America doubtless owes Armenia a debt of gratitude for Cher, but it is otherwise difficult to understand why, at this particular time, when American relations with her Turkish ally are jeopardized by both Islamic fundamentalism and Kurdish nationalism, the House of Representatives finds it necessary to try to pass a resolution recognizing the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1915 as genocide.

Alec Mouhibian muses on all this, from an Armenian perspective, in the American Spectator:

I never thought the day would come. But here it is! Being an Armenian—like playing women’s basketball at Rutgers, losing money on Enron, and contracting AIDS in Africa before it—is now relevant and topical. Hell, yes. I feel so damn temporarily important, and I wouldn’t trade it for having sold steroids to sluggers or resisted arrest in Los Angeles or, for that matter, having rented storefront from Barney Frank. Bask, fellow Armenians! Bask. Ours is the world and all that’s in it—and, which is more, we’ll have a hairy son.

Lest you’ve been comatose or going to history class at Princeton, the source of the spotlight is Congress’s resolution to recognize the Armenian genocide of 1915 as “genocide.” Turkey still insists it was merely a transportation malfunction, in which 1.5 million Armenians mysteriously vanished as piles of human carcasses appeared in their place.

Observers may find the issue inherently dull at first sight. Be patient. You don’t want to miss the massive collateral amusement—whether it’s Islamic Turkey taking postmodern relativism to its logical conclusion, competitors in the victim business afraid of losing market-share, arch unilateralists waxing worrisome over the self-esteem of a pathetically dependent ally, or truth-trumpeting moralists suddenly blowing dry in the name of diplomacy. Progressives have a meta-political reason to like the Armenian issue: it always results in an equal distribution of hypocrisy.

Add a few drops of Bush blood and you get a media frenzy that far outdoes anything surrounding the issue in its cyclical past. Jon Stewart gave it two segments on the Daily Show.

Maureen Dowd writes:

I was in my office, writing a column on the injustice of relative marginal tax rates for hedge fund managers, when I saw Stephen Colbert on TV.

He was sneering that Times columns make good “kindling.” He was ranting that after you throw away the paper, “it takes over a hundred years for the lies to biodegrade.” He was observing, approvingly, that “Dick Cheney’s fondest pipe dream is driving a bulldozer into The New York Times while drinking crude oil out of Keith Olbermann’s skull.”

I called Colbert with a dare: if he thought it was so easy to be a Times Op-Ed pundit, he should try it. He came right over. In a moment of weakness, I had staged a coup d’moi. I just hope he leaves at some point. He’s typing and drinking and threatening to “shave Paul Krugman with a broken bottle.”

Stephen Colbert writes:

I’d like to thank Maureen Dowd for permitting/begging me to write her column today. As I type this, she’s watching from an overstuffed divan, petting her prize Abyssinian and sipping a Dirty Cosmotinijito. Which reminds me: Before I get started, I have to take care of one other bit of business:

Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn’t have to think about. It’s all George Bush’s fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.

There. Now I’ve written Frank Rich’s column too.

In a seasonal allusion to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ late 17th Century witch trials (which resulted in 19 hangings), a Chicopee, Massachusetts homeowner decorated his front yard with the effigy of a witch dangling from a gallows.

But one of his neighbors (who practices Wicca) is offended, and considers his display a hate crime.

WHIOTV video

Apparently, if you’re a member of the party of America’s urban elites and you need to visit (shudder!) a fly-over Red State and rub elbows with the Common People, you take care to be immunized for infectious diseases.

My Way News:

It got the GOP’s engines revving – a Democratic official suggesting staffers get immunized for several diseases before heading south from Washington and into the Red State wilds of NASCAR country to conduct research at a pair of races.

The reaction on both sides illustrates just how valuable candidates for elected office consider the votes of NASCAR fans who pack grandstands by the thousands every weekend and the donations of business leaders who spend millions to sponsor the sport.

It started last month, when an official with the House Committee on Homeland Security suggested that staff aides get immunizations before visiting health facilities at Alabama’s Talladega Superspeedway and North Carolina’s Lowe’s Motor Speedway, where the Bank of America 500 was run Saturday.

In an e-mail, a staffer who works for committee chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., noted an “unusual need for whomever attending to be vaccinated against hepatitis A and B,” as well as “the more normal things – tetanus, diphtheria, and of course, seasonal influenza.”

The note didn’t explain why the committee saw such concern. It didn’t mention NASCAR or the races at the tracks at all. But the implication was enough to draw a snarky complaint from Republican Rep. Robin Hayes, whose district includes Lowe’s Motor Speedway.

“I have never heard of immunizations for domestic travel, and … I feel compelled to ask why the heck the committee feels that immunizations are needed to travel to my hometown,” wrote Hayes.

Thompson responded to Hayes that such immunizations are “are recommended for public safety professionals working in areas such as hospitals, holding areas and similar locations.” But the staffers were only scheduled to visit a few health care facilities – not work at them.

“What do they know about NASCAR that we don’t?” said Dr. David Weber, a professor of medicine and public health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

On Thursday last, the New York Times reported that CIA Director Michael Hayden has initiated an unusual investigation into the activities of the CIA’s Inspector General’s Office.

According to the Times, all this stems from criticism by that office of the CIA’s performance pre-9/11, and from “aggressive investigations” of “detention and interrogation programs and other matters.”

But, as MacRanger points out, it was Inspector General John L. Helgerson who personally recruited the same Mary O. McCarthy who was fired in April of 2006 for leaking information on covert counter-terrorism operations to Washington Post reporter Dana Priest.

AJStrata thinks the Times is spinning, and agrees that this story is really about CIA internal efforts finally to do something about the partisan leaks of highly classified national security information to the press by adversaries of the Administration within the agency.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we aren’t beginning to see some reciprocity, in the form of the Agency actually doing something about the most outrageous leaks, in return for the Bush Administration’s surrender, its abandonment of efforts to reform the Agency, and the reinstatement of Stephen R. Kappes and Michael Sulick.

Most of us are familiar with the furniture produced by the 19th century religious cult calling itself the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, better known as Shakers.

Shaker furniture is widely admired, collected, and frequently imitated, as its simple lines and imaginative forms have considerable congruity with modern aesthetics.

I had not been aware, however, previously that the Shakers also produced a variety of peculiar works on paper, including visionary drawings and unique imaginative efforts at the graphical depiction of musical inspiration. The examples here are very curious and strange.

These come from a book produced by the Drawing Center in New York and the Hammer Museum at UCLA, edited by Francis Morin, and titled Heavenly Visions: Shaker Gift Drawings and Gift Songs.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

Today’s big story as reported by NBC News, headlined ‘A Nightmare With No End in Sight,’ and written by Jim Miklaszewski and Courtney Kube, largely turns the message of retired Lt. Gen. Richard Sanchez’ luncheon address to military reporters and editors on its head.

General Sanchez’ speech comprised a strong condemnation of the MSM unethical conduct and unaccountability, followed by criticism of the Bush Administration’s failure to utilize the government’s political and economic power along with its military power in a coordinated and coherent strategy (including more effective efforts at building an international coalition), with just as much criticism of selfish and irresponsible political partisanship.

