wednesday, february 28, 2007
filthy lucre
The more serious Hillary gets about moving back into the White House (hey, maybe the Clintons will return some of the silverware they pilfered), the more we are reminded how scummy they were in their first tour.
Six years ago, the launch of Hillary Clinton's career in the US Senate was marred by allegations that her brothers had received payments from people pardoned by President Bill Clinton in the waning months of his presidency.
Now, in the wake of the launch of her presidential campaign, the pardon controversy has reemerged in an obscure court case in which Senator Clinton's brother Tony is battling an order to repay more than $100,000 he received from a couple pardoned by President Clinton.
Tony Rodham, who acknowledged approaching the president about a pardon for the couple, is the second of Hillary Clinton's brothers to receive money from people who were eventually pardoned by President Clinton. Hugh Rodham received $400,000 from two people, one of whom was pardoned and one whose sentence was commuted.
Meanwhile, Bill Clinton has been cleaning up as a ex-president:
Former president Bill Clinton, who came to the White House with modest means and left deeply in debt, has collected nearly $40 million in speaking fees over the past six years, according to interviews and financial disclosure statements filed by his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.)..
...
Many of Bill Clinton's six-figure speeches have been made to companies whose employees and political action committees have been among Hillary Clinton's top backers in her Senate campaigns. The New York investment giant Goldman Sachs paid him $650,000 for four speeches in recent years. Its employees and PAC have given her $270,000 since 2000 -- putting it second on the list of her most generous political patrons.
The banking firm Citigroup, whose employees and PAC have been Hillary Clinton's top source of campaign donations, with more than $320,000, paid her husband $250,000 for a speech in France in 2004. Last year, it committed $5.5 million for Clinton's Global Initiative to help encourage entrepreneurship and financial education among the poor.
Asked about the companies and their relationship to the Clintons, Jay Carson, a spokesman for the former president, said, "It certainly makes sense that reputable New York companies who support the policies and works of President Clinton and his foundation would also be supportive of their senator."
Of course, donating to Bill is a nice legal way to defeat the intent of campaign finance laws.
living the surge
Mohammed at Iraq the Model writes about Baghdad's ups and downs:
It's been less than two weeks since the Baghdad operation was officially launched. This period, though short, has been full of events; both good and bad ones.
Here we are not in a rush to judge the operation unlike some media or politicians who seek anything they can use to serve their agendas. We, Baghdadis, only want this operation to succeed and we still have some patience to show.
These days I make sure that I have daily tour in Baghdad, covering both Karkh and Resafa (west and east) and these tours aren't exactly boring because there are always new things to see.
The buildup of troops in the capital seems to be incremental and increasing by the day giving a steadily growing sense of the seriousness of the operation. Yesterday during my tour with some friends we were stopped to be searched seven times during about only two hours; five times in Karkh and two in Resafa. The search typically includes verifying the vehicle registration papers, looking for guns and munitions or suspicious objects, destination of the passenger/driver and often their identity cards. In general the security personnel are polite in their dealing with people they search and some of them even end the procedure with an apology for the inconvenience.
We are getting used to the procedures at checkpoints; keep your hands visible on the wheel, keep your papers close to you, prepare to open the trunk and if it's getting dark then turn the headlights off and turn the reading light on.
I hear a lot from people how they want to see checkpoint search each and every vehicle on the street even their own because we know that the more effective checkpoints are the more secure the city would be....
The best part of the results remains the return of displaced families to their homes; the latest count for this shows that more than 600 families have returned so far.
While the return went with little problems for most families some forty families are complaining about receiving new threats from terrorists immediately after they returned to al-Adl district.
More occupied mosques are also being returned to their original keepers and earlier today Sunni and Shia worshippers gathered to hold joint prayers in several places in Baghdad as we saw on TV.
Last week, Maliki made his first public appearance on the streets of Baghdad when he visited the area of Palestine Street in Resafa the day that followed the bombings in the New Baghdad district. The same day general Aboud Qanbar, the commander of the operation walked in Haifa Street.These public appearances are apparently part of a PR campaign to show that senior officials are not afraid of leaving the green zone anymore, and frankly this has left a good impression among the public.
the more things change...
From American Digest:
"An alarmist correspondent recently wrote to a daily paper foretelling the collapse of the earth by reason of the constant drawing out of her vital fluid in the shape of -- oil! According to the writer, the interior of the earth is liquid oil, and if this is drawn out the outside crust must give way.
Each country should pass a law constituting it a criminal offence to draw a drop of liquid oil out of the earth. In his imagination he sees cities and towns engulfed in vast chasms, and mountains shifted from their bases, while millions of human beings, old, young, rich, and poor, each with their different lamps, are marching on to destruction, sitting by their funeral pyre, the burning lamp, while smoke, fire, darkness, horror, confusion, cover the face of all things. " -- How Will the World End? by Herbert C. Fyfe. From Pearson's Magazine, July 1900
no more doubting thomas
The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that you are entitled to your own opinion but not to your own facts. Many on the political left, however, act as if they are entitled to their own facts — and especially the "fact" that those who oppose their ideas are either intellectually or morally inferior.
In other words, you cannot oppose "diversity," gun control, global warming or gay marriage unless there's something wrong with you. No hard evidence is necessary to support this conclusion. Indeed, no hard evidence can change this conviction.
No one has been denigrated and demonized by this mind-set more than Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The charge has been endlessly repeated that he is "not qualified" — with no evidence being offered or asked for.
His outstanding academic record in college, his graduation from one of the top law schools in the country, his experience as an attorney both in government and in the corporate world, his years of heading a federal agency and his service as a judge on the most influential federal circuit court in the country count for nothing, as far as the left is concerned.
Many, if not most, Supreme Court justices have not had as good a record of qualifications. But Thomas is considered "unqualified" because those on the left cannot accept his qualifications without a major shock to their whole vision of the world — and of themselves.
A recent book on the Supreme Court in general has a chapter on Thomas that devastates what has been said about him in the media. That book is "Supreme Conflict" by Jan Crawford Greenburg.
What will come as a shock to many who read this book is that the picture of Thomas as a blind follower of Justice Antonin Scalia, with whom he often votes, is completely different from the reality.
Notes made by Justice Harry Blackmun during discussions of issues among the justices make it clear that from day one Thomas staked out his own position on issues, even when all eight of his senior colleagues took the opposite position.
Often it was Thomas whose arguments won over Scalia and Chief Justice Rehnquist — and sometimes enough others for a majority.
Indeed, in Clarence Thomas first case as a justice, after his bruising confirmation hearings (the politics of attempted personal destruction) Thomas cast the sole nay vote in conference. Then he wrote his dissent. As it was read by his fellow justices, two changed their positions, Scalia and Renhquist.
what did you learn in college today, farouz?
We learned that Tom & Jerry cartoons were part of a Jewish conspiracy.
Before we get too smug, remember our universities are littered with such intellectual detritus as Ward Churchill and Noam Chomsky. Littered? Heck, many of their ilk are running the universities.
tuesday, february 27, 2007
who is greener, bush or gore?
...is it possible that George Bush is a secret Green? Evidently his Crawford Winter White House has 25,000 gallons of rainwater storage, gray water collection from sinks and showers for irrigation, passive solar, geothermal heating and cooling. “By marketplace standards, the house is startlingly small,” says David Heymann, the architect of the 4,000-square-foot home. “Clients of similar ilk are building 16-to-20,000-square-foot houses.”
Furthermore for thermal mass the walls are clad in "discards of a local stone called Leuders limestone, which is quarried in the area. The 12-to-18-inch-thick stone has a mix of colors on the top and bottom, with a cream- colored center that most people want. “They cut the top and bottom of it off because nobody really wants it,” Heymann says. “So we bought all this throwaway stone. It’s fabulous. It’s got great color and it is relatively inexpensive.”
So George and Laura manage to get by with 4000 square feet. Saint Albert and Tipper live in 10,000 square feet and burn as much energy in one month as the average Tennessean burns in a year.
And who is more generous, Dick and Lynne Cheney or Al and Tipper Gore?
- The Cheneys in 2006 donated $6.8 million
- The Gores in 1997 donated $353
the truth? you can't handle the truth!
Al Gore's tent-revival meeting movie was promoted with a poster linking smokestacks with hurricanes, cashing in on a cyclical spate of killer hurricanes. And, just as frigid temperatures seem to manifest whenever Gore comes to town ("The Gore Effect"), last year was a very quiet hurricane season.
