Editor & Publisher notes the appearance of impeachment talk recently in connection with the NASA flap all over the outposts of the leftwing commentariat:

NEW YORK Suddenly this week, scattered outposts in the media have started mentioning the “I” word, or at least the “IO” phrase: impeach or impeachable offense.

The sudden outbreak of anger or candor has been sparked by the uproar over revelations of a White House approved domestic spying program, with some conservatives joining in the shouting.

Ron Hutcheson, White House correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers (known as “Hutch” to the president), observed that “some legal experts asserted that Bush broke the law on a scale that could warrant his impeachment.” Indeed such talk from legal experts was common in print or on cable news.

Newsweek online noted a “chorus” of impeachment chat, and its Washington reporter, Howard Fineman, declared that Bush opponents are “calling him Nixon 2.0 and have already hauled forth no less an authority than John Dean to testify to the president’s dictatorial perfidy. The ‘I-word’ is out there, and, I predict, you are going to hear more of it next year — much more.”

Make no mistake. The level of the tactics of opposition the left is willing to resort to has increased continually over the last few decades with their ever growing frustration at political losses. These days, we see the Senate filibuster applied not just for the kind of primal confrontations which used to lead opponents in the major parties to die in the last ditch efforts. Today every significant mildly controversial bill, every tax cut, every presidential legislative initiative will reliably be filibustered.

We have reached a point of political opposition in which, if the weapon is available, the democrat opposition will use it.

The Bush Administration had better realize that it has only to lose control of the House of Representative in 2006, and they can bet that the NASA Flap or any later equivalent issue which can be inflated into a major scandal by the loving attentions of the democrat party’s MSM allies will be employed as a pretext for the Impeachment card to be played. The Left still believes it deserves revenge for the Clinton Impeachment, and for what it insists on looking upon as two “stolen” elections. The actual facts, fair play and intellectual honesty will have nothing to do with it. Lose the House and it will be Sauve qui peut! for the Bush Administration.

Since we could very well lose the House, if I were advising George W. Bush, I would tell him to fire that wimp Karl Rove, and get himself what is referred to in The Godfather as a war-time consigliere. The Bush Administration is being gradually brought down by the political equivalent of the death of a thousand cuts, by an endless succession of leaks and accusations. The opponents of the administration just keep throwing this one at the wall, and that one, to see which one is going to stick, and serve as the basis for a good old-fashioned Watergate-style scandal which can bring down the Administration.

Over four years, any endlessly repeated political initiative has a pretty decent probability of bearing fruit. As we have editorialized before, just like a football team, either an Administration is on the offensive or it is on the defensive. The only effective response to the calculated politics of scandal is to retaliate in kind more effectively. It’s not as if the opportunity does not exist. You have an active conspiracy of disgrunted former, and still active, Intelligence Community personnel leaking the most sensitive kinds of intelligence information for political purposes on time of war. A really aggressive Administration could be indicting people for treason. In this case, it should be entirely adequate to identify, prosecute, and punish some of the principal guilty parties on less extravagant charges.

The Bush Administration could take a leaf from the democrat party’s book, and learn how to use the politics of scandal to its own advantage. Only the politics of mutually assured destruction via scandal is likely to persuade democrats to relinquish ambitions of removing this president from office by impeachment.

This morning, I find Glenn Reynolds (one of the leading bloggers in league with Satan, at least according to Blogosphere alarmists in a tizzy over the possibilities of corporate influence intruding into blogging) advertising books and (Hurrah!) absinthe in his PJM ads. Libertarians, like the author of this blog, approve of books and absinthe.

Meanwhile, Power Line is running Blog ads, and is shudder advertising memberships in Greenpeace, which are telling us the polar bears are all going to drown, if we don’t give up driving our SUVs.

If PJM is selling absinthe, and Blog ads are selling Greenpeace memberships, I suggest every blogger wanting to do ads should run, not walk, in a PJM-wards direction.

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Those Greenpeace Polar Bears grabbed PJM’s Absinthe and both vanished by late morning Pacific time.

The Onion is breaking the latest Bush Administration leak scandal:

Rove Implicated In Santa Identity Leak
December 21, 2005

WASHINGTON, DC—The recent leak revealing Santa Claus to be “your mommy and daddy” has been linked to President Bush’s senior political adviser and deputy chief of staff Karl Rove.

What on earth is the admirable, highly respected, and politically sound Power Line blog doing running ads for…. Greenpeace? Ads selling memberships in the moonbat organization by promoting fears of Global Warming, no less. I’m as much in favor of capitalism as the next fellow, but really, guys.

The goofballs in the US Senate again blocked oil exploration in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Tara Sweeney explains what oil exploration means to her people, the Inupiaq Inuit who live there.

Right now, it’s 30 below zero in Kaktovik, the only village within the entire 19.6 million acres of the federally recognized boundaries of ANWR. It is total 24-hour darkness, and the wind is howling. Beyond the little houses, there is flat frozen ocean and tundra for as far as the eye can see. Stretching 1000 miles from the Barents Sea near Siberia in the west, to the Canadian border in the east, the Arctic Coastal Plain is one of the harshest climates in the world. Only the strongest people survive.

The PURE LUXURY of running water, flush toilets, local schools, local health care clinics, police and fire stations, were unavailable prior to the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay, America’s largest oil field, 90 miles to the west. Kaktovik was the last community on Alaska’s North Slope to get these wondrous things, courtesy of tax revenue from oil operations at Prudhoe Bay.

What would Americans in the Lower 48 States do if they were denied these basic necessities? They’d scream bloody murder!

Yet these are the basic amenities that radical environmentalists of the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society say the Inupiat Eskimo people should be denied.

It’s a funny thing: when the Democrats are in the majority, the Democrats run Congress. When the Republicans are in the majority, the Democrats still run Congress. How does that work?

Maybe if we get lucky, the democrats will nail Bill Frist with that phony scandal they’ve been working on, and get rid of him for us.

Never Yet Melted’s author was interviewed today by Blogasm.

Prenuptial Agreements are standard operating procedure among Hollywood celebrities these days. Sandy Cohen of AP reports:

LOS ANGELES - No mother-in-law sleepovers. Only one football game per Sunday. Mandatory sexual positions...

Prenups are the norm for most stars — even regular folks should have one, if you listen to Kanye West — and these documents can dictate far more than who gets what. Attorneys say some recent celebrity prenups include:

• Limiting the wife’s weight to 120 pounds or she must relinquish $100,000 of her separate property.

• Allowing a spouse to perform random drug tests, with financial penalties for positive results.

• Requiring a husband to pay $10,000 each time he is rude to his wife’s parents.

• The previously mentioned rules regarding mothers-in-law, football and sex.

“Everything is legal unless you’re dealing with custody of children or child support,” said Los Angeles divorce attorney Robert Nachshin, who has represented Barry Bonds (his ex signed the prenup the day before their wedding) and author Terry McMillan (who discovered the young hubby who brought her groove back was gay). “Everything else is up for grabs.”

“People have their own little peculiar peccadilloes they’re concerned about,” said attorney Leon F. Bennett, who has represented Marlon Brando, Kelsey Grammer and Dennis Hopper. “People of wealth have a sense they have power over others that their money can acquire, and reality shows it can.”

Infidelity clauses are common, Nachshin said. Michael Douglas agreed to pay Catherine Zeta-Jones millions should he stray, and Denise Richards made similar requirements of Charlie Sheen.

Granddaddy Long Legs (a relatively new blog devoted to MSM debunking) goes to work on backgrounding the NSA Flap story, fisking its propositions, and identifying the key mechanism of these kind of anti-Bush Administration news cycles:

The MSM reports stories about Democrats (who) opine and sensationalize about Republicans.

