Greenie Insanity And The Santiago Fire

Rick Moran at Right Wing Nuthouse, who's opinions I value, has called me a idiot. I'm not sure if I still value his opinions quite as much ...

Here's what he said, writing of the rush to score political points as the SoCal wildfires burned:

It didn’t used to be like this. No one would have dreamed of trying to politicize tragedy prior to the presidency of George Bush. But we’re in a different political ballgame now with no boundaries and few rules to live by. So we can expect this kind of idiocy from both sides from now on.

Mea culpa. I did work to score a political point or two by (very gingerly) comparing the situation faced by the Superdome evacuees to the experience of the evacuees at Qualcomm. Says Moran of that:

First of all, anyone who tries to draw parallels between a Hurricane and a fire is an idiot.

There's that "idiot" word again. But there were differences between Qualcomm and Superdome that cannot be explained by the differences between a hurricane and a firestorm, which I admitted were profound.

And it's not about rich or poor, or the width of streets or the availability of transportation. It's about an effective local government in San Diego, and how sharply that contrasted with a seriously dysfunctional (and since re-elected!) local government in New Orleans. (To his credit, Moran also make this point.)

Ray Nagin's re-election stands as the most racist political act in this country in all the years since the Civil Rights Act was passed.

Moran took a shot or two at folks who harped on the enviros during the current fire, saying it was too early to cast those stones. I haven't thrown those stones ... yet ... even though you can attribute at least some of the blame for the recent ferocity of fires on them.

Now, here comes the end of "not yet;" here come the stones.

It turns out, enshrined bureaucratic environmentalism did play a role in making the fire that threatened our home harder to fight. My friend Jim eagle-eyed this, way down in an OC Register story today:

Concerns over contaminated water supplies due to runoff from an abandoned silver mine kept helicopters from dropping water on flames along the top ridge along the northeast corner of the blaze.

Regulation run amok! Bureaucrats gone wild!

Because there is an old silver mine up on Saddleback Mountain, one can assume, can't we, that silver is a naturally occurring element in our local environment?

And if the water were to be dropped, it would land on ground that was parched bone-dry -- because that's why we're having a fire, right?

And if the soil is bone dry, what water that isn't evaporated by the flames and happens to pick up a silver atom or two will be sucked up by the now-bare soil, right?

So if the ridiculously tiny counts of silver are back in the soil, aren't they right back where they came from?

And if it rains like cats and dogs (Puhleeze God!) soon, and all that soil washes down the mountain, won't it be diluted by cat-and-dog volumes of water, until it's so diluted you could barely measure it?

In case you're confused, the answer to all those questions is "YES!" In the face of towering flames, bureaucratic idiots (to borrow a term from Moran) are enforcing regulations about parts per trillion instead of facing realities about burning homes in the hundreds (well, not here at least, thank God, but it's a nice turn of phrase).

So, dear bureaucrat, how many more tons of greenhouse gases were belched into the atmosphere because you denied the helicopters their water? And, in case you forgot that there are real human beings involved here, how many more hours will firefighters be placed at risk -- all because you're worried about concentrations of silver that are surely smaller than what Incredible Wife picks up through her skin when she slips on a silver bracelet?

So, Rick, all apologies, but I'm not waiting another moment. All barrels blazing here!

When Americans Run Loose In Iraq

Amidst all the rancorous squabbling brought to us courtesy of the anti-war Dems, we sometimes lose sight of the fact that our only hope to avoid a long-running war against radical Islam is to jerk the Gap nations like Iraq and Somalia out of their economic and human rights misery and welcome them to the enlightened world of the Core nations.

Fortunately, Americans on the ground in Iraq don't have to be reminded of this mission, as reported today by Nathan Ritzo in the Union Leader:

The best thing about my job on the Baghdad Provincial Reconstruction Team is seeing ideas become reality and make a positive impact. It's rewarding to visit places that have benefited from the ideas and hard work of American service members and civilians in Iraq and to see Iraqis adapt to their situation the Americans' example of dedication to national unity against the forces of terrorism and tyranny.

The reconciliation of Sunnis and Shi'ites across Iraq in a national movement to reject al-Qaeda is an example of this and was made possible by the troop surge. The reconciliation movement is evident in an area north of Baghdad called Taji. Tom Burke, the team leader for the Taji Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team, or EPRT, calls this reconciliation the "Taji Awakening."

"(The Taji Awakening) involves all the sheiks (in Taji), both Sunni and Shi'a. Over the period of four weeks now, it has gathered momentum," Burke said. "The movement here has become dynamic."

He said that the largest gathering of Sunni and Shi'a sheiks in Iraq occurred on Aug. 20 in the Taji area and that the terrorist forces in the area are now "on the run" because of the sectarian reconciliation. As a result, the overall quality of life in rural North Baghdad Province has improved, with marketplaces "flourishing" and critical infrastructure needs being met, according to Burke.

Did this happen because Sunni and Shi'a in the Taji area just decided one day to drop their age-old relationships with each other and try something new. No, of course not. It happened because we toppled Saddam Hussein and have occupied Iraq in order to teach them a better way:

Col. Mike Bridges, who heads up the governance section of the EPRT, concurs with Burke that progress has been made, but specifies that the reconciliation starts at the local level. "It really did start with our brigade commander's philosophy in engaging the senior tribal sheiks," said Bridges. He added that the brigade commander tired of his soldiers getting hurt and of good local people being terrorized when they tried to make changes in their community. The changes in Taji began with a simple outreach program using fliers to promote the idea of Iraqi national unity against terrorism with the support of Americans.

There you go. One man, one American, making a difference, turning back centuries of habitual hatred and distrust by introducing the American principles of a free press and freedom of speech. A few fliers, a few conversations, and it's U.S. in and al-Qaeda out.

President Bush's adaptation of the Perturbance Princple laid out by Thomas Barnett and others can still turn out to be the crowning glory of his presidency ... if we are allowed to keep perturbing the powers that be in the Middle East. It is America's destiny to be the country that pokes world leaders in the eye with the branch of the tree of freedom, and Iraq is increasingly our evidence that this approach will work.

Photo: This Jan. 2006 photo shows Lt. Col. John Cross, the commander of 1st Special Troops Battalion, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, greeting locals when the Army installed a new irrigation pump for a village in the Taji region -- a nice, positive little act of perturbance.

"America's Sheriff" Indicted

I first met OC Sheriff Mike Carona a day or two after he was elected -- and by all reports (except his), he was already corrupted by then.

If you believe the federal indictment unsealed yesterday -- drawn largely from the testimony against him of his two closest supporters, who ratted him out on their own plea deals -- even on that day, this smiling, warm future "America's Sheriff" was fully corrupted, sunk in a conspiracy to use his new office to accumulate illegal wealth and intoxicating power.

And it wasn't just Carona. It was also his senior aides, his wife ... and his long-time mistress! Carona always positioned himself as a strong Christian, but apparently not that strong:

In an indictment unsealed today, federal investigators charged the county’s top lawman with seven felony counts for using his elected office to “enrich” himself and offer “favors to friends who paid bribes.” Carona illegally accepted money, high-priced gifts, tickets to exclusive sporting events and loans for his wife and for his “longtime mistress,” the indictment said.

Debbie Carona, along with Debra Hoffman, a Newport Beach attorney and investor identified in the indictment as Carona’s mistress, were also charged along with the sheriff. All three face conspiracy counts while Hoffman faces additional charges that she aided Carona and also committed bankruptcy fraud.

