Pyongyang: old houses hidden behind high-rises. Note highway traffic: pedestrians.

Here’s something we don’t see every day. Photographs of North Korea taken by visiting Russian web-designer Artemii Lebedev.

The original version (in Russian) is here. Use CONTROL + arrow keys to move forward and back through the photo pages here.

You will be amused at this romance feature from the Sunday Times Style section. Sophia Raday, a typical Berkeley peacenik devoted to everything trendy leftie, recounts the story of how she fell for a West Point graduate, Oakland cop, and National Guard colonel.

MY husband is like the Lone Ranger: he leaves a trail of bullets in his wake. Not silver bullets, but gold 9 millimeters, orange “simunitions” and menacing hollow-points with bronze tips.

I find them at the bottom of the washing machine, next to the pile of mail in our front hall or mixed in a heap of change. He is a police officer in nearby Oakland, Calif., a former SWAT team member, and a colonel in the Army Reserve. Sometimes when I gather the cool bullets in my palm, I stare at them and wonder: How did I, a Berkeley resident, a former peace activist, someone with a “Bread, not bombs” button, end up married to The Man?

I like to tell people we met because he pulled me over, and I avoided the ticket with my feminine wiles. It’s not true, but our partnership is almost that unlikely. After all, I’ve been arrested several times in political protests and once for possession of marijuana. I’ve even trespassed onto a naval base to spray-paint protest messages over the sloganeering billboards.

My husband, on the other hand, subscribes to a magazine about wound ballistics, calls people he doesn’t like “communists” and distrusts anyone with a beard. He gets his hair cut at least twice a month. He loves to rub my hand over his spiky scalp while bragging about how especially “high and tight” it is this time.

The truth is, I met my husband on a blind date set up by a cousin who had gone to West Point with him. It amused me that on Tuesday night I was going out with a motorcycle-riding lesbian while on Wednesday I had a date with a soldier/cop. I wore a short skirt that showed off my long legs. When he arrived, I was charmed by his old-fashioned formality, how he called me “Miss Sophia” and pulled out my chair.

It was on our third date that I discovered he never left the house without a firearm. We went to see “Heat,” a crime drama with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, and when we were driving home, I asked, “So when you’re off-duty, do you ever carry a gun?”

He laughed. “Always. Got one on my hip right now.”

I was delighted. This was high adventure. I liked having covert awareness of hidden things under his clothes. Dangerous things. And I liked the idea that I would try to tame him, that I would be the one to put a daisy in his gun.

I mentioned this story to my wife, particularly noting the detail of the husband referring to people he doesn’t like as “communists.” My wife sniffed, and said, “That’s exactly what you do!”

(with the aid of some very clever editing) U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday.

Hat tip to Mr. Right.

Blatant violation of traditional Anglo-American liberties, and of the US Constitution, by police and prosecutors simply seizing (without process) the property of persons suspected of a crime is one of the most appalling fruits of the War on Drugs. Horror stories of local cops in Florida driving around in Ferraris and Porsches added to the constabulary fleet after seizure from wealthy tourists, of a Vermont granny losing her home because a visiting grandson was caught with pot, of the Hispanic cleaning woman who had her live savings taken “on suspicion” (what, other than drug dealing, could a Hispanic woman possibly be doing with a large sum of cash?), and so on have been showing up in news columns for the last few decades.

But, now the same highly dubious principle has been extended by Mayor Bloomberg, and the New York City Police Department, to new levels of legal and moral absurdity: for use in enforcing NYC’s Safety Nazi anti-fireworks laws far outside the borders and legitimate jurisdiction of the Cesspool on the Hudson. The Pennsylvania State Police ought to arrest the lot of them for criminal trespass and car theft.

NY Post story

Cato Institute History of American Forfeiture Law

The ACLU is not content with censoring and then pulling the plug on high school graduation speeches in Nevada.

Officials and a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union said Friday that administrators followed federal law when they cut the microphone on Foothill High School valedictorian Brittany McComb as she began deviating from a preapproved speech and reading from a version that mentioned God and contained biblical references.

“There should be no controversy here,” ACLU lawyer Allen Lichtenstein said. “It’s important for people to understand that a student was given a school-sponsored forum by a school and therefore, in essence, it was a school-sponsored speech.”

They are also hard at work on prohibiting the expression of dissent by their own board members.

Several board members of the American Civil Liberties Union expressed concerns at a meeting yesterday over proposed standards that would prohibit board members from publicly criticizing the organization’s policies and internal operations.

“I cannot vote for these proposals, as I have violated them nearly every time I have written an op-ed piece or spoken to the press,” said Mary Ellen Gale, an at-large member.

Bennett Hammer, a board member representing the organization’s New Mexico affiliate, cited examples of decisions in the last few years that he said had embarrassed the A.C.L.U. and contended that adopting the proposals would be yet another of “the things that have made us a laughingstock with the public.”

The board nonetheless voted against motions to strike the controversial provisions from the proposals and instead opted for further discussion.

Emily Whitfield, an A.C.L.U. spokeswoman, said the failure of the motions was not an endorsement of the proposals. “A vote at this early stage would have been a departure from the board’s deliberative process, and to suggest otherwise would be unfair and misleading,” she wrote in an e-mail message.

One of the provisions said, “a director may publicly disagree with an A.C.L.U. policy position, but may not criticize the A.C.L.U. board and staff.”

Another said, “Where an individual director disagrees with a board position on matters of civil liberties policy, the director should refrain from publicly highlighting the fact of such disagreement.”

Shouldn’t these guys change their name already?

The BBC collects fight songs from Ireland, Nigeria, South Korea, France, England, China, Cameroon, Argentina, Spain, and Italy.

Hat tip to PJM.

The Gulfnews reveals that Abu Musab al Zarqawi, while an full-time employee (Jihad Executive Director and Emir) of Al Qaeda working in Iraq, was collecting unemployment benefits in India.

Lucknow: Iraq’s deceased Al Qaida leader, Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, was registered for unemployment benefits in India, a recent report suggests.

A query has been ordered to certify how Al Zarqawi, who was killed in a US air strike in Iraq last week, came to be registered as an Indian resident.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Secretary, N C Bajpai, is particularly concerned about reports that the late Al Qaida leader, who was registered under the name of Ama Zarqawi, was made eligible for unemployment benefits by the Lucknow district administration.

Disciplinary action has been ordered by the principal secretary and district administration against those responsible for the lapse.

Better check the US Social Security beneficiaries list.

History professor Joyce Lee Malcolm discusses, in the Weekend edition of the Journal, the unwillingness of the British government to defend its subjects against crime rising comcomitantly with its determination to prevent their defending themselves.

With Great Britain now the world’s most violent developed country, the British government has hit upon a way to reduce the number of cases before the courts: Police have been instructed to let off with a caution burglars and those who admit responsibility for some 60 other crimes ranging from assault and arson to sex with an underage girl. That is, no jail time, no fine, no community service, no court appearance. It’s cheap, quick, saves time and money, and best of all the offenders won’t tax an already overcrowded jail system.

Not everyone will be treated so leniently. A new surveillance system promises to hunt down anyone exceeding the speed limit. Using excessive force against a burglar or mugger will earn you a conviction for assault or, if you seriously harm him, a long sentence. Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer jailed for killing one burglar and wounding another during the seventh break-in at his rural home, was denied parole because he posed a threat to burglars. The career burglar whom Mr. Martin wounded got out early.

Using a cap pistol, as an elderly woman did to scare off a gang of youths, will bring you to court for putting someone in fear. Recently, police tried to stop David Collinson from entering his burning home to rescue his asthmatic wife. He refused to obey and, brandishing a toy pistol, dashed into the blaze. Minutes later he returned with his wife and dog and apologized to the police. Not good enough. In April Mr. Collinson was sentenced to a year in prison for being aggressive towards the officers and brandishing the toy pistol. Still, at least he won’t be sharing his cell with an arsonist or thief.

How did things come to a pass where law-abiding citizens are treated as criminals and criminals as victims? A giant step was the 1953 Prevention of Crime Act, making it illegal to carry any article for an offensive purpose; any item carried for self-defense was automatically an offensive weapon and the carrier is guilty until proven innocent. At the time a parliamentarian protested that “The object of a weapon was to assist weakness to cope with strength and it is this ability that the bill was framed to destroy.” The government countered that the public should be discouraged “from going about with offensive weapons in their pockets; it is the duty of society to protect them.”

The trouble is that society cannot and does not protect them. Yet successive governments have insisted protection be left to the professionals, meanwhile banning all sorts of weapons, from firearms to chemical sprays. They hope to add toy or replica guns to the list along with kitchen knives with points. Other legislation has limited self-defense to what seems reasonable to a court much later.

Although British governments insist upon sole responsibility for protecting individuals, for ideological and economic reasons they have adopted a lenient approach toward offenders. Because prisons are expensive and don’t reform their residents, fewer offenders are incarcerated. Those who are get sharply reduced sentences, and serve just half of these. Still, with crime rates rising, prisons are overcrowded and additional jail space will not be available anytime soon. The public learned in April that among convicts released early to ease overcrowding were violent or sex offenders serving mandatory life sentences who were freed after as little as 15 months.

