The people of that Commonwealth will not endorse Gay Marriage, so the greasy pols in the democrat-controlled legislature have again blocked a popular vote on a Constitutional Amendment intended to reverse the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s absurd decision.

You hear a lot of talk about “democracy” from democrats, and about “voting,” until the time comes to deliver the goods to one of their pet constituencies, then so much for democracy, so much for voting.

AP

AP reports that Judge Walton has turned down Lewis Libby’s attorneys’ request for a prison delay to allow for appeal.

A federal judge said Thursday he will not delay a 2 1/2-year prison sentence for I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a ruling that could send the former White House aide to prison within weeks.

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton’s decision will send Libby’s attorneys rushing to an appeals court to block the sentence and could force President Bush to consider calls from Libby’s supporters to pardon the former aide.

No date was set for Libby to report to prison but it’s expected to be within six to eight weeks. That will be left up to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, which will also select a facility.

Now we will have a chance to see what George W. Bush is made of. Will he allow a loyal subordinate to serve actual prison time as the result a ridiculous, purely partisan criminalization-of-policy-disputes affair which he himself could have, and should have, prevented ever occurring in the first place?

If he does that, conservative Republicans should withdraw their support from such a president.

Mark Taibbi is extremely amusing, reflecting upon—and criticizing—the contradictions of American leftism.

The sad truth is that if the FBI really is following anyone on the American left, it is engaging in a huge waste of time and personnel. No matter what it claims for a self-image, in reality it s the saddest collection of cowering, ineffectual ninnies ever assembled under one banner on God’s green earth. And its ugly little secret is that it really doesn’t mind being in the position its in – politically irrelevant and permanently relegated to the sidelines, tucked into its cozy little cottage industry of polysyllabic, ivory tower criticism. When you get right down to it, the American left is basically just a noisy Upper West side cocktail party for the college-graduate class.

And we all know it. The question is, when will we finally admit it?

Here’s the real problem with American liberalism: there is no such thing, not really. What we call American liberalism is really a kind of genetic mutant, a Frankenstein’s monster of incongruous parts – a fat, affluent, overeducated New York/Washington head crudely screwed onto the withering corpse of the vanishing middle-American manufacturing class. These days the Roosevelt stratum of rich East Coasters are still liberals, but the industrial middle class that the New Deal helped create is almost all gone. In 1965, manufacturing jobs still made up 53 percent of the US economy; that number was down to nine percent in 2004, and no one has stepped up to talk to the 30 million working poor who struggle to get by on low-wage, part-time jobs.

Thus, the people who are the public voice of American liberalism rarely have any real connection to the ordinary working people whose interests they putatively champion. They tend instead to be well-off, college-educated yuppies from California or the East Coast, and hard as they try to worry about food stamps or veterans rights or securing federal assistance for heating oil bills, they invariably gravitate instead to things that actually matter to them – like the slick Al Gore documentary on global warming, or the “All Things Considered” interview on NPR with the British author of Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. They haven’t yet come up with something to replace the synergy of patrician and middle-class interests that the New Deal represented.

Bernie Sanders, the new Senator from Vermont and one of the few American politicians in history to have survived publicly admitting to being a socialist, agrees that this peculiar demographic schism is a fundamental problem for the American political opposition.

“Unfortunately, today, when you talk about the American left,” he says, “as often as not you’re talking about wealthy folks who are concerned about the environment (which is enormously important) who are concerned about women’s rights (which are enormously important) and who are concerned about gay rights (which are enormously important). “But you re not really referring to millions of workers who have lost their jobs because of disastrous trade agreements,” he says. “You’re not talking about waitresses who are working for four bucks an hour.” As often as not, he says, you’re talking about “sophisticated people who have money.”

David Sirota, ... a guy who frequently appears on television news programs defending the “left” in TV’s typical Crossfire style leftright rock-em sock‘em format. Like a lot of people who make their living in this world, he s sometimes frustrated with the lack of discipline and purpose in American liberalism. And like Sanders, he worries that there is a wide chasm between the people who speak for the left and sponsor left-leaning political organizations, and the actual people they supposedly represent.

“Perhaps what the real issue is that the left is not really a grassroots movement,” he says. “You have this donor/elite class, and then you have the public . . . You have these zillionaires who are supposedly funding the progressive movement. At some point that gets to be a problem.”

Sanders agrees, saying that “where the money comes from” is definitely one of the reasons that the so-called liberals in Washington – i.e. the Democrats – tend not to get too heavily into financial issues that affect ordinary people. ...

Citibank gives money to Tom Daschle, Tom Daschle crafts the hideous Bankruptcy Bill, and suddenly the Midwestern union member who was laid off in the wake of Democrat-passed NAFTA can’t even declare bankruptcy to get out from the credit card debt he incurred in his unemployment. He will now probably suck eggs for the rest of his life, paying off credit card debt year after year at a snail’s pace while working as a non-union butcher in a Wal Mart in Butte. Royally screwed twice by the Democratic Party he voted for, he will almost certainly decide to vote Republican the first time he opens up the door to find four pimply college students wearing I READ BANNED BOOKS tshirts taking up a collection to agitate for dolphin-safe tuna. ...

..having rich college grads acting as the political representatives of the working class isn’t just bad politics. Its also silly. And there’s probably no political movement in history that’s been sillier than the modern American left.

Read the whole article.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Back on February 13th, the Telegraph (CY refers to March 12th, presumably via a typo) reported that more than a 100 Steyr Mannlicher HS50 .50 caliber sniper rifles sold to Iran had been captured by US forces in raids on insurgent arms caches and safe houses.

The story was widely repeated by media outlets and blogs, and obviously did considerable harm to the public image and reputation of the renowned Austrian arm maker.

Steyr Mannlicher issued a rebuttal on March 29th, which I unfortunately have not previously seen.

But Confederate Yankee more recently looked into the matter, interviewing informed US military sources, and has debunked the story completely.

Personally, I’m delighted to learn that the history of the company succeeding as manufacturer of the illustrious Mannlicher Schonauer remains unblemished, and that we Americans can buy Jeff Cooper-designed Steyr Scout rifles anytime we want without a qualm.

Never Yet Melted extends apologies and best wishes to Steyr Mannlicher GmbH. & Co KG

and to

Ferdinand Ritter von Mannlicher.

Original erroneous post

Overlawyered has an update on this hilarious affair.

Apparently, the plaintiff was moved to tears when he testified about the loss of those trousers by his neighborhood dry cleaner.

Previous posting

Christopher J. Fettweis puts America on the couch for a session of (slightly premature) Post-traumatic Iraq Syndrome counseling in the La Times.

Losing hurts more than winning feels good. This simple maxim applies with equal power to virtually all areas of human interaction: sports, finance, love. And war. ...

The endgame in Iraq is now clear, in outline if not detail, and it appears that the heavily favored United States will be upset. Once support for a war is lost, it is gone for good; there is no example of a modern democracy having changed its mind once it turned against a war. So we ought to start coming to grips with the meaning of losing in Iraq.

The consequences for the national psyche are likely to be profound, throwing American politics into a downward spiral of bitter recriminations the likes of which it has not seen in a generation. ...

The American people seem to understand, however — and historians will certainly agree — that the war itself was a catastrophic mistake. It was a faulty grand strategy, not poor implementation. The Bush administration was operating under an international political illusion, one that is further discredited with every car bombing of a crowded Baghdad marketplace and every Iraqi doctor who packs up his family and flees his country.

The only significant question still hanging is whether Iraq will turn out to have been the biggest strategic mistake in U.S. history. ...

Perhaps at some point we will come to recognize that the United States can afford to be much more restrained in its foreign policy adventures. Were our founding fathers here, they would surely look on Iraq with horror and judge that the nation they created had fundamentally lost its way. If the war in Iraq leads the United States to return to its traditional, restrained grand strategy, then perhaps the whole experience will not have been in vain.

Either way, the Iraq syndrome is coming. We need to be prepared for the divisiveness, vitriol, self-doubt and recrimination that will be its symptoms. They will be the defining legacy of the Bush administration and neoconservatism’s parting gift to America.

———————————————
Thank you, Neocons, for returning the USA to the grand old pre-WWII philosophy of Isolationism.
———————————————
It seems curious to this reader that Mr. Fettweis, an assistant professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, in his eagerness to snatch defeat, never actually identifies when and where the US defeat occurred.

Where exactly did the American Blenheim, the American Retreat from Moscow, the American Stalingrad, or the American Dien Bien Phu take place and when did it occur?

Traditionally, nations lose wars when they suffer a major defeat in battle resulting in the destruction or surrender of an entire army.

Alternatively, nations lose wars the way the Confederacy did in 1865 and Germany did in WWI via drastic prolonged losses of manpower, economic exhaustion, and civilian starvation.

We lost 3513 men in Iraq over four years, not the 10-13 thousand Grant lost at Cold Harbor, the 100,000 each France and Germany lost at Verdun, not even the 7000 we lost in less than a month at Iwo Jima.

It can hardly be contended that the loss of 3500 men over four years has brought a nation of 300 million to its knees. The United States lost 3% of its population in the Civil War before one side lost the will to continue the fight. Germany lost more than 1,700,000 in WWI before accepting the Armistice. We lose 26,000 lives in highway fatalities per annum, and we’re not withdrawing from the nation’s roads.

