Cheat-Seeking Missiles Has Moved!

I've moved my blog to Wordpress, where an exciting new design and the same, trusted precision-guided logic bombs await you.

So click here to go to the new Cheat-Seeking Missiles.

I would appreciate it very much if those of you who have me on their blogrolls would update your blogroll with the new url. Thanks.

So long, old C-SM! Sniff. Yay!

Gimmickry

Dale has given me permission to post while old C-SM is transitioning to new C-SM, which is a good thing, 'cuz I was going nuts with all that's going on -- leading off with gimmickry.

By now you know that Obama said McCain's call for more drilling is just a gimmick. I'll go this far: McCain's call for a $300 million prize for the perfect electric car battery is pure gimmickry and certainly should have been called as much by Obama. But Obama's a guy who loves to needlessly hand out government money, so he actually supports that lame-brained idea.

(Lame-brained you ask? Of course it is. If anyone invents the perfect electric car battery, the free market will reward him so generously that $300 million, impressive as that number is, will be chump change.)

Anyway, here's my question to Obama: If calling for the drilling of more oil is a gimmick, why are you not calling for the immediate drilling of less oil? Wouldn't that be un-gimmicky? If more oil won't drop prices, then less oil certainly should, at least at the Obama School of Leftist Economics, right?

C'mon, Big O! Do the right thing! Stand up tall in support of less drilling! Even better, make your announcement at a press conference in front of a gas station selling regular for $4.29 a gallon. That's the ticket!

Out With The Old ...

Web designer extraordinaire, the ol' Okie Dale, has been hard at work on a total redesign of C-SM and is now in the process of transferring four years of C-SM-ing into the new layout.

Check back -- the new url will be posted as soon as it's ready; 'til then, Dale's asked me not to put up new stuff.

For this week's Watcher of Weasels nominees, click here.

When Blogs Take Goodies

This lead in Conde Naste's media publication, Portfolio, caught my eye:

Last week, I was surprised to learn that reporters from CNN, Fox News, the New York Post, the New York Daily News and the Huffington Post had all been allowed to go on an all-expenses-paid junket to Las Vegas, courtesy of JetBlue and Thrillist, and had taken home gift bags containing, among other swag, a shiny new Microsoft Zune (retail cost: $150 to $300). Don't any of those organizations have rules against journalists taking freebies?

The article then goes on to post the excuses (good or otherwise) received from CNN, Fox News, and the two NY tabloids. CNN and Fox said the junket violated their policies and claim to have returned the gift bags and reimbursed the junket organizer (Thrillist says no cash has come their way yet). The Post and News squabbled and pointed fingers at each other. Par for the course.

But no mention was made in the article of HuffPo's reaction. Were they not asked? Do they have a policy? Do they enforce it? Who knows? The blogosphere is the wild frontier when it comes to ethics.

Well, here's the resulting story, by Vreena von Pfetten, and it turns out she disclosed the freebie in the third graf:

In any case, [Thrillist's] big Vegas launch plus a very generous partnership with JetBlue means a plane full of "media types" (who, just like me, had no qualms about getting on a free flight to Vegas complete with gift bag and all - though, to be fair, some of the more ethically concerned, like CNet's Caroline McCarthy, paid their own way) ...

Jet Blue and Thrillist got a few plugs, readers got what appears to be an attempt at entertainment, though I'm still not at all sure what von Pfetten's purpose is, and the blogosphere continued expanding and reinventing itself.

I would be more comfortable with a strict no freebie policy, which I no doubt will enact if anyone is ever foolish generous enough to offer me gifts, thinking a C-SM mention is the key to whatever marketing conundrum they're facing.

Tortured Questions

I expect my government to be truthful, but I've got constructive knowledge that government can lie or spin.

Constructive knowledge is defined by lawyer Steve at Binjo Ditch as, "the type of knowledge that one using reasonable care or diligence should have, and therefore is attributed by law to a given person." I've lived through the Clinton years and the Nixon years, so I have constructive knowledge that even the U.S. government can lie.

That hardly makes me a wild conspiracy theorist. I certainly have given the Bush admin the benefit of the doubt, for a number of reasons. First, my own constructive knowledge tells me that the left has exaggerated, trumped up and outright fabricated criticisms against Bush and the war. Most of these accusations of lying are easily disproved, as is the case with "Bush lied, people died" on WMDs. So constructive knowledge reassures me that many of those making the claims are hardly credible; they're ranters, negative beings, BDR sufferers. Here's a good case in point. And finally, Bush just always struck me as an admirable, Christian man who wouldn't put up with lying. Call me naive; it's just been my impression.

Constructive knowledge also tells me that members of al-Qaeda and other jihadists will lie, and indeed are encouraged to lie, about being tortured while being held captive by American forces. They're trained to do it and the Koran encourages them to do it, and it's important to keep that in mind as we proceed.

So, who's lying in this case:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Medical examinations of former terrorism suspects held by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, found evidence of torture and other abuse that resulted in serious injuries and mental disorders, according to a human rights group.

The story from last week -- which of course I can't risk clipping more from, given AP's recent strict enforcement of its copyrights -- goes on to describe what was found in medical examinations of 11 former Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib detainees. Most shocking are allegations (supported, according to the report, by evidence of burns on thumbs) of electric shock, and of sodomization. (The latter charge was not substantiated, as the accuser would not allow an inspection of his private parts.)

Is my country lying to me, to us, about its policies on torture? Or is the human rights group? Or are the former detainees?

Arguing for the latter two is the timing of the release of the report, just as the (Dem-dominated) Senate Armed Services Committee began looking into warnings from military lawyers to the Pentagon regarding the possible illegality of some interrogation measures. Timing like this is often a sign that a study's been trumped up.

Arguing that interrogation techniques went beyond what we were told and what I personally would accept are the wear and tear caused by the endless stream of reports, and these latest reports, and my cognitive knowledge that the reported incidents at Abu Ghraib were, in fact, abominable.

Arguing against that is the nebulous qualities of the human rights group's report. Some of these detainees have been out of our control for a number of years, and all of them were living lives before they were detained. There's no way of knowing if their injuries occurred while under US control -- if they occurred at all. And that guy wouldn't pull down his pants to allow an examination.

Also on point is the fact that some of the alleged "tortures" are mere miscomforts suitable for the interrogation of enemy: sleep deprivation, stress positions, cold, heat, hunger. Sorry, but this is not about redefining torture; it's about whether torture -- being shocked or sodomized, for example -- occurred.

Arguing for concern that it might just be true is the committee's report on the lawyer's findings. Binjo Ditch summarizes the whole deal:

When military lawyers warn the Pentagon that interrogation techniques they are looking into may be illegal, then the DOD should know that they need to tread carefully, and to look into the legality of the issue, rather than dive in with reckless disregard for the law.

To which Lindsey Graham replied (paraphrasing here for AP's sake), "Bunk! It was just an irresponsible and shortsighted job by the lawyers!" I would normally say we have a he said/she said here, and that I'm biased to trust the government over the accusers, but Graham made an odd choice of words that's troubling. Had he used "wrong and deliberate," he would have communicated one thing (like the most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran), but he chose "irresponsible and shortsighted," which communicates something entirely different.

In the end, we must look for known facts, and that causes us to dismiss the human rights group's report because it is just too unsubstantiated. That leaves the Pentagon lawyers, the interrogators and those being interrogated.

Without knowing the Pentagon lawyers, my constructive knowledge tells me staff at State and the CIA have gone out of their way to throw up challenges and embarrassments to the administration, so I can't reasonably say the Pentagon staff would be any different. Their warnings appear to me to be part good and part reliant on a BDS definition of torture.

As for the interrogators, we rightfully don't know much. If their techniques were common knowledge, the enemy could train themselves to deal with them. But we do know this: Every interrogator knows the rules; they're clearly written. And every interrogator does not want to be the next Lynndie England, exposed, shamed and convicted.

That leaves the detainees, who constructive knowledge tells us have been trained to allege torture. In the end, this is the only rock-solid piece of evidence in the entire story. All we can say for certain out of all of this is that despite what the Pentagon lawyers said, despite what the interrogators have said, the only provable fact out of the whole pile is that detainees lie.

So, uncomfortable as this entire matter made me about what my country's up to, it must remain just that: a discomfort, a confusing addition to my constructive knowledge. In the end, it changes nothing.

Catching Fireballs

The U.N. press pool includes reporters from papers that don't even bother pretending to be sources of objective news, which results in some interesting questions at the daily press briefing at Turtle Bay. When the subject turns to Israel, the questions can be quite enlightening, as seen during today’s UN press daily briefing:

Question: Does the Secretary-General subscribe to the point of view of Mr. ElBaradei that any threat by Israel to Iran could really bring about a fireball in the whole region?

Spokesperson: I don’t have any information about that. The Secretary-General is certainly aware of what Mr. ElBaradei has been saying, but I don’t have any specific statement to make at this point.

The spokesperson might want to consider this alternative response:

Fantasy Spokesperson: Please explain what you mean by “a fireball.” My understanding is that Iran has threatened to place nuclear fireballs throughout Israel so as to, in Mr. Ahmedinejad’s own words, wipe Israel off the map. Are you talking about those threatened fireballs or some other fireballs?

We continue with the Q&A from the briefing:

Question: Why is the Secretary-General always slow to react to any threats by Israel?

Spokesperson: Well, we don’t react to threats; there are so many of them all around the world and all over the planet. If we reacted to threats and not to actual, physical, proven danger, I think the Secretary-General would be busy 24 hours a day issuing statements.

You know, I think ol' Spokesperson could have done better. How about:

Fantasy Spokesperson: It could be because then, in all fairness, he would have to respond to threats to Israel. Do you really want him to get into all the surrounding nations and entities that have called for the elimination of Israel’s right to exist? Would you like him to discuss the threat of the proposed genocide of the Israeli people?

OK now, last question! Let's see if Spokesperson learned from the valued free coaching:

Question: But here you have a situation that is really escalating, especially on the vocal level. And the Middle East is not just any area. It is a very inflammable area, as we all know. Does that not concern Mr. Ban Ki-moon?

Spokesperson: It concerns him, definitely. It does concern him. Several times he has appealed for calm and for people to refrain from threats.

Will the need for coaching ever end?

Fantasy Spokesperson: It concerns him, definitely. It does concern him. He would particularly like to see the day when the inflammatory anti-Israel media decide to cool down the rhetoric, stop running every trumped-up Palestinian charge verbatim, and also stop ignoring Israel’s position in its entirety. But Mr. Ki-moon is a realist and he understand there’s about as much a chance of that as there is a free and fair election under Robert Mugabe or the free practice of religion in China.

