Date ►►► November 5, 2005

Six Billion Chickens Come Home to Roost

Ingrid Newkirk, founder and president-for-life of PETA (People for Eating Tasty Animals the Ethical Treatment of Animals), is well known for saying that the massacre of six million Jews during the Holocaust is nothing compared to six billion chickens barbecued each summer.

But now, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) has extracted from an animal "rights" activist the obvious consequence of that sort of mentally unbalanced, misanthropic floccinaucinihilipilification: an explicit call to "assassinate" human beings in order to save "10 million non-human lives" from medical research.

From Robert Novac's column today (scroll to the bottom):

Sen. James Inhofe, chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, at an Oct. 26 hearing drew from an animal rights activist an admission that he advocated murder of medical researchers who performed experiments on animals.

Dr. Jerry Vlasak of North American Animal Liberation was quoted as saying at an animal rights convention: "I don't think you'd have to kill, assassinate too many. I think for five lives, 10 lives, 15 human lives, we could save a million, 2 million, or 10 million non-human lives."

Questioned by Inhofe whether he was "advocating the murder of individuals," Vlasak replied: "I made that statement, and I stand by that statement."

(Ten million non-human lives? What is Jerry "the Pickle" Vlasak counting -- experiments performed on bacteria?)

Well, there you are. Does this really need comment?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 5, 2005, at the time of 9:48 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

American Rambette

I was reading "old" history of Operation Iraqi Freedom and remembered the story about Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester. Something suddenly occurred to me that I haven't seen anyone mention so far. The award itself isn't really "news," because the MilBlogs were all over it at the time. But there is a special point to note that I'll get to a few paragraphs down.

Sgt. Hester is the first American woman awarded the Silver Star since World War II. The Silver Star is awarded for "gallantry in action against an enemy of the United States while engaged in military operations involving conflict with an opposing foreign force." But what is most interesting about Sgt. Hester is that I think she is the first American woman to be awarded that medal for actually attacking and killing the enemy!

Other recipients all received their medals (sometimes posthumously), whether Silver Star, Navy Cross, Distinguished Service Cross, or even Medal of Honor, for heroically performing their duties during air raids or under fire. But those duties were almost all as nurses (the Medal of Honor winner was a Civil-War surgeon, Dr. Mary Walker), except for a couple of pilots. They bravely stuck to their posts and did their duty despite bombs and gunfire. But their duty was to heal, not to kill.

Sgt. Hester is a Military Policewoman. She was assigned to Raven 42, 617th MP Co, Kentucky National Guard, assigned to the 503rd MP Bn (Fort Bragg), 18th MP Bde. She got her Silver Star on June 16th this year for her gallantry during an ambush on a convoy of supply trucks some months earlier. Raven 42 saw the convoy stopped and they charged directly towards the sound of the gunfire.

After her Humvee came under fire, Sgt. Hester grabbed an M4 carbine and an M203 grenade launcher, jumped into an irrigation ditch being used by Iraqi terrorists to fire on her Hummer crew, and killed at least five jihadis. She had to return to her vehicle once to reload, then ran back to the trench to continue clearing it out. She is America's first medal-winning Rambette!

You can read the After Action Report about her engagement at Blackfive.

Of course, until recently, women were not allowed to carry weapons into combat zones (even as MPs). As time passes, we will probably see more and more awards like Sgt. Hester received. Eventually, a woman will be awarded the Medal of Honor for the same reason Audie Murphy received his: for killing bad guys!

Here is Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester receiving her Silver Star:

Hatched by Sachi on this day, November 5, 2005, at the time of 6:29 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Date ►►► November 4, 2005

Thickening the Plot

Borrowing a thought from frequent commenter KarmiCommunist, who seems ever exercised over the limitations of dualism, I think we've got the wrong end of the dog when we ask whether the riots in France are a "French intifada" or only a natural militant response to the social anomie and economic dislocation that are inevitable under extreme social-welfarism. Let's suppose that they started out as the latter... what are the odds that corrosive Islamism will somehow get twisted into the weave as time passes and turns riot into rebellion?

We assume a riot either is or is not an uprising; Dualism. But in fact, it changes constantly, because it is a dynamic hydra that has not one head or a dozen heads but thousands and thousands. The rioters do not seem to have been militant Islamists at the beginning; the violence arose spontaneously from grief, anger, Gallic gall, and seething resentment. But as I noted in a previous post, events are simply events with no inherent significance; it is we hairless apes who invest observation with consequence; we spin a thread, then another, then we weave the threads together into the big tapestry of meaning.

I don't mean to get all hippie-dippy on you. A Molotov Cocktail is thrown into a building; that is a fact, it is measurable: we know what gasoline is, we know what a bottle looks like, we can tell when something is on fire. But is it jihad? An angry assault upon the cops because the thrower's brother was arrested? Or maybe insurance fraud? Even if it started out as the latter, how difficult would it be for others, victims or the rioters themselves, to inspire an act of simple arson with the organized and exciting rationalization of Holy War -- even ex post facto?

There's your real danger: that what begins as a race riot can metamorphose, inside its coccoon of post-hoc justification and organization, into jihad. The search for meaning is universal; but French Socialism-Lite has stripped France of such meaning. France isn't France anymore; it's a cog in the United States of Europe European Economic Community European Union. The entire continent is sans frontières, and humans need frontiers -- boundaries, walls, fences, divisions between this nation and the other.

For the immigrants who fled Algeria for France, and even more so for their children who grew up in atomized "Eurabia," the only meaning they can access is the one they or their parents left behind; around them they find only a moral, religious, and nationalistic vacuum. As we Republicans have said many times about the Democrats, you can't fight Something with Nothing; that is even truer for faith-based immigrants in the faithless wasteland of today's Europe, where the only acceptable belief is nihilism.

This is why I do not particularly fear that what is happening in France and Denmark and elsewhere on that continent will spread to the United States, or even to Great Britain; we are not the same. Most Americans are religious; and even those of us who are not religious still have a strong quasi-religious belief in our own exceptionalism: America is different, and real Americans know that. Immigrants to America can find new meaning and significance to replace the old; to a large extent, it works to suppress resurgence of old-world values.

We understand the concept of Americanism, even if we argue about what it encompasses; but I don't believe the French even have the word, let alone the concept of, Francism. How would it differ from Netherlandism, Belgism, or Italianism? America had the advantage of always being defined by a philosophy, an ideology, a creed, rather than the blind chance of people living near each other who happened to speak the same tongue. We have weathered the changes brought by the technology-shrunken world much better than has Western Europe.

Eastern Europeans are in better shape because at least they have vitalities to cling to -- their newly gained liberty and democracy -- that seem almost holy after decades of being nothing but little cogs in the big machine of the Evil Empire. And Great Britain still has a sense of self that transcends any tenative toe they have stuck into the waters of the European Union (within the memory of living Brits, all of occupied Europe was arrayed against England during the Battle of Britain). But I believe the French elite have lost their national identity, and I can't envision Jacques Chirac or Dominique de Villepin rising up in defense of French nationalism against imported Algerian Islam. And that's sad; France used to have a unique national identy as recently as under le général de Gaulle.

Europe needs another crusade.

If France can bestir itself to rediscover what makes it unique in the world, and if it can start teaching its children (and their parents and grandparents) what it means to be French and why that is vital for them, then they may redevelop a national identity to defend against Islamism in the great struggle over meaning. But if they contine along the present course, we may one day be asking "who lost France?" the way somebody lost China.

One last non-dualist answer to the question above: "this book is a mirror: when a monkey looks in, no acolyte looks out."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 4, 2005, at the time of 6:21 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Date ►►► November 3, 2005

Little Demo In Slumberland

John over at Power Line (easily the second snappiest dresser of those three) mulls the motive behind the Democrats' hysteria -- now -- over pre-war intelligence:

Democratic activists desperately want to block Judge Alito from ascending to the Court, but the reality is that Senate Democrats are powerless to achieve that goal. Alito's qualifications are unassailable, the Democrats are a minority party, and the Republicans are united in the conviction that Alito deserves a vote. A filibuster isn't out of the question, but if the Dems try it, it will fail.

So the Senate Democrats can't come through for their party where it counts. I doubt that the timing of the Month of Valerie is a coincidence; I suspect it is intended mostly to distract the Democratic base from the reality of the Senate Democrats' impotence.

I don't mean to be fip, but I think John has hold of the means, not the motive. He has to grab the bull by the tail and look the facts in the face.

Ever since the catastrophe of 1994, the Democratic Party has lived in a fantasy world of its own devising. Unable to face the reality of losing the House and Senate in 1994, then the presidency in 2000, then the Senate again in 2002 (after Jumpin' Jim Jeffords' defection was discounted), and most recently the 2004 reelection, they have been unable to recover sanity, daily drifting deeper into political schizophrenia... to quote Adam Savage, "I reject your reality and substitute my own."

I don't need a psychiatrist like Charles Krauthammer or Thomas Szasz; the signs are manifest. Most overtly and trivially, there are the two distinct TV shows set in fantasy universes where the Democrats are in charge of everything: the West Wing and Commander In Chief. Arguably, many Democrats demanded a show like CinC because they were unsatisfied with the West Wing -- because they had a few Republican characters who were not totally corrupt raving lunatics.

But the dementia manifests in uglier ways, too: many Democrats still, to this day, refuse to admit that Bush won the election in 2000 or in 2004. A U.S. senator, Barbara Boxer (D-CA), actually tried to prevent the Ohio electoral votes for Bush from being certified in January of this year, presumably on the grounds that John Kerry was the "real" winner there.

Democrats have wallowed in increasingly occult conspiracy theories and nightmarish fantasies, from George W. Bush conspiring with Arabs on the 9/11 attacks to Republicans and the Army Corps of Engineers plotting to blow up the New Orleans levees "to kill the black people." Karl Rove has assumed monstrous significance, as if he were an incarnation of Ernst Stavro Blofeld (for the younger set, Dr. Evil). Creepy cartels of neocons (read "Jew-o-cons") secretly seize control of the world for their nefarious Zionist plans.

