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

The Left Lies About Bush Lying

Yesterday I was chatting by phone with my inside-the-beltway mother when she said she used to think John McCain was OK until he started clarifying his positions, and now she thinks he's just another awful Republican.

The clarified position she offered up as an example: A willingness to be at war in Iraq for 100 years.

"Come on, Mom," I said, "you know that's not what he said."

"Well, he had to clarify it later."

"No, when the media and the Democrats started asking ridiculous questions, he had to explain it to them. He's a military man, Mom, and he knows there has been a 100-year war since the 1400s."

That turned the subject to the viciousness of the questioning in this year's race, and we had the sort of good chat friends have when they agree on something -- but it's troubling that someone as intelligent and experienced with the media as my mother would toss the "100-year war" canard about so easily.

Which brings me, lackadaisically, to "Bush Lied."

In today's WaPo, Fred Hiatt runs through last week's Rockefeller report on the administration's actions prior to the war, which concluded:

"In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent."

This from Rockefeller, who said in 2002:

"There has been some debate over how 'imminent' a threat Iraq poses. I do believe Iraq poses an imminent threat. I also believe after September 11, that question is increasingly outdated. . . . To insist on further evidence could put some of our fellow Americans at risk. Can we afford to take that chance? I do not think we can."

Hiatt's report on the report is simple. He runs through all the potential "lies" -- WMDs, associations with terrorists, nuclear weapons programs, etc. -- and after each, quotes actual words from the actual report, "Generally substantiated by intelligence information."

That's straightforward enough, but the Left does not want to give up that easily on "Bush Lied." Two loudmouths of the Left, Firedoglake and Rising Hegemon, both rise to defend the Bush Lied lie.

First, of course, they have to personally attack Hiatt. The Left always starts by shooting the messenger.

Firedoglake calls him " the Washington Post's Chief War Apologist," and accuses him of using Bush to "excuse his own record of enabling." Rising Hegemon provides this: "It must be copious in that Hiatt-scented colon that Fred puts his head up."

As if reading from the same playbook, both turn to a Walter Pincus article in today's WaPo to rebut Hiatt, and both refer to it, curiously, as "The Walter Pincus page." Who's talking points did they get? Anyway, here's the money quote:

There is an important line in last week's Senate intelligence committee report on the Bush administration's prewar exaggerations of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. It says that the panel did not review "less formal communications between intelligence agencies and other parts of the Executive Branch."

More important, there was no effort to obtain White House records or interview President Bush, Vice President Cheney or other administration officials whose speeches were analyzed because, the report says, such steps were considered beyond the scope of the report.

One obvious target for such an expanded inquiry would have been the records of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a group set up in August 2002 by then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr.

What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a classic leftist denial strategy. Faced with actual documents and chronicled facts that rebut their position, rather than accept the documents, they ask about what wasn't asked -- and since we don't know what the answers are to what wasn't asked, they write the fictional answers and (to their own minds at least) win the argument.

They assume there's a smoking gun in what wasn't asked and who wasn't interviewed, even though logic tells us that since every other line of inquiry got to the same "Bush didn't lie" point, that if the un-asked were asked, we'd reach the same conclusion: "Generally substantiated by intelligence information." After all, everything else was.

And as is so often the case with Leftist denial, the practice obfuscates the important to illuminate the irrelevant. We should be asking ourselves, "Why were all these matters generally substantiated by intelligence information," instead of ignoring that in order to prop up the threatened "Bush lied" bumper sticker and T-shirt industry.

Hat-tip: memeorandum

Slouching Towards Statism

I've been thinking a lot lately about our globe's two basic forms of governance -- Statist nations that see the people as a means to government's ends and Individualist nations in which government represents and protects the will of the people.

I can find no better illustration of the Statist form than this clip of a Chinese small truck undergoing a 40 mpg front-end crash test. It's just 33 seconds long, so do click it (and excuse the oddly constructed note at the end).


This is undeniable evidence of what happens when production is put into the hands of a Statist government. China's government certainly had access to car safety technology -- it's stolen all sorts of other technology, after all -- but it willfully decided to keep the cost down in order to advance the state's goal of moving goods cheaply in order to expand the economy. (Notice how the goods being carried probably suffered little ill effect -- something that can't be said of the human occupants?)

In America a few years ago, Ford Explorers began to roll over because Ford was recommending too low a tire pressure in order to offset the top-heavy nature of the Explorer's design. Compared to the Chinese truck, this was a less willful act -- executives didn't foresee deaths, but almost 300 died and 700 were injured. (That stat has to be compared to the 12,000 SUV rollover deaths and injuries in other SUVs before any blame can be ascribed specifically to Ford's Explorer team.)

As a result of this, Ford was targeted for lawsuits and the Explorer fell from its perch as the #1 selling SUV to near oblivion.

No stats are available for deaths in the Chinese truck, but obviously if it had been as popular in the US as the Explorer was, and was operated at US highway speeds, its death count would have been spectacularly morbid. But what choice do the citizens of Statist China have? The nation manufactures all their automotive options (and the others are just as bad; see clips here, here, here, here.) And Chinese citizens certainly can't sue their government.

China's Statist mindset was also evident in the recent earthquake, where the collapse of schools and possible collapse of dams is more evidence that the state was more interested in taking care of its business than it was in taking care of its people.

Contrast that to Individualist America. When earthquakes hit or tornadoes threaten, where are we told to evacuate to? Schools. To us, protecting the next generation is our tantamount goal. To China, it is merely to educate them. (We could use a bit more emphasis on education, however ...)

Last week, we helped one of our water district clients win regulatory approval of a 266-million-gallon earth dam reservoir just up-valley from a high school. There wasn't a peep of protest, despite an extensive outreach campaign to inform the public. Why? Because people here have cause to trust our dam construction techniques and our government's watchful control. Why? Because they don't have any experience with dam collapses, since collapses are so rare.

Do you think the Chinese government would have carried out an outreach campaign? Would they give the Chinese people a voice in the decision-making, or would they just slap a shoddy dam wherever they wanted? The weak, threatening dams throughout the earthquake zone give us our answer.

One last example. When the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant failed, thanks to our Individualist state's reams of regulations designed to protect the public no matter the expense, no one was injured. Some radioactive gas was released; it dissipated; that was it.