I remain, as always, available to the U.N. staff to help them with their messaging and media training.

Hard Times, Courtesy Of The Greenies

Water that used to flow from California's delta southward to irrigate the nation's breadbasket fields of the San Joaquin Valley, and on to slake our thirsts in SoCal, now stays in the delta, thanks to the Center for Biological Depravity's ... uh, Diversity's ... lawsuits to protect the Delta smelt fish.

When stuff like this happens, it causes what is generally referred to as "results." For starters, the California Department of Water allocation is now at 35 percent of normal, down from the routine 50 percent of normal, which is, as you probably guessed, half of what people would like to get.

And that has its own results. From the Bakersfield Californian:

Faced with too little rain and restricted pumping to protect an endangered fish, farmers and ranchers in and around Kern County are facing tough choices. In a typical year, 850,000 acres are irrigated, according to the Kern County Water Agency.

This year, about 45,000 of them will be idle at a cost of $46 million. In addition, 100,000 acres will be “underirrigated,” causing a $59 million loss.

“It’s a catastrophic crisis of historic proportions,” the agency’s general manager, Jim Beck, told the Kern County Board of Supervisors Tuesday before the board passed a resolution declaring “a potential disaster condition exists throughout Kern County.” ...

Rancher Kenneth Twisselman is worried. He works on Temblor Ranch in western Kern County, raising cattle on 50,000 acres. ...

Twisselman declined to divulge specific numbers, but said the drought forced the ranch to halve its herds from last year by slaughter or relocating them to pasture in Oregon or further north in the state.

“We have very few cattle, and very little grass,” he said. “And of course a lot of the corn has gone to ethanol, not feed lots.”

That translates as higher food costs, brought to you by the Greenies. Add it to the higher fuel costs, also brought to you by the Greenies (who are responsible for that portion of higher costs attributable to low domestic production and shortage of refining capacity), and higher housing costs (in CA between one-quarter and one-third of the cost of a home is its regulatory burden).

It seems a key platform of the Greenies is for us to have less green in our wallets ... and on our fields.

Obama Wins Valued Italian Designer Endorsement

Flush with his recent endorsements from Hamas, Castro, Michael Moore, Galloway and (almost) Gaddafi, Barack Obama added the much sought after Donatella Versace kisses on the cheeks this weekend.

Versace dedicated her new men's line to Obama saying (AP here, so I've got to be careful) she was inspired by Obama as a man who is relaxed and doesn't have to flex his muscles in order to show off his power. (It is rumored that Donatella wanted to dedicate her 1979 line to Jimmy Carter.)

The highly prized endorsement is expected to cement for him the already super-glued gay vote. Now look for Obama to jettison the tie, wear jazzier shirts (or go with a silk T-shirt -- always the symbol of the downtrodden), and cap it off with a structured jacket, perhaps with no lapel, and slim slacks made of a fabric with -- and here comes my high-risk direct quote from AP -- a "slick techno-fabric sheen."

Poor John McCain, stuck in his wool suits, dress shirts and club ties! (And muscles that flex.)

hat-tip: memeorandum

Top Warmie Hansen Wants Nuremberg For Oil Execs

For 20 years, your tax dollars have been supporting NASA scientist and Warmie Grand Inquisitor extraordinaire James Hansen as he demands that no voice be raised against his global warming theories. He went too far long ago, and now he's gone way, way too far. From the Guardian:

James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer. ...

Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.

In an interview with the Guardian he said: "When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that's a crime."

Note: Speaking of crap in school curricula, a British judge recently ruled that teachers there cannot show Gore's An Inconvenient Truth unless additional materials are also handed out to counter nine significant errors presented as truth in the film.

Be that as it may, here's Hansen's solution to the fact that the world is not yet kowtowing to him and has not yet issued groovy priest robes to him:

1. Witch hunts for any who stray from Warmie orthodoxy, perhaps followed by public floggings.
   
   
2. Political campaigns to rid Congress of pesky skeptics, who might stand in the way of Warmie totalitarianism.
   
   
3. Restrictions on lobbyists -- but only skeptical lobbyists. Lobbyists for the environmental and green industries will be free to wander the halls of Congress, and to take Congressmen on junkets (with carbon credit offsets, of course).
   
   
4. Banning, limiting and otherwise discouraging fossil-fueled power in order to give alternative energy "a chance to compete" -- i.e., facilitating skyrocketing energy costs and the attendant increases in poverty and hardship.
   

You're reading this today because Hansen's PR/lobbying machine is all fired up. He's got a new organization, 350.org, dedicated to getting CO2 levels below the hallowed 350 ppm. Here's an undecipherable film clip of the ad 350 is running in today's NYT, Financial Times and other major pubs:



Note the ominous interjection of the word "peaceably" in the ad -- they want the 350 target hit through peaceable means. The theme is repeated in a celeb blurb from Bianca Jagger, whose only claims to fame I can see are (1) sleeping with a rock star and (2) getting a big divorce settlement:

"Climate change is not an isolated environmental issue. It touches every part of our lives: peace, security, human rights, poverty ... blah, blah, blah"

What word did they chose to put first? Peace. Now that may be because they're a bunch of lamebrains who think the war in Iraq is all about oil and not at all about Islamofascism, or more likely, it may be that they see the distinct possibility of Warmie War, with military ops, bloodshed and civilian casualties, all in the name of Hansen's religion.

After all, they're already calling for a Nuremberg trial, as if they'd already won the war.

Media Bias 2008

The campaign is officially on, and MSM coverage is officially favoring Obama. Media Bias 2008 will cover that bias all the way up to the election.

Items are listed from most recent to oldest; the numbering only reflects this and is not a ranking. Send Media Bias 2008 examples via "comments"' below, or to email2laer [@] yahoo [dot] com.

9. The End (Not Of Media Bias) Is Near!

In a truly awful piece by AP writers Alan Fram and Eileen Putnam titled Everything is Seemingly Spinning out of Control that wails about "wars without end" and "polar bears ... adrift," we see that all this ubber-angst is leading up to this:

The sense of helplessness is even reflected in this year's presidential election. Each contender offers a sense of order — and hope. Republican John McCain promises an experienced hand in a frightening time. Democrat Barack Obama promises bright and shiny change, and his large crowds believe his exhortation, "Yes, we can."

Do you get the sense that to AP, McCain is alone, without a supporter in sight, but the Mighty O is surrounded ... as Christ was ... by multitudes? McCain is for a mere "sense" of order, but large crowds believe Obama; he's bright and shiny! Yes, we can! Yes we can bias this election!

8. 100 Years of Bias

Ever since John McCain said in January it was all right with him if troops stayed in Iraq for 100 years as long as they weren't suffering casualties, the media have pandered to Dem operatives who equate this to "100 years of war." Now it's back with McCain's statement that it's "not important" when the troops come home.

For over-the-top misinterpretation of this statement look no further than that Pillar of Objectivity, MSNBC and Keith Olbermann. After giving the full quote to provide "full context," Olbermann said:

And there is the context of what Sen. McCain said. Well, not quite, Senator.

The full context is that the Iraq you see, is a figment of your imagination. This is not a war about "honor and victory," Sir. This is a war you, and the President you support and seek to succeed, conned this nation into.

Of course, Olbermann is a commentator and is welcome to dish out all the thick-headed bias he wants. Another way of saying that is this: Olbermann gets to say what others in the MSM want to say; otherwise they would see the correct context -- that it's good for American security to have troops overseas -- and not report this story at all.

7. GOP Self-Loathing

Eagle-eyed reader Elvis Julip spotted this item in the SacBee:

"Three passions seem to be dominant so far this year, and all offer advantages
to Obama: ending the Iraq war, restoring a sense of economic security and
ousting the Republican Party from the White House."

"Forgive me," Elvis writes, "if I don't quite believe that Republicans share that third passion on the level that the Sac Bee writer would have us believe."

6. Cunning With Cunningham

The LA Times was looking for some quotes to fill in the blanks on a story they wanted to write: That John McCain was going to have trouble with conservatives in the critical swing state of Ohio. Rather than talk to, say the chair of the Ohio Republican party, they did this:

If McCain tried to gather his volunteers in Ohio, "you could meet in a phone booth," said radio host Bill Cunningham, who attacks the Arizona senator regularly on his talk show. "There's no sense in this part of Ohio that John McCain is a conservative or that his election would have a material benefit to conservatism."

You remember Cunningham. He's the former warm-up speaker for McCain who got drubbed by the candidate for his vicious attacks on Clinton and Obama. When McCain apologized to the two Dem candidates, Cunningham went ballistic in a temper tantrum worthy of a four year old:

A conservative radio talk-show host said that "he's had it up to here" with Sen. John McCain after the GOP presidential candidate repudiated the commentator's remarks about Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama at a campaign event.

"John McCain threw me under a bus -- under the 'Straight Talk Express,' " Bill Cunningham told CNN on Tuesday, referring to McCain's campaign bus. (CNN)

Want a negative story? Interview psycho-negative sources. It's five months before the election and no one knows how Ohio will go -- but it's not too early for the LAT to try to do its part.

5. Anger vs. Inexperience

On the surface, the Washington Post appears objective on two big questions of the campaign: McCain's age (29 hits on a WaPo content search) and Obama's experience (26 hits). But numbers can be deceiving, particularly since the McCain search turned up this dog: McCain, A Matter of Temperment.

It ran on page A1, and the Internet version rambles on for five clicks of tales (some tall) of McCain's "legendary" temper. McCain speechwriter Mark Salter said of the story, “In sum, this is one of the more shoddy examples of journalism I've ever encountered. But for the infamous [NYTimes] story, I'd say it was the worst smear job on McCain I'd ever seen.”

In contrast, WaPo offers up no A1 story on Obama's inexperience. The 26 hits are mostly on op/ed pieces, on McCain's statements about Obama, and WaPo blog posts. Even so, none rose higher than page A6.

4. Ignoring Rezko

Nexis, compiler extraordinaire of news stories in mostly major MSM outlets, conjured up 114 stories matching a "Rezko AND convicted" sort between the day the story broke, June 4, and the next day. I re-ran the sort for today's date and there were ... Ta Da! ... six, count 'em six, stories.

Imagine if the GOP nominee had a longstanding relationship with a major contributor who had just been convicted of 16 felony counts of, basically, taking money from the poor for his purposes. Do you think there just might have been more than six stories a couple days later?

3. Global Bias

AP had to go out of its way -- very far out of its way -- to tell us Obama is a "great man."