Many left-liberals now live in a world that is as thrilling and horrific as the H.P. Lovecraft "Cthulhu" Mythos *, full of dark, eldrich gods, nameless cults, and unspeakable rites. Reliable, old, secret-society paranoia has resurged, of course: the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergers, even the Illuminati; but new and bizarre cults have formed around the basic template of "Famous Right-Winger X is secretly in league with Evil Villain Y"... for example, Osama bin Laden is actually a Mossad agent working for Ariel Sharon, Bush-41 started the Gulf War in order to build an oil pipeline for Mullah Omar, and Saddam Hussein is actually a mole who has been under Donald Rumsfeld's thumb since the early 1980s. Other brand new (tired old) cult archetypes include the specter of "globalization," with the World Trade Organization taking the place of the Knights Templar or the Hashishim "Assassins;" and the omnipotent, omnipresent Haliburton standing in for Wolfram & Hart in the Buffy spinoff Angel.

Let's be clear about this. Reality does not come packaged in stories; but our brains are hardwired to comprehend events in dramatic form, with heroes, villains, a climax, and a denouement. So we (all of us) dream up "the story of our lives," in which the dreamer is the protagonist, someone or some group is elected to be antagonist, and life becomes a series of chapters, each ending in a cliffhanger.

For Republicans and conservatives, who are in the ascendency and generally happy with life, the tale is a modern-day adventure-romance, typically with a happy ending. But for Democrats and liberals, who have seen nothing but dark chapters for years now, the tome is a Clive Barker bloodfest, a King Lear tale of madness and woe, a science-fiction black comedy like the Matrix, or a Walter-Mitty fantasy of easy triumph and cheap, childish victory, depending how much angst the tale-singer can take before breaking from reality entirely. Read the New York Times quickly, then ask yourself whether it wouldn't have even more verisimilitude with a wicked stepmother and a dragon.

The Democrats have no "plan" for how to use pre-war intelligence against Bush... no more than John Nash (Russell Crowe) had any well thought out purpose for hallucinating "Agent Parcher" (Ed Harris) and his machinations in a Beautiful Mind. They are demon-driven to expose the evil, just as D.A. Jim Garrison was driven to expose the massive conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK (a plot that required the connivance of Lyndon Johnson, the FBI, the Soviets, and the 82nd Airborne). And it doesn't matter that nobody will listen anymore, that Democrats have "no one left to lie to," in Christopher Hitchens' memorable phrase. Like Dr. Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) in Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they are condemned to stagger forever along the street, flagging down cars and screaming the warning: "They're already here! You're next!"

* Spellchecker attempted to correct this to the "Chihuahua Mythos."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 3, 2005, at the time of 11:22 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

ANWR Shall Drilling Opponents Go to Cry?

Yesterday, I gave you all a heads up (HT Hugh Hewitt) that the Senate was to have a final vote on drilling for oil in ANWR.

Today the Senate voted -- and pro-energy forces won! The Luddites lost, but narrowly:

An amendment offered by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., that would have removed drilling authority for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), was defeated 51-48. She called the drilling proposal a gimmick that will have little impact on oil or gasoline prices, or U.S. energy security.

And Sen. Cantwell knows this -- how? Since we haven't gone there to explore much yet, all estimates of reserves are really just back-of-the-envelope guesses. They are educated guesses from geologists; but there are equally well educated guesses from other geologists that contradict the ones from the DOE's Energy Information Administration that Sen. Cantwell and other enviromentalist extremists rely upon.

Until we spend some real time there and drill more exploratory wells, we really don't know. The oil companies themselves have done some exploration in ANWR; but they keep the findings a closely guarded secret, since it affects which leases they want to bid on. It may conceivably turn out to be a big bust, as the Democrats desperately hope, since that would hurt the United States (and therefore President Bush); it may turn out to have as much oil as Saudi Arabia (not likely, but that's what Republicans hope); or most likely, it will land somewhere in between... which will still be good for the country.

Here is my favorite part:

Later the Senate in an 86-13 vote, required that none of the oil from ANWR can be exported. Otherwise ''there is no assurance that even one drop of Alaskan oil will get to hurting Americans,'' said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a drilling opponent who nevertheless sponsored the no-export provision.

That's a bit stronger than I would have wanted, but it's better than doing all that drilling, then selling it all to Japan, as some here have suggested is just the way things work; with this amendment, we need not continue to depend upon the beneficence of our enemies (Venezuela) and our intense rivals who might become enemies (Saudi Arabia)... at least not as much as we do today.

With that oil flowing here first and only later into the world market, we will have a much more robust supply if OPEC does to us again what they did in 1973, when they decided to punish us (and the the Netherlands) for supporting Israel after the Arabs launched a sneak attack in the Yom Kippur War... a non-market political reaction that drastically affected the market -- which was my point in proposing something like this yesterday.

For every million barrels of oil flowing from 1002 to the country, we would import a million fewer barrels; but the price will not be affected by the non-export proviso, because there is no requirement that the Alaskan oil be sold here for any less than the world market price. (More supply in the market will of course lower the price.) But in the event that we get cut off by OPEC again, at least we will have a flow of crude that the Islamists (and that Communist Hugo Chavez) cannot simply shut off.

Here is the most dishonest argument against drilling:

No oil is likely to flow from ANWR for 10 years and peak production of about 1 million barrels a day would be expected about 2025, according to the Energy Department.

Environmentalists have been making this argument -- for 10 years now, since the 1995 budget vote that President Clinton vetoed.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 3, 2005, at the time of 4:03 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

The Partisan Game

You can sing this to the tune of that old Irish rebel song, "the Patriot Game." But only if you do not have a voice like a walrus in heat.

Watch your hat and coat.

The Partisan Game

 

 

 

 

 

 

© 1999 by Dafydd ab Hugh, all rights reserved

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 3, 2005, at the time of 3:09 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Date ►►► November 2, 2005

Arms For the Poor

According to the Brussels Journal, the French police are quite simply unequipped to enforce lawn order in Paris, or any other cities where areas have become de facto part of the ummah. This is evidently true not only in France but the rest of Europe, even including Great Britain: the typically unarmed and overawed police cannot make arrests, and the terrified firefighters cannot fight arson fires with the arsonists shooting at them.

France

Since [Nicolas] Sarkozy became Interior Minister he has insisted on more police presence in Muslim neighbourhoods. This triggered last week’s riots in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, when policemen went in to investigate a robbery and two teenagers stupidly got themselves electrocuted while hiding from the police in an electricity sub station. Many French politicians now probably regret that the police had the audacity to investigate a robbery in Clichy. The result of the incident so far has been six consecutive nights of rioting that is now engulfing the entire Paris suburban area and might soon affect other parts of the country. Last night at least 69 vehicles were torched in nine suburbs across the Paris region. Officials say that small, mobile gangs are harassing police, sometimes even shooting at them. The gangs are setting vehicles, police stations and schools on fire throughout the region.

Denmark

“For several nights in a row Rosenhøj Mall has been the scene of the worst riots in Århus for years. ‘This area belongs to us’, the youths proclaimed. [...] ‘The police have to stay away. This is our area. We decide what goes on down here’. [Elipses sic]

All your base are belong to us?

Great Britain

Commenting on the situation in Britain, Theodore Dalrymple wrote in City Journal: “Surveys suggest that between 6 and 13 percent of British Muslims -- that is, between 98,000 and 208,000 people -- are sympathetic toward Islamic terrorists and their efforts.... This is the tightrope that the British state and population will now have to walk for the foreseeable future.” It applies to all West European nations. Where, however, is the boundary between carefully walking the tightrope and falling victim to the Stockholm syndrome? The latter would mean that Western politicians act as hostages of the Muslim extremists.

The European Collapse

One proposed solution is to send in the army. "In a war, use the army, rather than police." However, to do so is to admit that civil authority has completely lost control of the nation, and the politicians simply refuse point blank to make that admission. Instead, they hide, serve out their time, and hope to retire before the Noahide flood: "après moi, le déluge," as another famous Frenchie said.

Besides -- this is my own speculation, not that of Brussels Journal -- European military forces are not exactly known for their steadfast determination and willingness to stay the course, even when they start taking casualties. They're not as tough, resourceful, battle-hardened, experienced, or well trained as, say, the Army of Greater Iraq. I'm not so sure the French military (except perhaps la Légion Étrangère) would do any better at quelling the rioting than the police (or the firefighters, for that matter). The British Army is rather better than the armies of the continent; but even they have too great a tendency to so "softly, softly," as in Basra in Iraq.

There is old story that in 1967, in the Six Day War, the Israelis realized the Arab axis put together by Gamil Nasser of Egypt was about to invade the Holy Land. In a lightning-like pre-emptive strike, the Israeli Air Force struck the Egyptian and Jordanian air bases. Then the Israeli infantry, armor and artillery, and paratroopers swiftly pounded the Gaza and Sinai (Egypt), the West Bank (Jordan), and the Golan Heights (Syria) in a coordinated assault that bordered on genius.

Twenty-four hours later, the Italian Army surrendered.

The American Way

The solution seems simple to me. France and the rest of Europe (including Britain) need to enact the right for all citizens to keep and bear arms. Small arms, I mean: weapons a man can comfortably bear.

The advantages are myriad and manifest:

• Each person has a tremendous incentive to protect his own life, his family, and his property; so motivation is high.
• There are tremendously more citizens than there are police or soldiers. Even if only a small fraction of the people choose to carry a weapon, they will still dwarf the authorities.
• The armed citizen is right on the spot: he is, in fact, the intended victim... so the bad guys will come find him.
• As we're finding in Iraq and Afghanistan, the locals are better at spotting people who don't belong (or known violent thugs) than the cops, and certainly more than military troops who may not even be from that region of the country.

The studies above indicated that between 6% and 13% of British Moslems "are sympathetic toward Islamic terrorists and their efforts;" similar numbers probably apply across Europe. The corollary to this is that possibly as many as 85% are un-sympathetic; isn't it about time Europe armed that 85%? For those of you who worry that Europe would be arming the very people it's afraid of, may I remind you of findings of such folks as John Lott anent domestic gun-control attempts... the bad guys already have their guns. They're already armed. France, et al, can either dis-arm the good (or not so bad) guys... or else finally allow them to defend themselves.