Still, let's go to the science:
Chris Landsea, science and operations director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, said the notion that global warming is causing an increase in hurricanes gained widespread attention after the stormy seasons of 2004 and 2005.
But that perception is wrong and the statistics don't bear it out, Landsea told about 200 students and professors in the auditorium at USC's geography building.
Further study continues to show that hurricane activity occurs in cycles of 20 to 45 years, he said. Even though the seasons of 2004, when four hurricanes bashed Florida, and 2005, when Katrina devastated New Orleans and neighboring parts of the Gulf Coast, seemed shocking, they were no more intense than some storms in the early part of the 20th century and in the 1930s, Landsea said.
The 1926-1935 period was worse for hurricanes than the past 10 years and 1900-1905 was almost as bad, he said. So it is not true that there is a trend of more and stronger hurricanes.
"It's not a trend, it's a cycle: 20-45 years quiet, 20-45 years busy," Landsea said. Scientists currently have no idea what causes the time period.
meanwhile, al gore heads to broadway with "gorespell"
...and Maggie's Farm has the scoop and lyrics.
We've got an exclusive peek at Al Gore's next infotainment triumph. Al's taking his tent meeting onto the groaning floorboards of Broadway with his gospels according to, well... himself, I guess: Gorespell!
Sing along with Al:
-Day by day
-Day by day
-Oh Dear Al
-Three things I pray
-To see thee more clearly (You’re getting global looking yourself)
-Love thee more dearly (Dear Leader of our cult)
-Follow thee more nearly (In a private jet all the way, baby)
-Day by day-Day by day
-Day by day
-Oh Dear Al
-Three things I pray
-To discount the temperature variation trend inferred from δ18O of peat cellulose in a peat core from Hongyuan (eastern Qinghai–Tibet plateau, southwestern China) more clearly
-Love thee by offsetting your carbon emissions by paying someone else to plant on a tree on your behalf every time you breathe or drive your car more dearly
-Ignore the effect of diurnal correction on satellite-derived lower tropospheric temperature more completely
-Day by day
and what do god's messengers think?
The Reverend Jerry Falwell says global warming is "Satan's attempt to redirect the church's primary focus" from evangelism to environmentalism.
Falwell told his Baptist congregation in Lynchburg yesterday that "the jury is still out" on whether humans are causing -- or could stop -- global warming.But he said some "naive Christian leaders" are being "duped" by arguments like those presented in former Vice President Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth. Falwell says the documentary should have been titled "A Convenient Untruth."
While it's tempting to scoff at Falwell for dragging satan into this, is it any worse that the precious piety of the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori?
... Episcopalians tend to be better educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than other denominations.
No more "be fruitful and multiply?"
"No," we encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion."
telling women what to do with their bodies
The New York Times says girls should be compelled to take the HPV vaccination.
Regardless of how you feel about abortion, the "it's my body" argument is bogus. The object of an abortion is not fat cells, cuticles or unsightly pouches under the eyes. The object is a living something with unique DNA, not the mother's tissue.
the democrats' last hope
Sen. Joe Lieberman was run out of the Democrat party last summer, losing his primary to an antiwar candidate before winning reelection as an indepedent. His continues to caucus with the Democrats. Without him, they lose control of the Senate.
As the Democrat party becomes more stridently defeatist, Lieberman is the last of a breed that counted JFK and Scoop Jackson as exemplars: hawkish Democrats. Lieberman is being coy about possibly switching sides. Like the threat of nukes during the Cold War, it may be enough to scare the extremists in the party into stowing their white flags a bit longer.
In any case, Lieberman made his case in the Wall Street Journal:
The Senate and House of Representatives are bracing for parliamentary trench warfare--trapped in an escalating dynamic of division and confrontation that will neither resolve the tough challenges we face in Iraq nor strengthen our nation against its terrorist enemies around the world.
What is remarkable about this state of affairs in Washington is just how removed it is from what is actually happening in Iraq. There, the battle of Baghdad is now under way. A new commander, Gen. David Petraeus, has taken command, having been confirmed by the Senate, 81-0, just a few weeks ago. And a new strategy is being put into action, with thousands of additional American soldiers streaming into the Iraqi capital.
Congress thus faces a choice in the weeks and months ahead. Will we allow our actions to be driven by the changing conditions on the ground in Iraq--or by the unchanging political and ideological positions long ago staked out in Washington? What ultimately matters more to us: the real fight over there, or the political fight over here?
Read it all.
monday, february 26, 2007
over-educated idiots
My father, who left the University of Chicago six months shy of graduation because of WWII, always warned me about "over-educated idiots" found in academia, think tanks and the media. This came to mind reading David Remnick in the New Yorker fawning over Al Gore.
Remnick is smart, educated and accomplished. Yet, when it comes to Al Gore, in article after article, it's further proof that love is not just deaf, dumb and blind-- it's also stupid.
Here's Remnick:
It is worse than painful to reflect on how much better off the United States and the world would be today if the outcome of the 2000 election had been permitted to correspond with the wishes of the electorate.
The election did. Just as the Yankees scored more runs in the 2003 World Series, but lost to the Marlins who won more games, Gore got more popular votes but lost more states. That's the way elections work in the USA.
The attacks of September 11, 2001, would likely not have been avoided, though there is ample evidence, in the 9/11 Commission report and elsewhere, that Gore and his circle were far more alert to the threat of Islamist terrorism than Bush and his.
Hogwash. Clinton-Gore treated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as a police matter.
And Gore's own commission advocated installing secure doors on airline cockpits; had Gore followed through, it would have prevented 9/11.
But there was no follow through. They were too busy getting V-chips installed on TVs and waging war on Big Tobacco.
But can anyone seriously doubt that a Gore Administration would have meant, well, an alternate universe, in which, say, American troops were sent on a necessary mission in Afghanistan but not on a mistaken and misbegotten one in Iraq;
Who says Gore would have sent troops to Afghanistan? Recall the Democrats' dire warnings that the Soviet's were humiliated there and it was another quagmire in the making? I can envision Gore negotiating with the Taliban to shut down training camps.
the fate of the earth, not the fate of oil-company executives, was the priority of the Environmental Protection Agency; civil liberties and diplomacy were subjects of attention rather than of derision; torture found no place or rationale?
Is this the same Gore who advocated an extraordinary rendition in a meeting with Clinton, saying,
"That's a no-brainer. Of course it's a violation of international law, that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass."
Remnick goes on to praise Gore for his global warming crusade. Yet again, Gore negotiated the useless and DOA Kyoto treaty and, with Clinton, did nothing of consequence. Bush negotiated the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate that includes China and India.
Remnick hopes that Hillary and Obama will bloody each other so badly in the next year, it will open the door for Gore to run in 2008.
If only to take an honest man’s word for it, Gore’s entry into the race is unlikely.
Honest? He lied about raising illegal campaign funds at the Hsi Lai Buddhist temple in southern California. He illegally used the White House to pitch for campaign donations. If Gore had a Ronnie Earle on his case, he'd have been indicted for money laundering. Then there were all those artless fibs he blathered through the 2000 campaign.
For sheer cynicism, remember Gore telling the Democrat convention his weepy tale of watching his sister die of lung cancer and how it changed his mind about tobacco?
Some years after that "lifechanging" moment, Gore bragged to an audience of tobacco growers:
Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco. I want you to know that with my own hands, all of my life, I put it in the plant beds and transferred it. I've hoed it. I've chopped it. I've shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it.
Deaf, dumb blind and most definitely stupid.
opening the silos
It has been said that during the Cold War the principal adversaries would occasionally open the doors of their silos so rival satellites could verify that there were, in fact, missiles inside. The point, presumably, was to disabuse the adversary of any fantasy that there weren't thousands of ICBMs poised to retaliate.
One can't help but wonder whether Israel isn't doing essentially the same thing. Israel does not have ICBM silos and Iran does not have reliable spy satellite coverage, so Israel needs to leak its way to credibility:
Israel is negotiating with the United States for permission to fly over Iraq as part of a plan to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, The Daily Telegraph can reveal.
To conduct surgical air strikes against Iran's nuclear programme, Israeli war planes would need to fly across Iraq. But to do so the Israeli military authorities in Tel Aviv need permission from the Pentagon.
A senior Israeli defence official said negotiations were now underway between the two countries for the US-led coalition in Iraq to provide an "air corridor" in the event of the Israeli government deciding on unilateral military action to prevent Teheran developing nuclear weapons.
