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

Mother's Day Sunday Scan

Hi, Mom!

Inside the Beltway, my mom's going about her mother's day, no doubt anticipating a call from us later today. Despite our differences on politics and religion, which are enough to shatter any normal relationship, we are very close and I would not be who I am today without her -- and I mean that in the best way possible.

She took mothering seriously. She wasn't just raising kids (although she made sure there was a big dose of that in the program -- people who know my mom might have trouble visualizing her as a Cub Scout mom, for example), she was raising two grown-up men. She wanted to make sure that when my older brother and I grew up, we would have a solid foundation in the old liberal arts tradition.

So thanks! And thanks also for the deep friendship you've made with the mother of my children. Having the two moms in my life so close is one of my great joys!

To my readers: Thanks for indulging me. In return, please feel free to pirate the tacky Mother's Day greeting image above.

Muslims Cop Killers?

My brother-in-law, a Special Forces vet and police officer, is on the board of a group that watches out for the widows and orphans of police officers who are killed in the line of duty. He forwarded me this alert:

Sergeant Stephen Liczbinski
Philadelphia Police Department
Pennsylvania

End of Watch: Saturday, May 3, 2008

Biographical Info
Age: 40
Tour of Duty: 12 years
Badge Number: 486

Incident Details
Cause of Death: Gunfire
Date of Incident: Saturday, May 3, 2008
Weapon Used: Rifle; AK-47
Suspect Info: Shot and killed

Sergeant Stephen Liczbinski was shot and killed while responding to a bank robbery call at approximately 11:30 am.

Two men dressed in female Muslim garb had robbed a Bank of America on Aramingo Avenue. Sergeant Liczbinski encountered the suspects on East Schiller Street and stopped their car. As he exited his patrol car, a suspect opened fire with an AK-47, striking Sergeant Liczbinski several times. Several citizens who witnessed the incident rushed to assist Sergeant Liczbinski, wrapping his wounds in an effort to stop the bleeding. Sergeant Liczbinski told them "Tell my wife I love her", before he fell into unconsciousness. Another officer and a citizen carried Sergeant Liczbinski into a patrol car and he was transported to a local hospital, where he died from his wounds.

The suspects continued to flee, but crashed their vehicle. One suspect fled and the second suspect stole another vehicle, but was shot and killed by responding K-9 officers. A second suspect was arrested the following day and an arrest warrant was issued for a third suspect.

Sergeant Liczbinski had served with the Philadelphia Police Department for 12 years. He is survived by his wife and three children.

There is no evidence the perps -- Howard Cain, 33, who was shot and killed by police, Levon Warner, 38, who was arrested, and Eric DeShawn Floyd, 33, who is subject to a massive manhunt -- are Muslims. The local news coverage is lauding a lot of praise on Liczbinski, but is drawing no conclusions about Islam and the crime.

At this point, there's really just one point to be made from the story: It is perfectly sensible and valid for us to put restrictions on Muslim dress in the US for security reasons. It's not racial profiling to poke, prod and scan every single Muslim man and woman in traditional clothing.

Time For A New Perfume?

I have no explanation whatsoever for this:

A woman required 20 stitches to her face after a pelican crashed into her in the sea off Florida, apparently diving for fish.

The bird, which died in Thursday's collision, ripped a gash in Debbie Shoemaker's face as she bathed near the city of St Petersburg.

The city fire chief said he had never heard of a diving pelican hit a person.

Pelicans grow to up to 30lb (13kg) and can dive from heights of 60 to 70 feet (18 to 21 metres).

Ms Shoemaker, 50, returned home on Friday, the Associated Press reports.

Being Harry

Harry Reid has said a lot of truly stupid things in his day, but this is toppers, what he said about Hillary Clinton's recent racial analysis of her prospects vs. Howdy Obama's, i.e., that she can be counted on for the scruffy but hard-working white vote while Obama can be assured of the snotty white vote and the lazy black vote.

Here's Harry:

“I am confident that she meant nothing."

Well done, Harry! I see why they made you Speaker, since you speak just so darn well.

Leaves Of The Other Guy's Grass

In the scheme of Global Things, this is perhaps the most troubling squib I've read lately:

This week, Saudi Arabia announced plans to invest in overseas fisheries, livestock and food production, and is reportedly trying to partner with Thai rice farms to lock in future supplies. Libya is in talks with Ukraine about growing wheat there, and as China tries to feed its expanding middle class, it's looking to buy up farmland in Africa and South America. Commodities analyst Richard Feltes, with MF Global, says for decades these countries relied on cheap and abundant world surpluses to meet their food needs. (source)

Let's follow the line on this one. No, not the line where everything turns out all right. What fun is that?

Instead let's follow the line where global food supplies run short and Chinese Army troops are needed to keep hungry locals away from the fields they bought with the interest they earned from US Treasuries. Then the People's Army escorts the crops past the really hungry people to the docks, where underfed stevedores stare at the Chinese with their Type 56 AK-47 knockoffs, thinking, "If I pocket a handful of this wheat, will they shoot me?"

Yeah, that line. Anyone selling their country's land to the Saudis or the Chinese should see that this is the endgame that's in play, the endgame that everyone's anticipating. Yet they sell.

One very, very strange and troubling world.

An American Vampire In La Paz

Have you ever stopped by the site People You'll See In Hell? (I don't intend to see any people in Hell myself, but it's still an interesting site to visit, full of briefs on some of the most heinous humans imaginable.)

If he's not already there, let's add Lestat Claudius de Orleans y Montevideo (aka Tristan Jay Amero of Placerville, CA) to the list over at PYSIH.

LA PAZ Bolivia (AP)-- A convicted hotel bomber from California who modeled himself on a fictional vampire has died after becoming ill in prison, officials said Tuesday.

Twenty-six-year-old Tristan Jay Amero was serving a 30-year sentence for bombing two low-rent hotels in the Bolivian capital of La Paz in 2006. Two Bolivians died in one of the attacks. ...

According to U.S. court documents, Amero received psychiatric treatment off and on since age 7, spent years at a juvenile detention center and often made threats of suicide and violence against authorities.

He was serving his sentence at the grim, maximum-security Chonchocoro prison on the wind-swept outskirts of La Paz. ...

Prison officials said Amero last year was caught hiding gasoline in his cell and admitted plotting to immolate prison officials, fellow inmates and even a U.S. diplomat sent to visit him.

In earlier travels through South America, Amero had described himself as a Saudi Arabian lawyer, a pagan high priest, a public notary and even a vampire. At one point, he was jailed for allegedly bombing an automatic cash machine in northern Argentina.

