces by Bob Herbert) back in 1996.
The paper remains consistent on one point, however: It is taking the position critical of Republicans. That, I suppose, is a no-brainer.
Read on.
Posted by antle @ 02:05 PM EST [Link]
~ KEN STARR REPLIES TO CLINTON MEMOIRS: This is a remarkable Wall Street Journal piece by Ken Starr in response to Bill Clinton's harsh criticism of the Whitewater, Monicagate, etc. investigations, both in My Life and repeatedly in interviews following the book's publication.
What's especially interesting about it is that it shows Starr's class and willingness to take the high road. Clinton has essentially accused Starr of acting as a rogue prosecutor with blatant disregard for people's rights and engaging in a conspiracy against the Constitution. These are serious, even if overwrought, charges. Starr still graciously offers some praise of both the former president and My Life and does not show any rancor whatsoever.
The flip side of this, however, is that the piece also once again demonstrates why Starr was not up to the task of taking on the Clinton Spin Machine. His calm, Casper Milquestoast presentation is inherently unequal to the strongly worded, emotional attacks leveled by Clinton and his defenders. Starr and co. always appeared to believe that if they just kept up their "just the facts, ma'am" routine, they could beat the Clintonistas' adept political campaign against their investigation.
Such a competition may well be more than anyone should ask of a prosecutor - and for the record, I think the independent counsel statute is indeed constitutionally dubious and have favored its repeal since the Reagan years - but I think it goes a long way toward explaining why the real Teflon President was able to survive impeachment.
Posted by antle @ 01:51 PM EST [Link]
Friday, July 9, 2004 DEMOCRACY IN AFGANISTAN: Afghans will finally be able to vote for a president on October 9, that nation's election commissioner announced today. Another triumph for that evil Bush administration which made it all possible.
Posted by steve @ 03:08 PM EST [Link]
~ IS PBS STILL ON THE AIR?: Outside of those apparently insane Keno brothers who host that show Find!, there doesn't appear to be much on PBS worth watching. Millions of Americans apparently agree.
PBS has seen its share of the audience tank. Like-minded specialty services such as Discovery, A&E or TLC have beaten them up and stolen their lunch money.
As the numbers have dropped, so has the level of corporate sponsorship. Yesterday, on Day One of the annual U.S. network summer press tour, PBS president and CEO Pat Mitchell spoke to about 150 TV critics from across North America and confirmed that her network has lost one third of its corporate underwriting in the last three years.
I know, without PBS television would be a vast wasteland of "The Mattel and Mars Bar Quick Energy Choco-bot Hour" clones. Well, the problem for PBS is that other channels are pretty well doing what PBS has been doing and they're doing it as well or better than the public broadcaster...and without the liberal bias. Nova is a fine program but there are a dozen Novas on TV these days.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 01:28 PM EST [Link]
~ HEY, THANK GOD FOR THE ICJ: If you didn't know it, the UN's International Court of Justice can pretty well decide on whatever they want. They proved that today when they ordered Israel's planned wall to be dismantled because it violates the rights of Palestinians.
The Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz, quoting court documents, reported that by a 14-1 vote the judges found the barrier, along its planned route, "gravely infringes" on the rights of Palestinians and cannot be justified by military needs or national security, and violates international law.
I'm no security expert but it seems to me that since they started building that wall, the number of suicide attacks in those areas with it have dropped to almost none. That certainly sounds like it can be justifed by military needs and national security. Ah, but it's only dead Jews, right?
Regardless, I doubt that the Israeli government, at least under Ariel Sharon, is going to pay much attention to this ruling.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 12:56 PM EST [Link]
~ IT HAS BEEN PROVEN THAT GIRLS ARE 'ICKY': One of the stupider controversies is currently taking place in California (naturally). It seems that former LA mayor and current state education secretary Richard Riordan decided it would be cool to make fun of a little girl's name.
The conversation, videotaped by KEYT-TV, took place July 1. The girl, 6-year-old Isis D'Luciano, asked Riordan if he knew her name meant "Egyptian goddess."
Riordan replied, "It means stupid dirty girl."
After nervous laughter in the room, the girl again told Riordan the meaning of her name.
"Hey, that's nifty," he said.
A day later, Riordan issued a statement that said he "teased" the girl. "I immediately apologized to her, and I want to do so again for the misunderstanding," Riordan said.
So the clod apologized and Der Governator Schwarzenegger says that he won't lose his job over it. Then the NAACP gets involved with a spokesman stating publicly Isis was "a little African-American girl. Would he (Riordan) have done that to a white girl?"
Well actually, idiot, yes he would. Isis D'Luciano is about as white as you can get. Of course, Mervyn Dymally begged forgiveness for being an idiot but didn't extend that same courtesy to Riordan.
Read all about it here and be happy you don't live in California...unless you do. In that case your screwed.
[Update - 6:14pm] You watch the video of the event by visiting The Smoking Gun here.
Posted by steve @ 12:48 PM EST [Link]
~ YUCCA MOUNTAIN TO GO AHEAD: That whole Yucca Mountain mess has finally been resolved...until it's inevitably appealed: a federal court today ruled that the nuclear waste site could go ahead. The bit of unintentional comedy? The court also ruled that the federal government's plan to make it radiation leak prook for 10,000 years wasn't good enough and had to be improved. Yup, if anything goes wrong in 12,005, Nevadans can kick some federal butt.