We are obviously not really running out of manpower. Have we exhausted our financial resources?

We’re running a deficit, it’s true, but the deficit as percentage of GDP is low: 1.4%. The average since 1970 is 2.3%.

We haven’t lost any battles. No US army has been annihilated or surrendered. We are hardly running out of manpower. We are neither starving, nor broke. So why are we defeated?

What we are running out of is conviction in the justness of our cause and confidence in our success. Those losses did not occur in Iraq. Those losses were inflicted on the homefront in a highly successful propaganda operation which inflicted the death of a thousand cuts upon American support for the War in Iraq by lovingly detailed news coverage of every American casualty, by the systematic magnification of the enemy’s every trivial ambush or booby trap into a major victory, by the obfuscation and denigration of America’s causus belli and war aims.

American military forces cannot possibly be defeated on the battlefield by the inferior numbers of lightly armed irregular adversaries. But we have been brought very close to defeat, with withdrawal not difficult to imagine, by domestic defeatism and treason.

Before Mr. Fettweis undertakes to talk about Post-Traumatic Defeat Syndrome, he is under an obligation to identify the real character of that defeat.

Aaron Hanscom finds comedy in 21st century leftist Europe’s unwillingness to defend itself against apes or Islam.

To gauge the extent of the demise of Europe, look no further than the story of the male gorilla that escaped at a Rotterdam zoo last month. After managing to get over a moat, the 400-pound primate brutally attacked a woman who had been visiting the zoo regularly to see the animal. Because female gorillas establish prolonged eye contact when they want to mate, biologists concluded that the woman was responsible for the attack. Taking moral relativism to its illogical conclusion, the Antwerp Zoo in Belgium now has signs warning visitors not to stare at the apes.

Al Gore criticizes George Bush’s policy on Iraq: for disregarding Iraq’s ties to terrorism and ignoring Iraq’s attempts to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

9:27 video

Hat tip to Michael Lawler.

Richmond’s 4th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the Bush Administration cannot do what Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1 and 2 ) did in time of war, that the Bush Administration cannot detain as a military prisoner one Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, an individual arrested in the United States, who had trained at Osama bin Laden’s terrorist training camp in Afghanistan, who met with Khalid Shaykh Muhammed, the mastermind of the September 11th attacks, in the Summer of 2001, and then entered the United States just before September 11th attacks to serve as an Al Qaeda sleeper agent.

The opinion was written by Judge Diana Motz and joined by Judge Roger Gregory, both Clinton appointees.

Al-Marri v. Wright

Jules Crittenden takes the occasion of the failure of the Gonzalez No Confidence vote, Harry Reid’s 19% Favorable Rating, and the democrat Congress’s 27% Approval Rating (a 10 Year Low) to remind Americans that it is actually possible to be doing worse than George W. Bush.

Mark Tapscott says the unpopularity of both Republicans and democrats proves it’s time for a new Party.

The final episode of the much-admired series ended with the deliberate misdirection of viewers’ attention followed by a startlingly sudden cut to black. Writer David Chase’s failure to deliver up a more meaningful and definitive ending has provoked apologetic defenses and some scorching criticism.

Alessandra Stanley, in the New York Times (of course!) defended Chase’s pulling his audience’s chain. It was just so ironic, after all.

There was no good ending, so “The Sopranos” left off without one.

The abrupt finale last night was almost like a prank, a mischievous dig at viewers who had agonized over how television’s most addictive series would come to a close. The suspense of the final scene in the diner was almost cruel. And certainly that last bit of song — “Don’t Stop Believing,” by Journey — had to be a joke.

After eight years and so much frenzied anticipation, any ending would have been a letdown. Viewers are conditioned to seek a resolution, happy or sad, so it was almost fitting that this HBO series that was neither comedy nor tragedy should defy expectations in its very last moments. In that way at least “The Sopranos” delivered a perfectly imperfect finish.

But the more demotic Nikki Finke wasn’t buying any alibis, and delivered a real denunciation.

The line to cancel HBO starts here. What a ridiculously disappointing end lacking in creativity to The Sopranos saga. ... if David Chase, who wrote and directed the final episode, was demonstrating the existential and endless loop of Tony’s life or the moments before the hit that causes his death, it still robbed the audience of visual closure. And if it were done to segue into a motion picture sequel, then that kind of crass commercialism shouldn’t be tolerated. ... There’s even buzz that the real ending will only be available on the series’ final DVD. Either way, it was terrible. Apparently, my extreme reaction was typical of many series’ fans: they crashed HBO’s website for a time tonight trying to register their outrage. HBO could suffer a wave of cancellations as a result. ... Chase clearly didn’t give a damn about his fans. Instead, he crapped in their faces. This is why America hates Hollywood. Unlike some network series that end abruptly because broadcasters pull the plug without warning, The Sopranos has been slated for years to go off the air tonight. But instead of carefully crafted, this finale looked like it had been concocted in a day or two. (Some of the scenes were cut so abruptly, they caused whiplash.) ... Chase needed to exert himself to a concoct an artful denouement. But he took the lazy way out. The show we all loved deserved a decent burial. Instead, it went into a black hole.

Two days later, people are still talking about that ending, as the New York Times reports today:

After he completed the final episode of “The Sopranos,” David Chase told publicity executives at HBO that he was leaving for France and would not take any calls asking him to comment about the ending of his classic television series.

He also said that he had instructed all of his writers and producers to turn down any requests for information about the decisions that had gone into shaping the show’s last chapter.

The reason for his resistance became clear on Sunday night when “The Sopranos” ended, not with a moment of final summation, but with a literal blank. The reaction to the stunning last shot of an empty screen has been a mix of outrage among some fans at being left sitting on the edges of their seats, where they had been perched for much of the show’s last batch of episodes, and awe among others who have always regarded the show as the most ambitious and unconventional of television series. ...

and the Times found a bevy of suitably supportive screenwriters:

Damon Lindelof, one of the creators of the ABC hit show “Lost,” ... said: “I’ve seen every episode of the series. I thought the ending was letter-perfect.” ...

Doug Ellin, the creator of another HBO hit series, “Entourage,” said: “The show just ended, and I’m speechless. I’m sure there is going to be a lot of heated discussion, but that’s David Chase’s genius. ...

For David Shore, creator of the Fox hit “House,” one of the best touches was Mr. Chase’s own refusal to discuss the ending. Mr. Shore said: “Obviously he wants us to speculate on what it all means. Obviously that’s what we’re all doing.”

David Milch, who has created highly regarded dramas like “NYPD Blue” and “Deadwood,” said: “It was a question of loyalty to viewer expectations, as against loyalty to the internal coherence of the materials. Mr. Chase’s position was loyalty to the internal dynamics of the materials and the characters.”

Chuck Lorre, who created and leads the CBS hit comedy “Two and a Half Men” (said:) “People just finished watching that show and immediately talked about it for a half-hour,” Mr. Lorre said. “That’s just wonderful. What more could you want as a writer?”

And Chase has evidently been sufficiently nettled by audience reactions that he actually spoke to Allen Sepinwall, in a long-rearranged interview, you understand.

I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there,” he says of the final scene (just before proceeding to defend it -DZ).

“No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God,” he adds. “We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people’s minds, or thinking, ‘Wow, this’ll (tick) them off.’ People get the impression that you’re trying to (mess) with them and it’s not true. You’re trying to entertain them.”

Wired reports on the latest alliance between technology and the Humanities.

After a thousand years stuck on a dusty library shelf, the oldest [Oldest Medieval MSS. There are a considerable number of fragments from Antiquity. -DZ] copy of Homer’s Iliad is about to go into digital circulation.

A team of scholars traveled to a medieval library in Venice to create an ultra-precise 3-D copy of the ancient manuscript—complete with every wrinkle, rip and imperfection—using a laser scanner mounted on a robot arm.

A high-resolution, 3-D copy of the entire 645-page parchment book, plus a searchable transcription, will be made available online under a Creative Commons license.

The Venetus A is the oldest existing copy of Homer’s Iliad and the primary source for all modern editions of the poem. It lives in Venice at the ancient Public Library of St. Mark. It is easily damaged. Few people have seen it. The last photographic copy was made in 1901. ...

The idea is “to use our 3-D data to create a ‘virtual book’ showing the Venetus in its natural form, in a way that few scholars would ever be able to access,” says Matt Field, a University of Kentucky researcher who scanned the pages. “It’s not often that you see this kind of collaboration between the humanities and the technical fields.”

Venice is not the most convenient work site. All the gear had to come by boat and be carried or dragged up the stairs of the library. Built in the 1500s, the library has been renovated periodically, but its builders never envisioned a need for big lights, a motorized cradle, 17 computers or wireless internet.

The group set up shop in an upstairs room, using their own electrical cables and adapters to harness the library’s modest power resources. They covered the window overlooking the Piazzetta San Marco with a black sheet to keep out sunlight that could damage the manuscript. They placed the book, the size and weight of a giant dictionary, on a custom cradle that holds it steady, and turned the lights down low.

