World’s oldest Rock group: the Zimmers.

3:40 video

Unidentified “US officials” leak to Britain’s Guardian.

Iran is secretly forging ties with al-Qaida elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition forces intended to tip a wavering US Congress into voting for full military withdrawal, US officials say.

“Iran is fighting a proxy war in Iraq and it’s a very dangerous course for them to be following. They are already committing daily acts of war against US and British forces,” a senior US official in Baghdad warned. “They [Iran] are behind a lot of high-profile attacks meant to undermine US will and British will, such as the rocket attacks on Basra palace and the Green Zone [in Baghdad]. The attacks are directed by the Revolutionary Guard who are connected right to the top [of the Iranian government]. …

US officials now say they have firm evidence that Tehran has switched tack as it senses a chance of victory in Iraq. In a parallel development, they say they also have proof that Iran has reversed its previous policy in Afghanistan and is now supporting and supplying the Taliban’s campaign against US, British and other Nato forces.

Tehran’s strategy to discredit the US surge and foment a decisive congressional revolt against Mr Bush is national in scope and not confined to the Shia south, its traditional sphere of influence, the senior official in Baghdad said. It included stepped-up coordination with Shia militias such as Moqtada al-Sadr’s Jaish al-Mahdi as well as Syrian-backed Sunni Arab groups and al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, he added. Iran was also expanding contacts across the board with paramilitary forces and political groups, including Kurdish parties such as the PUK, a US ally.

Al Gore sings of Global Warming peril in this parody version of the Johnny Cash classic.

2:09 Ball of Fire

Christopher Hitchens has an article in Vanity Fair describing how Britain has “move(d) from cricket and fish-and-chips to burkas and shoe-bombers in a single generation.”

The British have always been proud of their tradition of hospitality and asylum, which has benefited Huguenots escaping persecution, European Jewry, and many political dissidents from Marx to Mazzini. But the appellation “Londonistan,” which apparently originated with a sarcastic remark by a French intelligence officer, has come to describe a city which became home to people wanted for terrorist crimes as far afield as Cairo and Karachi. The capital of the United Kingdom is, in the words of Steven Simon, a former White House counterterrorism official, “the Star Wars bar scene,” catering promiscuously to all manner of Islamist recruiters and fund-raisers for, and actual practitioners of, holy war. …

My colleague Henry Porter sat me down in his West London home and made me watch a documentary that he thought had received far too little attention when shown on Britain’s Channel 4. It is entitled Undercover Mosque, and it shows film shot in quite mainstream Islamic centers in Birmingham and London (you can now find it easily on the Internet). And there it all is: foaming, bearded preachers calling for crucifixion of unbelievers, for homosexuals to be thrown off mountaintops, for disobedient and “deficient” women to be beaten into submission, and for Jewish and Indian property and life to be destroyed. “You have to bomb the Indian businesses, and as for the Jews, you kill them physically,” as one sermonizer, calling himself Sheikh al-Faisal, so prettily puts it. This stuff is being inculcated in small children—who are also informed that the age of consent should be nine years old, in honor of the prophet Muhammad’s youngest spouse. Again, these were not tin-roof storefront mosques but well-appointed and well-attended places of worship, often the beneficiaries of Saudi Arabian largesse. It’s not just the mosques, either. In West London there is a school named for Prince Charles’s friend King Fahd, with 650 pupils, funded and run by the government of Saudi Arabia. According to Colin Cook, a British convert to Islam (initially inspired by the former crooner Cat Stevens) who taught there for 19 years, teaching materials said that Jews “engage in witchcraft and sorcery and obey Satan,” and incited pupils to list the defects of worthless heresies such as Judaism and Christianity. …

