CFACT Interview On CQ Podcast

The NARN interview with Bll Gilles from CFACT is now on my podcast RSS feed and can be also downloaded from this link. Duane Patterson and Mitch Berg ask some great questions about the funding controversy at the University of Minnesota. You can also come up to speed on this issue at my two posts on the subject:

Does The University Of Minnesota Discriminate Against Conservatives?

UMTC Cuts Conservative Group Funding Even Further

Cancel The Hysteria

I guess we can cancel the civil war -- Moqtada al-Sadr has reached a truce with Sunni leaders to stop the attacks on the mosques:

THE movement of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, alleged to have played a role in the anti-Sunni violence over the last few days, publicly made peace with political and religious Sunni leaders overnight.

Four sheikhs from the Sadr movement made a "pact of honour" with the conservative Sunni Muslim Scholars Association, and called for an end to attacks on places of worship, the shedding of blood and condemning any act leading to sedition.

The agreement was made in the particularly symbolic setting of Baghdad's premier Sunni mosque Abu Hanifa where the Shiite sheikhs prayed under the guidance of Sunni imam Abdel Salam al-Qubaissi.

The meeting was broadcast on television and the religious leaders all "condemned the blowing up of the Shiite mausoleum of Samarra as much as the acts of sabotage against the houses of God as well as the assassinations and terrorisation of Muslims".

Hmmmm ... seems like treating the Iraqis like adults capable of acting in their own self-interest may be working.

Northern Alliance Radio Network Today

The Northern Alliance Radio Network will broadcast today, as always, from 11 am - 3 pm Central time, and we have a great show lined up today. John, Chad, and Brian will have Jeremy Zilber, author of the children's book "Why Mommy Is A Democrat", on the line today at noon. You can check out a few sample pages of the book while listening to Zilber explain this rather sad attempt at political indoctrination.

At 1 pm, Mitch and I welcome Duane Patterson, the producer of Hugh Hewitt's show, as our co-host while King goes on assignment. We will have Bill Gilles of CFACT on at 2 pm to discuss the defunding attempt of the University of Minnesota against conservative student groups, as I've covered this week.

At 2:30, we welcome Karen Efrem from Edwatch -- that's not an oversight group dedicated to CQ surveillance, but a group which keeps a close eye on education issues in Minnesota. Today we'll discuss the effort to mandate psychological profiling of all Minnesota three-year-olds.

You can catch the show on AM 1280 The Patriot in the Twin Cities, or on the station's Internet stream around the world. Join the conversation by calling us at 651-289-4488 or sending an e-mail to the NARN. We hope to hear from you!

UPDATE: Duane's last name is Patterson, not Peterson -- but at least I got closer than Mitch's attempt ... Hanson.

The Difference Between Bush And Conservatives

Today's opinion piece by William F. Buckley, the father of American conservatism, highlights the difference between traditional conservatives and the Bush Administration's efforts in foreign policy, along with a host of other arenas. While the Left has railed about conservatives -- especially the dreaded neocons, a term that has an accusatory hint of "Zionist" to it -- they have missed the true historical parallels between the post-9/11 policy and that of an American president of almost a century earlier.

Buckley puts pen to paper to declare the American intervention in Iraq a failure, a position which undoubtedly many leftists will hail as a new schism on the right:

One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. The same edition of the paper quotes a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Reuel Marc Gerecht backed the American intervention. He now speaks of the bombing of the especially sacred Shiite mosque in Samara and what that has precipitated in the way of revenge. He concludes that “The bombing has completely demolished” what was being attempted — to bring Sunnis into the defense and interior ministries.

Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols.

The Iraqis we hear about are first indignant, and then infuriated, that Americans aren't on the scene to protect them and to punish the aggressors.

One hesitates to get into an argument with the icon of conservative philosophy, but in this case, Buckley isn't reversing course; he's expounding an argument that conservatives (paleoconservatives, if you will) have always made in terms of foreign engagement. His argument appears sound on a superficial level because it only addresses the actions of the moment. The insurgents won an important but momentary victory when they successfully collapsed the shrine of Askariya, but what Buckley wants to do is to grant them the war by default.

Buckley also erects somewhat of a strawman in this passage, one that exposes the real intent of his essay:

It would not be surprising to learn from an anonymously cited American soldier that he can understand why Saddam Hussein was needed to keep the Sunnis and the Shiites from each others' throats.

And here we have the essential Buckley, revealed. The traditional conservative position reached its most potent expression in the policies of Brent Scowcroft, the last bastion of realpolitik in government. Conservatives for decades fought against foreign entanglements and the liberation of people from tyranny for its own sake, only espousing military intervention when clear and short-term American economic or strategic interests came under threat. Buckley and Scowcroft would never have suggested that the US depose Saddam Hussein, mostly because they would not have thought that the oppression and genocide of Iraqis was worth the expense and headache of liberation. That thought kept the US from pushing through to Baghdad in 1991, when Scowcroft had Bush 41's ear, and when Saddam could have easily been toppled.

Bush 43 is not a conservative in foreign policy, at least since 9/11 taught him that genocidal tyrannies in Southwest Asia could produce immediate and existential threats to the American homeland. He has been much closer to Woodrow Wilson than his father or even Ronald Reagan in his reaction to the world.

The parallels with Wilson are rather striking. Originally elected due to a schism in the powerful GOP between an interventionist Teddy Roosevelt and an isolationist Republican establishment, Wilson believed in foreign interventions only to expand the role of liberty and democracy. He refused to ally with the West in World War I because he (correctly) believed that the entire conflict was little more than a land dispute between a number of empires and would-be imperialists. He got re-elected in 1916 primarily because he kept America out of the war, despite the sinking of the Lusitania over a year earlier. It wasn't until the Zimmerman note -- a clumsy and stupid German diplomatic effort to get Mexico to declare war on the US to keep America out of Europe -- that Wilson finally agreed to join the war effort.

Even then, Wilson made plain that America did not side with imperialists. He declared the US as "associates" of Britain and France, not allies, and publicly declared that US interests in the war focused on liberation and not acquisition. Much to the surprise of the British, Wilson meant what he said, and it caused severe problems at the end of the war -- problems that find their echoes in the current conflict.

When the Western forces broke the German/Austrian effort, Wilson wanted to dictate the terms of the peace along the same philosophy as when he entered the war. The British and French had other ideas. Most famously, they destoyed the German economy by imposing impossible reparations demands and forced the abdication of the monarchy in favor of a republic. They then undermined the republic's credibility by forcing it to agree to the Versailles codicils that led to the economic collapse.

Less famously, the British and the French rushed to carve up the Middle East as fast as possible, and attempted to force the US to assist them. The Sykes-Picot Agreement led to even less coherent arrangements, creating Iraq out of whole cloth and establishing "mandates" which became a new form of colonialism. Wilson opposed these efforts to cash in from the war, wanting to establish democracy and self-determination as the guiding principle for the areas that formerly comprised the Ottoman Empire. He tried to use the new League of Nations to enforce this, but the isolationist and conservative Senate (in control of the GOP) refused to ratify the American entry into the League -- which allowed the British and the French to create the Mandates as a dictate of the League itself.

Why did the British and the French install these petty despots as hereditary rulers? It was the lowest-cost solution in immediate terms. It didn't require any lasting commitment to establish a new rule of law. They relied on strongman rule instead of self-determination because self-determination would have taken too long.

Wilson, like George Bush, saw democracy and self-determination as the only strategy that would deradicalize and modernize the Middle East. Instead, the isolationists and conservatives left the area to the imperialists, who quickly set up petty monarchs that in many cases had no historical connection to the regions they ruled. Those decisions have resulted in the morass that we have seen in the Middle East ever since.

Now, almost a century later, Bush has launched a second Wilsonian effort to use democracy as a transformative agent to reduce or eliminate the radicalism borne of oppression and the terrorism borne of radicalism in the region. This is true liberalism, not the leftist/socialist tripe that hijacked its name -- the effort to spread liberty and individual freedom as a forward strategy against the evils that oppression breeds. Buckley may be proven correct in the long run, but given that the traditional conservative impulse in this region led us to the century of war and conflict that culminated in the 9/11 attacks, we can afford to spend more time and effort to see if Wilsonian impulses fare any better.

UPDATE: Mark Coffey notes that Glenn Greenwald attacks me for attacking Bill Buckley. Huh? I called him a conservative. That's not an attack, it's an accurate description. I'm not "preparing a noose" for Buckley, nor am I patting him on the noggin and pushing him over a cliff. I'm just disagreeing with him, that's all. Nor does Greenwald actually bother to deal with my argument, but instead gets himself in a tizzy because I dared to post my opinion on Buckley's assessment.

Apparently Greenwald cannot conceive of free thinking among conservatives. First he assumes we all act in lockstep, then he screeches when we disagree. That's what passes for analysis on the Left, I suppose -- namecalling and hyperbole.

Oops ... Wrong Civil War. Pardon Me.

Sectarian violence broke out today, with crowds swept by religious and historical fervor clashing openly with each other and the overwhelmed security forces that attempted to separate them. Firebombs and hand-to-hand fighting occurred in front of one of the historical shrines of the city as an unprecedented level of dissension threatened to open up old wounds and begin an unravelling of civil accord.

Iraq, you say? Not quite:

Hundreds of republican demonstrators have clashed with riot police in central Dublin as they attempted to block a parade by the Loyalist Orange Order.

About a dozen fireworks, metal barricades, bottles and stones were thrown at Gardai as loyalist marchers gathered 100 yards away.

Dozens of extra Gardai in full riot gear were called in in a bid to quell the disturbances, and two Gardai sustained head injuries as fireworks exploded.

A line of about 40 riot police blocked the entrance to O'Connell Street as hundreds of youths pelted them with rocks, bottles and sticks. The officers slowly moved in in a bid to disperse the rioting crowds. ...

At the front of the GPO, the headquarters of the 1916 Easter Rising, rioters charged police and fought hand-to-hand battles with around 100 officers. Mounted police were also drafted in to prevent more protesters joining.

When our family visited Ireland in June-July 2001, we stayed a few days in Dublin, around the corner from the GPO and just off O'Connell Street. Of all the sites in the city, this post office -- which still functions as a post office to this day -- is probably the most revered shrine of Irish independence in Dublin. The bullet holes in the facade remain to this day as they did when police fired on Padraic Pearse and his doomed band of holdouts. The 1916 rebellion failed, as so many had before, but the brutal British reaction to this wartime insurrection fired up the Irish and eventually led to their independence a few years later.

History in Dublin is palpable; it's in the streets, in the buildings, and in the water.

The curious part of this story isn't so much the clash as the fact that it occurred in Dublin. The Republic has mostly avoided these sectarian demonstrations, leaving the politics of the Boyne to the factions in Northern Ireland, where that battle still has political relevancy after more than 300 years. Dublin itself, while steeped in history, is the most cosmopolitan of Irish cities, with a bustling trade and a diversity of population that would impress any visitor. Dubliners know their history but have usually placed it in the proper perspective, which leads me to believe that the provocation came from outsiders intent on scoring a few points in the media.

That also points me back to Iraq. Despite the best attempt so far by outside provocateurs, the bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra has not resulted in a civil war. Iraqi bloggers such as Iraq the Model and Healing Iraq report that violence continues, but that the Sunnis have not risen up at all; they have not taken advantage of this supposed opening by launching their anticipated attack on the central government. Imams of both sects have called for a stop to the violence and unity in the face of foreign attacks by Zarqawi terrorists.

Civil war remains a distinct possibility, but it has not yet happened. It hasn't happened in Ireland or in Northern Ireland, despite the kind of hatreds that have existed for centuries in those places as well. Not all violence is war, and not all violence means defeat. Insurgents and provocateurs sometimes succeed in their aims, but it is still too early to declare them the victors in Iraq as it is in Dublin.

Sitzpinklers At NYT Discover Truth, Do Nothing

The New York Times's editorial board has finally recognized what its readers have known for at least two weeks -- that the violent protests, riots, arsons and murders committed in response to the publication of editorial cartoons criticizing Islam and Mohammed are meant to intimidate dhimmis into silence:

With every new riot over the Danish cartoons, it becomes clearer that the protests are no longer about the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, but about the demagoguery of Islamic extremists. The demonstrators are undeniably outraged by what they perceive as blasphemy. But radical Islamists are trying to harness that indignation to their political goals and their theocratic ends by fomenting hatred for the West and for moderate regimes in the Muslim world. These are dangerous games, and they require the most resolute response.

