The Democratic Lineup

Earlier today, the AP published a helpful list of the members of their House caucus that would assume control of the various committees if the Democrats win control of the lower chamber in the mid-term elections. While the list reflects the current ranking members of the existing panels, at least one comes as a surprise.

Jane Harman has served as the ranking member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence since 2002. Upon gaining control of the House, one would expect Harman to ascend to the chair of this panel. However, she has lost favor with Nancy Pelosi for her support of the war in Iraq and other aspects of the overall war on terror. Harman also was one of the Congressional contingent that received briefings on the two NSA programs that caused such an uproar the past couple of months, until the Democrats found out that the American electorate strongly supported them.

Harman, however, is not listed as the member that will assume the chair if the Democrats win control this fall. Instead, the Democrats have apparently selected Alcee Hastings. Hastings has entered a lot of flowery language about his career on his official member page, but the most telling is his nickname: "Judge". That's because Alcee Hastings used to be Judge Alcee Hastings, until his impeachment by Congress in 1988 in response to allegations of bribery and perjury. The Democrat-controlled House impeached him and the Democrat-controlled Senate removed him from office on these two counts in 1989.

So instead of having the existing ranking member ascend normally to the chair, the Democrats instead will promote a Representative that their own party helped impeach and convict of bribery and perjury. Despite Harman's long experience in leadership of the committee, she will not chair Intelligence or any other panel. It demonstrates the value system under which Congress will operate if the GOP loses the midterms this November -- and provides yet another reason for conservatives to re-engage.

Addendum: Here is the list of assignments published by the AP, along with the Republicans they would replace.

Agriculture: Collin Peterson, Minn.; Bob Goodlatte, Va.

Appropriations: David Obey, Wis.; Jerry Lewis, Calif.

Armed Services: Ike Skelton, Mo.; Duncan Hunter, Calif.

Budget: John Spratt, S.C.; Jim Nussle, Iowa.

Education and the Workforce: George Miller, Calif.; Howard McKeon, Calif.

Energy and Commerce: John Dingell, Mich.; Joe Barton, Texas.

Financial Services: Barney Frank, Mass.; Mike Oxley, Ohio.

Government Reform: Henry Waxman, Calif.; Tom Davis, Va.

Homeland Security: Bennie Thompson, Miss.; Peter King, N.Y.

House Administration: Juanita Millender-McDonald, Calif.; Vernon Ehlers, Mich.

Intelligence: Alcee Hastings, Fla.; Peter Hoekstra, Mich.

International Relations: Tom Lantos, Calif.; Henry Hyde, Ill.

Judiciary: John Conyers, Mich.; James Sensenbrenner, Wis.

Resources: Nick Rahall, W.Va.; Richard Pombo, Calif.

Rules: Louise Slaughter, N.Y.; David Dreier, Calif.

Science: Bart Gordon, Tenn.; Sherwood Boehlert, N.Y.

Small Business: Nydia Velazquez, N.Y.; Donald Manzullo, Ill.

Ethics: Howard Berman, Calif., or Alan Mollohan, W.Va.; Doc Hastings, Wash.

Broad Strata?

The politically-correct whitewash of the Canadian terror cell has already begun in earnest. The Globe & Mail reports that the RCMP has decided to emphasize the fact that the suspected terrorists came from a "broad strata" of Canadian society:

From an unmarried computer programmer to a university health sciences graduate and the unemployed, the 17 suspects charged in a foiled terrorist plot represent a “broad strata” of Canadian society.

“Some are students, some are employed, some are unemployed,” RCMP assistant Commissioner Mike McDonell said Saturday. ...

Most of the group, who were remanded into custody until their next court appearance on Tuesday, wore street clothes although some appeared in white jump suits.

The majority sported the traditional Muslim male beard. [emphasis mine -- CE]

The RCMP and all of the Canadian government can keep talking about broad strata all day long, but the seventeen have this much in common: they are all Muslim, something that the G&M manages to slyly emphasize in that last line. If the RCMP hopes to jolly Canadian Muslims into feeling comfortable, then their efforts have not paid off:

Alvin Chand, brother of Toronto suspect Steven Vikash Chand, scoffed at the charges outside the courthouse.

“He's not a terrorist, come on, he's a Canadian citizen” Mr. Chand said of his brother. “The people that were arrested are good people. They go to the mosque. They go to school, go to college.”

Aly Hindy, an imam at the Salaheddin Islamic Centre in nearby Scarborough, said the centre's mosque had been monitored by security agencies for years. He said Muslims were once again being falsely accused.

“It's not terrorism. It could be some criminal activity with a few guys, that's all,” said Mr. Hindy.

“We are the ones always accused.”

Gee, why does he suppose that might be? Is he prepared to argue that their possession of three tons of ammonium nitrate was meant for a new 4-H club project, perhaps?

The only broad strata at work is the network of multicultural apologists that will attempt to make themselves feel good by ignoring the obvious connection between these suspects, the one that even a child could detect from the list of suspects and their involvement in Islamist websites. That broad strata will go to their deaths rather than admit that radical Islam comprises a threat against Western civilization. Unfortunately, they will take the rest of us with them.

I'm Angry, I'm Foolish, And Dang It, People Really Dislike Me

The picture of the day comes from Andy Aplikowski of Residual Forces, who managed to get his picture taken with future Senatorial hopeful Al Franken.

Al looks thrilled to meet his constituents, doesn't he? Perhaps that might be because Andy's holding a Norm Coleman campaign sign.

UPDATE: Doug at Bogus Gold has one almost as good. By the way, Doug reports that Franken had a good sense of humor about this.

Northern Alliance Radio On The Air Today

The NARN once again takes to the airwaves today on AM 1280 The Patriot. The opening act will cover the end of the state Republican convention, while the second half will take on the issues of the day. Chief among them, I'm sure, will be the terror bust in Toronto and the controversy around the DHS grant allocations that led Re. Peter King to accuse Michael Chertoff of declaring war on New York City.

Be sure to listen on the Internet stream, and call us at 651-289-4488 to join the conversation!

Canadians Used Internet Monitoring To Stop Terror Attack

The Canadian intelligence service monitored Internet communications to identify and track the homegrown jihadists rounded up in last night's raids, according to the Toronto Star. The investigation began two years ago when agents cracked passwords and gathered communications from the group:

Last night's dramatic police raid and arrest of as many as a dozen men — with more to come — marks the culmination of Canada's largest ever terrorism investigation into an alleged homegrown cell.

The chain of events began two years ago, sparked by local teenagers roving through Internet sites, reading and espousing anti-Western sentiments and vowing to attack at home, in the name of oppressed Muslims here and abroad.

Their words were sometimes encrypted, the Internet sites where they communicated allegedly restricted by passwords, but Canadian spies back in 2004 were reading them. And as the youths' words turned into actions, they began watching them.

According to sources close to the investigation, the suspects are teenagers and men in their 20s who had a relatively typical Canadian upbringing, but — allegedly spurred on by images of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan and angered by what they saw as the mistreatment of Muslims at home — became increasingly violent.

Police say they acquired weapons, picked targets and made detailed plans.

The group had developed a list of targets, according to the Star's sources, and an impressive list at that. With their three tons of ammonium nitrate, they could have selected the Canadian Security Intelligence Service offices in Toronto, Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, or any of the nearby population centers for maximum casualties. They appeared to have particular interest in the CSIS due to media reports of racial and religious profiling. It comes as one of the war's most pungent ironies that these Muslims got captured by the very people they targeted and offered more proof of the wisdom in considering Islam an important review criterion.

The issue of Internet monitoring has some in the US uncomfortable about breaches of privacy. However, the terrorists use that as a decentralized communication method, and a willful refusal to investigate these communications is sheer folly, as this raid attests. Should the Canadians have eschewed their investigation -- and waited until this group killed hundreds or thousands of people before knowing anything about them? The Internet is not a private network, as some could argue the phone systems provide. Communications are not point-to-point but broadcast, and the expectation of privacy in Internet communications should have disappeared long ago.

If we want to catch these people before they strike, then we had better know when, where, and how they communicate for coordination and recruitment, and be prepared to stop them as the CSIS has apparently done today. (via Stop The ACLU)

UPDATE: ThreatsWatch notes this development as well, and reminds Americans that the CSIS is not unlike the NSA.

State GOP: No Taxation Without Voter Approbation

The Minnesota Republican convention overwhelmingly rejected the efforts of the current state legislature to fund a Twins stadium through the imposition of taxes without voter input, with 76% of all delegates adding a platform statement requiring any such revenue device to be put before the voters affected. This answers a bipartisan effort that has saddled the seven-county Metro area with a sales tax addition that will cost Twin Cities shoppers millions of dollars, all going to fund a new playground for millionaires:

A new state Republican Party platform plank calling for voter approval of local sales taxes for professional sports stadiums was overwhelmingly adopted Friday by state convention delegates.

The vote, which received 76 percent of the delegates' support, was a rebuff to Gov. Tim Pawlenty and dozens of Republican legislators who backed a 0.15 percent Hennepin County sales tax for a new Twins ballpark in Minneapolis. Pawlenty signed legislation on May 26 authorizing the county board to increase the tax without a referendum.

State Sen. David Hann, R-Eden Prairie, cochairman of the platform committee, noted, however, that the new plank replaced one opposing any use of taxes for sports, entertainment or the arts.

Republicans and Democrats alike put that tax on the metro area, replacing one that solely targeted Hennepin County despite the law prohibiting such taxes without a voter referendum. The House simply ignored its own law, but the state Senate got a little craftier, replacing the Hennepin-only tax with one that will get applied to all applicable sales within the greater metropolitan region. Although it only applies to seven of Minnesota's dozens of counties, it will affect almost half of the state's population. The measure will raise millions of dollars to build a private stadium for the Twins, a team wholly owned by a billionaire and fielded by millionaires.

The plank replaces one that opposed any public funds for stadium construction, but in the end it means the same result. Public investment in a baseball or football stadium has remained unpopular in Minnesota, creating an odd amalgam of fiscal conservatives who resent tax dollars getting redirected to private parties for their own benefit, and liberals who want the money spent on government programs rather than billionaire welfare. The message from the electorate has been consistent, but the legislature has not listened, and that deafness has affected both parties.

The GOP delegates have made clear that Republicans will not support these efforts. If the politicians do not start listening, they will find the next convention a much more hostile environment.

Canada Discovers Terrorist Plot

Canadian authorities rounded up seventeen suspected terrorists in a series of raids overnight, and have unraveled a plot to attack multiple targets in the Toronto area:

Media reports Saturday alleged that the suspects engaged in terror training camps north of Toronto. It was further alleged that a group were plotting to attack targets in Toronto including the headquarters of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. ...

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service aided the RCMP and officers from Toronto, Peel and Durham in detaining the suspects, described by an undercover officer involved in the operation as “terrorists, the ones who hate the West.”

The ethnicity of the group was not clear. A well- placed police source said they are Muslims, but not Arabs, and unconnected to anti-terrorism raids that occurred simultaneously in Britain yesterday.

Quoting anonymous sources, CBC said the targets of the raid are suspected of connections with al-Qaeda. A Canadian Press report said the arrests stemmed from a plot involving explosives.

While the intended target is unclear, the plan was to detonate an explosive device in Ontario, a source who asked not to be named told Canadian Press. “That's the tool of choice for anybody who wants to cause damage.”

Stephen Taylor is live-blogging the press conference now. They confiscated three tons of ammonium nitrate -- the same fertilizer ingredient that Timothy McVeigh used in the Oklahoma City bombing, only three times as much. Of the seventeen, 12 have been publicly identified, while five are apparently underage. The identified suspects are:

1. Fahim Ahmad, 21, of Robinstone Drive, Toronto, Ontario;
2. Zakaria Amara, 20, of Periwinkle Crescent, Mississauga, Ontario;
3. Asad Ansari, 21, of Rosehurst Drive, Mississauga, Ontario;
4. Shareef Abdelhaleen, 30, of Lowville Heights, Mississauga, Ontario;
5. Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43, of Montevideo Road, Mississauga, Ontario;
6. Mohammed Dirie, 22, Kingston, Ontario;
7. Yasim Abdi Mohamed, 24, Kingston, Ontario;
8. Jahmaal James, 23, of Trudelle Street, Toronto, Ontario;
9. Amin Mohamed Durrani, 19, of Stonehill Court, Toronto, Ontario;
10. Steven Vikash Chand alias Abdul Shakur, 25, of Treverton Drive, Toronto, Ontario;
11. Ahmad Mustafa Ghany, 21, of Robin Drive, Mississauga, Ontario;
12. Saad Khalid, 19, of Eclipse Avenue, Mississauga, Ontario.

Canadian authorities have had this group under surveillance since 2004. They do not appear to be foreigners but instead are "homegrown" Islamist terrorists. As the National Post notes today, presciently, the homegrown jihadists appear to be the next wave of terrorists:

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service acknowledged this week it has been investigating groups of "homegrown" extremists. In candid testimony to the Senate national security committee, the agency went on to say that these young followers of the "al-Qaeda ideology" have been plotting against targets within Canada.

"They are not looking to Afghanistan, the U.K. or anywhere else," Jack Hooper, the CSIS Deputy Director of Operations, testified on Monday.

The exact targets of these young terrorists were not revealed, but it is their profile that is most shocking: young Canadian Muslims who have somehow become radicalized while growing up in Canada.

Europe faces a similar situation, and now the question will be whether the US has something brewing in its mosques as well. We have already uncovered the Lodi mosque and the father-son jihadi team there. Canada has similar cultural flexibility as the US; to think that this could metastasize there but not here would be foolish indeed.

Keep an eye on Stephen Taylor's blog for further updates, and I'm certain Steve Janke will also be all over this.

UPDATE: As will Kate at Small Dead Animals. Confederate Yankee wonders whether a 'domestic spying" effort helped root these terrorists out. It certainly seems plausible, although no one knows at the moment how the Canadians sniffed this one out.

UPDATE II: John Stephenson at Stop The ACLU says that the Canadians used Internet monitoring to identify these terrorists. I'm posting on this separately.

Iran Takes The Bait

If the Bush administration used the Condoleezza Rice offer of talks with Iran to seal the deal on sanctions, Iran so far has played directly into their hands. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad confirmed their refusal to stop uranium enrichment -- as required by both the IAEA and the UN Security Council -- as a precondition for direct talks with the US:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Friday defied pressure from foreign leaders to accept a package of incentives in return for ending all nuclear activities, saying Iran will pursue its legal right to develop a peaceful nuclear program.

"Any pressure to deprive our people from their right will not bear any fruit," he was quoted as saying on state-run television.

"Their opposition to our program is not because of their concern over the spread of nuclear weapons," he said. "They are worried that Iran would become a model for other independent countries, especially Islamic countries, for access to advanced technology."

The details of the incentive package — approved at a meeting of foreign ministers from the United States, Germany, Britain, France, China and Russia in Vienna on Thursday — have not been made public, but the proposal is expected to be presented to Iran in the coming days. In a statement, the six countries warned that "further steps" would be taken by the United Nations Security Council if Iran did not comply, but avoided any mention of sanctions or other specific punitive measures.

Diplomats emphasized the unanimity of the major nations in drafting a compromise proposal, and in Vienna on Friday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke of a shared commitment to the offer. "We also have an alternative path if Iran doesn't negotiate," she said.

Obviously, the entire point of drafting the package and offering talks was to get the other nations on board a sanctions regime if Iran did not comply. Russia and China have spent the last few months claiming that diplomacy could resolve the standoff. They implied that the US would not provide the flexibility needed to offer an honest set of incentives for Iran to budge, and therefore would not agree to escalate the response, regardless of the stakes involved.

Now we have called that bluff. And predictably, Russia and China have become very vague on the consequences of continued defiance, which of course encouraged Ahmadinejad to pursue just that course. Putin ruled out any military force to resolve the standoff, and said it was "too early" to discuss sanctions. He claims that the question is completely hypothetical at this point. "If a grandmother had certain gender characteristics," he said, "she would be a grandfather."

And if Moscow were Tel Aviv, Red Square would have an entirely new meaning once Iran had the bomb.

The gambit played by the White House in their agreement to this incentive package, including talks, is not just to flush out Iran as a rogue nation. It also aims to reveal the nature of the UN Security Council. If Russia and China will still refuse to take any kind of punitive action in support of the UNSC's own resolutions, then it will give us the flexibility to move without the dubious imprimatur of Turtle Bay. Again, that may not mean direct military action, but it will mean gathering a large enough coalition to make sanctions hurt not just Teheran, but also Moscow and Beijing. At the least, it might result in the US Navy taking control of the Straits of Hormuz as a countertactic to any Iranian thoughts of petro-extortion.

That result would clearly disturb the two nations, especially China, whose dependence on oil delivered through the Strait has rapidly increased over the past decade. If the two nations continue to block progress at the UN, however, the US will not stand idly by while the Iranians complete work on the bomb. Their own intransigence will unshackle the US from the limits of the UNSC, the result that Russia and China fear most.

