Tim Rutten, writing in the LA Times, discusses why the most of the MSM (including the LA Times) did not see fit to publish the cartoons:

This paper has ample company. The New York Times, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and USA Today all have declined to run the cartoons because many Muslims find them offensive. The people who run Associated Press, NBC, CBS, CNN and National Public Radio’s website agree. So far, the only U.S. news organizations to provide a look at what this homicidal fuss is about are the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Austin American-Statesman, the Fox cable network and ABC.

Among those who decline to show the caricatures, only one, the Boston Phoenix, has been forthright enough to admit that its editors made the decision “out of fear of retaliation from the international brotherhood of radical and bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do. This is, frankly, our primary reason for not publishing any of the images in question. Simply stated, we are being terrorized, and as deeply as we believe in the principles of free speech and a free press, we could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy.”

There is something wonderfully clarifying about honesty.

Loni Hancock thinks coursing is “barbaric,” and the practioners of such a practice are insensitive. Here’s a passage by the author of the earliest surviving account of the sport, written in an era when crucifixion of human beings was a routine punishment.

The true sportsman does not take out his dogs to destroy the hares, but for the sake of the race, and the contest between the dogs and the hare, and is glad if the hare escapes. And if she flies to some brake that is too thin to hide her, and seems to decline the contest, he will call off his dogs, especially if she has run well. I myself often, when I have followed the course on horseback, and have come up in time enough to save the hare alive, have taken her from the dogs, and tied them up, and let her go. And sometimes, when I have come up too late to save her, I have not been able to avoid striking myself on the head in chagrin at so good an antagonist being killed by the dogs.

—Arrian (c.87 – After 145 A.D.), Cynegetica, 16:4-5.

Dean Wolstenhome, Greyhounds Coursing a Hare

The self-styled I-Team (“I” for investigation, get it?) of KGO-TV in San Francisco hit pay dirt Superbowl weekend. While couch-potatoes all over America swilled beer, munched pretzels, and watched steroid-enhanced gladiatorial combat over the pigskin spheroid, Ted Baxter discovered that a tiny minority of Americans were still afield in California pursuing the ancient sport of coursing.

Coursing is a very old and traditional form of hunting, whose literature goes back to the 2nd century A.D., cultivated both in Christian Europe and in the Islamic Middle East, consisting of the reduction to possession of game (typically, the hare) by the pursuit of gazehounds, i.e., dogs which hunt by sight. Some breeds typically used in coursing are greyhounds and saluqi.

Ted, of course, was engaged in a more modern, and far less sporting, type of hunting: the pursuit and elimination of the unpopular minority by a pack of fools and bigots down a trail of prejudice, guided by curs like Ted himself. Ted Baxter in this case being an orthodontically-gleaming opportunist named Dan Noyes, who preens and congratulates himself publicly for his reporter’s instinct (I’d call it something else), and for telling a compelling story.

The compelling story consists of the survival of a “blood sport” within the Bay Area, an esoteric and little-known activity, incomprehensible to the urban masses, with the controversial feature common to all blood sports, including fishing, of the death of the quarry, at least on those occasions –often in the minority– when the pursuit is successful. To city boys like Ted, meat is produced in government-supervised nutrition factories, where it is processed, packaged, and then shipped to convenient supermarkets. The death of an animal is unthinkable. As one city-dweller once said to me: how could you be so heartless as to kill an animal, when you can eat a hamburger at McDonald’s?

Ted Baxter’s indignant news story, which opines: “That’s got to be a tough way to die for a rabbit.” implicitly imagines that aging jack rabbits retire to nursing homes, collect old age pensions, and die in bed.

Ted has no idea that, in California, jack rabbits breed year round, producing a litter of up to 8 leverets every six weeks or so. Females nurse the young for only two or three days, and then go back to making more jack rabbits. Crash production is essential, because the life of the jack rabbit is characterically short. Few jack rabbits live to the ripe old age of one year. The jack rabbit is a principal staple of the diet of coyotes, bobcats, foxes (red, grey, and kit), minks, martens, fishers, ferrets, mountain lions, bears, weasels, and numerous species hawks and owls and snakes; and are commonly killed by motor vehicles and by domestic dogs and cats.

It sounds terrible and barbarous to some busy-body old lady, left-wing state legislator from Berkeley, like Loni Hancock to whom Ted went running to tattle, that jack rabbits do sometimes suffer the unenviable fate (as Ted notes) of being slain by the jaws of the greyhounds. But, once Comrade Hancock introduces (see her blog), and in theory passes, her bill banning coursing in California, the jack rabbit saved by her efforts and those of noble Ted Baxter (and Channel’s 7’s crack I-Team) gets to run only a short distance further down the sunny California meadow, and, whoops! down come a great big red-tailed hawk which slays him with his talons, and tears him to pieces with his beak. Or up comes the hungry coyote, whose jaws are not readily distinguishable from those of greyhound.