It is not the West that is most threatened in this crisis. The voices of moderation in the Muslim world are the ones that are being intimidated and silenced. Those few journalists and leaders who have spoken out against the rioting have been vilified and assailed, and even jailed. According to a report by Michael Slackman and Hassan M. Fattah in The New York Times, 11 journalists in five Islamic countries face prosecution for printing some of the Danish cartoons, even when their purpose was to condemn them.

Note to Pinch and the folks at the Gray Lady: these protests were never about the caricatures themselves. These examples of lunacy have always been about silencing any criticism of Islam and Muslim societies, and have a direct philosophical relationship to other crimes, such as the murder of Theo Van Gogh and the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie. These men have been martyred (Van Gogh literally so) for expressing opinions and criticisms of Muslims and Islam. From the time of the first arson and the point when the first signs appeared demanding violence -- in other words, since day 1 of the protests -- the point has always been to intimidate non-Muslims into silence.

The Times cannot bring itself to admit this. Why? It would force the Times to recognize its role in the shameful surrender shown by the American media in not just refusing to publish the cartoons themselves, but also in their haughty rationalizations that they must remain sensitive to the icons of Islamic faith. They routinely fail to show this sensitivity to icons of other faiths, such as their reprint of the Ofili Madonna, covered in elephant dung and pictures of female genitalia. Nor did they scold the gallery that exhibited the artwork, and they staunchly defended the federal funding the exhibition received when then-mayor Rudy Giuliani wanted it pulled. They only care about sensitivity when the offended carry bombs, guns, and torches.

Even today, with its far-too-late recognition of the real issues involved in the Cartoon Wars, the Times has yet to publish the cartoons themselves so their readers can understand the context of the controversy. The Gray Lady then scolds Yemen and Jordan for charging Muslim journalists who did publish the cartoons for "giv[ing] extremists a dollop of legitimacy". They hypocrisy drips from this statement, seeing as how the almost the entire American media establishment did exactly the same thing with their fear-based refusal to publish the cartoons themselves.

Don't be fooled by this editorial. It signifies something worse than the pusillanimity shown earlier -- the Times admits they understand the stakes involved, and yet refuse to stand up to the Islamists anyway.

Stacking The Deck

I haven't posted much about the pending prosecution of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby for alleged perjury before the grand jury investigating the leak of Valerie Plame's status as a CIA employee. The case moved from the political to the legal with the unsealing of the indictment, and most of the revelations coming from the case has consisted of the normal legal machinations that amount to nothing noteworthy.

However, the Washington Post notes one development that appears rather strange. The judge in charge of the case has barred the defense from learning the identity of another goverment official who reportedly discussed Plame's status with the press:

Former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, charged with perjury in the CIA leak case, cannot be told the identity of another government official who is said to have divulged a CIA operative's identity to reporters, a federal judge ruled Friday. ...

During a hearing Friday afternoon, Walton said Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald can keep secret the other government official's identity because that person has not been charged and has a right to privacy.

Since when does the prosecution get to withhold evidence in a criminal prosecution because of a right to privacy? Had the judge ruled that the information was not relevant to the charge, the ban would be understandable. However, since the entire prosecution appears to have its basis in the supposed evasion of Libby under oath on the nature of the information divulged and the timing of its publication, having more than one official discussing it with reporters sounds at least arguably relevant. Fitzgerald argued that the quoted remarks meant something entirely different, but that should be an argument for Fitzgerald to make to a jury, not a reason to deny Libby's lawyers to depose the witness for themselves.

If Libby committed perjury, then he should get convicted of the crime and suffer the consequences. However, Libby has the right to mount a defense against the prosecution's case, and the embarrassment that a subpoena might cause this material witness does not outweight Libby's right to that defense.

UPDATE: The Washington Post has removed the web-only article by Toni Locy and replaced it with an article by Carol Leonig at the same link, which also appears in the print version. As Tom Maguire notes in the comments, the new article now reports that the judge found the witness "not relevant". Check out Tom's blog for the latest in the Libby/Plame case.

Sexual Abuse Continues With UN Peacekeepers

The UN peacekeeping forces continue to sexually abuse their wards, according to an internal review at Turtle Bay, and the problem will exist for years:

Jean-Marie Guehenno said the UN had investigated 295 cases under a new reporting system introduced last year.

It could take several more years to reform the system fully, says Jordan's UN envoy who last year urged changes.

The 18 peace missions worldwide employ 85,000 staff from over 100 countries, with a budget of nearly $5bn.

Mr Guehenno said although significant progress had been made in reducing the number of cases of sexual exploitation following an investigation in the Democratic Republic of Congo two years ago, much more needed to be done.

"Allegations being lodged against UN peacekeeping personnel remain high and unacceptably so," he said.

He noted "how hard it is to change a culture of dismissiveness, long developed within ourselves, in our countries and in the mission areas."

So what's supposed to happen while the UN continues its weak efforts at reform? Do refugees need to literally hide the women and children when blue-helmeted soldiers appear on the scene? It seems as though the UN wants to take no responsibility for enforcing discipline in the armed forces that act on their behalf, and that's because they do not have the authority to do so. Troops only respond to national leadership, not to diplomatic personnel.

When people argue that only the UN has the moral authority to initiate military operations, clip this story and pass it around.

Sammenhold And Sitzpinklers

Michelle Malkin gives us a vocabulary lesson for today, as Chrsistopher Hitchens organizes a rally to support free speech:

The incredible thing about the ongoing Kristallnacht against Denmark (and in some places, against the embassies and citizens of any Scandinavian or even European Union nation) is that it has resulted in, not opprobrium for the religion that perpetrates and excuses it, but increased respectability! A small democratic country with an open society, a system of confessional pluralism, and a free press has been subjected to a fantastic, incredible, organized campaign of lies and hatred and violence, extending to one of the gravest imaginable breaches of international law and civility: the violation of diplomatic immunity. And nobody in authority can be found to state the obvious and the necessary—that we stand with the Danes against this defamation and blackmail and sabotage. Instead, all compassion and concern is apparently to be expended upon those who lit the powder trail, and who yell and scream for joy as the embassies of democracies are put to the torch in the capital cities of miserable, fly-blown dictatorships. Let's be sure we haven't hurt the vandals' feelings.

Sammenhold is Danish for "solidarity", a quality that the Danes could stand to see from the West at this time. Hitchens wants to stage a rally outside the Danish embassy to show support for our friends in their time of need -- something the mainstream press has yet failed to do. That's why CQ is also offering a vocabulary lesson today, or at least a re-run of a lesson that first appeared in August 2004 and got some attention yesterday at The Corner. That's when we discovered the delightful German word sitzpinkler:

Apparently, the Germans have a word for men who can't stand up for themselves, both literally and figuratively. It's 'sitzpinkler', which means both one who sits when urinating and wimp.

Try using these new words in a sentence, such as: "The American media consists of sitzpinklers who cannot summon the sammenhold to publish the Prophet cartoons in defense of the free speech they espouse."

Say it often.

UPDATE: Mark Tapscott went on a sitzpinkler hunt, but failed to find any in front of the Danish embassy. You can see his photographic evidence here, here, here, here, and here.

Dubai Deal Postponed And Rethought

The fallout from the Dubai deal continues to mount after a week of protest over the transaction. The UAE has offered to delay the completion of its purchase of P&O to allow Congress to review the deal, while Americans have their first real debate over port security and operations since 9/11 -- not that one existed much before that, either.

Like most controversies, this one has had its share of hyperbole and hysteria, but the debate has been educational. The questions about how port operators affect security needed to be aired, but in some ways the curt answers have left an incomplete picture. The administration's accurate answer that port security would remain in the capable hands of the Coast Guard and Customs service (a part of DHS now) clarified the role of the port operator, but left the impression that the companies filling those roles have nothing to do with security. That simply isn't true; any operation that has to interface with a serious security regimen winds up with potentially critical information regarding security procedures, personnel, and can identify holes within the process that can be exploited later. That to me is the one argument that remains unchallenged in the debate.

The Washington Post has several voices talking about the ports deal today, and each adds a rational and germane piece fo the debate. Their unsigned editorial takes apart the notion that the President should have had intimate knowledge of the deal prior to the controversy:

[T]he president's job description does not include taking a personal interest in decisions about whether foreign companies based in countries that are America's allies should be allowed to purchase other foreign companies that are based in countries that are America's allies. This is particularly the case when such purchases do not have any discernible impact on American security whatsoever.

In other words, the White House's "admission" that President Bush was unaware that Dubai Ports World, a company based in the United Arab Emirates, had purchased Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co., a company based in Britain -- and thereby obtained management control of the business operations of six U.S. ports -- strikes us as completely unnecessary. Why should the president know? Twelve government departments and agencies, including the departments of Treasury, State, Defense and Homeland Security, had examined the deal over a three-month period and found it acceptable. Perhaps the White House should have anticipated this week's political storm and prepared for it. But because the objections are irrational, even that complaint is questionable.

Both E.J. Dionne and Charles Krauthammer also expound on the ports deal. Both note that almost every side has a hypocrisy problem in this argument. Dionne:

Republicans and conservatives would be aghast at the idea of our government owning a company that operated so many of our ports. That would be -- just imagine! -- socialism. But Dubai Ports World is, well, a socialist operation, a state-owned company in the United Arab Emirates. Why is it bad for the federal government to own our port operations, but okay for a foreign government?

Krauthammer:

The Democrats, in particular, are in full cry, gleeful to at last get to the right of George Bush on an issue of national security.

Gleeful, and shamelessly hypocritical. If a citizen of the UAE walked into an airport in full burnoose and flowing robes, speaking only Arabic, Democrats would be deeply offended, and might even sue, if the security people were to give him any more scrutiny than they would to my sweet 84-year-old mother.

Democrats loudly denounce any thought of racial profiling. But when that same Arab, attired in business suit and MBA, and with a good record of running ports in 15 countries, buys P&O, Democrats howl at the very idea of allowing Arabs to run our ports. (Republicans are howling, too, but they don't grandstand on the issue of racial profiling.)

Dionne's point about the company itself is another good point. UAE has performed well as an ally in the war on terror up to this point, but in the end, it's still a hereditary autocracy, not a democracy with a strong mandate from a pro-Western citizenry. A state-owned company from such a nation will not have the same profit motives as privately-held or public corporations. State-owned companies primarily serve the interests of the ruling class of the state, not the bottom line, especially not in a nation where oil profits can more than make up for a loss elsewhere. Right now, we can rely on UAE's state interest to converge with our own based on their past performance -- but can we expect that to continue indefinitely? And will we have ample warning if the UAE decides that Islamofascism serves their state interest more than their economic and diplomatic partnership with the US?

Brant at SWLiP has an answer for that as well:

There could be something to the suggestion that a management company could be in a position to acquire intimate knowledge of port security operations, but I doubt that such knowledge would be anything that could not be obtained through very basic intelligence work (much of it available via open resources).

For example, someone could establish a front company for providing goods or services to one or more of the cruise lines, and by that route could obtain port passes and knowledge of security operations through its employees (as long as they could pass the County's background security check). There are all kinds of small companies that serve the port and which have employees going into secure areas on a regular basis.

It would even be easier to crew a cargo ship or cruise ship with Islamist informants or sympathizers. Crew manning agencies are located in just about every Third-World country you can think of, including Islamist hot-spots like Pakistan, the Philippines, Nigeria, etc. My former firm arrested a vessel shortly after 9/11 that turned out to be owned by the government of Egypt (no better or worse an ally than the UAE) and had an all-Egyptian crew. No word on whether any of them were al Qaida sympathizers, but it wouldn't be a stretch if some were. And this was a vessel that sat docked at the Port of Miami for several days on a regular basis.

The upshot is that a port can be targeted in numerous ways, but doing it through a state-owned management company would probably be among the more problematic ways to do it. Most painfully obvious is the fact that any infiltration of port security through the management company would be immediately traced back to the state-owned management company, and therefore the state (in this case, the UAE) would lack any plausible deniability (remember that term?) if anything were to go "boom."

In the end, the increased scrutiny of the deal may be the biggest boon of the debate; we're finally talking about port and border security, and Congress and the Administration is finally listening. I think Krauthammer has it correct that the deal will likely go through; however, we may wind up with better focus and security at our commercial ports as a result of the controversy.

