Abracadabrah I create as I speak

O! For a British Al Sharpton

2007-04-12T11:03:00.000-04:00

It's A Good Thing Tony Blair Doesn't Work at NBC .

Because they would be firing him just about now:

Tony Blair yesterday claimed the spate of knife and gun murders in London was not being caused by poverty, but a distinctive black culture. His remarks angered community leaders, who accused him of ignorance and failing to provide support for black-led efforts to tackle the problem...

Black community leaders reacted after Mr Blair said the recent violence should not be treated as part of a general crime wave, but as specific to black youth. He said people had to drop their political correctness and recognise that the violence would not be stopped "by pretending it is not young black kids doing it".

At least in America, this is the kind of statement which generally only receives approbation when uttered by an extremely successful member of the black community. In our case, someone such as Bill Cosby whose speeches are controversial, but are accepted.

I wonder if Tony Blair is unaware of this rule? Or if he decided to crash the gates of political correctness because he felt that the stakes were important enough finally to act. Not that that will do him any good, I imagine.

It's clear enough that not everyone in his government agrees:

Mr Blair's remarks are at odds with those of the Home Office minister Lady Scotland, who told the home affairs select committee last month that the disproportionate number of black youths in the criminal justice system was a function of their disproportionate poverty, and not to do with a distinctive black culture.

Which is more along the lines of the pablum such events as rising murder rates usually elicit.

In other words, it's not their fault, because they're victims of that world evil known as capitalism.

Apparently, Mr. Blair was motivated to speak by listening to members of the black community itself expound on the matter:

[T]he prime minister admitted he had been "lurching into total frankness" in the final weeks of his premiership. He called on black people to lead the fight against knife crime. He said that "the black community - the vast majority of whom in these communities are decent, law abiding people horrified at what is happening - need to be mobilised in denunciation of this gang culture that is killing innocent young black kids".

But, then, this is quite all right when a black leader utters such words. But when a white man issues such a statement, the only result is likely to be a rush of criticism directed at him. While everyone concerned ignores his statement.

In fact, the phenomenon is quite similar to non-Muslim criticism of Islamic culture. It does no good; it only results in cries of "orientalism," loud dismissals of the criticism and censure to the person who has mustered the courage to speak.

Some Thoughts on the Season 3 BSG Finale

2007-03-26T14:27:00.000-04:00

I enjoyed watching the episode while it was running, but I haven't really enjoyed thinking about it afterwards.

I don't like the idea that the heads of the resistance were all cylons, as though humans didn't have it in them to defend themselves, only cylons could do that effectively and with leadership.

Or, on the other hand, for people who found those methods unpalatable, that all those mistakes could be chalked up to the cylons as opposed to an actual resistance.

I'm also having mixed to negative feelings about Adama being unable to separate his own feelings of guilt, imperfection and inadequacy as an officer and an Admiral from ruling on Balthar. True, he did not live up to perfect standards at all times. But Balthar really was a traitor and collaborator and Adama knew that. Should his self knowledge of his limitations determine his perspective on judging others?

True, he took the more humane approach, at least in the short term. It won't be more humane, however, if it leads to more human deaths and destruction in the longer term.

At least we know Adama is consistent. This choice parallels the one he made last year, in the finale, about the election. And we already the outcome of that choice. His choice, though more satisfying to his conscious, led to the death of 1000s. Yet here he is faced with the same sort of choice and, once again, he steps up to the line, but then retreats hastily. This also parallels what happened with Admiral Cain. He gives orders to execute her, and then steps back from that. That situation ultimately led to a good result, but only because fate lent an immediate hand and created the result he desired - her death. Adama has a horror of becoming like Admiral Cain - a healthy one, considering her final incarnation and the kind of untempered military justice she meted out.

But he is the leader of the military and at times he must assert decisive control in that position.

And if even the head of the military can't differentiate in his public role between his own shortcomings and those of others, which have led to more serious problems than the ones that he caused or feels guilty about causing, I think the remains of the human race are in serious trouble.

It is poor leadership; Adama is merely creating conditions that will continue to incubate the same kind of problems that they have had. The cycle will run on continuously, one imagines, until he can overcome this issue of his, his false guilt about launching the cylon war made more poignant by the fact that if, as think we just learned, that Tigh is a cylon, the intent by the cylons to go to war had been going on for decades. In any case, as I have argued before, it is naive to believe that the cylons could respond in force like the way they did if they had not been separately building up their armies to go to war. Does Adama really believe the cylons weren't simultaneously spying on them? How absurd and naive of him, a point I also made at the time.

Moreover, how soon until Balthar attempts to step into a political role once again? And causes more trouble?

And why didn't the prosecution think to charge him with some lesser charge as well as treason and collaboration?

The Latest from Robert Novak

2007-03-26T11:43:00.000-04:00

Robert Novak's latest column, A President All Alone, discusses Bush's distance - even isolation - from congressional Republicans, and their chagrin at ongoing revelations of Bush administration incompetence.

"We always have claimed that we were the party of better management," one House leader told me. "How can we claim that anymore?"

But the final paragraphs in the article is what really grabbed my attention.

A few Republicans blame incessant attacks from the new Democratic majority in Congress for that image [of endless incompetence]. Many more say today's problems in the administration derive from the continuing impact of yesterday's mistakes. The answer that is not entertained by the president's most severe GOP critics, even when not speaking for quotation, is that this is just the governing style of George W. Bush and will not change while he is in the Oval Office.

Regarding Libby and Gonzales, unofficial word from the White House is not reassuring. One credible source says the president will never -- not even on the way out of office in January 2009 -- pardon Libby. Another equally good source says the president will never ask Gonzales to resign. That exactly reverses the prevailing Republican opinion in Congress. Bush is alone.

I'm wondering who that anonymous source is for the quotation about Libby - as each official refracts a different experience of the President. Is this a close reflection? Or one with high built in distortion?

We know that Novak is paleocon-ish; he definitely has a point of view on Bush in disagreeing with him on policy matters. Are his chosen sources representing this POV as well, or has disillusion become more widespread. Because the picture of Bush he is painting in the last paragraph is sure not a pretty one - it's very arrogant and self absorbed. As opposed to the picture of Bush of being overly loyal to the people who work for him.

It would reflect terribly on Bush, and would be disillusioning and disheartening both, if Tenet ends up with the Presidential Medal of Freedom - which he already has - while Libby ends up in jail.

What do we think?

At least we know that there will be a high burden of competence demanded from all candidates in the next election. And that burden will be met by a large number of them.

The Madness of King George III

2007-03-24T00:19:00.000-04:00

For those with an interest in history, there's been some interesting new research on the Madness of King George III.

As has been long suspected, King George III was suffering from porphyria. The new information is that his case was made more severe because he was treated with arsenic, which heightened the effects of his illnesss.

The Obligatory Aw Knut Post!

2007-03-23T11:35:00.000-04:00

Aw Knut, the most adorable baby polar bear. Yesterday, he was introduced to the public in his new quarters at the Berlin zoo.

I love the last one. Well really, I love them all, but the last one reminds me of the illustration of Winnie the Pooh's legs sticking out of the honey jar.

Plenty more Knut goodness can be found here and here.

Irony Alert

2007-03-23T00:12:00.000-04:00

How amusing!

Former President Bill Clinton yesterday complained that “it’s just not fair” the way his wife, presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), is being depicted for her controversial Iraq war vote.

Speaking to hundreds of supporters on conference call, the former president said, “I don’t have a problem with anything Barack Obama [has] said on this,” but “to characterize Hillary and Obama’s positions on the war as polar opposites is ludicrous.

“This dichotomy that’s been set up to allow him to become the raging hero of the anti-war crowd on the Internet is just factually inaccurate.”

How ironic. Hillary has become a victim of media spin.

Weird New Ad Campaign Spotted Around New York

2007-03-22T23:30:00.000-04:00

Manhattan Mini Storage has a new ad campaign going on NY city, to help publicize their three new locations.

I spotted the first Manhattan Mini Storage ad yesterday as, it happened, that I was strolling with two other republicans after gym. Fortunately, my closets are not that narrow.

Noticed the second one tonight on the way back from the gym, while schlepping bags home from Fairway.

I guess they figure they are safe enough, given the demographics of NYC. But I bet some minority gets completely turned off and won't use their services.

I swiped the pics from manhattah chowder, which believes the ad campaign is just great.

And Now for the Important News of the Day

2007-03-22T13:59:00.000-04:00

Battlestar Galactica gets renewed for a full season 4 plus a two hour movie.

The third season finale is coming up this Sunday evening - along with the end of Rome.

The big question is whether Starbuck returns this week, or we have to wait until next year to find out what happened to her? And is she a cylon, or did her ship pass out of Major Apollo's visual range before he saw the explosion of what looked like her ship on the horizon?

Apparently, for people who analyzed the digital download frame by frame, there was another ship in the frame with Starbuck's right before the explosion.

If Starbuck turns out to be a cylon - one of the original 5 as some people have speculated - we'll get to have a nice time doing a bit of metaphysical speculation over the hiatus.

Training Up the Next Generation of Soldier Bots

2007-03-22T12:45:00.001-04:00

Instilling young Palestinian children with their parents' ideals on Hamas children's tv. Instead of Sesame Street, this is what they get.

Watch a four-year-old girl sings about the glories of her mother, female suicide bomber Reem Riyashi.

Imagine coming from a culture where maternal self-sacrifice means not how much one's mother was prepared to do to to help her children; but, rather, that she considered taking care of her children of lesser importance than blowing herself up while killing a few enemies.

Now there's a life lesson no shrink will be able to overcome.

And there's a whole generation being trained up to think this way. These are now "Palestinian values."

Golda Meir's words are as relevant now as the day they were first spoken: “We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”

That goal is not yet in sight.

Palestinian Media Watch provides the translation of the song:

The following is the text of the song that Duha, Reem's daughter, sings to her mother:

[Daughter sees mother preparing explosives sticks]

"Mommy, what are you carrying
in your arms instead of me?

[Mother turns to hide bomb]

A toy or a present for me?...
Mommy Reem!
Why did you put on your veil?
Are you going out, Mommy?...
Come back quickly, Mommy
I can't sleep without you,
unless you tell me and Ubaydah [her brother] a bedtime story.

[Daughter sees mother's picture and news story about bombing on PA TV]

My mother, my mother,
Me and Ubaydah are awake and waiting for you
to come to put us to sleep.
Me and Ubaydah, oh Mommy,
still need you to wipe our tears...
Instead of me you carried a bomb in your hands.
Only now, I know what was more precious than us...
May your steps be blessed,
and may you be flawless for Jerusalem.
Me and Ubaydah wish we were there with you.

[Images of her mother's grave and the graves of other terrorists,
including Aayat Al-Akhras, 17-year-old female suicide terrorist]

Send greetings to our Messenger [Muhammad] and tell him:
'Duha loves you.'
My love will not be [merely] words.
I am following Mommy in her steps.

[Finds explosives that mother left in her drawer,
picks up stick of explosives]

Oh Mommy, oh Mommy."

Has Bush Learned from Past Mistakes?

2007-03-20T18:43:00.000-04:00

And the nature of the domestic enemy he faces? One can only hope that the disaster of the Scooter Libby verdict had a salutary effect. And that he now plans to stand firm and defend his people when the Senate Democrats are determined to pick them off, one by one.

Bush, in a late-afternoon statement at the White House, said, "We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants. ... I proposed a reasonable way to avoid an impasse."

He added: "There's no indication ... that anybody did anything improper."

Bush gave his embattled attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, a boost during an early morning call to his longtime friend and ended the day with a public statement repeating it. "He's got support with me," the president said...

"If the Democrats truly do want to move forward and find the right information, they ought to accept what I proposed," Bush said. "If scoring political points is the desire, then the rejection of this reasonable proposal will really be evident for the American people to see."

This is just Leahy and Schumer engaging in extremely partisan politics and going big game hunting.

They want to show off some heads to the moveon.org troops.

Menu Foods - Sue Their Asses

2007-03-20T17:51:00.000-04:00

It turns out that Menu Foods - makers of the poisonous pet food since recalled - has known for at least a month that there were problems with its pet food. But instead of doing an immediate recall and then sorting out the difficulty, they waited until late last week to come clean to the public and issue their recall. In the meantime, pets continued to fall ill of kidney failure and to die. The true number of pets to die from this is not, at present, known. It seems to be widespread, across the country.

The tainted ingredient was the wheat gluten in the food which may have contained molds or heavy metals - the cause is not yet known. If you think about it, though, feeding wheat gluten to cats is just bizarre. It's not as though their systems have evolved for wheat in the diet. In fact, after 1000s of years of eating wheat, it is becoming recognized lately, that not all humans are able to tolerate wheat either - thus the rising number of people recognized to have wheat sensitivities and celiac disease.

Menu Foods claim that reports of problems first reached them in February and they still waited a month to go public. But, that looks like the legal ground that they are staking out for themselves.

According to more informal sources, the kind found on the internet in the comments sections, so take it for what it is worth, warnings first arose months before that.

Kidney disease is the number one killer of cats in the US. Coincidence? I don't think so. I think this is related to the pet food industry. The difference is on this occasion enough food was tainted so that the effects were absolutely widespread and fatal and it couldn't be passed over. I suspect that food has been tainted before.

My cat had a similar but not fatal incident last year. All of a sudden, for no apparent reason, he got quite ill - vomiting, no energy, drinking tons of water. I brought him to the vet, it turned out he had early kidney disease, and I changed his diet completely and started using some natural remedies as well, such as making parsley tea for him and giving it to him in a dropper.

I now feed my cat only human grade cat food and table scraps. And he has mostly returned to health although I believe he still has some kidney problems that were brought on with his serious illness. He still drinks a great deal of water, for instance, a symptom of kidney disease. A healthy cat kidney permits a cat to go a long time without water, an adaptation necessary since they were once desert animals.

If Only Bush Would Have Fired His Ass

2007-03-20T00:51:00.000-04:00

U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald was ranked among prosecutors who had "not distinguished themselves" on a Justice Department chart sent to the White House in March 2005, when he was in the midst of leading the CIA leak investigation that resulted in the perjury conviction of a vice presidential aide, administration officials said yesterday.

Doesn't look like he'll be able to do it now.

Serious Questions for Henry Waxman's Show Trial

2007-03-15T02:02:00.000-04:00

By Rick Ballard, reposted with permission:

House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman will continue his show trials masquerading as Congressional hearings tomorrow with a focus on the purported outing of CIA celebrity agent Valerie Plame by the White House and Office of the Vice-President. Apparently Waxman has limited access to simple facts. If Waxman had even a minimal desire to determine the truth, Joe Wilson would have been called to sit beside his wife and testify to their joint decision to go into electoral politics.

The primary responsibility for the protection of agents’ identities rests with the agents themselves. That is a fact hammered into all CIA employees from the moment they are hired. Valerie Plame Wilson initiated her own ‘outing’ by participating in her husband’s successful effort to become an advisor to the Kerry campaign. The precise moment in which she abandoned any pretense of being ‘undercover’ is difficult to determine, but it is safe to presume it occurred prior to May 2, 2003.

On that day, during a meeting of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, the Wilsons succeeded in inserting Joe Wilson into the electoral political process. They also made contact with New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof.

From Vanity Fair:

“In early May, Wilson and Plame attended a conference sponsored by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, at which Wilson spoke about Iraq; one of the other panelists was the New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof. Over breakfast the next morning with Kristof and his wife, Wilson told about his trip to Niger and said Kristof could write about it, but not name him.”

The Wilsons pitched Ambassador Munchausen’s fable to Kristof and he bought it with the same degree of faith that won Walter Duranty (and the New York Times) a Pulitzer prize for publishing every lie Stalin’s propagandists fed him. The very gullible Kristof cobbled the Wilsons’ bogus concoction into an article in the New York Times, published on May 6, 2003. In that article Kristof stated:

“Consider the now-disproved claims by President Bush and Colin Powell that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger so it could build nuclear weapons. As Seymour Hersh noted in The New Yorker, the claims were based on documents that had been forged so amateurishly that they should never have been taken seriously. I’m told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president’s office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.”

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence disposed of Wilson's fable on pages 443 - 444 of the report:

... The plan to send the former ambassador to Niger was suggested by the former ambassador's wife, a CIA employee. The former ambassador's wife suggested her husband for the trip to Niger in February 2002.

... On February 12, 2002, the former ambassador’s wife sent a memorandum to a Deputy Chief of a division in the CIA's Directorate of Operations which said, “[m]y husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.”

... Rather than speaking publicly about his actual experiences during his inquiry of the Niger issue, the former ambassador seems to have included information he learned from press accounts and from his beliefs about how the Intelligence Community would have or should have handled the information he provided.

... The former ambassador told Committee staff that he, in fact, did not have access to any of the names and dates in the CIA's reports and said he may have become confused about his own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in March 2003 that the names and dates on the documents were not correct. Of note, the names and dates in the documents that the IAEA found to be incorrect were not names or dates included in the CIA reports.

... While the CIA responded to the Vice President’s request for the Agency's analysis, they never provided the information gathered by the former Ambassador.

... The Committee found that, for most analysts, the former ambassador's report lent more credibility, not less, to the reported Niger- Iraq uranium deal. [emphasis added]

According to the Vanity Fair piece, both of the Wilsons were present with Kristof and it is reasonable to assume that Valerie Plame Wilson at least listened attentively as her husband provided politically loaded misinformation to a Times byline reporter. Mr. Wilson casually disclosed his wife’s maiden name in the preparation of numerous biographical sketches beginning with Who’s Who and including Corporate and Public Strategy Advisory Group, the Middle East Institute and the EPIC Forum. Twenty people provided biographical sketches as participants in the antiwar EPIC Forum on June 14, 2003, some three weeks prior to the publication of Wilson’s fable on the NY Times editorial page. Joseph Wilson was the only forum participant to include even a mention of a spouse, let alone her maiden name.

The Kerry Campaign must have been impressed with the Wilsons’ ability to gull a Times reporter by having source and confirmation share a common last name, for soon after Kristof’s article appeared, Wilson was named as an ‘advisor to the campaign’ and held that position until the exposure of his prevarications. Wilson’s status as a Kerry advisor, coupled with the Times own Kristof having swallowed Wilson’s tale whole, was sufficient for the Times to grant Wilson its editorial page on July 6th, 2003. The Wilsons, working together, had achieved a level of national notoriety based entirely upon their manipulation of the Kerry Campaign and the New York Times.

As Jim Marcinkowski, one of Plame’s classmates during their CIA training has noted, she’s “a hell of a shot with an AK-47”. There is no reason to disbelieve that assertion; however, ample evidence also exists that Wilson can shoot his mouth off at least as well as Plame can fire a rifle. Why did Plame not unload the weapon that was her husband’s mouth—aimed as it was at her identity as a CIA agent? Indeed, why did she apparently load it herself by suggesting Wilson for the trip to Niger?

One person had the primary responsibility for the protection of a CIA agent’s identity. Valerie Plame Wilson failed. One person was primarily responsible for the events and actions leading to the ‘outing’ of a CIA agent’s identity. Joe Wilson succeeded.

Chairman Waxman has chosen to investigate the circumstances that led to the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s relationship with the CIA for strictly political purposes. If the Chairman is seeking to protect other CIA personnel, Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband can provide a complete primer on what not to do. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson could be of great assistance by honestly and forthrightly answering some simple questions that should have been asked a very long time ago.

Based on what we know to date, Congressman Waxman’s decision to look to the White House will not bring us closer to any answers. That fact should not diminish the importance of the task for other members of the committee. If you recognize your representative’s name on that list, click it and send them a copy of this article along with a suggestion that they ask a few of the following questions.

