WaPo: Some Silver Lining in the Clouds

The incessant drumbeat of demoralizing and often deliberately misleading bad-news barrages the MSM fires in salvo after salvo on a daily basis can actually begin to make one cynical about the future!

White House Assistant to the President Peter Wehner has been given space in the Washington Post to point out that not all the news is bad.

By now Americans know the litany: The nation is engaged in a difficult and costly war in Iraq; Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon; gas prices are high; the costs of reconstructing the Gulf Coast region are huge; illegal immigration is a major problem -- and more.

These issues are real and pressing. But they aren't the whole story -- and they ought not color the lens through which we see all other events. We hear a great deal about the problems we face. We hear hardly anything about the encouraging developments. Off-key as it may sound in the current environment, a strong case can be made that in a number of areas there are positive trends and considerable progress. Perhaps the place to begin is with an empirical assessment of where we are.

The rising tide is lifting all boats, socially and economically. To wit:

Social Indicators: We are witnessing a remarkable cultural renewal in America. Violent crime rates remain at the lowest levels in the history of the Bureau of Justice Statistics' survey (which started in 1973). We are experiencing the sharpest decline in teen crime in modern history. Property crimes are near the lowest levels in the history of the federal survey. Welfare caseloads have declined almost 60 percent since 1996. Both the abortion rate and ratio are at the lowest levels we have seen in the 30-year period these data have been tracked. African American and Hispanic fourth-graders posted the highest reading and math scores in the history of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test. The use of illegal drugs by teens has dropped 19 percent since 2001, while the use of hallucinogens such as LSD and ecstasy has declined by more than half.

The teen birth rate has fallen for a dozen consecutive years. The percentage of high school students who reported having had sex is significantly lower than in the early 1990s. The divorce rate has fallen steadily for over a decade. And teen smoking has dropped by almost 50 percent since the late '90s.

There are areas of concern, to be sure. Births to unmarried women are at an all-time high, and in many respects our popular culture remains a cesspool. But context is important. Between 1960 and the mid-'90s virtually every social indicator got worse -- and in many cases staggeringly worse. Then things began to turn around, almost as if a cultural virus created its own antibodies.

But just as impressive as the social gains are the outstanding performance of the booming and increasingly productive American material culture:

The Economy : The American economy is the strongest in the world and growing faster than that of any other major industrialized country. It grew at an annual rate of 5.3 percent in the first quarter -- the fastest growth in 2 1/2 years. It has added more than 5.3 million jobs since the summer of 2003, and employment is near an all-time high. The unemployment rate (4.6 percent) is well below the average for each of the past four decades. Mortgage rates remain near historical lows, homeownership remains near a record high, and sales of new and existing homes reached record levels in 2005. Real disposable personal income has risen almost 13 percent since President Bush took office; and core inflation rose just 2.3 percent over the past 12 months. The Dow Jones industrial average has risen from under 7300 in 2002 to above 11,000 for most of this year. Tax revenues are at an all-time high -- and so is total household net worth.

And even though our foreign policy has been misfiring in Iraq, the US does not have to fear a moral or military collapse:

National Security : Perhaps no nation has ever been as dominant as the United States is today -- and we are using our military power to promote great purposes. As a reference point, it's worth recalling that the 1930s and early-'40s were regarded by many as the twilight of freedom. Democratic societies were threatened both internally (by a depression) and externally (by Nazism and fascism). There were only a dozen or so democracies on the planet.

Today we are witnessing one of the swiftest advances of freedom in history. In the past four years more than 110 million people have joined the ranks of the free -- and for the first time freedom is taking root in the Middle East. Once ruled by cruel dictatorships, the people of Afghanistan and Iraq are now governed by constitutions and are participating in national elections. The governments of the two countries once provided safe haven to terrorists; now they are engaged in a mortal struggle against them. This struggle is longer and harder than any of us would wish, but by any standard or precedent of history, Afghanistan and Iraq have made remarkable political progress.

Kuwait's parliament has granted full political rights to women. Arab intellectuals are pushing for a rapid acceleration of democratic reform. After almost 30 years, Syrian troops left Lebanon in response to the Cedar Revolution. And Libya has abandoned its program of weapons of mass destruction. The biggest nuclear-smuggling ring in history, run by Pakistan's A.Q. Khan, is being rolled up. The government of Pakistan has cast its lot with us against al-Qaeda.

Islamic terrorists have been denied sanctuaries, their networks are being broken up, their leaders are being incapacitated and they are on the run. Our homeland has not been attacked since Sept. 11, 2001. And we have set aside decades of mistrust to put relations with India, the world's most populous democracy, on a new and fruitful path.

Wehner is not a complete Pollyanna, but he certainly makes more sense than the Cassandra wails of the MSM and their Judas goats like Al Gore and John Kerry and John Murtha, who bleat and whine and bray asinine negativity non-stop.

Love to hear the gnashing of teeth on the left when occasional successes are allowed to be trumpeted in an MSM outlet like the Wash Post. I'll bet Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell is already getting a ton of illiterate, ungrammatical, obscene nattering emails attacking personally the entire management of the Post for allowing a bit of optimism and bonhomie to be displayed in its pages.

Hitchens on My Lai versus Haditha---no contest!

I notice that Arwa Damon's blog on CNN about finding the Haditha tapes of the unit that a month is accused of snapping sort of went into an Orwellian memory hole. Damon had interviewed the Captain of the platoon or unit who told her that they were encountering an average of one IED per day. The officer told dDamon that his unit had found a cache of IEDs hidden in a mosque the day before, and his men were beginning to get more than peevish. Damon ended her blog by mentioning that the location where she interviewed the officer was subsequently mined with an IED just in case she and her camera crew conducted another interview on the same spot.

The always perceptive Christopher Hitchens puts a broad perspective on the Haditha massacres, noting the one similarity [loss of discipline] and dissimilarities [short duration of the Haditha episode before control was re-established and restoration of discipline by the unit commander himself, not an outside chopper pilot as in My Lai].

The combat in Iraq and Afghanistan is overwhelmingly political, and there is no soldier who doesn't know that it's imperative for this reason—to say nothing of any moral objections—to use his or her firepower with exact discrimination. If this principle is not being meticulously observed, then it means that there is a rupture in training and discipline, which would be a serious enough story in its own right.

However, all the glib talk about My Lai is so much propaganda and hot air. In Vietnam, the rules of engagement were such as to make an atrocity—the slaughter of the My Lai villagers took almost a day rather than a white-hot few minutes—overwhelmingly probable. The ghastliness was only stopped by a brave officer who prepared his chopper-gunner to fire. In those days there were no precision-guided missiles, but there were "free-fire zones," and "body counts," and other virtual incitements to psycho officers such as Capt. Medina and Lt. Calley. As a consequence, a training film about My Lai—"if anything like this happens, you have really, truly screwed up"—has been in use for U.S. soldiers for some time.

Another dissimilarity between the two incidents lay in the indigenous nature of the Vietcong opponents in Vietnam and the very heterogeneous Zarqawi foreign elements of the Iraqi terrorist/insurgents. A very large difference is the indifference of the insurgents in Iraq to loss of life by their own co-religionists.

...the forces of Zarqawi, the Fedayeen Saddam, and the criminal underworld now arrayed against us...are depraved elements [and] are the Iraqi Khmer Rouge. They have two methods of warfare. One is the use of random murder to create a sectarian and ethnic civil war—perhaps the most evil combination of tactics and strategy it is possible to imagine. The other is the attempt to alienate coalition soldiers from the population.

Even before the fall of Baghdad in 2003, Saddam's foreign minister, Naji Sabry, wrote a memo about how to combat the increasing fraternization between advancing Americans and Iraqi civilians. Send some suicide bombers to the scene, he recommended, and force a wedge between the two. The Americans would then learn to distrust anyone who approached. As with the foul policy above, the awful thing about this charming policy is that it works. Which leads us to one very important conclusion: Any coalition soldier who relieves his rage by discharging a clip is by definition doing Zarqawi's work for him, and even in a way obeying his orders. If anything justifies a court-martial, then surely that does.

The repulsive nature of the insurgents and their indiscriminate bloodthirstiness make them antagonists who render the Americans the moral high ground---even when a mistake or disciplinary infraction occurs. Hitchens reminds us who are now at the behest of the elected democratic government of Iraq---and makes an interesting and useful reference to Orwell as well:

It's not amusing to see fascist killers hiding behind human shields and then releasing obscene videos of the work that they do. Nor is it rewarding to clean up the remains of a comrade who has been charred and shredded by a roadside bomb. To be taunted while doing so must be unbearable. The humane George Orwell, writing of his life as a colonial policeman in Burma in Shooting an Elephant, told his readers that there were days when "I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts." But he did not, in fact, succumb to this temptation. And the British were unwanted colonial occupiers in Burma, while the coalition forces are—until further notice—the guests of Iraq's first-ever elected government and the executors of a U.N.-mandated plan for the salvage and reconstruction of the country.

The anti-war partisans can't have it both ways. As John Burns's article in yesterday's NYT pointed out, Saddam was a world-class tyrannical megalomaniac who murdered tens of thousands and was responsible for the deaths of over a million people with his mass murders of Kurds and Shi'ites and his incompetent imbecility in the Iran-Iraq War.