It would have been much cooler if Amero had let someone drive a wooden stake into his heart instead of just going off and dying of natural causes, and much cooler still if he had finally found peace and salvation in prison. C'est la morte.

Had he committed his crimes here instead of Bolivia, lawyers would have been lining the halls, fighting each other to represent him. His tragic life story is defense attorney fodder made of pure gold.

But for every Amero there are a thousand, ten thousand, kids who sorted it out, got it together no matter how dire their circumstances, and never became pseudo vampires on a killing spree. So off you go to the Great Beyond, Tristan, old boy. God have mercy.

Lefties Line Up For Spitzer

Even those at the peak of leftist commentary, like Glenn Greenwald, can sense that there's something wrong with the hypocrisy of (soon to be ex?) Gov. Eliot Spitzer:

That hypocrisy precludes me from having any real personal sympathy for Spitzer, and no reasonable person could defend him from charges of rank hypocrisy.

But that doesn't mean he shouldn't get a good, secularist, amoralist defense:

But how can his alleged behavior -- paying another adult roughly $1,000 per hour to travel from New York to Washington to meet him for sex -- possibly justify resignation, let alone criminal prosecution, conviction and imprisonment? Independent of the issue of his hypocrisy -- which is an issue meriting attention and political criticism but not criminal prosecution -- what possible business is it of anyone's, let alone the state's, what he or anyone else does in their private lives with other consenting adults?

Indeed, one of Greenwald's commenters, DCLaw1, takes it a step further, with nodding heads all around:

I have always found it very curious that one of the following, but not the other, is illegal:

(a) Two people have sex, one of them gets paid for it;

(b) Two (or more) people have sex, all of them get paid for it, and it is videotaped and sold to third parties as a commodity.

I have yet to hear a convincing argument why this difference makes any actual sense.

In that, DCLaw1 is absolutely right. They ought to throw the porn stars, directors, producers, gaffers, editors and best boys in the slammer, too. There was a day, before Free Speech got naked, when that would have been what people like then-DA Spitzer did to earn their keep.

Whoa. The heads just stopped nodding.

But the Left has much bigger fish to fry than simple morality in the Spitzer case. As Scott Horton writes in Harpers:

It looks like the Bush Justice Department just bagged themselves another Democratic Governor.

Horton has a figure, undocumented, that under Bush's Justice Department, 5.6 times more cases were opened against Dems than Republicans.

He would like us to think that these are all high profile political cases, but he offers us no data to prove it. In fact, he says, "Indeed, a study of the cases out of Alabama shows clearly that even cases opened against Republicans are in fact only part of a broader pattern of going after Democrats."

Let me hazard a guess here. More drug dealers and pimps are Dems than Republicans. Are we being told to elect Clinton or Obama so the purveyors of crack and whores, and crack whores for that matter, will face less prosecution?

And stop me if I'm reaching here, but in watching The Godfather, I never got the sense that anyone in the Corleone circle of influence was a big man in the GOP elite.

Of course, we know from ABC that it was suspicious fund transfers that got Spitzer in trouble, not hooking up with hookers, and we know that it was a bank that initially reported him to the feds, not Karl Rove.

Are we being told to vote for Obama or Hillary so suspicious fund transfers are to be ignored? Hmmm. Maybe.

That seems to be Firedoglake's POV, given the questions asked there:

1. Why would the bank tell the IRS and not Spitzer himself if there was a suspicious transfer?

I believe it's this troubling thing called the law.

2. What is the USA doing prosecuting a prostitution case?

Her point, of course, is that the local DA, not the feds, should be prosecuting it. Certainly that's a harken back to the Clinton admin, whose Justice Department was notoriously soft on sex crimes. But look at the facts: A person from New York was doing business on a large scale with a prostitution ring in DC. Federal jurisdiction, baby.

3. Mike Garcia is a Chertoff crony.

She's following this case a lot closer than I am, but please ... cronyism? Cronyism, thy name is politics. The Dems are all over cronyism during the Bush Admin. It must be because they were exhausted containing their outrage during eight years of Clinton cronyism. This rings of 9/11 Truther Whacko garbage.

4. How did Spitzer's name get leaked to the media, and who did it? Didn't happen to Dave Vitter.

The answer is Karl Rove, of course! Why ask? And if we're so concerned about such questions, Jane, who leaked the FISA surveillance story to the media?

5. Why did Mike Bloomberg suddenly start talking about running for governor recently?

Could it be because he decided not to run for president? Spitzer is 18 months into his term ... about time to fire up an opposition campaign, ya think?

6. The Mann Act? Are you kidding?

People who don't like prostitution being prosecuted don't like the Mann Act and are always harping about it being a political tool more than a prosecuting tool. But it was written to provide the tool for prosecuting interstate prostitution. I kid you not.

7. Spitzer's been in the line of fire of the GOP hit squad for a while.

Technically, that's not a question. But here's one for you, Jane: What high profile, ambitious Republican has not been in the Dems' line of fire for a while?

Eliot Spitzer's fall is a great personal tragedy and his family has the misfortune of it also being a great political spectacle. By turning his crime and fall into a rant against prostitution laws, Bush, old laws, the GOP, Chertoff and goodness knows what else, the Left is doing their man no favors.

But I'd rather watch their ranting than Spitzer himself, any day.

French WomenTrading Feminine Allure For Mere Sexuality?

A new study out of France confirms some of the recent postings here about the changing nature of rape (here and here), raising the question: If women are just as promiscuous and forward about sex as men, is it time to rethink our fundamental thoughts about how we define and prosecute rape?

(Obvious disclaimer for the thick-headed: This article is not about the violent, power-driven, violent rape -- the crime as we all have traditionally understood it. That remains unquestionably the place for fierce prosecution and long sentences. It is about "gray rape," when a woman who is sexually provocative not just by her dress, but by her words and actions, later charges her partner with rape.)

The study, as reported in The Telegraph, shows a dramatic transformation of the French female:

Women now have more than twice as many partners as they did in the 1970s, according to the study by the French Aids research agency, which is backed by the government.

"Are women just like men?" asked Le Nouvel Observateur yesterday, which released extracts of the Study on Sexuality in France, a 600-page tome that brings together 12,000 in-depth interviews with people of all ages conducted during 2005-06.

One of the biggest changes in recent years, according to the report, was that male and female sexual behaviour had become increasingly similar.

