Northern Alliance Radio Network Today

The Northern Alliance Radio Network is already on the air at AM 1280 The Patriot, on the stream if you're not in the Twin Cities. The first half has Bill James, the extraordinary baseball statistician, on the air now in a rare live interview with the diamond genius.

Between 1-3 pm CT, Mitch, King, and I will be discussing the latest translation of documents from the Iraqi Intelligence Service files, as well as McKinney Gone Wild!, NBC's Candid (Muslim) Camera, Katie Couric, and immigration. We will be joined by Rob Fulton from Ramsey County Public Health to talk about preparations for the impending arrival of the bird flu.

Please join in the conversation by calling 651-289-4488 or sending an e-mail to comments -at- northernallianceradio.com.

IBD Decries 'Amateur' Effort On Saddam Translations

An editorial in the Investors Business Daily scolded Congress and the White House for not putting more of an official effort into translating the tens of thousands of documents captured during the fall of Iraq in 2003. CQ reader Angry Dumbo points out one passage that stands out regarding the efforts made by the blogosphere (especially at Free Republic, which translated the document I posted earlier this week):

Equally embarrassing to our spies is another newly released document from 1999 detailing plans for a "Blessed July" operation.

According to the English translation on the Foreign Military Studies Office's Joint Reserve Intelligence Center Web site, Saddam's older son Uday ordered 50 members of the fanatical "Fedayeen Saddam" group to stage bombings and assassinations in Iraq and Europe — including London, where 10 people were assigned.

Excerpts from a long, recently declassified report by the U.S. Joint Forces Command's Iraqi Perspectives Project will be published in the upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. Looking at the "Blessed July" document, Foreign Affairs notes this "regime-directed wave of 'martyrdom' operations against targets in the West (was) well under way at the time of the coalition invasion." ...

At present, we're relying too much on translations by bloggers and other amateurs [emphasis mine -- CE]. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., says the White House has been dragging its feet for fear of embarrassing supposed allies (such as Russia) whose links with Saddam would come under scrutiny.

I understand Angry Dumbo's irritation. It really does not matter whether amateurs or professionals translate these documents -- rather, the accuracy of the translation is all that we need to ensure. Bloggers have done this because the government simply didn't want to commit the resources necessary to do it. Rather than scold Rep. Hoekstra, IBD should congratulate him for getting someone engaged in determining the contents of this treasure trove of documentation.

However, knowing the extent of IND's support of the blogosphere, this does not appear to be meant as an insult to bloggers. IBD wants to press the government to take responsibility for the evaluation of these documents rather than push it off to a community of volunteers. That's commendable; the government never should have let these sit for three years unexploited. We could have bridged a gap in our understanding of the war much earlier and avoided a lot of political infighting as a result.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that I agree with IBD's overall assessment of this credibility gap between the volunteers and the professionals within the intelligence agencies. The administration has to deal with a high level of distrust, a lot of it irrational, that would make anything they produce suspect in most circles. The administration sees the pre-war argument as something they're not likely to win even if the documentation shows clear links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, because most of the debate has become so unhinged that people now demand a threshold of proof so high that it surpasses even criminal prosecution. Under these circumstances, it might work better to have the documents independently translated and verified.

One argument that I received after posting the translation supplied by Laurie Mylroie was that because the translation came from Free Republic, it made it unreliable. After that argument was made, I contacted two professional translators who will translate page 6 of the BIAP document independent of each other. When I receive those translations -- for which I paid a fee to both -- I will post them along with the FR translation as soon as they arrive. That should put an end to speculation about the motives of the translators, and put to rest the worries about "amateurs" involving themselves in the process.

Give Me Socialism Or Give Me ... Socialism!

The student protests and riots in France have spilled over into a third month with no end in sight, as the Chirac government refuses to withdraw its new "employment contract" law that allows French employers greater flexibility in terminating younger employees. The students refuse to compromise, demanding that French law remain the barrier to youth employment that it has been thus far:

Hall B at the Faculty of Rennes 2 University was the starting point for the mass student movement against the French government's new youth employment law which has plunged the country into crisis. On February 7, thousands of students stormed the building, closing it down and staging a "sit-in".

All classes have been stopped and the building is now run by about 5,000 students. About 200 protesters sleep in the lecture theatres each night. Almost every protest they stage in Rennes ends in clashes with the riot police. On Wednesday, a group of students wearing masks and brandishing plastic guns held a press conference in one of the blockaded lecture halls in front of a sign saying: "We will never disarm."

On Thursday, students invaded the law faculty, which remains open, and ransacked the offices of the rightwing student union that backs the government's new employment law.

What do the students want? They want the government to guarantee their jobs. They claim that the new law proposed by Jacques Chirac, which allows employers to terminate student employees for poor performace in the first two years of the job, represents an unacceptable concession to Big Business. When asked about their solution to the high levels of unemployment for younger French workers, the students reply that the government and "big business" have to make sacrifices for them:

In Rennes, up to 100 students and unemployed people have set up a "protest village" in a central square. One student, Pierre Pennamon, said the "easy hire, easy fire" law would not solve unemployment. "An Anglo-Saxon model won't work in France. It doesn't suit our way of life. Anyway, UK unemployment is not as bad as here. In France, we need big businesses to take some sort of responsibility."

It doesn't suit our way of life. Of course not; the "Anglo-Saxon model" requires that one justify their expense at a business with a consistent level of productivity. The students' "way of life" requires that they do as little work as possible in order not to become cogs in the great capitalist society from which they want a salary. In short, they want Chirac to force businesses to retain substandard workers regardless of the strain it puts on the survival of those businesses and the value of the shares to its investors who write the payroll checks.

And the alternative? The French have begun to swing farther to the left and away from the center-right coalition that Chirac heads. The protestors have demanded more socialism and intend to get it one way or the other. That means that investors will continue to pull out of the French republic and unemployment will continue to soar, while the students trying to crash the Fifth Republic torch their own house, figuratively if not yet literally.

See If You Can Guess What I Am Now

The Venezuelans have apparently watched Animal House too many times as pro-government protestors pelted the American ambassador with fruit and vegetables when he attempted to distribute baseball equipment to poor children in Caracas:

Brownfield was handing out baseball gloves, bats and catchers' equipment to 140 youths at a sports stadium when several dozen protesters showed up and began throwing objects at the ambassador, U.S. officials said.

An official who identified himself as police commander Luis Villasana then approached Brownfield and ordered him and his staff out of the stadium.

Brownfield was accompanied by two former Major League Baseball players from Venezuela and had addressed a crowd that included the youths' parents. Before leaving, he told reporters at the scene that his intention had been to show baseball "as transcending politics."

Protesters on about 12 motorcycles then chased the ambassador's motorcade after he left the stadium and continued to throw objects at the car and pound on it when his vehicle became stuck in traffic, witnesses said.

No one believes that this was a spontaneous demonstration, and the complicity of the police seems rather transparent. Instead of arresting the protestors for assaulting the ambassador, they forced him to leave and then failed to provide adequate security for the motorcade. In this country, such a debacle would have heads rolling at the Secret Service. In Venezuela under Hugo Chavez, it likely will win people medals for their service. As this is the third such incident in as many weeks, the message that Chavez is sending is rather obvious: Venezuela will not protect foreign envoys, especially Americans.

The State Department summoned the Venezuelan ambassador immediately and delivered a different message: any more incidents and the US will place the Venezuelans under a form of house arrest. The US has the right to restrict the movements of foreign envoys for diplomatic or security reasons. If the Venezuelans want to play games with our delegation, then we can do the same here. Until Chavez grows up, we will probably continue to see escalations in this diplomatic kerfuffle, but until then we will have to respond in kind.

This Is What I Meant About Vetting

On Wednesday, I wrote about the scandal at the DHS surrounding Brian Doyle, the deputy press secretary for the agency who got caught trying to seduce a 14-year-old girl over the Internet. My post criticized the Bush administration for its inability to vet candidates for positions with public exposure, so to speak. A number of commenters reasonably disagreed, making a good point about the difficulty of vetting for personal perversions that necessarily remain in the shadows.

Unfortunately for Doyle, the Bush administration, and those of us who support Bush, Doyle's hobbies had already been exposed prior to his 2001 hiring for the Transportation Safety Administration. His former employer, Time Magazine, had to discipline Doyle in 2000 for using company computers to collect adult pornography, according to fellow Time-Warner media outlet CNN:

A Department of Homeland Security spokesman charged with soliciting a minor over the Internet was disciplined in a previous job after an incident in which pornographic images were seen on an office computer, his friends and former co-workers said. ...

Friends and former co-workers say Doyle was disciplined by Time magazine after he allegedly used company computers to view adult pornography in the publication's Washington bureau office.

Time magazine and CNN are both owned by Time Warner.

Time began an investigation after an employee in the bureau complained after finding offensive photographs on her computer, sources said. The photos, which were not of juveniles, were traced to Doyle. The complaint was dropped after Doyle's colleagues signed a petition of support, the sources said.

Doyle received a formal warning and was required to undergo mental health counseling before returning to work, the sources said.

Sources disagree over whether Time suspended Doyle or whether he took a leave of absence after the incident.

How did the TSA and the DHS manage to miss this? Federal background checks, especially for clearances, usually require an extensive search through personnel files at previous employers, interviews with co-workers and managers, and an accounting of every disciplinary action. It also usually requires an explanation for any mental-health counseling to determine whether the applicant is stable enough to be trusted with classified information and access to secure facilities.

One would hope that the revelation that an applicant used computers at work to download pornography would have at least called his judgment into question. Either it got missed entirely, which doesn't speak well at all for the investigators, or it didn't make a difference to the people who hired him, which doesn't speak well for management at TSA and DHS. Either way, it shows a level of incompetency that does not give anyone warm fuzzies who rely on either agency to help secure the nation.

If this report is true, then there is no excuse for Brian Doyle's employment at either agency. Someone's head should be rolling out the door right behind Doyle's.

ADDENDUM: One other possibility exists, which is that Time Warner didn't share the information with investigators. That would present Time Warner with a significant public-relations problem if not legal jeopardy. Applicants for law-enforcement agencies routinely sign releases holding former employers without liability for complete cooperation. In my line of work, I occassionally come in contact with police and sheriff departments hiring former employees, and we cooperate fully with their background checks. If Time Warner did not, then that needs to be made public immediately.

McKinney Losing Steam In Her District

Cynthia McKinney used to be a big hitter in DeKalb County, where Atlantans have sent her to Congress since 1992. In recent years, however, her increasingly erratic behavior and rhetoric has cooled the ardor of voters in one of Georgia's most populous counties; they even retired her for a cycle in 2002 after her claim that George Bush had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks . They elected her again in 2004 when the woman who beat her in '02 ran for the Senate instead (and lost). Now the Los Angeles Times reports that DeKalb voters have once again begun to consider McKinney a liability:

The lawmaker has received little if any support from colleagues of either party, and a federal grand jury is mulling whether to bring criminal charges against her.

In McKinney's suburban Atlanta district, the altercation has created doubts about her fitness for office.

Khalil King, a businessman, said he wasn't sure he would vote for her again. "I just feel like she's overreacting," said King, who is black.

But to many Georgia Democrats, much more is at stake than McKinney's political future.

Support from moderate white voters is seen as crucial to the party's chances of winning upcoming statewide contests, and there is a fear that McKinney's conflict will cast a negative light on the Democratic Party.

Georgia Democrats need the support of moderate white voters in order to win statewide offices, and the McKinney reuption has strained their credibility with that target set. The Democrats find themselves stuck because of McKinney's behavior; no one will criticize her, and as long as they remain silent, moderate voters won't trust them. Governor Sonny Perdue challenged his two Democratic challengers running in the primaries to publicly scold McKinney for her assault on a police officer, and when neither of them would do so, he made it a point to equate them to McKinney's strange brand of anti-Semitic and conspiracy-theory politics.

The smart action for Georgia Democrats would be to throw their support to a more moderate candidate in the primaries. A DeKalb lawyer already in the primary race appears to fit the bill. Hank Johnson already holds county office; the Times doesn't bother with specifics, but Johnson is a county commissioner with an impressive bio, at least for a Democratic candidate. He's been a judge and a successful defense attorney, bragging about winning acquittals or hung juries (why would an attorney brag about a stalemate?) in significant cases.

Johnson certainly won't excite Republicans, but the GOP has no chance of winning this seat anyway. Replacing McKinney with Johnson would create a marked improvement regardless of party, as it is difficult to imagine anyone worse than McKinney. It might also allow Democrats in Georgia -- and in Congress -- an opportunity to recover a small measure of their credibility. Will DeKalb voters and their state party seize that opportunity and finally rid themselves of this serial embarrassment, or will they play it safe by protecting the incumbent at the risk of losing statewide races? I suspect that McKinney will wind up "retired" once again.

UPDATE: As Yoda once said, "There is another ..." Dignan wants to generate blogospheric support for his potential run against McKinney. Maybe Georgia voters should take note and grab this opportunity for a real impact on politics.

Key Adscam Figure Gets 18 Months

One of the three key Sponsorship Programme figures facing criminal charges in the fraud conspiracy has had a prison sentence imposed on him after prosecutors appealed his initial sentencing. Paul Coffin, who pled guilty to 15 counts of fraud stemming from the $1.6 million of taxpayer money he collected from taxpayers, got sentenced to 18 months in prison earlier today (via Newsbeat1):

Montreal advertising executive Paul Coffin was sentenced to an 18-month prison term in a Quebec appeals court on Friday for his role in defrauding the federal government out of $1.5 million in sponsorship funds.

In May, Coffin pleaded guilty to 15 counts of fraud for his involvement in the sponsorship fiasco.

He initially received a two-year less a day conditional sentence of community service.

However, the Crown appealed that decision, saying the sentence was not enough to deter others from doing the same in the future.

I wrote about the ridiculous sentence given Coffin last year on September 19th in a post called "Steal Big, Risk Little". Coffin had netted well over one and half million dollars from his exploitation of the Sponsorship Programme, and yet the Canadian court only forced him to repay one million dollars as part of his sentence. Essentially it gave Coffin a 35% profit margin on his fraud, proving that crime pays in Canada.

The court had also sentenced Coffin to two years of community service -- speaking about the evils of fraud to college students, not picking up trash on highway embankments. He also had to endure a 9 pm curfew on weeknights, but apparently had no such restrictions on his weekends. Other than that and the felony conviction on his record, Coffin escaped punishment for his five-year theft of money from the government.

Prosecutors successfully argued that the purpose of sentencing involves not just rehabilitation, but actual punishment and deterrence. The appeals court agreed, critizing the sentencing judge for getting too wrapped up in Coffin's personal life to render a proper judgment. The original court forgot that two parties had come to the bar for justice -- Coffin and the Crown, representing the people. It was impossible to argue that the original sentence provided any justice for Canadians who just had their pockets picked.

This development does not bode well for the other two defendants in the Adscam case, Chuck Guité and Jean Brault. Brault also pled guilty to five separate counts of fraud which allowed him to steal a like amount, and his prospects for avoiding jail time appear slim indeed. Guité has pled not guilty and forced the Canadian government to prosecute the case; if he loses, he can expect an even tougher sentence.

Canadians will be impressed to see that someone will finally serve time for the worst scandal in recent Canadian memory. One wonders if the punishment will remain limited to these three cogs in a much larger money-laundering machine.