It's a good read. Two of the comments brought a chuckle:
Speaking for the left, if we would just negotiate I'm sure the issues could be worked out, and we could have peace in our time.
Then we all could go home and get a nice quiet sleep.By Neville Chamberlain, at Sat Feb 24, 01:24:00 PM
If the left would just sit down and negotiate with the military, instead of threatening and attacking it, perhaps they could relax and we could get on with the war.
the surge is working
This turnaround in Baghdad is confirmed at home by the media's near-deafening silence. If it seems like you've heard less about how Iraq is spiraling into civil war in the weeks since the surge was announced, this is why. Even some discordant voices in the media are starting to wonder what's happening. Time magazine worries that it's "Quiet in Baghdad. Too quiet." That's right -- a dramatic reduction in violence is actually bad news.
It's too early to claim victory just yet; the operation is just two weeks old. But U.S. troops have been able to accomplish all of this with just one more brigade in-country, with four more on the way by May. These encouraging early returns show the potential for success when we apply concentrated military force to the security problem. When the Army and Marine Corps are on offense, carrying out combat operations and clearing out insurgent strongholds, we win. When we lay back, carrying out routine patrols and playing Baghdad beat cop, we lose.
The key to success is staying power. The always incisive Daffyd ab-Hugh has a good read on this dynamic. Counterinsurgency in Iraq has often been compared to a game of whack-a-mole -- secure an area, only to have the insurgents pop up somewhere else. But if we slammed a mallet into the hole, and kept it there, then picked up a new one... and did the same?This is a new game called Seal-a-Hole , and it has a very different dynamic from Whack-a-Mole: the normal game is one of futility; the game continues until the player gets tired and quits or he runs out of money. But Seal-a-Hole actually has a victory point: when all the holes are sealed, the game is over -- and the player, America, has won.
Even though Seal-a-Hole is not futile, it nevertheless requires a great deal of patience; there are many, many holes, and each hole has a mole who must be whacked. Some of the holes, such as Sadr City, are very big and will require many mallets to properly seal. But if we have the courage and fortitude of our American forebears, we will seal those holes... and we will win....
When things don't go well in Iraq, we see the endless B-roll of chaos and carnage. When things are on the upswing, we tend to hear more about Anna Nicole Smith. The media will never acknowledge victories in Iraq, so we'll have to settle for an absence of bad coverage. But even in this relative lull in Iraq, it's important to understand and appreciate the short-term victories so we can create more of them. And finish the job.
the golden age of air travel
It was fancy, but it also took a lot of your gold. But the nostalgia is fun.
Via Instapundit
please don't share
Recently bio-researchers recreated the flu virus that, in 1918, killed between 50-100 million people worldwide in 18 months. (The wide range is due to poor recording-keeping in the third world.) Regardless, they were able to bring this killer back to life because they had its DNA blueprint.
The Influenza Genome Sequencing Project, funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), announced today that it has achieved a major milestone. The entire genetic blueprints of more than 2,000 human and avian influenza viruses taken from samples around the world have been completed and the sequence data made available in a public database.
“This information will help scientists understand how influenza viruses evolve and spread,” says NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., “and it will aid in the development of new flu vaccines, therapies and diagnostics.”
“Scientists around the world can use the sequence data to compare different strains of the virus, identify the genetic factors that determine their virulence, and look for new therapeutic, vaccine and diagnostic targets,” says NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D.
Suppose some suicidal death cult, like, say, a fringe group of jihadis decided to inflict mass death with a flu bug?
sunday, february 25, 2007
sunday reading
Here's your chance to bone up on the latest doings in Putin's Russia -- Kremlin, Inc.-- from the New Yorker.
wooden and abdul-jabbar
John Wooden is the legendary college basketball coach whose UCLA Bruins won 10 national championships in his last 12 years as a coach, including seven in a row.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played on some of those teams (as Lew Alcindor). Of course, Kareem went on to a Hall of Fame career with the Lakers. He's also a history buff and co-author of three books: Black Profiles in Courage: A Legacy of African-American Achievement, A Season on the Reservation: My Soujourn With the White Mountain Apaches and his latest, On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance.
Yesterday Wooden joined Kareem for a book signing event at UCLA:
It has been decades since Wooden and Abdul-Jabbar have coached and played, respectively, but the two can still put on quite a show.
Abdul-Jabbar wore a casual outfit - navy-blue UCLA polo shirt and jeans - while Wooden looked dapper, as usual, in a navy-blue suit with his customary bolo tie.
As the two sat and signed, cell phones and cameras clicked behind a roped-off area in front of the table. Fans lined the stairs in the middle of the bookstore. Security was everywhere. The autograph line started in the bookstore and worked its way outside, winding around the J.D.Morgan Center.
Abdul-Jabbar and Wooden didn't have much time to chat, but when they do, it's special.
"We've always had things to talk about, and it usually has nothing to do with basketball," Abdul-Jabbar said. "My father passed away about a year and a half ago, and (Wooden) is from his generation, so it's nice to have him here. I share his grandchildren and great-grandchildren."
Wooden is 96 years old and looks fit. He still attends Bruin home games, and often before tip off, visiting players form a line and pay homage to the man.
family ties
The Associated Press has a story about how Mitt Romney's great-grandfather had five wives. The fifth he married in 1897. This strikes me as ancient history, particularly since the Mormon church banned polygamy many years ago.
But the AP had to get that out there.
If a candidate's relatives are an issue, how about Hugh Rodham, the fatso brother of Hillary Rodham Clinton. You may remember how Hugh pocketed $400,000 in legal fees for getting two felons pardoned by then-president Bill Clinton. (After a big stink, he gave the dough back.)
So if Baby Hughie had that much sway with his brother-in-law, how much will he have with sis?
Inquiring minds want to know.
saturday, february 24, 2007
interview with rudy
Hugh Hewitt interviews Guiliani.
beverly hills farsi
Did you know that 20 percent of Beverly Hills residents are of Persian extraction? That requires the city to print election materials in both English and Farsi, and many of the limo liberal locals weren't happy. As the LA Times editorialized today:
There's nothing new about hostile reaction to foreign languages appearing alongside English on signs, pamphlets and other official reading material. But there's something more comical about it when it happens in Beverly Hills. Maybe that's because unlike much of the immigrant bashing in the rest of the country, the Beverly Hills clash isn't about (comparatively) rich versus poor but rather (comparatively) rich versus rich.
These aren't entitled natives angry because low-income newcomers are gobbling up their tax dollars and overcrowding their schools; it's established homeowners miffed at other established homeowners, at least in part because they're different. Much of the animosity between longtime residents and the newer population of Iranian immigrants is in reaction to what are pejoratively called "Persian palaces" being built around town by refugees from the Iranian Revolution. So we have the spectacle of people living in European-style manses, many based on film-set fantasy designs that represented the ultimate in ostentation for their time, upset by the gaudy ostentation of the Middle Eastern-style mansions arising next door.
Even the ballot snit was at least partly about aesthetics. One Beverly Hills resident who threw away her sample ballot in disgust told The Times that she thought it looked like "a menu from a Farsi restaurant with a translation in English."
blink. not.
CSIRO physicist Dr Piers Barnes explains to writer and occasional photographer Nic Svenson how many shots she should take to get one where no-one's blinking. This is Nic's story...
"Anyone who's played photographer at family functions knows that, even if everyone stays perfectly still, there's always someone who blinks.
I often have to take group photos and I wondered just how many shots I'd have to take to get one where no-one's blinking. I started counting: people, photos, photos spoilt due to blinks... It was taking forever! I couldn't make up a rule after ten counts. To be what's known as statistically significant, I'd need around two hundred.
I whinged to my colleague, Dr Piers Barnes, and he said: 'You don't need data, we can model it.' Trying not to feel like an idiot for thinking science is based on hard numbers, I set about finding some figures to plug into the formula Piers was working on.It turns out that the average number of blinks made by someone getting their photo taken is ten per minute. The average blink lasts about 250 milliseconds and, in good indoor light, a camera shutter stays open for about eight milliseconds.