No more than four people were allowed in the room at one time, to keep down heat and humidity. The conservator turned each page with his hands and set it against a plastic bar, where light air suction held it in place. The barn doors covering the lights were flung open for the time it took the photographer to snap a shot with a 39-megapixel digital camera, a Hasselblad H1 medium-format camera with a Phase One P45 digital back. As each page was photographed, the classics scholar on duty in the hallway outside the workroom would examine its image to make sure all the text was legible.

Then Field scanned each page to create a 3-D image. Using an ordinary flatbed scanner was out of the question—it would flatten the delicate parchments. So Brent Seales, a computer scientist from the University of Kentucky’s Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments, decided to use a laser scanner on a robot arm to make a 3-D scan of the pages.

Passing about an inch from the surface, the laser rapidly scanned back and forth, painting the page with laser light. The robot arm knows precisely where in space its “hand” is, creating a precise map of each page as it scans. The data is fed into a CAD program that renders an image of the manuscript page with all its crinkles and undulations.

“The resolution yields millions of 3-D points per page,” Seales says.

To store the data, the team used a 1-terabyte redundant-disk storage system on a high-speed network. The classicists on duty backed up the data every evening on two 750-GB drives and on digital tape. Blackwell carried the hard drives home with him every night, rather than leave the data in the library.

The next step is making the images readable. The Venetus A is handwritten and contains ligatures and abbreviations that boggle most text-recognition software. So, this summer a group of graduate and undergraduate students of Greek will gather at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., to produce XML transcriptions of the text. Eventually, their work will be posted online for anyone to search, as part of the Homer Multitext Project.

Iliad Manuscripts and Fragments

Walter Leaf (Loeb Library, 1886) on Venetus A

slideshow

Barry Dauphin comments along familiar lines at YARGB.

Virtually all of the features of Christianity which the rational and enlightened portion of mankind find objectionable survive perfectly happily in modern secular environmentalist leftism. Is there any real difference between the flagellant penitents of the Middle Ages and members of today’s militant chorus of greens? Both believed the imminent destruction of the world was at hand, and that it had been provoked by mankind’s instigation of divine wrath via excessive materialism and pursuit of pleasure. The only possibility, then or now, of averting ultimate catastrophe would be a vigorous program of repentance featuring a solid dose of self-inflicted pain and suffering. The key difference is that the medievals used wooden switches while the moderns prefer regulations and taxation.

Global warming gives a variety of people the way to “make nice” with each other. We can join hands and save the planet. Even scientists decide the issue by “consensus” rather than by thorough, accurate, appropriately cautious data collection, including challenges to the data collection and interpretation as is expected from any discipline that presumes to take the falsification principle seriously. By agreeing it’s the “big” problem, we are to put aside our differences. “Skeptics” are to be treated with derision. The question is said to be “settled” (there we can all agree about that). The remaining questions involve what to “do” about it. And most of the solutions appear to be either quasi-socialism or outright socialism, again to make level, to obliterate differences. There are to be no differences, no competition. We are to all agree.

AGW offers modern people and modern societies a secular sacrament. It is a New Penance: Forgive me, Gaia, for I have sinned. It’s been 5 yrs. since my last recycling. Instead of saying the rosary or davening, we can chant “sustainability” and become pure again. And now virtually everyone is getting in to the act. Even ChimpyMcBushitler is on board, although new religions may seek new sacrificial lambs. We will be told that it is the evil market system, which creates this problem. And that will lead to being told it is the individual’s pursuit of self-interest that lay at the heart of the warming- even life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness may come to be seen as culprits, if they haven’t already been. Top-down enforced social cooperation will save us from ourselves. A new god would be born, until…. Well, that wouldn’t really be paradise, and even the true believers would find that out at some point. But they could wreak a lot of hell in the meantime.

Gallery of photos of views from the tallest (170 meters 557 feet) glassfloored building in Europe: Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower.

The press is reporting (a bit late) that the best surviving sword owned by Napoleon Bonaparte still in private hands was to be auctioned yesterday at Versailles by Osenat.

The sword is a Mamelukestyle saber, a form of edgedweapon which became fashionable in France and Britain after Napoleon’s Campaign in Egypt in 1798.

The future Emperor, then First Consul, reputedly used this sword at the Battle of Marengo, June 14, 1800.

Napoleon presented the sword after the battle to one of his brothers as a wedding present. It has descended in the same family for eight generations.

BBC

Fox News

1:42 video

Louis-François (baron) Lejeune, Battle of Marengo, 1801
Musée National du Château, Versailles, oil on canvas
1.8 m. x 2.5 m.
—————————————————————————-

Doubtless stung by NYM’s criticism for slow reporting, Fox News has stepped up with the results of the auction. The sword sold for $6.4 million.

—————————————————————————-

Hat tip to Frank. A. Dobbs.

The Sunshine Project, another commie nuisance organization devoted to attacking biological weapons research by non-terrorist, non-totalitarian countries, made the headlines again by releasing the text of a rather old,and distinctly fanciful, Air Force non-lethal weapn development proposal, containing one odd hey!-what-if-we-could-make-something-like-this idea.

CBS 5 is shocked.

Edward Hammond, of Berkeley’s Sunshine Project, had used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the proposal from the Air Force’s Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio.

As part of a military effort to develop non-lethal weapons, the proposal suggested, “One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior.”

The documents show the Air Force lab asked for $7.5 million to develop such a chemical weapon.

“The Ohio Air Force lab proposed that a bomb be developed that contained a chemical that would cause enemy soliders to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistably attractive to one another,” Hammond said after reviewing the documents.

The Edge has a more complete article, noting that the story is old, going back to 2005, but was resurrected by Huffington Post blogger Larry Arnstein.

Air Force Report

The joke’s on them. They already developed it, and tested it on the San Francisco Bay area.

The ineffable David Broder thinks Scooter Libby’s 30 month sentence may have been the result of an unreasonable prosecutorial vendetta, but he still believes that this kind of injustice is nonetheless salutory in affirming the principle that anyone—at least any Republican—can be a victim of our legal system, and as a warning to inner city youth to avoid public service.

Quick! someone on the left tell me again why Bill Clinton’s perjury should not have served as an occasion for the reaffirmation of the universality of the Rule of Law and as an edifying and instructive example of crime and punishment for the young.

And exactly what lesson does the comparison of Sandy Berger’s wrist slap of a $10,000 fine, increased to $50,000 by the judge + two years probation and 100 hours of community service to Scooter Libby’s $250,000 fine + 30 months teach?

Despite the absence of any underlying crime, Fitzgerald filed charges against Libby for denying to the FBI and the grand jury that he had discussed the Wilson case with reporters. Libby was convicted on the testimony of reporters from NBC, the New York Times and Time magazine—a further provocation to conservatives.

I think they have a point. This whole controversy is a sideshow—engineered partly by the publicity-seeking former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife and heightened by the hunger in parts of Washington to “get” Rove for something or other.

Like other special prosecutors before him, Fitzgerald got caught up in the excitement of the case and pursued Libby relentlessly, well beyond the time that was reasonable.

Nonetheless, on the fundamental point, Walton and Fitzgerald have it right. Libby let his loyalty to his boss and to the administration cloud his judgment—and perhaps his memory—in denying that he was part of the effort to discredit the Wilson pair. Lying to a grand jury is serious business, especially when it is done by a person occupying a high government position where the public trust is at stake.

Knowing Judge Walton a bit, I was certain that he would never be party to allowing a big shot to get off more easily than any of the two-bit bad guys who used to show up in his courtroom for sentencing. When he goes to his next school session, he wants to be able to tell those young people that no one is above the law—and mean it. You see, Walton is not just in the business of enforcing the law. He is also committed to steering youths in the right direction. This case will help.

I didn’t report on the giant pig story, because I didn’t believe it when I first encountered it. This one looks like it could well be authentic.

Bud Bolen of Jacksonville, Florida says he received the above photo from a friend (presumably the lady herself), and posted it on Archery Talk.

Bolen identifies the bow used to slay the elephant as a PSE X-Force.

He quotes her saying:

I was pulling 85 [38.64 kg.] on the bow before I left. When I got over there, I lowered it to 83 [37.73 kg.]. It was getting 103 ft lbs of kinetic energy at 83. The bow was awesome. I think it fit me well.

I had been hunting hard for 8 days before I got a chance to draw back. I had to hold the bow for a minute before I could take a shot. I shot the elephant at 12 yards with one arrow. It was shot near dark. We went back the next day and found him. I was in the middle of 37 elephants when I took my shot. This was my first bow kill and first woman to take an elie with a bow. The safari will be on Versus at the end of Sep or beginning of Oct. It is suppose to be the premiere show of the season. I will let you know the date when I find out.

The huntress is also quoted here:

The Outfitter was Tshabezi Safaris – Dudley Rogers. If anyone would like to book a safari with him, I can set it up.

The main camp was in Gokwe north.

As for the equipment, PSE set up the bow including stabalizer (sic), rest and site. I used a Little Goose release. The broadheads were also set up by PSE. They [the arrow shafts] were Black Mombas [sic] 550 grains. The broadheads were German Kinetics at 180 grains. The total grains equaled 730.

I wore Danner boots and Foxy Huntress clothing.

Mike Christianson was my bow mentor. Dr. Hugo Gibson was my chiropractor. I had to have him along because the heavy bow was pulling and pushing my shoulders out.