Writing in the Washington Post, Posner argues that innocent parties’ privacy is not really generally being invaded by data-mining to find terrorist communications:

The collection, mainly through electronic means, of vast amounts of personal data is said to invade privacy. But machine collection and processing of data cannot, as such, invade privacy. Because of their volume, the data are first sifted by computers, which search for names, addresses, phone numbers, etc., that may have intelligence value. This initial sifting, far from invading privacy (a computer is not a sentient being), keeps most private data from being read by any intelligence officer.

An English Baronet, lacking an heir, is resorting to DNA testing of Americans of the same name to locate a suitable male relative to take up the burden of maintaining the estate. This interesting exercise in genealogy will by covered by the Discovery Channel in a program currently, misleadingly, titled I’m Really a Royal.

The ad would read: Free to one lucky American named Slade, a 16-room English mansion surrounded by 1,300 acres of prime land in southwestern England. But be prepared to work for it.

Baronet Sir Benjamin Slade, 59, has no heir, but is desperate to pass his ancestral home, Maunsel Home—now a busy entertainment venue—to someone in the family.

So he has given a DNA sample to a team of genealogists, who will search for the closest match among Americans called Slade; some 5,000 are estimated to live in North Carolina alone.

“Running Maunsel House is a young person’s thing and I’m tired of it,” Slade told The Associated Press Wednesday. “I spoke to my 14th cousin in England, but he has a nice house of his own and he doesn’t want to move.”

The lucky man—Slade insists his heir must be male—will inherit the stately home near Taunton in southwest England, which dates in part from the 13th century and boasts a library, a dining room for 80 guests and a staff of five.

Maunsell House

Slade Surname Genealogy Project

Slade Surname Genealogy Project Current Results
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Sir Benjamin appears on television to discuss the search.

The Washington Times is reporting:

The Lebanese killer of a U.S. Navy diver was in custody in Beirut yesterday, according to U.S. officials who decried his release from a German prison last week and pledged to bring him to the United States for trial….

U.S. and German officials said Berlin notified Washington a couple of days before Hamadi was released. The United States, whose extradition request was turned down in 1987, did not ask that he be held longer because it saw no chance that Germany would turn him over now. Instead, Washington approached the authorities in Beirut, where Petty Officer Stethem’s murder occurred and where Hamadi arrived on Friday. A senior State Department official said Hamadi was in “temporary custody” in Lebanon, although it was not clear where or when he was arrested.

It certainly looks like Germany’s foreign intelligence service got their hostage out and also doublecrossed the kidnappers by tipping off US authorities.

Hat tip to Captain Ed.

Max Boot writing in the LA Times notes the left’s hypocritical double standard on leaking. Robert Novak’s mention of Valerie Plame’s employment has been treated in every MSM outlet, and throughout the leftwing Blogosphere, as the gravest intelligence-related crime in US history since Benedict Arnold tried selling West Point to the British. On the other hand, an endless succession of intelligence leaks far more damaging to US interests, emanating from the anti-Bush administration conspiracy of pouting spooks not only never receives the slightest criticism, but instead, in each and every case, the revelation is promoted as a government scandal revealed by crusading journalists, assisted by righteously distressed officials, whose identities must be kept secret.

IT SEEMS like only yesterday that every high-minded politician, pundit and professional activist was in high dudgeon about the threat posed to national security by the revelation that Valerie Plame was a spook. For daring to reveal a CIA operative’s name — in wartime, no less! — they wanted someone frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs, preferably headed for the gallows.

Since then there have been some considerably more serious security breaches. Major media organs have broken news about secret prisons run by the CIA, the interrogation techniques employed therein, and the use of “renditions” to capture suspects, right down to the tail numbers of covert CIA aircraft. They have also reported on a secret National Security Agency program to monitor calls and e-mails from people in the U.S. to suspected terrorists abroad, and about the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity designed to protect military bases worldwide.

Most of these are highly classified programs whose revelation could provide real aid to our enemies — far more aid than revealing the name of a CIA officer who worked more or less openly at Langley, Va. We don’t know what damage the latest leaks may have done, but we do know that past leaks about U.S. successes in tracking cellphones led Al Qaeda leaders to shun those devices.

So I eagerly await the righteous indignation from the Plame Platoon about the spilling of secrets in wartime and its impassioned calls for an independent counsel to prosecute the leakers. And wait … And wait …

Hat tip to Scott Johnson at Power Line.

Joel Engle on What’s the Rumpus excoriates the California-King-sized sense of entitlement of the planning-to-have-it-all “professional couple” who placed the following ad:

“IF THERE’S ever a Museum of Chutzpah, this recent classified ad in a community newspaper will be the featured exhibit:

‘NANNY — FULL-TIME — MONDAY-FRIDAY: Professional couple seeks responsible, happy, engaging nanny for 3-month-old infant. 7:30 AM-6 PM M-F; $300-350/week; breakfast, lunch provided. Would consider splitting into 2 positions (morning, afternoon). Interact/play with baby, daily stroller rides, no TV; housekeeping as time allows (during baby’s naps). Web cams present. No evenings/weekends/major holidays, no travel required. Qualification: infant childcare experience with references; college coursework in ECE or child development; current infant CPR/First Aid certification; fluent English; no smoking; reliable transportation to/from our … home; willingness for annual background/credit check, drug screening.’

It concludes with a phone number and, no kidding, an e-mail address. So let’s recap: A professional suburban couple needs someone to raise their child from scratch. Someone with a car who’ll brave two rush hours daily and work without rest 10 1/2 hours daily, 52 1/2 hours weekly, cleaning house when baby’s asleep instead of checking e-mail on her PowerBook. Someone fluent in not only English but also the advanced dialect of early childhood education and development. Someone who doesn’t mind Big Brother capturing her every moment for the comfort of her employers watching on the Web at their desks. Someone who’ll do all that for whatever’s in the fridge and $6.67 an hour — at the top end.

Hat tip to (wait for it…) Pajamas Media.

The Scotsman, and numerous other news outlets, are reporting on Germany’s release of Mohammad Ali Hammadi, a Hezbollah terrorist previously sentenced to life in prison for the murder of US Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem in the course of a hijacking in 1985.

GERMANY has quietly released a Hezbollah member jailed for life for the murder of a US Navy diver, disregarding Washington’s desire that he be extradited or remain behind bars, officials said yesterday.

The government said there was no link between Mohammad Ali Hammadi’s release and that of a German hostage in Iraq just days later.

“He served his term,” Eva Schmierer, a spokeswoman for Germany’s justice ministry, told a news conference.

Sources in Berlin and Beirut said that Mohammad Ali Hammadi, who was convicted of killing Robert Dean Stethem in Beirut during the 1985 hijacking of a TWA flight and sentenced to life in prison, was flown to Lebanon last week.

The US did submit an extradition request to the West German government in 1987, but it was turned down since Hammadi could have faced the death penalty in America.

Still, several diplomats said that if he could not be extradited, the Americans had wanted Hammadi to remain behind bars for the murder of Mr Stethem, whose battered corpse was thrown out of the TWA plane by the hijackers after they had shot him.

The diplomats said that the release could complicate relations between Germany and the US, which have pledged to co-operate against terrorism.

The US embassy in Berlin made no comment on Hammadi’s release, which came shortly before Susanne Osthoff was freed in Iraq.

The 43-year-old archaeologist had disappeared last month. Germany said on Sunday she was in safe custody.

The foreign ministry denied any Hammadi-Osthoff link, saying: “There is no connection between these two cases.”