Questions for Valerie Plame Wilson:

Since the CIA maintains an office which is responsible for contacts with the press, on what date did you report your May 2 and 3 contacts with Nicholas Kristof to that office?

Did you also inform that office of the nature of your contacts? Who did you speak to?

Specifically what did you report?

What is the procedure at the CIA for reporting that classified information has been compromised? What typically takes place after a report is made?

Have you ever followed that procedure? How many times, and on what dates?

Did you disclose the nature of the conversations between your husband and reporters to the CIA?

When did you first inform Joe Wilson that you worked for the CIA?

What did you tell him was the nature of your job at the agency?

When you informed him that you worked for the CIA, was he aware that you wanted to keep your identity protected?

Did you and he discuss the methods of keeping your identity protected?

Your name, Valerie Plame, was listed in Who’s Who in America from 1999 through 2005, under your husband’s listing? Did you seek special permission from the CIA to be included in that entry?

Did you accompany Joe Wilson to the 2003 EPIC Iraq forum?

Did your husband consult with you before including your maiden name in his bio published at that conference? Did you seek and obtain permission from the CIA for that disclosure?

Did you discuss this publication with your bosses at Langley?

Is it common practice for CIA agents to donate to political campaigns? When you contributed to the Gore campaign in 1999 under your own name, did you have any obligation to report that to your superiors?

At the time of the alleged disclosure by Richard Armitage that you worked at the agency, your husband was working for the Kerry campaign, correct?

Did you also donate money to Senator Kerry’s campaign? What about organizations trying to help elect Senator Kerry?

When you informed Joe Wilson that you worked at the CIA, did you file a report that your identity had been compromised?

When you became aware that your husband had identified you in Who’s Who in America, did you make a report that your identity had been compromised?

When you learned that your husband had included your name in his bio for the EPIC Iraq forum, did you make a report that your identity had been compromised?

When you learned that Joe Wilson had included your name in his bio at the Middle East Institute, did you make a report that your identity had been compromised?

When you learned that your husband included your name in his bio with the CPS Corporate & Public Strategy Advisory Group, did you make a report that your identity had been compromised?

At anytime did you, or anyone at the CIA, ask Joe Wilson to stop exposing your identity?

Only the Republican members of the Oversight Committee can prevent Congress from joining The New York Times and John Kerry on the Wilsons’ sucker list. We wish them well.

Jane Woodworth, Jeff Dobbs, Mara Schiffren and Rick Ballard collaborated on this article (with help from several Plame aficionados from Tom Maguire’s Just One Minute).

Erasing History, One Objection at a Time

2007-03-15T01:18:00.000-04:00

Does objecting to history because it hurts your feelings make it go away?

The University of Leeds was accused of infringing free speech last night when it cancelled a lecture on 'Islamic anti-Semitism' by a German academic.

Matthias Kontzel arrived at the university yesterday morning to begin a three-day programme of lectures and seminars, but was told that it had been called off on 'security grounds'.

For security grounds, read "insecurity grounds." Namely, the fact that some Muslims can't deal with the free discussion of history. And some academics in the west seem eager to pander to their every insecurity.

Dr Kontzel ... said: 'I have lectured in lots of countries on this subject. I gave the same talk at Yale University recently, and this is the first time I have been invited to lecture in the UK. Nothing like this has ever happened before – this is censorship.

'It is a controversial area but I am accustomed to debate. I value the integrity of academic debate and I feel that it really is in danger here. This is a very important subject and if you cannot address it on university property, then what is a university for?'

What is a university for?

Why, to pander to feelings, of course.

Dr Kontzel ... said that he had been shown two e-mails that had been received, which objected to his lecture.

One, apparently written by a student, said: 'As a Muslim and an Arab this has come to me as a great shock. The only intention that you have for doing this is to increase hatred as I clearly regard it as an open racist attack.'

Ahmed Sawalem, president of the university's student Islamic Society, confirmed that he had contacted the office of Professor Michael Arthur, the Vice-Chancellor, to register an official complaint.

'The title of the talk is provocative and I have searched the internet to read his writings and they are not very pleasant,' Mr Sawalem said. “We are not opposed to freedom of expression. We just sent a complaint, we did not ask for the talk to be cancelled.”

No, but don't be shy there. You are delighted at your victory. And at how easy it was to impose your will and your ideology on the the Dhimmi Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University to sway him to do your bidding simply at the drop of the word racism.

Sad times for the academic world. What is academic freedom if not to resist this?

Or was there someone behind this decision who was delighted to suppress the lecture and hid his actions by claiming it was the result of bureacracy?

Here is the lecture that Professor Kontzel was going to present.

UPDATE: Other articles by Kuntzel can be found here.

Washington's Blood Sport

2007-03-15T00:29:00.000-04:00

Joseph Bottum's reflections on his friend, Scooter Libby:

let's remember what this was all really about. A black spot was being passed from hand to hand in Washington. Somebody was going to end up with it, and Scooter Libby was the unlucky one. Forget the lies Joseph Wilson told; forget the jovial leak from Richard Armitage to Robert Novak that started it all; forget what Scooter said or didn't say to the grand jury about conversations with reporters. The case was a political trial from the beginning--and the opponents lined up in a properly political way. One side wanted to use Scooter Libby as a step ladder to reach up and pull down someone higher. The other side wanted to make sure that the case ended with Libby.

I never saw much concern from either side about the man himself. I still don't. In its chortling editorial after the verdict was announced, the New York Times admitted that one of its own reporters had been jailed in the course of the investigation and a general legal respect for reporters' promises of confidentiality had been forever swept away. You'd think these would be frightening developments for a newspaper. But, no, it turns out the political purpose of Scooter Libby's prosecution trumps all that. "The potential damage" for the press, the Times agreed, "remains of real concern. But it was still a breath of fresh air to see someone in this administration, which specializes in secrecy, prevarication and evading blame, finally called to account."

I have several friends--a surprising number with real literary talent--who were invited to help this administration. And each one I urged to accept the appointment. You owe it to your country, I said, particularly in times like these. Public service is a duty you can't refuse, when your turn comes.

Never again. Bene vixit, bene qui latuit, Ovid once warned ambitious young men about the bloodsports of ancient Roman politics: "He lives well who is well hidden." Good advice, I suppose. Keep your head down. Don't look for trouble. Stay under the radar. Cultivate your own garden. It's just that, until now, I never really believed this was America. I never really believed this was us.

At the Spine, Marty Peretz writes:

Let me confess--not for the first time here--that Libby is a friend. I like him, I respect him and I think him an utterly honest and decent person. I am a member of the board of his defense committee, and I have contributed money to it. So you may discount my argument on his behalf. Still, I am deeply persuaded that there are many reasons in logic, in fact and in the very idea of justice why Libby's conviction should be overturned.

First of all, there is the question of why the special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald did not indict Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's second at State, who the counsel knew without the slightest doubt--before he ever charged Libby with anything--was the source of the leak, the leak being that Valerie Plame was an undercover officer at the CIA and also the wife of Joseph Wilson, one of the president's critics on the matter of whether Iraq tried to buy yellowcake from Niger. Here is someone who actually committed the crime, if any crime was actually committed, and he was charged with nothing. Absolutely nothing. There are others in the same cushy position as Armitage. Like Karl Rove. Why?

Conversation, Hillary Style

2007-03-10T19:01:00.000-05:00

It's just so her. As in "conversational."

Here's a direct video, but there's some useful data at the above site.

So, um, could David Geffen's people possibly be behind it? They have the resources.

Disappearing a Man's Freedom: Smoke and Mirrors

2007-03-10T18:50:00.000-05:00

In a column today, Charles Krauthammer points out the very thing that NBC does not want the public to know:

Everyone agrees that Fitzgerald's perjury case against Libby hung on the testimony of NBC's Tim Russert. Libby said that he heard about Plame from Russert. Russert said he had never discussed it. The jury members who have spoken said they believed Russert.

And why should they not? Russert is a perfectly honest man who would not lie. He was undoubtedly giving his best recollection.

But he is not the pope. Given that so many journalists and administration figures were shown to have extremely fallible memories, is it possible that Russert's memory could have been faulty?

I have no idea. But we do know that Russert once denied calling up a Buffalo News reporter to complain about a story. Russert later apologized for the error when he was shown the evidence of a call he had genuinely and completely forgotten.

There is a second instance of Russert innocently misremembering. [ed. misremembering is a kindness - IMO, it was an out and out lie, and for no good reason.] He stated under oath that he did not know that one may not be accompanied by a lawyer to a grand jury hearing. This fact, in and of itself, is irrelevant to the case, except that, as former prosecutor Victoria Toensing points out, the defense had tapes showing Russert saying on television three times that lawyers are barred from grand jury proceedings.

This demonstration of Russert's fallibility was never shown to the jury. The judge did not allow it. He was upset with the defense because it would not put Libby on the stand — his perfect Fifth Amendment right — after hinting in the opening statement that it might. He therefore denied the defense a straightforward demonstration of the fallibility of the witness whose testimony was most decisive.

Did you catch that. The judge did not let in rebuttal testimony on the credibility of Russert, because he was pissed of that the defense had determined not to put Libby on the stand.

Tim Russert's testimony did in Libby. The next day, after the verdict was delivered, Russert was on the Imus show - on a sister network - in absolutely shameless damage control, abetted by Imus, a crony of his, wearing a suit of mirrors. Everything that he was shaky on on the stand, he now deflected, trying to erase that very different picture we had seen of him without the protection gear. No teeny, tiny point was left unturned. Even to the extent of pretending that he and Chris Matthews were great pals, when one of the more amusing tidbits that came out at trial, was the extent to which he disliked Chris personally.

I find the initial impression indelible at this point, however. Tim Russert will not play any more as he did before this trial began. Even if they increase the wattage of that shiny suit to deflect that he is not personally "the modest man" that he plays on TV.

Moreover, it is perfectly clear that Washington is a town where Democrats get off on serious charges, and Republicans are destroyed on light ones, like a body rejecting a donor organ.

Come next week, and there is a congressional hearing scheduled - on a Friday, which is a travel day in the senate - and moreover is very close to the opening of yet another one of Patrick Fitzgerald's cases - the one in which he hounds Conrad Black. One can only hope that the defense for Black is going to prove more deft than the defense for Scooter; though Black, at least, does not have the demographics problem, in terms of jury selection, that Scooter did. Whereby in a room full of moveon.org people there for jury duty, Denis Collins is a more desirable choice. Think about that Kafkaesque turn for a moment. And how you would feel if that were you.

Though, on the other hand, Black's got another problem. Lots of people hate tycoons and there's a palpable schadeufreude in taking them down.

More Wisdom from the Sage at MSNBC

2007-03-10T18:49:00.000-05:00

Chris Matthew's blathers his pearls into the microphone:

The liberals will talk about poverty, injustice, and racism, and nuclear war, and pick that part of the Christian message from Jesus, and the conservatives will find the evils of sodomy, the evils of, uh, uh, infidelity, the evils of sex of any form. It seems like the conservatives don’t like sex and they’re very focused on that and the liberals are focused on social injustice.

Wonder how they make all those babies then?

Meanwhile, I wonder what his IQ is. He clearly thinks this is a true dichotomy - or maybe he is just playing to the hunger of his audience, who lap up these pronouncements like swine in a trough.

Audio from msunderestimated.com

Speaking About Exploiting Jury Duty

2007-03-07T11:14:00.000-05:00

Denis Collins is a juror on the Scooter Libby trial, somewhat discussed during the course of the trial because he had worked for Bob Woodward, who testified, and was a neighbor of Tim Russert, who also testified. Since unlike Russert, Woodward gave some very mature testimony, there was some hope that this guy would not prove to be an utter moonbat.

Wrong.

It turns out, a fact he did not reveal at the voir dire of the trial, that he had also authored a book on classified agents at the CIA, one of whom, a female of an appropriate age, just happened to have worked in Africa, very like, one, oh, Valery Plame. Meanwhile, he's already been on all the best liberal talk shows airing his opinions on this case. He's like the self-important Joe Wilson of the jury, can't shut up, is working to exploit this experience as a way to foist his self importance on the rest of us and is similarly endowed with important hair.

The guy has already come out with a massive article about his trial experience on Huffington Post, which, as we all know, is a nice politically balanced website. 7 pages. I expect he stayed up all night long, after the many talk shows he performed on last night, in order to get the work done in time to launch it this morning.

It would be interesting to know just who he was talking to to get this arranged while the jury was deliberating.

Can a deal for a book be far behind? Maybe he has already made one?

Breaking News: Mr. Cheney Has a Heart After All

2007-03-07T02:31:00.000-05:00

Don't you love it when the NY Slimes speaks in the passive voice!

Still, liberal critics of the administration had a field day with the trial. They are hoping the Democrats who now control Congress will use the case to investigate Mr. Cheney’s role further. Mr. Schumer, who was among the first to call for a special prosecutor in the case, suggested in an interview that they might.

No need to "question experts" in order to write up this particular paragraph. All that reporter SHERYL GAY STOLBERG had to do in this case was consult the demeanor of her colleagues in the newsrooms she shares with them.

The reference to Schumer is interesting, however. Clarice Feldman, who has written extensively at Just One Minute and American Thinker on the Scooter Libby case believes that Schumer worked a behind the scenes deal with James Comey, who was then Deputy Attorney General, to agree to bring Patrick Fitzgerald onto the case. As a very relevant aside, both James Comey and Patrick Fitzgerald prosecuted a case against Mark Rich, with Libby as Rich's attorney. They lost, Scooter won and the ruling in this case later formed the basis of the pardon for Mark Rich by President Clinton.

Meanwhile, Schumer, now, is all aglow to begin all kinds of investigations into high administration officials, the higher, the better.

“I think there is a view in the public that Libby was the fall guy,” Mr. Schumer said, “and I do think we will look at how the case shows the misuse of intelligence both before and after the war in Iraq.”

The successful prosecution of Libby has apparently merely whetted his appetite for larger game. Although the misuse of intelligence in such a regard seems like a loaded phrase. Whose intelligence? I certainly feel that mine has been misused watching the process of this trial.

Interestingly, now that it looks like it will be hard times for Cheney, the NY Times finally decides to show a softer side of the man:

On a personal level, friends of the vice president say the trial has been deeply painful for him. Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney were all but inseparable — Ms. Matalin has called the former aide “Cheney’s Cheney” — and often started their days by riding to work together. Mr. Libby accompanied the vice president almost everywhere he went, and Mr. Cheney made clear his high professional and personal regard for his aide, even playing host to a book party for him in 2002 at his official residence. Alan K. Simpson, a Republican former senator from Mr. Cheney’s home state, Wyoming, said he saw Mr. Cheney over Christmas and asked how he was doing. He took the answer as a kind of oblique reference to the Libby case.

“He said, ‘I’m fine, I’m O.K., I have people I trust around me — it’s the same old stuff, Al,’ ” Mr. Simpson recalled.

Another friend of Mr. Cheney’s, Vin Weber, a Republican former congressman, said the verdict had “got to be heartbreaking for the vice president.” But Mr. Weber said he wished Mr. Cheney would explain himself.

“I don’t think he has to do a long apologia,” Mr. Weber said, “but I think he should say something, just to pierce the boil a little bit.”

Yes, American public, the NYTimes finally feels it can admit that Cheney actually has friends and a heart as well. Surprise, surprise. They've kept it well concealed from their audience until now.

Finally, three further links: Sweetness and Light fisks Fitz language, showing how he sows confusion and obfuscates in his legal language in order to mislead. It's an interesting study because it has been a consistent part of the methodology he has used throughout the ordeal of this trial.

An audiofile of Senator Thompson's sad reaction to the news of Libby's guilty verdict.

And Clarice Feldman, takes on the role of Rome's Servilia, calling for justice for Scooter Libby.

Lovely: German Bishops Compare West Bank to Warsaw Ghetto

2007-03-07T02:14:00.000-05:00

Of all the people in the world who ought to be careful about making insensitive remarks comparing Jews to Nazis, you think high among them would be German Catholic religious leaders. Unfortunately that is not the case.

Yad Vashem lambasted a group of visiting German Catholic bishops on Tuesday for comparing the situation in the Palestinian territories with the Holocaust, calling the contentious remarks "political exploitation and demagoguery" and a gross distortion of history.

The sharp condemnation ... followed reports in the German press of comparisons made by senior German bishops between conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II and current conditions in Ramallah, resulting from Israeli military activities.

"The remarks illustrate a woeful ignorance of history and a distorted sense of perspective," Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev wrote in a Tuesday letter to Cardinal Karl Lehmann, who led the Conference of German Catholic Bishops on a 10-day visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Making analogies between the mass murder that was part of the plan to annihilate the Jewish people, carried out under the German Nazi regime and the current situation in Ramallah, and using words whose rhetorical power is immense, does nothing to help us understand what is going on today; such words only further poison the atmosphere making it that much more difficult to find workable solutions to deeply entrenched and thorny problems.

"These unwarranted and offensive comparisons serve to diminish the memory of victims of the Holocaust and mollify the consciences of those who seek to lessen European responsibility for Nazi crimes," he wrote.

Happy Fitzmas to the Libs

2007-03-06T20:11:00.000-05:00

Hope you're feeling good. That nothing quite like that special schadenfreude feeling.

The pursuit of justice by an overzealous special prosecutor is a wonderful thing. Finally, justice for the Clinton years.

Been gone all day - heard the news early afternoon on Rush - can't say I'm surprised except by the high number of guilty counts, as the jury questions of recent days indicated that a guilty verdict was coming.

I'll post on the verdict when I've caught up on the details.

Still catching up, but here's a tidbit to chew on:

"The trial has demystified the priestly practices of Washington journalism," said Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a school and resource center for working journalists. "I think we'll see prosecutors going after journalists more often."

And it couldn't happen to a nicer group of people.

Of course, the priestly practices of Washingtonian journalists - and their biases - have long been evident to people in the blogosphere. Although it's true that this trial made the practices of several members of the profession of journalism a complete laughing stock.

More: from the inimitable David Shuster of Hardball fame.

as Libby was leaving, MSNBC's David Shuster called out, "Mr. Libby, are you willing to go to jail to protect Vice President Cheney?"

What a ghoul.

testing

2007-02-26T14:47:00.000-05:00

Three Views of Women in Islam

2007-02-25T14:19:00.000-05:00

The first is Arab women in Israel finally speaking out against their menfolk, after the 8th woman in the extended family was murdered:

The perpetrators of most honor killings in the Arab community are not apprehended. Hamda's murder, however, was one too many for the women in the Abu-Ghanem family. She was the eighth woman to be murdered in the extended family in the last six and a half years. All her predecessors also lost their lives in "honor killings."

This time, instead of keeping mum when the police questioned them, the Abu- Ghanem women gave detailed testimonies of everything they knew. One said she had seen Rashad enter the house where Hamda was. Shortly afterward she heard shots and seconds later saw Rashad, the key suspect, fleeing from the building.

The victim's mother told the police that Rashad had forbidden his sister to leave the house after some men had called her a "prostitute."

"It was a women's revolt against the men of the family. While the men refused to cooperate with the police and forbade the women to speak, the women revealed all. They decided to put an end to the bloody circle of silence," Chief Inspector Haim Shreibhand, who was in charge of the investigation, told Haaretz.

Next we have a Memri translation of an Arab show on the proper way of conducting wife beating:

The male keeps instructing the women in the show with him that to beat the wife lightly, in order to train her to obey him, so she won't be lazy, so she does his bidding immediately, is the proper way to go about family life, as the husband is the master of the home.