I trained for 14 months to be able to pull the big bows.

Her hunt probably cost $800 per day on a 10-16 day safari plus a trophy fee of $8000. Minimally $16,000 plus air fare.

Ross Douthat’s guess is that

the finale will end with the Soprano nuclear family still intact and even with Tony back on top, in some limited sense at least; if any mob boss gets capped in the final hour, I’m betting that it will be Phil Leotardo.

He links several other predictions, including Jeffrey Goldberg at Stale:

I think Tony survives next week; to kill him would be to send a message that crime doesn’t pay, and my guess is that David Chase believes that, in this corrupt world, crime does, in fact, sometimes pay, and to telegraph otherwise would be dishonest. This is not to say that I think Tony will get off without consequence: His travails this season suggest that the series will end on some sort of ambivalent note, something that underscores the tension and the physical and emotional dangers in the life Tony has chosen for himself.

Peggy Noonan mourns the show’s passing in the the Wall Street Journal:

The Sopranos” wasn’t only a great show or even a classic. It was a masterpiece, and its end Sunday night is an epochal event. With it goes an era, a time. ...

The drama of Tony, the great post-9/11 drama of him, is that he is trying to hold on in a world he thinks is breaking to pieces. He has a sense, even though he’s only in his 40s, that the best times have passed, not only for the Italian mob but for everyone, for the country—that he’d missed out on something, and that even though he lives in a mansion, even though he is rich and comfortable and always has food in the refrigerator and Carm can go to Paris and the kids go to private school—for all of that, he fears he’s part of some long downhill slide, a slide that he can’t stop, that no one can, that no one will. Out there, he told his son and daughter, it is the year 2000, but in here it’s 1950. His bluster, his desperate desire to re-create order with the rough tools of his disordered heart and brain, are comic, poignant, ridiculous, human.

Tony became a new and instantly recognizable icon, and his character adds to American myth, to America’s understanding of itself. It’s a big thing to create such a character, and not only one but a whole family of them—Uncle Junior, Christopher, Carmella. This is David Chase’s great achievement, to have created characters that are instantly recognizable, utterly original, and that add to America’s understanding of itself. And to have created, too, some of the most horrifying moments in all of television history, and one that I think is a contender for Most Horrifying Moment Ever. That would be Adriana desperately crawling—crawling!—through the leaves in the woods as she tries to flee her lovable old friend Silvio, who is about to brutally put her down.

Here is a question that touches on the mystery of creativity, and I’ll probably put it badly because I can’t define it better than what I’m going to say. David Chase is the famous and justly celebrated creator of “The Sopranos,” the shaper of its stories. The psychological, spiritual and emotional energy needed to create a whole world, which is what he has done, is very great. It is a real expenditure, a kind of investment in life, a giving of yourself. You can’t do what he does without something like love. Not sentimentality or softness or sweetness, but love. And yet in a way, if you go by “The Sopranos,” Mr. Chase loves nothing. Human beings are appetite machines, and each day is devoted to meeting and appeasing those appetites. No one is good, there are no heroes, he sees through it all. The mental-health facility is a shakedown operation where they medicate your child into zombiehood and tell him to watch TV. Politicians are the real whores. The FBI is populated by smug careerists. In the penultimate show, a table full of psychotherapists top each other with erudite-seeming comments that show a ruthlessness as great as any gangster’s. I guess I’m asking where the energy for creativity comes when you see with such cold eyes.

Not that they’re unrealistic. They’re not. One of the reasons the show was so popular—one of the reasons it resonated—is that it captured a widespread feeling that our institutions are failing, all of them, the church, the media, the law, the government, that there’s no one to trust, that Mighty Mouse will not save the day.

In Mr. Chase’s world, everyone’s a gangster as long as he can find a gang. Those who don’t are free-lancers.

And what he seems to be telling us, as the final season ends, is that all your pity for Tony, all your regard for the fact that he too is caught, all your sympathy for him as a father, as a man trying to be a man, as a man whose mother literally tried to have him killed, is a mistake. Because he is a bad man. He has passing discomfort but not conscience, he has passing sympathies but no compassion. When he kills the character who is, essentially, his son, Christopher, he does it spontaneously, coolly, and with no passion. It’s all pragmatism. He’s all appetite. Tony is a stone cold gangster.

There have been shows on television that have been, simply, sublime. In drama there was “I, Claudius,” a masterpiece of mood and menace—“Trust no one!”—from which writers and producers continue to steal (see HBO’s “Rome.”) And PBS’s “Upstairs, Downstairs.” A few others. “The Sopranos” is their equal, but also their superior: It is hard to capture the past, but harder to capture the present, because everyone knows when you don’t get it right. It takes guts to do today.

David Chase did, and he made a masterpiece. I’ll be watching Sunday night, but I’ll wake up that morning with a blue moon in my eyes.

Michael Hodges, in Time Out London, looks ahead with optimism to London’s Islamic future.

Islam is not an alien religion to London. At the end of World War I the city sat at the heart of an Empire that had 160 million Muslim subjects, 80 million in India alone. London was the largest Islamic capital in the world. Forty years later and the end of the Empire, unrest and war and poverty in south Asia had lead to mass immigration to the mother country and London became a Muslim capital in another sense.

According to the 2001 census there are 607,083 Muslims living in London (310,477 men and 296,606 women). The majority of Muslims live in the east of the city and, by 2012, the Muslim Council of Britain estimates that the Muslim population of Tower Hamlets, Newham, Waltham Forest and Hackney will be 250,000. There are plans afoot (though no formal application has yet been submitted) to build the UKs biggest mosque – capable of welcoming 40,000 worshippers – near the 2012 Olympic site, a move which has prompted predictable outrage from some quarters. Consequently, Muslim disillionment with a reactionary and often ill-informed press is at an all time high.

But rather than fear the inevitable changes this will bring to London, or buy in to a racist representation of all Muslims as terrorists, we should recognise both what Islam has given this city already, and the advantages it would bring across a wide range of areas in the future. ...

Islam offers Londoners potential health benefits: the Muslim act of prayer is designed to keep worshippers fit, their joints supple and, at five times a day, their stomachs trim. The regular washing of the feet and hands required before prayers promotes public hygiene and would reduce the transmission of superbugs in London’s hospitals.

Alcohol is haram, or forbidden, to Muslims. As London is above the national average for alcohol-related deaths in males, with 17.6 per 100,000 people (Camden has 31.6 per 100,000 males), turning all the city’s pubs into juice bars would have a massive positive effect on public health. Forbid alcohol throughout the country, and you’d avoid many of the 22,000 alcohol-related deaths and the £7.3 billion national bill for alcohol-related crime and disorder each year.

‘The world is green and beautiful,’ said the prophet Muhammad, ‘and Allah has appointed you his guardian over it.’ The Islamic concept of halifa or trusteeship obliges Muslims to look after the natural world and Muhammad was one of the first ever environmentalists, advocating hima – areas where wildlife and forestry are protected. So we could expect more public parks under Islam, but halifa also applies to recycling: in 2006, 12,000 Muslims attended a series of sermons at the East London Mosque explaining the theological evidence for a link between behaving in an environmentally sustainable way and the Islamic faith. ...

Application of halal (Arabic for ‘permissable’) dietary laws across London would free us at a stroke from our addiction to junk food, and the general adoption of a south Asian diet rich in fruit juice, rice and vegetables with occasional mutton or chicken would have a drastic effect on obesity, hyperactivity, attention deficit disorders and associated public health problems. As curry is already Londoners’ and the nation’s favourite food (see our Brick Lane food feature), it would be a relatively easy process to encourage the adoption of such a diet. Not eating would be important as well. The annual fasting month of Ramadan instils self-discipline, courtesy and social cohesion. And Londoners would benefit philosophically and physically from even a short period when we weren’t constantly ramming food into our mouths. ...Each Muslim is obliged to pay zakat, a welfare tax of 2.5 per cent of annual income, that is distributed to the poor and the needy. If the working population of London, 5.2 million, was predominantly Muslim this would produce approximately £3.2bn each year. More importantly, everyone would be obliged to consider those Londoners who haven’t shared their good fortune. London would become a little less cruel.

Under Islam all ethnicities are equal. Once you have submitted to Allah you are a Muslim – it doesn’t matter what colour you are. End of story.

What would Richard Coeur-de-Lion say?
——————————————————
Hat tip to David Ross.

In the dog-bites-man department, famous conservative legal scholar Robert Bork is contributing to the contemporary flood of tort litigation.

The New York Times quotes from the text of Judge Bork’s complaint:

(On) “the evening of June 6, 2006,” ...The New Criterion magazine held an event at the Yale Club in honor of Hilton Kramer, the magazine’s co-founder. Mr. Bork, a contributor to the magazine, was among those invited to deliver remarks.

The event was held in a banquet room, the suit explains, where the club’s staff had erected a dais atop which a lectern had been placed for the speakers. It is the Yale Club’s “normal practice,” the suit contends, to provide a set of stairs so that the speakers may ascend easily to their appointed perch.

“At the New Criterion event, however, the Yale Club failed to provide any steps between the floor and dais,” the suit claims. “Nor did the Yale Club provide a handrail or any other reasonable feature to assist guests attempting to climb to the dais.”