Carona, 52, also faces two counts of witness tampering, allegedly for attempting to persuade a former assistant sheriff to lie to the federal grand jury. (OC Register)

He didn't seem like that kind of person back when I met him. He had a gentle disposition, but it was evident there was a lot of strength behind it. He seemed very centered and straightforward, even humble.

I recall him saying that while he was sheriff, crime would drop dramatically in OC ... but he would have little or nothing to do with it. He went on to explain how demographic trends guaranteed that crime would drop because the last population peak had either weaned itself from crime or was in prison, and the next population peak was still in elementary school. "I'm just lucky enough to be sheriff at a time when the population of 17 to 25 year-olds will be relatively low," he said.

I thought, "How refreshing -- a politician that's not taking credit that's not due."

Several years later, I reminded him of this conversation and he laughed, surprised that I remembered it so well. And once again, he gave the credit to demographics, because his prediction had turned out to be correct.

Among the most sordid of Carona's inside circle was Don Haidl -- you may remember that last name even if you live far from here -- who was Carona's money man, as summarized here by the Daily Pilot:

Corona del Mar businessman Don Haidl provided thousands of dollars in illegal payments to Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona in exchange for an assistant sheriff job and special treatment for his family and friends, according to an indictment unsealed on Tuesday.

The indictment of Carona — filed in October 2005 in United States District Court — alleges that Haidl repeatedly made payments to Carona that the sheriff failed to declare, made additional payments to a woman identified as Carona’s mistress, and rewarded Carona for his support by placing him on a previously nonexistent board of directors for a company owned by Haidl’s uncle.

That bit about "special treatment for his family" came in handy when Don Haidl's son Greg was among a group of young men charged with drugging and gang-raping a 16 year old girl. Here's the OC Weekly's Haidl Gang Rape Archive for anyone who's interested.) The case banged around forever before the three assailants finally got convicted in March 2005, and there was plenty of opportunity to point fingers at the Sheriff's office for being less than aggressive.

I agreed. By then I'd seen enough of old school cronyism from Carona. His glory days, when he performed magnificently during the nationally covered, and ultimately tragic, search for Samantha Runion, were far behind him even then.

Today, he says he will be exonerated. Perhaps. But not in the eyes of the people who elected a guy we thought was straight -- but even then wasn't.

If you want to follow this story in a juicy way, well-written way, I suggest you set up a feed for Frank Mickadeit's column in the OC Register. Frank's a long-time acquaintance and Coto neighbor, and has a wicked pen. Here's his lead today, that captures my feelings exactly:

The most shocking part of the indictment against Sheriff Mike Carona is just how well-planned the feds say the conspiracy was. If you believe the charges, what the sheriff did could never be mistaken for mere technical violations of campaign-finance law.

The overall sense I get from the indictment is that this was no case of a politician becoming arrogant with power over a period of years in office and gradually acquiring a sense of entitlement. That's commonplace. These charges, however, emanate from alleged activities dating back to before Carona even took office.

Photo: OC Register

Wednesday Reading

It looks like there's some good reading in store for us this week, as Watcher's posting of the Watcher's Council nominees covers a range of topics by a bevy of exceptional observers. Here you go; enjoy; winners posted here Friday!

Council links:

1. The Artificial Honkey
   Done With Mirrors
2. Comparisons Are Odious
   The Glittering Eye
3. Apologists
   Soccer Dad
4. American Schools Avoid Responsibility At Levels Both Large and Small
   Bookworm Room
5. Of Stonewalling and Blackwater
   Cheat Seeking Missiles
6. A Matter of Death
   Rhymes With Right
7. Mucking About With Mukasey
   Big Lizards
8. Why Hate Crimes Are a Joke Part 5783, and Why the University of Delaware Digs 'em
   The Colossus of Rhodey
9. When Kids Grow Up Too Fast: The Maine Story
   The Education Wonks
10. Syria's Assad Caught With His Hands in the Nuclear Cookie Jar
    Joshuapundit
11. The Race to Politicize Tragedy
    Right Wing Nut House
12. The Iraq War -- Coming To a Theater Near You
    ‘Okie’ on the Lam

Non-council links:

1. Where Do You Stand in the New Culture Wars?
   Times Online
2. The U.S. Media's Admiration of Chancellor Merkel Is Suddenly Over
   The Moderate Voice
3. The Unbearable Lightness of Optimism
   Simply Jews
4. I'm Sorry... Was That Supposed To Be Journalism?
   Confederate Yankee
5. Flag-folding Recitations Now Banned At National Cemeteries
   Flopping Aces
6. Nevermind Alcohol, Is Living In Canada Haram?
   Kafir Canada
7. Impossible to Take Seriously
   Power Line
8. The Inscrutable Angst of Little Round Headed Kids
   By Benjamin Kerstein
9. We Built This City On Pork and Bull
   Captain's Quarters
10. What's Wrong with America?
    National Review Online
11. Is This the State of Academics Today?
    The QandO Blog
12. Stifling My Radical Libertarian Conservative Goldwater Liberalism
    Classical Values
13. Helping the World Out of Its Misery
    Dr. Sanity
14. Farewell Israel?
    Dodgeblogium

Iraq Troop Deaths Down, But Not To Zero

AP reports this morning that U.S. military fatalities have dropped dramatically ... but not to zero, as I previously posted.

The monthly toll of U.S. service members who have died in Iraq is on track to being the lowest in nearly two years, with at least 34 troop deaths recorded as of Tuesday, but the military cautioned it's too early to declare a long-term trend.

It is the lowest number since 32 troops died in March 2006 and the second-lowest since 20 troop deaths in February 2004, according to an Associated Press count based on military figures.

That would be the second consecutive drop in monthly figures, after 65 Americans died in September and 84 in August. ...

By way of explanation, I heard a mention of 14 days without a combat fatality on a Fox News Radio program, and a couple days latter went to CentComm's news release page and checked the news release section. There, 16 days had passed between news releases announcing single combat fatalities.

I've been seriously out of the news loop the last few weeks as the low volume of posts here on C-SM evidences, and I simply put two and two together and posted without doing a second check. I apologize for the error.

CentComm is an interesting source of news on the war, particularly of successful actions we don't see covered by the MSM. I hesitate to use the data posted on anti-war body count sites, so I'm probably simply going out of the fatalities reporting business.

Let's finish up the news, though:

Maj. Winfield Danielson, a military spokesman in Baghdad, pointed to a number of likely reasons for the decline, including a U.S. security push that has driven militants out of former safe havens and a change in strategy that has placed troops closer to the population. That, in turn, has caused a rise in the number of tips from residents about roadside bombs and other dangers.

He also singled out the cease-fire call by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who in August ordered his fighters to cease attacks against U.S.-led forces and other Iraqis for up to six months. Danielson said Iraqi forces also were increasingly taking charge of security operations.

He welcomed the lower numbers but stressed it was too early to say it was a downward trend.

"Have we turned a corner? It might be a little too early to say that," he said. "It's certainly encouraging."

I think we have turned a corner and am wondering what will happen come February, when al-Sadr's six month hiatus wraps up. I doubt that even if he wanted to call his militia back to arms, he wouldn't be able to do so since he is not who he was, and Iraq is not what it was, when he scuttled his frightened butt off to Iran.