Expect to hear something a bit more welcoming from Ahmadinejad in the near future. His Russian and Chinese allies do not want to risk losing the limits on American power imposed by the UN over Iranian nuclear ambitions.

Is There A Lawyer In The House?

Bill Ardolino at INDC needs some legal advice in a case that has implications for all of us. Bill excerpted material from an article posted at Women to Women, a site dedicated to women's health issues, about breast cancer. In his post, Bill excerpted seven paragraphs of 23 to explain to his readers the potential triggers for the disease, complete with a link and block-quoting to show that the material was not original.

That, however, was not good enough for Women To Women, who called this "plagiarism":

The post at http://www.indcjournal.com/archives/002478.php used duplicate content from our following womentowomen website page http://www.womentowomen.com/breasthealth/estrogenbreastcancer.asp, without the author's permission. Moreover, its presence subjects our website to a duplicate content penalty assessed by search engines, directly causing us monetary damage. We do not mind you using our content for discussion purpose. However, please be sure they use the following at the top of the article:

1) Correct article title (verbatim); Causes of breast cancer - the estrogen controversy
2) The author of the article, i.e., Dixie Mills, MD, FACS
3) The following copyright clause, with an active hyperlink back to our site from ?WomentoWomen.com?:

Copyright 2004 Women toWomen.com. All rights reserved.

In addition, we request that you contact us once you have clearly cited and linked back to our site, for confirmation purposes. If we do not hear back from you within 2 weeks or see that this information has been clearly sited and linked to us, we will avail ourselves of legal measures to ensure its removal, in accordance with the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act.

The following link shows the highlighted plagiarized copy of material on your website taken from the women to women website[.]

Bill had linked the article in his post, but did not include the ridiculous citations W2W wants Bill to add to the post. Ironically, Bill linked it approvingly -- in an attempt to help educate readers about the cause W2W holds so dear.

If any CQ readers have legal expertise in this area, please contact Bill as soon as possible. This has obvious implications for all of us.

Good War? Ain't No Such Thing

Frank Schaeffer gains a scoop in his Washington Post column by relating an incident in the British zone of control, an account of brutality and a potential war crime related by an eyewitness to the incident:

"I saw an ugly sight: a British officer interrogating a civilian, and repeatedly hitting him about the head with the chair; treatment which the [civilian], his face a mask of blood, suffered with stoicism. At the end of the interrogation, which had not been considered successful, the officer called on a private and asked him in a pleasant, conversational sort of manner, 'Would you like to take this man away, and shoot him?' The private's reply was to spit on his hands, and say, 'I don't mind if I do, sir.'

"I received confirmation . . . that American combat units were ordered by their officers to beat to death [those] who attempted to surrender to them. These men seem very naive and childlike, but some of them are beginning to question the ethics of this order.

"We liberated them from the Fascist Monster. And what is the prize? The rebirth of democracy. The glorious prospect of being able one day to choose their rulers from a list of powerful men, most of whose corruptions are generally known and accepted with weary resignation. The days of Mussolini must seem like a lost paradise compared to us."

So it's not much of a scoop, coming sixty-two years late. It comes from British author Norman Lewis, who traveled through newly-liberated Italy after the fall of Mussolini in 1944, and it reminds us that war and brutality go hand in hand. Even in the Good War, as World War II has been called, Allied troops committed terrible crimes, some of which became known, and most of which got buried by the military and political leadership in order to protect the war effort.

In this sense, the pacifists have a point; war is a degrading experience for victor and vanquished alike.

However, what we know now about World War II is that it stopped a brutal genocide that would have killed millions of more people had the Axis powers not been stopped. We also know that the vast majority of our fathers, uncles, and grandfathers fought and behaved honorably, allowing Europe to shake off the shackles of fascism in its varying forms -- or at least Western Europe. Eastern Europe would not gain its freedom for another forty-five years, thanks to an ugly but probably necessary deal that handed half of the continent to a dictator not all that much better than the madman we deposed.

When we hear about the Hadithas that inevitably occur (if in fact Haditha turns out to be a war crime, something we have not yet confirmed), we react viscerally, because we believe ourselves to be good and honorable people. Proponents of the war will hurriedly attempt to excuse it or even justify it, while opponents use it to argue that all troops either have or eventually will behave in a similar manner. We saw both reactions during the Viet Nam War, although much more of the latter, thanks to men like John Kerry and put-up jobs like Winter Soldier.

The truth, as Schaeffer explains, is that there are no Good Wars. War brutalizes people and creates damage that takes years to undo. The question is whether the alternatives are worse, or whether they have proven ineffective. In the case of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, the answer to both questions was yes -- and especially with Europe, where alternatives had proven ineffective the multiple times they were tried. So too in Iraq, where a dozen years of sanctions and UN resolutions resulted in enriching Saddam Hussein's bank accounts, allowing him to fund Palestinian terror, commit genocide against his own people, and defy all UN resolutions demanding an accounting for his pre-war WMD and an end to his crimes against the Kurds and Shi'ites.

We decided that the alternatives of status quo (Saddam continuing to enrich himself, funding terrorism, defying accountability) were indeed worse than the price of going to war to end them. As in Europe, we deposed the tyrant and remained behind to build a representative government to reduce the risk of a failed state as well as to give the Iraqis a better shot at ruling themselves rather than just trading despots. If it succeeds, and thus far the democratic movement has continually gained strength, then the results of the war will be good indeed.

That does not mean that everything that happened during the war will be good or honorable. As Lewis recorded in his travels, the lack of discipline among soldiers led to terrible crimes against civilian populations in World War II, and not just in Italy, either. Proponents cannot shade their eyes from such events, nor can we pretend that they never occur. However, we cannot allow another Winter Soldier to besmirch the honorable and courageous efforts of the overwhelming majority of our troops in any conflict, regardless of one's position on this war or any other.

Liberal Candidate Shuts Down Critical Website

Several Canadian CQ readers have sent this update on Joe Volpe, candidate for the Liberal leadership post, who ran into some embarrassment when two of his major contributors turned out to be 11-year-old twins of a drug company executive. Volpe raised $54,000 from two families that had everyone contribute the maximum $5400, including underage children in apparent violation of Canada's campaign finance laws. The Liberal Party insists that the contribution came from the children and not from their parents, which would violate the strawman ban on using other people to launder contributions.

The Liberals just can't seem to shake their reputation for financing shenanigans, and now it looks like they've decided to enhance it by attempting to silence Volpe's critics. A satirical website, youthforvolpe.ca, attempted to poke fun at Volpe's predicament by posing as a contribution website for civic-minded Canadian youngsters. Not seeing the humor, Volpe reacted by having the website shut down:

It was all the buzz in official Ottawa yesterday -- a hilarious political whodunit in this age of websites, platforms and templates.

Overnight, someone built a website spoofing Liberal leadership candidate Joe Volpe and his acceptance of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from children, including the 11-year-old twins of a former vice-president of a generic drug company.

By early yesterday afternoon, the Volpe team had the website pulled down. ...

Mr. Volpe's campaign had the site shut down without knowing, it seems, who put it up: "Hi Everyone," wrote Brenden Johnstone, who is with the Volpe campaign, in an e-mail to other leadership campaigns. "There has been concern about how the issue of the Volpe donations was reflecting on the leadership race.

"My Office has had the website suspended through CIRA [Canadian Internet Registration Authority] and CDNS [Canadian Domain Name Services] and it will be down as soon as 6 p.m. I think the issue with the website has been dealt with. . . ."

If Volpe's office thinks that pressuring the hosting service to silence his critics will "deal with" the problem, I suspect they have some naivete on the Internet. More than just showing a thin skin, Volpe and his office will likely provoke a torrent of criticism that will dwarf any consideration of questionable contributions. Does the Liberal Party really stand for government officials bullying hosting services into gagging their critics?

Stephen Taylor, Canada's (future!) blogging Parliamentarian, has a few words to say about this:

This is absurd, censorship and an abuse of power. As a citizen, regardless of your political affiliation, and as a Internet consumer, this should outrage you. The Internet is for free speech, and this fundamental freedom is really only labeled as such because it is one of those elements of our liberty that had to be protected from tyrants with power. If one cannot lampoon a political candidate (the archetype of free speech in a free society) then we aren't truly free. What is perhaps most chilling is that this censorship has come from a candidate for the Prime Ministership.

If you believe in freedom of speech online and abhor the strongarmed actions of Mr. Volpe against Canadians and the Internet citizenry, please trackback this post and pass this on to all of those who might share this concern.

and then... why not send him an email to voice your concerns: Volpe.J@parl.gc.ca

In an update, Taylor confirms that the provider, CADNS.ca, shut down the website due to their fears of exposure to litigation from Volpe and his campaign. That transpired after Volpe's office contacted the registrar and informed them of that possibility. The man who aspires to the Prime Minister's office not only cannot handle criticism, but also has no trouble throwing his weight around to silence it.

After Adscam, is this the kind of public relations the Grits need?

UPDATE: Stephen Taylor has not quite made it to Parliament yet, but we're hopeful. And CQ reader Mr, Michael (one of the readers who tipped me) shows us where we can see the site in PDF format.

More Data On DHS Grants

Using the material at the Department of Homeland Security website, I have created a spreadsheet listing the grant allocations on state and urban area levels for both fiscal year 2006 and FY 2005. The data on these years tell an interesting story. While New York and Washington DC have howled the loudest about the reduction in grants to their cities, eight urban areas saw bigger cuts by percentage. And although the two cities' percentage lost from FY 2005 allocations to both cities is substantial (40.4% each), their combined share of the Urban Area Security Initiative grants still accounts for a quarter of all UASI grants this year.

The following cities have seen higher percentages of the FY05 UASI grants disappear in FY06:

Phoenix - 60.79%
Denver - 49.76%
New Orleans - 49.60%
Pittsburgh - 49.46%
Buffalo - 48.53%
San Diego - 45.96%
Dallas/Ft Worth/Arlington - 43.22%
Columbus - 42.96

Fifteen out of forty-four urban centers got the same or increased grants, and only three urban areas got new funding in FY06: Orlando, Ft. Lauderdale, and Memphis. At least in the case of Orlando, one can understand the rationale, as Disney World hosts tourists from around the world and would provide a spectacular target for terrorists. The other are also major population and travel centers. Memphis serves as a hub for Northwest Airlines, and Ft. Lauderdale is a "focus city" for US Airways. Of the fifteen which saw their funding increase over FY05, the greatest percentage increases went to:

Jersey City/Newark - 79.06%
Louisville - 70.4%
Charlotte - 63.71%
Omaha - 61.8%
Atlanta - 42.25%

These numbers are somewhat misleading, however. The only substantial actual dollar increase in the top five went to Jersey City ($15M). That increase still surpasses the amount of extra grant money for the other four combined. The next substantial increase went to the LA/Long Beach area ($11.3M, 16.43%) and Chicago ($7M, 16.13%). The amount given in increases to the eighteen urban areas, $85M, just barely surpasses what New York lost ($83.1M). No city got particularly rich in FY06, and twenty-eight saw their funding cut.

When reviewing the total DHS grant allocations by state -- not just the UASI program -- the plight of New York looks very different indeed. The overall program got cut by 33.61%, and New York saw its total state allocation cut just a bit higher than that at 38.44%. However, New York came in at 31st place in terms of percentage loss from FY05. DC finished 24th. In fact, every state and territory lost funding in the overall DHS allocations between FY05 and FY06, except for American Samoa, which got an increase of $415,717. The top ten states/territories for funding decreases are:

Puerto Rico - 69.31%
Minnesota - 62.06%
Mississippi - 61.38%
Arkansas - 61.31%
Utah - 59.57%
Tennessee - 57.79%
Virginia - 55.77%
New Mexico - 55.29%
Maine - 53.13%
New Hampshire - 52.99%

When viewed in this manner, it seems clear that a number of states have borne a far greater loss of their share of DHS funds than New York, and that the percentage loss for the Empire State roughly equals that of the overall program decrease. Also, for those who think that the loss of funds for New York was political, take a look at that top ten one more time. Notice anything? Six of the nine states went for George Bush in 2004, and at least three of these states have important Senate races in the fall. I would also note that the one territory that saw its share of funding cut the most is the only one with an active terrorist organization.

We can argue about the methodology of prioritization and the amount of overall funding for DHS grant programs, but what seems obvious from these numbers is that DHS did not act capriciously or with malicious intent. The state of New York received an overall percentage of DHS funds commensurate with its slice from FY05, decreasing slightly from 11.8% to 10.9% of overall grant allocations. Any accusations to the contrary are nothing more than misinformed hyperbole.

The Truth Behind The Numbers (Updated And Bumped)

The DHS awards of block grants for the Homeland Security Grant Program (HSGP) touched off a fiery round of criticism, with some calling for George Bush to fire DHS chief Michael Chertoff after seeing funding cut to New York City and Washington, DC. However, a look at the numbers calls the accuracy of this blamethrowing into serious question.

First, the reaction:

New York City will receive $124 million — the largest amount under the Urban Area Security Initiative. But that's just 60 percent of the $208 million given in 2005. The cut comes primarily because the Homeland Security Department determined that New York has no national monuments or icons. ...

Rep. Peter King, a Republican from New York and chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, called the cut in funding “indefensible and disgraceful.”

“As far as I’m concerned the Department of Homeland Security and the administration have declared war on New York,” King added. “It’s a knife in the back to New York and I’m going to do everything I can to make them very sorry they made this decision.”

The Urban Area Security Initiative is meant to help cities and urban areas prepare for and respond to terrorist attacks and other disasters. About $710 million is being allocated to 46 cities in 2006, compared to nearly $830 million last year.

Chertoff responded by saying that threats and intimidation would not make him change his mind. He also pointed out that NYC, DC, and LA have received the lion's share of DHS grant money for four years, allowing them to progress quite far in their preparedness. Chertoff argued that other cities need to catch up, and that at some point the federal government has to start considering potential secondary targets as well.

The New York Times reports that some ineptitude on the city's part may explain some of the cutback:

The federal agency distributing $711 million in antiterrorism money to cities around the nation found numerous flaws in New York City's application and gave poor grades to many of its proposals.

Its criticism extended to some of the city's most highly publicized counterterrorism measures.

In a report that outlines why it cut back New York City's share of antiterrorism funds by roughly 40 percent, the Department of Homeland Security was so critical of some highly viewed local measures — like Operation Atlas, in which hundreds of extra police officers carry out counterterrorism duties around the city each day — that the Police Department and other city agencies must now seek further federal approval before drawing on the money they were given to pay for those programs.

At the same time, federal officials said yesterday that the city not only did a poor job of articulating its needs in its application, but it also mishandled the application itself, failing to file it electronically as required and instead faxing its request to Washington, where it had to be entered manually into a computer system. City and state officials denied making that mistake.

A look at the actual dollars granted by DHS shows that NYC, DC, and LA/OC still get over a third of all grant monies ($263.51M, or 37%). In FY '05, the three areas combined for $366.11M, or roughly 43% of all grant monies. Bear in mind that this is not funding for federal resources in these cities that provide for national security, but block grants for the cities themselves to use for their proposed security initiatives. In the fifth year post-9/11, shifting some of that funding for other cities isn't exactly unreasonable, especially since the program itself lost about 17% of its funding -- and that decision came from Congress.

The entire block grant program got cut even more by Congress, going from $2.5B in FY '05 to $1.7B this year, a drop of 32%. Again, this funding comes from Congress, not the DHS, which has to administer the program based on the monies allocated by Congress. Considering the overall hit to the program, DHS redirected a greater proportion of funds to urban areas than last year, even as it tried to spread it out to areas overlooked in past years.

Perhaps the amounts allocated could have been adjusted, but I see nothing inherently unreasonable in this outlay. New York City still gets 18% of all UASI funds for FY '06 (24.3% in FY '05) despite holding about 3% of the nation's population. The LA/OC area gets 12.8% despite accounting for the same percentage of the population. Should they get more? It depends on how they planned to spend the money and how they justified it, and it appears that they did poorly at that task -- and still wound up with almost a fifth of the grants available.

Is a six-percent drop in their share really worth all of this hew and cry?

UPDATE: Added a forgotten link to FY '05, cleaned up a little grammar.

UPDATE II and BUMP: This is the kind of irresponsible reporting that leads to this hysterical reaction:

The city was stunned yesterday to find that its share of federal anti-terror funds was slashed nearly in half by bureaucrats who said it has no national icons to protect and lousy defense plans.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff determined, however, that cities that have never been targeted by Al Qaeda — like Louisville, Atlanta and Omaha — deserve whopping increases.

"This is a knife in the back," fumed a furious Rep. Pete King (R-L.I.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. "As far as I'm concerned, the Department of Homeland Security has declared war on New York."

