And The Lame Shall Run From The Police

McQ at QandO has this priceless CNN report of the miraculous healing power of the Las Vegas Police Department:

A wheelchair-bound Los Angeles woman, who has repeatedly filed lawsuits over access for the disabled, got up and ran after police arrested her for fraud, authorities said Thursday.

Laura Lee Medley, 35, had sued in at least four California cities over injuries she claimed she sustained while trying to navigate her wheelchair before she was suspected of fraud.

Medley, who claimed to be paralyzed from a drunk driving accident, was tracked to Las Vegas where police there took her into custody and then, when she complained of medical issues, to a local hospital, Long Beach prosecutor Belinda Mayes said. ...

Medley sprinted through the hospital corridors but was quickly apprehended by police and booked pending extradition to San Bernardino, California, where she is facing charges of filing false documents, attempted grand theft and insurance fraud.

Her next lawsuit will probably be against the LVPD for damaging her ability to earn a living through her specious lawsuits.

UPDATE: Bit's Blog ran with this story two days ago.

Northern Alliance Radio Today

The Northern Alliance Radio Network is already on the air, with Brian and Chad from Fraters Libertas and John from Power Line. Mitch Berg, King Banaian, and I will take over at 1 pm CT, discussing the pressing issues of the day, including the latest on the NSA story, the immigration debate, and much much more.

Listen to us on AM 1280 The Patriot, and join the conversation at 651-289-4488!

UPDATE: King says to tune in or the dog gets it.

Troops On The Border?

With George Bush announcing a major national address on Monday night regarding immoigration policy, many wonder whether he has any new initiatives to announce or whether he will simply re-emphasize the themes that have so far failed to resonate with the restive GOP base. The Washington Post reports that one new initiative may have National Guard troops deploy in greater numbers to the southern border, reinforcing the DHS' Border Patrol:

President Bush will push next week for a broad overhaul of the nation's immigration laws and plans to tighten security on the borders, possibly with a wider deployment of the National Guard, White House officials said yesterday.

The officials said Bush will use a prime-time television address Monday to outline his plans and then visit the U.S.-Mexico border on Thursday to highlight the problem of illegal immigration.

Officials say he is considering substantially increasing the presence of National Guard troops, some of whom are already deployed under state of emergency declarations in New Mexico and Arizona. Administration officials are exploring ways to allow governors to deploy troops across state lines to help seal the porous border with Mexico. ...

But congressional Republicans who back Bush's call for a guest-worker program and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants say that is precisely what they need to win over House conservatives. Otherwise, the president's stand will run headlong into a House bill, passed in December, that would make illegal immigrants felons and build hundreds of miles of fence along the Mexican border without offering avenues to legality for undocumented workers.

Bush obviously intends on changing the paramters of the argument. Presidents do not call for prime-time Oval Office speeches without having something substantive and new to reveal. The act itself raises expectations for change, especially when the topic has national-security and domestic policy implications. Polipundit assumes that Bush will use the occasion just to re-emphasize the old themes of hardworking immigrants doing jobs that Americans won't do, and so on; if she's proven right, it will be a mistake of gargantuan proportions. Karl Rove might get nostalgic for approval numbers in the low 30s if that happens.

The reports from the White House so far indicate that Bush as more on his mind. Governors in two Southwestern states have already deployed their National Guard units to the border in order to control the influx of immigrants across the Rio Grande. Apparently, Bush will propose similar deployments for all of the states bordering Mexico and propose ways in which the states can coordinate efforts across their borders.

That can create some legal issues, which the president will need to address in his proposals. The coordination of military efforts across state borders should be the responsibility of the federal government, but federalizing the Guard removes their ability to enforce law and make arrests due to the Posse Comitatus act. Any such deployment would need to be limited in length, as most Guard members have full-time jobs and cannot remain on post for any significant period of time. White House sources have suggested that the deployments will stop-gap the problem while they train a large number of new Border Patrol agents and contractors to do the job permanently.

The most significant development in this story is political, not military, in any case. The dissent from conservatives has clearly caught the attention of both the White House and Congressional leadership. The address on Monday will almost certainly shift the rhetoric of this administration from sympathy for illegals to strengthened border security. Bill Frist has also shown a positive reaction to the criticism in the appointment of the conference committee members. Along with the backers of the normalization program passed by the Senate (McCain, Martinez, Kennedy, Salazar, and Specter), Frist gave plenty of representation to the bill's opponents (Cornyn, Kyl, and Sessions). Combined with the House contingent, the conference committee appears oriented more towards border security as a priority ahead of normalization.

Even Lindsay Graham, a supporter of the Senate plan and a member of the conference committee, understands that the game has changed:

"The winds have shifted," said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who will serve on the conference committee that will negotiate a final deal with the House. "The American people are outraged at all of us for not controlling our borders and coming up with a legal system that works. They are not looking for revenge. They are looking for results."

Producing a bill that addresses the various constituencies will be challenging but not impossible. Rep. James Sensenbrenner will press hard for border security, and McCain and Kennedy will press equally hard for normalization. The final bill will likely include both, with perhaps stronger fines and assimilation requirements and tougher penalties for those who avoid registration altogether. That compromise will satisfy most of the nation and give us some progress on border security and the identification of illegals already within the country. It won't be perfect, but it has the potential for positive results.

The voices of the people have been heard, and their representatives have made some long-overdue adjustments. This proves that remaining engaged but not offering blind brand loyalty can bring change. We need to remain engaged in this battle and on spending in order to continue to return the GOP to core conservative values.

UPDATE: Lorie wrote to inform me that the opinion to which I linked belonged to Polipundit, not her. (I've corrected the text above.) She has posted her own opinion, and it's worth reading in its entirety. Here's a sample:

My opinion though is that, although he won’t please those who have decided there is no room for compromise, he will likely please the middle and those that think compromise is okay, as long as it is not on certain points. I think that as long as it has taken him to really come out on this issue, the fact that he knows how upset many in the base are, and that he has chosen the most highly visible forum possible, that he will do much more than rehash old rhetoric. I am expecting him to explain his position and to offer some real solutions to the problem of illegal immigration.

You Can't Trust Too Far One Who Writes Of 'Purple Stars'

One of the more humorous and yet revealing corrections seen in a major newspaper appeared in yesterday's New York Times, as my friends at Power Line point out:

An article and a picture caption yesterday about the funeral of Sgt. Jose Gomez of Queens, who was killed on April 20 in Iraq, referred incorrectly to the Army representative who comforted his mother. She was a sergeant first class — an enlisted woman, not an officer. The article also misstated the name of a service medal that a general presented to Sergeant Gomez's mother. It is a Purple Heart, not a Purple Star.

This contains two highly embarrassing mistakes for any publication that considers itself authoritative on military issues and news. As John Hinderaker points out, the Purple Heart may well be the most recognized military decoration, and one of our oldest. George Washington created the award as a way of honoring the efforts of enlistees, and the modern medal bears his silhouette. Given all of the discussion of John Kerry's service in Viet Nam and his three Purple Hearts, one would expect at least the editors of the New York Times to know the right name for the medal, if not the reporter herself.

The second mistake was identifying a sergeant as an officer. Up to now, I figured anyone with any understanding of military rank knew that sergeants were enlisted men and women, not commissioned officers. Most reporters used to know military rank and their commission or lack thereof simply by their devices of rank. Apparently, the Paper of Record has so little experience in these matters that their reporters and editors no longer can distinguish rank or medals. That should embarrass everyone at the New York Times and point out to its readers how little understanding the paper has of the American military in general.

Addendum: Okay, how many of us old fogies out there even get the reference to the commercial jingle in the title of this post?

UPDATE: Yes, I know that sergeants are non-commissioned officers, but that has never been the meaning of "officer" in the military. "Officer" refers to commissioned ranks, while the NCO designation refers to the leadership within the enlisted ranks.

Falkenrath: NSA Programs Show Hayden As The Right Man For War

Richard Falkenrath, the former deputy Homeland Security advisor to the President and now a fellow at the center-left Brookings Institute, writes a passionate defense of the NSA phone-call database in today's Washington Post. He also pushes back against the notion that the involvement of General Michael Hayden in the two controversial NSA surveillance programs disqualify him to lead the CIA. In fact, as Falkenrath explains, it underscores his potential value at Langley:

The potential value of such anonymized domestic telephone records is best understood through a hypothetical example. Suppose a telephone associated with Mohamed Atta had called a domestic telephone number A. And then suppose that A had called domestic telephone number B. And then suppose that B had called C. And then suppose that domestic telephone number C had called a telephone number associated with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The most effective way to recognize such patterns is the computerized analysis of billions of phone records. The large-scale analysis of anonymized data can pinpoint individuals -- at home or abroad -- who warrant more intrusive investigative or intelligence techniques, subject to all safeguards normally associated with those techniques.

Clearly, there is a compelling national interest in understanding and penetrating such terrorist networks. If the people associated with domestic telephone numbers A, B and C are inside the United States and had facilitated the Sept. 11 attacks, perhaps they are facilitating a terrorist plot now. The American people rightly expect their government to detect and prevent such plots. ...

Bureaucrats excel at finding reasons not to do something. They are most often guilty of sins of omission, not commission. A timid, ordinary executive might have concluded that it was too risky to ask U.S. telecommunications companies to provide anonymized call records voluntarily to an agency such as the NSA, dealing with foreign intelligence. If the USA Today story is correct, it appears that Mike Hayden is no timid, ordinary executive. Indeed, it appears that he is exactly the sort of man that we should have at the helm of the CIA while we are at war.

The 9/11 Commission report is chock-full of examples of bureaucrats finding excuses for inaction, and they correctly conclude that bureaucratic inertia and outright fear comprised the major component of our pre-9/11 failure. For some reason, of course, they then prescribed the hair of the dog as an antidote, but they were correct in that the lack of action and leadership in the intelligence bureaucracy had made our early-warning systems inefficient and unreactive.

We know that Hayden does not have those problems. He has shown bold leadership at NSA, an agency with no resources in human intelligence and field operations, transforming it into the most innovative and aggressive defenders of the nation. Given his lengthy experience in military intelligence, there is no reason to worry that Hayden cannot take that same bold leadership and aggressive nature to Langley and help transform a sick entity back into a world-class operation. We need someone with this type of leadership as the CIA director, especially now.

I have been pleasantly surprised at the reaction to Hayden's appointment, at least up until now. I expected a much tougher political battle based on his stewardship of the NSA terrorist surveillance program, but except for Russ Feingold and Arlen Specter, it hadn't materialized, at least not until this latest revelation. Even then, with initial public-opinion polls showing overwhelming support for the datamining effort at NSA, the initial outrage will undoubtedly dissipate. We already may see this with the endorsement of Chuck Hagel and Susan Collins, two GOP Senators that have rarely seen eye to eye with the Bush administration on war policy:

"I support him," Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), an intelligence committee member, said after meeting with the nominee. In a later interview Hagel added, "There's no question that General Hayden is going to have to fully and clearly explain these programs and precisely his role" in them.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who also met with Hayden, called him "highly qualified" to head the CIA.

The Washington Post followed ABC's lead in polling on the NSA datamining effort and found the American electorate comfortable with the project:

The Post's poll found that 63 percent of Americans said they considered the NSA program to be an acceptable way to investigate terrorism; 35 percent said the program was unacceptable. A slightly larger majority -- 66 percent -- said they would not be bothered if the NSA collected records of personal calls they had made, the poll found.

According to the poll, 65 percent of those interviewed said it was more important to investigate potential terrorist threats "even if it intrudes on privacy." Three in 10, or 31 percent, said it was more important for the federal government not to intrude on personal privacy, even if that limits its ability to investigate possible terrorist threats.

If those numbers look familiar, they should; they're close to the approval ratings for the NSA terrorist surveillance program. In this case, the American electorate has advanced beyond the political class in their understanding of the sacrifices needed to defeat this enemy during wartime. It will come as no surprise if the man who quarterbacked both efforts winds up with the same level of support for his appointment to the CIA. If Russ Feingold and Ron Wyden want to turn the confirmation hearing into an inquisition on these two points, they risk even further erosion of Democratic standing on national security.

CQ, The NY Post, And The NSA

The New York Post has adapted my lengthy post about the NSA phone-call database into a column for today's edition titled "Sacrificing Here". I argue that both sides have a point about the program, but that the sacrifice is not only limited and reasonable for the war effort, but that it's practically been the only one we've been asked to make:

Ba[s]ically, the NSA is building a powerful tool for determining the behavior of people inside the United States (and outside, as well). Is such a tool reasonable under the circumstances we face now? That's ultimately a political question, not a legal one - and the answer depends on whether people see a greater danger in terrorists or their government.

In my opinion, the effort is reasonable and limited. The calls themselves go unmonitored, and the records contain no billing information or even names in their raw form. With the United States still in danger of terrorist attack, and with all-too-rational fears that sleeper cells still hide in our communities, this tool makes sense and provides security - at the reasonable price of some loss of privacy.

That does not make the project completely benign under any circumstances. Such data could be used for purposes other than finding terrorists - e.g., to discover a whistleblowers' contacts, or to build a smaller database on members of a political party. People could get blackmailed for their phone calls in ways that have nothing to do with national security. If the CIA or State Department (which has its own intelligence service) were running this program, rather than the NSA, many on the right would worry far more over its implications.

When we finally acknowledged that Islamist terrorists had declared war on us, President Bush warned that we'd have to make sacrifices to beat our enemy. Yet civilians haven't been asked for much in the way of sacrifice to date. Here it is: a limited loss of privacy on our telephone habits, in exchange for giving the intelligence community a tool to root out terrorist sleeper cells.

I believe that the nation needs to understand what our grandparents knew almost instinctively over sixty years ago about sacrifice while under attack. This nation has found strength through its adaptation and flexibility during national crises, and somehow we have forgotten that. Every reasonable action in the effort to find and neutralize the enemy brings with it a hysterical shriek of outrage that we have somehow put one foot on a slippery slope to totalitarianism and the other on a banana peel. Yet the nation did not collapse when our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War and jailed many of his political opponents. We did not stick with a centrally-controlled economy when we rationed strategic goods during World War II. Our nation did what was necessary to win, and once we did win, we restored the proper role of government in peacetime.

The difference is twofold: the government has not asked us for much sacrifice in this war, and the nature of this enemy makes it difficult to see our way to total victory. In the case of the former, we can only be thankful that we haven't had the need to ration gasoline, flour, copper, and the like and allow for central control of industries like automobiles and steel manufacturing. I would argue that such requests would almost certainly not fly in today's me-first atmosphere, even though in this case the enemy successfully conducted an attack on our own soil and killed thousands of Americans. We certainly have not seen any unanimity from our political class on the need to fight this enemy despite their attack on the homeland and their numerous previous attacks on American assets overseas.

For the latter, people lack the context to know how World War II or even the Civil War appeared to the people who lived through them. With the hindsight of decades, we can see the inevitability of victory in both cases. The South lacked the economic components to beat the North militarily in a prolonged war; Germany and Japan not only had that same problem but also allowed their military conquests overreach. At the time, however, no one knew that our involvement against Japan and Germany would only last four years. Our first engagement against the Nazis turned out to be a disaster in which we suffered more than half of all the casualties we have suffered today in Iraq over the last three years. In the South Pacific, we lost an Iraq or more every time we made an amphibious landing on Japanese-held territory. On Tarawa alone, the assault cost us thousands of Marines.

We had no idea then the extent of the war or the length of the sacrifice asked of the American people to fight against foreign aggressors. We do not know it now, either. In this case, the sacrifice is so light as to shame us for our lack of resolve compared to the examples of our grandparents and their grandparents. The NSA database isn't harmless, but it is reasonable for the times and the dangers we face, and we need to understand that this is what it takes to win in wartime. Be grateful that we do not need to sacrfice more.

On The 'Lesser Of Two Evils'

After my post yesterday on the responsibility of making a meaningful choice in the November election, quite a few commenters made a point about refusing to choose between the "lesser of two evils". I want to address that thought and start a new comment thread for your reaction.

The phrase "lesser of two evils" gets a lot of use in politics, but it gets taken too literally in order to make an excuse for inaction. In the literal sense, it almost never applies anyway. Not many political figures in American history have been downright evil. We have had incompetents, malcontents, benighted fools, the hopelessly naive, and Jimmy Carter, but thankfully only a handful of outright crooks and genuinely evil men and women. The odds of having two choices in an election where both are evil are very, very slim. Perhaps if David Duke ran against Tom Metzger for Congress, that would excuse the district from voting for either one. Even then, I would argue that in that rare case, the responsible action would be to vote for a third party candidate to ensure neither got the seat.

Usually, voters are given the choice of the greater of two mediocrities. People face that choice quite frequently in life, and it doesn't absolve them from action. With a given financial situation and set of priorities, people don't simply refuse to buy a car just because they can't afford a Maserati. I bought my last suit from JC Penney because it was well made for the price range I could afford; I don't go naked because I can't afford Armani. Responsible people research their available choices and select from the limited choices they have.

Declaring all choices as "evil" provides false justification for abdication of that responsibility. In this case, once the primaries have determined the candidates for office, voters are presented with two candidates (in most cases) with realistic chances for victory. They rarely turn out to be philosophical or policy twins and/or uninspired candidates, but if that happens, the parties they represent have real differences, and the choice made in this one race will impact the ability of both to push their national agenda. When voters of either party refuse to vote, the absence of the vote has a negative impact on that national agenda.

By all means, if faced with a choice between Hitler and Mussolini on the November ballot, I would choose to write in Winston Churchill. However, the notion that we face that kind of choice is really nothing more than an expression of anger resulting in futility. It's eminently understandable, but it results in disaster. The only evil that we likely face is that the American electorate has grown so dismissive of the political process that it may squander its birthright. People across the political spectrum need to stay engaged in the process through the vote in order to get a government that most truly represents us -- and if we don't like the final choices presented us, then we must work harder in the next cycle to ensure that the final choices improve.

No Sitting, Just No Dimes

I have written extensively on the malaise and disaffection rising in conservative ranks, a trend reflected in declining approval ratings for both George Bush and Congress. I wrote yesterday that movement conservatives may be washing their hands of the Bush administration, frustrated by its big-government approach and its vacillation on border security. Some took this as an indication that I have joined an effort to convince conservatives to sit on their hands this November -- in other words, to boycott the midterm elections in order to teach the GOP a lesson. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As I wrote a week ago, we have no particular requirement to keep our voices silent when any of our elected representatives enact bad policy or fail to act in what we see as the best interests of the nation. In fact, we have a duty to do so when we can do so effectively. That requires us to stay engaged in the electoral process, to ensure that our views and policies get the attention that comes from positive effort. We have to stay engaged in the process to receive the credibility we demand. Taking our ball and going home only paints us as unreliable, dictatorial people who can never engage in -- and win in -- the negotiations that policy implementation requires.

Instead of staying home, we need to get more involved. If your Representative or Senator votes for pork, bigger government, and ignores border security, look for a credible primary challenger to represent conservative values instead. Organize and speak out on behalf of candidates and politicians who do the right thing, even if they don't represent your district or state.