Those who say that the rioters in Baghdad in the early days should have been put down more forcefully are accepting the chance that a mob might have had to be fired on to protect the National Museum. Those who now wish there had been more troops are also demanding that there should have been more targets and thus more body bags. The lawyers at Centcom who refused to give permission to strike Mullah Omar's fleeing convoy in Afghanistan—lest it by any chance be the wrong convoy of SUVs speeding from Kabul to Kandahar under cover of night—are partly responsible for the deaths of dozens of Afghan teachers and international aid workers who have since been murdered by those who were allowed to get away. If Iraq had been stuffed with WMD warehouses and stiff with al-Qaida training camps, there would still have been an Abu Ghraib. Only pacifists—not those who compare the Iraqi killers to the Minutemen—have the right to object to every casualty of war. And if the pacifists had been heeded, then Slobodan Milosevic, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein would all still be in power—hardly a humanitarian outcome. People like to go on about the "fog" of war as well as the "hell" of it. Hell it most certainly is—but not always so foggy. Indeed, many of the dilemmas posed by combat can be highly clarifying, once the tone of righteous sententiousness is dropped.

The Mugabes, Castros, and Kim Jung-Ils remain to be kept in check, as do the hydra-headed Iranian leaderships. Sadly, nasty dictators often provoke nasty measures to keep them from widespread infectious spread of their insidious dogmas. Like bird-flu preventive measures, sometimes prevention can seem worse than the cure.

Dalrymple on Karsh re: Islam--All or Nothing!

There is a very interesting book review on a book I intend to purchase in the City Journal by Ted Dalrymple, whom I first discovered in the New Criterion a while back, writing about his medical adventures in the bowels of Birmingham, England, among the marginal immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia---Muslims existing in a completely alien environment among hard-drinking low-class gentile soccer-hooligan wannabes.

Karsh's book doesn't do the Albert Hourani school of grandiose pageantry across centuries of Arab history, nor does he seem to come from the other semi-apologists for Ottoman and Islamic cultures whose expansion I have read about in neutral terms. The first book I read about Islam was The Mohammedans, by Gibbs, way back when the first oil shock had just rocked the gas-guzzling West. Since then, I have read a good half-dozen general histories of the entire Islamic phenomenon, or of the Ottoman subset or Arab subset of Muslim conquests. All are academic in tone and scholarly in intent, but lack a certain sense of what you confront when you are in an Islamic country.

What you confront often enough once you are in a Middle East society, even on the periphery as an Embassy official, is a sense of brotherhood among themselves and xenophobic solidarity against non-Muslims---at least among lower-class man-on-the-street Muslims. This varies from country to country, and Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, and a cosmopolitan center like Jidda in Saudi Arabia are more open and welcoming than other places----like dread Riyadh or other smaller towns in Saudi Arabia, e.g.
Here is a sample of the review, which I recommend reading in full:

It is important, of course, to distinguish between Islam as a doctrine and Muslims as people. Untold numbers of Muslims desire little more than a quiet life; they have the virtues and the vices of the rest of mankind. Their religion gives to their daily lives an ethical and ritual structure and provides the kind of boundaries that only modern Western intellectuals would have the temerity to belittle.

But the fact that many Muslims are not fanatics is not as comforting as some might think.....In his new book, Islamic Imperialism: A History, Professor Efraim Karsh does not mince words about Mohammed’s early and (to all those who do not accept the divinity of his inspiration) unscrupulous resort to robbery and violence, or about Islam’s militaristic aspects, or about the link between Islamic tradition and the current wave of fundamentalist violence in the world. The originality of Karsh’s interpretation is its underlying assumption that Islam was, from the very beginning, a pretext for personal and dynastic political ambition, from the razzias against the Meccan caravans and the expulsion of Jewish tribes from Medina, to the siege of Vienna a millennium later in 1529, and Hamas today.

Karsh seems to grasp the nettle, as old-time Brits used to put it, of looking at the entire Islamic phenomenon without either the bland historicism of Hourani or the polemic ferocity of some Western writers. But his judgments are harsh:

Contrary to its universalistic pretensions, Karsh argues, Islam has never succeeded in eliminating political power struggles within the Muslim world, where, on the contrary, such struggles have always been murderous. Islamic regimes, many espousing in the beginning the ascetic principles of what one might call desert Islam, invariably degenerate (if it be degeneration) into luxury- and privilege-loving dynasties. Like all other political entities, Islamic regimes seek to preserve and, if possible, extend their power. They have shown no hesitation in compromising with or allying themselves with those whom they regard as infidels. Saladin, a mendaciously simplified version of whose exploits has inflamed hysterical sentiment all over the Middle East, was not above forming alliances with Christian monarchs to achieve his imperial ends; the Ottoman caliphate would not have survived as long as it did had the Sultan not exploited European rivalries and allied himself now with one, now with another Christian power.

In short, Islamic imperialism, in Karsh’s view, illustrates three transcendent political truths: the Nietzschean drive to power, Michels’ iron law of oligarchy, and Marx’s economic motor of history. Religious feeling, on this reading, is but an epiphenomenon, a mask for what is really going on.

Ah, epiphenomenon and its echo of the great Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin!

To be fair to the Muslims, they more or less invented the sort of transcendent political history that enabled later Western historians like Gibbons and Giambattista Vico and Toynbee to search for underlying principles and modalities which were constants in different cultures.

Ibn Khaldun and his Prolegomena as well as Ibn Battuta in his travelogues from Rabat to Indonesia/China both anticipated later philosophies of history. So Islam cannot be described as lacking a sense of belonging to a larger context, nor as being unaware that it was subject to certain secular historical influences which Muslim philosophers were the first to describe in detail.

This interpretation raises the difficult and perhaps unanswerable question of what should count in history as a real, and what as merely an apparent, motive for action. When Bernal Diaz del Castillo claims a religious motive for the conquest of Mexico, at least in part, should we just dismiss it as a sanctimonious lie to justify a more rapacious motive? That he ended up a rich man does not decide the question; and Diaz himself would have taken his material success as a sign that God smiled upon his enterprise, just as Muslims have viewed their early conquests as proof of God’s approval and the truth of Mohammed’s doctrine. (On the other hand, failure for Muslims never seems to provide proof of the final withdrawal of God’s favor, much less of his non-existence, but rather shows his dissatisfaction with the current practices of the supposedly faithful, who will return to His favor only by restoring an earlier, purer form of faith.)

Also, the Muslims always had to explain why their religion did not put a premium on, nor demonstrate many examples, of miracles. They came up with the sort of lame circularity of the fact that the complexities of the Koran were a "miracle." Actually, the Christians could have argued that the success of Christianity as emanating from a bunch of dumb fishermen from Galilee, the Ozarks of the Roman province of Palestine, was also a miracle. But the Christians' profession of the divinity of Jesus trumped any mere "miracles," whether of the Koran or the Twelve Apostles [and their "wives," the Epistles!]. Karsh's book takes no prisoners, nor does Dalrymple:

Karsh seems to oscillate between believing that Islamic imperialism is just a variant of imperialism in general—imperialism being more or less a permanent manifestation of the human will to power—and believing that there is something sui generis and therefore uniquely dangerous about it.

I hesitate to rush in where so many better-informed people have hesitated to tread, or have trodden before, but I would put it like this. The urge to domination is nearly a constant of human history. The specific (and baleful) contribution of Islam is that, by attributing sovereignty solely to God, and by pretending in a philosophically primitive way that God’s will is knowable independently of human interpretation, and therefore of human interest and desire—in short by allowing nothing to human as against divine nature—it tries to abolish politics. All compromises become mere truces; there is no virtue in compromise in itself. Thus Islam is inherently an unsettling and dangerous factor in world politics, independently of the actual conduct of many Muslims.

Karsh comes close to this conclusion himself, when he writes at the end of the book:

Only when the political elites of the Middle East and the Muslim world reconcile themselves to the reality of state nationalism, forswear pan-Arab and pan-Islamic dreams, and make Islam a matter of private faith rather than a tool of political ambition will the inhabitants of these regions at last be able to look forward to a better future free of would-be Saladins.

The fundamental question is whether Islam as a private faith would still be Islam, or whether such privatization would spell its doom. I think it would spell its doom. In this sense, I am an Islamic fundamentalist. The choice is between all and nothing.

In countries where Islam does not demographically control the public marketplace of ideas and political discourse, as in Lebanon, Islamic elements attempt to impose it by terror and force [Hezbollah] when they cannot by means of the ballot box. In a secular Muslim country like Turkey, a very difficult situation is arising, as a secular Ataturk military confronts an Islamist government attempting to enter the European Union. If Europe rejects a moderate Islam, and the military is Qaddafized, will another Iran be the result? The mind boggles.

NYT John Burns On Saddam's Victims: Ramsey Clark Unavailable For Comment

Probably the best reporter for the New York Times will never get a Pulitzer, for John Burns has foresaken the "Informed Comment" type second-guessing of US military and political policies in Iraq to pursue a much more relevant story, the banality of evil and how fecklessness in Washington back in 1991 by George Herbert Walker Bush led to a hecatomb of Shi'ite massacres by Saddam Hussein.

Only Bush-bashing of #43 gets you a Pulitzer, as Dana Priest and her NYT counterpart Risen discovered to their subversive glee.

If memory serves me well, after the resounding and rapid reconquest of Kuwait, GHWB faced the decision on whether to destroy Saddam's fleeing armies. The Ayatollah Khomeini piped up with some nonsensical gibberish and the Saudis panicked. The Saudis were afraid that a UN victory would establish a Shi'ite state on its northern border. So GHWB did not listen to Schwartzkopf on the military side, but ceased after Saudi imprecations to chase the Republican Guard.