NYC's share was not halved; its share went from 24% to 18% of all grant monies given to urban areas across the nation. That's a reduction of 25% in their share. Someone needs to send Michael Saul and Michael McAuliffe back to math class.

And someone needs to give Peter King an ice bath. After 9/11, I thought we all would put aside stupid war analogies when we saw what happens when an enemy really does declare war on the US. If that's what Peter King thinks the DHS has done to New York City by giving them one-fifth of all urban block grants available, then I suggest he get himself to a treatment center and get fitted for a new jacket with extra-long sleeves. If he wanted New York City to get more money, then perhaps Congressman King could have gotten the House to allocate more for the program.

Iraq Syndrome?

Daniel Henninger warns of the impending war fatigue in his column today for the Wall Street Journal's Opinionjournal. Instead of Viet Nam Syndrome, we will increasingly shut out news rather than allow ourselves to react to it -- and that will spell the end of the American prosecution for the war on terror:

In El Paso, Texas, the father of Marine Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, whose death from a roadside bomb is the event said to have precipitated the Marine shootings at Haditha, said simply: "I don't even listen to the news." This may be the widespread reaction as the Haditha story overwhelms all else--enough, I don't want to hear about it.

And there begins the Iraq Syndrome.

Some elements of the newly ascendant Democratic left may welcome it, but no serious person in American politics should.

The Vietnam Syndrome, a loss of confidence in the efficacy of American military engagement, was mainly a failure of U.S. elites. But it's different this time. This presidency has been steadfast in war. No matter. In a piece this week on the White House's efforts to rally the nation to the idea of defeating terrorism abroad to thwart another attack on the U.S., the AP's Nedra Pickler wrote: "But that hasn't kept the violence and unrest out of the headlines every day." This time the despondency looks to be penetrating the general population. And the issue isn't just body counts; it's more than that.

The missions in Iraq and Afghanistan grew from the moral outrage of September 11. U.S. troops, the best this country has yet produced, went overseas to defend us against repeating that day. Now it isn't just that the war on terror has proven hard; the men and women fighting for us, the magnificent 99%, are being soiled in a repetitive, public way that is unbearable.

The greatest danger at this moment is that the American public will decide it wants to pull back because it has concluded that when the U.S. goes in, it always gets hung out to dry.

Other nations, notably Australia, has repeatedly warned of this dynamic. They have argued that the world needs an engaged US, simply because no one else has the resources necessary to handle nuclear proliferators and out-of-control despots. The UN has already abandoned the US once in this war, and the question will be, as Henninger points out, whether we will be inclined to assist them when they call the next time. Will we bother to go to Darfur or East Timor when no one would recognize the effort anyway, and would probably look for ways to discredit it? Would we trust ourselves to do it right when the press seems hell-bent on magnifying the actions of the few who may or may not have committed war crimes?

Hopefully, the answer would be yes, regardless of the anklebiters on the world stage. However, as we slowly lose the will to fight for ourselves, fighting for others will certainly not rejuvenate it. Through a continual focus on what less than 0.01% of our troops have done wrong, the nation appears ready to give up on the 99.9% of our men and women who perform magnificently in their country's service. That confidence will take another generation to recover, and when we do, we may find our enemies have multiplied -- as they did the last time.

The Next Battle Of Islam

Yousef Ibrahim reports that the next clash between secular Muslim governments and jihadist radicals may come in Tunisia. His column in today's New York Sun describes the efforts of that moderate nation to "rationalize" Islam, and the portents for violent backlash this program carries:

The next confrontation between secular dictators and Islamic jihadists in the Arab world may happen in Tunisia. The country's interior minister, Hedi Mhenni, has spoken of plans to issue an electronic identity card to Muslim worshippers, pairing them with the mosques nearest to their homes in what he termed "the rationalization of religion."

The crudely named initiative is an effort to restrict the political activities of Islamic fundamentalists, who for decades have used mosques as a staging ground to recruit, organize, and launch potential jihadists at home and abroad.

When it comes to battling fundamentalists, nothing done by Tunisia's president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali - or two other current and former prominent Arab secularist dictators, President Mubarak of Egypt and the imprisoned Saddam Hussein of Iraq - would ever surprise me. They are dictators all right, but tenacious secularists, too. ... These men, disdainful as they may be of human rights, make a pretty good argument for why jihadists are a cancer far more lethal than their contempt for democracy

Ibrahim makes a case for Tunisia and the brand of benevolent despotism that has allowed it to become, in his description, the most modern of Islamic states. Women have integrated into government and business roles, and they do not have the forced humiliations of polygamy and the veil. As of now, Tunisia also has shown remarkable stability, and its secular nature has ingrained itself into the cultural fabric of the nation. Ibrahim argues that such benevolent despotism may have more value in its imposition of secular values than a democracy which gives free expression to Islamist impulses.

Ah, but there's the rub: actually getting a benevolent despot. Two of the people that Ibrahim references in this article have all indulged in torture and violence to maintain their grip on power. Saddam send hundreds of thousands of his own people into unmarked mass graves in order to maintain his brand of despotism. Mubarak's police beat and imprison people for exercising free speech, even of a secular nature. Ben Ali may or may not be different, but this list of complaints by Human Rights Watch indicate at least some issues with the level of benevolence he exercises. Tunisians may not even read this post, as Tunisia apparently censors Internet traffic and jails Internet writers for their dissent.

However benevolent a despot may be, the inability to speak out against abuses ensures that abuses continue and escalate. Those abuses, as well as the frustration of the natural desire for self-determination, gives rise to more radical movements, whether they be democratic as in the Cedar Revolution, or Islamist as in the Iranian revolution of 1979. In fact, the Shah is a perfect example of this phenomenon; he had attempted a reform of his autocratic rule and his secret police, and got overthrown by the forces that he had allowed to build over the years. Saudi Arabia exports more jihadists than anywhere else, primarily because of the absolute Wahhabist dictatorship. Syria, whose Ba'athist dictatorship most closely resembles Saddam's, has never stamped out its jihadist elements, but has managed to redirect their anger towards Israel and not the government that massacred thousands of them over twenty years ago.

The Middle East is chock-full of despots, and most of them have no measure of benevolence at all. Despots retain power through the use of force, and applied force creates radical reactions. The only solution for radicalism in the Muslim world is rational self-determination. All else is simply delay and pressure cooking. Tunisia might remain stable for a year or five years, but sooner or later Ben Ali or another despot will have to go too far in order to maintain power. I suspect, as does Ibrahim, that this mosque-assignment plan may just be that occasion -- and then we will see how well his dictatorship disarms radical Islamists.

Eine Kleine Chin Musik

E.J. Dionne notes the extension of the hysteria in Congress over the raid on William Jefferson's Capitol Hill office, and likens it to a baseball game. The Congressional Republicans think they are employing a brushback pitch, but in this case they look more like the St. Louis Cardinals in the final game of the 1985 World Series. They have melted down beyond all sense, conducting silly hearings and making threats of impeachment against officials in the Department of Justice, in an attempt to intimidate anyone with the temerity to investigate corruption in DC:

In baseball, the hurler intimidates the batter with a brushback pitch. In soccer, the official warns an unruly player by pulling out a yellow card.

Politicians in legal jeopardy thunder and moan, threatening prosecutors while cloaking their pressure tactics in the grand language of constitutional rights and democracy. ...

The hearing was dominated by talk of abuses of power by long-dead monarchs and the need of the people's representatives for untrammeled communication with their constituents.

But Rep. James Sensenbrenner's committee was really sending a message as the House confronts a far-reaching corruption investigation: Nice little Justice Department you have there, Mr. Attorney General. Too bad if anything were to happen to it. Stop messing with us before we mess with you.

Why are the Republicans continuing to shoot themselves in the foot over this perfectly legal execution of a search warrant? Now we have the spectacle of GOP leadership in James Sensenbrenner and Darrell Issa threatening to impeach the Attorney General for investigating corruption. Nice. And not a word about the fact that the House sat on the subpoena that occasioned the search warrant for nine months.

Dionne suggests that the reason Republicans seem so interested in demanding immunity from the Justice Department is a worry that Republicans might also be under investigation. Well, that's certainly possible, but in this case political stupidity probably explains more than political cupidity. They want to show their independence from an unpopular White House in time for the upcoming election. Notice that none of this bellowing has emanated from the Senate, where Republican leadership has more political sense, and apparently owns a copy of the Constitution.

If Hastert, Sensenbrenner, Issa, and the rest of the GOP House leadership thinks this will help them get re-elected, they are deluding themselves. Only 27% of the voters think Congress has any integrity at all, and this high-profile attempt at intimidating investigators will only drive that number in the wrong direction. We already face a throw-the-bims-out electorate this fall, and now these GOP geniuses want to tell 86% of the American public that supported the execution of the search warrant that they have contributed to building an American dictatorship -- simply because a Congressman had to abide by the same laws as the rest of us?

If this really were a baseball game, I'd have concluded that this team deserves to lose.

I'd almost like to see Issa attempt an impeachment against Gonzalez. I, for one, would gladly contribute whatever I could afford to Issa's opponent in the fall election, regardless of party affiliation. If Issa and Sensenbrenner want to see how chin music really works, let them continue to crowd the plate and demand a free pass from the umpires when a pitch hits them.

Bush Wants Immediate Action On Immigration

... but probably won't get it, for a couple of reasons. The New York Times reports that some Congressional Republicans want to wait until after the election to reconcile the House and Senate versions of immigration reform, and the Washington Times predicts that a turf war over revenue will delay conference committee action. Meanwhile, Bush changes rhetorical tactics somewhat in a concession to hard-liners:

Beginning a public relations offensive intended to prod divided Congressional Republicans into overhauling the nation's immigration laws, President Bush rebuked conservative opponents of his plan on Thursday and warned that there is "no excuse" for delay.

With Congress set to return to Washington on Monday after a one-week recess, some Republicans have suggested they may fare better at the polls in November if the House and Senate wait until after Election Day to reconcile their vastly different immigration bills.

But Mr. Bush made clear in a speech at the United States Chamber of Commerce that he did not want Congress to wait. Next week, the president will take his case for what he calls "comprehensive immigration reform" on the road, with appearances in New Mexico and Nebraska.

Bush may get surprised by two inconvenient truths during his road trip. First, his speeches on immigration reform may not sell as well as he might imagine in New Mexico and especially in Nebraska. The latter state just rejected a popular politician, legendary Huskers coach Tom Osborne, for supporting Bush's immigration package during his primary run for governor. And while New Mexico has a high percentage of Hispanic citizens, they tend to view illegal immigration somewhat less hospitably than Bush.

The second inconvenient truth is that Bush isn't running for re-election again, ever. However, the Republicans in Congress and a third of them in the Senate do have to face voters this fall, and so far Matthew Dowd hasn't given them much confidence in their chances if they create an amnesty-lite program in conference. They have heard a crescendo of angry voices demanding that the federal government start enforcing the law rather than create complicated and costly schemes to avoid doing so.

Bush offered an olive branch in his remarks towards this end, but it wound up sounding out of place:

President Bush told the nation's most prominent business group yesterday that "unscrupulous" employers have contributed to the illegal immigration crisis in the United States by knowingly hiring undocumented workers, and called for steep new penalties on those exploiting the shadow economy. ...

"Businesses that knowingly employ illegal workers undermine this law and undermine the spirit of America," the president said during a speech against a backdrop of U.S. flags, images of the Statue of Liberty and the slogan "Comprehensive Immigration Reform." "And we're not going to tolerate it in this country." Although most businesses abide by the law, he said, "there are some unscrupulous folks who want to take advantage of low-cost labor."

Bush is undoubtedly correct on this point; conservatives have demanded that businesses be held accountable for their hiring practices, arguing that once the jobs dry up, the illegals will return home. However, coming from the man who has long extolled the work ethic of the illegals and their willingness to do the jobs Americans won't do, this argument makes little sense. If Bush is correct and the illegals fill a critical need that Americans won't perform for ourselves, and if that's as beneficial as Bush claims, then how exactly are the businesses "unscrupulous"?

The lack of scruples comes from employers exploiting illegal immigrants to keep wages low and to avoid transition to higher-tech solutions. Bush tacitly admits this in his statement, which would be news only because he has so far steadfastly avoided that obvious conclusion throughout this debate. Pressure in labor markets force businesses to either offer more compensation or to invest in technological solutions that reduces the need for the labor. The free flow of immigrants and the lack of government enforcement allow these businesses to avoid either kind of investment. The scruples shortage exists in both the businesses that exploit cheap labor and the government that allows it.

Bush may have to put up with some delay anyway, as the version that passed the Senate has Constitutional issues of an unusual type:

A key feature of the Senate bill is that it would make illegals pay back taxes before applying for citizenship, a requirement that supporters say will raise billions of dollars in the next decade.

There's just one problem: The U.S. Constitution specifically prohibits revenue-raising legislation from originating in the Senate. ...

Republicans -- including the bill's supporters -- say this will kill the bill, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist says he's offered a simple solution. He wants to attach the immigration bill to a tax bill that has already passed the House. It would then proceed as planned to a "conference committee," where negotiators from the House and Senate hammer out differences between the two chambers' immigration bills.

While this kind of hiccup would normally get ignored in conference, House Republicans looking for a fight might well jump on this technicality to scupper the bill altogether. Frist's solution might avoid that, but so far Harry Reid refuses to agree to it, saying that the Republicans should deal with it in conference instead. Some Republicans likely will deal with it, in unpleasant and final terms, and maybe Reid wanted that all along. If that happens, he and the Democrats can claim with some justification that the GOP killed immigration reform.

Bush may want immediate action on CIRA, but the more coverage this gets, the more likely we won't see any real action until the rump session after the election.

A Brief Moment Of Unity On Iran

As I suspected, Condoleezza Rice's offer of direct American participation came as she solidified an agreement with Russia and China on a carrots-and-sticks proposal for Iran which will carry sanctions for a refusal to comply. The acquiescence of the two nations presents a brief, perhaps transitory moment of unity that might give Teheran reason to reconsider its intransigence:

The United States, Russia, China and the leading nations of Europe announced agreement tonight on a general formula designed to resolve the nuclear crisis with Iran, but officials declined to specifically describe the package of incentives and punishments before it can be presented to Iran.

"I am pleased to say that we have agreed a set of far-reaching proposals as a basis for discussion with Iran," said Margaret Beckett, the British foreign secretary. "We believe that they offer Iran the chance to reach a negotiated agreement based on cooperation."

She said the nations represented at the talks "are prepared to resume negotiations should Iran resume suspension of all enrichment related and reprocessing activities as required by the I.A.E.A., and we would also suspend action in the Security Council."

But she warned that "further steps would have to be taken in the Security Council" if Iran does not comply. Ms. Beckett's statement avoided any mention of sanctions or other specific measures.

Iran has already said that they will refuse to participate in talks with the precondition of ceasing their uranium enrichment. However, they can change their mind, and the US has reiterated that they would honor their offer if Iran reverses itself. This would probably benefit Iran more than the West by pretending to demonstrate some reasonableness and flexibility. Unfortunately, the mullahcracy has painted itself into a corner domestically by pumping up public fervor for their sovereign right to the nuclear cycle. Backing down from that position might create a great deal of tension at a time when unrest has already reached a serious level.

An Iranian refusal will push Russia and China to either abandon their Iranian ally or to explicitly discredit the UN Security Council once again. Nuclear non-proliferation has been the responsibility of the UNSC for decades, and this test will either rejuvenate its power to effect positive change, or provide another reason for the US to discount it as any kind of helpful forum.

The Iranians surely know this. Expect them to try to split this new alliance with more declarations of sovereignty, mixed with offers to talk on the basis of status quo. Right now, it appears that the Russians and the Chinese will not fall for it ... but things will likely change soon.

Tinfoil Hats On Parade

Bobby Kennedy Jr has a turgid expose at Rolling Stone which purports to blow the lid off the 2004 presidential election by claiming that 350,000 Ohio voters were prevented from reaching the polling stations. This, unsurprisingly, has excited the entire port side of the blogosphere. However, when one begins to read through the argument, supported by a slew of citations but no evidence at all, it sounds like a very tired rehash of all the conspiracy theories we heard between November 2004 and January 2005, when the Electoral College made the results final.

Kennedy's lead argument gives readers enough excuse to stop on the first page. He argues that exit polls are "exquisitely accurate", and therefore since the pollsters are infallible, their early returns must have been the truth:

Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.''(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine -- paid for by the Bush administration -- exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.(20)

News flash: mathematics is an exact science. Polling isn't, and for at least one basic reason -- you can't force people to participate. The only people answering exit polls are those inclined to share their opinions. It also relies on the skill, integrity, and execution of the actual polltakers, many of whom are hired with little training. Moreover, reporting results in the middle of the sample almost always guarantees bad conclusions.

And interestingly enough, that's exactly what two research firms looking into the exit poll debacle found:

Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International found that the Democratic challenger's supporters were more likely than President Bush's supporters to participate in exit polls interviews. They also found that more errors occurred in exit polls conducted by younger interviewers, and about half of the interviewers were 34 or under. ...