Most of all, do not donate to political drives controlled by leadership that no longer acts responsively. That means withholding contributions from the Republican Senate and Congressional re-election committees and redirecting your contributions to individual races instead. Those committees serve to enhance leadership control over the caucuses, and contributing to them only reinforces the current direction of the policies we have seen for the past five years. When Congressional and Senatorial leadership starts promoting smaller government and works to eliminate pork, then by all means support them once again.

However, we still have to vote in November. If our preferred candidate does not win in the primaries, we still have to act responsibly and choose between the two major party candidates in the general election. Not only will abdication result in a loss of control over our own representation, the failure of GOP candidates has national implications that will wind up hamstringing the politicians that really have worked on our behalf -- the Tom Coburns, the John Boehners, the Jon Cornyns. And by sitting on our hands, we will have proven too inflexible to be dependable -- which will only encourage Republican candidates to reach out to the center-left more than ever before.

No sitting on one's hands, not now and not in November either. We call ourselves the party of personal responsibility, and it is up to us to demonstrate it.

UPDATE: Bruce Kesler worries that I have acquired conservative battle fatigue in my criticisms of Congress and the Bush administration. I disagree; what I have decided is that silence and cooperation has not forwarded the visions of limited government and border security. If we are to be taken seriously, then we must speak out. I still would vote for George Bush if 2004 came back around, and I still support him, but I disagree with a number of his policies. As I write here, I'm attempting to exercise the influence necessary to change them, not to toss him under the bus altogether.

Weapons-Grade Uranium Found In Iranian Military Site

The IAEA announced preliminary results of tests made on residue found at an Iranian military site that indicates Iran has weapons-grade enriched uranium (also here), not just the low-level enrichment they announced earlier. The report undermines the explanation given earlier by Iran when similar residue was found at a civilian facility:

The U.N. atomic agency found traces of highly enriched uranium at an Iranian site linked to the country's defense ministry, diplomats said Friday, adding to concerns that Tehran was hiding activities aimed at making nuclear arms.

The diplomats, who demanded anonymity in exchange for revealing the confidential information, said the findings were preliminary and still had to be confirmed through other lab tests. But they said the density of enrichment appeared to be close to or above the level used to make nuclear warheads.

Still, they said, further analysis could show that the traces match others established to have come from abroad. The
International Atomic Energy Agency determined earlier traces of weapons-grade uranium were imported on equipment from Pakistan that Iran bought on the black market during nearly two decades of clandestine activity discovered just over three years ago.

That much is true. However, those traces were found at their civilian research facility, where the Iranians claimed all the equipment from the AQ Khan network had been installed. Finding the enriched uranium at a military facility would call the earlier explanation into question as well as generate questions about why the Iranian military has involved itself in what Teheran purports to be a civilian use of nuclear technology.

Whatever the explanation, the implication is crystal clear: the Iranians have weapons-grade uranium somewhere. The gap between the enrichment level of energy-production and weapons-grade material (5% vs 90%+) is so wide that there is no other explanation for the possession of the latter. And with its discovery on equipment used at the former military base at Lavizan -- a site demolished by the Iranians after the US discovered its covert nuclear program -- it confirms that Iran possesses it for military purposes, not peaceful energy production, for which that level of enrichment is unsuitable anyway.

The US should demand an emergency session of the UN Security Council to address this issue, rather than wait for the two weeks Russia and China demanded before this development became known. If Iran has weapons-grade uranium already in its possession, a nuclear device may come much sooner than the common wisdom of five years. Iran may already have started the process of building the weapon itself -- and if so, the world must act now to keep Iran from using it to extort the UN for Iranian purposes.

CQ Fundraiser For Marriage Encounter (Bumped!)

Many CQ readers know that the First Mate and I volunteer our time at Twin Cities Marriage Encounter, a non-profit that holds weekend retreats for married and engaged couples to work on communication in their relationships in a non-denominational Christian approach. The organization does not provide counseling or advice, but instead assists couples with communication techniques that help resolve conflict and increase commitment between spouses. While we discuss religion and Christian thought on marriage, the weekends are open to all faiths.

We have seen the good results that Marriage Encounter provides. While it doesn't solve all problems, Marriage Encounter has strengthened thousands of marriages and helped numerous young couples prepare for marriage in a realistic and positive manner. Many of the couples that have an encounter weekend come back to lead weekends for other couples. We believe that by strengthening marriages, we help to support the basic unit of human society -- the family -- and therefore strengthen and stabilize society as well.

TCME is a non-profit organization, and we charge far less for the weekends than they cost. Most couples will provide us with tax-deductible donations to help cover our expenses at the end of the weekend, but we also provide assistance for couples with no means to pay for their encounter -- in fact, we have never turned a couple away for financial reasons in the 30+ years of Marriage Encounter. Accordingly, we rely on outside donations to help us keep our doors open.

I will be promoting a fundraiser for Marriage Encounter all week on CQ. We have just opened a PayPal account, and I would ask you to give generously to a truly worthy cause. (In fact, I would encourage those married couples to also attend an encounter weekend to see how worthy it is!) Your donations are tax deductible and will help keep our doors open so that we can continue to serve our community.

Thank you in advance for your generosity, and I will update you on our progress!

UPDATE AND BUMP: We've had some donations already roll into the PayPal account, and we thank you very much! If you wish to donate but do not have a PayPal account, please contact TCME at the website link for credit-card donations.

I thought I would include some comments from couples who had their encounter earlier this year:

“A new kind of trust & understanding.”

"A better understanding of each other and how important each of us are in our relationship. We had not been sharing well & really needed to be brought to this process. There are hurts that needed to be discussed. Thank you for offering & facilitating the weekend.”

Thank you again for your generosity!

UPDATE II: We've raised a few hundred dollars so far -- thank you to those who have donated. I hope that we can continue this over the weekend. Maybe we should do a caption contest?

British Court Refuses To Extradite Hijackers

A British court insisted that nine hijackers from Afghanistan should receive asylum rather than deportation for their takeover of a flight in order to escape the Taliban. The High Court even penalized the Home Office for its insistence on prosecuting the deportation:

Nine Afghan asylum seekers who hijacked a plane at gunpoint to get to Britain should have been admitted to the country as genuine refugees and allowed to live and work here freely, the High Court ruled yesterday.

In a decision that astonished and dismayed MPs, the Home Office was accused of abusing its powers by failing to give the nine formal permission to enter Britain, in breach of their human rights. ...

The judge ordered the Home Office to pay legal costs on an indemnity basis - the highest level possible - to signify his "disquiet and concern".

So far, the whole affair, including legal fees, asylum processing and benefits for the families, has cost the taxpayer an estimated £20 million to £30 million.

That which a society rewards will increase accordingly. If the British reward people who hijack airliners for their political purposes, then they will transform themselves into a favored landing spot for hijackers. The court fails to recognize that the regime the men fled has been toppled -- through the efforts of British troops, among others -- and that deportation does not carry the risks it may have earlier.

One cannot reward terrorism and criminality, even when the cause evokes such sympathy. Otherwise, nations move from the rule of law to the rule of whim -- with very dangerous results.

Once Burned

The Washington Examiner spells out conservative angst in its latest editorial, "Conservatives Won't Be Fooled Again". The Examiner notes the increasing disconnect between the administration and the conservative agenda, and warns Karl Rove that base-inflaming rhetoric will not work in these elections absent a concrete return to conservative principles in government:

Bush won two presidential elections thanks in large part to conservatives to whom he appealed as the true heir to the Reagan Revolution. But the Gipper wouldn’t recognize Bush’s version of “conservative” government: Federal spending and debt have exploded. Ditto the unfunded liabilities of major entitlement programs. Federal regulation has been vastly expanded in education and health care. As National Taxpayers Union President Dr. John E. Berthoud told The Examiner, “You can’t tax like Reagan while spending like Dean.”

Even worse, Bush’s refusal to veto pork-barrel spending has compromised the efficacy of his tax cuts. Indeed, “limited government” never looked so big. Adding to Bush’s problem is the stench of scandal stinking up Capitol Hill on both sides of the aisle. Conservatives look at 12 years of GOP control of Congress and wonder why they don’t have much more to show for it. ...

Karl Rove reportedly has a plan to “stir up” the base to again save the Republicans’ electoral bacon, but conservatives won’t be satisfied this time around with more token efforts on issues like marriage and dire warnings that “the Democrats would be far worse.” Conservatives have heard that song before and know it never has a second verse.

The Examiner, under the direction of Mark Tapscott, has developed into a coherent voice for conservative principles, and the administration should heed his warning. If Rove wants to fire the base up in 2006, he had better start imploring Bush to work on the reduction of government -- especially its spending -- and focus more clearly on the security implications on immigration, rather than continue to blather on about the dreams of immigrants. None of this requires any extraordinary insight; conservatives have been making their views clear at least since the last presidential election.

However, the real problem in this cycle is the Republican leadership in Congress, and more specifically, the Senate. Both chambers have allowed members to pork up their spending bills, but at least the House understands that it should be embarrassed by this effort. In the Senate, members treat pork as if it were an unquestioned perq of office -- which for too long it has been. Trent Lott, chief among the porkers, has repeatedly declared his disgust with those who would question his judgment on earmarks, going so far as to contemptuously dismiss citizens concerned about the abuse of their tax monies by remarking that he was "damn tired" of hearing from them.

That kind of arrogance -- that "Let them eat cake" attitude -- represents the real affront to conservatives in this election. George Bush has his problems, but Bush isn't running for anything this year. The people who feel so free to spend our money while sneering at us for demanding better oversight comprise the true threat to conservative principles. That's why we need to offer primary challenges to those politicians, in order to underscore our deep dissatisfaction with the haughty and dismissive nature of their rule.

Immigration Deal In Senate

The Senate reached a compromise on the immigration-reform bill that will allow for Republican amendments and soon create a conference committee to hash out a compromise on the effort for reform. Key to the final version will be the members from both houses to the conference committee, and at least one opponent of amnesty from the Senate will be included:

Senate leaders reached a deal yesterday on reviving a broad immigration bill that could provide millions of illegal immigrants a chance to become American citizens and said they will try to pass it before Memorial Day.

The agreement brokered by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) breaks a political stalemate that has lingered for weeks while immigrants and their supporters held rallies, boycotts and protests to push for action. ...

Key to the agreement is who will be negotiating a compromise with the House, which last December passed an enforcement-only bill that would subject the estimated 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States to felony charges as well as deportation.

Frist said the Senate will send 14 Republicans and 12 Democrats to negotiate with the House, with seven of the Republicans and five Democrats coming from the Judiciary Committee. The remaining seven Republicans will be chosen by Frist and the remaining seven Democrats by Reid.

At least one opponent of the compromise measure, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), will be among the remaining seven Republicans appointed to the committee, said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Cornyn.

Cornyn has stood tall against the Democrats and the White House in opposing the Senate's focus on normalization while mostly ignoring border security. He will be one voice among dozens, but his inclusion does show that the Senate leadership of both parties recognize the strong push for border security. Depending on the rest of the roster, it might show that both leaders want to move closer to the House position on security while salvaging as much of the normalization plan as they can. It also acknowledges that no conference bill will get any kind of credibility without the imprimatur of Cornyn and others of his perspective.

Once the two bills go to committee, they can get completely rewritten and in this case probably will. Some of that depends on the amendments attached to the Senate plan. Cornyn and others want to attach riders that will force the US to build a physical barrier on the southern border; others will press for more enforcement resources. If those pass, and they likely will if given a vote, then it will make it easier for similar components of the House bill to make it into the final product.

Given the politics surrounding this issue, clearly whatever comes out of committee will need to have elements of strong border security and normalization in order to pass in both chambers. Absent one of these elements, the legislation will fail, especially in the Senate which clearly shows a bipartisan sympathy for normalization. Immigration hardliners will not be pleased, but such a result will fairly accurately reflect the electorate's overall position on immigration. If border security and immigration enforcement gets taken seriously as a result, it will still represent a vast improvement over the current, sorry state of affairs.

Normalization, however, cannot take the shape of the initial Bush proposal of a temporary guest worker program. If we learned anything from France, it was that importing a permanent underclass of workers with no hope of assimilation into the social and political structure of the nation only buys trouble down the road. If we are to have normalization, then it should be a long and challenging journey, but one with true normalization at the end of the process. One of the benefits of normalization is that illegals self-identify and make it easier to find those who truly remain undesirable. Illegals will not self-identify without powerful motivation to blow their cover, and the promise of a three-year extension on their stay before they get kicked out won't be enough. We should also make the immigration process much more efficient as part of this compromise; the stories of legal applicants for immigration being forced to wait years for their status to be determined not only should embarrass us, it also tempts too many to enter illegally instead.

The compromise actually should be greeted as good news to immigration hardliners. The chances of positive action just increased exponentially with this deal. Democrats had once thought to stall any immigration legislation in order to kneecap the GOP in the upcoming elections, but the demonstrations forced them into action instead. Once the bill comes out of conference, it cannot be further amended or sent to committees for review. Both chambers must vote on it, which will make clear who supports action on border security and the resolution of the illegal-immigrant question. What we need to watch is the crucial composition of the conference committee and the amendments the Republicans can pass before the Senate version gets there.

UPDATE: Apparently, some Democrats still want to demagogue on immigration legislation as an election-year tactic:

However briefly, nearly everyone seemed pleased. ... Everyone but House Republicans, many of whom criticize the Senate's bill as an amnesty measure. And possibly House Democrats, who, ironically enough, seem to share the White House view of the political implications of immigration. They are eager to campaign against Republicans responsible for last year's bill to make all illegal immigrants subject to felony charges.

Of course, the House Republican leadership has tried to withdraw that provision for weeks now, and its chances for inclusion in the final bill are just about nil. That won't stop the Democrats from using it in the midterm elections, and that's fair. But if they attempt to stall the legislation, they will find themselves the target of bipartisan ire instead. Their leadership has clearly decided that their base now requires action, and a failure to support a true compromise that gives everyone at least some of what they want will not reflect poorly on the GOP if the Democrats torpedo it.

Pelsoi: What, Us Impeach?

Nancy Pelosi has backpedaled on her coy remarks about the possibility of impeaching George Bush if the Democrats win control of the House in November. She told the Washington Post last week that "you never know where [investigations] lead to," when asked about impeachment with her demand for numerous Congressional investigations into the Bush administration. When that touched off a roar of protest from Republicans and even some Democrats anxious to avoid rallying conservatives to the polls in the midterms, Pelosi meekly changed course:

Seeking to choke off a Republican rallying cry, the House's top Democrat has told colleagues that the party will not seek to impeach President Bush even if it gains control of the House in November's elections, her office said last night.

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) told her caucus members during their weekly closed meeting Wednesday "that impeachment is off the table; she is not interested in pursuing it," spokesman Brendan Daly said.

Some House Democrats, including ranking Judiciary Committee member John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, have called for impeachment hearings into allegations that Bush misled the nation about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction and that he violated federal law by approving warrantless wiretaps on Americans. ... Daly said Pelosi never considered impeachment a priority. Republicans "are in such desperate shape," he said, "we don't want to give them anything to grab on to." He said Conyers agrees with Pelosi's thinking.

I find it interesting that it took over a day for Pelosi's office to release this rather intriguing pledge -- and that they did so even after the hysteria-fest over the NSA datamining project. Why did it take so long for Pelosi to announce that decision, one which she apparently imposed on the caucus?

If she hoped to sneak in under the radar, with the press and the blogosphere distracted by the five-month old NSA story, she may wish she had kept her mouth shut. After seeing the reactions of Democratic activists and politicians on the USA Today article, this seems like a particularly inapt time to declare Democratic wishes for a Bush impeachment out of bounds. If Pelosi found the criticism from her party's moderates and strategists unpleasant, just wait until she has to explain her diktat to the rest of the group.

However, if anyone takes Pelosi at her word, they're being foolish. Pelosi just wanted to defuse an issue she practically gift-wrapped for GOP officials. If Conyers takes over the House Judiciary Committee after November, he will not sit on his hands for long. Besides, if impeachment really is out of the question for the Democrats, then why hold the investigations in the first place? That sounds like an implicit admission that these dramatic demands are nothing more than political witch-hunts, and they know well that Bush has done nothing for which he could be impeached.

If Pelosi gains the speaker's gavel, you can bet that anything dug up by the Democrats, no matter how insubstantial, will provide Pelosi with the excuse she needs to rationalize away her new-found reluctance on impeachment. Given the tenor of the debate on the Left, it's possible that she would squander the political support for a Congressional majority if she took no impeachment action against Bush. If she fails in that mission, she could lose the House once more in 2008. Pelosi knows this, so consider this nothing more than a temporary tactical retreat.

Ahmadinejad Plays Cat To Media Mouse

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got more headlines tonight by hinting that he would accept indirect negotiations with the United States on the nuclear program pursued by Iran, but only when the US quits issuing threats. The AP reports that the Iranian president also relied on the normal anti-Israeli diatribe when addressing his Indonesian hosts:

Iran's president said Thursday he was ready to hold talks over his country's nuclear program, but he warned that efforts to force Tehran to the negotiating table with threats could backfire.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also launched a scathing attack on Israel and told more than 1,000 cheering Muslim students in the Indonesian capital that the West was being hypocritical in pressing Iran to stop its uranium enrichment program. ...

Asked what it would take to begin talks to resolve the standoff, Ahmadinejad told the station Iran was "ready to engage in dialogue with anybody."

"But if someone points a weapon at your face and says you must speak, will you do that?"

Ahmadinejad also continued his verbal attacks on Israel — last year he said the Jewish state should be "wiped off the map" and questioned whether the Holocaust was a myth — calling it a "a tyrannical regime that one day will be destroyed."

The Indonesian government, which enjoys good relations with the US for its efforts to combat terrorism in the region, volunteered to mediate these talks. Ahmadinejad responded by saying that he had no problem meeting with anyone for direct talks, but that if mediators were needed, he would prefer Indonesia above all others.

This is nothing much more than a ploy to distract the media. Iran used similar tactics with the Russian initiative to enrich Iran's uranium for them in order to placate fears of an Iranian nuclear-weapons program. Ahmadinejad publicly vacillated between acceptance and refusal of the Russian offer for months, using the media to add conditions and to express his dissatisfaction with the plan. The Iranians stll occasionally make reference to the Russian suggestion, but the mullahcracy got its mileage from the offer and have shown no real interest in pursuing it.

Now Ahmadinejad visits Indonesia in a splashy state visit, and he shows that he understands exactly how to manipulate the media. Following his missive to George Bush, which Ahmadinejad admits had nothing to do with the nuclear standoff, he makes broad hints of his willingness to attend direct talks with Bush, even though the two nations have no diplomatic relationship at all. He knows that the Western media will portray him as a reasonable head of state and make any refusal on Bush's part appear churlish. He wants the media to create enough pressure on the West to distract from the true Iranian purpose: stalling for time.

His only miscalculation comes in his timing. By this time, most newspapers have their morning editions set. The coverage of this comment will remain limited to the Internet and to television news shows. However, Ahmadinejad has the right strategy in mind for victory, a strategy that the Western media too often telegraphs.

Needles, Haystacks, Phone Calls, And NSA

Today the blogosphere has focused on the supposedly new revelation by USA Today reporters that the National Security Agency has built a database of telephone records from the exchanges of most (not all) major phone providers in the United States. The NSA collected basic information on origination and destination on millions of phone calls, both domestic and international, creating a database of call records that data miners can exploit to determine calling patterns when intelligence and law-enforcement agencies suspect a phone of being used for terrorist purposes:

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA's activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, this person added.