Sanchez said about the press:

IN SOME CASES I HAVE NEVER EVEN MET YOU, YET YOU FEEL QUALIFIED TO MAKE CHARACTER JUDGMENTS THAT ARE COMMUNICATED TO THE WORLD. MY EXPERIENCE IS NOT UNIQUE AND WE CAN FIND OTHER EXAMPLES SUCH AS THE TREATMENT OF SECRETARY BROWN DURING KATRINA. THIS IS THE WORST DISPLAY OF JOURNALISM IMAGINABLE BY THOSE OF US THAT ARE BOUND BY A STRICT VALUE SYSTEM OF SELFLESS SERVICE, HONOR AND INTEGRITY. ALMOST INVARIABLY, MY PERCEPTION IS THAT THE SENSATIONALISTIC VALUE OF THESE ASSESSMENTS IS WHAT PROVIDED THE EDGE THAT YOU SEEK FOR SELF AGRANDIZEMENT OR TO ADVANCE YOUR INDIVIDUAL QUEST FOR GETTING ON THE FRONT PAGE WITH YOUR STORIES! AS I UNDERSTAND IT, YOUR MEASURE OF WORTH IS HOW MANY FRONT PAGE STORIES YOU HAVE WRITTEN AND UNFORTUNATELY SOME OF YOU WILL COMPROMISE YOUR INTEGRITY AND DISPLAY QUESTIONABLE ETHICS AS YOU SEEK TO KEEP AMERICA INFORMED. THIS IS MUCH LIKE THE INTELLIGENCE ANALYSTS WHOSE EFFECTIVENESS WAS MEASURED BY THE NUMBER OF INTELLIGENCE REPORTS HE PRODUCED. FOR SOME, IT SEEMS THAT AS LONG AS YOU GET A FRONT PAGE STORY THERE IS LITTLE OR NO REGARD FOR THE “COLLATERAL DAMAGE” YOU WILL CAUSE. PERSONAL REPUTATIONS HAVE NO VALUE AND YOU REPORT WITH TOTAL IMPUNITY AND ARE RARELY HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR UNETHICAL CONDUCT. ...

1. SEEKING TRUTH,

2. PROVIDING FAIR AND COMPREHENSIVE ACCOUNT OF EVENTS AND ISSUES

3. THOROUGHNESS AND HONESTY

ALL ARE VICTIMS OF THE MASSIVE AGENDA DRIVEN COMPETITION FOR ECONOMIC OR POLITICAL SUPREMACY. THE DEATH KNELL OF YOUR ETHICS HAS BEEN ENABLED BY YOUR PARENT ORGANIZATIONS WHO HAVE CHOSEN TO ALIGN THEMSELVES WITH POLITICAL AGENDAS. WHAT IS CLEAR TO ME IS THAT YOU ARE PERPETUATING THE CORROSIVE PARTISAN POLITICS THAT IS DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY AND KILLING OUR SERVICEMEMBERS WHO ARE AT WAR.

About strategic failures:

AFTER MORE THAN FOUR YEARS OF FIGHTING, AMERICA CONTINUES ITS DESPERATE STRUGGLE IN IRAQ WITHOUT ANY CONCERTED EFFORT TO DEVISE A STRATEGY THAT WILL ACHIEVE “VICTORY” IN THAT WAR TORN COUNTRY OR IN THE GREATER CONFLICT AGAINST EXTREMISM. ...

OUR NATIONAL LEADERSHIP IGNORED THE LESSONS OF WWII AS WE ENTERED INTO THIS WAR AND TO THIS DAY CONTINUE TO BELIEVE THAT VICTORY CAN BE ACHIEVED THROUGH THE APPLICATION OF MILITARY POWER ALONE. OUR FOREFATHERS UNDERSTOOD THAT TREMENDOUS ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL CAPACITY HAD TO BE MOBILIZED, SYNCHRONIZED AND APPLIED IF WE WERE TO ACHIEVE VICTORY IN A GLOBAL WAR. THAT HAS BEEN AND CONTINUES TO BE THE KEY TO VICTORY IN IRAQ. CONTINUED MANIPULATIONS AND ADJUSTMENTS TO OUR MILITARY STRATEGY WILL NOT ACHIEVE VICTORY. THE BEST WE CAN DO WITH THIS FLAWED APPROACH IS STAVE OFF DEFEAT. THE ADMINISTRATION, CONGRESS AND THE ENTIRE INTERAGENCY, ESPECIALLY THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE, MUST SHOULDER THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THIS CATASTROPHIC FAILURE AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE MUST HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE.

THERE HAS BEEN A GLARING, UNFORTUNATE, DISPLAY OF INCOMPETENT STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP WITHIN OUR NATIONAL LEADERS. AS A JAPANESE PROVERB SAYS, “ACTION WITHOUT VISION IS A NIGHTMARE.” THERE IS NO QUESTION THAT AMERICA IS LIVING A NIGHTMARE WITH NO END IN SIGHT.

And about the impact of politics on the war effort, General Sanchez said:

SINCE 2003, THE POLITICS OF WAR HAVE BEEN CHARACTERIZED BY PARTISANSHIP AS THE REPUBLICAN AND DEMOCRATIC PARTIES STRUGGLED FOR POWER IN WASHINGTON. NATIONAL EFFORTS TO DATE HAVE BEEN CORRUPTED BY PARTISAN POLITICS THAT HAVE PREVENTED US FROM DEVISING EFFECTIVE, EXECUTABLE, SUPPORTABLE SOLUTIONS. AT TIMES, THESE PARTISAN STRUGGLES HAVE LED TO POLITICAL DECISIONS THAT ENDANGERED THE LIVES OF OUR SONS AND DAUGHTERS ON THE BATTLEFIELD. THE UNMISTAKABLE MESSAGE WAS THAT POLITICAL POWER HAD GREATER PRIORITY THAN OUR NATIONAL SECURITY OBJECTIVES. OVERCOMING THIS STRATEGIC FAILURE IS THE FIRST STEP TOWARD ACHIEVING VICTORY IN IRAQ - WITHOUT BIPARTISAN COOPERATION WE ARE DOOMED TO FAIL. THERE IS NOTHING GOING ON TODAY IN WASHINGTON THAT WOULD GIVE US HOPE.

By cherry-picking pessimistic statements, Miklaszewski and Kube (assisted by AP) turn the General’s criticism of the press and of national disunity into another testament to hopelessness and defeatism. And, with just the most delicate application of a thumb on the scales of interpretation, criticism of the failures of “NSC, Congress, the State Department and the national political leadership” magically turn into “a broad indictment of White House policies and a lack of leadership in the Pentagon to oppose them.” Remarkable, isn’t it?

Washington, DC-based Transformational Defense Industries (TDI) is marketing a new recoil-less .45 ACP submachine gun. Eliminating recoil, and consequent muzzle climb, will markedly improve rapid-fire accuracy. The video (linked below) seems to imply that there is also a positive impact on velocity and penetration. One of the key reasons for many police forces choosing the 9mm Parabellum over the .45 ACP is the comparative inferiority of the latter, more potent round in penetrating automobile bodywork. In the video, .45 ACP bullets go right through a car door and also fully penetrate the ballistic-test dummy.