They noted that in a number of precincts, interviewers were kept 50 feet or more away from polling places, potentially skewing results toward people motivated to go out of their way to participate in exit polls. They also found suggestions that interviewers may not have carefully followed rules for selecting voters at random, which may have skewed results.

Kennedy never addresses the ridiculous notion that a sample poll will have exquisite accuracy, while the real vote somehow is unreliable. As we often say, the only poll that really matters is taken behind the curtain and doesn't rely on a pollster to conduct it. And his argument about the US government endorsing exit polling's exquisite reliability is also fallacious. The government uses exit polling to look for massive vote fraud on a scale far outside the margin of error for exit polling, not to determine the accuracy of results to the tenth of a point. Only when exit polls show a remarkably different result than the vote counts do they come into play at all. The Ukrainian fraud did not involve a couple of percentage points, but rather a ten-point swing -- and other obvious polling irregularities had already been documented, such as armed raids on polling centers.

Kennedy flat-out lies at least once, in this assertion:

In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election, Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology -- so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd(34) -- displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that skewed the polls in Kerry's favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.(35)

The Edison/Mitofsky report showed several flaws in methodology, as noted above. They identified several factors that contributed to the errors in reporting the results, including reporting interim results on inadequate sample sizes.

Why would Kennedy put on his tinfoil hat in this manner? We find out in his second unsupported pillar of the stolen-election conspiracy theory -- Ken Blackwell, the conservative Republican running for governor:

But in the battle for Ohio, Republicans had a distinct advantage: The man in charge of the counting was Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of President Bush's re-election committee.(43) As Ohio's secretary of state, Blackwell had broad powers to interpret and implement state and federal election laws -- setting standards for everything from the processing of voter registration to the conduct of official recounts.(44) And as Bush's re-election chair in Ohio, he had a powerful motivation to rig the rules for his candidate. Blackwell, in fact, served as the ''principal electoral system adviser'' for Bush during the 2000 recount in Florida,(45) where he witnessed firsthand the success of his counterpart Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state who co-chaired Bush's campaign there.(46)

Blackwell -- now the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio(47) -- is well-known in the state as a fierce partisan eager to rise in the GOP. An outspoken leader of Ohio's right-wing fundamentalists, he opposes abortion even in cases of rape(48) and was the chief cheerleader for the anti-gay-marriage amendment that Republicans employed to spark turnout in rural counties(49). He has openly denounced Kerry as ''an unapologetic liberal Democrat,''(50) and during the 2004 election he used his official powers to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens in Democratic strongholds. In a ruling issued two weeks before the election, a federal judge rebuked Blackwell for seeking to ''accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000.''(51)

Kennedy's two witnesses for the persecution on this pillar: Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers. And Kennedy excoriates Blackwell as a "fierce partisan"? The Confederate Yankee isn't fooled; he calls this piece an attempt "to smear a black fiscal and socially conservative candidate that has charisma, integrity, and cross-cultural appeal--in short, a real chance of winning."

I note that Kennedy never once mentions Wisconsin, where real election-day dirty tricks and voter fraud occurred and actually resulted in prosecution. Perhaps that's because voter fraud that benefits Democrats fails to interest Kennedy. I look forward to his expose on the 1960 election that made his uncle President.

Reid Forswears Freebies (Updated and Bumped)

After a chorus of apologists insisted that Harry Reid would have broken the law by buying his own tickets to boxing matches, the AP reports that Reid has now acknowledged that he misstated Senate ethics rules in defending his acceptance of tickets from the Nevada Athletic Commission. Reid's staff now says that he will no longer accept gifts from the NAC:

Reversing course, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid’s office acknowledged Wednesday night he misstated the ethics rules governing his acceptance of free boxing tickets and has decided to avoid taking such gifts in the future. ...

The announcement came after The Associated Press confronted Reid’s office early Wednesday with conclusions from several ethics experts that the Senate leader misstated congressional ethics rules in trying to defend his actions. ...

Manley said Wednesday night that Reid “misspoke when he said the rule applies only to senators who represent the state agency.” But he added he believes Reid still could ethically accept the tickets.

“It was therefore entirely permissible for Senator Reid — a senator from Nevada — to have attended a major Nevada sporting event as a guest of Nevada officials,” Manley said.

Several ethics experts disagreed, criticizing Reid’s rationale that he felt obligated to take the tickets to ensure boxing was being conducted properly in his home state.

“He is no more obligated to go to boxing matches than he is to a Celine Dion concert in Vegas,” said Melanie Sloan, a former Justice Department prosecutor and head of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

The reaction to the original story was enlightening. Partisans attacked the AP for supposedly having a vendetta against Reid, parsed the ethics rules to find a reason why Reid didn't violate them, and then postulated that Reid had a legal responsibility to accept the freebie. Even Reid didn't go that far, and now Reid's office has pulled the rug out from under his hysterical defenders.

Not one of them asked the question as to why Reid needed a free ticket to a boxing match to determine his vote on increased federal regulation in the first place. He spent years in the industry, as a boxer and later as a judge. What possible information could he glean from sitting ringside to watch Oscar de la Hoya and Bernard Hopkins duke it out? If he wanted to research the boxing industry, that would be the least revealing method in which to do so. As Melanie Sloan says, it would be equivalent to investigating payola scandals by sitting in the front row of a Celine Dion concert.

Anyone buying this line about research and Reid's legal obligation to accept freebies should have their heads examined. It's precisely this kind of excuse-making that perpetuates the ethical morass in DC. Politicians do not get paid to accept freebies from any special-interest group, regardless of their nature, when the groups have legislation pending before our representatives. Perhaps if we can all agree on that, we could start cleaning up national politics. Reid's example was hardly the most egregious ethical transgression we've seen, but we shouldn't be grading on the curve, either.

And I note that we still have no response to Reid's multiple ties with Jack Abramoff.

UPDATE AND BUMP: In response to a comment left by new CQ reader Muddy Mo, I reviewed the commentary at the TPM Muckraker about the supposed media bias that has unfairly tarnished Reid's reputation. Paul Kiel argues that John Solomon left out a key detail that exonerates Reid:

Yesterday, we reported that there was a major detail missing from Solomon's story: Reid didn't pay for the seats to the boxing matches because they were credentials given to him by the Nevada Athletic Commission - not tickets. Credentials are not for sale. In fact, it is against Nevada state law for the commission to accept money for them. ...

[Promoter Bob] Arum is saying that Reid didn't pay for credentials, because he couldn't. But when he got tickets, which he could pay for, he did.

Solomon looks at that, ignores the whole tickets versus credentials issue, and makes Reid's decision to pay or not pay a matter of when he became Minority Leader.

I'm excerpting here, but I would encourage readers to review Paul's post in its entirety ... because it boggles the mind that he thinks this distinction makes any difference. Kiel has argued for two days now that because the NAC gave Reid credentials rather than tickets, it somehow relieves Reid of his ethical obligations. Using Kiel's logic, the fact that the NAC cannot sell credentials makes them worthless -- even though it allowed Harry Reid to occupy seats that cost over a thousand dollars each.

Let's play that game a little further. If I sat on the Transportation Committee and had accepted a Cadillac Escalade from General Motors, I could excuse it by saying that I wanted to study CAFE standards, and the SUV was a dealer vehicle anyway and not for sale. Perhaps, if I sat on the Foreign Relations committee, I could get a trip to St. Andrews for a round of golf from a lobbyist, and argue that I needed to study Scots Home Rule and the private jet had an extra seat no one was using.

Under these definitions, no gift would ever be unethical, as a moment's reflection would confirm.

This is such an obviously faulty argument, I'm surprised that Paul even bothered making it. Reid and his apologists can call this anything they want, but Reid got free admittance and ringside seats that had a value in thousands of dollars from an agency that had business before the Senate. I note that John McCain paid for his admittance -- and that means the NAC and Reid knew damn well how phony this "credentials" argument is.

I do blame Solomon for failing to mention this more prominently in his reporting. It exposes the NAC, boxing promoters, Harry Reid, and everyone who flacks on his behalf as seriously lacking in integrity.

UPDATE II: Decision '08 isn't impressed by this argument, either.

I should say that TPM Muckraker is usually intelligent and provocative, but it falls down hard here.

Hastert's Folly Revealed

The latest ABC poll shows that House Speaker Denny Hastert miscalculated badly by erupting with outrage over the raid on Rep. William Jefferson’s offices. An overwhelming majority of Americans approve of the search performed by the FBI regardless of party affiliation:

In the rift between Congress and the Justice Department, Americans side overwhelmingly with law enforcement: Regardless of precedent and the separation of powers, 86 percent say the FBI should be allowed to search a Congress member's office if it has a warrant.

That view is broadly bipartisan, this ABC News poll finds, ranging from 78 percent among Democrats to 94 percent of Republicans. …

Sixty-five percent of Americans give a negative rating to the ethics and honesty of members of Congress. More, 54 percent, rate their own member's ethics positively, but that's down from 69 percent in a 1989 poll.

Nonetheless, support for FBI searches is about equally high whether people see Congress as honest or not. That suggests that the interests of law enforcement to investigate wrongdoing simply prevails in the public's mind over concerns about separation of powers, precedent, and the possibility prosecutors could use such searches to try to intimidate lawmakers. The question in this poll described both sides of the argument.

This shows that Hastert’s hysterics over separation of powers failed to convince anyone to turn Capitol Hill into a sanctuary for wayward politicians. Americans have much more concern over politicians selling their votes than in an arcane (and legally insupportable) argument over the potential for intimidation. Perhaps that comes from a couple of decades of legislative action that has produced asset seizures prior to convictions in drug cases, federal intervention in land rights due to overzealous prosecution of endangered-species regulations, and the blizzard of Congressional subpoenas directed at the executive branch for an unending series of hyperventilated investigations.

Or, maybe, it’s that the American public will not endorse the notion that election to public office grants an immunity from subpoenas and search warrants.

Hastert and Nancy Pelosi have yet to comprehend the paradigm shift in American politics and culture. We demand accountability from our elected officials. When they demand special privileges designed to block that accountability, we no longer remain silent.

Zionist Conspiracist Runs For Congress

The trouble with using elections to clean house is keeping even worse choices from reaching office. Voters can see this dynamic in play in Northern California, where a former Congressman has decided to challenge House Resources Committee chair Richard Pombo for his seat in the Republican primary. However, Pete McCloskey has a lot of his own baggage to carry:

A former congressman and longtime critic of America's alliance with Israel is hoping voter anger over bribery and ethical breaches in Washington will help him unseat a powerful committee chairman in a Republican primary in California next week.

Paul McCloskey Jr., 78, known as "Pete," is challenging Richard Pombo, 45, who has spent seven terms in Congress and presides over the panel that oversees energy and public land issues, the House Resources Committee.

In an interview with The New York Sun yesterday, Mr. McCloskey, who served in Congress between 1967 and 1983 and was among the first to call for the impeachment of President Nixon, said he decided to run again because of his sense of an ethical decline among Republican leaders.

"After 12 years in power, I think they've been corrupted," he said. "They've done precisely what the Democrats have done during their period in power."

Sounds great so far, right? I've advised conservatives to get active in the primaries and offer better alternatives to incumbents who do not support the conservative agenda, although I am unsure whether that applies to Pombo or not. Even if it does, sometimes the cure is worse than the disease, as we can see from the New York Sun's further exploration of McCloskey's past:

While some press accounts of the race have drawn parallels between Mr. McCloskey's vocal opposition to the Vietnam War and his outspoken criticism of the war in Iraq, news coverage of the current contest has made almost no mention of the ex-congressman's long history of clashes with Jewish groups.

Mr. McCloskey is a co-founder of a group aimed at revamping America's "collusive relationship" with Israel, the Council for the National Interest. The group recently took out an ad in the New York Times promoting an academic paper in which professors at Harvard and the University of Chicago claimed that a pro-Israel lobby has a stranglehold on American foreign policy.

In 2000, Mr. McCloskey spoke at a conference organized by the leading Holocaust denial organization in America, the Institute for Historical Review.

"I came because I respect the thesis of this organization - the thesis being that there should be a reexamination of whatever governments say or politicians say or political entities say," he told the group, according to its Web site. "The Jewish community has the power to suppress, either by advertising or control of the media, news reports that are hostile to Israel...The Jewish community is dedicated to preserve that state, and to destroy those who speak against it."

McCloskey later said that he had no affiliation with the IHR, claiming to have written them a letter advising them to "get off the anti-Holocaust kick"; McCloskey either has no clue or deliberately evades the point that Holocaust denial is the primary reason for the IHR's existence. He also denies that he is an anti-Semite, despite his repetition of paranoid theories of Jewish media control. It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic.

We need to keep our options open in primaries and use them to make our candidates as sharp as possible for the general election. We don't need to push nutcases past their expiration date into the mix. Republicans should shut down the McCloskey Rant Campaign forthwith.

UN: Rescue Palestinians From Themselves

The UN again demonstrates its fecklessness by insisting that the world owes the Palestinians refuge from their own bad choices, requesting emergency aid donations to stave of a financial crisis of their own making. The UN wants almost $400 million to replace what the Palestinians threw away when they elected terrorists to control their protostate:

The UN has appealed for a near doubling of emergency aid to the Palestinian territories to alleviate a crippling economic crisis after the freezing of foreign funds to the Hamas government and Israeli sanctions against the Palestinians. It has revised the amount it wants foreign governments to donate this year from $215m (£115m) to $385m to prevent the collapse of services such as health and education, and to provide food and medicines.

The appeal document said the UN had taken the unprecedented step of asking for more money because of the "extremely bleak" humanitarian outlook for the occupied territories that is "predicted to worsen dramatically in coming months". "We're seeing people cut back on food and basic expenses," said David Shearer, head of the UN's office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs. "The situation in Gaza is the most acute."

An existing economic crisis has been compounded by the freezing of about $1bn in foreign aid from the EU and US after the Hamas election victory in January, and Israel withholding taxes it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority.

When we say that the UN exists only to ensure that change never occurs, this is exactly what we mean. The Palestinian elections gave the Palestinians an opportunity to decide whether they wanted to move forward in peace, or whether they wanted to endorse more terrorism. They chose the latter, despite knowing that their Western benefactors would not engage Hamas while the terrorist group refused to recognize Israel. It got worse once their government took power, as Hamas announced that they would not recognize any previous agreements with Israel or anyone else, and that any negotiations had to start from scratch.

The Palestinians know what they need to do to restart aid; they need to have Hamas recognize Israel, forswear terrorism and violence, and agree that previous agreements are binding. The last is especially important. If we had to renegotiate agreements from scratch every time a government changed hands, we would have no basis of trust on which to proceed. If the Palestinians want to argue that their word is worthless, then let them do so. It's only that much more reason not to support them economically or politically.

The Palestinian approach will not change while groups like the UN insist on buffering them from the consequences of their choices. They elected Hamas freely -- more freely than they elected Mahmoud Abbas as president -- and that choice carries consequences. If they do not like those consequences, it is up to them to pressure their government to respond in such a way that the international community can re-engage them economically. If we keep treating them as helpless children, they will continue to act that way. When they grow up, then we can lend a helping hand.

We've spent most of the last two decades pouring money into the Palestinian protostate, and it has resulted in nothing but two intifadas and the election of Hamas. Having them fend for themselves can hardly produce worse results than an election victory by an Islamist terrorist group.

Santorum Collapsing In PA

The latest Rasmussen poll delivers bad news to Republicans hoping to hold or expand their majority in the US Senate. Incumbent and key conservative Rick Santorum has fallen far behind his challenger, Robert Casey Jr, with only five months left in the campaign:

The latest Rasmussen Reports election poll in Pennsylvania shows Republican Senator Rick Santorum solidifying his standing as most vulnerable congressional incumbent this election season.

Santorum now trails Democratic challenger Bob Casey 56% to 33% (see crosstabs). Our latest survey of the governor's race also brings good news for the Democrat in that contest.

Last month, Santorum trailed by thirteen percentage points. The incumbent began 2006 down by 20 points and closed to within single digits by March. That was before the Primary Election solidified Casey's position as the Democratic nominee.

Santorum continues to flounder with his base, attracting support from only 67% of GOP voters. Casey now attracts 87% of Democrats, a ten-point gain since our April 20 poll.

Rasmussen produces consistently reliable results on national polls, which makes this hard to dismiss. About the only bright spot left by these results are that Casey only drew 56% support, leaving 11% undecided. Santorum has poor internals as well, with five percent higher unfavorable responses than favorable (47%-42%). The head-to-head numbers have declined to their worst state so far this year, which indicates that Santorum has all the wrong kind of momentum.