In Statist Russia, where nuclear power plant technology was developed to speed production of power to feed Soviet industry, not to protect the Soviet citizens, when a failure hit the Chernobyl plant, there weren't the same safeguards:

All the Chernobyl reactors were of a design that the Russians call the RBMK--natural uranium-fueled, water-cooled, graphite-moderated--a design that American physicist and Nobel laureate Hans Bethe has called "fundamentally faulty, having a built-in instability." Because of the instability, an RBMK reactor that loses its coolant can under certain circumstances increase in reactivity and run progressively faster and hotter rather than shut itself down. Nor were the Chernobyl reactors protected by containment structures like those required for U.S. reactors, though they were shielded with heavy concrete covers. ...

No commercial reactor in the United States is designed anything like the RBMK reactor. Cohen summarizes several of the differences:

1. A reactor which is unstable against a loss of water could not be licensed in the United States.

2. A reactor which is unstable against a temperature increase could not be licensed here.

3. A large power reactor without a containment [structure] could not be licensed here. (source)

Such is the nature of radiation that we will never really know how many people were killed by the Soviet Statists. In 2006, the World Health Organization estimated up to 9,000 people died or will die of cancer because of the incident. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, an agency governed by the WHO and 16 member nations, published an estimate of 6,700 to 38,000 in a peer-reviewed journal. Greenpeace came up with 93,000 to 200,000, an overestimation typical of environmental hysteria cultists. (source)

But what of America's nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere over Nevada and Utah -- were we behaving as a Statist nation? There were obvious strains of Statism in the decision to test bombs there, driven by heightened Statism that occurs during times of external threats to the nation. But there were also two arguments countering Statism in the testing: First, the nation picked the most remote, unpopulated part of the nation for the test, which reflects concern for the individual, and second, we didn't really know what we were messing with -- unlike the Soviets who made a willful decision in the design of Chernobyl.

I could go on: Katrina vs. Myanmar, hot weather deaths in Paris vs. St. Louis, or the poor Chinese school kids who died when the fireworks they were required by the state to manufacture during school exploded. But the case has been made. Putting the government first is bad for the health, welfare and happiness of the people.

And yet, there are factions in the US -- let's call them Democrats -- who want to give more power to the state. They want the state in control of education, health care, what we eat (fat bans in Dem stronghold of NYC), what we hear (the renewed Fairness Doctrine debate), how marriage is to be defined.

Despite myriad examples of what happens when power is taken away from the people, they press on towards greater and greater collectivism. And they're winning. The zenith of conservatism -- the Individualist state -- in the modern era was reached in either the 50s or the 80s depending on your perspective. Since then, America has been sliding over our protests towards collectivist Statism.

There will be no improvement in the short term since all three remaining presidential candidates (Is Hillary still remaining? I haven't checked in the last hour.) are all more Statist than Individualist, and Congress should be firmly in the control of the Statists for at least one more election cycle. I'm a believer in pendulum swings, and I trust America will come up with another Reagan at some point ... but the question is, how much irreversible damage will be done before that occurs?

Why Myanmar Seized The Aid Shipments

Unbelievably, an election is going on today in Myanmar, cyclone or no cyclone, 100,000 dead or no 100,000 dead, to endorse a new constitution that will give the Hounds of Hell, aka the junta, even more power, control and wealth.

So we know why the junta seized much-needed aid shipments on the eve of the election:

Myanmar's military regime distributed international aid Saturday but plastered the boxes with the names of top generals in an apparent effort to turn the relief effort for last week's devastating cyclone into a propaganda exercise. (AP)

Message to America's whacked out Left, including Obama's pastor: When the water bottles arrived in New Orleans, they did not have George Bush's face plastered on them.

Myanmar Junta: Eviler And Eviler

The Left, which stumbles over the simple concept of good and evil, as exemplified in their thoughts about George Bush, will have some trouble processing this:

The U.N. World food Program has suspended aid shipments to Myanmar after the country's military government seized all the food and equipment that had been flown into the country for cyclone victims.

WFP spokesman Paul Risley said Friday that all "the food aid and equipment that we managed to get in has been confiscated." The shipment included 38 tons of high-energy biscuits. He said the WFP "has no choice" but to suspend further aid shipments until the matter is resolved.

Mr. Risley said it isn't clear why the material was seized. It also wasn't clear if the shipment seized was the one that was flown in Thursday or another one.

Earlier, the U.N. blasted Myanmar's military government, saying its refusal to let in foreign aid workers to help victims of a devastating cyclone was "unprecedented" in the history of humanitarian work, as the organization said it is putting together an urgent funding appeal to help victims. (WSJ)

The Left has convinced itself that evil (although it doesn't use the word, preferring "racism") was at work in Bush's response to Katrina. But that was just multi-tiered government incompetence. The Myanmar junta -- now that is evil personified. Will the Left get it?

One diarist at Kos, a guy who fled Myanmar 14 years ago, did have something interesting to say (although I don't know why someone who fled to freedom would be hanging out at Kos):

As a Burmese being in the States for 14 years, I believe I have a better understanding of what is happening. As is the case of 2005 tsunami, the military government is extremely weary of outsiders, regardless of the purpose of the visit. It (the ruthless regime machine) is also afraid of any single reporter that would return home and plaster a couple of pictures on the front page of Newsweek or Time magazine.

In short, if you are thinking about donating, the traditional way of giving might be slow and less effective. The last time I check the news, the UN aid is still blocked or being hindered and so is the case for a lot of other "western" countries and agencies. The reason is the junta is going to try to wrestle control of all the aid materials saying it will hand everything out: in the news about it already. But, what will happen after everybody leaves is that all the generals and military personnels will grab a significant portion of the aid and the victims will end up with a tiny percentage of the aid, if at all. If you have seen the initial food distribution scene of Black Hawk Down, it's kind of like that.

He goes on to promote his wife's charity, if you're interested. World Vision is probably be a better bet.

Commies, Greenies: Listen Up!

Here's the Yeahhhh Baby! follow-up to Monday's story about Silvio Berlusconi's big win in the Italian elections, courtesy of The Corner:

The big news is that the Communists are gone, for the first time since the end of the Second World War. Really gone. They didn't win a single seat in either chamber. A lot of famous faces will vanish from Parliament, and it is even possible, although unlikely, that some of the comrades will be forced to join the working class.

But wait, there's more:

The Greens are also gone.

Italy has been a political basket case for so long it's hard to get one's mind about the concept of an Italian legislature with only six political parties, with the most destabilizing and dangerous of them being shown the door.

What's going on?

All human group behavior is dynamic, a pendulum. While an individual may well be stupid forever, societies cannot be for the reason that the group has memory and intelligence.

The more erratic the group, the shorter the arc of its pendulum swing. The modern Italian Commies lasted about 60 years, the Greens just a couple decades. Both predicted things that didn't come true; both had chances to make effective policy but couldn't, and now they're gone. I'd say "for good," but I'm writing about pendulums here.