Figuring out the number of photos to take so I can expect to get one where no-one's blinking relies on probabilities (I'd like to guarantee a good shot, but apparently this is impossible as there's always a chance someone will blink). When sorting out probabilities, you have to consider what might influence them.
friday, february 23, 2007
spiteful, petty politics from trent lott
Mr. Lott's beachfront property in Pascagoula--one of three homes he owned--was swept away entirely by Hurricane Katrina's waters. Like many Gulf Coast residents, Mr. Lott was soon reminded by his insurer, State Farm, that his policy only covered wind damage--not flood damage. The senator surely knew that, which is why he'd also purchased federal flood insurance. According to his flood policy that was in effect when Katrina hit, he was covered up to $350,000 in flood damages, and he presumably collected in full. (Sen. Lott's office didn't return my call.)
State Farm, however, refused to cough up, inspiring Mr. Lott to embark on a campaign ripped straight out of the Democratic playbook. First was to pay a call to the favorite mob squad of the left, the plaintiffs' bar. Quicker than you can say "tort reform," Dickie Scruggs, the legal kingpin who engineered Mississippi's tobacco shakedown, was representing Mr. Lott in a high-profile lawsuit against State Farm.
...
his big bomb came last week, when he introduced legislation that would end the insurance industry's exemption from certain federal antitrust regulations. Mr. Lott suggests this is to keep big insurance players from conspiring to do evil things, though the reality is that the exemption mainly benefits small insurers who use it to pool statistically reliable data. So in his wrath, Mr. Lott may end up kneecapping many of the hundreds of small insurers who offer some real competition to the so-called conspiring giants.
media appearances
Burt will be the Mark Isler radio program tonight in Los Angeles (790 on the AM dial) from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m.
Joseph Phillips’ talk from the Reagan Ranch High School Conference will show twice this weekend on C-SPAN Book TV:
- Saturday 2/24 at 7:45 pm ET
- Sunday 2/25 at 10:15 am ET
are liberals born that way?
Michael Medved was discussing a study from Psychology Today that found innate differences between liberals and conservatives. Supposedly tendencies toward one or the other show up in early childhood.
As adults, the study says, liberals have messier offices and bedrooms, listen to more jazz and are more non-conformist. Conservatives keep neater offices and have a greater concern about death. There was much more I cannot recall.
I dunno... I regard myself as conservative, yet I listen to jazz and keep a messy office. I don't fear death or even think about it much. Still, the nature-nurture aspect of political views fascinates me.
Frankly, liberals fascinate me, much the way a strange tribe fascinates an anthropologist. Here are a few of my observations:
- Emotionalism-- most liberals I know are emotional people with good hearts. They are frustrating to debate because, after following the logical progression of an argument a few steps, and perhaps sensing the path of logic leads to a conclusion they dislike, they short-circuit. Debate ends with, "That's just how I feel."
- See no evil -- virtually every lib I know struggles with the notion of evil (unless it's Bush). Evil is just another point of view. I suspect for many this stems from the idea that a belief in evil requires a belief in god. I say, isn't hacking 800,000 people to death intrinsically evil, god or no god?
- If it feels good, do it. Liberal policy usually begins with a righteous motive -- help the poor, save the planet etc. But public policy often yields unintended consequences. Thus millions have died in the Third World of malaria because libs got spooked by Silent Spring and banned DDT. Millions of American black families were destroyed by welfare policies that begat fatherless households and smothered the underclass with pity.
- Love of treaties. Liberals want to believe that all people are reasonable and that sufficient negotiation can resolve conflict. Thus they love the UN despite its corruption, ineffectiveness and malfeasance. They abhor military action as unreasonable. In many cases, war is crime fighting writ large. If you are antiwar, shouldn't you also be against cops fighting criminals?
- Disdain for capitalism. Intellectually liberals understand that capitalism is the engine of our prosperity. On a gut level, they despise the notion of profit as exploitation. Hence they seek to punish business via taxes and regulation (which is not to say that business should not be taxed or regulated).
- Pie slicing. Wealth is created by human enterprise and is thus infinite. Again, liberals understand this intellectually. But in their gut, liberals believe wealth is something finite that must be divied up fairly via government. (If wealth were not dynamic, people in the time of Charlemagne would have been wealthier than people today -- after all, there were fewer people getting a cut of the pie.)
- Out of sight, out of mind, out of heart. Saddam Hussein murdered 300,000 Iraqis right after the Gulf War and liberals raised nary a peep. Since 2003 fewer than 300,000 have died, yet the "humanitarian" outcry is both shrill and sustained.
- Liberals are really conformists. Heather MacDonald observed that liberalism is the default condition in America, something one needs to "think their way out of." Being liberal is easy because it is swimming with the stream. Jon Stewart is a conformist. Every guy who sports a ponytail, tattoo and ear stud to signal his creative bona fides is a conformist.
- Liberalism is arrested development. Almost every conservative I know was liberal until they outgrew it. George Clemenceau said, "A 20-year-old who is not a Socialist has no heart, but a 30-year-old who is still a Socialist has no brains." It's condescending, yes. But liberals think conservatives are selfish, belligerent and judgmental.
For all the liberal bashing on this site, one must acknowledge the powerful contributions of liberals. Ending slavery, promoting civil rights, creating a social safety net, advancing women's rights -- how can one argue with all that?
But where are such liberals today?
My liberal friends think Iraqis "aren't ready" for democracy, which is both smug and bigoted and ignores the difficulties the United States faced in its infancy.
My liberal friends describe the Iraq war as a total disaster, ignoring the millions of Kurds prospering in northern Iraq and the trial/execution of a genocidal murderer.
My liberal friends, who once sent me email petitions about the plight of Afghan women under the Taliban, now sniff that Bush hasn't wiped out the poppy trade.
In short, today's liberals have become intolerant, intransigent and cynically isolationist. Worst of all, they refuse to see that, despite all of the USA's sins, it remains the greatest force for good in the world.
Let's hope that isn't innate.
Jim Bass
eric hoffer quote
Courtesy of Maggie's Farm:
The monstrous evils of the twentieth century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women, and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind.
-- Eric Hoffer
Hoffer died before Pol Pot and the Hutus murdered millions more.
a baghdad homecoming
Here’s a quick snapshot of the Baghdad security crackdown, from my own family’s point of view. My story involves only a single household, but – so far – it has a happy ending. I don’t pretend that this one household’s story is a counterweight to all the misery and murder that the crackdown is intended to address, but it’s my profound hope that this story is – or soon will be --representative of many other such individual tales that will be told by many other Iraqi families.
Read on.
gender humor
How to shower like a woman. How to shower like a man. PG-13.
thursday, february 22, 2007
happy birthday, george
Remembering our first president.
blackened kettle
Hillary and Obama are fighting for the soul of Hollywood ($$$) and it's getting ugly:
David Geffen offering a few caustic comments, has incited a strong Hillary Clinton campaign attack on Geffen -- and the candidate he now favors, Sen. Barack Obama.
Then Obama's team fired back. "Everybody in politics lies, but they [the Clintons] do it with such ease, it’s troubling,” Geffen had said.
Well said. I think Bill Clinton lies in his sleep, and I don't mean on his side.
But David Geffen casting aspersions? He's pure Hollywood, where as they say, "your friends stab you in the front."
And David reputedly knows how to wield an ambitious knife. From a BBC report on a Geffen biography:
The heavyweight tome by Wall Street entertainment reporter Tom King chronicles many of Geffen's bitter showbusiness battles and it paints a none too pretty portrait of a man often willing to destroy a friendship in pursuit of a business deal. ...Geffen's carefully crafted campaign to destroy his friendship with a record company chief to secure a negotiating advantage by humiliating his wife has brought particular pangs of disgust.
The book has also generated interest because it reveals Geffen's close relationship with President Clinton, who has turned to him for advice on handling the media.
King even reveals how Geffen, who is openly gay, once took a boyfriend, Todd Mulzet, to an Oval Office meeting where the president sought his counsel on spinning the media.
Geffen left the session grinning and turned to Mulzet and - according to the book - said "I did that for you", implying that he had given the president advice largely to impress his partner.
They all deserve each other.
pelosi's crocodile tears
While Dem Cong leader Nancy Pelosi and Slimey John Murtha plot to undermine (Murtha's word) the American military effort in Iraq, Dick Cheney made a very common sense observation:
"I think if we were to do what Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Murtha are suggesting, all we will do is validate the al-Qaida strategy," the vice president told ABC News. "The al-Qaida strategy is to break the will of the American people ... try to persuade us to throw in the towel and come home, and then they win because we quit."
The AP desecribed this as "harsh" criticism. Speaker Nancy Pelosi fired back that Cheney was questioning critics' patriotism.