Post.com To Hire Two Bloggers This Time

Raw Story posts an inside scoop from the Washington Post that their on-line site will hire two bloggers to replace the disgraced Ben Domenech -- one liberal and one conservative. This means that Jim Brady has not given up on his efforts to engage the blogosphere, good news for both the newspaper and bloggers:

The paper’s ombudsman, Deborah Howell, has informed RAW STORY that Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com, is looking for a liberal blogger, along with a conservative one, to replace Ben Domenech who resigned after only three days of blogging, when his earlier writings were discovered by mostly liberal bloggers to be racially insensitive and – in multiple cases – plagiarized.

The paper doesn’t plan on making any formal announcement, but the news should be welcome to many critics on the left who felt that it was unfair to hire just a conservative blogger in the first place.

I have to admit that I like this approach better than the original idea. Many may consider Dan Froomkin's blog liberal enough to require balance, but that should have been balanced by another Post reporter contributing his conservative thoughts to a blog -- assuming, of course, that they could find one. The Froomkin blog is really another animal altogether, an opportunity for a reporter to share his biases in the open and allow readers to make their own decisions as to his credibility.

(I met Dan at The Week's awards dinner, and he has a good sense of humor about his image in the blogosphere. He introduced himself to me by saying that he was glad to meet someone who had almost certainly made fun of him at some point. I couldn't recall if I had, but it turns out he was correct, at least in that I had criticized him earlier, but only once. He wrote the infamous story about George Bush having polled at 2% among African-Americans that turned out to be a sampling disaster.)

Brady and the Post have reached the correct conclusion about bringing on regular bloggers for political perspectives; they should accommodate both sides. Quite frankly, I hope that the two bloggers they do select agree to occasionally square off on issues simultaneously, giving us a blogger version of Point/Counterpoint for the day. The comment sections should go wild for those debates.

Some have suggested that I should ask about the conservative slot. I can tell you from my experience with the people at the Post that they are a class act, and any blogger fortunate enough to be invited to work on this project should jump at the chance. I know I will look forward to reading the blogs when the Post launches the project.

UPDATE: Jon at QandO suggests three bloggers, naturally desiring a libertarian blogger as well as a conservative and a liberal. Why not? My only suggestion for that position would be Jon himself rather than the two he selects, or perhaps Dale Franks.

Immigration Compromise Dies On Democratic Obstinacy

The compromise legislation announced by Senators from both parties has collapsed in today's session, garnering less than forty votes in a procedural vote that required at least sixty:

The Senate sidetracked sweeping immigration legislation Friday amid partisan recriminations, leaving in doubt prospects for passage of a measure that offered the hope of citizenship to millions of men, women and children living in the United States illegally.

The bill gained only 38 votes on a key procedural test, far short of the 60 needed to advance.

The vote marked a turnabout from Thursday, when the Senate's two leaders had both hailed a last-minute compromise as a breakthrough in the campaign to enact the most far-reaching changes in immigration law in two decades.

But Republicans soon accused Democrats of trying to squelch their amendments, while Democrats accused the GOP of trying to kill their own bill by filibuster.

The filibuster threat came from angry Republicans whose attempts to amend the legislation to address issues like border security got blocked by Democrats attempting to pass an amnesty-only bill. When Republican Senators could not get their amendments to a vote, they pulled their support for the bill. Instead, the GOP and six Democrats combined to block any vote in the near future.

This shows the rather transparent nature of the obstructionism of the Democrats, now applied to immigration policy instead of the judiciary. They extorted an agreement from the GOP to pass a weak immigration reform package, one that places all the burdens of regulation and enforcement on the business community and none on the illegals themselves. They also opposed efforts to build a wall along the border, in the same manner that the Israelis have employed to great effect in stopping terror attacks. The so-called compromise announced last night amounted to nothing more than a complete capitulation by a handful of GOP Senators, including John McCain, who most notoriously came up with a similar capitulation on judicial filibusters last year. Instead of hammering out other components of immigration reform through debate and votes on amendments, the Democrats insisted that the bill had to go through with no input from other Senators at all.

The GOP needs to hang tough on immigration. We have a historic opportunity to do something right for border security and immigration policy for the first time in generations through the control of the House, Senate, and White House. Just as they did with judicial nominees, the Republican Senate caucus has shown a lack of will to fight for its agenda -- and they will inspire a similar lack of enthusiasm among conservative voters in November if they continue to run up the white flag every time the Democrats challenge them on core issues.

Guest Post From A Gold Star Mother

CQ is honored to lend its platform to Merrilee Carlson, whose son Michael died in the service of our country in Iraq. Merrilee is the chair of Minnesota Families United, which wants to get the media to use the anniversary of the liberation of Iraq on April 9th to focus on the good works performed by Michael and his comrades.

Update: I was quite remiss in not linking to Patrick from Ankle Biting Pundits for arranging this blogosphere effort. Sorry, Patrick!

My Son Died to “Liberate People from Oppression” in Iraq

I was recently on captainsquarters reading your commentary about Jack Shafer’s study about slanted journalism. As for me, I don’t know what the reasons are, but I do now that many Americans have seemed to lose our resolve in the War on Terror, at least partly because of a steady diet of media negativism.

My son, Michael, served and died in Iraq fighting for a cause he believed in. I know for a fact that he believed the cause was honorable because he told me so when he wrote a personal credo that explained,

“I want to carve out a niche for myself in the history books. I want to be remembered for the things I accomplished. I sometimes dream of being a soldier in a war. In this war I am helping to liberate people from oppression...” Read more about Michael, including his entire credo here.

The mainstream media may have lost faith in the mission, but I haven’t forgotten that Michael – who’s friends called him Shrek – died to “liberate people from oppression.”

It sure would be nice to have the media use Iraqi Liberation Day on April 9th to remember all of the good things Michael and our troops have done in Iraq.

Towards that end, I’ve joined with other families (you can read more here) to send a letter that encourages the media to remember this historic milestone.

April 9th is just around the corner, so I hope that you’ll sign our letter – www.FamiliesUnitedMission.com/letter

Sincerely,

Merrilee Carlson, Shrek’s Mom

Gold Star Mother and Chair of Minnesota Families United

St. Paul, Minnesota

I will be interviewing Merrilee later today about the effort on behalf of Minnesota Families United to tell the entire story of the American liberation of Iraq.

Krauthammer Gets The Sequence Correct

The ever-reliable Charles Krauthammer gets to the heart of the Senate abdication on national security yesterday in his new column titled "First A Wall -- Then Amnesty". Krauthammer correctly identifies border security as the element of immigration most in need of reform and its rightful position as the highest legislative priority of the issue:

Every sensible immigration policy has two objectives: (1) to regain control of our borders so that it is we who decide who enters and (2) to find a way to normalize and legalize the situation of the 11 million illegals among us. ...

If the government can demonstrate that it can control future immigration, there will be infinitely less resistance to dealing generously with the residual population of past immigration. And, as Mickey Kaus and others have suggested, that may require that the two provisions be sequenced. First, radical border control by physical means. Then, shortly thereafter, radical legalization of those already here. To achieve national consensus on legalization, we will need a short lag time between the two provisions, perhaps a year or two, to demonstrate to the skeptics that the current wave of illegals is indeed the last.

This is no time for mushy compromise. A solution requires two acts of national will: the ugly act of putting up a fence and the supremely generous act of absorbing as ultimately full citizens those who broke our laws to come to America.

Without a fence that actually stops most illegals from crossing the border, any reform effort is rendered moot. It does no good to create new bureaucracies to handle a flood of amnesty applications when the course of least resistance remains wide open to those who cross the border to make a few bucks. All of the multi-track legalization and citizenship paths can get tossed right out the window, as it will only benefit those who have already broken the law to be here. It does nothing to prevent even more from following in their footsteps and remaining "in the shadows", as George Bush put it. This compromise provides nothing that didn't get tried in 1986, when we legalized three million border jumpers with the promise that we would also provide better enforcement at the border.

Twenty years later, we have the same promises from a new crop of politicians, which proves that nothing really changes.

Oh, of course, they promise that tough new regulations will disincentivize employers from hiring any new illegals in the future. The Senate says they will crack down with "draconian" laws on businesses caught with illegals on the payroll. Well, those regulations exist now, and the government lacks the will to enforce them. Based on their lack of will in strengthening the border now, it doesn't appear that they will garner any more testicular fortitude than they have in the past. Besides, border enforcement is the job of the federal government, one of the few jobs that the Constitution actually grants to DC. Why should we penalize employers for not doing a job that frightens the US Senate?

This compromise does nothing to increase the security of our borders; in fact, it only encourages more people to cross and to garner a fake paper trail that could land them on the fast track to citizenship. Krauthammer says it perfectly -- we cannot begin to have credibility on immigration reform until we show that we are willing to secure our borders. Until then, the illegals laugh us off, and for good reason.

Immigration Reform Details Not Appealing

The more we find out about this immigration "compromise", the more the term sounds exactly applicable. Kris Kobach, an attorney representing plaintiffs in court cases against states that defy immigration law by handing out government benefits to illegals, warns us in the New York Post about the fine print in this Senate bill that threatens to surrender the southern border to all comers:

With a few exceptions, today's immigration judges (who serve for life) are dedicated to enforcing the law, and they do a difficult job well. This bill forces all immigration judges to step down after serving seven years - and restricts replacements to attorneys with at least five years' experience practicing immigration law.

Virtually the only lawyers who'll meet that requirement are attorneys who represent aliens in the immigration courts - who tend to be some of the nation's most liberal lawyers, and who are certainly unlikely as a class to be fond of enforcing immigration laws.

It gets worse. Immigration judges are now appointed by the attorney general - whose job it is to see to it that laws are enforced. The Senate bill gives that power to a separate bureaucrat, albeit one directly appointed by the president, making immigration courts more susceptible to leftward polarization.

That's not something likely to make headlines in the coverage of this Senate collapse on security. Instead of embracing the independent judiciary to oversee immigration-fraud cases, the system put in place by the Senate will instead force out judges after a short period of time, to be replaced with activists from the immigration industry. Under those circumstances, what lawyer worthy of the appointment would agree to serve on this bench? They would interrupt their practices, only to be assured of unemployment seven years later. The only attorneys motivated to accept these appointment will be those with axes to grind on this debate -- hardly a recipe for good jurisprudence.

Nor is this the only stealth bomb in the compromise. Kobach notes that Dick Durbin slipped in an amendment enacting the DREAM Act. This amendment will render moot the prosecution of nine states for giving in-state tuition rates to illegal aliens. This means that California can offer illegal aliens better tuition rates than it does for Arizona residents -- you know, actual US citizens. Kobach has sued California and Kansas for violating a 1996 federal prohibition on such actions. Durbin's amendment will ensure that both states and the seven others who have defied the law can continue granting privileges to illegal aliens that it doesn't afford to American citizens.

What doesn't the immigration reform compromise do? It fails to adequately fund or structure the government agency responsible for processing the guest-worker applications that will flood the government. The CIS cannot keep up with demand now, even with no amnesty of any kind facing them. Now the bill divides illegals up into two categories based on their time of arrival in the country and dictates that the CIS will have to determine the validity of these claims, using whatever evidence the illegals can supply. It apparently doesn't give them extra funding or specific guidelines to accomplish this rather Herculean task, meaning that applicants will either be approved or denied more or less on the whim of the civil servant doing the processing. With millions of applicants ready to flood the already-overwhelmed CIS, how effective and sane does this sound?

The more one hears about this compromise, the more one realizes that the only things compromised are our national security, our border control, our common sense, and our pocketbooks.

WaPo Editorial Board A Little Slow

One has to wonder about the timing of the editorial in today's Washington Post regarding Saddam Hussein's admission of ordering the deaths of 148 Dujail residents after the failed assassination attempt on his life. The Post's editors rightly note the significance of this revelation, but appear to have discovered it from a magazine in the lobby of their dentist's office:

THE TRIAL of Saddam Hussein achieved a rare and important moment of accountability this week. The former Iraqi leader acknowledged that he ordered the deaths of 148 civilians from the town of Dujail after a 1982 assassination attempt against him there. "That is one of the duties of the president," he testified under cross-examination. ...

Still, it is no small thing when a former dictator in the dock looks the world in the face and does not pretend that his crimes did not happen, merely that he had the lawful power to commit them. It clarifies history against those who would later deny it. It assigns responsibility where it properly belongs.

I agree with everything written here by the Post. This trial has incredible historical significance, and having forced a genocidal tyrant to admit to approving the deaths of 148 people as casually as signing a requisition for office supplies -- he agreed that he only gave the execution orders a "cursory" review -- strips Saddam of any pretense of normal governorship of Iraq.

That's why the paltry coverage of this trial and the actual evidence and testimony constitutes such a crime against history. The failure of the American media to cover this trial properly will stain their establishment for decades. It is the triumph of the tabloid impulse over responsible journalism. As the Media Research Center points out and as I wrote yesterday in the Daily Standard, they have played an integral role in Saddam's trial strategy by focusing on his outbursts, his taste in snacks, and handwringing over the fairness of the trial rather than on the victims of his brutal dictatorship, literally a reign of terror. It threatens to bury Saddam's crimes while turning him into a media personality.

How badly does this coverage distort the facts? The editorial itself provides an answer to that, as Saddam did not first admit to ordering the Dujail executions this week, but more than a month ago. As Reuters reported on March 15th, Saddam had admitted ordering the trials of the 148 and called the death sentences perfectly legal, challenging the court by asking, "Where is the crime?" This week's testimony only clarified his role in the executions, but the admission of the crime is old news. Even the Big Three network broadcasts managed to get that much right, even if CBS only gave it 18 seconds of air time and NBC seven seconds.

The Post's editorial board normally does better work than this. Perhaps they should touch base with their news division and ensure that their reporting on the trial focuses more on the facts and less on the histrionics from now on.

Immigration Reform: Less Is ... Well, Less

In the hours after the announcement of a compromise on immigration reform, it seems that details have been might scarce -- never a good sign when legislators announce an agreement. If the deal actually satisfied anyone, the politicians would have had the wonks out in force in an attempt to impress the media and calm the passionate. The lack of detail signals that the compromise may be little more than an easy way out of a contentious battle.

The Washington Post and the New York Times both cover the story but neither has much on the particulars of the deal. The Post notes that the compromise keeps the temporary worker program and the path to citizenship:

The compromise would give illegal immigrants who have been in the United States for more than five years a chance to legalize their status and, eventually, to become U.S. citizens if they pay a fine and meet a series of requirements. Other rules would apply to those who have been in the country less than five years but more than two years. Illegal immigrants who arrived after Jan. 7, 2004, the date of a major Bush speech on immigration reform, would be required to return to their home countries, where they could apply for temporary worker visas. ...

Like previous bills, the agreement would authorize the hiring of 12,000 new border patrol agents, deploy new technologies such as unmanned aerial vehicles, require tamper-proof identification cards that would replace easily forged Social Security cards used now to obtain work and ratchet up penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants.

Why that date? Did the speech suddenly replace English and actual legal entry as the primary requirement for citizenship? And while we're dissecting this plan, does anyone notice that they seem to have forgotten something in this compromise? Perhaps the New York Times can shed some light on this:

Mr. Frist was swiftly confronted by angry conservatives who threatened the prospects for the compromise, which had been carefully cobbled together after days of difficult negotiations. They were particularly angry that Democrats were blocking efforts to get votes on several amendments.

One amendment would require the Department of Homeland Security to certify that the border was secure before creating a guest worker program or granting legal status to illegal immigrants. Another would have the legalization program bar illegal immigrants who had deportation orders or had been convicted of a felony or three misdemeanors.

Democrats said those amendments would gut the legislation, and added that they still needed detailed assurances from Mr. Frist and others that Republicans would defend the agreement in the face of strong conservative opposition when House and Senate negotiators sit down to reconcile their bills.