The proportion of French women who claim to have had only one partner has dropped from 68 per cent in 1970, to 43 per cent in 1992 and 34 per cent in 2006. A woman's average number of partners has risen from under two in 1970 to over five today, while a man's has remained the same for four decades, almost 13.

French women's first experience of sex is now almost as early as that of the opposite sex: in 1950 there was a two-year difference, but the gap has narrowed to four months, to around 17 and a half. Meanwhile, more women remain sexually active for longer than previously: nine-out-of-10 women over 50 are sexually active today, compared to just 50 per cent of that age group in 1970.

And here's the zinger:

"The good old dichotomy (male predators, females patiently awaiting the warrior's return in front of the cave entrance) is in big trouble", said Le Nouvel Observateur.

What we are seeing is the exchanging by women of feminism (not "feminist-ism!") for sexism or sexual parity. Feminism has taught women that they are the same as man, which means of course that women must be sexual in the same way as men are. Once that transformation occurs, especially if it's encouraged by alcohol and drugs, you get women as willing to be provocative as men are eager to be provoked, as evidenced by the increasing number of partners French women are bedding.

The old norm did not allow for breast-flashing, dry-humping on the dance floor, or the actually initiation of the sex act as normal feminine behavior; rather, it was seen as the actions of a woman who had made up her mind to go all the way.

The old norm had to do with the allure, the promise of something special and rare. If it were not so, why is does lingerie exist? The fact that in the old days, women slipped away to "slip into something more comfortable" shows that there were stages to seduction, and decisions made along the way. The lingerie was in dresser drawer, not the dance floor.

Feminism has done all it can to destroy the feminine. Left without their whiles, it's not surprising that some women decide part way through a sex act, or wake up the next morning, realizing that they've made a mistake. When that occurs, they would be more justified in charging Gloria Steinem with rape than the hapless man they led, or misled, into bed.

The man was just being normal, but Steinem and her sisters and acolytes were striving to turn normality on its head, attacking biology, physiology, morality and tradition. It's no surprise that the liquor companies, bar operators, fashion designers and frat houses have all been quick to seek their self-interests by aiding and abetting the transformation.

Lost in the process was innocence. Will society come to miss it one day? Will Pandora's box close once again?

More Questions On The Meaning Of Rape

In her recent excellent post, Rape, Bookworm gives us this quote from a Harvard female student who told this story of being raped -- or at least "raped" in today's warped sense of the word:

What can I tell you about being raped? Very little. I remember drinking with some girlfriends and then heading to a party in the house that some seniors were throwing. I’m told that I walked in and within 5 minutes was making out with one of the guys who lived there, who I’d talked to some in the dining hall but never really hung out with. I may have initiated it. I don’t remember arriving at the party; I dimly remember waking up at some point in the early morning in this guy’s room. I remember him walking me back to my room. I couldn’t have made it alone; I still had too much alcohol in my system to even stand up straight. I made myself vulnerable and even now it’s hard to think that someone here who I have talked and laughed with could be cold-hearted enough to take advantage of that vulnerability. I’d rather, sometimes, take half the blame than believe that a profound evil can exist in mankind. But it’s easy for me to say, that, of the two of us, I’m the only one who still has nightmares, found myself panicking and detaching during sex for many months afterwards, and spent more time looking into the abyss than any one person should.

The inequalities of the consequences of the night, the actions taken unintentionally or not, have changed the course of only one of our lives, irrevocably and profoundly.

She didn't even remember the party. She was making out with a guy she hardly knew. They slept together. Is it rape? Or as I said in my post on the same topic, The Rape of Rape on America's Campuses, was the guy guilty of no more than saying "OK" to her "Lesh do it?"

Before you answer, consider this email I got from a friend regarding the post:

Your past few blogs have been really excellent! I’ve OFTEN fumed about the feminist agenda when it comes to rape statistics. While at UCSB, the TAKE BACK THE NIGHT parade always had me miffed. They always quoted the 25% number. As the only “sober sister” at my sorority, I witnessed first hand the drinking, promiscuity and tears that followed over and over and over again.

When I asked why the girls would get so hammered knowing that they would probably make a choices that night that they would later regret, they all, without fail, said that they were “in college and just wanted to have fun without stressing about it.” Sleazy, cheap, drunken sex never sounded that great to me. It also doesn’t sound like RAPE. If the boys are just as drunk as the girls, how are they expected to be more accountable?

They shouldn't be. When a woman opens herself to a man and encourages him, the resulting act can be many things, but it can't be rape. But apparently some prosecutors don't get the difference. With a hat-tip to Bookworm, here's a case from England, told by The Daily Mail:

The sex trial nightmare of a Cambridge graduate ended yesterday leaving a huge question mark over the decision to charge him.

Jack Gillett was accused of assault by a fellow student after a drunken night of passion. He has spent nine months under a cloud of suspicion and facing the threat of up to ten years in jail.

But after a three-day trial this week, a jury took just two and a half hours to throw out the £50,000 case. Afterwards, Judge Gareth Hawkesworth questioned why it had ever been brought by the Crown Prosecution Service.

"It is a very sad thing that a case like this should come before the court involving two young people struggling to come to terms with the complexities of life and about to start on their careers," he said.

Indeed it is sad. Gillet, 23, was accused by a 22-year-old, whose charges included that she had begged Gillet many times to stop. Her anonymity is protected by the law despite the fact that the jury discounted her tale, and despite the fact that Gillet is anything but anonymous.

The girl's charges appear to be not unlike her Harvard sister's:

The jury had heard that Mr Gillett's accuser, the daughter of a well-known personality, had twice left the room on the night of the incident, but returned.

That effectively neuters her claim that she told him to stop early on, but he kept going. He counter-claims that he did stop, but she came back for more -- twice, apparently.

As for her cries for help:

Two students in a nearby room testified that they had not heard her calling for help, even though their door and Mr Gillett's were left ajar throughout the alleged ordeal.

This case has a fair amount of "she said/he said," but the circumstances obviously weighed in Gillett's favor -- especially testimony of one of the "victim's" friends:

A friend of the accuser said last night that she had not wanted Mr Gillett convicted, but just wanted to "give him a scare so he wouldn't do it again".

This is the even more unseemly flip side of the promiscuousness that permeates our society. It's all about morals: There's really not much difference between a girl having no compunction about going to a man's room and having sex with the door open, and a girl not being able to think proportionately about any other of her actions. Subjecting a person to a lengthy, public court process to "give him a scare?"

"My son's reputation has suffered, while she remains anonymous," [Gillett's mother] said. "If she could have been named maybe she would have held back."