Ghouls Land In Anoka

When a family has to bury a man or woman who has died in the service of their country, a minimal expectation would be that they have the ability to honor their loved one in peace. A rather strange and ghoulish phenomenon has arisen in the past year, however, that not only exploits the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq for political purposes, but also has inspired a group dedicated to countering their protests. And ironically, neither group is anti-war:

On her way into the church where the funeral was to be held for her 23-year-old son Thursday morning, Deirdre Ostlund approached six men and women waving signs against gays and America and told them in a cold fury: "I'm Andrew's mother, and I want you to know you are truly hateful people."

As Ostlund turned away, Shirley Phelps-Roper taunted her: "Adulterer! You can't admit you sent your own child to hell! If she does not heed this warning, she will look up from hell with him."

Her small group continued to sing "God hates America."

But across barricades, crime-scene tape and police officers, 20 flag-waving men and women countered with the original, "God bless America, land that I love ... "

This ritual, unfolding across the nation outside military funerals, arrived in Anoka on Thursday an hour before the funeral for Cpl. Andrew Kemple, who died in Iraq Feb. 12.

The group that serenades grieving family and friends of deceased soldiers with "God Hates America" belong to the Topeka church run by Fred Phelps, the virulent anti-gay preacher who used to do the same with funerals of AIDS victims. Shirley Phelps-Roper, the preacher's daughter, continues the family tradition of spreading hatred in the name of God in about the most repulsive non-violent way possible. Complete with garishly colored picket signs proclaiming "GOD HATES FAGS" and "GOD HATES AMERICA", these mouthbreathers from Kansas arrive to exploit the dead and get their message into the papers with their remarkably disgusting behavior.

Now a counterprotest group has formed in reaction to the Topeka ghouls called the Patriot Guard Riders. Their purpose is to provide a buffer between the Phelps gang and the funeral and to mount a defense of the US and our soldiers to the calumny offered by the haters. The PGR protestors have their hearts in the right place, but all this does is heighten the tension and rhetoric at what should be a ceremony where the survivors can find a bit of peace. It may be necessary, but it doesn't really solve the problem.

The Phelps group shows what happens when a bigot rises to authority of any religious group; the rest of the congregation winds up losing all sense of humanity. These protests by Phelps and his little minions of mouthbreathers violate the centuries of Christian sensibilities and sensitivities regarding the basic manners of grieving. In religious terms, their rhetoric represents the ultimate sin of presuming to know the judgment of God on another soul. They have proven themselves to be nothing more than ghouls in Christian clothing, a warning to others and an embarrassment to the truly faithful. (via Shot In The Dark)

Philippines Averts A Coup (Updated)

The Philippine Army has put down an attempted coup d'etat aimed at deposing the elected government apparently in favor of a military junta, according to the army's commander:

The Philippine army says it has thwarted an attempt by soldiers to overthrow the president, Gloria Arroyo, and form a military government.

Several commanders of elite units have been accused over the plot.

Security was tightened this week amid rumours of a coup timed to coincide with the anniversary of a 1986 revolt against President Ferdinand Marcos.

The plot apparently centered on the chief of the army's elite Scout Rangers corps, General Danilo Lim, and also involved other military and police units. Lim has been arrested and more are being sought as the military has enacted a de facto curfew. Schools have shut down, demonstrations have been canceled, and soldiers have set up checkpoints around Manila and bolstered security around Arroyo.

This is not the first time Arroyo has faced a coup in the volatile Philippines. She survived an attempted impeachment and an army mutiny during the past few years. Her government suffers from the same problems that have plagued Manila for decades -- official corruption and an ongoing Islamist insurrection that has sapped the credibility of democratic institutions for the strategic American ally.

The US has to be watching this with a nervous eye. The Islamists of Abu Sayyaf will do whatever they can to take advantage of the instability, and neither Manila nor Washington needs it right now.

UPDATE: The same BBC story has been updated to report that Arroyo has declared a state of emergency and granted the army and police "extraordinary powers". That sounds pretty strange while the army itself admits that they do not know the extent of the mutiny within the same institutions charged with administering what sounds like martial law. Is this naivete or something else?

Hospi-Non-Blogging -- First Mate Update

The First Mate has been in the hospital since Tuesday morning, suffering from severe anemia and a critically low white-blood-cell count as well. She has had four transfusions in the past week and still has low hemoglobin counts. She's just had a dialysis shunt put in and will begin treatments tomorrow.

In other words, she's had a hell of a week.

It looks like she'll be in until at least the weekend, probably Sunday at best. They want to give her two dialysis sessions in the hospital where they can keep a close eye on her. They will not release her until her hemoglobin levels stabilize.

On the plus side, we think we have a good potential live donor for another kidney transplant. I won't say who it is until it's ready to go, but we're going to pray that he's healthy enough and that he is a good tissue match.

Thank you for all your prayers. I'll keep you updated.

Al Gore On The March?

According to Dick Morris, former Vice President and lunatic-for-hire Al Gore may have enough momentum to steal the nomination away from Hillary Clinton in 2008. Morris postulates that Gore has picked up enough credibility on the Left that he can make himself the frontrunner by just entering the race:

The former vice president’s slashing attacks on the administration and his stalwart, if misguided, opposition to the Iraq war leave him without the complications and complexes that will devil Clinton as she seeks to appeal to the unforgiving left of the Democratic Party.

And Gore may be a man whose time has come in his party. It was he who warned of climate change and predicted its consequences. Hurricane Katrina was just a fulfillment of the prophesies Gore wrote about in his late-1980s book Earth in the Balance. He has been an energy-conservation nut for years, and his obsessions with alternatives to oil will play better and better as we come to realize how our addiction to oil has led us to dependency on the dealers of this particular drug — Iran, the Saudi royal family and Hugo Chavez.

The Democratic base’s anger at Gore’s defeat in 2000 was assuaged by the worse Kerry defeat of 2004. The idea that he was an incompetent candidate has been replaced in Democratic iconography by the idea that he was cheated out of the presidency. The hiatus has healed his reputation with the base in much the same way that the negative rap on Nixon for losing in 1960 was ameliorated by the Goldwater wipeout of 1964.

All Karl Rove must be thinking after reading this is: God, please make it so!

If Morris is right -- and Morris usually provides accurate analysis -- it only shows how radical and out of touch the Democratic Party has become. If their base prefers a bitter old man that panders to radical Islamist propaganda while we are at war against Islamofascist terrorism, then the Democrats had better consider jettisoning their base and starting fresh. No one in their right mind would nominate Al Gore for President after that speech in Saudi Arabia, and if that's what gets the leftist base involved, the Democrats will be better off in the long run without them.

Morris, the ultimate Machiavellian, notes that some would question Gore's loyalty for challenging the wife of the man who made him Vice President. He dryly quotes Truman's advice to "get a dog" if one wants a friend in Washington, but he fails to mention the stab in the back he delivered to Joe Lieberman in 2004. Lieberman refused to announce his entry into the primaries in case Gore decided to run against George Bush again, but Gore waited far too long to announce his abstention. Having handicapped his former running mate with an impossibly late start -- all the major donors had divided themselves between Dean, Kerry, and others -- Gore then made the surprise endorsement of Howard Dean instead of Lieberman, without even warning his old partner.

Gore? Loyalty? Since when?

Republicans should be delighted with this turn of events. Gore narrowly lost when running as a centrist. Just wait to see what happens when he tries running again after five years of paranoid-conspiracy theories flying out of his mouth. There won't be enough air time in the world to broadcast the commercials that the GOP would produce.

No Making Fun Of Making Fun In Islam

The Cartoon Wars just got sillier, if one can imagine such a development. Malaysia has now sanctioned a newspaper for publishing a cartoon that satirizes the protest over the Prophet cartoons, calling the cartoon "inappropriate":

Malaysia has reprimanded one of its biggest daily newspapers for printing a cartoon lampooning the global controversy over caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad.

The government's move has fanned a hot debate in this mainly Muslim country about where to draw the line between press freedom and respect of religion, because this time it involves a newspaper closely aligned with mainstream Muslim opinion.

The English-language New Straits Times had defended its right this week to publish the cartoon, which featured a street artist offering "caricatures of Muhammad while you wait."

But the government, a prominent voice in the Islamic world, felt it crossed the line and its internal security ministry had given the daily three days to explain itself, the New Straits Times said on its front page on Thursday.

The cartoon in question is an installment of "Non Sequitur", a satiric look at politics and culture drawn by Wiley Miller and popular in the United States. NST didn't even draw the cartoon but instead ran it as part of its syndication process. It didn't depict Mohammed or even the Qu'ran in a bad light, but instead criticized the knee-jerk lunatics flooding streets around the world, killing people and burning embassies over cartoons. It shows yet again that the issue behind the protests isn't a blasphemous drawing of the Prophet, but a global instinct to violent reaction to any critical look at Islam or its practitioners.

If the media hasn't figured that much out -- and they haven't -- at least Alan Dershowitz and Bill Bennett have. They point out the failure and cowardice of the supposed bastion of free speech and scold them for their capitulation:

To put it simply, radical Islamists have won a war of intimidation. They have cowed the major news media from showing these cartoons. The mainstream press has capitulated to the Islamists -- their threats more than their sensibilities. One did not see Catholics claiming the right to mayhem in the wake of the republished depiction of the Virgin Mary covered in cow dung, any more than one saw a rejuvenated Jewish Defense League take to the street or blow up an office when Ariel Sharon was depicted as Hitler or when the Israeli army was depicted as murdering the baby Jesus.

So far as we can tell, a new, twin policy from the mainstream media has been promulgated: (a) If a group is strong enough in its reaction to a story or caricature, the press will refrain from printing that story or caricature, and (b) if the group is pandered to by the mainstream media, the media then will go through elaborate contortions and defenses to justify its abdication of duty. At bottom, this is an unacceptable form of not-so-benign bigotry, representing a higher expectation from Christians and Jews than from Muslims.

Read the entire essay from the liberal Harvard professor and his conservative former student. The utter failure of the press to inform its readers and to defend free speech and open criticism has been remarked several times on this blog, but this effort by Dershowitz and Bennett will have major repercussions for the media in the politics of the day. We saw this coming with the media's love affair with the McCain-Feingold Act, in which Congress basically bribed the media with an exemption to the near-ban on political speech they imposed on almost everyone else. Once someone sells out, it becomes much easier to convince them to do it again.

When leading lights from across the political spectrum rise up to condemn the media for their cowardice -- I can find no other word -- the media can no longer hide behind a partisan analysis of the critique. They have exposed their own pusillanimity, and all Dershowitz and Bennett do here is shine a light on it.

UPDATE: Mark Tapscott says it's not just pusillanimity -- the leftists honestly believe in stifling dissent.

South Dakota Bans Abortions

South Dakota's Senate passed an abortion ban handily yesterday, 23-12, and sent both chambers into conference to hammer out a final version for Governor Mike Rounds to sign:

South Dakota moved closer to imposing some of the strictest limits on abortion in the nation, as the state Senate approved legislation that would ban it except when a woman's life is in danger.

The bill, designed to wage a national legal fight about the legality of abortion, passed 23-12 Wednesday. It next returns to the state House, which has passed a different version.

The measure would make South Dakota the first state to ban abortion in nearly all circumstances. Doctors would face up to five years in prison for performing abortions unless a woman needed one to save her life.

The primary aim of this bill isn't to outlaw abortions -- it's to challenge the Supreme Court on Roe v Wade by presenting them with such a law so clearly at odds with the original decision that the court will have to explicitly review the ruling. Other states have passed restrictions based on age and consent that have allowed the court over the past several years to nibble at the edges of Roe without having to face it honestly.

And in all honesty, Roe was bad jurisprudence, no matter what one thinks of the outcome. The reasoning behind Roe allows any Supreme Court at any time to declare anything unconstitutional, as long as five jurists can find an emanation from a penumbra of a out-of-context piece of text that may or may not have anything to do with the issue at hand. It certified a procedure that should have a fancy name in Latin, but it would nonetheless mean "making it up as we go along". Without a doubt, the South Dakota legislature would not have attempted to do this ten years ago with the composition of the Supreme Court at that time, but now they feel they have as receptive a panel as they are likely to ever have.