The elimination of this ancient, complex and honorable tradition will, in reality, spare few pangs to jack rabbits.

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Steve Bodio also comments on this classic manifestation of the well-known tolerance of California’s Bay Area.

Laughing at Europe in the Weekly Standard:

I AM JUST NOW CHOPPING up my Danish modern coffee table and throwing the pieces into the fireplace. I want to show my support for Muslims outraged by publication of Prophet Muhammad caricatures in Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten newspaper. All over the Muslim world there are riots and boycotts of Danish products. And I join the Muslims in solidarity (although, come on, you’re Muslims, you shouldn’t be drinking Carlsberg anyway). Next into the flames go my kids’ Legos, invented in Denmark. They’ll be followed by the satisfying smash of my wife’s Royal Copenhagen dinner plates.

I haven’t actually looked at the satirical drawings. Mainstream American media, recognizing that the First Amendment encompasses the right to shut up, have left them unpublished. I guess I could find them on the Internet except our computer was attached to Bang & Olufsen speakers. I seem to have crashed the system while yanking wires. But I’m sure these depictions of Muhammad will infuriate me as much as they infuriate Muslims, if for somewhat different reasons. The cartoons are badly drawn and not very funny. I know that sight unseen, because the cartoons are European.

Big Pharoah had a revelation of some new commandments for Muslims, including the all-important number 7:

7.Thou shall NOT riot over cartoons published 4 months ago. Try to riot over cartoons published 2 months ago. At least it might make more sense that way.

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Hat tip to FrancoAlemán via Glenn Reynolds.

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The same FrancoAlemán posts pictures of the blasphemous image of Jesus holding a Phoenix missile. An “artist” named Oscar Seco is insulting the Christian religion at an art fair being held outside Madrid. Quick! start the rioting, and boycott Spain.

(Arrived by email today:)

A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost.

She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below. She shouted to him, “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.

The sailor consulted his portable GPS and replied, “You’re in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above a ground elevation of 2346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.

She rolled her eyes and yelled down, “You must be a Republican.”

“I am,” replied the man. “How did you know?”

“Well,” answered the balloonist, “everything you told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to do with your information, and I’m still lost. Frankly, you’ve been no help to me.

The man smiled and responded, “Then you must be a Democrat.

“I am,” replied the balloonist. “How did you know?”

“Well,” said the man, “you don’t know where you are or where you’re going. You’ve risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise that you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. You’re in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but, somehow, now it’s my fault.”

The Washington Post today reported on an article by Paul R. Pillar in Foreign Affairs which criticizes the Bush Administration for “politicizing intelligence.”

Pillar’s basic contention is that the Bush Administration didn’t listen to the mandarins at the CIA. They cherry-picked analysis to support their own policy decisions, which were made independently of the opinions and preferences of far-better-qualified people like himself.

In Pillar’s view, the intelligence community has interests and responsibilities of its own, which need to be pursued without being in thrall to the whims of temporarily elected amateurs:

The intelligence community should be repositioned to reflect the fact that influence and relevance flow not just from face time in the Oval Office, but also from credibility with Congress and, most of all, with the American public. The community needs to remain in the executive branch but be given greater independence and a greater ability to communicate with those other constituencies (fettered only by security considerations, rather than by policy agendas). An appropriate model is the Federal Reserve, which is structured as a quasi-autonomous body overseen by a board of governors with long fixed terms.

In a slightly more polite way than the noisiest and most arrogant of the pouting spooks, Pillar is saying exactly the same thing. American foreign policy, decisions of peace and war, belong to an internal government elite, connected with and mirroring a national elite, not to temporarily elected parvenus with unconventional views on these matters, representing a bunch of yahoos from fly-over states.

At the very least, the intelligence community, if mean-spiritedly denied its own liberum veto, should really be entitled to cross the aisles and start vigorously criticizing and actively opposing any elected Administration’s policies, while retaining complete job security. A position in the US intelligence community ought to be rather like a tenured professorship at Harvard. And the collective body of that community should be, in relation to the US government, much like the Harvard faculty. When embarassed by the statements, policies, or behavior of a Bush, (shudder!) a Cheney, they ought to be able to circulate petitions advocating his removal, and vote on motions of censure.

Frankly, the more I read of this sort of arrogance, the more I feel like I’m revisiting some of the earlier sections of Milton’s Paradise Lost.

One of the correspondents quoted a medieval verse today concerning St. Roch:

Exempt de blame
rendit son ame
en bon chretien
dans les bras de son chien

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I had to look him up.

St. Roch was reportedly born 1295 in Montpellier to a rich merchant family. He became a hermit, and spent most of his life on pilgrimage. In Piacenza, he caught the plague while tending the sick, and survived miraculously, having been fed in the woods by a dog. He is consequently a patron of the plague-stricken. Often represented attended by a dog bearing a loaf of bread in his mouth. Feast: 16 August.