One of the women on the shows points out to the audience that, according to the research she has done, she has found men around the Muslim world beating their women with heavy electrical cords.

Finally, we have an historical view of Islam, that shows us that perhaps Islam was not always the way it is today, with regards to women. There was a time in the past when women, too, were noted scholars, who issued fatwas made legal rulings and prayed with men, and sat and conversed with them on Islam.

Mohammad Akram Nadwi, a 43-year-old Sunni alim, or religious scholar, has rediscovered a long-lost tradition of Muslim women teaching the Koran, transmitting hadith (deeds and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) and even making Islamic law as jurists.

Akram embarked eight years ago on a single-volume biographical dictionary of female hadith scholars, a project that took him trawling through biographical dictionaries, classical texts, madrasa chronicles and letters for relevant citations. “I thought I’d find maybe 20 or 30 women,” he says. To date, he has found 8,000 of them, dating back 1,400 years, and his dictionary now fills 40 volumes. It’s so long that his usual publishers, in Damascus and Beirut, have balked at the project, though an English translation of his preface — itself almost 400 pages long — will come out in England this summer.

The dictionary’s diverse entries include a 10th-century Baghdad-born jurist who traveled through Syria and Egypt, teaching other women; a female scholar — or muhaddithat — in 12th-century Egypt whose male students marveled at her mastery of a “camel load” of texts; and a 15th-century woman who taught hadith at the Prophet’s grave in Medina, one of the most important spots in Islam. One seventh-century Medina woman who reached the academic rank of jurist issued key fatwas on hajj rituals and commerce; another female jurist living in medieval Aleppo not only issued fatwas but also advised her far more famous husband on how to issue his.

Mohammad Akram Nadwi notes that the repressive attitude towards women in current Islamic culture is based on its current insecurity. And failing to educate a woman is like the pagan religions burying women alive.

Lawrence of Arabia: Serious Zionist

2007-02-25T11:05:00.000-05:00

Who Knew?

Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence - better known as "Lawrence of Arabia" - and renowned as a champion of Arab independence, actually had "a sort of contempt for the Arabs" and was an advocate of Jewish statehood from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, according to acclaimed British historian Sir Martin Gilbert...

T.E. Lawrence ... wore Arabian clothes and adopted many Arab customs. He is widely perceived, Gilbert told The Jerusalem Post this week, as "the great Arabist, right? ...

The "astonishing" truth, however, Gilbert went on, is that Lawrence was "a serious Zionist. He believed that the only hope for the Arabs of Palestine and the rest of the region was Jewish statehood - that if the Jews had a state here, they would provide the modernity, the 'leaven,' as he put it, with which to enable the Arabs to move into the 20th century."...

"He felt that only with a Jewish presence and state would the Arabs ever make anything of themselves. And, by a Jewish state, he meant a Jewish state from the Mediterranean shore to the River Jordan," said Gilbert, adding his own comment that this "will never come to pass."

Gilbert, in Israel for the International Book Fair, described his discovery of Lawrence's Zionist orientation as the most surprising archival revelation he had come across from an Israeli perspective...

And here is a comment in general from Gilbert about how the present understanding of history is often wrong:

"As a historian, I'm very cautious about anyone's claiming to know what any government is doing at the present time," he said. "I study archives as soon as they are open - normally 30 years after an event; sometimes a bit less. What you see when you do this is that the people you imagined had been strong were weak; the people you thought weak were strong; and things you thought couldn't possibly be taking place were taking place."

The distorting effect of "it bleeds, it leads," and journalists wanting to influence the outcome of events and writing their pieces in that way fortunately will have much less effect on the judgment of history 30 years on. Not to say that it will be nil, but it will be mitigated.

Thus, the change in Reagan's reputation in the intervening period, and thus, too, if Bush policies change the status quo in the ME in the long term, we'll see a very different historical judgement on him than the one he has at present.

Hat Tip: Stephen Pollard

The Perfect Comeback

2007-02-23T16:09:00.000-05:00

Earlier this week, Dick Cheney challenged Nancy Pelosi's repeated attempts to lead the House to vote for micromanaging the Iraq War into extinction by stating that having Americans leave Iraq before the situation there is better resolved will be playing right into Al Qaeda's hands.

Nancy Pelosi whined loudly, claiming that Dck Cheney was "questioning her patriotism." As though, from now on, any criticism of the Democrat's strategery, or lack of it, is always disallowed because it questions the patriotism of whomever makes it. This woman can't think for herself; all she can do is spin in pre-packaged phrases.

Dick Cheney makes the perfect comeback.

During Friday's interview in Sydney with ABC News, Cheney said, "I'm not sure what part of it is that Nancy disagreed with. She accused me of questioning her patriotism. I didn't question her patriotism. I questioned her judgment."

Blind to Reality

2007-02-23T13:19:00.000-05:00

You want to know why Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz is short sighted in his capabilities?

What, besides his complete lack of preparedness for the job of Defense Minister, might explain this?

Peretz joined the new army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, watching Wednesday's large-scale maneuvers. The pictures show the two side by side with military binoculars held up to their eyes — but Peretz's still have the lens caps in place. The photographer said Peretz raised the capped binoculars three times, nodding as Ashkenazi explained what he was "seeing."

Pathetic.

We've all done this kind of thing, but normally after realizing we are not getting any view, we figure out there is a problem. If he can't figure it out himself, was he too embarrassed to ask an aide why the binoculars weren't working for him? Or to tell someone he was given "a defective pair"?

Add whatever nuance you like to that final phrase.

UPDATE: Someone kindly added the video version to youtube.

Captain Ed takes on the rest of the world, insisting that these are glare protectors. Perhaps, but then as we see in the youbute video, someone forgot to explain this millitary innovation to the Ma'ariv editors. And given the military culture in Israel, and the backgrounds of the photographers likely to be following the Defense Minister, someone should have known this.

The BBC Keeps True to Tone

2007-02-22T09:14:00.000-05:00

By the bye,I'm listening to the BBC, John Humphries is interviewing Tony Blair, and it's absolutely the most unctuous interview that I've ever heard. He's dripping with self-righteousness and moral superiority and keeps on chastising Tony for making the world worse.

Tony Blair handles it perfectly however, never lets himself get flustered or riled, stays absolutely on point and takes nothing personally; and by the end, Humphries has dropped his immature tone and is speaking normally.

American Idol

2007-02-21T21:59:00.000-05:00

Anyone watch American Idol out there?

The African-American women have it in the bag this year! They were terriflc!

Jordin Sparks, Melinda Doolittle, Sabrina Sloane and most of all Lakisha Jones.

Justice by Prosecutor

2007-02-21T11:21:00.000-05:00

Hat tip: Clarice at JOM

When is Andrew McCarthy Going to Recant, Publicly

2007-02-20T18:39:00.000-05:00

I think Andy McCarthy should be deeply ashamed of himself if he ever follows up on the Plame case.

I spent a long time being really cautious before believing that Fitz was a moonbat based on Andrew McCarthy's professional opinion of his colleague.

Fitz's defense rebuttal just passes everything, however. It's clear the guy loathes the Vice President and is willing to impute alll kinds of evil motives to him.

He essentially argued that Joe Wilson is a saint, Libby is eeeevvil for treating Valery Plame "not as a person but as an argument", he subliminally reminded the jury of the Iraq War is lie and the VP and Scooter lied us into the war so that the jury would feel biased about them - in other words, appealing to the wrong grounds in order to convict.

This is a sad day in American justice.

If you don't know what I am talking about, this is from Fitz' rebuttal, from the incoherent not a transcript:

Is this about a bunch of madmen, two men. Or is about somemthing bigger, Is it about someone to whom Wilson's wife wasn't a person, but an argument. He focused on it June 23, July 8, July 7, focused on it when he talked to Addington. His boss thought it was important. His boss thought it was important. Did his boss forget about the wife/ One of the first thing he wrote, did his wife send him on a junket. They both talked to a briefer about it. You can't believe that 9 witnesses remember 10 conversations the same way. There is no conspiracy. There is no memory problem. He remembers a conversatoin that did not happen. But forgets all of his. He had a motive to lie, and he lied in a way that exactly matches his motive. You don't forget something on Thursday that you've passed along on Monday and Tueday. You don't forget about important arguments. You know they talked about a cloud over the VP.,

DONT YOU THINK THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ARE ENTITELD TO ANSWERS. If as a result his wife had a job, she worked at CPD, She gets dragged into newspapers. People want to find out was a law broken when people want to know, who did it. What role did Defendant play. What role did VP play? He told you he may have discussed this with VP. Don't you think FBI desesrves straight answers. When you go in taht jury room, you commonsense will tell you hthat he made a gamble. He threw sand sin the eyes o fthe FBI. He stole the truth of the judicial system. You return guilty you give truth back.

After which, the judge says:

Walton: Sometimes during course of argument. Lawyers say things they don't mean to say.

Like hell FItz didn't mean to say it and to make the jury think it was only right to punish Scooter for the Iraq war and to bring into his closing things he had agreed were not part of the case. He was particularly frustrated that he never got to do cross on the Vice President and Scooter Libby, so he could try to pin this ridiculous scenarion on them in the first person.

Israel: the greatest short-term threat to world peace

2007-02-20T18:35:00.000-05:00

Who recently said that Israel is the greatest short term threat to world peace?

Nope. Not Ahmadinejad. Not Abbas. Not the depressed Hassan Nasrallah.

Not even the senile Jimmy Carter. [Although he probably thought it.]

It was said to a bunch of Hollywood liberals by none other than the Silky Pony himself.

The aggressively photogenic John Edwards was cruising along, detailing his litany of liberal causes last week until, during question time, he invoked the "I" word — Israel. Perhaps the greatest short-term threat to world peace, Edwards remarked, was the possibility that Israel would bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. As a chill descended on the gathering, the Edwards event was brought to a polite close.

Hat Tip: National Review

"Go Grab His Ass"

2007-02-20T12:41:00.000-05:00

Don't Look Now, Saint Gore, But Your Clay Feet Are Showing.

Shamelessly cribbing from an old post of Tigerhawk here. But this is too good not to pass it on.

It's been common knowledge for years, for anyone who wanted to know, that the practice of extraordinary rendition started under the Clinton Administration, with Clinton's approval.

But now, it turns out, that according to that convenient hero of the left, Richard Clarke, it was Gore's enthusiasm for the method that helped convince Clinton to approve it:

Snatches, or more properly "extraordinary renditions," were operations to apprehend terrorists abroad, usually without the knowledge of and almost always without public acknowledgement of the host government.... The first time I proposed a snatch, in 1993, the White House Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, demanded a meeting with the President to explain how it violated international law. Clinton had seemed to be siding with Cutler until Al Gore belatedly joined the meeting, having just flown overnight from South Africa. Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides for Gore: Lloyd says this. Dick says that. Gore laughed and said, "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." (Against All Enemies pp. 143-144)

Of course, now that the bottom line on the left has become how shameful the policy is, and everyone blames Bush, Gore is shocked, shocked that the current Administration allowed this to become policy.

Jack Murtha, War Hero to the Left, in his own Words

2007-02-19T14:02:00.000-05:00

Whither the Centrist Democrats? Have they lost their way so soon? Have their bread crumbs already been eaten up by the doves?

Improbable though it may seem, blunt and brassy Jack Murtha is moving close to command over U.S. policy on Iraq.

Washington insider Robert Novak has a must read article explaining how Murtha, in cahoots with Pelosi, and despite his failure to become majority leader in November, has managed to pull off a management coup that seems likely to cause an extreme negative impact on the President's ability to serve as Commander in Chief.

Even the editorial board at the Washington Post is horrified. But not Pelosi, whose smiling face at her victory was seen all around the media last week.

From the Washington Post:

Mr. Murtha ... 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.

Thus Murtha. Corrupt, cynical and too full of himself not to crow ahead of time about his Machiavellan plot to usurp Presidential powers by micromanaging the war. Which may prove to be its undoing. For whatever it's worth, he is an elected official, and his public, if they ever sicken of this nonnsense, has redress.

Bryan, at Hot Air adds:

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a political party’s cynicism, cowardice, irresponsibility and narcissism? Ask Jack Murtha, because that’s exactly what he’s asking of our troops fighting in Iraq.

Unfortunately, not everyone on Pelosi's team to undermine America and American values has been elected. Which leads me to my next point.

Here's another fact about Pelosi's new management team you may not know. She recently hired Joseph Onek to be her Senior Counsel. Who is Joseph Onek? And why might this be a problem? He formerly served in both the Carter and Clinton administration. But that is not the problem I am referring to here.

[H]is more recent work as a Senior Policy Analyst with the Open Society Institute (OSI) should be of deep concern to all Americans. The Open Society Institute is a creation of billionaire atheist George Soros. This virulently anti-Christian man operates what some have called a "shadow government” in America – a network of groups and radical individuals who wish to control America's social and national security policies.

Here are some facts about the Soros funded group, the Open Society:

The current president of OSI is Aryeh Neier, who as director of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy, founded the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) back in 1959. OSI's Director of U.S. Advocacy is Morton Halperin, a man who has devoted his entire life to subverting America's intelligence efforts to fight domestic and international threats. Halperin is a former Carter and Clinton official who has consistently attacked the work of the CIA.

As you read this, keep in mind the profile of George Soros in his own words that we recently discussed here on Abracadabrah:

On December 20, 1998, there appeared this exchange between Soros and Steve Kroft on "60 Minutes":

Kroft: "You're a Hungarian Jew ..."
Soros: "Mm-hmm."

Kroft: "... who escaped the Holocaust ..."

Soros: "Mm-hmm."

Kroft: "... by posing as a Christian."

Soros: "Right."

Kroft: "And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps."
Soros: "Right. I was 14 years old. And I would say that that's when my character was made."

Kroft: "In what way?"

Soros: "That one should think ahead. One should understand that--and anticipate events and when, when one is threatened. It was a tremendous threat of evil. I mean, it was a-- a very personal threat of evil."

Kroft: "My understanding is that you went ... went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews."

Soros: "Yes, that's right. Yes."

Kroft: "I mean, that's--that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?"

Soros: "Not, not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don't ... you don't see the connection. But it was--it created no--no problem at all."

Kroft: "No feeling of guilt?"

Soros: "No."

Kroft: "For example, that, 'I'm Jewish, and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be these, I should be there.' None of that?"

Soros: "Well, of course, ... I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn't be there, because that was--well, actually, in a funny way, it's just like in the markets--that is I weren't there--of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would--would--would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the--whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the--I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt."

That's the man, using his money, to influence American governance in any way that he can.

More on Soros here.

Nietzsche on Memory

2007-02-14T17:58:00.000-05:00

"I have done that" says my memory. I could not have done that—says my pride and remains implacable. Finally, my memory gives up.

--Nietzsche--
Beyond Good and Evil, part 4, 68.

Just Deserts

2007-02-13T22:28:00.000-05:00

Last week I wrote a post entitled Tim Russert - Boldly Lying on the Stand wherein I discussed the fact, as per the title of the post, that Russert had just lied on the stand in front of everyone. He chose to lie on a trivial point. The context was the concessions the prosecutor had entered into in order to obtain his testimony - which was that they came to Russert's office and he had a lawyer present during the short, 22 minute ordeal. Russert stated he did not know that people testifying before a Grand Jury are not permitted to enter into the courtroom to give their testimony with a lawyer.

[Defense Attorney] Wells: (reads more of letter, saying testimony would be with lawyers in room) You know that in a grand jury, lawyers are not in the room?

TR: Didn't know that

Wells: You are an attorney?

TR: Non-practicing…. the most important thing is –

The MSM, being his cronies, declined to discuss it. So you may not have heard about this elsewhere unless you are following the case intensively.

Jewish Atheist, commenting on my post, was amused that I thought this was important at all given the gravity of "Libby's lies."

LOL. The chief of staff to the vice president of the united states is in trouble with the law for lying about activities related to a coverup of manipulating evidence to go to war and what you think is important is that Russert may have lied about not knowing an aspect of grand jury law. Very unbiased blogging, good work.

Now it turns out by far that I wasn't the only one who considered this a big deal.

The defense is now planning to use this statement of Russert's to impeach his testimony. Just deserts, isn't it.

From the liveblogging of the lawyers making arguments before the judge outside of the presence of the jury:

[Defense attorney] Wells. Second piece of evidence relates also to benefits received by Russert and would be form of impeachment testimony. Being able to testify in setting where lawyer was present. On cross, in attempt to explore Russert's understanding if he went before GJ, to my complete shock, Russert said he had no knowledge.

Judge Walton There's no evidence [Russert's] ever done criminal law.

[Defense attorney] Wells. I'm going to show you three video tapes where it's clear he's aware of it. "So you understand that normal procedure, they're not permitted to have lawyers in room." I've given govt transcripts of three different appearances where he acknowledges that witnesses before GJ don't have their lawyer. Discussing GJ testimony of Clinton. [why am I not surprised we were going to Clinton?] He askes why he doesn't go before GJ.Resisting a subpoena are words he can understand better. Clinton is saying "can we not testify on video" rather than having to march before GJ without his lawyers. In other portions of the interview, why she won't answer that question. She says it's one of may questions because it's before a GJ w/o a lawyer. These go right to the heart of a benefit.

In other words, it's in the public record that Russert knew well that normal people, at a grand jury, were not able to bring their lawyer with them, to direct their testimony or object, etc. As a member of the media who has dealt with this particular in his work, as well as a lawyer, the presumption is that he knew this very well. And therefore there is no reason for him to lie about it. Except, that to show he was accepting a special privilege worked out by his NBC NY lawyers to shelter him, the admission that he knew that he was receiving a special privilege from the Special Prosecutor does not highlight the plain-spoken, homespun, homily-delivering, just one of the folks image he has worked so hard - in order to maintain his image as "the man the public can trust."

There is another interesting thing about Tim Russert's™ lie on the stand.

On Just One Minute, Tom Maguire wrote out a hypothetical case as to how Russert might have come to lie originally to prosecutors as to whether he mentioned Plame to Libby.

In this model, Russert starts out lying on the stand in what looks like a negligible matter; the intent is protect the Tim Russert™ brand and his NBC team - to assure their pipeline to sources among other reasons.

Tom puts is thus in his post:

Well - as to Russert's motive ... the summary is this - Russert started with a little white lie to the FBI in November 2003, with the objective of concealing the fact that he (or Andrea Mitchell) had a source for the Plame leak. Russert did not "lie" to the investigators; he misled them with carefully phrased testimony so as to avoid subpoenas, jail time, and the disclosure of NBC News sources.

And it seemed like a little white lie at the time - Russert knew that Libby had not leaked to him, so he reasoned that his chat with Libby was not the sort of primary leak (government official *to* reporter) that investigators were seeking.

There is more to Tom's argument, and it is worth reading in full, because it makes practical and psychological sense as to how the situation might have occurred, if it occurred. I'm not claiming that this is necessarily so, nor is Tom. Simply that it is one construal of the evidence and the defense might choose to frame their ending to include such an inference. And the fact that Tim Russert just insouciantly lied on the stand makes this easier to buy.

Which is where this gets interesting. Because when Russert lies on the stand, he is also telling a harmless lie to protect the TR™ brand: And the TR™ brand is a modest, homespun man moderating over the truth every Sunday, a man whom you can trust, full of homilies and moral sayings. His lie was merely a harmless lie to protect the brand.

But this time, someone is pulling him up short on it. Publicly. And using it to impeach his evidence.

As Jane put it as Just One Minute:

The point is to show, at the least, Russert has a very bad memory, and at the most, that he is a liar.