There's hope pouring over the transom from Italy tonight. Much of what was making Italy nearly unlivable is gone from Italian politics, and I think that all that is destroying America has already reached the farthest point of its swing, and is now sliding into its own oblivion.

hat-tip: Urgent Agenda

Sunday Scan

Chinese Faking Protests?

What, you might ask, are Chinese soldiers doing holding fake Tibetan Buddhist monk robes?

Could they be preparing to stage violent protests by "monks" in order to justify more violent attacks in response by the Chinese military?

That's an easy conclusion to reach if you read Big Lizard's Forget It, It's Chinatown post, which uses Japanese-language blog postings from anti-Communist Chinese nationals living in Japan to hint at what really might be going on with Chinese military action in Tibet ... and, incredibly, anti-Chinese Olympic torch demonstrations.

Japanese-language blog postings from anti-Communist Chinese nationals living in Japan? Isn't the blogosphere amazing?

Clinton Schizophrenia

In public, the public Clinton makes her case that President Bush should boycott the Olympics grand opening in protest to Chinese suppression of pro-religious freedom demonstrations in Tibet.

In private, the somewhat less public Clinton stuffs cash into the couples' bank accounts, cash "earned" from his position as an advisor to China's main internet provider, Alibaba, which is helping the Chinese government totalitarians track down and prosecute Tibetan protesters.

Reports the LA Times in a front-page expose today:

Alibaba, which took over Yahoo's China operation in 2005 as part of a billion-dollar deal with the U.S.-based search engine, arranged for the former president to speak to a conference of Internet executives in Hangzhou in September 2005. Instead of taking his standard speaking fees, which have ranged from $100,000 to $400,000, Clinton accepted an unspecified private donation from Alibaba to his international charity, the William J. Clinton Foundation.

This is the same charity the Clinton's do not list on Hillary's Senate financial disclosure forms, despite the fact that it has raised some $500 million, with much of it coming from the Saudi royal family and the sheiks of the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar. The Capital Research Center says of the foundation:

Bill Clinton is masterminding his charitable foundation’s fundraising campaign at the same time that he advises his wife’s presidential campaign. Might that create some conflicts of interest? At the very least, linking nonprofit fundraising to political proximity is sure to generate lots of philanthropic clout—but to what end? Bill Clinton promises to disclose the names of donors to the William J. Clinton Foundation when his wife becomes president. How reassuring.

The wrap-up of the LAT story was pretty amazing:

Human rights activists said clear evidence of Alibaba's collaboration with China's state security apparatus surfaced last month with the appearance of a "most wanted" posting for Tibetan rioters on the firm's Yahoo China homepage.

The postings, which appeared March 15 on both Yahoo China and Microsoft's MSN China homepage, carried photos of suspected rioters and a phone number for informants to call. The postings vanished later the same day after news accounts highlighted them.

Yahoo officials said they had no advance warning from Alibaba that the postings would run. "We made our concerns known that the displays were inappropriate," one Yahoo official said, but were told by Alibaba officials "that it was a standard news feed."

The Clinton foundation spokeswoman would not address Alibaba's role in aiding the crackdown in Tibet. Instead, she emphasized the former president's efforts to push AIDS relief in China. "He has both pushed and helped the government of China to acknowledge and tackle the growing HIV-AIDs crisis facing their country," she said.

I'm struggling here to figure out why funding AIDs relief answers questions about Clinton failing to support human rights in China because he's taken money from the Commie oppressors. And I'm failing to see how Hillary Clinton can be president without Bill Clinton influencing her every move.

And I'm sure the Obama camp is happy it has the LAT working so hard for him.

Politics, Italian Style

That's the derrier of Italian porn star whore Millie D'Abbraccio, and it's gracing not a movie poster, but her campaign poster for a seat on Rome's City Council.

She's running as a Socialist. Surprise!

And here's her the big idea of her campaign:

If elected, D'Abbraccio wants to create a red light area with strip clubs, erotic discos and sex shops called "Love City" just kilometers away from the Vatican.

"It would be something cute, clean -- nothing to do with prostitution," said the actress whose films include "The Kiss of the Cobra" and "Paolina Borghese, Imperial Nymphomaniac." (source)

Cute and clean. Uh-huh. As screwed up as DC is, and as far out as our leftists are, things here are better, far better, than they are in Europe.

Which is why leftists love Europe so much.

BBC Warming Wilt Chronicled

In last week's Sunday Scan, I ran a piece documenting how BBC had edited a news item on lower global temperatures to basically take out any reference to lower global temperatures.

Now The [UK] Register has run the series of emails between Warmie fundamentalist Jo Abbess and Beeb editor Roger Harrabin that resulted in BBC cowering in fear of being branded a "global warming skeptic."

The exchange started hot and got hotter, with Abbess finally threatening Harabin:

"It would be better if you did not quote the sceptics. Their voice is heard everywhere, on every channel. They are deliberately obstructing the emergence of the truth. I would ask : please reserve the main BBC Online channel for emerging truth." [Our emphasis]

Abbess was worried about the consequences of Harrabin's report. People might think The Wrong Thoughts. She spelled it out:

"A lot of people will read the first few paragraphs of what you say, and not read the rest, and (a) Dismiss your writing as it seems you have been manipulated by the sceptics or (b) Jump on it with glee and email their mates and say "See! Global Warming has stopped !"

And she signed off with a threat:

"I am about to send your comments to others for their contribution, unless you request I do not. They are likely to want to post your comments on forums/fora, so please indicate if you do not want this to happen. You may appear in an unfavourable light because it could be said that you have had your head turned by the sceptics."

Harrabin meekly responded:

"Have a look in 10 minutes and tell me you are happier. We have changed headline and more."

So the initial copy ...

This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory. But experts say we are still clearly in a long-term warming trend - and they forecast a new record high temperature within five years.

... became:

But this year's temperature would still be way above the average - and we would soon exceed the record year of 1998 because of global warming induced by greenhouse gases.

If the debate on global warming is over, how come Abbess had to debate BBC into changing its story?

And if the media is to be believed, why did BBC fold?

BTW, a Google search on Jo Abbess now turns up a relatively strong 110,000 hits. I dug three pages into it and every link had to do with this scandal. God bless the blogosphere.

hat-tip: Icecap

Green Vs. Green Combat

And while we're on the subject of strange happenings in the Greenie/Warmie world, I must pass along this story from the NYT as the story that gave me the most giggles in the last week:

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Call it an eco-parable: one Prius-driving couple takes pride in their eight redwoods, the first of them planted over a decade ago. Their electric-car-driving neighbors take pride in their rooftop solar panels, installed five years after the first trees were planted.