Mr. Bork fell backward while ascending the dais, striking his left leg on the side of the dais and bumping his head, the suit claims. As a result of the fall, a hematoma formed on his leg and later burst. The injury required surgery, extended medical treatment and months of physical therapy, the suit contends.

“Mr. Bork suffered excruciating pain as a result of this injury,” according to the suit, “and was largely immobile during the months in which he received physical therapy.” Not only was he forced to use a cane, the suit maintains, but he also still walks with a limp.

How many 80 year olds normally limp or need to a cane, after all?

I can see how it could easily be difficult for a senior citizen to mount a tall platform without the assistance of some steps and something to hold onto, and whoever set up the room was doubtless inconsiderate of the aged. But service requests are typically quickly honored at the Yale Club.

If the room arranger lacked foresight about those missing steps, so too did Judge Bork, who could easily have beckoned a Yale Club waiter and demanded some portable steps and a handrail be provided.

Even when Michelle is wrong, she’s cute.

6:43 video

The Immigration Bill didn’t really please anybody (except for George W. Bush, and who cares what he thinks?), and died a deserved death last night during a procedural vote in the Senate.

Becky Akers and Donald J. Boudreaux, in the Christian Science Monitor of all places, supply the right answers: no restrictions on immigration, no welfare for immigrants.

The Constitution does not authorize the federal government to control immigration. Nor does it say anything about illegal aliens. We looked for a clause with directions for ranking immigrants on a points system – another feature of the Senate’s reform bill – but we couldn’t find one.

Sadly, lawmakers have repeatedly interpreted this silence as license for ill-conceived legislation. Congress began barring entry to the nation in 1875 with prostitutes and convicts. Soon, all sorts of people fell short of congressional glory: ex-convicts in 1882, along with Chinese citizens, lunatics, and idiots. Paupers, polygamists, and people suffering from infectious diseases or insanity made the list in 1891, while the illiterate were banned in 1917. ...

Given the talk about point systems, guest-worker programs, and fenced borders, you’d think immigration endangers America’s cultural and economic wealth. But just as the unhampered flow of goods and services – free trade – blesses participants, the easy flow of workers – free labor markets – also brings unprecedented prosperity.

By contrast, schemes to control immigrants hurt everyone, native or newcomer, and not just economically. Customs agents often abuse immigrants at the borders, but they also interrogate, search, and fine returning Americans.

Immigrants must produce the proper papers for bureaucrats’ inspection, but so do their American employers and landlords. And let’s not even think about the scary implications of the draconian Real ID Act.

As technology and globalization continue shrinking the world, people and ideas move more quickly and freely. Political borders become increasingly irrelevant. But that’s fine because the qualities that define Americans don’t depend on geography. Rather, it’s their history of liberty, pluck, ingenuity, optimism, and the pursuit of happiness. Culture is a matter of mind and spirit. Why entrust it to politicians, border guards, and green cards?

The ideal immigration policy for this smaller world would harmonize with both the Constitution and common decency. It wouldn’t deny anyone the inalienable right to come and go. ...

If Congress seriously wants reform, it might begin by returning decisions on immigration to the individuals involved, in obedience to the Constitution’s Ninth and 10th Amendments.

But Congress will need to go further. Requiring taxpayers to subsidize immigrants’ healthcare, education, food, shelter, or anything else breeds resentment.

Plenty of private charities will extend a hand to newcomers, not to mention friends and families eager to help their countrymen adjust to American life. ...

What do we do about the 12 million illegal immigrants already here? Apologizing for their poor welcome is a start. Then we can hire them, patronize their businesses, become friends. So long as we don’t control them, and they don’t expect our taxes to support them, goodwill should prevail on both sides. ...

Quota-wielding bureaucrats should not define the country’s demographic destiny. It’s time to let the free choices of millions of individuals determine America’s complexion.

Over at National Review’s The Corner, those jolly little tricoteuses Andrew McCarthy and John Derbyshire were having a pleasant time chatting yesterday as Scooter Libby’s tumbril rolled by.

McCarthy was conflicted because he has friends on both sides (!), and besides he just wasn’t sure that Libby wasn’t really guilty after all. After all, the prosecutor, the New York Times, many of his friends, and a DC jury all said so.

Witnesses have varying recollections, and juries sort it out. The evidence that Libby lied, rather than that he was confused, was compelling.

And class-warrior John Derbyshire just couldn’t see getting bent out of shape over the fate of somebody like Libby.

..compare the likely plights of Libby and the two Border Agents.

When state power rolls over little people like Compean and Ramos, my sympathies are stirred. Libby’s not a little person. He’s rich and terrifically well-connected. He’s not going to get beaten up in jail (as Ramos has been). He’ll have plenty of lucrative work opportunities after release. He will… be all right.

I wish the world were free of wrongs, but it isn’t, and never will be. In the scale of wrongs, and consequent suffering, that I read about every day, this one doesn’t seem worth bothering with.

Meanwhile Susan Estrich, speaking from the left, no less, took a considerably more intellectually and morally responsive position.

I suppose I should be pleased about the tough sentence handed down by Judge Reggie Walton, sentencing the vice president’s former Chief of Staff Scooter Libby to serve 30 months in prison. After all, he’s a Republican, and I’m a Democrat; I’m an opponent of the war, and he worked for one of its architects. I’m certainly no fan of his boss, Dick Cheney, one of the toughest hardball players to occupy the office of vice president. Former Ambassador Joe Wilson was practically gloating this morning when asked to comment on the sentence, declaring it a victory for the rule of law.

Maybe.

Having taught law for more years than I want to count anymore, and criminal law in particular, I know all the arguments about how the rule of law depends on everyone telling the truth, cooperating with criminal investigations, not trying to protect their bosses or those around them. I understand that people in high places have as much responsibility, or more, than the rest of us to follow the law and give their evidence, and that when they don’t, their years of public service are no excuse.

Being chief of staff for the vice president is a bruising job, but also an exciting one. If Scooter Libby hadn’t messed up, he’d be sitting pretty in a high-priced law firm right now, making a fortune not because his legal skills were better than anyone else’s, but because his contacts and connections were. So with the good goes the bad; with the visibility goes the scrutiny; with the fame comes the price. Valerie Plame’s career has been ruined. Why shouldn’t his be?

The only problem here is that there was no underlying crime. The answer to the question Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was initially appointed to investigate — had anyone violated the law in disclosing Ms. Plame’s name in their effort to discredit her husband’s criticism of the administration’s war policy — was no. No one violated what we used to call the “Agents Law.” Dick Armitage, the guy who admits he gave out her name in the first place, isn’t facing time; nor are Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, or any of the reporters or news organizations who didn’t hesitate to disclose her identity.

Libby is in trouble not for what he did, but because he wasn’t as careful as the others during his interviews and grand jury testimony.

If he’d just said, “I don’t recall” a hundred times, or even invoked the Fifth (whether properly or not, following the Monica Goodling approach), he wouldn’t be bankrupt, ruined, disgraced and heading to prison.

There is something troubling about prosecutors using perjury and obstruction of justice to turn into criminals people who haven’t committed any other crime. Instead of using the grand jury as a tool for investigating other criminal activity, it becomes the forum for creating criminal conduct. The role of the FBI and federal prosecutors becomes one of creating criminals instead of catching them. Technically, I know, it’s not entrapment, but it’s still different than the usual business of tracking down those who have violated the law and punishing them for their bad acts. The investigation doesn’t solve the crime; it creates it.

This time it was a pro-war Republican caught in the snare, which is why many liberals are cheering. But what goes around comes around, and I wonder if my friends would feel the same way if this technique were used to indict, convict and imprison one of our friends.

Not a good day for the NR punditocracy.
———————————————
Hat tip to David L. Larkin.

Six leading liberal international do-gooder organizations, including Amnesty International, Cageprisoners, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and NYU School of Law, Human Rights Watch and Reprieve, have issued a report titled Off the Record, which allegedly identifies 39 individuals secretly detained in the War Against Terror.

