The New York Times has discovered that a lot of people are shopping for high end mattresses these days.

The Times’ article mentions the $24,000 Magniflex and $50,000 Hollandia International $60,000 Hästens mattresses.

We went through all this a couple of years ago, did our research and selected the favorite mattress of old-time residents of San Francisco: the comparatively inexpensive (only $4700 for King Size!) McRoskey. We’d give McRoskey mattresses a strong endorsement.

AP has leaked details of a US Intelligence assessment with alarming news of al Qaeda’s current strength and capabilities.

A new threat assessment from U.S. counterterrorism analysts says that al-Qaida has used its safe haven along the Afghan-Pakistan border to restore its operating capabilities to a level unseen since the months before Sept. 11, 2001.

A counterterrorism official familiar with a five-page summary of the document – titled “Al-Qaida better positioned to strike the West” – called it a stark appraisal. The analysis will be part of a broader meeting at the White House on Thursday about an upcoming National Intelligence Estimate.

The official and others spoke to The Associated Press on condition they not be identified because the report remains classified.

The findings suggests that the network that launched the most devastating terror attack on U.S. soil has been able to regroup despite nearly six years of bombings, war and other tactics aimed at dismantling it.

The threat assessment focuses on the terror group’s safe haven in Pakistan and makes a range of observations about the threat posed to the United States and its allies, officials said.

Counterterrorism officials have been increasingly concerned about al-Qaida’s recent operations. This week, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said he had a “gut feeling” that the United States faced a heightened risk of attack this summer.

Still, numerous government officials say they know of no specific, credible threat of a new attack on U.S. soil.

Al-Qaida is “considerably operationally stronger than a year ago” and has “regrouped to an extent not seen since 2001,” the counterterrorism official said, paraphrasing the report’s conclusions. “They are showing greater and greater ability to plan attacks in Europe and the United States.”

The group also has created “the most robust training program since 2001, with an interest in using European operatives,” the official quoted the report as saying.

At the same time, this official said, the report speaks of “significant gaps in intelligence” so U.S. authorities may be ignorant of potential or planned attacks.

John Kringen, who heads the CIA’s analysis directorate, echoed the concerns about al-Qaida’s resurgence during testimony and conversations with reporters at a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday.

“They seem to be fairly well settled into the safe haven and the ungoverned spaces of Pakistan,” Kringen testified. “We see more training. We see more money. We see more communications. We see that activity rising.”

The threat assessment comes as the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies prepare a National Intelligence Estimate focusing on threats to the United States. A senior intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity while the high-level analysis was being completed, said the document has been in the works for roughly two years.

Peter Zeihan, writing at Strategic Forcasting (www.stratfor.com), a subscription service provider of information and analysis relevant to geopolitics, security and public policy, thinks Pakistan’s recent increasing internal conflicts could make Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier the key theater of US military operations.

Access to articles at Stratfor’s web-site requires a subscription, but the 7/10 Zeihan article is quoted in full by NOTR and by center-right Indian blogger RS.

Excerpt:

Back in 2005, the United States believed it had credible intelligence about a planned meeting of the core al Qaeda leadership in northwestern Pakistan. A strike force of several hundred to several thousand was assembled in order to punch through the Pakistani tribes hiding and shielding bin Laden and his allies, but the strike was ultimately abandoned because then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld felt the operation could not be kept quiet. It is one thing when Pakistanis think there are a few Americans running over the border to do something tactical. It is quite another when Pakistanis know that several thousand Americans with heavy air support are surging across to do something strategic. The U.S. might have been able to take out its target, but probably not without losing a critical ally.

Details of this attack plan were leaked July 8 to The New York Times. For us at Stratfor, news of the plans was nothing new. It made perfect sense that this plan, and likely dozens of others like it, were at various times in the works stretching back as far as 2003 (and we have noted such on numerous occasions). What caught our attention was the timing of The New York Times article. The United States has been eyeing northwestern Pakistan for years. Why draw attention to that fact now?