Trees — redwoods, live oaks or blossoming fruit trees — are usually considered sturdy citizens of the sun-swept peninsula south of San Francisco, not criminal elements. But under a 1978 state law protecting homeowners’ investment in rooftop solar panels, trees that impede solar panels’ access to the sun can be deemed a nuisance and their owners fined up to $1,000 a day. The Solar Shade Act was a curiosity until late last year, when a dispute over the eight redwoods (a k a Tree No. 1, Tree No. 2, Tree No. 3, etc.) ended up in Santa Clara County criminal court.

The couple who planted the trees, Carolynn Bissett and Richard Treanor, were convicted of violating the law, based on the complaint of their neighbor, Mark Vargas, and were ordered to make sure that no more than 10 percent of the solar panels are shaded.

A few weeks after The San Jose Mercury News wrote about the situation, the first act ended with the couple pruning 10 feet to 15 feet of Tree No. 6’s upper branches. The event drew more cameras than an episode of “Extreme Home Makeover.”

The Bissett-Treanor team responded as liberals will -- they turned to Big Brother, specifically in the form of Joe Simitian, a Dem (natch) state senator from nearby Palo Alto, who now will busy the state legislature with a new bill that will grandfather the owners of trees that pre-existed the installation of neighboring solar panels from prosecution under The Solar Shade Act.

The story concludes:

The state, Mr. Simitian pointed out, has a law to encourage the construction of one million solar roofs. “I’m trying to avoid a million neighborhood arguments,” he said.

Yes, that would be a lot of hot air.

Maoist Moron

In case you thought nothing much happened in San Francisco this week because the Chinese conspired with the Newsome administration to re-route the Olympic torch parade, you'd do well to visit this lengthy and impressive photo album at Pajamas media.

It was, in fact, quite a show with multiple anti-Chinese causes present and plenty of hostility flaring between pro- and anti-Chinese factions. Included is this photo of some anti-Chinese street theater:

Note the long-haired imbecile on the left in the Mao t-shirt. Who wears a Mao t-shirt on any day, and who is idiotic enough to wear one to an anti-China demonstration?

Beware when the left embraces your cause, because lame-brains will be coming to your side.

hat-tip: Jim

Five Years In Iraq

The invaluable MEMRI marked the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq with excerpts from articles written by liberal Muslim commentators, all of which are worth reading.

I particularly liked this excerpt from an interview by Iraqi Journalist 'Abd Al-Jabbar Al-'Atabihad of a news vendor in Baghdad. He asked the vendor how he felt on the anniversary of the invasion and was told:

"At the start of my journey I stopped by the newspaper seller to ask how he was after five years of change. He said: I will sum up what you ask in a few words. Despite everything that happened and is happening, I feel pride in the fact that the years of dictatorship are gone. There were no worse years than those, when we were afraid of our own shadows and our own children. I won't claim that the situation now is ideal, but compared to the past, it is much better, without any comparison…

Despite the sorrows I find in our present situation, I feel relieved. In the days [of the dictatorship] I didn't feel optimistic. Now, I am optimistic about what is to come. What is happening now is passing; while it has gone on long, it will end - it could end in the twinkle of an eye.

How do liberals, who are supposed to be the strongest champions of freedom, oppose the war in Iraq when it is so obvious that the work we are doing there is the good, hard work of defending freedom, and freeing the oppressed?

Also in the MEMRI post is an "Apology to the Valiant American Soldier" by Iraqi liberal (truly liberal, as opposed to the shameful disgraces that constitute liberalism in the US today) Khudayr Taher. Its beauty surpasses mere words; it is much deserved blessing for our troops:

"We forsook you and betrayed you - we, whose history is an expression of massacres, conflagrations, and ruin. We killed you, and we killed our dream and aspiration of reaching the sun, the moon, and the stars - [we killed our dream] of availing ourselves of the opportunity to live as true humans, thanks to your presence.

"My dear, brave American soldier, you noble individual who traversed land and sea in order to write the story of Iraqi freedom for the first time in its modern history - you believed, in accordance with logic, self-evident truths, and rational thought, that a people who had been subjected to repression, starvation, and killing would dance for joy, and would thank Allah who sent you to them as a liberating angel. [You believed that] they would strew flowers and break out in songs of joy that would smash the chains of slavery, ignominy, and humiliation.

"Not even a writer of surrealistic [literature] or [theater of] the absurd would have imagined that the Iraqi people would revolt against their liberator and would rush ardently back to a new bondage of a different kind - that of the religious cleric, the tribal sheikh, and the gang leader. It was unthinkable that the people would go against logic, rational thought, and self-evident truths, in a mad rush towards the abyss and total ruin.

"My beloved, brave American soldier, we apologize to you, and we are saddened at our wretched and miserable selves. Since we are a people that slaughters itself, and kills one another, cutting off heads, what can you expect from us other than ingratitude, perfidy, and stabbing you in the back for the benefit of Iranian and Syrian intelligence and Al-Qaeda?..."

Pass that one along, will you?

Sunday Scan

Iran Digs Deeper Into Iraq

The Times of London reports that Gen. David Petraeus will tell Congress next week that Iranians have been fighting in Basra:

Military and intelligence sources believe Iranians were operating at a tactical command level with the Shi’ite militias fighting Iraqi security forces; some were directing operations on the ground, they think.

Petraeus intends to use the evidence of Iranian involvement to argue against any reductions in US forces.

Proof of Iran's active involvement in Iraq is a given, which raises concerns about what would happen if we were to summarily leave Iraq on its own. That doesn't determ the leftist, pro-Palestinian, Sept. 10th people. For example, at the suspect blog Palestinian Pundit, the same lines I quoted above were headlined Manufacturing Consent for Attacking Iran.

Iran is the active force in this news story, but the crazies must find a way to make us the active force, so Iran's participation in an attack against freedom in Iraq becomes our sly tactic to justify the long-dreaded attack on Iran.

A commenter from Massachusetts on the London Times story makes the same point:

What are they (the US I mean) up to? It doesn't add up. There is something big brewing under the radar here. No further cuts, picking a fight with Iran while the army is strained to the limit and fraying - on the face of it it's absurd.

That's right. It doesn't add up; it's absurd on the face, but that doesn't keep the anti-Bush left from being absurd about it.

Moses Dies

Charlton Heston has died, and Hollywood has lost a great actor -- although it won't acknowledge as much. As Ed Morrisey puts it:

Hollywood turned its back on one of its biggest icons for the sin of becoming Republican and of supporting gun rights. Of course, while Hollywood rejected Heston for his stand on the 2nd Amendment, it churned out more and more films dedicated to mass shootings and indiscriminate violence.