The three-judge panel dismissed claims by Nevada that the Bush administration's plan to build the Yucca Mountain waste site was unconstitutional and said that actions by the Energy Department and President Bush leading up to approval of the waste site were not subject to review by the court.
In a victory for Nevada, however, the court rejected the government standard that the public would have to be protected from radiation leaks only for 10,000 years. It said the compliance period for the radiation standards would have to be developed well beyond that period.
The 100-page decision by the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia was a major blow to Nevada's attempt to block construction of the repository planned for 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The state was likely to appeal the decision and also has vowed to continue fighting the case before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which must issued a permit for the facility. The site is planned to store underground 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste, mostly spent reactor fuel from commercial power plants.
Congress approved the Yucca Mountain site in 2002, overriding an attempt by Nevada to block the project.
I like the phrasing of the article: "only for 10,000 years." Only? That's longer than recorded history mate. To put it another way, woolly mammoths were still walking the earth 10,000 years ago.
Read on.
We've reported on this story both pro (here and here) and con (here).
Posted by steve @ 12:31 PM EST [Link]
~ WELL, THEY ARE ONLY BLACK PEOPLE, RIGHT?: France, that bastion of freedom and respecter of human rights, yesterday declared that it would not support a US drive for sanctions against the Sudanese government in connection with the ethnic cleansing of the Darfur region. In fact, there isn't even any ethnic cleansing!
France led opposition to US moves at the UN over Iraq. As was the case in Iraq, it also has significant oil interests in Sudan.
Mr Muselier also dismissed claims of "ethnic cleansing" or genocide in Darfur.
"I firmly believe it is a civil war and as they are little villages of 30, 40, 50, there is nothing easier than for a few armed horsemen to burn things down, to kill the men and drive out the women," he said.
Once again, France sells out a people so that unbathed Frenchmen can fuel up their ratty little Citreons. The anti-war left was right, it is all about oil, but it's the French who pay for their oil with blood.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 12:25 AM EST [Link]
~ SMELLING A BUSH VICTORY IN NOVEMBER: Yup, if John Kerry keeps running his campaign like he has been, George W. Bush cruises to victory in November. Why do I say this? Brian Tiemann over at Peeve Farm assails Kerry for running on the notion that Dubya stole the election in 2000. Oh yeah, that and the racism of the political left.
Posted by steve @ 12:17 AM EST [Link]
Thursday, July 8, 2004 I'D MOVE TO ILLINOIS TOMORROW: I'm not just a Chicago Bears fan, I could have sat at the table with Da Bears! fans on that Saturday Night Live skit and fit in perfectly. Well, except that I don't have a moustache or a gut the size of a beer keg. But I'm there!
Bears fan one: Who would win if da Bears played against God?
Bears fan two: God wins, but it would be close.
Bears fan three: Are the Bears regular size or are they midget Bears?
Bears fan one: Regular size.
Bears fan three: Da Bears win.So anyway, after that pointless digression, it seems that a certain coach of the world's greatest Superbowl winning team is being considered to seek the Republican nomination in Illinois.
You don’t rise to the level that Ditka did without heart. You don’t succeed in the arena that Ditka did without intellect. And you don’t remain a favorite of so many Chicago sports fans without the ability to connect with people.
Mike Ditka understands contact sports, and politics is very much a contact sport. As both a player and a coach, Ditka knows what it means to hit, be hit, and teach others how to do both.
He knows how to win. He’s not only played on winning teams, he’s coached them. He’s seen that chemistry from the playing ranks and has helped build a team from the coaching ranks. Having played football and worked on campaigns, I can attest to the fact that there are clear parallels.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 06:01 PM EST [Link]
~ SO WHAT WAS THE POINT?: Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper announced yesterday that he wanted to make the party more inclusive to former Progressive Conservative Party members and move the CP closer to the political centre.
At the Tories' first post-election caucus meeting yesterday, sources said Mr. Harper told MPs he planned to include more members from the Progressive Conservative tradition in his inner circle.
Mr. Harper made private assurances to his caucus he wants to steer the party closer to the political centre, and will start by making changes to his office, bringing in people that will help make the party more palatable to Quebec and urban Ontario voters, sources said.
So we conservative Canadians who abandoned the traditional "conservative" party, lived for years with a divided right-wing movement, finally got everyone on the same page, only to end up with the Progressive Conservative Party again? Did we just waste our time for the past ten years?
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 04:50 AM EST [Link]
~ WOW: James Lileks takes the cudgel to Michael Moore for an inane op-ed the filmmaker wrote for the Los Angeles Times. I won't quote a word of it because it deserves to be read as a whole. Find it here.
Posted by steve @ 04:41 AM EST [Link]
~ KERRY'S HOUSE OF KETCHUP: It isn't a good week unless there's a new Kerry's House of Ketchup. Check out the latest here.
Posted by steve @ 02:46 AM EST [Link]
Wednesday, July 7, 2004 KID ROCK...BUSH FAN?: I offer this tidbit from the New York Daily News without comment:
A stubborn Kid Rocks the Bush vote
It was a lazy afternoon at Russell Simmons' spread outside downtown East Hampton.
The hip-hop and fashion mogul, his younger brother Joe (aka Rev. Run, who's filming a pilot of his own reality show for the ABC Family Channel), movie director Brett Ratner and his girlfriend, Serena Williams (recovering from her defeat in the Wimbledon final), were getting a little antsy on a rainy Monday, wondering what to do with themselves.