It’s impossible to exaggerate how far and how fast this situation has deteriorated. Even at the time of the Satanic Verses affair, as long ago as 1989, Muslim demonstrations may have demanded Rushdie’s death, but they did so, if you like, peacefully. And they confined their lurid rhetorical attacks to Muslims who had become apostate. But at least since the time of the Danish-cartoon furor, threats have been made against non-Muslims as well as ex-Muslims (see photograph), the killing of Shiite Muslim heretics has been applauded and justified, and the general resort to indiscriminate violence has been rationalized in the name of god. Traditional Islamic law says that Muslims who live in non-Muslim societies must obey the law of the majority. But this does not restrain those who now believe that they can proselytize Islam by force, and need not obey kuffar law in the meantime. I find myself haunted by a challenge that was offered on the BBC by a Muslim activist named Anjem Choudary: a man who has praised the 9/11 murders as “magnificent” and proclaimed that “Britain belongs to Allah.” When asked if he might prefer to move to a country which practices Shari’a, he replied: “Who says you own Britain anyway?” A question that will have to be answered one way or another.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

African video of lions attempting to take young Cape Buffalo.

8:23 video

I think Glenn Reynolds would say that those Cape Buffalo behaved like “a pack, not a herd.”

In 1998, Congress (influenced by intense lobbying by copyright holders) extended the duration of copyrights for an additional 20 years, from the life of the author plus 50 years, or 75 years in cases of corporate authorship, to the author’s life plus 70 years or 95 years respectively, but Mark Helprin (a novelist) thinks copyright protection should last forever.

No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.

Well, if Mr. Helprin cared about the character of his own descendants, he might reflect that it could very well be better for them to live in the real world and make their own way, rather than exist as idle Trustafarians, trying to justify their futile existences via the desultory support of supposedly enlightened causes.

And the more people look at it, the more a lot of people are concluding it should not.

Ed Morrissey rightly observes:

Proverbially, a compromise succeeds best when it leaves all sides unsatisfied. However, the compromise which everyone hates usually fails, and that appears to be the case with the new immigration reform package — and that spells trouble for any hopes of reaching a compromise at all. While immigration hardliners have found enough devils in the details to populate an entire plane of Dante’s Inferno, immigration advocates apparently dislike the bill at least as much.

The New York Times quotes Robert P. Hoffman, an Oracle vice president and co-chairman of Compete America, a coalition of high-tech companies.

Under the current system,” Mr. Hoffman said, “you need an employer to sponsor you for a green card. Under the point system, you would not need an employer as a sponsor. An individual would get points for special skills, but those skills may not match the demand. You can’t hire a chemical engineer to do the work of a software engineer.”

David Isaacs, director of federal affairs at the Hewlett-Packard Company, said in a letter to the Senate that “a ‘merit-based system’ would take the hiring decision out of our hands and place it squarely in the hands of the federal government.”

Employers of lower-skilled workers voiced another concern.

“The point system would be skewed in favor of more highly skilled and educated workers,” said Laura Foote Reiff, co-chairwoman of the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, whose members employ millions of workers in hotels, restaurants, nursing homes, hospitals and the construction industry.

Denyse Sabagh, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said, “This bill does not give employers what they need, and some are pretty upset about it.”

NZ Bear has an easy-to-comment-on version of the bill on-line.

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I think the Blogosphere is reaching the right conclusions: there are too many things wrong with this bill (from both sides’ perspectives) for it to be passed. And those of us who do support an amnesty for illegals shouldn’t get our way without winning an open and extensive public debate.

We need to avoid the traditional liberal methodology of imposing our more enlightened opinions on everybody else de haute en bas by some kind of legislative coup.

This Illegal Immigration mess demonstrates beautifully the difficulties Americans have conducting serious, rational debates on emotionally-charged, ideologically-driven issues of national policy.

If conservatives can make a meaningful difference by substituting genuine and substantive debate for emotionalism and blind ideological war on this one, we would be effectuating a reform even more basic.

AP:

The Little Mermaid statue in Denmark’s capital was found draped in a Muslim dress and head scarf Sunday morning. Police removed the clothing after a telephone caller reported it, spokesman Jorgen Thomsen said.

The statue sculpted in tribute to author Hans Christian Andersen draws about 1 million visitors a year and is targeted occasionally by vandals. On Tuesday, the statue’s face, left arm and lap were found doused with red paint.

In 2004, someone put a burqa, the head-to-toe Islamic robe, on the statue, along with a sign questioning Turkey’s bid to join the European Union.

The bronze statue by Edvard Eriksen has sat on a rock in Copenhagen harbor since 1913.