Then GHWB, always two-minded and willing to waffle, did call on the Shi'ites to revolt and the Shi'ites, never dreaming that GHWB would call for revolt without sending backup, rushed to the barricades, only to be slaughtered by Saddam's airpower. Only later were no-fly zones established to protect the northern and southern border regions of Iraq.

So in one narrow sense, the US is partly to blame for the slaughter of the Shi'ites. But Saddam Hussein slaughtered his way to the top of the Ba'ath Party and the eight-year slaughter of the Iran-Iraq War was Saddam's legacy to the entire region.

Burns give us some perspective on a horrific episode during a long history of atrocities by Saddam Hussein. The sooner that monster hangs, hopefully in public, the better.

No matter what simple-minded dolts like Ramsey Clark have to say about it.

Toronto Star Eclipses Canadian Press on Terror Arrests

The New York Times has a piece on how The Toronto Star actually assigned a full-time reporter named Michelle Shepherd to national security affairs. Those who know how Canada recognize how this is very unlike the smug, sleepy p-c broadsheet Globe & Mail, whose reporting eschews actual Realpolitik to focus on fuzzy feel-good Oprahfication projects around the planet, like the current bogus global warming hoax.

Michelle had several thousand words on the bust of the 17 terrorists, including a long background on how CSIS sleuths tracked the plotters on the internet in chat rooms when their terrorist cells were just beginning to take seed.

The Star does a follow-up on the hand-holding the Toronto CoP Bill Blair does with Muslim leaders that segues into a hilarious list of Muslim and defense attorney complaints on how the "timing" of the arrests is "suspicious."

You see, the Supreme Court of Canada is due sometime soon to rule on the constitutionality of locking up national security suspects:

hearings on the constitutionality of security certificates, which allow the authorities to indefinitely detain, without charge, anyone considered a threat to national security.

What a concept! The CSIS should have waited until the hearings on this issue were over before locking up suspects who were in the advanced stages of a plot to blow up the CSIS HQ with three times the force used in Oklahoma City! How thoughtless to prejudice the hearings by immediate arrests of the plotters!

This kind of brainless fecklessness is not new to Canada, long regarded as a collection of complacent sleepy-head second-raters by their English-speaking brethren to the South.

I was a reporter in Saudi Arabia during the First Gulf War and can attest that, except for the equally clueless Boston Globe, the Globe & Mail has the least competent reportorial crew when it comes to actual real-world events. These two papers had certain prisms embedded in their scribblers that prevented the reporters on the scene from any appreciation of what was actually happening---unless it was explained to the G & M/Boston Globe pair in a context that our invasion of Kuwait was an extension of Vietnam, with quagmire and body-count stats the prevailing leit motifs of their context.

To give the she-devil her due, Judy Miller was there in Saudi in '90-91 for the NYT and actually pursued the story rather than the leftist tilt.

Thank goodness the Star had the foresight to put Michelle, a police reporter, on the national security beat.

And thank you, NYT, for implying that your Doppelganger in the Great White North, the Toronto Globe & Mail, is a second-rate asleep-at-the-wheel collection of head-in-the-sand ostriches.

Global Warming Hysteria "Mild McCarthyism"

Colorado State University's Bill Gray is one of the world's foremost hurricane experts. Read some of his comments below on the current hyperventilation going on about Al Gore and the world's climate. Bear in mind that Bill Gray is a world-renowned expert on meteorology and climate matters:

"They've been brainwashing us for 20 years," Gray says. "Starting with the nuclear winter and now with the global warming. This scare will also run its course. In 15-20 years, we'll look back and see what a hoax this was."

Gray directs me to a 1975 Newsweek article that whipped up a different fear: a coming ice age.

"Climatologists," reads the piece, "are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change. ... The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality."

Bill Gray is not the only Denver-area scientist to be skeptical. Roger Pielke Sr. at the University of Colorado also has serious doubts about the science.

Pielke contends there isn't enough intellectual diversity in the debate. He claims a few vocal individuals are quoted "over and over" again, when in fact there are a variety of opinions.

I ask him: How do we fix the public perception that the debate is over?

"Quite frankly," says Pielke, who runs the Climate Science Weblog (climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu), "I think the media is in the ideal position to do that. If the media honestly presented the views out there, which they rarely do, things would change. There aren't just two sides here. There are a range of opinions on this issue. A lot of scientists out there that are very capable of presenting other views are not being heard."

Dr. Pielke seems to be unwittingly accusing the Mainstream Media of not presenting both sides. Okay, he is not unknowingly doing so. He is flat out and in a low key manner befitting REAL SCIENTISTS refuting the CW pervading the left-tilting MSM.
Bill Gray adds on a few observations:

"Let's just say a crowd of baby boomers and yuppies have hijacked this thing," Gray says. "It's about politics. Very few people have experience with some real data. I think that there is so much general lack of knowledge on this. I've been at this over 50 years down in the trenches working, thinking and teaching."

Gray acknowledges that we've had some warming the past 30 years. "I don't question that," he explains. "And humans might have caused a very slight amount of this warming. Very slight. But this warming trend is not going to keep on going. My belief is that three, four years from now, the globe will start to cool again, as it did from the middle '40s to the middle '70s."

Like a real scientist [not Al Gore] would acknowledge, there just is not enough evidence to make definitive conclusions, like propaganda blessed by Hollyweird and East Coast Chattering Class know-it-alls come to without any background in the field.

Both Gray and Pielke say there are many younger scientists who voice their concerns about global warming hysteria privately but would never jeopardize their careers by speaking up.

"Plenty of young people tell me they don't believe it," he says. "But they won't touch this at all. If they're smart, they'll say: 'I'm going to let this run its course.' It's a sort of mild McCarthyism. I just believe in telling the truth the best I can. I was brought up that way."

Not like phony fashionable Left Coasters and their snobbish counterparts on the East Coast. Both are new versions of Joe McCarthy on the right was fifty years ago. Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss.....

Global Warming Hysteria "Mild McCarthyism"

Colorado State University's Bill Gray is one of the world's foremost hurricane experts. Read some of his comments below on the current hyperventilation going on about Al Gore and the world's climate. Bear in mind that Bill Gray is a world-renowned expert on meteorology and climate matters:

"They've been brainwashing us for 20 years," Gray says. "Starting with the nuclear winter and now with the global warming. This scare will also run its course. In 15-20 years, we'll look back and see what a hoax this was."

Gray directs me to a 1975 Newsweek article that whipped up a different fear: a coming ice age.

"Climatologists," reads the piece, "are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change. ... The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality."

Bill Gray is not the only Denver-area scientist to be skeptical. Roger Pielke Sr. at the University of Colorado also has serious doubts about the science.

Pielke contends there isn't enough intellectual diversity in the debate. He claims a few vocal individuals are quoted "over and over" again, when in fact there are a variety of opinions.

I ask him: How do we fix the public perception that the debate is over?

"Quite frankly," says Pielke, who runs the Climate Science Weblog (climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu), "I think the media is in the ideal position to do that. If the media honestly presented the views out there, which they rarely do, things would change. There aren't just two sides here. There are a range of opinions on this issue. A lot of scientists out there that are very capable of presenting other views are not being heard."

Dr. Pielke seems to be unwittingly accusing the Mainstream Media of not presenting both sides. Okay, he is not unknowingly doing so. He is flat out and in a low key manner befitting REAL SCIENTISTS refuting the CW pervading the left-tilting MSM.
Bill Gray adds on a few observations:

"Let's just say a crowd of baby boomers and yuppies have hijacked this thing," Gray says. "It's about politics. Very few people have experience with some real data. I think that there is so much general lack of knowledge on this. I've been at this over 50 years down in the trenches working, thinking and teaching."

Gray acknowledges that we've had some warming the past 30 years. "I don't question that," he explains. "And humans might have caused a very slight amount of this warming. Very slight. But this warming trend is not going to keep on going. My belief is that three, four years from now, the globe will start to cool again, as it did from the middle '40s to the middle '70s."

Like a real scientist [not Al Gore] would acknowledge, there just is not enough evidence to make definitive conclusions, like propaganda blessed by Hollyweird and East Coast Chattering Class know-it-alls come to without any background in the field.

Both Gray and Pielke say there are many younger scientists who voice their concerns about global warming hysteria privately but would never jeopardize their careers by speaking up.

"Plenty of young people tell me they don't believe it," he says. "But they won't touch this at all. If they're smart, they'll say: 'I'm going to let this run its course.' It's a sort of mild McCarthyism. I just believe in telling the truth the best I can. I was brought up that way."

Not like phony fashionable Left Coasters and their snobbish counterparts on the East Coast. Both are new versions of Joe McCarthy on the right was fifty years ago. Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss.....

Palestinian PM Abbas Rolls the Dice

The circular double-helix of complexities vexing the Palestinians may only be stopped if some sort of Gordian knot is severed. Prime Minister Abbas called for a Referendum on implied recognition of Israel last week, in an effort to get the hydra-headed Hamas off its stuck-on-stupid policy of non-recognition. As the Economist points out concerning the referendum document crafted by Palestinian leaders in Israeli jails:

Most Palestinians, polls suggest, would support the idea. Hamas would then be jammed between its refusal so far to recognise Israel, which has led to an international embargo of the PA, and the will of the people who elected it in January.

The "prisoners' document" is signed by senior figures from Hamas, Fatah (Mr Abbas's party) and three other groups. It talks of a Palestinian state on the land Israel occupied in 1967 and of including Hamas in the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), the umbrella body that includes the PA and which officially recognises Israel. By accepting, Hamas could make a concession to the world that its voters might not see as too much of a sell-out.