Indonesians were rooting for the man they consider to be a hometown hero. Obama lived in the predominantly Muslim nation from age 6 to 10 with his mother and Indonesian stepfather and was fondly remembered by former teachers and classmates.

"He was an average student, but very active," said Widianto Hendro Cahyono, 48, who was in the same third-grade class as Obama at SDN Menteng elementary school in Jakarta. "He would play ball during recess until he was dripping with sweat.

"I never imagined he would become a great man."

In Mexico City, hairdresser Susan Mendoza's eyes lit up when she learned Obama had clinched the nomination.

"Bush was for the elite. Obama is of the people," she said. (hat-tip: LGF)

Indonesia? Yeah, OK, we'll give you that. But Mexico? AP apparently didn't ask the Vietnamese community in Little Saigon, OC, what they think of McCain.

2. NYT Expose ... Or Not

The NY Times didn't have a problem running a smarmy and unprovable story about a supposed McCain affair with a lobbyist. No similar bag o' crapola hit piece has run in the NYT.

Women swoon over Obama, but apparently there's never been an allegation of drop-trou, no matter how specious, that has caught the NYT's attention. This fact is not bias per se -- but the fact that only one crummy secondary hit comes up up on an NYT search of "Obama William Ayres" sure is.

1. Votin' Racist

An AP story that moved right after the announcement that Obama had sealed the deal compared the candidates in a biased way:

_Will McCain be able to overcome the country's intense desire for change by separating himself from the unpopular Bush while sticking close on issues of war and taxes?

_Will Obama be able to overcome the country's unsavory history of slavery andlingering bigotry that deeply divides the public to be elected the first black president?

Think about it: Don't vote for McCain and you're anti-Bush (a popular sentiment). Don't vote for Obama and you're a racist (a not-so-popular attribute).

Sunday Scan

No Fireworks In Gualala

A couple weeks back, I wrote about a particularly worrisome matter of the Cal. Coastal Commission issuing a cease and desist order against a 4th of July fireworks show planned in the No. Cal town of Gualala. It is, I think, the foothold the Coastal Commission has been seeking in a larger effort to stop these patriotic displays all along the California Coast.

How crazy is that? This crazy: One of the Gualala Gaeans said in a comment on the post that the damage of a 15 minute fireworks show would be permanent and unmitigatable. My gosh, if the earth were really that fragile, if would have dissolved into dust long ago.

The Gualala Patriots Day Committee (the good guys) appealed the decision and lost, so there will be no fireworks show this year. But the fight goes on; the judge merely failed to overturn the cease and desist; he did not rule on the underlaying matter. Says the Pacific Legal Foundation, which is representing the Patriots Day group:

“The legal fight goes on against this abuse of power by the California Coastal Commission. Although the fireworks won’t happen this year, our lawsuit goes forward. We’ll be litigating to bring the fireworks back in future years – and to have the courts instruct the Coastal Commission on the proper limits of its power.”

For a PLF summary on the case, click here.

The Inevitable In Zimbabwe

The despotic leaders of the multitude of thug-ocracies of the world can breathe a sigh of relief -- the popular uprising against their role model hero, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, has been crushed.

This was a close one, with Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change actually winning a popular election. But Mugabe froze the election results and started a campaign of intimidation ... which may be too faint a word. Remember what Mugabe's supporters did to the wife of Patson Chipiro, a MDC regional leader?

They grabbed Mrs Chipiro and chopped off one of her hands and both her feet. Then they threw her into her hut, locked the door and threw a petrol bomb through the window. (BBC)

Preceding the MDC announcement it was not going to participate in the new election was this, also from BBC:

On Sunday, the MDC was due to stage a rally in Harare - the highlight of the campaign.

But supporters of Mr Mugabe's Zanu-PF occupied the stadium venue and roads leading up to it.

Witnesses reported seeing hundreds of youths around the venue wielding sticks, some chanting slogans, and others circling the stadium crammed onto the backs of trucks.

Some set upon opposition activists, leaving a number badly injured, the MDC said.

It said African election monitors were also chased away from the rally site.

Sounds like exactly the sort of election Jimmy Carter would deem to be fair.

Another Reason To Vote For McCain

Buried deep in a WaPo story on hate groups and rising racism that's very short on stats and figures and verrrry loooong on opinion, we find this:

"One person put it this way: Obama for president paves the way for David Duke as president," said Duke, who ran for president in 1988, received less than 1 percent of the vote and has since spent much of his time in Europe. "This is finally going to make whites begin to realize it's a necessity to stick up for their own heritage, and that's going to make them turn to people like me. We're the next logical step."

Keep Duke in Europe! Vote McCain!

Alternative Energy Dreamin'

There's another horse in the alternative energy race ... but this one seems unlikely to generate even one horsepower. But what the heck! Don't stop believin', hold on to that feelin':

Scientists from Europe’s Atomic Energy Commission, in Grenoble, France, have shown that vibrations from raindrops landing on a certain type of plastic can generate enough energy to operate some low-power wireless sensors, like battery-powered outdoor thermometers.

Leonardo diCaprio, take note!

Plenty Magazine offers an "In Depth" feature on the new technology, gushing about how it could be used to power climate sensing devices that now need batteries, so that we get a continuous flow of data to feed into the electricity sucking beasts we call computers.

Of course, rain drop power comes with that bane of all alternative energy: a dearth of economic viability. It takes Penty to the last paragraph to mention this tidbit: The material used to generate raindrop power costs $460 for 1 kilogram, and given the milliwatts produced, a bunch of kilograms will be required. Batteries, on the other hand, cost a buck.

Undaunted, the article ends:

Who knows, April showers may soon bring power.

Of course, not enough power to offset the solar power that's not being generated due to the rain.

Very nice art: Josh Cochran

Extreme Climate Change

NOAA (named, perhaps, for that ark chap, since the oceans are going to flood us all) has released its newest climate change report, Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate. The resulting bad reporting can perhaps be best summarized by two quick cuts.

First, the pocket liner set got their first impression of the report from this Science Digest intro:

Among the major findings reported in this assessment are that droughts, heavy downpours, excessive heat, and intense hurricanes are likely to become more commonplace as humans continue to increase the atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

While the mainstream tuned into this Digg summary ...

New report highlights the likely changes in extreme weather and climate conditions under ongoing climate change.

... which in turn generated comments like:

Report: Turning on lamp will light up room.
Report: Pissing into wind will get you wet.
Report: Falling linked to failure to stand upright.

How many of these stories do we need to read before people start seeing this as completely obvious?!

Well, of course, it's just not that obvious. ICECAP gives us this summary by Roger Pielke Jr., who just happens to believe in anthropogenic global warming:

The report contains several remarkable conclusions, that somehow did not seem to make it into the official press release. They include: over the long-term U.S. hurricane landfalls have been declining, nationwide there have been no long-term increases in drought, despite increases in some measures of precipitation, there have not been corresponding increases in peak streamflows, there have been no observed changes in the occurrence of tornadoes or thunderstorms, there have been no long-term increases in strong East Coast winter storms (ECWS), called Nor’easters, there are no long-term trends in either heat waves or cold spells, though there are trends within shorter time periods in the overall record.

Pshaw. What's the fun in reporting boring ol' stuff like that?

Seismic Mitigation As Art

This amazing piece of industrial art is actually the tuned mass damper at the top of Taipei 101, for now the planet's tallest completed skyscraper.

The 728-ton steel ball is so massive it couldn't be lifted into location; rather, it had to be assembled in a cavern carved out of four stories at the top of the tower. Why, you might well ask, put a 728-ton ball at the top of the building?

The simple answer is that Taipei 101 stands just 800 feet from an earthquake fault. More specific: The ball swings counter to motion caused by wind or earth movement, dampening sway.

Deputy Dog, an architecture blog, has a short story on the mass damper, but what really attracts is the video that was shot on May 12, when shocks from China's massive earthquake hit the tower. Tourists in the building actually flocked up to the viewing area for the damper to see it in action.



Don't you just love human ingenuity?

Can You Say "Semper Cheese?"


If you don't understand this, says Blackfive, you've never met a Marine.

Memed

I've been memed by Bookworm. Thankfully, she's a best blog buddy, so I'll forgive her her trespass. Here we go, starting with the rules of the game:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5. Present an image of martial discord from whatever period or situation you’d like.

OK, and here are the seven facts about me:

1. I was once almost shot in the head ... by a fireplace. A bullet in a burning log went off, and buried itself in the wall just a few inches from my head.
   
   
2. My head was once almost run over by a truck. I was sliding on my stomach across a two-lane tunnel at the time, my motorcycle skidding merrily along behind me. The truck's rear wheels and my noggin missed each other by an inch or two.
   
   
3. I was almost paralyzed by a water skiing accident. Water can be very hard if you hit it fast and wrong, and neck vertebrae can be cracked half-way through without paralyzing you.
   
   
4. I was once in the rear seat of a small plane flying without a filed flight plan into La Guardia/NYC, while the pilot and his friend drank straight whiskey from a bottle. I drank a lot, too, figuring the more I drank, the less the pilot would be able to drink.
   
   
5. When I was in kindergarten, I was almost smashed to pieces by a giant wave at Point Lobos near Carmel. My mother got a "bad feeling," raced down the rock and grabbed me and my brother out of the way just before the wave hit.
   
   
6. In college, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a Southern Indiana nowhere, my car skidded on ice, slid across the road, and up on a guardrail. We got out and looked -- finding a deep ravine on the other side of the guardrail and a small part of the car's underside hung up on the guardrail's edge. We had seen no other cars on the road, but less than a minute later, a snow plow came by, pulled us off, and we went merrily on our way.
   
   
7. I sometimes feel God is watching over me.
   

As to rules three and four, sorry -- I don't pass these things on.

Here's my picture of martial discord (at first I read it as "marital discord" -- boy am I relieved!)

Setting Up A Winning GOP Campaign Strategy

In his Saturday address, President Bush handed McCain the campaign theme most likely to keep the White House in Republican hands:

The fundamental problem behind high gas prices is that the supply of oil has not kept up with the rising demand across the world. One obvious solution is for America to increase our domestic oil production. So my Administration has repeatedly called on Congress to open access to new oil exploration here in the United States. Unfortunately, Democrats on Capitol Hill have rejected virtually every proposal. Now Americans are paying the price at the pump for this obstruction.

Delivering the Dem response to the prez's radio address was Nick Rahall, chair of the Natural Resources Committee, which is the Senatorial power broker in this debate. His response:

This week, President Bush and his Republicans allies rallied behind the oil industry's political agenda once again and advocated opening more of America's federal land, including coastal areas, to drilling. This proposal will not bring the type of relief Americans deserve at the pump.