What happened? We knew that Santorum would have a difficult re-election campaign, but I don't think that even Mark Dayton would get these kind of polling numbers in Minnesota, and everyone knew he could not possibly win another term (everyone, including Dayton himself). When an incumbent only draws 33% in a two-man race, something significant has happened. Right now, Santorum has been caught up in a residency dispute which may have eroded whatever crossover appeal he had. The bigger problem is among the GOP base. Only 67% of Pennsylvania Republicans support Santorum, as opposed to 87% of Democrats supporting Casey.

Lynn Swann has returned to earth in his race to unseat Governor Ed Rendell in PA. He has dropped eighteen points below Rendell in the latest Rasmussen poll, after leading within the margin of error before the primaries. Swann, a novice running for his first political office, still has to define himself more clearly with voters, and he may have hit some Santorum turbulence as well; only 59% of Republicans support him so far. Unlike with Santorum, whose incumbency identifies him clearly, this gap may portend better results for Swann, as he can still win the remainder over during his campaign as he defines himself and his agenda.

If the Republicans cannot win in Pennsylvania in these midterms, it makes it more difficult to carry the state for the national ticket in 2008. The GOP had better call an emergency strategy meeting for Santorum's campaign and get their party energized quickly if they want to hold that seat.

UPDATE: The fine folks at FreePA say that this is an extension of the Pennsylvania Earthquake that kicked out more than a dozen incumbents in the primary. Swann had supported one of the biggest targets, State Sen. Jubelirer. Santorum, meanwhile, has never mended conservative fences after supporting Arlen Specter against Pat Toomey, according to PennConservative, and the state GOP hasn't forgiven him for it.

This comes down to a bit of housecleaning by Pennsylvania conservatives, and I applaud that. I would caution them about getting too enthusiastic about it, however, unless they like the sound of Governor Rendell and Senator Casey for the next several years. For Lynn Swann especially, I think conservatives would do better through engagement with this political neophyte rather than an electoral shunning.

Fineman Pumps Dodd

Howard Fineman uses his column at Newsweek to pump some much-needed drama into the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, but instead reveals how desperately dull their prospects outside of Hillary Clinton truly are. The candidate Fineman highlights in his look at the Anyone But Hillary sweepstakes is Senator Chris Dodd, a man who exists to make Joe Biden look exciting:

In presidential politics there are a series of concentric elections until the final one (in the Supreme Court.…). Money comes just after—and in conjunction with—the creation of buzz.

Can Dodd create any?

Unless you live in Connecticut, or followed the insider mechanics of the 1996 Clinton re-election race (when Dodd served an unhappy year as party chairman) you probably have no idea who he is. Let me tell you, briefly.

At 62, with snowy white hair, Dodd is a lifer in politics and government, an insider’s insider—very highly regarded within the visible and invisible club of the Senate. He retains a boyish enthusiasm for the old-school arts of bipartisan legislating and serious debate. The guy tends to know what he is talking about.

I like Dodd personally, having watched him for a while and met him once, briefly, but he has all the zing of oatmeal on a cold morning. For Democrats, he's probably at the center of the party right now, but no one would know it because Dodd attracts so little attention. The fact that Fineman had to start out his description by saying, "Let me tell you [who he is]" should tell you everything you need to know about a career politician already in his 60s. He's been in the Senate since 1974, following in his father's footsteps, and yet no one knows who he is.

The need for Dodd is explained earlier in the article by Fineman. Hillary is a strange kind of frontrunner, an almost-conceded winner who almost no one believes can actually win a general election. Fineman cites a panel of his connections within the party -- "a megamillionaire entrepreneur from Boston, an academic from Harvard, a show-biz big wig from New York, an industrial-union leader from Washington" -- in divining Democratic pessimism at Hillary's anointing. Democratic strategists are so skittish that they have tried coming up with candidates that will replace her star power with lower personal negatives, but the most high profile are retreaded losers, such as Al Gore and John Kerry.

The Democrats need a candidate who can bridge the gap between the DLC and MoveOn while appealing to centrists and independents. Dodd could probably accomplish the former with his policy initiatives, but expecting him to appeal to anyone outside of a think tank will only leave the Democrats that much more pessimistic about their chances for recapturing the White House in '08.

Fahrenheit Jimmy Carter? Er, No

The Canada Free Press site has reported that Jimmy Carter's Carter Center has taken a large amount of contributions from the bin Laden family over the past several years, reminding some of the specious lines Michael Moore attempted to draw between Osama bin Laden and George Bush in his film Fahrenheit 9/11. The only problem with this latest revelation is that it uses the same bad assumptions Moore used in smearing Bush for fun and profit on the silver screen:

Ex-U.S. President Jimmy Carter is in league with Osama bin Laden.

A paper trail shows that more than $1 million has been funneled from Bakr M. Bin Laden on behalf of the Saudi Bin Laden Group to The Carter Center.

That’s an impressive bit of investigative journalism that comes your way, not courtesy of the New York Times and company, but from Melanie Morgan, Chairman, Censure Carter Committee.

"An investigation by the Censure Carter Committee into the financing for The Carter Center of Atlanta, Georgia founded by President Carter and his wife to advance his "Blame America First" policies reveals that over $1,000,000 has been funneled from Bakr M. Bin Laden for the Saudi Bin Laden Group to the Carter Center," says Censure Carter.Com in a mainstream media-ignored recent media release.

"In fact, an online report accuses former President Carter of meeting with 10 of Osama Bin Laden’s brothers early in 2000, Carter and his wife, Rosalyn followed up their meeting with a breakfast with Bakr Bin Laden in September 2000 and secured the first $200,000 towards the more than $1 million that has been received by the Carter Center."

Judi McLeod warns her readers not to expect Hollywood to correct the story told by Moore in F-9/11 in 2004. However, she may well be incorrect, because the basic premise of her article -- and of Moore's film -- fails because it assumes the Bin Laden Group reflects Osama's worldview and supports his efforts. Nothing in the record substantiates that, and by this time the Censure Carter Committee should know better.

In truth, Bakr bin Laden and the rest of the bin Ladens have had little or no contact with their terrorist-leader relative, and the BLG in many ways represents everything that Osama opposes. Two years ago, Newsweek ran a major rebuttal of Moore's film, calling it "unfair" and titling their article, "More Distortions From Michael Moore" (and here is my post on this article). Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball reminded their readers then that the bin Laden family, apart from Osama, have never had any ties to terrorist activity. It relies heavily on business with the West, and all terrorist activities that pressure their business partners cost them a great deal of money.

With that history, and with many articles and posts defending George Bush against this brainless smear already in archives all over the Internet, the use of this particular connection by the Censure Carter Committee seems very strange indeed. In the first place, using allegations that an organization's likely allies have already repeatedly debunked tends to erode credibility very quickly. Second, it attempts to burn Carter for what may be one of the more positive projects he has undertaken. If we want to transform the Middle East through engagement and democracy, having one of the most powerful Saudi families publicly supporting the Carter Center helps legitimize Western ambitions in that direction.

Most of all, it makes the Censure Carter folks look rather desperate. I have little regard for Jimmy Carter, and I know that we have plenty of material already for which to excoriate him. Why go out on a limb with this tripe? More importantly, why spend all of this money advertising this unimportant episode in an effort to get the mainstream media to notice it? McLeod works her prose into a lather, but it doesn't hide the sad truth that Bakr bin Laden is not Osama bin Laden, the Bin Laden Group is not al-Qaeda, and the Censure Carter Committee is about to spend thousands of dollars destroying its own credibility. The only affect this will produce will be to make Jimmy Carter look good in comparison.

Perhaps Hollywood and the media might spend some time debunking this if the commercials roll. That might bring an unintended side benefit of further discrediting Moore's smear campaign against George Bush. It will certainly raise sympathy for Carter at a time when he has the potential to do tremendous damage to American interests around the world. For that, we will have only the Censure Carter Committee to thank.

UPDATE: DaMav in the comments makes a good point that Carter never defended Bush on this score even though Carter had to have known the allegations were ludicrous from his own experiences with the bin Laden family, nor did he challenge Moore at the 2004 Democratic convention. That wasn't the allegation coming from the Censure Carter Committee, though, and the CCC shows itself in the same league as Moore with this silly campaign.

Holocaust Deniers Accuse Rice Of Propagandizing

After their president has spent most of the last few months trying to convince people that the Holocaust never occurred in order to gain support for ejecting the Jews from Israel, the Iranian government described Condoleezza Rice's earlier offer for direct talks in exchange for a cessation in uranium enrichment as "propaganda". The state-run news agency IRNA carried Teheran's initial reaction to Rice's offer within a few hours of her press conference today:

The official Iranian news agency said Wednesday the U.S. offer to join in direct talks with Iran about its disputed nuclear program was "a propaganda move."

The American proposal, a major policy shift after decades without official public contact between the two countries, was made conditional on Iran agreeing to stop its uranium enrichment activities.

"It's evident that the Islamic Republic of Iran only accepts proposals and conditions that meet the interests of the nation and the country. Halting enrichment definitely doesn't meet such interests," IRNA said at the end of a dispatch reporting the offer of talks by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

"Given the insistence by Iranian authorities on continuing uranium enrichment, Rice's comments can be considered a propaganda move," IRNA said.

The Iranians insist that any talks be held without preconditions, but that still leaves them on the defensive diplomatically. With the US willing to meet Iran after three decades of enmity arising from their unlawful sacking of our embassy and taking our staff as hostages, suspending enrichment at least temporarily is a reasonable condition. After all, the entire point of the negotiations is to stop the development of nuclear material until we can have safeguards in place to ensure that the Iranians do not use it for weapons.

The Iranian refusal to meet the US on this rational basis can only lead to two non-exclusive conclusions: either the Iranian leadership is not rational, or they intend on building nuclear weapons regardless of their international agreements. Both are probably true. The only question that remains is what kind of action will effectively communicate global insistence on the end of the Iranian nuclear research program.

Towards that end, the US may have finally bought Russian and Chinese cooperation on sanctions with this offer. Both veto-wielding UN Security Council nations had insisted on negotiations rather than sanctions. Both had criticized the laissez-faire strategy of the US in allowing the EU-3 to conduct talks on its behalf. Now Rice and John Bolton can honestly report that the US attempted to start negotiations with Teheran, only to show that Teheran has no interest in negotiating on nuclear fuel development. Fox reported an hour ago (no link yet, heard it on the FNC through satellite radio) that sources at State have informed them that a sanctions package had received approval from all interested nations, which sounds like Rice brokered a deal.

The statement by Rice has put the diplomatic option back on the table. If the UNSC can get serious about its own resolutions and about nuclear non-proliferation -- one of the main purposes of the UN -- then the combination of world powers threatening Iranian isolation will force the government into conciliation, especially to protect themselves from their own people. If the permanent members continue to exploit the situation for economic and diplomatic gain, then Iran will continue to split the powers and drive towards the realization of its nuclear ambitions. The Russians and Chinese will then be responsible for the war that follows afterward.

UPDATE: Brant at SWLiP notes that the AP had some trouble earlier in comprehending the day's events. The AP reported that the US gave a concession to Iran. One wonders at the color of the sky in the AP's world.

Iran Presser Live Blog

Since I am homebound for the moment waiting on home health care to arrive to teach me to perform home IVs on the First Mate, I will watch the press conference called by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that will apparently announce direct talks with Iran on the nuclear-proliferation crisis.

10:04 - Iran represents a direct threat to the security of the US and world, and has accelerated its efforts to enrich uranium. So far, this sounds more like an indictment, not a conciliation.

10:05 - Offering a choice for Iran between a "negative choice" - pursuing nuclear weapons at "great costs". The positive and constructive choice would be to immediately suspend enrichment activities and returning to IAEA-based negotiations.

10:07 - This is just a proposal along the same lines as we have seen before, except with the carrot of direct talks. It's significant, but not earth-shaking. Iran won't agree to suspend enrichment, and certainly won't agree to the kind of verification necessary to pursue this offer.

10:10 - "If the Iranian nation believes it will benefit from the possession of nuclear weapons, it is mistaken." The example of North Korea to the contrary, of course.

10:11 - Questions ... Any linkage to concessions from Russia and China on sanctions? It appears not. One suspects that the UN Security Council has been rendered moot by this process anyway.

10:18 - Had to change channels; Fox's anchors think they're more interesting than the news conference.

10:19 - The US decided to join the EU-3 talks directly because we feel that the negotiations require our "weight" to check their the further expansion of their program. Translation: The EU has failed to do it themselves.

10:20 - Rice calls out the Iranians for their public vacillations. Good.

10:20 - Not ready for full diplomatic relations yet, but Iran can work towards a better relationship now.

This really doesn't change much except for an American offer to join direct, multilateral talks based on a condition that the Iranians have already said they won't meet. It does provide an effective response to Ahmadinejad's latest PR campaign and puts the onus back on Teheran for progress. I suspect that was the entire purpose of this statement.

Pentagon Understood Haditha Contradictions, Ordered Investigation

The Haditha investigation started earlier than previously thought after a Marine Corps investigator noticed key discrepancies between the physical evidence and the reports from the Marines involved. The New York Times reveals that the Pentagon had already referred the matter to criminal investigators weeks before Time Magazine reported the alleged atrocities at the end of March, from a presentation of the allegations by the magazine:

A military investigator uncovered evidence in February and March that contradicted repeated claims by marines that Iraqi civilians killed in Haditha last November were victims of a roadside bomb, according to a senior military official in Iraq.

Among the pieces of evidence that conflicted with the marines' story were death certificates that showed all the Iraqi victims had gunshot wounds, mostly to the head and chest, the official said. ...

When Colonel Watt described the findings to Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the senior ground commander in Iraq, on March 9, they raised enough questions about the marines' veracity that General Chiarelli referred the matter to the senior Marine commander in Iraq, who ordered a criminal investigation that officials say could result in murder charges being brought against members of the unit.

Colonel Watt's findings also prompted General Chiarelli to order a parallel investigation into whether senior Marine officers and enlisted personnel had attempted to cover up what happened.

From this description, rather than the impression of official denial and cover-up, the Marine Corps took decisive action early to ensure that evidence could be retained and that investigators started working on unraveling the deaths in Haditha. By the time that Time reported this incident publicly in the March 27th issue, the US military had already determined that war crimes had potentially been committed at Haditha. Time Magazine reported as much in its story, noting that it presented the military with the information that started the investigation.

Another key to the investigation was the payment of compensation to the families of Haditha's victims. The military received a lot of criticism for its failure to understand Arab culture in the early days of the Iraq war when it failed to compensate families for the collateral loss of life in villages where we operated. Blood money helps keep peace and avoids the perpetuation of hostilities between tribes for unintended deaths. The Pentagon now has policies in place which allow the military to pay compensation in those instances, allowing the issue to rest rather than fester. The Marines paid $38,000 to the families of those killed at Haditha, despite an initial finding that the victims participated in an attack on US forces, which eliminated their eligibility for compensation. Colonel Watt's investigation uncovered the payment by Major Dana Hyatt, who says he was ordered to make the payment by his superiors. In this case, the advice "follow the money" may apply.

The White House has announced that the investigations will be publicly released once completed:

Press Secretary Tony Snow said that he has been assured by the Pentagon that "all the details" will be made available. "We'll have a picture of what happened," Snow said.

That will help to build some confidence in the process used to determine the validity of the charges. Once the reports have entered the public domain, we can expect the blogosphere to thoroughly vet the documents and the evidence. If they provide as damning a case as we have been led to believe, then charges should be filed and the accused be given a public trial or court-martial for their alleged offenses.

Addendum: An interesting figure has entered this story. Paul Hackett, the Iraq War veteran and attorney that failed to win election in a special election for an Ohio Congressional seat, represents Captain James Kimber, an officer relieved of command after his unit conducted themselves improperly during an interview with a British news team. Hackett emphasizes that Kimber knew nothing of the Haditha incident and that the highest-ranking person under investigation is the staff sergeant who led the convoy when the roadside bomb exploded and started the chain of events.

What The Senate Didn't Tell You About Immigration

Robert Samuelson explains to his Washington Post readers what the Senate failed to communicate when it passed its Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act (CIRA) last week. Many people wrote about the Heritage Foundation's analysis of the proposal, which estimated that 100 million people would emigrate to the US over the next twenty years under CIRA's provisions. Robert Rector adjusted that figure to 66 million after CIRA passed with several new amendments which provided some limitation to entry.

The Heritage study received some criticism for its supposedly pessimistic view of immigration reform. However, Samuelson points out that the White House and the CBO actually have similar numbers:

The Senate passed legislation last week that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) hailed as "the most far-reaching immigration reform in our history." You might think that the first question anyone would ask is how much it would actually increase or decrease legal immigration. But no. After the Senate approved the bill by 62 to 36, you could not find the answer in the news columns of The Post, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Yet the estimates do exist and are fairly startling. By rough projections, the Senate bill would double the legal immigration that would occur during the next two decades from about 20 million (under present law) to about 40 million.