They may find themselves disappointed. John Roberts and Samuel Alito may indeed vote to strike down Roe, but it's no sure thing. Both men, especially Roberts, gave strong respect to stare decisis, and the courts have provided plenty of reaffirmation of Roe afterwards. In passing a ban that doesn't take into account rape and incest, the bill itself may give the court sufficient cover to reject it without delving too deeply into Roe. Perhaps the legislators thought those exceptions would prove too difficult to administer, but their exclusion gives another reason for the bill's defeat.

What I find so interesting is how unpopular abortion has become in South Dakota. This is a state, after all, that elected Tom Daschle to a string of Senate terms until his obstructionism cost him the job. It also narrowly elected Democrat Tim Johnson to the other Senate seat in 2002. Yet the state Senate voted for the most restrictive abortion ban in decades by an almost 2-1 vote. It appears that the popularity of this procedure is waning, and that portends many such challenges in the future, even if this particular effort fails.

The War Of The Golden Mosque

Insurgents blew up the golden dome of the Askariya mosque, destroying one of the holiest shrines in the Shi'a sect and potentially winning a long-running battle to pull Iraq into a sectarian civil war. In the aftermath of the bombing, carried out by terrorist commandos, Shi'ite militias killed at least 19 people as they attacked dozens of Sunni mosques in retaliation:

THE revenge attacks started within minutes of the devastating dawn blast that wrecked the Golden Mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest Shia shrines in Iraq.

By the end of the day, as thousands of Iraqis spilt out on to the streets in protest and more than 90 mosques lay damaged or destroyed, Iraq’s political and religious leadership was struggling to avert a full-blown civil war. At least eighteen Sunnis, including three clerics, were reported murdered.

The reprisal attack on al-Quds Sunni mosque in western Baghdad was typical. Residents ran for cover as more than a dozen masked Shia gunmen raked the building with bullets. The firing halted as suddenly as it had begun. The men stepped back into their six saloons and pulled away slowly, singing and waving jubilant V-signs from the windows. They were ushered from the scene by soldiers from an Iraqi National Guard checkpoint , who cheered and waved.

Such scenes were repeated across the country as thousands of people, many calling for revenge, massed in cities throughout the south of Iraq demonstrating against the desecration of the Golden Mosque.

As a result of the bombing and the misguided vigilantism that ensued, the political process in Iraq momentarily ground to a halt. The largest Sunni faction in the National Assembly withdrew from all negotiations and demanded thatl the government issue an apology for the attacks on their mosques. The Shi'ites insist for the moment on maintaining their militias to protect their shrines. Shi'ite gunmen broke into schools and cajoed students into taking up armed insurrection.

Some voices of reason could still be heard in the cacophony of hatred. Grand Ayatollah Ali- al-Sistani issued demands for peaceful protests and forbade his followers from attacking Sunni mosques. President Talabani urged restraint for all Iraqis and told the nation that insurgents exploited their fears in an attempt to create disunity between Iraqis. The national security chief pointed the finger at foreign insurgents and declared it an attempt to create a civil war. How many Iraqis listened to these moderating words? It appears that Sistani's edicts may have had the most effect, clearing the streets of Baghdad and leaving an unsettling tension boiing out of sight.

Unsurprisingly, Iran found a way to exploit the attacks, and again to no one's great shock, he blamed "Zionists and occupiers" for the attack:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blamed the United States and Israel on Thursday for the destruction of a Shiite shrine's golden dome in Iraq, saying it was the work of "defeated Zionists and occupiers." ...

"They invade the shrine and bomb there because they oppose God and justice," Ahmadinejad said, alluding to the U.S.-led multinational forces in Iraq.

"These passive activities are the acts of a group of defeated Zionists and occupiers who intended to hit our emotions," he said in a speech that was broadcast on state television. Addressing the United States, he added: "You have to know that such an act will not save you from the anger of Muslim nations."

Muqtada al-Sadr, the Iranian mullahcracy's puppet in Baghdad, echoed Ahmadinejad and called for an immediate withdrawal of American troops. The radical Shi'ite groups will try to make hay of this attack on Askariya by blaming the wrong foreigners without a doubt, but it will probably not gain much traction in Iraq. The majority of the Shi'ites already have deep suspicion about "Wahhabists", as they call the Zarqawi-led foreign provocateurs. Having a lunatic like Ahmadinejad spew his usual anti-Semitic paranoid fantasies will neither surprise nor influence many.

The greater issue is maintaining the political processes in Iraq and pushing the national security forces into position to ensure that the government has the monopoly on domestic force. The Shi'ite militias remain a direct challenge to the authority of the new Iraqi government and have to eventually disband or get absorbed into the command structure of the Iraqi security corps. As the terrorists intended, this bombing sets that effort back tremendously and makes the job of stabilzing Iraq that much more difficult. After the chaotic emotions quiet down, one hopes that the Iraqis themselves recognize that fact -- because if they do, all sides will focus on the Zarqawi nutcases with a literal vengeance for exploiting and using them in such a brutal and cold-hearted manner.

And On Review, There Is No Story

NBC has breaking news on Quailgate, and it won't please the members of the Fourth Estate. It turns out that all of the witnesses to the shooting have a consistent story -- and it matches what Dick Cheney said all along about the accidental shooting of Harry Whittington:

NBC News has obtained new documents regarding the shooting accident involving Vice President Dick Cheney.

NBC News filed an Open Records Act request with the sheriff's office in Kenedy County, Texas, which investigated the shooting. Late Wednesday, NBC received two dozen pages of documents, including hand-written affidavits on the shooting never before made public. ...

In this case, all the accounts are similar and consistent with how Vice President Cheney has already described the incident. The statements say Cheney and his friend were about 30 yards apart when the vice president shot, aiming for a single bird. The statements all agree this was an accident, and no one places blame on Whittington.

Several of the statements say that no one was drinking alcohol during the late-afternoon hunt — again, consistent with the vice president's account. One member of the hunting party does volunteer that she had a glass of wine at lunch, four hours before the accident.

All of the witnesses tell the same essential story: no one was drunk, the Veep aimed at a bird, and swung around to shoot it and hit his friend by mistake instead. The ellipsis in the above quotation eliminated one paragraph, however:

There are six new affidavits from members of the shooting party. Most are dated Feb. 15, four days after the shooting. One is dated Feb. 17, almost a week after the vice president accidentally shot his friend, Harry Whittington. Some law enforcement experts say that's an unusually long period of time, after a shooting, to gather written statements from witnesses. Ideally, they say, investigators like to get such affidavits when memories are still fresh, and can't be influenced by other witness accounts.

So on one hand, NBC wants to impress everyone by telling them that they've scooped the rest of the media by getting a hold of the affidavits first. Then, before they even report what the documents say, they undermine them with a thinly-veiled accusation of witness tampering. Besides, the police only worry about timing of statements when they investigate crimes, not incidents where everyone involved insists that the shooting was accidental, including the victim.

Now can we get the media kids to agree that this was never a story?

Behind The Scenes At Able Danger

An inside source on the Able Danger controversy -- one that has provided CQ with reliable background information in the past -- gives some interesting background information about the recent hearings on the data-mining program that the 9/11 Commission did its best to ignore. The source writes:

The Able Danger hearing was noteworthy for things that did not happen. One interesting item that everyone seems to have missed is that Steve Cambone did not swear in for his testimony to the subcommittee. (In fact, he refused to swear in, but this was not made an issue by the subcommittee.) Thus, no matter how blatantly erroneous his testimony was, he can't be charged with perjury as he did not testify under oath.

Also, Zelikow was excoriated in his testimony during the closed session by the Representatives present. He was called a liar to his face.

Steve Cambone was the director of the DoD's Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation, and reported directly to Donald Rumsfeld; he is the USD/I now. Philip Zelikow held one of the top staff positions on the 9/11 Commission and was Lt. Colonel Tony Shaffer's initial contact with the commission. At first he encouraged Shaffer to provide more information after their initial meeting in October 2003 in Afghanistan, but when Shaffer returned back to the US in January 2004, Zelikow had suddenly lost his enthusiasm for more discussions about Able Danger. Zekikow now works for Condoleezza Rice at the State Department.

If this is accurate, it appears that Congress has also found Zelikow's role to hold some interest in how Able Danger got buried. Perhaps more of this curiosity will be evident in the publc hearings to come.

UPDATE: My source mistook Steve Hadley for Steve Cambone. I have corrected the post above.

CQ On The Air Tonight

I'll be appearing on WTVN Radio in Columbus, Ohio, at 7 pm CT for a one-hour roundtable discussion about Able Danger, its implications, and the prognosis for its full disclosure. Be sure to check out their webstream to join in the conversation.

More Controversy, Crap, & Confusion! (Bumped & Updated!)

Yesterday I noted an interview with former Senator Alan Simpson and his statement that the Washington press corps seemed to specialize in "controversy, crap, and confusion". I asked CQ readers to send me their best logos for what should shortly become a classic motto for the DC gaggle. I posted a couple of entries I received shortly after I asked in my original post, but here are a few others that have come in since. Click on the link to the extended entry to see all of the suggestions.

UPDATE: I've added more to the list, including an entry from Sissy Willis I missed the first two times around. Take a look at the great entries, and keep sending more ...

Pete at iHillary has a number of ideas:

Jacqueline has certain people in mind:

Matt at Overtaken By Events has a certain network in mind:

And Karl has separate logos for the White House and Capitol Hill gaggles:

And Anonymous Drivel sends this graphic that fits neatly on any blog sidebar:

Sissy Willis focuses on the current victim:

Virgil Rogers has a bumpersticker:

Rick Holte sees red:

John McGrath broadcasts his dissatisfaction:

Jen goes global:

And Derek Brigham from Freedom Dogs shows his well-known ingenuity and artistic flair:

Keep them coming! Please be sure to keep the size within reason -- say, no more than 400 pixels in height or width.

Prophet Cartoons Polarizing Muslims

The New York Times reports that the cartoons that dared to criticize Islam and Mohammed have created a polarization not just between Islam and the West, but within Islam itself as well. More and more, moderate Muslims have noticed the damage done to the image of their faith by the crowds of lunatics burning embassies and killing people around the world, and they struggle to hold a mirror to the faithful:

In a direct challenge to the international uproar over cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad, the Jordanian journalist Jihad Momani wrote: "What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures or pictures of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of the cameras, or a suicide bomber who blows himself up during a wedding ceremony?"

In Yemen, an editorial by Muhammad al-Assadi condemned the cartoons but also lamented the way many Muslims reacted. "Muslims had an opportunity to educate the world about the merits of the Prophet Muhammad and the peacefulness of the religion he had come with," Mr. Assadi wrote. He added, "Muslims know how to lose, better than how to use, opportunities."

To illustrate their points, both editors published selections of the drawings — and for that they were arrested and threatened with prison.

Mr. Momani and Mr. Assadi are among 11 journalists in five countries facing prosecution for printing some of the cartoons. Their cases illustrate another side of this conflict, the intra-Muslim side, in what has typically been defined as a struggle between Islam and the West.

In fact, most Muslim journalists who have criticized the response to the cartoons find themselves either in jail or facing arrest, and the article itself provides a very telling look into why. The isolation and persecution of these journalists show that the riots and demonstrations represent mainstream Islam, despite the multicultural pablum given by most pundits over this eruption. Friends and relatives of these reporters remain silent for fear of violent retribution. A significant moderate faction within Islam has been cowed into almost-complete silence by the ascendant violent and radical factions.

Further appeasement of the latter means that the moderates will only lose more ground. The Islamists who exploited the cartoons to generate political capital for themselves have won a tremendous victory, and those Muslims who may have been on the fence before this issue will no doubt find themselves drawn to the faction with the most momentum. One measure of this victory has been the reticence of the Western media, especially the American media, to even show the cartoons to its readers before condemning them as offensive. The media moguls could take a lesson from the Muslim journalists about editorial choices:

Mr. Momani expressed exasperation when asked why he printed the cartoons. He insisted that it was the work of journalists to inform, and that he did so after speaking to many people who were outraged without ever seeing the cartoons.

Too bad American editors have forgotten this basic principle of journalism. Momani will pay for his adherence to journalistic integrity with his livelihood and perhaps his life, but he understood why a free press exists. Our leading media lights appear to have forgotten that in circumstances much less dire than Momani's -- to their everlasting shame.