This sent the nation into hysteria across the entire political spectrum -- a hysteria that should embarrass everyone, since this story hardly tells anyone anything new. This only repeats what James Risen and Eric Lichtblau reported on December 24th of last year in a follow-up to their December 16th revelation of the warrantless surveillance on international calls linked to terrorists. Risen and Lichtblau specifically reported on the data-mining exploits of the NSA at that time:

Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation. ...

Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

This so-called "pattern analysis" on calls within the United States would, in many circumstances, require a court warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.

The use of similar data-mining operations by the Bush administration in other contexts has raised strong objections, most notably in connection with the Total Information Awareness system, developed by the Pentagon for tracking terror suspects, and the Department of Homeland Security's Capps program for screening airline passengers. Both programs were ultimately scrapped after public outcries over possible threats to privacy and civil liberties.

Nothing in the USA Today report gives us anything we didn't already know. But does that mean that Leslie Cauley reported nothing of significance? No; while the program does not violate the law like the media and some Democratic politicians fairly seethed today, the building of these records does create a further intrusion into private behavior that should concern libertarians. The question we have to answer is whether that intrusion is limited and reasonable given the circumstances.

After 9/11, we discovered that the terrorists had easily infiltrated our society, used our communication systems to coordinate the plotting and execution of the attacks, and had done little else to indicate their hostility. In retrospect, we saw patterns of behavior and communication that many felt the government should have recognized as potentially dangerous. Not only that, but we also realized that more terrorists may still be living among us, and we demanded that the government root them out before they could attack again.

Targeting their communications is certainly a smart strategy, but the problem is the volume of phone calls in the US. Even if a phone number came up as a suspected terrorist line, the amount of time it would take to get the phone records involving that number would be enormous. The phone companies do not sort in both directions under normal circumstances, and so subpoenaing records on one account not only takes too long, but gives an incomplete picture.

When we discover terrorist phone numbers, we need to see more than just what numbers that phone dialed. We need to see who called the account as well, because the traffic might not be reciprocal in that manner. (In other words, just because I call you doesn't necessarily mean you call me.) Some phone accounts, like cell phones, have that information, but local calls on land lines normally do not. Even beyond that, when intelligence agencies have two or three known data points (terrorist phone numbers), they need to quickly find all of the other phone numbers that have called or have been called by the suspect accounts, especially those in common to all. That allows the search to expand quickly to identify even more potential sleepers, who rely on phones to communicate and coordinate.

As a database administrator and someone who has worked on telco issues for several years, I can tell you that any attempt to do that with traditional phone records pulled in a traditional manner will take far too long to complete. The only way to efficiently find these needles in very large haystacks is to create a relational database that will sniff out those relationships. In order to ensure that the effort succeeds, the database must therefore contain as many of the records of phone calls as possible -- all of them, under ideal circumstances.

Only such a database could make that kind of dot-connecting possible in any meaningful fashion. The kinds of patterns and connections that would reveal the potential for terrorist activity will be so small as to be impossible to discover through normal research. That's what makes Senator Pat Leahy's reaction so frightfully stupid. He said, "'Are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with al Qaeda? 'These are tens of millions of Americans who are not suspected of anything ... Where does it stop?'' Leahy either ignores or fails to grasp that the problem is precisely that so few in the US might be terrorist sleepers. If it were a large group, they would be much easier to track and data mining would not be necessary.

That presents the government with a powerful tool in determining the behavior of people inside the US, and for that matter outside of it as well. Is such a tool reasonable under the circumstances we face now? That is ultimately a political question instead of a legal one, depending on whether people feel themselves more in danger from terrorists or their government. In my opinion, the effort is reasonable and limited. The calls themselves do not get monitored, and the records do not contain billing information or even names in their raw form. With the US still in danger of terrorist attack and with the rational possibility of sleeper cells hiding in our communities, the use of this tool makes sense and provides security for a reasonable loss of privacy.

However, that does not make the collection of this data completely benign under any circumstances. This kind of data could be used for purposes other than finding terrorists. For instance, it could be used against whistleblowers to discover their contacts. It could get deployed against opposition parties to determine their scope and the location and number of their supporters. People could get blackmailed for their phone calls in ways that have nothing to do with national security. If the CIA or State Department (which has its own intelligence service) had this program rather than the NSA, many on the Right would feel much less sanguine about its implications.

When we finally acknowledged that Islamist terrorists had declared war on us, George Bush warned us that we would have to make sacrifices in order to beat our enemy. So far, we have not been asked for much in the way of sacrifice. Now that we see how the NSA has kept us safe, we should recognize that the limited loss of privacy on our telephone habits is not much of a sacrifice in giving the intelligence community a tool to root out terrorist sleeper cells. However, we should not dismiss the risks of giving even more power to the federal government so lightly, and we should ensure that the power we do grant them does not get misused.

Iraq To Unify Baghdad Force

The new Iraqi government has decided to remove the confusion of having various security forces for different ministries operating in the greater Baghdad area and consolidate all such units into one cohesive force. The concern over confusion between actual government forces and the sectarian militias has crescendoed with the recent violence in the capital, and a unified command would resolve those issues immediately:

Senior Iraqi leaders are preparing a major restructuring of the capital's security brigades that would place all police officers and paramilitary soldiers under a single commander and in one uniform, in hopes of curtailing the sectarian chaos that is ravaging the city.

The reorganization calls for a substantially reduced presence of American soldiers on the capital's streets, although not necessarily in their numbers nationwide.

The plan, disclosed Wednesday in interviews with senior Iraqi leaders, would substantially alter Baghdad's landscape, now permeated by tens of thousands of police officers, soldiers and paramilitary troops whose identities and allegiances are not always clear.

Private militias and death squads have flourished in such an environment, with Iraqi officials acknowledging that they do not control all of the armed groups operating in Baghdad. Such militias, some of them acting with official cover, have been blamed for much of the mayhem and killing that have become routine in the capital.

The centerpiece of the plan calls for consolidating the multitude of security agencies under a single command, with one easily identifiable uniform. Iraqi officials say that would give them greater flexibility to combat the insurgency and identify rogue elements within their ranks.

Until the elected permanent government had been formed, this issue could not get resolution. In the absence of a strong executive, the ministries ran their own programs and commanded their own security forces, which often worked at cross purposes, to put it mildly. Even without the sectarian militias operating in the city, such an organizational mess would create rivalries and even gang mentality within the ranks of the forces. It also makes it difficult for the residents and businesses within Baghdad to work with police and security forces when they oppose each other.

The new government hopes to get Baghdad pacified within a month. That will take the cooperation of the Sunnis, who may not want to see all security forces (and arms) consolidated under Shi'ite command. However, even the Sunnis will understand that uncontrolled militia forces on both sides represents a clearer danger and risk than a single unified command operating with the direction of elected officials. Whether the militias will go along with this is another question mark, but at least they will not find it as easy to sow confusion within the city.

Iraq seems to be taking the correct approach to establishing its own credibility on security. They plan to rely less on American forces in securing Baghdad, which is also the right idea to pursue. Their timetable sounds unrealistic, but their plan should bring stability and security to the most strategic area of Iraq.

Another Delay On Iran

Condoleezza Rice announced another delay on consideration of the Iranian portfolio by the UN Security Council, with the US agreeing to allow the EU to present another proposal to Iran intended to provide them with positive motivations to drop their nuclear program:

The US Secretary of State has said that efforts to pursue a tough UN Security Council resolution on Iran's nuclear programme will be delayed.

Condoleezza Rice said European countries would resume diplomatic efforts to persuade Tehran to change its position. ...

"We agreed...we would wait for a couple of weeks, while the Europeans design an offer to the Iranians that would make clear that they have a choice that would allow them to have a civil nuclear programme if that is indeed what they want," she said.

Speaking on American television, Ms Rice said the EU3 wanted to show Iran that it had two options. It could either defy the international community and face isolation and UN Security Council action.

The EU has trodden this path before, with little to show for it except wasted time and a bit of diplomatic humiliation. They offered economic incentives to Iran last summer, but the mullahcracy pointedly and loudly rejected the offer by asserting their right to the nuclear cycle. It was that failure which has led to the US-prompted IAEA and UNSC actions against Teheran. Nothing said by Iran's leadership have indicated any willingness to bend.

However, Russia and China insisted on more diplomacy during this week's meetings of the permanent UNSC meetings, even though diplomatic channels have produced nothing, not even with Russia's offer to supply Iran with nuclear fuel. This will allow another few weeks to pass with no resolution to the crisis, giving Teheran that much more time to continue its enrichment process unfettered.

The carrot has proven itself insufficient for motivating Teheran. It's time to start unveiling the stick if we want Iran to get serious about negotiations.

Have Conservatives Washed Their Hands Of Bush?

The Washington Post draws the correct conclusion of the low approval ratings for George Bush and his administration by reporting on the discontent among conservatives that have sunk his presidency to near-historic lows. Although Bush has not reached the nadir seen by two other wartime presidents (Nixon and Truman both descended to 23%), the loss of conservative support has dealt a body blow to presidential influence in this midterm election:

Disaffection over spending and immigration have caused conservatives to take flight from President Bush and the Republican Congress at a rapid pace in recent weeks, sending Bush's approval ratings to record lows and presenting a new threat to the GOP's 12-year reign on Capitol Hill, according to White House officials, lawmakers and new polling data.

Bush and Congress have suffered a decline in support from almost every part of the conservative coalition over the past year, a trend that has accelerated with alarming implications for Bush's governing strategy.

The Gallup polling organization recorded a 13-percentage-point drop in Republican support for Bush in the past couple of weeks. These usually reliable voters are telling pollsters and lawmakers they are fed up with what they see as out-of-control spending by Washington and, more generally, an abandonment of core conservative principles.

There are also significant pockets of conservatives turning on Bush and Congress over their failure to tighten immigration laws, restrict same-sex marriage, and put an end to the Iraq war and the rash of political scandals, according to lawmakers and pollsters.

Bush won two presidential elections by pursuing a political and governing model that was predicated on winning and sustaining the loyal backing of social, economic and foreign policy conservatives. The strategy was based on the belief that conservatives, who are often more politically active than the general public, could be inspired to vote in larger numbers and would serve as a reliable foundation for his presidency. The theory, as explained by Bush strategists, is that the president would enjoy a floor below which his support would never fall.

It is now apparent that this floor has weakened dramatically -- and collapsed in places.

The Bush administration has never been particularly conservative in any sense, other than perhaps in selecting judicial appointments and pursuit of right-to-life initiatives. When he ran his first campaign, he proclaimed his adherence to "compassionate conservatism", which anyone who recalled his father's single term in office knew meant big-government centrism. He added Dick Cheney to the ticket to get traction among the conservatives, who still did not flock to the polls in the way the GOP needed, and they nearly lost the election.

After taking office, Bush reversed at least two decades of conservative thought on the role of the federal government and began a massive expansion, especially at the Department of Education. During his five-year stay in office, federal spending has expanded somewhere around four times the rate of inflation. Bush and the Republican Congress have not curtailed spending in any major category of the budget during that time.

So what gave Bush traction among conservatives? The 9/11 attack and response, judicial appointments, and taxes. Conservatives have given him leeway in part because of his approach on these issues, and the lack of attractive alternatives in either party on these and other core issues. For those three areas of success, conservatives have endured the profligate spending and federal consolidation of power.

Now, however, Bush has gone more than one step too far on several fronts, and conservatives have finally allowed themselves to dissent. On immigration, which not only has long been a particular concern for conservatives but now more than ever has national-security implications, Bush has turned his back on the base in order to embrace the Democratic approach of amnesty rather than enforcement, even as a companion to normalization. He not only has consistently refused to rein in spending, declining to veto pork-laden bills, but continues to encourage ever-higher spending.

Predictably, as the money gets bigger the corruption follows, and the revelations of malfeasance have angered conservatives in their association with the GOP majorities in both houses of Congress. The 1994 "revolution" that brought Congress under Republican control based its approach on eliminating corruption from politics by reducing the spoils that lead to corruption. Now we have pork in every bill and not surprisingly corruption probes involving both parties as a result. This is not conservative governance; it's pandering by manipulating tax receipts for political gain, and the process gets more and more blatant.

The lack of conservative values in the basic functions of this Congress and government and the association nonetheless with conservatism has the Right extremely frustrated. They see the result of this situation becoming a discreditation of true conservatism that could set the movement back thirty years, and conservatives have decided to take a stand now in the final midterm of the Bush administration. Too much hangs in the balance, with immigration and federal spending out of control. If the movement is to survive, it has to either take control or establish its own identity again outside of current Republican leadership.

Whether Bush himself has lost all of the support claimed is questionable; Rasmussen has Bush at 41%, 74% among Republicans, and their reporting has been more reliable than other pollsters over the past several years. Even those numbers do not carry much good news for Bush among his own base, though. He has lost the enthusiasm among the movement conservatives. Even worse for the GOP in the upcoming elections, their Congresional leadership has done much worse in representing core conservative values, and that's the real story for 2006. The conservatives can't do much to Bush except embarrass him with low approval ratings, but they can have a much greater impact on Republican leaders this fall. Unless the GOP wants to return to minority status, Bill Frist and Denny Hastert had better start listening to the base.

UPDATE: Stephen Bainbridge reminds us that he reached the same conclusion a year ago.

Palestinian Unity Breakthrough?

Fatah and Hamas have proposed a platform which would bring both factions into the government and allow for meaningful talks with Israel on a two-state solution, the AP reports this morning. Leaders of both groups imprisoned by Israel for terrorism conducted the delicate negotiations, and the product has been embraced by Mahmoud Abbas on behalf of Fatah, while the Hamas leadership in the West Bank and Gaza study it:

After months of tensions, senior members of the rival Hamas and Fatah factions have forged a joint platform, including acceptance of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

However, it was unclear whether Hamas, particularly the group's hardline leaders abroad, will back the program, which would signal a major softening of positions. Until now, Hamas has balked at the West's demands that it renounce violence, recognize Israel and accept existing peace agreements. ...

"This document is very important. I adopt the position of those heroes," he said late Wednesday, referring to the prisoners. "It includes a deep and realistic political vision that to a very large extent represents my point of view."

Senior Hamas officials were not immediately available for comment. Hamas legislator Salah Bardawil said he has not seen the document, but that the views of the Hamas prisoners are considered important.

The negotiations took place between Fatah's Marwan Barghouti and Hamas' Abdel Khaleq Natche in the Israeli penitentiary Hadarim Prison, where both serve long sentences for their terrorist activity in Israel. Barghouti has tremendous cachet with the Palestinians and had been drafted for the position Abbas won handily even though Barghouti was imprisoned. It caused a diplomatic stir during the presidential elections when Israel refused to release Barghouti, even if he won. Less is known about Natche, who at one time led Hamas in Hebron. Whether he has enough influence to negotiate on behalf of the entire Hamas organization -- which has chapters all over the Middle East -- remains to be seen.

The agreement itself seems designed to address Western objections to the Hamas government in a substantial manner. It acknowledges Israel and recasts the struggle in terms of the 1967 occupation instead of the existence of Israel altogether. It explicitly accepts the two-state solution and calls for negotiation with Israel on determining the final border between Palestine and Israel. While it does not renounce violence, it specifically focuses its "resistance" to the disputed territories in the West Bank and Gaza.

Will this be enough to satisfy the West and garner agreement from Hamas? The latter appears desperate to achieve some diplomatic success in order to establish its credibility. Despite the promise of humanitarian aid from the Quartet and their allies, the Hamas-led government has no time left to resolve the financial collapse in the territories. The pressure placed on Hamas to govern came as a surprise, and clearly they want Fatah to join them in a unity government to both share that pressure as well as lend diplomatic assistance abroad. Either they accept reality or they will eventually face civil war, a fate narrowly avoided yesterday with a cease-fire between the two factions.

The West would like nothing more than to get Hamas to concede Israel's right to exist and force them to the bargaining table. The imposition of financial and diplomatic isolation appears to have worked, at least in getting Hamas leadership to understand that it will never achieve acceptance without major concessions in its platform. Although Western tenacity on this approach appears to have faltered somewhat this week, the West has made its point, and the misery the isolation caused made that point extremely clear. The Palestinians have no economy outside that donated to them by the West and Israel, and their Arab brothers have no particular passion to rescue them.

One faction that gets no mention in this agreement is Islamic Jihad, another Iranian-funded terrorist group that rarely honors cease-fires in the territories. Israel has had to close its borders on a number of occasions because of IJ attacks, especially from Gaza. The triangle offense that the Palestinians play against Israel rely on IJ as a "rogue" group outside of anyone's control. When Hamas and Fatah both have felt diplomatic pressure to act reasonably, they have relied on the smaller Islamist terror group to continue attacking Israeli citizens in order to get a reaction from the IDF -- which then takes Hamas and Fatah off the hook. Will the new unity government disarm IJ and ban its terrorist activities, at least against Israel itself? The new platform does not appear to address that, and until it does, it will be too incomplete to be reliable.

The opening gives hope for a return to negotiation, perhaps this time with a chastened Hamas and ascendant Fatah. The Quartet has better make clear that the Palestinians need to finally honor their Oslo accord and disarm terrorist groups within their territories. Otherwise, all of these initiatives will swiftly transform to vapor when Islamic Jihad or another splinter group lets the rockets fly against Israeli cities once again.

New AQ Capture The Man In The Centcom Memo?

The Iraqi News Agency reported last week that the military captured a high-ranking member of the al-Qaeda network in Karbala. The description given of this former Saddam Hussein army commander sounds familiar:

High-ranking leader of terrorist organization Al Qaeda was detained today in Iraqi province of Karbala during military operation, Iraqi news agency INA reports.

Abdel Fatih Isa, a.k.a. Abu Aisha, was arrested in a private home where he had been hiding for a long time. The arrest was made after a few houses in the town had been searched through.

The terrorist is among the chief organizers of terrorist acts in capital Baghdad. According to military sources Abu Aisha was an officer from the Iraqi army during Saddam Hussein’s rule, the agency notes.

I thought that the description of an AQ commander spending most of his time hiding sounded familiar. In the captured AQ document that Centcom released this week, a description of the Northern al-Karkh commander matches up quite well with the analysis provided in the AQ memo:

The current commander of Northern al-Karkh (Abu-Huda) is very concerned because of his deteriorating security situation caused by being pursued by the Americans, since they have his picture and voice print. Therefore, his movement is very restricted and he is unable to do anything here. We should remove him from Baghdad to a location where he can work easier; otherwise he is closer to become totally ineffective. I know nothing about his past military experience or organizational skills.

I don't know if "Abu-Huda" was meant as a name or a designation, but it sounds very similar. If it isn't the same person, then it means that more than one AQ commander has to keep his head below the surface these days, unable to do anything to further their lunatic cause. Either way, it shows that the US and the Coalition have the Zarqawi network just about destroyed. (via the Weekly Standard blog)

Catholics Won't Be Demanding Beheadings And Assassinations

The German magazine Der Spiegel reports on the launch of a new television series, Popetown, that pokes fun at the Vatican and Catholics in general. German Catholics have protested the series, but Der Spiegel goes hyperbolic when it states that the controversy provides a companion piece to the Prophet cartoon madness:

A new MTV pilot cartoon making fun of the pope has stirred up religious outrage in Germany. Can one really show the pope hopping through the Vatican halls on a cross-shaped pogo stick? Prepare for the sequel to the Muhammad caricature controversy. ...