Let me get this straight. Blocking entry to felons and securing the border will "gut" this immigration "reform" act? It's hard to imagine a worse set of circumstances than what exists now, but actually endorsing the entry of felons into the country while deliberately blocking efforts to secure the borders manages to soar far over that threshold. It moves the entire agreement from satire to farce.

And, I note, nowhere in either paper does the word fence get mentioned.

Let me be very clear on this point. I have no real problems with a program that identifies existing migrant workers and puts them on a citizenship track, assuming they pay their back taxes and a fine for breaking the law, once the border is secured. But security has to come first. It's the primary reason for government to exist! In aan annual budget of $2.77 trillion dollars, it is beyond embarrassment that we cannot muster the political will to enforce our own law at the border. Then again, I suppose that building roads to replace railroads that we just built must take priority over silly little things like, oh, ensuring that terrorists don't stroll across the Rio Grande.

The House has to stand firm on this point. Securing our border has to be the prerequisite of any reform effort. If the Senate cannot rise to the defense of American sovereignty and the security of our borders during wartime, then let the entire Congress come to a standstill until they discover their testicular fortitude. Nothing they will consider jointly has any higher priority than this issue, and if they cave this badly on this, God help us on any other part of the conservative agenda.

I guarantee you that Republicans who vote for this compromise can consider retirement, because none of them will ever advance to higher office after this. Why would we trust Bill Frist or John McCain with the presidency when they roll over on security and sovereignty as Senators?

UPDATE: Mark at RedState says this is where he gets off. Power Line has a poll up; be sure to cast your vote.

Still Crying Over The Lost Fitzmas

The New York Sun reported today that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby has testified that he released information from a National Intelligence Estimate in 2003 to a reporter prior to its publication. Predictably, the media and the blogosphere has overreacted, proving once again that most people do not understand classified materials, unclassified materials, and the process used to classify documents. The Josh Gerstein article is pretty straightforward:

A former White House aide under indictment for obstructing a leak probe, I. Lewis Libby, testified to a grand jury that he gave information from a closely-guarded "National Intelligence Estimate" on Iraq to a New York Times reporter in 2003 with the specific permission of President Bush, according to a new court filing from the special prosecutor in the case.

The court papers from the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, do not suggest that Mr. Bush violated any law or rule. However, the new disclosure could be awkward for the president because it places him, for the first time, directly in a chain of events that led to a meeting where prosecutors contend the identity of a CIA employee, Valerie Plame, was provided to a reporter. ...

"Defendant testified that he was specifically authorized in advance of the meeting to disclose the key judgments of the classified NIE to Miller on that occasion because it was thought that the NIE was Ôpretty definitive' against what Ambassador Wilson had said and that the vice president thought that it was Ôvery important' for the key judgments of the NIE to come out," Mr. Fitzgerald wrote.

Mr. Libby is said to have testified that "at first" he rebuffed Mr. Cheney's suggestion to release the information because the estimate was classified. However, according to the vice presidential aide, Mr. Cheney subsequently said he got permission for the release directly from Mr. Bush. "Defendant testified that the vice president later advised him that the president had authorized defendant to disclose the relevant portions of the NIE," the prosecution filing said.

Not too long ago, newspapers made a big deal out of nothing when it came out that Bush had given Cheney the authority to declassify material at his discretion. At the time, they clucked their tongues at the delegation of authority to the VP, claiming that it showed Bush's disinterest in his responsibilities. Now suddenly everyone is shocked to find out that Bush has the authority to declassify material. In fact, he has the ultimate authority to do so, and he is only responsible to the voters in the execution of these duties. And the estimate on Iraq and WMD involved in this story was released to the press on July 18, 2003, at a White House briefing.

Why did George Bush release the NIE at all? Because Joe Wilson had busied himself by spreading misinformation via leaks to Nick Kristof and Walter Pincus, and then finally under his own by-line at the New York Times twelve days prior to the release of the NIE information. The media had demanded answers to the charges leveled by Wilson and his supporters, and those answers were found in the NIE. The decision to declassify it and publish it came as a result of that demand. Once the decision is made to declassify information, it can be released in any number of ways. This was both leaked and openly presented in the same fortnight.

Beyond the issue of the Libby leak and its tie to George Bush, the hypocrisy of the media is truly astonishing. I just at at a dinner two nights ago where Senator Chris Dodd demanded that Congress pass a federal shield law to protect reporters from revealing sources. Why? So that they can report leaks of exactly this kind. I suppose when they like the leaker, then they call him a whistleblower. When they don't like the leak, and especially when it turns out not to be all that significant, then apparently the source is a weasel who doesn't deserve protection.

I understand how disappointing it was to the BDS sufferers that Fitzmas turned into Fizzlemas, but this report is just another non-story in a controversy full of them.

Others commenting ...

Austin Bay: "So what’s the story here? That someone who worked in the White House selectively passed properly declassified material to the press? That’s not a scandal; that’s Beltway business as usual. I’d love to hear that reported– it’s not news per se, but it would be refreshingly open and honest media analysis."

Power Line: "This is the same "scandal" the press tried to sell a few months ago. I wrote about it here. The Sun article (unlike some other press accounts) explains clearly what was going on. Intelligence insiders like Joe Wilson were leaking a combination of falsehoods and minority views to the press in order to challenge the administration's decision to go to war with Iraq. This was deeply unfair. In October 2002, the intelligence agencies presented to the administration their "consensus estimate" with regard to Iraq's WMD programs."

David Ensor at CNN:If the president decides to declassify information, he has that legal right. So, it's not about a law being broken here, and it's not about Valerie Plame-Wilson's name. But it does show us the first evidence that the president himself wanted some of this information put out in the media. (via Tom Maguire)

UPDATE: Once again, the President has the authority to declassify materials at his discretion, a point hammered home by the Washington Post as well:

Experts said the power to classify and declassify documents in the federal government flows from the president and is often delegated down the chain of command. In March 2003, Bush signed an executive order delegating declassification authority to Cheney.

One can argue about the wisdom of George Bush in declassifying the Iraq NIE when he did, but let's remember that the press had been clamoring for that information ever since the fall of Baghdad three months earlier. The WMD stockpiles had not been found, and Joe Wilson among others had claimed that "Bush lied". In response, Bush declassified the NIE so that everyone could see what exactly the intelligence services had told him about Iraq's WMD programs. Now everyone wants to proclaim George Bush a criminal for releasing the information that the entire media establishment demanded he reveal.

This isn't brain surgery, folks. Research may be tedious, but it really is necessary before reaching your conclusions.

UPDATE: In the interest of complete accuracy, I should state that Bush declassified the portion of the NIE relating to Iraq, not the entire NIE. Since the portion that got declassified is the same given to the reporter by Libby, I assumed that it was a difference without a distinction, but some commenters seem to feel otherwise. The declassified portion is published at the link I provided above and was the same portion given to reporters at the 7/18/03 briefing.

Atsa Spicy a-Meatball ...

One of the earliest commenters on CQ has a new home. Linda, the proprietor of the thoughtful liberal blog Auterrific, had engaged in a number of excellent debates in the early days of CQ before deciding to focus on other projects. One of those projects has now come to fruition; she and her husband Joe have started a new blog devoted to one of life's greatest pleasures -- spicy food. Titled The Hot Zone Online, the blog covers everything you want to know about habanero chiles but were afraid to taste. Linda and Joe may just corner the market on spicy blogging ... well, at least clean spicy blogging, ifyouknowwhatImean.

Drop by The Hot Zone and scald your eyeballs as well as your taste buds, and tell Linda that CQ says hello.

Doin' The Cut-And-Run Bump At Hugh's

Hugh Hewitt has asked his listeners to come up with themes for the bump music he uses for his syndicated radio show. The bump music is what plays when a radio show goes into and out of its commercial breaks, and except for the top of the hour, that changes in every show. I sent Hugh my list of a dozen or so songs that fit the Cut And Run Theme, and he tells me that they will be using it today. Be sure to listen to find out what songs I selected for this theme -- and if you have any suggestions, be sure to note them in the comments.

Don't forget to pick up Hugh's Painting The Map Red -- I have my copy and have already started to read it, after checking the index to see if CQ gets a mention. (I'm not saying ... you'll have to buy a copy to find out!)

Saddam's Trial Strategy Looks Familiar

Today marks my return to the pages of the Daily Standard with a column reviewing the recent Media Research Center's analysis of broadcast network coverage of the Saddam Hussein trial. Saddam has had better luck with the Goering Gambit than did Hermann Goering himself, thanks to the hopelessly misdirected priorities of the Big Three's news divisions:

If Saddam has calculated that the Goering gambit will work better for him, he may be right. Saddam is betting that his disruptions will play better than the evidence and testimony of genocide, which is so lacking in entertainment value. According to a study performed by the Media Research Center (MRC), the media is playing right into Saddam's strategy. After reviewing the coverage provided by the three American broadcast networks, MRC calculated that less than twenty percent of the news coverage reported on evidence, testimony, and the background of the case--when they could be bothered to cover the trial at all ...

Saddam has played his hand well, but he has one advantage that Goering never had--an American media so poorly managed that it easily lends itself to this kind of manipulation. The trial has shown detailed evidence and produced compelling testimony to support the charges against Saddam--Saddam even admitted that he had ordered the executions of 148 residents of Dujail, though only ABC thought this worthy of complete coverage. That confession received only eighteen seconds of coverage at CBS, though that still managed to more than double NBC's paltry 7 seconds.

Can anyone wonder why the American public mistrusts the mainstream media?

I covered this briefly a week ago or so when the MRC first published the study, but I discuss it at more length in this article. The superficial coverage granted to this historically momentous trial should not only embarrass the networks but also points out how irrelevant they have become to true news reporting. Hoisting Katie Couric atop the CBS ship will not keep it from sinking -- it will only make the denouement more entertaining.

Grand Jury To Decide McKinney's Fate (Update & Bump)

Prosecutors investigating the assault by Rep. Cynthia McKinney on a Capitol Police officer last week have decided to present the case to a grand jury to determine whether an indictment is warranted, CNN reported last night:

No more he-grabbed-she-slapped -- whether U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney should be charged over a confrontation with Capitol Police last week will be decided by a grand jury, perhaps as soon as next week, said federal law enforcement sources familiar with the case.

Prosecutors have decided to present the case, and the grand jury will begin hearing testimony Thursday, the two sources said.

Senior congressional sources said that two House staff members -- Troy Phillips, an aide to Rep. Sam Farr, D-California, and Lisa Subrize, executive assistant to Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, R-Michigan -- have been subpoenaed to testify.

The Justice Department and the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, which is handling the case, refused to comment.

This may represent a bit of a punt on the part of the prosecutors, who already have a complaint and eyewitnesses that apparently substantiate the story. Under normal circumstances, they would have skipped a grand jury and simply filed charges against the offender. However, with McKinney screaming racism and her peers in Congress oddly silent, the prosecutors have made the politically wise choice to defer the decision to a grand jury. Given the evidence already in hand, chances are very low that the grand jury will find that the prosecutors don't have a case for indictment, let alone conviction.

This should allow the embarrassment of the Democrats to simmer for a while longer. No coordinated effort has been made to support McKinney's charges of racism in the security details that protect Congress. A paltry few have repeated McKinney's assertions, but her party's leadership remains silent -- probably hoping that the entire affair will vanish. Even the Congressional Black Caucus has refused to officially comment on the controversy despite meeting with McKinney yesterday. They probably found ridiculous and embarrassing McKinney's insistence that guards should be trained to recognize the 535 members of Congress, on sight and within the two seconds it takes to breeze past a security checkpoint without identifying themselves.

McKinney's problem is that she has cried wolf one too many times. Most people, even Congresspeople, can figure that between the two choices of a vast conspiracy among Capitol police to humiliate minorities and the foolish and egotistical insistence of one member who repeatedly refuses to adhere to security protocols designed to protect them all from harm, the latter comes closest to reality. The grand jury almost certainly will agree.

UPDATE: Oh, so now she's sorry:

Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., expressed "sincere regret" Thursday for her altercation with a Capitol police officer, and offered an apology to the House.

"There should not have been any physical contact in this incident," McKinney said in brief remarks on the House floor. "I am sorry that this misunderstanding happened at all and I regret its escalation and I apologize."

McKinney's comments came after the case had been referred to a federal grand jury for possible prosecution.

She had previously insisted she had done nothing wrong, and accused police of "racial profiling." She is African-American and the police officer is white.

If that's the complete statement, it falls a little short. She says that the incident should not have resulted in "physical contact," but that became necessary on the part of the police when she refused to stop after blowing through the checkpoint. She should have apologized for striking the officer outright and not hiding behind this weasel-word construction. Nor, do I note, does she apologize for accusing Capitol Hill police of racism and racial profiling. She gave the minimal apology possible to try to get the story off the front pages.

Once again, we have an egotistical blowhard demanding that everyone cater to her whims and smearing people who refuse to submit to her bullying. I suspect that the deafening public silence from the Congressional Black Caucus disguised some pointed advice from them to McKinney to shut the hell up before she undid years of work highlighting real racism in law enforcement.

It shouldn't work, but it probably will; the story will quickly fade unless the grand jury decides to press charges anyway, and at some point we'll hear her colleagues demand that we "move on". I give it three hours.

Why The GOP Needs To Pursue School Vouchers

As the New York Times reports this morning, the issue of school vouchers has become a lost opportunity for the Bush administration to make solid inroads into the African-American electorate on the basis of policy. School vouchers formed the core of the original education-reform efforts of the White House until a compromise with Ted Kennedy scotched them from the No Child Left Behind program and revamp of the Department of Education. Instead, federal funding for other educational efforts rocketed up by 58% while still leaving inner-city children in failing schools.

Now we can see what we traded away:

Amie is one of about 1,700 low-income, mostly minority students in Washington who at taxpayer expense are attending 58 private and parochial schools through the nation's first federal voucher program, now in its second year.

Last year, parents appeared lukewarm toward the program, which was put in place by Congressional Republicans as a five-year pilot program, But this year, it is attracting more participation, illustrating how school-choice programs are winning over minority parents, traditionally a Democratic constituency.

Washington's African-American mayor, Anthony A. Williams, joined Republicans in supporting the program, prompted in part by a concession from Congress that pumped more money into public and charter schools. In doing so, Mr. Williams ignored the ire of fellow Democrats, labor unions and advocates of public schools.

"As mayor, if I can't get the city together, people move out," said Mr. Williams, who attended Catholic schools as a child. "If I can't get the schools together, why should there be a barrier programmatically to people exercising their choice and moving their children out?"

Why indeed? Why do we continue to insist on the state-monopoly model as the only investment path for our educational funding? The GOP had an opportunity in 2001, and a better one in 2003 with complete control over Congress, to push for school vouchers in order to empower parents with real choices for their children. That more than any other government program holds the key to unlocking people from the cycle of poverty -- a good education. Instead, we continued to throw money at the same institutions that have failed these children for generations and avoided the competition that could have improved all of the schools, not just the private and parochial schools in these areas. Even a school board will eventually see reason when their best and brightest leave for rapidly-expanded jobs in a new educational market that values and rewards excellence and competence, instead of forcing them to endure the mediocrity and union-imposed seniority systems that have transformed schools into civil-service bureaucracies.

The GOP still has a window of opportunity to create meaningful educational reform through competition. When the New York Times reports on how successful such a program has been for disadvantaged children, it indicates that the old politics of education no longer apply. The Republicans can get ahead of the curve if they act quickly and decisively before the 2006 elections, after which their control of Congress may be in doubt. However, they can establish themselves as the champions of true economic freedom and anti-poverty reformers by creating many more opportunities for these parents to ensure the success fo their children.