So we're told that supply and demand for some mysterious reason won't work with petroleum. Yet we're told that this same supply and demand does work with the cornerstone of the Dems' horse in the energy race, alternative fuels: We'll increase supply of alternative fuels and the price of energy will drop.

Everything the enviros have said since gas prices started spiking -- heck, everything they've ever said about energy pricing -- ignores supply and demand in favor of government controls through incentives, punishments,cap and trade programs and government take-over. It's not surprising since its basic socialism.

Also inherent in Rahall's response is a problem over the definition of federal lands. He criticizes Bush for calling for "opening more" federal land (and seas) for resource development. The name of Rahall's committee is "Resources," a word the Dems and their green special interest supporters have come to define as "something that should not be touched," but traditionally means "a source of supply, support or wealth."

What exactly is this "America's federal land" Rehall's talking about? The Bureau of Land Management has under its jurisdiction 258 million surface acres and 700 million acres of subsurface mineral estates. The surface holdings represent about 13 percent of all the US, and BLM states its purpose as management first and conservation second. The land it manages represents just 40 percent of all land owned by the Federal government.

And it's profitable stuff:

The public lands provide significant economic benefits to the Nation and to states and counties where these lands are located. Revenues generated from public lands make BLM one of the top revenue-generating agencies in the Federal government. In 2007, for instance, BLM’s onshore mineral leasing activities will generate an estimated $4.5 billion in receipts from royalties, bonuses, and rentals that are collected by the Minerals Management Service. Approximately half of these revenues will be returned to the States where the mineral leasing occurred.

These are the lands Bush -- and most of the rest of us -- are interested in opening up, which is the right thing to do, since it's the federal land purposed for productivity. The other federally owned land includes military bases, prisons, nuke storage sites, Washington DC -- and land owned and managed by the Department of Interior's wildlife guys for the Dem definition of "natural resources" -- critters and plants that just could not survive without our loving protection.

But to Rahall and the special interests he serves (Earth First!, the Center for Biological Depravity ... oops, Diversity, etc.), all federal land should be treated as this subset of DOI-managed land: preserved for critters and none of it leased for resources. It doesn't matter if the impact of production on land is large (as in oil shale) or small (as in drilling); no level of impact to Gaea is allowable.

You can't blame Rahall and the Greenies for the current energy situation; you can only blame them for part of it. How much is a matter of debate; they would say the impact of their anti-petroleum, anti-nuclear position is minimal, and that it would be less then minimal if only we would get our hearts behind alternative energy.

But our hearts have been behind alternative energy since the gas shortages of the 1970s. Billions of dollars are going into alternative energy and we have little to show for it beyond higher food prices thanks to ethanol production.

McCain, like all savvy politicians is a proponent of alternative energy -- after all he can read polls that say 98% (!) of usbelieve a goal of 25% alternative energy sources by 2025 is a good one. (Of course, the poll question didn't attach a cost to that effort or say reaching the goal might cause some discomfort and displacement.) But he can also read the frustration of voters who are paying over $4 per gallon of gas, and seeing the price raise every week, so he changed his position on drilling. Albeit, not far enough, since he's still stuck in a no position on ANWR, but unlike the Dems, he changed.

And the left pounced, with the Dem party strutting and crowing about McCain's Offshore Drilling Flip-Flop: "McCain caves, once again, to the special interest." We've been through the special interest allegation already, but in this particular case, the special interest isn't the dreaded "Texas oil," which was guilty of the great sin of helping make America the most powerful, wealthiest, comfortable nation on earth, it's the people at the pump.

With "flip-flop," the Dems are trying to paint McCain with a Kerry brush, but they fail. McCain is looking at an economic policy, seeing a changed global condition brought about by soaring demand and stifled production and refining capacity (see this lengthy PowerPoint for a good explanation of all that), and a futures market that's betting that price increases will continue, and he simply deduced that changed circumstances support changed policy.

Kerry, on the other hand, was looking at an Iraq where nothing was changing -- it was early in the war, instable and violent, and potentially could get worse or could get better. What was changing was not the situation, but the power and funding capacity of the anti-war faction of the Dem party. McCain saw a changed world and changed his policy. Kerry saw a changed Dem power elite and changed his.

It boils down to this: $4 gas gives the GOP a glimmer of hope in November because we have the right policy and, finally, a candidate who has signaled that he's with us on that policy. The Dems have a candidate who appears not to care about the plight of the people; he'll put the supposed plight of the polar bear first.

Congress, thanks to Bush's challenge to open up more land for drilling, needs to deal with this. My guess: The Dems will go on August recess without acting. McCain better be putting on his pouncing shoes.

O, Where And Whence?

For those of you who missed the last five minutes of the Hugh Hewitt show today and therefore missed Joe Tarzana's poem of the week ... well, you missed a good one. Here it is:

You’ve often heard me sing this song

Everything you know is wrong

Those in darkness doused the light

Things you knew were wrong…are right

What goes up might not come down

And Vegas is a Temperance Town

So now when oil prices soar

Let’s not drill for anymore

Pelosi and her merry band

Repealed supply, reformed demand

Sure, new refineries might be nice

But they might melt the polar ice

No matter what we must be fair

To terrorist and polar bear

Now soldiers entering fire fights

Must first shout out Miranda Rights

Opponents routed from their forts

Can take their case to higher courts

Those same courts that have opined

That marriages be redefined

The eloquent Obama pleads

“To each according to his needs”

Echoing another’s screeds

And no one heeds, no one heeds

O, where for art thou; where and whence

Have you gone, sweet common sense?

A Gift To New York's Trial Lawyers

Can you say "special interest?" Trial lawyers -- yeah, that particularly nasty special interest -- across New York state are visiting Maserati and Aston Martin dealerships and hunting for sexier gumars in anticipation of the windfall this little piece of legislation will bring them:

Each year, there are 200,000 new cases of cancer in New York State, and each one is reported to the State Health Department and meticulously recorded.

[U]nder legislation passed on Thursday, residents would be able to gain access to that information through the most detailed map yet available, and track all kinds of cancers and where they occur.

The online map would also plot where industrial facilities like power plants and chemical factories are located. (NYT)

Included among those "residents" will be the underpaid minions of trial lawyers, who will be scouring the maps, looking for anything remotely cluster-like in proximity (including downwind or downstream) from one of those power plants or factories. And lickety-split, each cluster will soon be sporting its very own class action lawsuit.

Who cares if chance, not science, mandates the cluster-creation? There's money to be made! Experts to bribe hire! Victims to save exploit!

If John Edwards doesn't get the gig he wants out of Obama's campaign, look for him to move to New York soon. Did you know his father worked in the mill?

Barack, Out Of Buses, Opts For Trucks

Apparently having depleted his entire fleet of buses under which he's thrown his church, his grandmother, his friends and his commitments, Barack Obama has rustled up a fleet of trucks. As David Brooks tells us in today's NYT:

And then on Thursday, Fast Eddie Obama had his finest hour. Barack Obama has worked on political reform more than any other issue. He aspires to be to political reform what Bono is to fighting disease in Africa. He’s spent much of his career talking about how much he believes in public financing. In January 2007, he told Larry King that the public-financing system works. In February 2007, he challenged Republicans to limit their spending and vowed to do so along with them if he were the nominee. In February 2008, he said he would aggressively pursue spending limits. He answered a Midwest Democracy Network questionnaire by reminding everyone that he has been a longtime advocate of the public-financing system.

But Thursday, at the first breath of political inconvenience, Fast Eddie Obama threw public financing under the truck.

What do you call a man who so casually breaks his promises in order to serve his impossibly pushy ambitions? A liar? An immoral sack of manure? A danger to all mankind? An old school, smarmy politician who's duped millions of naive Dems into thinking he stands for something new and better?

Fortunately for the wily liar, there is no subject more boring and unimportant to the American mainstream electorate than campaign reform, so today's outrage will come and go without so much as a furled brow among the duped Dems.

Unfortunately for John McCain, he's the father of this campaign reform mess, and he's shown sufficient honor to stubbornly stick to his word. Imagine that. From a politician!

Reading Charles Krauthammer this a.m., I came across an Obama quote that looks positively ridiculous in light of his tectonic shift on campaign reform. Obama is talking about McCain's reversal on offshore drilling:

"His decision to completely change his position" to one that would please the oil industry is "the same Washington politics that has prevented us from achieving energy independence for decades."

Besides being wrong on oil and wrong on economics, the quote is a harsh mirror held up to Obama's ear-y face.

But what the heck, his flip-flop on financing could give Obama a three-to-one spending advantage over McCain. To put that in perspective, sports fans, here's gleeful Dem operative Chris Lehane:

"It'll be like George Steinbrenner's Yankees in the '90s — an All-Star at every position — against the '90s Kansas City Royals, barely able to meet their payroll." (ABC)

Time to take out your wallets, my friends. We've got payroll to meet.

Watcher's Winners

The Watcher of Weasels has posted the winners in this week's blogospheric panorama of prose.

Wolf Howling wrote a heck of a piece on Boumediene v. Bush, Judicial Activism Run Amok-- thoroughly researched, deeply troubling and worthy of a bookmark under 'habeas corpus' -- that rightfully got the nod from the Watcher's Council as the best Council post of the week.

Just one-third point behind in second was my analysis of Bush's failures as a war time communicator, Admitting Defeat in the Rhetoric War.

Among the non-Council entries, many of which were about Boumediene v. Bush, it was a war journal post from Miserable Donuts, After the Charge, that won. It tells the story of the only American officer in Basra during the recent campaign. I didn't vote for it myself (that darn Michael Yon/Michael Totten standard), but I always like it when one of our soldiers gets this little honor.

My pick for the category went to Lone Star Times, for Obama and Taxes: An Unchanged Liberal Agenda, which came in second. Yikes! I see a cut in income ahead -- no one in their right mind would want to be a billionaire under Obama. No, I'm not a billionaire in the normal sense; he just defines it as anyone who makes over $250,000.

View all the winners here.

Thanks, Watcher, for so expertly stretching all these canvases and letting us bring our own palettes and brushes.

A Lot Of "Allah Akbars" From Gunatanamo

It's been a great week for our Guantanamo detainees. First Boumediene v. Bush, in which an activist SCOTUS decided foreign combatants who have never stepped foot in America deserved rights no nation anywhere, ever, have granted. Now this:

A military defense lawyer urged a Guantanamo judge to help restore America's reputation by dropping attempted murder charges against an Afghan prisoner who was subjected to 14 consecutive days of sleep deprivation.