The controversy generated by "Popetown" is reminiscent of the outrage sparked across the Muslim world by the publication of a series of cartoon drawings of the prophet Muhammad. The publication of the cartoons in a Danish newspaper last autumn, and the decision by a number of other European papers to reprint them, led to European consulates being set on fire in Damascus and Beirut, violent demonstrations in Afghanistan and week-long boycotts of Danish products in the Middle East. One of the more bizarre after-effects of the turmoil was the staging of a contest for the best anti-Semitic cartoon by a group of Israeli artists. "Popetown" appears destined, in Germany at least, to be the sequel.

The fictional town which gives its name to the series is home to a 77-year-old, plump and childish little man with an oversized hat -- a pope who likes to play hide and seek, doesn't wash for months, wants to drink Coca Cola but isn't allowed to and enjoys bouncing through hallways on a cross-shaped pogo stick. Popetown's true rulers are three corrupt cardinals who dwell in a wellness spa hidden behind a bookshelf, and who spend their days ruminating over how they can become the richest men in the world. Other inhabitants of the town include a young priest, a dim-witted nun and a cardinal with a sexual preference for exotic animals.

If that wasn't in bad enough taste, MTV promoted the series by running advertisements that showed Jesus coming down from the cross and plopping himself into a cozy chair to watch the tube. It came with a motto: "It's Better to Enjoy Yourself Than to Hang Around." The fact that MTV ran this advertisement the week before Easter might have something to do with Catholic outrage in Germany.

Der Spiegel is dismissive of the complaints while exaggerating their impact. The Church protested, various politicians scolded MTV for its tastelessness and offense, and the media debated the entire issue. DS pokes fun at the spokesman for the Catholic Youth League, even though he hasn't even called for the series to be taken off the air. All the while, DS treats this as some sort of equivalent counterpart to the Mohammed cartoon issue in Denmark.

Tell you what. When Catholics gather by the hundreds of thousands demanding the assassination of the people responsible for Popetown, when they send emissaries to complete that mission, and when they burn down MTV offices in predominantly Catholic nations, then Der Spiegel might be able to make that analogy. Until then, they join the ever-swelling masses who can't tell the difference between free-speech protest and incitements to murder and arson.

British Judge: Hacker Should Get Extradited

A Scotsman who hacked into US military and government computers in the wake of 9/11, causing damage and creating a security scare while America tried to defend itself from terrorism, has lost a battle in avoiding extradition from the UK. Gary McKinnon faces 70 years in a US prison for what the Department of Justice calls the "biggest military hack of all time":

A SCOTS-born computer hacker who has been accused of the "biggest military hack" ever detected should be extradited to the United States to face trial, where he could face up to 70 years in jail, a judge has ruled.

Gary McKinnon, 40, who said he had hacked into NASA and US military systems to check for material on UFOs, has six weeks to submit evidence to John Reid, the Home Secretary, who will make the final decision.

McKinnon was arrested last June following charges by US prosecutors that he illegally accessed 97 government computers, including Pentagon, US army, navy and NASA systems, causing £375,000 damage. He admitted hacking into the systems, but denied causing any damage.

McKinnon's backers say that he should face trial in Britain instead of the US, and politicians unhappy with the wide latitude in the bilateral extradition treaty have chimed in on McKinnon's behalf. Some of them argue that McKinnon did nothing to harm the US war effort. A few argue that McKinnon, who says he hacked the computers to find out what the US knows about extraterrestrials, did Washington a favor by revealing the security holes in our systems.

Well, count me among the ungrateful for Mr. McKinnon's assistance. He attacked US military computer systems on at least 97 occasions after knowing we had been attacked and needed to focus on terrorist attacks. No one asked McKinnon to provide his security expertise, and the intrusions used up resources that could have been applied elsewhere.

The British judge made the right call. McKinnon attacked American computer systems; we are the wronged party, the systems are on our soil, and McKinnon should face trial here in the US. I doubt he will get 70 years or end up with Zacarias Moussaoui as a next-door neighbor, but we cannot treat computer hackers like recalcitrant children in need of a time-out. McKinnon committed a crime by the admission of his own supporters, and did so at least 97 times. The acts were deliberate and McKinnon should face the consequences of those choices.

Jackson: You Can Trust Me Now

After telling a Dallas audience that he had killed a deal with a contractor because of his political affiliation, HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson found himself in the middle of a firestorm of criticism. After several House and Senate members called for an investigation into Jackson's contract awards practices at HUD and demanded his resignation, Jackson now denies he ever denied any contract on the basis of politics. In a press release at the HUD website, Jackson does his best Emily Litella impression by essentially saying, "Never mind":

I deeply regret the anecdotal remarks I made at a recent Texas small business forum and would like to reassure the public that all HUD contracts are awarded solely on a stringent merit-based process. During my tenure, no contract has ever been awarded, rejected, or rescinded due to the personal or political beliefs of the recipient.

In other words, Jackson wants to have everyone believe that he lied to small business forum that invited him to speak in his capacity as a Cabinet-level government official. This is a strange defense indeed, but the only one left to Jackson. He could have denied ever saying it, but any number of audience members would have swiftly contradicted him. Jackson wants to rehabilitate his credibility by admitting to being, frankly, a liar.

These leaves us two possibilities. The first option is that Jackson is lying now to avoid an investigation and possible prosecution, if such actions violate federal laws. This tactic would give Jackson his only hope of succeeding; he would hope to dial the heat down by seeming a fool rather than a crooked administrator. It seems unlikely that Jackson can unring the bell here, however, especially in this hyperpartisan atmosphere. HUD has long had a reputation as an ethical sewer even before this, as CQ commenters have well remarked, and any investigation would probably bring something embarrassing to light.

In this scenario, the Bush administration would do best to unload Jackson as soon as possible, firing him if Jackson will not resign.

The second is that Jackson is telling the truth now and lied in Texas. That calls into question exactly what he had in mind by telling that supposedly false anecdote. After all, this was not a GOP fundraiser; this was a nonpartisan business conference, which asked Jackson to discuss the efforts at HUD in outreach to minority businesses. Given that the GOP have had limited success in attracting voters from African-Americans, the only purpose of telling that kind of a fib would be to intimidate the businessmen into supporting the Republican Party if they wanted any chance of getting a contract with HUD, and perhaps any other government agency.

This scenario provides scant improvement over the first. It would reveal Jackson as a blowhard, a bully, and a fool. He has thrown away his credibility; what group would believe him when he spoke with them now? That may excuse Jackson from criminality, but not from stupidity. And in this case as well, Jackson needs to go, and go quickly.

I just don't see any other excuse for Jackson. He's either lying now or lied then, and both cases present nothing but career-limiting circumstances.

UPDATE: The New York Times juxtaposes the two versions nicely:

An account of Mr. Jackson's speech in the May 5-11 issue of The Dallas Business Journal has him describing someone who had been trying for a decade to land a contract with the housing department.

"He made a heck of a proposal and was on the G.S.A. list, so we selected him," the secretary said, alluding to the Government Services Administration.

Mr. Jackson then recalled how the publisher came to see him in Washington to thank him and how the man then volunteered, "I don't like President Bush."

"He didn't get the contract," Mr. Jackson told the real estate forum, according to the Dallas publication. "Why should I reward someone who doesn't like the president, so they can use funds to try to campaign against the president? Logic says they don't get the contract. That's the way I believe."

But in a statement this afternoon, Mr. Jackson said, "I deeply regret the anecdotal remarks," adding that during his tenure "no contract has ever been rewarded, rejected or rescinded due to the personal or political beliefs of the recipient." He said his agency was committed to awarding contracts "on a stringent, merit-based process."

A spokeswoman for Mr. Jackson told the business journal on Tuesday that his story was just meant to illustrate how some people in Washington "will unfairly characterize the president and then turn around and ask you for money." The spokeswoman, Dustee Tucker, said the secretary "did not actually meet with someone and turn down a contract."

Sorry, those two stories are absolutely irreconcilable. The only accomplishment Jackson achieved today was to muddy the particulars, but the issue comes down to either lying now or lying then -- and in either case, he should no longer serve on the Cabinet.

Podcasting At No Left Turns

Earlier this evening, I had a chance to chat with Dr. Peter Schramm, the director of the Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs and the center's blog No Left Turns. I first met Peter last month at the Heritage Foundation Resource Bank meeting, but only got the chance to introduce myself as I was leaving the Broadmoor for the airport. Peter had just received the Henry Salvatori Prize for American Citizenship, and we heard the moving story of his declaration that he was born an American -- just in the wrong place.

We had an engaging and (I believe) entertaining conversation regarding blogging, the upcoming elections, the inroads that the GOP hope to make in the African-American community, and most of all the Al-Qaeda documents that show the Zarqawi network in complete disarray. I believe the podcast will get hosted at this link when Peter has it ready for publication. I hope you enjoy it, and if No Left Turns hasn't made it onto your blogroll, this is a good time to rectify that.

UPDATE: Rick at The Ugly American interviewed Juan Williams in a pretty entertaining chat of his own,

On My Desk: Can She Be Stopped?

I have started reading John Podhoretz' new look at the next presidential election and Hillary Clinton's chances to reach the White House, and it's an excellent read so far. Can She Be Stopped? argues that the Democratic nomination is Hillary's to lose, unless the Republicans can get their act together in a manner which has clearly escaped them this year. John also analyzes the deep divisions within both parties and how Hillary can exploit them. John also lays out a plan for the GOP to follow in order to corner Hillary and dent her electoral prospects -- and then names the one salvation from a second Clinton administration.

When I've finished, I'll write a full review, but so far Can She Be Stopped? is a great read. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in the 2008 elections.

Israel Draws A Line While West Draws Back

Israel has set a deadline for the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority to recognize Israel's right to exist and agree to negotiate for a permanent settlement and the two-state solution. Otherwise, Israel's new prime minister warns, Israel will set the final borders unilaterally:

Israel will give the Palestinians until the end of the year to prove they are willing to negotiate a final peace deal, and will unilaterally set its final borders by 2008 if they don't, Israel's justice minister said Wednesday.

The statement by Justice Minister Haim Ramon, a close associate of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's, was the first by an Israeli official to set a deadline for the Hamas-led Palestinian government to disarm and recognize the Jewish state. ...

"Through the end of this year, 2006, there will be honest attempts to talk to the other side," Ramon told Israel's Army Radio.

"If it becomes clear by the end of the year that we really have no partner, and the international community is also convinced of this, then we will take our fate into our own hands and not leave our fate in the hands of our enemies," he added.

The Israelis have tired of the occupation game, waiting for the Palestinians to produce viable negotiators for peace. Hamas will only commit to a "long-term truce' if Israel returns to the borders that Arab nations found so attractive for attacks twice in twenty years. The Palestinians won't even negotiate for a formal end to hostilities or recognition of Israel. They want to keep their primary goal alive, which is the destruction of the "Zionist entity" and the acquisition of all the land to the Mediterranean.

The Israelis will not establish the long and nearly indefensible border positions that almost saw them pushed into the Mediterranean, nor should they. Israel occupies the West Bank because of the offensive war that Arab nations staged through that territory; they risked that territory and lost it. The Israelis have every right to reset its borders accordingly to ensure that they have a more defensible frontier, and if the Palestinians refuse to negotiate the terms, then Israel should set them, pull back behind them, and end the occupation and the debate.

While Israel remains firm in its defense, the Quartet has backpedaled on its own resolve. Faced with global cries over the plight in which the Palestinians placed themselves by electing Hamas, the US and EU have agreed to start sending money again, although they claim the funds will bypass the Palestinian government:

THE United States, facing a possible humanitarian crisis, last night agreed with its Quartet partners to set up a “temporary international mechanism” to channel aid directly to the Palestinians, despite its boycott of Hamas.

In an agreed statement, the Quartet of the US, Russia, the EU and the UN said that the mechanism should begin operating “as soon as possible”, and ensure “direct delivery of any assistance to the Palestinian people”.

The statement was issued after Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia predicted a civil war if the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority was left to collapse.

Diplomats said that it was not yet decided how many of the 160,000-plus Palestinian Authority employees, including 70,000 security personnel, would receive their salaries through the arrangement. The government salaries, which support about one third of Palestinian families, have not been paid for two months.

I have no objection to sending food and medicine to the Palestinian people for humanitarian purposes. However, sending money and paying the salaries of those with Fatah and Hamas government sinecures undermines the entire purpose of isolating the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinians voted these people into power, primarily because they believed that they would not have to suffer the consequences of electing unreconstructed terrorists as their representatives. Just when that decision started to make a personal impact on the people who made that decision, the Quartet has performed their normal Deus ex Machina role, rescuing the Palestinians once again from their own folly.

And what will be the result of handing cash over to these government employees? The Hamas government will collect taxes from the salaries, and probably in large amounts. The commerce it restores will also generate tax revenues for the Hamas-led government. Freed from the responsibility of paying salaries, just where will all those tax dollars go? It won't get earmarked for Bridges and Trains to Nowhere. And that assumes that Hamas (and Fatah as well) won't simply confiscate a large part of that money up front.

If anyone wonders why this situation still has no resolution, this fecklessness on the part of the West is a prime example. The Palestinians have no stake in negotiating a final settlement in a two-state framework they don't support. They want one state -- theirs. They know that they can defy the West and still get their funding and sympathy. The Palestinians never have to face consequences for their decisions, and so continue to make bad decisions. When that pattern stops, they may finally have an opportunity to learn from their mistakes. Until then, we can expect a continuation of the post-Oslo dynamic in the West Bank.

Morality At Turtle Bay

The United Nations validated every argument yesterday about the efficacy of its so-called reform when it announced that Cuba, China, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Azerbaijan would sit on its Human Rights Council:

Six nations with poor human rights records were among those elected to the new Human Rights Council on Tuesday, although notorious violators that had belonged to the predecessor Human Rights Commission did not succeed in winning places in the new group.

China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan, countries cited by human rights groups as not deserving membership, were among the 47 nations elected to the council. But in a move hailed by the same groups, both Iran and Venezuela failed to attract the needed votes. ...

Nations running for the council had to meet more demanding standards than in the past.

The previous commission was long a public embarrassment to the United Nations because countries like Sudan, Libya and Zimbabwe became members and thereby thwarted the investigation of their own human rights records.

The United States did not run for a seat on the council, saying that the new body did not go far enough to correct the deficiencies of the old one. The council was created on March 15, in a 170 to 4 vote, that the United States, Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands opposed.

Nations had to meet more demanding standards than in the past? They couldn't be much more demanding. Any system that applauds itself for replacing Zimbabwe with Cuba and Sudan with Saudi Arabia renders satire moot.

The US objected to the new Human Rights Council because its so-called reforms showed little difference between the new panel and the old Human Rights Commission. Once again, we see that notorious human-rights violaters have standing to pass judgment on other nations and to direct investigations as they see fit. Cuba will therefore get a pass on its jailing of dissidents and reporters; China will not answer for its forced abortions and its political oppression. The good news, however, is that Venezuela won't be a member despite Hugo Chavez' slavish devotion to Fidel Castro.

If the farcical selection of the guardians of human rights doesn't make people laugh out loud at Turtle Bay, then its new push for "moral investment" will. The UN has drawn up a set of principles for businesses to model if they want to have the moral imprimatur of the UN with which to attract investors. It sounds reasonable in principle, but as a result, entire industries get locked out of the UN's good graces:

The funds typically use "social screens" to rule out investments in alcohol or tobacco companies, military contractors or chemical companies with a history of environmental abuses.

Even General Electric Co. is excluded from some lists because of its defense business. ...

Part of the problem in keeping up with the best mainstream stocks is finding highly profitable companies that fit the criteria of being socially responsible. Typically, they cannot be involved in the tobacco, alcoholic beverage or gambling industries; they cannot hold contracts with the military; they also must have good records for labor relations.

About two-thirds of the companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange could survive the Calvert Group's social screens.

However, some of last year's best-performing companies, such as oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. or brewer Anheuser-Busch Cos., would be weeded out because of their environmental or health records.

People should invest their money into enterprises that reflect their values and that deserve more investment. Ideally, that should lead to better returns, but limiting the scope of investments decreases the chances for success, at least theoretically. The problem with this proposal is not the concept but the messenger. The same people who want to push morality in investment have just named some of the worst human-rights offenders to their Human Rights Council. The same organization also "invested" its money into the pockets of Saddam Hussein over a period of years, keeping his dictatorship afloat while enriching themselves. They also have known for several years of systemic forced prostitution in their relief operations and have yet to do anything to address the problem except assure everyone that they're looking into it.

The hypocrisy of this arrogance would stun if it weren't so common coming from Turtle Bay. In short, according to the UN itself, it is not worthy of investment; it has no moral standing at all. In this case, we should take them at their word.

GOP Finally Agrees On Tax Cuts

With a roaring economy and 4.7% unemployment fueled by a recovery launched by George Bush's tax cuts, one would suppose that extending these reductions would be almost assumed in Congress, or at least by the Republicans that enacted them in the first place. However, in a measure of how rudderless the GOP caucus has become, party leaders finally reached an agreement on extending the cuts while Democrats objected to its costs:

House and Senate Republican negotiators reached a final agreement yesterday on a five-year, nearly $70 billion tax package that would extend President Bush's deep cuts to tax rates on dividends and capital gains, while sparing about 15 million middle-income Americans from the alternative minimum tax.

Republican leaders hope to pass the agreement swiftly. House consideration is scheduled for tonight, with the Senate likely to send the measure to the White House for the president's signature by the end of the week. But the package remains controversial, with GOP leaders saying it is essential to sustain a strong economic recovery and Democrats and a few Republicans saying the cuts would mainly benefit the wealthy and add to the long-term deficit.

"Keeping taxes low helps Americans find and keep work, supports families and communities with good job bases, and makes America a great place to do business for companies both here at home and those overseas looking for a place to invest," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said in a statement.

But with the budget deficit still expected to exceed $300 billion this year, despite a strong economy, opponents say the government cannot afford to add $70 billion more over the next five years.

"The point is the preponderance of these revenues will go to upper-income people, people who make a million dollars or more," Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) said yesterday. "It's a question of priorities."

Snowe is one of the Republicans that held up the tax extensions for as long as possible, preferring to raise taxes rather than cut the budget -- which is also a matter of priorities. However, if Snowe really worries about tax revenues rather than the appearance of the tax cuts, then she would realize that the combination of investment in American business and jobs that the cuts provided has actually increased federal tax receipts far beyond the static cost of the cuts themselves. More people have jobs and therefore pay taxes; more goods get sold and purchased, also increasing tax receipts.

That is true even in the dividend and investment cuts that Snowe and the Democrats find most objectionable. Dr. Daniel Mitchell at the Heritage Foundation notes that federal tax receipts overall climbed 14.5% last year and 9% the year before that, far outstripping inflation, but did even better in the investment categories:

Revenues have been pouring into the Treasury at record rates. In the last 12 months, tax receipts have skyrocketed 14.5 percent, more than four times faster than inflation. And in the previous 12 months, they jumped nearly nine percent, almost three times faster than inflation.