Then Kid Rock arrived.
So they all decided to drive into town and take in a movie.
They jumped into various vehicles and headed for the United Artists East Hampton theater on Main St.
Standing in front of the box office and perusing the titles, Simmons suggested that everybody catch the 7:15 showing of "Fahrenheit 9/11."
Kid Rock balked.
"I don't want to see that, it's all propaganda," the rock star said - sparking a prolonged political debate right there on the sidewalk.
"Russell, don't you understand, everything we got in this country, we got from fighting," Kid Rock argued, according to Simmons' account. "It's just a movie. ... I'd rather go to the bar across the street."
Kid Rock refused to see the movie, and said goodbye. The others bought tickets and went into the theater.
A couple of hours later, Simmons returned to his parked car. On his windshield was a scribbled note:
"Vote Bush. Bush Rocks," apparently written by Kid Rock himself.
Only in the Hamptons, kids, only in the Hamptons.
Okay, I will comment. I would have went to the bar with Kid Rock.
Posted by steve @ 06:40 PM EST [Link]
~ AND THEY SAY HE CAN'T THINK ON HIS FEET: George W. Bush was asked what he thought about John Edwards being named John Kerry's veep nominee.
When a reporter noted that Edwards was being described as "charming, engaging, a nimble campaigner, a populist and even sexy" and then asked "How does he stack up against Dick Cheney?" the president immediately responded, "Dick Cheney can be president. Next?"
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 06:31 PM EST [Link]
~ IT'S NOT FAR FROM VEGAS: It's that time of year again!
------------------------------
5th Annual Freedom21 Conference Highlights Struggle to Protect Freedom
Freedom of religion, property rights, the United Nations, rights of gun owners, attacks on national sovereignty, on education, and the Constitution, will be among the issues featured during the fifth annual Freedom21 Conference to be held July 21-24 in Reno, Nevada.
“As Americans have demonstrated a steady preference for the protection of Constitutional freedoms since the days of Barry Goldwater’s bid for the presidency, culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan and Bush41 and Bush43, the rise of popular conservative talk radio personalities, it has been the efforts of the movement’s leaders that have galvanized public opinion,” says Henry Lamb of Sovereignty International, an organizer of the conference. “This annual event brings together those leaders for four days of discussion regarding the current status of these issues.”
On Wednesday, July 21, the conference will begin with an address by Judge Roy Moore whose monument featuring the Ten Commandments stirred a national discussion of freedom of religion in America. In his speech, “One Nation Under God” he will discuss what he regards as the unlawful intrusion of the federal government into state sovereignty.
David Rothbard, president of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, will lead a panel that will include Dr. Michael Coffman discussing the foundation for the choice between freedom and collectivism; Henry Lamb providing an overview of how international organizations and agencies work to influence domestic policy; Paul Driessen, author of “Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death”, will discuss why the expansion of freedom worldwide will prevent the death of millions due to environmental policies; Niger Innis, the national spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), will discuss how opponents of freedom affects the poorest people in developing nations; Floy Lilley, a founding member of Sovereignty International, will discuss freedom’s potential worldwide; and Craig Rucker of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, will report on stories of victories for freedom.
On Thursday, July 22, Dr. Michael Coffman will review programs based on “The Wildlands Project, and Henry Lamb will review the UN’s “Agenda 21” program, both of which attack property rights, the keystone of the American economy and the spread of capitalism. Under the rubric of “sustainable development”, the federal government is continuing to acquire more of the US landmass and similar efforts exist worldwide. In the afternoon, G.B. Oliver III, executive director of the Paraqon Foundation, will discuss how the ranching industry is affected by domestic and international policies and how land use restraints pose a threat to its ability to survive.
Joining Oliver will be Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, who will discuss continuing efforts to disarm Americans in the name of “sustainable development.” In the afternoon, former Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth-Hage and her husband, Wayne Hage, will share their experiences battling for his property through the courts. Decisions in this case may be precedent setting for other ranchers whose property rights have been “taken” by the federal government.
Congressman Ron Paul (R-14th District, Texas) will discuss efforts to erode the Constitution’s protections.
On Friday, July 23, the morning session will feature Tom DeWeese, president of the American Policy Center, a grassroots, activist think tank, along with Michael Chapman of EdWatch and Michael Shaw, discussing how “sustainable development” is eroding property rights and representation of citizens through the creation of unelected “councils” and with the continuing effort to undermine the nation’s education system. Mr. Shaw is the founder of Freedom21 Santa Cruz (CA), the first local organization to oppose the UN’s Agenda21 program that advocates “sustainable development”, as a way to control and undermine economic growth in the United States and throughout the world.
A second morning session is devoted to developing an effective response and will include Jim Burling who has litigated many important cases that establish case law for property rights issues. Also on the program is Chuck Cushman, executive director of the American Land Rights Association, a leader in local, grassroots actions to advance the principles of freedom in local, state, and national policy.
In the afternoon of July 23, there will be reports from the field provided by Lori Waters, executive director of Eagle Forum’s Washington, DC office. She will discuss how Loudoun Country, Virginia, suffered the consequences of “sustainable development” and the battle to reverse its programs. Silvia Allen, founder of Arizona’s People for the West and now founding president of the Freedom for America League, will report on events before and after the devastating Rodeo/Chediski fire that burned 500,000 acres due to poor federal and state forest management practices. They will be joined by Clarice Ryan who will report on events and activities in Montana where she works with Montanans for Multiple Use and serves on the Bigfork land use advisory committee for the Flathead County Planning and Zoning Office.