And the slackening of law enforcement continues to stimulate the Labour Government’s erosion of the ancient liberties which were always England’s pride.

...a host of actions have been initiated to bring about more convictions. At the end of its 2003 session Parliament repealed the 800-year-old guarantee against double jeopardy. Now anyone acquitted of a serious crime can be retried if “new and compelling evidence” is brought forward. Parliament tinkered with the definition of “new” to make that burden easier to meet. The test for “new” in these criminal cases, Lord Neill pointed out, will be lower than “is used habitually in civil cases. In a civil case, one would have to show that the new evidence was not reasonably available on the previous occasion. There is no such requirement here.”

Parliament was so excited by the benefits of chucking the ancient prohibition that it extended the repeal of double jeopardy from murder to cases of rape, manslaughter, kidnapping, drug-trafficking and some 20 other serious crimes. For good measure it made the new act retroactive. Henceforth, no one who has been, or will be, tried and acquitted of a serious crime can feel confident he will not be tried again, and again.

To make the prosecutor’s task still easier, he is now permitted to use hearsay evidence—goodbye to confronting witnesses—to introduce a defendant’s prior record, and the number of jury trials is to be reduced. Still, the government has helped the homeowner by sponsoring a law “to prevent homeowners being sued by intruders who injure themselves while breaking in.”

It may be crass to point out that the British people, stripped of their ability to protect themselves and of other ancient rights and left to the mercy of criminals, have gotten the worst of both worlds. Still, as one citizen, referring to the new policy of letting criminals off with a caution, suggested: “Perhaps it would be easier and safer for the honest citizens of the U.K. to move into the prisons and the criminals to be let out.”

Just last week, the BBC was reporting on the success of a “knife amnesty.”

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.—Adam Smith

Brian Carney interviews Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster in the Weekend Wall Street Journal, and finds a man operating a sensationally successful business operation based on an atypical, casting one’s bread upon the waters, model of customer service.

I put the question to Mr. Buckmaster: Google has turned unobtrusive text ads into a multibillion-dollar revenue stream. And posting a Google-type ad or two next to its search results wouldn’t cost Craigslist users one thin dime. So why not cash in?

“In the big Internet boom, thousands of companies were set up,” explains Mr. Buckmaster, who also counts himself as CFO and COO of the company. “With the exception of us, pretty much all of them were set up with the primary objective being to make a lot of money.” And yet, he continues, “Almost all of those businesses went under and never made any money. Even businesses like Amazon still haven’t made any money. They are still, over their entire lifetime, net negative. Here we are, we’ve been in the black since 1999—six or seven years.”...

Mr. Buckmaster figures that Craigslist employs 21 people, and starts to count them on his fingers. It never brought in venture capitalists with their grand designs and exit strategies. “We didn’t want to have those voices at the table,” he says. So Craigslist has remained beholden to no one—except, as Mr. Buckmaster constantly intones, its “users,” who pay nothing for the privilege of posting or searching the millions of pages of apartment listings, moving sales and personal ads that make up the Craigslist ecosystem. “If it’s not something that users are asking for,” he says, “we don’t consider it.” The money that does come in comes from businesses posting in just two categories of classifieds in three cities—job listings in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles and, this week for the first time, brokered apartment rentals in New York…

We’re much more comfortable charging companies than charging individuals,” Mr. Buckmaster says. “Businesses are better equipped to afford a small fee and businesses can pay for fees out of pre-tax dollars where on average users are less able to pay a fee and they have to pay in post-tax dollars.” Giving users something free and denying money to the government at the same time? This man is no commie. What’s more, he runs a lean outfit. “There are big advantages to focusing exclusively on user wants and needs as we do, and blocking out everything else. That’s one of the ways we keep our staff small and our operations simple.”

As for the banner ads, “It’s not something our users have asked us for,” Mr. Buckmaster deadpans, his 6-foot-8-inch frame slumped in a leather chair in his living room and his eyes fixed on some distant point out the window. It turns out this is something of a mantra for Mr. Buckmaster; what Craigslist’s users want, they tend to get. No more and no less…

When asked whether there’s a Craigslist model that other companies could emulate, the unflappable Mr. Buckmaster, his eyes once more fixed firmly on the horizon out the window, waxes lyrical for a moment: “It’s unrealistic to say, but—imagine our entire U.S. workforce deployed in units of 20. Each unit of 20 is running a business that tens of millions of people are getting enormous amounts of value out of each month. What kind of world would that be?”

Before I have time to object, Mr. Buckmaster comes back to our world. “Now, there’s something wrong in the reasoning there,” he admits. “You can’t run a steel company in the same way that you run an Internet company”—more points for understatement. “But still, it’s a nice kind of fantasy that there are more and more businesses where huge amounts of value can flow to the user for free. I like the idea, just as an end-user, of there being as many businesses like that as possible.” As an end-user, I suppose I do, too.

Buckmaster’s approach to capitalism as an exercise in serendipity clearly works for Craigslist. It could be argued that this sort of business model in which adversarial friction is minimized, and the delivery of value is maximixed, is closer to the original free market ideal than today’s more commonly encountered vastly regimented and hierarchical bean-counting organizations.

The old Andrew Sullivan came back yesterday, when Sullivan expressed shock at the firing by Governor Robert L. Erlich Jr. of Maryland of a Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority board member, Robert J. Smith, for expressing the opinion during a television talk-show discussion of Gay Marriage that there should not be a “special place of entitlement within the laws of the United States for persons of sexual deviancy.”

Sullivan defended Smith’s freedom of speech and opinion vigorously.

Reading this story upset me. A man is fired by the Maryland governor from his job as a member of the state’s Metro transit authority board. His sin? Speaking his mind about homosexuality, in a context which in no way affects his ability to do his job. I deeply disagree with his views and they could have been expressed more civilly, but he has every right to them, and they are indeed intrinsic to his understanding of his own religious liberty. Words hurt no one. Firing him for his views is an act of profound intolerance – by governor Ehrlich, and by my own city councilman, Jim Graham. The gay rights movement needs to practise the same tolerance it is asking for. Leave orthodox Catholics – and Protestants – alone in the expression of their own faith, and their own politics.

Sullivan’s principled libertarianism shows particularly well by contrast with the stance taken by Ilya Somin, one of the commentators at the Volokh Conspiracy, who equates the conventional religious view of homosexuality as “deviant” with racism, and thinks Smith’s firing was justified as:

The DC area has a large gay population and many of them presumably take Metro “trains and buses.” There is good reason to assume that a Metro Board member with Smith’s views would be less likely to enforce policies against antigay discrimination in public transport than one who is not a homophobe. At any rate, since there is unlikely to be a shortage of nonbigoted people willing to take this cushy patronage appointment, Governor Ehrlich was right not to take a risk on Smith.

Hat tip to PJM.

Dave Kehr corrects some conventional critical misconceptions, drawing upon an admirable familiarity with the history of the cinema.

As a Western buff since my diaper days, I’ve been glad to see the burst of positive publicity that our much maligned and neglected national genre has been getting, thanks to the simultaneous appearance of Warner Home Video’s magnificent John Ford-John Wayne box set and the debut of the third, apparently final season of “Deadwood” on HBO.

But it has also been an occasion for passing along the critical clichés and historical misconceptions that have gathered around the Western since it passed from mass popularity in the early 1970s. Nancy Franklin, the fine television critic of “The New Yorker,” begins her piece on “Deadwood” in the June 12 issue with a list of what she believes to be the genre’s conventions: “It has been many years since the Westerns were essentially black-and-white, cut-and-dried stories of good versus evil: morality tales with lots of horses and guns and one of everything else — a sheriff, an outlaw, an embattled hero, a town drunk, a whore with a heart of gold, a honky-tonk piano, and a schoolteacher from Illinois, who found out shortly after arriving in town that, for worse and for better, there was more to life than book learnin’. Indians were, for the most part, the obstacle that had to be overcome — although sometimes there was a ‘good one.’”

I suspect this isn’t the list of someone who’s seen a lot of Westerns; it’s the list of someone who’s absorbed the high culture caricature of them that has emerged since the genre effectively passed away, fatally linked in the minds of most baby-boomers with the disaster of Vietnam. Franklin goes on to say, “Although Westerns have evolved, the conventions are still often glaring, making even Westerns that have gray, shadowy moral areas a tough sell to some people. There’s just too much dust, leather, whinnying, shooting, and mud — too much brown — and not enough talking, understanding, humor and complexity. The trappings of Westerns make them seem fake and message-y, even as they strain to be realistic.” Franklin finds “Deadwood” the great exception to this rule.