UPDATE: And now for the evidence that is going to be used to impeach Timmeh's testimony, from a transcript of an interview of Tim Russert by Larry King, speaking about President Clinton's testimony to the Grand Jury:

RUSSERT: It's been suggested by no less than the former governor of New York the other night, that now that the president has decided that he's going to testify before the grand jury, why do it in the Oval Office and why insist that his lawyer be there.?

Go into the grand jury without a lawyer, like every other American citizen, go ahead, ask me any question you want and I'll give you an honest answer. And that would turn the whole situation around in the eyes of some.

Yep, Tim Russert sure seemed to know back then that regular Americans go to the Grand Jury alone, not with their lawyer present.

More: Tom Maguire suggests a motive for Russert to lie on the stand. In the same interview with CNN's Larry King, there is the following exchange:

KING: And do you stand by your guy if he is subsequently charged with something and they subpoena you?

RUSSERT: I would have to go to prison to protect his name.

That is his public statement. Judith Miller went to prison. Maybe Russert did not want to have to go to prison so "he mislead the investigators a bit," instead - not realizing that much of the prosecution of Libby would rest on his "misleads."

How much of this motive, I wonder, will be implied by the defense?

Interesting snippets on Libby's Role in OVP

2007-02-13T13:29:00.000-05:00

So this is among what Libby was working on, before Joe Wilson's enormous ego got upset that people actually were treating him, allah forbid, as a low-level type. And decided to start a national scandal and cost tax payers millions, and personally disrupt the government and people's lives, all so his ego would feel better.

This would interest Michael Ledeen and Chris Hitchens:

John Hannah Signs of internal turmoil in Iran, that "people" in USG monitored quite closely.

C Student protests something that you and Libby were monitoring.

John Hannah tried to watch internal sit in Iran closely.

C Iran harboring AQ leaders, some of whom had contacts outside of Iran.

John Hannah THis has all been declassified by govt?

C Just a yes or no, please?

John Hannah Yes.

C Libby considered possible means of obtaining custody of AQ terrorists.

C Looking at it in unclassified terms, why was Iran such a concern.

John Hannah Iran a major state in ME, one of the most populous, for the last 25 years a declared adversary of the US, probably trying to acquire nukes, and WMD, major state sponsor of terrorism, in this case, shared a border with Iraq at a time when we had forces in Iraq. Some reason to believe Iran trying to undermine US purposes.

C For you and Libby. Dealing with Iran Libby devoted considerable amount of time and attention. Turn to ME [hey, Cline, Iraq IS theME]

BTW, that idiot, the empty wheel, keeps childishly calling John Hannah "the Year of Iran", instead of his name, because of "the next war is Iran," mantra the left is spewing these days. I changed it here. Her other [mature] comments are in [].

And more:

The ballad of Andrea Mitchell by "Curly Smith"

85 days and what do you get
3 months older and branded a twit
Saint Fitz don't you call me 'cause I don't know
I sold my soul to the Peacock show

Too Funny!

2007-02-13T08:47:00.000-05:00

[Some spoilers for Children of Men, so don't read further if you don't want to know.]

I'm perusing a review of Children of Men written by that stupid fired Edwards blogger. According to KLO, at the Corner, it was apparently the last strike against her. So I'm slightly curious about it, because I disliked the film - which I categorize as a siren call to the heart of the nutroots angst, made by one who can exploit that malady well, being one himelf.

And I come across these line. So telltale:

It was moving and beautifully filmed, and the subplot about the leftist revolutionaries who are so dedicated to ideology that they forget the humanity that made them leftists in the first place could probably fit into a reactionary film. Could, but probably wouldn’t, since the subplot is rather too subtle for your wingnut crowd. After all, there’s a division between the grounded socialists and the People With Egos, a distinction that would be lost in a genuinely reactionary film. In sum, this movie would have been great no matter what the subtle political themes.

Apparently, the nutroot actually believes this is too sophisticated an analysis for someone tainted by rightwinged politics. She clearly equates being right-winged with a form of brain necrosis.

Moreover there's the implication there that revolutionaries who are so dedicated to ideology that they forget their ideology is actually a reactionary concept. As if only reactionaries would have such wicked thoughts about revolutionaries.

And then there's this - which has me giggling:

IThe great mystery of the movie is why all the women are infertile. No one quite seems to know, but this is my theory. Considering that babies are a symbol of hope in the movie, and that the patriarchy is viewed as the source of violence
and distrust, and considering that it’s only women that are infertile, my interpretion is that women’s bodies went infertile as an unconscious abandonment of hope. It’s like one worldwide uterine strike against the mess we find ourselves in.

Aren't you glad that we can't yet control fertility universally - because if we could, I'm sure someone on the left would arrange a worldwide uterine strike!!

Oh God! The horror!

Speaking About Joe Wilson

2007-02-12T18:20:00.000-05:00

Two frank assessments about Joe Wilson. God knows we can use the humor:

Short and sweet, from Robert Novak's testimony as transcribed by liveblogger Empty Wheel at Firedoglake:

Fitz: [When was your] first meeting with Wilson

RN On MTP. The day of his op-ed.

Fitz You did not become fast friends.

RN We did not exchange words. Most people in the green room quietly read. He was giving his opinion at some length about how things were done in the Clinton NSC, in a very loud voice, I thought that was an obnoxious performance.

And now for the kicker:

Dick Armitage to Bob Woodward, caught on tape:

Here's the link to the audio: Armitage to Woodward

And here is a partial transcript:

Woodward & Amitage Interview 1:14 WOODWARD: ...What's Scowcroft up to?
1:15 ARMITAGE: [ ] Scowcroft is looking into
1:16 the yellowcake thing.

1:17 WOODWARD: Oh yeah?

1:18 ARMITAGE: As the PFIAB

1:19 WOODWARD: Yeah. What happened there?

1:20 ARMITAGE: They're back together. [coughs] They

1:21 knew with yellowcake, the CIA is not going to be hurt by this

1:22 one---

1:23 WOODWARD: I know, that's---

1:24 ARMITAGE: -- Hadley and Bob Joseph know. It's

1:25 documented. We've got our documents on it. We're clean as a

2 3:2 2:1 Woodward & Amitage Interview -
2:1 [ ] whistle. And George personally got it out of the Cincinatti speech of the president.

2:3 WOODWARD: Oh he did?
2:4 ARMITAGE: Oh yeah.
2:5 WOODWARD: Oh really?
2:6 ARMITAGE: Yeah.
2:7 WOODWARD: It was taken out?
2:8 ARMITAGE: Taken out. George said you can't
2:9 do this.
2:10 WOODWARD: How come it wasn't taken out of the State
2:11 of the Union then?
2:12 ARMITAGE: Because I think it was overruled by
2:13 the types down at the White House. Condi doesn't like being
2:14 in the hot spot. But she ---
2:15 WOODWARD: But it was Joe Wilson who was sent by
2:16 the agency. I mean that's just ---
2:17 ARMITAGE: His wife works in the agency.
2:18 WOODWARD: --- Why doesn't that come out? Why does ---
2:19 ARMITAGE: Everyone knows it.
2:20 WOODWARD: ---that have to be a big secret?
2:21 Everyone knows.
2:22 ARMITAGE: Yeah. And I know [ ] Joe Wilson's
2:23 been calling everybody. He's pissed off because he was
2:24 designated as a low-level guy, went out to look at it. So,
2:25 he's all pissed off.
3:1 WOODWARD: But why would they send him?
3:2 ARMITAGE: Because his wife's a [ ]
3 3:23 3:2 Woodward & Amitage Interview -[update: adding in more transcript transcribed by JM Hanes

ARMITAGE: Because his wife's a [ ] analyst at the agency
Woodward: It's still weird.

ARMITAGE: It's perfect. This is what she does. She's a WMD analyst out there.

Woodward: Oh she is. Oh I see.

ARMITAGE: Yeah Get it? [Next couple of lines is my translation of crosstalk]

Woodward: Oh, I see. I didn't think

ARMITAGE: Yeah. See?

Woodward: Ohhh, She's the chief WMD ?

ARMITAGE: No, the chief? No.

Woodward: But INR thought that she could say, oh yeah, I'' be [garbled]

ARMITAGE: Yeah, no exactly

Woodward: Was she out there with him?

ARMITAGE: No

Woodward: When he was -----

ARMITAGE: Not to my knowledge. I don't know. I don't know if she was out there or not. Didn't wife [garbled] wmd analyst. How about that?

Shorter Armitage on Joe Wilson: Wilson turned the Bush Administration upside down in order to satisfy his ginormous ego. He didn't like being designated as a low-level guy.

How much has the Special Prosecution of Scooter Libby cost again?

Of course, no props to Armitage either for shutting his mouth so that others could take the blame for him.

Thanks to Roanoke at Just one Minute for finding the transcript and the audio file.

For even more humbling of poor Joe Wilson's ego, this is FDL liveblogging transcript of Grossman's testimony:

Conversation with Wilson on June 2003.

Is it correct that Mr. Wilson complained that he had seen Condi Rice on MTP on June 8 and he was very upset about her comments. June 9, which was a Monday, you had a conversation with Mr. Wilson about MTP.
What he told you was that he was furious at the comments of Condi Rice.

Yes sir, he was really mad.

As I recall he told me that he was angry at the way he'd been described and that people weren't taking him seriously. He was angry that he'd been described as some low level person.

Did he tell you he was considering going public.

Yes sir.

That's what this whole ordeal for the Bush Administration and Scooter Libby in particular has been about. No one was taking him seriously.

For previous posts on this subject, see here and here

The Old Jewish Quarter of Nineveh/Mosul

2007-02-11T23:52:00.000-05:00

A blog friend emailed me this story, in which the Rabbi of the 101st Airborne Division describes his inquries into the existence of the old Jewish section of Mosul/Nineveh:

As I entered light came through the half-open roof, and I could just make out writing engraved on the walls. It was Hebrew. It was then that I knew had stumbled into the ancient synagogue of the city of Mosul-Nineveh. My heart broke as I climbed over the garbage piles that filled the room where, for hundreds of years, the prayers of Jews had reached the heavens. I realized I was probably the first Jew to enter this holy place in over 50 years. Over three-and-a half meters of garbage filled the main sanctuary, and what appeared to be the women’s section. I could barely make it out because of the filth, but there was Hebrew writing on the walls.

A lovely story about discovering traces of the past community. Read the whole thing.

Media Blackout on a Few Essential Points: Libby Trial

2007-02-11T14:34:00.000-05:00

A Few Facts You May Not Know About the Libby/Plame Investigation Because of the Media ~~Blackout~~ lack of discussion.

The major witness the prosecution has called to impeach Libby's veracity is Tim Russert.

Before Tim Russert remembered journalistic privilege, he was first contacted by the FBI by phone, on occasion in which he spoke freely.

Did you know that the FBI notes of this phone call have been lost? So there is no contemporaneous record of it, only a report or summation on the notes of the call on which to rely.

How do you think that happened? That the Federal Government lost the notes to a key conversation with a key witness used to impeach the one person that the Special Prosecutor has brought up for charges.

Did you know that the report based on the lost notes states that Russert could not rule out absolutely that he talked about Wilson's wife.

If this is what the report based on the notes of the call said, what did the notes themselves say?

Further, that the man who interviewed Russert, Eckenrode, has an imprecise style of writing up reports based on notes.

For example, on another occasion, when the notes taken by his subordinate said Libby didn't recall discussing Plame during the Ari Fleischer lunch, Eckenrode wrote this up in the report on his notes as Libby adamanatly denied this. Note this difference, because the fact that he adamanatly denied that this occurred was the information that was presented to the Grand Jury, which then charged him with a count of perjury for this denial. The Grand Jury never saw the original notes which state that he did not recall.

[Defense Attorney] Wells belabors the point that the notes say "Libby does not recall" discussing Wilson's wife. He says that in writing up a report of the interview, FBI agent [Eckenrode] said Libby "adamantly denied" discussing Wilson's wife.

Bond says that they asked the FBI agent and verified the report. Wells says, but that's not what's in the notes, right? Bond admits this is true.

Then, think again about the fact that original notes of the first Tim Russert conversation have disappeared. And that only the report based on the notes remain. And even the report of Tim Russert's preliminary conversation with Eckenrode on the matter of whether Wilson's wife was mentioned with Libby differs extensively from the testimony Russert just gave publicly at the Libby trial.

So, too, on that now notorious phone call, Eckenrode may have similarly presented Russert with an extreme version of what Libby had originally claimed about discussing Plame with Russert. So that not only would Russert not recognize that as part of their initial conversation, but neither would Libby. And then Russert's response to a question that did not cite Libby's original language was then presented to the Grand Jury. This exaggeration or lying of investigators is a method commonly in use by the FBI.

However, we will never know what question was asked of Russert, in what specific language, because we no longer have the notes of this conversation.

Did you know that Libby and Fitzgerald had previous run-ins, on the matter of Mark Rich, all of which Libby ended up winning. This, perhaps, does not make Fitzgerald the most objective of special prosecutors when it comes to Libby. Then think again about the lost notes of the conversation.

On this point, at Just One Minute, commentator and attorney, MarkO makes an observation:

This case is frightening on one particular front.

Lawyers litigating against each other can really learn to hate one another. Prosecutors can (not all, by any means) take it to another level. After all, they are powerful and imbued with a sense of self-righteousness not known since the Inquisition.

Befuddle or humiliate a prosecutor and you need to drive fifty-five.

So, I cannot understand how it is possible for Fitzgerald to be permitted to indict a man who so fully humiliated him in the Rich prosecution. Again, it is not something that I could ever prove. That said, the thinness of this case, the failure to charge anyone with a substantive crime and the singling out of Libby (his arch nemesis) for prosecution on such silly grounds tells me it’s personal. You see, I think when Fitzgerald came up empty, and he needed something, he decided to avenge his humiliation and that’s where we are. Even if that is not true, the DOJ should not permit such a clear conflict (not legal but honest) to infect this proceeding. Libby humiliated Fitzgerald, but Fitzgerald ruined Libby’s life. And, again, there’s nothing to be done.

Did you know that someone in a position to review Grand Jury testimony leaked information to the Press regularly during the time the Grand Jury was sitting. And that the person in the position to do that, Eckenrode, has since quit, even though he had a long career at the FBI but he was not due for mandatory retirement. Then think about what the defense council could do with that information, if Eckenrode had taken the stand to be cross examined about his methods and his leaking. And about the fact that he lost his original notes from the conversation with Tim Russert.

As background to this post, see also the following posts: from Clarice: Libby Trial: NBC Connection

From Tom Maguire: Tim Russert: Equivocator?

Clarice Feldman, Tom Maguire and the entire JOM commentariat have been invaluable in assembling this information.

The Final Frontier

2007-02-09T23:28:00.000-05:00

Stuck on Stupid

2007-02-09T11:50:00.001-05:00

I haven't been much interested in the blogstorm about Presidential Candidate John Edwards' hiring then firing then rehiring of two leftwing moonbats to deal with the blogosphere outreach for his campaign. But now it appears that left wing religious folk are taken aback by Edwards' behavior by rehiring these folk, seeming to condone, by his rehiring of them, their attitudes.

And this little nugget in the current debate is too good to pass up:

In a comment that several Catholic Democrats told The Politico they found particularly offensive, Edwards aide Amanda Marcotte asked, in a posting to her personal blog, "What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?"

The other Edwards blogger, Melissa McEwan, has come under fire for referring to Christian conservatives as “Christofascists” in her personal blog.

Thursday, the campaign issued a statement from Edwards saying that he had been personally offended by the remarks and that the bloggers "have both assured me that it was never their intention to malign anyone's faith, and I take them at their word."

For my opinion of Edwards' summation, see the title to this post.

The campaign also sent out semi-apologetic statements from each blogger saying she was sorry if anyone was offended.

How ironic.

Since it's perfectly clear that offending other people was the raison d'être and sine qua non of their blogging existence, rehiring them into an existence of non-offense driven, leaden prose seems like an mete fate. Moreover, they'll never be able to keep their fan base!

Russert the Hypocrite

2007-02-08T23:50:00.000-05:00

In a previous post, I produced Russert's testimony showing that privately he spoke to an FBI agent about his call with Libby, the same call that later on, publicly, he fought against "being forced to reveal" because, as a member of the ~~elite~~ press, he did not want to create a chill with sources who would feel newly vulnerable.

So isn't it nice to find Tim Russert hassling Bob Novak about the ease with which he, ~~Tim Russert~~ Bob Novak revealed his sources to the ~~Grand Inquisitor~~ Special Prosecutor and the Grand Jury.

Russert asked Novak why he seemingly gave up so quickly without a fight.

"We were subpoenaed at NBC," Russert said. "We fought the subpoenas. Time Magazine subpoenaed, fought the subpoenas. The New York Times was subpoenaed, fought the subpoena. Why didn't you fight the subpoena?"

Well, isn't that special?

This is just one of those stories that will keep on giving for a long time...

Hat tip Clarice Feldman.

Clarice Feldman posts a longer article on this subject at American Thinker.

In the cross examination of Tim Russert this week we learned that although he'd made quite a show of fighting the prosecution's subpoena, asserting he did not ever and could not ever violate the principle of source confidentiality, he had on one or two occasions revealed to an FBI investigator over the phone the details of that Libby conversation prior to his charade of fighting the subpoena. He had in fact filed a false affidavit.

..."A pot calling the kettle black" doesn't begin to capture the breathtaking hypocrisy of NBC News' premier Washington journalist.

See also Tom Maguire, who takes this evidence and runs with it, just to see how funny it all gets.

And don't forget his comments, the many 1000s of them, where all the humor and much illumination is to be had. Today's mystery, disclosing the identity of the Thread Herder...

Tim Russert - Boldly Lying on the Stand

2007-02-08T12:21:00.000-05:00

A report on the Morning's testimony:

Libby's defense attorney, Wells, continues to grill Russert.

To recap, Russert, being a god, unlike you and me, got special treatment for his "grand jury" testimony. He got to testify in his office, with no jury present and with two lawyers present, his own and NBC's.

Thus is the life of the media gods.

Now they are discussing the letter Russert received detaiing these privileges in court.

Wells, the defense attorney is explicating the letter for Russert and the jury:

From the account in the Maine Web Report

Letter outlines special consideration for Russert that allowed his attorney and NBC’s attorney would be in the room. Wells asks if he understands that to be out of ordinary, that normal procedure is no lawyer in grand jury.

Russert makes the ridiculous claim that he was not aware that this is normal practice.

Wells is kind of incredulous, after reporting all these years you didn’t know that?

No

You’re an attorney correct?

Non practicing.

Wells moves on. This was a dumb answer by Russert, he obviously knows this like the rest of the world.

On this precise point, Tom Maguire commenting on his own blog, says:

On a good day, the blogosphere would pile up cites of Russert reporting on stories and noting that detail - maybe from the Clinton years, there were plenty of grand jury sotries then.

Are we having a good day?

Tom Maguire's column today on parsing together the direction the defense might take based on testimony from Russert yesterday is not to be missed.

Grilling Russert to a Fine Turn

2007-02-08T00:00:00.000-05:00

For those of you who are not Plamiacs - all Plame, all the time! now that the Libby trial is going on - there was a delicious moment in the court today.

Tim Russert walked into court today, a commanding presence, King of the Press. By the time he left, he might as well have skulked out. Or as Arianna Huffington puts it

Tim Russert hobbled into the courtroom this afternoon on crutches. When he left the stand at the end of the day (slated to return for more cross-examination tomorrow) his credibility had been so hobbled it needed a pair of crutches of its own.

Heh! Perfectly described. And by a certified despiser of the Bush Administration, which carries its own weight.

What was Arianna describing?