Isn't this getting a bit stale? Whenever someone disagrees with your policy -- in this case, cut and run -- you weep for the personal wound suffered.
Isn't this just a pussified approach to stifling dissent? Nancy ran to President Bush demanding that he make Cheney stop saying all those mean things.
Murtha will be crying, too, if he reads Ann Counter's latest:
Rumored ex-Marine John Murtha, Democrat congressman from Pennsylvania, has become the darling of the cut-and-run crowd for trying to place absurd restrictions on our troops, amounting to withdrawal from Iraq. Were Arab sheiks whispering into his ear?
In case you missed the video on "I Love the '80s," Rep. Murtha was caught on tape negotiating bribes with Arab sheiks during the FBI's Abscam investigation in 1980. The Abscam investigation was conducted by Jimmy Carter's Justice Department, not right-wing Republicans.
On tape, Murtha told the undercover FBI agent: "When I make a f***in' deal I want to make sure that I know exactly what I'm doing and ... what I'm sayin' is, a few investments in my district ..."
It is a profound and shocking fact that Murtha even showed up at this meeting, knowing he was going to be negotiating bribe money with Arabs.
...
The Democrats' cheat-sheet on Murtha demands that it be shouted out: "He didn't take a bribe on tape!" That's their defense. There is not even a pretense that he didn't talk to Arabs about a bribe.
He negotiated with a prostitute at the bar, but never consummated the deal. He's a saint! Let him be my congressman!
It's the Clintonian "incompetency" defense: Murtha was willing to be bribed; he just never got his act together enough to pick up the cash. I may not be honest, but I'm way too disorganized to actually take bribes!
Fine, Murtha was never convicted. Neither was Nixon. Venal hack John Murtha was willing to sell his country's interests to Arab sheiks. This is the man Democrats have put up to lead the anti-war charge today, demanding that the commander in chief stop deploying troops against his Arab friends.
If only this whole war thing would blow over, maybe that Arab is still waiting out there with a deal for him.
wednesday, february 21, 2007
priceless politics
How have San Francisco's golf courses been kept going when they cost more to maintain than they are receiving in fees from the golfers who use them? Recent renovations alone cost more than $23 million.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, "the city closed the gap with $16.6 million from state bond funds meant for recreation and park projects in underserved and economically disadvantaged areas." In other words, the poor have once again been used as human shields, this time to protect golfers.
The great allure of government programs in general for many people is that these programs allow decisions to be made without having to worry about the constraints of prices, which confront people at every turn in a free market.
They see prices as just obstacles or nuisances, instead of seeing them as messages conveying underlying realities that are there, whether or not prices are allowed to function. What prices are telling San Francisco is that municipal golf courses cost more than they are worth -- not in my opinion, but in the actions of people who are spending their own hard-earned money.
But what politician wants to hear that? Politics is priceless.
pregnancy hormone reverses ms damage
A hormone produced during pregnancy could reverse some of the neurological damage associated with multiple sclerosis, a mouse study suggests.
The finding could help explain why women with MS suffer fewer symptoms during pregnancy. And the results suggest that the hormone - prolactin - might one day be used to treat people with the disorder.
Multiple sclerosis involves the destruction of the sheath of fatty tissue called myelin that normally protects nerve cells. The loss of this protective layer disrupts nerve signalling and leads to symptoms including loss of coordination.
mitt romney's wife
...has MS. Here is an interview with her at ABC News.
the rapping pitchman
Moving goods to a rap rhythm. Video here.
that sinking city
New Orleans: Nearly a year and a half after Katrina, most of the Gulf Coast is recovering nicely — with one major exception. So who is to blame for that?
We know this much: It's long past time to blame FEMA. Whatever sins were committed in the hurricane's aftermath by the Federal Emergency Management Agency or anyone else at the federal level, they're now of relevance only to historians.
For cities that were in the storm's path, the future is largely in their own hands by now. Most are responding to that challenge with energy and hope. Then there's New Orleans.
This week's Mardi Gras brought some much-needed tourist cash to the Big Easy, but along with it came some probably unwanted media attention to the city's social and economic ills. On Monday, Reuters ran a story on New Orleans' crime, noting that its 27th homicide of the year — a remarkably high number for a place with only about 200,000 residents — occurred over the weekend.
A few days earlier, the New York Times chronicled the exodus of educated, middle-class New Orleans residents who are giving up on the city they love because of "high crime, high rents, soaring insurance premiums and what many call a lack of leadership, competence, money and progress."
We all know that Bush pointed that hurricane at New Orleans because he doesn't like black folk -- except for all the black people he's appointed to high positions in his administration.
dem cong
Turns out the Dem Cong are governing with pinpoint smart-bomb poll-guided accuracy. This, via Joyner:
Public Opinion Strategies* has released a survey [PDF file here] of likely voters’ attitudes toward the Iraq War that finds that most voters think the country is going in the wrong direction (67%) and President Bush is doing a poor job (60%), and that Iraq will never be a stable democracy (60%). No real surprises there, right?
However:
- 57% believe “The Iraq War is a key part of the global war on terrorism.”
- 57% “support finishing the job in Iraq, that is, keeping the troops there until the Iraqi government can maintain control and provide security for its people.
- 50% want our troops should stay and “do whatever it takes to restore order until the Iraqis can govern and provide security to their country” while only 17% favor immediate withdrawal
- 56% believe “Even if they have concerns about his war policies, Americans should stand behind the President in Iraq because we are at war.”
- 53% believe “The Democrats are going too far, too fast in pressing the President to withdraw the troops from Iraq.”
Thus far immobilized from taking any action beyond expressing some wishful thinking, an anti-war Congress … which senses viscerally it is on the wrong side of history and is afraid to act … is accurately reflecting the will of an American people who have been successfully depressed and confused about our prospects and direction in this war, but still don’t want to surrender.
Dem Cong -- whoever coined that is brilliant.
tuesday, february 20, 2007
idiot insurance
We require motorists to carry insurance protecting themselves and the rest of us against the costs of catastrophic events. Perhaps it is time to require the terminally clueless among us to carry similar insurance. In fact, given that they are sure to substantially damage themselves and others, while most motorists will never have a serious accident, the benefits of stupidity insurance will certainly accrue to everyone.
the stink
Remember Big Daddy in the movie Cat on Hot Tin Roof? He kept walking around complaining about the “stink of mendacity” emanating from his dysfunctional family. I know how he feels, for every day the bad odor of lies, hypocrisy, and deluded appeasement wafts from the daily news.
As always, the conflict between Israel and the Arab states is the prime source of malodorous mendacity. The latest noisome news concerns the agreement hammered out in Mecca between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. These two terrorist gangs have been killing each other for the past several weeks, but now supposedly they are going to form a “unity” government — which means they can get back to killing Israelis and pursuing their goal of cleansing the land of Jews “from the river to the sea.”
What’s really the issue here is not creating a functioning government, but rather restarting the billions in welfare that the West for years has been foolishly sending to the corrupt gangs that control the lives of Palestinian Arabs, and that was cut off in the wake of Hamas’ electoral victory. Over the decades we have bought into the lie that Palestinian “nationalist aspirations” and “frustration” with the “illegal occupation” are the engines of terrorist murder. So we have been sending money to “leaders” who speak the soothing words of “agreements,” the “two-state solution,” “frameworks,” and “road-maps,” all the while that the real aim — the destruction of Israel — continues to be pursued.
inside job
It's easy to beat up on the LAUSD, the Los Angeles school district. It is big, bloated, stupid, incompetent and corrupt. It built a $150 million high school on top of a known toxic site. The school was never occupied. Graduation rates are abysmal.
Now, in the latest scandal, some 10,000 district employees have been without paychecks for two weeks. Why?
The district let a contract to SAP Public Services for a new payroll system in 2005, which has bungled the job. Why did that firm get the gig although it was not the lowest bidder?
The lobbying firm Rose & Kindel represents the LAUSD's interests in Sacramento. The firm, it turns out, was also representing SAP at the very same time - but never, everyone vows, did it lobby the LAUSD on SAP's behalf. That would have been wrong.
It gets worse.
At the same time the two clients of Rose & Kindel were involved in the bidding process for a new district payroll system, the firm was pushing legislation sponsored by Assemblyman Lloyd Levine, D-Van Nuys, that would allow the LAUSD to waive state rules requiring it to accept the lowest bid for contracts. In other words, a bill that would allow the LAUSD to accept SAP's payroll bid, even though it wasn't the lowest one submitted.