It has indeed been many years since Westerns were like what Franklin describes — I’d say, since about 1903 and “The Great Train Robbery.” Westerns have, in fact, been the primary means through which American filmmakers have expressed “the gray, shadowy moral areas” of American history and the American character. In my experience — which includes way too many hours watching the routine B movies Franklin presumably has in mind (little she says applies to the adult Westerns that emerged in the late 40s, and were developed by such outstanding artists as Ford, Howard Hawks, Samuel Fuller, Budd Boetticher, Anthony Mann, Delmar Daves and quite a few others) — I’ve found the genre to be far less reactionary and rigid than consistently questioning and even progressive. There probably is a brutally racist, genocidal Western out there somewhere that advocates the extermination of the Indians, though I have never seen it or heard of one that fits that description. From the very beginnings of the genre on screen, Westerns frequently took the point of view of the Indian — romanticizing him and condescending to him, of course, but almost always following the Fennimore Cooper tradition of the “noble savage.”

D.W. Griffith, who could be as brutal a racist as anyone, made quite a number of Cooperesque odes to the “Vanishing American” (to borrow the title of a Zane Grey magazine serial of 1925, filmed that same year by George Seitz), including the exemplary 1909 “The Red Man’s View” (available on the “D.W. Griffith — Years of Discovery” DVD from Image Entertainment), a moving version of the “Trail of Tears” story about an Indian couple forced to separate when white settlers drive their tribe from their land. Another fine example is “The Invaders,” a 1912 production from Thomas Ince that may have been directed by Francis Ford, John Ford’s older brother, and included in the “More Treasures from American Film Archives” box set from the National Film Preservation Foundation. This very accomplished work depicts an epic battle ignited when white surveyors trespass on Indian lands, using Lakota Sioux as actors, eighty years before the proudly revisionist “Dances with Wolves” made the genre briefly fashionable again in the early 90s.

In a comment on the same post, Larry Kart recommends a selection of “non-obvious Westertns.”

Excerpts from an e-mail exchange (obviously inspired by this thread) with a friend of about my age (64) who didn’t see many Westerns as a kid:

Some Westerns that I can personally recommend, not only because they’re good but also because (no less important) they really get under my skin (won’t list all the ones we’ve the previously mentioned by Anthony Mann [though you might miss, but shouldn’t, Mann’s “Man of the West” with Gary Cooper] Boetticher, etc. or John Ford or Hawks— order is what I can see, by director or otherwise, as I leaf through David Thomson’s “Biographical Dictionary of Film”):

Andre de Toth: “Ramrod,” “Springfield Rifle,” “Man in the Saddle, “Carson City,” “The Stranger Wore a Gun,” “The Bounty Hunter,” “Riding Shotgun”). The latter bunch are B-movies with Randolph Scott and prefigure the Scott-Boetticher movies, though De Toth definitely has his own flavor. “Ramrod,” with De Toth’s then wife Veronica Lake and Joel McCrea, is a noir Western par excellence and not to be missed.

Allen Dwan: “Tennesse’s Partner,” with Ronald Reagan, based on a Brett Harte tale; “Montana Belle, with Jane Russell as Belle Starr, “Silver Lode.”

Fritz Lang: “The Return of Frank James,” “Rancho Notorious” with Marlene Dietrich — at least as out there as “Johnny Guitar” and made a year before it.

Rudolph Mate: “The Violent Men,” with Barbara Stanwyck. Glenn Ford, and Edward G. Robinson — another noir Western par excellence.

Robert Parrish: “The Wonderful Country,” with Mitchum in great form and a superb score by Elmer Bernstein.

Jacques Tourneur: “Wichita,” with J. McCrea as Wyatt Earp.

Raoul Walsh: “They Died with Their Boots On,” “Pursued” (with Mitchum, another extreme noir Western), “Colorado Territory” (a remake of “High Sierra”with J. McCrea in the Bogart part).

I notice that the list is shorter than I thought it would be (even having ruled out the movies that seemed obvious) and that Joel McCrea pops up fairly often. Also, I’m fairly sure that the air went out of the genre about the same time the air went out of science fiction (at least for me) and probably for related reasons. Also, again, it’s worth taking a look at some of the epic De Mille Westerns from the ’30s with Gary Cooper or McCrea (“The Plainsman,” “Union Pacific,” Northwest Mounted Police”) — the myths are there in potent, garish, unfiltered form. You may laugh at times, but you’ll be gripped too, I think, almost against your taste and will — which is a potentially useful state to be in.

Find western film posters and information on other movie classics.

Karl Rove, in a NH interview quoted by Raw Story, opines that the rise of the Blogoshpere has proven a much more useful and positive development for Republicans than it has for democrats.

I do also think that the Internet has proven to be a more powerful tool on our side than it has been for the other side. It has proven to be a tool on our side to sort of unite Conservatives and have a healthy intra-movement dialogue. But it’s essentially been something that has helped us gain in influence and broaden our appeal. Among Democrats, my sense is that the blog world has tended to strengthen the far Left of the Democratic Party at the expense of liberal, but somewhat less liberal, members of their party. It has tended to sort of drive their party even further to the Left rather than focusing on good ideas that would help unite people around common goals and common purposes. Instead, the Internet for the Left of the Democratic Party has served as a way to mobilize hate and anger — hate and anger, first and foremost, at this President and Conservatives, but then also at people within their own party whom they consider to be less than completely loyal to this very narrow, very out-of-the-mainstream, very far Left-wing ideology that they tend to represent.

I like them both.

video

Michael Barone, in the WSJ, reflects on the consequences of the habitual misuse of power of the press to delegitimize elected administrations.

It is hard in retrospect to understand why the left put so much psychic energy into the notion that Mr. Rove would be indicted. He certainly was an important target. No one in American history has been as powerful an aide to a president, both on politics and on public policy, as Karl Rove. Only Robert Kennedy in his brother’s administration and Hamilton Jordan in Jimmy Carter’s come close, and neither was as involved in electoral politics as Mr. Rove has been.

Still, it was clear early on that the likelihood that Mr. Rove violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act was near zero. Under the law, the agent whose name was disclosed would have had to have served overseas within the preceding five years (Valerie Plame, according to her husband’s book, had been stationed in the U.S. since 1997), and Mr. Rove would have had to know that she was undercover (not very likely). The left enjoyed raising an issue on which, for once, it could charge that a Republican administration had undermined national security. But that rang hollow when the left gleefully seized on the New York Times’ disclosure of NSA surveillance of phone calls from suspected al Qaeda operatives abroad to persons in the U.S.

In all this a key role was played by the press. Cries went up early for the appointment of a special prosecutor: Patrick Fitzgerald would be another Archibald Cox or Leon Jaworski. Eager to bring down another Republican administration, the editorialists of the New York Times evidently failed to realize that the case could not be pursued without asking reporters to reveal the names of sources who had been promised confidentiality. America’s newsrooms are populated largely by liberals who regard the Vietnam and Watergate stories as the great achievements of their profession. The peak of their ambition is to achieve the fame and wealth of great reporters like David Halberstam and Bob Woodward. But this time it was not Republican administration officials who went to prison. It was Judith Miller, then of the New York Times itself.

Interestingly, Bob Woodward himself contradicted Mr. Fitzgerald’s statement, made the day that he announced the one indictment he has obtained, of former vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby, that Mr. Libby was the first to disclose Ms. Plame’s name to a reporter. The press reaction was to turn on Mr. Woodward, who has been covering this administration as a new story rather than as a reprise of Vietnam and Watergate.

Historians may regard it as a curious thing that the left and the press have been so determined to fit current events into templates based on events that occurred 30 to 40 years ago. The people who effectively framed the issues raised by Vietnam and Watergate did something like the opposite; they insisted that Vietnam was not a reprise of World War II or Korea and that Watergate was something different from the operations J. Edgar Hoover conducted for Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy. Journalists in the 1940s, ‘50s and early ‘60s tended to believe they had a duty to buttress Americans’ faith in their leaders and their government. Journalists since Vietnam and Watergate have tended to believe that they have a duty to undermine such faith, especially when the wrong party is in office.

That belief has its perils for journalism, as the Fitzgerald investigation has shown. The peril that the press may find itself in the hot seat, but even more the peril that it will get the story wrong. The visible slavering over the prospect of a Rove indictment is just another item in the list of reasons why the credibility of the “mainstream media” has been plunging. There’s also a peril for the political left. Vietnam and Watergate were arguably triumphs for honest reporting. But they were also defeats for America—and for millions of freedom-loving people in the world. They ushered in an era when the political opposition and much of the press have sought not just to defeat administrations but to delegitimize them. The pursuit of Karl Rove by the left and the press has been just the latest episode in the attempted criminalization of political differences. Is there any hope that it might turn out to be the last?

This unattributed email item seems to be basically factually correct, and provides plenty of food for reflection.

THE YEAR 1906

This will boggle your mind, I know it did mine! The year is 1906. One hundred years ago. What a difference a century makes!