The New York Times asked some contemporary authors to suggest well-known books which could stand abridgement. The mostly unreadable Joyce Carol Oates responded:

I can suggest Ernest Hemingway. There’s much too much smoking, drinking, fishing and hunting in Hemingway, and it could all be cut out. If that is cut out about 70 percent of Hemingway would go.

As Ernest Hemingway said about Joseph Conrad and T.S. Eliot respectively: If I believed that sprinkling Ms. Oates ground into a fine powder onto the grave of Ernest Hemingway would cause Mr. Hemingway to arise from the grave, looking irritated, and resume writing, I would depart for Princeton immediately with a meat grinder.

Conservatives are still raving today over the proposed Immigration Bill.

Legalizing the status of (an estimated) 12 million illegal aliens in the United States is being looked upon by people like Mark Steyn as a capitulation.

If so, it’s a capitulation to reality.

Illegal aliens are here, because Americans want to hire them. because the US economy needs them.

They snuck over the Rio Grande in many cases, rather than arriving on steamships at Ellis Island and doing the appropriate paperwork, because Ellis Island is closed, and legal admission to the US via airports and bus stations was not an option.

I think quite of lot of my conservative compatriots have lost their marbles on this particular issue. How would you get rid of the 12 million+ people here, even if you wanted to? House to house searches? A new system of commissars inspecting every American farm, construction site, restaurant, assembly plant, and front lawn to catch people violating the law… by working?

Suppose all this was even possible. You waved your magic wand, and all those Hispanics were instantly gone.

Who’s going to harvest American crops you buy at the supermarket? Whose going to fill the shelves?

When you eat out, who’s going to bus the tables and wash the dishes?

When you want a house, who’s going to frame it and nail up the sheetrock?

Who’s going to mow your lawn and mine?

I’ve heard the answer from voices on the right: If you pay enough, you can attract native-born American labor.

Regional conditions vary, of course, but in a lot of places I’ve lived you’d have to pay high school dropouts like investment bankers to get them to work at all, and they’d still do lousy jobs.

If you eliminated cheap immigrant labor, the economic impact would be devastating to this country. The price of everything you buy would skyrocket. Produce, processing, and delivery costs would go right through the roof. Restaurant prices would multiply. Every little thing you buy in a retail store would go up dramatically in price, so that native-born stock boys and counter clerks could make big bucks. Prices of new homes would rise enormously, and their size and amenities would shrink.

How would you like $50 movie tickets? $35 supermarket tomatoes? $50 McDonald’s Happy Meals? And you’d be mowing your own lawn.

Of course, not all pay scales would rise. You’d just transfer a lot more manufacturing, assembly, and food processing jobs permanently out of the country.

Conservatives ought to be working on the issue of assimilation, and looking to welcome to the Republican Party a major new constituency of Roman Catholic, family-oriented, hard-working people. Those Hispanics will pay taxes, and be just as annoyed as the rest us of us by liberal elitist busybodies trying to tell them how to live.

AP reports:

Former President Carter says President Bush’s administration is “the worst in history” in international relations, taking aim at the White House’s policy of pre-emptive war and its Middle East diplomacy. …

“I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” Carter told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in a story that appeared in the newspaper’s Saturday editions. “The overt reversal of America’s basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me.

Outgoing British PM Tony Blair also came in for criticism from the little peanut farmer from Plains:

Asked how he would judge Blair’s support of Bush, the former president said: “Abominable. Loyal. Blind. Apparently subservient.”

“And I think the almost undeviating support by Great Britain for the ill-advised policies of President Bush in Iraq have been a major tragedy for the world,” Carter told British Broadcasting Corp. radio.

I would call this a truly remarkable case of reporting so partisan that it simply becomes ludicrous.

Personally, I think there can be no doubt whatsoever that the worst president in United States history, both domestically and in foreign policy, was Mr. Carter himself.

The Carter administration’s supine failure to do anything effective in response to the revolutionary government of Iran’s taking US diplomatic personnel hostage, and the spectacle of the United States humiliated by a Third World country holding 52 American diplomats hostage for 444 days is unquestionably the absolute US foreign policy nadir of all time.

The same president managed also to preside over double-digit inflation, a stagnant economy, and an energy crisis. During Mr. Carter’s term, the prime rate hit 21.5%.