I suspect that most European politicians would literally rather lie down and die than allow their citizenry to be armed (the latter could lead to the former, or so they may fear!) It would be an even greater blow to Socialism than bringing in the army. But it would have the advantage of putting individual self-interest and the distributed swarm attack on the side of decency and good, not criminal evil.

And it might just work. It seems to work here; and even without the traditional American ethos of self-reliance and defense of home and hearth, it could hardly be worse than what they have now.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 2, 2005, at the time of 11:43 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

ANWR Shall We Drill Next?

Hugh Hewitt notes that tomorrow, the Senate votes on drilling for oil and natural gas in a teensy sliver of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) -- the 1002 Area of the Arctic Coastal Plain, to be specific. And just now, Sen. George Allen (R-VA) predicts that drilling will pass.

If this proves correct, this is great news! I would stick the "Good News" subject on this post, but we typically use that for Good News about Iraq, not about Alaska. Even if it involves black gold.

The House has been supportive of drilling in ANWR for a long time, even going back to the Clinton administration, when they voted for it in 2000. The Senate has always been the roadblock. Ever since 9/11, there has been a majority in the Senate willing to vote for drilling... but the vote has been stopped at least once before by Democratic threats of a filibuster.

I don't know whether Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) has solved this problem; they got ANWR drilling into a budget vote on March 16th of this year; the budget is not subject to filibuster, and it passed. However, simply budgeting money does not release it... it also must be appropriated; and I don't know whether the Democrats are going to be allowed to filibuster that vote -- which presumably is what they will hold tomorrow.

Perhaps the procedural machinations have made ANWR drilling immune to the filibuster; in that case, Sen. Allen's prediction will likely eventuate. But if it's still subject to filibuster, I'm pretty sure there are more than 40 die-hard opponents of Alaskan oil drilling, and it will fail.

This is a critical battle that can have long-term impact not only on gasoline prices (when coupled with major construction of refineries, as called for in the recently approved Energy Bill) -- but also on the Global War on Terrorism, for reasons which are obvious.

And who knows? If this passes, maybe we can likewise step up oil production off the coast of Santa Barbara and in the Gulf of Mexico. We could, if we chose, convert ourselves into almost being energy independent.

I would actually hope for one codicil in this ANWR bill: I want a proviso that says Americans have the right of first refusal to buy the oil and natural gas from this site, at prevailing world oil prices, before it's sold on the world market. In other words, we should first offer to sell American oil to American consumers (at the same price, but of course with lower transportation cost) before exporting it to foreigners. This would encourage energy independence, weakening the Axis of Islam significantly.

Well, that's my two barrels, at least.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 2, 2005, at the time of 5:07 PM | Comments (19) | TrackBack

Is Paris Burning?

Is This the "Third Intifada" -- Or Not?

It fascinates me how little attention the riots in France have received, even from the blogosphere. The paucity of posts points out, as if we needed reminding, how dependent bloggers are upon the very MSM that we decry... media that all too often, as in this case, leave us in the dark about critical aspects of the stories they supposedly "report." Unknown unknowns, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld might say.

For example, everyone (including me) seems to think he has the answer to this question: are those riots in Paris an organized uprising by Moslems, a "third intifada," as some have called it? I think most folks would say "Yes," but much of that is just due to bloggish logrolling, a "blogstorm," as Hugh Hewitt calls it. Being a natural skeptic -- I'm even skeptical about skepticism -- I want something more than just handwaving, even when it fits my belief system (or perhaps especially when). Alas, this is precisely the information that the mainstream news seems determined to conceal from us.

(Wretchard of the Belmont Club, I believe, once called for citizen journalism to go along with citizen punditry... a million folks with digital cameras, each person roaming his city, taking photos, and doing original reporting; this would then, I recall, be passed along to blogpapers that would post the news and photos -- and finally blogs, who would analyze it. So far, that intriguing idea has come to nought. Taking myself as representative of many bloggers, I don't have a digital camera; I wouldn't know where to go to snap pictures of news events; I have no "sources" who slip me tips; subjects won't talk to me as readily as they would talk to CBS or the LA Times; I don't have the resources of a news agency to do research (I don't even have a Nexis/Lexis account), and on and on. I don't think the time has yet come. Sorry for the digression.)

Where was I? Oh yes, fumfahing around, trying to find information about the riots without actually hopping on an Airbus to Pahree. Were they sparked by Moslem anger against France? Or did they have nothing to do with the rioters' "origin or religion or faith," as the mayor of Clichy-Sous-Bois, "a neighbourhood of high-rise public housing projects," implies?

Over on Hugh Hewitt's radio show, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy flatly stated that "Islamofascists" were burning Paris. He noted that they were "confined to ghettos" surrounding Paris, presumably by Parisian laws or zoning rules (which I have heard before), but he did not elaborate. Hugh himself stated that the two kids whose deaths sparked the riots were Moslems; but as with Gaffney's comment, there was no citation for how he would know this.

Power Line had a post about them -- but John had to turn to al-Jazeera for the original story! Reading the al-Jazeera account, you would barely realize that the rioters might possibly be Moslems; apart from the fact that al-Jazeera is interested in them at all (which is itself suggestive), there is only one passing reference:

The area, home mainly to families of immigrant origin, most of them from Muslim North Africa, is marked by soaring unemployment and delinquency.

This tells us who lives in Clichy-sous-Bois but not who is rioting there, nor why, exactly.

Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) has linked to stories about the riots a couple of times; the first time to CBS (see below), and the second to Tim Blair's website (called Tim Blair, appropriately enough). Blair, in turn, cited a post on Little Green Footballs, another French/English speaking blogger whose name I don't recognize, and yet another.

He does cite a CBS story; but it's the same story that Glenn linked yesterday. CBS is even more reluctant to discuss the ethnicity and religion of the rioters. Note how this paragraph doesn't even entirely admit to being on topic:

Suburbs that ring France's big cities suffer soaring unemployment and are home to immigrant communities, often from Muslim North Africa. Disenchantment, and anger, run high.

At least al-Jazeera admitted that the particular suburb with the riots was one of those "Muslim North Africa[n]" ones. CBS won't edge itself quite that far out on a limb, being only willing to tell us that some unknown suburbs somewhere near Paris are stuffed full of Moslems from North Africa -- but they won't say which 'burbs or whether they have anything to do with this story. Just thought you'd like to know.

Other than that, all we learn is that the riots began after two teenagers were electrocuted:

The troubles started Thursday night in Clichy-sous-Bois, northeast of Paris, following the accidental electrocution deaths of two teenagers who hid in a power substation to escape police whom they thought were chasing them. Officials have said police were not pursuing the boys, aged 15 and 17, at all.

We are not told anything more about them than their ages... despite the same-day revelation of their first names in another source; we're coming to that.

Reuters took the same tack, dancing around the question in this piece published Monday (via CNN International). We are told in the subhead:

French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy defended his tough crime policies on Monday after a fourth night of riots in a Paris suburb in which tear gas was fired into a mosque.

But any hope for a conceptual breakthrough -- presumably the cops shot tear gas into the mosque because that's where the rioters were congregating -- are dashed in the next paragraph:

Sarkozy, addressing police officers, vowed to find how tear gas had been fired into the Muslim place of worship, an incident which had helped fuel the disturbances....

"I am, of course, available to the imam of the Clichy mosque to let him have all the details in order to understand how and why a tear gas bomb was sent into this mosque," he told about 170 police officers at the prefecture.

Again, we're left unsure whether the fact that one police target was a mosque (or was it a misfire?) has anything to do with the rioting. Reuters then takes away the prize for most misleading statement in any MSM article on this issue:

The violence began four days ago after the deaths of two teenagers, believed to be of African origin, who were electrocuted after clambering into a power sub-station while apparently fleeing police.

Evidently, it was too much trouble (or they ran out of room) to add the word "North" in front of "African," leaving the impression the youths might be from Kenya or the Congo, or perhaps rampaging Boers from Johannesburg.

The New York Times rewrites the Reuters story down even further, to a scant three paragraphs. Again, that same misleadingly truncated "African" rather than "North African," now tidily combined into the same sentence with the mystery term "immigrant population":

The violence began three days ago in Clichy-sous-Bois, which has a large immigrant population, over the deaths of two teenagers, believed to be of African origin, who were electrocuted.

Still on my quest to find out What the Heck Is Going On Here™, I turn to the BBC's account -- and snag another tile of the mosaic. The Beeb is even more politically correct, mentioning only that the yutes came from a suburb that "has a large immigrant population" which faces "discrimination against immigrant communities such as theirs." But they finally begin to give the game away by unwisely identifying the first names of the two boys who were electrocuted:

Flowers now lie near the spot where Ziad, aged 17, and Banou, 15, died.

Gateway Pundit actually had the names earlier, on Saturday, October 29th, from the Guardian. He also notes that:

Most of the residents in the rioting suburb are immigrants from Northern Africa.

Since every country in Northern Africa (north of and including the Sahara Desert) is Moslem, this does tend to at least imply a religious identity, especially when coupled with the names, the fact that the cops fired tear gas into a mosque, and that al-Jazeera felt moved enough by their plight to write about them. Of course, there are non-Moslems living in North Africa -- in Sudan, for example -- so I still don't know for certain.

Gateway Pundit links to Reuters video that shows some marchers who could be Moslems; they're being addressed by some guy speaking what sounds like Arabic to me (or else Hebrew, but somehow I doubt that possibility). But we only see a few people, and none of them is rioting. No signs visible in the shots, so I can't even see whether they're in French or Arabic.

At this juncture, I think I have to just throw up my hands in surrender. I have no idea if the rioters are Moslems, whether that's one reason they're rioting, whether it has anything to do with the headscarf law, and what is the significance of the fact, solemnly chronicled by Gateway Pundit, that the neighborhood just opened up their first halal (Moslem-kosher) Burger King.

The sad and simple fact is that when the basic news conveyers -- the mainstream media -- conspire to withhold key facts from the readers, there is often no way of reliably getting that information. As much as we may hate it, the fact is that we are still, several years into the blogger revolution, utterly dependent upon exactly the people we hope to supplant. This is not a good sign.