"You have an opportunity to restore just a bit of America's lost luster," Air Force Maj. David Frakt told the judge presiding in the war crimes case against Afghan prisoner Mohammed Jawad. (Rueters)

Jawad is in the Cuban clinker because he's a combatant -- he threw a grenade into a group of GIs -- but his attorney thinks that's no big deal, that America's reputation is so tarnished by Jawad's sleep deprivation that he ought to walk.

Imagine how much these thugs want Barack Obama to be elected, so they can be treated as lawbreakers instead of combatants, and arguments like Frakt's can be emoted all over a bunch of juries who aren't my peers or yours. If things break their way, they'll be back on the battlefield in no time, trying to kill our boys.

Obama buttons would be a hot commodity in Guantanamo.

Obama: "I've Never Said Troops Should Be Withdrawn"

Thanks to Power Line, the truth is out: Obama was for staying in Iraq before he was getting out of Iraq. No wonder he's relying on John Kerry more and more for foreign policy advice crisis management. Here's the clip:



Of course, Obama has an excuse for this: The interview was in 2004, when he was still in Pampers.

hat-tip: Jim

Home Of The Future?

Sure, the future's hard to see, but after just four short years of Obamacracy, the kitchen of the future just might look like this:


A hat-tip to Elvis Julep for the photo and the idea, taken from his entertaining and provocative post, The Home of a Possible Future.

An Interesting Juxtaposition

Two news items crossed paths this morning, creating some excited synapse-jumping in my brain. First this:

BAGHDAD (NYT) — Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.

This de-nationalization of oil is, unquestionably, great news for the people of Iraq and more evidence that we are winning the war and -- remember this idea? -- building democracy in the place of totalitarianism in the Middle East. Oil production will be freed of bureaucratic incompetency and corruption, capitalism will reign, and the democratic Iraqi government will begin reaping financial benefits it can use to defend itself, rebuilt infrastructure, care for refugees, etc.

The left doesn't see it that way, of course.

The NYT, forgetting for the moment that it was American blood that freed Iraq, wonders why Chinese and Russian bids were shunted aside and whispers conspiratorially that American advisors are at work in the Iraqi oil ministry.

The Soros-funded Think Progress isn't letting any editorial feelings slip with this illustration on its coverage of the story, eh?

Matthew Yglesias lays it out for the lefties:

I think the evidence is clear that the Bush administration went to war in Iraq because it's run by crazy people. The oil money more plausibly comes into play in explaining the desire to stay at war forever.

Hmm. Last time I checked, American multinationals prefer working in peaceful countries. Then Yglesias cues up the next story that caught my attention with this:

Nationalization, you see, is a substantial risk of doing business -- especially natural resource business -- in unstable countries. But a given government is much, much, much less likely to nationalize western countries' assets if it's dependent on external U.S. military support and especially if its security services are nicely enmeshed with the U.S. military.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S., a country whose security is also nicely enmeshed with the U.S. military, there's this:

Link: sevenload.com

The clip, courtesy of Hot Air, shows NY Rep Maurice Hinchey calling for the nationalization of oil refineries; he was one of several Dems who yesterday spouted similar socialistic rhetoric. (I understand the DNC is considering a name change to DPP, Democratic Peoples Party.)

Watch the clip because Hinchey comes and goes quickly, followed by an interview between Neil Cavuto and an Obama supporter Malia Lazu that will blow your mind. Lazu says it was a mistake for the U.S. to allow oil to be a free market industry in the first place, and that this grievous mistake -- evidenced, I suppose, by the horrible state of our oil infrastructure and government's continuing inability to allow an increase supply or new refineries -- and that "we won't find out" that oil will just get more expensive under government ownership because "when Congress can set prices it can set prices."

Her excuse for destroying a system that's served us well for over 100 years despite all of government's efforts to screw it up: "It's our oil." Follow that line of this Obamaniac's thinking -- which ignores royalties BTW -- and it's our forests, it's our lakes, it's our coal, it's our clay in the bricks you built that factory with, Capitalist Pig.

Fortunately, we are already a democracy, so Hinchey and his fellow travelers can vomit out Communist party talking points with no real effect on the rest of us. And in Iraq, another step has been made down the road that will allow the Mohammed el-Hincheys to be just as ridiculous, just as threatening to our stability, with no real effect on their government.

hat-tip: memeorandum

My ANWR Photo Gallery

Brace yourselves. Now that President Bush and John McCain are both pushing for more drilling, you'll be hearing a lot about ANWR (which as you know stands for "Any Nitwit Will Rant"), and the environmental movement will be doing their talking with pictures like this:


Very nice, very beautiful ... and very misleading. This is not the look or the landscape of the area where drilling's proposed. That's an area about the size of a large metro airport tucked into ANWR's 19 million acres, an area that's larger than the area of 10 of our Union's states.

Nope. The area where drilling would occur looks more like this:

Or this:


But wait. I'm really showing the area at is best, at the peak of summer when Mother Nature's done all she can to beautify the place. Poor baby. She must be so exhausted and so disappointed with the results.

No, ANWR really looks like this:


But of course, that's not really it either, because the sun's shining ... which doesn't happen during the winter. Which is most of the year. This ain't Yosemite, folks. It's a big, empty place where drilling can happen with minimal consequence to what minimalistic nature's up there.

Oh, and by the way, for the coastal crybabies who think they shouldn't have to actually look at energy being produced even though a lot of them use more than their fair share of it, I offer up this:


Pretty, isn't it? You don't think so? What makes it less pretty than say, the sails of a schooner, or the twinkling lights on the peninsula across the bay?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, eh? And all of us agree there's nothing too pretty at all about this picture:

No Iraqi Endorsement For Obama (Natch!)

"The Iraqis are really fearful about some of the positions the Democratic Party has adopted. If the Democrats win, they will be withdrawing their forces in a very rapid manner. Are we going to tell [Iraqis] that the game is over? That the Americans are pulling out?"
-- Sheik Ahmed Abu Rishah, Iraqi Awakening Movement

Who knows more about the possible effects of Obama's cut-and-run promises for Iraq: Dem campaign operatives or Iraqi leaders?

Barack Obama isn't available to answer this question because he "was unable" to meet with a group of visiting Iraqi leaders last week. According to Bret Stevens in WSJ, the leaders, who were able to meet with McCain, included Abu Rishah, Mamoun Sami Rashid al-Alawi, the governor of Anbar province, and Hussein Ali al-Shalan, a Shiite from Diwaniyah.

Says al-Alawi of that aborted Obama meeting and their visit to Walter Reed:

The governor tells a moving story about their visit to Walter Reed hospital, where they were surprised to find smiles on the faces of GIs who had lost limbs. "The smile is because they feel they have accomplished something for the American people."

But the Iraqis came away with a different impression in Chicago, where they had hoped to meet with Mr. Obama but ended up talking to a staff aide. "We noticed there was a concentration on the negatives," the governor recalls. "The Democrat kept saying that Americans have committed a lot of mistakes. Yes, that's true, but why don't you concentrate on what the Americans have achieved in Iraq?"

The visitors were even more flabbergasted -- Sunni and Shi'ia alike -- by Obama's willingness to negotiate with their bloodthirsty neighbors to the east, asking Stevens, "Do you Americans forget what the Iranians did to your embassy? Don't you know that Ahmadinejad was one of [the hostage takers]?"

Of course we remember. Of course we know. But it seems to have slipped Obama's mind, and in continuing his refusal to honestly assess Iraq, our visiting Iraqi friends weren't able to remind him.

Wednesday Reading

Yeah, yeah, school's out. Tough. Here's your reading assignment, courtesy of the Watcher's Council via the Watcher of Weasels:

Council links:

1. What the Free World Would Do Well To Emulate
   The Colossus of Rhodey
2. My Mother-in-Law The Democrat
   The Razor
3. Just Once
   Done With Mirrors
4. The Cult of Global Warming
   Hillbilly White Trash
5. Metaphorically Shooting
   Soccer Dad
6. Say It Loud, Say It Proud: I Am a Racist! *UPDATED*
   Bookworm Room
7. The End of Guilt?
   The Glittering Eye
8. R. Kelly: I Believe He's a Platinum Predator
   Rhymes With Right
9. Admitting Defeat in the Rhetoric War
   Cheat Seeking Missiles
10. Judicial Activism Run Amok
    Wolf Howling
11. A Rose By Any Other Name -- Tiptoeing Around Jihad
    Joshuapundit
12. The New College Major: "Fat Studies"
    The Education Wonks

Non-council links:

1. French Theory's American Adventures
   The Chronicle of Higher Education
2. McCain Energy Heads-Up: End Moratorium on Offshore Drilling (Details Tuesday)
   Big Lizards
3. Let's Get Something Straight
   Balloon Juice
4. Why Irish Voters Rejected the Lisbon Treaty
   The Brussels Journal
5. After the Charge
   Miserable Donuts
6. They Never Change
   Confederate Yankee
7. The Future of Russo-American Relations (Guest Voice)
   The Moderate Voice
8. Obama and Taxes: An Unchanged Liberal Agenda
   Lone Star Times
9. The Willful Blindness of Barack Obama
   Hugh Hewitt
10. Serlo the Mercer and Magna Carta
    Brits At Their Best
11. The United States Supreme Court Versus America: Awarding "The Privilege of Habeas Corpus To Terrorists"
    Townhall.com
12. Who's To Blame For High Gas Prices? Look in the Mirror, America
    Right Wing Nut House
13. Supreme Court: Supreme Overreach
    Neo-Neocon
14. Obama Finds Bitter Voter Man
    Pondering Penguin

Council members will submit their votes Thursday evening and you'll see the results right here at C-SM on Friday morning.

Thanks, Watcher, for cranking that cyber-mimeo machine all night to get this to us.

Dughmush Now Dog Mush

I'm not sure exactly what dog mush is, but it's definitely nothing nice, so I couldn't resist the headline.

(IsraelNN.com) The Israel Air Force struck terrorist groups in Gaza in three separate attacks Tuesday afternoon, killing at least six operatives, including Army of Islam second-in-command Muataz Dughmush.

The head of the terrorist group, Mumtaz, is Muataz' half-brother.

Two of the strikes were carried out in the central Gaza town of Dir el-Balah, where IAF pilots successfully targeted the gunmen involved in the 2006 kidnapping of IDF Cpl. Gilad Shalit.

One of the missiles struck a vehicle carrying the Army of Islam terrorist cell, which included Muataz Dughmush. Five terrorists were killed, including Dughmush, and three others were wounded, one critically. The vehicle was completely destroyed.

Two other Army of Islam terrorists were wounded in the second strike, which occurred in the same area a short time later.