Maybe if she had been taught logic, civics and morality, she would have held back as well.

The Rape Of Rape On American Campuses

Listen to this very short clip and be prepared to be attacked in a whole new way for your conservative beliefs:



And you probably weren't even aware that as a conservative, you were promoting the gray rape myth! I certainly wasn't. In fact, because of my Incredible Wife's Voice of the Victims work, I'm very concerned about the very real problem of drug-induced rape -- although I admit that "gray rape" is a phrase I would have defined incorrectly, if asked.

Heather Mac Donald, whose LA Times piece so triggered Tracy Clark-Flory's clip above, defines gray rape thusly:

In all these drunken couplings, there may be some deplorable instances of forced and truly non-consensual sex. But most campus "rape" cases exist in the gray area of seeming cooperation and tacit consent, which is why they are almost never prosecuted criminally.

Because of my wife's work, I've been introduced to women who have been drugged in bars, then raped, so this is a topic that interests me. That and Clark-Flory's accusation that conservatives are causing all this, caused me to immediately read Clark-Flory's story at Salon, Girls, Stop Rape through "Sexual Restraint"! and the story that set her off, Heather Mac Donald's LAT op/ed, What Campus Rape Crisis? Promiscuity and hype have created a phony epidemic at colleges.

Mac Donald's piece starts with a simple enough premise: The reported number of campus rapes is so high as to raise legitimate questions regarding the source and quality of the data:

It is a central claim of these [campus sexual assault] organizations that between a fifth and a quarter of all college women will be raped or will be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years. Harvard's Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response uses the 20% to 25% statistic. Websites at New York University, Syracuse University, Penn State and the University of Virginia, among many other places, use the figures as well. ...

If the one-in-four statistic is correct, campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. No felony, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20% or 25%, even over many years. The 2006 violent crime rate in Detroit, one of the most violent cities in the U.S., was 2,400 murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants -- a rate of 2.4%.

Such a crime wave -- in which millions of young women would graduate having suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience -- would require nothing less than a state of emergency. Admissions policies, which if the numbers are true are allowing in tens of thousands of vicious criminals, would require a complete revision, perhaps banning male students entirely. The nation's nearly 10 million female undergraduates would need to take the most stringent safety precautions.

It is a healthy reaction in a Free Press society to question statistics that seem unreasonable, so Mac Donald is absolutely legitimate in posing here question -- especially given that NationMaster tells us the rape rate per capita in the US is 0.3 incidents per thousand population. Even so, that Mac Donald even raised the question set Ms. Hyphenated off:

There is the stereotype of the feminist blogger foaming at the mouth while banging on a keyboard covered in spittle. Let me tell you, though, writing week after week about feminist issues inevitably causes you to become a bit jaded; things that once would have sent the spittle flying only inspire a curl of the lip, a roll of the eyes. But today, thanks to an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times about "the rape hype" on college campuses, my blood is boiling and I am fully embodying that stereotype.

Having vented, Clark-Flory does actually rebut Mac Donald, but she does it by quoting another study instead of addressing the perceptive demographic challenge raised by Mac Donald.

Let's dispense with the "science" behind this argument first. It all goes back to a 1980's study commissioned by Ms Magazine (red flags, anyone?), in which the author, Mary Koss, didn't use the word "rape" in her survey designed to identify the rate of rapes on campus.

That may seem odd, but she had her reasons. Her question didn't use "rape" because she thought sensitive females would not answer such a direct question honestly. Instead, she asked,

"Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?"

Not surprisingly, she got HUGE results -- the same 20 to 25 percent figure the colleges want us to believe. Mac Donald says, and I believe, that many women who answered "yes" simply had on "beer goggles" at a bar and put out, then regretted it. As Mac Donald put it:

College women -- as well as men -- reportedly drink heavily before and during parties. For the women, that drinking is often goal-oriented, suggests Karin Agness, a recent University of Virginia graduate and founder of NeW, a club for conservative university women: It frees the drinker from responsibility and "provides an excuse for engaging in behavior that she ordinarily wouldn't." Nights can include a meaningless sexual encounter with a guy whom the girl may not even know.

These women are not the victims of rape, even though they would answer "yes" to the survey question. Rape is a violent, ugly crime, not a Saturday night moment of ill-advised (or even self-directed) promiscuity.

The study with which Clark-Flory fights back attempted to fix this problem, not by asking about rape straight-up, but by rephrasing the question,

Have you engaged in sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to but were so intoxicated under the influence of alcohol or drugs that you could not stop it or object?

The results were identical to Koss', thereby "proving" a phenomenal amount of drug or alcohol-facilitated rapes on campus.

But here's the problem: Neither question addressed the man's intent, the woman's actions against the man, or any of the circumstances of the act. Rape is -- or has been up until now -- described legally by a particular set of circumstances that feminists are now trying to redefine. Just as anti-war factions are trying to redefine "torture" in order to create a cause where where wasn't one before, the feminists want to broaden the meaning of rape so more women become victims, thus increasing the relevance of their cause.

In one sense I agree with them: More attention has to be given to women who are victimized by drug-assisted rape, when a man slips GHB or a roofie slipped into their drink so they become immobilized, then hustles them out of the bar and carries out upon them an act that is, indeed, rape.

Drug-facilitated rape is very real crime that should not be minimized. Incredible Wife posted on her blog the story of Annette, the drug-facilitated rape victim you see here, that illustrates that the crime is, indeed, rape, with long-term damage that can be even worse that when the rape victim is sober.

Victims like Annette have trouble convincing police and prosecutors they've been raped. They have no memory of what happened and there's frequently no physical evidence because memories of what happened to them start to become real well after the crime. And, most damaging to the victims, law enforcement officials too readily dismiss these victims as bar sluts, not rape victims. That's particularly damaging to them because they were drugged, and were not drunk and promiscuous prior to being drugged.

To the extent that creating a false crisis out of campus and bar rapes will help the thousands of Annettes who are struggling to be heard, and who are psychologically damaged because society is calling them bar sluts instead of rape victims, more power to the false statistics.

But the studies cited by Clark-Flory do just the opposite. They group true date-rape victims with the girls who just got drunk and got laid. That minimizes the crime, and worse, it minimizes the perpetrator. One perp is a premeditating criminal who uses dangerous drugs just as effectively as other rapists use weapons and threats of violence; the other is some guy who just happened to be at a bar when a drunk girl said, "Lesh do it."