Yes, that would be smart, but Hamas is in far too complicated a situation to just go ahead and do the right thing.

Mr Abbas's ultimatum takes the fight back off the streets and into the political arena. It puts Hamas in a bind, and exposes differences among its multi-headed leadership—the prisoners who signed the proposal, the bosses in Damascus who look dead against it, and the government in the West Bank and Gaza, which seems torn. Hamas members have been publicly trying out various arguments against the referendum: it is legally dubious; it is expensive when the PA cannot even pay salaries; it is irrelevant because it hardly differs from Hamas's stance, or because the election was just a few months ago, or because Israel, though busy planning a unilateral withdrawal from much of the West Bank, has no intention of retreating all the way to the pre-1967 borders anyway. So far, none has really stuck. If the referendum happens and the Palestinians say yes, Mr Abbas will look much stronger.

However, his move is also very risky. Hamas can argue that even if it accepts the prisoners' proposal, that will still fall short of the world's three conditions for ending the PA embargo—that Hamas recognise Israel unconditionally, renounce violence and honour the PA's agreements with Israel—and so will achieve nothing, unless there is a reward on offer for going only part of the way, which there is not. On top of that, Mr Abbas risks looking to Palestinians like the stooge of a hostile Israel and the West, as he often has in the past. It will take some clever juggling of Palestinian public opinion and the forces within Fatah and Hamas for him to pull this one off.

But Abbas does have world opinion on his side, and I suspect some sort of Israeli support that dare not show itself just yet. Hamas did not really want to win these elections, but now that it has a legislature, it should cooperate with the executive.

Northern Part of Ireland Looks South

The institutionalized political insanity of Northern Ireland has an economic subtext. There is a cockamamie situation where in the North lies 25% unemployment and the public sector produces 61% of the province's output---due to the mindless 30% corporate taxes, no company wants to situate in the North.

Meanwhile, as the Economist points out in a free article online, Eire in the south is importing tens of thousands of workers from Eastern Europe to feed its booming economy, growing at a rate of 5% compared to 2% in the mixed-economy of Belfast and environs. The sad facts derive from the umbilical cord to a stagnating British economy:

If the region's politicians seem largely oblivious to the parlous state of the economy, businessmen and Peter Hain, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland at Westminster, are not. "Do we have a sustainable, self-supporting economy? No we don't," says Frank Cushnahan, the chairman of the Belfast Harbour Commissioners. Northern Ireland's GDP grew by 2% last year, faster than the United Kingdom's 1.8%. Its economy nonetheless suffers, says Philip McDonagh, an economist at accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers, from “potentially fatal underlying structural weaknesses”.

A sprawling state sector employs one in three people, thanks to the subsidies that kept the economy ticking over during three decades of conflict. About £5 billion more is spent in Northern Ireland each year than is raised there—almost £3,000 for each of its 1.7m inhabitants. Those figures are unsustainable, says Mr Hain, who is trying to cut costs and reduce the number of people employed by the state. For now, however, the public sector accounts for 61% of Ulster's output, compared with 42% in the United Kingdom as a whole.

Such assistance may once have kept a lid on social discontent but latterly it has crowded out private enterprise. Only 65 private-sector firms employ more than 500 people, and half of the region's exports are produced by just ten firms. Much traditional employment was in heavy industries which are now in decline throughout Europe. But problems go deeper than that. Northern Ireland's electricity grid is small and virtually cut off from Ireland's, so consumers pay the highest electricity prices in the United Kingdom—and more than their neighbours to the south. Its banks charge higher fees and pay lower interest to customers than they would if it had a genuinely competitive market for financial services, according to the Competition Commission in London.

Now that it is the south with the economic clout---Ireland's per capita income is second in the Euro area to Luxembourg---looking to invest in the North.
Catholic businessmen are making huge strides north of the border as the population from which they spring becomes more numerous and more prosperous. It should be no surprise that Northern Ireland's business community, who once thought its interests lay in throwing in its lot—economically as well as politically—with Britain, is looking increasingly to the south. Ireland's economy grew by an average of 9.5% a year between 1995 and 2000 and it still outstrips Northern Ireland and Britain (see chart). “Money talks,” says John FitzGerald, an architect working on the Titanic Quarter. “It pushes aside all sorts of territorial issues that get in its way.”

Mr Hain, who is pressing for closer de facto co-operation between the island's two economies, argues that the south lacks workers and particular skills that the north could supply. He has a point. A quarter of Northern Ireland's working-age population sits idle, yet Ireland's tight labour market is sucking in workers from eastern Europe and beyond. Mr Hain also reckons that Northern Ireland would receive more inward investment if it worked more closely with the south.

Yes, it would make sense if the two economies moved closer to each other, but antediluvian relics on both sides of the Irish Sea---fossilman Paisley in the North and socialist-wannabe fossil Gordon Brown in the UK---give the absurdities of Ireland's past sustained life because of their separate agendas:

This week, plans were announced to build a £120m electricity connection linking the island's two grids as a step towards creating a single market. And earlier this year mobile-phone companies stopped charging international fees for calls across the border. It would be easier to compete, Northern Ireland's businessmen argue, if their corporate taxes were cut from Britain's 30% to something nearer Ireland's 12.5%. Gordon Brown, Britain's chancellor of the exchequer, is unlikely to give them the time of day but the demand heralds growing pressure for convergence.

But that is a dangerous word to use in a country where every public utterance is scrutinised for signs that Northern Ireland is being nudged down the slippery slope towards political unification. "I wouldn't even use the term economic integration," advises a Belfast businessman. "Just say that people want to exploit the benefits of an all-island economy."

Ireland should take steps to accelerate some sort of economic progress toward alleviating the chronic economic problems of the North, if only to allow its Catholic co-religionists privileged entry. Better fellow Irishmen than Eastern Europeans, or am I missing something?

Economist Lex Article on US Culture Wars

While the article in the Economist concerning the pitfalls of a gay marriage prohibition amendment ignores a key point, the point about undermining federalism has merit.

Of course, Frist and the Republican right are trying to mobilize and activate their base, which is the point ignored by the Economist. The Republicans are hardly more loosey-goosey than Democrats when it comes to betraying their underlying platforms [as any glance at the GWB budget deficit demonstrates]. But a motion for an anti-gay amendment is not going to go far, as the article shows. Then the editorial goes on to make a more salient point:

Overreach is also foolish because it exposes conservatives as fair-weather federalists. The strongest conservative argument against abortion is that the Supreme Court overstepped the mark by imposing a single solution on a diverse country; but since then the Republicans have used their temporary dominance in Washington to trample on states' rights.

Such overbearing behaviour is not a monopoly of the right. The American left has long imposed its values on a divided country through the courts—from the abolition of school prayer to civil rights for blacks to the legalisation of abortion. And many gay activists regard themselves as exactly like blacks—oppressed citizens who are being denied their full constitutional rights because of social prejudice. One Californian same-sex couple has a marriage-rights case pending before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. In May 2005 a federal court in Nebraska overturned the state's constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, an amendment that passed with more than 70% of the vote.

Leave judges out of it
The strategy of using federal courts is a disaster in the making—a guarantee that America will be divided over gay marriage just as deeply as it is over abortion. Some gay activists argue that the best way to get around this problem is to focus on state courts, introducing gay marriage in liberal states like Massachusetts and avoiding conservative ones. But an even better way is to focus on legislatures. The best model for gay-rights activists should be California, where both houses approved a gay-rights bill without pressure from the courts, rather than Massachusetts, where marriage rights were conjured up by a handful of judges. Activists may complain that the legislative road is strewn with landmines: Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the California law. But surely these mines are less lethal than those on the judicial road, as supporters of abortion rights have discovered. Activists may also complain that majorities of people are against marriage rights. But opinion is moving in their direction: the proportion of people who support gay marriage has risen by 12 points to 39% since 1996, according to Gallup.

Judicial activism as practiced by Massachusetts and the Bolshevik 9th Circuit in San Francisco should be curtailed, that is the one certainty in the political minefields across the country. But the fact is that hypothetically, if I am correct, even in the long-shot event of a Gay-Marriage Prohibition Amendment, the SCOTUS could overrulle it as unconstitutional. [Not that that would occur with the Roberts court now that Alito is on board.]

In that case, Andrew Jackson might resurrect himself, as when he overruled Marshall "The Court has made its decision, now let it enforce it."

Canadian PM Harper Sees Press Corps Walkout

Luckily, it is a rare occasion when a Canadian Primier's press conference unearths any real news, largely because of the largely left tilt of the national media, which no longer reflects political reality at the top.

So the Press Corps in Ottawa is in a snit about ground rules with Stephen Harper and walked out today, which was covered on American cable just as a 10-second tape without much explanation. I guess by that standard, Helen Thomas and Gregory and the other WH newsies are paragons of decorum in comparison.

But remember that Canada does not have a First Amendment, so as Stephan Taylor's blog describes, a liberal Canadian pol named Volpe just shut down a satirical website he didn't like.

I guess in Canada, these things aren't that important if it is a Liberal pol being covered by the liberal press. The very liberal Toronto Globe and Mail barely stifles a yawn as it comments on what would be a five-alarm fire in the American media---unless, again, it was a Republican website shut down by a Dem, but then it would still set off alarm bells and a federal case would be made of a Freedom of Speech issue.

Thank goodness the Canadians are beginning to awaken, but they are still a very sleepy complacent smug little backwater with a condescending attitude towards world affairs---as practiced by their neighbor to the south which protects them with its armed forces, enabling them to pay almost nothing for defense.