These parents will vote for hope, not for yet another outlay of billions into a system they know from painful experience has failed them, their children, and their grandchildren. If the GOP wants to get serious about winning a bigger share of the urban vote, they need to act now to do so. So far, campaigning as Democrats on education has won them nothing.

A Step In The Right Direction

The House passed a bill slamming the lid on 527 advocacy groups of the kind that proliferated in the last presidential election and removed the limits for national parties to coordinate funds with specific candidates. The measure passed on a party-line vote, 218-209:

The House approved campaign finance legislation last night that would benefit Republicans by placing strict caps on contributions to nonprofit committees that spent heavily in the last election while removing limits on political parties' spending coordinated with candidates.

The bill passed 218 to 209 in a virtual party-line vote.

Lifting party spending limits would aid Republican candidates because the GOP has consistently raised far more money than the Democratic Party. Similarly, barring "527" committees from accepting large unregulated contributions known as "soft money" would disadvantage Democrats, whose candidates received a disproportionate share of the $424 million spent by nonprofit committees in 2003-2004.

The 527 committees, named for a section of the tax law, are tax-exempt organizations that use voter mobilization and issue-based ads to influence federal elections. They grew in importance after the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law barred federal candidates and national parties from accepting unlimited donations from individuals, unions and corporations.

Joe Gandelman at the Moderate Voice objects to this and calls it an example of why we need divided government (between the two parties):

So much for meaningful reform that tries to seriusly fix the system in general. Instead we get yet another demonstration about why one-party rule has proven to be a disaster in terms of authentic problem solving and biparitsan solutions.

I disagree with Joe on this issue. The eruption of 527s did not reform the system at all. Even Joe acknowledges that this offshoot of the BCRA allowed millions of dollars to pour into campaigns from single benefactors such as George Soros. It laughably treated this money as somehow more pure than that going to political parties, even though its use was at least as partisan as any given directly to Democrats. Even worse, it put that money in the hands of people who have no accountability in the political process and allowed the parties and candidates to wash their hands of the messages it produced.

It's this kind of mischief that occurs when people try to create artificial categories for cash and attempt to impose limits on its collection and usage. The 527s have mostly gone away in favor of other tax-exempt structures that do the same thing, so simply kneecapping the 527s would have had little effect on the corruption that the BCRA has created. The companion effort to remove the limits on party spending and collection are much more important for reversing this problem in the McCain-Feingold "reform". The parties can be held accountable for their messages and their positions, and the candidates will have no excuse to ignore the worst of the abuses in their advertising.

The only problem with this bill, as far as I can see, is that it doesn't go far enough. We need to ensure that all contributions go to organizations with built-in accountability for their message. If George Soros wants to buy his own advertising, or if he wants to fund an organization that wants to advertise, that's fine -- but it shouldn't be exempt from taxation. If we remove the artificial limits set on political campaigns over the past three decades and instead require immediate and full disclosure of all contributions, the money will naturally flow back to the candidates and the parties, where voters can impose their own sanctions for misbehavior and undue influence. This measure starts that process and should be expanded to undo all of the damage done by the BCRA on free speech and the Byzantine process of campaign funding it helped create.

Saddam Targeted American Assets For Terrorism (Update)

One of the most contentious issues of the Iraq War is whether the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein served as a distraction from the war on terror or as an integral part of the overall war itself. This is no mere academic question; the answer not only impacts the political future of those who supported and opposed the invasion, but also has real implications for the American resolve to stay in Iraq to see the effort through to completion.

A new document from the captured Iraqi files in Baghdad now appears to show that Saddam Hussein's regime not only had ties to al-Qaeda and financed terrorist efforts but also explicitly attempted to recruit people to attack American interests. According to Laurie Mylroie, page 6 of the document is a memo from the command of an Iraqi air force base asking for volunteers for suicide missions:

In the Name of God the Merciful The Compassionate

Top Secret

The Command of Ali Bin Abi Taleb Air Force Base

No 3/6/104

Date 11 March 2001

To all the Units

Subject: Volunteer for Suicide Mission

The top secret letter 2205 of the Military Branch of Al Qadisya on 4/3/2001 announced by the top secret letter 246 from the Command of the military sector of Zi Kar on 8/3/2001 announced to us by the top secret letter 154 from the Command of Ali Military Division on 10/3/2001 we ask to provide that Division with the names of those who desire to volunteer for Suicide Mission to liberate Palestine and to strike American Interests and according what is shown below to please review and inform us.

Air Brigadier General

Abdel Magid Hammot Ali

Commander of Ali Bin Abi Taleb Air Force Base

Air Colonel

Mohamad Majed Mohamadi.

If this translation stands up to further scrutiny, it will provide a substantial answer to the question of Saddam's role in terrorism, both in general and specifically aimed at America. This memo will prove that Saddam had no intention of remaining neutralized in the region. He not only funded and encouraged terrorism, but he actively recruited terrorists from the ranks of his own military to carry out suicide attacks on American interests.

Obviously, the terror missions could not be conducted under the color of Iraqi military or get traced back to them, otherwise the American forces -- especially under George Bush -- would almost certainly attack Iraq with everything we could muster. Saddam would also not be able to rely on his clandestine partners on the Security Council to wield their vetoes, as even France and Russia would have to acknowledge the right of the US to defend itself once Saddam initiated this kind of attack. So how would he hide the nationality and identity of these volunteers? He would have to "launder" them through another organization, one that would not necessarily immediately point back to Iraq -- like al-Qaeda.

It's also interesting that the Iraqi air force asked for these volunteers. By April 2001, the 9/11 attackers had already been selected and the pilot training finished. It appears that Saddam may have had a similar operation in mind, but using already-trained pilots that could easily handle commercial jets for the purpose of crashing them into buildings. It has already been discovered that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed wanted to conduct another wave of suicide hijackings after 9/11 but stopped when security got tight. Could it be that KSM wasn't the one concerned about operational security -- and that Saddam himself pulled out of Phase II?

If this translation holds up, it provides answers and even more troubling questions about Saddam and his connections to terrorism targeted against us. It also shows what a dangerously dumb decision it was to leave Saddam in power and to fritter away a dozen years at the UN in a vain attempt to defang the viper.

UPDATE: Free Republic's JVeritas has been doing excellent work in translating these same documents; see his translations as well. He's doing them for free, by the way, for all of us to see. Pat Fish posted an inteview with him as well.

Clarifying Arianna

Paul Mirengoff quoted Arianna Huffington from the panel discussion at The Week's awards banquet in DC last night as saying that William F. Buckley had written that the war in Iraq was "the greatest foreign policy disaster in US history." Apparently, Arianna now says that she only said that Buckley called for an acknowledgement of defeat. Arianna feels that Paul implies that she made the quote up. I recall this moment on the panel, because my jaw dropped when she said it, and Paul got the quote right.

Now, when people speak off the cuff on a panel discussion, it's very easy to get quotes and citations mixed up. Arianna is correct when she says that Buckley believes the war in Iraq was a mistake, but as I wrote when Buckley's column appeared, Buckley opposed the war from the beginning anyway. I don't recall Arianna even mentioning William Odom -- but that doesn't mean she didn't have him in mind when she pulled out that quote. I'd say that Paul remembers it correctly but that Arianna made a mistake common in extemporaneous speech, which is to accidentally conflate two different sources into one reference. I don't think Paul or anyone else considered it intentional.

However, the assertion itself is rather laughable, and hardly worth defending. Iraq is worse than Viet Nam, for instance? Worse than our abandonment of the Shah and the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979-1981 that created the Islamofascist movement? Worse than our refusal to engage during the Versailles debates, an isolationist impulse that led directly to the rise of the Nazis and World War II? Worse than the slave trade with Africa in the early decades of the Republic? If Odom said it, and I don't doubt Arianna when she says he did, then Odom is an
historical illiterate and anyone who quotes him is a fool for doing so. Buckley certainly knows that this assertion is hyperbole gone mad.

Arianna would do better to drop the entire matter.

South Park Takes On Islamists, Cowardly Broadcast Executives, And 'Family Guy'

Last week, when the raunchy cartoon series South Park killed off Chef after Isaac Hayes complained about the show's religious intolerance, some CQ readers noted that Matt Stone and Trey Parker had never taken on Muslims. Actually, Mohammed made an appearance in the "Super Best Friends" episode, where Big Mo teamed up with Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Joseph Smith, and Sea Man to stop a giant stone Abraham Lincoln -- by creating a giant stone John Wilkes Booth. They also skewered al-Qaeda in an episode where the boys go to Afghanistan to return a goat sent to them by four boys who received their one-dollar donation.

However, in this week's episode, the duo take on Islamists and the cowardice of the media in confronting their intolerance. The episode begins with the town going insane and stampeding towards the community center for shelter-- because Family Guy is going to depict Mohammed in their cartoon. Fox wimps out at the last moment, but that doesn't stop Family Guy from trying again. In the first installment of a supposed two-parter, the two manage to satirize the ultrasensitive multiculturalists, the scolds of the mainstream media, and Comedy Central for pulling their "Trapped In The Closet" episode from their normal repeat cycle. I suspect that the gag will be that the second half will never air.

South Park may be raunchy and tasteless, but it has become the bravest voice for freedom and common sense in modern entertainment. If you have not yet started watching it or have refused to do so in protest of its language, please give it another shot with this season's episodes, especially this one.

UPDATE: The Anchoress agrees, even though the last episode of last season ("Bloody Mary") offended her enough for her to shut off the television. Too bad everyone doesn't understand how to react when something offends you ...

Lott 'Damn Tired' Of Taxpayers Who Check Up On Congress

Mark Tapscott continues his excellent watchdog duties as he prepares to leave the Heritage Foundation for greener pastures at the Examiner newspaper chain (coming to a town near you, and soon). Mark posts the latest hostile reaction to Porkbusters by the former Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott:

Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, the Republican from Mississippi, has had it to here with Porkbusters and other critics of pork barrel spending like Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, who think the federal government has better things to do with $700 million of the taxpayers money than tear up a just-repaired coastal rail line and replace it with a new highway.

Said Lott when asked by an AP reporter about criticism of the project he has long championed and which was just funded in a Senate Appropriations Committee bill to pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as additional Hurricane Katrina relief:

"I'll just say this about the so-called porkbusters. I'm getting damn tired of hearing from them. They have been nothing but trouble ever since Katrina. We in Mississippi have not asked for more than we deserve. We've been very reasonable."

Nearly $300 million worth of repairs to the line were just completed in January, financed by CSX Railroad and its insurance company. No word yet on how CSX or its insurance company feel about the plan favored by Lott and his fellow Mississippi Republican Senator Thad Cochran to tear up the tracks and replace them with a highway to serve the heavily populated coastal region.

No one doubts that Mississippi suffered a tremendous blow from Katrina, and no one wants to sit on their hands and tell Mississippians to pound sand, either. However, we want to know that the money we spend in the Gulf region gets to those who need it the most and is used wisely. Tearing up newly built railroad tracks that cost $300 million in order to spend another $700 million on a highway to replace it sounds like a billion dollars down the tubes -- and that money comes from the American taxpayer, not from trees.

The money, in this case, is secondary. What I find most troubling is Trent Lott's attitude that federal spending is none of my business, and it's not the first time he's as much as said so. We elect representatives to spend our money carefully and wisely, and it's apparent that Trent Lott doesn't give a damn about that. He's much more concerned with conducting his office in the Robert Byrd manner, in which he leverages his seniority to drag as much money from American taxpayers home to Mississippi, in order to maintain his popularity and cement his incumbent advantage in the next election.

I doubt that Mississippi will dump Lott any time soon. However, we need to continue to press for accountability from Lott and all of the other porkers who believe that the American public should cease questioning them about their spending habits. If nothing else, perhaps we'll annoy them out of office -- and then we can elect people who understand that they're spending our money and should expect to be held accountable for it.

Able Providence: Bypass But Inform Bureaucracy

One of the Able Providence briefing slides shows that the Pentagon did learn something from the 9/11 Commission debacle and the subsequent ruination of the American intelligence community -- don't trust the bureaucracy. In a graphic designed to show the flow of information out of the new data-mining project in the war on terror, this note conspicuously appears:

Bypass but inform bureaucracy. That directive aims at the action-validation process, which under the current DNI would have to go through multiple levels of bureaucrats, thanks to the 9/11 Commission recommendations that slapped an entirely new bureaucracy on American intelligence. Able Providence would go to the Joint Chiefs and/or the DNI directly for approval on field ops, with an AP "away team" coordinating with the AP team at home. This is a much-improved model over the existing morass of intel agencies.

Someone's listening and learning.

NOTE ON SOURCING: A few commenters have asked me about the sourcing of this material. It came from a trusted source, one who has provided accurate information in the past on Able Danger, but one who wished to remain in the background. The source vetted this with appropriate government officials, who confirmed that the briefing materials were not classified. The program itself has been discussed in the open previously by Government Computer News, a magazine focused on the intelligence community; they published one of the best interviews of the central Able Danger figure Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer last year.

The Gang That Couldn't Vet Straight

I'm not sure what's going on at the Department of Homeland Security, but significant background checks certainly are not. The agency first slated to be run by Bernard Kerik until the press performed his background check instead of the White House has another winner on its hands, a deputy press secretary with a late-night hobby:

Brian J. Doyle, DOB 4/7/50, the Deputy Press Secretary for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Office of Public Affairs in Washington, D.C., was arrested this evening at his residence in Silver Springs, Maryland, on 23 Polk County charges related to the use of a computer to seduce a child and transmitting harmful materials to a minor. Doyle's arrest is the result of a joint investigation by the Polk County Sheriff s Office, working with Florida’s 10th Judicial Circuit State Attorney Jerry Hill s office, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Inspector General s Office.

On March 12, 2006, Doyle contacted a 14-year-old girl whose profile was posted on the Internet, and initiated a sexually explicit conversation with her. The girl was actually an undercover Polk County Sheriff s Computer Crimes detective. Doyle knew that the girl was 14 years old, and he told her who he was and that he worked for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. During future online chats, Doyle gave the undercover detective posing as a 14-year-old girl his office phone number and his government-issued cell phone number, so that they could have telephone conversations, in addition to their online chatting. Doyle used the Internet to send hard-core pornographic movie clips to the girl and used the AOL Instant Messenger chat service to have explicit sexual conversations with her. The investigation revealed that the phone numbers given to the detective were in fact Doyle s, and that the AOL account used was registered to Doyle. Doyle also sent photos of himself to the detective, which were not sexually explicit but did serve to further positively identify him.

In this case, Doyle's extracurricular activities escaped everyone's attention, including (one supposes) the FBI and its pre-hire background check. It still reflects badly on the White House and the DHS, which is why political appointees such as Doyle are supposed to get a thorough vetting not just for security risks but also for the potential to embarrass the administration they serve. In the future, the Bush team had better learn to vet their candidates a little more thoroughly. Voters may not remember who Jack Abramoff is come November, but they will certainly remember who hired the Dirty Old Man of the DHS.

UPDATE: An anonymous e-mailer says that Doyle was a civil-service employee and not a political appointee, although that sounds strange for a Deputy Press Secretary. Also, I do agree with commenters that point out the difficulty in vetting for perversion, unless Doyle had an arrest record. Still, this kind of scandal forces us to rethink the hiring process in general, especially for prominent position in government.

