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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go, PJM. Up the Revolution!

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Found it. That earlier one read:

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

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

I found the Times’ choice of blogs interesting.

The first blog quoted was: A Star from Mosul, written by “Aunt Najma,” a 17 year old school girl, who has been posting from war-torn Mosul, deep in Sunni Iraq. It is impossible not to like this charming young girl (proud of recently becoming an aunt), who posts fairly regularly concerning the dangers and inconveniences the war has brought to her life. When I began reading her, she was apolitical, but in recent months as the fighting neared her home, her postings became anti-American. Najma reports that a Mufti informed residents of Mosul this time that voting was a religious duty, and Najma’s family responded enthusiastically. Her election post ended on a patriotic note.

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The Times’ second blog was predictable. It was, of course, Riverbend’s Baghdad Burning. Its author describes Baghdad Burning as a “girl blog,” and uses as an epigraph: I’ll meet you ’round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend. But Baghdad Burning consistently features a lot more strident and inflammatory anti-Americanism than it does healing and mending. This one was a dead certain cinch for NYT selection.

Riverbend tells us in the Times:

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

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

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

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

“The kid himself” is not a high volume blogger. He hasn’t posted since Monday, December 12, and his posts have nothing to say about politics. Way to go, Times, there’s a great job of journalism, really getting the real inside dope on the Iraqi point of view on the election.

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No. 4 was Hassan Karuffa, a civil engineering student, and the author of A Star from Mosul‘s cousin, who writes An Average Iraqi. Hassan, like his cousin, was much more enthusiastic about this election. He does describe some of the electoral slates who were running in a recent posting. Alas! for the Times, Hassan too strikes a positive note:

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

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

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

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

Section 2 of Article 3 of the Geneva Convention:

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

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

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

(c) That of carrying arms openly;

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

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

As Mackubin Thomas Owens writes:

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

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

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

Jeff Goldstein posts this comment from Steve in Houston:

If I’m a terrorist, feeling all bummed by my comrades getting greased along the Euphrates, I’m really trying to find a silver lining. Fortunately, the infidels are cooperating:

— I now no longer need fear any kind of physical coercion; the Dems have basically put me in the same position as Nigel Tufnel’s guitar: It’s never been played. Don’t touch it. Don’t even point. Don’t even look at it.

— As a potential martyr, I know I won’t need to comply with a treaty I never signed; I won’t be incarcerated for much more than a fortnight; I won’t be returned to my country of origin; and I won’t be placed in some allahforsaken Caribbean gulag where they pee within 20 feet of my plastic-encased Koran.
— I also know that if the kufr find my Blackberry, they can’t really do much about checking on my contacts at Harvard and Georgetown. I’ll lose my speed dial to Ahmenedijad (sp?) and Dana Milbank’s (or is it Dana Priest’s?) e-mail address, but I can always rebuild my contacts list.

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

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

AP reports:

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

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