David Kahane, at National Review, observes signs of a double-standard flourishing in the ultra-affluent communities of the Hollywood elite.

I was driving through Beverly Hills yesterday, on my way out to Malibu, and the signs in the yards caught my eye.

Not the “For Sale” signs. …

No, the other signs. You know, the ones that say “ARMED RESPONSE.” (They’re usually just to the left of the “Kerry/Edwards” signs.) Not only in Beverly Hills, of course, but in Santa Monica, Hancock Park, Brentwood, Bel Air, and all the best neighborhoods in town. The signs that advertise our private-security services.

You see, although we in Hollywood are personally opposed to firearms, and passionately support gun control, we have to be realistic about Bush’s America and protect our families and, more important, our possessions from burglars, stalkers, muggers, street people, the homeless, immigrants, the Christian Right, and tourists from Kansas City.

That’s why we were all so taken aback by the recent D.C. circuit-court ruling, which found that the residents of Washington are constitutionally entitled, as individuals, to possess firearms. It’s bad enough that every criminal in L.A. County has unlimited access to guns — now they want to give them to ordinary people, too?

Everyone knows perfectly well that the Bill of Rights was meant to protect the federal government against the depredations of the citizens — if you don‘t believe me, just ask senators McCain and Feingold …

Read the whole thing.

Debra J. Saunders, at the San Francisco Chronicle, explains why conservatives will not be crying if democrats’ attacks force Alberto Gonzales to resign.

If Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigns over the U.S. attorneys flap, many Republicans will not be sorry to see him go.

It’s not just that some believe Gonzales made a huge mistake in claiming that he asked for the resignations of eight U.S. attorneys for “performance-related” reasons — which was bad form. Or as Washington attorney Victoria Toensing, who worked in the Reagan administration, noted, “Replacing at-will employees should be Government 101. This is not a difficult process. They flunked smart.”

Forget the U.S. attorneys flap. Many on the right believe that Gonzales has been lax in enforcing immigration law, not been sufficiently partisan, and that he’s not particularly competent, either. They wonder: With friends like this, who needs enemies?

For example, some Republicans wonder why Gonzales did not include U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton of the Western District of Texas on his got-to-go list. Sutton, you may recall, prosecuted two Border Patrol agents, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, for shooting at a fleeing drug smuggler, covering up the incident and depriving the Mexican smuggler of his constitutional rights. Many voters are outraged that the two agents are now serving 11-year and 12-year sentences.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Huntingdon Beach, is incensed that Gonzales did not stop Sutton from throwing the book at two good agents — strike one — while Sutton granted immunity to a man who was smuggling 743 pounds of marijuana into the country. Strike two.

Rohrabacher told me that his frustration with the Bushies had been mounting. “I kept quiet for a long time,” he said. “But when he put the lives of these two Border Patrol agents on the line and decided he was going to squash them like a bug, that was the end of it.”

The cherry on top: Gonzales failed to protect Ramos and Compean when they entered prisons filled with the sort of criminals they used to put away. One night, gang members at the Yazoo City Federal Correctional Complex in Mississippi beat up Ramos. Said Rohrabacher, “The attorney general knew and knows today that these two men’s lives are at risk. Instead of moving forward to try to send them to a minimum security prison or let them get out on bond (while they appeal), he has dug his heels in.” Strike three. …

Then there is former Clinton adviser Sandy Berger. It drives conservatives crazy that the feds prosecuted Scooter Libby for lying about leaking the identity of ex-CIA operative Valerie Wilson, when the feds cut a generous plea bargain with Berger for destroying classified documents.

Berger, who in 2003 destroyed classified National Archives documents relating to the Clinton administration’s terrorism policies, received no penalty: No jail time, just a fine, 100 hours of community service — and he even gets his security clearance back after three years.

Earlier this year, Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., charged the Justice Department with giving Berger a “free pass.” …

As one conservative lawyer, who did not want to be named, told me, the right wants an attorney general who is a “pugilist.” As for Gonzales, he said, “All he does is walk backward and apologize.”

Read the whole thing.

South Africa has the highest incidence of reported rape in the world. One in three women questioned in a recent Johannesburg poll said they had been raped in the last year.