Of course, the news report I heard said merely that six Palestinians had been killed. Are we to assume that all Palestinians are terrorists? Of course not (at last report, there were 17 who didn't support terrorism). Are we to assume that every Palestinian killed by Israelis is an innocent? Of course not (go ahead and use that 17 number again).

The media could do a better job of reporting Israel/Palestinian issues. That said, please register me in the "Understatement of the Year" contest.

hat-tip: Jim

Drilling Through Obama's Rhetoric

Obama looks at oil as foreign policy:

"Oil money pays for the bombs going off from Baghdad to Beirut, and the bombast of dictators from Caracas to Tehran." (WaPo)

What a bizarre ... no, what a leftist ... view. Commerce is evil. Big commerce is big evil.

The Dem presumptive also refers to oil drilling as "a failed policy." Failed? Look at what oil drilling has accomplished for our world. It changed us from a globe of far-flung, isolated peoples to a global community. It gave us new medicines and materials that have improved our lives. It made it possible to get to the hospital by ambulance or helicopter instead of horse and carriage. It fuels our economy, creating jobs and wealth.

One drawback: It makes it possible for one Barack Obama to campaign relentlessly across our very large nation.

But to him, oil and drilling for oil are nothing more than a failed policy -- even though all the alternative energy forms, that have been spouted relentlessly since the 1970s, have failed to deliver even five percent of our national energy needs.

Not only does Obama support failed energy sources, he supports failed methods for making alternative energy just energy. His plan is to use money raised through an auction of greenhouse-gas emissions credits (i.e., an energy tax) to bolster research and development projects, which have been bolstered for three decades now with little to show for it.

Meanwhile, he wants to force alternative energy into the economy by imposing requirements on how much renewable energy public utilities would have to buy. Ve have ways ov making you buy! Never mind whether its available, never mind whether its cost effective. What people have to pay for energy is of no concern to Mr. Elite, because it's a hidden tax.

Meanwhile, McCain's laying out an energy policy with some positive energy behind it: Drill now in America. Go nuclear. Conserve. Use alternate fuels. This is a sound and diverse plan that actually would cause America to be less dependent on foreign oil

Drill now? Obama actually said that there's no point in drilling now because it'll be ten years until offshore oil wells deliver. Clinton said the same thing about drilling for ANWR oil -- ten years ago. If he had been a visionary instead of reflexively pushing alternative fuels, ANWR oil would be moderating prices today. Alternative fuels certainly aren't.

Of course, Obama's not alone in calling oil drilling "failed policy." Here's the DNC:

The Democratic National Committee responded that Mr. McCain’s speech “will cave in to his friends in the oil and gas industry’’ and that he would be offering “more of the same failed Bush policies that have driven energy prices through the roof.’’ (NYT)

Note to Dems: Fuel prices under Bush in 2001 were the same as they were in 1995. After Sept. 11, they started a slow climb -- but they didn't start soaring until the Dems took over Congress in 2006.

Our Crumbling Civilization: Amped For Sex Edition

Let's say you've got an energy drink to hawk. You know the deal: Young demographic, need to be edgy, viral.

You could make an ad about having energy to party, or energy to work out, or energy to work. No, scratch that last one. You could have beautiful girls surrounding the guy with the energy drink. It could be fun. Fun .... There's a concept. You could make it all about sex! Not just sex, but stranger sex!

Welcome to AMP (that's three capital letters, required) Energy Drink.



For those who don't want to click through or are blessed with short-term memory disorder:

Man 1, waking up in woman's apartment: "When you wake up in the morning in an unfamiliar place..."

Man 2, sitting on woman's bed: "And you can't remember where or when, let alone her face ..."

Woman 1, looking under man's bed in her underwear: "When you cannot find your shoe and your hair smells like a bar ..."

Man 3, sitting on woman's bed: "But you kinda feel excited because you got really far ..."

Man 4, on street: "Last night I was sure I was with a 10 ..."

Man 5, buying energy drink: "But this morning when I saw those knakles I had to think again ..."

You get the idea.

(Kankles, courtesy of Incredible Daughter #2, who introduced me to this video, are calf's or cow's ankles.)

"They ought to put a Trojan commercial on after it," said ID #2. But it appears her peers like the idea of hawking products with trampy, tawdry sin. And they don't just view this spot on YouTube -- they watch it on TV. And they like it; here are some of the comments from YouTube:

Oooooh, good one doooood!

this is the best, funniest, and awesomest commercial ever!!! its soo funny and it rox!!

That is hilarious and its so true i usally am so wasted and dont no ne thing and just go its really funny tho theres usally other peeps 2

In case you're not text-friendly, the middle of that last one is "and don't know anything."

To capture just how civilization-crumbling this culture of cheap sex, loose morals and freewheeling materialism is, I offer up this comment from a concerned YouTube viewer:

why do people have to ruin a good commercial with cases of std comments stfu

Yeah, why let chlamydia or gonorrhea get in the way of fun? Feeling good for the moment, that's the ticket.

And the hucksters at ad mega-agency BBDO know it well, assailing morality in the name of bringing yet another unneeded brand of energy drinks to market. Eight different versions of the clip are up on YouTube, with combined hits in the 330,000 range.

That Ol' Time Bush-Bashing

Some things never change.

Stuck in the middle of Reuter's slide show on President Bush's trip to Europe -- during which he accomplished a broad set of foreign policy goals despite his lame duck status, a pretty neat feat -- was this photo of our pres.

With fast-shooting digital cameras frame-by-framing every moment of his trip, these sort of images turn up. You can have fun at home while watching Obama or Oldermann by regularly pausing the TV. Within two or three pauses, you'll get a frame like this, or worse.

Of course, we never see pictures like this of Obama or Bill (Hillary maybe ...) or Gore or Kennedy or any other heroes of the left. But even after eight years, the adolescents of the left never tire of a good goof-ball Bush photo.

It Depends On What Your Definition Of "Precipitously" Is

There's more good news about the improving situation in Iraq today: AP reports that the Iraqi parliament will move out of the heavily fortified Green Zone and begin holding its sessions in the Iraqi parliament's former home, outside Baghdad's most heavily fortified sector.

"There is progress in the security situation and the reconstruction has been completed of the new building," [Deputy parliamentary speaker Khalid] al-Attiyah said, adding the new accommodations will be large enough for the full legislature and staff members.

The endless stream of news like this, along with McCain's nonstop haranguing of Obama's "talking to Ahmadinejad but not Petraeus," led Obama to say this, which I'm sure you all heard, as it was big news yesterday:

(CNN) – A day after his Republican counterpart sat down with visiting Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari, Barack Obama spoke with him by phone from Chicago Monday morning and told him that he looked forward to seeing him in Baghdad before November.

WATCH Sen. Obama discuss Iraq

“I emphasized to him how encouraged I was by the reductions in violence in Iraq, but also insisted that it is important for us to begin the process of withdrawing US troops, making clear that we have no interest in permanent bases in Iraq,” Obama told reporters ....

“I gave [Zebari] an assurance that should we be elected, an Obama administration will make sure that we continue with the progress that’s been made in Iraq, that we won’t act precipitously,” said Obama.

Now, I define giving our enemy the advantage of knowing the day we'll depart, and sticking to that departure date no matter what as acting precipitously. What else could he be referring to?

If I was the American anti-war left, I'd start being very, very careful around buses, because it looks like now that the general election's coming up, and America is smelling victory in Iraq, that the Ambitious Mr. O. is considering throwing them under the bus.

There's quite a lot of his Web site content he'll have to toss out, too:

• "Moreover, Iraq's political leaders have made no progress in resolving the political differences at the heart of their civil war." Let's track that against the progress of Obama's legislative record. Oh. What record?
  
  
• "In January 2007, he introduced legislation in the Senate to remove all of our combat troops from Iraq by March 2008." That would have assured the failure of the surge.
  
  
• "Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months." Precipitous.
  
  
• " ... if al Qaeda attempts to build a base within Iraq, he will keep troops in Iraq or elsewhere in the region to carry out targeted strikes on al Qaeda." Idiotic -- al Qaeda doesn't "build bases."
  

I don't understand Obama's fixation on not having permanent bases in Iraq. Iraq is not the hallowed Arabian Peninsula, which the radical jihadists want to keep pure of any foreign blood (in yet another example of Islam's wonderful tolerance). Many in Iraq would welcome our long-term stabilizing influence. And having an ongoing military presence in the Gulf would encourage regional stability, an important strategic goal.

Obama's Web site doesn't hint at why he wants no ongoing military presence there; I can only assume because it would support the wrong-headed Leftist claim that we are "occupying" Iraq. Just more soaring rhetoric replacing down to earth, practical policy.

Quote Of The Day: Slapping Mullahs Edition

"So today, Britain will urge Europe and Europe will agree to take further sanctions against Iran. First of all we will take action today that will freeze the overseas assets of the biggest bank in Iran, the bank Melli."
-- UK PM Gordon Brown

So Bush is a foreign policy dolt? Too stupid to do anything but alienate Europe and other far more sophisticated allies? Once again, has proved himself smarter than this critics, this time touring Europe as a lame duck and achieving all the policy goals set forth for the trip.

While the policy elite thought nothing much would come of this trip, Bush was able to convince Europe's big three -- England, France and Germany -- to drop their happy faces and admit that they have nothing to show for years of diplomacy with Tehran. If they were ton continue on this course, all that would happen is that Tehran would be granted years to move forward with its nuke program.

The latest round of rumors of a US attack on Iran, surfacing in tandem with the trip, no doubt helped to convince the Europeans to tighten up sanctions. Reuters reports that sanctions on oil and gas will likely follow.

The wiley Bush has once again shown that diplomacy works best when there's a big stick involved.

What Next For Guantanamo's Bad Guys?

The Libs won, finally, after pushing pig-headedly through every logical obstacle placed before them, and got the men of Guantanamo, who never saw a provision of the Geneva Conventions they didn't mind breaking, rights beyond what we've ever offered foreign enemy combatants before.

Now that a few hundred habeas hearings are going to be scheduled before federal judges, what possible hope do we have that the judges will handle the matter well? As Andy McCarthy points out today at The Corner, we don't trust judges enough with criminal cases to let them make habeas decisions without reams of guidance and piles of precedence, there are no such safety brakes in place to guide judges in the proper handling of foreign enemy combatants. McCarthy points out the risks of this situation:

By comparison, (a) alien unlawful enemy combatants are more serious threats to public safety (indeed, to national security) than drug dealers and violent felons; (b) alien unlawful enemy combatants are also not defendants accused of crimes (they're hostile operatives captured in military operations overwhelming authorized by Congress following the mass-killing of nearly 3000 Americans on 9/11) and, therefore, they are not entitled in detention hearings to the constitutional presumption of innocence that applies in civilian prosecutions (by contrast, they do get the presumption of innocence if charged with war crimes); and (c) judges have no institutional competence in determining the status of enemy combatants, a war power the framers committed to the political branches.