One job of journalism is to inform the public about what our political leaders are doing. In this case, we failed. The Senate bill's sponsors didn't publicize its full impact on legal immigration, and we didn't fill the void. It's safe to say that few Americans know what the bill would do because no one has told them. Indeed, I suspect that many senators who voted for the legislation don't have a clue as to the potential overall increase in immigration. ...

One obvious question is why most of the news media missed the larger immigration story. On May 15 Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama held a news conference with Heritage's Rector to announce their immigration projections and the estimated impact on the federal budget. Most national media didn't report the news conference. The next day the CBO released its budget and immigration estimates. These, too, were largely unreported, though the Wall Street Journal later discussed the figures in a story on the bill's possible budget costs.

The immigration reformers made sure to avoid those numbers when debating the impact of their bill. Instead, we got plenty of lectures about the noble immigrant looking for a better life, as if almost all of us hadn't descended from those exact same kinds of people. We never argued for shutting out all immigration, but what we wanted was controlled and sensible immigration that would benefit us and the world.

What we got instead was the deluge. Even with the White House estimates of 40 million people over the next twenty years rather than the Heritage Foundation's 66 million, we still need to know how this nation will assimilate two million people every year, both economically and culturally. I take that back: we need to know whether this country will assimilate two million immigrants or whether we will allow them to form insular communities instead.

Even with assimilation, that scope provides a daunting one-time task, let alone every year. Minnesota, for instance, only has 5 million citizens. That level of immigration would be the equivalent of adding eight Minnesotas to the nation within a generation without adding any more territory, and that doesn't even take into account the concomitant growth through births. Where will they all go, and what will we do to house and educate them?

By 2026, over ten percent of our population will have emigrated here within the past generation. What kind of impact will that have on our economy, our culture, our politics? Has the Senate even bothered to find out?

Samuelson is right. The Senate failed to inform us of the impact of CIRA, and the media did little to correct the problem. Samuelson argues that this reflects a bias that punishes those who ask critical questions about immigration policy, labeling them as bigots or idiots. Their closed-minded approach to debate instead reveals them as partisan absolutists, and in this case has done a tremendous disservice to their consumers.

McCain Bypasses Party Building

If a candidate for the presidency had an ambivalent relationship with his party, would he (a) go out of his way to show loyalty to the party by appearing on behalf of its candidates for lower office even when the two disagree on one issue, or (b) stiff the candidate by backing out of a promised appearance over said disagreement? If you answered (a), you're one step ahead of John McCain:

Arizona Sen. John McCain on Tuesday canceled an appearance for a Republican congressional candidate who has attacked his opponent for supporting McCain's immigration bill.

McCain, R-Ariz., was scheduled to speak Wednesday at a breakfast fundraiser for Brian Bilbray, who is locked in a close runoff race with Democrat Francine Busby for the San Diego-area seat left vacant by disgraced former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham. The event was expected to raise at least $65,000.

The winner of the June 6 special election will fill the remaining seven months left in Cunningham's term.

In an e-mail sent to the Bilbray campaign, McCain spokesman Craig Goldman acknowledged that McCain and Bilbray "disagree on some of the issues related to immigration reform." He said McCain did not want his appearance to distract from Bilbray's campaign.

Let's acknowledge the actions that McCain's campaign did correctly. They reiterated their endorsement of Brian Bilbray over the Democrat, Frances Busby. They also pledged the maximum contribution to Bilbray's campaign, $5000, from McCain's Straight Talk America PAC. While these steps should be the minimum effort for supporting fellow Republicans in tight races, at least they did them.

However, McCain fails to understand the role of the presidential nominee even while he pursues it a second time. The nominee becomes the de facto party leader, and that role carries responsibilities beyond campaigning for the presidency in the general election. The national ticket needs to provide lift for other Republicans on the ticket in lower offices, and is expected to argue on their behalf regardless of individual policy differences. Immigration, while an important issue, is not the only reason we elect representatives to Congress. The failure to elect Bilbray might mean the difference between Democratic and GOP control of the lower chamber in the final two years of McCain's campaign.

A party leader does not cancel appearances out of pique simply because a candidate in a close race disagrees with his pet legislation. Party leaders look after more than just their own narrow interests; they work to ensure that their party remains as united and broad as possible. McCain himself will have to argue for conservative support in any general election by reminding us that if we agree on 70% of the issues, it's better than having someone take office who only agrees with us 30% of the time. How is this any different?

McCain has a reputation among conservatives for being brittle and self-serving. In this case, McCain has reinforced both perceptions. If he cannot see fit to put aside a policy difference over immigration, then he can hardly ask conservatives to do the same in 2008, and on a much larger list of issues than just immigration.

UPDATE: A CQ source in San Diego's North Coast says that the district would not have reacted well to a McCain visit, and that perhaps Bilbray responded to pressure within the local GOP to distance himself from the Senator. Well, maybe, but it was the McCain people who canceled the appearance, and considering his reputation as a reformer, a McCain appearance in Duke Cunningham's district in the aftermath of his removal from office would have carried some weight with centrists in San Diego. If this came from Bilbray and the North Coast GOP, it was pretty short-sighted.

UPDATE II: Another source in the North Coast says that Bilbray didn't cancel the appearance. Bilbray, according to this knowledgeable source, is more of a moderate and would have preferred to have McCain appear at the fundraiser.

What Are They Hiding?

The Democrats have a deep divide on electoral strategy, the Los Angeles Times reports, which has its basis in policy, at least indirectly. Instead of a party debate between moderates and leftists on the nature of the Democratic legislative agenda, however, the party cannot decide whether to be honest with the American public:

With President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress facing bleak approval ratings, many Democrats are increasingly confident that the public is ready to hear the party's alternative policy ideas as the 2006 campaign heats up.

The question is whether the Democrats have an alternative ready to present. ...

On one side are those who believe the Democrats must present a sharp alternative to Bush's direction — as Republicans did with their "Contract with America" before sweeping into control of Congress in 1994.

"It is a time to move toward offense and toward talking about the big things that we stand for," said Eli Pariser, executive director of the political action committee associated with liberal MoveOn.org.

On the other side are strategists who fear that offering too many specifics could allow Republicans to shift focus away from public discontent with how they have governed. Those sentiments appear especially strong among Senate Democrats.

"If you start to [discuss] big government programs … you open yourself up to criticism in all directions, and there's no reason for Democrats to do that now," said one senior Democratic Senate aide, who asked not to be identified when discussing internal party deliberations.

In other words, the Democrats know that their agenda will lose them support in the upcoming elections. They want to offer more big-government, big-spending programs at a time when we can't afford the programs we already have. Democrats don't need a debate to determine this; it appears to be a consensus. Instead, they divide on the tactical wisdom of telling voters who they are and what they will do if elected. Honesty may be the best policy, but dishonesty seems to be the Democratic strategy for the midterms.

That may cause them more headaches than simply acknowledging their affinity for increased government spending -- an affinity shared by some Republicans as well, as we have noted often. If the Democrats offer nothing more than broad strokes about the benefit of positive government action, they will give the Republicans an opening to translate that gibberish into more specific policy implications. The longer the Democrats wait to explain their legislative agenda, the more time Republicans have to parse it out for American voters nationwide.

This reluctance to discuss their policy aims makes it clear that they already know that voters will not support it. This is the odd state of the Democratic party these days, pushed into increasingly radical postures by its powerful but fringe elements, especially MoveOn. They have torpedoed centrist candidates, and even talk of doing the same to the more liberal Hillary Clinton in 2008 for supporting the war in Iraq. Their fundraising goes to far-left politicians like Russ Feingold and Barbara Boxer instead of reaching out to the center. Small wonder that Senate Democrats have pushed especially hard for agenda silence in the mid-terms.

In a way, it's 1972 all over again but with a different, more cynical twist. The McGovernites believed that their policies would resonate with voters and did not hesitate to share them. Thirty-four years later, the Left knows that their ideas will find no resonance -- and so they simply choose to remain silent about their policy objectives. Instead, they want to campaign on Republican negatives, and we have seen the effort in the so-called "culture of corruption". Unfortunately for Democrats, it turns out that corruption knows no party affiliation, and the cases of William Jefferson and Alan Mollohan have almost nullified that argument entirely.

Will this force the Left into actually revealing an agenda for voters to appraise? Not if the Democrats can help it.

German Women Volunteer For Suicide Bombings

We noted with alarm the recent interview with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his attempt to inflame Germans against the West by blaming their post-war humiliation on Jews. Apparently Ahmadinejad's attempts to provoke German fringe-dwellers have a ready audience, as Der Spiegel reports that three German women had to be tracked down and arrested after proclaiming their readiness to act as suicide bombers in Iraq:

SPIEGEL ONLINE has learned that German intelligence agencies have prevented three German women from travelling to Iraq in recent weeks. The women, who have close contacts to the Islamist scene in Germany and at least one whom has converted to Islam, came to the attention of intelligence agencies after one of them had announced on an Internet site that she intended to blow herself and her child up in Iraq.

After the Web posting were spotted, Germany's domestic and foreign intelligence agencies mounted an intense search for the three women. One of them was located in Berlin, the other two are believed to come from southern Germany. The Berlin woman's child was taken away from her and she has been put in a psychiatric clinic. The two other women were also prevented from leaving Germany. One of them is also believed to have a child.

It's not clear yet how serious the women were about their claims and how far their plans for an attack had progressed. There has been no official confirmation. Well-informed sources say the women have had contacts with sympathizers of Ansar al Islam, a militant group linked to al-Qaida and suspected of smuggling suicide bombers from Germany to Iraq. The group is also suspected of raising money for the resistance to the US-led forces in Iraq.

Last year, as DS notes, a Belgian woman conducted a suicide bombing in the Baghdad area, and now it appears that Ansar al-Islam wants to recruit Germans on behalf of Arab fanatics. The woman's volunteering of her child as part of her own suicide shows the sickness required to participate in such assignments, but the fact that three German women made that decision and proclaimed it rather publicly has to give concern about Ansar's efficacy in their nation.

Besides the obvious advantage of using Europeans to defuse some of the normal suspicion of people traveling into Iraq, the recruitment of Westerners gives AQ two distinct victories. First, it embarrasses the West, and AQ can use these cases to show that even those who grew up in freedom want to see it end. Second and more important, every Westerner who carries out a suicide mission allows an Arab to avoid it. From an AQ leadership perspective, that's a good trade.

Give Us The Pork Database

The Washington Examiner today endorses a Senate bill that would require the government to create a public database that would allow taxpayers to access data for all federal expenditures (except for indivdual assistance). Tom Coburn, a noted pork hawk, authored the bill and has a bipartisan group of co-sponsors which include Barack Obama and John McCain:

Abraham Lincoln said, “Let the people know the facts and all will be safe,” so the Great Emancipator would certainly cheer an unlikely group of United States senators who have recently joined forces to push a potentially landmark measure. That measure is designed to put every American citizen within a few mouse clicks of knowing the facts needed to track federal spending as never before.

This measure should receive top-priority attention in Congress and be signed by President Bush at the earliest possible opportunity. The proposal is known as the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (S. 2590). Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., is the original architect of the proposal, which was quickly co-sponsored by Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., Tom Carper, D-Del., and John McCain, R-Ariz. ...

The Coburn-Obama-Carper-McCain measure stipulates that within 30 days of awarding federal tax dollars, the government would have to post the name of the entity receiving the funds (excluding individuals receiving federal assistance), the amount of funds received by the entity in each of the past 10 years, detailed information about each of the transactions during the previous decade, the location of the entity, where the goods or services purchased with the federal dollars will be performed or purchased, and a unique identifier such as the Dun & Bradstreet number commonly used by the private sector.

The bill itself can be read at OMB Watch, a non-profit described by the Examiner as a liberal advocacy group. OMB Watch enthusiastically supports S2590 but has its issues with the approach taken by S2718, an alternative offered by Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), which it details in its report. In either case, OMB Watch will not wait for the Senate to act. It will create its own searchable database for the federal budget for taxpayers interested in how Congress spends its money, an act that might embarrass Capitol Hill into finally introducing some sunlight into a process that has existed in darkness for far too long.

This proposal has come before the Senate previously in this session. In March, Trent Lott killed an amendment offered by Coburn and Obama which would have attached the requirements of S2590 onto the lobbying reform bill under consideration in the upper chamber. He used Rule 22, which labeled the amendment as irrelevant to the purpose of the bill it amended, even though almost everyone who has urged lobbying reform has made earmarks the centerpiece of why such change is necessary. Lott, on the other hand, felt that earmarks were of no concern to taxpayers and essentially told them to butt out.

At the time, I urged Coburn and Obama to reintroduce the amendment as a separate bill so that parliamentary tricks like Rule 22 would be avoided. Now the Senate has it in front of them once more. If they truly intend to reform appropriations politics, they will allow taxpayers this tool for accurately gauging the influence of lobbyists and special interests in DC.

CQ Joins The Examiner

Earlier today, Washington Examiner editorial-page editor Mark Tapscott informed me that I have been named to the Examiner Newspapers Blog Board of Contributors. As far as either Mark or I know, the Examiner has made itself a pioneer in partnering with the blogosphere in this most substantive manner. I will join other prominent bloggers to comprise a diverse group of voices from the world of citizen journalists.

My contributions will begin next week, and I hope that CQ readers will show their appreciation to the Examiner organization with their traffic.

Able Danger: Shaffer Fights Dismissal

Mark Zaid, attorney for central Able Danger figure Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer, has filed a new supplemental declaration supporting the opposition of the government's motion for dismissal of his lawsuit. The Defense Intelligence Agency has moved to dismiss due to its insistence on refusing access to his attorney to classified material. Two weeks ago, Zaid filed a motion opposing the dismissal, and this new declaration contains some interesting revelations.

Here is the text of Zaid's latest filing:

3. Shaffer and the undersigned counsel participated in interview sessions with the defendant Department of Defense’s Office of Inspector General (“DoD OIG”) on May 16, 2006, and May 24, 2006. The DoD OIG is conducting an investigation into, among other issues, the factual circumstances surrounding ABLE DANGER and also whether the defendant Defense Intelligence Agency retaliated against Shaffer. These two meetings, as well as two others that occurred in November 2005, have all been conducted at the unclassified level, particularly - apparently - in order to allow the undersigned to participate.

4. During both meetings (and even during the November 2005 sessions), but especially the interview held on May 16, 2006, there were numerous instances where the conversation began to encroach upon “out of bounds” classified areas. For all I know, the conversations actually extended at times into the classified arena. In any event, it is clear to me that the primary focus and core issues at the heart of ABLE DANGER remain classified. This is of concern to me, and I believe should concern this Court for purposes of this litigation and present Motion, on at least two levels.

5. First, I, as Shaffer’s counsel, cannot adequately or effectively provide him sound legal advice since I do not know all the facts of the operation, nor the full scope of Shaffer’s role within the operation. This was more than clear when the conversation involved specific questions and seemingly vague discussions surrounding the legality of operations that Shaffer, and/or ABLE DANGER, might or might not have engaged in. The investigator asking the questions, and Shaffer in providing answers, continually danced around the issue while at the same time ensuring it was abundantly obvious they both knew what they were addressing. The conversation became so alarming to me that I was forced to specifically note on the record that I was concerned for Shaffer’s legal well-being and could not provide either adequate or effective representation, and I advised that both this line of questioning and his answers cease. I cannot judge at this time whether Shaffer is in legal liability or not because of the veil that the Government has purposefully placed over my face while at the same time continuing to pursue matters that potentially expose Shaffer to either administrative, civil or even criminal penalties. This scenario is completely unfair and inappropriate of the defendants to place Shaffer, or anyone, in.

6. Second, it is also clear that specific individuals and organizations, due to their classified or protected nature, are not being discussed or addressed in the investigation (again being danced around during interviews), at least not with Shaffer, who obviously was a key player in most of the relevant events. On multiple occasions I have witnessed first-hand Mr. Shaffer being stopped from providing testimony or sworn information by investigators (and I know of instances involving congressional staff) based on “security classification”. I also know that Shaffer has not been asked, nor has he provided, classified inputs to the DoD OIG investigations on ABLE DANGER. This issue is of grave concern to me as it directly impacts the scope and accuracy of the DoD OIG investigation. It is one thing to protect classified capabilities and avoid discussion due to the presence of uncleared counsel, but it is entirely another to avoid specific relevant areas of inquiry simply because of alleged classification concerns. While I personally presently perceive the conduct of those handling the investigation to be fair and professional, I cannot imagine the investigation can be completed, and more importantly any accurate conclusions reached, without addressing the gaping holes Shaffer can apparently fill and desires to address. Due to the potential administrative and legal liability that Shaffer faces as a result of his participation in ABLE DANGER, it is imperative that the testimony he provides (unless perhaps under some grant of immunity) to the DoD OIG occur in the presence of counsel.