In response, a new invention will soon be marketed, a female-used condom-like device with teeth.

Some liberals are outraged.

This is a medieval instrument, based on male-hating notions and fundamentally misunderstands the nature of rape and violence against women in this society,” said Charlene Smith, one of South Africa’s most prominent campaigners against rape.

“It is vengeful, horrible, and disgusting. The woman who invented this needs help.”

Gary Shapiro, in the New York Sun, discusses Barack Obama’s collaboration with Harvard Law School’s ultra-liberal Constitutional Law Professor Larry Tribe in the production of a 1989 Law Review article employing scientific metaphors to justify bizarre and over-reaching interpretations of the Constitution.

You thought liberal Supreme Court justices’ interpretations of the Constitution were bad enough now? Just imagine new Obama-appointed justices following Larry Tribe’s suggestion of applying a little Heisenberg to Constitutional jurisprudence.

Is Barack Obama a space cadet? The man who would become senator of Illinois and a top Democratic presidential contender was credited for editorial or research assistance in a page-one footnote of what may be the zaniest-titled article ever published by the Harvard Law Review: “The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn From Modern Physics,” authored by noted legal scholar Laurence Tribe.

The 39-page densely argued treatise — think “The Paper Chase” meets “Star Trek” — argues that constitutional jurisprudence should be updated in a similar way that Einstein’s theory of relativity replaced Newtonian mechanics, a view that would release judges from the original intent of the Founders of America. Published in 1989, with help of the much younger and politically greener Mr. Obama (a few others are also thanked in that footnote), the article is sprawling with references to cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz and physicists Stephen Hawking and Werner Heisenberg.

In 1990 Mr. Obama became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. The long-ago article could indicate his views on the Constitution, which, if he is elected, could come into play in such matters as his choice of nominees to the Supreme Court. …

Mr. Tribe employs this analogy to argue for a more expansive view of what constitutes governmental action. He examines legal cases involving child abuse, suburban white flight from suburbs, and abortion, asking what the state’s role was in shaping the legal environment.

A Yale-trained lawyer who earned his Ph.D. in mathematics at New York University, Elisha Kobre, said Mr. Tribe is “making a reasonable — but debatable — legal point that courts should intervene not only when government directly infringes individual rights but also when people are adversely affected by existing social structures that he asserts have been created or perpetuated by the government.” Mr. Kobre added that while Mr. Tribe’s physics analogy did not particularly add to or enlighten a point that others have made before, it was nice to see a lawyer managing to incorporate ideas of science into legal theory. …

If Mr. Obama captures the White House, he might not curve space but may settle for setting aside a high-altitude seat on the Supreme Court for his former teacher, Mr. Tribe, who is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard.

Whether James Madison and the other Founders would have had such a benign view of Mr. Tribe’s theory is another matter, though.

Read the whole thing.

The Jerusalem Post reports that the 15 British Naval personnel were specifically taken by Iran to use as hostages to trade for the release of members of Iranian Intelligence captured by the US at Irbil.

An Iranian military official said Saturday afternoon that the 15 detained British sailors “confessed” to illegally entering Iranian waters.

The sailors, taken at gunpoint Friday by Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Al Quds soldiers were captured intentionally and are to be used as bargaining chips to be used for the release of five Iranians who were arrested at the Iranian consul in Irbil, Iraq by US troops, an Iranian official told the daily paper Asharq al-Awsat on Saturday.

In addition, a senior Iranian military official said Saturday that the decision to capture the soldiers was made during a March 18 emergency meeting of the High Council for Security following a report by the Al-Quds contingent commander, Kassem Suleimani, to the Iranian chief of the armed forces, Maj.Gen. Hassan Firouz Abadi. In the report, according to Asharq al-Awsat, Suleimani warned Abadi that Al Quds and Revolutionary Guards’ operations had become transparent to US and British intelligence following the arrest of a senior Al Quds officer and four of his deputies in Irbil.

According to the official, Iran was worried that its detained people would leak sensitive intelligence information.

Foreign embassies in Teheran are preparing for emergency evacuations.

So, the interesting question becomes will Britain and the US bow to the mullahs and make a hostage exchange, or will the domestically-embattled Western leaders confront Iran in earnest?