Have You Heard Them, General Tom?

With apologies to David Bowie for the headline, and a quick answer "Yes" to the question, let's get on with Gen. Tom McInerney's statement today on Fox News regarding Saddam Hussein's secret tapes.

I'd forgotten about them frankly, and in case you have too, here's some background. They constitute at least twenty hours of Saddam acting like Nixon, recording his most secret conversations. Siezed after the fall of Baghdad, they have been mostly kept under wraps by the US command since then.

It's evident from the limited translated transcripts that were released that Saddam was mad for WMDs and dedicated to trouncing UN efforts to get info on his programs, yet they stay buried in secrecy.

The Left is convinced they're buried because they contain definitive proof that Saddam wasn't pursuing WMDs -- but they're stuck in the denial quagmire. McInerney's explanation is much more compelling: That Russia, China and other "allies" were so complicit in arming Saddam that we have decided to keep the tapes secret.

Well, fie on that! Let the truth be told, and let the cards lie where they fall.

Sunday Scan

This is probably going to be more of a Fire Scan than a Sunday Scan, because there's something about flames and smoke on the hillsides I've hiked not that far from myhome that focuses my attention away from other news.

Heroes From Cocoons

My computer is being rebuilt this weekend, so I can't load videos to Blogger (don't ask). Here, then, is the link to an NBC clip that tells the story behind the picture I posted a few days ago of the metallic cocoons that saved 8 firefighters in the Santiago Canyon fire. (By all accounts, it's 8, not 12, which is the number NBC reports.)

It's just over three minutes, so please watch it -- if for no other reason than (1) you'll see some heroes defiantly facing down death and (2) you'll see a seasoned journalist show emotion and admit, a little self-consciously, that she prayed at that moment.

Hot Air

This John Trever cartoon captures the yakking and attacking that has followed the shellacking California got from these fires.

The Hill caught Pinky Reed claiming a global warming connection (for the moment, until pressed, when he wimped back, sniveling):

“One reason why we have the fires in California is global warming,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters Tuesday, stressing the need to pass the Democrats’ comprehensive energy package.

Moments later, when asked by a reporter if he really believed global warming caused the fires, he appeared to back away from his comments, saying there are many factors that contributed to the disaster.

Under the categories "Crime and Corruption" and "Terror Psyops," hyper-paranoid blog Aftermath News apparently was busy making up the thoughts of San Diego evacuees:

Instead of praising Bush, evacuees said it is important to remember that the Bush administration censored reports on global warming. In San Diego County, the leaves and grasses were extremely dry from drought, creating prime conditions for fast spreading fires.

None of these evacuees are quoted by name, nor does Aftermath mention that it's the land the enviros fought to keep out of development, along with land owned and managed by the state and the feds, that were the source of the tinder.

The Latino news service Prensa Latino picks up the global warming rant, helped along by that always objective and trustworthy alliance of Wobblies and Warmies:

Amy Goodman, of Democracy Now, said over this radio and TV network that fires extend from the Mexican border to Santa Barbara, the most devastating fires in San Diego County and the Governor has declared a state of emergency.

Bill McKibben, a leading environmentalist has found that wildfires are related to global warming. This is the kind of disaster that we see more and more of as we begin to change the basic physics and chemistry of the planet we live on, he said in an interview with Amy Goodman.

One of the San Diego authorities noted this is the driest in at least ninety years. Another scientist, Tom Swetnam has found that global warming has increased temperatures in the West about one degree, and that's caused four times more fires.

Is there anything to make of this? Dr. Ricky Rood of wunderground thinks the conclusions are getting way ahead of the facts. First post:

The Santa Ana winds are not being caused by climate change. They’ve been around longer than Santa Ana. It’s wind falling down a hill, which warms the air, lowers the relative humidity, and sucks up moisture from the ground. Bad stuff for fire fighters. The fact that the fires are so damaging is that they are in places where people have built in very dry and very vulnerable places. And for the most part, people seem to set the fires one way or another. It’s mostly a land-use and land-management issue.

If, if, if there is anything to do with climate change it would be that the extended drought has warmer temperatures than similar droughts in the past, and hence, drying is worse. I cited some research earlier that made such a argument in a way that has some substance.

Second Rood quote, from OLTN Weather Update:

There have also been papers which make a compelling argument that wild fires in the western U.S. are increasing in intensity and duration. In the paper of Westerling et al. (Science, 2006), the conclusion is drawn that this is directly related to snow melt occurring earlier in the year, a hotter and drier forest, and hence, a longer burning season. Plus they isolate the impact to be at mid-elevations in the Rockies, and hence, relatively free of land-use changes. While many newspapers reported that this work showed an increase of wild fires due to climate change, I quote directly from their paper: “Whether the changes observed in western hydroclimate and wildfire are the result of greenhouse gas-induced global warming or only an unusual natural fluctuation is beyond the scope of this work”.

In other words, a little science, a lot of jumping to conclusions, and an unhealthy dose of hysteria -- the Warmie formula for mixing up a batch of "news."

Pensions and Pumpers

We were worried all week about the amount of equipment that would be available to fight our fire, given that significant firefighting resources were (rightfully) focused on LA and San Diego counties, where more homes were threatened than here. Rightfully or not, the OC Register lead editorial today makes a good point:

[F]irefighter unions are powerful, and fire budgets in recent years have been stressed as agencies, such as the Orange County Fire Authority, have expanded pensions. The more the agencies spend on salary and benefits, the less will be available for the latest equipment and other capital expenditures. Those who always call for more spending for public safety aren't doing taxpayers a service – no government agency ever has the amount of money it would like to have, and wise public officials understand the need to balance the many demands on the treasury.

A few years back, the OC Board of Supervisors lost their collective spines in the face of employee unions and approved a new pension plan that we have no hope of financing in the real world.

We love our fire fighters all the more after the last week ... but we still hate their greedy pension scheme.

Taking the Union's Side

Not surprisingly, the LA Times has chosen to megaphone the union's rhetoric in its lead story today, Shortages added fuel to OC fire. The main shortage, it appears, was union members.

Like most departments in the region, the Orange County Fire Authority was ready for trouble. Forecasts called for humidity in the single digits and hot Santa Ana winds roaring in from the desert.

[OC Fire Chief Chip] Prather put 30 extra crews on duty, roughly 100 firefighters. They added to the typical staffing of about 70 crews. He was paying firefighters overtime to have engines staffed and ready to go.

The size of those crews was one way that Orange County fell below the national standard. Most of the county's engines were staffed with three people. Four per engine is the voluntary minimum standard from the National Fire Protection Assn., a private organization that writes fire safety guidelines.

Crews with three firefighters work more slowly than larger crews, according to a study by the Insurance Services Organization, a national group that evaluates fire departments.

"When you lose one person on the crew, you're sacrificing safety," said Afrack Vargas, a spokesman for the California State Firefighters' Assn. "You're sacrificing another set of eyes. You're sacrificing another strong back to help in the incident. It makes a difficult situation that much more difficult."

Our cartoonist who leads of this column should have added "Union Shills" to the wind machines that are attempting to fan a new fire from the one that's burning up in the hills. Every union tries to write rules that require more union workers, from nurses on the hospital floor to machinists on the factory floor, and the fire unions are no different.