Depkafile, the Jerusalem-based news and rumor source, whose reports are not always found to be reliable, and which is believed by many to function as a mouthpiece for Mossad, is affirming the German prisoner release was indeed a hostage trade arranged by the newly-appointed head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, and that the German betrayal of the United States constitutes the beginning of a campaign to promote German influence in the Middle East:

Ernst Uhrlau, Angela Merkel’s new head of the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, is revealed by DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources as the man behind Berlin’s secret decision to trade German archeologist Susanne Osthoff kidnapped in Iraq on Nov. 25 for the jailed Hizballah terrorist wanted in America, Mohammad Ali Hammadi.

Frankly, I believe Depkafile this time, and I sincerely hope the Bush Administration takes appropriately serious diplomatic and trade-related steps to punish Germany. We really should also have had some non-pouting US spooks waiting for this guy’s arrival in Lebanon to provide him with a free one way trip to a destination of our choice.

Here

Rex Hammock writes:

Yes, Virginia, there is a Web 2.0: I got this email from a young rexblog reader this morning, and I thought I should share it, knowing there are lots of children out there who this year are wondering the same thing:

Dear Rexblog:

I am 8 years old.
Some of my little friends say there is no Web 2.0.
Papa says, ‘If you see it on the rexblog, it’s so.’
Please tell me the truth; is there a Web 2.0?

VIRGINIA O’HANLON.
vohanlon@nospam.com.
Here is my response:

Dear Virginia,

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see….

Not believe in Web 2.0! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire Tim O’Reilly to come over to your house and explain Web 2.0 to you, but even if Tim O’Reilly showed up and you didn’t understand what the heck he was talking about, what would that prove? So what if nobody can actually explain Web 2.0 without using techno babble and business buzzwords? That is no sign that there is no Web 2.0. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see—and that’s why they develop buzzwords. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

The Harvard Crimson yesterday reports that Bob Woodward disclosed an interesting bit of gossip, over roast beef and asparagas, during an invitation-only dinner he attended at Harvard on December 5th:

in a conversation at Harvard earlier this month, Woodward hinted that he knows the identity of yet another key player in the case: Robert D. Novak’s original source for his July 2003 column on Plame, which touched off the scandal in the first place.

“His source was not in the White House, I don’t believe,” Woodward said of Novak over a private dinner at the Institute of Politics on Dec. 5. He did not indicate what information, if any, he had to corroborate the claim.

Woodward also denied conventional wisdom about the leak:

At the Harvard dinner, Woodward sparred with his friend and former Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein, over the motives behind the leak. The pair had just come from the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the Institute of Politics, where they spoke for more than an hour before television cameras and a large audience. The invite-only dinner afterward, which was attended by Harvard students as well as a handful of journalists and politicians, was declared on-the-record from the outset by Alex C. Jones, director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, who moderated the dinner conversation.

Responding to Bernstein’s claim that the release of Plame’s identity was a “calculated leak” by the Bush administration, Woodward said flatly, “I know a lot about this, and you’re wrong.”

On the one hand, the front runner in Bolivian presidential race is leftist Evo Morales, who campaigned promising to legalize cocaine production. On the other hand, Morales is a socialist who is planning to introduce new government planning and production controls. Just watch coca production plummet under Socialism. Shortages may soon be expected.

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 19 (Xinhuanet)—An international research team reported on Monday that it has mapped part of the genome of the woolly mammoth, a huge relative of today’s elephant extinct for about 10,000 years.

Using a combination of novel techniques, the researchers have sequenced a chunk of ancient DNA belonging to remains of a woolly mammoth and “fellow travelers,” including a sample of the bacteria, fungi, viruses and plants that lived at the same time as the mammoth. The remains of the mammoth, which lived in Siberia about 28,000 years ago, were well preserved in the permafrost, the researchers from Canada and the United States said in the Dec. 22 online edition of the journal Science.

Today’s must-read posting on Mudville Gazette of Robert Stokely’s observations on the meaning of his son’s Michael’s death last August in Iraq, the eloquent response of a decent and honorable man to the Cindy Sheehans of this world.

Linked by both Glenn Reynolds and Charles Johnson. There are some posts we think it obligatory to link, even if everyone else has already linked them.

A non-film review
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I don’t intend to see this PC film, but I’ve read the Annie Proulx story, and have seen Frank Rich’s column in the Sunday NY Times, which opines:

Without a single polemical speech, this laconic film dramatizes homosexuality as an inherent and immutable identity, rather than some aberrant and elective “agenda” concocted by conspiratorial “elites” in Chelsea, the Castro and South Beach, as anti-gay proselytizers would have it. Ennis and Jack long for a life together, not for what gay baiters pejoratively label a “lifestyle.”

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Perhaps Ang Lee made the film more heavy-handed and conventional than was the original story. Or perhaps Rich sees what suits his own political agenda. I can’t say. I haven’t seen the film.
———————————————-

The short story Brokeback Mountain is one of a series of “the hard reality of life among the simple and poor” stories set in rural Wyoming of which Proulx has recently written enough examples to make up two published collections.

Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist aren’t homosexual “by inherent and immutable identity.” They are

high school dropout country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life.

After the accidental sexual encounter, the conversation goes:

Ennis said, “I’m not no queer,” and Jack jumped in with “Me neither. A one-shot thing. Nobody’s business but ours.”

When four years later, they get together again, Ennis says:

“We both have wives and kids, right? I like doin it with women, yeah, but Jesus H., ain’t nothin like this. I never had no thoughts about doin it with another guy… You do it with other guys? Jack?

Jack replies:

“Shit no. You know that, Old Brokeback got us good.”

They are not homosexual. The entire point of the story is the tragic fate of two ordinary uneducated men, who accidentally develop an unaccountable and powerful emotional relationship
(including sex), which does not fit their ideas, circumstances, or possibilities.

The moral of the whole story is not: “Queers can be cowboys too!” Or: “A certain percentage of cowboys were secretly gay.” The moral of the story may be found in the closing sentence:

There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.

It seems interesting to note that the Left is treating the film as triumph in the culture wars, entirely on the basis of a 180 degree distortion of the central meaning of the original short story.

Rather than a vindication of “inherent & immutable gay identity,” Brokeback Mountain tells the story of the unhappy fate of Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar in the very same vein in which The Half-Skinned Steer tells the story of an octogenerian returning to the family ranch from Massachusetts for his brother’s funeral, who winds up driving off the road in a snowstorm a few miles from his boyhood home and freezing to death.

Annie Proulx isn’t purveying political correctness; she’s chronicling representative examples of strange and cruel accidents in a hard country. In the original story, homosexual love isn’t so much “an inherent and immutable identity,” as it is another example of the weird and miserable things that can sometimes happpen to people under an indifferent Western sky.

“More Iraqis think things are going well in Iraq than Americans do. I guess they don’t get the New York Times over there.”—Jay Leno

The Boston Globe is reporting that democrats, especially those seeking office in rural & Western states, are trying to disconnect from support of Gun Control, an issue which has functioned like the bug-zapper at the local Dairy Queen on many democrat hopes:

WASHINGTON—The Democratic Party, long identified with gun control, is rethinking its approach to the gun debate, seeking to improve the chances of its candidates in Western states where hunters have been wary of casting votes for a party with a national reputation of being against guns.

Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, who had been a critic of some forms of gun control during his tenure as governor of Vermont, has urged candidates to view gun control laws as state issues, allowing those in rural states to reflect the values of hunters and others hostile to gun control, while supporting restrictions in urban areas with serious crime problems.

‘’On gun rights, we’ve allowed the Republicans to paint us in a way that just doesn’t represent our values,” said Damien LaVera, a Dean spokesman, noting that Republicans have repeatedly portrayed Democrats as hostile to the Western way of life.