The list, compiled on the basis of public sources, government officials (i.e., Pouting and Leaking Spooks), and witness interviews, includes: “off the Record”

Individuals whose detention by the United States has been officially acknowledged and whose fate and whereabouts remain unknown:

1.Hassan Ghul

2.Ali Abd al-Rahman al-Faqasi al-Ghamdi (Abu Bakr al Azdi)

3.Ali Abdul-Hamid al-Fakhiri (Ali Abd-al-Hamid al-Fakhiri, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi)

Individuals about whom there is strong evidence, including witness testimony, of secret detention by the United States and whose fate and whereabouts remain unknown:

4.Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (Abu Musab al-Suri, Umar Abd al-Hakim)

5.& 6. Two, possibly three, Somalis [Names Unknown] (one of whom is either Shoeab as-Somali or Rethwan as-Somali)

7.Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan (Abu Talha, Talaha)

8.Abdul Basit

9.Adnan [Last Name Unknown]

10.Hudaifa

11.Mohammed [Last Name Unknown] (Mohammed al-Afghani)

12.Khalid al-Zawahiri

13.Ayoubal-Libi

14.Abu Naseem

15.Suleiman Abdalla Salim (Suleiman Abdalla, Suleiman Abdalla Salim Hemed, Suleiman Ahmed Hemed Salim, Issa Tanzania)

16.Yassir al-Jazeeri (Yasser al-Jaziri, Abu Yasir al-Jaziri, Abu Yassir Al Jazeeri, Yasser al-Jazeeri)

17.Mohammed Omar Abdel-Rahman (Asadallah)

18.Majid [Last Name Unknown] (Adnan al-Libi, Abu Yasser)

19.Hassan [Last Name Unknown] (Raba’i)

20.[First Name Unknown] al-Mahdi-Jawdeh (Abu Ayoub, Ayoub al-Libi)

21.Khaled al-Sharif (Abu Hazem)*

Individuals about whom there is some evidence of secret detention by the United States and whose fate and whereabouts remain unknown:

22.Osama bin Yousaf (Usama Bin Yussaf, Usama bin Yusuf, Usamah bin-Yusuf)

23.Osama Nazir

24.Sharif al-Masri (Abd-al-Sattar Sharif al-Masri)

25.Qari Saifullah Akhtar (Amir Harkat-ul-Ansar Qari Saifullah)

26.Mustafa Mohammed Fadhil (Moustafa Ali Elbishy, Hussein, Hassan AH, Khalid, Abu Jihad)

27.Musaab Aruchi (Mosabir Aroochi, Masoob Aroochi, Abu Mosa’ab al-Balochi, Abu Mosa’ab Aroochi, Musaad Aruchi, al-Baluchi)

28.Ibad Al Yaquti al Sheikh al Sufiyan

29.Walid bin Azmi

30.Amir Hussein Abdullah al-Misri (Fazal Mohammad Abdullah al-Misri)

31.Safwan al-Hasham (Haffan al-Hasham)

32.Jawad al-Bashar

33.Aafia Siddiqui

34.Saif al Islam el Masry

35.Sheikh Ahmed Salim

36.Retha al-Tunisi

37.Anas al-Libi (Anas al-Sabai, Nazih al-Raghie, Nazih Abdul Hamed al-Raghie)

38.[First Name Unknown] al-Rubaia

39.Speen Ghul

Flushed with self-importance, these enlightened organizations proceed to issue a series of “recommendations,” which are really demands.

The United States must cease use of secret or unacknowledged detention.

For those individuals currently detained by or at the direction of the United States, the United States and relevant foreign governments must:

Make known the names and whereabouts of detainees;

Provide immediate access by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to all detainees the organization seeks to visit;

Charge detainees with a recognizable criminal offense and promptly bring them to trial before a court that meets international fair trial standards or release them;

and Allow detainees access to lawyers and to communicate with family members.

The United States must not detain family members of terrorism suspects based on their family relationships.

The United States must make known the names, fate, and whereabouts of all individuals it has detained in the “War on Terror,” even if they have been released, transferred to the custody of another state, or are dead.

The United States must provide reparations, including compensation, to individuals it has secretly detained.

Other governments must not facilitate secret detention: they should not assist or cooperate in secret detention operations, and should disclose information about such operations that comes into their possession.

President Bush has nominated Dr. James W. Holsinger Jr., a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Kentucky College of Public Health, as Surgeon General.

The Holsinger nomination will ignite a firestorm of controversy because Dr. Holsinger wrote a politically incorrect paper for the United Methodist Church in 1991 at a time when that denomination was considering changing its position on homosexuality.

Holsinger’s paper on the Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality identifies anatomical inconsistencies and epidemiological hazards attendant upon common male homosexual activities, concluding that the inevitably greater likelihood of injury and disease provides a “speaks for itself” argument against the proposed change.

This nominee’s decade-and-a-half old heresy will not go unavenged by the forces of political correctness.

Representatives of the life style which Dr. Holsinger criticized in 1991 are well entrenched in prominent positions in government and the punditocracy, and will certainly not be inclined to forgive his observations.

Today’s initial ABC News story, just for instance, manifests such a tone of high-pitched indignation, and undertakes so detailed a point by point effort at refutation that its author’s personal interests and affiliations seem only too clear.

Aspects of the fight on this one will have amusing elements of comedy, but I don’t see how Bush can possibly believe this nominee is going to be confirmed. It seems remarkable that the president is willing to take the heat over a foredoomed gesture like this one, but isn’t willing to stick his neck out (at least, perhaps until the last possible moment) to right an injustice as eggregious as the conviction of Lewis Libby.

How would the media report the D-Day landings today? People’s News Network supplies a demonstration.

7:33 video

Hat tip to Blackfive.

ABC News:

NATO officials say they have caught Iran red-handed, shipping heavy arms, C4 explosives and advanced roadside bombs to the Taliban for use against NATO forces, in what the officials say is a dramatic escalation of Iran’s proxy war against the United States and Great Britain. ...

The coalition analysis says munitions recovered in two Iranian convoys, on April 11 and May 3, had “clear indications that they originated in Iran. Some were identical to Iranian supplied goods previously discovered in Iraq.”

The April convoy was tracked from Iran into Helmand province and led a fierce firefight that destroyed one vehicle, according to the official analysis. A second vehicle was reportedly found to contain small arms ammunition, mortar rounds and more than 650 pounds of C4 demolition charges.

A second convoy of two vehicles was spotted on May 3 and led to the capture of five occupants and the seizure of RPG-7mm rockets and more than 1,000 pounds of C4, the analysis says.

Also among the munitions are components for the lethal EFPs, or explosive formed projectiles, the roadside bombs that U.S. officials say Iran has provided to Iraqi insurgents with deadly results.

Supplying arms to our adversaries to be used against American and British forces is obviously an act of war. But if the Bush administration did what it ought to do and took military action against the odious fundamentalist Islamic Iranian regime, what would be the domestic American reaction?

The left would say very much what Mr. M says here:

My official reaction: Aw crap.

You’ll have to forgive my cynicism here, first, because to me this has an awful lot of Iraq flavor to it with a hint of “Meeting with al Qaeda in Prague,” and just a touch of yellowcake. Which just goes to show that hte whole story of the boy who cried wolf might just have a bit of truth to it.

In the worst case scenario where this is true… uh-oh. ...

We caught them red handed, we must bomb them. John McCain can provide the soundtrack.

But let’s remember something folks. Good things take time. Really really crappy things are rushed, and I implore everyone to read this story with a dose of judicious caution because we have heard this story before. On the surface it doesn’t make sense, Iran is Shi’a, Taliban Sunni, and we have seen how well they play together.

This is reminiscent of the old OBL Saddam Hussein meme. Ooh, their in bed together except, they weren’t, and no sane thinking mind would think that considering that Saddam was a secularist, and bin Laden ran al Qaeda are hardcore extreme fundamentalists.

We must not jump the gun and consider this another reason to leap to war. First the report must be verified and vetted. Second, we must stop a second and look at what is going on. Is this a sign to make war, or is this yet another sign on the road saying we have already gone way too far.

The left has its talking points already prepared: the administration is lying, Iran is innocent and no threat; or, on the other hand, if Iran is a threat, that’s really terrifying, and we better retreat.

An unruly passenger accompanied by his brother on a Minneapolis to Boston flight refused to take his seat, and upset his fellow passengers by shouting things like “Your lives are going to change today forever.”

A stewardess appealed for help to 65-year-old Bob Hayden, former Boston police deputy superintendent and former Lawrence, Massachusetts police chief.

Boston Globe:

I had looked around the plane for help, and all the younger guys had averted their eyes. When I asked the guy next to me if he was up to it, all he said was, ‘Retired captain. USMC.’ I said, ‘You’ll do,’ ” Hayden recalled. So, basically, a couple of grandfathers took care of the situation.” ...

The incident on Northwest Airlines Flight 720 ended peacefully, but not before Hayden… and the retired Marine had handcuffed one man and stood guard over another until the plane touched down safely at Logan International Airport around 7:50 p.m.

State Police troopers escorted two men off the flight. ...

The struggle had been short, and never in doubt, according to Hayden’s wife.

When the captain announced preparations for landing, the man jumped up shouting, the flight attendant held up the handcuffs, and Hayden and the Marine came bounding down the aisle. Hayden said he and the retired Marine, whose name he never got, received an ovation from fellow passengers, and “some free air miles.”

Hayden’s wife of 42 years, Katie, who was also on the flight, was less impressed. Even as her husband struggled with the agitated passenger, she barely looked up from “The Richest Man in Babylon,” the book she was reading.

“The woman sitting in front of us was very upset and asked me how I could just sit there reading,” Katie Hayden said. “Bob’s been shot at. He’s been stabbed. He’s taken knives away. He knows how to handle those situations. I figured he would go up there and step on somebody’s neck, and that would be the end of it. I knew how that situation would end. I didn’t know how the book would end.”

The Scottish Daily Record reports:

Poor NHS treatment has led to almost half a million Scots dying in the last 30 years, a new study has revealed.

Doctors at Glasgow University found that between 1974 and 2003, a total of 462,000 people died in Scotland as a result of health service failings.

It means Scotland has one of the highest avoidable death rates in western Europe.

The study examined the number of deaths caused by a lack of “timely and effective health care”.

The vast majority of people – around 250,000 – who died due to inadequate or delayed treatment were heart or stroke patients.

Another 7300 had cancer and slightly more than 2000 were pneumonia patients.