It is especially worth noting that the government is collecting more money from capital gains taxes and dividend taxes. As the Wall Street Journal noted, “…capital gains receipts from 2002-04 have climbed by 79% after the reduction in the tax rate from 20% to 15%. Dividend tax receipts are up 35% from 2002 to 2004, even though the taxable rate fell from 39.6% to 15%.

Dr. Mitchell notes that rational tax policy should aim to increase tax receipts and not focus on jacking up the rates as a vehicle for doing so. In the first place, it makes an assumption that the government owns the money that it taxes rather than the individuals doing the investing. Secondly, taxation provides a negative influence on behavior; as taxes rise on a particular channel, people will direct their money elsewhere. The best way to get more revenue from taxes is to expand the tax base, and that has been the result of these tax cuts.

That does not make the concern over budget deficits misplaced, but the villain in deficits has not been the tax cuts. It has been the unbridled spending spree that the GOP and this administration has indulged for the past six years. Federal spending has risen faster than inflation in every major category since the GOP has controlled Washington. Putting entitlement spending to one side for the moment, discretionary spending has gone up 39% over the past three years while inflation has accounted for about 9% during the same period. If the federal budget cannot keep up with the expanding tax base and increasing revenue flowing into its coffers, the last solution we need is to take more money away from taxpayers to feed the beast. That solution is akin to giving an addict more fixes in order to put off the pain.

Unfortunately, the pain cannot be put off any longer. We are long overdue for a rethinking of the role of the federal government and a drastic reduction in its reach. Not only has the welfare state become far too expensive, but it also continues to fuel corruption and bribery as politicians get more and more money and power to manipulate. We thought that we would get that kind of paradigm challenge when we elected a GOP Congress and a Republican President to match. Unfortunately, the Republicans have squandered their opportunity and now face defeat at the hands of the Democrats, who at least argue in good faith for a larger and more powerful central government.

Mark Tapscott has more thoughts on this -- and Republicans should heed his words.

Loyalty Oaths At HUD?

Government bureaucracies serve at least one benign purpose in democracies -- they should ensure that citizens will get impartial treatment when it comes to services and contracts. Unfortunately that system failed according to one of the men supposedly in charge of a good-sized section of one, and now the Bush administration has to answer why its HUD Secretary steered contracts according to the political preferences of their recipients:

Once the color barrier has been broken, minority contractors seeking government work may need to overcome the Bush barrier.

That's the message U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson seemed to send during an April 28 talk in Dallas.

Jackson, a former president and CEO of the Dallas Housing Authority, was among the featured speakers at a forum sponsored by the Real Estate Executive Council, a national minority real estate consortium.

After discussing the huge strides the agency has made in doing business with minority-owned companies, Jackson closed with a cautionary tale, relaying a conversation he had with a prospective advertising contractor.

"He had made every effort to get a contract with HUD for 10 years," Jackson said of the prospective contractor. "He made a heck of a proposal and was on the (General Services Administration) list, so we selected him. He came to see me and thank me for selecting him. Then he said something ... he said, 'I have a problem with your president.'

"I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'I don't like President Bush.' I thought to myself, 'Brother, you have a disconnect -- the president is elected, I was selected. You wouldn't be getting the contract unless I was sitting here. If you have a problem with the president, don't tell the secretary.'

"He didn't get the contract," Jackson continued. "Why should I reward someone who doesn't like the president, so they can use funds to try to campaign against the president? Logic says they don't get the contract. That's the way I believe."

This is, bluntly, appalling. If Jackson wants to work on the GOP election campaign as a contracts administrator, then he has every right to deny contracts to those who do not support the GOP. However, as Secretary of HUD, Jackson has ceased representing George Bush and the Republicans and now should work on behalf of all Americans. The government serves all of us, regardless of political orientation, and it had better do so fairly and in an even-handed manner.

Raw Story (via The Moderate Voice) reports that Senator Frank Lautenberg has demanded Jackson's resignation from the Bush cabinet. I don't often agree with Lautenberg, but if the Dallas Business Journal has reported this correctly, then Lautenberg is right. Jackson has to go, and go now.

Jon Henke at QandO wants to go further and have him prosecuted. I'm not sure if Jackson broke any criminal laws in his actions, but he violated the public trust in his partisan hackery. That's enough to get his ticket punched as far as I'm concerned. The Bush administration needs to send a message that partisanship should not infect the ability of American citizens to compete fairly for government contracts.

Iran Expert: Ahmadinejad Letter A Defiant Challenge

The German magazine Der Speigel interviewed an expert on Iran regarding the letter from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to George Bush and its purpose. Wahied Wahdat-Hagh tells Der Spiegel that far from an act of potential conciliation, the Iranian president sent the letter as an act of defiance -- and warns that Ahmadinejad is not bluffing in this crisis:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Wahdat-Hagh, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote a letter to US President George W. Bush. In the letter, he once again questions Israel's right to exist, accuses the US of lying about Iraq and insists on his country's right to use nuclear technology. What message is Ahmadinejad trying to communicate?

Wahdat-Hagh: The purpose is to show strength. It's Ahmadinejad's way of saying: "We are powerful! You are a cowboy! Islam, though, is the true democracy and your system will collapse." Former Iranian President Khatami used to give interviews to CNN. But Ahmadinejad has gone directly to Bush and told him straight to his face that Iran is going to continue with the strategy it has thus far followed.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The letter, in other words, doesn't open up any new options for the West to convince Iran to give up its nuclear program.

Wahdat-Hagh: Ali Ardashir Larijani, the head of the country's Supreme National Security Council, has already said that the letter can't be read as a watering down of the Iranian position. On the day that the UN Security Council once again addresses the issue of Iran, Ahmadinejad could have said: "I'll make some concessions on our uranium enrichment program." But he's not willing to do that. Instead, he points to American mistakes -- for example in Iraq.

That gets to the heart of the hyperbole over this supposed attempt at a breakthrough. If Ahmadinejad wanted to create an opening for peace, all he needed to say was that Iran would negotiate on uranium enrichment, perhaps accepting the Russian offer to supply Teheran with uranium suitable for peaceful energy production and not weapons. He didn't need to write George Bush a letter; he could just as easily sent Larijani to the IAEA or to the UN Security Council to negotiate their compliance with the NPT.

Wahdat-Hagh, who works for MEMRI, also disagrees with those who claim that the Iranian nuclear program amounts to a giant bluff. He tells Der Spiegel that the Iranian rocket program is very real, and that their nuclear-weapons program is no vaporware either. The Iranian mullahcracy intends on transforming itself into Southwest Asia's leading military power, and have developed the rockets and new domestically-produced submarines to show its reach throughout the region. It has a strategic point with which to extort concessions from nations around the world: the Straits of Hormuz, through which most of the oil produced in the area gets shipped. Nuclear weapons represent the final key, the most powerful component with which to catapult Iran into the same class as Pakistan, India, and the West.

In fact, as Wahdat-Hagh points out, the arrogance of a Muslim leader posing as a lecturer on Christianity is quite deliberate and intended to humiliate Bush in the eyes of Iranians. Ahmadinejad does not want Iranians to see him as respectful or deferential to the Great Satan, but scolding and condescending. It establishes him as Bush's superior and shows Iranians that he does not fear the US, but is contemptuous of it. On the other hand, Ahmandinejad knows that the West will interpret this much differently -- as an extension of dialogue, and a potential diplomatic opening. Ahmadinejad wanted Bush to respond to his missive with a plea for more contact, a reaction that would have had a much different impression in Iran and the Middle East than it would in the West.

Many people assume that Ahmadinejad enjoys popular support, or at least his nuclear program does, but Wahdat-Hagh disputes this. He points to surveys performed under careful conditions that show much less unity than the mullahcracy will adknowledge, and even the peaceful use of nuclear energy has some in Iran nervous about the regime's intentions. The amount of domestic support has always been overestimated; it's possible that this might even fuel the mullahcracy's drive for nuclear weapons -- in order to keep outsiders from empowering democratic activists.

Right now, it appears that many in the West have fallen into Ahmadinejad's trap with his letter. Fortunately, it also appears that Bush and his foreign-policy team are not among them.

101st Fighting Keyboardists Update!

A quick update on the status of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists: we have now grown to a membership of over 300 bloggers, with a number of reader pledges as well. The blogroll contains men and women from the military, including active-duty, reserve, retired, and their families. In fact, the list has grown so long that I may have to limit the display to the 100 most-recently updated blogs.

For those who wish to join, please either drop a comment on this post or send me an e-mail. The Fighting Keebees, as one of our members called it, is strictly a volunteer organization. We just ask that you support the troops and support civilian control over foreign policy and the military, and have a really good sense of humor. It's all in fun and meant to irritate all the right people.

Speaking of which, this blogger certainly has his knickers in a twist over this. He claims that the 101 represents the great shame of this nation and wonders why we don't get jobs in Iraq, if we love the war so much. Considering that this is the same man who dismissed four murdered American security contractors in Fallujah as "mercenaries" and demonstrated his concern with a hearty "Screw 'em", I'd call his shame great praise indeed.

Will Rage Undo The Democrats?

Two items from prominent opinion journalists point to a meltdown in the Democratic base even as they close in on a vulnerable GOP in midterm elections. Jonah Goldberg and Richard Cohen have one thing in common: irrational e-mail. However, while the conservative Goldberg received one ludicrous rant regarding the Jewish conspiracy to control oil, Cohen received thousands of hysterically angry e-mails denouncing him as an administration stooge -- for writing that Stephen Colbert bombed at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Cohen responds in amazement in today's column, "Digital Lynch Mob":

It seemed that most of my correspondents had been egged on to write me by various blogs. In response, they smartly assembled into a digital lynch mob and went roaring after me. If I did not like Colbert, I must like Bush. If I write for The Post, I must be a mainstream media warmonger. If I was over a certain age -- which I am -- I am simply out of it, wherever "it" may be. All in all, I was -- I am, and I guess I remain -- the worthy object of ignorant, false and downright idiotic vituperation. ...

But the message in this case truly is the medium. The e-mails pulse in my queue, emanating raw hatred. This spells trouble -- not for Bush or, in 2008, the next GOP presidential candidate, but for Democrats. The anger festering on the Democratic left will be taken out on the Democratic middle. (Watch out, Hillary!) I have seen this anger before -- back in the Vietnam War era. That's when the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party helped elect Richard Nixon. In this way, they managed to prolong the very war they so hated.

The hatred is back. I know it's only words now appearing on my computer screen, but the words are so angry, so roiled with rage, that they are the functional equivalent of rocks once so furiously hurled during antiwar demonstrations.

Perhaps the Right got this insane during the Clinton presidency, but I doubt it. When we disagreed with columnists who overall remained sympathetic to conservatism, we didn't send hate e-mail (or regular mail) by the thousands accusing them of being Clinton stooges. There was certainly a segment of irrational people involved in the debate, but they didn't control it the way that the analogous segment on the Left appears to do now. We see it in the rise of MoveOn and International ANSWER as significant political forces on the Left. Now Cohen has felt its power, and he sees its danger.

It occurs in the blogosphere as well. Many on the Left have well-written and provocative arguments, sometimes overheated but usually not irrational. However, a large segment rely on nothing but schoolyard namecalling (as I noted here) and a deep, unrelenting anger colors all of their discourse. It's not just the blogs, either. Not a day goes by when I don't receive some meandering and hyperbolic rant from anonymous individuals with fake e-mail domains like "bushboy.org" who appear to lack the courage of running their own blog. These inevitably wind up in my spam folder, as they come to me via mass e-mail addressed to an ever-increasing number of conservative writers. I'm not sure what purpose these misspelling-filled missives serve, but they certainly provide entertainment, although of a different sort than its senders intend.

The irrational Left appears more enthusiastic about venting than argument. Cohen, a liberal columnist, found this out when he dared challenge the Colbert orthodoxy. Instead of reasoning with a columnist that they should consider a political ally, they filled his mailbox with hatred, venom, and ridiculous accusations of war-mongering. As Cohen writes, it's difficult to see how this will convince anyone of the rightness of their cause, and this impulse to vent rage instead of offering argument will backfire in November. If all you give is rage, then eventually people assume you have no argument, and vote accordingly.

UPDATE: Jim Hill notes the conversation on the Washington Post Writer's Group blog. He has the right perspective on how the media should view the Internet and the blogosphere:

If we in newspaper journalism would see this as an opportunity and not as a threat, we could turn it into our salvation, not our demise. It's taken awhile, but I think the newspaper industry now gets it. Little signs keep emerging that newspaper publishers are moving rapidly to find their niche in cyberspace, and earning the profits to maintain the quality journalism this country must have for democracy to thrive. Today's online reading of Romenesko brought two promising reports, which I'll share here and here. One is that Wall Street is reacting positively to the online growth of newspapers, even if circulation of the "dead-tree editions" continues to slide. Another, about journalism in the Boston area, casts the Web as being positively Emersonian.

I like that. A year ago, in a forum on blogging in which I took part, I told a questioner that I thought the Founders were surely smiling seeing all the blog activity that was developing on the Internet. We're finally having a national conversation -- all you need is a modem to take part.

Welcome to the conversation, Jim, even if it gets a little strained from time to time.

UPDATE II: Josh Trevino at Swords Crossed give us the latest example of this rage-hatred -- bloggers on the Left are chortling with glee over the news that Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom takes anti-anxiety medication. Making fun of people with real problems is of the same piece as making fun of people's names, and you won't be surprised to see some of the "Special Ed" crowd involved in this one.

Smoother Landing For Hayden?

The New York Sun reports that although the nomination of General Michael Hayden to be director of the CIA has aroused some complaints, few Democrats have openly and directly opposed his appointment. David Donadio writes that a retirement from the Air Force might be enough to get a relatively painless confirmation:

Although committee members were hesitant about expressing their support for General Hayden yesterday, few Democrats offered serious reservations to his nomination, and several Republicans expressed wholehearted support. There was a widespread feeling, however, that General Hayden might smooth his passage through the committee if he were to resign from the military.

"General Hayden is more than qualified for the position of CIA director," Senator Bond, a Republican of Missouri, said. "The job of CIA director is to track down and stop terrorists. That's exactly what General Hayden has been doing. His exemplary military background and his recent assignment running America's 'early warning' terrorist surveillance system are clear strengths that only highlight the critical intelligence experience that [he] brings to the CIA. I look forward to the confirmation process, but see no evidence that General Hayden is anything but highly qualified for the position." ...

But Ms. Feinstein also expressed her admiration for the nominee. "We need a respected, competent intelligence professional who can command respect and manage this growing agency," she said. "Based on what I know so far, General Michael Hayden appears to fit that bill."

Senator Mikulski, a Democrat of Maryland, echoed the concerns of her Democratic colleagues, but added that she has "enormous respect for [Hayden] ... He is competent, candid, and has a spirit of reform," a remark that summarizes Senate opinion of him.

So far, it appears that if the administration was spoiling for a fight over the NSA surveillance program with Hayden's nomination, the White House may find itself disappointed. Only Russ Feingold and, oddly, Arlen Specter have made it an issue over the past few days, and they appear to be in the minority. Feingold may have hoped to rally his caucus behind his threat to combat the general on terrorist surveillance, but so far his colleagues have only mentioned it in passing before lauding Hayden's qualities to the press.

All of this could be a feint, of course, designed to lull the White House and the media into a false sense of peace and bipartisanship. However, it appears that two different dynamics are in play, at least for everyone but Feingold and Specter. First, the popularity of the NSA program has finally dawned on the politicos, and they appear to have lost the stomach for another round of Orwellian hysteria over a program that has helped keep the nation safe since 9/11. They also know that George Bush wants nothing more than to go another round with Democrats, forcing them into the position of demanding that the country honor the civil rights of foreigners suspected of terrorist activity. Going into a midterm election, the last problem the Democrats need is another beating on national security.

Second, and more significant in the long run, is a general agreement among those who know the intel community that Hayden is the right man for the job. While the press paints Hayden's military connections as a potential Trojan Horse for Donald Rumsfeld to control the CIA, knowledgeable people on the inside know that the opposite is true: Hayden represents an effort for the kind of reform envisaged by the 9/11 Commission when they demanded the creation of the Directorate of National Intelligence. That has its own issues, but Defense control of the CIA isn't among them. Hayden will probably acquiesce to the condition that he take his retirement from the Air Force before assuming the new position, defusing even that concern.

All of this hinges on the confirmation hearings, and its structure benefits Feingold. He can ask anything he wants in his time allotted, and we can expect him to attempt to push Hayden into a corner, especially on the NSA program. The other Democrats on the panel will watch closely. If Feingold can draw blood, they will sense it like sharks and attempt to move in for the kill. If Feingold comes up empty -- like he and his colleagues did against Samuel Alito and especially John Roberts -- they will hastily call it a day and move Hayden forward with little resistance. The Democrats can't afford the hat trick on committee stupidity in one election cycle. They've already given the GOP enough material for several campaign commercials from the Judiciary Committee.

We may have stumbled into a position where Congress takes the right action for the right reasons. If the confirmation hearings go smoothly -- and Hayden has always performed impressively with Congress -- he should move into Langley by the first of next month.

Cuba Giving China And India Access To Caribbean Oil

The US and Cuba have had a pact in place for almost thirty years dividing the Florida Straits between the two nations for ownership of the oil and natural gas underneath the ocean. Up to now, Cuba has been unable to drill for the resources, and the US has been unwilling to do so. Now, with energy prices skyrocketing due to rising demand, Cuba has leased its field to China and India. Both will begin drilling within sight of the US, giving Cuba much-needed hard currency while demonstrating the lack of US resolve in mustering its own resources:

With only modest energy needs and no ability of its own to drill, Cuba has negotiated lease agreements with China and other energy-hungry countries to extract resources for themselves and for Cuba.

Cuba's drilling plans have been in place for several years, but now that China, India and others are involved and fuel prices are unusually high, a growing number of lawmakers and business leaders in the United States are starting to complain. They argue that the United States' decades-old ban against drilling in coastal waters is driving up domestic energy costs and, in this case, is giving two of America's chief economic competitors access to energy at the United States' expense.

"This is the irony of ironies," Charles T. Drevna, executive vice president of the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, said of Cuba's collaboration with China and India. "We have chosen to lock up our resources and stand by to be spectators while these two come in and benefit from things right in our own backyard."

Inaction on the part of the US on our side of the straits may result in a loss of our reserves. No one knows whether the Cuban fields have a connection to our own, and the Chinese and Indian drilling could wind up depleting our own oil and natural gas. That would allow the Chinese and the Indians to get a strategic advantage in energy supply, and in the case of the former allow yet another potentially hostile player control world oil sales along with the kleptocracies in the Middle East. It also puts a few bucks into Castro's pocket, helping his grip on power, but there's little to be done about that.

We can do something about the potential encroachment on our oil fields by lifting the bans on off-shore drilling and increasing the domestic production of oil and natural gas. The Times notes that we could become self-sufficient for energy for the next generation just on the known oil and gas reserves off our shores, and that does not count the ANWR preserve. The commodities market for oil would deflate with the US running on its own energy production, greatly reducing the revenue to potentially dangerous regimes. At the least, we can shed our trade with Venezuela and the Middle East, focusing on imports from Canada and Mexico instead, and extending the life of our reserves in the process. That would send a message that we have the will to reach self-sufficiency as well as remind some regimes how much they rely on American petrodollars and the inflated price of oil for survival.

