Gifts From The Left

Apparently, Dianne Feinstein's reversal on the filibuster of Samuel Alito didn't pacify Cindy Sheehan enough. The former Bush gadfly now wants to take on the California Senator in a primary fight for her re-election:

Cindy Sheehan, the peace activist who set up camp near President Bush's Texas ranch last summer, said Saturday she is considering running against Sen. Dianne Feinstein to protest what she called the California lawmaker's support for the war in Iraq.

"She voted for the war. She continues to vote for the funding. She won't call for an immediate withdrawal of the troops," Sheehan told The Associated Press in an interview while attending the World Social Forum in Venezuela along with thousands of other anti-war and anti-globalization activists.

"I think our senator needs to be held accountable for her support of George Bush and his war policies," said Sheehan, whose 24-year-old soldier son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004.

Feinstein has always enjoyed a lock on her seat, and even the GOP hasn't focused as much of their energy on her as they have on the more-radical Barbara Boxer. Feinstein's relatively centrist approach has made her a tougher target for Republican opponents in liberal California. The state Republican party has been in disarray for several years and mostly unable to mount serious challenges for state-wide seats for the last decade. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger's surprise election as governor has done little to build party credibility.

A primary challenge to Feinstein might give Golden State Republicans an opening to reverse that trend. With Sheehan attacking Feinstein from the leftist base, Feinstein will have to move towards Sheehan to head off the Senator's traditional Bay-area support from abandoning her for the new radical on the block. That will leave Feinstein vulnerable in teh general election, especially if the GOP can find a well-known, credible challenger for her seat.

It will probably prove a long shot for the GOP, but it might turn out that Sheehan could be an unexpected gift for GOP hopes of reinvigorating the party on the West Coast.

...And Generalissimo Franco Is Still Dead

The AP updates us on the process of moderation that Hamas has undertaken:

Following their resounding election victory, the Islamic militants of Hamas met the question of whether they will change their stripes with a loud "no": no recognition of Israel, no negotiations, no renunciation of terror.

But the world holds out hope that international pressure can make them more moderate. At stake is the future of Mideast peacemaking, billions of dollars in aid and the Palestinians' relationship with Israel, the United States and Europe.

Hamas' victory — winning 76 of 132 parliament seats in Wednesday's election — has created a dizzying power shift in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, overturning certitudes and highlighting the failure by Palestinian leaders, Israel and the international community to ease growing desperation in the Palestinian territories.

The AP gets its editorial voice into a news report with that last paragraph, blaming Israel and the West for the Palestianian selection of Hamas as its government. That will apparently be the left-wing meme for the collapse of the illusion of a peace process that involved one party that would only accept the peace of annihilation. Israel coughed up Gaza without any return gesture from the Palestinians, and the West has poured billions of dollars into the territories through the organization that Europe and liberals insisted was the only one that truly represented Palestinian interests. Now the rejection of that corrupt organization for an explicit supporter of genocide and terrorism somehow translates to a failure of the West?

Perhaps the only failure that can be blamed on the West comes from trusting people like Jimmy Carter for advice and analysis. The Palestinians, however, have spoken clearly about what they want, and they want a government committed to the destruction of Israel and not to a two-state solution. Any other analysis not only ignores the obvious choice open to the Palestininans, it also transforms Palestinians into idiots who voted without understanding that Hamas supports terrorism as its main strategy for change.

I'm taking the Palestinians at their word. They want terrorism over negotiation, and war over peaceful coexistence with Israel. Let them have it -- and let them handle it without the moderating influence of the entire West restraining Israel's response to Palestinian provocations. Let the Palestinians feel the full consequences of the choice they have made. Only when they realize that the world will allow them to lose the war against Israel, and lose the land they have, will they start to form political parties that advocate for peaceful coexistence instead of two parties advocating for annihilation on two different schedules.

The WSJ Almost Gets It Right

The latest Wall Street Journal editorial on pork once again sounds all the right alarms in dealing with the profligate spending in Washington and the ensuing corruption that it brings. It starts off by scoffing at an earmarked subsidy from the US Navy on a "waterless urinal" -- we used to call those pipes, by the way, and they didn't cost two million dollars -- and goes on to urge an end to all earmarks and a line-item veto:

Now for the good news. Amid the humiliating publicity about the bridge to nowhere in Alaska, maple syrup research in Vermont and blueberry subsidies in Massachusetts, nearly everyone in Congress is suddenly swearing off pork. All three Republicans running for House Majority Leader have pledged to end the abuse of "earmarks." And so has Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, though she too has used her political clout to steer millions of dollars to her California district.

Democrats insist they can do a better job than Republicans of protecting taxpayers from parochial spending on Capitol Hill. And it's hard to imagine they could do worse. The number of special-interest earmarks inserted into spending bills has quadrupled in five years to 14,000, and the price tag has more than doubled--to $27.1 billion last year.

Defenders of pork-barrel projects contend they are a trivial expense in a $2.6 trillion budget. Sadly, that's true, but it speaks volumes about the culture of overspending in Washington that $27,100,000,000 is dismissed as a rounding error. Unfathomably large spending bills, with hundreds upon hundreds of pages of line-item expenditures, have become normal budgeting practice in Congress. In this environment, $10 million giveaways start to seem like loose change.

Unfortunately, $27.1 billion is a rounding error -- it's 1% of the federal budget. Don't get me wrong; the earmarks need to get eliminated, and they do cause corruption. However, the Journal misses the larger point, which is that the other 99% of the budget causes corruption as well, and it causes a lot more of it than the 1% does, if for no other reason than its worth. And let's not forget that the 1% that goes to earmarking are one-time-only expenditures, not new programs that will continuously generate new costs and new oversight powers for the federal government.

Earmarks get used for helping out donors and public causes that politicians use to get elected, and then re-elected over and over again. Their constituents, unfortunately, act as enablers for this kind of corruption. They elect people on the basis of bringing home the money, getting federal expenditures for local projects that hijacks money from one set of taxpayers for the benefit of another. It's a gigantic shell game in which we all pony up an ante, and then hope that our particular con man can grab at least the amount we paid for our own use.

Line-item vetoes from the executive and forcing each earmark to pass a vote in Congress sound like reasonable reforms for the existing process, but it doesn't get to the root of the problem, which is the overall size of the federal budget itself. Too many mandates have been granted to federal control, most of which fall outside of the constitutional boundaries of federal power as it is. The size of the budget creates a vast treasure that encourages grand corruption that makes earmarks look like petty cash. Entitlements that stretch out into trillions of dollars over a generation invites the manipulation of special interests to ensure lifetime sinecures of government funding, not just a couple of years of office construction with some old pol's name eventually winding up on the facility.

The corruption cause du jour is the Jack Abramoff scandal, involving hundreds of thousands of dollars from Indian tribes going to politicians of both parties, 2-1 for the GOP since 1998. That corruption did not involve earmarks, but instead involved decisions made by the Department of the Interior and Congressional action on Indian gaming -- an industry generating billions of dollars. The corruption flows to where the money goes. And the money goes to power, which leads back to the other 99% of the federal budget.

We need to address earmarks and the petty pork that comprises the appetizer on government spending. If the Journal and the blogosphere wants to get serious about corruption and spending, then we need to attack it at its source: the expansion of federal power over the last seventy years. Only by making government smaller and reducing its reach, both legal and financial, into the lives of citizens will spending and corruption decrease. In the meantime, attacking earmarks will provide us the necessary momentum and training to go after the serious spending later on.

UPDATE: My calculation was incorrect, as noted by SF in the comments -- the earmarks are 1% of the federal budget, not 0.1%. This might explain my running deficit in my checking account, too ...

Post Editorial Scolds Losers For Anti-Americanism

The Washington Post notes that the Liberals in Canada became the second victims of their own strategy to use anti-Americanism as an electoral tactic. The Post sees this as a potential tide-turning moment in global politics, where simply insulting Americans does not provide the credentials necessary for election:

Mr. Martin becomes the second G-8 leader in four months to exit from office after discovering that anti-U.S. demagoguery is no longer enough to win an election. Gerhard Schroeder, the former German chancellor, also tried to rescue his political career last fall by parading his differences with Mr. Bush; the result was the victory of Angela Merkel, who has moved swiftly to repair relations with Washington. Interestingly, both Mr. Schroeder and Mr. Martin won previous campaigns by playing anti-American cards, in 2002 and 2004 respectively. While it's not clear that the level of ill feeling toward the United States or its president has changed much in Germany or Canada, it's obviously not the foremost concern of voters fed up with domestic mismanagement -- or, perhaps, political venality.

Neither Merkel nor Harper plan on being American puppets, as both have showed shortly after their election, nor should they be. They should represent the interests of their citizens, some of which will inevitably conflict with our interests. However, the notion that governments of democracies should stoke contempt and hatred for their putative allies has been roundly and rightly discredited by the two elections spotlighted by the Post in today's editorial.

I'm delighted that the Post recognizes this trend. Of course, CQ readers have already noticed this at least a week ahead of the Post ... as Mark Tapscott pointed out to me earlier today.

John Kerry, Blog Boy Of The Left

The Washington Post discerns a strategy emerging from John Kerry and his actions this week in yodeling a filibuster demand from the Swiss Alps to block the confirmation of Samuel Alito. Kerry has decided that the blogs and the leftist activists that control them own the Democratic Party future and has aligned himself with them for better or worse, as seen in Jim Vandehei's report in today's Washington Post:

Liberal activists seemed to have slightly more influence with their campaign to persuade Senate Democrats to filibuster the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel A. Alito Jr. Despite several polls showing that the public opposes the effort, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) on Thursday strongly advocated the filibuster plan -- and wrote about his choice on the Daily Kos, a Web site popular with liberals. Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), a leading liberal and critic of the Iraq war, told reporters Kerry's viewpoint is not shared by most in a culturally conservative swing state such as West Virginia. Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) also opposes the filibuster. ...

"John Kerry is beginning to bring the traditional Democratic leadership in Washington together with the untraditional netroots activists of the country," James Boyce wrote on the Huffington Post. "A man often accused of being the ultimate Washington insider looked outside of the beltway and saw the concern, in fact, the distress among literally millions of online Democrats."

Other Democrats, Boyce wrote, "triangulated, fabricated, postulated and capitulated."

Democrats should take careful note of this development, which shows exactly how desperate Kerry has become in his desire to win the Presidency. He knows that the party establishment will have nothing to do with another Kerry candidacy, having failed miserably against a vulnerable George Bush. This week, in his decision to post at Daily Kos (which he disavowed during his campaign after Kos' "Screw them" statement) and his sudden passion for a filibuster, he has now separated himself from the current party leadership to make himself the chief representative of the activist base. He wants to convince the bloggers and the special-interest groups that run the Democratic Party that he speaks for them, not for some namby-pamby centrist urge promoted by the Democratic Leadership Council.

What does that mean? It will help fuel the split on the Left that started with Dean's ascension as primary front-runner in 2003. Instead of refocusing efforts to appear reasonable to the American voters, the party will have its radical wing on full flight in 2006, drawing attention to its passionate insistence on obstructionism, impeachment, surrender in Iraq and Southwest Asia, and the further growth of socialism in the US. All of this will prove exceeding popular -- with 20% of the American electorate. Unfortunately, as the Dean Scream and the Kerry presidential campaign showed, it doesn't translate into electoral victory. It doesn't even translate into good fundraising, as the DNC has discovered during Dean's chairmanship of the party.

Kerry's actions this week are all about positioning himself as the anti-Establishment candidate for 2008, the Eugene McCarthy of the next presidential election cycle. Just as he stole a march on Howard Dean after the Vermont governor stumbled in Iowa, Kerry plans to manipulate the left-wing elements of the base to carry him through the primaries against the party Establishment's choice, Hillary Clinton. If that means civil war in the Democratic Party, then Kerry appears happy to foment it.