How obviously self-serving is the union argument? Far be it from the LA Times to ask the question:

Orange County, the sixth-wealthiest county in the state, has an annual firefighting budget of about $260 million. The Fire Authority has roughly one firefighter for every 1,100 people in the county's coverage area. But that figure climbs dramatically -- one firefighter for every 1,800 residents -- if only full-time, professional firefighters are counted.

By comparison, Ventura County has twice as many firefighters per capita, approaching 900. Los Angeles County's ratio of one firefighter per 1,500 residents is about 16% stronger than Orange County's. (emphasis added)

The LAT fails to point out that Ventura County is ranked higher in per capita and household income than Orange County ... but let's not let fact get in the way of reporting.

Besides, what does truck manpower have to do with this:

Prather said that [calling up overtime fire fighters] left the Fire Authority with 15 more engine companies than usual, in addition to help from other departments if things got bad in Orange County. He thought that would be enough.

It wasn't.

The Santiago fire broke out 13 hours later. By then, the 11 city fire departments in Orange County had also dispatched substantial forces to Malibu. That deprived Prather of the backup he would normally have relied on.

Plus, the state committed to buying 150 new engines after the 2003 fires, but so far has only ordered 19, none of which have been delivered.

But it's all about not enough union workers. Who will be eligible for generous union pensions. And pay union dues to support their union bureaucracies.

16 Days Without A US Combat Fatality In Iraq

Corrected: See this post, which reports data that disproves this post. I apologize for the error.

A U.S. soldier died Thursday, October 27 when he was hit with small arms fire in Salah ad Din, Iraq.

This is the first combat-related New Casualty Report posted on Cent-Comm since October 11, when a release was posted on a soldier who was killed in combat operations in Baghdad.

Two weeks and two days passed between one death and the other. Did the MSM notice? Do you recall seeing a raft of stories about success in Iraq? Let's see.

Here's a CBS story ... from July. Here's a McClatchy story from September. This USA Today story is a little hard to peg; there's a note that it was updated "95d" ago, presumably in July, like the CBS story. Even this Fox News report from last Wednesday failed to note the fact.

These stories and many like them, right up to this WaPo editorial from October 11, are reporting on the general success of the surge, one measure of which has been the dramatically falling rate of combat deaths and injuries among not just US forces, but also Iraqi forces.

Have the Dems on Congress taken notice? Certainly, some of them have, but the leadership plods on in a quagmire of denial and defeatism.

Has the media noticed? Nowhere can I find a report that says that two weeks and two days went by without a single American dying in combat in Iraq. It seems like a newsworthy story ... but what would I, a former reporter who's spent 30 years in PR, know about newsworthiness?

Note: The photo at the top, from A Soldier's Blog, doesn't show a soldier grieving over a fallen comrade. It's even more touching. Here's the caption:

U.S. military police officer Brian Pacholski comforts his hometown friend and fellow officer David Borell, both from Toledo, Ohio, at the entrance of the military base in Balad, Iraq, about 30 miles northwest of Baghdad, on June 13. Borell broke down after seeing three Iraqi children who were brought to the base seeking medical help after they were injured while playing with and burning a powder that was inside a plastic bag near their farm.

These strong, tough men who break down when seeing an injured child ... how noble they are; how different from our enemy, who plant bombs on children.

Of Stonewalling and Blackwater

Bad news and snooping reporters are never greeted with welcoming arms. In my business -- high-level public relations consulting -- crises relating to bad news that my clients would rather not see are depressingly familiar affairs.

It's hard work and clients come at it from different ways, with the best using "explain" as their strategy in a word, but others going for "delay" or even "cover up." Only the last response is unethical, but neither of the last two are winners, so my clients get counsel that is based in "explaining."

Too bad the State Department isn't my client; look at this, from the LA Times today:

Even as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended her department's oversight of private security contractors, new evidence surfaced Thursday that the U.S. sought to conceal details of Blackwater shootings of Iraqi civilians more than two years ago.

In one instance, internal e-mails show that State Department officials tried to deflect a 2005 Los Angeles Times inquiry into an alleged killing of an Iraqi civilian by Blackwater guards.

Get it? Today's efforts by State are being undermined by poor decisions made two years ago ... reporters never forget. And agencies and corporation never remember that their emails aren't private.

"Give [the Los Angeles Times] what we can and then dump the rest on Blackwater," one State Department official wrote to another in the e-mails, which were obtained by ABC News. "We can't win this one."

One department official taking part in a chain of e-mails noted that the "findings of the investigation are to remain off-limits to the reporter." Another recommended that there be no mention of the existence of a criminal investigation since such a reference would "raise questions and issues."

The embarrassment of the moment seemed a compelling argument against disclosure in 2005, leading now to that embarrassment being compounded by stories of stonewalling and deceit by public officials.

What would have happened if State had come clean in 2005? Clearly, there would have been a scandal of sorts in 2005. But it would have been a scandal largely implicating Blackwater, not one that besmirched the administration itself.

And more important, a dozen or perhaps more people would still be alive today, because new policies would have been set in place two years earlier.

We had a case recently when a reporter went after one of our clients. He called every prior associate of the client he could find, looking for unfair business practices of some sort or another, because from the very outset he was convinced our client was a crook -- not because of anything he knew about our client, but because of his preconceived negative attitudes about the client's industry.

Of course he found stuff. You can't be a big, far-flung, successful entrepreneur for 15 years and not have some soured business relationships or flopped endeavors in your background.

We spend two weeks furiously trying to shake the reporter back to reality by putting him in touch with dozens of new sources, and getting those involved in the negative news to explain that the client was playing straightforwardly, despite whatever may have happened at the time.

In the end, the reporter remained true to form, ignoring all the facts and writing his story the way he'd set out to do it in the first place. (Sorry, no link; it's not in the client's best interest.)

About a week later, the LA Times did a story on the same client, and it was a beautiful thing -- overall quite positive, hitting most of our key messages, and none of the stuff that had so fixated the other reporter. It turned out so well in part because we were able to quickly disclose all from the outset, using the research we had pulled together for the reporter from the Daily Crapsheet.

The media live off people who never seem to learn these simple lessons and continue to fall into their trap. You would think that State -- supposedly where the really smart people go, if they're going into government -- would be far too sophisticated to try to cheat their way through the news cycle, but again and again they prove that they are no smarter -- even less smart -- than the rest of us ...

... but certainly smarter than the Kings of What Were They Thinking at FEMA, who have written a new chapter in Dealing Stoopid With The Media.

These Nerve-Rattling Wildfires

Here's an email I sent out earlier today:

Friends and family:

It’s been a worrying several days as we’ve watched the Santiago Canyon fire spread, threatening neighborhoods and burning down homes in areas just five or ten from our home. The last few days have been a God-send, with the winds dying down and the humidity inching up to about 14%.

The danger is still real, however. Were the winds to pick up and blow in our direction, the threat would increase dramatically. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that every house that has been lost has been older or remote and surrounded by trees – no new subdivision homes have burned because of our more fire-proof construction and the modifications they make to vegetation around the edges to give the firefighters more opportunity to knock down the fires.

Please look at this map of the Santiago Canyon fire. If you look at the bottom right, you’ll see a little triangle formed by two green lines coming up from the bottom – that’s the northern edge of our community, about 2.5 miles north of our home. You can see how each day the fire is spreading more and more in our general direction each day – but it’s still north and west of us, and the strong winds typically are east to west, not northeast to southwest, so that’s good … for us anyway.