On Saturday, July 24, the morning will feature reports from Washington, DC, and an organizational workshop. Kent Snyder, executive director of the Liberty Committee, a Congressional Caucus founded by Congressman Ron Paul, will discuss pending legislation affecting the Constitution and, therefore, the principles of freedom it establishes. Also participating will be Michael Shaw and Brent Duncan who will lead attendees in a workshop on organizational processes that can be used by any organization advancing the principles of freedom in public policy. A report by Kathy Benedetto will update attendees on the hearings affecting Klamath Falls whose farmers will adversely affected by the shutoff of water for irrigation based on the premise of endangered species. Constitution Party candidate for president, Michael Peroutka, will offer a presentation.
The afternoon of July 24 will be devoted to a presentation of the Freedom21 Platform and Action Plan. A banquet in the evening will be addressed by C.J. Hadley, editor and publisher of Range Magazine.
The Conference is sponsored by the Eagle Forum, American Policy Center, American Land Rights Association, League of Private Property Voters, Heartland Institute, Sovereignty International, Paragon Foundation, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and Environmental Conservation Organization.
The freedoms that Americans have fought for and have sacrificed their lives to protect are the heart and soul of Freedom21 and this conference will address them as few others do. This year’s conference is of particular importance as a new generation of Americans who fought to extend freedom to Iraq continue the nation’s promise to extend its benefits far from home to the citizens of that newly constituted sovereign nation. The conference, however, will demonstrate the need for a continued struggle to protect and presume those same freedoms for Americans in their own nation.
More information can be found here.
Posted by steve @ 04:24 PM EST [Link]
~ I GUESS HE ISN'T ONE OF KERRY'S 'FOREIGN LEADERS': The Kuwaiti ex-ambassador to the U.S. said in comments published today that a John Kerry win in November would be catastrophic for the Middle East.
Sheik Saud Al Nasser Al Sabah, who was Kuwait's ambassador to the United States when Republican President George Bush formed a US-led coalition to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army in the 1991 Gulf War, said a Republican government would do a better job in solving the region's problems.
"If the American administration changes in November, it will be catastrophic ... because those Democrats do not understand a thing about foreign policy, and they lack the determination to make decisions the way (President George W.) Bush made them in Iraq and elsewhere," Sheik Saud told Al-Siyassah daily in an interview conducted recently in Kuwait.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 02:22 PM EST [Link]
~ WHAT KILLED MORE?: I happened to be up this morning at 6:30am when the newscaster made one of those typical statements that irks me. He reported that AIDS was now the most lethal epidemic in the history of humanity. It's a dubious statement given the history of death but that's not why it raised an eyebrow.
Figuring out the lethality of an epidemic is a little like trying to figure out what movie has made the most money all-time in the United States. Some will tout the $600,788,188 Titanic made domestically. Those in the know, however, realize that you have to make adjustments for inflation. That means Gone with the Wind is the winner with an inflation adjusted box office total of $1,218,328,752. (Figures courtesy of Box Office Mojo).
And so it is with AIDS. There are currently 38 million people with AIDS, not an inconsiderable number. They will all, of course, die. At least 28.1 million people have died of AIDS already.
By contrast, our old friend bacillus -- the bubonic plague -- killed 'just' an estimated 25 million people by 1350.
The difference, of course, is in the overall impact of the deaths. Although the plague killed 25 million, that represented one-third to one-half of Europe's population. And it happened in just five years. With a global population of over 5 billion, the number of people with AIDS and those who have died of the disease is 'insignificant'.
Now before you send me email telling me I'm an evil conservative bastard who wants to kill people with AIDS, let me say that I'm not dismissing the incredible suffering that the disease has caused. I'm not one of these people who believe we're past the hump when it comes to fighting the disease. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. But if we're going to start glibly tossing around statements like that the news reader made, we ought to be aware of some facts first.
Posted by steve @ 02:11 PM EST [Link]
Tuesday, July 6, 2004 KERRY TO THE RIGHT OF BUSH ON LICENSES FOR ILLEGALS?: Michelle Malkin has the scoop on John Kerry's Sister Souljah moment. We'll see how long it is before he flips on the issue.
Posted by antle @ 11:36 PM EST [Link]
~ WFB, EXIT STAGE RIGHT: Partly due to our technical difficulties, I neglected to point out that Ben Johnson over at FrontPage Magazine penned the latest in a long line of fine tributes to William F. Buckley, Jr. following Chairman Bill's decision to relinquish control of National Review.
But WFB has remained interesting even in semi-retirement. First, in the New York Times story on his ceding control of NR, he allowed that in retrospect he would have opposed the Iraq war. Then he wrote a syndicated column containing praise for The American Conservative. Cool.
UPDATE: The Andrew Bacevich article Buckley references in his column is now online.
Posted by antle @ 10:38 PM EST [Link]
~ TWO PEOPLE WHO BENEFIT FROM THE EDWARDS PICK: It's too early to tell what kind of boost John Edwards will provide the Democratic presidential ticket headed by John Kerry. But I can see two other people who benefit from his selection right now:
The first is Erskine Bowles. I doubt Edwards will help Kerry beat Bush in North Carolina, but he might keep the race close enough to allow Bowles, the Democrat who is already beating Republican Richard Burr in the polls, to succeed him in the Senate.