Here are some of the US statistics for the Year 1906:

The average life expectancy in the US was 47 years. Only 14 percent of the homes in the US had a bathtub. Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone. A three-minute call from Denver to New York City cost eleven dollars. There were only 8,000 cars in the US, and only 144 miles of paved roads. The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph. Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee were each more heavily populated than California. With a mere 1.4 million people, California was only the 21st most populous state in the Union. The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower! The average wage in the US was 22 cents per hour. The average US worker made between $200 and $400 per year. A competent accountant could expect to earn $2,000 per year, a dentist $2,500 per year, a veterinarian between $1,500 and $4,000 per year, and a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year. More than 95 percent of all births in the US took place at home. Ninety percent of all US doctors had no college education. Instead, they attended so-called medical schools, many of which were condemned in the press and by the government as “substandard.” Sugar cost four cents a pound. Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen. Coffee was fifteen cents a pound. Most women only washed their hair once a month, and used borax or egg yolks for shampoo. Canada passed a law that prohibited poor people from entering into their country for any reason. Five leading causes of death in the US were: 1. Pneumonia and influenza 2. Tuberculosis 3. Diarrhea 4. Heart disease 5. Stroke The American flag had 45 stars. Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Hawaii, and Alaska hadn’t been admitted to the Union yet. The population of Las Vegas, Nevada, was only 30! Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and ice tea hadn’t been invented yet. There was no Mother’s Day or Father’s Day. Two out of every 10 US adults couldn’t read or write. Only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated from high school. Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over the counter at the local corner drugstores. Back then the pharmacist said, “Heroin clears the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind, regulates the stomach and bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health.” Eighteen percent of households in the US had at least one full-time servant or domestic help. There were about 230 reported murders in the entire US. So, to think I forwarded this from someone else without typing it myself, and sent it to you in a matter of seconds! Try to imagine what it may be like in another 100 years.

Jim Dunnigan’s Strategy Page offers an insider’s assessment of the developing situation.

Al Qaeda in Iraq has been virtually wiped out by the loss of an address book. The death of al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi was not as important as the capture of his address book and other planning documents in the wake of the June 7th bombing. U.S. troops are trained to quickly search for names and addresses when they stage a raid, pass that data on to a special intelligence cell, which then quickly sorts out which of the addresses should be raided immediately, before the enemy there can be warned that their identity has been compromised. More information is obtained in those raids, and that generates more raids. So far, the June 7th strike has led to over 500 more raids. There have been so many raids, that there are not enough U.S. troops to handle it, and over 30 percent of the raids have been carried by Iraqi troops or police, with no U.S. involvement. Nearly a thousand terrorist suspects have been killed or captured. The amount of information captured has overwhelmed intelligence organizations in Iraq, and more translators and analysts are assisting, via satellite link, from the United States and other locations.

Perhaps the most valuable finds have been al Qaeda planning documents confirming what has been suspected of terrorist strategy. Also valuable have been the al Qaeda assessment of their situation in Iraq. The terrorist strategy is one of desperation. While the effort continues, to attempt to trigger a civil war between Sunni and Shia in Iraq, this is seen as a losing proposition. The new strategy attempts to trigger a war between the United States and Iran. This would weaken the United States, and put the hurt on Iran, an arch-enemy of al Qaeda. Other documents stressed the need to manipulate Moslem and Western media. This was to be done by starting rumors of American atrocities, and feeding the media plausible supporting material. Al Qaeda’s attitude was that if they could not win in reality, they could at least win imaginary battles via the media.

Zarqawi considered al Qaeda’s situation in Iraq as “bleak.” The most worrisome development was the growing number of trained Iraqi soldiers and police. These were able to easily spot the foreigners who made up so much of al Qaeda’s strength. Moreover, more police and soldiers in an area meant some local civilians would feel safe enough to report al Qaeda activity. The result of all this is that there are far fewer foreign Arabs in Iraq fighting for al Qaeda. The terrorist organization has basically been taken over anti-government Sunni Arabs. That made the capture of Zarqawi even more valuable, as his address book contained a who’s who of the anti-government Sunni Arab forces. This group has been hurt badly by last week’s raids.

The government deployed two infantry divisions and over 40,000 police in and around Baghdad to prevent “revenge” attacks by terrorists not yet rounded up by the growing wave of raids. Al Qaeda has announced an increased number of attacks. These have not occurred, although it is believed that more attacks are possible, as many attacks in various stages of preparation can be rushed forward before they are aborted by a raiding soldiers or police. At the moment, most al Qaeda members appear to be scrambling for new hiding places.

The damage done by the post- Zarqawi raids has spurred the Sunni Arab amnesty negotiations. These have been stalled for months over the issue of how many Sunni Arabs, with “blood on their hands”, should get amnesty. Letting the killers walk is a very contentious issue. There are thousands of Sunni Arabs involved here. The latest government proposal is to give amnesty to most of the Sunni Arabs who have just killed foreigners (mainly Americans). Of course, this offer was placed on the table without any prior consultations with the Americans. Naturally, such a deal would be impossible to sell back in the United States. But the Iraqis believe they could get away with it if it brought forth a general surrender of the Sunni Arab anti-government forces. The Iraqis, after all, are more concerned with Iraqi politics, than with what happens in the United States. Iraqi leaders believe that the U.S. has no choice by to continue supporting Iraqi pacification efforts. However, the spectacle of amnestied Sunni Arabs bragging to Arab, European and American reporters about how they killed Americans, might have interesting repercussions.

You won’t read it in the Times or the Washington Post, but Investor’s Business Daily reports that Bush may keep his promise and halve the deficit three years early

Aided by surging tax receipts, President Bush may make good on his pledge to cut the deficit in half in 2006 — three years early.

Tax revenues are running $176 billion, or 12.9%, over last year, the Treasury Department said Monday. The Congressional Budget Office said receipts have risen faster over the first eight months of fiscal ‘06 than in any other such period over the past 25 years — except for last year’s 15.5% jump.

The 2006 deficit through May was $227 billion, down from $273 billion at this time last year. Spending is up $130 billion, or 7.9%.

The CBO forecast in May that the 2006 deficit could fall as low as $300 billion. Michael Englund, chief economist of Action Economics, has long expected a deficit of about $270 billion this year. Now he thinks there’s a chance the “remarkable strength in receipts” will push the deficit even lower.

With the economy topping $13 trillion this year, a $270 billion deficit would equal less than 2.1% of GDP, easily beating the president’s 2.25% goal. Bush made his vow when the White House had a dour 2004 deficit forecast of 4.5% of GDP, or $521 billion. The actual ‘04 deficit came in at $412 billion, or 3.5% of GDP, before falling to $318 billion, or 2.6% of GDP, in 2005.

A CBO analysis last week noted that withheld individual income and payroll taxes are up 7.6% from a year ago, with the gains picking up in recent months.

Buffalo Bill Cody with his Winchester

Today’s WSJ reports that efforts are underway to obtain investment support to revive the production of Winchester rifles in the United States, and to keep the iconic brand alive.

Now, it has fallen to an unlikely modern-day Winchester fan, Michael H. Blank, a 32-year-old who quit his job as a Merrill Lynch stockbroker, to salvage the venerable company. Despite its glorious past, modern times haven’t been kind to the gunsmith. In March the Belgian owners shut down the relatively modern factory built on a site where Winchesters have been made for 140 years, citing a bloated cost structure and slumping sales.

The move has sparked a frantic hunt for a buyer, a debate over what to do with the bronze of Mr. Wayne in the lobby, and a shot of soul-searching by gun owners themselves, who know the value of their Winchesters will soar if the factory closes forever.

Mr. Blank, who is a paid consultant in the search for a buyer, says there’s no reason Winchester’s U.S. factory has to die as long as there are people like him around. The main reason for slumping sales is that the company was making and marketing the wrong guns, not that there aren’t enough people willing to buy them.

“I have 10 Winchester lever-actions,” he says, “but if I had 5,000 more, I’d never have enough. By and large, I believe that whoever dies with the most guns, wins.” Mr. Blank says the company can thrive again if it goes back to its roots, producing high-quality guns for enthusiasts and collectors like him.

He contends the Belgian owners, Herstal Group, don’t have the right vision, pushing, among other things, low-end guns sold through Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Instead, he believes the company should concentrate on the burgeoning market for replicas of historic Winchester models and on upgrading its modern rifles. Today, many replicas, which aren’t allowed to bear the Winchester name, are made in Italy and sell for up to $1,200. Those rifles—with their blued barrels, wood stocks and distinctive levers for cocking the weapon with an unforgettable metallic “cha-chink” sound—are avidly sought by collectors fascinated by the history of firearms and of the American West.

“If we put out real replicas, and slap on the Winchester name, we’ll have the Italians out of the business in three years,” Mr. Blank predicts.

Earlier New Haven plant closing story.

Trenchantly argues Fjordman, guest blogging at Gates of Vienna:

The simple fact is that we never won the Cold War as decisively as we should have. Yes, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union collapsed. This removed the military threat to the West, and the most hardcore, economic Marxism suffered a blow as a credible alternative. However, one of the really big mistakes we made after the Cold War ended was to declare that Socialism was now dead, and thus no longer anything to worry about. Here we are, nearly a generation later, discovering that Marxist rhetoric and thinking have penetrated every single stratum of our society, from the Universities to the media. Islamic terrorism is explained as caused by “poverty, oppression and marginalization,” a classic, Marxist interpretation.