Feingold Claims The Fringe Left

Russ Feingold has decided to embrace the far-left fever swamp in hopes of building momentum for his run at the Presidency in 2008, and yesterday announced his support for gay marriage as another step in that strategy. The Washington Post reports that Feingold blames Republicans for using the controversy as a wedge issue, but also notes that his fellow Democrats have not lined up in support of gender-neutral marriage either:

Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), a prospective 2008 presidential candidate, said yesterday that he thinks bans on same-sex marriages have no place in the nation's laws.

Feingold said in an interview that he was motivated to state his position on one of the most divisive social issues in the country after being asked at a town hall meeting Sunday about a pending amendment to the Wisconsin state constitution to ban same-sex marriages.

Feingold called the amendment "a mean-spirited attempt" to single out gay men and lesbians for discrimination and said he would vote against it. But he went further, announcing that he favors legalizing same-sex marriages.

That puts him at odds with many prominent Democratic politicians who support gay rights but not same-sex marriage. Should Feingold decide to run for the party's presidential nomination in 2008, his position would put him to the left of many likely rivals.

Apparently Feingold intends on positioning himself thusly, which is why he went further than the question required. He wants to signal that the far left can absolutely count on him to carry their platform into the 2008 convention. It's not a bad idea in the primaries, and he will be able to harness the money-raising power of the MoveOn and I-ANSWER crowd early enough to be able to keep them from financing any of his more moderate rivals.

In terms of actually winning primaries, let alone a general election, Feingold has made a mistake, however. Bans on gender-neutral marriage garner large majorities wherever contested, up to 70% of the vote in some places. Feingold can blame Republicans all he wants, but those numbers show a significant number in his own party support the traditional notions of marriage as well. Nowhere is that support strongest than in the African-American community, the demographic with the strongest ties to religion in the party. The truth is that the GOP doesn't need to exploit the issue to create a wedge; the wedge exists whether politicians like Feingold recognize it or not.

And Feingold's position creates a problem for Democrats that Kucinich did not. The latter had always been seen as a fringe candidate, a man who stuck around long past his expiration date in the 2004 primaries mostly to provide some comic relief. Feingold, as a Senator, has a higher political profile and more impact on the party's image. At a moment when the Democrats want to paint themselves as a serious voice in both foreign and domestic policy, one of their leading lights has done his best to embrace the radical and hysterical, starting with his censure motion and continuing with his Baghdad demand for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Now he takes one of the least-popular domestic policy positions and reminds the American electorate why they cannot trust Democrats for responsible representation of their views.

CQ readers know that I'm rather agnostic about the notion of legalizing gay civil marriages. If a state legalizes such unions through legislation, then the majority will have spoken and it will cause me no heartache. That's relatively easy to say since even the most liberal electorates have rejected such legislation, including my home state of California. It's such a slam dunk that Democrats do well to stay out of its way. Instead, Feingold embraces the radical, and threatens to drag his party into electoral suicide -- once again.

What's Next? Stealth Tanks?

It appears that imagination has run wild in the Iranian mullahcracy the past couple of weeks. The Iranians have announced successful tests, unverified by outside sources, of a stealth MIRV platform and a sonar-evading underwater missile that travels so fast that the cavitation alone would make it easily identified. Now Teheran announced that they have also successfully tested a stealth 'flying boat', which they insist cannot be detected by radar:

Iran said Tuesday it had tested what it called a "super-modern flying boat" capable of evading radar. State TV showed a brief clip of the boat's launch.

"Due to its advanced design, no radar at sea or in the air can detect it. It can lift out of the water," the television said. It said the boat was "all Iranian-made and can launch missiles with precise targeting while moving."

On Monday Iran said it tested a second new radar-avoiding missile during war games in the Persian Gulf that the military says are aimed at preparing the country's defenses against the United States.

The new surface-to-sea missile is equipped with remote-control and searching systems, the state-run television reported Tuesday.

The number of "stealth" weapons programs getting tests in the past fortnight is truly remarkable. Either Iran has the most advanced R&D infrastructure in the history of warfare, or they have the best writers this side of The West Wing. At least this time they took pictures of the test, and from this we can see that they do have a sea-launched airplane. Anything flying that low to the surface will not easily be detected by radar regardless of its composition, but fortunately for us we have other means to watch for that kind of launch -- satellites, spy planes, AWACs, drones, and so on.

The Iranians seem intent on frightening someone, and the kind of weapons systems it claims do not appear to be designed to impress dissidents at home, who could care less about whether the mullah's missiles and planes evade radar. They want to establish a deterrent to the military force that will come if they do not abandon their nuclear-weapons program. However, even if these programs didn't appear to have escaped from Tom Clancy's reject bucket, one has to remember that even the best weaponry only performs as well as the people in charge of them -- and these mullahs are the same ones who mismanaged an eight-year war against Saddam Hussein into a bloody stalemate, boosting Saddam's profile for a short period until we wiped him out in six weeks in 1991.

So they can claim all the weapons systems they want, but until they claim possession of a nuclear device, they're not fooling anyone. They will find the US determined to prevent that day from coming.

The Week's Blogger Of The Year

Now that the event has concluded, I can reveal why I came to Washington DC tonight. The Week Magazine selected me as Blogger of the Year for 2005, following in the footsteps of my friends from Power Line, who won the honor last year. The magazine flew me out here earlier today and put me up at an excellent hotel, and then brought me to the Andrew Mellon Auditorium for dinner and the presentation.

The announcement has not been posted at their site yet, but the story that garnered the most attention of the judges was the Adscam scandal in Canada and my coverage of the testimony during the Gomery hearings. The Week also had kind words for the overall effort at CQ even outside of that story. I have the dead-tree version of the article, but as soon as it's posted at The Week, I'll link back to it. Nor was I the only recipient of The Week's honors in opinion journalism. Nick Kristof won for his columns on the Darfur crisis and Mike Luckovich won for his editorial cartoons. I have been a fan of Mike's for years, with his witty take on the issues of the day, and I rode over to the dinner with Nick and had an opportunity to talk to him a bit about his efforts in getting the world to notice the genocide in Darfur. We were joined by Michael Massing, who sat on a panel discussion after dinner about White House correspondents.

Mark Tapscott and Jonathan Last joined me for the dinner and presentation, giving me an opportunity to meet my Weekly Standard editor for the first time. Paul Mirengoff from Power Line was on hand to pass the baton, as it were. I also finally got a chance to meet John Aravosis and Joe Sudbay from Americablog, and they made for great company during the predinner drinks. Arianna Huffington was there and joined Michael Massing on the panel, as did Tony Blankley from the Washington Times. Tony made a point to tell me how much he enjoys the blog.

I didn't speak at the event, which probably was for the best. Margaret Carlson from Time gave me a splendid introduction, the most generous of the three introductions despite having just met me for the first time about two minutes earlier. Unfortunately, with the plethora of Michaels back stage -- Luckovich, Massing, Mike McCurry -- she wound up referring to me as Michael Morrissey several times, leading Tony Blankley to ask if "Michael Morrissey" was any relation to Ed Morrissey. Poor Margaret was mortified when one of the event organizers whispered what she said when we came off stage, but after eating the delicious dinner and dessert and soaking up the company at the event, she could have called me Saddam and it probably wouldn't have registered.

And of course, Mark and Jonathan could not resist congratulating "Michael" when I returned to my seat.

It was a lovely evening, and although I wish I could have stayed in town to catch up with my friends here, I have to return home tomorrow morning. Blogging will almost certainly be light tomorrow as I have a tight travel schedule, but the trip was well worth it. I never did get a chance to thank The Week at the event, but they were so kind and generous in their arrangements for me that I would be remiss to let it go without thanking them here.

It's wonderful to be recognized alongside Nick Kristof and Mike Luckovich, but now the nose must get back to the grindstone.

UPDATE: Paul adds his thoughts and congratulations, and gives an excellent account of the panel discussion.

UPDATE II: My friend Brian at Fraters Libertas guessed wrong: "In Washington DC for an event, what could that be? My guess would have been the keynote address at a Free Cynthia McKinney Rally." Nope, Brian, I had to miss that one to attend the dinner, but life is full of small cruelties like that ...

A DC Interlude

I'm in the nation's capital this evening for an event, so blogging will be light. I'll have more to say about the event itself later this evening. It should be a night to remember, though ...

Able Providence Background

Earlier today, I wrote about the funding of a new program the promises to use the "engine" of Able Danger to develop leads on potential terror cells, both here and abroad. The new program, Able Providence, wants to produce data as a shared resource for all intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, placed under the joint supervision of the DNI and the Joint Chiefs. For those of us who have followed the Able Danger effort and worried that a vital effort had been abandoned, this is exceptionally good news.

However, it is not a shock, as the intelligence-community magazine Government Community News (GCN) wrote a little-noted article about the Able Providence proposal last October:

A draft proposal floating behind closed doors would reconstitute and improve upon a former Army data-mining program called Able Danger.

Able Providence, as the new program has been dubbed, would establish “robust open-source harvesting capabilities” to give military and law enforcement agencies the information to take the initiative in the war on terrorism—that is, to be able to plan and execute offensive measures—in addition to continued defensive actions.

In addition, the program would be driven by a presumption that use of weapons of mass destruction within the United States is possible. As a result, Able Providence would need to detect, track and target terrorists as they move from location to location and reorganize their cells.

As one part of the new data-mining effort, the proposal suggests using information about terrorist financing and the Islamist system worldwide to identify correlations.

The proposal, which GCN has seen, would place the Able Providence project within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, with the Defense Department having joint oversight responsibilities.

A first-year budget of a little more than $26 million would cover the cost of a director drawn from the Senior Executive Service, a deputy director from SES (or a brigadier general), five planners, software and hardware, and office space.

The program itself is not classified, but also has not received much attention, especially in light of the treatment afforded to the Able Danger team members who have fought to have their successes recognized and repeated. Able Providence appears to be the program that they have desired, and the with the funding now in place, the datamining should soon commence as soon as their team forms.

One improvement over the experiment of Able Danger is a recognition of the enemy being targeted. AD had been a toss of the dice to determine whether the datamining concept could succeed in identifying potential targets. Now that the model has been proved, the focus of the data being mined can narrow towards the Islamofascists. Able Providence has already taken this focus into account, as this slide from the unclassified briefing shows:

We can see that the new program correctly focuses on those areas that bore fruit in Able Danger. The new datamining will pay attention to the mosques and the interaction between them, presumably the most radical in nature getting first priority. It's refreshing to see a government agency accepting the religious nature of the conflict, even in a low key. The effort is explicitly pre-emptive, designed to stop an attack before it happens rather than pursue an investigation amid the smoking ruins, as on 9/11.

More to come ... in the meantime, be sure to keep up with Mike Kasper's Able Danger coverage, including more information on Able Providence. Mike also has a good post on Sandy Berger's fundraising for Curt Weldon's opponent in Pennsylvania. That sounds rather ironic -- the man who stole key materials from the National Archive raising funds against the man who stood up to the 9/11 Commission to ensure our national security.

Son Of Able Danger

One of the frustrations surrounding the revelation of the Able Danger program is the knowledge of what might have been -- how we could have potentially stopped the 9/11 attacks and saved thousands of American lives. Had the American intelligence community been allowed to coordinate with each other and with law enforcement properly to constitute an effective defense against terrorism, the data that Able Danger produced would have captured Mohammed Atta and his core pilot cell in plenty of time to stop al-Qaeda's biggest victory.

Even afterwards, the willful disregard of the successes of Able Danger has led many to question in growing frustration why the Pentagon has not put another program in its place. With the threat still high for retaliatory strikes from AQ sleeper cells, a data-mining program like Able Danger seems more necessary than ever. In a new program, however, the Pentagon would need to integrate it into an overall counterterrorism strategy that links all of the alphabet soup of intelligence agencies in the American armada.

CQ has learned that such an effort has already been launched at the Pentagon. Titled "Able Providence", the effort seeks to use the Able Danger "engine" to generate hot leads for counterterrorism and law enforcement agents to pursue. Located in the Office of National Intelligence, AP will serve all agencies, as this unclassified graphic shows:

The Able Providence project, estimated at an initial cost of around $27 million, will report jointly to the Director of National Intelligence (John Negroponte) and the Joint Chiefs. The datamining component of the project, named KIMBERLITE MAGIC, will follow and update the SOCOM and NOAH efforts of the pre-9/11 period. After an initial burn-in phase, the Able Providence team will then coordinate with the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), SOCOM, Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), FBI, CIA, NSA, DHS (Customs/TSA, etc) and partner with Army 1st Info Ops Command (IDC), Army Asymmetric Warfare Group (ASW), Navy DEEP BLUE, Air Force CHECKMATE to produce actionable "Decision Support" Option Packets. AP would then act as a conduit for these efforts to law enforcement agencies for immediate domestic action when required.

I will have more on this as the day goes along, including more graphics to explain the program in full.

All The News That Fits Our Mindset, Volume III

Michelle Malkin has an e-mail from Dateline NBC that tries to create artificial situations where the supposedly latent American hatred of Muslims can be caught on tape. This particular section, from a Muslim that NBC purportedly asked to help find subjects for their "investigation", tells everyone all they need to know about the agenda journalism at NBC's news magazine show:

They recently taped two turbaned Sikh men attending a football game in Arizona to see how people would treat them. They set them up with hidden microphones and cameras, etc.

They want to do the same thing 2 or 3 other times (in various parts of the USA) with one or two Muslim men in each setting. They are looking for men who actually "look Muslim". They want a guy with no foreign accent whatsoever, a good thick beard, an outgoing personality, and someone willing to wear a kufi/skullcap during the filming.

They also want someone who is fairly well accomplished and has contributed to American society at large in some meaningful way.

That said, I'm urgently looking for someone who can be filmed this April 1st weekend at a Nascar event (and other smaller events) in Virginia. NBC is willing to fly in someone and cover their weekend expenses. The filming would take place all day on Saturday and Sunday.

According to this, not only has NBC made up the news but apparently has no real examples outside of their own Psych 101 experiments on various entertainment events. Perhaps NBC's Sports Division hasn't explained this to the News Division, but the people who attend sporting events tend to be loud and boisterous, which hardly provides the best example of everyday American activity. The introduction of people looking to cause an event for the hidden cameras -- and they have powerful motivation to push for a confrontation of some sort -- not only makes the entire exercise a waste of time as science, but it also puts people at risk if the confrontation gets out of hand.

Not too bright. And also on the intelligence topic, guess who broadcasts NASCAR? Do you suppose that the folks at NBC Sports might be dialing the News Division first thing this morning? I'm sure they will not be pleased to have Dateline NBC insinuate that NASCAR fans are nothing more than Muslim-hating bigots ...

I'd Call It A Stalemate

EJ Dionne poses an interesting take on the recent campaign-finance legislation that the FEC has finally produced. Dionne hails the blogger exemption that the FEC delivered while maintaining the regulations regarding Internet advertising as a win-win:

The new FEC rule is not that complicated, but it did involve some careful balancing. The commission, under pressure from a court decision, decided that paid advertising on the Internet should be subject to the same regulations as paid advertising on television, radio or in newspapers. The restrictions on the use of unregulated "soft money" that apply to the old media would apply to the new media, too.

At the same time, bloggers won what they had long sought: exemptions from regulations on what they can say that are akin to those that apply to what is now quaintly called the "old media." For bloggers, it was a Let Freedom Ring moment.

The decision could be looked at as a classic political compromise: Campaign reformers got something they wanted (the Web would not be allowed to become the loophole that ate all campaign finance regulations), while bloggers got something they wanted (freedom to inform, opine, fulminate and enrage, i.e., to speak their minds).