Hamas: No, We Weren't Kidding

As the world pontificated about how the responsibility of governing would prove a moderating influence for Hamas and that the West would wind up having to come to terms with the terrorists as statesmen. The only fly in that ointment is Hamas itself, which had to reaffirm today for the doubters that, once again, it really does hate Israel and wants to see it destroyed:

Militants from Fatah and Hamas capped a tense and emotional day with violent clashes on Friday, while a Hamas leader said the group had no intention of recognizing Israel's right to exist or changing its charter, which calls for Israel's destruction.

"Why are we going to recognize Israel?" said the leader, Mahmoud Zahar. "Is Israel going to recognize the right of return of Palestinian refugees? Is Israel going to recognize Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital?" ...

Until now, Hamas has refused to take part in the Palestinian government because that government emerged from the 1993 Oslo accords with Israel, which Hamas rejected.

Hamas still does not recognize Israel and says it will not change its charter calling for Israel's destruction.

Of course it won't change its charter, and all of the Western aid in the world won't make a difference. Hell, all of the aid the West poured into the PA when Fatah ran the joint didn't get a change to their charter either, so undoubtedly Hamas will not go out of its way to accommodate the Jews. Hamas only has one objective, the one on which its originators founded it: to cause the annihilation of Israel, replaced by an Islamist terror camp that will send its members across the ummah.

They will not succeed, of course, as Israel won't get fooled into thinking that Hamas spent its election cycle joking around. Too many of the Israelis will see the same kind of denial that took place among Western leaders when Adolf Hitler came to power, after having written Mein Kampf, which outlined all his political goals. Despite having published exactly what he wanted to do -- eliminate the Jews and grab as much land in Eastern Europe as possible -- the world thought that governing would force Hitler to moderate his positions. He confounded them by simply turning the Reichstag into a cheerleading squad and terminating German democracy. Seventy years later, no one appears to have learned that painful lesson except the victims of Hitler and their descendants.

Genocidal lunatics do not change their stripes because their party won one election, and Hamas isn't even pretending to do so. Predictions of moderation are nothing more than excuses to avoid taking a stand against terrorists and the people who now overwhelmingly support them. The Palestinians have been the cause of this political generation for decades, and even after a free election where they hoisted the terrorist flag as their emblem, their apologists cannot bear to conclude that they simply refuse to live in peace under any solution but Israel's destruction. Their continued excuses appear now to have more to do with saving face among themselves than in judging reality.

Yodeling Past The Graveyard

John Kerry has plunged his party into an internecine squabble this afternoon by pushing for a filibuster on Samuel Alito's confirmation, a sure losing strategy even with Dianne Feinstein's late reversal on her pledge to give Alito an up-or-down vote. The pandering to Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and People For The American Way has dragged Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer back to the parliamentary procedure they'd hope to save for a possible retirement by John Paul Stevens or Ruth Bader Ginsburg and set off a public argument over the foolishness of fighting lost causes in an election year:

Long-smoldering Democratic dissension flared openly Friday as liberals sought support for a last-minute filibuster of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito against the advice of leaders worried about a backlash in the 2006 elections. ....

Two of the party's Senate leaders, Harry Reid of Nevada and Charles Schumer of New York, privately made clear their unhappiness with the strategy, even though they, too, oppose Alito's confirmation. And Rep. Harold Ford, seeking a Senate seat in Republican-leaning Tennessee, dismissed the filibuster approach openly.

"It does not appear that there is any reason to hold up a vote. I hope my colleagues in the Senate will move quickly to bring this process to a dignified end," he said.

Ford wasn't the only Democrat to go on record opposing a filibuster. Kent Conrad, who faces a red-state electorate in an uphill battle for re-election this year in North Dakota, ticked off a number of reasons to oppose blocking Alito's nomination:

In an interview, Conrad said that in remarks to fellow Democrats at the caucus, he outlined several factors. These included Alito's strong backing from the American Bar Association, his uncontested confirmation 15 years ago to the appeals court, public opinion polls and the fact that Republicans had voted overwhelmingly to confirm Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer when President Clinton nominated them.

"So I put that all together and I find it makes it hard to justify a filibuster," Conrad said.

Put that together with the three Democrats who have already agreed to vote for his confirmation and one can see that a filibuster has little hope of succeeding. Even if a few Republicans may not vote for Alito's confirmation, none of them will be stupid enough to join a filibuster, especially with Democrats crossing the aisle to support Alito. But even if the filibuster succeeds, the entire exercise will explode in the faces of the liberals. Frist has pledged to go with the Byrd option in the event of a successful filibuster on a Supreme Court nomination, and he already has the support of enough of the GOP part of the Gang of 14 to get it passed.

What will the Democrats win from all this? They will have momentarily obstructed a nominee who has the support of 2/3rds of the country for confirmation, proving yet again to be nothing more than knee-jerk obstructionists. They will have lost the filibuster for all the other judicial nominations, which would mean a return of Henry Saad to the list. It will also mean that if Stevens or Ginsburg leave the court in the next three years -- a distinct possibility -- the Democrats will have no means to stop Janice Rogers Brown or Priscilla Owen from taking their place. They will have lost all leverage with which to bargain. And along the way, they will have once again emphasized their inability to produce anything positive with all of the smear tactics and character assassination in which they indulged, a chapter so shameful that even their own senior member stood on the floor of the Senate and called it a "disgrace".

However, John Kerry may prove to be the consummate party leader of this era. He gladly led the party to an across-the-board loss against a vulnerable president during a divisive war, and now he gleefully calls for their further humiliation and degradation while playing on the slopes of the Swiss Alps, as far from the fight as he can get. It's the Era of Absent Maturity for Democrats, and Kerry may well be its poster boy.

UPDATE: Priscilla Owen, not Brown. (h/t: CQ reader Steve F.)

NYT/CBS Poll Undersamples Republicans, Still Shows Approval For NSA Program

The New York Times reports this morning on "mixed support" for the NSA surveillance program it exposed last month just as the Patriot Act came up for renewal. Fifty-three percent of all respondents support electronic monitoring of communications without warrants if necessary to protect national security and save lives:

In a sign that public opinion about the trade-offs between national security and individual rights is nuanced and remains highly unresolved, responses to questions about the administration's eavesdropping program varied significantly depending on how the questions were worded, underlining the importance of the effort by the White House this week to define the issue on its terms.

The poll, conducted as President Bush defended his surveillance program in the face of criticism from Democrats and some Republicans that it is illegal, found that Americans were willing to give the administration some latitude for its surveillance program if they believed it was intended to protect them. Fifty-three percent of the respondents said they supported eavesdropping without warrants "in order to reduce the threat of terrorism."

The results suggest that Americans' view of the program depends in large part on whether they perceive it as a bulwark in the fight against terrorism, as Mr. Bush has sought to cast it, or as an unnecessary and unwarranted infringement on civil liberties, as critics have said.

In one striking finding, respondents overwhelmingly supported e-mail and telephone monitoring directed at "Americans that the government is suspicious of;" they overwhelmingly opposed the same kind of surveillance if it was aimed at "ordinary Americans."

That sounds reasonable; Americans don't want the tactic used unless the government has a reasonable suspucion that at least one of the participants in the communication has a tie to terrorists. In fact, if one actually reads the study, Bush's numbers on handling terrorism have improved since the revelation last month of the NSA directive by four points (now at 52%). The Democratic attacks on the Bush administration appear to have reinforced his image as an active defender of the nation.

That is most remarkable, given the nature of the sample used by CBS and the NYT for this poll. The last two pages contain the demographic information for the poll sample, and it reveals that the Democrats got overrepresented once again in the respondents:

Republicans: 29%
Democrats: 34%
Independents: 33%
Other: 4%

That imbalance is a running feature of the NYT/CBS polls, as the data shows. ABP has more on the biases of the sampling, but the bottom line is that even with this tendency towards the left, the poll results are hardly "mixed" in the traditional sense; a majority of respondents agree with the NSA program, even when it got misrepresented in the question asked:

SPLIT HALF – ASK EITHER 62 OR 63.

62. After 9/11, President Bush authorized government wiretaps on some phone calls in the U.S. without getting court warrants, saying this was necessary in order to reduce the threat of terrorism. Do you approve or disapprove of the President doing this?

Approve Disapprove DK/NA
1/20-25/06 53 46 1

63. After 9/11, George W. Bush authorized government wiretaps on some phone calls in the U.S. without getting court warrants. Do you approve or disapprove of George W. Bush doing this?

Approve Disapprove DK/NA
1/20-25/06 46 50 3

Neither form of the question mentions two salient facts: the monitoring involved only international communications and were initiated by other evidence showing at least one of the participants had connections to terrorist organizations. Do you suppose those numbers would have been significantly different under that context? I suspect that both the NYT and CBS knows it would have been -- which is why they asked the questions above instead.

Democrats know the difference, which is why they've changed their tune subtly over the past week or so. No longer are politicians calling for impeachment, but instead amending the laws involved to put Congress in charge of the NSA effort. That won't pass Constitutional muster -- the Commander-in-Chief has to run the war, not Congress, as various cases during the Civil War decided -- but now instead of the NSA threatening civil liberties, Congress wants to take credit for the protection it has offered the nation. Expect the outrage to dissipate sometime soon.

I Know We're Forgetting Something ...

Quick quiz: when one builds a war memorial, what one subject should not be overlooked? If you answered "the war", then you're at least two steps ahead of the French designers of a D-Day memorial in Normandy. The London Times reports today that the Memorial Museum in Caen manages to mention multiculturalism, feminism, and Father Christmas, but it neglects to focus on that big armada of ships that parked itself off of the shores of Normandy in June 1944:

THE museum set up by the French authorities to commemorate the D-Day landings is struggling under a mountain of debt amid a sharp decline in the number of visitors.

The Memorial Museum in Caen, Normandy, has been accused of mismanagement for turning its back on the Second World War to concentrate on subjects from feminism to Father Christmas. In recent months the museum has focused efforts on transforming itself into a “place of reflection on the contemporary world”. ...

In 2002 the museum, which is run by Caen town council, opened a €13.72 million (£9.4 million) extension that includes sections on “the principal disorders in the world today” and the need for “eco-responsibility”. Stéphane Grimaldi, who was appointed director in October, said that it had lost €400,000 when the number of visitors fell to 400,000 from 560,000 in 2004, the 60th anniversary of D-Day.He announced cost-saving measures, including cuts to the guided tours of the D-Day landing beaches. His rescue plan includes exhibitions on Living without Petrol and on Father Christmas.

And people think that Americans have a lousy sense of history! This seems almost willfull, as if the people of Caen want to forget the sacrifices of the American, British, and Canadian forces that stormed the beaches of Normandy to liberate places like Caen from Nazi rule. That would not surprise the people who have long noted the French intelligentsia's disdain for the nations that freed them. The French people and the tourists who come to Caen have delivered their own verdict on the usurpation of the memorial to the elimination of Fortress Europe, but the Caen town council apparently hasn't listened. They continue to eliminate remembrances of D-Day in favor of politically-correct displays of can't-we-all-just-get-along foolishness.

They should be grateful, at least, that the Allies didn't hold to that philosophy in the 1940s, or they'd still be singing the Horst Wessel Song in Caen's cafes today. Perhaps that thought should occupy at least a corner of the D-Day memorial in their benighted little town.

Gore Attacks Canadians For Exercising Democracy

Former American VP Al Gore, who managed to lose a can't-miss chance for election in 2000 in part by proving too radical for his home state to support, has inexplicably decided to scold Canadians for voting out the scandal-plagued Liberals from government. In a fresh tirade yesterday, he claimed that Canadian voters got duped by "Big Oil" into allowing the minority Tory government to take power, a mystifying allegation given Canada's political-contribution limits:

Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore has accused the oil industry of financially backing the Tories and their "ultra-conservative leader" to protect its stake in Alberta's lucrative oilsands.