The other danger of the Clark-Flory approach is that it places justice in the hands of collegiate bureaucrats. As you can imagine, the colleges have set up protocols for dealing with the crisis created by foolishly broadening the definition of rape. Girls can ask committees of muddle-headed academics to rule on the fate of boys whose crime may have been no more than to say "Sure" to the girl's "Lesh do it."

Muddle-headed? You bet. This is from Mac Donald's piece:

"If one partner puts a condom on the other, does that signify that they are consenting to intercourse?" asks Alan D. Berkowitz, a campus rape consultant. Short of guiding the thus-sheathed instrumentality to port, it's hard to imagine a clearer signal of consent, although Berkowitz apparently finds it "inherently ambiguous."

Woe be to the American university.

Boiled down to its core, Clark-Flory puts her faith in academic research and Mac Donald puts hers in human intelligence and reason -- all of which makes Mac Donald a quaint anachronism in a world that is set at full speed towards confusion and victimization.

She is demonized because she has the gall to suggest that dressing with your boobs and butt-cheeks hanging out, dancing the bump and grind with whatever male approaches you while swilling booze straight from the bottle may have consequences.

No matter if she's fighting against the minimization of rape -- a position feminists should laud -- she has argued against freedom without consequences and victimization without a crime.

Lost in all this is education, which once was the reason for going to college. That we are even having this debate is evidence that another institution that was foundational to the creation of America's greatness is slipping into mediocrity.

"America's Sheriff" Resigns In Disgrace

Mike Carona, the OC Sheriff deified by the media over his handling of the kidnapping of Samantha Runyon early in his tenure, naming him "America's Sheriff," resigned in disgrace today after being charged with a bucket-load of corruption charges.

The resignation makes it possible for Carona, who we now know was always looking for a financial advantage, to accept pro bono legal services from a couple white collar crime defense crook-freers attorneys. The OC Reg quotes Carona:

“Although this is one of the most difficult decisions I have ever made, my family, my staff and my lawyers all believe that this is the right time to take my retirement. This action will permit me to focus on vindicating my name and refuting the false charges which have been made against me and my wife.”

He apparently is not interested in clearing the name of his mistress, Debra Hoffman, who was also charged.

The charges against Carona are pathetically simple: He accepted gifts (cash, a Cartier watch, tickets at sporting events) in return for favors (concealed weapons permits, badges, and access to Sheriff's Dept. resources).

So, here are the attys Carona now gets to hire (while he enjoys a taxpayer-funded retirement):

• Brian Sun, who victoriously defended Wen Ho Lee, who was charged with being a Chinese spy, who I think is nothing more than a skunk who skated.
  
  
• John Cline, who defended a couple guys a like a lot more: Oliver North and Scooter Libby.

The defense better get its act together. I don't want to see America's Sheriff become America's embarrassment.

"This Was An Honor Killing"

Sarah and Amina Said were buried yesterday -- matching pink caskets at a Baptist, then a Muslim, funeral -- while their father, who shot the two teens to death because he was upset about their dating, remained on he lam.

The Dallas Morning News write-up includes this:

Gail Gartrell, the sisters' great-aunt, said Saturday that Mr. Said had physically abused the two girls for years. Around Christmas, the girls' mother – Ms. Gartrell's niece – had fled because of Mr. Said's threats to kill the girls after he learned they had boyfriends, she said.

"She ran with them because she knew he would carry out the threat," Ms. Gartrell said. "This was an honor killing."

She said her niece returned after Mr. Said told her that he would move out so they could reconcile. Within a few days, she said, the girls were dead.

At the Muslim service, an Imam said that families being the most important thing in Islam and the need for parents to work to keep their families strong. How about it, Muslims? Is this going to be your creed, or is honor killing?

Sunday Scan

SoCal's Own Fruit And Nut

Adam Gadahn, born of OC, raised by hippie parents on a goat farm in the hills of Riverside County, gives us such pride. Not. He is, of course, al-Qaeda's American mouthpiece, and he's released another screed against the country that raised him:

"We felt it necessary to address the American people and explain to them some of the facts about these critical and fast-moving events. The first questions Americans might ask is has America really been defeated? The answer is yes and on all fronts."

If we're so defeated, I wonder why Gadahn feels compelled to say this:

Meanwhile, the occupied territories are awaiting their first visit by the Crusader Bush, and the mujahadeen are also waiting. [He switches here from English to Arabic, and leans into the camera.] At this point I issue an urgent call to our mujahadeen brothers in Muslim Palestine, and in the Arabian Peninsula in particular and all the region in general.

They should be in full readiness to receive the crusader arch-killer Bush in his visit to Muslim Palestine and to the occupied Arabian Peninsula at the beginning of January. They should receive him not with roses and applause, but with bombs and booby-traps.

He then proceeds to destroy his American passport. Good riddance, traitor.

The story of how a Jewish boy from SoCal could have become the hate-filled mouthpiece of al-Qaeda should be a lesson on the consequences of even gushy liberalism and its anti-establishment bent and ingrained distrust and hatred of America.

The only difference between Adam Gadahn and thousands of kids raised by very liberal parents is that Gadahn started attending a mosque, just as John Walker Lindh did.

For an in-depth three-part biography of Gadahn, his Jewish grandparents, hippie parents and Muslim conversion, here, here and here are links to my overviews, each of which includes links to the three parts of the article.

Czech Artists' Joke Bombs

They say you can't be an artist if you haven't suffered. Will three years in a Czech jail suffice?

Last June, anyone watching a certain Czech weather channel at the right moment saw a panning shot of the countryside near the Krkonose, or Giant Mountains, in Bohemia, when a yellow flash filled their screens and a skinny mushroom cloud lifted in the distance.

It was a hoax. A Czech artists' group had inserted the explosion digitally. A state prosecutor said on Thursday that six members of the group will now have to stand trial for the hack. They could face up to three years in jail. (Spiegel)

The artists wanted to make the point that it was easy to hack into broadcast computer systems -- a curious new form of art, eh?

Here are the two sides of the argument. First, the artists:

"We are neither a terrorist organization nor a political group," a statement by Ztohoven said. "Our aim is not to intimidate society or manipulate it, which is something we witness on a daily basis both in the real world and that created by the media. On June 17 2007, [we] attacked the space of TV broadcasting, distorting it, questioning its truthfulness and its credibility."

And the accuser:

No one was hurt, but a spokesman for Czech Television said, according to the UK's Guardian newspaper, "The fake broadcast was really very inadvisable and could have provoked panic among a wide group of people."

True, but I like Ztohoven's point about media manipulation more.