Interesting. While Zaid offers praise for the conduct of the investigators, he clearly senses that the depositions have aimed at making any court action impossible by tying too many classified threads into it. Not only does this confound any prosecution of the lawsuit, but Zaid cannot even be sure that it is deliberate, since he has little frame of reference about the issues at hand. As Zaid says, in this position he can do nothing to protect his client's interests.

First Mate Docks

The First Mate has returned home after six days in the hospital. It almost took an act of Congress to get out of the place; she had a bronchoscopy earlier in the day and they did not like her oxygenation levels. That did not hinder her from telling them in no uncertain terms (and certain salty nautical terms as well, under her breath) that she would not stay another night in the hospital.

She's resting comfortably at home now. Tomorrow I get lessons in how to start a home IV for her treatment over the next couple of weeks. Hopefully, I will not incur her wrath from my service ...

Let's Get Ready To Rumble

Democrats who have busied themselves painting corruption as an exclusively Republican affair have hit a number of obstacles to that message -- Reps. William Jefferson and Alan Mollohan prominent among them. Now the Democrats have to add their own leadership -- again -- as the Senate Minority Leader has been exposed as taking favors from a notoriously corrupt industry while he intervened on their behalf:

Senate Democratic Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) accepted free ringside tickets from the Nevada Athletic Commission to three professional boxing matches while that state agency was trying to influence him on federal regulation of boxing.

Reid took the free seats for Las Vegas fights between 2003 and 2005 as he was pressing legislation to increase government oversight of the sport, including the creation of a federal boxing commission that Nevada's agency feared might usurp its authority.

He defended the gifts, saying that they would never influence his position on the bill and he was simply trying to learn how his legislation might affect an important home state industry. "Anyone from Nevada would say I'm glad he is there taking care of the state's number one businesses," he said. "I love the fights anyways, so it wasn't like being punished," added the senator, a former boxer and boxing judge.

Senate ethics rules generally allow lawmakers to accept gifts from federal, state or local governments, but specifically warn against taking such gifts -- particularly on multiple occasions -- when they might be connected to efforts to influence official actions. ...

Several ethics experts said Reid should have paid for the tickets, which were close to the ring and worth between several hundred and several thousand dollars each, to avoid the appearance he was being influenced by gifts.

In a further blow to efforts to paint corruption as Republican, two GOP Senators also attended fights with Harry Reid. John McCain insisted on paying for his tickets at the retail value ($1400) while Reid's fellow Nevadan, John Ensign, recused himself from participating in Reid's pending legislation.

This follows on Reid's four interventions on behalf of clients of Jack Abramoff, actions which closely coincided with large donations from the tribes Abramoff represented. Reid, some will recall, also accepted campaign assistance from a former aide, Edward Ayoob, after Abramoff hired Ayoob to work as a lobbyist. These revelations get little play from the media (the AP mentions both in this story) and none from Democratic partisans who headline almost everything they can about Jack Abramoff, even though they have been known for a year. They excuse this and a number of other Abramoff recipients by rationalizing that Abramoff donated more money personally to Republicans, even though he directed his clients to donate tens of thousands of dollars to Senators Reid and Tom Daschle, Reps. Patrick Kennedy and Dick Gephardt, and at least in the case of Reid in conjunction with specific interventions on their behalf.

Now Reid has been caught taking favors on behalf of an industry with an embarrassing past and a not-much-improved present. I enjoy boxing, but no one who has watched the sport believes that its alphabet soup of associations play straight, nor does the judging always raise its credibility above the level of professional wrestling. Reid's instinct to regulate the sport has a rational basis, even if it would be unlikely to improve anything more than boxer safety. Accepting several thousands of dollars worth of tickets while actively pursuing legislation that would impact this industry is such an obvious ethical violation that Reid's protestations of overreaction are insulting to the intelligence of the voters.

I wrote last year that Democrats would regret their attempts to turn corruption into a partisan campaign issue. That problem relates to power, not party, and corruption affects enough of both parties to require a bipartisan effort to truly contain and end it. Neither party seems willing to commit to such reform, and as long as Democrats continue to screech at corrupt Republicans while excusing the likes of Reid, Kennedy, Jefferson, and Mollohan, then nothing will ever change.

Canada: The Terrorists Among Us

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has informed Parliament that many veterans of al-Qaeda's initial war against the Soviet Union live in Canadian cities, and that some have trained since then in terrorist camps:

Canada's spy agency says potential terrorists already reside in Canadian cities.

The deputy director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service said Monday that there are many people currently living in Canada who fought with al-Qaeda during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

And Jack Hooper says those same people have since trained in al-Qaeda terrorist training camps.

The testimony to the Canadian Senate came during hearings on the nation's mission in Afghanistan and how it could affect their domestic security, and that answer does not give much confidence in the status quo. The Globe & Mail did not give any more specifics about Hooper's testimony, nor did it even report whether Hooper had more discrete data on the threat.

This information comes at an interesting time for the US. We have debated for months about our overall immigration policy, but mostly have focused on the Mexican border. We have two long and mostly unguarded borders that need more attention in time of war, especially against the kind of enemies we face. The key difference between the two is that our northern partner takes border security much more seriously than our southern partner. Ottawa also has no policy encouraging and enabling swarms of migrants to cross the border in order to relieve political pressure at home.

Nevertheless, we need to remain engaged with Canada on security issues, and this should remind everyone why.

Ahmadinejad: Send The Jews Back

The German magazine Der Spiegel has published its interview with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and it should disturb anyone who reads it fully. The interview reveals Ahmadinejad as a man obsessed with Jews, and one intent on provoking German resentment over its post-war humiliation to split the West on Israel:

Ahmadinejad: Look here, my views are quite clear. We are saying that if the Holocaust occurred, then Europe must draw the consequences and that it is not Palestine that should pay the price for it. If it did not occur, then the Jews have to go back to where they came from. I believe that the German people today are also prisoners of the Holocaust. Sixty million people died in the Second World War. World War II was a gigantic crime. We condemn it all. We are against bloodshed, regardless of whether a crime was committed against a Muslim or against a Christian or a Jew. But the question is: Why among these 60 million victims are only the Jews the center of attention?

SPIEGEL: That's just not the case. All peoples mourn the victims claimed by the Second World War, Germans and Russians and Poles and others as well. Yet, we as Germans cannot absolve ourselves of a special guilt, namely for the systematic murder of the Jews. But perhaps we should now move on to the next subject.

Ahmadinejad: No, I have a question for you. What kind of a role did today's youth play in World War II?

SPIEGEL: None.

Ahmadinejad: Why should they have feelings of guilt toward Zionists? Why should the costs of the Zionists be paid out of their pockets? If people committed crimes in the past, then they would have to have been tried 60 years ago. End of story! Why must the German people be humiliated today because a group of people committed crimes in the name of the Germans during the course of history?

Der Speigel notes in a separate piece that Ahmadinejad's remarks will give new energy to the anti-Semitic neo-Nazi groups currently on the fringe of German politics. Financial Times Deutschland gave mild criticism DS for carrying such potent propaganda on behalf of Ahmadinejad while noting that "an open society should know its enemies". After reading the entire interview, I see nothing to criticize on that score. The DS interviewer continually challenges Ahmadinejad's answers regarding Holocaust denial. (Less worthy of praise is the interviewer's repeated assertion that America has lost the war in Iraq; with Saddam gone and a freely elected representative government in place, DS should have included its criteria for success.)

The prospects did not improve when DS changed the topic, with some resistance from Ahmadinejad, to nuclear weapons. When DS asked the Iranian president bluntly whether Iran desired nuclear weapons, he changed the subject:

SPIEGEL: The key question is: Do you want nuclear weapons for your country?

Ahmadinejad: Allow me to encourage a discussion on the following question: How long do you think the world can be governed by the rhetoric of a handful of Western powers? Whenever they hold something against someone, they start spreading propaganda and lies, defamation and blackmail. How much longer can that go on?

SPIEGEL: We're here to find out the truth. The head of state of a neighboring country, for example, told SPIEGEL: "They are very keen on building the bomb." Is that true?

Ahmadinejad: You see, we conduct our discussions with you and the European governments on an entirely different, higher level. In our view, the legal system whereby a handful of countries force their will on the rest of the world is discriminatory and unstable. One-hundred and thirty-nine countries, including us, are members of the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) in Vienna. Both the statutes of IAEA and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as well as all security agreements grant the member countries the right to produce nuclear fuel for peaceful purposes. That is the legitimate legal right of any people. Beyond this, however, IAEA was also established to promote the disarmament of those powers that already possessed nuclear weapons. And now look at what's happening today: Iran has had an excellent cooperation with IAEA. We have had more than 2,000 inspections of our plants, and the inspectors have obtained more than 1,000 pages of documentation from us. Their cameras are installed in our nuclear centers. IAEA has emphasized in all its reports that there are no indications of any irregularities in Iran. That is one side of this matter.

In fewer words, Ahmadinejad refuses to answer the question. One would think that he would take the opportunity to categorically deny his pursuit of nuclear weapons. Instead, he tries to launch into a debate on global politics and the tyranny of the Western democracies. The only topic he truly embraces with DS is Holocaust denial and the removal of Jews in Israel to Europe, towards which he manipulates the DS interviewer in the last third of the piece.

Ahmadinjad is obsessed with Israel and the Jews. Der Speigel does us a service in demonstrating this, and people had better start taking it seriously. He means to prepare the world for some kind of action against them, and this attempt at a charm offensive in Germany was no accident.

Saddam's Kelo

The trial of Saddam Hussein resumed last night, and Saddam and his co-defendants continued presenting their defense witnesses. The new strategy for the defense is to transform the seizure and destruction of farms and orchards in Dujail not as an attempt at genocide, but instead as an economic redevelopment plan:

Witnesses for two Saddam Hussein co-defendants accused of taking part in a 1982 massacre of 148 people from Dujayl described the men as fair and merciful, and dismissed destruction of the village's fields and orchards as an economic redevelopment project.

Defense witnesses denied that the defendants, former spy chief Barzan Ibrahim Hasan and Awad Hamed Bandar, former head of Hussein's Revolutionary Court, took part in the massacre — even as they acknowledged that they had little direct information about the Dujayl incident.

Prosecutors say the two defendants led a retaliatory purge against the predominantly Shiite Muslim residents of Dujayl after an assassination attempt on Hussein during a visit there.

The witnesses failed to impress, on many levels. They could not remember key details of the supposed project, nor could they identify the people who ran it. None of them could substantiate how they came across this information, most of which was hearsay. However, a couple of them made sure to announce their fealty to Saddam Hussein, toadying up to the former dictator by offering greetings to his family. One of them announced during his testimony that "I would die for you! I would die for you, president!"

Credibility, one must presume, was not high on the list of qualifications for defense witnesses.

This does give a peek into the twisted mindset of a brutal dictatorship. In the culture Saddam imposed, where 148 people (including children) could be executed in reprisal for one attempted assassination, the genocidal act of destroying the means of subsistence for an entire community might look like economic development. At least, if the dictator calls it that, few people would have dared to disagree after seeing what happened in Dujail .... which was the entire point of the exercise.

Prayers For CBS Crew Killed, Injured In Bombing

CBS correspondent Kimberly Dozier received severe wounds and two of her crew died yesterday in a car bombing in Baghdad. The Washington Post reports that Dozier is expected to live:

A car bomb explosion in central Baghdad Monday killed two CBS News crew members, an Iraqi interpreter and a U.S. soldier, and severely wounded the news team's correspondent, in one of a string of attacks that killed dozens of people in Iraq over the course of the day.

Paul Douglas, a cameraman, and James Brolan, a sound man, died in the blast, CBS News said in a statement. Both men were British citizens based in London. Kimberly Dozier, an American correspondent who has covered the war in Iraq for nearly three years, was taken to a Baghdad hospital for surgery. The network said she was listed in critical condition and that doctors were "cautiously optimistic" about her prognosis.

Critics of the media often complain that they engage in "balcony journalism", reporting from hotel rooms while posing on a balcony for better visuals. This shows that some American journalists put more on the line in Baghdad than just a room service tip. We should all offer our prayers and hopes for a complete recovery for Dozier and our gratitude for risking her life to report on a dangerous area of Iraq.

Decoration Day

Our national holiday of Memorial Day began as Decoration Day, proclaimed by General John Logan in 1868 to honor the dead of both sides of the Civil War. It later changed names, but the purpose of the day remains a recognition of the last full measure of devotion on the part of America's true heroes.

Today, CQ thanks and honors all of those who have fallen in our country's service, and the families they left behind. In honor of all of them, I present you the story of SFC Paul Smith, a recent Medal of Honor recipient.

The President of the United States of America, authorized by Act of Congress, March 3, 1863, has awarded in the name of Congress the Medal of Honor to

Sergeant First Class Paul R. Smith
United States Army

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty:

Sergeant First Class Paul R. Smith distinguished himself by acts of gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty in action with an armed enemy near Baghdad International Airport, Baghdad, Iraq on 4 April 2003. On that day, Sergeant First Class Smith was engaged in the construction of a prisoner of war holding area when his Task Force was violently attacked by a company-sized enemy force. Realizing the vulnerability of over 100 fellow soldiers, Sergeant First Class Smith quickly organized a hasty defense consisting of two platoons of soldiers, one Bradley Fighting Vehicle and three armored personnel carriers. As the fight developed, Sergeant First Class Smith braved hostile enemy fire to personally engage the enemy with hand grenades and anti-tank weapons, and organized the evacuation of three wounded soldiers from an armored personnel carrier struck by a rocket propelled grenade and a 60mm mortar round. Fearing the enemy would overrun their defenses, Sergeant First Class Smith moved under withering enemy fire to man a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on a damaged armored personnel carrier. In total disregard for his own life, he maintained his exposed position in order to engage the attacking enemy force. During this action, he was mortally wounded. His courageous actions helped defeat the enemy attack, and resulted in as many as 50 enemy soldiers killed, while allowing the safe withdrawal of numerous wounded soldiers. Sergeant First Class Smith’s extraordinary heroism and uncommon valor are in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself, the Third Infantry Division “Rock of the Marne,” and the United States Army.

UPDATE: I changed "winner" to "recipient", thanks to the CQ reader and military officer who wished to remain anonymous.

Times: 20 Terrorist Plots Active In Britain

The Times of London reports that MI-5 and the police have found themselves stretched to the limit from a score of active terrorist bomb plots. The Home Secretary has told the nation that so many Islamist conspiracies are afoot that the security agencies have no time to participate in an inquiry regarding the Tube bombings last year:

TWENTY “major conspiracies” by Islamist terrorists in Britain have been uncovered by the security services, John Reid, the home secretary, has disclosed. ...

Reid revealed the existence of the plots — far more than have previously been reported — at a meeting with some of the victims’ relatives and survivors of the attacks last week.

He failed to give further details but the claim appears to fit in with briefings by MI5 which suggest that as many as 1,200 potential terrorist suspects may now be in the UK.

One of the operations is thought to have been the target of raids by hundreds of police officers last week. Anti-terrorist police believe they may have thwarted a wave of suicide bomb attacks on British and US forces in Iraq.

The police arrested eight men during the armed raids. The men, all from Libya, were being held on suspicion of encouraging and financing Al-Qaeda operations abroad.

British police and MI-5 believe they have foiled at least three al-Qaeda plots since the July 7 bombings that killed 54 Londoners. Three more plots have already been uncovered and suspected terrorists charged. Taking the one plot from last week's raids off the list, and that leaves 13 active conspiracies to engage terrorist attacks in the UK, presumably each separate from the other. Small wonder that MI-5 has no time to appear in an inquiry on a plot long since discharged.

AQ and its affiliates have not stopped probing Western defenses. The UK has a particular vulnerability, especially in London, where radical Islamists have long congregated. Europe's proximity to the Middle East made it a preferred destination for such groups, especially once they got the boot in their home countries. Islamists use Western openness and freedom to gather and organize their assault on both concepts, and our staunch allies will find themselves in the thick of that problem for a generation or more. We have fewer openly radical Muslim organizations in the US, but then again, it doesn't take many to generate a real threat to security, as we saw on 9/11. It only took 19 men to kill 3,000 people in less than an hour.

The problem for Western nations will eventually focus on immigration, although not exactly the immigration issues Americans have debated for the last few months. We may have to start making our doorways much narrower for immigrants hailing from Islamist autocracies, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Kuwait, and others. Until they have a democracy in place which allows their political factions representational power, we can continue to expect these nations to export terror, even if unwittingly. They exploit radical Islamists to distract people from their oppression, and eject Islamists as soon as that gambit fails. Those people then go where they can organize like-minded radicals in the easiest manner possible.

It sounds harsh to bar the door, and it would be regrettable. However, in order to keep a free society within our borders, it will be necessary to close the borders down to a much larger degree than we have. Otherwise, we will face the same problem that Britain now has: too many Islamist plots and not enough resources to stop them. If we experience another 9/11, the pressure we put on our government to stop the terrorists will likely force them to assume even greater power, making us more prisoner than freeman in order to distinguish between friend and foe. Hysterics screech that that day has already come, but it has not. It will, however, as long as we allow people from Islamist nations to freely traverse our borders.