This acquiescence is not helping moderate Muslims to take control. It cedes the center ground to the Islamists and encourages them to make ever-increasing demands on the West for submission. As long as they keep winning those battles, the moderates do not stand a chance.

Turning Idiots Into Martyrs

In the United States, we trust that the exercise of free speech allows for a natural corrective to idiocy, where informed criticism allows effective rebuttal against ugly and ignorant rantings. In other words, we act on the assumption that the populace consists of rational adults until proven otherwise. In Europe, however, the culture demands more control over speech, in a manner that resembles American campus "speech codes" enacted into law. With the background of the cartoon protests as stark relief, an Austrian court sentenced Holocaust denier David Irving to three years in prison for openly stating that the massive genocide never occurred:

David Irving, the controversial historian, has confirmed he is to appeal against his three-year sentence for denying the Holocaust. ...

Irving was arrested last November in Austria in connection with two speeches he gave in the country in 1989, in which it was alleged he denied the existence of the gas chambers.

He pleaded guilty on Monday to denying the Holocaust, a crime in Austria punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

This is ridiculous on many levels. First, the "offenses" occurred seventeen years ago, far past the time that most crimes would be dropped. Second, Irving recanted under oath during his trial, acknowledging that the Holocaust did indeed happen and resulted in the deaths of millions of Jews.

Most importantly, the notion of sending someone to prison for uttering an opinion amounts to tyranny, no matter where it occurs. At a time when the European press has taken a courageous stand for freedom of speech and open criticism regarding the Prophet cartoons, Austria provides an embarrassing reminder of European hypocrisy on speech rights. These laws banning all critical debate on the Holocaust only serve to transform historical illiterate and latent anti-Semites like Irving into folk heroes and martyrs for the twisted causes they serve. It also allows nutcases like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to sound rational when he argues for a ban on criticism of Islam and Mohammed.

Free speech means having to listen to repugnant and idiotic drivel on occasion. The antidote is not government censorship but more speech in rebuttal to the ignorance that arises. David Irving would be nothing more than an obscure ranter had it not been for the Austrian court and the European instinct for top-down censorship that wound up with him sentenced to a three-year stretch in prison for nothing more than being an idiot. We beg our European counterparts to reconsider their political-correctness speech laws and resist turning more idiots like Irving into free-speech "heroes".

Swastikas And Sieg Heils At Turtle Bay

The guards at the United Nations have engaged in a pattern of harrassment towards Israelis in their department, including entering swastikas and Nazi salutes, while UN management has mostly done nothing to end the anti-Semitic behavior. The New York Sun reports that except for the American undersecretary-general for management, who has urged more severe consequences:

The U.N. incident, as was pieced together by the Sun after talking to four sources who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject, began last September at a guard post inside Turtle Bay, where entry permits are inspected and the identities of visitors are recorded in an official log book.

The Israeli guard has just taken a scheduled break and his post was manned by a fellow guard, who is from Haiti. Upon returning to his post, the Israeli guard discovered that two swastikas had been drawn in the log book. As a descendent of Holocaust victims, the guard decided he could not overlook the drawings, which he felt were left as a message to him. He complained to his superiors. In the investigation that ensued, the Haitian guard denied he had meant any offense, saying instead that the symbols were nothing but "innocent doodles," according to an official familiar with the investigation.

The U.N. security chief, Bruno Henn, tried to draw the investigation to an end within his department. The Israeli guard, however, demanded a more extensive investigation and that the guard who had offended him be given a severe reprimand. It was then that the Israeli was met by Nazi salutes in the guards' quarters. Mr. Henn declined to comment to the Sun. The matter was brought to the attention of other officials, but they too wanted to leave the offense as a "category 2" case, a misdemeanor that is deemed best investigated within the department.

The irony is that UN management specifically wanted Israelis as guards to change the image of Turtle Bay from anti-Israel to something more open and accepting. Now when they have Israelis working at the facility, the Haitians and other guards treat them with more open anti-Semitism than even the General Assembly would dare show, a rather high threshold to top.

Even worse is the indictment of management as incompetent and ineffectual that this incident provides. After five months, no one still has addressed a situation that would have taken all of five minutes at any corporation in the US. A guard who draws swastikas in official logs -- or who has nothing better to do than draw "innocent doodles" in one -- would find himself out on the street looking for another job. The same fate would await the co-workers who issue Nazi salutes in a deliberate attempt to insult and provoke others in the department. It wouldn't take five months for management to wring their hands.

In fact, one might suppose that any other expression of bigotry and racism would result in immediate action by UN management. Had the roles been reversed and the Israelis drawn crude anti-Haitian or racist "doodles" in the official log books, they would have seen the outside of the building tout suite. The mild response to this harrassment has only reinforced the image of Turtle Bay as a hostile environment for Israel and Jews. The UN may have hired the Israelis to argue that "some of its best employees are Jewish," but their lack of action in the face of anti-Semitism makes it difficult to reach any other conclusion.

Bush Raises The Stakes

The controversy over the sale of P&O to DP World took a high-tension tone after George Bush drew a line in the sand with Congress. He defended the decision by CFIUS to approve the transfer of port management to the nationalized UAE operator, and threatened to cast his first veto to save the deal from an increasingly hostile Congress:

Brushing aside objections from Republicans and Democrats alike, President Bush endorsed the takeover of shipping operations at six major U.S. seaports by a state-owned business in the United Arab Emirates. He pledged to veto any bill Congress might approve to block the agreement.

The president on Tuesday defended his administration's earlier approval of the sale of London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co. to Dubai Ports World, despite concerns in Congress it could increase the possibility of terrorism at American ports.

The sale — expected to be finalized in early March — would put Dubai Ports in charge of major shipping operations in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia. "If there was any chance that this transaction would jeopardize the security of the United States, it would not go forward," Bush said.

"It sends a terrible signal to friends around the world that it's OK for a company from one country to manage the port, but not a country that plays by the rules and has got a good track record from another part of the world," Bush said.

To assuage concerns, the administration disclosed some assurances it had negotiated with Dubai Ports. It required mandatory participation in U.S. security programs to stop smuggling and detect illegal shipments of nuclear materials; roughly 33 other port companies participate in these voluntarily. The Coast Guard also said Tuesday it was nearly finished inspecting Dubai Ports' facilities in the United States.

Bill Frist has come out in opposition to the deal, claiming at one point that he has the votes to override a presidential veto -- which would be the first ever cast by this administration. He doesn't appear to be bluffing, either. Both Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer agree with Frist, and House Speaker Dennis Hastert has asked the president to reconsider. Republican and Democratic governors have publicly opposed the deal, with Jon Corzine and George Pataki threatening to sue to stop it. Under the circumstances, Bush has few allies -- and when he looks around at John McCain and Jimmy Carter as his chief defenders, he should wonder how he wound up at such a pass.

Without doubt, this is a complicated issue. In order to win the war on terror, we have to engage moderate Muslims and push the rest of the ummah in their direction. That doesn't just mean politically, but economically as well. DP World has a long reach in Southwest Asia, and the government of the UAE has supported the US when that support cost them among their neighbors. Other bloggers have supported the President's contention that we may be passing up a rare opportunity to demonstrate our willingness to work with Muslim countries, and perhaps even gain some opportunities for better intelligence.

However, the operation of our ports opens a risk that the Bush administration has not adequately shown to have covered. While DP World would not handle port security -- tasks that will still fall to DHS and the Coast Guard -- the management of port operations gives DP World and the UAE government access to a lot of information that could be used by terrorists to attack us. Port managers have to know security protocols, procedures, and personnel, all of which could be used by infiltrators to gain access to sensitive areas or to sneak weapons through what safeguards exist. And while the government of the UAE has been supportive of the US, the feeling isn't unanimous; DP World may have trouble keeping its less-enthusiastic citizens from gaining important posts in their organization.

At any other time, this would not be an insurmountable problem, but the fact is that we are at war with Islamists around the world, and some of them gather in the UAE. Handing operational control over our ports to a state-owned corporation from the same region that generates the terrorists seems like an exceedingly bad idea at this time, and the administration has not done any work until now to make a case for the opposite.

UPDATE: My former partner Dafydd at Big Lizards has a modest proposal ...

UPDATE II: AJ Strata disagrees ...

CQ On The Air Tonight

I'll be appearing on Rob Breckrenridge's show, The World Tonight, on CHQR in Calgary later tonight to discuss the State of the Union and the Alito confirmation. Canadians can listen on AM 770, but everyone else can catch us on the Internet stream on their website. I should be on at 9:30 PM Central Time.

Rob has a terrific show, and it's always a pleasure to be on as his guest. We'll be talking about the ports controversy and other topics Be sure to tune in!

Will McCain Successfully Woo Conservatives?

ABC News profiles the efforts of John McCain to attract conservative support for his expected run at the 2008 presidential nomination, an effort that looked like a dead letter several months ago. After angering the base on several issues -- campaign finance and judicial nominations chief among them -- McCain now wants to consolidate his support among moderates while attracting enough conservatives to remain viable:

In recent months, McCain has taken several steps to court his party's base: he has endorsed teaching intelligent design alongside evolution; he has backed a ban on gay marriage in his home state of Arizona; he has met with the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

He has also described former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., as "the finest leader we've had" and questioned the commitment of media darling Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., to ethics reform . And to top it off, he recently said he wouldn't be bothered if Roe v. Wade were overturned since he's never supported it.

But far more important to McCain's conservative resurgence has been his opposition to what he calls wasteful spending and his commitment to persevering in Iraq.

ABC never asks about the Gang of 14 and the BCRA, two issues with which conservatives have split -- painfully -- with McCain. Any analysis of his chances for a primary victory have to take those schisms into account. When asked to stand up for conservative jurists, McCain balked and legitimized the obstructionist tactics of the Democrats, kneecapping fine judges like Henry Saad and Brett Kavanaugh. He also pushed through Congress one of the worst abridgments of political speech in American history, the BCRA, which forbids private citizens and groups the right to buy advertisements for their candidates within 60 days of an election -- and also seeks to regulate Internet websites for their involvement in politics, potentially including this one.

Conservatives may wind up with no choice but McCain in 2008, as the pickings look slim so far. If it comes down to McCain against Hillary Clinton, they'll support the former ... but not enthusiastically. Look for the conservatives to rally around a George Allen or Mike Huckabee before they surrender to McCainia

Backstabbers At State Unhappy With Changes

The Washington Post runs a report that shocks no one at all. The effort by Condoleezza Rice at the State Department to consolidate the bureaucracy and bring it into line with the policy of the elected government has created hard feelings among some of the rank and file careerists, who apparently liked their ability to ignore the chain of command and undermine appointees. Some of them have run to the Post and Glenn Kessler to complain about their treatment in the Rice regime:

A State Department reorganization of analysts involved in preventing the spread of deadly weapons has spawned internal turmoil, with more than half a dozen career employees alleging in interviews that political appointees sought to punish long-term employees whose views they considered suspect.

Senior State Department officials deny that and say an investigation has found that the proper personnel practices were followed. But three officials involved in the reorganization, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly, acknowledge that a merger of two bureaus reduced the influence of employees who were viewed by some political appointees as disloyal to the administration's policies.

"There are a number of disgruntled employees who feel they have been shoved aside for political purposes. That's true," said one of these officials. "But there was rank insubordination on the part of these officers."

How rank was that insubordination? Previous management encouraged the careerists to bypass key political appointees designated to ensuring that the elected government's policies were carried out, allowing State to thumb their nose at the White House. Since the Administration has the ultimate responsibility for the performance of State, this situation was untenable. Even Kessler reports that the insubordination was reality:

"The suspicion is we would undermine the policy," said one of the officials who have felt sidelined. "That is what all of us find most offensive. We are here to serve any administration." ...

The employees who say that they have been targeted once had a back channel to then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, who they said would on occasion ask them to bypass their superior, John R. Bolton, now the ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton, with backing from allies in the Pentagon and the vice president's office, frequently battled the rest of the State Department on policy issues.

State has always had its cadre of careerists whose outlook is that they run American foreign policy and not the elected President. It's been an example of the Washington bureaucracy for ages, and the Bush administration decided that it has gone on long enough. The President has a right to expect that his foreign-policy initiatives get implemented once so directed at State, and that the legitimate check on that authority resides with Congress and the American electorate, not a few self-important unaccountable apparatchiks at Foggy Bottom.