Say, where's Wretchard? Maybe he should trot out that "citizen journalist" idea again.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 2, 2005, at the time of 3:51 PM | Comments (38) | TrackBack

Swervy Surveys

The latest surveys from various sources are still mixed -- but now they're virtually incomprehensible. As always, Daniel Weintraub leads the way with his Sacramento Bee-blog California Insider.

The disappointment is SurveyUSA, which consistently had all four of the Schwarzenegger initiatives up; now it has Proposition 73 (Parental Notification Before Abortion) winning by 55-44, 77 (Redistricting Reform) losing by 44-53, and 74 (Teacher Tenure Reform), 75 (Paycheck Protection), and 76 (State Spending Limitation) all dead even.

One caveat: SurveyUSA uses short, punchy descriptions of the ballot initiatives. But they did a "split ballot" on Proposition 76 this time and noticed that the longer their description was, the worse the initiative did: with the original description of 36 words, the measure ties 49-49; with a longer description of 51 words, Proposition 76 loses by 42-56; and with the third description of 54 words, it loses by a whopping twenty-five percent: 36-61!

Bear in mind, these descriptions are all read to the respondents over the telephone (by a recorded voice); they do not have them in written form before them. It's entirely possible that the longer a description that the respondents have to listen to on the phone, the more lost they become -- and when they get lost, they tend to vote No. Interestingly, SurveyUSA noted that the longest description they read is similar to the descriptions read by the other two phone pollsters, the Field Poll and the PPIC poll... both of whom showed strikingly similar results for Proposition 76: losing by 28% and 32%, respectively.

By contrast, a new Knowledge Networks Poll conducted by the Hoover Institute of Stanford University shows a kinder picture, with only Proposition 76 (State Spending Limitation) losing, by 10 points (45-55). The other initiatives are all winning.

Once again, the...

Table 1: Justifiably World Famous Big-Lizards Vote-At-a-Glance Table

Survey USA (in bold); Stanford Knowledge Net Poll (in italics)

• Prop 73: Parental Notification Before Abortion
  55 yes, 44 no (2% undecided) lead: +11
  58 yes, 42 no (0% undecided) lead: +16
• Prop 74: Teacher Tenure Reform
  49 yes, 50 no (1% undecided) trail: -1
  53 yes, 47 no (0% undecided) lead: +6
• Prop 75: Paycheck Protection
  50 yes, 49 no (2% undecided) lead: +1
  64 yes, 36 no, (0% undecided) lead: +28
• Prop 76: Limit State Spending Growth
  49 yes, 49 no (2% undecided) Tie: 0
  45 yes, 55 no (0% undecided) trail: +10
• Prop 77: Redistricting Reform
  44 yes, 53 no (3% undecided) trail: -9
  55 yes, 45 no (0% undecided) lead: +10

(The Knowledge Net Poll is a "forcing poll," where respondents do not have the option of voting "no opinion" or "undecided;" just as with the real ballot, they can vote Yes, vote No, or skip the question -- in which case they are not counted for that question. That is why all questions have 0% undecided above.)

I have one reason to be somewhat skeptical of the Knowledge Net Poll -- and one reason to consider it more reliable:

• My back of the envelope calculations indicate the poll may have oversampled Republicans.

Assuming that roughly the same people voted on each question, taking the first three questions, turning everything into matricies and inverting, I ended up calculating 42% Republicans, 25% Independents, and 34% Democrats. Now, bear in mind that the initial sample was probably closer to the state party percentage; it's possible this simply represents a "side prediction" that turnout will be higher among Republicans. But I'm still a bit worried, and this makes me somewhat skeptical about the results.

Therefore, I recalculated all the question results using two alternative turnout models; see Table 2 below.

• On the other hand, unlike the other polls, the Knowledge Networks Poll is not a telephone poll. Instead, respondents vote on a simulated paper ballot, just as they would vote in the voting booth.

The ballot descriptions are there in front of them, and they can read and reread as necessary, rather than just listening over the phone. This makes it a better simulation of the actual vote than a telephone poll.

As in the 2003 California Recall Election Surveys conducted by Stanford University and Knowledge Networks, the wording from the actual ballot was presented to survey respondents. Therefore, there was not provided to respondents a category to capture “undecided” or “not sure” responses. Respondents were forced, as in the actual ballot, to make a “vote” decision or to skip a ballot question. Also, as in an actual vote decision, the interview simulated conditions in the ballot box in that an interviewer did not administer the ballot questions; the questionnaire is self-administered.

(Daniel Weintraub opines that during the 2003 California Recall election, both the SurveyUSA poll and the Knowledge Networks Poll "pretty much nailed it.")

Here is a table contrasting what you get with the original mix, as above (in bold); then after correcting the percentages of Republicans, Independents, and Democrats to 37.5%, 25%, and 37.5% (equal numbers of Rs and Ds, italics); and then finally correcting again to flip the percentage of Rs, Independents, and Ds to 34%, 25%, and 42% (ordinary Roman text):

Table 2: Knowledge Networks Poll, Three Turnout Models

• Prop 73: Parental Notification Before Abortion Robust Lead
  58 yes, 42 no -- lead: +16
  56 yes, 44 no -- lead: +12
  55 yes, 45 no -- lead: +10
• Prop 74: Teacher Tenure Reform Shaky Lead
  53 yes, 47 no -- lead: +6
  50 yes, 50 no -- Tie
  48 yes, 52 no -- trail: -4
• Prop 75: Paycheck Protection Robust Lead
  64 yes, 36 no -- lead: +28
  61 yes, 39 no -- lead: +22
  59 yes, 41 no -- lead: +18
• Prop 76: Limit State Spending Growth Loser
  45 yes, 55 no -- Trail: -10
  41yes, 59 no -- trail: -18
  39 yes, 61 no -- trail: -22
• Prop 77: Redistricting Reform Good Lead
  55 yes, 45 no -- lead: +10
  52 yes, 48 no -- lead: +4
  50 yes, 50 no -- Tie

I define an initiative as having a "robust lead" if it wins in all three turnout models; it has a "good lead" if it wins in two of the three; it has a "shaky lead" if it leads only in the first; and one initiative is a "loser," losing in all three turnout models.

So that's my story, and I'm sticking to it!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 2, 2005, at the time of 12:42 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Date ►►► November 1, 2005

Weapon of Mass Media Deception

The absurdity of Harry Reid's tantrum today, forcing the Senate into a rare closed session as a stunt to draw attention to the Democrats' claims that the entire Iraq war was cooked up by Karl Rove and the neocons and sold to Americans by lies and distortions (see virtually any speech by John F. Kerry in 2004) has been ably covered already today by Power Line and by Captain's Quarters. I have little to add to the main points of Paul and Ed.

I'm more interested in the way that the mainstream news media manipulate the story in order to support the Democrats' side of the dispute. Let's start with the easiest to document, the slam dunk. Here is the Associated Press today:

Democrats contend that the unmasking of Valerie Plame was retribution for her husband, Joseph Wilson, publicly challenging the Bush administration's contention that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium from Africa. That claim was part of the White House's justification for going to war.

Missing in action from this report is the fact that the Butler Report from Great Britain completely affirmed this very contention (actually, Bush said that the British had such evidence), and also that the final, unanimous report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that Joseph Wilson himself told his CIA debriefer that the Nigerien prime minister (and former minister of mines) had stated that the Iraqis conducted secret negotiations to buy something from Niger -- and that the prime minister believed that "something" was yellowcake uranium (as opposed to animal hides or cowpeas, Niger's other exports).

But lying by omission is not the worst of the reporting. In its zeal to cheer the Democrats on, AP has yet again exaggerated beyond the evidence to blatant falsehood about what we actually found in Iraq:

Reid's move shone a spotlight on the continuing controversy over prewar intelligence. Despite administration claims, no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, and some Democrats have accused the White House of manipulating the information.

While it is true that under the crabbed definition of WMDs used by the U.N. inspectors no "large stockpiles" of chemical or biological weapons have been found, it is completely false to assert, as AP does, that none were. Washington Post, July 3rd, 2004, in a story written by Walter Pincus:

Yesterday's coalition release also said that two other 122-milimeter rounds, found by the Poles on June 16 with help from an Iraqi informer, tested positive for small quantities of sarin but were "so deteriorated" that they would have had "limited to no impact if used by insurgents against coalition forces."

...

Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, told Fox News on June 24 that "some" old sarin and mustard rounds have been discovered in scattered places, demonstrating "that the Iraqi declarations were wrong at least in . . . amount." But Duelfer cautioned he was not ready to make any judgment whether there were any "still concealed" military-capable stockpiles.

Even by the overly strict definition of the Iraqi Survey Group (ISG), these all qualify as "weapons of mass destruction." But more to the point is the definition itself: for Walter Pincus, the Associated Press, the entire mainstream media, the official line of the Democratic Party, and evidently the CIA and State Department themselves, the rockets found (or purchased) by the Poles in 2004 do not count as chemical munitions because the warheads, while manufactured to accept chemicals, were not filled.

Bear in mind that the ISG was led first by David Kay, then by Charles Duelfer. Kay was pushed by the State Department and by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency and Mohamed ElBaradei; and Duelfer was appointed by then-Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet: all three of these groups have waged relentless political warfare against George W. Bush, against Operation Iraqi Freedom, and in particular, against the conclusion of the "neocons" that Iraq posed a grave and gathering threat to the United States.

Each has persisted in this war-against-the-war long after the major-combat phase of the war itself was won, and the peace began to be waged with such intensity. The primary tactic they have used during this latter period has been to dispute every single WMD find as being something benign -- or at least potentially civilian -- instead of military.

Many times, we found huge drums of cyclosarin-based "pesticides" hidden in camouflaged ammunition bunkers... and many times we found empty chemical rockets and artillery shells, often at the same ammo dumps. But evidently, that doesn't constitute chemical weapons according to the ISG. But if Hussein's regime had actually poured the first into the second, then and only then would they be defined as chemical weapons.

Does this mean that a gun is not a gun if it's not loaded?