Indeed. Who has done more to promote gun use in the US, Heston and the NRA or Hollywood? No contest -- especially if you ask a young punk with a gun, who will answer "Charlton who?" but be able to describe in detail shoot-outs in any number of recent movies.

Torching China's Reputation


Watch this short and fascinating clip of the Olympic torch's troubled passage through London; it shows the beating China's reputation is getting as police must battle protesters just to give the torch safe passage.

I remember when the torth passed through OC during the Olympics in LA in '84. No protests, no issues -- just cheers and a glow from being a part of something special. Not so this year, when a brush with the torch is suddenly a brush with something evil.

It's all good; China needs global embarrassment -- but I wonder, would this protest have happened without the Tibetans' timely protest? There are plenty enough other human rights abuses going on in China beyond Tibet, abuses that might not have attracted the world's attention without the efforts of brave Tibetan activists. All the abuses deserve attention, but it was the Tibetans who had the perfect mix of bravery and timing.

But will China, even if it's driven to improve things in Tibet due to world protest, clean up the rest of its horrific human rights problems?

Don't Read Arnie's Lips

The Dem-soaked California legislature has loaded up the state with spending programs up the wazoo, but don't talk to anyone in Sacto about cutting spending instead of raising taxes.

That goes for our once-Republican governor, too, who appears to have mastered the role of playing another free-spending Republican, George Bush:

Arnold Schwarzenegger, who stormed into office five years ago deriding tax-and-spend Democrats and who mocked his re-election opponent in 2006 as a gleeful "taxoholic," is singing a different tune these days.

Facing the worst fiscal crisis of his political career, the Republican governor in recent months has signaled in increasingly frank language that he would consider new taxes as part of a compromise to close an $8 billion deficit.

To be sure, he's never declared: "Let's raise taxes." But more and more, he's saying he is at least open to discussing it.

"I made it very clear my proposal" does not call for raising taxes, Schwarzenegger said at one of several appearances around the state last month addressing the budget. "But I'm not the only one that runs the state Capitol and that runs the state."

Legislators, he added, are also involved in budgeting. And in the process of finding a compromise with the governor, higher taxes might enter the picture.

"I said and I made it very clear that everything is on the table," Schwarzenegger said. (San Mateo Times)

Sorry, Girly Boy, there should only be one thing on the table: cuts, cuts and more cuts, in a concerted effort to return California to the long-ago days of small, responsible government. Because as they used to say, as California goes, so goes the nation.

Freezing Out The Truth

For our relationship with the media to be fruitful, it needs to be based on either of two things: Either we must trust them, or we must understand that everything they say is a lie, and we can believe none of it.

If there's a gray area -- some lies, some truth, but how to tell the difference? -- we have a problem. We have a problem. From Greenie Watch:

Roger Harrabin is one of the less ideological reporters for the BBC and he sometimes mentions things that call global warming into question. But that does not suit the British Bias Corporation of course. In this article, Harrabin mentioned recent global cooling. But when someone senior to him saw it, they were obviously not happy. The article was changed after it initially appeared.

I have a PDF of the article produced shortly after it was posted. I also have a PDF of what was up last time I checked. Let us compare the 3rd/4th sentences in each. In V1, they say:

'This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory. But experts say we are still clearly in a long-term warming trend - and they forecast a new record high temperature within five years.'

In V2 they say:

'But this year's temperature would still be way above the average - and we would soon exceed the record year of 1998 because of global warming induced by greenhouse gases.'

Not even a hint of fairness and objectivity, just agenda journalism running wild, one of the four cylinders that runs the powerful engine that is global warming, with Greenies, government and science grant writers firing the other three.

Beauty In The Eye Of The Chip

Computer scientists in Israel -- home of many beautiful women -- have successfully programmed a computer to do a job no man needs help with: Differentiating between women based on looks.

"Until now, computers have been taught how to identify basic facial characteristics, such as the difference between a woman and a man, and even to detect facial expressions," says [Amit Kagian, an M.Sc. graduate from the TAU School of Computer Sciences]. But our software lets a computer make an aesthetic judgment." (Science Daily)

Uh-huh, cool. But why bother?

The discovery is a step towards developing artificial intelligence in computers. Other applications for the software could be in plastic and reconstructive surgery and computer visualization programs such as face recognition technologies.

So how about the more challenging test: A computer that can identify beauty in men?

This may be more difficult. Psychological research has shown that there is less agreement as to what defines "male beauty" among human subjects. And his own portrait, jokes Kagian, will not be part of the experiment.

"I would probably blow up the machine," he says.

Yoo Interrogation Memo Paranoia

Marty Lederman, writing at the blog Balkanization, has his hands on, as he so objectively calls it, "The Big Kahuna: The Torture Memo that Makes the August 2002 Memo Look Like Objective and Thoughtful Legal Analysis."

This is the "notorious" memo ... well, allow me to let Lederman describe it:

On Friday, March 13, 2003, Jay Bybee resigned from his Office as the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, to become a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The very next day -- a Saturday, mind you -- John Yoo, merely a Deputy AAG in the Office, issued his notorious memo to the Pentagon, on behalf of OLC, which effectively gave the Pentagon the green light to disregard statutory limits on torture, cruelty and maltreatment in the treatment of detainees.

The paranoid implication here is that Bybee read the memo, wouldn't sign it, was forced out, and Yoo issued it. There may be some level of truth there; there may not. But the override here is that Bybee left not because of a tiff over a memo, but to become a U.S. Court of Appeals judge, a position that doesn't exactly open up over night. He was not forced out; his departure date was known long in advance.

And the 81-page memo is hardly something that could be whipped up overnight. (I know that's not part of the passing hysteria here, but Lefties quick to conspiracy theories will take it there, trust me.)

Lederman goes on to say,

Needless to say, the classification of these memos all these years was ridiculously unjustified. There's no reason at all that this roll out could not have occurred in 2004.

Needless to say? Really? You've read all 81 pages and can say that with certainty? You can't see any scenario whatsoever that would allow the classification of a document that discusses at length what may and may not be legal when interrogating enemy combatants? Nothing at all that might not give the enemy combatants a wee edge against our forces?

To the American Left, conspiracy is a one-way street: America is capable of all the evil in the world; our opponents and enemies are capable of none of it.

Lederman also calls the memo "the blueprint that led to Abu Ghraib," hyperbole on a par with Obama's endless incorrect parsing of McCain's "100 years in Iraq" statement. We all know that Abu Ghraib's perps followed no blueprint and were summarily punished for their renegade actions, and Lederman's insistence at blaming Bush for what happened there befouls every other argument he makes.