The highlight of the Libby trial so far, which was the dismantling of Tim Russert and his ego. But in this case, given that Timmy is King of the Press, his dismantling pointed to the hypocrisy of all those vaunted legal rights that the Press claims for its own.

Such as the desire not to be called to testify against a source - because to do so would impugn the public's free access to information. It turns out - in the hands of Russert, this precise "right" is no more than a public face he claims in order to permit himself a greater lattitude than ordinary mortals. In private, he's apparently happy to spill the beans to the FBI about conversations with his sources. Being a journalist - and having an ethical responsibility not to reveal what sources say - only comes into question when the matter of one's testimony becomes public.

Maine web report is one of two livebloggers at the scene. And here is his description of the final moments of Russert's testimony today.

Wells grilling Russert on his filing to squash the subpoena. Wells has brutally and effectively shown the hypocrisy of this filing. The filing, and NBC’s statement, says that testimony would create a chilling effect that would keep sources from talking to him, and thereby limit the access the general public has to information. This looks absurd now, since Russert just testified that he freely and unreservedly spoke to an FBI agent by phone about the entire contents of his Libby conversation, despite declaring emphatically that he understood the Libby call to be in confidence.
—
Russert is trying to show a difference between the Libby call and what he was talking about in the filing. Not effective in any way.

Russert is saying now that the focus in the FBI call was a focus on his words, not Libby’s words. Wells already got him to say that they spoke about both sides of the conversation.

Russert is entangled like a peanut-butter coated cat in a yarn factory right now.
—–

Russert is at once trying to justify his discussion of Libby’s call with the FBI, while at the same time backing up his request to keep the same call in confidence in regards to the subpoena.

Wells now is making the allegation that Russert lied to a Federal judge in his filing.

And at this precise moment, just after Wells, Libby's defense attorney makes the allegation that Russert lied to a Federal judge in his filing to keep him from testifying, the judge calls it a day.

Therefore, the moment that will stay in the minds of the jurors overnight - the moment that will crystallize there, or fester perhaps - is Wells knocking Russert's credibility entirely off balance by suggesting that his lawyer's filing to squash the subpoena contains within it a self-serving falsehood, because the very position that he is claiming to "defend publicly" - that is the rights of the press - he has already in private abrogated iinsouciantly. And it is this hypocrisy between Russert's public and private faces that the jury will contemplate overnight. As Clarice Feldman, among several of the attorney's liveblogging the liveblogging at Just One Minute, pointed out to me, this was Wells strategy - to have the trial end tonight on such a memorable point. Both for the jury and the witness.

So Russert, too, will contemplate it, wondering, perhaps, what other measures Wells has in store for him and his credibility and his massive ego tomorrow. Though it may be he will regain his composure. Still, from Maine Web Report's description, he looked naked up there.

Personally, after this beginning, I can't wait. See also Clarice Feldman's invaluable description of Russert's precarious credibility here.

From a filing by the prosecutor last evening trying to block inquiry into the accommodations made to Russert for his (total of 22 minutes) deposition testimony in his lawyer's offices, it appears that while this last point was not specifically noted in any pleadings I can see, the defense was provided with the FBI notes which provided some notice to them of the discrepancies in the NBC public pleading and that it contained a false suggestion that Russert had not already cooperated with the government. It is not clear that this Court, or the Court which determined the related case on the reporters' obligation to testify, was ever informed that the Russert filing was false.

And don't think the jury isn't paying attention. So far, the jury, which contains a lawyer as well as a retired, old time reporter, has asked some of the questions that go right to the heart of the difficulties with all the witnesses that Fitzgerald has presented.

By the way, I just saw a few minutes of this trial presented on CNN. They reiterated all their old talking points. Isn't it scary how much power Dick Cheney has. Iraq is a cancer on this White House even in 2003. Look how scared Joe Wilson made them. It's clear what the commentators had not done, in this case Jeffrey Toobin and David Gergen, was read the last few days of testimony.

They were repeating MSM platitudes, that's all.

There used to be a time when Toobin, for one, actually watched the details of cases he was speaking about. Now he's just commenting on form without detail. And it's absolutely clear he has no clue what is going on. Just as it is stunningly clear that the press had no clue about the story they were reporting on at the beginning of this whole thing.

For one thing, it should be clear to all of the MSM by now, that Valery Plame suggested Joe Wilson go to Niger for the CIA the day before the Vice President asked for clarification about what was happening in Niger. But perhaps an article by Byron York in NR is considered too réchercé for the MSM to read these days.

And do you know why these facts weren't known until today for sure? Because the CIA only released the memo clarifying these dates recently. They didn't bother to give them to the Senate Committee which investigated the Joe Wilson imbroglio. So Joe Wilson never went anywhere at the behest of the Vice President. He was suggested for the job before the Vice President inquired.

As for the details about Russert, I gather they won't trickle forth for the next days or two.

Or if they follow political protocol, they'll announce the bad news on Friday afternoon.

Now Even Bears Don't Like Bush

2007-02-05T18:05:00.000-05:00

Busch beer that is. Bears prefer local beer.

Campground workers were stunned to come across the bear sleeping off the effects in their grounds, surrounded by dozens of empty beer cans.

...He had apparently tried out and rejected the mass-market Busch beer in favour of local brand Rainier.

The Mis-state of the Libby Trial

2007-02-05T13:19:00.001-05:00

From Clarice Feldman, one of the most able commentators on the Libby Trial, at Just One Minute, summing up the current cross examination:

"So--Libby said at [his initial FBI] interview says that he "didn't recall" and [FBI agent] Eckenrode writes Libby "adamantly denied it", [FBI agent] Bond [currently being cross examined by Libby's team] knows[her boss] Eckenrode's characterization is wrong, but keeps her mouth shut, and at the [Grand Jury] Libby is confronted with "adamantly denied" and has no evidence to contest that that is what he said. And it is before the [Grand Jury] where he has no counsel to object to this.

Do you like this, possums?"*****

pretend you're in the gj..You told the FBI agents that you didn't recall something, you are (as Libby was) confronted with a summary of the interview which says instead that you "adamantly denied" the very thing you told them you couldn't recall..how would you respond?

Then imagine hours of this.

Kafkaesque.No?

Clarifications in square parentheses are mine.

As Clarice has now pointed out numerous times, if you go before the FBI to testify, do not say a word unless video tape is being used.

UPDATE II: From James Lewis at American Thinker, from an article entitled Fitz the Gullible?:

The prosecutor's faith in the media therefore passeth mere mortal understanding. No one who knows the bottom-feeding habits of our journos could possibly be so virginal. Any professional historian knows better --- because careful research always shows the big headlines of the day to be a slapdash made-up job. Smart news folk like H.L. Mencken and A.J. Liebling notoriously think of their profession as an endless clown parade. And any blogger who remembers Dan Rather, Reuters fauxtography, and a slew of New York Times fabrications, has to be utterly skeptical about the media narrative.

(That's why they call it a narrative, Counselor. It's a story. They make it up. It's not really that complicated.)

...Unfortunately for Patrick Fitzgerald, our conscientious reporters didn't even bother to take readable notes of the crucial conversations that have now placed Mr. Libby in the dock. Their memory for fleeting words heard many months ago is as just bad as anybody else's --- which is utterly dismal. The newsies never even bothered to use tape recorders, trained stenographers, personal organizers, or any of the other tools at the disposal of the merest junior attorney at the local ambulance chaser's office. It looks like they just followed each other's buzz, and if they all agreed on some conspiratorial version of events over that evening's booze, that had to be grist for the next day's headlines. This trial has therefore turned into an ordeal by baying newshounds. If Libby can sprint fast enough to survive their yipping and biting, he will be a free man. If not, he will be in jail.

Trial by ordeal is not exactly in the best tradition of Western jurisprudence, but that is exactly what we are left with. All thanks to our "prosecutor's prosecutor" and the tabloid press, working hand in hand.

ordeal by baying newshounds Heh! That pretty much sums it up.

Senate Resolution on Iraq, Version 4.0

2007-02-05T11:47:00.000-05:00

Jim Geraghty makes a suggestion about the wording of a Senate Resolution all the senators can sign on to:

Aw, heck, why don't they just introduce a resolution declaring, "We, the Senate, like all the good parts of the war and disapprove of all the bad parts. We demand all credit for anything that goes right, and reject any blame for anything that goes wrong"?

Come on, Senators. Be bold. You know you want to.

Donald Sensing Poses A Question About Global Warming

2007-02-04T10:40:00.000-05:00

What if global warming is a good thing?

He asks this with reference to this data list compiled by J.R. Dunn that appeared in the American Thinker, Resisting Global Warming Panic.

Despite the insistence of Al Gore and friends, this is far from the first time the Earth has ever passed through a climatic warming period. In fact, one occurred relatively recently, the medieval warm period, more commonly known as the Little Climatic Optimum (LCO), a period stretching roughly from the 10th to the 13th centuries, in which the average temperature was anything from 1 to 3 degrees centigrade higher than it is today. Several years ago, I covered the LCO in an article detailing the climatic history of the last millennium. But it's worthwhile to cover the highlights once more, to help put the contemporary panic into perspective.

* How warm was it during the LCO? Areas in the Midlands and Scotland that cannot grow crops today were regularly farmed. England was known for its wine exports.

* The average height of Britons around A.D. 1000 was close to six feet, thanks to good nutrition. The small stature of the British lower classes (and the Irish) later in the millennium is an artifact of lower temperatures. People of the 20th century were the first Europeans in centuries to grow to their "true" stature - and most had to grow up in the USA to do it.

* In fact, famine - and its partner, plague -- appears to have taken a hike for several centuries. We have records of only a handful of famines during the LCO, and few mass outbreaks of disease. The bubonic plague itself appears to have retreated to its heartland of Central Asia.

* The LCO was the first age of transatlantic exploration. When not slaughtering their neighbors, the Vikings were charting new lands across the North Atlantic, one of the stormiest seas on earth (only the Southern Ocean - the Roaring 40s - is worse). If you tried the same thing today, traveling their routes in open boats of the size they used, you would drown. They discovered Iceland, and Greenland, and a new world even beyond, where they found grape vines, the same as in England.

* The Agricultural Revolution is not widely known except among historians. Mild temperatures eased land clearing and lengthened growing seasons. More certain harvests encouraged experimentation among farmers involving field rotation, novel implements, and new crops such as legumes. While the thought of peas and beans may not thrill the foodies among us, they expanded an almost unbelievably bland ancient diet as well as providing new sources of nutrition. The result was a near-tripling of European population from 27 million at the end of the 7th century to 70 million in 1300.

* The First Industrial Revolution is not widely known even among historians. Opening the northern German plains allowed access to easily mined iron deposits in the Ruhr and the Saarland. As a result smithies and mills became common sights throughout Europe. Then came the basic inventions without which nothing more complex can be made - the compound crank, the connecting rod, the flywheel, followed by the turbine, the compass, the mechanical clock, and eyeglasses. Our entire technical civilization, all the way down to Al Gore's hydrogenmobile, has its roots in the LCO.

But in the late 13th century, it all came to an end.

The climate closed down. Rains ruined crops and washed away entire seacoast towns. Far to the north, the great colonies of Iceland and Greenland faltered and began to fade away. Famine returned to Europe, and with it the plague, in one of the greatest mass deaths ever witnessed by humanity. The bright centuries were replaced by the dance of death and a dank and morbid religiosity. The focus of culture shifted to the warm Mediterranean. It remained cold, within certain broad limits, for six hundred years. The chill only lifted in the 1850s, when our current warming actually began.

For more information, see also here and here.

On a truly random note, I'm wondering if the end of the little climatic optimum in roughly 1300 had anything to do with creating the colder social climate that led to the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290.

In a sense, yes. Italian banking was one of the things created during the high middle ages - which occurred as a result of the warming period. And with the rise of the pope's bankers, the rationale for keeping Jews within England ceased to be important to the king, whose ancestors had used them for loans and to create revenue by exceedingly high taxation rates.

Moreover, note that the entire period of residence of Jews in England in this early period nearly exactly corresponds to this medieval warming period: Jews arrived sometime after 1066 and stayed until 1290. (Jews were not known in England before William the Conquerer.) One would have to do much more research to support the following hypothesis, but it is certainly possible that, with the warmer weather and agricutural abundance, English society became more open to outsiders; and the reciprocal closing of society occurred as resources became scarcer and conditions generally harder.

Also, note, that in our own country, 1100-1300 marked the height of Anasazi culture in the Southwest. I wonder if, to the extent that cannabalism existed in Anasazi culture (research suggests that it was introduced to Anasazi culture through trade with the Aztecs), it, too, occurred as a result of worsening weather conditions, with agricultural crops harder to produce in the severe drought years.

Drought, no doubt, would have adversely effected hunting conditions as well.

Iranian Nuclear Scientist Assassinated - Was Mossad Involved?

2007-02-03T22:57:00.000-05:00

Stratfor had a report a few days back that I saw mentioned, which is now getting more traction, that the Mossad may have assassinated one of Iran's top nuclear scientists - showing that it is serious about preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear material and can do so in other ways than a straightforward military attack. Here is the write-up in the London Times:

According to Radio Farda, Iranian reports of Hassanpour’s death emerged on January 21 after a delay of six days, giving the cause as “gas poisoning”. The Iranian reports did not say how or where Hassanpour was poisoned but his death was said to have been announced at a conference on nuclear safety.

Rheva Bhalla of Stratfor, the US intelligence company, claimed on Friday that Hassanpour had been targeted by Mossad and that there was “very strong intelligence” to suggest that he had been assassinated by the Israelis, who have repeatedly threatened to prevent Iran acquiring the bomb.

Hassanpour won Iran’s leading military research prize in 2004 and was awarded top prize at the Kharazmi international science festival in Iran last year.

Human Interest Stories with an Islamic Twist

2007-02-03T16:45:00.001-05:00

Can you renounce Islam in Malaysia (where it is illegal) if the hospital sent you home at birth with the wrong family?

And here's something novel - if the story reflects accuracy, a Jewish school in Birmingham, UK, that is attended by a majority of Muslims, where Hebrew is taught and Jewish history and everyone gets along and no one complains - I gather because it is an excellent school and gives the kids a better hope of getting into Oxbridge.

Who is George Soros?

2007-02-03T16:45:00.000-05:00

Perhaps you've heard George Soros' recent comment at Davos. Though, until the last day or two, the comments have received little notice.

But if you have not, here they are:

"The United States is now recognizing the errors it had made in Iraq, [Soros] said, adding, “To what extent it recognizes the mistake will determine its future.” Mr. Soros said Turkey and Japan were still hurt by a reluctance to admit to dark parts of their history, and contrasted that reluctance to Germany’s rejection of its Nazi-era past.

“America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany,” he said. “We have to go through a certain de-Nazification process.”"

And who is this man claiming that in order for things to get back to the correct path, hawks must be gotten rid of, like Nazis after WWII? Presumably by jailing them, putting them to death and other such niceties. Or what else did Soros mean by using this language?

Marc Shulman at American Future, points to a Martin Peretz article at The New Republic (subscription only, so I'm quoting Shulman here) containing mind boggling information about who George Soros is. The history of George, from George's own lips:

On December 20, 1998, there appeared this exchange between Soros and Steve Kroft on "60 Minutes":

Kroft: "You're a Hungarian Jew …"

Soros: "Mm-hmm."

Kroft: "... who escaped the Holocaust …"

Soros: "Mm-hmm."

Kroft: "... by posing as a Christian."

Soros: "Right."

Kroft: "And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps."

Soros: "Right. I was 14 years old. And I would say that that's when my character was made."

Kroft: "In what way?"

Soros: "That one should think ahead. One should understand that—and anticipate events and when, when one is threatened. It was a tremendous threat of evil. I mean, it was a—a very personal threat of evil."

Kroft: "My understanding is that you went … went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews."

Soros: "Yes, that's right. Yes."

Kroft: "I mean, that's—that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?"

Soros: "Not, not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don't … you don't see the connection. But it was—it created no—no problem at all."

Kroft: "No feeling of guilt?"

Soros: "No."

Kroft: "For example, that, 'I'm Jewish, and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be these, I should be there.' None of that?"

Soros: "Well, of course, ... I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn't be there, because that was—well, actually, in a funny way, it's just like in the markets—that is I weren't there—of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would—would—would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the—whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the—I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt."

Peretz's conclusion:

So this is the psychodrama that has been visited on American liberalism. We learn Soros never has nightmares. Had he been tried in a de-Nazification process for having been a young cog in the Hitlerite wheel, he would have felt that, since other people would have confiscated the same Jewish property and delivered the same deportation notices to the same doomed Jews, it was as if he hadn't done it himself. He sleeps well, while we sleep in Nazi America.

I was 14 years old. And I would say that that's when my character was made.

And this is the same amoral character that chooses to compare us to Nazis, who himself joined with the Nazis, because such behavior had become normative. And he himself places no judgement on his past actions - certainly not publicly, and to judge by the measure of his deeds, not privately either. Clearly, he is ready to turn on anyone, to have loyalty to no one, as long as the "market" - by which he means social norms deranged by wartime - might possibly permit it.

This strikes me as sociopathic.

Obama

2007-02-02T12:40:00.001-05:00

Dick Morris brilliantly sums up Obama:

“Obama is like a stem cell. He can become any part of the body he wants to be!”

Or that the media wants him to be!

In reality, he's an unleavened liberal. But the press, using their magical powers, have largely managed to ~~suppress~~ make that fact disappear. At least in their own perception. He's not a liberal, he's a centrist.

Rich Lowry is at the DNC meeting in Washington covering presidential candidates as they speak. Here he covers Obama's speech today at the , describing both his charisma, the response to that charisma he gets from the crowd, and the unoriginality of his discourse.

That's A Relief Then

2007-02-01T02:46:00.000-05:00

President Jacques Chirac said this week that if Iran had one or two nuclear weapons, it would not pose a big danger, and that if Iran were to launch a nuclear weapon against a country like Israel, it would lead to the immediate destruction of Tehran.

And Israel, too. But as they say, tant pis. On the plus side, this outcome would surely resolve the Israeli/Palestinian crisis right quick.

Chirac, I suspect, has not yet woken up to the realization that nuclear deterrence went out with the Soviets and that there is a Shi'ite president heading Iran, who wants to hasten the Messiah by bringing the apocalypse as soon as he can. i.e. with nuclear bombs. Preferably aimed at Israel.

Yet, the scary thing about Chirac's remarks is how much it overlaps with what Dr. Shmuel Bar, the director of studies at the Institute of Police and Strategy in Israel, claims is Iran's nuclear strategy claims is Iran's nuclear strategy vis-a-vis Israel.

Iran believes "that Israel is a one-bomb country, one bomb from the point-of-view of the receiving side; that the U.S. would not intervene against Iran under such conditions; and all of that with apocalyptic zeal may result in actual use of nuclear weapons," he said.

Bar, who for years worked in the Israeli intelligence community, told a conference on Jan. 9 that Iran was prepared to destroy Muslim cities as the price for firing nuclear missiles toward Israel. He said the ruling Islamic clergy would support a nuclear attack on Israel even at the risk of killing millions of Palestinian Muslims.

In this scenario, as we see, allowing Iran one bomb may very well be fatal - for Israel.

"They're developing weapons both as deterrents and that part of the Iranian regime — the more revolutionary part — has all of the components for developing a doctrine of use of nuclear weapons, as opposed to adoption of using nuclear weapons as deterrents," Bar said. "I think that it's a religious background which brings them to this sort of a doctrine."

Bar said Iran has studied the U.S. wars against the former Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. The chief Iranian lesson was that only nuclear weapons could deter a U.S. attack.