The study revealed that avoidable deaths among men in Scotland over the time period was 176 for every 100,000 people.

This compared with 159 in Portugal, 129 in Austria and 100 in Italy.

Rates for women were 123 per 100,000, also higher than every other European country investigated.

Model Michelle Marsh signing a ‘regulation’ silhouetted image of herself on a Harrier

The Daily Mail reports that the enforcers of Political Correctness are worried that the traditional pin up images might offend women and Muslims.

The risque images of women that have decorated warplanes since the First World War have been scrubbed out.

The Ministry of Defence has decreed they could offend the RAF’s female personnel.

Officials admitted they had no record of any complaints from the 5,400 women in the RAF.

But commanders are erring firmly on the side of caution and “nose art“, as it is known, has been consigned to the history books. ...

The decision to ban the images followed a visit by glamour models to southern Afghanistan before Christmas. During the trip they signed paintings of themselves on RAF aircraft.

Commanders decided the images were sexist and insisted there was no place for them in the modern armed forces.

There was also concern that they could cause offence in a muslim country where until 2001 all women were forced to wear the head-to-toe burkha in public.

Can you picture the RAF during WWII banning cartoon images on planes because they might offend the German or the Japanese?

Charles Johnson accurately describes the left blogosphere today as “smirking and gloating like evil children.”

Jules Crittenden sums up reaction to Libby’s sentencing left and right best.

AP:

Former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was sentenced to 2½ years in prison Tuesday for lying and obstructing the CIA leak investigation. ...

“People who occupy these types of positions, where they have the welfare and security of nation in their hands, have a special obligation to not do anything that might create a problem,” U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton said. ...

The White House said that President Bush feels “terrible” for Libby and his family, but does not intend to intervene now. ...

Walton fined Libby $250,000 and placed him on probation for two years following his release from prison. Walton did not immediately address whether Libby could remain free pending appeal.

Bush is not really on the spot, unless Judge Walton refuses to allow Mr. Libby to remain free pending appeal.

I would think myself that there is every reason to suppose that an appeal would be successful.

If Libby really does face imprisonment, and George W. Bush does not pardon him, regardless of the political cost, my own view is that Mr. Bush will have irretrievably disgraced himself.

AP:

The Basque separatist group ETA called off its cease-fire today, saying the government was not committed to ending the nearly 40-year conflict. ...

Today, however, the group notified two Basque newspapers that the cease-fire will end at midnight and described itself as “active on all fronts to defend the Basque homeland.”

ETA had declared the cease-fire unilaterally, saying it wanted to negotiate an end to the conflict, which has left more than 800 people dead. ...

The group reiterated assertions that the Spanish judicial system continued to arrest and try ETA members and suspects while the truce was in effect.

“Minimum democratic conditions for a negotiating process do not exist,” ETA said in the statement sent to the pro-independence newspapers Berria and Gara.

“Zapatero’s character has turned into a fascism that left parties and citizens without rights,” ETA said.

ETA also complained that Spanish courts barred most pro-independence candidates from Basque local elections on May 27.

Zapatero, who planned to address the nation later today, has said peace with ETA is one of its priorities.

ETA took up arms in 1968 in a goal of carving out an independent Basque homeland in the mountains between Spain and France.

In 2004, when Al Qaeda bombed a Spanish train, Spanish voters elected the current Socialist government so that it could withdraw from Iraq.

Will the next successful act of terrorism by ETA persuade Spanish voters to withdraw from the Pyrenees?

Hat tip to José Guardia.

The London Times reports:

Middle-class wine drinkers will be the focus of government plans to make drunkenness as socially unacceptable as smoking, The Times has learnt.

Under the plans published today, a fresh audit is to be conducted by the Government into the overall costs of alcohol abuse to society and the National Health Service.

“We want to target older drinkers, those that are maybe drinking one or two bottles of wine at home each evening,” a Whitehall source said. “They do not realise the damage they are doing to their health and that they risk developing liver disease. ...

The move comes as The Times has been told that the British Medical Association is to investigate measures used in other countries to curb excessive alcohol consumption. Doctors’ leaders are also calling for pubs and restaurants to display warnings stating how many units of alcohol are contained in drinks served by the glass.

Today’s strategy, by the Home Office and the Department of Health, broadens the Government’s offensive against excessive drinking, with the focus moving beyond teenagers and the binge-drinkers to include those regularly sipping wine at home.

As part of the strategy, ministers wish to highlight the increasing burden that drink-related disease is placing on the NHS, which four years ago was estimated to be costing between £1.3 billion and £1.7 billion. Ministers want drunkenness in public to be as socially unacceptable in ten years’ time as smoking or drink-driving is today.

Last night Ian Gilmore, President of the Royal College of Physicians, gave his full support to the focus on the health costs of heavy drinking. “We really need the spotlight more on health. While crime and antisocial behaviour is important it’s too easy to concentrate on that because it’s somebody else causing the trouble.

“When you look at health it’s more uncomfortable because there’s a very significant percentage of the population already drinking at potentially hazardous levels.”

With alcohol costing 54 per cent less in real terms than in 1980, Professor Gilmore, a liver specialist, also called on the Chancellor to raise drink taxes.

Socialized medicine demonstrably involves the surrender of private liberty to the nanny state now in charge of paying your doctor bill.

The Telegraph has a story illustrated the price of free socialized health care.

Smokers could be denied routine operations on the NHS unless they quit a month before surgery.

In this month’s Vanity Fair, Nick Tosches serves up a tour d’horizon of the world of sushi from Tokyo’s Tuskiji fish-market where fish merchants use out-sized samurai swords to slice 300 lb. (136.36 kg.) tuna into quarters, to the locally famous Daiwa hidden in nondescript Tokyo streets in search of sea pineapple, to super high end restaurants like Sugiyama and Masa in New York where dinner for one can cost $480.

Sample excerpt:

My companion, the Japanese translator Eva Yagino, speaks to the chef, Hiroyoshi Gota, who tells her that, among the many sakes sold here, there’s a special sake, made by the Miyagi brewer Uragasumi, that’s rarely available. The waitress pours us some, letting the cold sake overflow to the ceramic saucer beneath the masu, the sake box, made of the same pale wood, hinoki—a cypress that grows only in Japan—from which the best sushi-bar counters are crafted. A ceramic dish of sea salt is placed on the table, and Eva-san sets me straight: I’m to put a pinch of the salt on a corner of the masu, drink from that corner, raising the masu and ceramic saucer together, replenish the salt in the corner whenever I want, and in the end drink all the spillage in the saucer; then order more sake and do it again. As we sip our salted spillage, Eva-san translates the menu for me.

“Nodo-kuro,” she says. “A white fish with a black throat from the Sea of Japan. It is rarely caught.”

As she continues, I recall the way Tom Asakawa smiled when he said, ” … and other things.”

“Anglerfish liver. Ayu-fish guts. Sea-cucumber guts. Oh, and look at all these whale dishes: whale sushi; hari-hari nabe—that’s whale meat with mizuna, a sort of Japanese mustard green that looks like a dandelion green; whale bacon; whale skin; whale tongue; whale brain; shinzo (that’s whale heart); whale ovary—and, oh, here’s your hoya sashi, your raw sea pineapple. Sashi is what the restaurant people call sashimi.”

As I ponder my choices, Eva-san tells me about mamushi-zake. It’s a sake to which, during fermentation, a mamushi is added. The mamushi, a type of pit viper, is one of the two species of poisonous snakes indigenous to Japan. Introduced live into the fermenting sake, it releases its poison into the brew as it leaves this vale of tears. Unlike the Chinese, the Japanese are not big on snake eating, but there is this sake.

“I need to drink that,” I say.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

What was the #1 song on …

– the day you were born? – the day you graduated from high school? – the day you were married? – the day your child was born? – the approximate date you were conceived?

web-site link

Hat tip to David L. Larkin.

A touching tribute to US WWII veterans.

11:30 video.

When an open boat bearing illegal immigrants to Europe from Libya lost power, Boudafel, a Maltese tug towing a tuna-breeding plant to Spain threw those on board a line and proceeded to give them a tow.

The boat then foundered and sank, and the Maltese tug, obeying orders from owners ashore, refused to stop to provide further assistance.

Survivors were left to cling to the buoys holding up the tuna farm’s system of nets. In the end, 27 young men were rescued by the Italian Navy.

The Independent:

For three days and three nights, these African migrants clung desperately to life. Their means of survival is a tuna net, being towed across the Mediterranean by a Maltese tug that refused to take them on board after their frail boat sank.

Malta and Libya, where they had embarked on their perilous journey, washed their hands of them. Eventually, they were rescued by the Italian navy.

The astonishing picture shows them hanging on to the buoys that support the narrow runway that runs around the top of the net. They had had practically nothing to eat or drink.

Last night, on the island of Lampedusa, the 27 young men – from Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Sudan and other countries – told of their ordeal. As their flimsy boat from Libya floundered adrift for six days, two fishing boats failed to rescue them. On Wednesday, the Maltese boat, the Budafel allowed them to mount the walkway but refused to have them on board.

In the end, it was established to have been a second boat, and bodies of its passengers were found Friday.