As for the memo itself, it is thorough and comprehensive, the work of a government trying hard to figure out the legal limits of working with stateless terrorists bound by no legal limits.

Here's just a taste of that thoroughness, from the introduction:

In Part I, we conclude that the Fifth and Eighth Amendments, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, do not extend to alien enemy combatants held abroad. In Part II, we examine federal criminal law. We explain that several canons of construction apply here. Those canons of construction indicate that federal criminal laws of general applicability do not apply to properly~authorized interrogations of enemy combatants, undertaken by military personnel in the course of an armed conflict. Such criminal statutes, if they were misconstrued to apply to the interrogation of enemy combatants, would conflict with the Constitution's grant of the Commander in Chief power solely to the President.

Although we do not believe that these laws would apply to authorized military interrogations, we outline the various federal crimes that apply in the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States: assault, 18 U.S.C. § 113 (2000); maiming, 18 U.S.C. § 114 (2000); and interstate' stalking, 18 U.S.C. § 2261A(2000). In Part II.C., we address relevant criminal prohibitions that apply to conduct outside the jurisdiction of the United States: war crimes, 18 U.S.C. § 2441 (2000); and torture, 18' U.S.C. § 2340A (2000 & West Supp. 2002).

In Part III, we examine the international law applicable to the conduct of interrogations. First, we examine the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Apr. 18, 1988,1465 D.N.T.S. 113 ("CAT") and conclude that U.S. reservations, understandings, and declarations ensure that our international obligations mirror the standards of 18 U.S.C. § 2340A. Second, we address the U.S. obligation under CAT to undertake to prevent the commission of "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment." We conclude that based on its reservation, the United States' obligation extends only to conduct that is "cruel and unusual" within the meaning of the Eighth Amendment or otherwise "shocks the conscience" under the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Third, we examine the applicability of customary international law. We conclude that as an expression of state practice, customary international law cannot impose a standard that differs from U.S. obligations under CAT, a recent multilateral treaty on the same sUbject. In any event, our previous opinions make clear that customary international law is not federal law and that the President is free to override it at his discretion.

In Part IV, we discuss defenses to an allegation that an interrogation method might violate any of the various criminal prohibitions discussed in Part ll. We believe that necessity or self~defense could provide defenses to a prosecution.

This is not the work of an administration, as portrayed by the braying donkeys on the Left, that is riding roughshod over human rights. It is, rather, the work of an administration that is rigorously seeking appropriate guidance in a thick forest of often conflicting laws, regulations, treaties and court decisions.

It is also the work of an administration that knows it has to deal with enemies besides the ones who bow to Mecca daily -- it is an administration that anticipates and plans for attacks from the ACLU; various Soros-funded activist groups; Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer and a Congress-full of other anti-Bush, agenda-driven electeds; activist judges, and paranoid bloggers.

Of course, unaddressed by Lederman or his colleagues is anything about the nature of the enemy, anything about the nature of the interrogation procedures that actually have been used, or any analysis of benefits vs. cost of the administration's policy on the interrogation of foreign enemies intent on killing us.

But then, being a leftist has never required being rational.

Collegiate Indoctrination

I asked Incredible Daughter #1 if she was experiencing a lot of Leftist indoctrination at Chapman U., and she affirmed it's there in some classes:

From what I've seen, there is a liberal slant, but the students aren't afraid to call BS on stuff that is way out there.

I'm proud to say that she's one of those unafraid students:

We had some guest speaker in that human diversity's class, and the class would push them very hard afterwards based on what they said. You may go cross eyed over what one of them said.

She said that it is DISCRIMINATION to assume that someone is heterosexual and that it is OFFENSIVE AND NOT POLITICALLY CORRECT to ask a guy if he has a girlfriend because he might be gay. I told her that if you assume he is gay and he's straight, you might get your butt kicked, so sorry, I'll err on the side of political incorrectness.

She was a little shocked at my response.

Interestingly, in our work I'm becoming concerned about writing about real estate developments as "homes for families," and a cringe a bit each time I see "mom" or "dad" in copy, especially if it's copy that's directed to children.

I'm dreading the day gay activists get on us for assuming that houses will be filled with families, not gay couples, or that schools will tell us they're not interested in materials that assume children have moms and dads, rather than dads and dads, moms and moms, dads and ponies or whatever.

I'm sticking with the good ol' fashioned copy for now, but feel the ice getting thinner at all times.

Beer-Soaked Politics

The lengths the Left will go to create anti-American drivel ...

Bear with me. A few days back, the blog Gusts of Popular Feeling ran a post The General Sherman Sails Again, that told the story of a US war ship converted to a merchant trader (the namesake of the post), that was sunk in North Korea's Taedonggang River in Pyongyang in 1866, with the loss of all on board.

Current (revisionist to the max) NoKo history marks the start of modern (oxymoron, anyone?) history to the event, and says Li'l Kim's great-granddaddy led the mob that attacked the ship (although that's probably fabricated).

Gusts of Popular Feeling was moved to re-tell this pretty much forgotten story because the cap of Taedonggang Beer supposedly bears the image of the General Sherman, causing the author to ask:

Does Taedonggang have the honor of being the world's only anti-American beer?

Honor?! Sheesh.

Move forward three days to today, when Andrew Leonard, author of Salon's How the World Works Column, captured this little tale to launch a screed about imperialist America and its many sins. He starts with the history, which is more interesting than the thinking of his brain:

But then... While digging around for more details on the General Sherman, I found "The Opening of Korea by Commodore Shufeldt," published in Political Science Quarterly in 1910, in which author Charles Oscar Paullin tells the tale of how Korea was forced out of its cave and into the family of nations. The opening few pages recount the aftermath of the General Sherman incident -- in 1871, Rear-Admiral John Rodgers and the American minister to China, Frederick Low, led "a flotilla of five steamships, carrying 85 guns and 1235 men" for the purpose of establishing "peaceful relations with Korea."

On June 1 a flotilla from the fleet, while engaged in surveying the river, was unexpectedly fired upon by a Korean fort. The fire of the natives was returned, and a fight took place in which the Americans lost two wounded and the Koreans twenty wounded and many more killed. After a careful consideration of this incident, Low and Rodgers decided that the prestige of the United States would be impaired unless the injury to its flag were avenged or an apology tendered by the Korean government. Through one of his secretaries Low explained to an officer of the local prefecture that sufficient time would be allowed for an apology before any further steps were taken. While deeply regretting the firing on the flotilla, the officer defended the action of the forts, on the grounds that the Korean laws prohibited foreigners to pass a barrier of defense. He sent a present of chickens, bullocks and eggs to Rodgers, who declined to accept it.