But the decision was better than your usual split-the-difference Washington sausage-making because it acknowledged that two serious principles are at stake and because it sought to make sure that regulations would be applied uniformly across media outlets.

The two principles are free speech and the ability of our democratic political system to protect itself from corruption.

Ah, if only this compromise succeeded in doing the latter, but unfortunately it fails in doing both. The BCRA and the lawsuit by Reps. Shays and Meehan that forced the FEC into addressing Internet regulation do not protect the principle of free speech. It controls, via government authority, the timing of political speech and the people and organizations that can participate in it. While I agree with EJ that the FEC should be commended for waiving regulation on bloggers and Internet journalists in the same exemption that EJ enjoys as a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, the fact that we had to get the government to grant us the right to write about politics without fear of legal harassment shows how dangerously adrift we have become in the zeal to purge money from politics.

EJ forgets this simple truth: what the government grants, it can also withdraw. And now that we have established the government as the arbiter of who can conduct political speech and when, what keeps the feds from telling the Washington Post when it can do the same?

When we put the government, in the form of the FEC, in the role of political moderator, we open a Pandora's Box of evils that this country has yet to know. Selective prosecution under these terms could result in the silencing of certain unpopular political factions, even if only through intimidation. That would perpetuate the status quo and result in skewed elections and the removal of choice from the electorate. Government would descend into self-renewing autocracy, a problem we already have with Congress and reapportionment even without the incumbency benefits of the BCRA.

All of this to protect us ... from what? Money. And the very regulations that supposedly protect us from its malign influence create the evils that the reformers want to purge. By putting money into a myriad of artifical classifications -- hard, soft, 527, 501(c), and so on -- it strips the responsibility for its use from the candidate to a series of players who never have to face voters or show any accountability. The regulations themselves create illegality for money; it takes a staff of lawyers for campaigns to navigate the labyrinth of legislation in order to keep candidates from becoming felons.

EJ is correct to hail the FEC decision, and he is among the few in the media who truly engage the blogosphere as peers and equals. My correspondence with him proves that. If the FEC could forever be in the hands of Brad Smiths and EJ Dionnes, we would not have so much concern over the the future of free speech. But our system of government is predicated on ensuring against abuses so that we don't have to live in fear of whomever comes to power in any agency, and the right to free speech is the bulwark of that defense. We need to repeal the BCRA and conduct real reform through complete and immediate disclosure rather than creating a system where everyone is a criminal -- because when speech becomes a crime, the government then becomes the only solution.

Boycott For Illegals On May Day

The traditional Communist holiday of May Day has been selected for a boycott protesting the push to secure the southern border of the United States, the Washington Times reports this morning. The timing is not coincidental, as the Stalinist sympathizers International ANSWER has led the effort to stage the economic protest:

Immigration rights organizers today will call for a nationwide boycott of work, school and shopping on May 1 to protest congressional efforts to clamp down on illegal aliens as part of pending immigration-reform legislation.

he "Great American Boycott of 2006" is only one in a series of large-scale events the protesters hope will sway lawmakers to put millions of illegal aliens on track toward permanent residency and U.S. citizenship.

"The massive March 25 march and rally in Los Angeles of well over one million immigrant workers and their supporters -- along with protests and student walkouts throughout the United States -- is irrefutable evidence that a new civil rights and workers' rights movement is on the rise," said Raul Murillo, one of the key organizers and president of the Hermandad Mexicana Nacional. ...

The Act Now to Stop War & End Racism (ANSWER) coalition, which organized the Los Angeles march to win "full rights for undocumented workers," is confident its new "national action" will prove successful.

ANSWER's steering committee includes the Free Palestine Alliance, the Partnership for Civil Justice, the Nicaragua Network, the Korea Truth Commission, the Muslim Student Association, the Mexico Solidarity Network and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. It denounces as racism attempts to criminalize illegal aliens.

The selection of May Day as its target date reveals much of the philosophical underpinning of the illegals movement. They wish to deny the United States sovereignty over their own territory and control of its own borders. It follows from their political ambition to recreate the Communist hegemony that died in Europe from its own internal rot and to fuel the notion of mob rule in the name of a rising proletariat. Workers of the world, unite! and all that.

Someone should have warned them about the obvious nature of the date, but then again, the I-ANSWER crowd has always worn its love of Stalinism on its sleeve -- right next to the Che Guevara images it wears on its chest.

It seems like a rather stupid idea, anyway, and one almost guaranteed to backfire on its promoters. For one thing, May 1 is a Monday, traditionally the worst day of the week for retail business anyway. Travel will be light, and restaurants more or less empty regardless of the boycott. Most travelers will have checked out of their hotels the previous day. If one could pick a day with the least amount of impact on the traditional job categories for illegals and their interaction with the public, May 1 has to rank in the top three this year.

And besides its watered-down economic impact, the notion that people who entered the country illegally will now obstruct American citizens and legal residents from conducting their business will generate as much sympathy as the sea of Mexican flags did during last week's protests. It will backfire and polarize the immigration debate, generating more calls for strict enforcement and undercutting reasonable compromise. Why? Because most Americans will not back down when confronted with unreasonable demands, and the demands of the I-ANSWER crowd for unlimited and unfettered border crossings, complete with automatic qualification for the entire range of government safety-net programs, is completely unreasonable.

The proponents of illegal immigrants have continued to tie their own shoelaces together as a political strategy, and this will provide yet another embarrassing stumble.

Media Bias - Another Form Of Cognitive Dissonance?

Jack Shafer at Slate reports on a new study that delves into the reasons journalism gets slanted in the American market. The study explains that news which has quick resolution and immediate accountablility get more straightforward treatment, while those stories which take significant time for resolution -- tax policy, war, and so on -- have the most susceptibility to overt and institutional bias:

1) If a media outlet cares about its reputation for accuracy, it will be reluctant to report anything that counters the audiences' existing beliefs because such stories will tend to erode the company's standing. Newspapers and news programs have a visible incentive to "distort information to make it conform with consumers' prior beliefs."

2) The media can't satisfy their audiences by merely reporting what their audience wants to hear. If alternative sources of information prove that a news organization has distorted the news, the organization will suffer a loss of reputation, and hence profit. The authors predict more bias in stories where the outcomes aren't realized for some time (foreign war reporting, for example) and less bias where the outcomes are immediately apparent (a weather forecast or a sports score). Indeed, almost nobody accuses the New York Times or Fox News Channel of slanting their weather reports.

3) Less bias occurs when competition produces a healthy tension between a news organization's desire to conform to audience expectations and maintaining its reputation.

The mechanism Shafer describes in the first paragraph has a basis in psychology. One of the dynamics at work in assessing information gathering in general on an individual basis is the constant re-evaluation of the messenger based on whether the data it delivers matches our worldview. When a trusted source brings us information that contradicts our own set of assumptions, it tends to increase the credibility of the new data while decreasing the trust level in that source. Whether the dynamic Shafer describes involves conscious effort on the part of the media outlets or is more of a normal but subconcious human response, its existence is hardly a surprise.

Points two and three follow from a competitive environment. In the recent past when almost everyone in the nation had ready access to only two news sources -- the local-newspaper monopoly and the lock-step reporting of the Big Three TV networks -- no one had to worry about news consumers discovering holes in the reporting which could undermine media credibility. Various developments have changed that, starting with the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and the rise of AM radio talk shows, the advent of cable news, and the Internet. Suddenly, after a few decades of relative safety, the news media faced serious competition and a much more sophisticated audience. In the new market, the consumers gained the upper hand over a marketplace that has evolved much too slowly but has begun to catch up with reality.

Shafer, on the other hand, has always been ahead of this curve and includes some of his own observations of this phenomenon. He writes about the famous Daniel Okrent column in which he "admitted" that his New York Times was a liberal newspaper, an admission forced on the then-ombudsman once the Gray Lady had to compete not just within New York City on the streetcorners but with other major newspapers in the boundary-free Internet. This admission established credibility for Okrent in his position as reader representative, but it never would have come without the competition that the new environment presents.

Interestingly, Shafer notes that this dynamic only appears in the American media. For some reason, the British have avoided it altogether and instead have embraced obviously slanted national newspapers, with competition providing diversity through market choice rather than internal diversity within each market entrant. That springs from the long fantasy of the American media that it provides objective reporting to their consumers, a tradition that dictates more movement towards that goal than towards a British-style embrace of specific points of view. Even the New York Times fights against Okrent's characterization of the paper.

Whatever model gets embraced by the American media, the competition has made the news more honest and more diverse. Shafer makes sure that this point does not get lost.

Faribault Discovers Bombing Plot

Details are sketchy at the moment, but police in this sleepy Minnesota town have uncovered a plot to bomb public buildings, threaten judges and prosecutors, and target the police. Two brothers are in custody as well as a large cache of arms and explosives:

Officials in Faribault, Minn., say they have uncovered what appears to be a plan to bomb public buildings and threaten judges, prosecutors and law enforcement officials.

The plan came to light in a follow-up to a drug investigation when officers searched a farm last November, Rice County Sheriff Richard Cook said Monday. The county courthouse and law enforcement center were among potential targets, Cook said.

One man, Allan Weatherford, 44, was arrested Friday and made a first appearance in court today. He was charged with attempted first-degree arson, possession of explosive devices and being a felon in possession of firearms.

His brother, Mark Weatherford, 34, was jailed a week earlier for failure to appear in court on another charge.

The South Central Drug Investigation Unit said officers seized more than 50 firearms from the farm, including assault rifles, and a fuel oil and fertilizer mixture along with detonation devices.

So far nothing points to a wider organized effort to terrorize Minnesotans, but the size of the stash shows that the Weatherfords meant business. The fuel oil/fertilizer mixture debuted on the American scene in 1993 World Trade Center attack and reappeared in 1995 in Oklahoma City.

More on this as it develops ...

DeLay Steps Down, This Time For Good

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay will resign from Congress this summer according to reports in Time Magazine's website and the New York Times. At turns defiant and nostalgic, DeLay told Time that although he thought he could win in November, he didn't want to run in a race that would turn out to be a personal referendum:

"I'm going to announce tomorrow that I'm not running for reelection and that I'm going to leave Congress," DeLay, who turns 59 on Saturday, said during a 90-minute interview on Monday. "I'm very much at peace with it." He notified President Bush in the afternoon. DeLay and his wife, Christine, said they had been prepared to fight, but that he decided last Wednesday, after months of prayer and contemplation, to spare his suburban Houston district the mudfest to come. "This had become a referendum on me," he said. "So it's better for me to step aside and let it be a referendum on ideas, Republican values and what's important for this district." ...

The surprise decision was based on the sort of ruthless calculation that had once given him unchallenged dominance of House Republicans and their wealthy friends in Washington's lobbying community: he realized he might lose in this November's election. DeLay got a scare in a Republican primary last month, and a recent poll taken by his campaign gave him a roughly 50-50 shot of winning, in an election season when Republicans need every seat they can hang onto to avoid a Democratic takeover of the House.

"I'm a realist. I've been around awhile. I can evaluate political situations," DeLay told TIME at his kitchen table in Sugar Land, a former sugar plantation in suburban Houston. Bluebonnets are blooming along the highways. "I feel that I could have won the race. I just felt like I didn't want to risk the seat and that I can do more on the outside of the House than I can on the inside right now. I want to continue to fight for the conservative cause. I want to continue to work for a Republican majority."

DeLay coldly calculated that in a strong Republican district, a GOP candidate unencumbered by the kind of baggage he carries could win easily, while his candidacy would likely require a lot of help from the national organization. In this election, that money and energy should go elsewhere to help the Republicans hang onto their majority in the lower chamber. Losing control in the House makes it more likely that the Democrats will pursue impeachment of George Bush, and DeLay may have taken one for the team here.

I'm sorry to see him go under these circumstances. The Hammer has never made it onto my list of favorites in DC, but up until recently he performed reliably in keeping the caucus focused on the agenda. This prosecution pursued by Ronnie Earle is the worst kind of political hackery, and to the extent that this weighed on his campaign, DeLay's withdrawal and resignation diminishes the political process.

However, no one can deny that DeLay carries baggage, and at least a significant portion is of his own making. Jack Abramoff may have disavowed any connections between himself and DeLay, but the former leader made it his business to engage K Street and turn it red. This is nothing different than what Democrats did for forty years prior to 1994, but the point was that the GOP promised us something different in the Contract With America. The Republicans, led by Gingrich with DeLay as one of his chief lieutenants, campaigned on a platform of fiscal responsibility in 1994. Last year, with the federal budget having grown a whopping 89% since 1994, DeLay managed to say with a straight face that Congress had cut all of the fat out of the budget.

Like Glenn Reynolds says, DeLay lost me there, and while I hoped he would bring his prodigious talents back onto the task of reducing the federal budget and government itself, it did not look promising. DeLay settled into the all-too-familiar role of brokering power by using our money as a tool, proving the allure of big government does not limit itself to one party.

The Republicans can now wish DeLay well and start to rethink their purpose and identity in national politics. They should start with 1994.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has an excellent roundup on all of the DeLay coverage. Keep checking in with her. Power Line says this is triumph of the politics of personal destruction.

One Year After Gomery

Yesterday marked the anniversary of a CQ post that started a wave of indignation and anger in Canada, as the Gomery Commission attempted to close its doors to blockbuster testimony to all but the powerful and connected. Titled "Canada's Corruption Scandal Breaks Wide Open", it gave ordinary Canadians an opportunity to learn about the specifics of the Sponsorship Programme scandal that had been deliberately withheld from them by a publication ban -- although the witnesses were testifying in an open hearing. By the time I posted the second in a series on the testimony, more than a million Canadians had flocked to CQ to read what their pressed had been banned from reporting to them.

Much has changed in the twelve months since that post. The Liberal stranglehold on power crashed on the news of their high-level involvement in Adscam, although former Prime Minister Paul Martin finagled his way through several months of Let's Make A Deal, which cost Canadian taxpayers another $4 billion in deals with the NDP. Stephen Harper, thought by many at the time to be too "scary" to ever rise to governing the nation, now has strengthened the Tory position to a near-majority standing among the electorate. In fact, a recent poll shows that 81% of Canadians want the Harper government to continue for at least the next year, and the Tories and Harper lead the Liberals now by ten points and Harper's government garners an astounding 62% approval rating.

Most of all, the coverage allowed me to connect with the Canadian blogging community and Canadians in general in a manner I never imagined. I find myself continually fascinated with Canadian politics, and Canadian readers have been instrumental in adding to the information here at CQ. I hope CQ readers will take another look at the coverage of Canada here at CQ over the past year and stay with us for even more to come.

Warrants To Be Issued For Idiocy In The First Degree

Cynthia McKinney, the one-woman gang that can only hit straight, faces possible arrest for assaulting a Capitol Hill police officer after failing to properly identify herself or stop at a security checkpoint. Predictably, she and her supporters continued to throw more gasoline on the fire instead of simply shutting up and letting the entire incident pass:

Capitol Hill police on Monday asked a federal prosecutor to approve an arrest warrant for Rep. Cynthia McKinney for her role in a scuffle with a police officer last week, the prosecutor's office confirmed.

Capitol Police had no immediate comment so it's not yet known whether the intent is to file felony or misdemeanor assault charges against McKinney, a DeKalb County Democrat.

Coz Carson, a spokesman for McKinney, said the requested warrant should be dismissed if "this is a prosecutor who's not a politician."

"Any prosecutor with any sense can look at this thing and understand that it's not something that should be blown out of proportion any further," Carson said.