"Nuclear weapons are strategic necessity for deterring the West and Israel and for achieving their strategic goals," Bar said. "Until they arrive at nuclear weapons, Iran's strategic deterrence must rely on terrorism and subversive potential."

As a way of effecting the situation in Iran ourselves, I heard something very interesting on Lawrence Kudlow's Finance show on CNBC earlier this week.

He was discussing Iran with a guest and one of them brought up the notion of disinvesting from Iran, in order to put the financial squeeze on Iran, now that the country is suffering from its truly rotten economy. They've already been outplayed, at least for a while, by the Saudis, who lowered the price of gas substantially, thus lowering the desperately needed revenue.

Divesting from stocks and mutual funds that have investments in Iran is something we can do at home to help put our own financial pressure on the country.

By the way, you'll be glad to know that Chirac retracted some of his remarks.

Mr. Chirac spent much of the second interview refining his remarks of the previous day.

He retracted, for example, his comment that Tehran would be destroyed if Iran launched a nuclear weapon. “I retract it, of course, when I said, ‘One is going to raze Tehran,’ ” he said.

What a relief!

The Solution for the Middle East

2007-01-31T12:25:00.000-05:00

Stolen from Stephen Pollard, who stole it from Samizdata:

"I think we should take Iraq and Iran and combine them into one country and call it Irate. All the pissed off people can live in one place and get it over with."

-- Denis Leary

2007-01-29T19:08:00.000-05:00

Bethlehem Christians Break Their Silence Over Muslim Treatment by Khaled Abu Toameh, himself a Palestinian Muslim.

Rowan Williams - our favorite archidiot - loves to blames the Jews for the condition of the Bethlehem Christians, but Jews do not appear to be in the forefront here, as Bethlehem Christians break their silence over their treatment by Muslims.

According to the families, many Christians have long been afraid to complain in public about the campaign of "intimidation" for fear of retaliation by their Muslim neighbors and being branded "collaborators" with Israel.

But following an increase in attacks on Christian-owned property in the city over the past few months, some Christians are no longer afraid to talk about the ultra-sensitive issue. And they are talking openly about leaving the city.

...Fuad and Georgette Lama woke up one morning last September to discover that Muslims from a nearby village had fenced off their family's six-dunam plot in the Karkafa suburb south of Bethlehem. "A lawyer and an official with the Palestinian Authority just came and took our land," said 69-year-old Georgette Lama.

The couple was later approached by senior PA security officers who offered to help them kick out the intruders from the land. "We paid them $1,000 so they could help us regain our land," she said, almost in tears. "Instead of giving us back our land, they simply decided to keep it for themselves. They even destroyed all the olive trees and divided the land into small plots, apparently so that they could offer each for sale." When her 72-year-old husband, Fuad, went to the land to ask the intruders to leave, he was severely beaten and threatened with guns.

"My husband is after heart surgery and they still beat him," Georgette Lama said. "These people have no heart. We're afraid to go to our land because they will shoot at us. Ever since the beating, my husband is in a state of trauma and has difficulties talking."

...

A Christian businessman who asked not to be identified said the conditions of Christians in Bethlehem and its surroundings had deteriorated ever since the area was handed over to the PA in 1995.

"Every day we hear of another Christian family that has immigrated to the US, Canada or Latin America," he said. "The Christians today make up less than 15 percent of the population.

People are running away because the Palestinian government isn't doing anything to protect them and their property against Muslim thugs. Of course not all the Muslims are responsible, but there is a general feeling that Christians have become easy prey."

What's Wrong with this Picture?

2007-01-29T14:14:00.000-05:00

New evidence of Iran's role in Iraq will be made in Baghdad by the chief spokesman for the multinational forces in Iraq, Major General William Caldwell. The Directorate of National Intelligence worked over the weekend to clear new intelligence and information that sources inside the intelligence community said would implicate Iran in deliberately sending particularly lethal improvised explosives to terrorists to kill coalition soldiers.

The plan to present the evidence will coincide with a presentation this week by Ambassador Khalilzad to the press detailing the charges against Iranian operatives affiliated with the country's Quds Force arrested in the last six weeks in three raids.

The decision to go public with new evidence on Iran's role in fomenting Iraq's civil war and in working with terrorists killing American soldiers marks a change in strategy for the Bush administration, which has until now provided scant evidence to the public about Iran's role in the Iraq conflict. Since the president unveiled his new war strategy on January 10, leading Democrats have challenged claims of Iran's role and intentions in the Iraq war.

Separate Bathrooms for Muslims?

2007-01-29T11:48:00.001-05:00

It's separate bathrooms for Muslims now in LaTrobe University in Australia. And why is that?

Victorian Muslim community leader Yasser Soliman said the washrooms were necessary.

He said the separate facilities were also due to concerns from non-Muslim students.

"Muslims need to wash their feet before prayer and in the past there have been complaints about them washing their feet in sinks, so this is a happy medium," he said.

Mr Soliman said most universities provided Muslim-only prayer and washrooms for students.

A La Trobe University spokesman said the washrooms were established with the advice of senior Muslim religious leaders.

Why not simply install a lot sink in the antechamber of the prayer room?

Jimmy "Too Many Jews" Carter

2007-01-29T10:13:00.000-05:00

Last week I reported on the story circulating about how Jimmy Carter decided he needed a quota against holocaust surviving Jews on the Holocaust Memorial Council.

This week, the NYSun provides more detail on the story. First Professor Freedman confirmed all the details of the story that had appeared in WND last week, except that it was Elie Wiesel who had picked the members of the committee, not himself. He then added:

Mr. Freedman told us that Carter saw the idea of a Holocaust Memorial "principally as a political gimmick." He "in effect politicized the idea" and saw it as a means of getting "political support from Jews" but at the same time he didn't want to "alienate other potential constituencies," and so wanted more Polish Americans, and other ethnic groups, who claimed to be equally affected by the Holocaust.

Mr. Freedman did stress that Carter's domestic policy adviser, Stuart Eisenstadt, who came up with the idea of the Holocaust Memorial Council, did support the memorial "on the merits" -- not like Carter who did it for political reasons. Freedman said, "I think Carter's motivations were very different."

Professor Freedman also stated that he had told this story privately for years, but this was the first time word had reached a reporter interested enough to follow up with him.

Doggone Good Pet Tricks

2007-01-28T01:18:00.000-05:00

The best doggone good pet tricks you've ever seen:

John Kerry Among Friends At Davos

2007-01-27T19:30:00.000-05:00

John Kerry announced this week he was not going to run for President this election cycle, leaving him free to "speak truth to power" by proclaiming that America is an international pariah among an audience of the like minded.

Hot Air has the video

Here he is posing, from left to right, with Amr Moussa, Secretary-General of the League of Arab States, Abdullah Gul, Foreign Minister of Turkey, Ahmed Mahmoud Nazif, Prime Minister of Egypt, Adil Abd al-Mahdi, Vice-President of Iraq, Mohammad Khatami, former President of Iran, and John Kerry, Senator from Massachussetts, U.S in a group photo after a plenary session on the Middle East during the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, Saturday, Jan. 27, 2007.

Shoot to Kill

2007-01-27T18:30:00.000-05:00

Bush, at long last, has changed the rules of engagement for soldiers in Iraq, giving them the order to kill or capture Iranian operatives.

A senior US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed the outlines of the Post report and stressed: "The most important job is to protect US troops on the ground and prevent Iran from meddling in Iraqi affairs."

"If we get information about Iranian agents or networks operating inside of Iraq and actively providing weapons or support to insurgents, we are going to go after them," the official said.

"Over the fall, we were receiving additional information indicating Iranians were becoming more and more involved," the official added.

What took Bush so long? This seems basic to me, leading me to wonder if his briefing panels were not shielding him from home truths about the situation in Iraq. This lack of hands on approach is often what leads his adminisration into incompetencies.

Newt Gingrinch recently made some excellent proposals as to how the President should manage Iraq. Here they are, noted by Kate O'Beire in the Corner.

“1.Place General Petraeus in charge of the Iraq campaign and establish that the Ambassador is operating in support of the military commander.

2. Since General Petraeus will now have responsibility for victory in Iraq all elements of achieving victory are within his purview and he should report daily to the White House on anything significant which is not working or is needed

3. Create a deputy chief of staff to the President and appoint a retired four star general or admiral to manage Iraq implementation for the Commander in Chief on a daily basis.

4. Establish that the second briefing (after the daily intelligence brief) the President will get every day is from his deputy chief of staff for Iraq implementation.

5. Establish a War Cabinet which will meet once a week to review metrics of implementation and resolve failures and enforce decisions. The President should chair the War Cabinet personally and his deputy chief of staff for Iraq implementation should prepare the agenda for the weekly review and meeting.”

As someone whose name I've long since forgotten commented some while ago, having Newt in the Presidential race will be a good thing. He'll never win, but his presence will help to raise the level of intelligent policy discourse. Of course, so will Rudy. In fact, seeing Rudy and Newt together, debating issues, will be a real treat.

Everything Old is New Again

2007-01-27T18:29:00.000-05:00

And now for some more Carter Derangement Syndrome:

Cox and Forkum reprise their cartoon from 1/26/06 due to it recurring relevancy.

Too Jewish Sounding for the Holocaust Committee!!

2007-01-26T01:29:00.000-05:00

Suddenly, it has become socially acceptable for liberal Jews to come out of the closet with their first hand tales of Carter's implicit anti-semitism and irascibility about Jews; the floodgates are now wide open.

It's become a trend. I suspect we'll hear more and more stories in the near future - stories that liberal Jews have been repressing all these years in the service of God's knows what - perhaps merely their own closeness "to power" or some kind of odd "respect for the office". Perhaps they all believed these examples had occurred in isolation. Or, perhaps they did not want to draw attention to it and make a fuss. God knows the reason.

Thus, in the last several weeks we learned that Jimmy Carter lent his personal support to the family of a Nazi, in a bid for leniency for the Nazi.

And now comes the latest tale.

Apparently, after Carter helped found the American Holocaust Committee, in itself a noble deed, he decided that there would be an unspoken quota! on the number of Jews on the board. OF THE HOLOCAUST COMMITTEE!

[Monroe] Freedman, [the council's former executive director,] says he was tasked with creating a board for the council and with making recommendations to the White House on how best to memorialize the Holocaust.

He told WND he sent a memo to Carter's office containing recommendations for council board members.

He said his memo was returned with a note on the upper right hand corner that stated, "Too many Jews."

The note, Freedman said, was written in Carter's handwriting and was initialed by Carter.

Freedman said at the time the board he constructed was about 80-perent Jewish, including many Holocaust survivors.

[Emphasis mine]

There's also the matter of his referring to the Holocaust recently as "the so-called Holocaust."

As Ace points out, its clear that Carter believes that the Holocaust was a terrible thing. But it's also clear that his expression gives away the kind of idioms that spring to his mind of late.

[T]he fact that this locution springs to his mind while speaking extemporaneosly kind of suggests who he's been reading and talking to of late, no?

Also, make note of the distinction that Ace draws between Palestinian moderates and extremists.

Moderates are the Holocaust deniers; extremists are the Holocaust enthusiasts,

[Hat Tip: Douglas Stanley, Jr.]

Israel: A Stiff Necked Country

2007-01-26T01:27:00.000-05:00

Israel: A Stiff Necked Country

That's not my opinion, by the way; rather, its my translation of Jimmy's belief that Israel was "intransigent."

I guess he believed he had the God's eye view, that he shared God's perspective and God's judgement on Israel so closely.

Carter's distrust of the U.S. Jewish community and other supporters of Israel runs deep. According to former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Carter's feelings on Israel were always ambivalent. On the one hand, he felt Israel was being intransigent; on the other, he genuinely had an attachment to the country as the ‘land of the Bible.'"

This quote is taken from Ken Stein's review of Jimmy Carter's book; Stein, you will recall, was the first to resign from the Carter center, after the recent publication of Carter's infamous book. Leading to the unavoidable conclusion that it is not a good idea to piss off publicly someone who worked with you over the years so closely that he understands the nature of your thought mechanisms. And feels betrayed enough by you to reveal the kind of mind you have and your intellectual shortcomings in public.

And this Ken Stein does, in a judicious and rational way, peeling off the mask on Carter's methodology and biases.

As we collaborated on The Blood of Abraham,[2] Carter's first book about the Middle East, I witnessed Carter's passion, determination, and stubbornness. He was capable of absorbing vast amounts of information, and he had an extraordinary capacity to recall detailed points and concepts almost verbatim months after reading them.

Carter's preferred method in writing the book was to lay a brief and somewhat selective historical foundation for each chapter and emphasize the contemporary. I sought to anchor each chapter more deeply in history and political culture. He had little patience for precedent or laborious recapitulation of history. Too often it interfered with his desire to find action-oriented solutions, which befit his training as an engineer. For Carter, history and ideology bestowed unwanted moorings and unnecessary rigidities; they shackled the pragmatism and flexibility of the would-be negotiator.

So, too, Stein exposes the kind of malicious hatred Carter held for Menachim Begin, to the extent that he preferred knowingly to print inaccuracies in past books after him - even when those inaccuracies have been pointed out:

While Carter lauds Begin for his intelligence, a point he has repeatedly made when speaking to my students, [ed. adds: well of course - he is a "clever Jew"] his animus toward the late Israeli leader is limitless. This became evident when we were writing The Blood of Abraham, and Carter insisted on asserting that Begin "wanted to expand Israeli borders to both sides of the Jordan River." In fact, this is anachronistic. True, this had been Begin's view prior to Israel's independence in 1948, but it was not, as Carter implied, Begin's position after his twenty-nine years in the Knesset (parliament) or during his premiership. During chapter editing, I brought the error to Carter's attention. He declined to correct it.

During the difficult negotiations between Egypt and Israel, Carter and his advisers tried to get Sadat to engage in a collusive scheme: They would encourage Sadat to make "deliberately exaggerated" demands. The White House would then intervene to "compel" Cairo to scale back its demands in exchange for Israeli concessions. Then-national security advisor Brzezinski explained that Washington would "apply maximum leverage on Israel to accommodate," by keeping the West Bank's political future on the table for future negotiations. That Carter risked possible Israeli-Egyptian peace in an effort to extract greater concessions from Begin underscores the tension in their relationship.

It's fascinating to find out as well, the effect these political manipulations had on Begin, once he learned of them. He was so angry that he refused to see Carter various times when Carter was in Israel, blaming it on illness.

On our 1987 trip to Israel, Begin refused to see Carter, citing health reasons, but Begin's personal secretary told me it was because of the way Carter had treated Begin.

It is not surprising, moreover, to have confirmed for us by Ken Stein that Carter blames his loss in 1981 on Begin and not on his own huge failures as President.

What's that they say in Christianity again?

Do not criticize the speck in your neighbor's eye, before you remove the log from you own.

Carter, however, would prefer to blame the "Jews" for being a stiff necked people. Not so much the Gd's eye view when it comes to seeing himself, is it.

But no matter, for the man still possesses missionary zeal. And a belief in his own godlike vision:

Carter has come to scorn those who disagree with him. On his recent book tour promoting Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, whenever an interviewer disagreed with a premise or challenged Carter's views, he would respond, "It is obvious you did not read my book." This is Carter's way of chiding the interviewer for not accepting his wisdom. When Carter says, "Everything in the book is accurate; it is correct," he seeks acknowledgment that he possesses a privileged understanding of the conflict's fundamental truths and should, therefore, be accepted as someone qualified to apportion blame.

Another example of this godlike vision is here:

Carter is convinced that he himself was the essential ingredient to enable the Egyptian-Israeli peace. However, Carter does not understand how fortunate he was to have in Begin and Sadat two leaders who needed agreement. Each possessed vision and courage and faced a common adversary in the Soviet Union. This reality welded them into uncomfortable but necessary interaction. Had Carter continued his diplomacy into a second term, he would not have found Israeli and Palestinian leaders possessing any degree of urgency for a solution. There is no evidence that the Arafat of the early 1980s was more willing to compromise or abandon terror than the Arafat faced by Clinton. Nonetheless, Carter believes his negotiating skills could bear fruit where Clinton failed. His conviction is so great that he need not read Ross's account.

This article is a must-read demythologization and deconstruction of the ex-President. Please read the entire thing, available here.

Hat tip, Michael Rubin in the Corner. And scroll the Corner for more commentary on it.

Yemenite Jews flee their homes following threats by extremists

2007-01-22T12:24:00.000-05:00

Some 45 Jews of Sa'ada county in Yemen left their homes after being threatened by radical Muslims, the Saudi daily Al Wattan reported on Monday.

According to the report, the extremists told the Jews to leave their homes within ten days, after which time they will be exposed to abductions and looting.

I hadn't realized that there were any Jews still living in Yemen, but apparently there are a few hundred still, who are made to pay special dhimmi taxes to the government for protection.

They blame their strife on the oblivious Yemenite government, which refuses to offer them assistance. The Jewish community, say its members, does not have efficient communication channels with the regime that would allow it to influence its actions.

The Jews under threat contacted local authorities and demanded fair treatment as ordinary Yemenite citizens. They told the authorities among other things that Islam imposes taxes on Jews in return for protection and security.

Nick Cohen on the Anti War Left

2007-01-22T11:54:00.000-05:00

Nick Cohen, raised a principled liberal, where even the decision of what fruits and vegetables to buy was a moral decision, from his own account, did not knowingly come into contact with a Conservative until he was 13.

I still remember the sense of dislocation I felt at 13 when my English teacher told me he voted Conservative. As his announcement coincided with the shock of puberty, I was unlikely to forget it. I must have understood at some level that real Conservatives lived in Britain - there was a Conservative government at the time, so logic dictated that there had to be Conservative voters. But it was incredible to learn that my teacher was one of them, when he gave every appearance of being a thoughtful and kind man. To be good you had to be on the left.

And of course a lot of liberals are to this day raised with these kinds of assumptions - assumptions that act as blinders. How do you reconcile the dogma with which you are raised and that colors your worldview - that all good people are, by definition, liberals - with facts on the ground that challenge that assumption.

He tells us this for a few reasons. On the simple level, in the narrative of his changing political stance, this was his innocent starting place. It also gives him "liberal creds." Without them, he would be all too easy to swipe away. He'll still be easy to discount from the conversation, as an apostate who lost his faith, but recounting his narrative might lead to some dislocation among other individuals and strengthen them in their sense of jarring disjunction, as reality and political orthodoxy diverge from each other.

Moreover, Cohen's adolescent sense of dislocation appears to mirror, indeed even foreshadow, the much greater sense of dislocation from the left that he experienced since 9/11 and, particularly, since the discourse about the Iraq War began to burgeon in 2002-2003 and on. So that, they found themselves even unable to oppose Abu Musab Al Zarqawi:

Journalists wondered whether the Americans were puffi ng up Zarqawi's role in the violence - as a foreigner he was a convenient enemy - but they couldn't deny the ferocity of the terror. Like Stalin, Pol Pot and Slobodan Milosevic, they went for the professors and technicians who could make a democratic Iraq work. They murdered Sergio Vieira de Mello, one of the United Nations's bravest officials, and his colleagues; Red Cross workers, politicians, journalists and thousands upon thousands of Iraqis who happened to be in the wrong church or Shia mosque.

How hard was it for opponents of the war to be against that? Unbelievably hard, it turned out. The anti-war movement disgraced itself not because it was against the war in Iraq, but because it could not oppose the counter-revolution once the war was over. A principled left that still had life in it and a liberalism that meant what it said might have remained ferociously critical of the American and British governments while offering support to Iraqis who wanted the freedoms they enjoyed.