According to the press release, the company’s Super V action is also being adapted the 12 gauge shotgun round.

US civilians, of course, are effectively precluded by the National Firearms Act of 1934 from owning fully automatic weapons.

Virginia Pilot article.

Kriss Super V web-page

7:53 video

Transformational Defense Industries (TDI) is owned by Gamma Applied Visions Group GAVG) of Nyon, Switzerland, a privately held holding company and “re-think” tank whose mission is to create visionary solutions in security and defense technology.

TDI in Wikipedia.

This test claims it can determine which side of your brain you use most, depending on in which direction you see the dancer turn.

I basically agree with John Hawkins’s summary of the situation.

Thompson is the most authentically conservative candidate with the best potential to win. Romney could fail to carry the South, and Giuliani is a liberal pretending to be conservative.

Thompson is definitely much more representative of the vision of the Republican Party that people had in 1980-1994—than he is of the “Big Government Republicanism” vision of the GOP that George Bush has come to represent. That means that Fred Thompson could be someone conservatives really want to have in the White House, as opposed to a candidate who could only be said to be the “lesser of two evils” when compared to Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.

Complete article.

Scappleface reports a snag:

Gore Wins Nobel Prize, High Court Gives It to Bush

(2007-10-12) — Although former Vice President Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize this week for his work as a global-warming performance artist, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled early today that President George Bush would receive the gold medal, the diploma and the $750,000.

Mr. Bush, who was narrowly defeated by Mr. Gore in the 2000 presidential election, thanked Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito “for swinging the vote my way, and helping me to join the pantheon of great Nobel laureates like Jimmy Carter and the late Yassir Arafat who together brought peace to the middle east.”

Mr. Gore could not be reached for comment as he was returning from Oslo, Norway, in a private jet. However, his spokesman said that his efforts to bring peace on earth speak for themselves.

“Thanks to Al Gore’s movies, speeches and books,” said the unnamed spokesman, “Terrorists and tyrants around the world will soon lay aside the weapons of war and give peace a chance by working together to develop a hybrid car that runs on cheap, clean-burning gunpowder.”

They have to put up with their party’s insane base. As Michael Herszenhorn explains in the Times, Barney Frank is currently under fire from the nutroots for being insufficiently Gay.

The damaged Swat valley Buddha is thought to date from the seventh century AD

The Telegraph reports:

Islamist radicals in Pakistan have attempted to destroy an ancient carving of Buddha by drilling holes in the rock and filling them with dynamite.

The 23ft high image was damaged during the attack, which brought back memories of the Taliban’s destruction six years ago of the giant Buddhas at Bamiyan, in neighbouring Afghanistan.

The Buddha, in the Swat district of north-west Pakistan, is thought to date from the seventh century AD and was considered the largest in Asia, after the two Bamiyan Buddhas.

The explosion on Monday night damaged the upper part of the rock.

Pakistani troops have stepped up recent operations against militants in the fertile Swat valley, where thousands of locals are in thrall to Mullah Fazlullah, a rabble-rousing cleric who has called for suicide attacks and holy war. Fazlullah’s men have continued to wage an offensive against what they deem ‘un-Islamic’ activity, last week blowing up dozens of music, video and cosmetics stalls at a market.

AgenceFrance story.

Charles Johnson notes the irony of such observance “In the city that suffered the worst Islamic terrorist attack in history.”

JCM comments: “How about lighting the windows in a bullseye pattern?”

Michael Gerson, in the Washington Post, tells conservatives why Americans should be willing to fight for other peoples’ freedom.

In the backlash against President Bush’s democracy agenda, conservatives are increasingly taking the lead. It is inherently difficult for liberals to argue against the expansion of social and political liberalism in oppressive parts of the world—though, in a fever of Bush hatred, they try their best. It is easier for traditional conservatives to be skeptical of this grand project, given their history of opposing all grand projects of radical change.

Traditional conservatism has taught the priority of culture—that societies are organic rather than mechanical and that attempts to change them through politics are like grafting machinery onto a flower. In this view, pushing for hasty reform is likely to upset some hidden balance and undermine the best of intentions. Wisdom is found in deference to tradition, not in bending the world to fit some religious or philosophic abstraction, even one as noble as the Declaration of Independence.

A conservatism that warns against utopianism and calls for cultural sensitivity is useful. When it begins to question the importance or existence of moral ideals in politics and foreign policy, it is far less attractive.

At the most basic level, the democracy agenda is not abstract at all. It is a determination to defend dissidents rotting in airless prisons, and people awaiting execution for adultery or homosexuality, and religious prisoners kept in shipping containers in the desert, and men and women abused and tortured in reeducation camps. It demands activism against sexual slavery, against honor killings, against genital mutilation and against the execution of children, out of the admittedly philosophic conviction that human beings are created in God’s image and should not be oppressed or mutilated.

And the democracy agenda goes a step further. It argues that the most basic human rights will remain insecure as long as they are a gift or concession of the state—that natural rights must ultimately be protected by self-government. And this ideology asserts that most people in all places, even the poor and oppressed, are capable of controlling their own affairs and determining their own rulers. If this abstract argument seems familiar, it should, because it is the argument of the American founding.

Read the whole thing.

Coconut crab Birgus latro

Native to the Indian and Western Pacific Ocean regions, the Coconut Crab is the largest terrestrial arthropod on earth. Despite its intimidating appearance, it is quite edible.

Earliest posting found here, via Kottke and New Shelton.

George Friedman, at Stratfor, explains how (and why) military functions and support were privatized.

The important point is that the U.S. military went to war with the Army the country gave it. We recall no great objections to the downsizing of the military in the 1990s, and no criticisms of the concepts that lay behind the new force structure. The volunteer force, downsized because long-term conflicts were not going to occur, supported by the Reserve/Guard and backfilled by civilian contractors, was not a controversial issue. Only tiresome cranks made waves, challenging the idea that wars would be sparse and short. They objected to the redefinition of noncombat roles and said the downsized force would be insufficient for the 21st century.

Blackwater, KBR and all the rest are the direct result of the faulty geopolitical assumptions and the force structure decisions that followed. The primary responsibility rests with the American public, which made best-case assumptions in a worst-case world.

Read the whole thing.

James Bowman, in the New Atlantis:

Writing in the Washington Post about the dedication of the new Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C., Philip Kennicott suggested that there is encoded in it the subtextual and “contentious” claim that “the left failed to adequately oppose communism.” As the memorial consists of a statue based on the replica of the Statue of Liberty carried by the students of Tiananmen Square in 1989, while the inscription on the plinth doesn’t mention “the left” at all but only says “to the more than one hundred million victims of communism and to those who love liberty,” you might almost think that somebody on the left had a sore conscience. It is hard to see, moreover, what would have been “contentious” about the claim—if it had been made—that, so far from opposing communism “adequately,” many on the American left hardly opposed it at all. Many others were unashamed apologists for the regimes that murdered the (estimated) 100 million people now being memorialized. Much of the left was —and remains— “anti-anti-communist.” This is what accounts for what Ferdinand Mount calls the “asymmetry of indulgence” afforded communistic and fascistic state-sponsored murders.