If he has to live with the consequences of the performance at State, then Bush has decided to make sure that the insubordination comes to a screeching halt. Rice has followed that policy and implemented it more quickly and efficiently than anyone predicted. If that makes the insubordinates unhappy and demoralized, that doesn't bother me a bit, and it shouldn't bother anyone else, either.

The Most Irresponsible Editorial

Today's New York Times issues what has to be the most irresponsible editorial within memory, no mean feat for the Paper of Record's editorial board. Today, they try their hand at health reporting and manage to make Meryl Streep look like a cynic during the Alar scare.

The subject of the paper's venture into scientific hysteria? Aspartame, otherwise known as NutraSweet, a sugar-free sweetener that has been on the market for two decades. The Times breathlessly reports a new study saying ASPARTAME CAN KILL YOU!

Aspartame, an artificial sweetener used by more than 200 million people around the world, has passed numerous safety evaluations in the past quarter-century. It is used as a tabletop sweetener (Equal, NutraSweet) and as an ingredient in more than 6,000 processed foods, including diet sodas, desserts, candy and yogurt, among others. But now comes a provocative if inconclusive report that says aspartame may cause cancer, even at levels long considered safe.

Only after reminding readers that aspartame is in EVERYTHING THEY EAT does it toss in a curious modifier. Inconclusive? If it's inconclusive, why does the Times make it a subject of its unsigned editorial?

There is no reason for panic, but surely good reason for regulatory authorities to look again at this much-studied sweetener.

Don't panic, but someone in the government should get to banning NutraSweet. Okay, I'm not panicking. Much.

The new alarm was raised by a large study in laboratory rats conducted at the European Ramazzini Foundation in Italy. The study found a statistically significant increase in lymphomas, leukemias and other cancers in rats that were fed aspartame for a lifetime and compared with rats that were not. Excess cancers were found even in rats fed doses equal to 20 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, well below the 50-milligram level currently deemed acceptable for humans in the United States. If these results hold up under further scrutiny, the guidelines will need re-evaluation.

Okay, so if I eat 50 milligrams per kilogram every day, the current guidelines say I may be at risk. That would be 4500 milligrams of sweetener a day for a 200-pound man, which seems rather a stretch for even the biggest sweet tooth. The cancer level found in this study would be 1800 milligrams of sweetener. That amounts to eighteen packets of sweetener every day over a lifetime before a 200-lb user would create a risk. If you're eating that much sweetener, folks, you're not fooling anyone. Switch to sugar or get over the sweet tooth, if you have any teeth left.

But wait -- how reliable is this study anyway?

But the study could turn out to be a false alarm. There was an abnormally low incidence of cancers in a key control group, which could have made the cancer rate in rats fed aspartame look worse than it really was. And there was only a very weak relationship between the doses of aspartame administered and the cancer rate, which makes it hard to be sure that aspartame was causing the tumors.

In other words, the researchers fed a ridiculous amount of aspartame to 1900 lab rats and noted that the control group wound up healthier than normal control groups, making the statistical analysis of the experimental group almost worthless. Not only could they not rely on the control-experimental relationship to determine a rate of increase, the researchers found no relationship between levels of exposure to aspartame and an increase of the cancers that the substance supposedly causes. That latter finding should be enough to convince researchers that they barked up the wrong tree ... but then that would not allow the Times to screech about new regulatory action.

And screech they do:

The Ramazzini group has an obligation to make its full findings public quickly if it expects regulators to take urgent action. Meanwhile, consumers of aspartame can either wait for a final verdict or switch to products containing sucralose (Splenda), a sweetener that some food activists deem safer.

I switched to Splenda long ago, but I did it for the taste. I don't eat eighteen packets of Splenda a day, either. Nevertheless, I don't expect regulators to take "urgent action" based on one study with the kinds of flaws that the Times describes, nor would I expect a news organization to get hysterical over the results. The Gray Lady's editorial board long ago gave up that designation, and editorials like these are the reason why.

Able Danger Conference Call

Earlier this evening, I was able to participate in a conference call with Mark Zaid, the attorney representing Lt. Colonel Tony Shaffer in his dispute with the DIA in the Able Danger controversy. Joining in the call were the group of bloggers that has kept the fire burning on this key element in our failure to discover the al-Qaeda terrorists in our midst before they successfully staged the 9/11 attacks:

Mark Coffey of Decision ‘08

Mike of Able Danger Blog

QT Monster

Rory O’Connor

Pierre from Pink Flamingo Bar & Grill

Bluto from Jawa Report and The Dread Pundit Bluto

AJ Strata already posted a good review of the conversation with Zaid over the Congressional hearings this past week, after Shaffer finally got an opportunity to speak publicly about the Able Danger program. The hearings fell rather flat, despite Rep. Curt Weldon's best efforts. The press has lost interest in covering the program that apparently put lie to the notion that the intelligence community had no idea of the threat profile of AQ in the US before the attacks.

As Zaid points out, the lack of press almost certainly results from the committee members themselves; the only thing that Republicans and Democrats have in common these days is a desire to push Able Danger out of sight. The FBI also appears to have gotten the same disease as the two parties. The FBI, which once acknowledged that several attempts occurred to have meetings between its agents and the Able Danger team now denies that any such contacts occurred.

I have not performed much better, to be fair. Other issues have pushed Able Danger off of my radar screen, and even Zaid noted that no explosive developments have arisen from the story in weeks. Nonetheless, the above bloggers have done an excellent job in maintaining some interest in the story. The conference call gave me an opprortunity to pick the thread back up and start pressing Congress for more hearings. Zaid thinks that three or four more committees may conduct hearings on the matter, and the DoD Inspector General is expected to issue a report on AD sometime in May. Zaid believes that an unclassified summary will be part of that, but if it isn't, he will take action to get a declassified summary released.

Shaffer and the rest of Zaid's Able Danger clients can use some donations to their legal fund. Those donations can be sent to:

Mark S. Zaid, Esq.
Krieger & Zaid, PLLC
1920 N Street, N.W.
Suite 300
Washington, D.C. 20036

Zaid is deep into out-of-pocket territory on this case, and the men who risked their careers to make sure that the entire story of American intelligence efforts to combat AQ before 9/11can use your support.

UMTC Cuts Conservative Group Funding Even Further (Updated!)

Last week, I posted about the funding decisions made by the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities regarding the division of student fees. UMTC defunded the most active conservative groups on campus while increasing funding for politically active groups with liberal political agendas. Bill Gilles reports that the second round of recommendations has come through the Student Activities Office, and that the results have changed the picture somewhat -- it's actually gotten worse. CFACT and SFV still have received an unprecedented defunding by UMTC, and now the allocations that were to go to the Minnesota Republic, a newspaper with a conservative outlook, and the Conservative Club have been cut by almost 30% from the initial funding announcement.

The Minnesota Daily, which Gilles lists as a liberal newspaper, reports on the process without ever mentioning the cessation of funding for conservative voices:

While the Student Organizations Committee recommended funding more than 80 percent of the requests, several organizations will take a considerable hit in funding come fall semester if the committee’s recommendations are adhered to.

Ten organizations were recommended to receive at least 30 percent less money than requested.

Under the committee’s initial recommendations, three organizations would receive no money for 2006-2007. Eight organizations would receive full funding.

Three organizations will receive no funding, but the Daily never mentions their names. Two of them are CFACT and Students for Family Values (SFV), and the list of recommendations for 2006-7 only lists the Student Emergency Loan fund as a group requesting funding to fail to garner any monies at all -- and they weren't funded in the last term, either.

The Daily does note that one of the conservative groups attended the open hearing to protest the reduction of his group's request:

While the committee’s deliberations are open to the public, few representatives from fees-requesting student groups attended.

But when Aaron Solem arrived to find his organization’s request had already been considered and wasn’t allowed to address any questions, he wasn’t too happy.

Solem’s organization, Students for a Conservative Voice, would be funded about $13,000 to $17,000 less than requested under the initial recommendations.

Solem, who has served on the committee, berated members when they refused to reconsider his organization’s request.

“To address discrepancies, groups are allowed to speak,” he said. “We were not allowed to speak.”

That reduction accounts for a 40% loss in funding for the MN Republic, which SCV produces.

Last week, some commenters left excellent remarks concerning this story. First, some questioned the inclusion of groups such as the various ethnic communities requesting funding as "liberal" -- a good question. Reviewing their applications, at least some of them acknowledged political activities as part of their "outreach", but the Asian and Native Americans did not explicitly do so. Others protested the inclusion of the Daily as a liberal group, since it is the official student newspaper on campus. Even if one strikes those out, it still amounts to a 6-1 funding gap for last year, and that expands to a 16-1 gap for the next year based on current recommendations:

Liberal Groups........................This Year...........Initial Outlay..............Updated Outlay
Muslims.................................$58,000.00...........$55,900.00.................$55,900.00
Africans................................$10,000.00...........$20,000.00.................$14,138.00
Black Student Union..............$53,900.00...........$49,300.00.................$49,300.00
Atheists...................................$8,500.00.............$6,000.00...................$6,000.00
Alternative Theatre.........................$0.00..........$15,000.00..................$10,000.00
Disabled.................................$28,000.00..........$28,000.00..................$23,000.00
La Raza.................................$36,400.00..........$42,600.00..................$39,600.00
International Students............$59,000.00..........$42,700.00..................$42,100.00
MPIRG....................................$78,181.00..........$76,880.00..................$76,880.00
Queers..................................$29,000.00..........$37,000.00..................$37,000.00
Voice.......................................$5,000.00............$7,000.00....................$5,000.00
The Wake (liberal paper).......$91,000.00........$100,000.00................$100,000.00
Women's Collective...............$25,000.00..........$28,500.00..................$28,500.00

Liberal Totals.......................$481,981.00........$508,880.00................$487,418.00

Conservative Groups
Family Values..........................$5,000.00...................$0.00............................$0.00
CFACT...................................$85,000.00...................$0.00............................$0.00
MN Republic (paper).......................$0.00..........$24,000.00...................$17,800.00
Conservative Club..........................$0.00...........$15,000.00..................$12,800.00

Conservative Totals...............$85,000.00..........$39,000.00...................$30,600.00

Another series of comments talked about the essential dichotomy of a conservative group complaining about a lack of government subsidy. This to me seemed a very good point. (Note: read the update below for more information on this point.) Instead of arguing for the restoration of the money from what is essentially a tax, perhaps CFACT would be better off by demanding an end to the student fees altogether and require these groups to get direct student donations for their survival instead. Gilles addresses this point in a separate message to CQ readers:

Not all conservatives believe we should apply for funding. They believe the system is bad and we should not participate. We think this is foolish and allows liberals an uncontested pot of $1 million on every campus of note. We disagree with that sentiment, but respect those conservative groups who choose to sit out the fees fight on ideological grounds.

That's also a fair point, but CFACT might do well to apply for the funding as long as the system exists while still arguing for the elimination of the fees.

I'll be talking with Bill later tonight and will podcast the interview afterwards.

UPDATE: I spoke with Bill Gilles earlier tonight and asked him some of the questions CQ readers have posed here. Take a listen to the entire interview via the CQ Podcast (note the link to the RSS feed above the blogads in the right column) or by downloading the file at this link. One important fact comes out in this interview about the fees. There are, in fact, two sets of fees involved in this process. The first comes from mandatory student service fees that the university collects every semester from every student. Most of the organizations listed above requested fees from those monies. However, CFACT and MPIRG have received their funding through voluntary fees based on donations that come through the registration process.

The students, during their registration, fill out a form that asks whether they wish to donate to certain campus groups. Those earmarked donations then pass to the student groups through UMTC's administration. What the SAO committee has done is to strike CFACT from this voluntary process. Since MPIRG is the ideological counterpart to CFACT on campus, that essentially leaves the process biased towards them and establishes a university endorsement for MPIRG's point of view on environmental matters. This violates the Supreme Court's direction on the use of student fees, Gilles argues.

CFACT plans to continue using the appeals process at UMTC to get their access to the voluntary donations restored. I'll update CQ readers as the story develops.