Congress needs to create a real energy plan that supports vastly increased domestic production in the short term. That will provide the only means to alleviate market shock from the exponential increases in demand from the two most populous nations in the world. If properly staged, we can use the savings on energy costs to fund the architecture of a new energy delivery system -- perhaps hydrogen, or a switch to nuclear-generated electricity for all transportation needs. That would take a generation to establish, and we have at least that much reserve to get the nation to that goal.

Instead, we will probably continue to dream up conspiracy theories about greedy oil companies which have few investment choices, given the restrictions on drilling and refining that the US has imposed on the domestic industry. And while we travel through the fascination of paranoia, we will allow our economic and military rivals to steal our reserves out from underneath us -- literally -- and pretend that their drilling somehow doesn't carry the same environmental problems as our drilling would.

The World According To Mahmoud

The letter hailed as a potential breakthrough in the Iranian nuclear impasse turned out to contain no new initiatives towards a resolution to the crisis, according to various news reports quoting Condoleezza Rice and a number of unnamed sources within the administration. In fact, it never mentioned Iran's nuclear program directly, instead attempting to give George Bush a perspective on history from an Islamist perspective.

The New York Times reports that the letter didn't make much of an impression:

The letter, described in Tehran as the first direct communication from an Iranian leader to an American president since 1979, was said by the spokesman to analyze "the roots of the problems" with the West. But American officials said it was a meandering screed that proposed no solutions to the nuclear issue. ...

American officials said the letter, which was not released, was 16 pages in Persian and 18 pages in an English translation that Iran provided. The officials said the letter offered a philosophical, historical and religious analysis of Iran's relationship to the West, and asked questions about the cost to the world of the establishment of Israel, while another section asserted that Western-style democracy had failed humanity.

In fact, the letter did more than discuss the costs of Israel; according to the Post, Ahmadinejad questioned why a Christian would support Jews at all. The Iranian leader and messianic Muslim took it upon himself to school Bush, a devout Christian, about the tenets of Christianity:

In the letter, Ahmadinejad sharply criticized Bush on a broad range of fronts, suggesting that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, abuses of detainees in U.S.-run facilities from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and support for Israel were inconsistent with Bush's Christian faith.

"Can one be a follower of Jesus Christ, the great Messenger of God . . . . But at the same time, have countries attacked: the lives, reputations and possessions of people destroyed," read the letter, which was delivered by Swiss diplomats, whose embassy received it in Tehran from Ahmadinejad's foreign minister.

The AP does not report on specifics, but includes more of the general points Ahmadinejad tried to hit in his omnibus screed:

The letter from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made only an oblique reference to Iran's nuclear intentions. It asked why ''any technological and scientific achievement reached in the Middle East region is translated into and portrayed as a threat to the Zionist regime.''

Otherwise, it lambasted Bush for his handling of the Sept. 11 attacks, accused the media of spreading lies about the Iraq war and railed against the United States for its support of Israel. It questioned whether the world would be a different place if the money spent on Iraq had been spent to fight poverty.

''Would not your administration's political and economic standing have been stronger?'' the letter said. ''And I am most sorry to say, would there have been an ever- increasing global hatred of the American government?"

In a show of the looking-glass world in which the Iranian government appears to live, their chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani called the letter a "diplomatic opening", despite the complete lack of any proposals, new or old, to resolve the impasse. The Iranian diplomatic corps somehow considers an arrogant letter from Muslims attempting to teach Christianity an invitation for more conversation. The letter did not even contain any invitation for further talks, instead limiting itself to a written lecture on how Ahmadinejad sees the world -- a perspective that the Iranian president has already made clear in his frequent and well-publicized diatribes on Israel and the West.

Ahmadinejad has his reasons for this tactic, and most of them have to do with internal Iranian politics and his own messianic version of Shi'ism. Ahmadinejad has tried to wrap himself in the mantle of the Ayatollah Khomeini much more than his predecessor Rafsanjani, and this effort duplicates one by the leader of the Islamic Revolution, who wrote a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev urging the Soviet leader to study Islam. It also hearkens back to the Prophet himself, who often wrote letters to his enemies while he prepared to destroy them militarily, in an effort to demonstrate mercy by offering them the chance for conversion first.

This will play well on two levels with the Iranians. The state-controlled media will spin this into a grand offer of friendship and understanding -- perhaps Ahmadinejad even sees it that way -- designed to appeal to the devout and the secular alike. The latter may see this as an attempt to open a diplomatic channel for the resolution of the conflict, in the manner of Khomeini. The devout will appreciate the allegory and homage to Mohammed, cementing Ahmadinejad's claim to be a true follower of the Prophet and convincing them of his ability to best the Great Satan in this crisis.

The US, so far, has taken the correct tone. Until Iran offers a real solution to their repeated violations of the NPT, or at least starts to discuss the problem seriously, then historical lectures are meaningless. There is no interest in Ahmadinejad as a lecturer in history or Christianity, and the issue at hand is not the Iraq War. The State Department should consider releasing its contents in order to demonstrate the lack of substance within the document. This effort doesn't even qualify as a speed bump in the progression of efforts to hold Iran accountable for its nuclear program and uranium enrichment.

Feinstein: I'm Inclined To Support Hayden

Neil Cavuto interviewed Senator Dianne Feinstein about the nomination of General Michael Hayden as the replacement of Porter Goss at the CIA. Far from hostile to the appointment, Feinstein praised Hayden as a "superb choice" for the Director position. She claimed than anyone familiar with the intelligence community would have listed Hayden as one of the three top picks for the position, and that while she would not commit to any vote before a thorough hearing, at the moment she was "inclined" to support Hayden's nomination.

Here is a rough transcript of the interview:

DF: ... Good to be here, Neil, but I think you have that a little bit wrong. I haven't been blasting that choice at all. As a matter of fact, I think that he is a very competent intelligence professional, which I think the CIA needs at this particular point in time. The only problem with it is that the CIA has been traditionally -- traditionally, I say -- been a civilian agency, and there is concern about the fact that he is a four-star general. But I think he is a superior human being, I think he would be very competent, I think he would restore morale and do what he has to do within the agency.

NC: ... Is there concern on your part? Do you have concerns about his military credentials?

DF: Yeah, ideally I'd like it to be a civilian. If you ask me, and I think it's true of everyone up here, give me three choices and Mike Hayden would be on everybody's three choices. A majority. Number one, he is totally qualified for this post. About 80% of intelligence dollars is controlled by Defense. There is concern about that. On the other hand, General Hayden can be independent. He can stand up, he's done that before, and hopefully he would be willing to do that again. I think he'll bring in some superb professionals to surround himself with, and particularly his number two, which I think is important. ...

NC: All things being equal and the vote were tomorrow, how would you vote?

DF: That's a hypothetical question, I know better than that. I --

NC: Would you be inclined to support him or reject him?

DF: Look, I think this is a very good appointment. I want to get through the hearing, there are a number of questions -- I think the NSA electronic surveillance will come up. I would anticipate that I would be supportive, and I want to be supportive. This is not a business as usual time. We have to get on with it, and we have to get this replacement in place as soon as possible. At the same time, we need to do our due diligence. We need to ask the questions and get the answers. So I would hope that Senator Roberts would schedule the hearing next week so we can get on with it and get it done by Memorial Day. ...

....

DF: He's superbly qualified, that's the bottom line for all of this.

It sounds as if the hearings may not provide the drama we once feared, or that the White House may have wanted. Feinstein sounded like more of a Hayden booster than Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee, as well as her counterpart on the SSCI, Saxby Chambliss. This was just a hair shy of a ringing endorsement, military commander or not, and she acknowledged that the appointment of Stansfield Turner to the same position during the Carter administration did set a precedent for a military commander to lead the CIA.

It will be interesting to see how the rest of her caucus reacts to these comments.

Captured AQ Documents: "Every Year Is Worse Than The Previous Year"

CENTCOM announced today that they had captured al-Qaeda correspondence in Iraq that discusses the state of the insurgency, especially around Baghdad but also around the entire country. Far from optimistic, the documents captured in an April 16th raid reveal frustration and desperation, as the terrorists acknowledge the superior position of American and free Iraqi forces and their ability to quickly adapt to new tactics.

In these passages, the AQ terrorist author -- described as a person "of significance" due to the extensive analysis applied -- often refers to the elected Iraqi government as the "Shi'ites":

A glance at the reality of Baghdad in light of the latest events (sectarian turmoil)

1. It has been proven that the Shiites have a power and influence in Baghdad that cannot be taken lightly, particularly when the power of the Ministries of Interior and Defense is given to them, compared with the power of the mujahidin in Baghdad. During a military confrontation, they will be in a better position because they represent the power of the state along with the power of the popular militias. Most of the mujahidin power lies in surprise attacks (hit and run) or setting up explosive charges and booby traps. This is a different matter than a battle with organized forces that possess machinery and suitable communications networks. Thus, what is fixed in the minds of the Shiite and Sunni population is that the Shiites are stronger in Baghdad and closer to controlling it while the mujahidin (who represent the backbone of the Sunni people) are not considered more than a daily annoyance to the Shiite government. The only power the mujahidin have is what they have already demonstrated in hunting down drifted patrols and taking sniper shots at those patrol members who stray far from their patrols, or planting booby traps among the citizens and hiding among them in the hope that the explosions will injure an American or members of the government. In other words, these activities could be understood as hitting the scared and the hiding ones, which is an image that requires a concerted effort to change, as well as Allah’s wisdom.

The author of this analysis acknowledges two truths. First, rather than representing any real existential threat to the government, the insurgency only rises to the level of a "daily annoyance". This clashes with the depiction in the American media of the Zarqawi network as a mass destabilizer, a description that even AQ rejects. The terror analyst also recognizes that the tactics used by the terrorist network have largely alienated even the Sunnis by killing those who represent no threat to AQ -- the "scared and the hiding ones". AQ, he says, needs an image makeover.

2. The strength of the brothers in Baghdad is built mainly on booby trapped cars, and most of the mujahidin groups in Baghdad are generally groups of assassin without any organized military capabilities.

3. There is a clear absence of organization among the groups of the brothers in Baghdad, whether at the leadership level in Baghdad, the brigade leaders, or their groups therein. Coordination among them is very difficult, which appears clearly when the group undertake a join[t] operations.

This passage admits that the foreign insurgents not only do not have any organization or military capabilities, but also resist coordination. In some ways, that makes discovering and neutralizing them more difficult, but it also keeps AQ from holding any territory or controlling the area in any meaningful way. Their assets in Baghdad cannot even coordinate with each other to carry out joint operations, indicating a poor system of communications -- likely brought about by American and Iraqi offensives against the network.

4. The policy followed by the brothers in Baghdad is a media oriented policy without a clear comprehensive plan to capture an area or an enemy center. Other word, the significance of the strategy of their work is to show in the media that the American and the government do not control the situation and there is resistance against them. This policy dragged us to the type of operations that are attracted to the media, and we go to the streets from time to time for more possible noisy operations which follow the same direction.

This direction has large positive effects; however, being preoccupied with it alone delays more important operations such as taking control of some areas, preserving it and assuming power in Baghdad (for example, taking control of a university, a hospital, or a Sunni religious site).

This is a frank admission that the only effect that AQ has made is to convince the media -- presumably the American media -- that the situation cannot be controlled, despite their acknowledgement that they represent nothing more than a nuisance. It also cautions against falling in love with seeing themselves on the TV, because the cost of such operations results in a lack of assets for holding real territory. Right now, they cannot even hold a university, let alone a city or suburb.

At the same time, the Americans and the Government were able to absorb our painful blows, sustain them, compensate their losses with new replacements, and follow strategic plans which allowed them in the past few years to take control of Baghdad as well as other areas one after the other. That is why every year is worse than the previous year as far as the Mujahidin’s control and influence over Baghdad.

The terrorists realize that their control over the Sunni Triangle -- their power base -- has waned with each passing year. It also acknowledges the great strength of the American military: its ability to quickly adapt and persevere. The "clear and hold" strategy adopted by military commanders in conjunction with the training of the Iraqi army has forced AQ to the brink of irrelevancy, and they know it.

5. The role that the Islamic party and the Islamic Scholars Committee play in numbing the Sunni people through the media is a dangerous role. It has been proven from the course of the events that the American investment in the Party and the Committee were not in vain. In spite of the gravity of the events, they were able to calm down the Sunni people, justify the enemy deeds, and give the enemy the opportunity to do more work without any recourse and supervision. This situation stemmed from two matters:

n First, their media power is presented by their special radio and TV stations as the sole Sunni information source, coupled with our weak media which is confined mainly to the Internet, without a flyer or newspaper to present these events.

n Second, in the course of their control of the majority of the speakers at mosques who convert right into wrong and wrong into right, and present Islam in a sinful manner and sins in a Muslim manner. At the same time we did not have any positive impact or benefits from our operations.

In other words, the Americans are winning the media war in Iraq. That's something that the American media has yet to report in any substantive way. The memo also indicates that the mosques have largely turned against the insurgents, apparently excoriating them for sinfulness. Their continuing murder of Iraqi civilians and police have only made that impression worse.

6. The mujahidin do not have any stored weapons and ammunition in their possession in Baghdad, particularly rockets, such as C5K Katyosha or bomber or mortars which we realized their importance and shortage in Baghdad. That was due to lack of check and balance, and proper follow-ups.

The insurgents have finally run low on ammunition, and AQ cannot resupply them in Baghdad. That sounds like a critical tipping point for AQ in Baghdad.

7. The National Guard status is frequently raised and whether they belong to the Sunnis or Shiites. Too much talk is around whether we belong to them or not, or should we strike and kill their men or not?

It is believed that this matter serves the Americans very well. I believe that the Committee and the Party are pushing this issue because they want to have an influence, similar to the Mujahidin’s. When and if a Sunni units from the National Guard are formed, and begin to compete with the mujahidin and squeeze them, we will have a problem; we either let them go beyond the limits or fight them and risk inciting the Sunnis against us through the Party’s and the Committee’s channels.

I believe that we should not allow this situation to exist at all, and we should bury it before it surfaces and reject any suggestion to that effect.

The terrorists understand that their only hope in fighting the Iraqi army is if the Sunnis do not enlist. As soon as the Sunnis start enlisting in large numbers, AQ runs the risk of murdering family members of the dwindling support they currently still have. Integrating the Iraqi Army will provide the biggest blow to AQ ambitions in the nation, and almost guarantees to put them on the run for good.

The rest of the document evaluates the commanders in the field for AQ, and they sound like a sorry lot. The expertise of the Baghdad commander is limited to transporting cars for conversion to booby-traps; otherwise, the analyst notes, he's rather "simple" and has no grasp of strategic matters. The commander for Northern al-Karkh worries about his own personal security, because the Americans have his picture and voice print -- so all he does is hide out.

At the end, we find this gem:

Northern al-Karkh groups are estimated at 40 mujahid, so is the Southern Karkh. They could double that number if necessary. Al-Rassafah groups in general is estimated at 30 mujahidin as I was informed by the commander of al-Rassafah. These are very small numbers compared to the tens of thousands of the enemy troops. How can we increase these numbers?

This plaintive assessment shows how weakened Zarqawi has become at the hands of the Americans. Between the three commands in the Baghdad area, AQ has a grand total of 110 mujahid, admittedly no match for the thousands of American troops in Baghdad and the thousands of Iraqi troops we are training and putting into play. No wonder Zarqawi has given up on suicide missions -- he has almost nothing left.

This document shows that we have just about triumphed over the AQ network in Iraq, and AQ knows it. Hopefully, the American media might finally start reporting it.

UPDATE: Added the final quote and edited the description.

UPDATE II: Michelle Malkin isn't holding her breath about the press covering this, but my good friend and fellow NARNian John at Power Line notes that the AP actually did report on the documents. They did manage to miss the point about how they have been successful only in manipulating the American media.

UPDATE III: Welcome to Instapundit and Lucianne readers!

Courage And Cowardice (Updated and Bumped)

Please see Update III below -- the identification in the London Times was incorrect.

The London Times reports on the final days of Atwar Bahjat, an Iraqi woman viciously murdered by terrorists of one type or another for her courage in reporting on events in her native Samarra. Bahjat, a television reporter for al-Arabiya television, had built a following for her work in covering the violence in Iraq until kidnappers abducted her while a group of Samarrans did nothing to assist her. Bahjat's body was found later along with those of her cameraman and sound man, and the presumption was that she had been shot to death.

Not so. In fact, Bhajat experienced the worst of the terrorist depravity in he final moments, made clear when a video recording of her execution was sent to her family:

First she was stripped to the waist, a humiliation for any woman but particularly so for a pious Muslim who concealed her hair, arms and legs from men other than her father and brother.

Then her arms were bound behind her back. A golden locket in the shape of Iraq that became her glittering trademark in front of the television cameras must have been removed at some point — it is nowhere to be seen in the grainy film, which was made by someone who pointed a mobile phone at her as she lay on a patch of earth in mortal terror.

By the time filming begins, the condemned woman has been blindfolded with a white bandage.

It is stained with blood that trickles from a wound on the left side of her head. She is moaning, although whether from the pain of what has already been done to her or from the fear of what is about to be inflicted is unclear.

What is painfully and disgustingly clear is the cowardice of the "men" who brutally tortured Bahjat. The Times gives entire gruesome description of her last conscious moments. Without a doubt, the perpetrators used Bahjat to indulge the darkest impulses of their souls, sending her to death in an orgy of violence that defies description. The use of adjectives of any kind cannot possibly do justice to the horror of this murder.

It reveals the cowardice and evil at the heart of terrorists, no matter the cause. When a cruelty grows too banal for them, they come up with ways to increase the depravity. These sick and disgusting cowards use a woman in the most grotesque manner possible, and then send off the video to her family. Of course, their pride doesn't extend to revealing their identities on the video so that they can actually take responsibility for their cowardly cruelty. This is the measure of the terrorists that have declared war not just on us but on liberty wherever it appears. The terrorist groups are nothing but a club for craven sociopaths and psychopaths that use religion as an excuse to get their sick, twisted kicks.

On the other end of the spectrum we have Bahjat and the other journalists who try to cover Iraq by getting into the towns and villages where the action takes place. Bahjat knew that she risked this kind of death every day she reported for al-Arabiya, and yet she insisted on continuing her work in her country. She believed in Iraqi unity -- so much so that she wore a locket in the shape of a united Iraq whenever she appeared on television, a locket that became her trademark. Her torturers removed it before filming her painful death, apparently unable to endure the symbolism of her love for her country.

We need more people like Bahjat, courageous men and women who do their best to inform us of the Iraqi situation. We need people like Michael Yon, Stephen Vincent, and Jill Carroll -- men and women willing to risk their lives and on occasion give them in order to give us the information we need. They provide a much-needed contrast between the civilized world and the world that these terrorists plan for us if these sick murderers succeed in their fight.

UPDATE: Joe Gandelman has a good round-up on this story, and Michelle Malkin nails it when she calls it "insanely evil".

I hope that the Iraqi people get a chance to either read about or view Bahjat's last moments. It will make their course that much more clear and perhaps put an end to support for the various insurgencies and sectarian gangsters in the Sunni Triangle.