And heck if it wasn't timely.
The same day the Levine bill was signed into law in October 2005, the LAUSD announced its contract with SAP.
Coincidence? Of course not. Nothing this convoluted and connected could be mere happenstance. But its sheer complexity is perhaps what school officials are counting on for insulation.
Who can work up a proper froth when the details are so mind-numbing? Who bears the blame when so many people are involved - school officials, the school board, SAP, Levine and lobbyists at Rose & Kindel.
With responsibility for the corruption spread so far and wide, no one has to bear the brunt of it.
Question for those who insist a "single payer*" healthcare system will be more efficient: what planet are you living on?
Meanwhile, the school board is angling for a 600% pay raise.
* Government monopoly
all wet
Many of us chuckle at the prudishness of much of Islamic culture. I say much because many Turkish women are quite stylish and western in their attire. In fact, wearing the head scarf is against the law in many places.
Still...
Amana Siddiqi loved swimming as a child but gave it up as a teenager because her Muslim faith required she fully cover her body in public.
"At age 15, I started to cover, so I stopped going to public pools," said Siddiqi, now 27, whose parents come from India and Pakistan. "Most of my friends stopped, too. They felt self-conscious."
Before getting too smug, look at this photo from the USA in the 1920s.
monday, february 19, 2007
spot the common problem
It is a dangerous and self-deluding mistake to focus only on suicide attacks in Israel and Iraq. That makes us forget that the carnage is not so much about us but about a them - a them that is even more dangerous to other Muslims than it is to us in the West.
The article gones on to highlight a few of the latest Islamic terror attacks, ranging from the Phillipines to Eritrea.
surrender? nuts!
Some surprising poll numbers about the war.
it's officially hopeless
From the New York Times:
Two days after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called the opening steps of a security crackdown here a "dazzling success," two car bombs tore through a crowded market and killed at least 60 people Sunday.
Got that? Don't believe anything you hear about success -- two bombs negate all that.
How hard is it to murder people and make a political statement with a truck bomb? Just ask the folks in Oklahoma City.
Meanwhile, things have calmed down a bit in Baghdad, according to Mohammed Fadhil,who lives there.
Since the multiple bombings in Shroja market district on the 12th, Baghdad hasn’t seen any major attacks and there’s a tangible decrease in all kinds of attacks.
Not only official statements say so (Defense ministry officials said today that attacks are down by 80% in Baghdad). It’s a reality I live in nowadays, at least in my neighborhood and its surroundings. It is also what I hear from friends and relatives in other parts of the city.
We are hearing fewer explosions and less gunfire now than two weeks ago and that, in Baghdad, qualifies as quiet.
I agree with what some experts say about this lull in violence being the result of militants keeping their heads down for a while. It is also possibly the result of the flight of the commanders of militant groups. Grunts left without planners, money or leaders wouldn’t want to do much on their own.
During my tour in Baghdad today I had to pull over to be searched at several checkpoints — something that has rarely happened to me before. When you are searched soldiers or policemen check the identity cards of passengers, and the registration papers of the vehicle along with a thorough physical search. Checkpoints deal even more strictly with large vans and cargo trucks.
The interesting thing about new checkpoints is the constant shifting of their location. One hour the checkpoint would be here and two hours later it would relocate to another position within the area. I think this helps security forces avoid becoming targets instead of hunters.
In addition to soldiers and policemen, most checkpoints have one or more traffic policemen reportedly being equipped with laptops that enable them to flag suspected vehicles by offering instant access to vehicle-registration databases.
UPDATE
Although soldiers and policemen are filling the streets, the terrorists are too coward to face the troops and choose to massacre unarmed civilians instead. What are they trying to prove with these cowardly acts? They can’t defeat the troops, so they attack civilians to discredit the security plan. But I don’t think such attacks can change the course of events on the long term; the Baghdad plan is a strategic effort that will go on for months, and time doesn’t seem to be on the terrorists’ side right now.
Today there was fighting in the neighborhoods around us and there were several attacks in other parts of Baghdad. It looks like some militants consider that sitting back and waiting is not an option and so they are trying to break the siege. The fighting was fierce and gunship helicopters circled at low altitude over the fighting zone and adjacent areas.
The sky of Baghdad is a story by itself—the city is being watched from above at several levels; from helicopters flying just above rooftops to various types of surveillance drones -which Baghdadis collectively refer to as “the fly” because of the buzzing sound- that remain in the air for hours, to another type of surveillance aircrafts that fly silently at higher altitudes and I suspect are also unmanned. Above those flies an assortment of fighter jets, and sometimes heavy bombers. All in all it’d be true to say that the sky is full of eyes and guns.
Although attacks happen here and there, the general feeling is still closer to hope and appreciation of the plan than pessimism. More families are returning to the homes they were once forced to leave, and we’re talking about some of the most dangerous districts such as Ghazaliya and Haifa Street.
indicting patrick fitzgerald
Victoria Toensing, co-author of the espionage statute that was the basis of the Plame brouhaha, indicts the Special Prosecutor:
Could someone please explain to me why Scooter Libby is the only person on trial in the Valerie Plame leak investigation?
Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald charged Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff with perjury on the theory that Libby had a nefarious reason for lying to a grand jury about what he told reporters regarding CIA officer Plame: He was trying to cover up a White House conspiracy to retaliate against Plame's husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. Wilson had infuriated Vice President Cheney by accusing the Bush administration of lying about intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Fitzgerald apparently concluded that a purported cover-up was sufficient motive for Libby to trim his recollections in a criminal way. So when Libby's testimony differed from that of others, it was Libby who got indicted.
There's a reason why responsible prosecutors don't bring perjury cases on mere "he said, he said" evidence. Without an underlying crime or tangible evidence of obstruction (think Martha Stewart trying to destroy phone logs), the trial becomes a mishmash of faulty memories in which witnesses can seem as guilty as the defendant. Any prosecutor knows that memories differ, even vividly, and each party can be convinced that his or her version is the truthful one.
If we accept Fitzgerald's low threshold for bringing a criminal case, then why stop at Libby? This investigation has enough questionable motives and shadowy half-truths and flawed recollections to fill a court docket for months. So here are my own personal bills of indictment:
Read on.
hillary scurries away
Sen. Clinton can take no such refuge. She faces an activist base that essentially believes that you cannot really be a Democrat without being solidly anti-war. As the author of some of the tougher and better-argued speeches in favor of regime change in Iraq, she now faces repeated demands that she pass this test of correctness—and pass it by denouncing her own recent positions. It will be difficult if not impossible for her to make this full act of contrition. This is not just because such a full-scale grovel would make her look flaky and pandering—she can stand a little of that, as her absurd position in favor of the flag-burning amendment showed us—but because what she said in the first place was so definite and unambiguous.
On her campaign visit to New Hampshire this weekend, she was asked by an audience member to describe her 2002 vote as a mistake "right here, right now, once and for all, without nuance." Until "we hear you say that," the questioner went on, "we're not going to hear all these other great things you've said." Not for the first time, she declined to oblige. Instead, she took refuge in the softer claim that she couldn't know then what she knew now, and in the following rather bizarre view of the Bush administration's policy:
From almost the first day they got into office, they were trying to figure out how to get rid of Saddam Hussein. I'm not a psychiatrist; I don't know all of the reasons behind their concern, some might say their obsession.
If she continues in this vein, then someone is going to remind her of how truly agonizing an effort to ride two horses can be. The record is very plain and easy to look up. Here is what she said in her crucial speech of October 2002:
In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaida members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001.
Notice what this does not say. It does not say that she agrees with the Bush administration on those two key points. Rather, it states these two claims in her own voice and on her own authority. A man like John Edwards can back away from his own 2002 vote easily enough by suggesting that he was deceived by Republican propaganda, but he was barely in politics before 2000. Sen. Clinton, however, was not just in politics. She was in the White House. That's why she had to speak of "the four years" that had elapsed since the relationship between the United States and Iraq went critical once more. As the preceding paragraph of her speech said:
In 1998, the United States also changed its underlying policy toward Iraq from containment to regime change and began to examine options to effect such a change.
sunday, february 18, 2007
hey man, this cat can play
Nora the cat loves to tickle the ivories.
the democrat/media's losing ways
The week's news from Iraq: According to the state television network, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, was wounded in a clash with security forces just north of Baghdad. A senior deputy was killed.