Captain Ed discussed this also, way back in April of 2004. He quotes extensively from Kenneth Timmerman's investigative piece in Insight Magazine, April 26th, 2004:

In virtually every case - chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missiles - the United States has found the weapons and the programs that the Iraqi dictator successfully concealed for 12 years from U.N. weapons inspectors....

But what are "stockpiles" of CW agents supposed to look like? Was anyone seriously expecting Saddam to have left behind freshly painted warehouses packed with chemical munitions, all neatly laid out in serried rows, with labels written in English? Or did they think that a captured Saddam would guide U.S. troops to smoking vats full of nerve gas in an abandoned factory? In fact, as recent evidence made public by a former operations officer for the Coalition Provisional Authority's (CPA's) intelligence unit in Iraq shows, some of those stockpiles have been found - not all at once, and not all in nice working order - but found all the same....

But another reason for the media silence may stem from the seemingly undramatic nature of the "finds" [Douglas] Hanson and others have described. The materials that constitute Saddam's chemical-weapons "stockpiles" look an awful lot like pesticides, which they indeed resemble. "Pesticides are the key elements in the chemical-agent arena," Hanson says. "In fact, the general pesticide chemical formula (organophosphate) is the 'grandfather' of modern-day nerve agents."

(Hanson was an "atomic demolitions munitions security officer and a nuclear, biological and chemical defense officer" who was a civilian analyst in Iraq in summer 2003 working on WMD issues.)

It is well known that the staggering extent of Saddam Hussein's WMD programs was only discovered after he lost the Gulf War. Iraqi chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons by the tens of thousands were unearthed (often literally) and destroyed by the coalition. Afterward (we have known this for some time from defectors), Hussein decided that Iraq would take a new tack in its never-ending quest for WMD: from then on, all of Iraq's programs were designed to be "dual use": each would have an ostensibly civilian purpose (pesticides, medical research, nuclear power generation) but could quickly -- in some cases within minutes -- be converted to military use.

Therefore, when looking for "stockpiles" of WMD, the Iraqi Survey Group (ISG) should have been looking, not for a warehouse full of shells pre-filled with sarin or mustard gas or anthrax, but rather for the precursor components of such: shells and rockets built to accept such chemicals or biological agents in close proximity to the agents themselves... even if they're not actually loaded into the warhead yet.

A rocket that can accept toxic chemicals into its warhead near a 55-gallon drum of cyclosarin-based "pesticide" is a chemical weapon, and it should be defined as such.

At Karbala, U.S. troops stumbled upon 55-gallon drums of pesticides at what appeared to be a very large "agricultural supply" area, Hanson says. Some of the drums were stored in a "camouflaged bunker complex" that was shown to reporters - with unpleasant results. "More than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to a nerve agent," Hanson says. "But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative, end of story, nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into nonexistence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders about the advantage an agricultural-commodities business gains by securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers 6 feet underground. The 'agricultural site' was also colocated with a military ammunition dump - evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG."

That wasn't the only significant find by coalition troops of probable CW stockpiles, Hanson believes. Near the northern Iraqi town of Bai'ji, where Saddam had built a chemical-weapons plant known to the United States from nearly 12 years of inspections, elements of the 4th Infantry Division found 55-gallon drums containing a substance identified through mass spectrometry analysis as cyclosarin - a nerve agent. Nearby were surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, gas masks and a mobile laboratory that could have been used to mix chemicals at the site. "Of course, later tests by the experts revealed that these were only the ubiquitous pesticides that everybody was turning up," Hanson says. "It seems Iraqi soldiers were obsessed with keeping ammo dumps insect-free, according to the reading of the evidence now enshrined by the conventional wisdom that 'no WMD stockpiles have been discovered.'" [Emphasis added]

Coalition troops have found mortar shells filled with a mystery liquid that tested positive in the field for being a blister agent (mustard gas, used so horrifically in World War I, is a blister agent); subsequent testing (redefinition) by the ISG disputed that finding. But lost in the shuffle was the question that should have leapt out at everyone: what conceivable purpose is served by placing a liquid inside a mortar shell in the first place?

Putting any sloshing substance inside a ballistic object would obviously throw off the accuracy -- so there must be some advantage that offsets that problem. Can we put our heads together and think of some possibility, a reason why a man like Saddam Hussein would order some liquid to be poured into a rocket or a mortar round?

Even by the most tendentious definition of WMD, we have found some; so AP's overreach is just flatly wrong. But more important, the definition of WMD stockpile itself is wrong. When assessing threat, you dare not take the most benign view that all those drums of cyclosarin, "reference strains" of Anthrax and botulinum, and those empty chemical and biological munitions are unrelated and only coincidentally situated right next to each other in camouflaged bunkers and ammo dumps. You must use the most expansive defintion that takes into account the avowed intent of the Iraqi WMD programs to produce "dual use" chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons. And by that definition -- which the ISG would have used in any other context than the CIA's attempt to thwart the Bush Administration's foreign policy -- we have indeed found "large stockpiles" of WMD.

Even if the Democrats -- and their allies in the MSM and the CIA -- don't want to admit it.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 1, 2005, at the time of 4:57 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

DeLay DeLight

Rep. Tom DeLay (D-TX) won the first round today of his epic toe-to-toe squareoff with obsessed political prosecutor Ronnie Earle when the judge hearing the recusal motion, C. W. Duncan, decided that Bob Perkins, the "MoveOn" judge, would not be hearing the case as originally planned. Instead, DeLay will get a different judge... presumably one who is not a longtime Democratic activist who had donated to an organization and groups that actively sought to remove Tom DeLay from the House by any means necessary.

It isn't merely that Perkins is a Democrat, it's that he has been a Democratic activist, donating thousands of dollars to the cause -- including $200 to the extremist left-wing group MoveOn.org, which in particular has had a vendetta against Tom DeLay for years. From the New York Times on October 21st (free registration required to read article):

In respectful tones, Mr. DeLay's lead defense lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, noted that Judge Perkins had given money to, among others, MoveOn.org, a liberal group that Mr. DeGuerin said had been "selling T-shifts with Mr. DeLay's mug shot on it...."

(MoveOn.org quickly denied that it had been selling DeLay T-shirts. "DeGuerin has either bad information or lied in court," said Tom Matzzie, the organization's Washington director. "Americans are sick of the corruption in Congress and think it will be a better place without Tom DeLay.")

In court filings this week, Mr. DeGuerin listed dozens of contributions that Judge Perkins had made since 2000 to "causes and persons opposed to Tom DeLay," including $1,175 to Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, last year's Democratic presidential nominee; $400 to the Democratic National Committee and $200 to MoveOn.org.

(Incidentally, nice defense, Mr. Matzzie: the claim, true or false, that MoveOn.org had been "selling T-shifts with Mr. DeLay's mug shot on it" was intended to show that they had a very strong and visceral hatred of Tom DeLay in particular. So in the course of vigorously denying this, the Washington director simply could not stop himself from tacking on a completely gratuitous statement of visceral hatred of Tom Delay as the embodiment of "corruption" in Congress. If I ever want to get the chair, I'll hire Tom Matzzie as my attorney.)

In contrast to Mr. Matzzie, DeLay's attorney, Dick DeGuerin, made a point that he was not accusing Judge Perkins of any wrongdoing, only that his liberal activism created the appearance of a political trial. This seems to have gotten under Ronnie Earle's skin:

District Attorney Ronnie Earle, who heads the criminal investigation into DeLay's fund-raising activities, watched in the courtroom while his deputies questioned witnesses. He got up at the end of the hearing and chided DeLay's attorneys for repeatedly calling it a "political case."

"This is not a political case; this is a criminal case," Earle said. "Mr. DeLay stands charged with a felony."

Yes... a felony indictment that Earle had to go through three grand juries to obtain -- and finally did so only on the basis of a critical piece of evidence that Earle has now admitted he does not actually have. Thank goodness Mr. Earle has only disinterested justice at heart.

And now he will have to play out his obsession before a disinterested judge.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 1, 2005, at the time of 2:25 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Alito Lit. 101

There are two main cases tried by Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel Alito that will whip all the Democrats into a froth of hysteria. First, Patterico has a great analysis of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Alito's dissent from a ruling that reaffirmed but rewrote Roe v. Wade.

Second, John at Power Line does the same for another major case that has gotten a lot of attention: Alito's dissent from a decision that rejected dismissal of a lawsuit against police officers for "strip searching" (by a female cop, of course) a mother and her ten year old daughter who were found in a methamphetamine den (Patterico adds his own two centavos worth, disagreeing with John Hinderaker about Alito's dissent but agreeing that there was nothing terrible or even untoward about it).

These will likely be the two lines of attack by leftists against Judge Alito; we should read up on them to gird ourselves for battle.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 1, 2005, at the time of 3:26 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Syria Activates Bat-Signal for Help

...But Batman lets the answering machine pick up.

In a sign of increasing desperation, Syrian President Bashar Assad has issued an urgent call for an emergency meeting of the entire Arab League, the twenty-two Arab-speaking countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

But in a sign of increasing Syrian isolation, Arab diplomats have rebuffed Assad, suggesting instead a cozy gathering of just five countries -- all but one of whom (Algeria) are actively working with the United States in the GWOT, hence against Syrian interests.

From the Associated Press via FoxNews.com:

DAMASCUS, Syria — Syria called for an emergency Arab League summit in a bid Monday to rally regional support in the face of a stern, unanimously adopted U.N. Security Council resolution demanding greater cooperation in the probe of the assassination of a former Lebanese prime minister.

But Arab diplomats, anticipating lack of broad support for a summit of all 22 members, suggested a smaller gathering of Syria, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Lebanon and Egypt if others decline out of concern over harming ties with the resolution's prime sponsors — the United States, France and Britain.

That "if" in the second paragraph is actually a gentle reminder that Bashar Assad is not his father Hafez, and this is not the 1970s.

Take a look at Syria's position as it stands now:

Every single country surrounding Syria is now actively working with the United States in the Global War on Terrorism: Turkey in the north, Lebanon and Israel in the west, Jordan (to some extent) in the south -- and on the eastern border is of course Iraq, which used to be Syria's brother Baathist dictatorship but which now contains a democratic government and 157,000 American soldiers, Marines, airmen, and sailors.