UPDATE II: Be sure to read Greyhawk's excellent post at the Mudville Gazette.

UPDATE III: Rusty at The Jawa Report has rather conclusive evidence that the woman in the video was not Bahjat but a Nepalese man murdered by an insurgent group in Iraq in 2004. Bahjat's body had been photographed and clearly was not beheaded.

That does not make this video a hoax, however. It still depicts the gruesome torture and death of an unarmed hostage, and Halal Jabar's description of the video is accurate.

Meet Hillary's Backers, Dear John Edition (Bumped!)

Hillary Clinton may have owe a few explanations for the company she kept on her path to the Senate and her presumed presidential bid in 2008. The explanation for John Burgess and International Profit Associates will make for an interesting read, as the company's owner -- a convicted thief and john of an underage prostitute -- has emerged as one of Hillary's most prominent contributors:

John R. Burgess makes for an improbable courtier of presidents, or of a senator who might become one.

A disbarred New York lawyer with a criminal record for attempted larceny and patronizing a 16-year-old prostitute, Mr. Burgess owns International Profit Associates, a management consulting company in Illinois.

Federal authorities are pressing a sexual harassment suit against the company on behalf of 113 former female employees.

The Illinois attorney general is investigating accusations of deceptive marketing tactics, officials say, and the company has been the subject of 470 complaints to the Better Business Bureau across the nation in the past three years. ...

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has collected more than $150,000 in contributions from executives of International Profit Associates, some as recently as September, and spoke at a company event in 2004. As a group, company officials and their spouses are one of the largest sources of contributions to Mrs. Clinton's re-election campaign.

The IPA has generated a lot of contributions for political candidates, almost all of them prominent Democrats. Rod Blagojevich, the Democratic governor of Illinois, got over $125,000 from IPA and its employees, and wound up returning the money in 2002. So did Andrew Cuomo, the son of former governor Mario Cuomo, who returned $20,000 the same year after running for governor. Oddly, this did not dissuade Hillary from accepting thousands of dollars from this same source after Blagojevich and Cuomo discovered the seamier side of IPA. For instance, Hillary received 38 donations of $2,000 apiece on the same day from IPA employees (12/15/2003). Under a different formulation of the company's name, Clinton received another four donations on 4/16/2005 of $2,000 each from three different people. Those two days account for almost $90,000 Clinton took from IPA employees well after the issues with the company had become known.

What did Burgess do to earn his police record? In 1988, New York disbarred Burgess for stealing over $15,000 from a client's bank account and pled guilty to attempted grand larceny. In 1984, he pled guilty to hiring a 16-year-old prostitute. IPA also has falsely represented Burgess as a White House advisor for small business well after these incidents occurred. A special fund created for reimbursing fraud victims of New York attorneys has shelled out over $30,000 to Burgess clients.

He hasn't done much better since. IPA has an unsatisfactory rating from the Better Business Bureau, which received 470 complaints against the consultancy. The BBB says the company refuses to address core concerns over its high-pressure sales tactics, bad customer service, and aggressive collections. The Illinois attorney general has opened an investigation of IPA for its business practices after receiving over 200 complaints since 2001. And for a politician lauded by feminists for her pioneering career, taking so much money from a company facing a class-action lawsuit for sexual harassment that includes 113 plaintiffs has to look particularly hypocritical -- and will remind voters of the same hypocrisy that arose from her husband's importuning of at least one low-level White House intern.

It seems that Hillary and shady financial backers attract each other. Last Sunday we noted the relationship between the Clintons and billionaire Ronald Burkle, who put Bill Clinton on the payroll in a position that could net the Clintons millions of dollars for almost no effort whatsoever. In March, the New York Sun reported on Hillary's connections to South Korean real-estate financier Hyung Young "Daniel" Lee, who resigned his post as ambassador after his control of a political slush fund came to light. Once again, the Clintons appear determined to grab power through the use of any money they can find, regardless of the source or the association that cash carries.

UPDATE AND BUMP: I have received some encouragement for further investigation into IPA, such as this comment from Catman1:

I became more and more disgusted with the level of corruption in the day to day operations with the company and left them for a different type of consulting company. They refused to send me my last two weeks of pay as punishment for going to a different company. I did attempt to recover the money via Illinois system, but was unsuccessful. They sent a young woman from the company that I knew as a secretary to one of the executives and had given her the title of Human Resources Director. She then testified that she had a signed copy of an employment contract in their files (she hadn't brought the signed copy though, just a blank copy). Needless to say, I had never signed the contract that they showed the administrative judge.

In retrospect, I have always thought that I got off easy because it did take me six or seven months to realize how corrupt this organization was and to then make a decision to leave.

What happened to me is really just a microcosm of what this company does for a living. They go into small businesses and give them a "cut-and-paste" plan to create higher levels of profit and charge them an outrageous price per hour. The cost would be worth it if the results were real increases in profitability. If the process fails in the client company, there is no true recourse or follow up available.

All of which makes it even more curious that Hillary would continue her association with IPA, even after its business practices became well known and even after Andrew Cuomo cut ties with the group. If anyone has any first-hand knowledge of IPA's practices and its association with the Clintons, e-mail me with the subject line "IPA".

Examiner: Time To Veto

The Washington Examiner exhorts George Bush to take an unprecedented step for this administration and veto any emergency spending plan that includes $20 billion in pork. The editorial argues that the White House must establish its authority in spending now or lose it for the rest of the term:

President Bush has frequently portrayed many of his most controversial actions as necessary to protect executive branch prerogatives against usurpations of power by Congress. So it is especially curious that Bush has yet to use the most potent weapon the Founders gave occupants of the Oval Office against Congress: the veto.

If Bush is truly serious about protecting the powers and prerogatives of his office, he will set aside his veto reservations and slam-dunk the emergency funding bill if it comes to his desk in anything remotely resembling the form in which the Senate passed it last week. Bush originally asked for $92 billion to support U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and to assist with hurricane recovery efforts on the Gulf Coast. The House approved the bill substantially as Bush requested.

Things were completely different in the Senate, where the Old Bulls had a field day larding the measure up with nearly $20 billion worth of special-interest earmarks like $700 million for the “Railroad to Nowhere” in Mississippi. A valiant effort by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., to remove a dozen of the worst earmarks failed and the thoroughly stuffed final measure was approved by a wide margin. Passage came within days of release of a highly credible survey that said stopping such spending sprees was the public’s top priority.

The actions of the Senate made clear their contempt for White House intervention. Trent Lott, who has made a dubious name for himself with his arrogant reaction to voter oversight on spending, scoffed at the notion of a presidential veto. The leadership of both caucuses demonstrated the same attitude by stocking their side of the joint conference committee with some of the most notorious porkers in the upper chamber. This does not bode well for the final product.

In fact, it presents Bush with a dilemma. Likely the House members of the conference will succeed in stripping some of the more egregious pork from the final bill, but how much? And how much is enough for Bush to accept? It is highly unlikely that the conference will produce the $92 billion that Bush requested. Can Bush veto anything above that number?

The nightmare scenario for Bush will be a bill that comes in at $100 billion or so, splitting the difference. If Congress passes something in that neighborhood, it will be difficult for Bush to veto it -- and just as difficult for him to sign it. Given his track record, it looks like Bush might try to find an excuse to sign off on the final bill. However, in this case, I think he's more likely to issue a veto in order to fire up the conservative base and get them enthusiastic in time for the November elections.

Carter: Give Money To Elected Terrorists

Jimmy Carter, writing in the International Herald-Tribune, demonstrates the knack for foreign relations that got us the Iranian hostage crisis and limited him to a single, embarrassing term in office. He argues that the suspension of foreign aid to the Palestinians not only hurts innocent citizens but damages prospects for peace by failing to fund terrorists:

Innocent Palestinian people are being treated like animals, with the presumption that they are guilty of some crime. Because they voted for candidates who are members of Hamas, the United States government has become the driving force behind an apparently effective scheme of depriving the general public of income, access to the outside world and the necessities of life.

Overwhelmingly, these are school teachers, nurses, social workers, police officers, farm families, shopkeepers, and their employees and families who are just hoping for a better life. Public opinion polls conducted after the January parliamentary election show that 80 percent of Palestinians still want a peace agreement with Israel based on the international road map premises. Although Fatah party members refused to join Hamas in a coalition government, nearly 70 percent of Palestinians continue to support Fatah's leader, Mahmoud Abbas, as their president. ...

With all their faults, Hamas leaders have continued to honor a temporary cease-fire, or hudna, during the past 18 months, and their spokesman told me that this "can be extended for two, 10 or even 50 years if the Israelis will reciprocate." Although Hamas leaders have refused to recognize the state of Israel while their territory is being occupied, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh has expressed approval for peace talks between Abbas and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel. He added that if these negotiations result in an agreement that can be accepted by Palestinians, then the Hamas position regarding Israel would be changed.

Regardless of these intricate and long-term political interrelationships, it is unconscionable for Israel, the United States and others under their influence to continue punishing the innocent and already persecuted people of Palestine. The Israelis are withholding approximately $55 million a month in taxes and customs duties that, without dispute, belong to the Palestinians. Although some Arab nations have allocated funds for humanitarian purposes to alleviate human suffering, the U.S. government is threatening the financial existence of any Jordanian or other bank that dares to transfer this assistance into Palestine.

It's almost impossble to excerpt this silliness; one has to read the entire essay to get a sense of Carter's capitulation on terror. However, we can at least make a couple of specific points about the former president's argument.

First, Carter uses the Arabic hudna completely without any sense of its context. A hudna has never been understood as a prelude to a lasting peace, but a temporary cease fire of no more than ten years that allows Muslims a chance to gain the upper hand against an enemy. At any time during a hudna the Muslims can end it without warning in order to destroy their infidel enemies. It is a term that arises from the Prophet himself, and has specific meaning and limits. The hudna proposed by Hamas in any case does not carry any promise of recognition for Israel; it appears Carter just made this up out of whole cloth. Perhaps the Hamas spokesman told this to Carter, as he alleges, but Hamas has yet to make this statement publicly -- and to commit to a permanent cease-fire.

Second, the $55 million in tax transfers that the Israelis continue to withhold only belong to the Palestinians as a consequence of the Oslo accords. Those taxes did not exist prior to those agreements, and the Palestinians have never fulfilled their end of the bargain. The Palestinian Authority, founded at Oslo, never disarmed the militias and terrorist groups, nor did they even attempt to do so. Hamas took office and promptly rejected all previous treaties with Israel, including Oslo, and refused to even recognize Israel's right to exist. Since they have explicitly rejected the treaty which produced the revenue in the first place, the money does not belong to the Palestinians. Furthermore, the Israelis have no moral or legal obligation to fund a group or protostate that refuses to recognize Israel and plots for its destruction.

Overall, the essay boggles the imagination. On one hand, Carter acknowledges that the Palestinian people voted to put a known Islamist terrorist group in charge of its protostate in free and fair elections, and in the same breath says that we should not treat that decision as legitimate. If the Palestinians want peace so badly, why did they elect terrorists to office? Just as with the Israelis, we have no obligation to fund Islamist terrorists, no matter who votes for them or how legitimately they do so. If the Palestinians cannot make decisions any better than this, our continued rescuing of them from the consequences of their actions will not teach them any differently.

People like Carter and James Wolfensohn seem to believe that we can buy peace by paying for terrorism. That explains a lot about the Carter presidency and the rise of Islamofascism. Carter once again proves that his ex-presidency only marginally improves on his presidency, but only in the sense that he has less power to keep affairs as screwed up as possible.

UN Aid Workers And Peacekeepers Still Tricking Out Girls

The BBC reports that the United Nations still has not stopped its aid workers and peacekeepers from turning female refugees into prostitutes in order to secure food and water. Some of the victims are as young as eight years old, and the problem is widespread, according to Save The Children:

Young girls in Liberia are still being sexually exploited by aid workers and peacekeepers despite pledges to stamp out such abuse, Save the Children says.

Girls as young as eight are being forced to have sex in exchange for food by workers for local and international agencies, according to its report.

The agency says such abuse is becoming more common as people displaced by the civil war return to their villages.

This behavior was first revealed four years ago, and two years ago the scope of the problem became common knowledge, thanks to a series of reports in the British newspaper The Independent. Since then, Turtle Bay has repeatedly promised to clean house and to put an end to a practice they themselve define as both a war crime and a form of genocide. Two years later and God knows how many victims later, the UN still says it is "investigating".

Can anyone name anything that the UN has done in the last ten years that has actually been beneficial to anyone? Even their aid programs have become nothing more than a cover for the exploitation of defenseless children, and the worst aspect of it is that everyone knows it and does nothing to stop it. In my last post, I talk about the maintenance of UNSC credibility, but how can any organization that is demonstrably and structurally unable to stop this grotesque abuse retain any credibility at all?

The UN makes a great debating society, and if it didn't exist, we'd have to invent it as such. Other than that, we should bring an end to its supposed moral authority in any fashion, and let nations form their own multilateral ties to solve problems like Liberia, Congo, and Darfur. That way, the individual nations can and will be held accountable for their actions -- a mechanism sorely missing at the UN.

Dear Satan, How Are You? I Am Fine ...

The news services are abuzz with the announcement from Teheran that Iran will end 25 years of silence between the Islamic Republic and the US. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will write a letter to George Bush in an attempt to ease tensions between the two nations:

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is writing to U.S President George W. Bush in an attempt to ease mounting tensions between Tehran and the West, an Iranian official said on Monday. ...

Government spokesman Gholamhossein Elham said a letter from Ahmadinejad to Bush would be delivered later on Monday to the Swiss Embassy in Tehran, which represents U.S. interests in the Islamic Republic.

"In this letter, he has given an analysis of the current world situation, of the root of existing problems and of new ways of getting out of the current delicate situation in the world," he told a weekly news conference.

Ahmadinejad had said earlier in the day that he would announce some "important news." It was not immediately clear whether he was flagging the letter to Bush.

One has to wonder what Ahmadinejad would say in a letter to Bush that he hasn't already said publicly. Perhaps the Iranian president can explain more of what he meant when he called for the annihilation of Israel and the United States. Maybe he will instruct Bush on the true history of the Holocaust. It could be an attempt to convert the Christian to Islam, considering Ahmadinejad's belief in the coming global rule of Islam.

Whatever it is, clearly it will not be an agreement to suspend nuclear enrichment and to abide by IAEA rules and regulations. Until Iran agrees to stop its nuclear program, Ahmadinejad can get all the pen-pals he wants, but the UN has to take action against Iran. If the UNSC fails to enforce its own resolutions again with anything more than a sternly-written memo, there will be no deterrent for other nations to go rogue on nukes.

Bush can tell Ahmadinejad that in his reply, but I suspect that the Iranian president will already know the US position. What matters is whether the rest of the world is ready to enforce the NPT, or whether it has become a dead letter, thanks to UN fecklessness.

The New York School For The Irony-Challenged

Former Senator Bob Kerrey has spent his time since retiring from politics as president of the New School University, formerly known as The New School for Social Research (which is the name of one of its subsidiary colleges now). The progressive institution has benefited from Kerrey's political connections, and when he arranged to have one of his former colleagues, now running for President, as a graduation keynote speaker, it seemed an impressive achievement. However, the progressive students and faculty at this progressive college have made it clear that they cannot abide a conservative appearing on their campus for a speech -- because John McCain isn't open-minded enough:

Hundreds of New School students, staffers, and faculty members want the university to rescind its invitation to Senator McCain, who is set to receive an honorary degree and give the keynote speech at the graduation ceremony in two weeks.

The campaign against the Republican of Arizona began three weeks ago, after the New School's president, Bob Kerrey - a former Democratic senator of Nebraska - announced that Mr. McCain would give the speech. Since then, about 1,000 signatures have been collected on paper petitions and at an Internet site, an organizer of the opposition, Harper Keenan, said.

"This ceremony is supposed to represent the culmination of these students' experience at a school that is known for being progressive, liberal, and open-minded," she said. "For the speaker not to represent these values at all is appalling."

Ms. Keenan is the president of Out Proud Environment at New School, a gay and lesbian group on campus. She said many of the group's members take issue with Mr. McCain's votes against gay marriage. They are also upset that he is speaking at the Reverend Jerry Falwell's Liberty University - a fundamentalist, Baptist institution in Virginia - just six days before he comes to the New School.

The irony here is far too attractive to ignore. A group of students and faculty want Kerrey to disinvite McCain because (a) he isn't open-minded like they are, and (b) he's going to associate with Christians in the same week as these progressives. Not only do they want to pass on hearing one of the presumed front-runners for the presidency speak as individuals, they don't believe that anyone on their campus should hear him speak -- lest he corrupt their open-mindedness.

Do I have that about right?

People wonder why speech codes exist on college campuses; this provides a perfect example. Private universities tend to produce people who, rather than broaden their horizons, become narrow-minded and arrogant. They believe that their professors contain the sum of all human wisdom and reject anything that conflicts with their orthodoxy. Therefore, any position that opposes their own not only is wrong, but probably evil and should be silenced. The faculty and administration usually agree, since the students by and large parrot their own positions. Instead of teaching intellectual rigor through research and self-discovery, too many of these professors teach intellectual rigor mortis. The New School students and faculty appear to have succumbed to this affliction.

Bob Kerrey has not. He refused to back down, telling the school in a letter that McCain represents the core values of the school regardless of some political differences they may have. He praised McCain's moral and political leadership and that the school has judged him unfairly. In fact, as Kerrey probably should have pointed out, they have judged him without hearing what he has to say to them -- and if they indeed valued open-mindedness, this wouldn't have been an issue at all.

Caption Contest Winners!

With The Sopranos about to start, it's time to announce the winners of the latest Caption Contest. Just to remind everyone, the subject was this photograph of John Negroponte and Michael Hayden conferring over a pitcher of water:

Here are the winners:

1st place -- Keaukina: "It's a very important test-- you drink it all down, then they see if you leak..."

2nd place -- Hurricane567: Here we see DNI John Negroponte and Gen. Michael Hayden bracing themselves for Washington's 6th Annual Head Butt Days.

3rd place -- Bar Code King: "Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon... er, Minoxodil?"

Honorable Mention #1 -- Billyoblog: "Oh, by the way, you're not related to anybody named Tom, are you ?"

Honorable Mention #2 -- Liberal Goodman: "Let's try it again. First lean right together, then left TOGETHER."

Comments will remain open to honor the winners, slander the judge, come up with more flashes of wit, or for other lunatic rants. Thanks to all who entered, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!

Alaa Arrested

Egyptian blogger and democracy activist Alaa has been arrested by Egyptian authorities, and worse. I'll let Sandmonkey say it in his own words:

Alaa, blogger, co-founder of the egyptian blog aggregator Manalaa and democracy activist, got arrested today during a protest to support the Judiciary's branch fight for independence. He, and about 10 others, were rounded up in the street, beaten up and thrown in a police car. Amongst those who got arrested were at least 3 girls, and the police beat up at least another 2 girls as well.

The way it worked, the police made sure to press the demonstartors close to the egyptian musem, where they cordoned them and wouldn't let them leave, while continiously hurling insults at them. The demonstartors tried to get the police to let them go for half an hour, but no avail. The Police cordon then opend where a group of plainly dressed police officers and thugs rushed in and started beating up the demonstartors and dragging them on the asphalt till they threw them in the police vehicles. The Police also made sure that none of the satalite news channels would be able to get video footage of what they did by not allowing the press to come close and keeping them away the entire time.