Robert Service, writing in The New Statesman, recently complained that merely because his book Comrades: A World History of Communism had noticed the toll taken on the lives and liberties of those unfortunate enough to have lived under Communist dictatorships, a reviewer in the British press had assigned to him the most despised epithet in the vocabulary of the contemporary British intellectual: “neocon.” Service noted ruefully that, though discredited wherever it has been instituted, “Communism, like nuclear fuel, has a long afterlife.” Indeed it does. But it didn’t occur to him to ask why. I think it is because Communism was a powerful example of the recurring strain of utopianism in the intellectual life of the West. Communism itself may have failed, but the utopian habit of thought on which it was based lingers on even among those who find Communism repugnant and hateful—even, perhaps, among the dreaded neocons themselves. And this survival, in turn, is a result of our culture’s having nowhere else to go in its long flight away from a heroic past it is determined to reject.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Stephen Green summarizes at PJM:

When asked point-blank if he’d support the Republican nominee next fall, (Ron) Paul answered just as Grosse Pointe-blankly: “No.” Unless the party retreats from Iraq – and Germany and Korea and Japan, too – then Paul wants nothing to do with the Republicans. That said, Paul should stick to his principles and RSVP “thanks but no thanks” to the next debate, and the one after that, and so on. If he’s not even going to pretend to be a Republican, he ought to go back to the Libertarian Party where he and his five million dollars would be more than welcome. In the meantime, he’s just taking up space, time, and a whole lot of hot air.

Thompson’s performance was much more low-key than Paul’s, which is like saying that napping tree sloth is somewhat calmer than a spider monkey hopped up on Mountain Dew and herbal Viagra. Over the course of a two hour debate, I caught Thompson mentioning exactly one hard fact – Israel’s air strike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear plant, way back in 1981. The rest of the time, Thompson spoke in platitudes, slowly, and yet still stumbled through some of his answers. The good news, if you can call it that, is the expectations game. After a month of dismal campaigning, Fred looked pretty good just showing up fully dressed and speaking in complete sentences. ...

Really, today’s debate was the Mitt & Rudy Show. Romney and Giuliani were offered more questions than any other three or four candidates, and neither of them made any major flubs. There was one telling moment, however, just minutes before the end of the debate. CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo asked Giuliani if London would ever replace New York “as the world’s financial capital.” As I wrote on my blog, live during the debate, “Rudy basically gave her the New Yorker Single Finger Salute.” Ain’t nobody bigger ’an New Yawk, lady. When asked the same question a moment later, Romney gave a canned answer, which included mention of some obscure provision of the impenetrable Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

You have to give this debate to Rudy on points and style, and hope that the real Fred Thompson shows up at the next one – if ever.

I watched the first hour. Thompson seemed surprisingly nervous and unprepared to me. He also looked unwell. He kept his head bent forward in a perpetual stoop, as if he had to minimize his height to get into the angle of the camera, and he looked drawn and cadaverous.

The Romney-Giuliani exchange was telling, and left a little blood in the water. Giuliani boasted he cut taxes 23 times as New York mayor, and Romney nailed him by noting that it was hizzoner who sued all the way to the Supreme Court to kill the presidential line-item veto. Giuliani scuttled to hide under the protection of the Constitution, claiming it was only what a strict constructionist like himself had to do. A few moments later, he admitted that retaining NYC’s share of federal pork had also motivated him.

I did not even initially recognize second-tier candidates like Brownback, Tancredo, Huckabee, and Hunter, and I was surprised by how articulate and comparatively substantive all of them were. Brownback and Huckabee distinctly increased my interest and respect. But, unfortunately, the way US politics operates, with our dimbulb celebrity-culture media functioning as the filter between reality and the voting public, however meritorious any second-tier candidate might be, unless he starts dating Paris Hilton, he is just not going to get the attention needed to compete effectively.

Ron Paul was also an effective speaker, but I doubt that his economic prescriptions (which implicitly demanded a return to the Gold Standard) or his foreign policy of isolationist pacifism are going to win him a lot of support.

Thompson survived, but his performance can only have disappointed and alarmed those of us hoping he’d provide a conservative electoral choice. Fortunately, only journalists, bloggers, and the rest of an infinitesimal minority of intensely political Americans were watching. He still has lots of time to get into shape and improve.

The Washington Post has a new club to beat the Bush Administration. with today.

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company’s Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group’s communications network. ...

(Rita) Katz (the firm’s founder) said she decided to offer an advance copy of the bin Laden video to the White House without charge so officials there could prepare for its eventual release.

She spoke first with White House counsel Fred F. Fielding, whom she had previously met, and then with Joel Bagnal, deputy assistant to the president for homeland security. Both expressed interest in obtaining a copy, and Bagnal suggested that she send a copy to Michael Leiter, who holds the No. 2 job at the National Counterterrorism Center.

Around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, Katz sent both Leiter and Fielding an e-mail with a link to a private SITE Web page containing the video and an English transcript. “Please understand the necessity for secrecy,” Katz wrote in her e-mail. “We ask you not to distribute . . . [as] it could harm our investigations.”

Fielding replied with an e-mail expressing gratitude to Katz. “It is you who deserves the thanks,” he wrote, according to a copy of the message. There was no record of a response from Leiter or the national intelligence director’s office.

Exactly what happened next is unclear. But within minutes of Katz’s e-mail to the White House, government-registered computers began downloading the video from SITE’s server, according to a log of file transfers. The records show dozens of downloads over the next three hours from computers with addresses registered to defense and intelligence agencies.

By midafternoon, several television news networks reported obtaining copies of the transcript. A copy posted around 3 p.m. on Fox News’s Web site referred to SITE and included page markers identical to those used by the group. “This confirms that the U.S. government was responsible for the leak of this document,” Katz wrote in an e-mail to Leiter at 5 p.m.

Al-Qaeda supporters, now alerted to the intrusion into their secret network, put up new obstacles that prevented SITE from gaining the kind of access it had obtained in the past, according to Katz.

So Ms. Katz called up the White House, and passed along to three officials, two of whom she’d never even met, a web-link to the video in question. Having thus shared a piece of information obviously picked up via the Internet to strangers, Mirabile dictu! one or another of those strangers shared it some more.

How difficult it is for anyone possessing the appropriate linguistic skills to penetrate Islamic extremist sites seems uncertain. Obviously those sites exist with the intention of reaching audiences of persons not intimately connected in a single terrorist cell. Their proprietors are likely also to feel that the language barrier alone is adequate to provide protection against ordinary outsider readers. At most, one would expect some very modest sort of password protection, probably using a trivial and obvious Islamist expression like Allah Akhbar.

Access via that kind of password to some semi-public web-site is not exactly the same thing as possession of atomic secrets.

Someone like Ms. Katz, working in the Intelligence business, ought to be familiar with the old maxim: “A secret that is known by three full soon will not a secret be.”

Midland (Michigan) Daily News:

The U.S. Capitol’s architect won’t allow God to be mentioned in certificates of authenticity accompanying flags flown over the Capitol and bought by constitutents.