Though the California Governator is not in-step with the European intelligentsia, Brendan O’Neill identifies someone who is (though he does seem to be a bit of a plagiarist):

How long before Osama bin Laden gets invited to something like the Edinburgh Book Festival, to rub shoulders with the likes of Julian Barnes, wolf down canapés and win polite applause from the chattering classes for his poetic ramblings?

One of his statements has already been published as a bona fide opinion piece in that liberal bible the Guardian (under the heading ‘Resist the new Rome’ in January 2004), and now there’s this new book from the leftish literary publishing house Verso. It’s a collection of bin Laden’s statements from 1994 to 2004 with a handsome and serious jacket cover and discoloured, raggedy-edged pages to give it the look and feel of an instant classic. Reviewers have fawned over its ‘magnificent, eloquent, at times even poetic Arabic prose’, and claim that it shows the ‘author’ bin Laden (he’s not really the author, being stuck in a cave and all and with few means to receive royalties) as a ‘charismatic man of action, an eloquent preacher, a teacher of literature and a resilient, cunning, wonderfully briefed politician’ (1).

If it were not for the fact that bin Laden is the most wanted man in the world, and a mass murderer, and possibly dead, and apparently painfully shy (but then, aren’t all great poets?), surely the book festival circuit would not be far behind. I can picture him in the Speakers’ Tent in Edinburgh, all ethnically coiffured and clutching a copy of this, his life’s work, surrounded by wide-eyed journalists inquiring about his writing style and what inspires him to put pen to paper.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

The leftwing European chattering classes have been seething in outrage over the State of California’s recent execution of convicted murderer (and Nobel Peace Prize nominee) Stanley “Tookie” Williams, and the Bush Administration’s treatment of terrorists.

Writing in the German news magazine Stern, Florian GüÃu0178gen condemns the harshness of American methods of dealing with malefactors. (Ray D. translates—and responds—in Davids Medienkritik):

Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. The same principle is also used by the USA in the worldwide hunt for criminals. Because George W. Bush and the CIA are hunting terrorists – mass murderers, they allow themselves the right to kidnap and torture – without consideration for principles of justice or international rights. The ends justify the means. There that German al-Masri is just kidnapped for a short time from the Balkans, dragged to Afghanistan, shut-in, interrogated, probably also tortured. The USA, the home of the “West” works with the same methods of the dark rogues of the Russian mafia.

As the Stern editorial demonstrates, anti-American PC is particularly strong in the territories of the former Reich. Leftwing politicians in his hometown of Graz, Austria, responded to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s decision to decline clemency for Tookie Williams with a petition-drive to remove Schwarzenegger’s name from a local stadium re-christened in his honor in 1997. The naturalized-American governor responded in unmelted-American fashion:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday told officials in his hometown in Austria to remove his name from a sports stadium and stop using his name to promote the city.

The governor’s request came after politicians in Graz began a petition drive to rename the stadium, reacting to Schwarzenegger’s decision last week to deny clemency to condemned inmate Stanley Tookie Williams. Opposition to the death penalty is strong in Austria.

In a letter that began “Dear Mister Mayor,” Schwarzenegger said he decided to spare the Graz city council “further concern” should he be forced to make other clemency decisions while serving as California’s governor. He faces another such decision regarding a 75-year-old inmate scheduled to be executed Jan. 17.

“In all likelihood, during my term as governor, I will have to make similar and equally difficult decisions,” Schwarzenegger said in the letter. “In order to spare the responsible politicians of the city of Graz further concern, I withdraw from them as of this day the right to use my name in association with the Liebenauer Stadium.”

Schwarzenegger spokeswoman Margita Thompson said the letter was faxed to Graz city hall on Monday.
In it, Schwarzenegger also said he would no longer permit the use of his name “to advertise or promote the city of Graz in any way” and would return the city’s “ring of honor.”

“Since, however, the official Graz appears to no longer accept me as one of their own, this ring has lost its meaning and value to me. It is already in the mail,” the governor wrote.

The letter notes that city officials will receive a follow-up letter from Schwarzenegger’s attorney.

IT’S official: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was 83 per cent happy, 9 per cent disgusted, 6 per cent fearful and 2 per cent angry.

Nicu Sebe at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands tested emotion-recognition software on the famous enigmatic smile. His algorithm, developed with researchers at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, examines key facial features such as the curvature of the lips and crinkles around the eyes, then scores each face with respect to six basic emotions. Sebe drew on a database of young female faces to derive an average “neutral” expression, which the software used as a standard to compare the painting against.

Dr Cynthia McVey, a psychologist at Glasgow Caledonian University, tried to explain the apparent conflict in the emotions they found in the Mona Lisa’s face.

“She could have been chuffed he wanted to paint her and … a wee bit disgusted by the old man doing the painting. He might have been in the nude or have come on to her for all we know,” she said. “Or maybe she was annoyed because she had been sitting there for ages and he’s still not finished.”

Doesn’t it seem peculiar the way the same people who customarily take the most flexible point of view of Constitutional limitations on government suddenly transform into hardcore libertarians and Constitutional absolutists when the question on the table moves from gun ownership or property rights, or even campaign free speech, to the right of enemy conspirators to privacy?

Glenn Reynolds notes a good one this morning in Reason by Ronald Bailey:

For the average American living in the United States is like having more than half a million dollars in wealth. So says a new study from the World Bank, Where is the Wealth of Nations?: Measuring Capital for the 21st Century, which makes estimates of the contribution of natural, produced, and intangible capital to the aggregate wealth of 120 countries.

Why are Americans so well off? It’s not just because of America’s fruited plains and its alabaster cities. In fact, it turns out that such natural and man-made resources comprise a relatively small percentage of our wealth.

The World Bank study begins by defining natural capital as the sum of nonrenewable resources (including oil, natural gas, coal, and mineral resources), cropland, pastureland, forested areas, and protected areas. Produced capital is what many of us think of when we think of capital. It is the sum of machinery, equipment, and structures (including infrastructure) and urban land. The Bank then identifies intangible capital as the difference between total wealth and all produced and natural capital. Intangible capital encompasses raw labor; human capital, which includes the sum of the knowledge, skills, and know-how possessed by population; as well as the level of trust in a society and the quality of its formal and informal social institutions.

Some prominent PJM blogs began sporting cool new sidebar logos, featuring rabble-rousing slogans embodying hard-core “we bloggers vs. the evil MSM” rhetoric. I meant to grab both examples, and put up this post praising them, but the text could not be cut and pasted, and while I was typing out Number 2 below, that sneaky Charles Johnson went and switched ‘em all over to Number 2.

You couldn’t have a starker contrast between a system of checks and balances, and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing what he thinks. —- Jonathan Klein, former CBS executive.

Go, PJM. Up the Revolution!

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Found it. That earlier one read:

The core of the American people has manifested itself most purely in blogs because elites for so long controlled all avenues of communication. Those days are over now.—Tammy Bruce, Editorial Board.

If anybody has doubts about the Blogosphere constituting a serious form of media expression these days, I would point to the Sunday New York Times turning to Iraqi blogs for response on the recent election.

I found the Times’ choice of blogs interesting.

The first blog quoted was: A Star from Mosul, written by “Aunt Najma,” a 17 year old school girl, who has been posting from war-torn Mosul, deep in Sunni Iraq. It is impossible not to like this charming young girl (proud of recently becoming an aunt), who posts fairly regularly concerning the dangers and inconveniences the war has brought to her life. When I began reading her, she was apolitical, but in recent months as the fighting neared her home, her postings became anti-American. Najma reports that a Mufti informed residents of Mosul this time that voting was a religious duty, and Najma’s family responded enthusiastically. Her election post ended on a patriotic note.
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The Times’ second blog was predictable. It was, of course, Riverbend’s Baghdad Burning. Its author describes Baghdad Burning as a “girl blog,” and uses as an epigraph: I’ll meet you ‘round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend. But Baghdad Burning consistently features a lot more strident and inflammatory anti-Americanism than it does healing and mending. This one was a dead certain cinch for NYT selection.