Stossel and the Libertarian Ethos

John Stossel's new book Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out The Shovel, Everything You Know is Wrong is being touted as I type here on CSPAN2.

Stossel's take on the overwhelming failure of America's public school system, especially the primary and secondary schools, is instructive. His ABC-TV comparison between NYC's public and Catholic school system is crushing. NYC spends $13,000 per student in its public primary and secondary schools, versus $5000 for private Catholic schools, supported by taxpayers who pay extra money just to avoid the public schools their taxes subsidize. The graduation rate for the Catholic schools is 98%, for the public schools 49%. The NYC example matches roughly what takes place in DC, where parents compete to pay for a Catholic education their kids could get free in the crime-ridden public schools.

Much of this is due to public teacher's unions such as NEA and AFTA, parasitic entities which dumb down students, avoid accountability, and function as a monopoly where incompetents [apologies to the many hard-working union members, but your unions are DESTROYING America's public education] continue to motor on punching the time clock with no possibility of removal---tenure for illiterates, in some cases. [The feckless NEA and AFTA picketed Stossel in NYC and challenged him to teach a week in one of their schools. Stossel accepted the dare.]

The public school teachers do make the point that they cannot throw the kids out of school and therefore there is a lower graduation rate. This absurdity apparently passes for reasoning by the NYC public teacher corps. Stossel, however, agrees that the fact that Catholic school teachers can discipline and eject fractious or criminal students actually makes the student body more studious, well-behaved and boosts attendance.

But the worst part of the public school catastrophe afflicting the nation is the inverted pyramid of bureaucrats perched on top of relatively competent teachers. The Seattle School System actually has an incompetent barely literate Doctor of Psychology [I guess literacy is no longer a requirement for a psych PhD in many programs] named Caprice Hollins, whom I blogged about earlier today. This functionary put out a memo concerning rules about Cultural Racism that called planning for the future and mentioning words like flesh or nude "racist." I lost the link, but it's George Orwell's Animal Farm come true.

Stossel is worth a read and I'm going to buy his book, even if occasionally he says
"The War on Drugs is far more harmful than the drugs," which is an exaggeration even if it contains a germ of truth.

Washington Post Applauds Bush on Latin America

As one of the bulwarks of the left side of the MSM, the Washington Post editorial page is not studded with frequent encomiums of GWB's foreign policy. However, GWB now has an opponent who makes him look as smart as dBill Clinton by comparison. Who else but Venezuela's oafish lout of an elected caudillo, Hugo Chavez.

Even in Mexico and Brazil, where politics tilts left as naturally as the Leaning Tower in Pisa, leftish leaders and lefty candidates are beginning to distance themselves from the over-eager, clumsy, rude and stupid wannabe regional hegemon Hugo. Even Daniel Ortega is having second thoughts in his quest for elected office in Nicaragua. But here are the WaPo judgments on Fidel Castro's pet monkey:

Mr. Chavez is the object of a growing backlash from leaders around Latin America -- from Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Mexico and Nicaragua, among other countries. In part, the politicians are responding to foolish overreaching by Mr. Chavez, who has been busy trying to turn Bolivia into a satellite state while suggesting he has similar plans for much of the rest of the continent. Latin Americans don't like imperialism, whether it comes from Washington or Caracas. And even leftist leaders, like those who rule in Brazil and elsewhere in South America, find it hard to imagine themselves prospering in a Venezuela-led economic bloc that includes Cuba but shuns the United States.

The other reason Latins have found their anti-Chavez tongues is delightfully pragmatic: It's a proven vote-getter. Elections are taking place or are on the way in a host of Central and South American countries -- and politicians in most of them are finding that linking their opponents to Venezuela's demagogue works wonders. The biggest beneficiary may be Peru's Alan Garcia, who is the front-runner in Sunday's presidential election runoff. Mr. Garcia is himself a leftist populist who two decades ago presided over one of the most disastrously incompetent governments in Peruvian history. But his opponent, a former military coup-plotter named Ollanta Humala, has been endorsed by Mr. Chavez, and Mr. Garcia has focused his campaign on that point, saying only he can prevent Peru from becoming "a colony of Venezuela." It's a logical strategy: Mr. Chavez's approval rating in Peru is 17%.

Granted that a buffoon like Chavez makes a great side-by-side comparison stooge, but the Washington Post does give Condoleeza Rice's State Dept. scant credit even though she has been very effective in modulating US policy vis-a-vis troublemakers like Venezuela and Iran:

The Bush administration, which has haplessly allowed Mr. Chavez to exploit the U.S. president as a political foil for years, has hit on just the right response as it has watched Peruvians and Mexicans turn the tables on the Venezuelan: It has kept quiet. The sight of Latin Americans rising up in defense of democratic values, and against the attempt of a would-be regional hegemonist to subvert them, is inspiring -- and it requires nothing from Washington save discreet applause.

Bravo, GWB & Condi! That editorial may even make the talking-head shows Sunday morning!

Chavez and David Horowitz

Over the last few hours I have seen two different ends of the political spectrum on C-Span2 watching Hugo Chavez address the Opec delegations in the OPEC meeting on the left, and David Horowitz address a hostile audience at Duke University on the right.

The Chavez speech was completely disorganized and sophomoric, and frequent pans across his listening audience displayed total boredom and indifference until he starting raving about the US and called for cutting production to raise prices to punish the United States. The audience reaction: smirks of contempt,

The Horowitz talk was greeted with catcalls and jeers by a claque in the auditorium. Unfortunately David is not good at under-the-gun situations. Whereas Christopher Hitchens would demolish his opponents [as he did to George Galloway in the Arsenal in NYC some months back] because of the Oxford tradition of training in political debate, Horowitz appeared in low dudgeon and disconcerted at the hostility. His points were delivered in a staccato manner when he did not seem thrown off his game, which is when he began to stammer a bit and occasionally search for the right word or the name of an author or professor.

Chavez's brand of populism is patently ridiculous when translated to the international arena---and Bolivian doctors are protesting and are on strike because of the Cuban doctors foisted on Morales by Fidel Castro through Venezuelan funding. Alan Garcia in Peru has called the nutty colonel Chavez a "meddling midget" because of the open support Hugo is giving Humala, Garcia's opponent, who in turn asked Chavez to allow him to run his own campaign against Garcia. I doubt if Chavez is smart enough to catch the hint of sarcasm.

Horowitz has a terrific writing style derived from his student days at Columbia. But even though his arguments against entrenched faculties of Black Studies, Feminist Studies, and other fake scholarly rackets are very on point, his saeva indignatio does occasionally intrude on the very rational point of view he is presenting. Too many you knows, uhs, and other lapses in his attention span.

He makes very good polemical arguments, but his anger keeps popping up. He did demolish a hostile questioner who dislikes Ann Coulter by noting that she is a "great satirist," a riposte that got a lot of applause.

But his book on 101 Professors who are totally off-base hits home, and his remarks that there are 50,000 professors dedicated to getting on search committees to further alienate the academy from any pretense to scholarship and turn whole departments into propaganda agencies.

Canada's Slow Awakening

The Toronto Star has an extensive story on the amazing Canadian Security Intell Service [CSIS] coup in arresting around 20 Muslim Islamic extremists.

The Muslim nasties have been tracked since 2004 by CSIS discovering their subversive terrorist plans online and then cracking their encrypted messages. Before the arrests, the terrorists had bought THREE TONS of ammonium nitrate, 3X as much as Oklahoma City, and, it appears, were preparing to blow up either CSIS Toronto HQ or the Ottawa govt. complexes.

So in a sense, Canada has elected a Conservative government and discovered it must defend itself from home-grown toxic waste almost simultaneously!

What a coincidence!

I wonder what the feckless patty-cake Liberal Govt. would have done? And maybe Canada might pull its pants back up and un-assume the position by actually doing a little bit towards spending for its own defense? What a thought!

It's hard for nanny-staters to put their minds around the concept of evil, since the multicultural moral relativism of forebearance and submission to alien doctrines has been drummed into Canadian heads for so long.

But soft, effete, feminized countries face contempt from aggressively masculine subcultures like Islam, who regard tolerance as intolerable. So Holland and France and Spain might have to inject a little more testoserone into their national psyches, unless of course the spirochetes of dissolution and decay have rotted their insides out. And Britain must remain on guard against its own traditions of tolerant political discourse. It seems political discourse is not an Islamic tradition.

Clueless in Seattle: Cultural Racism Defined

The Seattle Public School District put out a mind-boggling definition of "cultural racism" seeking to promote a multicultural agenda. Yes, this effort was engendered by an aptly-named political commissar named Caprice Hollins, Psy D.[sic] who is Director of "Equity and Race Relations" of the Seattle School System.

Cultural Racism:

Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as "other", different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers.

Ace Schoolteacher Betsy Newmark has the appropriate reaction:

See, only white people can be racist so every definition centers around them.

What is having a "future time orientation?" Is that implying that only white people plan ahead, meet deadlines, save for retirement? The mind boggles.

And why is individualism racist? Why do we need a "more collective ideology?" Do they know anything about American history? Or is that too racist for them? Do they have any idea of the ideals on which this country was founded? Or would that be racist because those were white men? Collective ideology is not the foundation of our country.

And why is English no longer have a standard form? Can you imagine what this means for their curriculum in English in Seattle? Can teachers correct students' grammar anymore? Are spelling rules just a construct of the white overclass?