Please keep us, the firefighters, the people at more risk, and the people who have lost homes in your prayers.

Here's a recent update from the Register:

The fire was making some moves toward the south – and communities such as Rancho Santa Margarita and Coto de Caza. Firefighters were hoping to turn it back before then, and were holding a line along Ortega Highway.

The hellish Santa Ana winds that drove the fire earlier in the week had gone slack, but the flames were still moving fast as they devoured the forest and swept uphill. A crew of firefighters was forced into retreat overnight after the fire made a sudden rush up the mountain slope.

Not wanting to get trapped by the flames with only an uphill escape route, the firefighters pulled back around 6 p.m. They returned several hours later, after the fire had calmed down.

“It’s really dangerous to be uphill on a fire, trying to fight it,” said Ken Frederick, a spokesman at the National Interagency Fire Center and a 13-year firefighter. “You just don’t want that fire below you.”

Those fire fighters are just amazing! God bless 'em!

Here's a hot on-the-Internet update from the LA Times about Silverado Canyon, one of the rare funky areas in OC, where narrow lanes wind along creeks and slopes are lined with rustic homes:

The Santiago fire raged this afternoon on Pine Canyon Ridge, with authorities estimating that the blaze was less than an hour from reaching Silverado Canyon. Firefighters scrambled to coat homes in the far reaches of the five-mile canyon with fire-resistant white gel and evacuate dozens of residents as thick plumes of smoke billowed into the sky.

Authorities are no longer allowing residents, media or even some firefighters to go more than three miles into the canyon. Nearby, a sign outside a community center reads, "God please save our canyon."

It looks like a good chance that there's going to be more heartbreak before this is over.

Photo: Bruce Chambers, OC Register

Snot-Nosed Secularist Defeats Vets

Vets like these two gentlemen, Bobby Castillo and Rees Lloyd, have conducted a flag-folding ceremony for the funerals of vets at the Riverside National Cemetery, as have others throughout the country.

And they're spittin' mad:

Through thousands of military burials, Memorial Honor Detail volunteers at Riverside National Cemetery have folded the American flag 13 times and recited the significance of every fold to survivors of those being laid to rest.

The first fold, a narrator tells relatives, represents life, the second a belief in eternal life.

The 11th fold celebrates Jewish war veterans and "glorifies the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob."

A single complaint lodged against the words for the 11th fold recently prompted the National Cemetery Administration to ban the entire recital at all 125 national cemeteries.

It turns out that complaint came from just one person, a selfish, bitter, vicious subhuman who heard the dreadful word "God" at that very cemetery. Rees Lloyd actually spun together some better adjectives than I did:

"That the actions of one disgruntled, whining, narcissistic and intolerant individual is preventing veterans from getting the honors they deserve is truly an outrage. This is another attempt by secularist fanatics to cleanse any reference to God."

The bureaucrats at that most august and valiant agency, the National Cemetery Administration, followed standard bureaucratic protocol and simply folded in the face of one sludge-synapsed, self-aggrandizing sorry soul -- the bizarre flipside of their characteristic bureaucratic inability to list a finger to simplify their byzantine processes for good people in need.

Mike Nacincik, paper clip chain maker for the Cemeterians, thinks we're a stupid bunch that aren't much worth his taxpayer-funded time:

"We are looking at consistency. We think that's important."

Yeah, but are we? Do we think it's important to have a consistently soulless ceremony or a memorable and appropriately solemn one? Whatever -- just don't read anything into their action to imply that these secularist wimps public servants showed any bias against religion by their action.

"People are going to have their own views on that."

You mean, Nacinicik, that there's no Federal Manual for Raging Impotently at the Bureaucracy we can pull out, flip to subsection 7(A) 4.7c and read the proper procedures for flippin' our stacks over the power placed in the hands of little people looking for ways to impose their twisted, minority will on everyone?

The bureaucrats are by far the worse secular intolerants in this story, not the unnamed -- Oh, how I wish they had named the faceless coward! -- whiner who initiated the action.

Ken Calvert is a fine conservative Republican Congressman who represents Riverside. I'm going to drop him an email to ask for an investigation and regulatory fix to this situation. Won't you, too?

Hat-tip: Jim

I Coulda Been A Contender

The Watcher has posted this week's winners and I would have come in second, behind Bookworm's The MSM's Rush Limbaugh Horror Story, a fast-reading but lawyerly brief on the whole phony soldier/Harry's letter escapade, but I simply didn't have the time this week to read the entries.

My post on another Dem collapse in Congress, DC Coughs Up a War On Terror Win, would have come in a far distant second, but as it is, Big Lizard's An Inconvenient Demographic Truth and Soccer Dad's Walking Back the Cat's X 2 shared that honor. I haven't had a chance to read BL yet, but was prepared to vote Dad's piece second, after Book's.

On the non-Watcher side, Michael Yon finished strong with Resistance Is Futile and - came in next with The Niggers of Palestine.

Here's where Watcher stashed all the winners. Thanks as always, Watcher, for putting together this reportorial ambrosia; sorry I couldn't get a full serving this week -- blame it on the California Coastal Commission.

Fire Brief

Ash fell like snow today and the air was reminiscent of a burning Bangladeshi garbage dump, but the most threatening fires didn't move much if at all in our direction ... or in the direction of anyone else, either. One shift of the wind though and this respite will be over quickly.

We're Still Here, But One Arsonist Isn't

Speaking of the flag he had just loaded into his pickup, Jess Morris said, "You can always try and find one thing to hang onto." Morris' 136-acre ranch in Modjeska Canyon was destroyed by fire yesterday. (OC Register)

We're still here, even as the threatening Santiago Canyon Fire grows and containment shrinks. Fortunately, most of the growth is to the northeast, into the Cleveland National Forest and away from us.

But one worrying arm is heading south, slowly towards us. I came home at 8:30 last night from a client's board meeting, and at the stop sign a couple blocks from our house, I could see a wall of flames in the not-too-distant distance, looking decidedly evil against the black night sky.

All of this worry, danger, effort and expense is the work of one person -- almost certainly a man. OC Fire Chief Chip Prager told the media yesterday that the fire was set in three locations by someone who understood fire dynamics and knew how to use starting points and wind to ensure a large, difficult-to-fight fire.

They're offering $70,000 for info; I know plenty of folks who would contribute to make it much more -- folks who aren't troubled by reading this:

Amid worries of new blazes adding to the firestorm already afflicting the region ... police reported shooting and killing another arson suspect after chasing him out of scrub behind Cal State San Bernardino. ...

The confrontation that ended in the shooting death started about 6 p.m. Tuesday when San Bernardino university police spotted a man in a rural area of flood channels and scrub near the campus. University police tried to detain the man, but he got into his car and fled, authorities said. When he began to ram officers' vehicle, they shot him.

The suspect is described as a 27-year-old man with a home address in Arizona. Sheriff's investigators will search his impounded pickup truck pending a search warrant, Lt. Scott Patterson of the San Bernardino Police Department said this afternoon. (LA Times)

I was thinking this morning that California must attract arsonists from all over America because it really is the ideal place for nutcases who want to cause the kind of grief we've been suffering through -- and there you have it, an Arizonan coming our way to get his sick jollies.

Nervous

Yesterday evening, as I was getting the mail and breathing some of the smoke you see in this NASA photo, my neighbor of 16 years P. walked by with her dog Paris (named long, long before anyone had ever heard of Paris Hilton).