Now, I don't know that this will be just a one night arrest thing or if they will try to make an example out of him and keep him arrested for a while. I am still waiting on that piece of news. But by all the gods in heaven, if they keep him more than another day I will start my own campaign and will not rest till we free him like we did AbdelKarim. I will be damned if we let the regime get away with this. So, readers, if things come to that, we will need your help. The Committe to protect bloggers is no more , we are on our own and the regime is getting more desperate, paranoid and brutal by the minute. We will most certainly need your support to get him out, but let's just hope it doesn't come to that.

Let's hope not. We can help by speaking out against Alaa's arrest and making every effort to have our voice heard. Send your concerns to the US Embassy in Cairo using this e-mail address.

UPDATE: Tigerhawk also notices.

Clift: Hillary Is The New Reagan

Newsweek's Eleanor Clift reports on the nascent Hillariphobia creeping through the ranks of Democrats as they begin to seriously consider their presidential prospects in 2008. Clift tries to sell the idea that Hillary Clinton somehow represents the Democratic version of Ronald Reagan, divisive yet full of courageous leadership that her party can ill afford to discard at this political juncture:

The late great Jerry Garcia used to say the Grateful Dead were like black licorice. People who loved them loved them a lot. People who hated them really hated them. "Hillary Clinton is black licorice," says a Democratic strategist. "There's a huge upside, and there's a huge downside. And we don't know how it will balance out."

When was the last time we had such a dominant front runner this early who raises such anxiety about electability? The answer is Ronald Reagan. It took a leap of imagination to believe an aging grade-B movie actor with orange hair could win the presidency. Hillary's supporters are counting on the same act of faith in the political marketplace, but they are far from making the sale. The angst among Democrats borders on insurrection over whether to place their bets for '08 on Hillary.

Orange hair? Excuse me? Maybe Clift has mistaken Ronald Reagan for Strom Thurmond. It's no sillier than mistaking Hillary for the second coming of Reagan, and just as obviously dense.

Reagan may have well been a divisive force in 1976, during his first presidential campaign, when the Rockefeller Republicans still held sway over the Goldwater faction that had performed so disastrously in 1964. However, by the time Reagan ran in 1980, the GOP had fully embraced the limited-government and anti-communist messages he had consistently heralded for his entire political career. The supposedly "divisive" Reagan not only unified the GOP for the first time since Watergate, he also dispensed with that scandal's legacy in unseating Jimmy Carter after a single, pathetic term in office.

The only quality Hillary shares with Reagan is that at one time, a large number of people in their own parties did not trust either one. Unfortunately for Hillary, that season is now, when she wants to take her best shot at the presidency. If another Democrats wins, the best she can hope is that people won't think her too old to run in 2016. Otherwise, she'll have to hope that the GOP can hold the White House for another term in order to run.

What doesn't she have in common with Reagan? Consistency and a philosophical core on which it's based. Hillary has been everything but consistent in her political career. She started off by sitting on the board of Wal-Mart -- until she needed to get populist. She wanted to nationalize health care -- until it lost her husband control of Congress. She supported the war in order to run to the right of the Kerry/Feingold clique. She now wants to occupy a moderate position on abortion publicly while supporting unfettered abortion on demand through her legislative votes.

That's not Reaganesque, it's Clintonesque. Clift should know the difference. However, for someone who cannot tell the difference between orange and black, distinguishing between political consistency and opportunism must be well-nigh impossible.

Bush: We'll Close Gitmo Jail

George Bush told a German interviewer today that he wants to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay but must await a Supreme Court decision on how to try the remaining detainees. Reuters reports from the transcript of the television station ARD that Bush insists that detainees will get their day in court:

President George W. Bush said on Sunday he would like to close the U.S.-run prison at Guantanamo Bay -- a step urged by several foreign leaders -- but was awaiting a Supreme Court ruling on where suspects held there might be tried. ...

Bush was asked by the German public television station ARD how the United States could restore its human-rights image following reports of prisoner abuse.

"Of course Guantanamo is a delicate issue for people. I would like to close the camp and put the prisoners on trial," Bush said in comments to be broadcast on Sunday night.

"Our top court must still rule on whether they should go before a civil or military court. They will get their day in court. One can't say that of the people that they killed. They didn't give these people the opportunity for a fair trial."

This is the first real notice of an intent to shut down the facility since it first opened during the war against the Taliban. Gitmo still holds 480 prisoners, some of whom would be released but cannot be returned to their home countries due to the strong probability of persecution. For instance, a handful of Chinese Uighers -- Muslims in the far west of China -- had qualified for release but could not be sent to China, which fights the Uigher separatists. Albania agreed to accept them instead just this week.

The rest of the Gitmo detainees will face trial in military or civilian court. Until now, the timeframe for those trials was unknown, but if the report from Reuters is accurate, they could begin in months. It would end the controversial use of the naval station at Gitmo to house captured terrorist suspects not killed in battle. That may take some diplomatic heat off of the Bush administration, and if the base can be closed quickly, might help in garnering more stable support for the US initiative against Iran. It could also impact the November elections, if carried out quickly enough.

However, we still have a need to detain terrorists when found that doesn't shunt them into the criminal justice system. We saw the results of that with the farcical trial of Zacarias Moussaoui. All such trials provide is a platform for the political diatribes of the Islamists and yet another chance to manipulate the media to get their message of hate out to their followers. Criminal trials in civil settings assign a status to terrorists that belie their declaration of war on the West. Military tribunals perform effectively enough and still provide justice for those within that system, without giving them a megaphone for their lunacy.

Addendum: I undertook a study of the Gitmo records a few months back. Some of those records got corrupted in an e-mail meltdown (Thunderbird), and I will need a lot of hours to rescue them. I do plan on doing that when I have a couple of days to concentrate on the project. I apologize to those who have waited patiently for the results and those who gave me such wonderful assistance.

One other note: Last year, I attempted to gain access as a journalist to visit Gitmo and provide a first-hand report to CQ readers. I purchased plane tickets and made the arrangements for time off to do so. In the end, however, the military would not recognize bloggers as legitimate journalists, not even after the Weekly Standard allowed me to identify myself as a free-lance writer for their on-line magazine. I had hoped to present a more realistic picture of the detention center as well as the life of our men and women stationed on their corner of Cuba, but I respect the security decision made by the military. Hopefully we can establish our credibility the next time such a situation occurs.

Referral Stat Of The Week

I often check my referral stats to check on the availability of the site as well as which sites send readers to CQ. Occasionally I see surprises in the logs, as I did just now. One intrepid Internet voyager came to CQ based on a Google search for "Playboy mate 2005". Google returns this post as its top match for that search.

Well, welcome to CQ. I hope you get over your disappointment.

The Hayden Flier Hits Serious Turbulence

The nomination of General Michael Hayden to succeed Porter Goss as CIA Director generated some surprising opposition today by an influential Republican Congressman. Peter Hoekstra, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee and a reliable supporter of the war on terror, objects to military leadership at the CIA:

A leading Republican came out against the front-runner for CIA director, Gen. Michael Hayden, saying Sunday the spy agency should not have military leadership during a turbulent time among intelligence agencies. ...

Despite a distinguished career at the Defense Department, Hayden would be "the wrong person, the wrong place at the wrong time," said the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich.

"There is ongoing tensions between this premier civilian intelligence agency and DOD as we speak," Hoekstra said. "And I think putting a general in charge — regardless of how good Mike is — ... is going to send the wrong signal through the agency here in Washington but also to our agents in the field around the world," he told "Fox News Sunday."

If Hayden were to get the nomination, military officers would run the major spy agencies in the United States, from the ultra-secret National Security Agency to the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Hoekstra was not the only Republican to publicly question Hayden's selection as Goss' replacement. Saxby Chambliss, who sits on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, also worries that placing the civilian intelligence agency under the control of a military commander may send a disconcerting message to the organization. They were joined by Dianne Feinstein, who also underscored the intent of having the intelligence agency outside of the control of the military. Joe Biden, who does not have a seat on the SSCI but does join Arlen Specter on Judiciary, also expressed concern that the Pentagon would "gobble up" CIA with Hayden in charge.

One has to wonder why the administration did not consult with Hoekstra and Chambliss before sending out their test balloons on Hayden. The White House knew his confirmation would present difficulties even without having key Republicans in opposition to his appointment. With legislators like Hoekstra and Chambliss publicly objecting to Hayden's nomination, the White House faces yet another botched appointment process. How hard was it to pick up the phone and make a few calls, especially to the GOP members of the committee that would conduct the confirmation hearings?

On the other hand, the concern expressed by Hoekstra and Chambliss is reasonable enough to allow the White House to withdraw Hayden -- if they choose to do so -- without acknowledging any retreat on the NSA surveillance program. The concern over military overreach is an overreaction, especially given John Negroponte's efforts to wrest budgetary control over intelligence from Donald Rumsfeld, but still a legitimate issue for independence in the intelligence community. It allows Republicans to voice their opposition to Hayden while protecting Hayden's NSA project as much as possible.

These two are not on par with Lincoln Chaffee, Arlen Specter, and Olympia Snowe. Hoekstra and Chambliss represent the core of the party in regard to war policy and support. With these defections, I expect the White House to name another candidate by tomorrow morning, probably Mary Margaret Graham or Frances Townsend. Neither will be as good as Hayden, but both will cause little disruption for confirmation.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

Israel Saves Abbas

In a strange, ironic twist, Israel saved Mahmoud Abbas from assassination at the hands of Hamas, the London Times reports this morning. The armed wing of the "political party" had planned on murdering Abbas on a visit to his office in Gaza before Israeli intelligence discovered the plot and stopped Abbas from walking into the trap:

A HAMAS plot to assassinate Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has been thwarted after he was tipped off by Israeli intelligence.

Hamas’s military wing, the Izza Din Al-Qassem, had planned to kill Abbas at his office in Gaza, intelligence sources said.

Abbas, who became president of the Palestinian Authority last year after the death of Yasser Arafat, was formally warned of the danger by the Israelis and cancelled a planned visit to the territory.

The murder plan is the clearest sign yet of the tensions inside the Palestinian Authority between Hamas, which swept to power after elections in January, and Abbas’s Fatah movement.

Hamas leaders, who refuse to recognise the state of Israel, suspect Abbas of obstructing their attempts to govern, which have been hampered by a financial boycott from donor nations. “Hamas considers Abbas to be a barrier to its complete control over Palestine and decided to kill him,” said a Palestinian source who was an adviser to Arafat and is a close acquaintance of Abbas.

This certainly reveals a society in its last stages before an all-out civil war. The lack of any true civilian government in the Palestinian Authority has created this situation, which was the reason that all of the accords giving Arafat power in the territories insisted on the disarming of all militias and terror groups. Arafat may have had a high enough profile and enough support from the Palestinians to accomplish this if he tried; he almost surely was the only person who could have tried it. Instead, he chose to support a series of intifadas and allowed his ostensible rivals to keep their arms -- an indication that they really were not rivals, at least not then.

Now they are political rivals, and even more than that. That comes as a direct result of the defiance shown by Arafat over the years when he supported terrorist attacks instead of consolidating power into the state apparatus. He never clearly understood that the West only really needed him for that one task, and that was partly because the West failed to force any consequences on Arafat for his defiance and refusals. Had Arafat created a real police force instead of a Department of Sinecures for his Fatah fighters and political cronies, Abbas could have exercised some control over the terrorists and militias now.

As it is, no one has the mandate to disarm the various factions. Arafat's death also brought an end to any kind of Palestinian cohesion. Unless the Palestinians wise up and start forming political parties rather than endorsing lunatic terrorist groups, civil war may be the only way to resolve the internal direction of this failed protostate.

Democratic Agenda: The Two-Year Republican Hate-In

The Democrats have announced their agenda if they succeed in taking back the House in November, and as predicted, it focuses on exactly what the Democrats have done for the past six years: hating Republicans. Rather than having much of a legislative agenda, the Democrats plan to run on the promise to launch endless investigations of Republicans and the administration:

Democratic leaders, increasingly confident they will seize control of the House in November, are laying plans for a legislative blitz during their first week in power that would raise the minimum wage, roll back parts of the Republican prescription drug law, implement homeland security measures and reinstate lapsed budget deficit controls.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) said in an interview last week that a Democratic House would launch a series of investigations of the Bush administration, beginning with the White House's first-term energy task force and probably including the use of intelligence in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Pelosi denied Republican allegations that a Democratic House would move quickly to impeach President Bush. But, she said of the planned investigations, "You never know where it leads to."

We know exactly where it will lead, and Pelosi does as well. She displays disingenuity when she claims that the attempt to rehash all of the old complaints that lost them three elections in a row has no ultimate purpose. However, Russ Feingold exposed the real direction of the Democrats with his call for hearings and censure (at the least) of George Bush earlier this year, a move that made Democrats very nervous then but apparently no longer.

The plan to re-open the investigation into Dick Cheney's energy-planning meetings is a perfect case in point. The executive has the right to consult with anyone they see fit in forming policy. In fact, that concept forms the entire basis of executive privilege, and for good reason. If they do not want to reveal their consultants, that is their prerogative. The courts have ruled against the Democrats on at least two occasions on this.

The Democrats, instead of attacking the policy, want to smear the administration instead to undermine it. They wanted to intimidate the White House into backing down through court action instead of the political process. When that didn't work, they stalled Congress on the energy bill for five years. Voters responded to both the Bush energy policy, the Democratic lawsuit about the task force, and the obstructionism on which the Democrats relied -- and they voted more Democrats out of office in the House and Senate.

The voters have spoken on this issue, but the Democrats refuse to listen. Now they want to use this election as yet another referendum on their obstructionism, this time through the use of endless investigations into long-dead issues like the task force. Well, if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, then Democrats may want to schedule a mental-health screening for their leaders.

Not everything the Democrats propose is crazy, however, and the GOP had better take notice. One proposal, an effort to reinstate spending controls through either tax increases or spending cuts, needs to be addressed by the profligate Republican majority. The GOP has a major vulnerability on spending over the past six years, and they need to put their house in order. Conservatives have long warned about the massive increases in federal spending and the effect they will have on the electorate, especially a disheartened GOP base in the midterms. Porked-up emergency spending bills such as those passed by the Senate last week provide Democrats with gilded examples of Republican irresponsibility, examples which are impossible to defend.

Had the Democrats stuck to fiscal responsibility instead of witch hunts, they may have garnered some support from disillusioned Republicans. Their confident declaration of war should rouse these disaffected voters to return to the Republican Party in November, to keep Congress from bringing this nation to a standstill in the middle of a real war against terrorists.

Gaza Uprising Against Hamas

Hamas faces a dangerous situation in the Gaza Strip, once its base of power, as Palestinians went on strike and staged demonstrations over their overdue paychecks. The ruling party in the Palestinian Authority has rapidly dissipated its mandate as its support for terrorism has isolated it from the nations that had been paying civil servant salaries in the territories:

Hundreds of Palestinians staged strikes and demonstrations Saturday in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to demand payment of overdue salaries to government workers — the first public signs of discontent with the Hamas-led Cabinet's handling of a growing financial crisis.

The unrest occurred ahead of a meeting in Gaza late Saturday between Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas and moderate President Mahmoud Abbas. The two, involved in a power struggle since Hamas defeated Abbas' Fatah Party in January's legislative elections, failed to resolve their differences during four hours of talks but agreed to meet again Sunday. ...

Until now, the Palestinian public had heeded calls for patience, largely following the government in blaming the crisis on Western hostility to Hamas.

On Saturday, however, teachers at five schools in the West Bank city of Hebron cancelled classes Saturday — a strike that affected only a small number of the city's schools but marked a change in attitude.

"I haven't received a salary for 66 days. Of course I'm not happy with the government," said one teacher. "I need to live and I need to feed my children." The teacher, a father of six, asked not to be identified, fearing he could lose his job.

This actually represents progress. The Palestinians have ceased to enjoy protection from the folly of their own choices and have to deal honestly with the consequences of electing terrorists to represent them. At first they blamed Israel, and then the West, for two reasons: habit and pride. None of them want to acknowledge that they made the mistake of pushing an Islamist terror organization into government at the same time that other such organizations had declared war on the people sending them money.

The West needs to continue its policy of isolation. The only way to convince the Palestinians that war will bring either their starvation or destruction is to allow them to experience it. If we pay them to make war, why would they bother with peace? For the first time we see a glimmer of hope that the Palestinians may actually grasp why their government has forced them into abject poverty and turned the world against them. If we do not continue this path, we will do nothing but reinforce that the Palestinians will never have to face any consequences for their actions, allowing them to do whatever they please against the Israelis.

Of course, not everyone thinks killing Jews is a bad thing to do, and a collection of them will meet in Doha to urge Muslims to support Palestinians by sending them money to defy the West:

Islamic scholars are to meet in Doha next week to draw up a fatwa, or religious edict, obliging the Muslim faithful to help the internationally isolated Palestinian government headed by Hamas. ...

Ulemas (scholars) as well as other Muslim and Palestinian leaders will "draw up a fatwa on the duty of the ummah (Muslims) and of governments" toward the Palestinians and the Hamas cabinet, Qardawi told a press conference Saturday.

The fatwa will refer to financial aid to the Palestinians as well as offering them moral support, Qardawi said.

He slammed what he called "the duality of the West, which rejects Palestinian democracy after encouraging such a democracy just because it doesn't suit them."

"This is political hypocrisy and we reject it," he said.

Once again, Muslim scholars prove they know nothing about democracy and less about responsible government. Apparently they believe that all democracies agree with each other and that anything produced by a democratically-elected government gets a pass from any criticism. Before the death of Yasser Arafat and the holding of elections in the Palestinian Authority, the West could dupe itself into believing that the terrorist policies of the PA represented only a small fraction of the peace-loving Palestinian people, and that groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah's Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade amounted to nothing more than small groups of agitators. However, after the Palestinians voted in free elections to have terrorists run their protostate and to continue supporting attacks on civilians in Israel, that illusion got stripped from the last of the rose-colored-glasses crowd.

Other nations have no obligation to support terrorism simply because a twisted populace votes for it, and the Palestinians have no right to our money under any circumstances. Nor should they receive a red cent while they actively support the same brand of lunacy that has launched terrorist attacks in the US and Europe. Democracy is about choices, and in the end we show respect to the Palestinians by taking them at their word. They want war, and we're not going to pay for it.

The ulemas should focus their wrath at the Islamic world. For sixty years, the various Islamic nations in the area have used the Palestinians to excuse their own internal and external policies while relegating the Palestinians to camps and degradation. They used the Palestinians' territory to launch two wars against Israel, which forced Israel to grab the West Bank and Gaza Strip so that it could hold the Jordan River as a much smaller frontier against attack in the future. If any nations are the cause of the Palestinian misery, it isn't Israel and the US but Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. None of them have ever accepted responsibility or told the Palestinians to make peace withe Israel and return to normalcy.

Let the imams issue their fatwas. The Islamic world will respond as it always has -- with lots of talk and little else. They need the Palestinians poor and degraded in order to prop up their own regimes. The Palestinians may start to recognize this as well, and rethink who exactly their friends really are.