CBS News journalist Richard Butler said he believes he was kidnapped in Iraq by policemen with sympathies toward the Hezbollah but isn’t entirely sure who held him captive for two months or why.
Butler, a British journalist kidnapped with his interpreter on Feb. 10, was rescued by Iraqi troops on April 14 when he was found with a sack over his head in a house in Basra. . .
While he was held, he heard a lot of Hezbollah propaganda video and Hezbollah ringtones on mobile phones, but he can’t be sure his captors were affiliated with the organization. . .
Yes, let’s not jump to any conclusions that Hezbollah was involved. Anyway, now we get to the point:
Butler said he felt it was better to be kidnapped in Iraq then taken into custody by Americans in Afghanistan.
“I was pleased I wasn’t being mortarboarded in Guantanamo or being held for six and a half years like an Al-Jazeera cameraman, for instance,” he said.
Yeah, I hear that mortarboarding is really unpleasant. . . I didn’t know there was a chapter at Guantanamo, but I guess those guys want it on their resume when they graduate.
All snark aside, one is tempted to speculate about Stockholm syndrome, but I think it’s more likely he leaned that way from the start.
The original defense of Jeremiah Wright’s was that his sort of hatemongering was typical of black churches. This struck me as a strange sort of defense (“everybody’s doing it!”), but more importantly, it smelled to me like a slander of Black churches. Nevertheless, it didn’t seem like something I could usefully comment on. Now, Protein Wisdom takes on the matter. (Via Instapundit.)
For what it’s worth, the one time I visited a Black church (an AME church in the Boston area), the focus of the service was on Christ, and no racial hatred was preached.
James Pethokoukis asks, “Dude, where’s my recession?” The economy grew 0.6 percent in the first quarter 2008. A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth, so the soonest we could say there was a recession this year is October. (Via Instapundit.)
This news is actually pretty good, in a beats-low-expectations kind of way. The press will probably notice it early next year.
A college student apparently called 911 from her cell phone shortly before she was killed but a dispatcher hung up, failed to call back and never sent police to investigate, authorities said Thursday.
Madison Police Chief Noble Wray said it was too early to know whether a better response could have prevented the April 2 slaying of Wisconsin-Madison student Brittany Zimmermann or helped police capture her killer.
Too early to know? More like it’s too late.
Depending on the government for protection can be a risky gamble.
Pittsburgh is now the nation’s sootiest city, surpassing Los Angeles, according to the American Lung Association. However, Los Angeles remains number one in overall air pollution. Pittsburgh doesn’t make the top eight.
The Washington DC Examiner has the shocking story of an Arlington County court permanently dissolving the parental rights of a special-needs child’s parents, despite the parents having been exonerated of neglect nine months earlier.
Arlington Judge Esther Wiggins Lyles signed the removal order with neither Hey nor Slitor even aware of the proceedings, much less being present to contest the decision. Sabrina went to a politically influential local professional couple with no training as foster parents, despite CPS requirements that foster couples be trained before being entrusted with children. Judge Almand later used the baby’s inappropriate removal to justify making the separation permanent, saying it would be too “traumatic” to return Sabrina to her natural parents.
No happy ending here either. This outrage has yet to be corrected.
Now, to some degree, you know — I know that one thing that he said was true, was that he wasn’t — you know, he was never my, quote-unquote, “spiritual adviser.”
He was never my “spiritual mentor.” He was — he was my pastor. And so to some extent, how, you know, the — the press characterized in the past that relationship, I think, wasn’t accurate.
A new DNC ad attacking McCain prominently features the 100-years calumny yet again. Then it goes on to show two soldiers apparently being blown up by an IED.
This is the same party that thought it was unacceptable for President Bush to “politicize” 9/11 by using its images in his re-election campaign.
ASIDE: Confederate Yankee tracks down the clip and finds that both soldiers survived the blast. Also, the clip comes from Fahrenheit 911, Michael Moore’s notorious propaganda piece.
On Meet the Press Sunday, DNC chair Howard Dean defended the ad, saying, “we’re not arguing that he’s going to be at war for a hundred years. We don’t think we ought to be in Iraq for a hundred years under any circumstances.”
That won’t wash. They use images of war and quote casualties. They are clearly implying 100 years of war.
“I have been a member of Trinity United Church of Christ since 1992, and have known Reverend Wright for 20 years,” Obama said. “The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago.”
Oh, come on! You expect us to believe that Wright had a big change in character, and it just so happened to occur exactly when people started paying attention to him? Sheesh.
YET ANOTHER UPDATE:
“And what I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. Anybody who knows me and anybody who knows what I’m about knows that I am about trying to bridge gaps and I see the commonality in all people,” [Obama said.]
In all the stuff Wright said (e.g., the United States created HIV to commit genocide against minorities), the thing that particularly angered Obama was that Wright called him a politician. (Via the Corner.)
STILL ANOTHER UPDATE: Wright agrees with me. (There’s a sentence I never I thought I’d use!) (Via the Corner.)
He sounds bitter. Maybe that explains his antipathy toward people who aren’t like him.
“In the course of a year after they got full up they would have produced enough plutonium for one or two weapons,” Hayden told reporters after a speech at Georgetown University. . .
U.S. intelligence and administration officials publicly disclosed last week their assessment that Syria was building a covert nuclear reactor with North Korean assistance. . . The Syrian site, they said, was within weeks or months of being operational.
The head of the UN nuclear monitoring agency on Friday criticized the US for not giving his organization intelligence information sooner on what Washington says was a nuclear reactor in Syria being built secretly by North Korea.
IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei also chastised Israel for bombing the site seven months ago, in a statement whose strong language reflected his anger at being kept out of the picture for so long. . .
“The director general views the unilateral use of force by Israel as undermining the due process of verification that is at the heart of the nonproliferation regime,” it said.
In full knowledge that the reactor would have produced two bombs in a year, ElBaradei is still against the Israeli operation. I think we can safely say that the IAEA is fundamentally unserious. To them, “nonproliferation” isn’t about preventing proliferation, it’s about verifying proliferation. Hmm, I wonder why we and Israel weren’t hurrying to give them our classified intelligence.
“Job opportunities are scarce for women in Saudi Arabia, mainly limited to teaching and health care.” (I doubt we’re talking about radiology, either.)
“The Saudi Education Ministry appoints thousands of male and female teachers to fill vacancies every year at government-run schools in remote areas.”
“Female teachers find it difficult to move because they need permission from a male guardian to live alone and have to find a landlord willing to rent them an apartment.”
As a result, many women live in the city and commute to remote rural areas.
“Women are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, so the teachers must hire drivers — sometimes sharing rides in minivans, leaving home as early as 3 a.m.
The Saudi roads on which female teachers spend countless hours are among the most dangerous in the world:
Nearly 6,000 people died in traffic accidents in 2007 in this country of 27.6 million, according to the Saudi Traffic Department. That is a rate of around 21 deaths per 100,000 people — one of the highest in the world. By comparison, around 14 per 100,000 people were killed in road accidents in the United States in 2006, according to the most recent statistics from the Transportation Department.
As a result, female teachers are dying in car accidents at an alarming rate:
A study released in October by the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology found that female teachers commuting to their jobs have about a 50 percent greater chance of getting into car accidents than average Saudi citizens. Its findings were based on figures from the late 1990s.
The worst thing about this is how little I’m shocked.
Somehow I missed this when I happened, so I’m grateful to Power Line for pointing it out again. In a speech at UCLA earlier this year, Michelle Obama described her husband’s messianic qualities:
We have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I am here. Because Barack Obama is the only person in this race who understands that. That before we can work on the problems we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.
If we can’t see ourselves in one another we will never make those sacrifices. So I am here right now because I am married to the only person in this race who has a chance of healing this nation. . .
Barack, as Oprah said, is one of the most brilliant men you will meet in our lifetime. Barack is more than ready. He’ll be ready today. He’ll be ready on day one. He’ll be ready in a year from now. Five years from now. He is ready. That is not the question.
Okay, I’m frightened now. Obama is not Jesus. Does Obama really see himself as the one to fix my broken soul?
It gets scarier, because it isn’t just about Obama. No, it’s also about what Obama will require of us:
Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your division. That you come out of your isolation. That you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual; uninvolved, uninformed.
Got that? Obama will require our complete psychological reconfiguration so we can carry out his agenda.