It is much more efficient to keep potential terrorists out of the US than it is to find them once they've arrived. The former solution puts no burden on American citizens, while the latter will eventually create a police state where we all must carry papers to identify ourselves in internal transit and account for our every action to the state. By closing our doors to those who hail from Islamist autocracies, we will eventually force them to create their own democracies rather than escape to ours, and terrorists looking to infiltrate our country will have to try a little harder to succeed than simply appllying for a visa.

Frist: Congress Not Above The Law

Showing more political acumen than his House counterpart, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist waited a few days before publicly commenting on the raid on Rep. William Jefferson's offices. Frist put that time to good use, and instead of accusing the executive branch of assuming dictatorial powers for simply executing a judicially-approved search warrant, he acknowledged that members of Congress have no privilege that allows them to ignore court orders or that turn Capitol Hill into a sanctuary for wayward politicians:

After a week of bipartisan outrage over an FBI raid on a congressman's office, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist weighed in yesterday, saying that he was "okay" with the search and saw no constitutional problems with it.

"No House member, no senator, nobody in government should be above the law of the land, period," Frist said of the search of the office of William J. Jefferson (D-La.), who has been accused of bribery.

Frist (R-Tenn.) said on "Fox News Sunday" that he had studied the provision in the Constitution regarding the separation of powers, and consulted with Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales. He concluded that the FBI acted appropriately when it used a warrant to search the office of a sitting lawmaker for the first time in history.

"I don't think it abused separation of powers," Frist said. "I think there's allegations of criminal activity, and the American people need to have the law enforced."

Frist did what Denny Hastert and Nancy Pelosi apparently could not: he waited to get all of the relevant information before leaping in front of the first available microphone.

What has been most frustrating in this issue is the way Hastert played into the media' favorite Washington trope -- how the Bush administration has supposedly eroded the balance of power between the legislative and executive branches. As soon as the news of the raid hit the wires, Hastert pulled that meme out of his back pocket, knowing he would garner the sympathy of the media in his complaint. Never mind that the subpoena had judicial approval, and never mind that Jefferson and the House counsel had ignored it for over eight months -- a luxury none of us would have been allowed.

Unfortunately, Hastert and James Sensenbrenner have yet to understand the concept of applying the law equally to all citizens. Sensenbrenner appeared on "Meet The Press" yesterday to still beat the dead horse of protecting Congress from executive coercion. Neither of these men have yet said a single word about Jefferson's months-long defiance of law enforcement or their own chamber's failure to cooperate with the FBI. Neither of them realize how arrogant and elitist their supposedly principled stands appear to the voters, either. Instead of defending Congress, they all appear to be trashing the President in order to protect a crook -- of the other party.

Perhaps their constituents can get them to realize the error of their ways.

A Birthday Party With A Missing Guest

We celebrated the Little Admiral's fourth birthday today, along with our son's 22nd birthday, making for a special father-daughter party. Last year, the LA wanted an Incredibles party, but this year she wanted a Princess theme. Since she is the first and only grandchild on both sides of her family, we were happy to oblige, and probably overoblige. (Hey, what are grandparents for, anyway?)

However, I'm glad to report that she never fails to appreciate all of the attention she gets, and hasn't let it spoil her -- a testament to my son and daughter-in-law. Even after a long day of swimming and an almost endless parade of presents, she still had enough delight in hearing everyone sing Happy Birthday for this moment:

We all had to wear that tiara at some point during the day, by the way.

Unfortunately, the First Mate could not be with us today, making this the second time in four years that she has missed the LA's birthday party by being in the hospital. She's doing a little bit better, but this is going to just take a long time regardless. I had our granddaughter talk to the FM on my cellphone and they had a long chat talking about all of the fun at the party. That perked up the FM's spirits quite a bit.

I hope all of you are having a happy holiday with your families!

LA Times: Hillary Should Eschew Presidency For Bill To Lead UN

In one of the most bizarre editorials seen recently from a major newspaper, the Los Angeles Times' editorial board requests that Hillary Clinton declare an end to her presidential aspirations -- so that Bill Clinton can take over the United Nations when Kofi Annan leaves. Telling readers that the world needs Bill more than the US needs Hillary, the editors urge the UN to consider Bill the man to lead a rapprochement with Washington and the West:

The U.N.'s reputation has been tattered by peacekeeper sex scandals, the Iraq oil-for-food fiasco and other leadership failures. Nearly everybody agrees that reforms are desperately needed, but no one has emerged who can unite the competing factions and bring about real change. The United States — the most potent force for spreading freedom and democracy around the world — is thoroughly disillusioned with the United Nations. Americans are largely disengaged with the organization's actions. Bill Clinton at the helm would change that overnight.

Clinton also could bridge the growing divide between Washington and much of the world. He has been all but beatified in Africa, where his foundation has negotiated big discounts on drugs for treating AIDS. European heads of state eat out of his hand, and even the most hostile elements in the Arab world respect him as a peacemaker. He is so well known in China that a condom has been named after him, and his support in the U.S. cuts a swath across the ideological and socioeconomic spectrum, from billionaires to evangelicals to inner-city minorities. If Clinton can attract hordes of reporters at every public appearance even when he's out of office, think of the clout he would wield as head of the United Nations — clout that could focus Americans on the plight of the Third World or persuade implacable enemies to at least take a seat at the negotiating table.

[China has named a condom after Bill Clinton. Priceless. Somehow, that evokes memories of domestic affairs more than foreign policy.]

The Times makes the argument that the world would be a "much grimmer place" if the UN did not exist. It laughably states that its blue-helmeted soldiers keep tyrants from abusing innocent civilians, even though incidents like Srebrenica continue to show how feckless and unprepared UN troops are in dealing with actual conflict. They give the false impression that they will protect innocent civilians, when all they do when the shooting starts is retreat to their barracks. It's at their barracks and the refugee centers they supposedly protect that UN peacekeepers have a long record of forcing young girls into prostitution for basic subsistence food and water.

Perhaps the Times does not see that as particularly grim, but the thousands who died in Srebrenica and the legions of abused female refugees would likely disagree.

The UN has become an obstacle to change, not an agent for it. Could Bill Clinton change that? Hardly. Clinton governed as a status-quo president, avoiding reform until it was pressed on him by a newly-motivated Republican Congress. His instincts on reform run statist, as his aborted health-care initiative showed. He showed no real drive to confront tyranny and oppression in office except to pull Europe's chestnuts out of their Balkan fire, and thanks to Clinton's efforts, the area has progressed little since the intervention. After six years, Kosovo is still in limbo. Bill Clinton would have little power to change any of that, and has shown little inclination to do so anyway.

As president, Hillary would hold much more power to effect positive change in the world. The UN relies on America as much as it acts to contain us, and any president can use that as leverage to make the necessary changes to promote democracy and expand liberty. George Bush has done so, attempting to engage the UN on every single issue and documenting its failures to respond. When the UN has shown itself as impotent, as it has frequently done so, Bush has built multilateral coalitions to take action to circumvent Turtle Bay.

The UN is not a world government, but it appears from the LAT that they would like it to be so. They want to see Bill Clinton at the head of this corrupt and discredited organization rather than have Hillary lead a nation with real power to do good. It almost sounds like ... a Karl Rove dream come true.

Why Kerry Is The Democrat's Nightmare

The New York Times reports that John Kerry wants to re-fight the Swift Boat debate, two years after his serial exaggerations and outright lies about his military service cost him the presidential election. The only possible reason for raising this issue would be to clear the decks for another presidential run in 2008, but like 2004, it shows that Kerry's only strategy for elections is to live in a refashioned past:

Three decades after the Vietnam War and nearly two years after Mr. Kerry's failed presidential bid, most Americans have probably forgotten why it ever mattered whether he went to Cambodia or that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth accused him of making it all up, saying he was dishonest and lacked patriotism.

But among those who were on the front lines of the 2004 campaign, the battle over Mr. Kerry's wartime service continues, out of the limelight but in some ways more heatedly — because unlike then, Mr. Kerry has fully engaged in the fight. Only those on Mr. Kerry's side, however, have gathered new evidence to support their case. ...

His supporters are compiling a dossier that they say will expose every one of the Swift boat group's charges as a lie and put to rest any question about Mr. Kerry's valor in combat. While it would be easy to see this as part of Mr. Kerry's exploration of another presidential run, his friends say the Swift boat charges struck at an experience so central to his identity that he would want to correct the record even if he were retiring from public life.

Mr. Kerry portrays himself as a wary participant in his own defense, insisting in the two-hour interview that he does not want to dwell on the accusations or the mistakes of his 2004 campaign. "I'm moving on," he says several times.

Obviously, he's not moving on, and that was the problem with his whole presidential run. It would be inaccurate, to put it mildly, to say that the Swift boat veterans cost Kerry the presidency. What defeated Kerry was his insistence on focusing his campaign on his valor in Viet Nam and the repetition of stories like Christmas in Cambodia that failed the smell test. Instead of offering coherent policies on foreign and domestic issues, but especially about the war in Iraq, Kerry insisted on talking about his service in Viet Nam as opposed to Bush's National Guard service and Cheney's deferments. When the opposition engaged on those topics, seeing as how Kerry didn't want to talk about much else, he seemed shocked that people would question his assertions.

Had Kerry developed a coherent message on policy and left Viet Nam in the past where it belonged, he would never have had to deal with the Swift Boat vets at all. They only organized because Kerry stupidly put their photos on his campaign material and implied that these veterans supported him. When they angrily demanded a retraction, the Kerry campaign refused -- and they set about telling their stories instead.

Interestingly, the Times never addresses the central Kerry fib that allowed the opposition to get a toehold on this issue. Kerry had pontificated during the 1986 debate over funding the Nicaraguan contras that he knew what it was like to be behind enemy lines, and told a story that he had often related regarding how he spent Christmas 1968 in Cambodia (March 27, 1986 CR 3594):

Mr. President, I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the President of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia.

I have that memory which is seared -- seared -- in me ....

In an article for the Boston Herald written on October 14, 1979, Kerry wrote about this experience:

"I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real."

As has been pointed out time and time again, President Nixon took office a month after this incident supposedly occurred. Nixon was elected in 1968, but took office on January 20, 1969. Moreover, one of Kerry's crew has always insisted that the closest their boat came to Cambodia at Christmas was Sa Dec, about 50 miles away. That testimony comes from Stephen Gardner, who served with Kerry until mid-January 1969, when Kerry transferred to another boat. Trying to address Kerry's complaints without mentioning this obvious lie indicates a serious amount of bias in the reporter and leaves the story incomplete.

The Times reports that Kerry's supporters are gathering evidence that will prove the Swift Boat vets liars. The report contains no evidence supporting this conclusion except Kerry's assertion that William Schachte lied about his recollections of Kerry's service. In this case, the article seems rather premature. Why not wait until Kerry and his supporters actually have the proof?

My coverage of the Swift Boat controversy can be found in the category I created especially for it. I have not posted on this topic for eighteen months, believing that the story had been thoroughly told. If Kerry really wants to open the topic for debate again, there are plenty of questions contained within the category that have never been answered. Here are just a few:

1. Why did Kerry appropriate Tedd Peck's battle record into his own record?

2. Why did Kerry allow David Alston to appear at numerous campaign events and misrepresent himself as an eyewitness to Kerry's Silver Star engagement?

3. Why did Alston disappear from the campaign after this became public, and why didn't the Kerry campaign explain his absence?

4. If Kerry came under fire on the December 2, 1968 incident for which he requested and eventually received his first Purple Heart, why then did Kerry write in his journal on December 11 that he had not yet been shot at?

If he can explain all this with new evidence, I'll be glad to post it. Until then, this looks like the same bluster that his supporters have used all along -- to claim that the Swift Boat veterans have been thoroughly debunked and that Kerry had been vindicated without producing a single piece of supporting evidence for either conclusion. It also proves that Kerry will never get past Viet Nam, and as long as he occupies a leadership position in the Democratic Party, neither will the Democrats.

And once again, let's point out that it's Kerry who's making this an issue -- again.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire has more:

And just to be clear - I have no interest in beating on Kerry like a rented mule (again). I am much more curious to see whether we can demonstrate that the MSM was horribly deficient in their coverage of this story. My recollection, which may be colored by hyperbole, is that the entire NY Times coverage amounted to one story saying "The Swift Boat Veterans are lying because Kerry says they are". That does not count the snide and ignorant asides in seemingly unrelated stories or misleading columns by Nick Kristof or the rest of the stable.

The New England Republican says the media is still in pro-Kerry spin mode. And the Confederate Yankee shows that geography must be part of the Swift Boat conspiracy against Kerry as well.

UPDATE II: Jon Henke says this should occupy about as much of the public debate as the 1972 Olympic basketball final, and has no idea why Kerry still insists on living in the past. Could it be that he has nothing to say about the present or the future?

Iran Shifting To War Footing

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made it clear that he sees European opposition to his nuclear program a threat, and returned one in kind. Speaking to the German magazine Der Spiegel, the Iranian president warned Europe that they will "suffer the consequences" if they did not capitulate:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned Europe that it should support his country's nuclear program or "suffer the consequences."

In an interview to be published in the German Der Spiegel on Sunday, Ahmadinejad also expressed his doubt regarding the Holocaust, saying that even if it had occurred, the Jewish state should have been established in Europe, not in Palestine.

The article in DS has not yet been released, but the Jerusalem Post blurb indicates that Iran's president has not yet tired of following the playbook of Adolf Hitler in dealing with the West. Alternating between veiled threats and offers of diplomacy, Ahmadinejad has attempted to split the coalition of nations opposing its development of nuclear weapons. In this case, it looks like Ahmadinejad wants to stress the reach of Iranian weapons and the fact that most of Europe falls within their range.

Nor is that the only parallel between Hitler and Ahmadinejad these days. The messianic Shi'ite has conducted a purge of high-level political opponents from national offices, seemingly with the blessing of the Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini. The New York Times reports on the "consolidation" underway in Teheran:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is trying to consolidate power in the office of the presidency in a way never before seen in the 27-year history of the Islamic Republic, apparently with the tacit approval of Iran's supreme leader, according to government officials and political analysts here. ...

Mr. Ahmadinejad is pressing far beyond the boundaries set by other presidents. For the first time since the revolution, a president has overshadowed the nation's chief cleric, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on both domestic and international affairs.

He has evicted the former president, Mohammad Khatami, from his offices, taken control of a crucial research organization away from another former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, challenged high-ranking clerics on the treatment of women and forced prominent academics out of the university system.

"Parliament and government should fight against wealthy officials," Mr. Ahmadinejad said in a speech before Parliament on Saturday that again appeared aimed at upending pillars of the status quo. "Wealthy people should not have influence over senior officials because of their wealth. They should not impose their demands on the needs of the poor people."

In this theocratic system, where appointed religious leaders hold ultimate power, the presidency is a relatively weak position. In the multiple layers of power that obscure the governance of Iran, no one knows for certain where the ultimate decisions are being made. But many of those watching in near disbelief at the speed and aggression with which the president is seeking to accumulate power assume that he is operating with the full support of Ayatollah Khamenei.

The Times notes that the elimination of the fog surrounding the exercise of power in Iran gives the US an opportunity for meaningful direct talks for the first time since the revolution 27 years ago. However, what the Times fails to comprehend is that, much like the Nazi "consolidation" in the early days of their rule, the accumulation of power to one man allows for streamlined internal decisionmaking, not external, where Khameini always held the power. That kind of structure lends itself to one purpose: war.

Ahmadinejad, working under Khameini's approval, is stripping all of the potential elements of opposition to war from his government. Arrests have not yet come, but this is certainly a politicial purge, attempting to guarantee a political purity in the government under Ahmadinejad. Nor is this limited to the secular government. Khameini appears to be using Ahmadinejad to bypass the rest of the Guardian Council and establish himself as the only cleric whose opinion matters. It reduces the amount of time needed for decisions and eliminates any potential for time-wasting dissension.

Why else would all decision-making power get concentrated in the hands of two men, and all mechanisms for dissent eliminated?

Other warning signs exist as well. Iran, like Germany in the late 20s and early 30s, has a restive population wishing for a sharp improvement in their standard of living. Ahmadinejad has to either deliver that or explain why he cannot. For this purpose, he has turned to Islamic anti-Semitism and as the Times reports, he has started to raise up a new intellectual elite that uses Jews as a scapegoat for the domestic woes Iranians suffer. They quote an unnamed political-science professor in Teheran as saying, "He is reshaping the identity of the elite. Being against Jews and Zionists is an essential part of this new identity." He has also started large government-works programs and promised all sorts of welfare to garner a populist following.

We have seen this path before. The world should recognize the signs, and the West had better start looking for Churchills rather than Chamberlains, and quickly.