What happened is that while the “hard” Marxism of the Soviet Union may have collapsed, at least for now, the “soft” Marxism of the Western Left has actually grown stronger, in part because we deemed it to be less threatening. The “hard” Marxists had intercontinental nuclear missiles and openly said that they would “bury” us. The soft Marxists talk about tolerance and may seem less threatening, but their goal of overthrowing the evil, capitalist West remains the same. In fact, they are more dangerous precisely because they hide their true goals under different labels. Perhaps we should call it “stealth Socialism” instead of soft Socialism.

One of the readers of Fjordman blog once pointed out that we never had a thorough de-Marxification process after the Cold War, similar to the de-Nazification after WW2. He was thinking of the former Soviet Union and the countries in Eastern Europe, but he should probably have included their Marxist fellow travellers, their sympathizers and apologists in the West. We never fully confronted the ideology of Marxism, and demonstrated that the suffering it caused for hundreds of millions of people was a direct result of Marxist ideas. We just assumed that Marxism was dead and moved on, allowing many of its ideals to mutate into new forms and many of its champions to continue their work uninterrupted, sometimes filled with a vengeance and a renewed zeal for another assault on the capitalist West.

We are now paying the price for this. Not only has Marxism survived, it is thriving and has in some ways grown stronger. Leftist ideas about Multiculturalism and de-facto open borders have achieved a virtual hegemony in public discourse, their critics vilified and demonized. By hiding their intentions under labels such as “anti-racism” and “tolerance,” Leftists have achieved a degree of censorship of public discourse they could never have dreamt of had they openly stated that their intention was to radically transform Western civilization and destroy its foundations.

From goodbye_natalie

(Sung to the tune of Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl)

Hey where did he go,
Days when the bombs came
Laughing so hard I can’t swallow,
Man, Al-Queda is so frickin’ lame,
Laughing and a running hey, hey
They’re tripping and a humping
In the late evening smog when
Zark’s hearts quit thumpin’ and you
My hadji girl,
You’re my hadji girl.

Whatever happened
When Zark was laid so low
Going down one last time
Blew his ass to the patio
Crouching in the sunlight laughing,
Hiding behind a concrete wall,
Tripping and hiding
As the two bombs fall, and you
My hadji girl,
You’re my hadji girl.

Do you remember when we used to sing,
Allah allah la la la la la la la la la te da

Old Zark had his day,
But now he is all alone.
I saw him just the other day,
As he laid there and groaned,
Cast my memory back there, Lord
Sometime I’m overcome thinking ‘bout
When they killed Zark’s sorry ass
With those two Mk 82
My hadji girl
You’re my hadji girl

Do you remember when we used to sing,
Allah allah la la la la la la la la la te da

Read by Michelle Malkin.

Video

From Mr. Right:

Ms. American Spy
(Sung to the tune of Don McLean’s American Pie)

A short, short time ago
I can still remember
How the “Plame Game” used to make me smile
And as I read those D-Kos rants
I got a big bulge in my pants
And thought maybe we’d get “Chimpy” for awhile

But then June 12th made me shiver
Fate became an “Indian Giver”
Bad news on the Internet
Precisely what I had fret!

Oh, I remember how I cried
When I thought of Wilson’s “outed” bride
Something deep within me fried
The day that Fitzmas died

So don’t cry, Ms. American Spy
We’ll get Libby for his fibby
And then Cheney will fry
And that smirking chimp will finally wave us goodbye
Singin’, this’ll be the day donkeys fly
This’ll be the day donkeys fly.

MORE

In our Second (and continuing) Reconstruction Period, few thought crimes are more vigorously prosecuted by the radical mob of the MSM than expressions of sympathy for the Lost Cause of the Southern Confederacy, and public display of the Confederate flag is treated as a major offense.

One might have assumed leftist power was purely terrestrial, but, no! it seems that even commercially-motivated displays of Confederate flags in space by foreigners must be carefully noted and arraigned before the bar of bien pensant opinion.

Russian cosmonaut Salizhan Sharipov may possibly have, with a keen eye on the bottom line, fetched along a 4×6” Confederate flag with the diabolical intention of selling the well-travelled emblem of Rebellion and Agrarianism on Ebay to some overly affuent and irredentist red state dweller. Thank goodness, the forces of Political Correctness were on top of things to prevent the prospering of such a nefarious scheme.

The seller, one Alex Pachenko, withdrew the controversial symbol from the Ebay auction, claiming that cosmonaut Sharipov denied having anything to do with it, though NBCs photo does suggest otherwise.

Second story.

from Russ Vaughn:

Libs think Hillary’s smart as a whip,
I think she’s just a fraud.
She couldn’t hold Ann Coulter’s slip;
Ann’s America’s sharpest broad.
She chews up liberal talking heads,
With wit so quick and cunning,
Rips Alan Colmes to bloody shreds,
And sends Matt Lauer running.

But now she’s really gone too far,
All the liberal lambs are bleating;
Is there nothing sacred she won’t tar?
My word, she’s widow-beating!
“Can you believe it?” reporters gasp,
“Those are victims that she’s dissing;
How dare that vicious rightwing asp
Threaten widows with her hissing?”

more

John B. Roberts II, in the Washington Times, points out the latest damaging Intel leak in the War on Terror.

Two-and-a-half years ago, I first learned of the CIA’s covert program to use secular warlords to contain al Qaeda in Somalia. As early as 2002 intelligence officials concluded that al Qaeda had re-established an operational network in Somalia after being routed in Afghanistan. Some reports even suggested that Osama bin Laden crossed the Arabian Sea in a dhow and found sanctuary in Somalia after escaping the noose in Tora Bora.

Until now, I refrained from writing about the Somali front in the war on al Qaeda because of its extreme sensitivity and its vital importance. Regrettably, State Department career officials, in order to condemn the program, have now confirmed to the New York Times the existence of the covert operation being run by the CIA station in Nairobi, Kenya. This is an unconscionable breach of security that ought to outrage us all.

How long will it be before the leakers are prosecuted for treason in time of war? Or will it take another 9/11?

A group blogging effort is being organized in observance of the 9/11 attacks, in which 2996 blogs are to be enrolled. Each blog is to publish on September 11, 2006 a memorial to one of the 9/11 victims.

Never Yet Melted will be memorializing Rick Rescorla.

More volunteers are needed.

2996 project

Hadji Girl

I was out in the sands of Iraq
And we were under attack
And I, well, I didn’t know where to go.

And the first thing that I could see was
Everybody’s favorite Burger King
So I threw open the door and I hit the floor.

Then suddenly to my surprise
I looked up and I saw her eyes
And I knew it was love at first sight.

And she said…
Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah
Hadji girl, I can’t understand what you’re saying.

And she said…
Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah
Hadji girl, I love you anyway.

Then she said that she wanted me to see.
She wanted me to go meet her family
But I, well, I couldn’t figure out how to say no.

Cause I don’t speak Arabic.

So, she took me down an old dirt trail.
And she pulled up to a side shanty
And she threw open the door and I hit the floor.

Cause her brother and her father shouted…
Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah
They pulled out their AKs so I could see

And they said…
Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah
(with humorous emphasis:)
So I grabbed her little sister, and pulled her in front of me.

As the bullets began to fly
The blood sprayed from between her eyes
And then I laughed maniacally

Then I hid behind the TV
And I locked and loaded my M-16
And I blew those little f*ckers to eternity.

And I said…
Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah
They should have known they were f*ckin’ with a Marine.

Thanks to Raya, who tells us here that the chorus comes from Team America.

LGF

LGF is linking a terrific unmelted USMC song and video, called Hadji Girl, in which the dumb marine who understands no Arabic falls for the beautiful Hadji Girl, whose chorus goes (something like) “Dirka, dirka, Mohammed Jihad…,” clearly amounting to “Kill, kill, Mohammed! Jihad!...”

She lures the love-struck gyrene home to her family’s hooch, where her brother and father are waiting in ambush. The love-struck marine can’t decline her invitation, because he doesn’t speak Arabic. But when she opens the door, the marine hits the floor (he’s not that stupid), because her father and brother shout, “Dirka, dirka, Mohammed, Jihad..,” and open up with their AK-47s. The marine then “grabbed her little sister and put her in front of me.”

“As the bullets began to fly, the blood sprayed from between her eyes, and then I laughed maniacally,” and he leaps behind the TV.

As he shoots the whole gang, sending them “to Eternity,” he is singing at this point himself: “Dirka, dirka, Mohammed, Jihad…” ” Observing, as the moral, that “they should have known they were f**king with a Marine.”

This video has been around for quite a few months, but the gossipy old ladies of the MSM are throwing a hissy fit right now, because CAIR (the Council on America Islamic Relations) is making an issue over the Marine’s song’s political incorrectness.

Go kiss a camel, I’d suggest.

Can you imagine the German-American Bund, or the (Japanese) Black Dragon Society successfully making a public scandal over satirical Marine Corps songs composed during the struggle for Guadalcanal?

Note how the USMC audience recognizes with delight the words of the chorus, and breaks up.