McCarthy proposes a narrow detention procedure law for these cases, which could be modeled on the federal pretrial detention statute, followed by a national security court, but sees the problems inherent in the suggestion. The Left has fought tooth and nail to minimize the risk posed by the Guantanamo detainees and to give them undeserved legal rights, and they're not about to settle for a Pyhrric victory this close to the finish line.

Even with all the guidance before them, liberal judges often make horrible habeas decisions, and little itty bitty bad guys catch a break as a result. It would be nice to say "we can't allow such mistakes to happen with the detainees," but that's ridiculous. We are going to allow such mistakes to happen thanks to the SCOTUS ruling, and we are going to deal with the consequences -- in this case, the deaths of our soldiers, our allies, or us.

I share McCarthy's concern that when that happens, Obama and the other politicians who brought us to this point will be shielded by the courts. Let's hope that as that happens, the communicators on our side will be more effective than the Bush communications team, and the American people will be reminded that it was politicians on the left, not the courts, that have the greatest measure of responsibility.

hat-tip: memeorandum

Father's Day Sunday Scan

Role Model Day?

Here's an interesting take on Father's Day from Sweating Through Fog:

I'm getting pretty tired of seeing things that treat being a father as just a "male role model."

A father is not a male role model. A father is an adult male that a child knows:
a) will take a bullet for them.
b) will work hard for many, many years, doing things he may or may not like, in order to provide a loving, secure home for his wife and children.
c) loves the child enough to consider the well-being of that child the foundation of his worth as a person.

You can be a male role model if you teach a kid how to ride a bike, throw a curve ball, learn a trade or act on a date - all good and wonderful things. Fatherhood is an irrevocable, lifetime commitment to sacrifice - with grace and pride - for the benefit of a child. A child derives great benefit knowing that someone made those sacrifices for them.

God bless the Dads who dedicate themselves to doing both, and God bless the kids who have neither. For them, today's not much of a day.

Father's Day Read

David Woo, a photographer with the Dallas Daily News gave a reverse Father's Day present to son Jake that merits an entry in the Chronicles of Fathering -- Woo the elder visited Woo the younger at his post on at Forward Operating Base Iskan, south of Baghdad.

Woo the elder's piece is posted at the Dallas Morning News today; here's a poignant excerpt:

As I walked about 100 yards to my room, the only light was moon glow. As I looked up, I had to stop. Before Jake was deployed to Iraq, I told him that I would go outside every night before I went to sleep, look up in the heavens and say a prayer for his safety. This time, my prayer was a little different:

"God, I'm here with my son now. Keep him and his fellow soldiers safe."

For whatever his reasons, God did not keep several thousand of Woo's fellow soldiers safe in Iraq. What a terrible, terrible day today must be for those families and those fathers. Please keep them in your prayers today ... there are no words sufficient to the loss.

(See Woo the elder's photo gallery from the trip here.)

Predators And Reapers


Two of the coolest named weapons in the US arsenal, the Predator and Reaper unmanned aircraft, are flying over the Pakistan/Afghanistan border like never before, in a renewed effort to bring in Osama bin Laden before the end of the Bush presidency. The Times of London reports:

As Mr Bush arrived in Britain today on the final leg of his eight-day farewell tour of Europe, defence and intelligence sources in Washington and London confirmed that a renewed hunt was on for the leader of the September 11 attacks. “If he [Bush] can say he has killed Saddam Hussein and captured Bin Laden, he can claim to have left the world a safer place,” said a US intelligence source.

The Special Boat Service (SBS) and the Special Reconnaissance Regiment have been taking part in the US-led operations to capture Bin Laden in the wild frontier region of northern Pakistan. It is the first time they have operated across the Afghan border on a regular basis.

The hunt was “completely sanctioned” by the Pakistani government, according to a UK special forces source. It involves the use of Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles fitted with Hellfire missiles that can be used to take out specific terrorist targets.

One US intelligence source compared the “growing number of clandestine reconnaissance missions” inside Pakistan with those conducted in Laos and Cambodia at the height of the Vietnam war.

I'm not a big supporter of last-minute legacy-building by presidents, so I have to ask why this effort wasn't undertaken sooner? Why the big rush now?

I hope they get him -- today wouldn't be soon enough -- but having big stories in major international newspapers about the hunt isn't going to help the effort any.

Obama Backing Off Gun Control?

Is Obama already sprinting to the middle in prep for the election? Perhaps. The candidate, who voted a pretty standard anti-gun ticket while an Illinois senator, had this to say Saturday nightabout the campaign against McCain:

"If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun."

The line drew cheers from the crowd. Maybe they've had enough of Obama's "new politics" jibberish, seeing it for what it is, just so much politician-speak.

Delaying That Dialog On Race

Are we ready for that national dialog on race yet? If and when we start it, can we put on the required reading list Hanna Rosin's American Murder Mystery from The Atlantic

The story turns on the rising crime rate in mid-sized cities (500,000 to 1 million population) -- a stat that's counter to the flat crime rates in the big cities. In Memphis TN, for example, the violent crime rate's been rising at 20 percent annually.

And it didn't take too long before a hint of a topic for the national dialog on race began to form up:

Memphis has always been associated with some amount of violence. But why has Elvis’s hometown turned into America’s new South Bronx? [Police Lt. Doug] Barnes thinks he knows one big part of the answer, as does the city’s chief of police. A handful of local criminologists and social scientists think they can explain it, too. But it’s a dismal answer, one that city leaders have made clear they don’t want to hear. It’s an answer that offers up racial stereotypes to fearful whites in a city trying to move beyond racial tensions. Ultimately, it reaches beyond crime and implicates one of the most ambitious antipoverty programs of recent decades.

It is, of course, that the crime wave has a black engine -- and because Memphis politicians need the black vote, they would rather stick their heads in the sand. Good idea; a gunshot wound to the buttocks is less life-threatening than one to the head.

The story behind the Memphis stats is fascinating, so I'll pull a rather long quote from the story:

About five years ago, [criminologist Richard] Janikowski embarked on a more ambitious project. He’d built up enough trust with the police to get them to send him daily crime and arrest reports, including addresses and types of crime. He began mapping all violent and property crimes, block by block, across the city. “These cops on the streets were saying that crime patterns are changing,” he said, so he wanted to look into it.

When his map was complete, a clear if strangely shaped pattern emerged: Wait a minute, he recalled thinking. I see this bunny rabbit coming up. People are going to accuse me of being on shrooms! The inner city, where crime used to be concentrated, was now clean. But everywhere else looked much worse: arrests had skyrocketed along two corridors north and west of the central city (the bunny rabbit’s ears) and along one in the southeast (the tail). Hot spots had proliferated since the mid-1990s, and little islands of crime had sprung up where none had existed before, dotting the map all around the city.

Janikowski might not have managed to pinpoint the cause of this pattern if he hadn’t been married to Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis. Betts and Janikowski have two dogs, three cats, and no kids; they both tend to bring their work home with them. Betts had been evaluating the impact of one of the city government’s most ambitious initiatives: the demolition of the city’s public-housing projects, as part of a nationwide experiment to free the poor from the destructive effects of concentrated poverty. Memphis demolished its first project in 1997. The city gave former residents federal “Section8” rent-subsidy vouchers and encouraged them to move out to new neighborhoods. Two more waves of demolition followed over the next nine years, dispersing tens of thousands of poor people into the wider metro community.

If police departments are usually stingy with their information, housing departments are even more so. Getting addresses of Section 8 holders is difficult, because the departments want to protect the residents’ privacy. Betts, however, helps the city track where the former residents of public housing have moved. Over time, she and Janikowski realized that they were doing their fieldwork in the same neighborhoods.

About six months ago, they decided to put a hunch to the test. Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts’s map of Section8 rentals. Where Janikowski saw a bunny rabbit, Betts saw a sideways horseshoe (“He has a better imagination,” she said). Otherwise, the match was near-perfect. On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.

Betts remembers her discomfort as she looked at the map. The couple had been musing about the connection for months, but they were amazed—and deflated—to see how perfectly the two data sets fit together. She knew right away that this would be a “hard thing to say or write.” Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they’d been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down, in ways they’d never expected. But the connection was too obvious to ignore, and Betts and Janikowski figured that the same thing must be happening all around the country.

The process of tearing down the projects and moving the (primarily black) residents to more affluent (primarily white) neighborhoods started carefully; in fact, no projects were torn down. Fewer than 200 families were picked for relocation and screened to find the motivate families with fewer than five children. Not surprisingly, the results were very good -- more kids finishing school, families rising out of poverty.

Also not surprisingly, the media leaped on it, turning the resulting ACLU book, Waiting for Gautreaux, into the prophetic tome of leftist social meddling.

And not surprisingly, given the impatience of the left, what followed was the wholesale destruction of housing projects and accompanying relocation of all their residents -- not just the motivated, relatively low childbirth ones.

And finally, not surprisingly at all, what followed was bunny rabbits in Memphis. Memphis is now the fourth most violent mid-sized city in America, and think demolition of housing projects when you consider the three ranked worse, from third to first: Baltimore, Washington DC, Detroit. (Rosin found other stats that placed Memphis "at the very top.")

How did the leaders of Memphis respond to the data? Predictably, not well:

Earlier this year, Betts presented her findings to city leaders, including Robert Lipscomb, the head of the Memphis Housing Authority. From what Lipscomb said to me, he’s still not moved. “You’ve already marginalized people and told them they have to move out,” he told me irritably, just as he’s told Betts. “Now you’re saying they moved somewhere else and created all these problems? That’s a really, really unfair assessment. You’re putting a big burden on people who have been too burdened already, and to me that’s, quote-unquote, criminal.”

To Lipscomb, it's the data -- the reality -- that's criminal, not the splashes of red throughout the bunny's ears. It's the studies of black behavior that is criminal, not the behavior of blacks.

Is America ready for a dialog on race?

Of course, housing -- whether the projects of old or the suburban Section 8 apartments of today -- isn't the problem. Neither is race, per se.

My mother-in-law owned several apartments in Redding CA and did all she could not to rent to Section 8 renters -- who were mostly white or Hispanic there -- because they simply were more destructive and problematic than routine renters. Part of the Memphis crime problem is the result of the welfare, statist society the Left has succeeded in building in America.