Reuters:

A French navy ship found around 20 bodies floating off the south coast of the Mediterranean island of Malta on Friday, a maritime official said.

The frigate Motte-Picquet was on a routine surveillance mission when it spotted the bodies.

“We are in the process of picking up some dead bodies,” said Emmanuel Dinh, spokesman for France’s Mediterranean maritime authority.

He said he could not give a precise number but said: “There will certainly be around 20.”

Dinh said there was no sign of a boat and the navy could not yet identify where the bodies came from.

“They are in a state of decomposition so they have been in the sea for several days,” he added.

Last week 27 shipwrecked Africans spent three days clinging to tuna nets in the Mediterranean while Malta and Libya argued over who should rescue them. They were eventually picked up by the Italian navy.

Malta refused to allow a Spanish tugboat to land another 26 would-be migrants. Spain decided to take them in.

The migrants’ plight sparked calls from European Union officials for EU countries to adopt common rules to clarify who is responsible for saving them at sea.

Hat tip to José Guardia.

At Maggie’s Farm.

They look like Western Diamondbacks (Crotalus atrox) to me.

I ran over a pretty large snakeskin when I was mowing yesterday. I expect I have my own rattlesnakes right here atop the Blue Ridge.

Los Angeles Times:

Former 18th Street gang member Hector “Weasel” Marroquin for years was celebrated and rewarded for having turned his life around.

He founded the anti-gang organization NO GUNS and received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the city for his efforts to help steer Latino youths away from a life of crime. His champions included former state Sen. Tom Hayden.

But his arrest this week on charges of selling firearms to federal undercover officers underscored concerns long held by people familiar with Marroquin’s background that he had not left his criminal life behind.

“I never for a moment believed that he ever left the life,” said Connie Rice, a civil rights attorney and former member of the Los Angeles Police Commission who noted that she saw Marroquin at meetings of anti-gang agencies. “I always thought he was using the system.”

Marroquin, 51, was arrested Thursday at his Downey home on charges of selling several guns, including a machine gun, two silencers and two rifles, to undercover officers. He bailed out of Los Angeles County jail Thursday night and could not be reached for comment.

His lawyer, Patrick Smith, did not return phone calls Friday. ...

Marroquin’s arrest marks the latest chapter in a life filled with controversy.

In the mid-1990s, claiming to have left the gang life, Marroquin formed NO GUNS — Networks Organized for Gang Unity and Neighborhood Safety — headquartered in Lennox. Over the next decade, NO GUNS emerged as one of the area’s few anti-gang groups run by Latinos.

In 2000, the Sheriff’s Department called in NO GUNS to help quell riots between Latinos and blacks at its Pitchess Detention Center.

But some law enforcement officials believed that Marroquin was a front man for the Mexican Mafia prison gang and that NO GUNS was a facade for illegal activity and a channel for public funds.

Classic.

The sleeper awakes to find Communism gone, replaced by prosperity and plenitude.

Reuters:

A Polish man has woken up from a 19-year coma to find the Communist party no longer in power and food no longer rationed, Polish TV reports.

Railway worker Jan Grzebski, 65, fell into a coma after he was hit by a train in 1988.

“Now I see people on the streets with mobile phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin,” he told Polish television. ...

When Mr Grzebski had his accident Poland was still ruled by its last communist leader, Wojciech Jaruzelski.

“When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere,” Mr Grzebski said.

The following year’s elections ushered in eastern Europe’s first post-communist government.

Poland joined the Nato alliance in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.

“What amazes me today is all these people who walk around with their mobile phones and never stop moaning,” said Mr Grzebski.

“I’ve got nothing to complain about.”

Hat tip to Robert Breedlove and Toni Marcus.

An Iraqi news cameraman employed by Associated Press died Thursday defending his home and neighborhood against Al Qaeda insurgents. His family and friends said he died a martyr’s death, and laid a bullet on his chest as a symbol of his heroism.

But his employer behaved differently. Rather than reporting that Saif Mohammed Fakhry had died a hero, fighting rifle in hand, against the enemies of the Iraqi government and of the United States, the Associated Press misleading described him as just another victim, killed senselessly walking to a nearby mosque on his day off.

AP reports:

An Associated Press Television News cameraman was killed in Baghdad on Thursday while walking to a mosque near his home on his day off.

Saif M. Fakhry, 26, was the fifth AP employee to die violently in the Iraq war and the third killed since December.

“Our heartfelt sympathies go out to Saif’s wife and family and his colleagues in Iraq,” said AP President and CEO Tom Curley.

“This is a particularly dangerous time in a place that already is unimaginably dangerous. Saif’s death reminds us again of the risks and hardships that accompany vital frontline journalism and of the gratitude we all owe to those who do it.”

Family members said Fakhry, who worked for APTN since August 2004, was spending the day with his wife, Samah Abbas, who is pregnant with their first child and expecting in June.

According to his family, Fakhry was walking to a mosque in the Baghdad neighborhood of Amariyah when he was shot. Gunmen had been involved in fighting in the area around his home for two days, but it was not clear who fired the shots that killed Fakhry.

But his brothers, Omar and Yasser, both also journalists, told Jane Arraf that he had gone out armed into the street to defend his neighborhood against Al Qaeda terrorists.

“I told him to stay inside – that the fighting was none of our business,” he told me, still sobbing. “He was a peaceful man but he said: ‘They are killing us every day – we live like this with no electricity, with no water and they are killing us.”

Saif had gone into the street carrying the rifle that each family in Baghdad is allowed to own. ...

One of the imams leading the group said they killed an al-Qaeda leader and two other al-Qaeda members in the clashes Thursday.

Saif, who drew his last breath in a mosque after fighting for his home, died a martyr’s death. His friends laid a bullet on his chest.

His brother Omar mourns over Saif Fahkry’s body
——————————————————
The Associated Press chooses to deny the honor due to the courage of its own employee in order to avoid confirming truths about the War in Iraq inconvenient to its customarily prejudiced perspective. What a disgrace to their profession and their humanity.

It used to be Texans who made news with unprecedentedly large outlays on conspicuous forms of high living. These days, it’s billionaires from India.

The DailyMail reports:

India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, is planning a palace in the heart of Mumbai with helipad, health club, hanging gardens and six floors of car parking.

His wife, mother and three children will live there with him, looked after by 600 live-in staff.

Construction has already started on what will eventually be a 175m tower and planners are aiming to complete it in September 2008.

Earlier this year, Forbes rated Mr Ambani as the richest resident Indian with a net worth of US$20.1 billion.

He came 14th in Forbes’ 2007 worldwide rankings.

Currently he is chairman of petroleum major Reliance Industries Ltd, India’s largest private sector company

The building, already worth £500 million, could start a rush on skyscrapers.

The Age reports:

The building, named Antilla after a mythical island, will have a total floor area greater than Versailles.

Hat tip to Dominique R. Poirier.

Hillary at Applied Materials

Palo Alto Daily News:

Clinton used the presidential campaign stop at Applied Materials in Santa Clara to unveil a nine-point “innovation agenda” to combat fear of surrounding global competition. ...

The senator’s nine-point agenda focuses on spending more government funds on education and research in math, science and technology, and on using incentives to encourage companies to pursue new ideas. ...

Clinton’s proposals include doubling the budgets of the national science and health foundations, increasing the number and size of innovation-oriented fellowships and starting a $50 billion “strategic energy fund” to break the cycle of energy dependence.

The senator also emphasized the need to build the infrastructure for innovation, including constructing broadband Internet works, recruiting more women and minorities to the fields of science and technology, and retaining foreign workers who graduate from U.S. universities. ...

her affirmation of visas and green cards for immigrant and foreign employees brought the afternoon’s most enthusiastic applause.

AP reports that the most famous symbol of American bad taste has been saved from oblivion.

No, it’s not a politician.

The original pink flamingo lawn ornament, the symbol of kitsch whose obituary was nearly written after its central Massachusetts manufacturer went out of business, is rising phoenixlike from the ashes and taking wing to upstate New York.

A manufacturer that bought the copyright and plastic molds for the original version plans to resume production in Westmoreland, N.Y.

HMC International LLC will pick up where Union Products Inc. left off last year when it shuttered its Leominster, Mass., plastics factory after 50 years of flamingo making. ...

Mr. Waszkiewicz’s firm expects to resume flamingo production by Labor Day. After Union Products ceased production last June, uncertainty surrounding the fate of the original led aficionados to snap up remaining stock in stores and secondhand Featherstone flamingos, in case those models became extinct. ...

The ornaments hit the market in the late 1950s when the color pink was in vogue, and America’s exploding population of suburbanites sought to add flair to their lawns.

But the birds also came to symbolize bad taste, and some residential developments even banned flamingo ornaments from lawns. The bird became a target of pranksters, some of whom swiped the ornaments from front yards, took them on the road, and then sent photos to their owners showing the kidnapped birds in front of sights like the Grand Canyon.

The flamingos typically sell for $10 to $20 for boxed sets of two—one standing nearly 3 feet high with its head held proudly erect, the other bending over as if munching on grass.

Their legs consist of spindly metal rods that can be planted in the ground.

Whole article

I was always more of a glass ball man myself.

A remedy for our democrat friends having problems achieving the necessary enthusiasm for a certain candidate.

1:40 video