Brad Warbiany has been reading liberal journalists and democrats, and (worse!) taking their nonsense seriously.

Brad writes:

Fear has become the name of the political game, and the stakes are high. Unlike World War II, we’re not asked to ration sugar or observe meatless meals. Instead, we’re asked to suspend habeas corpus, willingly submit to National Security Letters and warrantless domestic wiretapping. Of course, we’re asked to provide implicit trust to the government to faithfully protect us, while acting as watchdogs to snitch on our untrustworthy family, friends, and neighbors at the first sign of wrongdoing. We’re watching as crucial controls on government, going back to the Magna Carta in 1215, are being removed…

There was never, ever any occasion from 1215 to the present day, in which prisoners of war had the benefit of habeas corpus. Still less, spies, saboteurs, and other illegal combatants, who did not even enjoy the privileges and immunities associated with the status of prisoner of war, and who were traditionally executed out of hand, by hanging.

What should still be regarded as determinative is the Supreme Court’s decision in Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U.S. 763 (1950), which held:

Modern American law has come a long way since the time when outbreak of war made every enemy national an outlaw, subject to both public and private slaughter, cruelty and plunder. But even by the most magnanimous view, our law does not abolish inherent distinctions recognized throughout the civilized world between citizens and aliens, nor between aliens of friendly and of enemy allegiance, nor between resident enemy aliens who have submitted themselves to our laws and non-resident enemy aliens who at all times have remained with, and adhered to, enemy governments. …

But, in extending constitutional protections beyond the citizenry, the Court has been at pains to point out that it was the alien’s presence within its territorial jurisdiction that gave the Judiciary power to act. …

If this [Fifth] Amendment invests enemy aliens in unlawful hostile action against us with immunity from military trial, it puts them in a more protected position than our own soldiers. …

We hold that the Constitution does not confer a right of personal security or an immunity from military trial and punishment upon an alien enemy engaged in the hostile service of a government at war with the United States.

Brad Warbiany continues:

The time comes that I have to ask myself a simple question: Is it worth it?

What level of uncertainty of a terrorist attack should we allow in our lives in order to be certain that we’re not subjects of a police state? It has become a sad state of affairs when I’m more concerned that the actions of my own government will cause me trouble than the actions of extremists who have sworn an intent to kill me. In a world where we’re asked to submit to intrusive surveillance on a daily basis, and further to do so gladly and “for our own protection”, I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to simply take my chances without their blanket of security?

Might there be better ways of reducing terrorism than turning our own country into a prison, while engaging in a foreign policy which causes those who didn’t hate us 5 years ago to start? Nearly 40 years of effort have proven that our tactics in fighting a war on drugs have proven futile and counterproductive, while damaging American society in the process. Should we take a step back and evaluate whether our tactics fighting international terrorism have been futile and counterproductive, while damaging American society in the process?

“Turning our own country into a prison” is just a bit of an exaggeration, is it not?

What intrusive surveillance has the gentleman experienced? I wonder, outside the revolting and irrational practices of airline security, which have gotten worse recently, but which long predate 9/11 and the current administration, going back to the 1960s when Castro’s Cuban regime initiated the practice of airline hijacking.

The government is widely believed to be practicing some forms of mechanical surveillance, data-mining electronic and telephonic communications, in search of messages transmitted between terrorists.

This sort of thing has been going on for a very long time, all the way back to the WWII era, when the predecessor agency of the NSA was opening every telegram.

In 1945 Project SHAMROCK was initiated to obtain copies of all telegraphic information exiting or entering the United States. With the full cooperation of RCA, ITT and Western Union (representing almost all of the telegraphic traffic in the US at the time), the NSA’s predecessor and later the NSA itself were provided with daily microfilm copies of all incoming, outgoing and transiting telegraphs.

Are either Mr. Warbiany or myself really inconvenienced by the NSA’s Echelon program datamining our emails, presumably in search of such obvious giveaway signals as the presence of provocative texts like “Allahu Akhbar!”, “the anthrax is on the way,” or “the nuclear bomb goes off at noon”? Our emails are, in a sense, “read” by machines already simply in the process of being transmitted across the Net.