Meanwhile, Walid Jumblatt, head of Lebanon's of the Progressive Socialist Party and fierce critic of Assad and Syria, bluntly warned Assad to look east to see what was in store for him if he obstructed the U.N. investigation:

"If (he) acts like Saddam did, yes, we are heading to a situation similar to what happened in Iraq," Jumblatt said in an interview with the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya satellite television channel late Sunday. "But if he acts in order to preserve Syria's national unity and Syria's interest before (serving) the brother-in-law, a brother or anyone, he can save Syria."

Jumblatt was referring to Assad's brother, Maher Assad, and his brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat, the chief of military intelligence, who were named in an initial report submitted by U.N. investigator Detlev Mehlis on Oct. 28.

Jumblatt was probably being overly optimistic: as noted in a previous post, it is unlikely that the Syrian military would allow its head of intelligence to be handed over to the U.N. for interrogation and possible prosecution; they may well respond with an attempt at a coup d'etat instead.

It is looking more and more like Assad's days are numbered (or perhaps, as Woody Allen suggests, "lettered"). Many fear that if the Baathists collapse in Syria, it will bring a wave of Wahabbism or other Islamic fundamentalism to Syria. This is certainly a possibility; but as Turkey has proven, a country can be Islamist and still be democratic... and an Islamist democracy like Turkey does not pose a threat to the United States. The real danger is not Islamism but Islamic totalitarianism.

Bush may not have to "throw the dice" on Syria; it looks ready to come apart all on its own. We should be prepared, however, to move swiftly if necessary to rearrange the pieces into something more closely resembling democratic Iraq than the Wahabbist autocracy of Saudi Arabia or the Mullocracy of Iran.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 1, 2005, at the time of 3:06 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

The New German Left Has Left

The so-called "Grand Coalition" in Germany of the two biggest parties -- the Christian Democrats, who (barely) won the recent elections, and the erstwhile ruling Social Democrats -- has been shaken, if not yet stirred, by an uprising of more hard-core leftists within the ranks of the latter party.

According to the New York Times,

The chairman of the Social Democratic Party, Franz Müntefering, said he would not run for re-election next month after the party's executive committee rejected his candidate for its No. 2 position.

Mr. Müntefering, 65, is representing the Social Democrats in delicate negotiations to form a coalition government with the Christian Democratic Union, led by Angela Merkel. The parties had hoped to wrap up the talks in time to elect Mrs. Merkel on Nov. 22 as the first woman to serve as German chancellor.

It seems that the German Socialist youth took umbrage at being told what to do by their elders. Younger members of the Social Democratic Party (Gerhard Schroeder's party) tend to be much more leftist... rather like Michael Moore Democrats here. They don't like the idea of any economic reforms at all, preferring to rescue the ailing German economy by shouting slogans at it.

Like Mr. Müntefering, Mr. Schröder, 61, represents an older generation of Social Democrats that is increasingly at odds with younger party members. Some of these up-and-comers are staunchly leftist and opposed Mr. Schröder's efforts to overhaul the German economy.

The tension finally erupted at the recent party meeting, when Mr. Müntefering backed a longtime aide, Kajo Wasserhövel, to be general secretary. Political analysts said some of the younger members were antagonized by what they viewed as Mr. Müntefering's high-handed style.

Andrea Nahles, 35, a former leader of the party's youth wing and an unofficial leader of its left-wing faction, emerged as an alternative candidate. She was chosen in a secret ballot, by a vote of 23 to 14. Ms. Nahles's victory must be ratified at the party's congress in Karlsruhe in two weeks, where members are also scheduled to approve the agreement for a grand coalition.

Conceding her decisive victory, Mr. Müntefering said, "I can no longer be party chairman under these conditions."

This has set plans for the Grand Coalition wobbling, if not quite yet crashing down. If the merger does not go through as planned, however, new elections will be required, since neither the Christian Democratic Union on the "right" nor the Social Democratic Party on the left is likely to be able to form a ruling coalition with smaller parties.

Nobody seems to know what would happen in new elections: either voters would decide it had been a mistake to oust the Social Democrats, and they would win; or they would become impatient with the antics of the Left, and the Christian Democrats would win; or most likely, the results would be more or less the same, and the country would remain in turmoil. Ah, the wonders of the parliamentary system... it's so much more exciting! (Imagine Florida 2000 for months on end, with not only the presidency but also Congress in limbo.)

Oddly, although it's the Social Democrats who are splintering, the Christian Democrats are now also in trouble:

The jolt reached other parties too. Edmund Stoiber, a leading conservative politician who has developed a good rapport with Mr. Müntefering, said the announcement had given him second thoughts about his own role in a grand coalition government.

Mr. Stoiber, the prime minister of Bavaria, is the designated economics minister under Mrs. Merkel, and he has been a constant presence at her side in the talks with Mr. Müntefering and Mr. Schröder. His defection would sting Mrs. Merkel, since he heads the sister party of the Christian Democrats [the Christian Social Union in Bavaria, that is].

We'll have to watch this game of "spin the Bundestag" carefully, as it could have a very significant impact on Europe and the United States... both directly in terms of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) and indirectly as a result of its effect on the increasingly fragile German economy.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 1, 2005, at the time of 2:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Defund the Thugs

Of the five major initiatives on the California ballot this year -- I don't consider either of the two drug-cost initiatives all that important; I voted for one and against the other -- the two with the most long-term urgency are Proposition 77, Redistricting Reform, of course... and Proposition 75, Paycheck Protection.

For a perfect example of why we so urgently need to sever the automatic pipeline from the employee's wallet to the public-employee unions' campaign coffers, just take a look at this video, courtesy of Daniel Weintraub's Bee-blog, California Insider:

Genevieve.wmv.

(This video is work safe; it's off the KCAL Channel 9 News, and is fairly short.)

(Apologies to Daniel for hot-linking the video, but as his is a corporate (newspaper) site, and I deliberately waited a day to give him the scoop, and his site doesn't accept comments or trackbacks anyway -- I thought it was reasonable to link directly. By the way, do you notice how often I link California Insider? Take the hint and start reading him every day!)

The video shows an anti-Schwarzenegger rally by a small crowd of union members. One of the Governator's initiatives would force public-employee unions to first get written permission from each member before using any of his dues money for political purposes... and they don't like the restriction one bit.

Nor do they like anyone who supports it. In the video, a lone woman, identified as Gene Vieve Peters, showed up at the rally with some pro-initiative, pro-Schwarzenegger signs. You will see the crowd surround her, intimidate and harass her, and then violently lay hands on her, seizing her materials and destroying them. Even one of the "security" guards (orange Security vest) snatches the woman's signs and proceeds to tear them into pieces with a visceral hatred that makes me wonder how little more it would have taken for that woman to have torn up Ms. Peters instead of her campaign placards.

It is a videotape of sheer wanton union thuggery, nothing less. And this picture makes the case better than ten thousand words why we need, ultimately, to defund the thugs.

Yes on 75 -- no on political violence. This isn't Iraq or Russia or even France... this is America the free and California, the Golden State. For God's sake, haven't the unionistas even enough wit to rationally answer one lone woman at a rally of hundreds of their own supporters?

I hope this gets played every day in the news from now until the vote on Tuesday, November 8th. If it is, we win in a landslide.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 1, 2005, at the time of 12:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Date ►►► October 31, 2005

UN to Syria: It's Déjà-Vu All Over Again - UPDATED

UPDATE 5:18 pm PST: See below.

Once again, I must trot out poor, old Yogi Berra to explain international affairs.

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) just voted unanimously to impose an inspection regime on Syria similar to that imposed on Iraq... but in this case, they're looking for evidence about Syria's involvement in the assassination of Rafiq Hariri.

But I have a question: suppose the team investigating Hariri's assassination, poring through records, comes across evidence that Syria accepted "large stockpiles" of weapons of mass destruction from their Baathist brothers in Iraq; is there any way that the investigation can be expanded to include that question?

I suppose I'm really asking three questions:

1. Is there any possibility that the UN inspection team members would decide to follow such a lead if they stumbled across it?
2. Is there any possibility that the UNSC could rein them in if they decided to do so?
3. Is there any wiggle room for Syria to prevent the investigation turning that direction without violating the resolution?

Number 2 is the easiest to answer: since the United States and Britain are both permanent members and have veto authority in the UNSC, if the inspectors did start moving that direction, I don't believe the UNSC would, as a body, stop them; any such attempt to restrict the investigation would be vetoed by us and probably by the Brits as well.

Number 3 is so inside baseball that it could only by answered by an attorney familiar with this particular resolution and with "international law" in this area (those are scare quotes because I am very skeptical about the existence of international law in the first place). It certainly seems as if the leader of the inspection team, Detlev Mehlis, has the authority to pursue the case wherever he wants to take it:

The resolution grants the U.N.'s chief investigator, Detlev Mehlis of Germany, the authority to take his investigation anywhere in Syria, demand any documents and interview any individual, including Syrian President Bashar Assad, inside Syria or abroad. Syria is also required to abide by any request by Mehlis to arrest suspects, including Assad's closest aides and relatives.

So the most interesting question is number 1: suppose such evidence of WMD transfer cropped up... would Mehlis pursue it? He is the investigator who just submitted a hard-hitting report accusing Syria of active complicity in the assassination and also specifically naming a number of top Syrians, including chief of Syrian military intelligence Asef Shawkat (Bashar Assad's brother in law), President Bashar Assad's brother Maher, and other top members of the Assad regime. So it's pretty clear that Mehlis is rock solid on the assassination question.

But I don't know how he would react to discovering evidence on the two questions that are more interesting to me than the fairly settled issue of the Hariri bombing: did Iraq transfer its WMD to Syria before the war to prevent it being found, and is Syria actively complicit (as opposed to passively turning a blind eye) to terrorists crossing the border into Iraq to kill Americans and Iraqis?

How wide is Detlev Mehlis willing to expand his investigation to follow the evidence?