In context, it’s fairly clear that Mrs. Obama is not talking about a Soviet-style campaign of re-education and psychological adjustment. She is talking about what we must all do as Obama’s disciples. She truly sees him as a christ for America.
For most of the primary campaign, Gov. Ed Rendell acted as a “super staffer” for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, raising serious questions about his use of state resources for political purposes, a state House GOP spokesman says. . .
“The vast majority of the governor’s campaign activity was either very early in the morning, in the evening or on weekends and did not interfere with his full time job,” said Rendell’s spokesman Chuck Ardo. “He merely added hours to a routinely hectic schedule by getting less sleep.
“Additionally, he flew to campaign events on commercial airlines and paid his own way, and he reimbursed the commonwealth for the use of his office phone to a far greater extent than the charges incurred,” Ardo said. “No one got short-changed by this governor’s work ethic, and no one needs to be concerned about the misuse of state resources.”
This doesn’t seem like a profitable tack to me. Rendell has had his ethical problems, but absent any evidence to the contrary, I’d be surprised if he’d be so sloppy as to spend state resources on the Clinton campaign. As far as his own time goes, the less time Rendell dedicates to state business the better.
The world’s stupidest Obama controversy is given new legs . . . by Obama. At a town hall in Kokomo, Indiana, Obama takes up the topic yet again:
“Then I was asked about this in Iowa,” Obama said. “And somebody said ‘Why don’t you wear a flag pin?’ I said, well, sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. I said, although I will say that sometimes I notice that they’re people who wear flag pins but they don’t always act patriotic. And I was specifically referring to politicians, not individuals who wear flag pins, but politicians who you see wearing flag pins and then vote against funding for veterans, saying we can’t afford it.”
(What Obama said last October was: “You know, the truth is that right after 9/11, I had a pin. Shortly after 9/11, particularly because as we’re talking about the Iraq War, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security, I decided I won’t wear that pin on my chest. Instead, I’m going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism.”)
Obama continued, saying “so I make this comment. suddenly a bunch of these, you know, TV commentators and bloggers (say) ‘Obama is disrespecting people who wear flag pins.’ Well, that’s just not true. Also, another way of saying it is, it’s a lie.”
(Interjection in original.) One thing I’ve noticed about Obama is a bizarre inability to take anything back, be it his statements about Jeremiah Wright (e.g., “I don’t think my church is actually particularly controversial”), his claim that rural Americans are religious because of bitterness about the economy, or his bizarre foreign policy pronouncements (e.g., we should invade Pakistan).
No, when Obama wishes his remarks would go away, he doesn’t retract them: either he retroactively rewords them, or he makes it someone else’s fault for bringing them up, or (most often) both. This is a perfect example. First, he rewords his remarks. (For our convenience, ABC juxtaposes his revised comment with the original.) Then, he counter-attacks against those who quoted him, calling them liars.
To my mind, there is no one more a scoundrel than the man who lies in accusing another man of lying. Here, it’s the journalists and bloggers who accurately quoted Obama’s remark that get the treatment.
PS: Lest I commit the same offense, let me concede that Obama left himself some wiggle room here. He doesn’t name anyone in particular, and no one actually makes the statement that Obama cites. (At least, Google gets no hits on the phrase, other than this very story.) So, even if nearly everyone quoted his remarks accurately, he could probably find someone who lied, and say that’s who he meant.
Robert “Get behind the fist” Mugabe’s latest atrocity in his reign of terror hits a new low:
Scores of children and babies have been locked up in filthy prison cells in Harare as Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president, sinks to new depths in his campaign to force the opposition into exile before an expected run-off in presidential elections.
Twenty-four babies and 40 children under the age of six were among the 250 people rounded up in a raid on Friday, according to Nelson Chamisa, spokesman for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Yesterday they were crammed into cells in Southerton police station in central Harare. . .
The families were rounded up from MDC headquarters, where they had sought refuge from violence in the countryside.
The abduction of children is just one element in a systematic campaign of murder and intimidation:
Thought to be directed by top military officers, Operation Where Did You Put Your Cross? has prompted thousands to flee. They are trying to escape the so-called war veterans, who are attacking people and burning down hundreds of houses for voting “incorrectly” in last month’s elections. . .
The regime’s strategy is to ensure that by the time of the run-off, Mugabe would have a clean sweep in rural areas, where 70% of Zimbabweans live. A police officer admitted yesterday that he had been instructed not to interfere with war veterans as they carry out their campaign of terror.
The chief of Hamas said Saturday that the Palestinian militant group would accept an Egyptian proposal for a cease-fire with Israel but it would be a “tactic” in the group’s struggle with the Jewish state. . .
“It is a tactic in conducting the struggle. … It is normal for any resistance … to sometimes escalate, other times retreat a bit. … Hamas is known for that. In 2003, there was a cease-fire and then the operations were resumed.”
Jerry Pournelle has a very interesting, and frightening, insight:
The Democrats seem to be drifting toward the concept of prosecution of former office holders by criminalizing policy differences. That’s a certain formula for civil war; perhaps not immediate, but inevitable. The absolute minimum requirement for democratic government is that the loser be willing to lose the election: that losing an election is not the loss of everything that matters. As soon as that assurance is gone, playing by the rules makes no sense at all. (Pinochet learned that lesson. Fortunately for Chile, he was old and was allowed to die in peace; the inevitable — liberals can always find a good reason not to keep their word — persecutions after he turned over power on the assurance that he would be allowed to retire in peace were not so severe that his adherents didn’t take to their weapons.)
Via Instapundit, who adds an interesting email about the Roman civil war. I’m not so sure Caesar was a republican to the core, but the point doesn’t seem to rely on that.
David Freddoso has a post about Nancy Pelosi’s ignorance and deceit on gas prices. Apropos to that, here’s a graph of gasoline prices at the pump since 1979, real and nominal. I was interested to see that real gas prices are indeed high now, flirting with their peak in the early 1980s. They spiked in mid-2005, started fluctuating wildly and settled into the higher price in mid-2007. (If we’re in a recession now, that has to be a significant cause.) On the other hand, the recent spike in the nominal price is all due to inflation. Real prices haven’t changed much since mid-2007.
Young women are daring to wear jeans, soldiers listen to pop music on their mobile phones and bands are performing at wedding parties again.
All across Iraq’s second city life is improving, a month after Iraqi troops began a surprise crackdown on the black-clad gangs who were allowed to flourish under the British military. The gunmen’s reign had enforced a strict set of religious codes.
Yet after three years of being terrified of kidnap, rape and murder – a fate that befell scores of other women – Nadyia Ahmed, 22, is among those enjoying a sense of normality, happy for the first time to attend her science course at Basra University. . .
She also no longer has to wear a headscarf. Under the strict Islamic rules imposed by the militias, women had to cover their hair, could not wear jeans or bright clothes and were strictly forbidden from sitting next to male colleagues on pain of death.
“All these men in black [who imposed the laws] just vanished from the university after this operation,” said Ms Ahmed. “Things have completely changed over the past week.”
Read the whole thing; there’s too much good news here to pull quotes.
A couple of observations. First, we were told for years that the British “softly, softly” strategy was superior to the American strategy. It may well have been, when our strategy was to defeat the enemy and then leave. But now that we have decided to defeat the enemy then stay and keep them defeated, we’re succeeding where “softly, softly” failed:
The contrast could not be more stark with the last time The Times visited Basra in December, when intimidation was rife.
Many blame the British for allowing the militias to grow. “If they sent competent Iraqi troops to Basra in the early stages it would have limited the damage that happened in our city,” said Hameed Hashim, 39, who works for the South Oil Company.
Second, the above can teach us an important lesson. We’ve learned clearly on the small scale that defeat-and-depart does not work; you eventually need to return and fight again. Why would anyone think that it would work on the large scale? But that’s exactly what the Democrats are proposing. Al Qaeda is largely defeated but not annihilated. If we left, we would be handing the country over to some of the worst butchers in the world, and eventually we would have to invade all over again.
In their more practical moments, some Democrats have seemed to suggest a limited withdrawal from Iraq, one that would leave us with a limited presence there, but not on the front lines. That is, they want to employ the softly-softly strategy, which has also been shown to be a failure.
We need to employ the one strategy that has worked in Iraq: defeat-and-hold. We need to stay in Iraq until the locals are capable of defending themselves. That’s the strategy that will be least costly in the long run. Anything else ignores the clear lesson of this war.