A 17-year-old Eagle Scout from Ohio reportedly was denied the request to have a certificate read, “This flag was flown in honor of Marcel Larochelle, my grandfather, for his dedication and love of God, country and family.”

“I can’t believe the U.S. House of Representatives can pass a resolution recognizing the Muslim holiday of Ramadan, which we did this week, but can’t send out certificates with the word ‘God’ on them,” (Rep. David) Camp (R-MI) said. “It doesn’t make any sense. The policy needs to be changed.”

The controversy over certificate wording has arisen several times in past years, with the architect’s office saying religious and political messages should not be permitted, House leadership aides said.

Charles Croke collects some amusing results of unsuccessful efforts at turning the idioms of foreign signs into English.

A few examples:

Jerusalem: there’s no such city!

Japan: Don’t protrude the tartness and keenness out the staircase

China: Deformed man toilet

India: Edible. Oil tanker!

Read the whole thing.

Nathaniel R. Helms reveals the inside story on Haditha. The incident was a deliberately crafted propaganda ploy designed and executed by al Qaeda insurgents, with which the MSM, led by Time Magazine, enthusiastically cooperated.

Buried in the mountain of exhibits attached to the once secret Haditha, Iraq murder inquiry prepared by US Army Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell is an obscure Marine Corps intelligence summary (see pdf) that says the deadly encounter was an intentional propaganda ploy planned and paid for by Al Qaeda foreign fighters.

Veteran military defense attorney Gary Meyers said he never understood why the Naval Criminal Investigative Service special agents leading the Haditha criminal investigation didn’t “examine the linkage” between Al Qaeda, the local insurgency and the events at Haditha. Meyers was an attorney on the defense team that successfully defended Justin Sharratt, a Marine infantryman accused of multiple murders at Haditha.

The report – apparently overlooked by a Washington press corps awash in leaked Bargewell documents and secret Naval Criminal Investigative Service reports – shows that Marine Corps intelligence operatives were advised of the scheme to demonize the Marines by an informant named Muhannad Hassan Hamadi. The informant was snared by 3/1 Marines on December 11 2005 and decided to cooperate.

The attack was carried out by multiple cells of local Wahabi extremists and well-paid local gunmen from Al Asa’ib al-Iraq [the Clans of the People of Iraq] that were led by Al Qaeda foreign fighters, the summary claims. Their case was bolstered by Marine signal intercepts revealing that the al Qaeda fighters planned to videotape the attacks and exploit the resulting carnage for propaganda purposes.

Eleven insurgents involved in the attack are identified by name and affiliation in the details of the summary. All of them were killed or captured in the days immediately following the Haditha incident.

During the November Haditha battle, the insurgents secreted themselves among local civilians to guarantee pursuing Marines would catch innocent civilians in the ensuing crossfire.

The prosecutors in the case against eight Marines charged with murder and cover up at Haditha still maintain the besieged infantrymen acted solely out of malice and poor judgment when they killed 24 Iraqis there. The prosecution’s investigation was launched after a story by Time magazine reporter Tim McGirk on March 6, 2006 accused the Marines of cold blooded murder in retaliation for the death of a brother Marine.

McGirk received his video “evidence” and contacts from two known Iraqi insurgent operatives already under observation by Marine Corps counter intelligence teams. One of the Iraqi witnesses McGirk relied on had just been released from almost six months captivity for insurgent activities and the other witness was considered a useful intelligence tool by Marines listening to him talk on his cell phone. McGirk never interviewed the Marines, who ironically had prepared a similar intelligence summary in anticipation of his canceled visit.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft expresses a European’s natural astonishment at the willingness of the American Republic to take seriously candidacies to high public office based entirely upon dynastic pretensions.

Among so much about American politics that can impress or depress a friendly transatlantic observer, there’s nothing more astonishing than this: Why on Earth should Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton be the front-runner for the presidency?

She has now pulled well ahead of Sen. Barack Obama, both in polls and in fundraising. If the Democrats can’t win next year, they should give up for good, so she must be considered the clear favorite for the White House. But in all seriousness: What has she ever done to deserve this eminence? How could a country that prides itself on its spirit of equality and opportunity possibly be led by someone whose ascent owes more to her marriage than to her merits? ...

..in no other advanced democracy today could someone with Clinton’s résumé even be considered a candidate for national leadership. It’s true that wives do sometimes inherit political reins from their husbands, but usually in recovering dictatorships in Latin America such as Argentina… or Third World countries such as Sri Lanka or the Philippines—and in those cases often when the husbands have been assassinated. ...

What a contrast (to Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher) Hillary Clinton presents! Everyone recognizes the nepotism or favoritism she has enjoyed: New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has written that without her marriage, Clinton might be a candidate for president of Vassar, but not of the United States. And yet the truly astonishing nature of her career still doesn’t seem to have impinged on Americans.

Seven years ago, she turned up in New York, a state with which she had a somewhat tenuous connection, expecting to be made senator by acclamation (particularly once Rudy Giuliani decided not to run against her). Until that point, she had never won or even sought any elective office, not in the House or in a state legislature. Nor had she held any executive-branch position. The only political task with which she had ever been entrusted was her husband’s health-care reforms, and she made a complete hash of that.

David Brock’s “progressive” spin factory got Don Imus, and it’s now gunning for Rush Limbaugh, reports Jonah Goldberg.

In the parable of the million monkeys banging on typewriters for a million years, the reward is supposed to be the complete works of Shakespeare. But have you heard the parable of the million interns? Here, the prize is Rush Limbaugh’s head, and Bill O’Reilly’s, and Brit Hume’s, and pretty much any other prominent conservative or non-leftist who doesn’t kowtow to the Democratic Party and its “netroots” army of Lilliputian cannibals. This, in a nutshell, is the vision behind a group most people have never heard of, at least not until this week, Media Matters for America.

Don Surber invented the game, and Glenn Reynolds and Scott Johnson want to play, too.

The DesMoines Register reports:

Mitt Romney still leads in Iowa but Fred Thompson, a relative newcomer to the presidential race, has emerged as his nearest competitor in a new Des Moines Register poll of likely Republican caucus participants.

Mike Huckabee and Rudy Giuliani are in a close fight for third place in the Iowa Poll taken over three days last week.

It’s early October, Thompson is moving up in the polls, and Manhattan’s vest pocket Mussolini is doing about as well as an obscure governor of Arkansas. Not bad.

No longer pouting, but smiling with content, Bush administration adversaries in the CIA put their feet up and reminisce contemptuously about Porter Goss and his associates, referred to as “Goslings,” who tried to change the agency’s culture and were defeated.

“From day one, Goss and his people seemed to be punching above their weight,” reports Jeff Stein.

Results.

Hat tip to MeaninglessHotAir.

Scappleface reports that serious consideration is being given to subjecting detainees to the worst possible ordeal.

According a newly-leaked top-secret document published in The New York Times ‘Classified’ section today, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has employed controversial methods to extract information from terror suspects, including threats to put the detainee in front of a Senate committee for further interrogation.

If true, it means that U.S. agents may be using a technique “tantamount to torture,” an unnamed source told the Times.