If he is more of a Norm Coleman or Richard Butler type, then I think the answer would be "as far as the evidence leads;" but if he's a Hans Blix clone, I would suspect "not one inch beyond the mandate."

My guess is he is somewhere in between those two extremes, so I'm left in a state of uncertainty.

One delicious Freudian slip on the part of the Syrians is contained in the article, though the Washington Post reporter, Colum Lynch, doesn't seem to have noticed:

The Syrian foreign minister, Farouk Sharaa, said Syria would cooperate, but he argued that the U.N. report produced no evidence that Syrians had committed a crime. He denied that Syrians knew in advance of the plans to kill Hariri and said such suggestions were akin to saying that U.S. officials were aware that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were coming or that British officials expected the subway bombings last summer.

In other words, Sharaa drew a comparison between the United States suffering an attack on American soil and Great Britain suffering an attack on British soil -- with a terrorist attack on Lebanese soil. Is he admitting that the Syrians consider Lebanon a "renegade province" of Syria, as Saddam Hussein used to consider Kuwait to be Province 19 of Iraq, and as China considers Taiwan to be a breakaway part of Red China? An interesting admission!

One excellent sign: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice used exactly the same phrase, "serious consequences," to describe what would happen if Syria refused to cooperate as UN Resolution 1441 threatened if Iraq refused to cooperate -- which, of course, is just what he failed to do.

Even if the United Nations refuses, at the end, to enforce its own resolution (again), let's hope that America will show as much resolve in 2006 as we did in 2003.

UPDATE: Captain Ed at Captain's Quarters earlier predicted dire consequences for the Assad dynasty if this resolution passed... which of course it did, unanimously. If Detlev Mehlis exercises his mandate and demands that Bashar Assad hand over military intelligence chief Asef Shawkat or Assad's brother Maher Assad, this puts the Syrian president in a quandry:

Assad doesn't generate the same kind of fear his father did, and that means his enemies will not find themselves cowed merely by his personality the way they might have with his father.

Turning over the suspects, of course, means coughing up his own family and the people at the top of the military intelligence apparatus. Before that happens, the military will likely have something to say about protecting its own, especially after suffering the humiliation of the withdrawal from Lebanon just this year. That looks like actual suicide, rather than political suicide.

If Assad chooses not to turn over the suspects, it will likely trigger real economic sanctions: even Russia and China will be hard-pressed to vote against such sanctions if Syria thumbs its nose at the resolution that they, themselves supported. As Ed notes,

After losing Lebanon for economic exploitation, the Syrians cannot afford any more economic hurdles and will not handle this kind of outside assault. The collapse of the Syrian economy will force the monied interests out of the country, and those have provided Assad with most of his power base.

So if Ed is correct, then the real question is who will follow Bashar Assad in the UnComfy Chair? If Syria suffers an actual coup d'etat, that might well open the door for the US forces just across the border to intervene much more directly and aggressively by launching attacks on so-called "safe cities" inside Syria, where terrorists gather and plot before infiltrating into Iraq.

It also might make it easier for Syrian democrats -- and I am sure they exist -- to try to seize their own country back from the vicious Baathists who have ruled there since 1963, after Syria split from the United Arab Republic (under which Syria had unified into a single country with Gamil Nasser's Egypt). If so, I hope that we offer whatever support such democrats may request from our nearby troops and airpower.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 31, 2005, at the time of 4:33 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Judge Alito -- Breaking News!

According to Hugh Hewitt, Charles Schumer is "slowing" the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court; I haven't yet seen this in print, but he did say that "it is a question" whether Alito would "reverse much of what Rosa Parks and so many others fought so long and so hard to put into place," as reported by Hugh. (I just heard the audio clip of Schumer using this phrase, so it's not just Hugh's word.)

Hugh had the same idea as I on the point of the delay: it's not out of any idea that Schumer and the other rejectionists could gather enough support to stop Alito's confirmation; rather, they hope to delay his confirmation long enough that Sandra Day O'Connor, not Samuel Alito, will decide the two abortion cases that will be argued in November.

But Hugh also reports that Lindsay Graham (R-SC) has as much as signalled that he will not support a filibuster against Judge Alito, and that he will support the "constitutional option" if the Democrats try. And just now, I heard with my own ears (not someone else's ears) Senator Mike DeWine (R-OH) explicitly say that he sees nothing in the way of "extraordinary circumstances" in the Alito nomination and that DeWine too would support the constitutional option if the Democrats filibuster.

That means two members of the Gang of Fourteen (specifically, the Seven Dwarfs contingent) have now come out in favor of the constitutional option -- banning judicial filibusters altogether -- if the Democrats filibuster Alito, as Patterico long-ago predicted the Democrats would for anybody that Bush nominated to his second Supreme Court opening.

Assuming that neither Arlen Specter (R-PA) nor Chuck Hagel (R-NE) would refuse to pull the trigger on that option, that means that the Democrats can get no more than five Republicans to vote against it... and that is not enough; with Dick Cheney's tie-breaking vote, the rules change would in fact pass. (Assuming, that is, that no Republican is unable to make the vote due to illness.) Though I'm also a bit concerned about Chuch Grassley (R-IA),

Speaking of Patterico, he also discusses this question.

I am convinced that Specter, in his present capacity as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, could not reasonably vote against the constitutional option in the context of a Democratic filibuster against Alito. So we need to get one more Squish on record out of the following group: John McCain (R-AZ), Chuck Hagel, Lincoln Chafee (R-RI), Susan Collins (R-ME), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), and John Warner (R-VA). I suspect Hagel, McCain, and Warner will make it clear before the hearings that they see no "extraordinary circumstances" in the Alito nomination.

It's looking good. The only question is whether the Democrats go ahead and force a filibuster, thus allowing the Senate to ban such tactics, or whether they read the tea leaves and drop the idea, just to keep that possiblity open for the future. (But who would they be waiting for, other than Samuel Alito? Is there anyone reasonably imaginable that Bush could nominate who would be worse for the Democrats than Alito?)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 31, 2005, at the time of 3:57 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

While You Were Aimlessly Frittering Your Time Away...

...Over the weekend, in keeping with your drab, wretched lives that have all the drama of an episode of MisteRogers' Neighborhood, we here at Big Lizards were engaged in the exciting industry of blog production!

In fact, we producted -- er, produced -- two posts this weekend, one each day, that you might enjoy:

Saturday, October 29th, 2005

• The Dog That Didn't Bark, in which I note that Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald declined to charge I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby with conspiracy, and that this very likely means Fitzgerald does not believe Karl Rove (or Dick Cheney) either told Libby to leak the information about Joseph Wilson's wife being in the CIA or to lie or obstruct Fitzgerald's investigation. In other words, as I predicted ages ago (here, here, here, and here), Rove is off the hook.

Sunday, October 30th, 2005

• Iraqi Kumbaya, in which Sachi reports the Good News that politics is breaking out all over Iraq!

Realistically speaking, y'all should be reading Big Lizards nine or ten times a day. (But be sure to allow a half-hour cooling-off period between readings, so each will register as a separate "hit" on SiteMeter.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 31, 2005, at the time of 4:47 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

AP Sez Alito! -- and It's Now Official

AP says that President Bush has selected Judge Samuel Alito to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court. And President Bush is currently announcing Judge Alito's nomination even as I type these words.

Here is Alito's c.v. from the Federal Judicial Center:

Born 1950 in Trenton, NJ

Federal Judicial Service:
U. S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit
Nominated by George H.W. Bush on February 20, 1990, to a seat vacated by John Joseph Gibbons; Confirmed by the Senate on April 27, 1990, and received commission on April 30, 1990.

Education:
Princeton University, A.B., 1972

Yale Law School, J.D., 1975

Professional Career:
Law clerk, Hon. Leonard I. Garth, U.S. Court of Appeals, Third Circuit, 1976-1977
Assistant U.S. attorney, District of New Jersey, 1977-1981
Assistant to the U.S. solicitor general, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, DC, 1981-1985
Deputy assistant U.S. attorney general, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, DC, 1985-1987
U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, 1987-1990

Race or Ethnicity: White

Gender: Male

(To find this, go here and type alito,samuel in the text box, and press Enter; click on the link that appears.)

I would love to see Patterico scramble to explain this post! Relevant quote:

If you believe this commenter at Confirm Them, Alito is out because Arlen Specter doesn’t like him. [Please see both updates to this post.]

Good Lord. Does Bush want Specter’s blessing or that of his base? Because they’re not the same thing.

Has he learned nothing from the Miers debacle?

Heh... we went from "if you believe" to "has he learned nothing -- ?" in just five sentences!

Patterico reminds me of Mark Twain's story about a cat who sat on a hot stove. It was such a painful lesson that he never sat on a hot stove again.

Trouble was, he never again sat on a cold stove, either!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 31, 2005, at the time of 4:24 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Just Go Right in There and Get 'Em!

Yesterday, Captain Ed had an interesting and troubling post on the rise of a particularly vicious Central-American gang called Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, M-18, or MS. At the end of the post, Captain Ed noted that deportations have had virtually no effect on gang members, who now number more than 50,000; they simply sneak right back into the United States again the moment they are released. He ends with this ringing demand:

We need to demand that Congress finally do something about the southern border and the flood of illegals that come across it if we purport to take security seriously, especially in this age of terror. We made an impact on the Supreme Court and on spending just by speaking out -- and we need to do so on this issue as well. [Emphasis added]

All right. Like what, exactly?

Note, I want specifics: not like Phil Donohue's prescription for how he would have captured Osama bin Laden without invading Afghanistan: "I would just go right in there and get him!" Ed links Michelle Malkin (Chris Kelly writing) -- another brilliant blog whose brilliance seems to fade a bit on this particular issue; Kelly suggests no more of a solution than does Captain Ed.

There are probably about 12,000,000 illegal immigrants in the U.S. How do you round up this many people? How many cops would it take? Do we need to rewrite the posse comitatus act to set the military loose to search American houses and arrest people they suspect of being criminals? How many soldiers do we pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention Central America, to play police officer when they have had exactly zero training for that function?