Meanwhile, the punk cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has decided that discretion is the better part of mullahs and has temporarily relocated to Iran. That's right: The biggest troublemaker in Iraq is no longer in Iraq. It may be that his Persian vacation is only to marry a cousin or two and consult with the A-list ayatollahs, but the Mookster has always had highly sensitive antennae when it comes to his own physical security -- he likes being the guy who urges martyrdom on others rather than being just another schmuck who takes one for the team. So the fact that urgent business requires him to be out of town for the Big Surge is revealing at the very least of how American objectives in Iraq are not at the mercy of forces beyond their control; U.S. military and political muscle can shape conditions on the ground -- if they can demonstrate they're serious about doing so.
Which these days is a pretty big "if." Reporting the sudden relocation, the New York Times decided -- in nothing flat -- that it was yet another disastrous setback. In Iraq, no news is good news, and Sadr news is badder news:
''With the new American offensive in Baghdad still in its early days, American commanders have focused operations in the eastern part of the city, a predominantly Shiite area that has long been the Mahdi Army's power base.
''If Mr. Sadr had indeed fled, his absence would create a vacuum that could allow even more radical elements of the Shiite group to take power.''
As my National Review colleague Rich Lowry marveled: ''So now we need to keep Sadr in Iraq because he's such a stabilizing influence!'' Of course! As Hillaire Belloc wrote, ''Always keep a hold of Nurse/For fear of finding something worse'' -- and, even when Nurse Sadr is blowing up the kids in the nursery every day, it's best to cling to her blood-drenched apron strings because the next nurse will be an even bigger psycho. America is a big helpless baby who's blundered into a war zone he can never hope to understand.
According to a report by the New York Sun's Eli Lake last month, Iran is supporting Shia insurgents in Iraq and Sunni insurgents in Iraq. In other words, it's on both sides in the so-called civil war. How can this be? After all, as the other wise old foreign-policy "realists" of the Iraq Study Group assured us only in December, Iran has "an interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq.''
Au contraire, the ayatollahs have concluded they have a very clear interest in fomenting chaos in Iraq. They're in favor of Sunni killing Shia, and Shia killing Sunni, and if some vacationing Basque terrorists wanted to blow up the Spanish Cultural Center in Mosul, they'd be in favor of that, too. The Iranians don't care who kills whom as long as every night when Americans turn on the evening news there's smoke over Baghdad. As I say in my book, if you happen to live in Ramadi or Basra, Iraq is about Iraq; if you live in Tehran, or Cairo, or Bei-jing, Moscow, Pyongyang or Brussels, Iraq is about America. American will. American purpose. American credibility.
what makes jimmy run?
Besides Killer Rabbits, what is Jimmy Carter afraid of? Eleven professors from Emory want to know.
cargo cult
Another peek into the strange world we live in:
Shouldering bamboo poles like rifles, theyexecuteimmaculatedrills, stamping to attention, about-turning and deploying their imitation weapons beneath a giant stars and stripes flag fluttering from a pole.
This tiny, imitation army belongs to one of the world's last surviving cargo cults, an anthropological phenomenon thought to have begun in the late 19th century and which mushroomed in the Pacific after the second world war.
When soldiers and airmen from the US and other allied countries arrived in the islands with huge war cargoes, it was believed by islanders that these were gifts from the gods - so those who followed the beliefs of a cargo cult would be rewarded for their faith. When goods fail to appear, as in the post-war period, it is because they have not yet performed the correct rituals - this has led to islanders re-creating airstrips, lookout towers and "radio equipment" made from wood or coconut shells and imitating the troops drills.
The Jon Frum cult on the island of Tanna, in the former Anglo-French colony of Vanuatu, celebrated the 50th anniversary of its founding last week with two days of parading, dancing and feasting. Miniature US flags festooned treesliningtheblacksandparade ground, the focus of Lamakara village, the cult's headquarters. Nearby Mount Yasur, a live volcano, is said to be the home of the spirit of Jon Frum.
HT: Betsy's Page
shoot the curl
Hey, it's been in the 80s for the past two days here in Southern California. And that means it's time to wax those long boards and cock those shotguns and get in some skeet surfin'.
it's the gangsters, stupid
Before the victories of the civil rights movement, the murders of black people during the most intense redneck reigns throughout the South were committed by those once called "poor white trash." These were the people who became homicidally enraged at the idea of a black man acting as if he was a free person.
What is now so appalling is that while the street gangs that presently terrorize black communities across the nation do so with astonishing levels of murder and mayhem, they are so often defined by supposedly empathetic liberals as victims of race and class.
No such glib hogwash was spewed when the murderers were white and the resultant corpses were black. No one ever explained that the lower-class rednecks who were presenting themselves under peaked sheets while burning crosses, setting homes afire, bombing homes, offices and churches or murdering and mutilating their black victims, did so because they were feeling inferior to the white upper class of the South.
When the killers were white, the issues were justice and injustice, not social status or income. If there were actual justice, as we often heard during those violent Southern years of the civil rights movement, the killers would be punished for their crimes and black people would be able to walk the streets with the safety that should be the right of every citizen of this country.
But when the street gangs emerged with unprecedented fury 30 years ago in Los Angeles, we began to see something quite unusual. The opinions of those who had been so ice cold when it came to Southern racists either became quiet or looked for ways of explaining away the corpse after corpse after corpse left perforated by shotgun blasts and automatic weapons. Some were gang bangers, some were innocent bystanders, some were children caught in the crossfire.
In my travels to many cities during the past 30 years, I have noticed a distinct difference between the perception of these knuckleheads by those within striking distance of their anarchist wrath and those who live far from the mean streets on which so much violence takes place. Those oppressed by crime do not have the kind of inordinate sympathy for these killers that the bleeding hearts do. They want them controlled, incarcerated or removed from the world.
When liberals wail about the vast number of black men in prison, I doubt their black victims join the chorus.
big bad john
Congressman John Murtha gets reamed by the Washington Post
Mr. Murtha has a different idea. He would stop the surge by crudely hamstringing the ability of military commanders to deploy troops. In an interview carried Thursday by the Web site MoveCongress.org, Mr. Murtha said he would attach language to a war funding bill that would prohibit the redeployment of units that have been at home for less than a year, stop the extension of tours beyond 12 months, and prohibit units from shipping out if they do not train with all of their equipment. His aim, he made clear, is not to improve readiness but to "stop the surge." So why not straightforwardly strip the money out of the appropriations bill -- an action Congress is clearly empowered to take -- rather than try to micromanage the Army in a way that may be unconstitutional? Because, Mr. Murtha said, it will deflect accusations that he is trying to do what he is trying to do. "What we are saying will be very hard to find fault with," he said.
Mr. Murtha's cynicism is matched by an alarming ignorance about conditions in Iraq. He continues to insist that Iraq "would be more stable with us out of there," in spite of the consensus of U.S. intelligence agencies that early withdrawal would produce "massive civilian casualties." He says he wants to force the administration to "bulldoze" the Abu Ghraib prison, even though it was emptied of prisoners and turned over to the Iraqi government last year. He wants to "get our troops out of the Green Zone" because "they are living in Saddam Hussein's palace"; could he be unaware that the zone's primary occupants are the Iraqi government and the U.S. Embassy?
See John Murtha on FBI tapes from 1978. Murtha was a target of the Abscam investigation and an unindicted co-conspirator. This video shows him being cagey about taking a bribes. Slime.
Murtha's contribution to America? Mark Steyn:
"Democratic leaders have rallied around a strategy that would fully fund the president's $100 billion request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but would limit his ability to use the money. . . . The plan is aimed at tamping down calls from the Democrats' liberal wing for Congress to simply end funding for the war.
"The Murtha plan, based on existing military guidelines, includes a stipulation that Army troops who have already served in Iraq must be granted two years at home before an additional deployment. . . . The idea is to slowly choke off the war by stopping the deployment of troops from units that have been badly degraded by four years of combat."
So "the Murtha plan" is to deny the president the possibility of victory while making sure Democrats don't have to share the blame for the defeat. But of course he's a great American! He's a patriot! He supports the troops! He doesn't support them in the mission, but he'd like them to continue failing at it for a couple more years. As John Kerry wondered during Vietnam, how do you ask a soldier to be the last man to die for a mistake? By nominally "fully funding" a war you don't believe in but "limiting his ability to use the money." Or as the endearingly honest anti-war group MoveCongress.org put it, in an e-mail preview of an exclusive interview with the wise old Murtha:
"Chairman Murtha will describe his strategy for not only limiting the deployment of troops to Iraq but undermining other aspects of the president's foreign and national security policy."