One of Caprice's sentences may demonstrate why she is dead-set against grammar:

It is our hope that we can explore the work of leading scholars in the areas of race and social justice issues to help us understand the dynamics and realities of how racism permeate [sic] throughout our society and use their knowledge to help us create meaningful change.

Orwell said somewhere that the rapidly-advancing decadence of our age derives from the debasement of language. If you link to Betsy and the other commentators, such as Volokh, we have more than debasement of language to worry about.

Trackback: http://haloscan.com/tb/betsynewmark/114916087991529338

Billy Jeff Clinton Don't Like Crony Capitalism---Tell it to Burkle!

There has got to be a significant difference between a "bachelor buddy" getting all sorts of favorable tidbits [like $500 million from CALIFORS to invest] as Ron Burkle did from the Cal Pension authority, a Dem Party sluice chute for its own slush fund referrals, and "cronies" who make money the old-fashioned way, called the marketplace.

Of course, the Dems disdain "markets" and the marketplace because they have so many monster scams like Fannie Mae, the public sector pension funds of California, Target, and probably other "lock-boxes" for their own agendas. And the California legislature genuflects when Billy Jeff raises his hand in benediction. Plus their whacko-plutocrat-wannabe constituency on the coasts still pine for a socialist 'worker's paradise' that the perfessers taught them in the days before a nanny-state began to supplant atheistic communism. They're still materialists, but now they want the world Oprahfied, not socialized.

So strap on your pacemaker when you read about the only guy up there with GWB in the "worst president since World War II" contest run by Quinnipiac the other day, the ineffable and insufferable narcissist nicknamed "Forty Two" by the present inhabitants of the WH, inveighing loud and long about them "crony capitalists."

Billy Jeff Clinton has a far better idea. Just get "Government Sponsored Enterprises" like the trillion-dollar scam Fannie Mae, whose monster kickbacks and "bonuses" have yet to get the MSM excited. Now if there were only an angle to get the MSM make Fannie Mae look like it was Bush's fault.

That's the ticket!

The Sky is Falling, Literally, or Fell Once Upon a Time!

Well, Al Gore keeps saying that the sky is causing the earth to warm up and he has historical precedents of all kinds to point to, although they are way far back in time. We are all now more or less familiar with the iridium layer between the Cretaceous and the Eocene which was caused by a 6-mile wide asteroid that hit the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago. Now comes more and bigger precedents.

The Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction 251 million years ago dwarfed the Cretaceous die-off of the dinosaurs in duration and extent, as far as paleontologists can gather that far back. Back in the days when I would read Scientific American in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, I recall reading the mystery surrounding the fact that a species of giant land animal that was warm-blooded and superior in bone structure [diapcids?}to the dinosaurs had preceded the dinosaurs, but died out long before the thunder-lizards appeared on the scene.

Now it appears that a 30-mile wide asteroid that caused a gigantic crater hidden under the ice in Antarctica might have been the culprit causing the Permian die-off.

Yahoo's link above has a link to Space.com detailing the scientific knowledge of the Permian-Triassic border event 250 million years ago. Back then, a huge crater in western Australia was suspected to be the event horizon [or whatever they call the spot in the middle of the bullseye] for the more ancient extinction. South African scientists have been onto the story for a decade-plus.

Of course, unlike Gore's Apocalypse Now Redux movie-of-the-week, real science and real scientists don't follow Box Office or Voting Booths to ascertain the real condition of our planet's previous [and present] ecosystem.

For the latest info from that side of the pop-scifi pseudo-politics, just dial up your lefty bloggers and get the crystal meth view of political "science." The sky did fall twice, or at least huge space chunks destroyed the vast majority of life forms twice in earth's history.

Vote Democrat so it won't happen again!

Fifty More Conservative Rock Songs

Jon Swift lets me know [on my website]that he has fifty more conservative pop/rock/rap songs that promote traditional values---kinda!

I remember reading somewhere that the Nazi propaganda preached that all music had to be in major chords/keys and that the slower the pace, the better. They even had some sort of metronome test to assure that a pop tune did not overstimulate their youth, who were drenched in Wagnerian Sturm und Drang on every possible occasion. So these American "conservative" tunes are nowhere near the ultra-right criteria of political Goebbels. Or whatever. Love Pete Townshend's Gibson Stratocaster riffs and Lynard Skynard's Sweet Home Alabama, no matter how un-German the beat and tempo may be.

And what about Eric Satie, and other eccentric musicians.

Actually, counting "Desperado," that would make 101 songs on the right side of the aisle---and 101 reminds me of Chicago's famous song, which could bump the total to 102.

Angry Left Unhinged by LGF? Why?

Ace of Spades has a very succinct well-written rundown of the reason humor and irony seem to be absent on lefty blogs. Lack of emotional distance from the subject.

And why Jeff Goldstein, Israel, Michael Steele, and Thomas Sowell are viscerally reviled with obscene projectile spewing----they don't follow the leftist narrative taught to aspiring revolting revolutionaries by their Marxist mentors holding tenured positions in tax-exempt and often tax-supported higher ed institutions. Or as Goldstein, a professor of semiotic horse manure puts it:

I’d simply add that I think one of the prime reasons the Western left, for all its purported "progressivism," is so concerned with punishing Israel is that Israel, like, say, Michael Steele or Thomas Sowell, has wandered off the progressive plantation and rejected the narrative assigned it by those who presume to speak for a larger identity agenda. Which is to say, kibbutz culture has given way, over the years, to a strong capitalist system—and so Israel is considered by many on the left to be a traitor to the cause of worldwide socialism, just as surely as Steele and Sowell (among others) are considered race traitors for rejecting the political narrative assigned them by those who have assumed the mantle of "authentic" blacks.

Yep, the Orwellian funhouse mirror on the left makes phony freaks like Jesse J and Al [Tawana Man] Sharpton "authentic" and Booker T. Washington "pull yourself up by your bootstraps and don't whine all the time" blacks "inauthentic." It should be a joke, but sadly it is true. Ace of Spades takes up the narrative of Progressive ego-inflation:

On the other hand, there's Jeff Goldstein. He's a college professor. He's even in a field they respect as being particularly intellectual-- literary criticism, semitiocs. You know-- bullshit. (Sorry, Jeff.) So he represents to them a threat that I'm not, wish though I do that I were. He's a member in good standing of the intellectual class and has an official credential to prove it. Something that, for example, Jane Hamsher does not. (Unless serving as a producer on such movies as Natural Born Killers and, um, Double Dragon is considered to be a credential of intellectualism.)

He believes almost nothing that they do and in most of the things they don't. And, unlike them, his status as intellectual is founded upon something more tangible and indisputable than a mere belief that Al Gore is the currently elected President of the United States.

Ergo, a direct threat not so much to their politics -- they get that from all over the blogosphere -- but to their egos. And that is an insult they simply cannot let stand.

He should agree with them. He should be a pious member of their church. But he strayed; he is Heretic. His very existence is anathema.

It's about identity politics, of course. They say that in the progressive mode of thought, "victim" is the most holy identity of all. But that's not quite right. He holiest status among progressives is their own status -- the status of Redeemer, the Hero who Saves the Victim, who liberates the enslaved. Not through actual action, of course, but through the sheer power of caring. By their lofty rhetoric shall we know them.

Moreover, Jeff Goldstein actually reads their claptrap hooey-filled regurgitations of whack-job Froggy interpretations of Nietzschean nihilism. Then he expertly DECONSTRUCTS these tropes with tools of analysis employing the very same methods invented to deconstruct American power. Ace finishes them off by showing Jeff is better at their game than they are!

When progressives talk about the oppressed, those who died in Katrina, have no doubt-- they're mostly talking about themselves. They are the ones who are concerned, who worry for the fate of this Republic. To borrow Goldstein's schtick-- the text of their expressions of outrage and compassion is merely a complex system of signifiers for the true authorial intent, the subtext, or maybe even the supertext, that they are among the chosen.

Bush lied, people died. Message: I care.

Is all of this overstated? Generalizing? I suppose so. But I do think this is primarily what fills the left with such emotion over so many issues. Emotion is a response to a stimulus that affects one personally. Not abstractedly, or intellectually, or theoretically, or even politically.

And looking at the unhinged rantings of the left-wing of the blogosphere, and left-wing poltiicians and pundits, I simply cannot accept that all we're talking about is politics here. I got physically angry when psychopathic death-cultists killed 2700 of my fellow Americans just 100 or so blocks south of my home. Jane Hamsher and Kos seem to get physically angry about-- well, what don't they become angry about? Why is humor and irony so common on the right and so hard to find on the left? Humor and irony require emotional distance from a subject-- something I would contend the left is in of rather short supply.

As they say-- the politics is personal. And they're quite right, though perhaps in not the way they think.

Edward Said began this current obsession with his literary-based critique of western imperialism in 19th century lit [Said was a professor at Columbia in lit and also wrote about music] which he transposed to the Middle East. In Said's demonology, Israel's role in the 20th century mirrors Europe's colonial imperialism in the previous centuries. And the Palestinians play the role of victim of Israel and its guilt-tripped western supporters---Palestinians are the passive recipients of crimes concocted on another continent. Much of the current lefty blah-blah about Iraq is derived from Said's narrative matrix. Pat Santy has a comment in Dr. Sanity:

The truth is that reality itself -- when it is imperfect and/or doesn't conform to their preconceived ideas -- is a slap in the face to this crowd. How dare Jeff Goldstein, a university professor who should know better, think differently from us? How dare bad things happen in a war? How dare the military, including every single individual within it, not be perfect like us?