Oh, the train has left the station on that, Mr. Carson, and quite a long time ago. McKinney practically dared police to arrest her last week when the assault first occurred. The Congresswoman could have simply apologized for not presenting the proper identification (the pin given to members that allows them to pass through the checkpoint) and for misunderstanding the officer's intent in stopping her. Instead, she made the embarrassing incident literally into a federal case by taunting Capitol Hill police for their alleged racism and sexism.

McKinney and her supporters continued with their offensive offense today, continuing to claim that institutional racism in Congress caused the guards not to recognize her, blaming "racial profiling" instead. One Georgia politician, Alberta Abdul-Salaam, told the press that Congress and the White House have a well-planned conspiracy to attack black leaders, apparently involving the enforcement of procedures at security checkpoints. Another lunatic at her rally claimed that McKinney has been "set up" without providing any explanation of the plot. Did someone steal her pin? Was the Congresswoman told that the rules didn't apply to her, only to be shocked that the police take security rather seriously in our nation's capital?

McKinney's Hill colleagues, meanwhile, have developed a serious case of selective laryngitis on this matter. Do leaders of her party think that security protocols are part of a plot against their African-American members? Do they support the notion that elected officials that are responsible for securing our nation against attack somehow bear no responsibility for cooperating with security procedures designed to make themselves and their staffers and employees secure from danger? Their silence speaks volumes about the support they give the police officers who risk their lives every day to protect them; two of them died in 1998 protecting them from an insane gunman.

Until the Democrats and their allies start condemning McKinney's demagoguery and exploitation of racial tensions intended on distracting people from her status as an arrogant, egotistical idiot, we can't take anything they say on security seriously.

Iranian Kurds Take On Teheran

The Kurds of Iraq have enjoyed their taste of freedom so much that they wish to extend it to their cousins across the border. The Washington Times reports on the efforts of a secular, Western-sympathetic band of insurgents that have targeted the Iranian military in a region of the Islamic Republic that has four million Kurds living under the mullahcracy's thumb:

A little-known organization based in the mountains of Iraq's Kurdish north is emerging as a serious threat to the Iranian government, staging cross-border attacks and claiming tens of thousands of supporters among Iran's 4 million Kurds.

The Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, better known by the local acronym PEJAK or PJAK, claims to have killed 24 Iranian soldiers in three raids against army bases last month, all staged in retaliation for the killing of 10 Iranian Kurds during a peaceful demonstration in the city of Maku.

Three more soldiers from Iran's elite Republican Guard were killed last week in a gunbattle near the Iraqi border, Iran's official news agency reported.

But the greater threat to the Tehran regime may come from the group's underground effort to promote a sense of identity among Iranian Kurds, who make up 7 percent of that country's population. PEJAK leaders say the effort is spreading quickly among students, intellectuals and businessmen.

"The Iranian government's plan to create a global Islamic state is destroying our people's culture and values," said Akif Zagros, 28, a graduate in Persian literature who was interviewed in a simple stone hut at the group's headquarters. "So we fight back. But our aim is not just to bring freedom to Kurds, but to liberate all the peoples of Iran."

It's amazing that the Kurds remain so pro-Western, considering the raw deal that the West has given them since Winston Churchill started dividing up Southwest Asia. I greatly admire Churchill, but when he was wrong, he was wrong big. He opted for the early 20th century version of realpolitik in denying the Kurds their own nation, instead splitting them up across four or five other countries and ensuring their minority status in each one. Churchill decided that making the Arabs happy was more important than giving the Kurds their own homeland in order to pursue freedom on their own terms.

After that kind of betrayal, one might expect the Kurds to reject Western thought, but they have been among the most enthusiastic supporters of the West in the region. Given the opportunity, they have embraced democracy, secular government, free markets, and fought Islamist terror on our behalf. We may have done better supporting an independent Kurdistan in the long run; the results would have been more obvious, if more costly in relations with the Turks and the Shi'ites.

Even now we still don't give them the support they desire. James Brandon notes that the PJAK sees no Western support, especially in terms of money or weapons. Yet they continue with their mission, treating men and women with equality in the ranks and fighting side by side to free not just the Kurds but all of Iran from the grip of Islamist tyranny. If the US wants to see the mullahcracy gone, at some point they may want to consider the Kurds as an agent of change.

Scully: Bonds Moment Will Be 'Awkward'

Vin Scully has seen and heard it all in baseball, and has lent his wonderful voice and skills as perhaps the game's greatest announcer ever to reporting it. Scully provided the play-by-play when Henry Aaron broke Babe Ruth's home-run record thirty-two years ago this month as Dodger pitcher Al Downing left a slider over the plate in Atlanta for number 715. He delights in that experience, but dreads the thought of calling the homer that will break Aaron's record of 755 lifetime home runs:

In 1974, when Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's all-time home run record in a game against the Dodgers, Scully called it. But at the start of a season in which Barry Bonds could pass Ruth and then Aaron for perhaps the most cherished mark in American sports, the Dodgers' Hall of Fame announcer wants no part of that history.

"I would just as soon it not happen against the Dodgers," Scully said. "With Aaron, it was a privilege to be there when he did it. It was just a great moment. With Bonds, no matter what happens now, it will be an awkward moment. That's the best word I can think of now. If I had my druthers, I would rather have that awkward moment happen to somebody else."

Scully's ambivalence mirrors that of fans, current and former players and sports executives across the country. No sport treasures its statistics and fusses over its milestones like baseball, and yet no one is sure of the proper way to celebrate the accomplishments of Bonds, a supremely talented player widely perceived as a cheater, the most valuable player of his league a record seven times and the biggest name in a federal investigation into steroid use.

The record book, for now: Aaron, 755 home runs; Ruth, 714; Bonds, 708.

Normally, Vin Scully likes to remain positive when talking about baseball. He rarely criticizes anyone and is one of the few remaining announcers that rejects "homerism", where the on-air commentary slants precipitously towards the home team. He ladles compliments as quickly to visiting players as he does to those wearing Dodger Blue, and refrains from criticizing even obviously boneheaded plays as much as possible.

That's what makes this interview extraordinary. Even to use the understatement of "awkward" shows the disdain Scully feels about Bonds and his chemically-enhanced performance in pursuit of Aaron. Scully has made a career out of announcing some of the most dramatic and historical moments in baseball, and for him to wish that history could be broken on someone else's watch demonstrates the overall mood towards Bonds this season.

What can baseball do about this? Not much, especially for a game that relies on its statistics so heavily. Disallowing Bonds' home runs would mean that ERAs would have to be recalculated, along with runs scored for the people hitting ahead of him, and so on. Bud Selig could drag out the dreaded asterisk again, but the connotation has gathered so much injustice in the way it was applied to Roger Maris and his pursuit of Babe Ruth that it will do more harm than good.

It's better to leave Bonds' mark alone, once he makes it, and consider it a testimony to the Lords of Baseball as well as the players' union, and their unwillingness to do anything about steroids until it warped the game. They didn't want to take any action to stop it then, and really have only started to address it now. For those who know the game, we will always consider Henry Aaron the true home-run king. That will lead to the "awkward" moment that Vin Scully dreads, and like him, I'd take a pass on being a part of it.

UPDATE: One or two comments wonder why I don't mention Mark McGwire, who admittedly took androstenedione supplements while breaking Roger Maris' record. For one thing, Mark's not playing baseball any more. Also, you'll note that Mark doesn't own that record any more; Barry Bonds does. And since the comment wonders why I didn't reject McGwire during his record-breaking season, I should remind everyone that this blog started in 2003, after McGwire retired.

For the record, though, I'd say that most of the hitting records of this era are tainted thanks to baseball's complicity in juicing. No one can pretend that both the players and the owners disliked the fan response from the explosion of power over the last twenty years. Players like Rafael Palmeiro, Jose Canseco, Jason Giambi, McGwire and Bonds have cast a pall over all of the accomplishments of this generation. While some rightly point out the greenies and amphetamines that earlier players in professional sports took to give them an energy edge as a similar corruption of the game, steroids in baseball target the one specific act of home runs and power batting. For those who think that only bat speed plays a part in dingers, take a look at the fastest bats in that generation -- Brett Butler, Tony Gwynn -- and see how many homers they hit.

Hammerin' Hank did it the old-fashioned way, and he did it against integrated teams and unfettered competition, unlike Babe Ruth. For that matter, so did Roger Maris. Others may come along and break their marks without chemically enhancing their strength to do so, but until then, those men deserve to own those records.

Midwives -- Natural Assistants Or Unlicensed Menaces?

The New York Times reports today on a prosecution against a midwife for delivering babies in defiance of legislation requiring attendants to be licensed nurses or doctors. Adam Liptak writes that the triggering event in this prosecution was the death of a child during birth, but that the charges have been limited to practicing without a proper license:

Angela Hendrix-Petry gave birth to her daughter Chloe by candlelight in her bedroom here in the early morning of March 12, with a thunderstorm raging outside and her family and midwife huddled around her.

"It was the most cozy, lovely, lush experience," Ms. Hendrix-Petry said.

According to Indiana law, though, the midwife who assisted Ms. Hendrix-Petry, Mary Helen Ayres, committed a felony punishable by up to eight years in prison. Ms. Ayres was, according to the state, practicing medicine and midwifery without a license.

Doctors, legislators and prosecutors in Indiana and in the nine other states with laws prohibiting midwifery by people other than doctors and nurses say home births supervised by midwives present grave and unacceptable medical risks. Nurse-midwives in Indiana are permitted to deliver babies at home, but most work in hospitals.

Midwives see it differently. They say the ability of women to choose to give birth at home is under assault from a medical establishment dominated by men who, for reasons of money and status, resent a centuries-old tradition that long ago anticipated the concerns of modern feminism.

The midwife in question, Jennifer Williams, assisted a family whose delivery had serious complications. Williams conducted her own pre-natal exams on Kristi Jo Meredith, performed an episiotomy during the birth when the baby's heart rate showed signs of distress, tried reviving the child through CPR, and after the baby died closed the suture she had made. Both the prosecution and the defense agree that the family has not pursued the prosecution, at least not with any enthusiasm, although Liptak could not get them to comment on the story.

Normally, my approach to questions like this is to ensure that all sides understand the limits and ramifications of their choices and act responsibly; if a family wants a midwife delivery, then let them have one -- but the midwife can't take it upon herself to act outside her own expertise. The prosecution has a strong case that Williams wasn't acting as a midwife but practicing medicine without a license -- and the fact that they have focused on that point shows the proper prosecutorial temperament.

And the first question that should be answered is this -- why didn't anyone call 911 when it started to go wrong?

I'll share a little story with you that will illustrate my frustration with this. Many years ago (well, not that long ago), friends of mine asked me to help out when their baby was due by babysitting their older daughter. They also asked to borrow my camera for pictures of the birth, so I brought along my Canon AE-1 SLR rig for the father to use. I assumed that they would be going to the hospital while I stayed at their place, but it turned out that they had arranged for a home delivery by a midwife. Labor turned out to be about twenty hours or so, during which time I got regaled with the entire political history of the oppressive male-dominated medical establishment and their extermination of midwives as witches, and so on.

Oh, and by the way, it turned out that the photographer was going to be ... me. Surprise!

I didn't really mind all of this, although it would have been nice had they just told me the entire story when they asked me to volunteer. I considered it a bit odd -- well, more than a bit -- but relatively harmless, and giving me the opportunity to be present at the birth was really rather sweet. However, that all changed once the labor got serious. The midwife could not get the water to break properly, causing some significant distress to the mother, and then the head got caught in the cervix. It turned out that the baby was a lot bigger than anyone had anticipated. At that point, I suggested we call an ambulance, but the midwife assured me that they had a backup plan for a hospital in case of complications.

It turns out that the hospital was twenty miles away. And this was in Orange County, CA, where we probably passed a half-dozen hospitals as everyone drove from Yorba Linda to the midwife's preferred birthing center in La Palma. I would have cheerfully strangled the midwife myself by that point, but she disappeared when they took the mother in for an emergency Caesarian. Fortunately, everyone survived the experience, but it turns out that only the father got to see the birth. I loaned him the camera, but I don't recall if he took any pictures.

I can understand why people might choose a midwife, I truly do. Most probably aren't as nutty as the one with which I spent almost two days. However, the truth is that births often bring complications, and midwives aren't qualified to deal with most of them. It seems to me that allowing unlicensed midwives to operate independently in home births asks for trouble, especially when they attempt surgeries and conduct prenatal examinations that supplant those conducted by medical professionals. Hundreds of years of medical research, understanding, and training do not turn people into oppressors; it turns them into professional doctors and nurses who can rely on that knowledge and experience to rescue people when things go wrong.

Addendum: Thanks, Mom, for going to the hospital 43 years ago today.

Iranians Test Yet Another Missile, Or So They Claim

The Iranians either want to escalate their bluffs on military capability or they have some extraordinary timing on R&D. Teheran announced the test of another missile within a week of what they claim to have been a successful test of a multiple-target Fajr-3 missile, only this weapon aims at naval forces:

Iran said Sunday that it had test-fired what it described as a sonar-evading underwater missile just two days after it announced that it had fired a new missile that could carry multiple warheads and evade radar systems.

The new missile is among the world's fastest and can outpace an enemy warship, Gen. Ali Fadavi of the country's elite Revolutionary Guards told state television.

General Fadavi said only one other country, Russia, had a missile that moved underwater as fast as the Iranian one, which he said had a speed of about 225 miles per hour. State television showed what it described as the missile being fired.

It's hard to know what to make of the sudden spate of missile claims by the Iranians. This started when the West pressed the IAEA to make a determination last year on the efforts by Iran to hide their nuclear program and their non-compliance with the NPT. Around that time, the Iranians tested the new Shahab-3 missile, which they claim can reach targets as far away as London. Now that the UNSC has given them 30 days to comply with the IAEA and come back into compliance with the NPT, the Iranians have supposedly tested two new and completely different missile systems successfully within the past week. It's not impossible to have done so, but that might even tax the Pentagon a bit; one can imagine that the Iranians would have more trouble with that level of multitasking.

Their expanded comments on this don't add much to their credibility. At first, they claim that the missile evades sonar -- which sounds an awful lot like their claim last week about the Fajr-3 evading radar. The Iranians then concede that some forces might be able to track the inbound underwater missile, but that it moves so fast that it won't make any difference. At a claimed 225 MPH, they would be correct; large battleships and submarines would not be able to outrun it and would be unlikely to outmaneuver it. However, surface-to-surface missiles like the Harpoon travel much faster (almost supersonic) and have better guidance capabilities. Torpedos and underwater missiles have their use, but in terms of missile technology, it doesn't represent a great leap forward, at least not towards the surface ships likely to have primary duty in blockading Iran if hostilities break out.

The most likely explanation falls closer to bluff than reality. The continued boasting of superweapon technology combined with the diplomatic isolation Iran has experienced makes this sound like the mullahcracy is willing to pull out all stops in order to intimidate the West into backing off of Teheran. The mullahs have overplayed the threats at this point.

McCain: Isolate Russia

John McCain appeared on Meet The Press this morning and spoke about the relationship between the administration and a powerful political figure. No, it wasn't Jerry Falwell, although his comments on the preacher has his former admirers on the left rather annoyed today. McCain told MTP that Bush should isolate Russia and Vladimir Putin by shunning the G-8 meeting in Moscow, advice which Bush declined:

Sen. John McCain said Sunday the United States should respond harshly to Russia’s anti-democratic actions and suggested that President Bush is reconsidering his assessment of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

After meeting Putin for the first time in June 2001, Bush said he had been able to gain “a sense of his soul” and had found Putin to be “very straightforward and trustworthy.”