Astonishingly, Mr. Carter has managed to continue to distinguish himself with respect to all other US presidents by bustling around the world to confer a personal endorsement of the validity of elections stolen by leftwing dictators, by championing continually the causes of the adversaries of the United States, and by an unprecedented (and ungentlemanly) habit of voicing open criticism of his successors.

AP demonstrates its own contemptible lack of journalistic integrity by openly lying to its readers, putting a claim into the mouth of an unidentified Carter “biographer” that today’s attack on the Bush Administration “is unprecedented.” Carter’s unseemly and disloyal attacks on the current president have not only been frequent but inveterate.

I recall noting the sour expression on Jimmy Carter’s wizened face as he watched with visible envy the outpouring of national grief during the funeral of Ronald Reagan. I’m sure he was thinking ahead, disgruntled over the obvious truth that the nation would have no similar response in his own case.

On the contrary, I expect there will only be a collective shrug, and a momentary thought of “Good riddance” from most Americans when Mr. Carter’s time comes.

Kimberly Strassel talks to coal mine operator Robert E. Murray about the impact on the US economy of carbon caps, and why some big corporations are allying with environmental activists to get them passed.

Every good party has its wet blanket. In the case of the energy industry’s merrymaking for a global warming program, the guy in the dripping bedspread is a 67-year-old, straight-talking coal-mine owner by the name of Robert E. Murray. …

“The science of global warming is speculative. But there’s nothing speculative about the damage a C02 capture program will do to this country. I know the names of many of the thousands of people — American workers, their families — whose lives will be destroyed by what has become a deceitful and hysterical campaign, perpetrated by fear-mongers in our society and by corporate executives intent on their own profits or competitive advantage. I can’t stand by and watch.” …

“Some 52% of this country’s electricity is generated from coal,” Mr. Murray says. “Global warming legislation would place arbitrary limits on the use of coal, yet there’s nothing to replace it at the same cost. There’s nuclear, but the environmentalists killed it off and aren’t about to let it come back. There’s hydro, but we’re using that everywhere we can already. There’s natural gas, but supply and pipeline capacity is limited, and it’s three times the cost of coal. Politically correct — and subsidized ‘alternative energy’ is very limited in capability and also expensive.

“So what you are really doing with a global warming program is getting rid of low-cost energy,” he says. The consequences? Americans have been fretting about losing jobs to places such as China or India, which already offer cheaper energy. “You hike the cost of energy here further, and you create a mass exodus of business out of this country.” Especially so, given that neither of those countries is about to hamstring its own economy in order to join a Kyoto-like accord. He points out that since 1990, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 18%, while China’s have increased by 77%. Mr. Murray also notes that many countries that have joined Kyoto have already failed to meet their targets.

Mr. Murray, like most honest participants in this debate, can reel off the names of the many respected scientists who still doubt that human activity is the cause of rising temperatures. But he tends to treat the scientific debate almost as a sideshow, an excuse for not talking about what comes next. “Even if the politicians believe 100% that man is causing global warming, they still have an obligation to discuss honestly just what damage they want to inflict on American jobs and workers and people on fixed incomes, in the here and now, with their programs.”

This is where Mr. Murray really gets rolling, on his favorite subject of his fellow energy executives and the role they are playing in encouraging a mandatory C02 program. “There is this belief that since even some in the energy industry are now on board with a program, that it must be okay. No one is looking at these executives’ real motives.”

To understand those motives, you’ve first got to understand how a cap-and-trade plan works. The government would first place a cap on CO2 emissions. Each company would then be given an “allowance” for emissions. If the company produced less CO2 than allowed, it could sell the excess credits to others. If a company wanted to produce more CO2 than its allowance, it would have to buy credits. “The strategy for these folks now is to go to Washington, help design the program to suit their companies, and snap up all the carbon emission allowances,” says Mr. Murray. “The more allowances they get, the more they’ll have to sell, and the more money they’ll make . . . This has nothing to do with creating ‘regulatory certainty,’ which is how they like to sell their actions. This has to do with creating money, for their companies, off the back of an economy that will be paying more for its energy.”

Read the whole thing.