"Undermining"? Why not? To the Slow-Bleed Democrats, it's the Republicans' war. To an increasing number of what my radio pal Hugh Hewitt calls the White-Flag Republicans, it's Bush's war. To everyone else on the planet, it's America's war. And it will be America's defeat.
saturday, february 17, 2007
flu kills and retards
Some states contemplate making the new HPV vaccine mandatory. This is a significant personal intrusion for a disease (the virus is a precursor to cervical cancer) that is not communicable to the general public in the way that measles or polio is.
Annual deaths in the US number 3,900.
Annual deaths in the US from the flu? 36,000
Given that flu can only survive by moving from person to person, why doesn't the government make flu shots cheap and easy for everyone, instead of just the "high risk" people?
This question is even more urgent given research showing that pregnant women who get the flu have children who:
“displayed reduced educational attainment, increased rates of physical disability, lower income, lower socioeconomic status, and higher transfer payments compared with other birth cohorts.”
Freakonomics blog has a good discussion about this.
lawnmower man
Hugh Hewitt rips GOP Congressman Ric Keller a new one. First, this quote from Keller:
Let me give you an analogy. Imagine that you have a next door neighbor who refuses to mow his lawn, and the weeds are up to his waist. You mow his lawn for him every single week. The neighbor never says thank you, he hates you, and sometimes he takes out a gun and shoots at you.
Under these circumstances, would you keep mowing his lawn forever? Would you send even more of your family members over to mow his lawn? Or, would you say to him, you better start mowing your own lawn or there’s going to be serious consequences for you?
Hewitt replies with his own lawn analogy:
Okay, Congressman, let’s say that we are mowing our neighbor’s lawn. Let’s say the neighbor’s entire family isn’t uniformly grateful and that the place still looks like a pig sty in spite of our best efforts. Still, there are a few more things you want to work into the equation.
For instance, you mentioned the neighbor has weeds, weeds up to his waist. Did you know that those are pernicious weeds? If those weeds are not adequately taken care of, they will take over not only the neighbor’s lawn but soon the whole neighborhood. Someday, those weeds are going to be threatening our very own lawn, even though we live a couple of streets away.
There will probably even be some times when those weeds make serious inroads on our verdant grounds. We had to deal with them before, back in Fall of 2001. Do you remember that? It ruined the entire autumn. We had to spend the whole season spreading Scott’s LawnGro to contain it but it still did incredible damage.
Also, did you know that the neighbor’s lawn has an incredible vegetable garden? That vegetable garden helps everyone in the neighborhood eat right, including us. No matter who controls that garden, people will still want to buy the vegetables it produces. There will be a lot of hungry and sad faces around the neighborhood if everyone doesn’t get their heirloom tomatoes and beautiful cucumbers.
In short, I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s in our own selfish interest to help our neighbor take care of his lawn. Once we teach him how to ride the Toro and use the Weedwacker, he’ll be able to do it himself. But we can’t just walk away from the situation because we don’t like his attitude. We have to help him for as long as it takes to get that lawn ship-shape and until we’re sure that he can keep it that way. Even if his punk teenage son uses the Toro we gave him as a “lawnmower bomb,” we can’t give up.
Yes, it would be nice if he were a little more grateful. It would be even nicer if he would give us some of those delicious vegetables as a gift for all we’ve done. But we don’t expect that. All we want to do is get him to the point where he can take care of his own lawn. Besides, there are some other houses on the block that have that same weed.
"cold cash" jefferson back in the saddle
Eight months after stripping Rep. William J. Jefferson of his seat on the Ways and Means Committee, Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to award the lawmaker with a spot on the Homeland Security panel.
The move, confirmed by a top Democratic leadership aide and expected to take place Friday, is aimed at giving Jefferson, D-La., a greater opportunity to help the people in his district, particularly those still recovering in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Jefferson, the subject of an ongoing federal bribery probe, surprised fellow lawmakers and political observers Dec. 9 when he won election to a ninth term in a close runoff race.
“He’s been in limbo for a long time,” the leadership aide said. “He’s a member of Congress representing his constituents and is working on issues of concern to his district and the country.”
Let's put this into perspective.
Last year the GOP's Tom DeLay was forced to resign his House leadership position because he was indicted for supposedly mishandling $190,000 in campaign donations. The indictment was brought by DA Ronnie Earle, who makes no secret of his liberal politics nor his personal animus toward DeLay. The charge is weak and trivial.
DeLay never took money and stuffed it in his freezer. The campaign funds were not for DeLay but other candidates. Yet he's gone.
And now Nancy Pelosi is assigning a suspected thief to oversee Homeland Security.
iraq update: how are the bad guys doing?
From StrategyPage:
How are the bad guys doing in Iraq? The Iraqi media is full of information on what the various Sunni, Shia and Kurdish factions are up to. Lots of the reporting is speculation, but a lot of it is not. If you've been following the action long enough, you can pick out the accurate stories. And the talk on the street and in the shops is also pretty dependable. That said, most people believe al Qaeda in Iraq is finished.
After boasting last Fall that they would establish a safe zone in western Iraq, and failing to do anything close to that, the Islamic terrorists lost whatever credibility they had left. Most of the terrorist bombings these days are the work of Iraqi Sunni Arab organizations, who still believe that if you make the Iraqi Shia Arabs mad enough, they will get so nasty that neighboring Sunni Arab nations will feel compelled to invade. This plan has split the Sunni Arab nationalists, mainly because the invasion shows no sign of happening, and the brighter terrorists point out that the Saudi army is unlikely to win against the Americans. In a trend that began two years ago, Sunni Arab factions are continuing to battle each other. U.S. troops stand aside when they encounter "Red-on-Red" fighting, then deal with the winner.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi Shia Arab militias, especially the Sadr forces (the Mahdi Army), have lost whatever unity and discipline they once had. Factionalism has taken over as several of Sadr's lieutenants compete for popularity and territory by driving Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad neighborhoods. Most of Iraq's Sunni Arabs have been chased from their homes since 2003, and that process has accelerated in the last year. The Iraqi Sunni Arabs are quite wealthy compared to Iraqi Shia, and the Shia gangs have been fighting each other over the loot, and the power. Gang war, literally, because many of the militiamen moonlight as gangsters (or vice versa).
While the number of terror bombings has been declining in the past year, the crime rate has not, and most people in central Iraq are looking forward to the "Battle for Baghdad." Brigades of troops are arriving from the Kurdish north and Shia south, and more American troops can be seen on the streets. There are more raids in Baghdad. But all the average Iraqi wants is safer streets, fewer kidnappings and a little peace and quiet. Realizing that that kind of paradise is not likely to be found in the Middle East, Baghdad has been suffering a major brain drain in the past year, with the most educated fleeing for foreign countries. Europe and North America are preferred destinations, but any place with a lower crime rate will do.
rudy giuliani
"What I don't get is the nonbinding resolution. I don't get that. In the business world, two weeks spent on a nonbinding resolution would be considered nonproductive."
Unless you're producing political cover for yourselves.
shrinking zawahiri's head
Know your enemy. Shrinkwrapped:
"recently spent some time putting together a Psychoanalytic look at Zawahiri, using open source material, which may offer some illumination into the mind of a brilliant, psychopathic savage.
Although I used a number of sources, all the quotes in this post are from the New Yorker profile of Zawahiri by Lawrence Wright from 2002.
the democrats' racial hangup
Jeffrey Lord puts the Donkeys on the couch:
As President Bush ever so delicately touched on the subject in a press conference with then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin: ""There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may or may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that stronglly...I believe that people whose skins are a different color than white can self-govern."
Left unsaid by Bush is the very, very long record of the Democratic Party in believing precisely that "people whose skins are a different color than white" cannot govern. It was, after all, Abraham Lincoln's famous Democratic opponent for both the Senate and the presidency, Stephen A. Douglas, who said: "I believe this government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity for ever, and I am in favor of confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon Negroes, Indians and other inferior races."
Is it any wonder that a political party that has such sentiments as its founding principles moved seamlessly from slavery to segregation to racial quotas, whose prominent adherents promote a journalist because of race, prosecute athletes because of race or ra