“I’ve seen those Senate hearings on TV,” the source said. “I’d rather be waterboarded, slapped about the head and assaulted with high-volume Britney Spears music while confined to a meat locker.”

President Bush refused to confirm or deny the new allegations, saying only: “We use humane methods that have proven fruitful for gathering intelligence. So, that don’t make any sense.”

Mr. Bush added that if, in the future, the U.S. did decide to subject terror suspects to Senate hearings, “at least no one would accuse us of using sleep deprivation.”

2nd LT Daily in Mosul, January, 2007

Christopher Hitchens read in the LA Times that his own writings had inspired Mark Daily, a young graduate of UCLA, to change his mind about the war and enlist as an officer in the US Army in order to serve in Iraq, where he was killed last January by an IED.

A must read.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Officer James Kellett of Carrolton Township, Michigan is clearly a good man to have around around in an emergency, as the Associated Press reports.

Officer James Kellett said a skunk whose head was stuck in an empty salad dressing jar wandered into the police station’s parking lot Thursday in Carrollton Township, near Saginaw and about 80 miles north of Detroit.

Kellett wanted to serve and protect the white-striped weasel, but wasn’t interested in any resistance — spray or otherwise. So he grabbed a BB gun used in hunters’ safety courses and shot at the jar from about 40 feet.

The shots cracked and shattered the jar, leaving a glass collar around the skunk’s neck. With its head free, the skunk ran off.

“I didn’t want to use deadly force, and it is a residential area,” Kellett told The Saginaw News. “The way he was when he took off, he was able to eat, breathe and spray — and do anything else skunks like to do.”

Kellett didn’t get much in the way of gratitude, but he’s grateful the skunk didn’t spray. And the makers of T. Marzetti’s salad dressing are sending the officer coupons good for free dressing as a reward.

There is a Japanese saying, Katsujin-ken Satsujin-to “The sword which kills is also the sword which gives life.”

Hat tip to Frank A. Dobbs.

Also in the New York Times, Paul Krugman responds to George W. Bush’s veto of a middle-class entitlement first step to socialized health care by taking out the world’s smallest violin and playing the world’s saddest song.

Here’s what Reagan said in his famous 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing,” which made him a national political figure: “We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.”

Today’s leading conservatives are Reagan’s heirs.

Reagan was perfectly right back then. The cost of food is derisory in the United States, and even welfare provides more than enough income to preclude “going to bed hungry.”

And George W. Bush was perfectly right to veto that manipulatively-titled bill today. And, yes, conservatives are Ronald Reagan’s heirs and proud of it.

David Brooks grazes meditatively beneath the New York Times’ luxuriant English oaks.

Modern conservatism begins with Edmund Burke. What Burke articulated was not an ideology or a creed, but a disposition, a reverence for tradition, a suspicion of radical change.

When conservatism came to America, it became creedal. Free market conservatives built a creed around freedom and capitalism. Religious conservatives built a creed around their conception of a transcendent order. Neoconservatives and others built a creed around the words of Lincoln and the founders.

Over the years, the voice of Burke has been submerged beneath the clamoring creeds. In fact, over the past few decades the conservative ideologies have been magnified, while the temperamental conservatism of Burke has been abandoned.

Over the past six years, the Republican Party has championed the spread of democracy in the Middle East. But the temperamental conservative is suspicious of rapid reform, believing that efforts to quickly transform anything will have, as Burke wrote “pleasing commencements” but “lamentable conclusions.” ...

To put it bluntly, over the past several years, the G.O.P. has made ideological choices that offend conservatism’s Burkean roots. This may seem like an airy-fairy thing that does nothing more than provoke a few dissenting columns from William F. Buckley, George F. Will and Andrew Sullivan. But suburban, Midwestern and many business voters are dispositional conservatives more than creedal conservatives. They care about order, prudence and balanced budgets more than transformational leadership and perpetual tax cuts. It is among these groups that G.O.P. support is collapsing.

American conservatism will never be just dispositional conservatism. America is a creedal nation. But American conservatism is only successful when it’s in tension — when the ambition of its creeds is retrained by the caution of its Burkean roots.

There is something, doubtless, about a New York Times editorial position, possibly the prestigious title or perhaps the unlimited expense account, which is liable to make any man into a Burkean defender of the status quo.

Mr. Brooks is, however, clearly confusing American with British conservatism, when he describes it in these emolient and unthreatening Burkean terms. But the American case is very different.

The roots of American conservatism lie in the American Revolution against Royal authority and established traditions of governmental supremacy. And the pedigree of modern American conservatism goes back to the movement which took over the GOP led by Barry Goldwater and his supporters.

Barry Goldwater was correctly perceived as a radical opponent of the New Deal’s established order of Welfarism, mixed economy socialism, Big Government and tolerance of International Communism, the champion of a collection of American principles and ideals, which (however originalist) were so utterly alien to the prevailing Establishment consensus as to seem revolutionary.

Mr. Brooks needs to remember that the father of the modern conservative Republican Party is the man who said “Extremism in defense of Liberty is no vice.”

ABC News:

An eagle-eyed reporter for the ABC affiliate in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, noticed something missing from Democratic presidential contender Sen. Barack Obama’s, D-Ill., lapels.

“You don’t have the American flag pin on. Is that a fashion statement?” the reporter asked, at the end of a brief interview with Obama on Wednesday. “Those have been on politicians since Sept. 12, 2001.”

The standard political reply to that question might well have been, “My patriotism speaks for itself.”

But Obama didn’t say that.

Instead the Illinois senator answered the question at length, explaining that he no longer wears such a pin, at least in part, because of the Iraq War.

“You know, the truth is that right after 9/11, I had a pin,” Obama said. “Shortly after 9/11, particularly because as we’re talking about the Iraq War, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security, I decided I won’t wear that pin on my chest.

Instead,” he said, “I’m going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism.”

Obama could also have just said that he thought politicians wearing US flag lapel pins had become a cliche, but he did not.

However diplomatically he puts it, stating publicly that he isn’t wearing the US flag because he does not support the war in Iraq is an extremely striking gesture of anti-patriotism.

There really ought to be an alternative lapel pin Obama could substitute, something featuring an emblem identifying the wearer’s membership in what Thomas Sowell likes to refer to as “the elect.” Perhaps a blue background pin with a gold halo on it would do the trick.

Anthony T. Kronman, Sterling Professor of Law and former Dean of Yale Law School, laments the post-1960s dégringolade of liberal education in America in Against Political Correctness: A Liberal’s Cri du Coeur in this month’s Yale Alumni Magazine.

Today’s defenders of diversity assume that the interpretive judgments of their students will differ according to their race, gender, and ethnicity. But at the same time they expect their students to share a commitment to the values of political liberalism on which the concept of diversity is based. These values may be the fairest and most durable foundation on which to build a political community. I believe they are. A legal and cultural environment marked by the freedoms that political liberalism affords may be the setting in which institutions of higher education are most likely to flourish. I think it is. But when a presumptive commitment to the values of political liberalism begins to constrain the exploration of the personal question of life’s meaning—when the expectation that everyone shares these values comes to place implicit limits on the alternatives that may be considered and how seriously they are to be taken—the enterprise itself loses much of its power and poignancy for the students involved and their teachers lose their authority to lead it.