And certainly, the uniquely black propensity to out of wedlock birth -- another residue of the ravages statism has caused in the black community -- has a lot to do with it. Rosin never mentions this in her article. Rather, she dwells on the difficulty project residents have getting acclimated to new neighborhoods, particularly those who weren't motivated to leave the projects, and ignores the fact that the families she writes about are mom and kid families, not mom and dad and kid families.

This is almost a taboo subject among liberals. For example, when recent stats on unwed births came out, the NYT trumpeted it as good news:

The birth rate for unmarried black women, long a focal point in the debate over the causes of poverty among African-Americans, has reached its lowest point in 40 years, Federal health officials said today.

According to figures compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics, there were 74.4 births per 1,000 unmarried black women in 1996 -- the last year for which complete data are available. That rate is significantly below the peak of 90.7 per 1,000 unmarried black women reached in 1989.

Buried 12 paragraphs down was the stat that the unwed birthrate among non-Hispanic whites was a still shocking but comparatively minuscule 21.5 percent.

In the face of all this, most of America wants to react like Memphis' housing director: Don't talk to me about race because I don't want to blame statism and I don't want to criticize black social behavior, even if it is destructive.

hat-tip: Jim

Obama Largely To Blame For SCOTUS Guantanamo Ruling

John McCain's promise to close Guantanamo is one strike against him in my playbook, but I can't find a quarrel with his position on yesterday's awful Supreme Court decision extending habeas corpus to terrorist foreign combatants.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Friday sharply denounced a Supreme Court decision that gave suspected terrorist detainees a right to seek their release in federal courts.

"I think it's one of the worst decisions in history," McCain said. "It opens up a whole new chapter and interpretation of our constitution." ...

McCain ... attacked the decision, saying the law he helped write "made it very clear that these are enemy combatants, they are not citizens, they do not have the rights of citizens."

He might have thought about that before calling for the closing of the prison, so his slam of the SCOTUS decision rings a bit hollow. But in this political year, I'll take it gladly -- especially when compared to Obama's reaction.

Of course, I haven't found a reaction from Obama, which isn't that surprising because he is probably considering his options ... none of them too attractive ... before getting someone to write words for him to deliver smoothly from his teleprompter.

Here's the cause of his troubles:

Lawyers for Gitmo detainees endorse Obama

(January 28, 2008) -- More than 80 volunteer lawyers for Guantanamo Bay detainees today endorsed Illinois Senator Barack Obama's presidential bid.

The attorneys said in a joint statement that they believed Obama was the best choice to roll back the Bush-Cheney administration's detention policies in the war on terrorism and thereby to "restore the rule of law, demonstrate our commitment to human rights, and repair our reputation in the world community." The attorneys are representing the detainees in habeas corpus lawsuits, which are efforts to get individual hearings before federal judges in order to challenge the basis for their indefinite imprisonment without trial.

The attorneys praised Obama for being a leader in an unsuccessful fight in the fall of 2006 to block Congress from enacting a law stripping courts of jurisdiction to hear Guantanamo detainee lawsuits. The constitutionality of that law, which was part of the Military Commissions Act, is now being challenged before the Supreme Court in one of the most closely-watched cases this term.

"When we were walking the halls of the Capitol trying to win over enough Senators to beat back the Administration's bill, Senator Obama made his key staffers and even his offices available to help us," they wrote. "Senator Obama worked with us to count the votes, and he personally lobbied colleagues who worried about the political ramifications of voting to preserve habeas corpus for the men held at Guantanamo. ... Senator Obama demonstrated real leadership then and since, continuing to raise Guantanamo and habeas corpus in his speeches and in the debates."

(Read the whole article here.)

We know how that turned out, so we can thank Obama for the mess the five Sept. 10-think judges on the SCOTUS have put us in.

We know what Obama is feeling about the decision: Elation. He worked hard to achieve giving enemy combatants the opportunity to use our courts as a weapon of war -- a right we did not extend to the thousands of Nazi prisoners of war who were on our land, not offshore in Cuba. But Obama's work was in the fall of '06 -- basically a decade or so ago in Obama Time. Now that he's a general election candidate, he'll have to figure out how to fake a different, less hardcore hard-left response to use when he's asked for a response to the decision.

One thing is for certain: He will work hard to separate himself from the 80 volunteer Guantanamo lawyers. The bodies on the other side of the separated from Obama gap are becoming legion; I wonder if there's room for 80 more.

Mad Mullahs From Space!

The Tehraniacs are about to go in orbit, or at least the rarely reliable FARS news agency says they are:

TEHRAN (FNA)- The deputy head of the Islamic Republic of Iran's Broadcasting (IRIB) for parliamentary and provincial affairs said that his organization will launch a satellite in the near future.

"With the launch of this satellite, we will be able to send signals to everywhere in the country," Musavi Moqaddam said in the western city of Sanandaj on Wednesday.

Stressing that radio and television networks should be developed in Iran, he said, We need 450bln to 500bln Tomans (approximately 450m- 500m dollars) of credit to expand our signal coverage across the country.

Looking at the photo that accompanied the article, I have just one question. If they're using the satellite to broadcast television programs propaganda to Iran ...

... why did they put it in orbit around the moon?

But seriously folks, if the Mad Mullahs succeed in getting a satellite into orbit, it's a matter of grave concern to folks who would like to live with high levels of radiation everywhere.

Circumscribing The Debate

The NYT has one heck of a hand-wringer this a.m., searching its navel and the navel of other MSM news purveyors for any speck of sexism in their coverage of Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Leading the charge is Katie Couric. Here's the clip:


And what the NYT had to say about it, ignoring her statement that if similar "iron my shirt" issues were tossed Obama's way, it would have been front-page news:

Taking aim from the inside, though, was Ms. Couric, who herself has faced harsh criticism as the first woman to be the solo anchor of an evening news broadcast. Ms. Couric posted a video on the CBS Web site on Wednesday about the coverage of Mrs. Clinton.

“Like her or not, one of the great lessons of that campaign is the continued — and accepted — role of sexism in American life, particularly in the media,” Ms. Couric said.

She went on to lament the silence of those who did not speak up against it.

Odd that the NYT didn't characterize the Couric clip a bit more accurately and dig into it some -- like her reference to a free market entrepreneur's creation of a Hillary nutcracker as somehow being indicative of sexist bias in MSM coverage. Instead, they dredged up these examples of horrific sexism directed at Mrs. Clinton:

• Chris Matthews called her a she-devil.
  
  
• MSNBC panelist Mike Barnicle said Clinton was “looking like everyone’s first wife standing outside a probate court.”
  
  
• Also on MSNBC, Carson Tucker said, "When she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs.”
  
  
• The NYT was guilty of writing about Hil's "cackle."
  
  
• Ken Rudin of NPR apologized after the fact for comparing Hil to Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction: “She’s going to keep coming back, and they’re not going to stop her."

Awful, awful stuff. Note that all of it came from decidedly left-tilting outlets. Let's take them one by one.

• Perhaps if Matthews had just called her a devil, he would have escaped criticism. You know, like "actresses" are just "actors" today.
  
  
• Barnicle's comment is hardly original; there's polling data that shows Hillary reminds many men of their first wife. Polling data are there to be reported. Ignoring them because it dealt with a candidate's sex would be just as sexist, would it not?
  
  
• Tucker's comment about crossing legs is in accord with Hil's campaign strategy of not running as a woman ... which leaves the alternative of running as a man. And any woman that behaves like a man understandably makes men nervous.
  
  
• And there's been plenty of coverage of Obama's ears and McCain's age, so please, no harpie screeches about Hil's cackle. Oops.
  
  
• Rudin, it turns out, was right. She still has not conceded defeat or left the race.
  

Now, all this bitching and endless nagging about sexism (heh) is all set-up, of course. The real game is not whether Hillary was treated with sexist disregard, but rather, it is a game of using allegations of sexism against Hillary to prime the media to be very, very careful in any criticism of Obama. After all, if sexism is a sin in America, racism is a mortal sin.

You can see Howard Dean hard at work priming this message in his comments about the coverage of Hillary:

“The media took a very sexist approach to Senator Clinton’s campaign,” Mr. Dean said in a recent interview.

“It’s pretty appalling,” he said, adding that the issue resonates because Mrs. Clinton “got treated the way a lot of women got treated their whole lives.”

Mr. Dean and others are now calling for a “national discussion” of sexism.

Obama, in dealing with the Wright blow-up, called for a "national discussion" of racism; Dean did not borrow the term by accident. And if the media's treatment of Hillary is appalling and resonates because it reflects how a lot of women are treated, then any criticism at all of Obama will remind all blacks -- men and women -- of negative ways they've been treated and be even more appalling.

In other words, it's now officially hands off Obama time. This won't make much difference to the average American, as the media has kept its hands pretty well off Obama all along. It will make a profound difference to GOP candidates, speechwriters and campaign chiefs, and to reporters, editorial cartoonists and editorial writers. The former know they are being watched and offenses will be dealt with very, very harshly by the latter.

Missing from this discussion is the Dems' recent sump-diving into ageism with McCain. To twist beyond recognition his comments about the strategic benefits of having an ongoing military presence in Iraq into an attack on McCain's capabilities because he is old must remind many American men and women in their 70s and older of the ways they are discriminated against and belittled ... but where are the calls for a national dialog on that?

Watcher's Winners

The Watcher wants not for worthy notes. This week's submittals by the Watcher's Council were a joy to read and the winners were worthy.

Joshuapundit topped the Council rankings with a piece innocuously titled The Chicken or the Egg? which is such a comprehensive analysis of the ills of Islam that I tagged it for future reference. Wolf Howling followed the same tack, but with biting sarcasm, in his second-place post, Dear Pakistan.

Bookworm tied for second with For Once, It really Is About The Children, which is pretty remarkable because the piece (which got my vote, along with Joshuapundit) is just the set-up for a series she's going to do on children. This piece frames the series with some clear thinking on gay marriage, race relations, socialism, freedom, reproduction and, of course, those sweet little results of reproduction.

On the non-Council side, an American Thinker piece, What Kind of War Crimes Trials Does Obama Plan? (Updated), won. The piece presents an entirely new Obama Horror: The good chance that, if elected, Mr. Bipartisan may very well start his administration with war crimes investigations and trials against members of the Bush admin. In Obama's own words:

What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that's already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued. I can't prejudge that because we don't have access to all the material right now. I think that you are right, if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated.

Yeah, that's reaching across the aisle. That is the new politics. That'll help win the war against Islamofascism.

See all the winners here.

Thanks, Watcher, for another weekly walk through the forest of illuminating electrons. And thanks for keeping those nasty cyber-bears away.