A week ago, I noted that the Sunnis that had left Nouri al-Maliki’s government last year in a huff had decided to return. A week later, the New York Times has reported on it, making it true.
Earlier on Thursday, a Chinese ship carrying armaments made by a Chinese state-owned company and bound for Zimbabwe headed back to China without unloading its cargo of bullets and mortar bombs, a spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry confirmed at a briefing Thursday.
“The Chinese company has already decided to send the military goods back to China in the same vessel, the An Yue Jiang,” the spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, said. . .
China’s decision to turn the ship around was welcomed by the dock workers, trade unionists, religious leaders, Western diplomats and human rights workers who have been campaigning since last week to block delivery of the weapons to Zimbabwe.
They had said the weaponry could be used to carry out an even more violent crackdown on Zimbabwe’s political opposition, which is allied with the country’s unionized workers.
“This is a great victory for the trade union movement in particular and civil society in general in putting its foot down and saying we will not allow weapons that could be used to kill and maim our fellow workers and Zimbabweans to be transported across South Africa,” said Patrick Craven, spokesman for the Congress of South African Trade Unions, which represents 1.9 million South African workers. China’s strategic retreat in delivering the weapons also allows it to avoid Zimbabwe-related protests over its human rights record before it hosts the Olympic Games this summer.
Also, the State Department has decided to acknowledge what everyone knows:
Turning up the pressure on President Robert Mugabe, the top United States envoy to Africa declared Zimbabwe’s opposition leader the “clear victor” in the nation’s disputed presidential election. . .
“This is a government rejecting the will of the people,” she said, referring to the government’s refusal to announce who won the presidential election last month, despite independent projections that placed the opposition ahead. “If they had voted for Mugabe the results would already have been announced. Everyone knows what time it is.”
Nancy Pelosi quotes some “scripture” on Earth Day:
The Bible tells us in the Old Testament, ‘To minister to the needs of God’s creation is an act of worship. To ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us.’
Huh? Where exactly in the Old Testament would that be? Biblical scholars are equally puzzled:
John J. Collins, the Holmes professor of Old Testament criticism and interpretation at Yale Divinity School, said he is totally unfamiliar with Pelosi’s quotation.
“(It’s) not one that I recognize,” Collins told Cybercast News Service. “I assume that she means this is a paraphrase. But it wouldn’t be a close paraphrase to anything I know of.”
Claude Mariottini, a professor of Old Testament at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, told Cybercast News Service the passage not only doesn’t exist – it’s “fictional.”
“It is not in the Bible,” Mariottini said. “There is nothing that even approximates that.”
In fact, one hardly has to be a Bible scholar to recognize Pelosi’s quote as unlikely. Although the Bible definitely suggests that we should be good stewards of creation, to call doing so “an act of worship” sounds awfully close to idolatry.
Mark Goodwin, an associate professor of theology at the University of Dallas, said Pelosi’s quote only reflects a partial Scriptural truth, at best.
“‘To minister to the needs of creation is an act of worship’ doesn’t sound right to my ears,” Goodwin said. “To minister to the needs of creation’- yes, but not as an act of worship. I’m not sure what she meant by that, and if I were there, I would have raised my hand and asked her to clarify that.”
Mariottini doesn’t mince words:
“People try to use the Bible to give authority to what they are trying to say,” he said. “(This) is one of those texts that you fabricate in order to support what you want to say.”
Sources with knowledge of the incident said the official, Rafael Quintero Curiel, served as the lead press advance person for the Mexican Delegation. . . He took six or seven of the handheld devices from a table outside a special room in the hotel where the Mexican delegation was meeting with President Bush earlier this week. . .
It didn’t take long before Secret Service officials reviewed videotape taken by a surveillance camera and found footage showing Quintero Curiel absconding with the BlackBerries.
Sources said Quintero Curiel made it all the way to the airport before Secret Service officers caught up with him. He initially denied taking the devices, but after agents showed him the DVD, Quintero Curiel said it was purely accidental, gave them back, claimed diplomatic immunity and left New Orleans with the Mexican delegation.
If Mexican officials don’t punish this guy, they will be making themselves complicit in his espionage.
UPDATE: The linked article has been updated:
Mexican Embassy spokesman Ricardo Alday said Thursday he was asked to tender his resignation once he arrived back in Mexico City.
“Mr. Quintero will be responsible for explaining his actions to the American authorities conducting an investigation. The Mexican Government deeply regrets this incident,” he said.
Getting fired seems a little minor to me, but it’s a start.
John McCain received permanent injuries at the hands of the North Vietnamese during his time as a POW, injuries that earn him a disability pension. The LA Times insinuates that this should disqualify him from being President.
This is the stupidest thing I’ve heard since the Amazing Race 7, when Kelly accused Ron of not following through on his army obligations. Ron “escaped” his obligations by becoming a POW during the Gulf War.
The nation’s most hypocritical editorial page issues another gem, entitled “The Low Road to Victory”. It calls for an old-fashioned Fisking:
The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.
According to the New York Times, negative campaigning is the job of the New York Times. They’ll take care of the mean, vacuous hatchet jobs so the Democrats don’t have to.
Also, 10 points is inconclusive? Reagan defeated Carter by 10 points and won 44 states.
Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.
Getting tired of it? Actually, we Pennsylvanians had to wait a long time for the candidates to pay attention to us. When we did, we didn’t like what we saw in Obama. And by the way, on what planet does negative campaigning not work?
If nothing else, self interest should push her in that direction. Mrs. Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race. It is true that Senator Barack Obama outspent her 2-to-1. But Mrs. Clinton and her advisers should mainly blame themselves, because, as the political operatives say, they went heavily negative and ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point lead.
The “political operatives” say that, do they? Those operatives wouldn’t happen to be the NYT editorial board, would they?
On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned.
Islamic terrorism is the most dangerous threat facing our country today. For many people, such as me, it’s the only issue of consequence. But according to the NYT, it’s out-of-bounds even to mention it. We can’t even mention it in the context of crises from throughout the last century.
If that was supposed to bolster Mrs. Clinton’s argument that she is the better prepared to be president in a dangerous world, she sent the opposite message on Tuesday morning by declaring in an interview on ABC News that if Iran attacked Israel while she were president: “We would be able to totally obliterate them.”
Anyone who recognizes the value of deterrence is not prepared to be President, I guess.
By staying on the attack and not engaging Mr. Obama on the substance of issues like terrorism, the economy and how to organize an orderly exit from Iraq, Mrs. Clinton does more than just turn off voters who don’t like negative campaigning. She undercuts the rationale for her candidacy that led this page and others to support her: that she is more qualified, right now, to be president than Mr. Obama.
As Lisa Schiffren asks, what on earth has changed about Hillary Clinton since the NYT endorsed her? It used to be she used her super-powers for good (ie, against Republicans), but now she’s using them against a Democrat.
Mr. Obama is not blameless when it comes to the negative and vapid nature of this campaign. He is increasingly rising to Mrs. Clinton’s bait, undercutting his own claims that he is offering a higher more inclusive form of politics. When she criticized his comments about “bitter” voters, Mr. Obama mocked her as an Annie Oakley wannabe. All that does is remind Americans who are on the fence about his relative youth and inexperience.
When Clinton is negative, she’s bad. When Obama is negative, he’s rising to her bait. I get it.
No matter what the high-priced political operatives (from both camps) may think, it is not a disadvantage that Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton share many of the same essential values and sensible policy prescriptions. It is their strength, and they are doing their best to make voters forget it. And if they think that only Democrats are paying attention to this spectacle, they’re wrong.
I have no idea what they’re trying to say here.
After seven years of George W. Bush’s failed with-us-or-against-us presidency, all American voters deserve to hear a nuanced debate — right now and through the general campaign — about how each candidate will combat terrorism, protect civil liberties, address the housing crisis and end the war in Iraq.
We should have a nuanced debate about fighting terrorism without mentioning it? How’s that going to work?
It is getting to be time for the superdelegates to do what the Democrats had in mind when they created superdelegates: settle a bloody race that cannot be won at the ballot box. Mrs. Clinton once had a big lead among the party elders, but has been steadily losing it, in large part because of her negative campaign. If she is ever to have a hope of persuading these most loyal of Democrats to come back to her side, let alone win over the larger body of voters, she has to call off the dogs.