Saaskavili Vote Revisited

Here's what Speigel has to say about Mikhail Saaskavili's apparent victory in yesterday's presidential elections in Georgia:

President Mikhail Saakashvili wants to be re-elected in Georgia on Saturday -- after violent crackdowns on the opposition. This ally of the West is looking more and more like a dictator, with opponents arrested, beaten or sent into exile, and accusations of vote-rigging from critics inside Georgia and abroad.

Georgia, as I mentioned Friday, sits in one of the world's most strategic pieces of real estate. Both Saakashvili and his opposition support ties with the West and staying outside the sphere of Russia, but the government's crushing of opposition last summer has raised fears (including my own) that the U.S. may be getting back to the "Yeah, he's a dictator, but he's our dictator" school of diplomacy.

Last November, Daniel Fried, our Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs, said in Tbilisi:

[W]e are all here because Georgia is on the frontiers of freedom. Frontiers of freedom began in Poland in 1989 and those frontiers have advanced. This is where the link between freedom and security is being made; where democratic institutions are being built.

Freedom is not a luxury that one looks to achieve as an afterthought. The 21^st century faces many challenges-terrorism, the proliferation of unconventional weapons and energy dependence are three important ones. The response, however, to these problems will be found through the expansion of democracy, of free markets, the rule of law, and the willingness to defend them. These values in turn make the resolution of these problems easier.

Georgia has taken strides in all these areas already. Georgians must know that the world is aware of and appreciates their progress.

Georgia's strong progress should not mask the progress yet needed. Georgia's ultimate fate is still to be determined. Much depends on the decisions Georgians and their leaders take in years to come. I can outline an American perspective on the issues at stake. To start, let me quickly deal with a couple of questions where easy answers are in fact available.

A bit of a wrist-slap there -- and a slap State should re-visit in the wake of the election, as opposition demonstrations broke out in Georgia's capital declaring the election results to be fraudulent.

Georgia is doing OK, but just OK, and Saaskavili has become problematic. He's too valuable an ally to lose, but he needs to face continuing pressure to reinstitute support for Democratic reforms, even as he receives our support.

BBC reports the elections appear to have been fair, but the opposition says not. That tees up State's first challenge following the election.

"A Cosmic Clock Being Reset"

Thomas P.M. Barnett writes that the seventh year of the Bush administration forces a reassessment of the entire Bush presidency:

The White House's recent policy reversals amount to a stunning repudiation of the first seven years of George W. Bush's presidency. Where allies were previously disrespected, now they're viewed as essential. Where diplomacy was eschewed, now it's pursued with vigor. No longer running the government from his base, George W. Bush finally tries to lead the entire nation.

Bush's political opponents detect weakness and regret and a last-ditch attempt to salvage legacy, while supporters point to a self-professed dissident leader extending a freedom agenda in his final months. Both perspectives hold much truth.

But, as someone who's worked extensively throughout the national security community across this administration, both inside and outside government, I am struck by how the world seems to be returning to its pre-9/11 correlation of forces, like a cosmic clock being reset. It's almost as if the sum total effect of the second Bush term will be to repair the damage caused by the first.

Barnett, author of The Pentagon's New Map, supported John Kerry in 2004 because he felt that Kerry would be more able to readily refocus on the broader, global issues that require cooperation between nations. Now Bush has reached that view and all that has been lost in the last few years is "time and opportunity, our most precious assets."

I would argue that national security is our most precious asset, and support Bush for a unilateralism that many can't forgive him for. But I agree with Barnett that the War on Terror has progressed enough that we can begin focusing more on other global issues, and my own support for Bush has increased in the last year, as the war in Iraq has been fought more intelligently, and diplomacy has improved.

The $400 Million Bail

War profiteer and greed-meister David Brooks is out on bail -- but my oh my, what a bail!

• A $400 million bond, which Brooks secured with $48 million in pledged assets.
• Monitoring of all communications, including Internet, excluding attorney-client privileged communications.
• Brooks funding of private guards authorized to use force to if necessary to restrain Brooks

Those are terms that would make a Mafia godfather shake his head in awe.

Brooks is the founder of DHB Industries, which manufactures bulletproof vests for U.S. troops in Iraq and cops here at home. The charges against him aren't for war profiteering -- a common complaint against him since he sells high priced, often defective products to the military -- but because he allegedly defrauded shareholders by overstating profits.

The Blotter explains the strict terms:

In large part, the terms, dubbed "bulletproof," by one senior law enforcement official, are so severe because Brooks' wealth and alleged blatant flaunting of the law make him a far larger flight risk than these and many other defendants, two federal officials said.

Brooks gained a bit of notoriety when he dropped $10 mil on his daughters bat mitzvah and another $10 mil on a diamond. Sounds like a lovely man.

No Further Debate Update

We all know the global warming debate is over and that changes in ocean temperature are caused by nothing more than the nasty emissions of SUVs, power plants and factories, but I thought I'd pass this along nonetheless:

ScienceDaily (Jan. 5, 2008) — A Duke University-led analysis of available records shows that while the North Atlantic Ocean's surface waters warmed in the 50 years between 1950 and 2000, the change was not uniform. In fact, the subpolar regions cooled at the same time that subtropical and tropical waters warmed.

This striking pattern can be explained largely by the influence of a natural and cyclical wind circulation pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), wrote authors of a study published Jan. 3, in Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science.

Wind!? How are you going to build a user tax and fund a global bureaucracy on wind, for cryin' out loud?

Oh, My!

clipped from www.dailykos.com

Spitting On Returning Troops Update

Our troops have been treated pretty well, all in all. The American Left apparently has cut through their muddled cloudiness that is their brains on Liberalism and determined that spitting on returning troops is not always a good idea.

But in Britain (which, as you know -- unless, perhaps, you're one of the people interviewed in the clip above -- is a part of that advanced Liberal nirvana called Europe), the troops are not doing as well:

Scores of soldiers flying home from Afghanistan on Christmas leave were ordered to change out of their uniforms on a freezing runway before being allowed into a civilian airport terminal.

Troops were told not to be seen in public in their uniforms - which they had worn with pride while risking their lives during months of intense fighting against the Taliban.

Last night the Ministry of Defence and bosses at Birmingham International Airport blamed each other for the indignity suffered by the soldiers - which comes amid mounting anger over the treatment of British troops returning from war.

One soldier, who was ordered to undress for "security reasons", said: "It is an insult to the entire Army to force guys who've been fighting in Afghanistan to obey some jobsworth rule when all they want to do is get home to their families.