Riverbend tells us in the Times:

Many Iraqis went to vote because the current situation is intolerable. It’s not so much with high hopes for drastic change that people went to the polls as it is in the national aspiration of putting an end to the occupation, and to the tyranny of the last year in particular….
In my opinion, elections in Iraq cannot be democratic under a foreign occupation – especially when the election lists were composed largely of the same people who supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq. We are recycling the same names, faces and ideologies of sectarian and ethnic divide.

Even so positive a concession as the admission of a large electoral turnout was reserved by Riverbend for the Times. Baghdad Burning has not been updated with the material appearing in today’s Times, and sits sullenly without new postings since Thursday, December 15, just before the election. Riverbend is refusing to acknowledge the news she doesn’t like, news of the size of the turnout and the election’s success. I used to consider this blog worth a regular look. Its author was obviously a passionate America hater, but I thought the blog worth reading as an effective voice for a particular point of view. This little exercise in self censorship shows just how honest a voice Baghdad Burning really is. Chances are “Riverbend” has a great big, bushy mustache, and is really the nephew of “Baghdad Bob,” aka Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the former Iraqi Minister of Information.

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No. 3 was an Iraqi blog I didn’t know, titled: Eject: Iraqi Konfused Kollege Kid. “The kid himself” brought an apolitical youthful rocker’s perspective to the election:

IRAQ’S first Election Day last January was another Anyday for me. As a so-called Sunni who would rather be identified as “Iraqi,” I wasn’t really into politics… Now, I’m not the kind of person who simply gets up and does whatever his ayatollah tells him to do, but I was rather fed up with all the bad blood that resulted from American-installed sectarian policy, and I felt that voting would restore much-needed balance….I chose List 618 (the so-called Sunni list), not because I want an Islamic government, but to restore the balance between Sunnis and Shiites. I considered the secularist Allawi list (731) for some time, but something told me that guy’s going to win anyway. Besides, Ahmad Radhi, Iraq’s most famous soccer player, is strangely supporting 618.

“The kid himself” is not a high volume blogger. He hasn’t posted since Monday, December 12, and his posts have nothing to say about politics. Way to go, Times, there’s a great job of journalism, really getting the real inside dope on the Iraqi point of view on the election.
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No. 4 was Hassan Karuffa, a civil engineering student, and the author of A Star from Mosul’s cousin, who writes An Average Iraqi. Hassan, like his cousin, was much more enthusiastic about this election. He does describe some of the electoral slates who were running in a recent posting. Alas! for the Times, Hassan too strikes a positive note:

Looking back at the things we achieved since the war, I feel very proud. Although we hear shootings and bombings every day. We reached this far, and we are going on, on and on to the finish. Yes, I am optimistic about the future. Life in Iraq has been so bad so far, but I see a bright future. I see an Iraq with full-time electricity, full-time water and full-time security.

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Studiously overlooked by the Times were Iraq the Model and Hammorabi, both pro-American, and both far more more widely read, and much more politically substantive than the Times’ choices: three nice kids plus Baghdad Bob’s hairy nephew.

Marty Lederman in the fourth of a series of postings, linked by Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy, reviewing the John McCain-sponsored Al Qaeda Bill of Rights, notes what he regards as potential negatives, including: (the possibility of the) Admission of Evidence Obtained by Torture and Limitations on Detainees’ Access to Judicial Review.

Lederman’s position implicitly involves vesting detained terrorists and illegal combatants with rights to treatment and protections pertaining to persons enjoying the status of prisoners of war. But what is the actual status of such persons? To be entitled to be treated as a prisoner of war, the individual apprehended under arms in some form must be either a uniformed individual serving in the regular armed forces of a recognized state, which these detainees are not; or meet all of the criteria required for recognition of equivalent irregular status in

2. Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfil the following conditions:

(a) That of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;

(b) That of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;

(c) That of carrying arms openly;

(d) That of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

Terrorists and unlawful jihadist combatants fail all four of the above tests, and should be consequently regarded as ineligible for the honorable status of prisoners of war, and should be regarded and treated, as hostes humani generis, “the common enemies of humankind.” See Joseph P. Bialke, Al-Qaeda & Taliban unlawful combatant detainees, unlawful belligerency, and the international laws of armed conflict.

As Mackubin Thomas Owens writes:

The real reason the detainees are not entitled to POW status is to be found in a distinction first made by the Romans and subsequently incorporated into international law by way of medieval European jurisprudence. As the eminent military historian, Sir Michael Howard, wrote in the October 2, 2001 edition of the Times of London, the Romans distinguished between bellum, war against legitimus hostis, a legitimate enemy, and guerra, war against latrunculi — pirates, robbers, brigands, and outlaws — “the common enemies of mankind.”

The former, bellum, became the standard for interstate conflict, and it is here that the Geneva Conventions were meant to apply. They do not apply to the latter, guerra — indeed, punishment for latrunculi traditionally has been summary execution.

While not employing the term, many legal experts agree that al Qaeda fighters are latrunculi — hardly distinguishable by their actions from pirates and the like. As Robert Kogod Goldman, an American University law professor who has worked with human-rights groups told the Washington Times, “I think under any standard, the captured al Qaeda fighters simply do not meet the minimum standards set out to be considered prisoners of war.”

Jeff Goldstein posts this comment from Steve in Houston:

If I’m a terrorist, feeling all bummed by my comrades getting greased along the Euphrates, I’m really trying to find a silver lining. Fortunately, the infidels are cooperating:
—I now no longer need fear any kind of physical coercion; the Dems have basically put me in the same position as Nigel Tufnel’s guitar: It’s never been played. Don’t touch it. Don’t even point. Don’t even look at it.
—As a potential martyr, I know I won’t need to comply with a treaty I never signed; I won’t be incarcerated for much more than a fortnight; I won’t be returned to my country of origin; and I won’t be placed in some allahforsaken Caribbean gulag where they pee within 20 feet of my plastic-encased Koran.—I also know that if the kufr find my Blackberry, they can’t really do much about checking on my contacts at Harvard and Georgetown. I’ll lose my speed dial to Ahmenedijad (sp?) and Dana Milbank’s (or is it Dana Priest’s?) e-mail address, but I can always rebuild my contacts list.

It’s great. I get all the benefits of being an American citizen and still get to plot its violent demise.

Many of us remember the amusing, light-hearted, and non-partisan, JibJab cartoons which were some of the brighter moments of the 2004 presidential election. The JibJab boys have done a new one commenting on 2005, George W. Bush’s Annus horribilus. George W. sings “Auld Land Syne.”

AP reports:

Prisoners were tortured and starved to death in a post-World War II interrogation camp run by Britain for former Nazis and others, a newspaper reported Saturday.

The Guardian’s report cited documents recently released under the Freedom of Information Act that described the suffering of some of 372 men and 44 women detained at the camp in Bad Nenndorf, a spa town in northwest Germany occupied by the British after the war. Many prisoners had been former Nazi party members or former SS members, rounded up to prevent any insurgency, the Guardian said. Other detainees included businessmen and industrialists who had flourished under Adolf Hitler’s regime.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been shot dead, according to Wikipedia, the online, up-to-the-minute encyclopedia. World mourns.

(The report was corrected.)

George W. Bush came to Washington ambitious to fulfill a promise to be “a uniter, not a divider.” He had been successful as Governor of Texas in governing in a relationship of cooperation with legislative democrats, and he believed that he could successfully apply his natural amiability and charm to achieving the same kind of good-natured bipartisanship at the national level. George W. Bush was dead wrong. No one in Washington was open to being charmed. The stakes are looked upon as too high, and its adversarial politics are these days professionally conducted on the basis of calculation, not personalities. His political opponents had never accepted the legitimacy of the Bush electoral victory in 2000, and when he easily turned aside what they had fondly believed would amount to a formidable challenge in 2004, they were even more furious.