The second is Ralph Nader. The consumer activist and third-party presidential candidate is now running against a Democratic ticket that consists of two senators who voted in favor of going to war with Iraq. Granted, Edwards was a fair-weather hawk like Kerry, which probably gave him the veepstakes edge over Dick Gephardt. But that war vote, combined with the fact that the Kerry-Edwards position on postwar Iraq really isn't dramatically different from the Bush administration's (the status quo plus multilateralism), hands Nader an issue. Now if only he could get himself on the ballot somewhere...
Posted by antle @ 10:26 PM EST [Link]
~ IT'S NOT ON THE SAME LEVEL AS "DEWEY BEATS TRUMAN": But the New York Post today incorrectly reported that John Kerry picked Dick Gephardt as his running mate. I'd like to know who their 'sources' were for this one.
Posted by steve @ 07:09 PM EST [Link]
~ NO SURPRISE: Well, John Kerry named his running mate today and not surprisingly it was John Edwards. If you hadn't figured it out weeks ago, it was pretty well telegraphed a few days ago when Edwards cancelled his family vacation to meet with Kerry.
Edwards brings with him the same strengths and weaknesses that he brought to the nomination fight, both good and bad for Kerry. That said, he could have chosen far worse and this certainly helps his campaign.
Posted by steve @ 01:21 PM EST [Link]
~ SELF PROMO ALERT: I have a piece in today's Jerusalem Post about the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.
Almost as if on cue, one decade after the killing fields of Rwanda, another genocidal campaign is being conducted in Africa. The latest victims are black Muslims in Sudan's Darfur region.
The perpetrators are a camel-riding Arab Muslim militia called the Janjaweed, previously financed by the Sudanese government to ethnically cleanse the region. In violation of every human norm the government is attempting to exterminate three tribes so that Arabs can take their land.
USAID satellite pictures reveal that over 2,000 structures in several villages have been destroyed in the fighting.
One million people from Darfur have been displaced within Sudan while another 200,000 have fled to neighboring Chad. The Sudanese government is preventing aid from reaching these people and some experts believe that up to 350,000 people could die in the next few months.
Read on. (Free registration required)
Posted by steve @ 12:06 AM EST [Link]
Monday, July 5, 2004 IT IS A HECK OF A RESUME: John Kerry for President? has a humorous take on Kerry's resume:
CAREER OBJECTIVE
President of the United States, Renter of the Lincoln bedroom, Intern Supervisor, Commander and Chief and Defender of the Working Man, I mean Person
EDUCATION
Educated at Swiss Boarding Schools -- because my parents did not like me that much
Attended elite private schools like Fessenden School in West Newton, Massachusetts and St. Paul's in New Hampshire -- just like your kids
Graduated Yale University, 1966 (I am much smarter than that Bush guy -- oh, wait, he also went to Yale.)
Graduated Boston College Law School in 1976 (I am much smarter than that Bush guy -- oh, wait, he got an MBA from Harvard.)
Check out the rest of it here.
Posted by steve @ 11:42 PM EST [Link]
~ IT'S MOSTLY GOOD: According to the Iraq America Freedom Alliance, things are mostly good in Iraq. The alliance itself is "a coalition of Americans and Iraqis committed to fostering goodwill between our nations and winning the war on terror. IAFA will provide Americans a fuller picture of Iraq and give voice to some of the many Iraqis grateful for their newfound freedom."
Check it out here.
Posted by steve @ 11:38 PM EST [Link]
~ ONLY 59?: Dave Kopel has compiled a list of 59 of what he calls deceits in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.
We can divide the film into three major parts. The first part (Bush, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan) is so permeated with lies that most of the scenes amount to lies. The second, shorter part involves domestic issues and the Patriot Act. So far, I've identified only one clear falsehood in this segment (Rep. Porter Goss's toll-free number). So this part, at least arguably, presents useful information. The third part, on Iraq has several outright falsehoods--such as the Saddam regime's murder of Americans, and the regime's connection with al Qaeda. Other scenes in the third part--such as Iraqi casualties, interviews with American soldiers, and the material on bereaved mother Lila Lipscomb--are not blatant lies; but the information presented is so extremely one-sided (the only Iraqi casualties are innocents, nobody in Iraq is grateful for liberation, all the American soldiers are disillusioned, except for the sadists) that the overall picture of the Iraq War is false.
Find them all here.
Posted by steve @ 11:33 PM EST [Link]
~ OH VINCENTE, YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE DIFFERENT: It's appropriate that I reviewed a book this week about Mexico's corrupt politics under the Institutional Revolutionary Party for seven decades because it looks like nothing has changed under Vincente Fox.
President Vicente Fox's chief of staff resigned on Monday, a stunning announcement that indicated even the Mexican leader's most trusted staff have become disillusioned with his administration and his wife's possible campaign to succeed him.
Alfonso Durazo turned in a 19-page letter saying he objected to first lady Marta Sahagun's presidential ambitions and claiming the administration was repeating some of the vices of the old ruling party that Fox unseated after seven decades in power.
"The desire for a government to decide who the next president will be or won't be was the original sin of the old regime," Durazo wrote in the resignation letter, dated June 22. "It is my conviction that that the issue of presidential succession is operating more under the logic of the old regime than that of a government of transition."