"So much for a nation proud of its servicemen. The temperature was Baltic on the runway but most of just wanted to get home so we cracked on."

The December 23 flight, carrying 200 personnel, had been diverted from RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire to Birmingham because of bad weather.

The troops were told they could either wait for coaches to take them back to Brize Norton or else travel home via public transport - in which case they must change into civilian clothes before entering the terminal. (Daily Mail)

The Brit's Department of Defensed shuched and jived to come up with an excuse that I won't bother to even pass on, but I liked this quote from Conservative MP Patrick Mercer, a former infantry commander:

"This is just the sort of thing that gets seriously up the noses of fighting troops."

Indeed it does. (hat-tip: What Bubba Knows)

Secular Progressive Insanity

Here's a bit of classic secular progressive-think for you:

1. People who rape and murder little girls to get their sexual jollies need help, not jail, so let's keep their prison sentences to a minimum. Say three years or so.
   
   
2. People who are (1) foolish enough to have children and (2) savage enough to spank them are the worst of criminals. Let's charge those parents with abuse and neglect. (Neglect? For being aware that there's a disciplinary problem that needs dealing with?)

That's the state of the law -- and the mindset of the state -- in Massachusetts today under its current and proposed laws.

Read more at The Provocateur, who adds:

I am not necessarily a huge fan of spanking, however it is not only ironic but downright shameful that a state moves quicker to stop parents from deciding for themselves what punishment their kids should have than they do from protecting children from actual child predators.

Such is the absurd and perverse world view of the secular progressives. In their world, all criminals need treatment not punishment. At the same time, parenting decisions are taken away from the parents and controlled rather by the states. In some sense, child predators have more rights than parents.

"Everyone Has His Flaws." Terrorism Was This Guy's

A third would-be terrorist plead guilty today in federal court in Santa Ana, admitting that he had robbed gas stations in order to fund jihad attacks he planned to carry out on military sites, synagogues and Jewish centers in Southern California.

The terror ring, created in prison via Saudi-funded programs, was on the verge of action when it was busted by a joint federal/local task force.

The jihadist who plead guilty today is Gregory Patterson, a 23-year-old college student. Patterson's attorney executed a spin session that would have dazzled a Sufi, as described in the OC Register:

[Patterson's] attorney, William McKesson, said his client was an easily impressionable youth who become involved with the terrorist group after he was "manipulated" and "abused" by [Levar Haley] Washington [who plead guilty last week].

Patterson – who lives in the South Bay, and took classes at El Camino College in Torrance and California State University, Northridge – was raised Christian but was studying Islam when he met Washington, who was a guest speaker at an Islamic center attended by Patterson, McKesson said.

"He led a typical middle-class lifestyle, he never was in trouble with the law,'' the attorney said. "But everyone has flaws, and his (flaw) was that he was a follower."

Yeah, that's all that's wrong with him; he's just a follower.

What sort of person becomes interested in Islam after 9/11, the Mohammed cartoons and teddy bears, the Daniel Pearl beheading, Ahmadinejad's declarations on the Holocaust and Israel, and the continuous news of Islam's misogyny?

Oh, just a typical, middle-class Christian kid, right?

Gregory Patterson has a flaw all right. He is violently disturbed. He hates Jews, women and his country. He loves repression, violence and the killing of innocents.

He is a soldier of jihad, no different from any of the other crazies, really, who are nothing more than followers ... of Mohammed.

What Would Satan Do?

I don't think Satanists wear What Would Satan Do bracelets, because Satan wouldn't like the behavior of Peter Gilmore, a Church of Satan high priest, too much:

CORTLAND, Ohio (AP) - A teenager was arrested after a leader of the Church of Satan turned over to the FBI an e-mail the high school student had written to the sect in which he threatened to kill his grandparents, authorities said.

Andrew Culver, 18, told police the e-mail detailing his intention to kill his grandparents and steal their money and car was a joke, said Bazetta Township Police Chief Charles Sayers.

According to police, Culver wrote he had access to an arsenal of weapons and wanted to "kill in the name of our unholy lord Satan."

Culver sent the message Wednesday to Peter Gilmore, the high priest of the New York City-based Church of Satan, Sayers said. Gilmore alerted the FBI, which notified local police. Culver was taken out of class Thursday and questioned by police, Sayers said.

"To send an e-mail making specific threats, to sign your name, that to me is not a joke," Sayers said.

Gilmore said his church discards most of the hundreds of e-mails it receives daily. But Culver's message stood out, he said.

"I thought it could be a joke, but with recent events in Colorado and Nebraska, I thought it was better to play it safe," he said, referring to mass shootings in an Omaha mall, a missionary school near Denver and a Colorado Springs church that killed a total of 13 people, including the gunmen.

Gilmore's behavior was quite moral, wouldn't you say? Where does that morality come from if the Church of Satan professes this belief of man's morality:

Man’s true nature—that of a carnal beast, living in a cosmos which is permeated and motivated by the Dark Force which we call Satan.

Satan would not be at all happy with Gilmore. He would have let the email pass, let the grandparents be murdered, and get the boy's eternal soul (assuming no jail house conversion, of course), don't you think?

What's this world coming to? A moral Church of Satan while priests molest children and Episcopalians embrace homosexualitiy!

"The clock was ticking. All they needed to do was to start killing"

Even the LA Times, whose editorial line espouses jihad-denial, reports straight-up how close to deadly action the most recently busted U.S. terror operation was:

It was not the most spectacular domestic terrorism plot since the Sept. 11 attacks, and certainly not the best-known.

But no other case posed such a real and immediate threat as the audacious scheme to attack more than a dozen military centers, synagogues and other sites in Southern California, experts said Thursday.

"If you look at the roster of defendants in terrorism cases, it often seems like a casting call. They all have aspirations, but most lack real talent and helpful connections," said Brian Levin, an attorney and director of Cal State San Bernardino's Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.

"But here you actually had a case where defendants had a radicalized ideology, a list of targets and they had already gone from planning to operations," Levin said. "This was beyond merely a threat. In this instance, they were operational."

As the FBI's John Miller put it:

The clock was ticking. All they needed to do was to start killing.

Because the wannabe jihadists were so close to carrying out their plots, investigators had to act with uncharacteristic speed:

In a matter of weeks, the FBI, Los Angeles and Torrance police departments and two dozen other agencies conducted 19 searches, seized two dozen computer hard drives and examined about 53,000 documents, all without the normal luxury of moving at their own pace with undercover informants, surveillance and wiretaps.