Hackett Identified Intelligence Gap

Apparently, Paul Hackett had done his homework in preparing for the Democratic primary election for the campaign to unseat Senator Mike DeWine. His team had analyzed their opponent, Rep. Sherrod Brown, and discovered that Brown had consistently voted to reduce or eliminate funding for the intelligence community during his years in Congress, leading to a large liability in a general election against DeWine. Instead of reacting to the intelligence gap, the Democrats tossed Hackett under the bus in favor of Brown -- whom they claim is more electable:

Congressman and U.S. Senate candidate Sherrod Brown voted to cut intelligence funding more than a dozen times before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a record that Paul Hackett's campaign advisers called proof that Mr. Brown could not win in November.

A consultant hired by Mr. Hackett, Mr. Brown's onetime Democratic opponent for Senate, estimated the funding cuts would have totaled billions of dollars if enacted. None were. The consultant called Mr. Brown's votes on those proposals and a dozen more recent national security issues "toxic in today's political environment," according to campaign research documents obtained by The Blade. ...

In August, 1993, his first year in Congress, Mr. Brown supported an amendment to reduce funding for intelligence agencies by 10 percent of what they'd received in the 1993 fiscal year. It failed by a 3-1 margin. Democrat Louis Stokes was the only Ohioan to vote with Mr. Brown.

Mr. Brown voted for similar attempts to cut intelligence budgets, most of them sponsored by Rep. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) or Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.), at least once a year through 1999. ...

The Hackett researchers also noted Mr. Brown voted against the entire intelligence appropriations bill in 1998 and voted twice to declassify Congress' intelligence spending levels, which are secret. He opposed creating the Department of Homeland Security, along with establishing and reauthorizing the USA Patriot Act.

The Democratic leadership has stepped on its own foot in a big way in Ohio. The Republicans have struggled to get past a scandal involving its investment in rare coins, and the tightly-contested state looked ready to switch to red as a result. Mike DeWine had already angered the GOP base by tossing in with the Gang of 14 and allowing the Democrats to block several appellate-court nominees such as Henry Saad and Brett Kavanaugh in return for the uberpartisan smearfest that the Democrats staged for the Alito hearings.

Now, however, the Democrats have shoved Hackett aside to grease the skids for Brown, whose track record on national-security issues has been abysmal. After spending years doing his best to starve the intelligence community into non-existence, what will Brown say about his view of national security? The Democrats will once again face an election where their candidate will only reinforce the worst aspects of their tattered reputation on the issue that will be foremost in voters' minds during wartime. Hackett could have given them a chance to argue that opposition to the Iraq war did not mean a hostility to the military and national-security agencies. Brown's track record demonstrates that for Democrats, it does.

Ohio Democrats can thank the party leaders that hail from New York, Vermont, and Nevada for sticking them with what has to be Mike DeWine's dream opposition this November. Once again, given a choice between a competitive candidate and one from Stereotype City, the Democratic kingmakers have chosen ... poorly.

Mike and Karl would send their personal congratulations, but they're too busy laughing to pick up the phone.

Guess Who's Running For Leader?

Canadians will wind up with a new Liberal leadership soon, after Paul Martin's resignation forced a change of direction for the once-powerful party. According to SES Reseach, which nailed the predictions for the last national election, one of the front-runners has only been a Grit since bailing Martin out of a jam last spring. A poll of Ontario voters show these four in front:

Ken Dryden: 14%
Bob Rae: 12%
Michael Ignatieff: 12%
Belinda Stronach: 11%

Yes indeed, Strollin' Stronach has a virtual tie with the other three front-runners, with 28% still undecided. Stronach crossed the aisle after giving her boyfriend, Tory deputy leader Peter MacKay, all of a few hours' notice before betraying him in every way possible to prop up the corrupt Liberal government. For this, she received a portfoliio for a ministry in human resources, which lasted all of six months before the government got the boot from a disgusted Commons.

I wouldn't count her out of the race, either. She has a lot of money behind her, and a friendship with Bill Clinton to boot. That combination proved successful south of the 49th, and it will be potent above it as well.

Hip-Hop Hugo

Has Latin America ever produced an embarrassment as significant as Hugo Chavez? The nuttiness of the paranoid dictator continues with his response to a speech by Condoleezza Rice, in which she called the Chavez regime a "challenge for democracy" in the region. In response on his television show, Chavez made fun of her name and imagined himself as a hip-hop idol:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez launched a new verbal attack against US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, bluntly warning her "don't mess with me, girl."

Responding to remarks before the US Congress last week in which Rice called Chavez a "challenge to democracy" in Latin America, Chavez warned the top US diplomat to back off.

"She messed with me again," he said in his weekly "Hello President" television show, deliberately mangling her name as "Condolences." "Don't mess with me, girl."

Last week, after her US Congress testimony, Chavez dismissed Rice as "the imperial lady."

Did he snap his fingers and wave his hand, too? Call her "girlfriend"?

Coming soon: Hugo joins "The View"!

Finance Office Cleared Senior Staff In Scandal

The trading scandal that broke at the beginning of the Canadian election season resulted in an immediate but cursory investigation by the Finance Office itself, which cleared senior FMO staff of leaking advance word of a policy change to traders. However, the list of those who benefitted has widened as the Mounties continue their own, more in-depth investigation into how those firms got the inside information:

An internal Finance Department probe into the alleged leak of confidential income-trust policy exonerates senior staff — but also suggests the circle of those potentially in the know may have been wider than previously reported.

Documents released under the Access to Information Act show the department made inquiries of key staff in the days after Nov. 23, when then-finance-minister Ralph Goodale announced after markets had closed that there would be no tax applied to income trusts. ...

Mr. Goodale has already indicated he gave advance word of his decision to then-prime-minister Paul Martin, who shared it with three aides and to two cabinet ministers, one of whom — John McCallum — has said that he also shared it with aides.

Assuming that the findings of the initial Finance investigation remain valid, that points the finger in the direction of the Prime Minister's office -- another scandal that may attach itself to Liberal leadership, and this one personally to Paul Martin. Martin has declined to fight for the party leadership position, resigning as such after losing the election to Stephen Harper.

The RCMP has a tough job in investigating insider trading, and it doesn't get easier when it involves high government officials. With the gun registry off its back, the RCMP should have more time and resources to thoroughly check out how that information got leaked to the financial street; they'll start with those who benefitted the most and work their way back up the chain. The resultant report will garner a lot of interest when it finally appears.

More Leaders Objecting To Ports Deal

The deal allowing the state-owned Dubia Ports World to take over management of major American ports has raised more objections from Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle. DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff tried to assuage fears of security breaches, but the criticism continued:

U.S. terms for approving an Arab company's takeover of operations at six major American ports are insufficient to guard against terrorist infiltration, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee said yesterday.

"I'm aware of the conditions, and they relate entirely to how the company carries out its procedures, but it doesn't go to who they hire, or how they hire people," said Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.).

"They're better than nothing, but to me they don't address the underlying conditions, which is how are they going to guard against things like infiltration by al Qaeda or someone else, how are they going to guard against corruption?" King said.

King spoke in response to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's comments yesterday about conditions of the sale. King said he learned about the government's terms for approving the sale from meetings with senior Bush administration officials.

Perhaps the media can start reporting this deal in more depth, now that they have exhausted the paranoid-schizophrenic dimensions of the Cheney hunting accident nine days ago -- or at least we hope they have. The US could have exercised a veto over the deal by cancelling the contracts held by British-based P&O before they got acquired by DP World. Instead, we seem to have done nothing while control of our ports transferred from a privately-held British corporation to a Arab-state-owned consortium.

Some have claimed that the US should not object to a free-market decision, and others claim that foreign investment should be encouraged. I agree with both of those statements ... within reason. We do not allow foreign ownership of our media because we want to make sure that the American press is not used for foreign propaganda. (Whether it gets used for domestic propaganda is a favorite topic of the blogosphere, of course.) More to the point, we do not allow foreign companies to compete for defense contracts in order to maintain national security.

With that as a precedent, why would we allow a foreign company of any kind control over our ports when we are in the middle of a war against Islamofacist terrorism? Many among us have continued to note the vulnerabilities of our ports as a potential entry point for terrorists, and yet we treat them with less care than a defense contract for toilet seats. American companies exist for this purpose and should have precedence in this market, or if not, then the government should take control of our ports. We nationalized airport security after 9/11; will it take an attack on a port to get us to take those targets seriously as well?

UPDATE: I should note that the limitation on defense contracts applies to prime contractors, as Swab Jockey points out in the comments. Those contractors can buy parts overseas, but they cannot release secured information to their contractors without heavy government oversight -- and they retain responsibility for information and physical security at all times.

Sounds Good To Me

Osama bin Laden apparently told the West in his tape released last month that he would never be taken alive -- a scenario that fits quite nicely with US plans:

Osama bin Laden promised never to be captured alive and declared the United States had resorted to the same "barbaric" tactics used by Saddam Hussein, according to an audiotape purportedly by the al-Qaeda leader that was posted Monday on a militant website.

The tape appeared to be a complete version of one that was first broadcast Jan. 19 on Al-Jazeera, the pan-Arab satellite channel, in which bin Laden offered the United States a long-term truce but also said his al-Qaeda terror network would soon launch a fresh attack on American soil.

"I have sworn to only live free. Even if I find bitter the taste of death, I don't want to die humiliated or deceived," bin Laden said, in the 11-minute, 26-second tape.

Bin Laden also compared the actions of the US in Iraq to the "criminality" of Saddam, a passage that USA Today says denies Bush administration assertions that a link existed between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Only an American newspaper would make that kind of statement. Plenty of links between Saddam and AQ have already been proven; what's at issue is whether those links came into play for the 9/11 attacks.

Nevertheless, for once we find ourselves in agreement with Bin Laden. Let's not capture him. Let's just seal the entrance to whatever cave he currently calls home and leave him to rot. Otherwise, we'll only wind up with Ramsey Clark representing Osama and telling us how misunderstood the terrorist really is. I'd consider that torture of the worst kind.

Carter: They Know Not What They Did

Jimmy Carter takes an opportunity to explain to us why the United States and the world should not take the Palestinians at their word and cut off their funding after electing an Islamist terrorist group to a majority government. One month ago he was certifying the election as fair, and now today he argues that it makes no difference at all:

Although Hamas won 74 of the 132 parliamentary seats, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas retains the right to propose and veto legislation, with 88 votes required to override his veto. With nine of its elected members remaining in prison, Hamas has only 65 votes, plus whatever third-party support it can attract. Abbas also has the power to select and remove the prime minister, to issue decrees with the force of law when parliament is not in session, and to declare a state of emergency. As commander in chief, he also retains ultimate influence over the National Security Force and Palestinian intelligence.

After the first session of the new legislature, which was Saturday, the members will elect a speaker, two deputies and a secretary. These legislative officials are not permitted to hold any position in the executive branch, so top Hamas leaders may choose to concentrate their influence in the parliament and propose moderates or technocrats for prime minister and cabinet posts. Three weeks are allotted for the prime minister to form the cabinet, and a majority vote of the parliament is required for final approval.

After delineating all the reasons why the Palestinians may not see any immediate change in their government, he tells readers that Israel and the United States should remain positive about the changes that will come. Reacting to the ascension of an avowed terrorist group to power in a proto-state in a negative manner might, after all, give the impression that the US and Israel have colluded to undermine the new terrorist government there.

Oh, well, we can't have that happening, can we?

Carter further argues that we should not overreact because Hamas will be no worse than Fatah in holding peace talks, which have not restarted after more than a year. At least Fatah's governing element had a willingness to meet on a basis that recognized an Israeli state, but that's not even really the point. Carter wants the US and Israel to restart the funding of the Palestinian government despite the clear mandate from the Palestinians that they want a war with Israel -- in effect demanding tha Israel fund the machinery that wants to kill it.

The argument coming from Carter and others is that we need to support democracy, including when people make choices for terrorism. In those instances, we should forget our own national interest and act as if the Palestinians had no idea that Hamas bombs women and children in pizzerias and buses and loudly proclaims its desire to annihilate the state of Israel. It's a ludicrous position and one that holds people in contempt. Why not acknowledge the choice that the Palestinians have made, freely and openly as Carter has certified? They have chosen poorly -- and removing the consequences of that choice will only allow them to continue to choose poorly in the future.