In fact, (if I may digress from their hatred of Jeff, who doesn't conform to their positive stereotype of the intellectual; to the US servicemen and women who do conform to their negative stereotype of the "warmonger") they long ago dismissed the military and anyone in it as semi-literate, oafish, tools of oppression; whose only purpose is to kill innocents and advance the evil objectives of America (particularly when a Republican is President). Military action is never good enough, fast enough, tidy enough, perfect enough for them.

They are so threatened on such a fundamental level at the idea that the US military could still be a force for good--despite incidents like Abu Ghraib or even Haditha (and we still do not know all the facts about the latter, but justice will be done)--that their reactions to any problem are overblown, histrionic, and completely irrational

You don't have to have a PhD like Pat does to agree. Done With Mirrors notes:

Intellectuals, professional intellectuals, are supposed to be progressives. The only other blog personality I can think of on the right who regularly gets bathes in leftist vitriol the way Goldstein does is Michelle Malkin -- an Asian-American woman. She's supposed to think of herself as a victim of America's racism and fascism. She doesn't; another one who slipped the plantation.

Yes, Hewitt and Reynolds fit their preconceptions. The fact that Goldstein and Malkin do not is a slap in their heavily cosmeticized faces, and puts the lie to their identity politics.

"Dotty" Dotty of CBS's Presidium On the Couch

I guess it wasn't enough yesterday for James Taranto to take aptly-named Dotty Lynch to the woodshed for her condescending remarks about how less heroic today's generation seems to be than her own, whom she apotheosisizes [sorry] as that immortal band of heroes that skedaddled to Canada or went underground to avoid military service around thirty years ago.

Taranto says that popular demand from readers requested a further deconstruction of this pretentious self-important personage who obviously adored[s] Andrew Heyward, the fired TV News Chief who was cashiered along with his agitprop-in-chief Gauleiter, Danny Boy Rather, when CBS News ratings kept tanking due to a combination of abhorrent ideological content and Rather's personal weirdness.

Taranto outlines the difference between the truly selfless abdication of white privilege which the American civil rights provoked and the very self-indulgent scurrying for the woodwork that Vietnam War protesters demonstrated by "speaking cowardice to power."

By contrast, expediency was sufficient to create a mass antiwar movement. Half-baked pacifistic and anti-American notions were all it took to make young people feel justified in acting on their own self-interest, and to bring about, in less than a decade, an end to the draft and an American retreat from Vietnam.

But this could not endure. With the threat of the draft gone, those who had opposed the war out of self-interest moved on and got about the business of living. That left only a tiny core of true believers, who exaggerate their own importance because so many of them hold important positions in elite institutions like the media and academia. They will likely go to their graves wondering when they'll get another Vietnam.

George Bernard Shaw said it ninety years ago: "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." [Major Barbara?]

The latest codicil for MSM mavens like dotty Dotty might be: "Those who can't do, and can't teach, propagandize."

Bad Bad GWB's Timeline of Infamy

After incessant requests for blogs negative about GWB, Aussie Tim Blair has a timeline of infamy that outlines each month/year of the Forty-Third President's current presidency. You just won't believe what a bad hombre George W. has been.

The Bulletin has all of the infamous incidents the American and British MSM have catalogued, including the terrible trick of bringing a plastic turkey to our troops in Iraq for a surprise Thanksgiving visit/dinner.

Here are the best excerpts from the official crazy-lefty presidential chronology, in which all assertions are false.

March 2003: After repeatedly linking Saddam Hussein to the September 11 attacks, Bush unilaterally invades Iraq. With support from British and Australian troops, among others, which is pretty sneaky for a unilateralist.

June 2003: According to trustworthy Palestinian sources, George W. Bush makes the following comments during a meeting with Palestinian Authority leaders: "God would tell me, 'George, go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me, 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq'. And I did. And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, 'Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East'. And, by God, I’m gonna do it." Finding this entirely believable, British papers The Guardian and The Independent run with the claim on their front pages.

December 2003: The Guardian’s Mark Lawson, The Sydney Morning Herald’s Alan Ramsey, and The Australian’s Phillip Adams reliably report that Bush turned up at a Thanksgiving dinner for troops in Baghdad with a turkey made of plastic. Incredibly, Bush survives the dinner without being beaten by hungry and insulted soldiers.

October 2004: Bush wears a listening device in his first debate with John Kerry so that he may parrot responses from puppet-master Karl Rove.

November 2004: After losing all three television debates to John Kerry during a campaign marked by incompetence and deceit, blundering neocon pawn and war criminal George W. Bush steals the election with help from rigged electronic voting machines and a compliant, toothless media.

December 2004: Bush-approved nuclear tests provoke an Indian Ocean tsunami that devastates South-East Asia. And then he offers only a stingy $US950m in aid.

August 2005: By neglecting to sign the Kyoto Protocol, Bush causes Hurricane Katrina. He compounds his crime by doing nothing while babies and the poor are tortured and killed in New Orleans' Superdome of Horror. His selection of New Orleans as the hurricane’s target is evidence of Bush’s lack of concern for black people.

May 2006: Enron executives – exemplars of the Bush Way – are found guilty of massive fraud, signalling the end of the Bush era. This is despite their crimes being committed during Clinton’s presidency, and the executives being arrested and tried during Bush’s presidency.

April 2077: Nathan Chirp, 92, whose early adulthood was defined by opposition to Bush’s reign, dies of brain failure. His last words: "I blame Bush."

I remember how the homeless appeared in massive numbers Jan.20th, 1981, and almost immediately, it was Ronald Reagan's fault.

And I remember the untimely early end of Reagan's presidency in 1986 when the Iran-Contra Scandal broke---Reagan loitered fruitlessly through the last two years of his tenure, stirring only to ENGINEER THE END OF THE SOVIET UNION'S SEVENTY YEARS of tyranny over Russia and numerous subject peoples and states.

When will it ever end?

Greatest Liberal Songs

Gagdad Bob Godwin over at One Cosmos has a great rundown of liberal rock songs from way-back-when Stalinists like Pete Seeger and Country Joe to the latest Canucklehead [hat tip to Bob] Neil Young exhalations!

The fifty-one posts are worth scrolling through just to get to Ted Nugent's rustic philosophy of bucolic bliss---or "what do the deer think when you come out with your bow and arrow?"

I'm putting Bob on my blogroll---those West Coasters aren't always Left Coasters.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old......

There is a fundamental lack of something essential that keeps liberals from being taken seriously---gravitas. How can you maintain a dialogue with people who don't believe in borders or legal constraints or the use of force or a number of things that most adults simply chalk up as having common sense?

It is clear from the James Taranto piece attached that sublunar tendencies abound on the Peter Pan wannabe fringe---those people who believe that growing up is a crime against nature and growing old must be avoided at all costs. Taranto has a long quote from the aptly-named CBS maven Dotty, who employs liberal mantra-word "passionate," but wisely eschews "feisty & vibrant," two other soft-lefty code words that what you are hearing/reading is pure unadulterated hooey.

Then Taranto quotes another empty-minded MSM leftist cant-machine, Pinch Sulzberger:

"we entered the real world committed to making it a better, safer, cleaner, more equal place. We were determined not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors. We had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government. Our children, we vowed, would never know that. So, well, sorry. It wasn't supposed to be this way."

Deconstruction of this self-referential autism by Taranto:

"This wonderfully encapsulates several elements of the liberal baby-boomer mindset. First, the self-congratulation: "My fellow students and I had just ended the war in Vietnam and ousted President Nixon." Even Sulzberger, however, is self-aware enough to present this with some irony: "OK, that's not quite true. . . . Maybe there were larger forces at play."

Then, the perversity of reveling in tragedy. To most Americans, the retreat from Vietnam and the resignation of Nixon were at best necessary evils; but to the liberal baby boomer they were, and at least to Sulzberger they remain, points of pride. The baleful consequences of Vietnam and Watergate--boat people, the Khmer Rouge's massacres, the presidency of Jimmy Carter, the impeachment of Bill Clinton--go unmentioned in Sulzberger's speech.

The liberal love of getting high on sniffing its own flatulence must have been derived from the French gene ["Nous nous felicitons...yadda, yadda"]prevalent in leftist cant. The Gotterdaemmerung streak perhaps from Nietzsche? Taranto concludes:

Baby-boomer liberalism, with its smug sense of moral superiority and its impatience with America's imperfections, is today the prevailing worldview among many of our elite institutions, not least the so-called mainstream media.

Actually, "impatience with America's imperfections" should be part of the Boy Scout oath or the Pledge of Allegiance---Apple pie ala mode sort of Americana-central material.

The dripping condescension and complete certainty that one knows better:
MAINSTREAM LIBERAL LEFT standard operational mode. Throw in a few vulgarities, scatological references. grammatical errors, and obscenities and you have a standard ultra-left blog!

French-style Crackdown

Back when I spent two years in Lyon as US Vice Consul in the early '70s, the Compagnie Republicaine de Securite, CRS for short, would roam the streets in Black Maria vans or Paddy Wagons to keep public order. Now the gendarmerie appears to be kept in vulnerable squad cars, much more dangerous than big vehicles.

True to fashion, the criminal-coddling New York Times buries the money quote that tells the subtext deep in its story about the Paris suburbs beginning to simmer early in the summer.

The police in the two towns northeast of Paris, Montfermeil and Clichy-sous-Bois, arrested 13 people, including Muhittin Altun, 18, the only survivor of the electrocution accident that set off the wave of violence last year. Two youths died in that incident.