This makes no sense. This race could have been won at the ballot box, if the Democrats operated under the same rules as the GOP and the United States. If not for the superdelegates, the race would be over. The purpose of the superdelegates was to give the party elites the chance to overturn the voters’ choice. Now the Democrats are reaping the dividend of their bizarre rules. Bravo.
An outburst of gunfire rattled the city during the weekend, with at least nine people killed in 36 separate acts of violence.
“There are just too many weapons here,” [Police Superintendent Jody] Weis said Sunday. “Too many guns, too many gangs.”
I’m confused. Doesn’t Illinois have the most severe gun control outside of D.C.? From Wikipedia:
Some municipalities, most notably Chicago, require that all firearms be registered with the local police department. Chicago does not allow the registration of handguns, which has the effect of outlawing their possession, unless they were grandfathered in by being registered before April 16, 1982. . .
Illinois is one of two remaining states that have no provision for the concealed carry of firearms by citizens. Open carry is also illegal, except when hunting. When a firearm is being transported, it must be unloaded and enclosed in a case.
If gun control works, there shouldn’t be any guns in Chicago, right?
The debate over net neutrality is frustrating, since so few people seem to know what they are talking about. This AP article (“FCC chief says no need for new regulation of the Internet”) is a good example:
The hearing was called at a time when the issue of “network neutrality”—the principle that people should be able to go where they choose on the Internet without interference from network owners—has heated up.
This is exactly not what network neutrality is about. The main thing to remember is the Internet is not, contrary to popular opinion, a bunch of wires. The Internet is a protocol. Specifically, the Internet Protocol (IP) is a way to route packets over a variety of networks.
An important property of IP is it provides best effort delivery. That means that sometimes it drops packets, typically when it gets too much traffic. Indeed, there is no way to prevent this in a packet-switched network, unless you can prevent routers from getting too much traffic, which IP does not do. If you want reliable delivery, you need to layer another protocol (such as TCP) on top of IP.
IP does not dictate any rules regarding how a router chooses which packets to drop. (This is what network neutrality supporters want to change.) Typically it chooses them arbitrarily. But, it could do something more sensible, based on the nature of the packets. Some packets are more important than others. For example, a video stream typically contains some keyframes and various other frames that depend on the latest keyframe. Dropping one of the latter frames is no big deal, but dropping a keyframe loses you a chunk of video. Therefore, we would like it if our router kept keyframes in preference to non-keyframes.
Furthermore, there’s been research on Quality of Service, by which we might somehow reserve a certain level of network performance. QoS is an active research area, but one thing is for certain, to achieve it we definitely need to discriminate between packets.
Network neutrality advocates are concerned that the people who own the routers might choose to discriminate between packets on some basis that’s bad, like “Google didn’t pay me any money, so I’ll deliver their packets slowly or not at all.” The thing is, exactly no one is proposing to do this. Were any ISP to do it (and it is the ISPs that people seem particularly concerned about), they would immediately lose their customers to another ISP that did not.
But what an ISP might do is establish some preferences between different sorts of traffic; for example to prefer interactive traffic over large downloads. (According to the article, Comcast has done this.) Someday, they might even implement Quality of Service. This is all for the good. It would be a tragedy if network neutrality were to prevent it.
The broadband carriers should not be permitted to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content.
If I had ever heard of such a thing happening, I might feel differently. Until then, network neutrality is a solution to a non-existent problem, and one that, if not implemented very carefully, could be very harmful to the development of the Internet. Readers of this blog will not be surprised that I would estimate the likelihood of Congress being so careful at roughly zero.
A large shipment of weapons from China to Robert “get behind the fist” Mugabe (I won’t call him “President” any more) has been unable to reach him, as African ports have refused to unload the cargo. (Via Instapundit.) I’ve resisted getting too pleased by this, figuring China would find somewhere else to unload their guns, but this story has the first indication that they might give up:
China has defended the shipment as “perfectly normal trade” but Beijing has hinted it may recall the ship as it was unable to offload its cargo.
Pennsylvania Lt. Governor Catherine Baker Knoll makes a scene at a rally for Hillary Clinton:
Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato was introducing [Bill] Clinton to a crowd of about 6,000 people in Market Square, where they had gathered to hear a campaign speech by Clinton’s wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton.
When Onorato tried to hand over the microphone, Knoll grabbed it and let loose with some talk targeted at Onorato and Mayor Luke Ravenstahl.
“They never recognize the lieutenant governor. These two men can’t stand women,” she said, before leaving the stage while talking to Onorato.
It gets weirder:
After the campaign event ended, Knoll spoke briefly with WTAE Channel 4 Action News reporter Paul Van Osdol.
“You really think that Mr. Onorato and Mr. Ravenstahl don’t like women?” Van Osdol asked.
“No, it’s a guy in the back who doesn’t know who Cathy Baker Knoll is,” Knoll said.
“Why did you say that about Luke and Dan?” Van Osdol asked.
“Because they’re afraid of the guys who call the shots,” Knoll said. “You know what? I’m not afraid of anybody.”
(There’s video.) How often do you see a politician simultaneously make powerful enemies and show the world that they’re barking mad? I think Knoll just committed political suicide.
“Some will be surprised that Penn, an Ivy League school, would reject Obama’s appeal to creative class ‘wine trackers.’ But the university is known as being heavily pre-professional, a favorite choice of New Yorkers, and in general, much less of an activist campus than brethren such as Brown, or even Yale and Harvard. So all in all, the endorsement is not a huge shock,” wrote Dana Goldstein at TAPPED.
The article (and the linked TAPPED article) doesn’t give any context, though, so I’m not sure how many of their readers will know what Goldstein meant.
As he suggested last week he might, Obama has decided to cancel the upcoming North Carolina debate. Were he to be brutalized again, it might affect his standing with the superdelegates. I expect this is the last time for a while that we’ll see him anywhere he can’t control the agenda.
Running out the clock makes good sense for Obama, if he can, but there is a downside. This pulls the rug out from underneath his spin that the last debate was a travesty for not focusing on the important issues. Apparently Obama doesn’t think there’s much more to be debated on those issues after all.
Carter announces the results of his meeting with Hamas:
Former President Carter said Monday that Hamas — the Islamic militant group that has called for the destruction of Israel — is prepared to accept the right of the Jewish state to “live as a neighbor next door in peace.”
But Carter warned that there would not be peace if Israel and the U.S. continue to shut out Hamas and its main backer, Syria. . .
“They (Hamas) said that they would accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, if approved by Palestinians and that they would accept the right of Israel to live as a neighbor next door in peace,” Carter said.
Somehow this is not very exciting, even if we assume Carter is accurately reporting his conversation. Firstly, over half of Palestinians approve of attacks on Israeli civilians. Secondly, if such a referendum were actually held, and did pass, Hamas would simply renege. In fact, they already have:
Carter said Hamas promised it wouldn’t undermine Abbas’ efforts to reach a peace deal with Israel, as long as the Palestinian people approved it in a referendum. In such a scenario, he said Hamas would not oppose a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
Carter said Hamas officials, including Mashaal, agreed to this in a written statement.
But Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri in Gaza said Hamas’ readiness to put a peace deal to a referendum “does not mean that Hamas is going to accept the result of the referendum.”
While searching for the video of Palestinians celebrating the 9/11attacks, I discovered an urban legend that seems to be popular in certain circles. It says that the video was not from 9/11 as CNN and other major new outlets claimed, but it was actually from 1991, celebrating Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. This YouTube comment is typical:
This footage was later proven to be from the 1990s so it had absolutely nothing to do with 911.
All around the world we are subjected to 3 or 4 huge news distributors, and one of them – as you well know – is CNN. Very well, I guess all of you have been seeing (just as I’ve been) images from this company. In particular, one set of images called my attencion: the Palestinians celebrating the bombing, out on the streets, eating some cake and making funny faces for the camera. Well, THOSE IMAGES WERE SHOT BACK IN 1991!!! Those are images of Palestinians celebrating the invasion of Kuwait! It’s simply unacceptable that a super-power of cumminications as CNN uses images which do not correspond to the reality in talking about so serious an issue. A teacher of mine, here in Brazil, has videotapes recorded in 1991, with the very same images; he’s been sending emails to CNN, Globo (the major TV network in Brazil) and newspapers, denouncing what I myself classify as a crime against the public opinion. If anyone of you has access to this kind of files, serch for it. In the meanwhile, I’ll try to ‘put my hands’ on a copy of this tape.