Do I really even care if some clerical employee pulls my sarcastic “Allahu Akhbar!” email out of the pile, and eyeballs it for a fraction of a second? Not much. In fact, a lot less than I like having to remove my shoes at the airport.

It is somewhat difficult for those of us on the sidelines to evaluate sensibly the necessity and propriety of the secret operations of our intelligences services in time of war. We do know, however, that no successful incident of mass terrorism has taken place on US soil since 9/11, and we have good reason to believe that there are a lot of people trying. So somebody, somewhere, must be doing something right.

As to international opinion, what can one expect? The international leftwing intelligentsia, and its media outlets, have always hated the United States. They hate the United States more vigorously when the United States actually does something in the world, it’s true. But it would be insane to base US foreign policy upon the preferences and desires of our rivals and adversaries, on the one hand; and even worse to base it upon the goofy and pernicious world view of the international community of leftist bien pensants on the other.

James Bradley’s Flags of Our Fathers reveals that his father’s buddy PFC Ralph Ignatowski, in the course of the battle for Iwo Jima, was captured by the Japanese, who pulled him into one of their caves.

Over the course of three days, the Japanese tortured the unlucky private.

When his body was eventually discovered, fellow marines found that his fingernails had been pulled out, his tongue cut out, his ears cut off, his eyes gouged out, his teeth smashed in, his arms broken, and his genitalia cut off and stuffed into his mouth, before he had been bayoneted to death.

Do you think the War Department in 1945 told his mother and father in Milwaukee exactly what happened to their son Ralph?

In the past, the practice of telling families that their soldier had died instantly, in the course of performing a vital military mission, was universal. No one was going to tell some mom and dad back home that their son’s death was a meaningless accident, or a grieving widow that her husband died screaming.

Death occurs commonly in war, and not all soldiers’ deaths are beautiful, painless, or even intentional. Accidental casualties from friendly fire have always occurred. The outcome of the American Civil War might possibly have been different, if General Thomas Jonathan Jackson had not been mortally wounded by fire from a North Carolina Regiment in the closing hours of the Confederate victory at Chancellorsville, May 2, 1863.

Did Stonewall Jackson’s widow demand an investigation or insist that those unfortunate North Carolinians should be punished? Did General Lee conduct a formal inquiry to determine who exactly was to blame? They did not. People used to be mature enough to recognize that unfortunate accidents occur in war.

The conniving opportunists of the MSM are clearly intelligent enough to know all this perfectly well, but the accidental death of Corporal Pat Tillman was deliberately publicized and manufactured into a large-scale scandal by the press specifically in order to damage the American military and undermine its efforts in the war in the Middle East. The Tillman family has behaved disgracefully as well, demonstrating a complete absence of both the character and patriotism which distinguished their son.

Now the US Military is responding to all this unseemly melodrama by delivering up the required victims for public sacrifice.

Thanks to our utterly corrupt media, and one selfish and not-very-sensible family, henceforth we can count on reliable reportage of exactly what happened to US casualties reaching their loved ones on the homefront.

“Yes, Mrs. Smith, your son Joey was burned to death by napalm. No, his death was excruciatingly painful and took a very, very long time. I’m sorry, as it happened, his unit was assigned to undertake a futile attack on a target which ultimately proved to be of no military value, and our own air units mistakenly bombed them. We’re very sorry.”

Visiting some environmentalist whackjobs in Manhattan, the New York Times’ Penelope Green found:

DINNER was the usual affair on Thursday night in Apartment 9F in an elegant prewar on Lower Fifth Avenue. There was shredded cabbage with fruit-scrap vinegar; mashed parsnips and yellow carrots with local butter and fresh thyme; a terrific frittata; then homemade yogurt with honey and thyme tea, eaten under the greenish flickering light cast by two beeswax candles and a fluorescent bulb.

Michelle Conlin rides her scooter, even in the snow. “Rain is worse,” she said.

A sour odor hovered oh-so-slightly in the air, the faint tang, not wholly unpleasant, that is the mark of the home composter. Isabella Beavan, age 2, staggered around the neo-Modern furniture — the Eames chairs, the brown velvet couch, the Lucite lamps and the steel cafe table upon which dinner was set — her silhouette greatly amplified by her organic cotton diapers in their enormous boiled-wool, snap-front cover.