Canadians, Gore said, should vigilantly keep watch over prime minister-designate Stephen Harper because he has a pro-oil agenda and wants to pull out of the Kyoto accord -- an international agreement to combat climate change.

"The election in Canada was partly about the tar sands projects in Alberta," Gore said Wednesday while attending the Sundance Film Festival in Utah.

"And the financial interests behind the tar sands project poured a lot of money and support behind an ultra-conservative leader in order to win the election . . . and to protect their interests."

I doubt that Gore reads Captain's Quarters, so he is probably unaware of the reason the Tories tossed the Liberals out of office. Harper ran on tightening restrictions on political contributions to eliminate corporate donations altogether, while the entire Adscam scandal involved kickback schemes and political money-laundering on behalf of Paul Martin, Jean Chretien, and Liberal Party leadership during its twelve-year reign. Besides, in a parliamentary system, the tar sands of Alberta would hardly have political play in Ontario or the Maritimes, and since Alberta has been a Conservative power base for some time, "Big Oil" wouldn't need to spend too much anyway in getting CPC candidates elected in their ridings. (The CPC carried all of the Alberta ridings in the election.)

Why would Gore think that such an effort would go unremarked during the campaign, especially given the nastiness of the Liberal advertisements? Gore says that "media concentration" kept the truth from the Canadian people:

Gore believes the issue of the oilsands and the sway he contends the industry holds with Harper didn't garner news coverage during the election because "media concentration has taken a toll on democratic principles around the world, and Canada is no exception."

Sorry, Canada. We thought Al Gore had enough to engage his paranoia here at home. We didn't think he'd get bored enough with his conspiracy theories long enough to attack the integrity of the Canadian electoral process. Apparently, Gore never met an election he didn't detest.

UPDATE: Forgot the link to the story!

How Many Buttons Will This Story Push?

Colombian authorities have broken up a counterfeit ring that manufactured passports for al-Qaeda and Hamas terrorists, used by the lunatics to enter the United States, according to the Colombian attorney general in charge of the investigation. The first hint that the ring existed came when three Iraqis traveled to Colombia on faked Israeli passports in 2002:

Colombia has dismantled a false passport ring with links to al-Qaida and Hamas militants, the acting attorney general said Thursday after authorities led dozens of simultaneous raids across five cities.

The gang allegedly supplied an unknown number of citizens from Pakistan, Jordan,
Iraq, Egypt and other countries with false passports and Colombian nationality without them ever stepping foot in the country.

An undisclosed number of those arrested are wanted for working with the al-Qaida terror network and the militant Palestinian group Hamas, said acting Attorney General Jorge Armando Otalora.

The counterfeit Colombian, Spanish, Portugese and German passports were used to enter the United States and Europe, he said.

Three Iraqis traveled to Colombia in 2002, before our invasion, on Israeli passports supplied by al-Qaeda and Hamas. That sounds like a good indication of a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, I would think. Does anyone wonder what their final destination was, or how they planned on getting there? And does anyone else find it interesting that Hamas and al-Qaeda launched joint operations to send people to the United States back in 2002, or even earlier than that, well before we invaded Iraq? This also tends to put the Hamas victory in the Palestinian Authority elections in a new light. If they're teaming up with al-Qaeda on missions against the US, then we should treat them just the same as we do al-Qaeda, and wipe them out, regardless of their electoral status in the West Bank and Gaza.

The Colombians have identified eight suspects they believe are in the US and want extradited for prosecution. The NSA program just went from an academic exercise to a practical application. The Colombians know that at least eight people snuck through on faked passports and are now in the United States. Do you suppose that an NSA program designed to check international calls might help locate these suspects -- and perhaps help stop a planned attack on an American target? Obviously, this long-term and expensive project by the al-Qaeda/Hamas partnership has some grand mission in mind. They're not traveling to the US for their health; they want to stage new attacks on the American mainland.

How does everyone feel about that international surveillance now? Sounds like a pretty damned good idea, doesn't it?

The Massachussetts Comedy Duo Call For Filibuster

Like a couple of bad comedians who remain clueless about their timing, the Senators from Massachussetts teamed together to call for a filibuster even while two more Democrats announced their support for Samuel Alito, one of whom scolded the senior member of the comedy team for conducting an "outrage and a disgrace" in the Judiciary Committee hearings:

Leading Democrat Senators John Kerry and Ted Kennedy said they would try to block Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito by preventing a vote on him with a filibuster.

Former presidential candidate Kerry announced from Switzerland that he wanted to block President George W. Bush's conservative nominee with the stalling tactic to prevent "an ideological coup" on the high court.

"Judge Alito will take America backward, especially when it comes to civil rights and discrimination laws," Kerry said is a statement.

Kennedy, Kerry's fellow Massachusetts senator, also called for a filibuster on Alito when the Senate is called to vote, probably early next week.

"We owe it to future generations of Americans to oppose this nomination. If Judge Alito is confirmed ... the progress of half a century on the basic rights of all Americans is likely to be rolled back."

We can speculate where Kennedy may have been when he made this statement; perhaps he went for one last night at the Owl Club, a males-only organization to which he's contributed a C-note a month for the last 40+ years, or perhaps at the family compound in the oh-so-inclusive retreat of Martha's Vineyard. We don't need to speculate with Kerry, who was so enthusiastic about fighting Alito's confirmation that he dialed in his filibuster plea from Davos, Switzerland -- where Eason Jordan spent last January slandering American troops. (Apparently, Davos is the place to go when issuing character assassinations.)

Unfortunately for both of the Massachussetts Senators, the numbers game has already played itself out. Three Democrats now plan to vote for confirmation -- Robert Byrd, Bob Nelson, and Tim Johnson -- while at least two of their caucus have already warned against attempting to block the vote (Mary Landrieu and Dianne Feinstein). Even with Jeffords on board for a filibuster, that leaves only 40 Democrats, and it takes 41 to keep debate open on the Senate floor.

Did Kerry or Kennedy take math in college? Or did they just have someone else take the tests for them?

People expect hyperventilation and bloviation from Kennedy, which winds up rather Shakespearian in its effect -- full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, because Kennedy has no real influence and no more higher ambitions than simply clinging to his Senate sinecure until his last breath. Kerry, on the other hand, still suffers from delusions of being the front-runner for the 2008 presidential race. Does he think that maligning Alito's character and issuing a call for a filibuster while hanging out on the Swiss slopes, thousands of miles away from the fight, makes him look presidential? Or does it just make him look like the accidentally wealthy dilettante that he has become?

The two should take this act out on the road. It would be sure to get laughs from everyone who understands that they're serious.

Did We Mention That He's Facing Re-Election?

Senator Robert Byrd, a man whom I've often criticized, managed to get two things right today on the Senate floor -- and in doing so, demonstrated the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of his fellow Democrats in the body as a whole and especially on the Judiciary Committee. The Political Teen has the video, and Michelle Malkin has the transcript of Byrd's remarks in supporting Samuel Alito's confirmation while scolding Democrats for their outrageous conduct during his hearing:

Regardless of any Senator's particular view of Judge Alito, I think we can all agree that there is room for improvement in the way in which the Senate and indeed the nation have undertaken the examination of this nominee.

Let me be clear. I mean no criticism of the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee or any particular member of that ccommittee. I feel compelled to address this issue. Not to point fingers. Not to scold. Not to assign blame. But only to address specific, sincere, heartfelt concerns that have been brought to my attention by the people of West Virginia in particular.

The people of West Viriginia in no uncertain terms were, frankly, appalled by the Alito hearings. I don't want to say it, but I must. They were appalled. In the reams of correspondence that I received during the Alito hearings, West Virginians--the people I represent--West Virignians who wrote to criticize the way in which the hearings were conducted used the same two words. People with no connection to one another. People of different faiths. Different views. Different opinions. [They] independently and respectively used the same two words to describe the hearings. They called them called an outrage and a disgrace.

And these were not form letters ginned up by special interest groups on either the right or the left. These were hand-written, contemplative, old-fashioned letters written on lined paper and personal stationary. They were the sort of letters that people write while watching television in the comfort of their living rooms or sitting at the kitchen table. It is especially telling that many who objected to the way in which the Alito hearings were conducted do not support Judge Alito. In fact, it is sorely apparent that many who opposed Judge Alito's nomination also opposed the seemingly made-for-TV antics that accompanied the hearings ...

He may not have meant it as a particular criticism for individual Senators, but there simply is no other way to read this. While it is true that Byrd has been one of the more moderate Senators on confirmations in general -- he voted for Roberts' confirmation -- he undoubtedly (as Michelle puts it) feels the heat of the upcoming election in an increasingly conservative West Virginia. Yet Byrd could easily have addressed that by simply voting to confirm Alito and kept his mouth shut about the hearings themselves.

Byrd deserves recognition for going the extra mile to call his party to account for their mudslinging, character assassination, and perversion of the nomination/confirmation process. It doesn't make me want to endorse him, but it shows that at least one Democrat has some semblance of ethics left ... and it's pathetic that the only Democrat to speak against this McCarthyist tactic of smearing people as bigots for political gain is the former Klansman.

The Tory Test Drive

I make my return to my regular rotation in the Daily Standard this week with a look at the Canadian election and the lessons it has for politicians north of the 49th. Titled "Test Drive A Tory Today," it argues that the Canadian electorate turned out to be more intelligent, engaged, and nuanced than anyone predicted:

The thin plurality means that the Conservatives will have to work with the other three parties to pass their legislative agenda, which will force them to keep a moderate approach. Harper will have to convince Layton or Gilles Duceppe of the BQ to support the creation of any new programs or the curtailment of existing ones before attempting to push his budget and policies through Parliament. His only alternative will be to work directly with the new Liberal leadership by broad consensus. Either way, the scare-mongering of Liberal electioneering will not come to pass; there will be no dismantling of the national health-care system, nor will Canadian troops be parachuting into Baghdad by March.

On the other hand, Harper's government will be capable of incremental changes. Canada is not likely join the United States in Iraq, but Harper will prove a closer partner in the war on terror and in tightening immigration in North America. He may also reverse the reversal of Paul Martin and entertain a Canadian partnership in missile defense. The Tories won't pass any corporate giveaways but they will be looking to cut taxes with the unpopular GST a likely starting point. They will also focus on fulfilling election promises, a child-care initiative among them. Most worrisome for the Liberals will be the ability of the new government to investigate the worst excesses of the old, but the split in Commons will prevent a wholesale dumping of the Ottawa bureaucracy overnight.

In the long run, I think that the minority government works best for Harper and the Tories. It allows them to control the most extreme elements of their party while building credibility with Canadians for a longer run at governing. Had they won a majority, the party may have been tempted to push through too much change at once, creating a political backlash among the electorate. Having to take their reforms slowly and selecting them with care will serve them better in bringing more and more voters into the tent with them, and eventually could result in a much stronger and longer-lived Tory mandate.

We shall soon see. The installation of the new government should take place within the next fortnight or so.

Beware The Iranian Stall Tactic

The Iranians have shown renewed interest in the Russian proposal to enrich their uranium for civilian-power potential, a proposal the Islamic Republic rejected late last year. The New York Times reports that Iranian negotiators now say that the proposal is "positive" and want to explore it further. However, the negotiations will only take place after the next IAEA meeting, in which Iran warned that any action to refer the standoff to the UN will end any consideration of the Russian proposal:

Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, said here on Wednesday that he welcomed a Russian proposal to defuse the confrontation between Iran and the West over its nuclear programs by establishing a joint venture to enrich uranium in Russia. But he indicated that no agreement had been reached and that significant details remained to be negotiated.

"Our attitude to the proposal is positive," Mr. Larijani, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, said after meeting with his Russian counterpart, Igor S. Ivanov, Russian news agencies reported. "We tried to bring the positions of the two sides closer."