Snopes does a good job of debunking the legend, including statements from Reuters, CNN, and the Brazilian university where the legend originated, and also listing several other news outlets that carried the same story.
The debunking hasn’t stopped the Palestinians from promoting it. Here’s a video of Manuel Hassassian, the official Palestinian “Ambassador/General Delegate” to the United Kingdom, telling the story. (His version is a little bit different. Predictably, he blames Israel rather than CNN for the fraud.)
Given how incendiary the video is, it’s not surprising that the Palestinians would like to discredit it. Their first effort was to suppress such videos entirely, by threateningjournalists if the media ran them. For instance:
Encouraging the Associated Press in Jerusalem not to air the footage [of a September 12th rally in Nablus], Ahmed Abdel Rahman, Arafat’s cabinet secretary, said that the Palestinian Authority “cannot guarantee the life” of the cameraman if his film was broadcast.
Unfortunately for us (but fortunately for the cameraman) the AP folded. That particular video was never broadcast.
UPDATE: I found the original JPost story at the Wayback Machine. It’s a little different; it suggests that the AP producers, not the cameraman, were the ones being threatened.
According to a poll published in the Jerusalem Post, the number of Palestinians who support attacks on Israeli civilians now exceeds 50% for the first time, including nearly two-thirds of Gazans:
The number of Palestinians who support attacks against Israelis continues to rise and more than half of them favor suicide bombings, according to a poll published this weekend.
The survey also showed that Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh is still more popular than Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
The percentage of Palestinians who support “resistance operations” against Israeli targets rose from 43.1 percent in September 2006 to 49.5% at present. Support for this option was highest in the Gaza Strip, at 58.1%, with 24.5% in the West Bank agreeing.
Palestinians who support bombing attacks against Israeli civilians rose from 44.8% in June 2006 to 48% in September 2006 and to 50.7% now.
Again, more Gazans support these operations (65.1%), compared with 42.3% of Palestinians in the West Bank.
The Palestinian public is divided on the rocket attacks on Israel: 39.3% said the firing of these rockets was “useful” to Palestinian national interests, while 35.7% said they were harmful.
Over half of Palestinians approve of murdering civilians. They celebrated on 9/11. They chose Hamas in a free election. Why do we persist in thinking that these people will ever make peace?
ASIDE: It’s interesting that attacks on civilians (i.e., soft targets) gains the highest support, followed by “resistance operations”, and then rocket attacks (which often evoke an IDF response).
MoveOn.org claims they never opposed the campaign in Afghanistan. Tom Maguire tracks down the facts. (Via Instapundit.) The Internet Wayback Machine is involved.
At the debate, Charlie Gibson asked Obama about the handwriting on a questionnaire returned by his campaign on which someone wrote that Obama supports a total ban on handguns:
GIBSON: But do you still favor the registration of guns? Do you still favor the licensing of guns?
And in 1996, your campaign issued a questionnaire, and your writing was on the questionnaire that said you favored a ban on handguns.
OBAMA: No, my writing wasn’t on that particular questionnaire, Charlie. As I said, I have never favored an all-out ban on handguns.
No surprise; this was obviously coming. Now, someone needs to ask Obama the obvious follow-up questions:
Whose handwriting was it?
The handwriting in question was revising the answers to the questionnaire, to include some additional endorsements. Why did the staffer bother to revise the list of endorsements, but not correct all the inaccurate policy positions?
I suppose, though, that’s the sort of “gotcha” politics we’re not supposed to play.
At TalkLeft, Jeralyn Merritt reports a statement from Obama’s campaign that D.C.’s total ban on guns is constitutional:
But the campaign of Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said that he “…believes that we can recognize and respect the rights of law-abiding gun owners and the right of local communities to enact common sense laws to combat violence and save lives. Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional.”
Bob Casey (D-PA), an Obama surrogate, goes further, saying that Obama approves of the ban:
Bob Casey: He would probably be a supporter, as he has been in the U.S. Senate and the Illinois legislature, for various restrictions on gun ownership. I happen to disagree with him on that, we have our disagreements.
(No link to either, so I’m trusting that Merritt transcribed them accurately.) Prepare to be disavowed, Senator Casey!
There’s more. David Bernstein notes that Obama wants to require that all gun dealers operate from a storefront and also wants to ban such storefronts within 5 miles of a school or park. (5 miles is roughly the radius of Pittsburgh.) And, shockingly, when a stolen gun is used to hurt someone, he wants to make it a felony on the part of the rightful owner if he didn’t store it “securely.”
I think we can close the book on Obama and gun rights now.
Zimbabwe’s opposition revealed 10 of its supporters have now been killed with 400 arrested and 500 injured in President Mugabe’s post-election clampdown.
As a further delay was announced in the recounting of votes cast over three weeks ago fears grew that an attempt is being made to overturn the results of the parliamentary election, which showed ZANU-PF losing its majority to the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) for the first time.
This makes sense for Mugabe, I suppose. As long as he’s going to thwart the Presidential election and stay in office, there’s no reason to abide by the Parliamentary vote.
But don’t despair, the African Union is on the case:
An AU statement said: “The African Union wishes to express its concern over the delay observed in the announcement of Zimbabwe’s election results, which creates an atmosphere of tension.
“The African Union therefore urges competent authorities of the Republic of Zimbabwe to announce the results without any further delay, in transparency, thus contributing, inter alia, to reducing the prevailing tension.”
A newspaper that defied the Kremlin by reporting that President Vladimir Putin was planning to marry an Olympic gold medal-winning rhythmic gymnast half his age was shut down yesterday. The closure of Moskovski Korrespondent, whose editor Grigori Nekhoroshev was forced to resign, was a sharp reminder of the perils of invoking Kremlin displeasure. . .
Its parent firm blamed “costs” and “conceptual disagreements with the newsroom” but insisted in a statement that “this has nothing to do with politics and is solely a business decision”. Few in Russia will believe that. The closure came a few hours after Putin had said during a visit to Sardinia that there was not a word of truth in the story.
It has previously been reported that Obama’s church has been known to print racist material in its worship bulletin. So it’s not as shocking as it should be to learn that in July 2007 Rev. Wright handed over his “Pastor’s Page” for a piece by Mousa Abu Marzook, a terrorist and front man for Hamas. In that column, Marzook justifies attacks on Israel, denies Israel’s right to exist, and bizarrely refers to a Fatah coup that partitioned the Palestinian Authority.
Even if Wright didn’t know Marzook was wanted by the government, Hamas has been designated a terrorist group since 1995, blacklisted by a Democrat administration.
Wright had to have known from headlines that Hamas targets innocent civilians in pizza parlors and buses for suicide bombings, eviscerating children and elderly with fireballs laced with nails and ball bearings. These are not warriors, but terrorists.
Obama, for his part, says he is shocked— shocked! — that his church would support Hamas.
“I certainly wasn’t in church when that outrageously wrong piece was reprinted in the bulletin,” he said in a carefully worded statement that denies only his attendance and not his prior knowledge of the bulletin.
The IBD editorial mentions something else I hadn’t known, that Wright’s ties to notorious anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan go deeper than is generally known:
Obama also pleaded ignorance about Wright last year honoring anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan with a “lifetime achievement award,” even though the church featured Farrakhan on the cover of its magazine and held a gala in Chicago to celebrate his “greatness.”
This didn’t come out of the blue. Wright and Farrakhan go way back. In the 1980s, they traveled to Libya to pay homage to terrorist leader Muammar Qaddafi.
Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has worked to assure uneasy gun owners that he believes the Constitution protects their rights and that he doesn’t want to take away their guns.
But before he became a national political figure, he sat on the board of a Chicago-based foundation that doled out at least nine grants totaling nearly $2.7 million to groups that advocated the opposite positions. . .
Obama’s eight years on the board of the Joyce Foundation, which paid him more than $70,000 in directors fees, do not in any way conflict with his campaign-trail support for the rights of gun owners . . . a spokesman for Obama’s presidential campaign, asserted in a statement issued to Politico this week.
As with most foundations, Joyce did not record how individual board members voted on grants, but former Joyce officials told Politico that funding was typically approved unanimously.
During Obama’s time on the Joyce board, though, the foundation gave seven grants totaling more than $2.5 million to a group that wants Congress to take much more proactive action: the Violence Policy Center.