A visitor avoided the bathroom because she knew she would find no toilet paper there.

The nincompoop has a web site. All this idiocy does, of course, have a motive beyond mere self-righteousness. Both a book and a film are in the works.

Abstinence should be no problem for all those nerdy types at Harvard. They won’t be running into a lot of opportunities to sin anyway.

CNN story.

Meanwhile, at Yale….

La plus ça change, la plus c’est la même chose.

Breaking News

Bloomberg:

Iran seized 15 British naval personnel who were conducting “routine boarding operations” in Iraqi waters, the U.K. Ministry of Defence said.

“The boarding party had completed a successful inspection of a merchant ship when they and their two boats were surrounded and escorted by Iranian vessels into Iranian territorial waters,” the ministry said in an e-mailed statement. “We are urgently pursuing this matter with the Iranian authorities at the highest level.”

The incident occurred in the Arabian Gulf at about 10:30 a.m. Iraq time today, the ministry said. It gave no details of the units and vessels involved. Britain is demanding the immediate return of the military personnel and vessels, and Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett has summoned the Iranian ambassador in London, the ministry said.

It’s not the first time U.K. naval forces have clashed with Iran in the region. In June 2004, Iran held eight British servicemen for three days after capturing them in the Shatt al- Arab waterway that runs along the border between Iran and Iraq.

Iran, which also captured three British vessels in the 2004 incident, said the Britons were in Iranian waters and paraded them blindfolded on television, forcing them to make statements apologizing for their “mistake.” The U.K. crews said they were escorted forcibly into Iranian waters.

Even the Washington Post draws the line at the shameful conduct of the democrat house leadership using bribes funded by the US Treasury to buy votes in favor of unconditional and irresponsible withdrawal.

TODAY THE House of Representatives is due to vote on a bill that would grant $25 million to spinach farmers in California. The legislation would also appropriate $75 million for peanut storage in Georgia and $15 million to protect Louisiana rice fields from saltwater. More substantially, there is $120 million for shrimp and menhaden fishermen, $250 million for milk subsidies, $500 million for wildfire suppression and $1.3 billion to build levees in New Orleans.

Altogether the House Democratic leadership has come up with more than $20 billion in new spending, much of it wasteful subsidies to agriculture or pork barrel projects aimed at individual members of Congress. At the tail of all of this logrolling and political bribery lies this stinger: Representatives who support the bill — for whatever reason — will be voting to require that all U.S. combat troops leave Iraq by August 2008, regardless of what happens during the next 17 months or whether U.S. commanders believe a pullout at that moment protects or endangers U.S. national security, not to mention the thousands of American trainers and Special Forces troops who would remain behind.

The Democrats claim to have a mandate from voters to reverse the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq. Yet the leadership is ready to piece together the votes necessary to force a fateful turn in the war by using tactics usually dedicated to highway bills or the Army Corps of Engineers budget.

In what the Providence Journal (if asked for login, use BugMeNot) describes as “a show of sensitivity,” the nincompoop Superintendent of a Tiverton, Rhode Island Middle School has banned the Easter Bunny.

It’s not that he has anything against rabbits, or even eggs, he’s just worried about the use of the word “Easter.”

The Easter Bunny was to have made a stop at a craft fair at the Tiverton Middle School tomorrow, appearing for photos with students as part of a fundraising effort sponsored by the school’s Parent-Teacher Council.

But Schools Supt. William Rearick called a halt to the use of the word “Easter” at a school event, just as the word “Christmas” is out of bounds in school publications and activities.

Instead of the Easter Bunny, the Parent-Teacher Council booth will offer photos with Peter Rabbit.

Similarly, Rearick said, he has told officials of the Tiverton Land Trust that a flier inviting children to an egg hunt cannot include the word “Easter.”..

Rearick nixed the Easter Bunny in response to a complaint from Burk, vice chairman of the School Committee.

Burk said yesterday that the appearance of an Easter Bunny at a school event would violate federal prohibitions against the public schools “soliciting or encouraging religious activities or participating in such activities.”

Read the whole thing.