At the same time, he warned that Iran would begin enriching uranium on an industrial scale if its nuclear program was referred to the United Nations Security Council. His remarks came a day after Mr. Larijani and Mr. Ivanov said the confrontation should be resolved at the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose governors are scheduled to meet next week.

The Iranians have never mastered the art of subtlety, as shown by their latest threat to put Israel into an "eternal coma" if the IDF attacks Iranian nuclear sites, a crude reference to Ariel Sharon's medical condition. This latest gambit with the Russians is nothing more than a stupidly transparent and childish stalling tactic. If you refer us to the UN, then we won't think "positively" about the Russians doing our enrichment! After years of lying about their program, they expect people to take this seriously?

What they want is to have the IAEA bite and give them another six months or so to explore this Russian proposal. During that time, they will continue with their own enrichment while the West dances around, waiting for Teheran to make a decision. Of course, they will find some reason to reject it in the end, at which point the IAEA will once again take up the question of referral ... when Iran will suddenly find some other moderate position to be "positive" and ask for more time to consider adopting it. And it will then expect the entire cycle to start over again, and again, and again, until they finally develop enough weapons-grade fissile material to top a few of the Shahab-3 missiles with active nukes.

Pardon the obvious pun, but this isn't exactly rocket science. Any parent whose child has a game station has to play this negotiation out at every bedtime. Until the parent finally takes the game away from the child, the negotiations never end until the game gets fully played out -- and in this case, that "game" would put nuclear weapons in the hands of radical Islamists with well-established links to terror groups. It's time for the grown-ups to take charge of the negotiations and start getting tough with the Iranians before that happens.

Welcome To War

Exit polling turned out to be optimistic for the now-defunct Palestinian Authority, dominated by Fatah since its founding by Yasser Arafat. The supposedly reformed terrorist kept the government as a sinecure for his PLO comrades, and made sure that any elections held in the occupied territories only served to confirm his power and that of his faction, Fatah.

Those days are over. Hamas has won a majority in yesterday's election, taking perhaps as many as 80 seats in the new Parliament, and claiming a mandate for its insistence on armed conflict with Israel:

Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei has announced his resignation, saying Hamas must form the next government following the parliamentary elections. ...

Hours before official results were due to be released, Fatah officials privately admitted that Hamas had won.

Hamas claimed it had won at least 70 seats in the 132-member parliament, while EU election observer Richard Howitt told the BBC he had been informed that Hamas could have won up to 80 seats. ...

Another Hamas official, Mushir al-Masri, warned that Hamas would not hold peace talks with Israel. "Negotiations with Israel is not on our agenda," he said. "Recognising Israel is not on the agenda either now."

Unless someone can show widespread voter fraud on behalf of Hamas, the Palestinians should be judged by the choices they have made this week. They have chosen war and the annihilation of Israel over the two-state solution favored publicly (if not fervently) by Fatah. Europe and the United States need to wake up from their delusional dreamland of a situation where both sides in this conflict want a peaceful conclusion and a world without hatred for their children and grandchildren. Clearly, the Palestinians want war, and they have made no secret of using their children and grandchildren as bomb fuses in order to perpetuate it.

The first item on our list should be an absolute end to all aid to the Palestinian territories and government. The US should not subsidize Hamas, nor should it give money to a people whose only aim appears to be genocide. Second, the US should allow Israel to respond militarily to any and all provocations -- no more pressure from Washington on Tel Aviv to moderate their responses to suicide bombings and missile attacks. And if Hamas and the Palestinians still want to wage war after that, then let the IDF roll across the West Bank and Gaza Strip and push the whole lot of them right into the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. That's what total war means, and as soon as the world stops preventing the Palestinians from the risks of their own choices, the sooner they will conclude that war is the worst possible choice for them.

The Return Of Raese

John Raese officially announced his return to electoral politics tonight, almost twenty years after his last effort to unseat a corrupt GOP governor in a primary, to take on Robert Byrd's re-election campaign for the Senate:

A multimillionaire businessman entered the GOP race to challenge Sen. Robert C. Byrd on Wednesday, hoping to deny the 88-year-old incumbent Democrat a record ninth term.

John Raese, 55, said he would campaign on a platform touting free enterprise and reduced regulation, among other issues. "What I'm going to run on is a rebirth of capitalism," he said.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee heralded the filing by Raese, a former state GOP chairman who has sought office before.

Raese, in fact, sought office in 1984 by squaring off against Byrd's colleague Jay Rockefeller for what was then an open Senate seat. Rockefeller outspent Raese 6-1 and wound up winning by a whisker over the young Reaganite. Raese then became state GOP chairman and a favorite of the Reagan administration. He allegedly found out about a criminal investigation involving then-Governor Arch Moore in 1986 from sources within the Reagan DoJ and decided to run against Moore in an attempt to keep the office in the GOP and to limit the damage to the state party. He narrowly lost to Moore in 1988, who won the primary but lost the general election -- and then found himself under indictment. He wound up doing a stretch in Club Fed, while Raese returned to the private sector.

Now, with Shelley Moore Capito (Arch Moore's daughter) out of the Senate race, Raese has apparently decided to come back for one more attempt at politics. His Reagan-brand Republicanism has a much broader appeal in West Virginia than it did twenty years ago, and he still has a coterie of fans who want to see him win office. He will have to make the GOP choose between his renewed interest and the candidacy of current GOP activist Hiram Lewis. Lewis has already attracted support for his status as a Iraq Wae veteran. The two GOP candidates will need to make some arrangement to avoid damaging each other in the primaries if either one of them wants to beat Robert Byrd in the general election. He may appear vulnerable with the renewed strength of the Republicans, but sentiment will be strong to give him a final tour of the Senate and the record for longest tenure.

Palestinians Split Vote Between Terrorist Organizations

It's not like the Palestinians gave themselves much in the way of choice for their first Parliamentary elections in ten years, but in a surprise, the hardline Hamas terrorists took a bigger slice of the vote from the more moderate terrorists of Fatah in today's vote. Exit polling shows that Hamas will likely trail Fatah by a handful of seats in the new assembly, forcing the new government into the uncomfortable position of adding Hamas to its cabinet when most peacebrokers consider them part of the problem:

Hamas fared better than expected in Palestinian elections Wednesday, exit polls showed, raising the prospect that the ruling Fatah Party might be forced to form a coalition with the Islamic militant group that calls for Israel's destruction. The outcome could put Mideast peacekeeping at risk.

Fatah had said before the first parliamentary contest in a decade that it would rather team with small parties than join forces with Hamas, which has carried out dozens of terror attacks against the Jewish state and whose presence in the government would likely cause friction with Israel, the U.S. and Europe.

But with the militants making a strong showing in their first legislative run, Fatah would need the backing of an array of smaller parties to cobble together a government. Because some of the smaller parties have ties with Hamas, Fatah might not be able to court enough of them to form a coalition firm enough to survive the Palestinians' domestic challenges — and face Israel again at the negotiating table.

Once again, in a fairly free and somewhat honest vote, the Palestinians have chosen to continue waging war against Israel. Abbas wants to argue that Hamas will tame itself if it gets a chance to share governance with Fatah is sheer folly. This isn't the Sunnis in Iraq, who may resent the loss of influence and power with the fall of Saddam but have followed the movement towards democracy. Hamas formed out of a singular hatred and philosophical determination to annihilate Israel, and giving them power only hands them better weapons with which to carry out those aims.

The powers that work to impose a peace on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have failed to take into account that the Palestinians have shown over and over again that they not only do not want peace, they do not value peace at all. They have consistently voted in support of terrorist organizations. Peace-espousing political parties play no role in Palestinian electoral efforts. Certainly Fatah doesn't qualify as such; their own Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade conducted nearly as many terrorist raids as Islamic Jihad under Yasser Arafat and now attack their own leaders for not being amenable enough to killing Israelis in pizzerias and bus stops. Until the world gets over the notion that peace can exist when one side wants nothing more than all-out war, the situation in Southwest Asia will forever be in a state of suspension.

Perhaps this election will finally convince the United States, if not Europe and Russia, of the folly of continued efforts on "road maps" and the like. Gaza showed that Fatah cannot govern a state, and the West Bank just elected bloodthirsty terrorists almost to a Parliamentary majority. These people want war. They will not settle for half the land when they believe a war will bring them all of it. In the end, it may be better for the world to let the two sides fight their war in order to make them both sick enough of the consequences to start selecting leaders that want peace and plan for it. If all the Palestinians understand is death and martyrdom, then let them have their fill of both.

Democrats Catching Up To Hillary's Negatives (Updated And Bumped)

Hillary Clinton may cruise to re-election for the Senate in New York, but the Democrats have grown increasingly nervous about the prospect of her run for the Presidency in 2008. The New York Sun reports that internal and external polling show that Clinton faces a hostile electorate, particularly in the South and Midwest, and would lose against most Republicans despite her predicted strength in the primaries:

Senator Clinton's emergence as the early and perhaps prohibitive favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 is fueling anxiety among Democratic strategists and operatives who are worried she would lose to a Republican in the general election.

Recent polling underscores some of those worries. In a CNN/USA Today/ Gallup poll made public yesterday, 51% of voters said they would definitely not vote for Mrs. Clinton if she chooses to run for president in 2008. In a separate nationwide poll conducted this month for a spirits company, Diageo, and a political newsletter, the Hotline, 44% of all voters and 19% of self-described Democrats said they viewed the New York senator unfavorably.

According to Democratic Party insiders, such numbers are adding to skittishness about Mrs. Clinton's potential candidacy. ... A former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, Richard Harpootlian, is among those who will own up to such misgivings. "Mrs. Clinton, because of some positions she has taken over the years, gets a visceral reaction to her here, both negative and positive. I'm afraid around the South and Midwest the visceral reaction is not good," he told The New York Sun.

Part of this skittishness, as one person put it, has been the relentless partisan nastiness that the Democrats have exhibited throughout the Bush presidency. Even Leon Panetta admits that the negatives surrounding Hillary have something to do with the "bitter political fighting" and a continuation of "hate" politics. Had the Democrats settled into the traditional role of the loyal opposition, eschewing character assassination and instead offering coherent alternative strategies and legislative choices, the political temperature would have declined to a point where the nastiness both sides displayed during the Clinton's term would have faded to dull memory.

Instead, the Democrats -- especially in the Senate, where they have done everything possible to obstruct the Bush administration -- have done little except act like petulant children. Nowhere has that been displayed more prominently than in the Judiciary Committee hearings on judicial nominees such as William Pryor, Janice Rogers Brown, and now most of all Samuel Alito. All of them have faced smear campaigns of the worst order, character assassinations led by a triumvirate of Democrats who during their political careers plagiarized speeches, employed staff that stole an opponent's credit report and publicized it, and abandoned a young woman to drown in his back seat after a car accident. It has provided the American electorate a constant reminder of the slimy ethics of the Clinton era and a strong desire to put as much distance as possible between them and a return to that kind of governance.

Most amazing, one of the smears against Alito was bigotry. Can anyone tell me what besides conservatism these three judicial candidates have in common? First one correct in the comments gets the kewpie doll.

If the Democrats want their front-runner to stand a chance in the election, perhaps they should consider that their actions while out of power have hardly acted to convince anyone that they deserve to return to running the show. They need to govern themselves before we trust them to govern us.

UPDATE: Here's the Gallup numbers. Gallup compares the response to Hillary to that generated by Condoleezza Rice, and it turns out that Rice winds up only slightly less polarizing than Hillary. She gets a 46% absolutely-not response from registered voters in Gallup's poll, as opposed to the 51% for Hillary. That seems rather remarkable, considering that Rice has never really campaigned or talked about her position on issues other than foreign policy, where one presumes she supports Bush's goals. Clinton has spent the last fourteen years playing hardball politics.