"How are you?" she asked.

"Nervous," I replied. I had just driven home and was shocked to see how far south (towards us) the Santiago Canyon fire had spread. It had jumped out of its namesake canyon and had burned Modjeska and Silverado Canyons, and was now burning in our direction along the face of Saddleback Mountain, less than 10 miles from our home.

Meanwhile, an ominous gray cloud completely smothered the entire southern sky, evidence that the new fire in Camp Pendleton was spreading badly.

Here's the Santiago Canyon fire map as of this morning (click to enlarge). Our home is in Coto de Caza, south-south-east of the fire. That big blob of dark green you see just to the right of us is a wilderness park (i.e., dry coastal sage scrub up the wazoo) and the light green to the east of that is the Cleveland National Forest (i.e., much more of the same).

Coastal sage scrub is an oily plant that explodes into flame when fires hit it, so you can see why any further southern movement of the already terribly destructive Santiago Canyon fire is very worrying.

Just off the map to the south is Camp Pendleton, where the OC Register reports today:

While firefighters battled the Santiago fire overnight, another blaze swept across Camp Pendleton just south of the Orange County line. Flames lapped on both sides of the I-5 freeway, forcing officials to close down the thoroughfare in both directions shortly after 2 a.m. from Cristianitos Road to Harbor Drive, according to California Highway Patrol.

"It's not looking good right now," said Camp Pendleton Fire Inspector Bill Gick. "For the morning commute, you can forget about it. The freeway is closed."

To the north of Pendleton, thousands of acres of coastal sage scrub spread across Rancho Mission Viejo, an old Spanish land grant recently approved for the development of 14,000 new houses, and tie into that same wilderness park to the east of my home.

So we're praying that the fire to the north and the fire to the south don't join. If they do, there's about 100 yards of houses -- four or five rows -- between us and the parched wildlands beyond. I don't know what I'm asking for when I ask for your "thoughts," but I do know what I'm asking when I ask for your prayers, and I'm asking for them. Not for us, but for everyone throughout SoCal who has to answer "nervous" when asked how they're feeling.

All images courtesy of OC Register.

Wednesday Reading

Good ol' Watcher of Weasels has posted this week's selection by the Watcher's Council of blog must-reads. (My choices were easy -- I've been so busy this week that my blog output has fallen to the lowest levels since I started blogging over three years ago, vacations excluded.)

Council members will vote Thursday afternoon and the winners will be posted here Friday morning.

Council links:

1. No Place Like Home
   Done With Mirrors
2. News Journal Writer Falls Prey to Media Matters
   The Colossus of Rhodey
3. The World Is Watching
   The Glittering Eye
4. The MSM's Rush Limbaugh Horror Story
   Bookworm Room
5. Walking Back the Cat x 2
   Soccer Dad
6. DC Coughs Up a War On Terror Win
   Cheat Seeking Missiles
7. Alzheimer's and Education: The Bad and the Worse
   The Education Wonks
8. Cold Civil War
   Rhymes With Right
9. An Inconvenient Demographic Truth
   Big Lizards
10. An LA Times Love Letter To Che Guevara
    ‘Okie’ on the Lam
11. Harry Reid's DREAM Act Is America's Nightmare... Joshua's Army Alert!!
    Joshuapundit
12. Kill the Messenger! Or Is the Message Already Dead?
    Right Wing Nut House

Non-council links:

1. When Mediocrity Attacks!
   Protein Wisdom
2. The Inevitability of Neoconservatism
   By Benjamin Kerstein
3. The Massacre at Karsaz Bridge: Analysis of the Bhutto Blast (Part 2)
   The Pakistan Policy Blog
4. Resistance Is Futile
   Michael Yon
5. The Niggers of Palestine
   Daled Amos
6. Can We Please Define 'Racism'?
   American Thinker
7. Dummycrats, Dhimmicrats, Democrats
   Dr. Sanity
8. Police Deny Reports of Randi Rhodes Mugging
   Watching the Watchers
9. Raid Revelation
   National Review Online
10. President Who?
    Classical Values
11. Thompson Gets Immigration Right
    Jay Reding.com
12. Debate Analysis
    Right Wing News
13. Who Is Responsible for Your Finances?
    TFS Magnum
14. Kurdistan Crisis... Hello EU?
    Dodgeblogium

A Tale Of Two Cities

Here's a bit of a mystery for you.

Consider two disasters of epic proportions, Katrina hitting New Orleans and wildfires hitting San Diego. Both unprecedented in their damage, both offering some warning before striking, both displacing tens of thousands of homeowners.

Consider two stadiums in the heart of these cities, Qualcomm in San Diego and the Superdome in New Orleans. Both equipped to handle crowds, both close to the heart of town and the civic services available there.

At the Superdome, as we know, there was at a minimum of service and supplies and, depending on what news report you read, not much civility or an utter breakdown of humanityt. People waited for to be taken care of, and waited, and waited.

At Qualcomm, we see this:

Bartenders and food servers who usually staff the Qualcomm Stadium Club level have been replaced by doctors, nurses and volunteers. The decor now includes wheelchairs, cots and medical equipment.

The Club level and lounges of the stadium-turned-evacuation center have become a refuge for hundreds of nursing home residents and the elderly who have moved in since fleeing the fires that have ravaged the region.

“I've never seen so many people willing to help out,” said Jean Alaback, who with her husband, Jim, evacuated from the Remington Club retirement center in Rancho Bernardo.

Some nursing homes have moved their residents and staffs into the lounge areas, and cots and wheelchairs spilled out into the hallways outside. Senior citizens living alone also found shelter in the Club level.

A seemingly endless stream of food, water and medical supplies flows to the makeshift care facility. Volunteers and health care professionals show up unannounced offering their services. And worried relatives walk the concrete hallways looking for loved ones. (SD Union Tribune)

And this:

Remember those heartbreaking images of people stranded without goods and services in the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina? Think the exact opposite and it would probably come close to the scene here today at Qualcomm Stadium, the primary evacuation center for San Diego County wildfire victims.

The chairs at the acupuncture/massage station at the evacuation center were constantly full and there were signs giving directions for yoga and meditation classes (sooo, California) and a three-piece soft rock band even serenaded diners who munched on free hot dogs, hamburgers, chicken, pasta and salads. Did I mention the stilt-walkers and clown entertaining the kids? (AP Far and Wide Blog)

Of course, in San Diego, there is no "Where's Bush?" screaming from the Left. Well, that may be because he's visiting the fires tomorrow, but more importantly, it's because in San Diego there isn't an assumption that Bush, or the feds, or the state, or the city have to be engaged before caring can take place.

The Left will get all nasty about Bush visiting here so soon when he "ignored" New Orleans -- this from the same folks who say Bush is too stupid to learn from his experiences!

Once they get their messaging together, the Left will probably focus on the "unfairness" that the mostly black temporary residents of the Superdome fared so badly while the mostly white folks at Qualcomm were practically pampered during their evacuation. Surely this must be racism, they'll say, even more evidence of white America's unwillingness to treat blacks as well as they treat their own.

It is neither fair nor unfair; it is merely a fact that is reflective of two mindsets, one Democratic and one Republican, one that expects government to be a prominent provider, and one that would just as soon go it along. Hillary's or Obama's approach vs. Thompson's or Romney's.