The D.C.-based nonprofit, which calls itself “the most aggressive group in the gun control movement,” for years has argued for a national handgun ban.
In a 2000 study called “Unsafe in Any Hands: Why America Needs to Ban Handguns,” the group concluded that Congress could and should ban handguns nationwide “soon” and allocate $16.25 billion to buy back the 65 million handguns it estimated were then owned by civilians.
The study dismissed as “pure myth” the theory that the Second Amendment bars such strict gun control laws.
The study was funded partly by the Joyce Foundation, said Josh Sugarmann, the center’s executive director. “The Joyce Foundation gives us general support,” he said.
There’s more. I don’t doubt that Obama will disavow this; if you can disavow your own handwriting, you’ll disavow anything. Whether he’ll get away with it is another matter.
Gallup now gives Clinton the advantage over Obama among Democrats nationwide 46%-45%, with a very noticeable shift since the last debate. (Via Hot Air.) Both Democrats also tie McCain among registered voters.
The top story at the New York Times is a lengthy piece on the Pentagon’s information strategy. Although I haven’t had a chance to read the whole thing yet, it seems pretty interesting. The NYT’s slant, of course, is that there’s something sinister about the Pentagon even to have an information strategy. (If they’re bothered by Al Qaeda having an information strategy, I’ve never heard of it.) Most of the Pentagon strategies they allude to (and cast aspersions on) seem like just good sense to me: court the media’s military experts, and give them access to the facts. They also write that the Pentagon recognizes the importance of not letting enemy propaganda drive the media cycle. (You’re doing a bang-up job, then. Thanks guys!)
I’m most interested, though, in the New York Times’s own information strategy. (Let’s not pretend they’re not a combatant in the information war.) They’re not targeting their article at any particular military expert. It doesn’t gain them much to discredit a single person, and they don’t have the material to do it anyway. More interestingly, they aren’t really targeting the Pentagon or the White House, which is surprising since there are few things they enjoy more. Instead, they are targeting media military experts as a group.
Why? Here’s my theory. The good news out of Iraq is becoming increasingly unavoidable. Even the bad news isn’t staying bad for long enough. The usual anti-war sources can only get them so far. In order to maintain their narrative, they need a way to discount all the positive news out of Iraq. If they can convince people that all the experts are colluding with the Pentagon to deceive us, the good news simply goes away.
Of course, they won’t succeed to that extent — the experts aren’t going away — but they can instill a grain of suspicion into every positive analysis. Look for a new meme on the left: any expert that speaks of progress is a tool of the Pentagon. (Not just former generals, incidentally, but also embedded journalists.) What we need, they will say, are “independent” experts, ones with no active ties to the military. The “independent” experts will not know anything — they’ll have no sources, after all — but they will be reliably anti-war (not knowing anything will help), and they’ll serve as a counterbalance to any good news out of Iraq.
UPDATE: Commentary has two columns on the piece. (Via Instapundit.) Max Boot’s analysis agrees substantially with mine, except without the prediction. (Internet Scofflaw: tomorrow’s expert analysis from a non-expert today!) John Podhoretz thinks that the piece was an investigative report that failed to uncover any wrongdoing, but they couldn’t bear to kill. (Note to the NYT: sunk cost.)
It’s popular in certain circles to assert that US funding for the mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan war went to Osama Bin Laden. This is convenient for that crowd, because it places the ultimate blame for all of his atrocities back where they want it, on the United States. The problem is, it’s not true in the slightest.
There were two factions of Afghans who fought against the Soviets. One was a domestic faction that eventually evolved into the Northern Alliance. The other was the so-called “Afghan Arabs”, foreign Muslims (mostly Arabs) who came into Afghanistan to fight the jihad. Osama Bin Laden, obviously, was a member of the latter faction. The United States funded the former faction, but never gave a cent to the latter. The latter was funded primarily by Saudi Arabia. (The Taliban, incidentally, didn’t exist then at all.)
This is made clear by this article from the US Department of State. Richard Miniter has a good column on the subject as well. I found both articles with just a few minutes of Googling; it’s hardly a secret.
UPDATE (9/12/11): Freshened the stale links with links to the Internet Archive.
In response to the Obamaists’ apoplexy at their candidate being asked about his friendships with a racist and a terrorist, Peter Wehner proposes a hypothetical:
Assume that a conservative candidate for the GOP nomination spent two decades at a church whose senior pastor was a white supremacist who uttered ugly racial (as well as anti-American) epithets from the pulpit. Assume, too, that this minister wasn’t just the candidate’s pastor but also a close friend, the man who married the candidate and his wife, baptized his two daughters, and inspired the title of his best-selling book.
In addition, assume that this GOP candidate, in preparing for his entry into politics, attended an early organizing meeting at the home of a man who, years before, was involved in blowing up multiple abortion clinics and today was unrepentant, stating his wish that he had bombed even more clinics. And let’s say that the GOP candidate’s press spokesman described the relationship between the two men as “friendly.”
Do you think that if those moderating a debate asked the GOP candidate about these relationships for the first time, after 22 previous debates had been held, that other journalists would become apoplectic at the moderators for merely asking about the relationships? Not only would there be a near-universal consensus that those questions should be asked; there would be a moral urgency in pressing for answers. We would, I predict, be seeing an unprecedented media “feeding frenzy.”
The truth is that a close relationship with a white supremacist pastor and a friendly relationship with an abortion clinic bomber would, by themselves, torpedo a conservative candidate running for president. There is an enormous double standard at play here, one rooted in the fawning regard many journalists have for Barack Obama. They have a deep, even emotional, investment in his candidacy.
Seriously, the best thing about this Democratic primary is the spectacle of Democrats getting critical media attention. Unlike Republicans, they’re not used to it, and they don’t like it one bit. Too bad it won’t last.
Glenn Reynolds remarks, “He’s not used to being challenged on his statements. That will change.”
I’m not so sure. No one (outside the blogosphere) is calling him on it here, and they still have another candidate. Why would you think the media will be more likely to fact-check him after they’re stuck with him?
UPDATE: Dowdification refers to the selective editing of a quote in such a way as to change (or invert) its meaning, particularly by the addition of ellipses. In this case Obama extracts a relative clause, deletes its relativizer, and quotes it as a complete sentence.
ANOTHER UPDATE: David Freddoso asks, “Is the man a liar, or are his speechwriters and advisors just that willing to leave him vulnerable to attack?” Good question.
Obama was asked by a voter via video why he did not wear the American flag in his lapel.
“I have never said that I don’t wear flag pins or refuse to wear flag pins. This is the kind of manufactured issue that our politics has become obsessed with and, once again, distracts us,” he said.
“You don’t have the American flag pin on. Is that a fashion statement?” the reporter asked, at the end of a brief interview with Obama on Wednesday. “Those have been on politicians since Sept. 12, 2001.”
The standard political reply to that question might well have been, “My patriotism speaks for itself.”
But Obama didn’t say that.
Instead the Illinois senator answered the question at length, explaining that he no longer wears such a pin, at least in part, because of the Iraq War.
“You know, the truth is that right after 9/11, I had a pin,” Obama said. “Shortly after 9/11, particularly because as we’re talking about the Iraq War, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security, I decided I won’t wear that pin on my chest.”
A manufactured issue? Yes, but Obama was the one who manufactured it.
Last month it was reported that the Brown government had put an end to the “special relationship” between the U.S. and U.K. Now it appears that the special relationship is back on:
“The world owes President George Bush a huge debt of gratitude for leading the world” in the fight against terrorism, Brown said. “No international partnership has served the world better than our special relationship … the bond between our two countries is stronger than ever.”
Imagine an election race of Pat Robertson versus James Dobson, each of them appearing at organic grocery stores and Starbucks throughout Massachusetts, with each candidate insisting that he alone deserves the vote of gay-marriage advocates. An equally silly spectacle is taking place these days in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Indiana, West Virginia and Kentucky, as Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama compete for the pro-gun vote.
The Democrats are upset about a partisan political operative (Stephanopolous, they mean, not Russert or Matthews) masquerading as a journalist. The mind boggles.
Fortunately for Stephanopolous, this will be short-lived. Once the Democrats have their nominee and he’s a Democrat again rather than a Clintonite, all will be forgiven.
Barack Obama, for the first time in his entire career, is facing a seriously contested campaign. At the debate, he gets some questions he’d rather not answer. (Via Instapundit.) And, since this is a debate, not a press conference, he can’t just walk off. He actually accuses George Stephanopoulos of acting as a Republican operative. (As if!) Well, boo hoo.