Whatever fails to accord with the values of political liberalism fits uncomfortably within the range of possibilities that the prevailing conception of diversity permits students to acknowledge as serious contenders in the search for an answer to the first-personal question of what living is for. The political philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, with their easy acceptance of the natural inequality of humans, offend these values at every turn. So, too, does the theological tradition that runs from Augustine to Calvin, with its insistence on church authority and its doctrines of sin and grace. And much of poetry is motivated by an anti-democratic love of beauty and power.

All of these ideas and experiences are suspect from the standpoint of liberal values. None represents the “right” kind of diversity. None is suitable as a basis for political life, and hence—here is the crucial step—none is suitable (respectable, acceptable, honorable) as a basis for personal life either. None, in the end, can perform any useful function other than as an illustration of the confused and intolerant views of those who had the misfortune to be born before the dawning of the light.

Today’s idea of diversity is so limited that one might with justification call it a sham diversity, whose real goal is the promotion of a moral and spiritual uniformity instead. It has no room for the soldier who values honor above equality, the poet who believes that beauty is more important than justice, or the thinker who regards with disinterest or contempt the concerns of political life. The identification of diversity with race and gender has thus brought us back full circle to the moral uniformity with which American higher education began, nearly four centuries ago.

AP:

In an unlikely marriage of desire to secede from the United States, two advocacy groups from opposite political traditions — New England and the South — are sitting down to talk.

Tired of foreign wars and what they consider right-wing courts, the Middlebury Institute wants liberal states like Vermont to be able to secede peacefully.

That sounds just fine to the League of the South, a conservative group that refuses to give up on Southern independence.

“We believe that an independent South, or Hawaii, Alaska, or Vermont would be better able to serve the interest of everybody, regardless of race or ethnicity,” said Michael Hill of Killen, Ala., president of the League of the South.

Separated by hundreds of miles and divergent political philosophies, the Middlebury Institute and the League of the South are hosting a two-day Secessionist Convention starting Wednesday in Chattanooga.

They expect to attract supporters from California, Alaska and Hawaii, inviting anyone who wants to dissolve the Union so states can save themselves from an overbearing federal government.

If allowed to go their own way, New Englanders “probably would allow abortion and have gun control,” Hill said, while Southerners “would probably crack down on illegal immigration harder than it is being now.” ...

The first North American Separatist Convention was held last fall in Vermont, which, unlike most Southern states, supports civil unions. Voters there elected a socialist to the U.S. Senate.

Middlebury director Kirpatrick Sale said Hill offered to sponsor the second secessionist convention, but the co-sponsor arrangement was intended to show that “the folks up north regard you as legitimate colleagues.”

“It bothers me that people have wrongly declared them to be racists,” Sale said.

The League of the South says it is not racist, but proudly displays a Confederate Battle Flag on its banner.

Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which monitors hate groups, said the League of the South “has been on our list close to a decade.”

“What is remarkable and really astounding about this situation is we see people and institutions who are supposedly on the progressive left rubbing shoulders with bona fide white supremacists,” Potok said.

Sale said the League of the South “has not done or said anything racist in its 14 years of existence,” and that the Southern Poverty Law Center is not credible.

“They call everybody racists,” Sale said. “There are, no doubt, racists in the League of the South, and there are, no doubt, racists everywhere.”

Harry Watson, director of the Center For the Study of the American South and a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said it was a surprise to see The Middlebury Institute conferring with the League of the South, “an organization that’s associated with a cause that many of us associate with the preservation of slavery.”

He said the unlikely partnering “represents the far left and far right of American politics coming together.”

George Friedman, at Stratfor, discusses the fundamental contradiction of the current European Union.

How do you have multiple sovereign states within a single central bank? How do you reconcile national sovereignty with a multinational monetary system when it is impossible to create a single monetary policy that satisfies the policies of multiple sovereign nations? Someone must always be hurt. What is of great significance is that Sarkozy has made it clear that it is France, one of Europe’s founders, that is being hurt—to the benefit of its partner, Germany.

This leads to the more immediate question: If Germany and France undertake fundamentally different approaches to economic development, how can both of these strategies be contained in a single European structure? In a way, it would have been simpler had there not been a euro. Multiple economic strategies can be reconciled with a customs union, or even a multinational regulatory system. But reconciling multiple economic approaches with a single currency cannot happen.

The United States confronted this question in the past. In the 1850s, some states wanted a radical revision of social, economic and monetary policy that would benefit them but leave other states at an enormous disadvantage. The industrializing part of the country wanted policies that would protect its interests. The agricultural part of the country, heavily dependent on exports, wanted a different policy. A conference was held in 1863 at Gettysburg. Both sides made compelling arguments over three days, but in the end it was decided that not only would the policies of the industrializing states be followed, but no one would be permitted to withdraw from the economic, political and social union of the United States. State sovereignty was to be limited and federal power was to be paramount.

It was the Union Army that made the most convincing argument at Gettysburg. There is no Union Army in Europe. There is no sovereign center that can hold dissidents in the monetary or economic union. And there is, for that matter, no power on Earth that can keep France and Germany within a single system if they do not want to be there. Sovereignty, without the slightest shadow of doubt, rests with the nation-states of Europe—and the European institutions will last only as long as they reflect the interests of all of these nations.

George Friedman has started blogging.

FOX News:

Iranian technology is on pace to build a long-range missile that could strike the United States within a decade, a high-level Pentagon official told FOX News. ...

“Most of the intelligence experts predict that sometime before 2015, or in that time frame, the Iranians will have developed the capabilities to threaten the United States, from a missile technology perspective, “Lt. Gen. Henry Obering, chief of the U.S. missile defense program, said Tuesday in a Pentagon interview with FOX News. Of concern Obering said is Iran’s ability to take shorter range technology and improving it to longer and longer ranges.

Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said Wednesday the U.S. was in no position to start a war against Iran given its military commitment in Iraq.

AP reports that Cold War rivalries survive in the breeding of German Shepherds.

As the country celebrates 17 years of reunification on Wednesday, some animosities between the formerly communist East and capitalist West remain — and few are as doggedly contested as the fight over whose shepherds are superior.

One thing nobody denies is that in the more than four decades of Germany’s division, the dogs did develop different looks: Eastern shepherds are mostly dark gray or black, while the Western dogs have the better-known yellow-and-black appearance.

West German shepherds also have a characteristically sloped back, while their East German counterparts have a straighter back — which their proponents claim is less prone to the hip problems that can plague the breed. ...

Because of this, the claim for the better dog at times sounds more like a battle over moral superiority between the East and the West than breeder rivalry.

Grube called the claims from the East German breeders an “obvious case of Ostalgie” — a sentimental nostalgia about life in former East Germany, which went out of existence at reunification in 1990 at the end of the Cold War.

East German breeders get particularly upset when confronted with the widespread assumption that most of their dogs were used at the border to keep citizens from fleeing to the West.

“The army and the police only got the scum — the best ones went to dog lovers,” said Werner Dalm, the former government official for shepherd dog breeding in communist East Germany. However, he acknowledged that the East German army asked particularly for those “that could really bite well.”