(Song text corrected.)
———————————————UPDATE

CAIR took down the video of the song, but Michelle Malkin produced a video defending Corporal Belile and his song, which includes an improved version of the video, complete with scrolling text of the lyrics 15 June 2006.

Marc Coffey identifies the top ten “Progressive” reactions.

Scrappleface

‘Twas the Night Before Fitzmas.
—————————-

Pretty girl casting admiring glance at good old Karl is identified at Wonkette.
—————————-

• I know, I know, having to annotate this kind of thing is an open admission of just how out-of-it some my college contemporaries, and readers, really are, but I discovered today that it has to be done. “Fitzmas” is the Blogospheric term for what all the lefties want for Christmas: the indictment on any old day of the year of Karl Rove by Plamegame Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

No Fitzmas, no handcuffs, no frogmarch, no Karl Rove’s head on a platter for them.

Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald sent a letter to Karl Rove’s attorney, reports the New York Times, throwing in the towel, and stating officially that he does not intend to pursue any criminal charges against Mr. Rove.

Some of us don’t find that very surprising, considering the astonishing levels of conceptual acrobatics and prosecutorial overreach it required for Fitzgerald to bring an indictment against I. Lewis Libby. The charges against Scooter Libby will eventually be laughed out of court, and Fitzgerald will have to slink off to Salem, Massachusetts to see if he can find further employment in the next witch hunt.

PJM has the best link collection.

I thought the best leftist comedy material was here, including Joe Wilson attorney’s statement:

While it appears that Mr. Rove will not be called to answer in criminal court for his participation in the wrongful disclosure of Valerie Wilson’s classified employment status at the CIA in retaliation against Joe Wilson for questioning the rationale for war in Iraq, that obviously does not end the matter. The day still may come when Mr. Rove and others are called to account in a court of law for their attacks on the Wilsons.

A Sunday London Times article quoted some awfully gloomy predictions from a leading British defense analyst.

ONE of Britain’s most senior military strategists has warned that western civilisation faces a threat on a par with the barbarian invasions that destroyed the Roman empire.

In an apocalyptic vision of security dangers, Rear Admiral Chris Parry said future migrations would be comparable to the Goths and Vandals while north African “barbary” pirates could be attacking yachts and beaches in the Mediterranean within 10 years.

Europe, including Britain, could be undermined by large immigrant groups with little allegiance to their host countries — a “reverse colonisation” as Parry described it. These groups would stay connected to their homelands by the internet and cheap flights. The idea of assimilation was becoming redundant, he said.

The warnings by Parry of what could threaten Britain over the next 30 years were delivered to senior officers and industry experts at a conference last week. Parry, head of the development, concepts and doctrine centre at the Ministry of Defence, is charged with identifying the greatest challenges that will frame national security policy in the future.

If a security breakdown occurred, he said, it was likely to be brought on by environmental destruction and a population boom, coupled with technology and radical Islam. The result for Britain and Europe, Parry warned, could be “like the 5th century Roman empire facing the Goths and the Vandals”.

Parry pointed to the mass migration which disaster in the Third World could unleash. “The diaspora issue is one of my biggest current concerns,” he said. “Globalisation makes assimilation seem redundant and old-fashioned . . . [the process] acts as a sort of reverse colonisation, where groups of people are self-contained, going back and forth between their countries, exploiting sophisticated networks and using instant communication on phones and the internet.”

Third World instability would lick at the edges of the West as pirates attacked holidaymakers from fast boats. “At some time in the next 10 years it may not be safe to sail a yacht between Gibraltar and Malta,” said the admiral.

The Blogospheric Left was recently partying down at Las Vegas at the annual YearlyKos Convention of Commie Bloggers.

The usual subhuman troglodytes of the Blogospheric Left (Digby, Eschaton, Fire Dog Lake – Sorry, I will not link them) flung obscenities (their only known form of articulate speech) at poor little Ana Marie Cox, formerly Wonkette, having become inspired with Envy at the lady’s new position at Time magazine, and incensed at her fraternizing with Glenn Reynolds.

One of the Kos kids claims this year’s convention saved his life, as a car ran into his office while he was partying with the pinks.

But our own Harry Hutton can top that, by Jove:

Kos once saved my life too. I was reading a post about Senator Joseph Lieberman, and it was so dull that I got up to run my head under a cold tap. Just then this assagai comes flying through the window. Zulus! Fuck! If it hadn’t been for Kos, I could have wound up in a cooking pot. I’ll always be grateful to him for that.

Anyway, so we formed a laager, called for reinforcements and went all Rorke’s Drift on their arses, and it all ended happily with a glorious slaughter of tribesmen. That was the day Boris Johnsons won the Victoria Cross.

The trial of Oriana Fallaci for the crime of defaming Islam by statements made in her 2004 book The Force of Reason began today in Bergamo, and was adjourned until June 26.

Adel Smith, head of the Italian Muslim Union, brought a lawsuit contending that Fallaci’s book included 18 blasphemous statements, including a reference to Islam as “a pool that never purifies”.

The lawsuit resulted in the 77 year old author being charged with violating a law that forbids defamatory statements concerning a religion recognized by the Italian state, an offence punishable by a fine of up to ₤6,000 (£4,100/$7560).

Smith previously unsuccessfully sued his hometown of Abruzzo to have crucifixes removed from classrooms in public schools.

Oriana Fallaci, who resides in New York and is suffering from cancer, did not attend.

Associated Press

If you subscribe to any Yahoo Groups email lists, you have undoubtedly been hit today by numerous copies of a worm. I’ve seen about twenty copies this afternoon, all stopped by PC-cillin.

Information Week warns:

A new worm targeting Yahoo’s Web-based e-mail service bent on collecting addresses for a spam database has been spotted in the wild, a security company warned Monday.

The “Yamanner” worm exploits a JavaScript vulnerability in Yahoo’s Web mail, Cupertino, Calif. security specialist Symantec said in a Monday morning warning to customers of its DeepSight Threat Management System. Yamanner is spreading, added Symantec, which has assigned the threat a “2” in its 1 through 5 rating system.

The worm targets addresses with the “yahoo.com” and “yahoogroups.com” domains, and arrives as an HTML message containing JavaScript. As soon as the recipient views the message, the script automatically runs to spread the worm to other users in the Yahoo address book. The message will have a From” address of av3@yahoo.com and a Subject: of “New Graphic Site.”

“Harvested addresses from the address book are then submitted to a remote URL, which is likely to be used for a spam database,” noted Symantec in its alert.

We can apply to doctors Goethe’s famous rueful comment on the German people: “so estimable in the individual and so wretched in the generality.”

story

At the end of last month, for reasons of his own which are difficult for the rest of us to fathom, John Kerry launched a new campaign of press statements replying to the charges about his awards and military record made by fellow Swift Boat Veterans during his 2004 presidential campaign.

The Swift Boat Veterans’ attacks on Kerry’s record, and the associated book, unquestionably demolished Kerry’s “reporting for duty” campaign theme, and Kerry’s failure during the course of the campaign to release his military records and to reply effectively to the veterans’ charges did not go unnoticed by the voters.

More recently, Kerry seems to have decided that everyone has discarded his copy of Unfit for Command, and forgotten all the details, and he evidently thinks it’s now safe to go around striking martyred poses in front of the obliging liberal media.

Well, John Kerry is wrong. Not everyone has forgotten, and it is not safe, as Thomas Lipscomb demonstrates with a detailed review of Kerry’s first-Purple Heart-producing skimmer mission.

Xavier has a video of some impressive exhibition shooting by a felow named Bob Munden. This guy would impress even Karen.

The indiscreet New York Times Magazine feature last February rejoicing in the presence at Yale (in the capacity of a special student) of former Taliban roving ambassador and international spokesman Sayed Ramahtullah Hashemi led to a heap of controversy and proved a major embarassment to the university administration. But it’s an ill wind, and all that.

All the flak brought down upon liberal heads at Yale during the brouhaha over poor little Ramahtullah’s presence on campus intimidated the rascals. It was the million dollars worth of Ramahtullah-associated bad publicity that persuaded the powers that be at Yale to refrain from a far worse decision: the appointment of an egegrious apologist for Midde Eastern terrorism, the infamous Juan Cole, to a senior position on the faculty at Yale.

The decision is in. Cole is out.

And Juan Cole is now posting on his blog all about just how sour grow the grapes in old New Haven:

I am very happy at the University of Michigan, which has among the largest and oldest Middle East Studies programs in the United States. It is like Disney World for a Middle East specialist. To its credit, the University invested tens of millions of dollars in creating positions and building library and other resources in this field at at time when it was considered marginal by many other universities. Michigan also has a History Department that is among the very best and largest in the country, characterized by diversity of area specialization and innovative, interdisciplinary scholarship. It is a nurturing and congenial intellectual environment. Many fine departments in the US have a North Atlantic focus or bias, but Michigan for decades has had a global emphasis.