Bush’s re-election with increased congressional majorities appeared to represent an historic political watershed. The democrat party was seemingly in complete disarray. The liberal establishment’s traditionally decisive weapon of MSM domination had proved astonishingly ineffective during the 2004 campaign. The MSM wouldn’t cover allegations about John Kerry’s military service and awards, and his veteran opponents just published a book which topped the best seller list for weeks. No one had any problem learning what John Kerry’s fellow sailors thought of him. The left tried to turn the tables by producing a Big Story attacking Bush’s military record, and the Blogosphere brought down Dan Rather and humiliated CBS. It looked as if conservative AM talk radio combined with a newly ascendant Blogosphere, operating as alternative information sources, had arrived as the Republican Party’s fully operational ABM system, able to repel and refute MSM attacks, and able as well to launch devastating counterstrikes.

Then came 2005.

No one on the Right foresaw that what the MSM could not do in the 2004 campaign, they could do given a natural disaster to work with.

No one in the Bush camp recognized the possibility that endless repetition of the claim that “Bush lied” would ever succeed in gaining traction beyond the circles of the leftwing lunatic fringe, and rise in the minds of the general public to the level of accepted fact.

No one in the leadership of the Administration seems to have recognized that the executive branch, from the Intelligence Community and the State Department to the Department of Justice, featured significant numbers of entrenched and disgruntled liberal opponents ready to work systematically to bring down the administration from within.

The Bush Administration has stood there, like the proverbial deer in the headlights, doing nothing to save itself, while its pouting spook opponents from the Intelligence Community have run a disinformation operation that has successfully forced the resignation of the Vice Presidential Chief of Staff, and which promises also to “take out” the president’s chief advisor. While this organized group of administration opponents has successfully managed to criminalize disputes over the interpretation of intelligence by promoting a trivial press leak into a major scandal and full-blown criminal investigation, it has also leaked far more substantive and far more damaging information routinely on a weekly basis without the least sign of any administration response.

Bush is about as unpopular as presidents get right now without being impeached. He has an excellent chance of being accorded a place in the history books in the general vicinity of Warren G. Harding and Richard Nixon. How many more weekly leakfests does this administration think it can sustain?

It doesn’t have to be this way. Get Porter Goss to swear out a complaint of the violation of intelligence statutes. Find the meanest, and sharpest, and most press-hungry Harvard or Yale Law-educated Republican Appeal Court judge you can find, and get somebody actually on your side in the Justice Department (not the guy who appointed Patrick Fitzgerald), to appoint that man the next Special Council, and let slip the dogs of prosecution.

The President can make the news, you know. Instead of waiting for the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or Mr. Zarqawi, to write the weekend’s headlines, why don’t you guys write some yourself? Let’s invade Syria. Just like Iraq’s, the Syrian dictatorship will crumble like a rotten pumpkin with one good kick. There’ll be a lot less insurgency in Iraq, once the Syrian base is out of business. Terrorism all over the Middle East wil be significantly reduced. Maybe Iran will think twice about that nuclear bomb project when they see US tanks rolling through Damascus.

Let’s bomb Al Jazeera. So what if they set up a second operation elsewhere? We do actually have more than two loads of bombs. I bet they run out of broadcasting facilities, before we run out of ordinance.

Your opponents are leaking US Intel secrets like a sieve. Leak some yourself. Tell some war stories. Go on television, show pictures, and tell the people how we caught this really bad guy, or that one, up to some serious form of skulduggery.

You’re getting lots of static about the treatment of terrorist captives and lack of terrorist due process. Let’s have some due process. Put on a show trial. Take one or several murderous jihadist fanatics, from whom we’ve gotten every piece of information we can, put them on trial on television, convict them, and then ceremoniously hang them.

You need better news management. Making a case for the war, making a case for the administration’s policies, needs to be a completely different scale of priority. Our adversaries in the Middle East cannot possibly defeat US military forces in the field, but they can defeat us, and bring about our ultimate humiliation and withdrawal, by winning (with the aid of the domestic left) the battle for control of the US public’s perception of reality. The fight for control of domestic American opinion needs to be understood as absolutely vital to the successs of American arms.

And the active, and skilled, conduct of the battle for public opinion is essential for this administration’s place in history, its effectiveness at governing, and—at this point—its very survival.

Dennis the Peasant, while we weren’t looking, produced reams of anti-PJM postings. No, I’m not going to read, or count all of them, but he has come up with a logo which beats PJM’s by wide margins.
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Steve H. writes (12/12):

I love these guys. They can’t write their way out of a wet Kleenex, so they whore their way to 15,000 measly visits per day, and suddenly they think they know how to dance? Standing up in your high chair may make you feel just as tall as Daddy, but that doesn’t mean it’s so.

and on 12/13:

Wizbang is an undistinguished blog that gets 15000 visits per day, half of which are search engine accidents, which means it’s about as important as one of the bigger condo newsletters. There are high school papers that have readership of the same order of magnitude.

This aroused my curiosity, and I found that his own hit score on 12/15/05, at 9:00 PM PST looked like:

Average Per Day 2,781

Average Visit Length 2:45 Last Hour 229 Today 9,249 This Week 19,467

He gets better on 12/14 with We Will Bury You!, which—for the curious—provides some speculation on the economics of PJM.

That has been my biggest gripe about blogs such as Instapundit for quite a while. Glenn Reynolds can browse the various news sites faster than anyone in the world and post a quick link that looks something like “THE PRESIDENT’S APPROVAL RATING is down, but I predicted this in my sleep sixteen months ago to the minute…” and be considered a prophet by the vast majority of the blogosphere. LGF does much of the same, and outside of proving that Dan Rather’s documents were fake, hasn’t been known for much of anything outside of that since that day (with the exception of the failed Pajamas/OSM media venture, but we won’t bring that up). The reason I chose to post about this is because the blogosphere has turned into a K-12 playground; there are the cool kids who get fame and look down on the regular guys who bust their asses, and there are those of us stuck somewhere in the middle who are here to have some fun, yet get jerked around and trashed because we don’t take the “blogging industry” seriously enough for those who want it to be the next MSM.

Wizbang is a great blog with great insight, and they have at least two posts a day that I learn something new from. What keeps them from becoming an Instapundit or a LGF is the fact that they grab snippets of an article and then create their own points and perspective from it. Wizbang editorializes and creates content, versus Instapundit and LGF who merely link like an e-mailed crawler gone haywire. But, the blogs will always be on top because of the fanatical blogging crowd who wake up each morning hoping that their posts will be linked by one of the two.

Does this make them bad? Not at all. The wonderful thing about the blogosphere is the fact that we can do what we want and not be forced to worry about a profit margin or angry advertisers. When the Pajamas/OSM debacle was occurring, I read from one pundit who equivocated it to the bossy girl up the street who wants to become the leader and organizer of the local baseball game, which subsequently took the fun away from the whole process. When people take blogging too seriously, or when the little cliques are created that demonize and demoralize others in the blogosphere by shunning them and trashing them because they’re not the “cool kids,” it ruins exactly what made the blogosphere fun to begin with.

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Liberal Avenger kisses up to Hog on Ice.

Moxie has nothing interesting to say, but that doesn’t stop her.