Today, Dalm, who is still breeding shepherds at age 81 and is also convinced of the East German dogs’ superiority, believes that pure East German bloodlines are all but extinct.

“Since the unification in 1990, we’ve been mixing bloodlines,” he said. “Even my dogs don’t have pure East German pedigrees any longer.”

Whatever the truth, it does seem like the East German shepherd is making a comeback among the 75,000 members of the German Shepherds’ Club and even abroad.

“We get so many requests for our dogs, there’s an international wait list of several years,” said Schultze.

The Bangkok Post reports a story of imprudent optimism.

A Cambodian man who took off his trousers, tied the legs at the bottom and wrangled a 2-metre cobra into them died when it bit him through the fabric, local media reported Monday.

Khmer-language daily Koh Santepheap [Peace Island] quoted police as saying Chab Kear, 36, saw the reptile swimming in a river just outside the capital last Thursday during a drinking session and captured it in the hopes of selling it later in the day.

He tied the animal inside his trousers and a scarf around his waist, but as he continued carousing the enraged snake managed to get its fangs free and bite Kear three times on the stomach.

The newspaper reported Kear’s last words as being “don’t worry – it’s nothing a drink can’t fix” before he succumbed to the cobra’s venom.

Bobby Henderson provides an example of the same kind of “logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence” featured in all Global Warming theorizing.

You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.

Sincerely Yours,

Bobby Henderson, concerned citizen.

From Donald L. Luskin via Bird Dog.

Henry Waxman

Today’s attempt by the left (Atrios and TPM to whip up something to cry about concerns Rep. Darrell Issa noting the impracticality of Congressional democrats trying to take over the functions of the Executive Branch, by pointing out that democrat Inquisitor Henry Waxman would require Blackwater’s protection in Iraq to pursue his witchhunt against Blackwater.

Issa’s comment:

If Henry Waxman today wants to go to Iraq and do an investigation, Blackwater will be his support team. His protection team. Do you think he really wants to investigate directly?

0:41 video

New York Times:

For five years, Yale Law School has fought to restrict military recruiters from its job fairs because of the Pentagon’s policy that bars openly gay or bisexual people from the military. But with the federal government threatening to withhold $350 million in grants if the university does not assist the recruiters, that fight will all but end on Monday.

After an appeals court ruled in favor of the Defense Department on Sept. 17, the law school said it would allow recruiters from the Air Force and Navy to participate in a university-sponsored job interview program for law students on Monday afternoon. For now, the legal battle to stop the recruiters is over, said Robert A. Burt, a Yale law professor and the lead plaintiff in the case.

“The judges who hold office at the moment disagree with us,” Professor Burt said. “We must wait for history to vindicate our position.”

History will have nothing but contempt and derision for pampered academic prigs whose commitment to leveling the distinction between perversity and ordinary life so greatly exceeds their loyalty to country and their gratitude to the armed forces which defend them.

In an Iowa interview with Roger Simon, Fred Thompson, promises to fight the good fight to keep the Republican Party principled and conservative.

Fred Thompson has a folksy, good old boy persona on the stump, but it may not last much longer.

When I asked him if he is an 11th Commandment man — Never speak ill of a fellow Republican — he responded, “I am more of a 12th Commandment man: Don’t speak ill of them until they speak ill of me. And then really speak ill of them.”

Thompson’s stump speech contains the warning that Republicans must “stay with our principles” when it comes to choosing a nominee.

I asked him if that was a veiled reference to Rudy Giuliani.

Thompson made a face of mock horror and laughed.

The bear was walking across the 80ft (24.38 meters) high bridge on Highway 40 near Donner Summit in the Sierra Nevada when the closeness of two oncoming cars spooked it, causing it to jump over the railing. Falling, it managed to grab on to a ledge and pull itself onto a concrete girder beneath the bridge. Local volunteers tranquilized and rescued the stranded bear.

Sierra Sun

photographs

In the US, companies are marketing bulletproof book bags:

MJ Safety Solutions

BackPackShield

While in Britain, Cox News Service recently reported:

An East London company called BladeRunner has started selling school uniforms lined with knife-resistant Kevlar. The customers are mostly worried parents seeking peace of mind in a city that has seen seven teens stabbed to death this year.

“My son is 14 and rides his bike to school, and I feel he’s a moving target,” said Andrea Lovell, an East London mother who recently bought a Kevlar-lined jacket for her son. “A few of my friends have bought the jackets as well for their children.

“We all worry about our kids, and this makes us feel a little better when they go out the door,” she said.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

From the New York Times’ point of view, the Council for National Policy (CNP), is some sort of slightly sinister and secretive conspiratorial organ of the Religious Right. When I Googled this organization, and read over the names of members and officers, my own impression was the CNP appeared to be a slightly more diverse networking group of influential and activist movement conservatives, including many famous names. Some, but not all, were prominent figures in the Religious Right.

Not surprisingly, this group of activists did a certain amount of saber-rattling over the possibility of the Republican Party nominating Rudolph Giuliani.

Alarmed at the possibility that the Republican Party might pick Rudolph W. Giuliani as its presidential nominee despite his support for abortion rights, a coalition of influential Christian conservatives is threatening to back a third-party candidate.

The threat emerged from a group that broke away for separate discussions at a meeting Saturday in Salt Lake City of the Council for National Policy, a secretive conservative networking group. Participants said the smaller group included James C. Dobson of Focus on the Family, who is perhaps its most influential member; Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council; Richard A. Viguerie, the direct-mail pioneer; and dozens of other politically oriented conservative Christians.

Almost everyone present at the smaller group’s meeting expressed support for a written resolution stating that “if the Republican Party nominates a pro-abortion candidate we will consider running a third-party candidate,” participants said.

The participants said that the group chose the qualified term “consider” because it had not yet identified an alternative candidate, but that it was largely united in its plans to bolt the party if Mr. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, became the nominee. The participants spoke on condition of anonymity because the Council for National Policy meeting and the smaller meeting were secret, but they said members of the smaller group intended to publicize the resolution.

The CNP leak to the New York Times focussed on the Abortion issue, but I’d say that’s merely one of a number of important reasons that the movement conservative core will never support the former New York City mayor.

Giuliani’s record is that of an opportunist, statist, and populist politician. He originally came to prominence via a series of questionable prosecutions of prominent figures in the financial industry, conducted ruthlessly and in the spirit of class warfare.

Giuliani was so liberal that, back in 1994 when nearly everyone mistook George Pataki for a conservative, Giuliani tried to torpedo his gubernatorial candidacy with a last-minute endorsement of Mario Cuomo.

Neither opponents of abortion nor defenders of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms can have confidence in Giuliani’s current promises or future court appointments.

Nominating Giuliani would be a far greater disaster than nominating Nixon was. A Giuliani nomination would reverse the results of the Conservative Movement’s long and ultimately victorious struggle for control of the Republican Party, and return national control of the party to Northeastern liberal Republicans-in Name-Only.

Giuliani is an unacceptable Republican nominee, period. Real conservatives, both libertarian and traditionalist, will not support him.