What's even more remarkable is that her long history of working the stump only translates to 16% strongly supporting her. Rice's lack of history in electoral politics should have put her far behind a seasoned politician like Hillary for passionate believers, and yet she polls within two points (14%) without ever having run for office before.

A Tribute To Ground State

... who selected the perfect icon for his link to Hugh Hewitt. A man with his excellent taste belongs on my blogroll -- so now he's there.

Keith, in case you missed it, this one's for you from the CQ archives:

I still think that the colors suit Hugh much better than that dingy orange/brown combination that looks like a reject from James Lilek's Interior Desecrations ...

Coleman, The Cat Who Laughed Last

Somewhere in Washington, Senator Norm Coleman has the satisfaction of the last laugh. After the Left proclaimed George Galloway the winner in his appearance before Coleman's investigative committee on the UN Oil-for-Food scandal -- mostly because Galloway was rude and arrogant, two popular qualities among the MoveOn crowd -- Coleman patiently got Galloway to lie on record and under oath, ensuring that a case could be built against him for fraud and conspiracy. The Guardian (UK) reports today that the other shoe will drop in the next few days on the other side of the pond:

George Galloway faces the prospect of a criminal investigation into his activities by the serious fraud office, which has collected evidence relating to the oil-for-food corruption scandal in Iraq.

A four-strong SFO team returned from Washington with what a source close to US investigators calls "thousands of documents" about the scandal. The team is expected to produce, within the next four weeks, a report for the SFO director, Robert Wardle, as to whether a full criminal investigation should be mounted into UK individuals and companies involved, including Mr Galloway, the Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow.

The SFO is following up two official reports published before Christmas in Washington, which detailed banking evidence that Mr Galloway's wife and his political campaign organisation both received large sums from Saddam Hussein, laundered through under-the-counter oil allocations.

Mr Galloway is unaware of the SFO's activities. He is in the Channel 4 TV show Celebrity Big Brother and cut off from outside contact. He is expected to be evicted from the Big Brother house tonight.

Galloway way pull off quite a feat; he might go from the Big Brother house to the big house in a short period of time.

The Guardian also reports that the Telegraph may use the information to appeal its latest loss on Galloway's libel case against them to the Lords, and that the Washington investigation may soon force Parliament to reopen its review of Galloway's ethics as a member of the Commons.

Galloway may believe that he won some sort of battle against his critics and the Bush administration by appearing before Congress and bluffing his way through questioning by responding with lies and accusations, but in the end all he proved was that politicians who break the law act exactly like ... anyone else who breaks the law. Some people were just dumb enough to fall for his act.

Europe Finds Nothing But What It Reads In The Papers

An investigative panel researching the supposed "rendition centers" in Europe alleged by American newspapers has turned up no evidence of their existence -- but still filed a report consisting of newspaper clippings from the US to support continuing their efforts, a report that even Europe couldn't countenance:

An inquiry by the Council of Europe into allegations that the C.I.A. has operated secret detention centers in Eastern Europe has turned up no evidence that such centers ever existed, though the leader of the inquiry, Dick Marty, said there are enough "indications" to justify continuing the investigation.

The report added, however, that it was "highly unlikely" that European governments were unaware of the American program of renditions, in which terrorism suspects were either seized in or transferred through Europe to third countries where they may have been tortured. Drawing from news reports, Mr. Marty contended that "more than a hundred" detainees have been moved anonymously and illegally through Europe under the program.

The findings, delivered to the Council on Tuesday, drew scornful reactions from some representatives of the Council's 46 member states, particularly from the British, who called the interim report "as full of holes as Swiss cheese" and "clouded in myth and motivated by a desire to kick America."

What did Marty hand in as his homework assignment? Not much besides "a compendium of newspaper clippings," the New York Times reports in its article. Marty uses them to argue that the Washington Post, ABC, and Human Rights Watch information came from different sources, but apparently has no evidence to back up that claim. The number of detainees Marty alleges passed through Europe comes from a Die Zeit article.

At best, Marty has made himself and his investigation an incredibly expensive clipping service or perhaps a publicity agency, but as an investigator he leaves a lot to be desired. When he finds solid evidence of such detention centers, he should present them, but an independent investigator should restrain himself from advocating for a particular point of view without having any evidence.

UN Peacekeeping Via The Murtha Method, Part II

The United Nations adopted the Jack Murtha method of peacekeeping deployment in Congo today, evacuating its troops after having several of them killed in a gunbattle with Ugandan rebels. The reason the UN gave for withdrawing the peacekeepers? They couldn't find the rebels, even though the rebels had found them easily enough:

The United Nations pulled its remaining peacekeepers out of the national park where eight Guatemalan peacekeepers were killed in an apparent gunbattle with Ugandan rebels, a U.N. spokesman said Tuesday.

Hans-Jakob Reichen, U.N. military spokesman for eastern Congo, said the peacekeepers were withdrawn because they had completed a two-week mission to clear Garamba National Park of rebel forces. "It was decided to pull peacekeepers out of the park since any suspected rebels had melted into the jungle," Reichen said. ...

The 105-strong special forces contingent of Guatemalan peacekeepers was added to the 16,000-strong U.N. mission in Congo because of the Guatemalans' extensive experience fighting in wet, equatorial forests and hilly terrain, the U.N. official said.

It would be difficult for the Guatemalans to find the rebels while busily retreating -- er, redeploying to a strategic event horizon. I'm sure the rebels understand that the UN's sudden absense means that they must not venture back into Garamba National Park, or the UN will certainly send them back ... unless someone actually fires a gun somewhere.

Bear this in mind when people talk about how we can still protect Iraq by allowing the UN to take over our mission. Turtle Bay did the exact same thing in 2003 when it skedaddled out of Baghdad after one bombing, and that at the hands of the ex-Baathists it insisted on hiring for security instead of accepting the American offer to provide security at their compound instead. When Brent Scowcroft and others insist that the UN is the only entity with the moral standing to enforce a cease-fire, we can now add Garamba National Park to the military actions that demonstrate their competency, along with Srebrenica, Rwanda, and a host of other routs as an answer.

Hell No, I Won't Show ... Support

Several members of the CQ community, as well as Hugh Hewitt, Michelle Malkin, and Glenn Reynolds, noted a most unfunny column by "humorist" Joel Stein in today's Los Angeles Times. Titled "Warriors and Wusses", Stein uses his column inches to announce that his support for Americans who serve in the armed forces only extends to the political correctness of their mission:

I do sympathize with people who joined up to protect our country, especially after 9/11, and were tricked into fighting in Iraq. I get mad when I'm tricked into clicking on a pop-up ad, so I can only imagine how they feel.

But when you volunteer for the U.S. military, you pretty much know you're not going to be fending off invasions from Mexico and Canada. So you're willingly signing up to be a fighting tool of American imperialism, for better or worse. Sometimes you get lucky and get to fight ethnic genocide in Kosovo, but other times it's Vietnam.

Hugh and Michelle and plenty of others in the blogosphere have already weighed in on the moral abdication of such a position, along with its smarmy undercurrent of intellectual snobbery. Hugh absolutely destroyed Stein in his interview this evening, which I caught on the way home.

I will remind Stein and the Left that these men and women elect, as free citizens, to join the armed services of their own free will to protect all of us, regardless of partisan standing or philosophical bent. They follow the orders of their duly elected Commander-in-Chief, as authorized by Congress and organized by the officers commissioned under the Constitution. If one has a problem with the direction given to these men and women, take it up at the ballot box. We have an open and free society that allows for the peaceful transfer of power over the military by popular vote. If you find that your viewpoint does not get shared by a voting majority, don't blame the soldier for the lack of appeal that your partisans had in the election.

Supporting the troops really just means that you appreciate that they stand ready to carry out the policies of the United States in defense of our freedom and liberty, as expressed in the policies of our elected government. That has no bearing on any particular mission or enterprise, but instead comes from the sacrifice offered by our fellow citizens in uniform to give their lives so that we may remain free -- free to select our own leaders, free to write blogs, free to disagree with each other ... and in Stein's case, free to make an ass of himself by writing one of the most ill-conceived pieces of tripe published in a major media outlet.

If you can't even give the men and women in uniform that much consideration, then just consider keeping your mouth shut. It will serve you best in the long run.

Dionne Comes Close To The Answer

The Washington Post's E. J. Dionne comes close to unlocking the mystery of Democratic incompetence in dealing with Republican electoral strategy. Dionne notes that Karl Rove, the GOP's master of electoral politics since 2000, has always shown a rather remarkable openness and honesty about how the Republicans plan to handle the electoral battle, and the Democrats have never come up with an answer:

Perhaps it's an aspect of compassionate conservatism. Or maybe it's just a taunt and a dare. Well in advance of Election Day, Karl Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, has a habit of laying out his party's main themes, talking points and strategies.

True Rove junkies (admirers and adversaries alike) always figure he's holding back on something and wonder what formula the mad scientist is cooking up in his political lab. But there is a beguiling openness about Rove's divisive and ideological approach to elections. You wonder why Democrats have never been able to take full advantage of their early look at the Rove game plan.

That's especially puzzling because, since Sept. 11, 2001, the plan has focused on one variation or another of the same theme: Republicans are tough on our enemies, Democrats are not. If you don't want to get blown up, vote Republican.

Dionne then takes us through a thumbnail history of Democratic failures for electoral themes, a hilarious ride through complaints about an economy that turned out to be one of the strongest in history, education, and a "patients' bill of rights", a deranged priority set during wartime. Dionne gets it right when he says the big failure comes from an aversion to directly engaging the Republicans on the war.

However, the missing ingredient is that Democrats have a bigger problem than lacking a coherent theme; they've lacked a coherent program, especially on national security. Nowhere does that come across more than in the divergent approaches to Iran and Iraq. For three years, Democrats have screamed that the Bush administration has taken a "unilateral" approach to Iraq and trashed our relationship with European allies -- despite trying for five months to get them to enforce 12 years worth of useless UN resolutions. Suddenly with Iran, the Democratic front-runner claims that allowing Europe a significant role in negotiations amounts to "outsourcing" America's responsibilities, and they scream that George Bush hasn't been unilateral enough.

For that matter, the NSA program gives voters another stiff neck from the Pong Game Of Politics that Democrats have employed. Sice 9/11, Democrats have sought to blame the Bush administration for being asleep at the switch before 9/11 and dragging their feet afterwards in protecting the country from further attack. However, when the New York Times revealed this program that the administration put into place -- and about which they kept key Democrats fully briefed continuously since -- all of a sudden they start screaming about personal privacy, when most Americans worry about stopping the next al-Qaeda attack. The most vocal start threatening impeachment when many people start feeling relieved that the attack-free period following 9/11 doesn't appear to have been a mere fluke after all.

Dionne has a good start on the problem, but misses the cause. Until the Democrats start coming up with a coherent plan for national security, they will remain locked out of power no matter how many "themes" they dream up.

Bush Offered Blair An Out For Iraq

George Bush offered Tony Blair a pass on participating in the invasion and liberation of Iraq, afraid of the political effect it would have on the British PM's stability, Bush revealed yesterday in a speech at Kansas State University. The London Telegraph reports on Bush's statement for the benefit of British voters:

President George W Bush has revealed he offered Tony Blair the chance not go to war in Iraq, but the Prime Minister turned it down.

Mr Bush said he made the offer amid concerns about the stability of the Labour Government in the months before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

"He [Blair] was worried about his Government and so was I, and I told him one time, 'I don't want your Government to fall, and if you're worried about it just go ahead and pull out of the coalition so you save your Government'," said Mr Bush.

"And he said to me, 'I have made my commitment on behalf of the great country of Britain and I'm not changing my mind'.

"He said, 'I'm not interested in politics, what I'm interested in is doing the right thing.'