Of course, this isn't a perfect parallel because the devastation around New Orleans was much more all-encompassing, making emergency logistics much more difficult. But what is happening today in San Diego goes beyond logistics to the mindset and heartset of the cities' leadership, which in turn reflects the mindset and the heartset of the cities' residents.

Dinosaurs Alive And Kicking In Blogosphere

The dinosaur media may be struggling ... but we'd be struggling without them.

That fact becomes clear when you look at the sources for the most cutting-edge new media. Memeorandum qualifies in that regard, with its running, nonpartisan log of the news of the day, drawn from the blogosphere, the printosphere and the real atmosphere (the broadcast media).

The site just posted its top 100 news sources; here are the top ten.

1	New York Times
2	Washington Post
3	Associated Press
4	The Politico
5	Think Progress
6	The Atlantic Online
7	The Corner
8	CNN
9	The Hill
10	CNN Political Ticker

Seventy percent of the top ten are old line media, with only The Politico, Think Progress and The Corner qualifying as new media. New media become more pronounced in the second ten, representing 60 percent of that grouping:

11	Los Angeles Times
12	The Huffington Post
13	Crooks and Liars
14	Weekly Standard
15	Captain's Quarters
16	Opinion Journal
17	Talking Points Memo
18	MSNBC
19	Firedoglake
20	michellemalkin.com

The MSM are struggling, but they're obviously continuing to perform a needed function no one has figured out how to usurp. To succeed they must first overcome their bias and become Everyman's media; only then will they be able to figure out a way to stay profitable in the face of a finely tuned and efficient new media.

Can they do it? Sometimes. Look what the LA Times is doing to use new media to stay ahead of the blogosphere in its fire coverage.

Getting Through The Firey Night

I stepped outdoors at 10 p.m. last night to sweet air, no breeze and a starry sky -- and it was hard to imagine than just five or six miles away, firefighters were battling towering flames to save homes.

The OC Register maintained ongoing on-line coverage throughout the night, detailing how the wind directed the fire first towards the new neighborhoods of Foothill Ranch and Portola Hills, then back towards the funky old canyon settlements of Modjeska and Silverado.

There's a superlative photo and video gallery to go along with the coverage, showing how the oldline media shine when disaster strikes. Here are two samples from the Register's photo coverage:

Don't pass off this photo by Mindy Schauer as uninteresting; it is terribly, frighteningly compelling. The silver sheet in the foreground had sheltered eight fire fighters shortly before this photo was taken, a tiny wall between them and a rage of flames that otherwise would have brought certain death. It did its job; if it hadn't, this would be the most famous hillside in America today.

It makes you think about the heroic nature of fire fighters, and their willingness to put their lives on the line to protect others. God bless 'em.

There were several photos in the gallery of citizens pitching in to help the fire fighters, like this one by Michael Goulding showing Foothill Ranch resident Rick Taylor pitching in to help save his neighbor's condo.

Today looks like another tough day on the fire lines. Please keep the fire fighters, their commanders and the folks who's homes are lost or at risk in your thoughts and prayers.

A Day In The Smoke

You might have heard me today updating Hugh Hewitt on the air about the Santiago Canyon fire that was threatening Foothill Ranch.

I spent the day just a mile or two downwind from the fire, watching through plate glass windows as great columns of black smoke rush skyward, and smelling the smoke that breached the filters of our building's AC units, turning eyes red and throats sore. Tough, huh?

Anyway, what I shared with Hugh was the oddness of commuting home on thoroughfares just three or four blocks from where fire fighters were struggling -- successfully! -- to save homes, all of us sitting in our air conditioned mobile cocoons, like we do every day ... even though this was hardly a day like the others. It was strange, very strange.

What I forgot to mention to Hugh and his listeners was that this fire would have been much more interesting a few years ago, before the Marines abandoned the El Toro Marine Air Station. Today the now empty ammunition dump went up in smoke. I imagine the Marines would have put up one heck of a fight to keep the fire from those munitions.

Here at home, we're not under any risk from the current fires, but there's about 30 miles of dry brush starting just a couple blocks east of us that runs all the way across the Santa Ana Mountains to Riverside County. We know that if a fire were to break out, the fire fighters are over-extended and we couldn't depend on a rapid response.

So we're praying ... for the victims who have lost their homes, for those who sit in fear tonight, for the fire fighters and, yes, for our neighborhood's safety too.

One more thing: I'm quite certain they will catch the @#$%&! who set the Santiago Canyon fire. The doofus set three separate fires along the Foothill Corridor Toll Road. Thing is, the Foothill Corridor uses transponders and cameras, so every single car that was on the road at the time the fire was set was recorded. I'm sure the cops are running the plates and knocking on doors as you read this.

What an idiot!

Postal Service Recalls Hillary Stamp

Get your morning chuckle here.

Give Me A Break (From Global Warming)

clipped from hotair.com

This clip from John Stossel, courtesy of Hot Air, is a typically good Stossel dissection of a Big Foolishness.

It's a bit over 8 minutes long, but you don't have to watch the whole thing. In the first few minutes you'll see him interviewing terrified children who are convinced they will drown in global warming floods or die other horrible deaths because of mankind's irresponsibility over global warming.

Are these kids the Brown Shirts of a future enviro-fascist army? Watch them and it's hard to think otherwise.

A Son, A Father, A War

"This world with its complexity is only an imperfect analogy of the eternal abyss from which it comes. . . Is there truly a telos (an ultimate reason) to history or are we merely spinning out of control in an ambivalent universe?. . . I am trying to make sense of a world that I had never known until the first time that I had to kill a man. . . ."

Sen. Kerry's derision aside, these are the words of a soldier who fought and died in Iraq; words so complex I could never have written them, and the LATimes had to help us along with a kindly inserted definition.

They are the words of Darrel Griffen Jr., who was killed by a sniper's bullet in Sadr City last March.

Today's LAT story on the father and his slain soldier son is a wonderfully, sorrowfully moving piece about Griffen Jr's strong mindset and selfless service, and his namesake father, who recently returned from Iraq, where he met with his son's mates as part of a commitment to completing the journals Jr. had kept while stationed there.

Reading the story, it is hard to imagine a father and son who are closer, making it even harder to imagine the heaviness of the task ahead for the father.

"Neither of us liked sports, so the thing we shared was reading and talking," he said. "We'd get a couple of bottles of merlot and talk philosophy late into the night. I used to ask him in advance which philosophers we were going to discuss so I could read up. I don't think you'll find a father and son closer than we were. He was the smartest man I ever met. I'm not writing this book, we're writing it."

Gen. David Petraeus is writing the forward, and I'm looking forward to reading it.

Idiot Leftist Sloganeering

This incredibly stupid chick is showing off a T-shirt that in turn shows off the incredible stupidity of the left.

The act of making money does not take money away from others. Witness Bill Gates, who has made a lot of money. Is there more poverty in the world because of Gates? No, of course not. More frustration, for sure, but economically, it's clear that there is more money in the world, more people living well, than there would be had Gates not cobbled together Microsoft.

Ditto the Monopoly fat cat resting on her chest. The quintessential old school rich guy, be he a railroad mogul or a real estate magnate, did not make people poor because he was rich. In fact, they employed thousands, and endowed libraries and universities, hospitals and foundations, all dedicated to improving humanity.