He was referring to the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which held Mexico's presidency without interruption from 1929 until Fox defeated it in the polls in 2000. Under the PRI, the outgoing president named his party's presidential nominee, who invariably went on to win the vote.
The criticism was especially cutting because Fox has billed his administration as "the government of change" that would abolish old, undemocratic practices. He is limited by the constitution to one six-year term in office.
I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 10:45 PM EST [Link]
~ COMPLETELY CLASSLESS: Mexican troops today interrupted the funeral of a U.S. Marine -- who had been born in Mexico -- because the Marine honour guard carried ceremonial replicas of rifles.
Four U.S. Marines marched solemnly to the grave carrying an American flag and the colors of the Marine Corps. Two of the men had rifles that looked real, but could not be fired, strapped to their backs.
Four Mexican soldiers blocked their path, asking the four Marines and six others who had served as pallbearers to return to the car that had brought them to the funeral. Several minutes of discussions by soldiers from both countries continued until a trumpet player began a rendition of taps and the funeral proceeded, despite the objections of the Mexican troops.
When the ceremony was complete, the Marines returned to a U.S. Embassy vehicle and waited. Fourteen Mexican soldiers arrived to guard the premises. About 40 minutes later, the Mexican soldiers allowed the van to leave.
I understand that Mexico has had, to be kind, a difficult relationship with the United States over the past century and a half, but interrupting a funeral over something like this is appalling.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 04:34 PM EST [Link]
~ TEKNUCKAL DIFIKALTIES: As you may have noticed, some aspects of ESR aren't working, notably the poll, "Send to a Friend" and anything involving the scripts that power them. There's a problem at our host's end and we're currently at work trying to get them working again.
Unfortunately our blogging software runs on Perl so posting stuff is difficult. You'll see reduced activity on this blog until everything is working properly again.
Posted by steve @ 04:03 PM EST [Link]
~ SELF-PROMO ALERT: If you live in Kitchener-Waterloo feel free to pick up a copy of the Record to marvel at my brilliance. Today's topic, Canada's battered health care system. If you don't live in K-W, click on "More" to read the piece.
[more]
Posted by steve @ 03:10 PM EST [Link]
Sunday, July 4, 2004 IS IT STARTING TO GET HEAVY SADDAM?: Iran announced today that it will file a formal criminal complaint against Saddam Hussein for the 1980 invasion he launched.
Tehran will file the documents with the Iraqi court where Saddam is standing trial, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said. He did not say precisely when the complaint would be lodged.
"One of the crimes Saddam committed was his invasion of Iran and starting the war, killing many Iranian citizens and using chemical weapons in Halabja (within Iraq) and other places (in Iran) during the war," Asefi told reporters.
Iran expects Saddam will face judgment in an open trial for war crimes, Asefi said.
"We have prepared the complaint and Iran will definitely file the complaint with the Iraqi court ," he told a news conference. "We will hand over our documents to the court ... We believe the court has to investigate Saddam's crimes transparently and openly."
Dude, enjoy your remaining time on the planet.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 11:28 PM EST [Link]
~
HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA: On behalf of all of us America loving Canadians, I just wanted to wish the United States a happy 228th birthday. You're in the midst of a war not of your choosing these days but today remember why your nation is the envy of the world.
You cats can be infuriating at times. Some days you think you have all the answers, other days you feign ignorance. That aside, I can't think of any other country I'd be chums with than you guys. You've given the world a lot and hopefully one day people will recognize that.
At any rate, happy birthday and remember the ideals your nation was founded on while your eating those hot dogs and enjoying some cold adult beverages.
Posted by steve @ 04:05 AM EST [Link]
~ JOHN KERRY'S DUKAKIS MOMENT:
And of course he was shooting clay pigeons.
Posted by steve @ 03:55 AM EST [Link]
Saturday, July 3, 2004 GET THE CONSPIRACY MACHINE ROLLING!: The former military commander of Abu Ghraib prison said today that while on a tour of the prison, she bumped into an interrogator who was from Israel.
Although Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski told the BBC in an interview that no Israelis were working at Abu Ghraib, she claimed that she met an Israeli interrogator at an undisclosed facility while she was escorting a retiring four-star general through Iraq last year.
"He was clearly from the Middle East and he said, 'well I do some of the interrogation here, and of course, I speak Arabic but I'm not an Arab, I'm from Israel," Karpinski said in an interview with the Today program on BBC Radio 4.
"My initial reaction was to kind of laugh because I thought maybe he was joking," Karpinski said.
"He did look like he was an Israeli. At that time he didn't elaborate any more than to say that ... he was working with them and there was people from lots of different places that were involved in the operation," Karpinski said.
I'm sure Original Dissent will have plenty to say about this.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 09:37 PM EST [Link]
~ THE WAPO AND THE TRUTH ABOUT IRAQ: (via Instapundit) Eric Johnson, who participated in the war in Iraq as a Marine Corps reservist, positively hammers the Washington Post over its 'reporting' about the post-war situation in Iraq.
Part of the explanation is Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post. Chandrasekaran's crew generates a relentlessly negative stream of articles from Iraq. Last week, he had a Pulitzer-bait series called "Promises Unkept: The U.S. Occupation of Iraq."