Recalling Bush’s assessment just months after taking office, McCain said: “Look, we all say things that are stupid. ... I’m sure that the president has re-evaluated his position in light of Putin’s recent actions.”

According to the MS-NBC report, McCain gave a laundry list of reasons to split with Putin and to start pushing for the return of democracy, all of them good but forgetting the most egregious of all. McCain noted Putin's push to repress the free media, bully his own people and especially potential political rivals, and the Russian anchor on any concerted effort to confront Teheran about its nuclear-weapons development. Missing in this indictment is the Russian perfidy of supplying Saddam Hussein with military intelligence prior to and during Operation Iraqi Freedom, operational information that would have put our troops in serious risk had the Iraqis been bright enough to actually use it.

However, McCain is right. Even without the Russian alliance with Saddam -- and that is most definitely what it was -- continued engagement with Putin has gotten us nowhere. Russia tried protecting Saddam, and now they're protecting Iran. Under those circumstances, we owe Putin nothing except a strong message that we have a limit to our patience, and the G-8 lies beyond that limit. It's time to deliver that message.

ADDENDUM: This is the issue that has soured the left on McCain:

Potential presidential candidate John McCain says he longer considers evangelist Jerry Falwell to be one of the "agents of intolerance" that he criticized during a previous White House run.

The Republican senator from Arizona will be the commencement speaker in May at Liberty University, the Lynchburg, Va., institution that Falwell founded in 1971.

"We agreed to disagree on certain issues, and we agreed to move forward," McCain said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."

I don't have much to say about Falwell, myself. I've never considered him terribly compelling as a preacher or a politico. Falwell ha never seemed as much of a problem as Pat Robertson, who can always be counted upon to issue a stupid statement on almost any major story. McCain's attack on him earlier seemed outsize and overblown, which complicates his attempt to back away from it now. I'd hardly think that this will be his most difficult climb-down, however, if he hopes to attract the conservative base to his banner in 2008, and I doubt that burying the hatchet with Falwell will get him very far on that goal anyway.

Lighting A Fire Underneath Them

Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw made an unannounced visit to Iraq today in order to send an unusually public message to the political factions that have stalemated the formation of a new government. Both bluntly told the press that they want to press for a unity government now, not two months from now, in order to end the political vacuum that has Iraqis losing patience with their national assembly:

The top U.S. and British diplomats told Iraqi leaders on Sunday they cannot afford to "leave a political vacuum" and must work quickly to form a new unified government.

The surprise visit by Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw highlighted the allies' growing impatience with the Iraqis' failure to set up a governing coalition nearly four months after elections.

Rice told reporters she and Straw conveyed the same message to each of the leaders they saw: that each must do his own job in resolving the political stalemate and do it quickly.

"Whatever role that is, it's time to play it because the Iraqi people are losing patience," Rice said. "What is more, your international allies want to see this get done because you can't continue to leave a political vacuum."

One of those leaders, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, said Rice and Straw made clear "there is a sense of urgency to form this new Iraqi national unity government" and that "there is a sense of impatience back in Washington and London about the delay."

That's about as blunt a message as one will see delivered by Western diplomats, especially in a region with this much volatility. It shows that the Bush and Blair administrations have come to the end of their patience with the eleventh-hour style of negotiations that the Iraqis have used for the past year when consolidating the elections into a functioning executive. The longer it takes to form a government, the more opportunity that fringe groups and radical militias have to cause mischief and mayhem.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to this transition may shortly be removed from the calculations. Prior to Rice and Straw arriving in Baghdad, Reuters reported that Shi'ite support for Ibrahim al-Jafaari had disintegrated, with voices calling for his resignation:

Leaders of Iraq's ruling Shi'ite Alliance bloc called publicly for the first time yesterday for Ibrahim al-Jaafari to step down as prime minister to break weeks of deadlock over a national-unity government.

The move against Mr. al-Jaafari, declared publicly by one leader and echoed, anonymously, by others, came as parties held their latest round of talks on a grand coalition with Kurds and Sunnis.

Kurds and Sunnis remain adamant in their rejection of Mr. al-Jaafari.

The majority Shi'ite coalition could not get the two-thirds necessary to retain Jafaari in the executive post, and his continued insistence on holding onto his office had created all sorts of tensions and obstacles in the latest talks over forming the government. The US officially took no position on Jafaari, but it is clear from the high-stakes visit from both Rice and Straw that the Western coalition wants the talks to move beyond Jafaari. It is no mere academic exercise for the two nations, as the violence threatens our soldiers as well as our resolve to see Iraq through to victory.

The real message that Rice and Straw brought to the Iraqi leadership may not be known in detail for some time. I suspect it was a reminder that the only thing standing between the democrats in Iraq and the Ba'athist remnants and al-Qaeda terrorists is Anglo-American resolve. The leaders of the assembly spend that unwisely on their dithering and their petty rivalries rather than uniting as democrats to face down tyranny and build their nation anew. One hopes that the Sunnis and the Shi'ites in particular have listened well, and that they propose leadership that can unite the factions rather than perpetuating the discord. With Jafaari getting tossed under the bus by his own parties, that appears to finally be under way.

Terrorists Terrorize When Attacked, Film At 11

The Washington Post wants to sound a cautionary note in their front-page report on the consequences of military action against Iran. Dana Priest writes that any attempt to eliminate Iran's nuclear capacity through military strikes would result in an eruption of terrorist attacks against Western assets, especially American and Israeli:

As tensions increase between the United States and Iran, U.S. intelligence and terrorism experts say they believe Iran would respond to U.S. military strikes on its nuclear sites by deploying its intelligence operatives and Hezbollah teams to carry out terrorist attacks worldwide.

Iran would mount attacks against U.S. targets inside Iraq, where Iranian intelligence agents are already plentiful, predicted these experts. There is also a growing consensus that Iran's agents would target civilians in the United States, Europe and elsewhere, they said. ...

The Iranian government views the Islamic Jihad, the name of Hezbollah's terrorist organization, "as an extension of their state. . . . operational teams could be deployed without a long period of preparation," said Ambassador Henry A. Crumpton, the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism.

Who doesn't already know this? And who doesn't already know that Iran has sponsored terrorist attacks on Americans for years, as well as funded most of the Islamist terror groups operating in the Middle East? None of this comes as a shock to anyone who has watched the news even occasionally for the last twenty years, and the notion that terrorists will retaliate if attacked is not a gigantic leap in tactical or strategic thought.

The question before the US and the West is not whether to take action if it means a retaliation through terrorist channels. That question harbors the seeds of appeasement and surrender. After all, if we are afraid to act in our own defense merely because terrorists might attack us even more as a result, we will have handed terrorists an overall victory -- and we will be forced to knuckle under to their demands to avoid the confrontation that might result in their retaliation.

Terrorism, right now, is a given thanks to the decades of precisely this kind of paralysis that preceded 9/11. What we need to decide is when to stop threats from forming into existential dangers, and Iran's nuclear program and missile technology combines to bring that point ever closer. Iran already supports the terrorism that Priest reports, in Iraq, Lebanon (Hezbollah), the Palestinian territories (Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah's subsidiary), Syria, and elsewhere. Priest also warns about an American attack leading to an operational alliance with al-Qaeda, but that train has already arrived at the station, according to last year's State report on terrorism:

Iran remained the most active state sponsor of terrorism in 2004. Its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Ministry of Intelligence and Security were involved in the planning and support of terrorist acts and continued to exhort a variety of groups to use terrorism in pursuit of their goals.

Iran continued to be unwilling to bring to justice senior al-Qa’ida members it detained in 2003. Iran has refused to identify publicly these senior members in its custody on "security grounds." Iran has also resisted numerous calls to transfer custody of its al-Qa’ida detainees to their countries of origin or third countries for interrogation and/ or trial. Iranian judiciary officials claimed to have tried and convicted some Iranian supporters of al-Qa’ida during 2004, but refused to provide details. Iran also continued to fail to control the activities of some al Qa’ida members who fled to Iran following the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

During 2004, Iran maintained a high-profile role in encouraging anti-Israeli terrorist activity, both rhetorically and operationally. Supreme Leader Khamenei praised Palestinian terrorist operations, and Iran provided Lebanese Hizballah and Palestinian terrorist groups -- notably HAMAS, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command -- with funding, safe haven, training, and weapons. Iran provided an unmanned aerial vehicle that Lebanese Hizballah sent into Israeli airspace on November 7, 2004.

Iran pursued a variety of policies in Iraq during 2004, some of which appeared to be inconsistent with Iran’s stated objectives regarding stability in Iraq as well as those of the Iraqi Interim Government (IIG) and the Coalition. Senior IIG officials have publicly expressed concern over Iranian interference in Iraq, and there were reports that Iran provided funding, safe transit, and arms to insurgent elements, including Muqtada al-Sadr’s forces.

What the Post warns about in today's entry is already reality. What we need to determine is if we have the will to confront it and stop it. Iran has provided most of the funding of Islamist terrorism since the 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah and put the Islamists in power in Teheran. Now they almost have their hands on nuclear weapons, a point which may put them beyond our reach. The real question isn't whether Iran might step up its attacks after we eliminate this nuclear capacity -- it's whether we will ever be able to stop Iranian terrorist activity at all once the mullahs have the bomb.

The window is closing. That's the real story.

The Slow Descent Into Madness, French Style

France has ground to a halt with its recent strikes over the government's attempt to invigorate the jobs market by allowing employers to termnate younger workers who do not succeed in their jobs, easing job-security regulations for the first two years of their employment. Sadly and predictably, the very people this program intends on helping have responded by threatening revolution, rioting and destroying property while protesting the administration that had the temerity to attempt to treat them as responsible adults. While these events threaten to kill what's left of the French economy, the culture has once again sunk to targeting Jews as the traditional center of European anti-Semitism rises once again.

The student protests have gone on for weeks, following on the heels of Muslim riots that saw thousands of cars burnt and mobs rampaging through their ghettoes. Everything that Jacques Chirac and his cabinet tries appears to backfire, including a televised offer for a compromise on the new labor law:

FRANCE is heading for even greater unrest after furious trade union and student leaders vowed to intensify their protests yesterday, following president Jacques Chirac's refusal to withdraw his government's youth labour law.

Despite Chirac's gamble in going on TV to win a compromise and end image-damaging riots in Paris, union and student leaders stayed firm in their intention to hold another mass protest on Tuesday, when more than two million demonstrators are expected to take to the streets. ...

The president's decision to try to please everyone - by compromising between saving his loyal lieutenant and chosen successor, prime minister Dominique de Villepin, who wanted the law applied promptly and in full, and millions of protesters, who are demanding it be scrapped before any compromise can be discussed - has ended up pleasing no one. It now threatens to plunge him and his centre-right government into an even greater crisis, overshadowing his last months in power and potentially sinking the presidential ambitions of his protégé.

Far from quelling the revolt against his government's labour reforms, Chirac's televised announcement on Friday night that he was pushing ahead with the CPE, has drawn the wrath of trade union and student leaders and the socialist-led opposition.

Chirac has nowhere left to turn. His center-right coalition (which anywhere else would be considered significantly left) needs the support of the business community to maintain power, but it's apparently no longer enough. The Socialists want a stricter nanny state and, if history serves, nationalization of French industry to guarantee job rights. They have tapped into a national anger that comes from many sources but looks to one outlet for solutions, and that is the national government. While Chirac gives them reality, they demand fantasy, and only the most talented politicians can hold onto office in that kind of situation.

While the French continue to pursue this social upheaval, another element has taken increasing advantage of the unrest. The French call them casseurs or "smashers" -- people who delight in destruction for its own sake and who latch onto protests in order to sate their appetite for it. These vultures have developed into an emerging subculture and now operate quite openly in Paris:

They create primarily a law-and-order problem, evoking the rioting that gripped the troubled suburbs of French cities for weeks last autumn. Pumped up by news coverage, these youths boast of trying to steal mobile phones and money and vow to take revenge for the daily humiliation they say they endure from the police. ...

The police and independent analysts say that most of the vandalism and violence that has marred the protests has been by young men, largely immigrants or the children of immigrants, from tough, underprivileged suburbs, who roam in groups and have little else to keep them busy.

"In France, we always imagine violence to be political because of our revolutions, but this isn't the case," said Sebastian Roché, a political scientist who specialises in delinquency in the suburbs.

The casseurs are people who are apart from the political protests. Their movement is apolitical. It is about banal violence - thefts, muggings, aggression."

Now we're back to the immigrants, the same people who rioted earlier this year in protest of their economic stratification and inability to escape the ghettoes. However, the emergence of them as smashers show that the earlier riots had much less to do with the rigid French society's inability to allow them assimilation than with their own rejection of French culture. They want their own autonomy and an arachistic freedom to act out and break things without being held to account for it. The casseurs take digital videos and pictures with their cellphones and trade the clips as war trophies, according to The Scotsman's report.

And they're not just breaking things, either. The burgeoning immigrant population, primarily Muslim, has combined with historical French anti-Semitism, resulting in a toxic brew that now results in "honey traps" for Jewish men, traps that result in torture and murder according to the London Times:

THE pretty schoolgirl known as Yalda wore tight white trousers and thigh-high boots to the rendezvous. Her target, a young Jewish telephone salesman, quickly fell under her spell. He meekly followed her when she suggested a nightcap at her place.

It would be his last date.

The testimony of this 17-year-old femme fatale who happily offered herself as “bait” in the kidnapping of Ilan Halimi, whose tortured body was found on wasteland, has shocked a country which is haunted by a painful history of anti-semitism. ...

The gang she worked for was known as “les Barbares”, the Barbarians, and included blacks, Arabs and whites from Portugal and France.

Barbarians seemed an appropriate name. The shocking cruelty inflicted on Halimi seemed to have little to do with efforts to extract money from his anguished family. It evoked the sadistic moral universe of A Clockwork Orange, the novel by Anthony Burgess, with a dose of anti-semitism thrown in.

Gangs like Les Barbares exploit young women (who apparently get raped by the gang and inducted into their number) in order to seduce Jewish men, ostensibly for ransom as the thugs fervently believe that Jews control all the money and will pay to get any Jewish man released from bondage. The leader of Les Barbares selected people as potential victims by noting the various shops that shut down for the Sabbath and punished girls who did not successfully trap Jews into returning home with them. However, as the torture and murder of Ilan Halimi showed, ransom is secondary to their primary thirst for sadistic torture and murder of Jews.

Even worse is the reaction of the French to these atrocities. Halimi was kept in a basement for three weeks, tortured with acid and cigarettes. Neighbors -- at least thirty of them -- heard his screams and knew what was going on, and not one of them lifted a finger to notify police or to help Halimi escape.

Nor is this gang the only one who engages in these kind of tactics. Others have murdered and tortured young men and women in an orgy of sadism that French authorities say began in 2000, at the time of the second Palestinian intifada. In one sense it provides an ironic twist, as the violence has driven Jews out of France in record numbers -- and into Israel. 3,300 emigrated last year, the highest number since 1970, as the French appear to do nothing to defend their Jewish citizens from this kind of depredation.

All of this shows that France has slid onto a precipice, pushed there by a seriously flawed immigration policy that never demanded assimilation from its immigrants or itself, as well as its ingrained political instability. We may be seeing a "perfect storm" that will rend France asunder, leaving the nuclear-armed nation up for grabs among its various and warring constituencies. Forget worrying about a civil war in Iraq -- we may soon have one on the streets of Paris, and at least once contingent will be thrilled for the opportunity to smash, break, torture, and murder to their blackhearted content.