Besides stopping the JIS' planned attacks, the case has resulted in new protocols between prison officials and anti-terror investigators, designed to track Islamic prison activities more closely.

Soon to follow: The CAIR/ACLU lawsuit against the new protocols.

American Jihadists Plead Guilty

A couple home-grown jihadists -- recruited for the Holy War against the Great Satan through Saudi-funded prison programs -- have pleaded guilty today here in OC to charges of conspiring to wage war against the United States, including plotting attacks on military sites, synagogues and other targets in Southern California.

The OC Register reports:

Kevin James, 31, and Levar Haley Washington, 28, members of a radical Islamic organization known as Jamiyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh, or JIS, appeared before U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney in Santa Ana at separate times today and entered guilty pleas.

James, who is said to have founded the organization while in state prison in 1997, faces up to 20 years in prison. Washington, who also pleaded guilty to using a firearm during the plot, faces a sentence of up to 20 years on the conspiracy charges and five years to life in prison for the firearm charges, according to his plea agreement.

Also charged in the case are Gregory Vernon Patterson and Hammad Riaz Samana. The latter is a Pakistani national, but the other three are American-born Muslim converts.

James founded the JIS, which counsels its member to learn Arabic, train in various weapons, visit parole officers on schedule and not to stand out because "we've got work to do."

The Patriot Act was not needed to bring in this bunch. They decided to fund their jihad by robbing gas stations. The investigations into those crimes led the police to these men who were willing to kill their own people for no "crime" other than failing to convert to Islam.

Poster: 21st Century Paladin

Carona's Muslim Girlfriend?

Is it true indicted OC sheriff Mike Carona's indicted mistress is a Muslim? Rumors flew after the OC Register posted this photo, but C-SM's inside sources say she was only "playing Muslim" in a shame-faced (hidden-faced?) play for media sympathy. Those poor, undeserviedly mistrusted Muslims, don't you know?

Meanwhile, C-SM has also found that Carona may have periodically confused his mistress (left) with his wife (right), another rumor generated by a Register photo.

We understand that after a few embarrassing blunders, Carona learned that the trick to dodging flying frying pans was to not look either woman in the eye, if you get my silicon-padded drift.

Meanwhile, in the serious world of crime and corruption, the scum factor just keeps growing:

The sudden death of Orange County Sheriff's Deputy Brad Warner after knee surgery in May 2001 was a gut punch to his colleagues.

Another punch came Thursday when deputies learned that top sheriff's officials are alleged to have made money off the $340,000 settlement given to Warner's widow in a medical malpractice suit against St. Joseph's Hospital.

Court records and a federal indictment against Sheriff Michael S. Carona allege that the sheriff and his top aides steered Warner's widow, Rosita, to attorney Joseph Cavallo. In exchange, according to the allegations, Cavallo paid a percentage of the October 2002 settlement to assistant sheriffs George Jaramillo and Don Haidl. ...

Carona was known for his caring touch at the funerals of fallen deputies. He could be stoic and tearful. The same jaw that jutted into the air at his court appearance would tremble ever so slightly at the funerals. He was strong yet caring. He even went so far as to buy gifts for the children of fallen officers.

At least that was his public persona. But the indictment paints a different picture of a man who with his friends allegedly schemed to profit off widows. (OCR)

Just another day on the dark side of politics ...

Arson Or "Playing With Fire?"

LA Times photo: Lawrence K. Ho

Our local fire still burns and the person who set it isn't caught. Fifty miles or so to the north, the Buckwheat fire in Agua Dulce fire is out, 21 homes are burned, and the person who set it has confessed. And that's just the start of the problem.

Prosecutors grappled on Wednesday with what charges, if any, to file against the 10-year-old boy who admitted he set a fire last week that charred more than 38,000 acres and destroyed 21 homes in northern Los Angeles County.

On the ranch northeast of Santa Clarita where the boy's parents helped care for horses, people who knew him said he had no history of problems and was distraught about the destruction.

"He's a child, and I certainly believe that he had no malice and I absolutely believe it was accidental," said Denise Tomey, executive director of Carousel Ranch, which offers equestrian therapy for physically and mentally disabled children.

The boy had no connection to the program but had lived in a trailer on the property in the Agua Dulce area for about a year with his parents, one of whom is a ranch caretaker.

Tomey called the boy's family "peaceful." (LA Times)

The boy admits to "playing with matches" while the winds howled around him. I remember playing with matches -- heck, even playing with blowtorches we created with my mom's hairspray and a lighter -- and as I recall, not one of my friends ever dropped out of this foolishness, saying, "Momma said ...." So I'm sympathetic, to a point.

It's the howling winds that get me. You have got to really want to start a fire to try it when the winds are gusting to 80 or 100 miles an hour, so I wonder at this boy's innocence.

Juvenile Hall is too much for a 10 year old, and would probably set arson into his genes. I'd rather see a process that intimidates: Statements, standing before a judge, fearing deeply ... then receiving mercy.

And then ten years or so of Reaganesque "trust but verify."

According to the LAT, the local record is mixed on youngsters who start fires:

Earlier this year, Los Angeles County prosecutors refused to file charges against two teenagers who touched off a blaze that charred 160 acres in the Hollywood Hills. The boys, who were visiting Los Angeles from Linden, Ill., were playing with a lighter in the back of the Oakwood apartments when they accidentally set twigs on fire. The flames spread up the hillside through deep vegetation. The boys, who turned themselves in to authorities, were not prosecuted.

But in Orange County, a 12-year-old girl was arrested Oct. 22 for allegedly setting a seven-acre fire in Anaheim. She remains in the custody of the Orange County Probation Department.

So the prosecutors will grapple, trying to look into the head of a 10 year old -- and we all know, for all their innocence, that 10 year olds are accomplished liars.

The other problem to grapple with is the civil liability that's now on this kid's parents' shoulders. By law, the couple, who live in a trailer on the ranch and serve as its caretakers, are liable for all the expenses of fighting the fire and replacing the losses of those whose homes burned.

This law's harsh application -- the kid did it; you're liable -- has always unsettled me. What if the parents knew something was twisted in the kid and had already spent thousands of dollars seeking treatment? Shouldn't that differentiate them from parents who just blew off their kid?

And what if the kid was innocent of malice? Why then are the parents guilty of a higher crime?

So here's a family that because of one moment's indiscretion by someone to young to have discretion has their lives hanging in the balance. Will normalcy ever return, or are they at the trailhead of a long, hellish trail?

"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