The grizzled foreign-desk veteran — who until 2000 was covering dot-com companies — now sits in judgment over a world-shaking issue, in a court whose rulings echo throughout the media landscape.
He finds the Bush administration guilty. Such a surprise. Before major combat operations were over, Chandrasekaran was already quoting Iraqis proclaiming the U.S. operation a failure.
Reading his dispatches from April 2003, you can already see his meta-narrative take shape: Basically, that the Americans are clumsy fools who don't know what they're doing, and Iraqis hate them. This meta-narrative informs his coverage and the coverage of the reporters he supervises, who rotate in and out of Iraq.
How do I know this? Because my fellow Marines and I witnessed it with our own eyes. Chandrasekaran showed up in the city of Kut last April, talked to a few of our officers and toured the city for a few hours. He then got back into his air-conditioned car and drove back to Baghdad to write about the local unrest.
Read the whole thing, it's very illuminating.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 05:58 PM EST [Link]
~ GREENHOAX?: John Ray reports that the authors of the original greenhouse paper apparently fudged their data in order to prove the existence of the greenhouse effect.
"The Corrigendum in Nature today (July 1, 2004) by Professors Mann, Bradley and Hughes is a clear admission that the disclosure of data and methods behind MBH98 was materially inaccurate. The text acknowledges extensive errors in the description of the data set. Even more important is the new online Supplementary Information (SI) site, which concedes for the first time that key steps in the computations behind MBH98 were left out of (and indeed conflict with) the description of methods in the original paper.
These items were published on the instruction of the Editorial Board of Nature in response to a Materials Complaint that we filed in November 2003. That our complaint was upheld and the Corrigendum was ordered represents a vindication of our view that, prior to our analysis, there had been no independent attempt to verify or replicate this influential but deeply flawed study, something which was forestalled, at least in part, by inadequate and inaccurate disclosure of data and methods.
I'm no scientician so you'll have to form your own opinion on this. If true, it's a heck of a boot to the rumps of the environmentalist movement.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 03:41 PM EST [Link]
Friday, July 2, 2004 I GUESS SHE'D BE EXPERIENCED IN THIS AREA: None other than Moammar Gadhafi's daughter will help in the defense of Saddam Hussein's trial.
Aicha Moammar Gadhafi, a law professor, will form a Libyan law experts team to defend Saddam Hussein, Ziad al-Khasawneh told The Associated Press.
"The daughter of the Libyan president is welcomed to join us, and we consider her as an official member of the team," he said.
He added that the Jordanian-based multinational defense team had telephoned Gadhafi on Thursday to offer their thanks.
A statement issued late Thursday by a charity association headed by Gadhafi's daughter, in her late 20s, said she wanted to guarantee Saddam received a "fair trail (based on) the principle that all accused should be presumed innocent until proven guilty."
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 11:34 PM EST [Link]
~ I'M SURE THEY'RE ALL DEMOCRATS: (via reader Dobro2837) Nine Florida lawmakers have sent a letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan asking for UN elections observers for this November's presidential election.
"As lawmakers, we must assure the people of America that our nation will not experience the nightmare of the 2000 presidential election," she said in the letter.
"This is the first step in making sure that history does not repeat itself," she added after requesting that the UN "deploy election observers across the United States" to monitor the November, 2004 election.
The lawmakers said in the letter that in a report released in June 2001, the US Commission on Civil Rights "found that the electoral process in Florida resulted in the denial of the right to vote for countless persons."
I'm sure all we need is the UN sanctioning an American election. I wonder who the UN is rooting for?
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 05:26 PM EST [Link]
~ RIP MARLON: In his last two decades of life he was hardly the actor he was the previous three decades, but Marlon Brando was at one time among the greatest American actors of the 20th century. Though your personal life was, to be polite, a little eccentric, you played some of the most memorable characters in movie history. You deserve your place in acting history for "On the Waterfront" alone. Sleep well.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 05:19 PM EST [Link]
~ KERRY'S HOUSE OF KETCHUP: So many July 4 foods go with ketchup! Another week, another collection of Sean Hackbarth's Kerry's House of Ketchup!
Posted by steve @ 05:12 PM EST [Link]
~ WATCH FAHRENHEIT 9/11 FOR FREE!: Deciding to put Michael Moore's words to the challenge, anti-Moore web site MooreWatch.com is offering free downloads of Fahrenheit 9/11.
A June 27 posting on the site www.MooreWatch.com invites visitors to download the film. It quotes Moore, though it doesn't cite a source, as encouraging such downloading by saying: "I don't agree with the copyright laws, and I don't have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people. As long as they're not doing it to make a profit, you know, as long as they're not trying to make a profit off my labor. I would oppose that."
There you go. Now you can watch the movie to fact check it without actually giving Moore any of your money!
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 02:08 AM EST [Link]
~ I THINK HE'S TRYING TO GET HIMSELF KILLED: Not content with the backlash he suffered in May after delivering a withering message to the black community, comedian/actor Bill Cosby again unleashed a torrent of criticism.
Cosby made headlines in May when he upbraided some poor blacks for their grammar and accused them of squandering opportunities the civil rights movement gave them.
He shot back Thursday, saying his detractors were trying in vain to hide the black community's "dirty laundry."
"Let me tell you something, your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day, it's cursing and calling each other n------ as they're walking up and down the street," Cosby said during an appearance at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition & Citizenship Education Fund's annual conference.