It's an admirable anecdote that shows Blair as a stalwart advocate for the liberation of the oppressed Iraqi people, but perhaps a story that might have some less-than-pleasant ramifications for Blair back home. He has been ridiculed as Bush's "poodle" in the European press. This development might earn him more respect as his own man in terms of policy but burden him with more of the political opposition to the war itself ... if that's possible.

The revelation came from the new effort by the White House to push the exposed NSA program as an asset for the war on terror and a program that has to be continued as a critical part of the national defense. In his presentation, Bush and Gen. Michael Hayden laid out their explanation of the program and the efforts made to ensure that the intercepts only dealt with international calls involving suspected terrorists:

Mr. Bush, for the first time, called his decision to authorize the interceptions part of a "terrorist surveillance program," a phrase meant to convey that only members of Al Qaeda and their associates were falling into the net of the security agency. General Hayden took issue with many news reports that have referred to a "domestic spying" program. Saying the program is not really domestic in nature, he emphasized that it was limited to calls and e-mail in which one end of the communication was outside the United States and which "we have a reasonable basis to believe involve Al Qaeda or one of its affiliates."

At the same time, General Hayden acknowledged that some purely domestic communications might be accidentally intercepted. The New York Times reported last month that this appeared to have happened in a small number of cases because of the difficulties posed by globalized communications in determining whether a phone call or e-mail message was truly "international."

"If there were ever an anomaly, and we discovered that there had been an inadvertent intercept of a domestic-to-domestic call, that intercept would be destroyed and not reported," General Hayden said.

Thanks to the NYT, we now have the ridiculous spectacle of a wartime President going on the road, having to sell the idea that gathering intelligence about terrorist cells in the United States is within his authority -- when we just had a Congressional commission complain that both this and the previous administration didn't do enough to gather intelligence on domestic terror cells to prevent 9/11. The Democrats used that to attack the President during the last election, and now they want to attack him for protecting America in the next election.

If that strategy sounds like winner, one has to have "Dean" as a surname.

Wild Night

I want to thank all of the CQ readers, the regulars and the first-timers, who hung in there last night through the election results. We had our biggest live-blog event ever, not surprising for those who have come to know the Canadians as anything but politically apathetic. That misjudgment should disappear forever, especially if one looks at my Sitemeter stats. We had over 115,000 unique visits yesterday and over 130,000 page views, mostly between 6 pm to midnight.

That made for some pretty slow load times, particularly in the first two hours. I saw that Hosting Matters had to do some quick work in getting the network to respond to the traffic flow. CQ shares a server with other blogs, and I could see a few HM-hosted sites start to have problems due to our traffic. (I had time to look at that because I couldn't pull up my own site about half the time!) As they always do, HM found a solution quickly and freed up the bandwidth to let the traffic flow.

I hope everyone enjoyed the live blog as much as I enjoyed providing it. Thanks to all of those who linked to me last night, and a big thanks to the anonymous few who provided me the details that Canada had banned from its citizens. One day, both major North American governments may stop treating their citizens like children, but only when those citizens demand an end to parental government handouts. I think Canada took a major step in that direction last night, which is one of the reasons why live-blogging the historical election turned out to be such a remarkable experience.

Harper Calls For Unity, Martin Quits

The first consequences of Canada's major political realignment came within minutes of the polls giving their final numbers as the two major party leaders gave their valedictory speeches for the 2006 election. Stephen Harper, the triumphant Tory, called on Canada's political parties to unite for the good of the country, while outgoing Prime Minister Paul Martin quit his post as party leader, avoiding an almost certain dismissal by the losing Liberals:

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, Canada's next prime minister, pledged to work with all parties in the next Parliament after Canadians elected a Tory minority government Monday, ending a 12-year reign of Liberal rule.

"Tonight friends, our great country has voted for change. And Canadians have asked our party to take the lead in delivering that change," Harper told his supporters in Calgary.

Harper acknowledged that Canadians have not given any one party a majority and have asked all parties to work together.

Martin won his riding in Quebec but saw ten others shift to the Conservatives, the first time in a generation that the right has carried any seats in the troubled province. Harper, commentators speculated, discovered the "secret code" for unlocking Qebecois support and not only took seats from the Liberals but racked up an impressive slice of the vote. BQ retained its seat total but wound up far below 50% of the popular vote, only outpollling the Tories by 42%-24%, an impressive result for Harper. Martin resigned as party leader after the national debacle:

Liberal Leader Paul Martin won't lead his party into another election, he said early Tuesday morning as he conceded that Stephen Harper's Conservatives had won Monday's general election.

"I will always be at the service of the party," he added in a speech to a crowd of emotional supporters in his Montreal riding of Lasalle-Émard. "The Canada we want is one very much worth fighting for."

He also said he will remain the Liberal MP in the riding, which he has represented for five terms.

"When I think about it, 17 years is a long time, and you have stood by me," Martin said.

The Liberals were fortunate to have retained over 100 seats in the new Commons and only trail the Tories 124-103. Conservatives made gains in almost every province except Prince Edward Island. They did especially well in rural ridings, but did not make much of a dent in the cities, as CBC noted late in its broadcast. In the cities, NDP did well, picking a few ridings off of the Liberals, but for the most part the Grits hung onto what they had in those contests.

Stephen Harper should be sworn into office within the next two weeks, and the new era of Tory leadership will begin. Canadian voters have given Harper a rather limited mandate, a test period where they expect the Conservatives to prove that they can lead from the center-right, maintaining the economic success of the last few years while cleaning up and streamlining the excesses of the Liberal government. If successful, the voters might reward Harper and his party with a majority government down the road -- but until then, Harper will have to keep his diplomatic skills trained on the Commons.

Canadian Election Live Blog

6:30 - I'm off to a late start, thanks to a last-moment emergency at work. Now that I'm home, the First Mate has me fixed up with dinner and I'll be eating while blogging. (Excuse typos for a while, IOW.) We're still two hours ahead of poll closings in Canada, and I'm a bit behind on my e-mail. C-SPAN 2 will have Canadian TV coverage at 8:30 CT. CTV has their explanation of the publication ban already posted.

I'll be back in a few ...

6:58 - It looks like the first results are starting to come in. I'm trying to make sense of the data I'm seeing, but it looks like the first handful of ridings that can be called are going to the Liberals more than the Tories. They're leading in 15 ridings and four of those look solid enough to call, while the the Conservatives lead in 5 and 3 can be called. I'm missing the geography involved at the moment, but it looks like the Tories should get a move on ...

7:15 - Sorry for the delay. The numbers I'm seeing are for the Maritimes. It looks like the overall Liberal vote there is edging the Tories, 42.9% - 39.7%, with NDP at 15.8%. Ipsos had the Tories ahead by 2 points a couple of days ago, but having them run this closely is a pretty good development so far. I'm checking some other numbers right now ...

7:30 - Whew. I'm having a hell of a time updating posts here, but that's a great problem to have when you're blogging. So far, the Maritimes look like a Liberal stronghold again; they have 19 ridings to 10 for the Tories and 3 for the NDP. Holding their seats thus far are Andy Scott (L), Scott Brison (L), Loyola Hearn (C); Andy Savoie (L) looks to be losing in NB, and Paul Zed having a tough time but staying above water in Saint John.

Comments may not be functioning due to the traffic levels. Be patient and keep trying!

7:35 - Thanks to CQ reader Norman D who reminds me that "Maritimes" does not refer to Newfoundland. I believe the results we're seeing are from all four provinces in the Atlantic, which is a more accurate way to portray them.

7:53 - It looks like the Tories may have picked up a couple of seats in the Atlantic, but probably no more than that. The Conservatives will look for bigger gains elsewhere anyway. I don't think anyone expected a big turnaround for Tory fortunes in the Atlantic, but the polling there shows that Ipsos may have been off in its projections.

8:11 - Quebec and Ontario results will start coming through shortly ... It looks like the Grits lost a few seats, perhaps as many as three., in the Atlantic. Two have gone to the Conservatives.

8:16 - Right now the Atlantic looks like this: Libs - 19, CPC - 11, NDP - 3.

8:21 - Hmm, I'm having an easier time updating for the moment. I should note that Newsbeat1, Small Dead Animals, and Steve Janke have been very helpful in my efforts to keep up with the latest in Canadian news, and I would be seriously remiss if I didn't thank them tonight.

8:39 - Libs - 20, CPC - 11, NDP - 4, B - 1.

8:43 - C-SPAN has the results coming through now. They have Libs leading 40 to 16 for CPC, but that's mostly in the east.

8:47 - Now they have some other numbers flying in. L-43, C-24, N-9, B-4.

8:53 - With the prairies and Ontario reporting now, it's almost evened up. 56-55 Libs-CPC. Now it's 56-all!

8:57 - Here's an interesting development; early polling shows the Tories leading in seven Quebec ridings! They're leading in 32 Ontario ridings as well, to the Libs 40. Nationally, they lead the Libs 82-69 for the moment.

9:03 - Ralph Goodale, the embattled Finance Minister involved in the insider-trading scandal, has been projected the winner in his riding. He joins Scott Brison and Peter MacKay as holds for the moment ... 95-87 C-L at the moment.

9:10 - Michelle says that people still are having trouble hitting the site. We're getting some huge traffic here, so please be patient.

9:11 - The CBC has called the election for Harper and the Conservatives, but in a minority. That's about what we figured earlier, too. However, one very surprising result has come out of Quebec, where so far the CPC has gotten about 31% of the vote -- and the Liberals have almost disappeared. A huge development, and one that will probably force BQ to move closer to the CPC.

9:20 - Right now, with the west still largely silent, the Tories lead 110-88, and they picked up 16 seats so far in Ontario. To me, this looks like a possible CPC majority win, not just a minority.

9:26 - It looks like the Tories took 10 ridings in Quebec, all in rural areas, but that's 10 more than they had before.

9:33 -- No, the minority call is the right one, my math was off. I was enjoying the First Mate's fruit salad a little too much to concentrate properly. Right now with 20 ridings left to hear from, we're still at 115 Tory, 99 Grits.

9:39 - Right now I'd say that the Tories will wind up with about 25 more seats than the Liberals when all is said and done, maybe a couple less. Based on the polls done before the election, that's a better showing than I expected for the Liberals, but there is still no doubt that tonight has been a debacle for Martin and his party. How they could allow the Tories to outpoll them by such a wide margin in Quebec will be the big question of this election. The CPC has taken 36.3% share of the vote, about 5 points up on the Liberals, which is about where SES Research had the election.

9:51 - Tony Valeri lost his seat to the NDP in Ontario, where it looks like Layton may have picked up as many as 5 seats at the expense of the Liberals.

9:58 - It looks like Belinda Stronach will return to Parliament.

10:01 - Alberta brought in all 28 ridings for the CPC, which means the Liberals lost their only two seats in this province.

10:07 - The numbers have been pretty steady for the last ten to fifteen minutes, 123-102 Tories to Libs. It moves one to two seats each way every couple of moments, but it looks like that's the spread we'll see. How galling it will be to Paul Martin that losing his grip on Quebec made the difference in this election -- that was a potential 20-seat swing.

10:18 - So much for the winter-election effect; the turnout will wind up being higher this time than in 2004, according to the CBC.

10:29 - Stronach offers her victory speech for Newmarket-Aurora Liberals. "I love you all," she tells her staff, and then she thanks the Liberal Party for working "tirelessly" for her. I wonder if that will prove comforting when she crosses the aisle again to try to join the new Cabinet.

10:48 - Getting slower updates now, or the changes have come slower, at least. Still 123-104, Tories over Grits. The best description of the minority government win comes from Diana Ablonczy, the Tory winner: "Canadians decided that they wanted a change, but they want to take the Conservatives for a test drive, and we're happy with that."

10:50 - The CBC asks Stronach about crossing the aisle to support a losing cause, and Stronach says that one can't go wrong when following one's heart. I wonder if Peter MacKay has anything to say about that comment.