The king refused to apologize.

It is sufficient to say that the Americans performed their allotted task with great thoroughness. Five forts were captured or destroyed; fifty flags and four hundred and eighty-one pieces of ordnance were taken, and twenty Koreans were made prisoners. In the principal engagement the loss of the natives were three hundred and fifty men killed and wounded, more than half of them being killed; the loss of the Americans was three killed and ten wounded...

And he concludes with ... brace yourself for the inevitable foul stench of America-hatred:

Is the term "imperialist robbers" too strong to describe such behavior? Maybe not. And as a reminder that the terms of trade agreements between nations often depends on who owns the biggest battleships, even a beer bottle-cap can be effective.

America the imperialist ... worked then, works now, right? Forget that we don't have colonies ... doesn't matter. Forget that trade agreements lift up the nations we make them with, improving lives, not enslaving them ... doesn't matter, either.

Well, besides the obvious historical and political errors in Leonard's analysis, there's this little problem:

Here's the now-notorious beer cap:

And here's a NoKo stamp showing a bridge across the Taedonggang River:

Oops. We've got a flawed launching point for the screed -- it's a bridge not a boat. But that's not what makes the screed flawed. Leonard and his lefties will go back in time -- to the Crusades if necessary -- to find a way to paint a dreary, evil picture of America, while ignoring all the good we do today.

Is NoKo a better place for standing up to America? Would the people -- the people, who are supposed to be the concern of the left -- be living longer, healthier, happier lives if Li'l Kim and his father had stopped being Commie-dictators and tried to do for their people what America tries to do for the people for the world?

Don't bother the Left with such questions; let them see bridges as Yankee ships, terrorists as insurgents, and progress as anti-Progressive.

Sexual Hysteria Over Huckabee

My readers know that even though I'm a conservative Christian, I'm no Huckabee huckster. Even so, I found this charge at TPM Election Central utterly (udderly?) ridiculous:

Huck, in elaborating on his views that the Constitution should be subjected to Biblical standards, had just wrapped up a discussion of the fact that marriage has meant "a man and a woman in a relationship for life." With this context firmly established, this exchange followed:

QUESTIONER: Is it your goal to bring the Constitution into strict conformity with the Bible? Some people would consider that a kind of dangerous undertaking, particularly given the variety of biblical interpretations.

HUCKABEE: Well, I don’t think that’s a radical view to say we’re going to affirm marriage. I think the radical view is to say that we’re going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal. Again, once we change the definition, the door is open to change it again. I think the radical position is to make a change in what’s been historic.

That's pretty clear cut. Changing the definition of marriage so it can mean "two men" or "two women" is equivalent to changing it to mean "a man and an animal." No ambiguity here whatsoever.

Based on this, TPM trumpets that Huckabee "directly equated homosexuality with bestiality."

You would think that the writer, Greg Sargent, has never heard of the concept of "slippery slope."

Huckabee's statement is one oft used by marriage defenders, who worry that once you allow two men or two women to marry, it won't be long until one man and two women or one man and one boy start pushing the courts for the same coverage. Given American courts' propensity to write new liberal law, the argument can easily go to bestiality without too extreme a rhetorical leap.

Well, in fact Sargent has heard of the "slippery slope," since he ends the post with:

Separately, it's worth pointing out that Huck's quote above doesn't even use the tried-and-true "slippery slope" argument to couch his view that homosexuality is akin to bestiality. It's a direct equivalence.

Must every candidate statement be footnoted and parenthesis-ized to present all relevant background? That seems too tall a test by a factor of a bunch of numbers. besides, Sargent analysis is utterly oblique. Here's Huck again:

I think the radical view is to say that we’re going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal. Again, once we change the definition, the door is open to change it again.

Note the logical progression, coincidentally exactly as I laid it out above (other than the polygamist gets three women instead of two), and I wasn't cross-checking. As if that did not define a slippery slope well enough, Huck added that the law would "open the door to change [the definition] again." That is what we mean when we say slippery slope.

You open the door, and there before you is a slippery slope.

Sargent is showing the common anti-Born Again prejudice in his extreme and inflammatory interpretation of Huckabee's position. So here's a slippery slope argument for him: If we allow you to open your door to redefining marriage, the next move will be to accept the Left's opening the door to banning un-multicultural thought and speech.

But if that happens, it will be the Right that is prosecuted for their thoughts, not the Left, so Sargent feels free to fling the door open to his hearts content, because he has no fear of the slope he will slide down.

hat-tip: memeorandum

500,000 Iraqis Did Not Die

A few months after the notorious and suspect Johns Hopkins/Lancet study of civilian deaths in Iraq was issued, a new study by the World Health Organization and the Iraqi government has issued a new study estimating 500,000 fewer war-related civilian deaths.

The Hopkins study pegged the death count at 655,000, a number no one by anti-war fanatics (and some Dem prez wannabes) accepted as anything other than hysteria. The new study says 151,000 civilian Iraqis have died violent deaths since the start of the war, 95% from military operations, insurgent attacks or sectarian violence.

(Certainly, 151,000 violent deaths is an awful thing, but by comparison, between 24,000 and 40,000 civilians died in a single night in the bombing of Dresden, and in just two years the Nazis were able to shrink the Warsaw ghetto's population from 400,000 to 70,000.)

WaPo's report on the new study highlights why the counts are so different:

Both teams used the same method -- a random sample of houses throughout the country. For the new study, however, surveyors visited 23 times as many places and interviewed five times as many households. Surveyors also got more outside supervision in the recent study; that wasn't possible in the spring of 2006 when the Johns Hopkins survey was conducted. (emphasis added)

Given that the same method was used, the broader sampling ensures more accurate results. The methodology was apparently much better as well:

"Overall, this is a very good study," said Paul Spiegel, a medical epidemiologist at the United Nations High Commission on Refugees in Geneva. "What they have done that other studies have not is try to compensate for the inaccuracies and difficulties of these surveys, triangulating to get information from other sources."

Les Roberts, who was involved in the Hopkins/Lancet study also praised the new study as more accurate.

"My gut feeling is that most of the difference between the two studies is a reluctance to report to the government a death due to violence," he said. "If your son is fighting the government and died, that may not be something you'd want to admit to the government."

Strangely, today WaPo said the Hopkins/Lancet study pegged the count at 601,000. Did they not check their own archives for the 655,000 figure? Does time heal mortal wounds?