The press has some out of date impressions about our major research universities, imagining that the old hierarchy of Ivy League versus the rest is still meaningful. It is not. Research universities, whether state (Berkeley, the University of Michigan) or private, are much more similar than they are different. Were I ever to go to another place, it would likely be as a pioneer in a less well-developed Middle East Studies program, for the purpose of building up something that we already have at Michigan. That is, it would be a personal sacrifice for some purpose, and not a decision easily made.

Ah, yes! Michigan is just as good. We’re all sure you’ll be very happy staying there, Juan, old boy. And a good many Yale men are even happier than you are that you’re staying there.
—————————————-

Just how disgraceful a faculty appointment Juan Cole’s would have been may be discerned from a perusal of this Front Page article.

Vulgar (contains numerous obscenities), but definitely not melted.

link
——————————Hat tip to Jeff Goldstein.

Jeff Goldstein of the illustrious Protein Wisdom blog scoops the MSM with the first anywhere post-death interview with Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.

protein wisdom: “First of all, I’d like to thank you for taking this time to sit down with me, an infidel dog, and a Jew infidel dog, to boot. But I think it’s important that we as Westerners try really to understand what it is that motivates people like you—21st century Minutemen, the Thomas Paines and George Washingtons of the new Caliphate, to hear some speak of it.”

Jack, a 15lb (7kg), (declawed!) ginger tabby is a trifle possessive of his yard in West Milford, New Jersey.

A neighbor discovered Jack sitting on the ground regarding a black bear perched high above in a tree. She first thought Jack was merely watching. But when that bear tried to descend 15 minutes later, to her astonishment, the feisty house cat ran him right up another tree.

Jack’s owner had to call him into the house in order to allow the terrified bruin to make a hasty escape.

“He doesn’t want anybody in his yard,” said proud owner Donna Dickey.

Star-Ledger

Stare at the dot, then move your mouse over the picture.

link

The Israeli-based purveyor of Intel-gossip Depkafile tells us that Jordanian intelligence provided the breakthrough leading to the successful targeting of Zarqawi.

(It is generally believed that Depkafile functions as a mouthpiece for Mossad, and commonly distributes rumors or even false stories, but this one serves no obvious Mossad agenda, and could possibly even be true.)

The final breakthrough in the long pursuit of the most blood-stained terrorist of them all, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, came from Jordan.

The source was Ziyad Halaf al Karbouli, also known as Abu Hufeiza, one of the lowlifes Zarqawi employed to attack and rob the convoys plying Baghdad’s main supply route across the Jordanian border and murdering their Iraqi or Jordanian drivers. Foreigners riding along were taken hostage. DEBKA-Net-Weekly reveals that he was picked up — not by chance, but in consequence of a well-laid Jordanian sting operation set up and executed by King Abdullah’s old unit, The Riders of Justice of Jordan’s 71st Commando Brigade – and on his orders.

Jordanian intelligence had a score to settle with Zarqawi’s highway robber-in-chief. Last September, he kidnapped a Palestinian called Khaled Da Siko, who was an important Jordanian undercover agent, assigned with penetrating Zarqawi’s following. The abduction took place in Ruthba in western Iraq. When Abu Hufeiza asked Zarqawi what to do with his captive, he was told to execute him forthwith, which he did.

From that moment, Jordanian intelligence never let up on their efforts to lay hands on the kidnapper to exact revenge.

The Riders of Justice infiltrated western Iraq at the beginning of 2006 and scoured al Qaim, Ruthba, Falujja and Ramadi for the wanted man. At some point, they realized that even if they overpowered his bodyguards and killed him, they would never make it back to Jordan past Zarqawi’s killers. It had become necessary to go for the boss, who was in any case under sentence of death in the kingdom.

In early April therefore, a decision was taken in Amman to lure Abu Hufeiza into entering the kingdom in defiance of Zarqawi’s prohibition. Double agents held out an offer of a Jordanian base for al Qaeda, plus information on ways to lay hands on the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through the funding channel between Jordan and Iraq.

Abu Hufeiza swallowed the bait. He was dazzled enough to picture himself handing the rich booty over to Abu Zarqawi and being promoted to his Number Two in al Qaeda’s Iraq hierarchy by his grateful master.

The moment he and his bodyguards set foot on Jordanian soil, all got up as Iraqi businessmen on a shopping trip, the trap snapped shut; they were surrounded by the Riders of Justice and hauled to Amman for questioning.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s counter-terror sources report that Abu Hufeiza held nothing back from his Jordanian interrogators. He was the source of the first real lead to Zarqawi’s location to be made available to the US command and intelligence in Iraq.

Abu Hufeiza also gave away certain members of the Butcher of Baghdad’s command group. Here is a summary of the data the Jordanians extracted from him:

The name of al Qaeda chief’s chief of operations, Yassin Harabi — an Iraqi Sunni codenamed Abu Obeida. Going down the chain of command, he identified Yunas Ramlawi, a Palestinian from the West Bank town of Ramallah, and Muhammad Majid, a Saudi Arabian known as Abu Hamza.

The descriptions he gave the Jordanians were good enough for identikit portraits and betrayed their hideouts, how they stayed in touch with Zarqawi and their movements.

This data haul Jordanian intelligence whipped across to Washington where analysts went to work on it and rushed their findings to American headquarters in Baghdad.

All of a sudden, the US military in Baghdad had an intelligence bonanza instead of chance identities of the odd Zarqawi adherent which was all they had to work with before. From Abu Hufeiza Jordanian intelligence had extracted the first clue to the location of the safe house near Baquba, where Zarqawi was actually in conference with his senior commanders. The next link in the chain came from a senior Zarqawi commander in Iraq, who fell into American hands and was persuaded to part with the final steps that brought two US 500-pound bombs crashing down on Zarqawi’s last address.

At first, some American officers queried these offerings as disinformation designed to trip them up. But when US commander General George W. Casey and American ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad ordered the input examined and cross-referenced, it proved solid enough for direct action.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a story which appears to be incorporating the Depkafile report:

Perhaps the most important arrest, however, say Middle East and European intelligence agents, was Jordan’s capture last month of an al Qaeda logistics and smuggling agent, Ziad Khalaf Raja al-Karbouly. Mr. Karbouly went on Jordanian television after his arrest and described murdering Jordanian truck drivers moving goods into Iraq. He also described carrying out political assassination of Moroccan and Kurdish diplomats on the orders of Mr. Zarqawi.

The Jordanians worked with agents inside Iraq to draw Mr. Karbouly across the border, Jordanian intelligence officials said last month. And the al Qaeda operative provided Jordanian interrogators with important intelligence on Mr. Zarqawi’s top aides, including his spiritual adviser, Abu Abdul-Rahman. In recent weeks, U.S. military personnel said they monitored Mr. Rahman’s movements and, ultimately, were drawn to Mr. Zarqawi’s hideout near the Iraqi city of Baqubah.

The Jordanian operation “offered a critical link” on al Qaeda’s leadership structure, said a European counterterrorism official.

Legalization of polygamy following legalization of gay marriage already happend in the Netherlands. It could happen here. Stanley Kurtz, in a must read article, identifies the fundamental connections between monogamy and democracy.

Alexis de Tocqueville, that great nineteenth-century student of America, pointed to the abolition of primogeniture (exclusive property inheritance by first-born sons) as the social key to American democracy. Once American children inherited equally, said Tocqueville, landed estates were dispersed, and the ethos of kin unity and hierarchy was replaced by a spirit of democratic equality. Yet America’s abolition of primogeniture was only the culmination of a process begun centuries earlier by the Christian Church. Muslim families arrange marriages to cousins and other kin, thereby reinforcing couples’ identification with family and tribe. But from the fourth century through the Middle Ages, the Church fought to protect individual choice in marriage, while prohibiting marriage between cousins and other relatives. That undercut social forms based on kinship and collective identity, ultimately leading to the triumph of democratic individualism in the West.

Yet the weakening or even disappearance of extended kinship groups from family life in the West poses a problem. If families aren’t going to be held together by collective honor, mutual obligation, and shared economic interest, how will they cohere? The answer is love. Exclusive affection for a unique individual is the structural foundation on which Western families are built. In polygamous societies, where marriages are arranged and wives and children live collectively, too much individualized love (for spouses or children) endangers group solidarity. Yet in a democratic society, individualized love is praised and cultivated as the foundation of family stability. So take your pick. You can have a love-based democratic culture of monogamy, or an authority-based hierarchical culture of polygamy. But—as the Reynolds Court knew—you can’t have both.

Iowahawk publishes presumably the last Zarkman report. This one is from the Islamic Paradise.

despite Zarqawi’s death, reports the inimitable Scott Ott.

As Blackberry devices and cell phones on Capitol Hill hummed with news of the death of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi yesterday, Congressional Democrats vowed that despite the loss they would fight on in “the war on the war on terror.”

“Zarqawi will be missed because he put a human face on the futility of the illegal U.S. occupation of Iraq,” said one unnamed lawmaker, who assured a reporter that “Democrats are still optimistic. We’re still looking for the silver lining.”

Rep. John Murtha, D-PA, a former Marine and vocal critic of the military occupation of Iraq, immediately denounced “the Zarqawi massacre” and suggested that the F-16 pilot who dropped the bombs had snapped under pressure and murdered the al Qaeda leader “in cold blood.”