We need to set an example for the rest of the world that with democracy comes responsibility. If a people freely elect avowed terrorists to government instead of responsible leaders, then they will reap the consequences of that choice. We do not need to take the advice of the father of our conflict with Islamofascism -- the man who undermined the Shah in Iran and allowed the Islamists to take over that strategic country and then sat back and did nothing when they sacked our embassy and held our people hostage for 444 days. Had we treated the Iranians as responsible for that act of war in November 1979, we would have put an end to the modern Islamist movement and would have avoided almost thirty years of Iranian funding of terrorists in the region, including Hamas itself.

The Palestinians are not children, and they have chosen their course. If Carter doesn't accept that, then he has no business discussing democracy at all.

UPDATE: Note to SwabJockey -- my prediction is that State will continue to push for humanitarian aid to the Palestinian "people", which will wind up in Hamas' hands regardless. See "Oil For Food Program, Volumes I - XXVII".

Movie Review: 'Date Movie"

Today is our 12th anniversary, and I wanted to take the FM out of the house for a while, even though she's not feeling too well at the moment. We decided to go to the movies, where she could relax and hopefully get a couple of laughs. The only comedy playing around us that showed at the right time was Date Movie, advertised rather charmingly as written by "2 of the 6 writers of Scary Movie!" Figuring the FM could use a couple of laughs, even cheap ones, we decided to see it.

I'm still waiting for my laughs.

The film stars the highly likable but poorly-managed Allison Hanigan, who debuted in the Dan Aykroyd-Kim Basinger stinker My Stepmother Is An Alien and hit the big time with the American Pie movies and the cult favorite Buffy the Vampire Slayer series. She teams up with Adam Campbell to satirize a large number of modern romances. It starts with Shallow Hal and then moves through My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Meet the Parents and its sequel Meet the Fockers, Hitch, When Harry Met Sally, and a lot of other movies which all have one thing in common that this movie lacks: they made people laugh.

I've seen some clunkers before; I sat all the way through Anger Management and Say Yes after buying tickets, but this one I almost left after the first thirty minutes. I stuck around DM just to see if it ever came up with even one funny gag, but aside from a laugh after the credits started rolling, it didn't. That one moment of actual wit came during a sequence when Hannigan and Campbell are supposedly seeing a counselor, who asks about their last sexual encounter, and the two characters explain how exactly the PG-13 MPAA rating restricts them to upper-body contact with clothes left on. I didn't expect As You Like It, but even a few flashes of Not Just Another Teen Movie would have been worth the price. It couldn't even meet those low expectations.

Joining Hannigan and Campbell for this embarrassment is Eddie Griffin, whose presence seems to doom every movie; Fred Willard and Jennifer Coolidge, apparently escaping from the Christopher Guest compound for a couple of weeks; Sophie Monk; and even Carmen Electra puts in an appearance in the final scene. She should be ashamed to be seen here, but not too many people will make it to the end.

Fortunately, we went home to spend the rest of the day relaxing. I bought some Buca di Beppo for dinner and we watched Parenthood for the laughs we missed at the cinema, and then I watched Serenity again for a reminder of the fun good movies can bring. If you insist on paying to see Date Movie, I'd suggest having some similar plans for a good antidote.

The Misguided And Cowardly Outrage Of The Press

We have watched two separate news stories overwhelm the national press over the past fortnight. The first is the deadly protests that have come from imams stoking Muslim ire over four-month-old editorial cartoons satirizing Islam and Mohammed. The latter is the outrage of the White House press corps and the national media in general over an eighteen-hour delay in reporting the accidental shooting of Harry Whittington by the Vice-President. One would hope that the outrage of the media might get expressed over the former more so than the latter -- but that would apparently give more credit for courage and integrity than the national media deserves.

Jeff Jacoby notes in his Boston Globe column today that the press has mostly abdicated their position as the conveyors of truth and information when the effort carries any real risk:

The vast majority of US media outlets have shied away from reproducing the drawings, but to my knowledge only the Phoenix has been honest enough to admit that it is capitulating to fear. Many of the others have published high-minded editorials and columns about the importance of ''restraint" and ''sensitivity" and not giving ''offense" to Muslims. Several have claimed they wouldn't print the Danish cartoons for the same reason they wouldn't print overtly racist or anti-Semitic material. The managing editor for news of The Oregonian, for example, told her paper's ombudsman that not running the images is like avoiding the N-word -- readers don't need to see a racial slur spelled out to understand its impact. Yet a Nexis search turns up at least 14 occasions since 1999 when The Oregonian has published the N-word unfiltered. So there are times when it is appropriate to run material that some may find offensive.

Rationalizations notwithstanding, the refusal of the US media to show the images at the heart of one of the most urgent stories of the day is not about restraint and good taste. It's about fear. Editors and publishers are afraid the thugs will target them as they targeted Danny Pearl and Theo van Gogh; afraid the mob will firebomb their newsrooms as it has firebombed Danish embassies. ''We will not accept less than severing the heads of those responsible," an imam in Gaza preaches. ''Whoever insults a prophet, kill him," reads the sign carried by a demonstrator in London. Those are not figures of speech but deadly threats, and American newspapers and networks are intimidated. ...

Journalists can be incredibly brave, but when it comes to covering the Arab and Muslim world, too many news organizations have knuckled under to threats. Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, a veteran foreign correspondent, admitted long ago that ''physical intimidation" by the PLO led reporters to skew their coverage of important stories or to ignore them ''out of fear." Similarly, CNN's former news executive, [Eason Jordan], acknowledged after the fall of Saddam Hussein that his network had long sanitized its news from Iraq, since reporting the unvarnished truth ''would have jeopardized the lives of . . . our Baghdad staff."

Instead of informing the people of the context of these riots -- the almost ridiculously mild satire of the cartoon published four months ago -- they have steadfastly declined to print them at all. While they regularly issue pronouncements about the right of the people to know, they have banded together to ensure that most of their readers have no idea exactly what the Danish cartoonists drew that have prompted the burnings of at least a half-dozen embassies around the world.

At the same time, the same media outlets that have kept its customers in the dark in one of the most important stories in the conflict with radical Islamists screeched like banshees when Dick Cheney took all of eighteen hours to reveal that he had accidentally shot his hunting partner and friend on a Saturday afternoon. For days, these stalwarts of journalistic courage took turns castigating Scott McClellan for Cheney's failure to give the story to the White House press corps, arguing that the story was so important that it could not be trusted to the Corpus Christi local paper to inform the nation. David Gregory, whose network has not even allowed a pixilated version of the Prophet cartoons to appear lest they incur the wrath of Muslim terrorists, accused the White House of censorship and coverups in supposedly hiding the shooting from the nation.

Jacoby has this correct. The media attacks those who they know will not spend much energy fighting back. Gregory could act like a rude, spoiled child denied his choice of birthday gift because he knew the White House would not dare to even expel him from the room. However, their supposed calling to keep the people informed suddenly takes a powder when the remote threat of violence appears. This only acts to encourage such threats in the future, as the nutcases take a lesson from the pusillanimity of the mainstream American media, especially in contrast with their European counterparts that have taken a stand against extortion and published the cartoons in defense of the Danish press.

When our media has the testicular fortitude to report on terrorists honestly, then they will have gained the moral authority to lecture any White House on censorship and the responsibility of fully informing the public. Until then, such demonstrations as we saw this week by the White House press corps only stands as a perverse monument to the media's hypocrisy and venality.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

Alan Simpson Sums Up The DC Press Corps

Fox's Chris Wallace interviewed former Senator Alan Simpson about the Cheney shooting brouhaha that overwhelmed the news in Washington and the nation this week. Simpson's response conveyed a tremendous disdain for the reporting that followed, but his summation of the entire DC press corps should become an instant classic. Here's the transcript:

WALLACE: So, many up here, Senator -- and we love your tour of this whole event -- what does the last week tell us, or should tell us, about Washington, about the politicians, about the press corps?

SIMPSON: Well, it tells you that you should listen to Lindsay Graham and Evan Bayh and that really there is cooperation. But what it really tells you -- what are we going to expect out of our national press corps, and especially the Washington press corps, when something really happens? How are we to trust, after a whole week of absolute drivel and babble -- and people interviewing themselves! [mimicking reporters] "Uh, what do you think about Cheney?" [makes a face] Jay Leno and David Letterman asked them, "How would you feel if this happened to you?" Let me tell you, the American people are really waiting with a sense of glee when something really, really happens in America, and I suppose they'll just have a catatonic stroke and pitch forward on their faces.

W: So I take it, Senator, that you really miss this place?

S: [Claps hands and laughs] Oh, no, I do! I loved it, I did, I loved it. And I loved it because it was fun. I have a lot of pals on both sides of the aisle. I worked with President Clinton, enjoyed him, President Bush, President Carter, good people doing good things. But let me tell you, you'll never find it if you just follow the Washington media. You'll never know the good -- all you'll get is controversy, crap, and confusion.

W: [laughing] Well, there you go, there's a slogan. I've got to put that on a bumper sticker.

I'm hoping that a CQ reader with a penchant for design can work up a graphic with that slogan for the White House press corps. We can display it every time they go insane over Controversy, Crap, and Confusion^TM.

Senator Simpson is a great interview and a notoriously straight shooter. I had the pleasure of interviewing him at the GOP convention in 2004.

UPDATE: We already have a couple of entries. Hold the Mayo devises a superb new graphic:

Bullwinkle Blog, however, sticks with a classic that practically drips with historic significance:

Bullwinkle explains that the logo stands for the "Controversy, Crap, and Confusion Press." Just in case you wondered.

Any more?

The Wrong Tipping Point

Newsweek, in its new article titled "A Real Racial Tipping Point," argues that we have finally reached a point where race may not matter as much in politics. But Newsweek picks the wrong tipping point in its focus:

It is not just that so many blacks—in both parties—are running for top positions, but that their candidacies are seen as something other than symbolic. In Tennessee, Harold Ford Jr. has his heart set on the U.S. Senate, as do Michael Steele and Kweisi Mfume in Maryland, as does Keith Butler in Michigan. And then there are the people running for governor: Deval Patrick in Massachusetts, Ken Blackwell in Ohio, Lynn Swann in Pennsylvania—not to mention the host of candidates running for other lofty posts.

Mfume, a former congressman, predicts that 2006 will be a "watershed year... in terms of African-American participation in both parties." Carol Moseley Braun, the only black woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate (1992), agrees: "We have reached a tipping point in which race and gender, which go hand in hand... matter a lot less. When I ran against [the then Sen.] Alan Dixon, people laughed at me," she recalls. Fewer people are laughing these days.

With blacks running major corporations, with two having served in succession as secretary of state and with three having won election to the Senate in the modern age, it is becoming harder to argue that blacks can't succeed at the top. And as more and more blacks accumulate the requisite experience, they naturally seek to move up. "Most of these people who stand a good chance have been around a while," says Ronald Walters of the University of Maryland.

Newsweek builds a strawman at the heart of this argument by making an argument that no one has seriously made in 30 years. Who has alleged that "blacks can't succeed at the top"? Surely not this administration, which has had more African-Americans in Cabinet roles than any other previous White House. Not the corporations which have promoted them to positions of executive power. Maybe the only areas in which progress for blacks has been painfully slow has been, ironically, in major professional and college sports, where except for basketball few have risen to top coaching and personnel positions.

The real racial tipping point, and the one that Newsweek misses, comes as more blacks have opened campaigns for national and gubernatorial offices as Republicans. Lynn Swann, Michael Steele, Ken Blackwell, and Keith Butler have made waves for identifying as conservatives or center-right candidates under the GOP banner, threatening the last bastion of Democratic lock-step voting. The Democrats know that if this trend continues and splits the national black vote beyond the 9-1 advantage they enjoy now, they will not be able to compete nationally against the Republicans.

The real question that should be asked is why we have reached this tipping point. Despite having a deathgrip on the black vote for four decades, the party has almost no leaders of African descent and have fielded almost no such candidates in national elections. Carol Mosely-Braun is the only black woman ever elected to the Senate; the Democrats, in their monopoly of that demographic, could never bother to find and support another? How many blacks have won mainstream Democratic support in races for governor or senator?

Up to now, it has been enough for the Democratic party to use the African-American community as a vote bank, and they have exploited it as such while giving few of them high-profile positions of power. It has been one of the least-rewarded dynamics of loyalty for any constituency in politics. In contrast, the Republicans have offered real leadership positions to those who support the GOP despite the embarrassingly small penetration the GOP gets in the African-American community. Newsweek should ask why Democrats apparently felt that blacks could not represent them in leadership instead.