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John Cole finally gets sick and tired of the relentless (and mostly pointless) bashing.
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I have to agree with John here. An awful lot of electrons were spilled to very little substantive, and no positive, purpose this time. I think it is more than a little churlish to abuse Glenn Reynolds and Charles Johnson. I read them daily, as most of us do, for good reason. If the PJM critics could do anything half as well as those two gentlemen, whatever it was, we’d all be reading them too. But this unutterable waste of bandwidth demonstrates why we don’t read some of them at all, and read others infrequently. Trying to report PJM bashing is becoming both overly laborious and a crashing bore. If you can’t feud amusingly, don’t feud, say I. This is it. No more rubbish about PJM will I waste my time on.
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As to PJM: well, I wouldn’t give it a Best Site award this year, but Roger Simon borrowed no money from me, and they don’t charge me to click on it, so I am not demanding a refund. It would not surprise me if it got better over time. Suggestion: how about a longer page? There could be more features, more major stories. Maybe throwing more darts per diem would produce more bullseyes.

Powerline’s Scott Johnson remembers Rick Rescorla, a hero in Vietnam and a hero on 9/11.

The Pouting Spooks unleashed today their latest salvo against the Bush Administration. This intelligence leak concerned the National Security Agency, was released via the NY Times, and featured a civil liberties scare story. The leak was carefully timed to compete for attention with headlines of the election in Iraq, and to assist Senate opponents in preventing a vote on the renewal of the Patriot Act.

The Times informed its readers breathlessly that:

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying.

And then went on to source the story:

Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation’s legality and oversight.

Oh sure, they’re so anonymous. The pouting spooks behind this leak, and all the others, are a collection of Intelligence community and State Department doves, operating above-ground as Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS, which ought to be Vipers), mentioned here previously:

Ray McGovern, in a 2004 interview with the leftwing journal Mother Jones, stated that VIPS was organized in January of 2003.

We established our group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, in January of last year. Before that several of us had been writing op-eds, and we had been giving each other sanity checks, because the conclusions we were coming up with were pretty far out — that the President and the Secretary of State were lying through their teeth.

According to McGovern, VIPS, at the time of the interview (March 2004), had 35 members consisting of retired and resigned officials from the FBI, Defense Intelligence, NSA, Army Intelligence, and the State Department, and also boasted of the existence of active members of the intelligence community working with VIPS, but “not as members.”

Earlier Posts

NY Times promises of anonymity have already been demonstrated to be valueless in the face of criminal investigations, specifically as the result of the efforts of the same pouting spooks to criminalize policy differences. It seems inevitable that sooner or later the Administration is going to get tired of passively serving as a punching bag for an endless series orchestrated media attacks, and will decide what’s sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander, and begin prosecuting obvious breaches of federal law. The federal prison system is large enough to accomodate 35+ Vipers.

Liberals are not happy. Hat tip to Preaching Politics.

CNN reports that Zarqawi was in the hands of Iraqi Security Forces last year, who let him go:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN)—Iraqi security forces caught the most wanted man in the country last year, but released him because they didn’t know who he was, the Iraqi deputy minister of interior said Thursday.

Hussain Kamal confirmed that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—the al Qaeda in Iraq leader who has a $25 million bounty on his head—was in custody at some point last year, but he wouldn’t provide further details.

The 39 colleges of Oxford University are destined to lose their 800 year-old right to select their own students in a plan drafted by a so-called “working party” of sophisters, calculators, and economists appointed by the Labour Party’s collectivizing commissars in a new social engineering outrage aimed at further levelling. The Telegraph musters at least a modestly pejorative headline of protest.

The Times

But even this is insufficient. The Guardian exposes other surviving relicts of elitism:

Oxford University is being accused of snobbery after leaked details of admissions criteria for a post-graduate course revealed that tutors were instructed to give preference to candidates from “prestigious” universities over those from “second-rank” and “weak” ones…

Michael Driscoll, the vice-chancellor of Middlesex University and the chair of the Campaign for Mainstream Universities, representing the new universities, said the guidance was appalling.

“On what basis can they be saying that a degree from one institution is worth more than a degree from another?”

Hat tip to Cacciaguida.

It appears that I am not the only reader to reach for the air sickness bag after receiving my dailing helping of Andrew Sullivan’s limitless supply of sanctimony anent mean tweatment of poor widdle terrorists. Even the easy-going Glenn Reynolds writes:

Andrew Sullivan—pursuant to his apparent brand differentiation strategy, I guess—is bravely standing up to the “NRO-Reynolds chorus,” whatever that means. I don’t think I really agree with Mark Levin, Rich Lowry, et al. on the specific subject at hand, though I confess that I haven’t followed that particular pissing match very closely. However, I do agree with them that Andrew has been consistently, pompously, and annoyingly moralistic and irritatingly unspecific. So if that’s the chorus, well yes—but it’s a song that has a lot of notes, most of them struck by Andrew himself. And I’m irritated with him, not for the reason you might think—because I disagree with Andrew—but more the contrary, because every time I read one of his preening posts, I find my opposition to torture weakening in response, even though I’ve been consistently in opposition to torture since 2001 (and before). God help me if he ever starts blogging in support of nanotechnology and bans on cloning—I’ll probably start looking at Leon Kass more sympathetically. It’s like listening to Robert Bork talk about original understanding jurisprudence.

Israeli Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, former chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Force

asserted that Saddam spirited his chemical weapons out of the country on the eve of the war. “He transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria,” General Yaalon told The New York Sun over dinner in New York on Tuesday night. “No one went to Syria to find it.”

Exactly what we’ve been saying all along.

And some people say there’s nothing good on PJM!

Iowahawk is offering special coverage of the election in Iraq by Special Correspondent Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi:

Yozup, haters? Yeahhh, the Zarkman’s comin’ at ya from B-town, and me and the Q Crew be all up in this bish. Infidel who runs this blog says all y’alls over in Satanland got some big hard-on about this Iraqi election shit, and asked me if I would jack his hit counter with a little local Q Crew flava. Normally Zarkman would tell the tell the punkass bitch to go suck it. But the choads at Pajamas Media are passin’ out the Haterade, so somebody’s gotta give you the Team Z POV.

An announcement is expected later today.

It would be unrealistic for the Bush Administration to continue to try to oppose this unstoppable piece of feel-good legislation.

The United States has an ancient, and very deep, cultural tradition of hypocrisy, dating back to the settlement of Massachusetts Bay by Puritans from England early in the 17th century. This tradition commonly expresses itself in intellectually dishonest, impractical, and counter-productive public policies, which are nonetheless nearly invariably successfuly rammed through by the contemporary elect on the basis of simplistic slogans and a chorus of pieties.

Are we Americans really so humane and idealistic that we would prefer to avoid the coercive interrogation of captured terrorists, even at the potential cost of mass American civilian casualties, even at the cost—perhaps—of our own precious and unique lives? You’ve got to be kidding! Of course, we’re not. We all know perfectly well that we have every intention of being safe and protected by the rough men charged with our defense. But we are a self-indulgent and intellectually dishonest people. We want to have it both ways. We insist on striking public postures demonstrating to the world, and to ourselves, that we are too fine and noble to condone brutality and force, and we still want those entrusted with the responsibility for our defense to break the rules, to sacrifice themselves if necessary, to protect us. Of course we intend to be safe, but we feel a need to indulge in a public ceremony of innocence, to assure ourselves that, come whatever may, our own hands are clean. Feeling better about ourselves for a fleeting instant may have a terrible cost for someone else someday, but what do we care?
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And 24 hours later, Gregory Djerejian confirms:

No. McCain is right. Torture can never be legally preordained as an acceptable tactic, even against the monsters we face. It must remain a crime to engage in it, without exceptions, and interrogators must be held accountable for their actions. They may, under the totality of the circumstances, be pardoned or otherwise excused when the full facts come to light. But ex post, not ex ante.