"They think they're hip," the entertainer said. "They can't read; they can't write. They're laughing and giggling, and they're going nowhere."
In his remarks in May at a commemoration of the anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision, Cosby denounced some blacks' grammar and said those who commit crimes and wind up behind bars "are not political prisoners."
"I can't even talk the way these people talk, 'Why you ain't,' 'Where you is' ... and I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk," Cosby said then. "And then I heard the father talk ... Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth."
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 12:23 AM EST [Link]
Thursday, July 1, 2004 I GUESS THEY WERE RIGHT: In a secret terrorist handbook found in Beirut, al-Qaida predicted that a couple of terrorist strikes would be enough to drive Spain out of Iraq.
"It will not take long for pawns to fall, but the headpiece (U.S.) still has to be knocked down," the booklet said
The handbook was apparently prepared for the mujahedeen as a terror master plan for driving coalition forces from Iraq.
"We consider that the Spanish government cannot suffer more than two or three strikes before pulling out under pressure from its own people," the handbook, obtained in Beirut, said.
It did not mention the March train bombings in Madrid — but its prediction of the victory of the anti-war Spanish Socialist Party proved accurate.
If Spain still had troops in Iraq after hit by terrorist attacks, the handbook said, a Socialist victory "would be near-guaranteed and the pullout of Spanish forces from Iraq would be on its agenda."
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 05:51 PM EST [Link]
~ SCHIAVO CASE GRINDS ON: Although it's dropped from the media's consciousness for the most part, the Terri Schiavo case continues on. Yesterday an appeals court ruled that Terri Schiavo's parents don't have standing to intervene in the legal battle over a state law keeping her alive.
"Terri's Law," passed in October, allowed Gov. Jeb Bush to order the reinsertion of a feeding tube keeping Terri Schiavo alive. She has been in a persistent vegetative state for 14 years after collapsing from a chemical imbalance.
The 2nd District Court of Appeal upheld Circuit Judge W. Douglas Baird's ruling denying an attempt by Bob and Mary Schindler to join the fight over the law's constitutionality.
The appeals court didn't issue an opinion with the ruling.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 05:43 PM EST [Link]
~ I ALWAYS HATED THOSE DANCING SANTAS: The latest craze in Iraq are "Dancing Saddams" apparently.
Toy stores around Baghdad are doing a quick trade in dancing Saddam dolls -- foot-high battery-powered puppets of the former president, kitted out in full insurgent regalia, who swing their hips to cheesy pop music at the flick of a switch.
Decked out with hand-grenades, daggers, a walkie-talkie, binoculars and an AK-47, Saddam dances to the "Hippy Hippy Shake" when turned on.
"It's funny, isn't it?" said Mustapha al-Kadamy, a young father as he browsed through a toy store in the wealthy Mansoor district and prepared to buy one of the dancing Saddams.
"Tomorrow Saddam will go before an Iraqi judge and so today is a good day to make fun of him -- we need to be able to smile after all the horrible things he's done to us."
I guess that's how you know you've finally defeated evil. You can laugh at it.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 05:29 AM EST [Link]
~
HAPPY BIRTHDAY CANADA: You totally get me angry some days. Sometimes you're the insecure teenager, other days you're the overly confident drunk. Your national character seems to be defined as whatever the American one isn't. Sometimes that's good, sometimes that's bad. You also have a habit of loving people who don't love you back.
That said, Happy Birthday Canada. For all the problems this country has, it's given me a good life. I've never had to worry about all the different kinds of horrible evil in the world taking place in this country. I could have been born in a lot of really bad places but instead I was blessed to live here. Canada really is a special place. It's a great country and it will have a great future.
It's hard to hate any country which has given the world hockey and some of the best looking babes. Happy Birthday Canada!
Posted by steve @ 02:01 AM EST [Link]
~ SADDAM IS GOING TO STAND TRIAL -- AND BUSH ISN'T: James Lileks has a funny/sad roundup of the blasé attitude everyone has today.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 01:52 AM EST [Link]
~
DOES WHAT EVER A SPIDER CAN: I just came back from Spider-Man 2 and all I can say is wow. For a former comic book geek it was pure heaven. It surpassed the first movie with the quality of acting -- everyone was far more comfortable in their roles -- the story, and the CGI. It all came together almost flawlessly.
Special kudos go to Alfred Molina who played Dr. Otto Octavius/Doc Ock. Where Willem Dafoe played the Green Goblin with a bit of camp, Molina struck the right note between being understated when he had to be and over the top like every villian in the comicsphere is.
The most impressive part of the movie is that director Sam Raimi balanced the superhero aspect of the story with the human aspect. The characters were allowed to be real people. Tobey Maguire was convincing as a young man who was frankly tired of the awesome weight that Spider-Man carried. As much as I hate agreeing with Roger Ebert, this is a movie that is the gold standard for what comic book based movies are supposed to be.
Some amazing set pieces: Doc Ock and his battle with Spider-Man on and in a train (nearly ruined with a stupid scene with the crowd) and when the pair fight their first battle. Amazing stuff. Funny scene: Hal Sparks in an elevator with Spider-Man. You learn some things about the Spidey suit.
As you may remember when I raved about the first Spider-Man, my Hollywood dream wife Elizabeth Banks -- who played Betty Brant -- is back in this one again and looking better than ever.
[Musings Archive Index] [Back to New Musings]