Giant Comet in the Sky

2007-01-22T00:00:00.000-05:00

The brightest comet in 40 years lights the sky. It's around 140 million kilometres (87 million miles) from the Earth.

The comet consists of a head bigger than Mount Everest and a tail that stretches 30 million kilometres into space.

For Dorothy Dunnett Fans

2007-01-20T01:05:00.000-05:00

Hey, I got Lymond! Without [much] cheating!

Which Lymond Character Are You?

Congratulations, you're Francis Crawford of Lymond, for a time the Master of Culter. You're the hero and the focal point of everything. You're the quintessential romantic hero: brooding, mysterious, witty, informed, gentle, sensitive and all the rest. You should, perhaps, consider doing the dishes once in a while and speak in your native tongue when possible. In other words, show off a bit less. It won't kill you.
Take this quiz!

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The Threshold of Soul

2007-01-18T13:10:00.000-05:00

In an interview at the Jerusalem Post, Velvel Greene, retired former NASA scientist and professor at Ben Gurion describes the effect of his first meeting with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, before he became religious. It's a transformative moment, a moment of religious epiphany.

His first sight of the Rebbe was at a 'Farbrengen,' a lively hassidic event where the Rebbe would speak. "I was in New York on business and Rabbi Feller called to say a Farbrengen would be held at Chabad headquarters. He said I should go, so I did. The Rebbe spoke in Yiddish, so I understood the words, but I didn't have enough Jewish knowledge to comprehend most of it. The whole event amazed me: There was the Rebbe - educated in math and science himself - who spoke of the 'soul' as something real, not just an idea. And listening to his every word were a thousand Chassidim, working guys, just like me. But for them, everything the Rebbe said had critical importance for their lives today."

As the Rebbe spoke, Greene recalled a Bialik poem he'd memorized as a child. "In one of his poems, Bialik wrote about standing on the threshold of existence, looking into the depth of the Jewish soul. That's what I did at that Farbrengen. It was my epiphany."

It's an interesting term in this context, threshold. And key to the mystical experience of coming closer to God. With the Rebbe providing the portal for him to look through to the other side.

In ancient Hekhalot mysticism, there were seven thresholds to pass through in the experience of drawing near to God. Each level represented an ascent in closeness.

As for this image of the Rebbe, I'm reminded of the passage in Hagigah 15a the beginning of which is cited in reference to Rabbi Akiva to describe his ascent above: "Draw me, we will run after thee: the king hath brought me into his chambers: we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine: the upright love thee." (Song of Songs 1:4)

One imagines that Rabbi Akiva presented a similar clarity and depth of soul for his followers that is here transcribed in this moment of epiphanic transformation.

Harridan of the Sea

2007-01-18T09:41:00.000-05:00

From the New York Post

But she's doing it for the children!

That is, the children of Del Monte's investors.

2007-01-17T15:55:00.001-05:00

In a Q&A at the Independent, with questions sent in from online readers Martin Amis was asked:

What is the most depressing thing about Britain you have observed since your return? And the best? GRANT MULLIN, Surrey

The most depressing thing was the sight of middle-class white demonstrators, last August, waddling around under placards saying, We Are All Hizbollah Now. Well, make the most of being Hizbollah while you can. As its leader, Hasan Nasrallah, famously advised the West: "We don't want anything from you. We just want to eliminate you." Similarly, when I went on Question Time the other week, a woman in the audience, her voice quavering with self-righteousness, presented the following argument: since it was America that supported Osama bin Laden when he was fighting the Russians, the US armed forces, in response to September 11, "should be dropping bombs on themselves!" And the audience applauded. It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead.

[Hat tip: Stephen Pollard]

The Saudis Finally Got the Damned Memo

2007-01-17T15:48:00.001-05:00

Bush must feel relieved.

Remember when the Democrat talking points told us that in the fall, just before the 2004 elections, Bush was going to whisper in Saudi ears to increase oil production and the price of a barrel of oil would drop astronomically in order to assure "his popularity" before the election?

Well it finally happened, only two and a third years to late. So I guess, in the manner of truthiness, we can say the Dems were right, after all. It's just that their forecast came a bit too early.

Prices fell in early trading after Saudi Arabia's Oil Minister, Ali al-Naimi, said his country has 3 million daily barrels of spare capacity and will push ahead with projects to expand output. Oil futures plunged yesterday after al-Naimi said he saw no need for an emergency OPEC meeting to consider further cuts in output.

``The Saudis are saying that they don't want to be the swing producer,'' said Bill O'Grady, director of fundamental futures research at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc. in St. Louis. ``The Saudis have made substantial cuts, unlike a lot of the other OPEC members. Oil in a $40 to $50 range suits the Saudis much better than oil at $70.''

And the only reason that it suits the Saudi's better, is because it suits the Iranians much, much worse. No wonder that Ahmadinejad was huddling so closely with that kuffir Chavez last week. But it doesn't seem to have done any good, except to reinforce the Saudis in their decision to keep oil production constant.

This Saudi-Iranian hostility could keep gas prices low for some time. Which might work out to be another "mistake" caused by the blundering Bush policy in the middle east.

The Saudis Finally Got the Damned Memo

2007-01-17T15:48:00.000-05:00

Prices fell in early trading after Saudi Arabia's Oil Minister, Ali al-Naimi, said his country has 3 million daily barrels of spare capacity and will push ahead with projects to expand output. Oil futures plunged yesterday after al-Naimi said he saw no need for an emergency OPEC meeting to consider further cuts in output.

``The Saudis are saying that they don't want to be the swing producer,'' said Bill O'Grady, director of fundamental futures research at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc. in St. Louis. ``The Saudis have made substantial cuts, unlike a lot of the other OPEC members. Oil in a $40 to $50 range suits the Saudis much better than oil at $70.''

And the only reason that it suits the Saudi's better, is because it suits the Iranians much, much worse. No wonder that Ahmadinejad was huddling so closely with that kuffir Chavez last week.

Michael Oren Talk Tonight at B&N, NY

2007-01-15T13:56:00.000-05:00

Excuse the late notice.

ME scholar, Michael Oren is speaking tonight at B&N, 7:30, Broadway and 82nd St., NYC, on his new book, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present.

I meant to post this last week, but it slipped my mind. I was reminded today, when reading his interesting editorial in the LATimes:

THE STALLED U.S. mission in Iraq has prompted calls for a return to "realism" in American foreign policy. Instead of striving for freedom and national cohesion in the Middle East, realists argue that the U.S. should negotiate with Syria and Iran and abandon the dream of remaking the region on a democratic, federated model. Realists claim that replacing a faith-based policy with an agenda based solely on economic and strategic interests will return the United States to its traditional posture in the Middle East.

In fact, long before the rise of radical Islam and even the discovery of oil, Americans worked to bring liberty and human rights to the Middle East. For well over 200 years, U.S. citizens have sought to endow Middle Eastern peoples with the same inalienable liberties Americans enjoy at home.

The Cost of an Infamous Kiss

2007-01-15T13:52:00.000-05:00

Remember this? A scion of Naturei Karta kissing up to 'Jad at the world Holocaust Denial Conference. I discussed it here.

Turns out that Moshe Aryeh Friedman's wife didn't much like the image either, and has left him, fleeing to her parents Satmar community in Williamsburg, New York. She is now seeking help on obtaining a divorce. Good for her. It couldn't happen to someone more deserving of it.

Friedman's British naturei karta colleague has been banned from Britain by the Jewish community in the United Kingdom. I suppose that works out to excommunication.

BTW, there are even some Saudi Muslim writers outraged by Iran's behavior hosting the Holocaust conference. Memri translates and YNET reports.

Saudi journalist Yusuf Al-Swaidan, writing in the Kuwaiti al-Sayassah newspaper, described the conference's attendants as "the new Nazis."...

Do Demographics Determine Destiny?

2007-01-14T18:24:00.000-05:00

Here's a demographic perspective on what is fueling the current surge in Muslim fundamentalism.

It's worth considering because the model it uses accounts for a great deal, including Europe's current antipathy to fighting. And probably also accounts for why America is a mixed country - as opposed to predominantly pro or anti-war, given that our figures are slightly above replacement.

Gangland slayings in the Palestinian territories this week have pitted the Islamist gunmen of Hamas against the secular forces of Fatah. The killings defy civilised norms: in December even children were targeted for murder. But the killings also defy political common sense. Ariel Sharon's wall cuts terrorists off from Israeli targets and what happens? The violence - previously justified with the cause of a Palestinian homeland - continues as if nothing had changed, merely finding its outlet in a new set of targets. This makes it appear that Palestinian violence has never really been about a "cause" at all. The violence is, in a strange way, about itself...

Since 1967, the population of the West Bank and Gaza has grown from 450,000 to 3.3m, 47 per cent of which is under 15. If Mr. Heinsohn is right, then Palestinian violence of recent months and years is not explained by Israeli occupation (which, after all, existed 30 years ago) or poverty (the most violent parts of the Muslim world are not the poorest) or humiliation. It is just violence...

If you follow this argument to its logical end point, then the religion of Islam, the focus of so much contemporary strategic discussion, is a great red herring. Islamic countries are certainly growing in importance. They will make up a quarter of the world a decade from now. Of the 27 biggest youth-bulge nations, 13 are Muslim. But if there is a clash between civilisations, it is not a civilisational clash. Religion can be a convenient rationalisation for violent people who do not want to think of themselves as conventional criminals, but this problem is not unique to Islam.

I'm not saying that this is the only factor in the current war, but it is hard to argue against the fact that demographic trends do have a big role, if at times one that is largely unconscious in the populace that it is driving, in determining the outlook of individual nations. Fascinating and scary the way this works on us.

It makes me wonder what German population growth was like between the two wars. Must have been astronomical, if this model is correct.

Hat Tip: Random Jottings

From Michael Totten in South Lebanon

2007-01-13T22:44:00.001-05:00

Michael Totten and Noah Pollack visit South Lebanon guided by Said and Henry, who work for the Lebanese Committee for UNSCR 1559, an NGO which closely advises the Lebanese government and the international community on the disarmament of illegal militias in Lebanon. From the safety of the Christian village of Ein Ebel just outside Bint Jbail, Henry discusses the situation in Lebanon.

“We have been screaming about this conflict for 30 years now,” Henry said as he dealt himself a hand of Solitaire from a deck of cards in his pocket. “But no one ever listened to us. Not until September 11. Now you know how we feel all the time. You have to keep up the pressure. You can never let go, not for one day, one hour, not for one second. The minute you let go, Michael, they will fight back and get stronger. This is the problem with your foreign policy.”

“Since 1975 we have been fighting for the free world,” Said said. “We are on the front lines. Why doesn’t the West understand this? America can withdraw from Iraq, you can go back to Oregon, but we are stuck here. We have to stay and live with what happens.”

More of Arafat's legacy. He sowed chaos and death wherever he strode.

In retrospect, though, it's interesting to note that Arafat's use of Lebanon for war against Israel - a Sunni incursion - was soon followed by the Iranian revolution.

We are still living in the aftermath of these two disastrous events.

Arafat and Khomeini in hell looking up at the world, at Gaza, at South Lebanon, at Jenin, at parts of Iraq:

Arafat says to Khomeini: This is the world that we made. Isn't it wonderful?

Who Conquered the ME and When

2007-01-12T23:37:00.000-05:00

A Cool animated map showing the progression of who conquered the Middle East and when.

5000 years in 90 seconds

Faux Klingons are Running the War!

2007-01-12T16:29:00.000-05:00

Congressional Eloquence at its peak:

Animal Affection

2007-01-12T15:47:00.001-05:00

Otherwise known as Friday smushy blogging.

I saw this story a few days ago, and I lurved it. And now it is circulating on Drudge and I decided what the hay! It's adorable enough to post.

Ana Julia Torres, who runs the Villa Lorena animal shelter in Cali, Columbia fed and nursed Jupiter the African lion back to health years ago after it was found abused and emaciated in a traveling circus.

"It is amazing to see an animal like that be so sweet and affectionate," said Torres. "This hug is the most sincere one that I have received in my life."

**My attempt to load the squishy but adorable vid, available at the link above, has temporarily been stymied. And given the hour and the closeness to Shabbat, I'll have to leave it as is for now.

Shabbat Shalom, y'all.

The Art of Counterprotesting

2007-01-12T15:47:00.000-05:00

Friend of KesherTalk, Pamela Hall, helped lead a counterprotest against the anti-war protest in Manhattan's Times Square last night.

And for her trouble, we're pleased to note, she got quoted in the AP, where she made eminent sense:

A band of pro-war protesters on the other end of the island yelled for passers-by to ignore the anti-war rally. The group held a large sign that said "Warning - Leftist protesters trying to demoralize our troops."

"They say they are supporting our troops, but they are lying," said Pamela Hall, a member of the United American Committee. "You can't support someone if you don't support what they are doing. It's disrespectful."

Demographics Rule

2007-01-12T12:42:00.000-05:00

In my opinion, something that will determine the political stance of China in the coming decades not only will be the path of its industrial revolution, and its sizable population, but the very pertinent fact of the huge and growing population disparity between men and women:

China will have 30 million more men of marriageable age than women by 2020, making it difficult for them to find wives, according to a national report.

The gender imbalance could lead to social instability, the report by the State Population and Family Planning Commission warned.

By way of example, think of the social instability in Moslem countries, where wealthy men often possess several wives, making the marriage market far more difficult for poorer men. Similarly, years ago I read an article discussing how the economics in Middle Eastern Arab countries - and particularly Gaza and the West Bank - was forcing higher and higher the age at which men married for the first time. In some cases creating very long engagements. In other cases, it heightened large age differentiations in couples, a man in his 40s marrying a girl in her late teens or early 20s.

It's little discussed in the MSM, but it strikes me that this is a societal failure which has silently bolstered the rise of fundamentalism.

Young men at their peak deprived of licit sexual activity abet a militant posture within government.

We'll have to await to see what happens in China, but this has been a disaster in the making for decades. Not to mention the human tragedy of aborting millions upon millions of female fetuses.

More Please

2007-01-11T13:20:00.001-05:00

US forces have stormed an Iranian consulate in the northern Iraqi town of Irbil and seized six members of staff.
The troops raided the building at about 0300 (0001GMT), taking away computers and papers, according to Kurdish media and senior local officials.

The US military would only confirm the detention of six people around Irbil.

Tehran said the attack violated all international conventions. It has summoned ambassadors from Switzerland, representing US interests, and Iraq.

Now that the Bush Administration is finally doing what we want, the only question is why it didn't start on this path much, much earlier.

Malaise, incompetence, fear of taking a harder line, ignorance?

I'm grateful for the change in policy, and I hope this is the start of a harder line towards those sowing terror and confusion in Iraq and their proxy master in Iran. But, really, this is the approach he should have been using for at least the last two years, instead of allowing Iran and Syria to control the stakes. What kept him from it?

14 Members of the Carter Center Resign Due to Carter's Recent Book

2007-01-11T12:31:00.000-05:00

From the letter sent by 14 members of the Carter Center announcing their resignation, now published in the WSJ:

The facts in dealing with the conflict are these: There are two national narratives contesting one piece of land. The Israelis, through deed and public comment, have consistently spoken of a desire to live in peace and make territorial compromise to achieve this status. The Palestinian side has consistently resorted to acts of terror as a national expression and elected parties endorsing the use of terror, the rejection of territorial compromise and of Israel's right to exist. Palestinian leaders have had chances since 1947 to have their own state, including during your own presidency when they snubbed your efforts.

Your book has confused opinion with fact, subjectivity with objectivity and force for change with partisan advocacy. Furthermore the comments you have made the past few weeks insinuating that there is a monolith of Jewish power in America are most disturbing and must be addressed by us. In our great country where freedom of expression is basic bedrock you have suddenly proclaimed that Americans cannot express their opinion on matters in the Middle East for fear of retribution from the "Jewish Lobby" In condemning the Jews of America you also condemn Christians and others for their support of Israel...

You wrote that UN Security Council Resolution 242 says that "Israel must withdraw from territories" (p. 38), but you know the word "must" in fact is not in the resolution. You said that since Mahmoud Abbas has been in office there have been no peace discussions. That is wrong. You wrote that Yassir Arafat told you in 1990 that, "The PLO has never advocated the annihilation of Israel" (p. 62). Given that their Charter, which explicitly calls for Israel's destruction, was not revised until the late 1990s, how could you even write such a claim as if it were credible?

You denied on Denver radio on December 12 that Palestinian Prime Minister Haniyah said he would never accept or negotiate with Israel. However the BBC monitoring service reported just the opposite. In fact Haniyah said: "We will never recognize the usurper Zionist government and will continue our jihadist movement until Bayt al-Maqdis (Jerusalem) and the Al-Aqsa Mosque are liberated. When presented with this fact you said, "No he didn't say that, no he did not do that, I did not hear that." These are not points of opinion, these are points of fact...

In other words, in the world according to Carter, even if Haniyah said it, he can't hear it...la,la,la,la,la.

So, it's an open question for now, I think. Is the man, now in his early 80s, going senile, or is he merely letting his true instincts out; or has senility removed his reticence to flaunt certain aspects of himself that have always been there.

Abir: Ancient Jewish Fighting Techniques Made New

2007-01-09T02:39:00.000-05:00

In early November, Rabbi Lazar Brody put up a post that discussed the backgroud of the Abir Aluf - the Grandmaster of Abir, Yehoshua Sofer and the historical roots of Abir, the martial art he (re)established.

Fascinating stuff. Who knew that there was a tradition of Jewish fighting, based on ancient techniques, that lingered in Yemen? And that, in the 1920s, King Abdulla Ibn Hussein of Transjordan had Jewish bodyguards, trained in this ancient fighting technique.

This week, Rabbi Brody added a clip showing the Abir Aluf, bio here in action. If you have an appreciation for martial arts, this vid is well worth watching. Yehoshua Sofer holds 7th Degree black belts in Korean Kuk Sool Won, Hapkido and a 6th Degree black belt in TukGong Musool (designed for elite military and intelligence agents in S.Korea)

Plus, if that kind of thing bothers you, no worry of avodah zara - idol worship. Always a plus. I've studied Krav Mega in the past - which I enjoyed tremendously, and keep meaning to resume - but it is true that it does feel like a mish-mash, inauthentic, as far as martial arts go, in that there is no cohesive spiritual side to it.

Years ago when I lived in France, I had an amazing Taekwon Do instructor who often happened to make the point that the warrior ethic of Taekwon Do went hand in hand with Buddhism, to achieve a body and soul in harmony, each to strengthen the other.

Which makes Krav Mega, I suppose, the anti-religious step-child of the martial arts.

From the information provided, the only problem I see is there doesn't seem to be a women's school yet. Or a New York branch.

To quote Michael Ledeen. Faster Please.

Life in the Kuffrocacy Otherwise Known as Britain

2007-01-08T00:21:00.000-05:00

Who is a modern Cassandra now?

Irony of ironies, could it be the Observer?

An undercover investigation has revealed disturbing evidence of Islamic extremism at a number of Britain's leading mosques and Muslim institutions, including an organisation praised by the Prime Minister.

Secret video footage reveals Muslim preachers exhorting followers to prepare for jihad, to hit girls for not wearing the hijab, and to create a 'state within a state'. Many of the preachers are linked to the Wahhabi strain of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia, which funds a number of Britain's leading Islamic institutions...

The 12-month investigation ... recorded a deputy headmaster of an Islamic high school in Birmingham telling a conference at the Sparkbrook mosque that he disagrees with using the word democracy. 'They should call it ... kuffrocracy, that's their plan. It's the hidden cancerous aim of these people.'