One of our correspondents in the Comments section, who signs himself “Charles Peirce” (clearly a pragmatist), cites a CNN article, dated 11 Feb 2004, in which it is reported that:

Sources told CNN that Plame works in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations—the part of the agency in charge of spying—and worked in the field for many years as an undercover officer.

“If she were only an analyst, not an operative, we would not have filed a crimes report” with the Justice Department, a senior intelligence official said.

Thanks to “Charles Peirce” for bringing this to our attention, but the question remains: is it actually true that Valerie Plame was in the Directorate of Operations? The Counterproliferation Center was clearly an analytic, rather an operational, entity.

A bit of web searching discloses an earlier Valerie Plame career as an CIA officer working with Non-Official Cover, what is called an NOC:

Plame worked as a spy internationally in more than one role. Fred Rustmann, a former CIA official who put in 24 years as a spymaster and was Plame’s boss for a few years, says Plame worked under official cover in Europe in the early 1990s — say, as a U.S. embassy attache — before switching to nonofficial cover a few years later. Mostly Plame posed as a business analyst or a student in what Rustmann describes as a “nice European city.” Plame was never a so-called deep-cover NOC, he said, meaning the agency did not create a complex cover story about her education, background, job, personal life and even hobbies and habits that would stand up to intense scrutiny by foreign governments. “[NOCs] are on corporate rolls, and if anybody calls the corporation, the secretary says, ‘Yeah, he works for us,’” says Rustmann. “The degree of backstopping to a NOC’s cover is a very good indication of how deep that cover really is.”

We find also some speculation on her earlier career:

France to expel US ’spy’ diplomats Evening Standard (London) February 22, 1995

FRANCE has accused four American diplomats and a fifth US citizen of political and economic spying and has ordered them to leave the country, Le Monde newspaper has reported.

Interior Minister Charles Pasqua wrote to President Francois Mitterrand that the five worked for the CIA and were guilty of “acts of interference”, including attempts to recruit aides to Cabinet ministers, the newspaper said. The letter reportedly said the five were uncovered in a “long, detailed investigation” by France’s counter-intelligence service. It was not immediately clear whether France had set a deadline for them to leave. The State Department would not comment today on the expulsion but former deputy assistant Secretary of State Ernest Preeg, who ran the White House Economic Policy Group, said the action seems unnecessarily dramatic and may have an ulterior motive. “It looks as if this may be just a little hanky-panky around the edges,” he said.

‘Every country has people trying to get intelligence one way or another. It’s standard practice, even among allies. You don’t do anything as sensational as expelling five Americans unless there is something else going on.” Mr Preeg added: “It is well known that the French are doing a lot of espionage in America, most of it commercial.”

Other sources suggest the motive for CIA recruitment of French officials may be political. France’s recent relations with Iran and Iraq have been worrying to Washington, which has focused a great deal of intelligence activity on the two governments.

One of the five, a woman, worked with “clandestine cover” outside the embassy, said Le Monde. One is considered the head of the CIA’s Paris operations and a second his deputy. The other two, a man and a woman, also have diplomatic status, said the paper.

Exaggeration on the part of the pouting spooks of the hazardous character of Valerie Plame’s CIA activities is not unknown:

Former CIA official Larry C. Johnson, who left the CIA in 2004, indicated Plame had been a ‘non-official cover operative’ (NOC). He explained: ‘...that meant she agreed to operate overseas without the protection of a diplomatic passport. If caught in that status she would have been executed.’

Valerie Plame graduated from the College of Europe, an international-relations school in Bruges, in 1995. One tends to doubt that even the bloodthirsty Belgians would really have executed the poor girl, no matter how mad the frogs had gotten at US attempts to suborn ministerial assistants or to steal recipes.

Valerie Plame is next known to have met Joe Wilson at a Washington party in early 1997. If she is, in fact, working in Washington in “early 1997,” then she is not stationed overseas five years before July of 2003, and no one has violated the Covert Agent Identity Protection Act.

Jim Dunnigan’s Strategy Page is reporting that the Army has developed grape-shot loads for the M1 tank’s main gun:

December 11, 2005: The M-1 tank has finally, officially, gotten its M1028 “shotgun shell” for its 120mm gun. This is for use against hostile infantry. The XM1028 shell holds 1100 10mm tungsten balls that are propelled out of the gun barrel and begin to disperse. The tungsten projectiles are lethal at up to 700 meters. The official requirement of the XM1028 is to kill or disable more than 50 percent of a 10 man squad with 1 shot and do the same to a 30 man platoon with 2 shots.

To put this in perspective: 00 Buckshot is 8.382 mm—- so each cartridge would fire 1100 essentially 000 buckshot. Ouch!

ARNEWS reports:

Liquid armor for Kevlar vests is one of the newest technologies being developed at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory to save Soldiers’ lives.

This type of body armor is light and flexible, which allows soldiers to be more mobile and won’t hinder an individual from running or aiming his or her weapon.

The key component of liquid armor is a shear thickening fluid. STF is composed of hard particles suspended in a liquid. The liquid, polyethylene glycol, is non-toxic, and can withstand a wide range of temperatures. Hard, nano-particles of silica are the other components of STF. This combination of flowable and hard components results in a material with unusual properties.

“During normal handling, the STF is very deformable and flows like a liquid. However, once a bullet or frag hits the vest, it transitions to a rigid material, which prevents the projectile from penetrating the Soldier’s body,” said Dr. Eric Wetzel, a mechanical engineer from the Weapons and Materials Research Directorate who heads the project team.

Tom Maguire quotes Don Luskin, who concludes:

Was Plame really a covert operative? Yes, but this will be difficult to officially confirm and there will be debates as to just how covert she really was, and what real harm was done by outing her.

But is that really true?

Bob Novak, in the infamous 14 July 2003 column, refers to her imprecisely as an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. The word operative suggests that Valerie Plame was an officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, and a covert agent, working undercover on hazardous overseas assignments.

Valerie Plame was working in the Directorate of Operations, but she was working domestically in the DO Counterproliferation Division (CPD).

corrected 1 May 2006.

The MSM made much of Valerie Plame’s Brewster Jennings & Associates cover. The reality is not that Mrs. Wilson infiltrated the barbed-wire fortified boundary of a hostile foreign state, trusting for protection in her forged Brewster-Jennings parking permit. She merely listed that imaginary firm as her employer in connection with a 1999 one thousand dollar campaign donation to Al Gore. It appears that the reality is that “Brewster-Jennings” was merely a general purpose CIA front address, established in 1994, and available to numerous CIA personnel for use as a very modest form of employment camouflage.
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The real case for prosecuting the leak of Valerie Plame’s CIA employment is based on the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which defines the protected category of covert agent as:

The term “covert agent” means—
(A) a present or retired officer or employee of an intelligence agency or a present or retired member of the Armed Forces assigned to duty with an intelligence agency—
(i) whose identity as such an officer, employee, or member is classified information, and
(ii) who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States; or
(B) a United States citizen whose intelligence relationship to the United States is classified information, and—
(i) who resides and acts outside the United States as an agent of, or informant or source of operational assistance to, an intelligence agency, or
(ii) who is at the time of the disclosure acting as an agent of, or informant to, the foreign counterintelligence or foreign counterterrorism components of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; or
(C) an individual, other than a United States citizen, whose past or present intelligence relationship to the United States is classified information and who is a present or former agent of, or a present or former informant or source of operational assistance to, an intelligence agency.

She obviously was not serving outside the United States at the time of the publication of the Novak column, so the basic question for a Special Counsel ought to have been: did Valerie Plame Wilson within the five years prior to 14 July 2003 really serve on CIA assignment outside the United States? If she did not, he ought to have packed his bags, closed the investigation, and gone back home to Chicago.