Where do we put all these detainees as we round 'em up? Reopen Manzanar for anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant? Even at a rate of one hearing every five minutes, it would take more than 37 years just to process the first million detainees -- and you still have 11,000,000 to go. Plus however many slip across during that first 37-year period. How many courtrooms, judges, court reporters, and clerks are we going to dedicate to doing nothing but processing these hearings? And since the arresting agent would have to testify in any case where irregularies were alleged by the detainee, how many Border Patrol and soldiers do we pull from the line to hang around the courthouse in case they're needed?

And when the hearings end, what do we do with the proven illegals? Deport them?

Nothing, absolutely nothing, is going to work so long as we're dealing with millions of people. Before anything else is done, we must create incentives for the illegales to regularize themselves. And we only do that by offering something: people who have hidden here for years are not going to turn themselves in for nothing.

President Bush's plan might not be the best we can construct; Congress will have its say. But without first separating the "people [who] want nothing more than economic opportunity" -- the vast majority -- from the criminal scum who join gangs like MS-13 (or worse, al-Qaeda), everything we do will be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. As any engineer knows, any structure, no matter how sturdy, will collapse under its own weight if you make it big enough.

There is no blinking it: we are going to have to offer carrots along with the stick to get undocumented aliens to turn themselves in voluntarily. There is no alternative. Some may wrongly term this "amnesty;" but given the choice between the unpalatable and the impossible, I know which I would select.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 31, 2005, at the time of 4:03 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

God's Country

I grew up listening almost exclusively to classical music ("classical" used in the general sense to include baroque, classical, romantic, etc.) When I went away to university, I started listening to rock... but in typical reptillian unfashionable fashion, I focused on rock from an earlier era than the 1980s; I listened to tons of acid rock: Iron Butterfly, Country Joe and the Fish, early Pink Floyd -- the Syd Barrett period -- along with lots of progressive rock, mostly King Crimson, Yes, ELP, Bowie, Gilmour-era Pink Floyd, and so forth... all stuff that was already a decade old or more when I first heard it.

Very recently, Sachi (another recent convert) has gotten me interested in country music -- mostly the newer stuff from Toby Keith, Brad Paisley, Tim McGraw, Gretchen Wilson, and suchlike, but also older country from Hank Williams (sr. and Bosephus), Junior Brown, and even the Sons of the Pioneers (Roy Rogers' first group, started at the beginning of the 1930s). A later incarnation of Sons of the Pioneers included the amazingly good lead singer Ken Curtis -- who you might know better as Festus Haggen, the scruffy deputy with the strange accent on the TV show Gunsmoke.

I had always liked blues; but a few years ago, I found and loved Jimmie Rodgers, probably the first country-bluesman and direct inspiration for Gene Autry, who also began his career singing country-inspired blues (including several covers of Rodgers, including "Frankie and Johnny," "In the Jailhouse Now," some of the "Blue Yodels," and so on).

To me, country represents the real lives of real people. I would turn to the progressive rock of the 70s for cosmic consciousness, and to classical music for transcendancy. But for the personal moment, songs like Keith's "Huckleberry" or Paisley's "Alcohol" just can't be bettered.

But more and more, contemporary country is losing some of the distinctive "twang" that has both defined and bedeviled it since the earliest days. Alt-country especially sounds like a country-cousin to rock anymore.

So I'm turning to any long-time country fans to help me out here: how would you define the essence of country and how it differs from rock? Is it the values? the attitude? a particular element of the songs themselves that I've missed?

Enquiring ears want to know!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 31, 2005, at the time of 2:48 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

Happy Samhain Eve!

May all your ghosts, goblins, witches, and power-saw murderers be unectoplasmic, nonhumanitarians ("humanitarian" as in "vegetarian"), wartless, and purely pretend, respectively!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 31, 2005, at the time of 2:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Calling for Iraqi Bill of Rights

Omar on Iraq the Model reports on a conference he just attended. It was called Oath of Iraq (Ahd Al-Iraq), organized by a number of prominent Iraqi women and including powerful members of the national and tribal governments:

The event was attended by more than a few female Assembly members as well as several tribal sheiks and representatives of other political entities and organizations…one can fairly say that a wide range of social and political the spectrum of Iraq population was well represented in the event.

The group seems to be an attempt to enact an Iraqi bill of rights as the first amendments to the Iraqi constitution. The conferees initially proposed five amendments:

• A requirement for the explicit definition of the term of art "public order and ethics," which the constitution allows as a limit on certain basic rights and freedoms (speech, press, assembly, peaceful protest). Otherwise, individual judges can invoke it whenever they don't like the free exercise of freedom.

(Someone should warn Omar that even defining it doesn't always work... as we've found out with regard to the Second Amendment, the "interstate commerce" clause, and too many others!)

• An amendment "to return back to the civil law legislated back in 1959 and to prevent Shareat [Sharia] laws from replacing that law."
• Clarifying the qualifications of the supreme federal court, the requirement that Sharia judges not outnumber legal judges, and the demand for at least 25% of the court to be female.
• Requiring the Committee to review all laws to ensure they do not violate the Iraqi constitution.
• Requiring the Higher Human Rights Committee to review all laws to ensure they do not violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

They had better tread carefully with that last amendment, and with the constitutional invocation (explicit and implicit) of the Universal Declaration. It is a bludgeon used by the United Nations to force conformity with European social-welfare policies and includes such whoppers as....

• No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
• Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
• Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
• Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
• Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

And so forth. All these look nice on paper -- but the first is so vague as to justify anything, while the last is out and out Socialism; the others more or less boil down to the requirement that the productive labor on behalf of the unproductive... which seems to violate Article 4:

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

One more amendment was proposed by a tribal sheikh of Sadr City, and this one seems eminently reasonable. As Omar puts it in the post from Iraq the Model:

The entire crowd welcomed the notes of one tribal Sheik from Sadr city who raised an objection to one clause in the punishment law which states that teachers and husbands should not be persecuted if they use disciplinary beating against their students or wives respectively. in his unexpected note, the sheik asked the committee to include correcting this clause in its agenda. [Emphasis added]

Given the abuse of both women and students that is endemic in the Arab Middle East, such an amendment is vital.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 31, 2005, at the time of 2:01 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Date ►►► October 30, 2005

Iraqi Kumbaya

Togetherness is breaking out all over Iraq... and I understand that some sort of election might be about to be held. (Pssst! Nobody tell the Democrats... Carville and Begala might head out to drum up support for Hillary in 2008.)

Since the victory of the Iraqi constitution, an amazing thing has happened: in the midst of a terrorist war, Shia, Kurds, and even Sunni have begun to act like civilized people gearing up for an election: they're campaigning, making alliances of political convenience, giving speeches, and I wouldn't be surprised if they kissed a baby or two.

This is remarkable, because less than three years ago, they lived in a dictatorship that had never held a real, contested election in their lifetimes. The success of Iraq gives this skeptic of "nation building" a lot to ponder.

Islam Online reports that it's not just the Iraqi Islamic Party, but all three of the biggest Sunni parties have joined together to urge Sunnis to vote in the December elections -- and to warn them against boycotting this time.

The Conference of the People of Iraq (CPI), the Islamic Party and the Iraqi National Dialogue (IND) joined the political fray in Iraq on October 14 as one entity on October 14 to run in parliamentary elections.

"We want to run as a political bloc in the next elections in order to obtain the best results," IND head Sheikh Khalaf Alayan told reporters on Wednesday.

CPI chief Adnan Al-Dulaimi criticized those who might call for a boycott of the vote, saying they "sought to destroy the country".

"We hope that those who oppose this consultation will not place obstacles in our path," added Islamic Party number two Tareq Al-Hashimi.

In related and very odd -- and probably good -- news, even Muqtada Sadr, renegade functionally illiterate Shiite "scholar" and great disappointment to his revered father has, for the moment at least, given up his Mighty al-Mahti Militia and joined with the Sunni Arabs in Anbar province to present a joint slate of candidates for the Iraqi parliament:

NAJAF, Iraq, October 26, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Shiite leader Moqtada Al-Sadr said Wednesday, October 26, he would present a joint list of candidates with Sunni Arabs in Al-Anbar province to contest the December 15 legislative elections.

The office of the anti-occupation firebrand said it decided to ally itself with the Sunnis due to "the difficult situation facing the country, to prevent the occupier and enemies of Iraq from attaining their goals, to consolidate national identity and to reaffirm its unity," reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Sadr's deputy, Fattah Al-Sheikh, joins eight Sunni candidates on a list for the Anbar representation. While we're not great admirers of the buffoon Sadr (as you can probably tell), at least it's a step in the right direction that he wants to run for Parliament instead of holing himself up in a mosque in Najaf and threatening to destroy the 6,225th most holy site in the entire ummah.

In really unalloyed good news, the largest Islamic association in Iraq, the Association of Muslim Scholars (Hayat Al-Ulama Al-Muslimin), has decided not to call for a boycott this time -- at least for now. With all the major Sunni political groups in Iraq now calling for Sunnis to vote, not boycott, it's likely this Sunni association will do so too.

Regardless of whether we like or dislike various political parties in Iraq, it's just plain better that they fight against each other with political campaigns and parliamentary votes than Kalashnikovs and car bombs.

Let me give over the floor to Mohammed of Iraq the Model; he wrote some stirring words today at the end of a post describing all the new parties and alliances and political factions lining up for the election. It's like there's suddenly politics going on in heart of the Arab Middle East! Western style politics, as in Spain or France. Iraq has made amazing strides in just two and a half years... which is a tribute not only to the Iraqis themselves (of course) but also to a man named George W. Bush.

Here's Mohammed:

[I]t has to be acknowledged that the political experiment in Iraq has matured by far during these two and a half years and the political language slowly began to take more realistic dimensions and we can sense a growing faith in the ways of democracy giving some sort of special divinity to the ballot box which shall remain the only base for building a new Iraq. The more Iraqis believe in elections and in voting as a way to express themselves, the weaker violence becomes and the more isolated the terrorists will be. Iraqis will prove that they do believe in democracy and they do want liberty and justice and the[y] will show the region an example of how partners can work out their differences in spite of all the hardships. [Emphasis added]

Well, he ought to know!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 30, 2005, at the time of 12:38 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

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