On a similar note, Richard Landes, at Augean Stables, points to a comment at Jihad Watch that illustrates the threatening attitude of some Muslims in Britain - and the police compliance that prevents members of the public from pushing back against these new mores by legal means through police intervention.

No doubt - this is his method of maintaining community relations.

As that shrill modern Cassandra otherwise known as the Observer notes:

In a statement to Channel 4, Lord Ahmed, the convener of the government's Preventing Extremism taskforce, said he was worried about the programme's consequences: 'While I appreciate that exaggerated opinions make good TV, they do not make for good community relations.'

Community relations uber alles. Too bad, though, it only works one way.

Another preacher says: 'The time is fast approaching where the tables are going to turn and the Muslims are going to be in the position of being uppermost in strength and, when that happens, people won't get killed - unjustly.'

Squick to the Millionth Degree

2007-01-07T11:45:00.000-05:00

In his new book, Terry MacAuliffe reports that Arafat repeatedly rubbed his leg under the table at a dinner in Washington in 2000.

The idea of this has me gagging into my cereal. It's Arafat. Rubbing leg. Enough said.

Oriana Fallaci was the first, I believe, to report that Arafat was gay; she observed the eye-contact and body language between him and his bodyguard during her interview with him.

Here's also a very interesting book review on the current state of Islam and homosexuality; it is a fairly informative review dealing with how fundamentalism has complicated the situation for homosexuals in Islam, a phenomenon that had long been tolerated. See too here.

Teddy Kolleck and James Jesus Angleton

2007-01-07T01:51:00.000-05:00

Two fascinating stories about the relationship between Teddy Kolleck, former mayor of Jerusalem, who recently passed away aged 95 and James Jesus Angleton. Teddy Kolleck was apparently instrumental in establishing close ties between Israel and the US, and one way he did so was by the quality of the intelligence he passed from Israel to the US, including key information on the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

From Michael Ledeen:

Few Americans know of the unique role Kollek played in this country's history, when he was the right arm of David Ben-Gurion. I know about it only because, many years ago, the Forward newspaper asked me to write a serialized novel about Kollek and the CIA's legendary chief of counterterrorism, James Jesus Angleton...

Relations with America at the time were strained. Many top U.S. intelligence, diplomatic, and military leaders believed Israel was a communist cats' paw in the Middle East. It was a socialist country, after all, and the Soviet Union was one of the first countries to recognize Israeli independence.

And from Debkafiles, the personal recollection of Giora Shamis:

It was in fact Kollek's personal tip to [James Jesus] Angleton that led to the exposure of the notorious British Oxford Ring of British Soviet spies, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and George Blake.

Very little is known of the late mayor’s cloak and dagger career because he chose to keep it dark.

However, on one of the rare occasions when he offered a glimpse of his past, Kollek invited Giora Shamis, currently chief editor of DEBKAfile, to join him and a visitor, an old undercover buddy, Anthony Cavendish of MI6, in May 20, 1998 at the King David Hotel, Jerusalem. Both were long retired by then.

Read the whole thing.

Memories of Arik

2007-01-04T17:20:00.000-05:00

An excerpt of Sharon's final days from Uri Dan's last book on Sharon, An Intimate Portrait.

On January 2, 2006, at 5:15 p.m., my friend called me for the last time from his car. He was going to Sycamore Farm, where he was to dine with his family. Arik was still shuttling between his office and Jerusalem and his farm in the Negev, despite the advice of his doctors, who urged him to stay near the Hadassah hospital. He detested his ofﬁcial apartment, where he felt like he was suffocating.

“Get well soon!” I said to him. “Forty cretins are waiting for you to get them elected to the Knesset!” Instead of losing his temper or trying to calm my “extremist” fervor, Ariel broke into the thundering laughter that so many Israeli comedians liked to imitate. No, he wasn’t fooled by the political maneuvers of his current allies. That laugh still resonates in my ears, like a cry of truth.

Sharon fell into a coma a year ago today.

Uri Dan himself died on December 24, 2006.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Reported "In A Stable Condition"

2007-01-04T16:40:00.000-05:00

Pajamas Media is noting that there is a report of the death Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

We wish him much stability.

Meanwhile, has Iran entirely suppressed the results of its recent elections?

Because worse than Khameini as Supreme Leader would be that crazy apocalyptic nutter, Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi (born 1934), who is Ahmadinejad's spiritual leader.

A nice unstable Iran could turn out to be a big help for the US position in the short term.

In related news, Drudge has an unlinked headline reporting that President Bush will nominate Zalmay Khalilzad, the current Moslem-American ambassador to Iraq, as the new US ambassador to the UN. That looks to be a good choice for a few reasons - the Democrats cannot possibly filibuster it for any rational reason and he can call bullshit on anyone making up data points about the Middle East. From what I understand, he did a widely respected job in Iraq.

Kim Priestap at Wizbang points out that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon may select Khalilzad as Undersecretary General for Political Affairs, one of the most important jobs in the UN, setting the stage for an entirely different UN, hopefully a competent non-third world one.

Pan's Labyrinth

2007-01-04T13:10:00.000-05:00

I saw Pan's Labyrinth over the holiday weekend; and unlike the vast majority of films these days, I was still puzzling over the meaning days later. I've been unhappy with it the last few days because I felt the final scenes forced me into a perspective that I thought essentially negated the very story premise that I had watched during the course of the movie.

Last night I figured out the exegetical work around. And now, happily, I don't have to puzzle anymore; though I'm also sure there's a lot left of the movie I haven't yet worked through.

The last movie I saw, by the way, that took so much work to figure out was Hero. And like Hero, the exegetical solution to the film has to do with absence.

Spoilers for Pan's Labyrinth below.

Anyway, this is what I came up with last night.

I finally solved the magic trick of the movie. It takes place in first person serial - that means that there are several points of view that show us individual first person perspectives on the situation in Pan's Labyrinth. None of them is the authorial viewpoint, the perspective that shows us the correct interpretation of events, though Ofelia's comes closest; they are only their own viewpoint - and thus no one voice is the arbiter of what actually happened.

So we have Ofelia's POV - whose name inevitably makes us think of a dead, mad, young innocent girl. In this tale, Ofelia has a foot in two worlds. And she is the mediator between.

Then we have scenes from the POV of the fairy. The camera distinctly cuts away from Ofelia for the first time and shows us how things look from his POV.

Then we have the faun. That makes two points of view from the fairy world.

We also have Vidal, the cruel tyrant from the Spanish civil war.

Then we have Mercedes. Thus, to match, we are shown scenes from two characters in the "real" world.

The faun and Vidal parallel. They are both scary, violent authority figures -

Mercedes and the fairy parallel. Both are brave helpers who believe in Ofelia and love her.

At the end of the movie, Ofelia is shot and as she is shot she sees herself successfully returning to her own kingdom in the fairy world. But as she is dying, the POV moves away from her; and by the very end of the movie, the perspective we are given shows Ofelia merely dying, and we, thus, are maneuvered into drawing the necessary corollary - that her magic universe is suddenly and curdlingly diminished to the fantastic imaginings of a young girl who went too far into her own labyrinth. Which got her, tragically, killed. All of this reflects Mercedes perspective - and what we know is that Mercedes does not believe in magic.

Thus, the conclusion we are led to reflects Mercedes view of the world. A young girl dies by standing up for good against an insane tyrant and it is a great tragedy. And after the tears and deep heartache for another innocent killed by a cruel man in a cruel war, it's all over.

Except for the feeling of purposelessness that this viewpoint leads us right to, with no means of retreat, like the cliff edge of the void.

Yet, this stark view of the universe negates the entire narrative of Ofelia's tale - the tale we've just watched for the past few hours - so that the film leaves us on a troubled note. This perspectival disjunction is unsettling; it makes only a very grim sense of what we have seen. Which tends to render the entire film empty. But this very disjunction works as an exegetical siren call, leaving us desirous of working through the disjunction of the movie to film it out.

Consider again. The drastic change in perspective, from Ofelia to Mercedes is the effective narrative "magic trick," that convinces us everything we saw was a story that Ofelia made up and thus "not real"; from that point on, from the moment of Ofelia's death, we no longer have access to Ofelia's POV. We only see Mercedes' view of what occurred. And she, a redoubtable lady, does not believe in all that childish nonsense; for her, caught up in the tragedy of war, deaths of innocents are tragic and heartbreaking. And there is no meaning to them beyond the senselessness of what just occurred in the fight for freedom.

But elsewhere in the film we were already told that after Ofelia "died" all memory of her would be forgotten except small signs for those who could see them.

And Mercedes, certainly at that tragic point in her life, is unable to see any small signs.

But her POV is only one POV of the whole. It is the ending note, one note of resolution. But the story already told us in its own terms what happens to Ofelia.

So I would say that Mercedes' perspective is pshat - the plain line reading of the text. But what is also true, in the story's own terms, is that the character who mediated the two universes is no longer present.

Hence, there are the other levels of exegesis to consider: remez, drasha and sod (hints, allegory, secrets/mysteries), and these aspects of exegesis give us leave to interpret the tale differently. And we should not expect, in a story of this complication, for all points of view to be consistent - when are they ever?

So in the end, the audience gets to decide which story he saw based upon his own character, his perspective, his penchant for things and his view of the world; was it a magic tale? Or a story of an insane girl caught up in war? Is Ofelia's complete absence from the finale an indicator? Or does it merely signify her death?

Or should they regard the multiplicity of viewpoints, and no clear authorial solution, as the multiplicity of the universe, where often times different perspectives on the world are at war with each other.

Anyway, I feel better now that I have resolved my exegetical difficulty. I knew there was something lurking there then the surface appearance.

It just took me a while to dig for the key to open the lock.

All Manner of Heresy May Arise, Has V'helilah

2007-01-04T10:54:00.000-05:00

In an attempt to compete with their Muslim fundamentalist breathren, Ultra Orthodox Rabbis charged with determining education policies in the ultra orthodox community have come out with a Ban on Education for Women.

A committee of rabbis formulating the education policy in the ultra-Orthodox community has prohibited women's continuing education programs and severely restricted other study courses, thus blocking the advancement and development of haredi women's careers.

This is a devastating economic and professional blow to thousands of women teachers, who are the primary breadwinners in the ultra-Orthodox community. It is also a drastic regression in haredi women's ongoing process of moving ahead in their studies and career and in improving their economic situation.

The repercussions on the teachers and the ultra-Orthodox education system are tantamount to an earthquake, as the haredi newspaper Yated Neeman called it. The issues at the heart of the ultra-Orthodox society are at stake - the limits of education, the norm requiring women to be the breadwinners while their husbands study and, above all, the authority of the rabbis and functionaries to foist restrictions on the increasingly frustrated public.

In recent years, the reforms in the continuing education programs have not pleased the rabbis, who object to women's "academic" studies. The conservatives warned of women's "career ambitions," fearing they would now be able to break out of the "teaching ghetto" and find other jobs than teaching. Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv was quoted in Yated Neeman objecting to teachers' enrolling in "all kinds of other education programs without any supervision of rabbis on every detail".

He warned that without close supervision and determining the content, "all manner of heresy can creep into those programs."

The rabbis were mostly infuriated by the psychological subjects in the teaching programs. Freud and Western psychology had always been a red rag to them.

Our authors are playing games - a red rag, meaning that the subject matter is as impure to them as menstrual blood. And there is also the inevitable bull comparison leavened in - the subject makes them so mad, they charge instinctually. Moreover, there was the recent kerfuffle when the Rabbinic committee on Modesty - a committee made up of all men - continued their millenial commitment to banning the color red for women. Red being an immodest, attention seeking color in which to adorn oneself.

Most of all, one can't help thinking that the rabbis don't want any women analyzing their power and control issues. Or reflecting on the fact that once haredi women begin earning a lot of money, it will inevitably change the dynamics at home, and this is an easy way to head off that problem.

All in all - an absolutely shameful and deplorable decision. Though I wonder if it a bit like closing the gate once the horses have already fled the stable.

Will the status quo eventually prevail?

Or, now that they have been introduced to the advantages of higher education, will the women and perhaps the community at large - decide that the rabbis on this particular committee do not know what they are talking about and create in effect a grass roots movement to effect change from the ground up. There are certainly historical precedents for the rabbis coming around to the minhag of the people.

And will the rabbis in return make this the staging ground for an all out ideological war?

I can't help but think about Poland early last century - when the women began to assimilate at a great rate because they were offered secular education and no religious education - at which point the Bais Ya'akov school system for Haredi girls was founded to counter this move towards the women assimilating by offering them a baseline religious education. Perhaps this was a preemptive move by the rabbis to cut off greater secular education among women, lest they begin assimilating once they, too, receive their secular higher education.

But in the end, they seem dead set on keeping women in terribly compensated jobs, and the haredi world, with their huge families, living in or near poverty conditions. Do they believe that is spiritually beneficial?

To me that seems like the last shreds of exilic thinking strangling any oxygen to the brain. If this is how they propose to help the haredi world flourish until Messiah comes, it seems to me that Messiah will tarry quite a while still.

Happy New Year!

2006-12-31T17:16:00.001-05:00

A Comedy of Errors

2006-12-31T17:00:00.000-05:00

Update: Graphic content warning: Sweetness and Light provides a graphic look at the circumstances in which injuries occurred.

Over a thousand Turks spent the first day of the Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha in emergency wards on Sunday after stabbing themselves or suffering other injuries while sacrificing startled animals.

At least 1,413 people - referred to as "amateur butchers" by the Turkish media - were treated at hospitals across the country, most suffering cuts to their hands and legs, the Anatolia news agency reported.

Four people were severely injured, crushed under the weight of large animals that fell on top of them, the agency reported. Another person was hurt when a crane used to lift an animal tumbled onto him, the agency said.

Three other people suffered heart attacks and died while trying to restrain animals, CNN-Turk television reported.

One wonders about statistics from other Eid-celebrating statistics averse countries.

Meanwhile Happy Eid.

And if anyone knows the technical reasons that the Sunnis and the Shi'ites celebrate it on different dates, a comment would be appreciated.

Are the Pathans Descended from the Tribe of Ephraim?

2006-12-31T00:15:00.000-05:00

A new study suggestsa genetic link exists between the Pathans and the Jews, a connection rumored for many years.

According to Aafreedi's study, which was published as an e-book, about 650 out of the 1,500 members of the Afridi Pathan clan in Malihabad, India, may possess genetic material shared by nearly 40 percent of Jews worldwide. If confirmed, the findings would support the clan's connection to the tribe of Ephraim, Aafreedi said. A related Indian Pathan group numbering some 800 people was not tested for the project.

Although he performed the research for his doctoral studies at Lucknow University, the main motivation for Aafreedi's research was personal.

"My uncle told me when I was a child about our connection to the Israelites," he said.

He has been deeply interested in his ancestry ever since, especially in "the fact that the tribe is identified with Israel."

..."Historically, there were Persian writers who wrote about the connection between the Pathans and the people of Israel," said [Michael] Freund. "When the British arrived in the area there were missionaries who wrote about it as well. There is quite a good deal of historical evidence to support this assertion."

Even former president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi addressed the connection. In his book, The Exile and Redeemed, he quoted an Afghani Jew as saying, "According to the tradition current among the [Afghan] Afridis, they are indeed descendants of the Israelites, more particularly the sons of Ephraim." There are an estimated 40 to 50 million Pathans, mostly in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Years ago, during the time of the communists, my sister spent some time in Afghanistan and Pakistan and heard this rumor.

Of course, these days, there has been a lot of talibanisation among the Pathans; but, as is well known, it is not a movement that is native to them. It's rather a cultural import.

Rachel Corrie: Dismissed on the Merits

2006-12-30T00:07:00.001-05:00

Good for Canada, or at least one theater production company therein.

Toronto's Canadian Stage Company has decided not to stage My Name is Rachel Corrie, the controversial play about an American peace activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer.

It was a decision based on the play's merits, rather than the political controversy that dogs it, CanStage artistic producer Martin Bragg said in an interview with CBC.ca. "It was an artistic decision," said Bragg, who saw the play in New York. "It just didn't work on stage."

And this decision comes from someone originally interested in the play, and moved by reading it, deciding that the play did not work dramatically on the stage:

"If you cut through the hysteria around this play — which is being created by people who haven't read this play or gone to see it — the real problem was, no one went to see it," he said.

A dramatic failure. Good for him. Not everyone likes to pay for an evening of undiluted propaganda.

Hat tip: Pamela

Hizbullah paying Gazans for Kassam Attacks on Israel

2006-12-28T02:03:00.000-05:00

Saddam's successor as an enabler of terror in Gaza has arrived - and its Hizbullah:

Hizbullah is paying Palestinian splinter groups "thousands of dollars" for each Kassam rocket fired at the western Negev, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

According to Israeli intelligence information, Hizbullah is smuggling cash into the Gaza Strip and paying "a number of unknown local splinter groups" for each attack.

Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) sources said the Islamist organization paid several thousand dollars for each attack, with the amount dependent on the number of Israelis killed or wounded.

"We know that Hizbullah is involved in funding terrorist activity in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank," a security official said.

So that is the Iranian backed Shi'ite army paying Sunnis in Gaza to fire Kassam missiles on Israel.

When the spirit so moves them, Sunnis and Shi'ites are capable of a unity of purpose.

In other news, during the last month - which was a period of ceasefire - 64 missiles fell on Israel. The good news is that is only a quarter of the usual amount.

The Incredible Lightness of Snow

2006-12-27T19:33:00.000-05:00

This bizarre image adorning Ha'aretz's article on snow in Jerusalem is just screaming out for a title:

The grinch is dead!

(Come to think of it, he does kind of look like the grinch, doesn't he. And he did a good job of trying to steal Christmas, too.)

Your suggestions welcomed in the comments.

And then there's this:

My incredibly pathetic snowman.

And finally:

Oy, God, you had to make it snow when I was here praying to you? Where's the respect?

I should say, I lived in Jerusalem - without proper snowboots or snowshoes of any kind - during the snowiest year in history on the record books. Which came about because I was packing for my trip on the hottest day of the year in Boston - it was 97 degrees and really humid and we didn't have airconditioning because everyone knows you don't need airconditioning in Boston - snort! yeah right! And when I came to my sheepskin lined boots I just couldn't imagine ever needing them again. Let alone in Jerusalem.

So that year in Israel we got five major snows. The Kinneret went from record lows to repeat flooding. The rivers flooded the valleys. Even St. Catherine's in the Sinai got covered with snow that year. But the spring was fabulous. Poppies blossomed everywhere.

It can get damn cold in Israel. The heating device situation may be improved now. But when I was living there, all the student types performed this little ritual. You wrapped your feet up just next to the electrical space heater you were huddled around because the heat was off in your apartment at that time of the day and you were freezing. And then, inevitably, when you didn't pull your feet away fast enough, the heater would toast a black hole in the blanket or socks or sweatpants in which your feet were wrapped. And sometimes light them on fire. I came back with tons of holes in my socks and sweatpants from that. And I made several small holes in the blankets as well.

My current opinion on snowboots is buy Canadian. Those guys really have an incentive to figure out the tech, which is why Canadian snowboots are the best. And really, if those guys can't figure out the best tech, no one in the world can. Well, maybe the Russians have equal incentive. But would you buy Russian-made snowboots?

In fact, a friend and her daughter came to stay with me just before they took off for Israel - her daughter was staying in Israel for a year of studying abroad. My big contribution - I told them my story about the 5 snowstorms, and reminded my friend - who had been my roommate one year when we were studying in Jerusalem for the year - just how cold we used to be in winter - our room had a huge terrace and lots of uninsulated glass. So we all traipsed off to buy her some Canadian snowboots at Harry's before she left for Israel.

I bet she is happy about that tonight.