I’m honestly surprised by how thin-skinned he is. On the right, we’re subjected to a constant drumbeat of negative press. Every other question at a debate, even a Republican debate, is along the lines of “who does the GOP more resemble, Hitler or Lucifer?” But Obama, someone asks him why he’s cozy with an unrepentant terrorist and by his reaction, you’d think that CBS was making up fake documents about him.
UPDATE: Suddenly Obama isn’t sure if we need any more debates.
The Senate moved yesterday toward asking the Justice Department for a criminal investigation of a $10 million legislative earmark whose provisions were mysteriously altered after Congress gave final approval to a huge 2005 highway funding bill. . .
Top Senate Democrats and Republicans have endorsed taking action in connection with the earmark that Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) . . . inserted into the legislation. “It’s very possible people ought to go to jail,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). . .
Young’s staff acknowledged yesterday that aides “corrected” the earmark just before it went to the White House for President Bush’s signature, specifying that the money would go to a proposed highway interchange project on Interstate 75 near Naples, Fla.
This compromises the basic integrity of the legislative process. There also should have been a criminal investigation last August, when the House Democratic leadership falsified the result of a floor vote in the US House of Representatives:
Democrats appeared to have won the vote, but with the voting time apparently having expired, GOP leaders persuaded three Latino Republicans who had voted with the Democrats to change their votes. At the same time, Democrats say, five Democratic lawmakers who had voted with Republicans were scrambling to change their votes as well. With two of the GOP votes changed, Democrats gaveled the vote shut, 214 to 214, and declared that they had won. But the public tally showed that the Republicans had won, 215 to 213, just as the vote was declared for the Democrats. The official final tally was 216 to 212 in the Democrats’ favor.
But House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said there were no Democrats seeking to change their votes at the time. Moreover, he charged, [House Majority Leader Steny] Hoyer had told a protesting parliamentarian, “We control, not the parliamentarians.” And, he said, electronic records on the vote disappeared from the House’s voting system and on the House clerk’s Web site.
UPDATE: On futher reflection, didn’t Congress keep the earmarks out of the legislation this year, in order to circumvent the House’s new earmark rules? If Congress never voted on the earmark in question, that would seem to make its alteration a lot less serious. (I’ve altered the title of this post accordingly.)
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas was scheduled today to award the Palestinian Authority’s highest medal, the Al Kuds Mark of Honor, to the driver of the Jerusalem Sbarro suicide bomber. 15 people were killed, including 7 children, in the bombing. Those plans were cancelled yesterday; I suppose Abbas realized that giving medals to terrorists might make it hard to pretend to oppose them. (Remember, Abbas’s bunch are supposed to be the moderate ones.)
I recognize that we’ve abandoned the “sequentiality” of the Roadmap. (That was the idea that the Palestinians would stop murdering people before we start giving them what they want.) But can we at least require that they not give medals to terrorists? No? Just thought I’d ask.
This latest debate between Clinton and Obama is panned by left and right. (Via Instapundit.) Who can blame them, though, really? After so many debates, what is left to talk about? Other than how to win the war, that is . . .
Paid Federal, state, and local income taxes yesterday. Today we get a notice in the mail; the local school district is appealing our property assessment. (Hint: they don’t think it’s too high.)
On days like today, I am bitter. Bitter that I pay so much in taxes, and that people like Obama (and Clinton) think I’m not paying enough.
Come to think of it, the Revolutionary War patriots were bitter over taxes too, and they were into guns and religion. Think that’s what Obama meant?
Al Franken, the Democratic Senate candidate from Minnesota, failed to pay corporate income taxes from 2003 to 2007. (Via Instapundit.) I find it interesting that when it came out that he failed to pay his workman’s comp insurance from 2002 to 2005, he didn’t take that opportunity to pay his other back taxes.
The NYT writes that the Olympic torch relay was invented by Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film “Olympia.” (Via the Corner.) Who thought Riefenstahl would be a good source of Olympic tradition? The same sort of people that thought it would be a good idea for China to host the games, I suppose.
A Paris prosecutor yesterday called for French film legend Brigitte Bardot to receive a two-month suspended prison sentence and a £12,000 fine for inciting racial hatred in a letter.
In December 2006, Miss Bardot, 73, now an animal rights activist, wrote to President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, then the interior minister, criticising the Muslim practice of slaughtering sheep without first stunning them.
Of course, this is not really a case of animal rights, so much as human rights (i.e., free speech and petitioning the government). Perhaps the animals would have done better.
Taxpayers: It’s almost April 15, and you know what that means. It means the Miami Dolphins already have been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs.
But it’s also time to file your federal tax return. Yes, this is a pesky chore, but remember that paying taxes is not a ”one-way street.” When you send your money to the government, the government, in return, provides you with vital services, such as not putting you in prison. The government also uses your money to pay for programs that benefit all Americans, such as the Catfish Genome Project.
The British Columbia Human Rights Commission has ruled against McDonalds in a wrongful termination case involving an employee with a skin condition that made her unable to wash her hands. (Via the Corner.) The commission ruled she should not have been dismissed, and awarded the non-hand-washing employee $55,000.
The commission found that “There was no evidence of the relationship between food contamination and hand-washing” or “the risk to the public if Ms. Datt’s hand-washing was limited.”
Oooo-kay.
I had planned a business trip to Victoria, B.C. this September, but I think I might get hungry.
Barack Obama may be exactly what his supporters suppose him to be. Not, however, for reasons most Americans will celebrate. . . Obama does fulfill liberalism’s transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.
When a supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the losing Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, that thinking people supported him, Stevenson said, “Yes, but I need to win a majority.” When another supporter told Stevenson, “You educated the people through your campaign,” Stevenson replied, “But a lot of people flunked the course.” . . . [Michael Barone wrote,] “Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture—the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting.”
Stevenson, like Obama, energized young, educated professionals for whom, Barone wrote, “what was attractive was not his platform but his attitude.” They sought from Stevenson “not so much changes in public policy as validation of their own cultural stance.” They especially rejected “American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States was specially good and decent,” rather than—in Michelle Obama’s words—“just downright mean.” . . .
The iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension was Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970 but whose spirit still permeated that school when Obama matriculated there in 1981. Hofstadter pioneered the rhetorical tactic that Obama has revived with his diagnosis of working-class Democrats as victims—the indispensable category in liberal theory. The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree.
Obama’s dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America.
In the Pennsylvania primary, on the heels of Clinton’s 20-point surge in the ARG poll, Rasmussen has seen a much smaller improvement for Clinton, to a 50%-41% advantage. (Via Instapundit.)
NPR, as always, has its finger on the pulse of America. In a piece on video games, they correctly observe that video games are now big business and bought substantially by adults. But, they continue, “some critics” say that they can’t be taken seriously until they start taking on serious political issues like the war in Iraq, or teen pregnancy.
Naturally, the teen pregnancy suggestion was a throwaway; what they really want is games that oppose the war. Hollywood, they point out, has spent a lot of money making anti-war movies. True enough. Of course, those movies were terrible and lost (let me check the figures) a gazillion dollars.
Undeterred, NPR (er, “some critics”, I mean) wants the video game industry to do the same. They laud the one game with the courage to speak out against the war, BlackSite: Area 51. That figures. Having played the demo, I can say that BlackSite fits perfectly into NPR’s mold: it was a bad game. (Gamespot rated it 6.5; an terrible score.) The game flopped, of course.
Great idea, NPR; we need more games like BlackSite. We should quit wasting our time on fun ones.
The funny thing is, there are some good, popular games out there that touch on politics. Dead Rising pits a photographer against a plague of zombies that (surprise!) turns out to be the US Government’s fault. (You know what would shock me? If the US Government turned out not to be at fault.) Even better is BioShock, which deals with liberty, objectivism, and the nature of humanity in a really creative way. I guess those games just didn’t lend themselves to NPR’s narrative.
I’ll keep my eye out for a game about teen pregnancy. Sounds like a great idea . . .
Jerry Pournelle has an insightful observation about how bureaucracies function:
Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.
Dave S., a commenter at Tim Blair’s blog, nails it:
Well, I do go a-churchin’ every Sunday with a bunch of bitter folks who complain about how the government is evil and screws them over, and we yell an’ whoop it up when the preacher rails against them Italians and Jews, an’ then we …
Oops, wait a minute, that’s not me, that’s Barack Obama.