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Penn State Professor Michael Mann’s famous hockey-stick graph allegedly demonstrating dramatic Northern Hemisphere temperature increases in recent times is one of the best known evidentiary exhibits cited when the case for the reality of Global Warming is being made. Mann’s tree-ring-based temperature chart first appeared in a 1999 paper and was rapidly adopted as the prevailing orthodoxy in climate science, despite its revolutionary revaluation of the significance of known climatic events over the past millenium.

The hockey stick has drawn serious criticism in scientific circles, and as the Wall Street Journal reports, Republican Congressional inquiries have finally produced an upcoming review by the National Academy of Sciences.

An 11-member academy panel will now study the accuracy and importance of such research, in particular the work of Dr. Mann, whose hockey-stick graph was included in a report issued by the United Nations in 2001. An academy spokesman said the report would be completed in about four months.

Dr. Mann’s critics, including two amateur Canadian climate researchers, say his work contains serious inaccuracies. Dr. Mann has denied that, but the debate has prompted several climate researchers to take a fresh look at temperature reconstructions.

Ideological instrusions into academic research leading to flawed methodologies and fudged results, first celebrated and acclaimed, but ultimately provoking major scrutiny and being debunked, have occurred before. Dr. Mann’s hockey-stick is likely soon to be joining Dr. Bellisles’ study of American probate records in the Academic world’s rogues gallery of exploded fabrications.

Murray Waas, at National Journal, is reporting that:

Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been “authorized” by Cheney and other White House “superiors” in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration’s use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records…

Libby also indicated what he will offer as a broad defense during his upcoming criminal trial: that Vice President Cheney and other senior Bush administration officials had earlier encouraged and authorized him to share classified information with journalists to build public support for going to war. Later, after the war began in 2003, Cheney authorized Libby to release additional classified information, including details of the NIE, to defend the administration’s use of prewar intelligence in making the case for war.

Libby testified to the grand jury that he had been authorized to share parts of the NIE with journalists in the summer of 2003 as part of an effort to rebut charges then being made by former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson that the Bush administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make a public case for war.

All this seems to go without saying.

L’Affaire Plame has been operating from the outset on the basis of a kind of bizarre hyper-legalism, in which senior officials of the Executive Branch of the government are being targeted for indictment, and prosecuted, on a strange theory that the principal functionaries of government, the ultimate users and proprietors of classified information, can be deemed to have injured or offended the government, i.e., themselves, by using classified information to inform the public.

But, of course, the Executive Branch is itself the actual owner of all US classified information, and the employer of every participant, so we are regarding the preposterous unfolding of a scenario in which subordinate members of the Executive (the CIA, the Department of Justice) are seeking to indict and/or convict their superiors (The Vice President’s Chief of Staff; and in the left’s happiest and wildest dreams, also the President’s Policy Chief of Staff, Karl Rove, and the Vice President himself).

Obviously the Executive Branch at its highest levels ought to be (absent a particular law) assumed to be entitled to use classified information in any manner it finds necessary or desirable in support of the policies of the Government, i.e., itself. At its most senior levels, the Executive branch can, in theory, classify or declassify at will.

So how can the Executive Branch be prosecuting the Executive Branch over its own classified information?

It is as if we find there were a dispute among the king’s servants in the royal castle over the proper arrangement of some table settings, and a coterie of disgruntled footmen had complained to the castle warden that the king’s chancellor’s seneschal was misusing the silver, and were trying to persuade him that the chancellor should be held responsible for this outrage as well, along with another principal crown minister, and all of them should be sacked and flung into the dungeon for their offense against the footmen.

The only possible rational basis for a possible crime would have to be the Intelligence Identities Act of 1982, which was enacted to protect genuinely covert intelligence officers, working overseas and consequently particularly vulnerable, from being endangered by having their identities disclosed by adversaries of the US Government. There has considerable public confusion concerning Mrs. Wilson’s employment status, but public information makes it clear enough that she has been working in Washington for more than the five years, stipulated in the Act.

In relation to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the special counsel refers to Plame as “a person whose identity the CIA was making specific efforts to conceal and who had carried out covert work overseas within the last 5 years”. (8/27/04 Aff. at 28 n.15.)

Mr. Fitzgerald’s unspecific reference to Mrs. Wilson’s “covert overseas work” is very probably merely a desperate and highly disingenuous attempt to obfuscate the inapplicability of the statute serving as the basis for his entire investigation by so defining Mrs. Wilson’s employment as ipso facto covert, and treating any sort of trip abroad on Counterproliferation issues for consultation, or even conferencing, however brief, as sufficient to meet the terms of the statute.

If there is no violation of the 1982 Act, there was never a crime in the first place, and the entire affair represents a Kafka-esque spectacle of out-of-control partisan elements of government run wild, of government devouring its own tail.

Don’t touch the walls, evade the blue blocks.

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