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-PA, demanded an explanation of the secret intelligence gathering techniques and surveillance used to find Mr. Zarqawi.

“I want to give the president an opportunity to explain the program to the Congress and to assure the American people that nobody’s civil rights were violated,” said Sen. Specter.

Meanwhile, Democrat National Committee Chairman Howard Dean and former presidential candidate Al Gore observed a moment of silence as they heard of the passing of Mr. Zarqawi, a fellow Internet pioneer.

Simon Heffer, though not religious personally, is still capable of outrage at the multicultural impulses of the former Archbishop of Canterbury and the Prince of Wales.

former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey, made a predictable intervention in this debate (on Multiculturalism) from beyond the grave last weekend. He proclaimed that the coronation of our next monarch must be an “interfaith” event. The ceremony must, he added, have “very significant changes”, so that it is “inclusive” of other religions in Britain.

Lord Carey clearly has in mind what Private Eye would term a “Rocky Horror” coronation service. Never mind your archbishops, or even your Christians, your imams, your rabbis, ayatollahs, your assorted holy men and other diverse priests, layers-on-of-hands and speakers-in-tongues: in accordance with the professions of religious belief on the 2001 census forms, I expect to see a few Jedi knights in the sanctuary, while devotees of Ras Tafari smoke ganja at the high altar. And, as one of the realm’s noisiest atheists, I hope for a part in the proceedings, too, that I might feel “included”.

Having long regarded the Church of England as many people regard EastEnders, I have steeled myself not to intrude in its private grief, but to lament the largely self-inflicted decline of this great institution. Though it has, to my great spiritual regret, nothing to offer me personally, I can appreciate not merely the potential it has to succour and strengthen millions of believers, but also its role in our culture, our constitution and our nation.

However, intrude into the Church’s grief we now must: for Lord Carey’s successor on the throne of St Augustine, Dr Rowan Williams, who in many regards seems even more to inhabit the wilder shores of theology than Lord Carey, is having none of this nonsense. He has picked up on a threat issued by our probable next monarch, the Prince of Wales, in 1994 about how (in that very “last century” spirit) the Prince wanted to be “Defender of Faiths” when and if he became King.

Dr Williams said of the Prince in 2003 that “unless something really radical happens with the constitution, he is, like it or not, Defender of the Faith and he has a relationship with the Christian Church of a kind that he does not have with other faith communities”. That is self-evidently the case. Of course, were our Queen to emulate her late mother (and I fervently hope she does), there will be no coronation for another 20 or so years. Perhaps the needless vandalism of our constitution will have been completed by then. Perhaps there will be a different heir to the throne. Perhaps the moon will be made of green cheese. Until such times as these things happen,

Dr Williams’s view must prevail, and his predecessor would be best advised to keep his bizarre views to himself…

That is what inclusiveness means: it is how countries as diverse as France and America both do things. It is about having a standard template of Frenchness or American-ness, and welcoming people into that civilisation and those humane values by asking them to participate in them. We still, despite the attempts of such vandals as Lord Carey, have a core culture in this country. Christianity and the expectation that Christianity will, for historic reasons, prevail and be accepted as prevalent, are central to that culture. And few events in the nation’s life symbolise such an understanding more than the traditional coronation service.

The next coronation will be a formal renewal of our way of life and our values. It will formally recognise not only the legitimacy of the monarch in the eyes of God and the British constitution, but also of the identification of the vast majority of his subjects with the process of doing so. For that reason above all others it must be clear, comprehensible and in keeping with public expectations of such an event.

We are not a multicultural society. We are a monocultural one tolerant of other cultures, and whose clear identity is understood by the people, if not by their leaders. We are an old country with a strong sense of continuity. And anyone who trifles with such manifestations of our antiquity and stability does so at his peril.

The Wall Street Journal put the debate on the Death Tax (which costs more to collect than it adds to the Federal coffers).

Americans favor repealing the death tax not because they think it will help them directly. They’re more principled than that. Two-thirds of the public wants to repeal it because they think taxing a lifetime of thrift due to the accident of death is unfair, and even immoral. They also understand that the really rich won’t pay the tax anyway because they hire lawyers to avoid it.

For proof that they’re right, they need only watch the current debate. The superrich or their kin—such as Bill Gates Sr. and Warren Buffett—are some of the loudest voices opposing repeal. Yet they are able to shelter their own vast wealth by creating foundations or via other crafty estate planning. Edward McCaffery, an estate tax expert at USC Law School, argues that “if breaking up large concentrations of wealth is the intention of the death tax, then it is a miserable failure.”

Do the Kennedys or Rockefellers look any poorer from the existence of a tax first created in 1917? The real people who pay the levy are the thrifty middle class and entrepreneurs who’ve built up a modest nest egg or business and are hit by a 46% tax rate when they die. Americans want family businesses, ranches, farms and other assets to be passed from one generation to the next. Yet the U.S. has one of the highest death tax rates in the world.

But two Republican poltroons in the Senate joined the Party of Envy to defeat the repeal 57-41. A 60 vote majority was needed to end a democrat filibuster against basic decency.

Besides Mr. Baucus (D – Montana), three other Democrats voted to end debate and clear the way for a vote on repeal. They were Senator Ben E. Nelson of Nebraska, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida and Senator Blanche L. Lincoln of Arkansas. Two Republicans, Senator George V. Voinovich of Ohio and Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, voted to block the bill.

American pioneers, like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, made a practice of moving whenever a neigbor settled close enough that they could see the smoke from his chimney. Those old boys were smart.

In today’s metropolitan suburbs, regulation has burgeoned like kudzu. One pays more in taxes per annum than most members of my dad’s generation paid for their house. Those taxes are high enough and increase reliably enough that retirement and a fixed income will require moving for most people.

You get to pay something in the neighborhood of a million bucks for a lot of suburban properties these days, and then you need to get (almost impossible to obtain) permissions to remodel or build anything on your (so-called) own property.

Myself, I’m keeping my 300 acre farm in a rural township of Pennsylvania, where I can shoot guns, remodel my house, or erect a 200 foot replica of the Statue of Liberty painted fuchsia, and nobody can stop me.

Just read this eye-opening account from the Washington Post of life in today’s suburban hell:

Marianne and Marc Duffy say their dream home renovation in Chevy Chase has turned into a suburban nightmare. Their neighbors say the Duffys intentionally flouted building rules when they expanded their $725,000 house on Thornapple Street and have no one to blame but themselves.

Yesterday, a Montgomery County appeals board reaffirmed an earlier ruling that the Duffys had rebuilt their house too close to the street and to neighbors. The Duffys say the decision leaves them two choices: Move the house a few feet at a cost of $100,000 or continue an expensive battle in court….

The dispute has shed new light on the inner workings of the county’s Department of Permitting Services, which reversed course at least five times in the case, the Duffys said. The agency issued renovation permits to the couple last year but later pulled them back and ordered work stopped after neighbors complained that the Duffys had actually demolished and rebuilt the house. The couple are renting a house nearby.

The case has pitted the Duffys, both securities lawyers, against a group of prominent opponents, including two journalists—Mayer, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, and her husband, William Hamilton, a Washington Post editor—as well as lawyer Michael Eig and his historic preservationist wife Emily Hotaling Eig, former ABC News reporter Jackie Judd and real estate agent Kristin Gerlach. Both sides had lawyers but recently decided to represent themselves.

Neither side has signaled a willingness to give up the fight, while acknowledging the strain the protracted battle, including six days of hearings, has put on their lives.

The dispute has roiled the neighborhood, sparked contentious discussions at Town Council meetings, generated letters to local newspapers and debates on talk radio, and fueled discussions about liberal conspiracies.

Moral? Don’t live near pretentious suburban liberals.

Iraqi blogger Hammorabi gloats over US forces at last succeeding in nailing Zarqawi’s well-deserving hide to the barn door:

The Prime Minister of Iraq Mr Al-Maliki just announced that the criminal and terrorist thug Abo-Mousab Al-Zarqawi was killed by the Iraqi forces in the last few hours.

Zarqawi who is Jordanian from Palestinian origin was responsible for thousands of crimes against the Iraqis and the MNF as well as against humanity. He appeared recently in a video challenging the American and Iraqi forces. He beheaded by his dirty hands many Iraqis and foreigners.

Zarqawi was with at least 7 among his closest thugs in an area called Hib-hib in Diyala province north east of Baghdad before the MNF and Iraqi forces attacked them last night.

The attack was first by the US forces with an air strike to a selected target where they cockroaches were hiding in. On the same time and in the ground were the Iraqi forces making an advance towards the target and securing the area before and afterward.

Zarqawi without doubts went into the bottom of the Hell with blood of many innocent children, women and men in his dirty hands.

There were celebrations going on now in the holy city of Najaf and Kerbala. On the other hands there are sadness and shock among his allies in the region and abroad like Al-Jazeera Qatari TV and other Arab pro-terrorists thugs.

Zarqawi and his aides simply went to Hell and this is the worst fate for any one like them.