About 15 youths attacked the police with rocks and other projectiles in a housing project in Clichy-sous-Bois about 9 p.m. Tuesday. The police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets, and arrested a number of the alleged assailants, including Mr. Altun, said a national police spokeswoman, who under police rules cannot be identified. The attackers also burned a number of vehicles and set fire to a police car in which four officers were sitting, the spokeswoman said. The officers escaped unharmed.

Then the NYT says the young Altun:

"was seen with a rock in hand, and he was seen by the police throwing this rock toward the police vehicle," said the judicial official, whose name may not be published under French court practices. Mr. Altun's lawyer told the French news network LCI that his client was not involved in the violence.

What did the rough/tough constabulary/judiciary do?

Mr. Altun was RELEASED [emphasis mine] Wednesday morning but faces charges of "taking part in a group armed with rocks" and "voluntary degradation of a police vehicle as part of a group," which could carry sentences of up to five years, said a spokesman for the court in Bobigny, near Clichy-sous-Bois.

Yep, that'll demonstrate just how tough the crackdown will be. Guess an overnight cooling-off will keep this fellow in line. The Gaullist hoods back in the heyday of Le Grand Charles may not have been subtle, but they were effective. In comparison, girlie-man Chirac makes George W. Bush look wildly popular and respected, but there is hope:

The tough law-and-order interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, visited a police station in nearby Gagny on Tuesday night, stressing the government's determination to curb more trouble.

"I will not allow more disorderliness — neither in Clichy-sous-Bois, nor in Montfermeil, nor anywhere else in the republic," Mr. Sarkozy told reporters.

However, the hand-picked successor to the Louis Quinze ["apres moi, le deluge"] Chirac, PM Dominique de Villepin, just does not have the political musculature.Looks like a real female, Socialist front-runner Segolene Royal, may replace those pair of effetes now at the top, the last paragraph may hint.

Much of the violence last year was in areas of high unemployment and poor housing, where youths of immigrant origin complain of discrimination. The center-right government has announced measures to alleviate the problems, but little has changed.

If elected, Sarkozy will predictably confront the problem, and the Socialists will predictably finesse it.

If the problem is not addressed, a Le Pen or quelq'un pareil will eventually benefit from the xenophobia that lurks beneath the surface of French public life.

Liberals' Dilemma

Kevin Drum writes about pro-war liberal Peter Beinart's new book and is a bit confounded. Beinart makes a cardinal point:

A November 2005 M.I.T. study...found that only 59 percent of Democrats — as opposed to 94 percent of Republicans — still approved of America's decision to invade Afghanistan. And only 57 percent of Democrats — as opposed to 95 percent of Republicans — supported using U.S. troops to "destroy a terrorist camp." George W. Bush, in other words, has used the war on terror to cover such a multitude of sins that for many liberals the whole idea of focusing the nation's energies on defeating global jihad (whether you call that effort the "war on terror" or something else) has fallen into disrepute. Just as Vietnam turned liberals against the cold war, Iraq has now turned them against the war on terror.

Which Drum notes would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater if true, though Drum believes this may be overstating the conondrum just a bit. But Drum goes on to demonstrate that he himself may be suffering a bit from Bush-Derangement-Syndrome, though not as badly as pickled-brain delirium-tremens specimens like Murtha. Drum questions Beinart's central thesis that:

we need to engage more energetically with the war on terror and criticize illiberal regimes more harshly.

Maybe so. But this is something that's nagged at me for some time. On the one hand, I think Beinart is exactly right. For example, should I be more vocal in denouncing Iran? Sure. It's a repressive, misogynistic, theocratic, terrorist-sponsoring state that stands for everything I stand against. Of course I should speak out against them.

And yet, I know perfectly well that criticism of Iran is not just criticism of Iran. Whether I want it to or not, it also provides support for the Bush administration's determined and deliberate effort to whip up enthusiasm for a military strike. Only a naif would view criticism of Iran in a vacuum, without also seeing the way it will be used by an administration that has demonstrated time and again that it can't be trusted to act wisely.

So what to do? For the most part, I end up saying very little. And Beinart is right: there's a sense in which that betrays my own liberal ideals. But he's also wrong, because like it or not, my words — and those of other liberals — would end up being used to advance George Bush's distinctly illiberal ends. And I'm simply not willing to be a pawn in the Bush administration's latest marketing campaign.

Here Drum is confused because he accepts the premise: "[the]Bush administration's determined and deliberate effort to whip up enthusiasm for a military strike" without giving credit that it might be a way to force concessions from Iran. Then Drum says "Only a naif would view criticism of Iran in a vacuum, without also seeing the way it will be used by an administration that has demonstrated time and again that it can't be trusted to act wisely." without realizing the naivete of his own words.

Doesn't the sentence above contain presuppositions which discount the administrations' successes and, because of the Iraqi debacle, consider the new Rice condominium all of a kind with the previous ascendancy of Rumsfeld/Cheney/Feith/Wolfowitz?

Doesn't Drum extend the administration's shortcomings over one segment of US foreign policy, albeit the defining one for his first term, across the board so that the liberal moral sense is blunted because of political outrage?

Drum has fallen into the trap of defining himself partly by the overwhelmingly hysterical tone of the "nutroots" on the left into an instinctive mistrust of EACH and EVERY Bush foreign policy demarche.

When the US faces a monstrous threat worldwide geographically and religiously, if not militarily, as extensive as the Cold War, should the liberals accuse a Republican administration of bad faith on EACH and EVERY policy they disagree with?

The liberals have more than a moral dilemma, they have a geopolitical problem with REALPOLITIK, and in demonstrating that they can be serious in projecting America's power without falling prey to populist outcries on the ultra-left.

Reid Demonstrates Two-Step Doesy-Doe on Ethics

Always hilarious to read Dem bloggers claim that it was okay for Reid to take thousand dollar ringside seats from a boxing commission he might have to vote on---and slam Repubs for making a big deal out of Dem corruption. At least McCain had the good sense to reimburse for his ticket, but Minority Leader Reid thought he was above such venal considerations, given his exalted national status.

The AP's John Solomon busts him again and describes his climbdown after making a complete fool of himself. He and Pelosi will make a terrific tag team---maybe wrestling befits them more than boxing! They could take instructions from ethically-challenged Dennis Hastert!

Here's a short description of this girlie-man's wriggling and squirming:

AP reported Monday that Reid accepted the free seats to three fights from the Nevada Athletic Commission as it was trying to influence his support for legislation to create a federal boxing commission. The state agency feared the legislation would usurp its authority to regulate fights and wanted to convince Reid there was no need for a federal body. Reid continued to support the federal body.

Reid told Las Vegas reporters on Tuesday he would continue to accept such tickets and did not believe he did anything wrong even though a fellow senator, John McCain, R-Ariz., who joined him for one of the fights, decided to reimburse $1,400 for his seat.

Reid said he believed it was appropriate to accept the free tickets because the gifts were from his home state and that McCain had to reimburse because he was from out of state.

Senate ethics rules generally allow senators to take gifts from any state, not just their home state. But they specifically warn against taking normally permissible gifts if the giver may be trying to influence official action.

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

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

Several ethics experts disagreed, criticizing Reid's justification during his Las Vegas news conference that he felt an "obligation" to take the tickets to ensure boxing was being conducted properly in his home state.

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

Fred Wertheimer, a longtime ethics watchdog, agreed.

"The test under congressional ethics rules in these circumstances is not what state a member is from but whether the gift creates the appearance that the gift is motivated by a desire to influence the member or gain favorable official action," said Wertheimer, president of the nonpartisan Democracy 21 ground that advocates campaign finance, ethics and lobbying reforms. "If the gift creates such an appearance, it should not be accepted."

Reid told AP the free tickets did not influence his position, noting he voted for the legislation when it passed the Senate.

Here is the punchline and why one should always read the fine print:

However, Reid had forced a change in the bill that let the federal commission regulate the TV networks when they promoted fights. After the change, the House never approved the legislation.

Much ado about not much, but appearances always matter, especially when one preaches about moral probity on the other side of the aisle.

US Public OVERWHELMINGLY Wants FBI to Investigate Congress

The way Jay Leno's jokes about Congressional "privileges" during his recent monologues should have been a clue. The audience laughed uproariously when he chided Congress for claiming to be "above the laws they inflict on the rest of the country.

Although smarmy professional Bush-bashers among the legal beagles like Jonathon Turley, the local mediot-whore at GW Law School, claim "separation of powers," that claim is risible, ridiculous, and outright scandalous when it intends to cover up criminal activity.

An ABC Poll just out has the American public opinion numbers thusly:

86 percent say the FBI should be allowed to search a Congress member's office if it has a warrant.

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

Bravo for the US I grew up in! As Congress tries to weaken the Executive through subpoena power and the Judiciary weakens both Congress and the Executive through arbitrary "constitutional" diktats, at least the public knows that federal powers are oozing back and forth all over the place.

Peggy Noonan has her usual rational take on the large and growing alienation, ala the French political elites, between the mandarinate in DC [Bush, McCain, Kennedy on immigration amnesty, e.g.] and the hard-working taxpayer who finance their frivolity. Latest polls, though often worded by the MSM to get the desired "centrist" result, show a large majority for a Fence like the one Israel has to keep out undesirables.

Anyhow, the comment on the poll by the ABC piece goes on:

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

Even given the gerrymandered lock-boxes that most CDistricts have become, this bodes ill for incumbents this Fall, and it looks like neither party has a monopoly on bad apples in this mudslinging contest [excuse metaphors].