Unfortunately, the new Iraq/WHO study, which you can read in its entirety here, does not include a break-down of violent deaths among the three war-related causes -- military ops, insurgent attacks or sectarian violence. If the breakdown were available, I'm sure it would show Islamists to be responsible than Americans for the deaths of Iraqis. I'm looking forward to that study.

Even so, the new study has deflated a Great Canard of the anti-war movement.

"Great Canard?" some may ask. Well, click here to see how the foaming-mouthers have falsely extrapolated the false Hopkins/Lancet study to create a 1.1 million civilian death count.

Now comes the test: See how tenaciously the Left holds on to the 655,000 figure, or the 1.1 million or the 17 kazillion figure, rather than acknowledge that they are playing with numbers even their creators now reject.

No matter what numbers they use, they will continue to fault the U.S. invasion for all of Iraq's woes, conveniently forgetting what was going on there before the invasion. Under Saddam Hussien:

• Between 100,000 and 200,000 Kurds were killed, more than all the violent deaths since the invasion
• The crazy war Saddam started against Iran resulted in more than 1 million deaths.
• 85,000 died as a result of crazy war against Kuwait
• An unknown number if Shi'a were killed after the Kuwait war when Hussein brutally suppressed their quest for freedom.
• By the Left's accounting, 100,000 children died during the post-war period from disease and malnutrition, they say were caused by sanctions but were indeed caused by Saddam's refusal to comply with the sanctions, and his ability to siphon aid money off into humanitarian palace-building efforts.

(All except the last bullet sourced to Wikipedia)

Will any of this matter to the anti-war Left? No; they don't let facts bother them. But to the more rational among us, the new study is confirmation that our liberation of Iraq has resulted, as we all knew, in a huge net gain for humanity, even at the tragic cost of 151,000 civilians, Iraqi police and Army losses, and our own military losses.

The deaths of Islamists insurgents is in itself a net gain for humanity, so their body count goes in the "gain" column, not the "loss" column -- another benefit of the war.

Tortured By Lefty Comments

Andrew Sullivan and Salon both linked to my post this morning about Mike Huckabee's irresponsible and sophomoric comments about Guantanamo and waterboarding. They did not do this to underscore that Huckabee is not qualified to be a wartime president; rather, they did it to poke fun at those who believe as I do.

Here's the passage they mocked:

You can't be for closing Guantanamo unless you have a decent answer to the question of what you would do with the lovely people who bow toward Mecca from there. Return them to countries that won't have them? Give them trials in the U.S., where their attorneys would exploit our freedoms for the benefit of those who have professed their intentions to kill us by the millions?

And I don't care how uncomfortable or terrifying waterboarding may be to the few who deserve it. It's non-lethal, doesn't bruise the skin, break the bones, starve the tummy, or stretch the skeleton -- yet it can open sealed lips.

Sullivan's comment is so inane it boggles the mind:

Notice how torture is defended as something some terror suspects deserve. And notice no awareness that torture can open sealed lips to give us false information. The point of torture is always torture.

Yes, Andy, the people who are waterboarded do deserve it because they have been party to plots to kill our soldiers, our allies or us, and they don't want to be forthcoming with the information. We don't rush to waterboarding as step one, but if the person has information important enough and they would rather see innocents die instead of spilling the beans, then yes, they deserve it.

Sullivan also hoists up the old cannard about only false information being gained from torture waterboarding. (Sorry, torture to me is still, to paraphrase what I wrote this a.m., lethal, breaks the skin and bones, causes real physical danger, like starvation, or inflicts other bodily harm.) He ignores the fact that the technique has yielded true information that saved real lives on multiple occasions.

If the information is false, what's the result? Nothing happens. So we're supposed to stop pursing information because we're afraid nothing will happen?

If the point of torture were to torture, then Sullivan shouldn't even be asking about the efficacy of process for getting information; he should only ask about its efficacy for inflicting pain on one party and sick pleasure on another. America, of course, does not torture and we certainly are not the sort of country that does the despicable for the sake of doing the despicable. That's why we have the Army Field Manual. Shame on Sullivan for thinking so poorly of his country.

But not thinking well of country is the common demondenominator for this folks, as clearly stated by commentor Chop1:

Anyone can be a suspect for anything, even the writer of this piece, although I assume his blind trust of the government's wonderful intentions and incredible ability to only harshly interrogate those suspects who are actually guilty and deserve it exclude him from ever having to worry about this happening to himself of anyone he knows, so who really cares right?

I really don't have to worry about being waterboarded, and Chop1 doesn't have to either, unless he is an enemy combatant in reality, not just in his head. The Left's worry about diminishment of our freedoms and imminent ill-treatment by government rages without one example to cite. Go to jihad school, raise money under the guise of charity and send it to a recognized terrorist organization, fight on the wrong side in the war on terror and you've got something to worry about. Be paranoid about America and you don't.

The Left's deeply entrenched fear made Sam's comment a real hoot:

Do you check under your pillow for "jihadist/terrorists" every night before you go to bed. I suggest you see a psychiatrist, living in fear every day is no way to live.

I am considerably less afraid than any of these people because I am not afraid of my country. My country has never done anything to me personally to cause me to be afraid of it and I imagine the same is true of Sam and his friends on the Left. Yet they live in terror of bogeymen poised to strap them down in some dank dungeon.

Who needs the psychiatrist?

And who among these would recognize victory? They've achieved it, after all. Here, for example, is ME:

You are also aware that hundreds have been cleared for release because even the US didn't believe they were being held for a decent reason?

Frankly, I'm amazed that you think this argument is about run-of-the-mil POWs. It's not. It's about people who have been abducted by the US government who WEREN'T on a battlefield fighting american soldiers, and are being held without charge, without trial.

Gee willikers. These people who think America is out to get everyone just acknowledged that Guantanamo detainees won the right to have tribunals, and that these tribunals are either dangerously flawed or fair, because "hundreds" have been found worthy of release! Yet they still fear America.

M also thinks that if a general is captured in an air conditioned headquarters building planning an attack, he isn't a POW. Sorry, M, you don't have to be captured on the battlefield to be an enemy combatant.

All of these folks assume I just pull my opinions out of my behind, when in actuality I read their cherished liberal media outlets, NYT and WaPo, regularly peruse the Leftyblogs, read op/eds from both sides courtesy of Real Clear Politics, and admittedly read a lot of conservative blogs.

I therefore know what waterboarding is; I know it's history; I know the results we've achieved through all sorts of interrogation techniques; I know that America does not torture people; and perhaps most important, I know that the Left is trying desperately to redefine the word "torture" so it basically means "interrogation."

They do this because they are anti-war, anti-military, and ultimately, anti-American. Fortunately, they're also anti-convincing.

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.