11:37 - It looks like the split will be 124-103 Tories, with BQ getting 51 and 29 going to the NDP. Jack Layton is congratulating the crowd. The NDP wound up increasing their representation by a half-dozen ridings, a bit fewer than we first thought, but still an impressive showing. The Tories took a six-point lead in the overall voting, a bit less than predicted, but right about what SES Research showed in its final polling. Both parties will wind up with bragging rights tonight, and the Liberals and BQ will have to ask themselves what happened. Paul Martin, the answer for the Libs, will not last much longer as leader of the Grits when that question gets answered.

Congratulations to the Tories, and to Canada, which showed how a national election should be held.

Leftists Against Free Speech And Dialogue

One of the least-welcome developments of the Internet has been the rise of e-graffiti, especially at places like Amazon.com, where the victims overwhelmingly have been conservative writers. It appears that those who oppose conservative thought have little love for free speech when practiced by those who disagree with them, and their only intellectual recourse is to deface websites that sell the books written by conservatives. Kate O'Beirn's book, Women Who Make The World Worse attracted not just the usual flood of phony reviews from Kate's detractors but also a hacked picture of the book's cover. That hack job, in all senses of the word, is not only obvious but childishly so.

One could make an argument -- a specious argument, but at least an argument -- that Kate's approach to her subject generates the ill will it received. However, Fred Barnes' book about George Bush, the newly-released Rebel In Chief, focuses on Bush himself, not his opposition. Such is the lack of intellectual heft and tolerance on the Left that the Amazon site has already been overrun by the bookburners. Michelle Malkin provides a glimpse of the faux reviews entered from the book's "readers". The picture got hacked briefly and replaced with the image at the right. Daniel Coppens of Crown Forum notes:

Amazon already has contracts with Liberal newspapers and magazines that are free to post bad reviews (obviously) of Conservative books. However, they offer no such contracts to Conservative media and therefore offer no way to refute what is said in the negative Liberal reviews, other than what we are allowed to put in our own 'quotes' section. These types of business practices by Amazon are completely unacceptable; for them not to monitor these images that anyone can put up and for them not to make any effort to support their Conservative business partners is awful.

I would put it somewhat differently, and list Amazon as a victim of this as well. It offers free access to post reader reviews to assist their customers in selecting the books they want to read. Instead, the Left hijacks this system to get a free ride for their sloganeering and abuses Amazon by illegally interfering with its business. The Left doesn't want people to hear what conservatives have to say, perhaps knowing that they have been intellectually outclassed and proven disastrously wrong by history and current events. Instead, they issue mindless attacks, childish insults, and do everything possible to keep people from having access to conservative thought.

That's not the actions of people who have confidence in themselves. Those are the actions of a fearful, small-minded, vulgar group of Neanderthals who have suddenly seen Homo sapiens and realized that their days are numbered. These mouthbreathers cannot offer any new ideas, so instead of trying to compete with conservatives, they're busy with the electronic equivalent of sticking their fingers into their ears and shouting, "LA-LA-LA-LA, NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU!!" as loudly as possible.

In short, the Left consists of ill-educated, ill-mannered children. That they keep going to such lengths to prove it shows that they don't have anything else to offer.

Canada's Day Of Reckoning

Canadians go to the polls today to select a new Parliament, and all indications show that they will bring in a new government for the first time in 13 years. As both the New York Times and the American Spectator surmise, the new Conservative government could bring closer ties to the United States as both cooperation and the tone of the relationship will improve with Stephen Harper over the vacillating and accusatory Paul Martin:

Unless every national poll here is amiss, what has been perhaps the world's winningest political party is heading toward a humiliating defeat on Monday.

Stephen Harper, 46, an economist and social conservative who is writing a history of ice hockey, appears poised to lead his Conservative Party to victory over the Liberal Party of Prime Minister Paul Martin, something that seemed highly improbable just a few weeks ago. The Liberals won the last four national elections, governing Canada for 13 years - as the party did for three-quarters of the past century.

But whether a Harper victory would represent a seismic shift, in a country that has long promoted itself as a beacon of social democracy and frequent critic of American foreign policy, remains an open question. If he cannot muster a majority in the House of Commons, Mr. Harper may lead a weak, unstable government opposed by three left-of-center parties represented in Parliament.

Krauss casts this somewhat pessimistically. The Bloc Quebecois has already cast its lot with the Conservatives and is widely expected to form a government with the Tories if Harper can't win a majority in the new Commons. That has actually been the expectation all along; only in the final days of the election has the possibility of a majority win appeared within reach. Ipsos still says that its polling shows it could happen, while SES puts the Tory win somewhat lower. BQ will exact some concessions from the Tories for its partnership, probably in exemptions from some of the reforms Harper has espoused on the campaign trail, in exchange for a lowering of rhetoric on separatism.

John Tabin picks this up in the American Spectator today (link via Michelle Malkin, who has a lot more to say):

It's possible, though not likely, that the Conservatives will win an outright majority in Parliament. But even if they don't, and need to form a coalition government, they will have more of a chance to move an agenda than one would expect. As a political consultant explained to me in Washington a few months ago before heading north to work for the Conservatives, the leaders of the Tories' prospective coalition partner, the separatist Bloc Quebecois, are willing to give Harper several years of rule (but expect lots of Tory reforms to exempt Quebec). The Conservative victory will be a real one, and not just for Harper and his party but for Canada, for North America, and for the world.

CQ will start live-blogging the election starting at 6 pm Central Time this evening, with frequent updates as information "crosses my desk", so to speak. Keep checking back here, and don't forget to check out the excellent Canadian blogosphere, especially sites like Blogging Tories, Small Dead Animals, Stephen Taylor, Angry in the Great White North, and Damian Penny

UPDATE: And Andrew Coyne! How could I forget about Andrew Coyne?

It's All About Ideology For The Left

Today's New York Times editorial implores the Senate to vote against the confirmation of Judge Alito to the Supreme Court once debate starts this week in the Senate. Like the rest of those who have come out in opposition to his confirmation, the only basis for their rejection is ideological, transforming the process into an election rather than an appointment:

If Judge Samuel Alito Jr.'s confirmation hearings lacked drama, apart from his wife's bizarrely over-covered crying jag, it is because they confirmed the obvious. Judge Alito is exactly the kind of legal thinker President Bush wants on the Supreme Court. He has a radically broad view of the president's power, and a radically narrow view of Congress's power. He has long argued that the Constitution does not protect abortion rights. He wants to reduce the rights and liberties of ordinary Americans, and has a history of tilting the scales of justice against the little guy.

As senators prepare to vote on the nomination, they should ask themselves only one question: will replacing Sandra Day O'Connor with Judge Alito be a step forward for the nation, or a step backward? Instead of Justice O'Connor's pragmatic centrism, which has kept American law on a steady and well-respected path, Judge Alito is likely to bring a movement conservative's approach to his role and to the Constitution.

Either one has to believe that Supreme Court justices have to be vetted for ideology or that the process should be non-political. In both cases, the New York Times gets it wrong. If ideology is to remain outside of the process, then the only question for Judge Alito's confirmation is whether he has the competence to work on the Supreme Court. The ABA found him to have the highest degree of competence -- not the most conservative of groups either, one should remember -- as well as the highest degree of ethical practice. He has spent 15 years of fine public service on the federal appeals bench and almost a decade of work before that as a federal prosecutor, serving the people of the United States and enforcing the law. Outside of ideology, Judge Alito has the most experience in appellate law for a nominee in 70 years.

If ideology is to be considered, then the New York Times has it even more wrong. It asks whether a conservative should replace a centrist on the court. If ideology has suddenly become a qualifier, then one has to look at who nominates the candidate. The President won election twice, and at least during the last election, Supreme Court nominations clearly were a major issue. He has the mandate of the election to pick the ideological bent of the replacements for any opening on the Court; there is no quota system for leftists, centrists, and conservatives, nor have Presidents been particularly apt at guessing which categories their nominees would fill in the long run anyway. Bush's two elections show that the people want a more conservative court -- so as long as the Times considers ideology a basis for selection, then a conservative judge should be the most acceptable as a manifestation of the demand of the people.

I doubt that the Times asked whether the Court would be poorly served by replacing conservative Byron White with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for that matter. One easily detects the stench of hypocrisy in the Times' editorial approach today.

The reason why the opposition to Alito now rests on ideology is because his critics failed to gin up any other rationale for opposing his confirmation. The Times fails to mention that Mrs. Alito's "crying jag" came as a result of a disgraceful and disgusting attempt to smear her husband with a number of unsubstantiated allegations of bigotry and misogyny to shield Senators from having to use the ideological argument at all, a neo-McCarthyism in which the Gray Lady's editorial board indulged itself enthusiastically and with raptuous delight. The failure of those attempts makes this editorial not only possible, but the Paper of Record's last refuge.

Italian Atheist Sues Catholic Priest For Fraud

Some people never get over being told the Easter Bunny doesn't exist.

An Italian atheist has filed a lawsuit against a Catholic priest for claiming that Jesus of Nazareth actually existed, asking the court to impose damages on the priest for fraud and dishonesty:

LAWYERS for a parish priest in a small Italian town have been ordered to appear in court after he was accused of unlawfully asserting what many people take for granted: that Jesus Christ existed.

Father Enrico Righi was named in a complaint filed by life-long atheist Luigi Cascioli, after the priest wrote in a parish bulletin that Jesus existed and that he was born of a couple named Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem and lived in Nazareth.

Mr Cascioli claims this violated two Italian laws: so-called "abuse of popular belief", in which someone fraudulently deceives people, and "impersonation", in which someone gains by attributing a false name to someone.

He says that for 2,000 years the Roman Catholic Church has been deceiving people by furthering the fable that Christ existed, and says the church has been gaining financially by "impersonating" as Christ someone by the name of John of Gamala, the son of Judas from Gamala.

He also asserts that the Gospels - the most frequently cited testimony of Jesus' existence - are inconsistent, full of errors and biased, and that other written evidence from the time is scant and does not hold up to scholarly analysis.

Had this been an American court, I don't doubt that Cascioli would have had about ten minutes in front of a judge before being reminded that (a) no one forces him to believe in Jesus, either as a historical figure or as the Son of God, and (b) unless Cascioli could prove that he was personally damaged by the supposed fraud, he had no standing to bring legal action. Unfortunately, the Italian court did not choose to exercise a little common sense; for that matter, the Italian legislature should have understood the "abuse of popular belief" law would generate this kind of mischief from the beginning.

What is it about atheists that drive them to sue to eliminate all mention of God and faith in public? It demonstrates that everyone has a need to revere and worship something. In the case of atheist activists (a small but annoying percentage of atheists), apparently they have simply decided that courtrooms have replaced churches and judges have replaced priests. The worship of penal codes and case law instead of a higher power inevitably leads them to drag religious churches onto their own altars for a strange kind of sacrifice to their little demigods.

Mr. Cascioli and the rest of these secular Pharisees should take a cold shower and learn to live with diversity. It's not possible to kill God on the altar of the municipal courtroom.

Lunch With Legends

Those who know me and read my blog know that there isn't too much that could tear me away from an AFC Championship game with my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers vying for a chance to play in the Super Bowl. Herb Suerth is an exception to the rule, however. Suerth is the president of the E Company Association, the company made famous in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers. Suerth joined the company as a replacement in December 1944, which he noted in our conversation today as "sort of a bad place to come in." Shortly after joining E Company, they deployed to a town in the Ardennes named Bastogne and found themselves surrounded by Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. General Anthony McAuliffe's famous reply to a German request for surrender, "Nuts!", came up in our conversation. Suerth recalled that "there was a lot of discussion about what the word really was. I think they cleaned it up for publication."