In an April 4 editorial, the New York Times lambasts John Yoo, formerly a lawyer in the Justice Department, for his legal memo on interrogation that the Times says authorized torture. There’s a lot of blowhardiness to rebut here, and I’m not going to bother. But, there’s an astonishing statement in the middle:
Mr. Yoo, who, inexplicably, teaches law at the University of California, Berkeley, never directly argues that it is legal to [do various bad things].
(Emphasis mine.) Yoo, a tenured professor at Berkeley, took a leave of absence to work at the Justice Department before returning in 2004. During that leave, he produced a work of legal scholarship that proved politically unpopular. For the New York Times, that is apparently grounds for revoking his tenure. Nay, more than that; it is “inexplicable” that his tenure was not revoked.
Am I reading too much into one word? It’s hard to see what else “inexplicable” could mean, since “he has tenure” would otherwise appear to be an explanation. Moreover, I’m not the only one to read it this way. Other observers took it the same way, including the Dean of Law at Berkeley, who felt the need to put out a statement explaining academic freedom and tenure to the New York Times.
UPDATE: Paul Campos, writing in the Rocky Mountain News, comes out and says it explicitly, and laments the lack of seriousness of those like Berkeley’s Dean of Law (and me) who think academic freedom might be an issue. (Via Instapundit.)
According to the Rasmussen poll, 56% of Americans disagree with Barack Obama’s amateur psychoanalysis of rural Americans. (Via Instapundit.) That number actually sounded a little low to me, so I looked closer. Conservatives disagree 74%-12%, and moderates disagree 51%-27%. On the other hand, liberals tend to agree by a margin of 46%-33%. That’s nearly 60% of those with an opinion, and the numbers among Obama supporters are even higher. (The story doesn’t say by how much.)
So when Obama was explaining the bizarre, retrograde views of rural Americans to a crowd of San Francisco liberals, about two-thirds of his audience agreed. Please spare me the “he misspoke” spin. He was speaking clearly, telling his audience exactly what they wanted to hear. Either he was speaking from the heart or he was pandering; take your pick.
Come to think of it, this is no surprise. Liberals have been trying to psychoanalyze conservatives for years, since there has to be some explanation for their incomprehensible individualism and religion. As the Harley ads say, if you have to ask . . .
According to the ARG poll, the Pennsylvania race has gone from a tie to a 20-point Clinton lead in the last week. (Via Instapundit.) Hmm, I wonder what happened?
Now that I’m a registered Democrat, I’m getting all kinds of interesting calls. Yesterday I got a call from John Brenner, the mayor of York, Pennsylvania. (Now, in case you don’t know me, Mayor Brenner and I don’t speak all that often.) This was part of Obama’s ongoing damage-control, and I guess that Brenner was the best Obama-supporter he could find in rural Pennsylvania.
Anyway, Mayor Brenner told me that Obama was right, that we arebitter “frustrated” about the economy. (That stuff about our religion, guns, and xenophobia didn’t come up.) I was amazed. They think it’s a good idea to call people up and tell them about their own bitterness?! Even here in Pennsylvania, most people don’t need Barack Obama to explain their own feelings to them. Brilliant, guys.
Iraq’s Cabinet ratcheted up the pressure on anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr by approving draft legislation barring political parties with militias from participating in upcoming provincial elections.
Al-Sadr, who heads the country’s biggest militia, the Mahdi Army, has been under intense pressure from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, also a Shiite, to disband the Mahdi Army or face political isolation. . .
And in a new move to stem the flow of money to armed groups, the government ordered a crackdown on militiamen controlling state-run and private gas stations, refineries and oil distribution centers.
[Alicia Keys] tells Blender magazine: “‘Gangsta rap’ was a ploy to convince black people to kill each other. ‘Gangsta rap’ didn’t exist.” Keys, 27, said she’s read several Black Panther autobiographies and wears a gold AK-47 pendant around her neck “to symbolize strength, power and killing ’em dead” . . .
Another of her theories: The bicoastal feud between slain rappers Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. was fueled “by the government and the media, to stop another great black leader from existing.” . . .
Keys’ publicist, Theola Borden, said Keys was on vacation and unavailable for comment.
Rachel Lucas is doing her taxes. She’s not happy. (Via Instapundit.) No quotes to pull on a family-friendly blog, I’m afraid.
I shudder to think of what she’s going to say next year after the Democrats reverse the Bush tax cuts. On the bright side: English probably could use a few new swear words.
I’m headed to evening Mass in a bit. I might even get there early and pray for a few minutes beforehand, because I’m feeling especially bitter about the economy this week.
Did the Chinese use an agent provocateur to attack a wheelchair-bound torch carrier in the name of Tibet? Chinese bloggers say yes, and the evidence is compelling. (Via Instapundit.)
In the battle for Iraq, one key factor working against the Islamists is the behavior of the Islamists:
Many young people in Iraq, exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and skeptical of the faith that they preach. . . While religious extremists are admired by a number of young people in other parts of the Arab world, Iraq offers a test case of what could happen when extremist theories are applied. Fingers caught in the act of smoking were broken. Long hair was cut and force-fed to its wearer. In that laboratory, disillusionment with Islamic leaders took hold. . .
A shift seems to be registering, at least anecdotally, in the choices some young Iraqis are making.
Professors reported difficulty in recruiting graduate students for religion classes. Attendance at weekly prayers appears to be down, even in areas where the violence has largely subsided, according to worshipers and imams in Baghdad and Falluja. In two visits to the weekly prayer session in Baghdad of the followers of the militant Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr this fall, vastly smaller crowds attended than had in 2004 or 2005.
Such patterns, if lasting, could lead to a weakening of the political power of religious leaders in Iraq. In a nod to those changing tastes, political parties are dropping overt references to religion. . .
Violent struggle against the United States was easy to romanticize at a distance.
“I used to love Osama bin Laden,” proclaimed a 24-year-old Iraqi college student. She was referring to how she felt before the war took hold in her native Baghdad. The Sept. 11, 2001, strike at American supremacy was satisfying, and the deaths abstract.
Now, the student recites the familiar complaints: Her college has segregated the security checks; guards told her to stop wearing a revealing skirt; she covers her head for safety.
“Now I hate Islam,” she said, sitting in her family’s unadorned living room in central Baghdad. “Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army are spreading hatred. People are being killed for nothing.”
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has turned down a request from former American president Jimmy Carter for a meeting during his visit to Israel next week. The Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni both said that their schedules will not allow a meeting, but an anonymous Israeli official told the Washington Times, “You draw your own conclusions.” Other officials have expressed anger at Carter’s proposed meeting with Syrian-based Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal.
Now that the Duke lacrosse players have been exonerated, Duke thinks that it would a good time for people to hold their tongue on the case. What’s changed? Duke is the one on trial now.
An op-ed in the Boston Globe makes an amazing observation about the Colombia free-trade pact. US markets are already open to Colombia; this effect of the agreement (which the Democrats oppose) is to open Colombia’s markets to us:
The agreement, which President Bush sent this week to Congress for an up or down vote, essentially makes permanent the trade preferences that Colombia has had for 17 years. What is new is that the treaty opens the Colombian market to US exports. . .
The Colombian government is making the bigger sacrifice because a permanent agreement removes uncertainty for investors. Trade, combined with US support for Colombia’s military and justice system, have helped Colombia beat back a leftist insurgency, largely demobilize right-wing paramilitaries, and spark a boom that has reduced poverty, unemployment, and the economic weight of drug mafias.
The blogosphere is going crazy about Obama’s remarks insulting central Pennsylvania (and the Midwest) at a fundraiser in San Francisco:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
(Emphasis in linked article.)
Ace of Spades has the title I wanted to use: “Obama To Rural Pennsylvanians: Vote For Me, You Corncob-Smokin’, Banjo-Strokin’ Chicken-Chokin’ Cousin-Pokin’ Inbred Hillbilly Racist Morons,” but he said it first. . .
Because Obama’s comments are clearly a Category II Kinsley Gaffe–in which the candidate accidentally says what he really thinks–it will be hard for Obama to explain away.
I think what really could hurt him here isn’t just the insult itself, but the fact that he told it at a gathering of rich, San Francisco liberals at the exact same time as he was wooing the insultees in Pennsylvania.
Posted by K. Crary 
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