What did the Socialists of the era provide? Rhetoric, for sure, and lots of it, but it's tough to make a good meal out of rhetoric. They also made big government, which has proven to be considerably less efficient than rich people at lifting people out of poverty.

But in fairness, we have to admit that there are rich people who are indeed a drain on society -- the aristocratic rich. But these trust fund babies tend to be socialists, not capitalists, so our gal remains utterly stupid, a rebel without a clue.

Free Rice!

Try out this site: Free Rice.

When you pick the correct definition of a word it offers up with four alternative definitions, Free Rice will donate 10 grains of rice to an international aid agency to feed the poor.

The words get tough fast, so be warned.

I secured the donation of 110 grains of rice before I stumbled on "footpad." The four choices were caver, audio, female pilot and robber. I guessed at audio, thinking foot pedals controlling sound, but the correct one is robber, specifically one who robs pedestrians.

Audience Appreciation

Koran or no Koran, it's the same the world over ....

hat-tip: Factum

Sunday Scan

Pope Talks Tough

Pope Benedict XVI deftly chose Naples, with its long history of mafia killings and crimes, to speak out against using religion to justify violence but it's pretty clear he was directing his comments at others in the interdenominational audience of clerics:

"In a world wounded by conflicts, where violence is justified in God's name, it's important to repeat that religion can never become a vehicle of hatred, it can never be used in God's name to justify violence," he said. "On the contrary, religions can and must offer precious resources to build a peaceful humanity, because they speak about peace in the heart of man." (Breitbart/AP)

The Pope reportedly spoke to many Muslims during the confab, but only one was invited to his lunch table, Ezzeddine Ibrahim, one of the 138 Muslim scholars who recently signed a letter to Christian leaders urging Christians and Muslims to build on their common belief in one God to work for peace.

That's a conversation that should keep going.

Doolittle Didalot, Gottago

The SacBee reports that the ongoing ... three years ongoing ... investigation of GOP congressman John Doolittle in the Jack Abramoff scandal has led his supporters to demand a finding:

"After three years of investigation, if they haven't uncovered something that is chargeable, they should abandon this investigation and remove the cloud they've created over a very fine human being," [Lew] Uhler declared.

Sounds like a good idea, but I'm not so sure about Uhler's use of adverbs and adjectives. Political consultant Jeff Flint, who I've worked with a time or two, put it pretty well:

"I don't think we owe John Doolittle the right to run and lose. That's not acceptable to me. It's the most conservative district in the state. The only Republican who can lose it is John Doolittle, and he needs to step aside.

John?

Green From Green Offsets

The Contra Costa Times reports that "Joseph Farms is on the front end of a boom." It's actually the booms from rear ends that has dairy farmer Carl Morris sitting on an extra $250,000. Morris captures and sells the methane from his cows' manure and sells it as carbon credits to companies and individuals striving to cut their carbon footprints.

Just keep your footprints out of the now valuable cow pies!

More seriously, the paper, which reports from the fiercely beating heart of the Greenie and Warmie movements, now pegs the carbon offset business at $5 billion a year -- totally unregulated.

Is it an offset to merely save a tree, or do you have to plant a tree? No one knows. Is it an offset to sell carbon offsets for methane you are required by air quality regulations to capture? Again, no one knows.

C-SM rarely calls for more regulation of the marketplace, but c'mon. If there was a $5 billion market dreamed up by hardcore capitalists, you know Congress would have regulated it by now. Why not a market dreamed up by hardcore Warmies?

Decadence Triumphs

One of the most interesting reads of the week (with a hat-tip to Bookworm) is Michael Knox Beran's NRO piece on the death of Count Gottfried von Bismark, the great-great- grandson of Count Otto von Bismark, uniter of Germany.

Gottfried didn't quite live up to Otto's greatness, but he did have his superlatives. He had more cocaine in h is blood than the pathologist who autopsied him had ever seen. He also was an over-achiever when it came to infections, having Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, and an HIV infection.

Still, Beran posits, Otto and Gottfried really weren't that far apart.

In their coverage of Count Gottfried’s death, the newspapers contrasted the splendor of the ancestor’s achievements with the shameful notoriety of the descendant’s. Yet Otto von Bismarck was in his own way a character quite as demoniacal as Gottfried, only he enacted his Walpurgisnacht yearnings on a much grander scale. The Iron Chancellor fantasized that he was a bomb; confessed himself capable of lying awake through a whole night “hating”; and spoke of the “brutal sensuality” and “depraved fantasy” that led him “so close to the greatest sins.” His dreams were violent, his imagination washed in the darker oils: at the heart of Bismarckian self-culture was the question, What have you really hated till now?

It all makes half of my skin crawl, the German half.

Weimar Whiner

Speaking of Germany and crawling skin, historian Eric D. Weitz thinks the Weimar has taken far too much blame for the descent of Germany into Nazism. From History News Network:

Crazy or sane, left or right, these analogies all picture Weimar as nothing more than a conflict-ridden, sex-crazed epoch moving inexorably toward totalitarian dictatorship. Somehow, in some undefined way, a quantum of crisis became a stress-load that the political system could no longer bear. Too much sex or too much unemployment or too many Jews, and bamm! -- system collapse.

Bamm as opposed to bam notwithstanding, Weitz is not ready to let sex, unemployment or Jews take the rap. He's got a much more nefarious villain to poke his finger at:

Weimar did not collapse. It was deliberately murdered by a coalition of establishment conservatives and the extreme right. High government officials, bankers and factory owners, pastors and priests, army officers, old-line aristocratic landowners, some well-placed intellectuals -- those were the establishment conservatives. They were well-situated in powerful institutions like the state bureaucracy, the church hierarchies, big business, and universities, and they disposed of great resources. Yet they whined incessantly because the democracy had limited (though certainly not destroyed) their powers in the revolution that followed World War I and established the Republic. They were anti-democratic, anti-socialist, and anti-Semitic, if less rabidly so than Adolf Hitler and his cronies.

Weitz concludes, "when establishment conservatives play with the extreme right, draw them into the political system, make their ideas acceptable, then democracy is truly in danger."

The name of his column? Weimar America, natch. Weitz may have raised the intellectual level up a notch or two, but he's nothing more than another academician calling Bush a Nazi.

Hillary Dumped Socks

Is the new, softer Hillary real? Do I really have to ask? The Times of London answers, back arched and hissing loudly:

AS THE “first pet” of the Clinton era, Socks, the White House cat, allowed “chilly” Hillary Clinton to show a caring, maternal side as well as bringing joy to her daughter Chelsea. So where is Socks today?

Once the presidency was over, there was no room for Socks any more. After years of loyal service at the White House, the black and white cat was dumped on Betty Currie, Bill Clinton’s personal secretary, who also had an embarrassing clean-up role in the saga of his relationship with the intern Monica Lewinsky.

Some believe the abandoned pet could now come between Hillary Clinton and her ambition to return to the White House as America’s first woman president.

Well, that sounds like a bit of an over-statement, but still:

“In the annals of human evil, off-loading a pet is nowhere near the top of the list,” writes Caitlin Flanagan in the current issue of The Atlantic magazine. “But neither is it dead last, and it is especially galling when said pet has been deployed for years as an all-purpose character reference.”

Where are the media, though? The entertainment media were somehow falling all over themselves this week, gushing out reports on Ellen DeGeneres unadopting her adopted dog.

Where is the passion for Socks? Where is the outrage?