If you get the impression from that exchange that Herb Suerth has a good sense of humor and humility, then you guessed correctly. Suerth didn't come to talk about himself, but to discuss another issue of proper recognition for one of the legendary officers of E Company. (I learned that one does not refer to them as "Easy Company" -- that was an HBO artifact, not a reference used by the men themselves.) It would be an injustice not to mention the service of Suerth, who nearly had both legs taken off by an artillery shell in Bastogne. With compound fractures to both femurs but his femoral arteries miraculously intact, the surgeons managed to piece his legs back together. He spent eighteen months in hospitals recovering from his wounds. He went back into civilian life like so many of his generation -- he went to college, got married, had nine children and had a successful career in business. He lives in Minnesota, retired but active in his community.

But what brought Suerth to our luncheon, along with my friend Randy Penrod of Savage Republican, was an effort to correct a bureaucratic decision to deny proper recognition to Major Dick Winters, the legendary leader of E Company from its first action in the war. After having E Company spread all over Normandy during the drop on D-Day -1, then-Lieutenant Winters got assigned the task of taking out three German 88s that had rained artillery shells on GIs landing at Utah Beach during D-Day. Despite having only 17 of his 140 men available for the task and missing the unit's captain, Winters took the assignment without question. He found that the three German 88s were in fact four German 105s, complete with machine-gun nests and trenchworks reinforcement. Suerth told me that the Germans probably had upwards of 90 men in this site.

Despite this being the first action Winters had ever seen, he quickly drew up a strategy to attack the gun emplacements -- and proceeded to rout the Germans from their entrenched positions, kill or capture almost all of them, destroy all four guns, and capture intelligence information that proved crucial in locating other artillery emplacements in Normandy. Winters' first engagement in combat showed such brilliance that it is still taught as the textbook method of attacking reinforced positions at West Point. His commanding officer put him up for the Medal of Honor, but in a development that could only happen in the US Army bureaucracy, a decision had been made that only one MOH would be awarded in each division for the Normandy campaign -- and another officer had already won that one (the remarkable Lt. Col. Robert G Cole).

Major Winters won the Distinguished Service Cross instead -- no small achievement, but not the MoH that his men felt he deserved for his bravery, brilliance, and execution, which saved hundreds of lives on Utah Beach. His men continue to press for a reconsideration from the Department of Defense and the Secretary of the Army, but thus far have not been successful in getting a review. Suerth would like to see that addressed while Major Winters can live to receive the award himself.

Randy and I will be updating this effort as we move along. We hope to get a letter-writing campaign going to press Congress to ask for a reconsideration of the denial of the Medal of Honor for Major Winters. In the meantime, I want to thank Randy for arranging the thoroughly entertaining afternoon and having the honor of Mr. Suerth's company for lunch.

CORRECTION: This is what I get for watching football when I'm supposed to be blogging. It should be General Anthony McAuliffe.

Steelers Get To The Super Bowl In Style

The Pittsburgh Steelers became the first team in NFL history to make it to the Super Bowl from the sixth seed position, having to beat the first, second, and third seeded teams in order to do so:

Big Ben, The Bus and all those Terrible Towels sure are traveling well this postseason. Next stop, the Super Bowl, the final destination of a Pittsburgh road trip the Denver Broncos were powerless to derail.

Ben Roethlisberger had a brilliant afternoon, throwing for 275 yards and two scores, and Jerome Bettis extended his career one more game, lifting the Steelers to a dominating 34-17 victory in the AFC title game Sunday. ...

They became the first team to win three away games to make it to the Super Bowl since the 1985 New England Patriots.

The Steelers have looked unstoppable since losing three when Ben Roethlisberger went out with a knee injury and looked rusty on his return. After beating the Chicago Bears at home, the Steelers have not lost a game at all and have looked even better on the road. Good thing, too, because as the last team to make the playoffs in the AFC, they had no shot at playing a home game during the post-season.

Now, of course, Jerome Bettis gets to go home for his first Super Bowl and possibly his last game in his NFL career. If it turns out that Bettis retires, he will want to make the last game as memorable as the road taken to get there. Seattle or Carolina may well just be another Bus stop on the way to the Hall of Fame.

Media Notes Rove Appearance At Blogfest

Newsweek's Holly Bailey reports on Karl Rove's appearance at the RNC blogger function for the Alito confirmation hearings two weeks ago. Rove, as CQ readers know, met with us for an off-the-record chat but did allow us to mention his appearance at the Hay-Adams hotel where a number of White House policy managers had come to brief us on the administration's efforts for 2006. Baily reports:

The Republican National Committee organized a forum for conservative bloggers earlier this month, telling attendees they'd be briefed by RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman and other party operatives on the 2006 political outlook. But a surprise guest arrived. "Karl Rove is in the house!!!" wrote Matt Margolis, who was live-blogging the event for his site, Blogs for Bush. While Rove implored the group to keep the substance of his remarks off the record, some bloggers posted photos and snippets of their talk with the president's top political adviser, which included a discussion on the politics of the war and the upcoming midterm elections. Rove told the group that he regularly reads their blogs and spent more than a half hour answering questions. "I think we all found ourselves a little surprised to have received that kind of attention," Ed Morrissey, who wrote about Rove on his blog, Captain's Quarters, told NEWSWEEK. "I think he was taking our temperature a bit, which I found interesting."

Actually, he may have been there longer than a half-hour, but I wasn't timing it. Bailey only has a limited amount of space in which to work for Periscope items, and in truth I almost stiffed her by waiting until her deadline to answer her questions, as I got backed up on my e-mail and other tasks this week. Be sure to catch the entire item on this week's issue.

US To Pakistan: Either You Do It Or We Will

The US intends on sending Pakistani PM Shaukat Aziz back home with a message that should have been clear from the action two weeks ago in Damadola -- either Pakistan has to get serious about taking out al-Qaeda leadership or we will do the job ourselves, regardless of national borders:

US leaders are expected to call for more intensive efforts by Pakistan to flush out Osama bin Laden in meetings with Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz here this week.

Believed hiding in northwestern Pakistan, Al-Qaeda chief bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri taunted
President George W. Bush last week in new messages, glorifying the terror network's bloody actions and warning of more to come. ...

Another US concern is the jump in suicide bombings and roadside blasts in
Afghanistan, attributed to an influx of foreign militants across the Pakistan border, said Strategic Forecasting Inc. (Stratfor), a private US intelligence firm.

"While Washington continues to get cooperation from Pakistan, it is always concerned about the quality of the cooperation and its longevity, if you will," said Kamran Bokhari, Stratfor's senior analyst for Middle East and South Asia.

Stratfor believes bin Laden and Zawahiri are in northwestern Pakistan.

"To the best of our understanding, our company places them somewhere in northwestern Pakistan, we don't even think they are in the tribal areas.

"How they have survived this long? Definitely, there is evidence to suggest that in certain quarters of the military and security apparatus, there are sympathisers," Bokhari said.

The partnership between Musharraf and the US has come at some cost to both parties. It has marginalized the democracy movement in Pakistan, which does not set well with those in the administration who see the promulgation of democracy as the Big Theme of the Bush presidency. It has made Musharraf a target for assassination twice with the Islamists and has made him unpopular with the border tribes that used to provide a first line of defense for Pakistan in the days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. It has also complicated our efforts to ally with India, a true democracy and an undervalued potential partner against Chinese expansionism.

However, the partnership has also paid dividends. The roundup of lower-level AQ recruits and destruction of their camps on both sides of the Pakistani/Afghan border has reduced the AQ threat significantly. Intelligence has improved in the region for both nations, and the partnership has allowed for better economic health for Pakistan and influence for the US.

We need to tread somewhat carefully, but in the end, our interests can only be served if the present Pakistani government understands the emphasis we place on the total destruction of al-Qaeda and its leadership. That message came through loud and clear in the roar of three Hellfire missiles at Damadola, announcing that the US had lost patience with the Pakistanis and their diffident cooperation. The message Aziz will take back to Musharraf will no doubt sound very similar, if more diplomatically couched.

NY Times Talks Pre-Emption Against Iran

In a strange coincidence, right after Senator Hillary Clinton criticized the Bush administration for its lack of unilateral, imperial action against Iran, the New York Times has suddenly developed an interest in the possibility of a pre-emptive attack on the Islamic Republic and its nuclear facilities. David Sanger picks up what Democrats hope to use as the party line against Republicans to prove their national-security mettle:

If diplomacy fails, does America have a military option? And what if it doesn't?

"It's a kind of nonsense statement to say there is no military solution to this," said W. Patrick Lang, the former head of Middle East intelligence at the Defense Intelligence Agency. "It may not be a desirable solution, but there is a military solution."

Mr. Lang was piercing to the heart of a conundrum the Bush administration recognizes: Iran could become a case study for pre-emptive military action against a gathering threat, under a policy Mr. Bush promulgated in 2002. But even if taking out Iran's facilities delay the day the country goes nuclear, it would alienate allies and probably make firm enemies out of many Iranians who have come to dislike their theocratic government. And Iran simply has too many ways of striking back, in the oil markets, in the Persian Gulf, through Hezbollah.

"Could we do it?" one administration official who was deeply involved in planning the Iraq invasion said recently. "Sure. Could we manage the aftermath? I doubt it."

Similar fears, he said, gave President Bill Clinton pause about launching a strike on North Korea in 1994. Later that year he reached an accord for a freeze on the North's nuclear production facilities. But in 2003 everything unfroze, and now the North, by C.I.A. estimates, has enough fuel for at least half a dozen bombs.

The Iranians took careful notes then, and here in Washington today the Korean experience underlies diplomacy-versus-force arguments that rarely take place on the record.

First, let's clear a major factual misrepresentation in Sanger's narrative. The North Koreans didn't "unfroze" in 2003; they announced that they had never been frozen and had already built a nuclear weapon. What should be obvious to everyone but a newspaper reporter, one does not "unfreeze" and overnight have the ability to refine fissile material into weaponized matter and construct a working nuclear device. The entire 1994 agreement had been a ruse under which they continued their nuclear efforts in a more clandestine manner. This development is one of the reasons why pre-emptive strikes on potential nuclear proliferators has gained such credibility.

Beyond the Times' inability to give an honest rendition of history is an interesting political question: why has the newspaper become so interested in covering pre-emption when the matter has not yet even come before the UN Security Council? After Hillary's speech at Princeton earlier this week, it seems a little more than coincidence that the Paper of Record suddenly finds pre-emption a valid diplomatic tactic for debate, especially given its vehement opposition to the doctrine entirely when it came to Iraq.

For that matter, one could say the same thing about the entire Democratic Party. Why did they not scold Clinton for this advice:

"I believe that we lost critical time in dealing with Iran because the White House chose to downplay the threats and to outsource the negotiations," Ms. Clinton said, according to a transcript of the speech published by The Daily Princetonian. "I don't believe you face threats like Iran or North Korea by outsourcing it to others and standing on the sidelines."

Since 2002 Britain, France and Germany have led talks meant to assure that Tehran's nuclear program would not give it the capacity to build weapons. The three countries last week declared that Iran's decision to resume nuclear research had brought the talks to an end, and, with the United States in support, asked that the matter be sent to the United Nations Security Council for possible action.

All we have heard from the Democrats and their media partners such as the NYT since 2003 is that the administration doesn't work in concert with our allies, and that our arrogance and unilateralism has isolated the United States. Now, suddenly, they want the electorate to believe that they've become more Catholic than the Pope in foreign policy by proclaiming that the Bush administration "outsourced" the Iranian negotiations by doing exactly what they demanded we do with Iraq -- a nation with whom we still were in a state of armed conflict, unlike Iran. And the Times provides this follow-up as a potential legitimization of military force against Iran without even taking the issue to the UN, a step Democrats and the NYT demanded on Iraq and one which held up military operations five months, allowing Saddam to prepare for the invasion and possibly to move the WMD we sought.

Coincidence?