The United States’ core fear in 2005 was that the Pakistani government would destabilize. Well, in 2007, the Pakistani government is horrendously unstable. On July 10, Islamabad launched a multi-hour raid replete with Branch Davidian overtones against the Red Mosque complex and a gathering of radical (some would say mentally unhinged) Islamists challenging the government’s writ. Be worried when the government of an Islamic republic feels it must take such action. Be doubly worried when the government taking the action already seems to be in its death throes.

Previous efforts by Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf to strengthen his political grip on the country by firing the chief justice rebounded on him so severely that he cannot even depend upon his oldest allies. Various political, military and cultural power centers are sniping at the president, making their own independent and often contradictory demands. There are also hints that Musharraf’s faculties are beginning to crack. The government — as well as the president — is now teetering on the edge of oblivion, facing an unsavory menu of crushing compromise with one force or another to stay in power in name, and risking the turbulent waters of emergency rule over an increasingly hostile population.

If the threat of a government fall was the only thing holding Washington back in 2005, and now that the fall is imminent through no action of the United States, what does Washington have to gain from restraining itself any further?

This is more than a rhetorical question. The relative inactivity of al Qaeda these past six years, as well as the political situation in Pakistan, has imposed a shaky equilibrium on the issue. Al Qaeda’s security protocols curtail al Qaeda’s threat level, and that has allowed the United States to shelve the issue for another day. Meanwhile, the instability of Musharraf’s government limits the United States’ ability to pressure Islamabad over the issue of al Qaeda. Consequently, al Qaeda has been more or less hiding in plain sight.

Alter any aspect of this scenario — in this case, drastically increase the tottering of the Musharraf government — and the “stability” of the other pieces immediately breaks and the United States is forced to surge assets into Pakistan.

Washington has to assume that an al Qaeda anywhere but Pakistan is an al Qaeda that will act with less conservatism. By the American logic, al Qaeda assets in Saudi Arabia, long drilled that security is paramount, would naturally doubt that a telegram from bin Laden ordering a new attack is genuine — but they would certainly believe bin Laden himself should he show up at their door. By al Qaeda’s logic, Musharraf’s fall would force al Qaeda to relocate from Pakistan because the group would have to assume that the Americans would be coming.

Which means the odd stasis in the war on terror these past six years could be about to loosen up, and a front that has proven oddly cold might be about to catch fire.

John Derbyshire contemplates Political Correctness, the modern species of cant, distinguishing what he chooses to call Weak PC, its “speech and manners” expression (which he is willing to endorse) from Strong PC, the ideology itself which controls our universities and which has what Derbyshire considers disastrous impact on contemporary policies pertaining to education, immigration, law enforcement, and war.

Derbyshire is optimistic that the pendulum will swing away from the worst excesses of today’s Strong PC:

You may drive Nature out with a pitchfork, said Horace, but she will come running back. So she will. I believe we can already hear the pattering sound of her feet coming up the path.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

At 50in high from head to paw and still growing, Samson, a Great Dane/Newfoundland cross is Britain’s biggest dog

Telegraph:

Standing 6ft 5in (1.956 meters) on its hind legs and tipping the scales at 19st 10lb (276 lbs. = 125.19 kg.), Samson is a giant in every sense of the word. …

He boasts a 59in (1.499 meter) chest and a 29in (.737 meter) neck, meaning he has to wear pony coats when it rains and has had to have an extra large collar fitted. The dog’s paws are almost the size of dinner plates.

While Samson’s awesome build is impressive enough for a fully grown dog, this huge hound is only three years old and will grow even more.

Julie Woods, 54 and her husband Ray, 65, whose last dog was a small terrier, spend £60 a month on dried food and turkey legs for Samson and take him on four two-mile walks a day.

Mrs Woods, from Boston, Lincs, said: “He’s a lovely dog whose bark is definitely worse than his bite. People are often intimidated when they first see him because he’s about the size of a small horse and very quick.

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Read the whole article.

Ed Husain, author of a memoir The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left, explains the dynamic which turns Muslims with Western technical educations so frequently into terrorists.

Right from the very top of the terrorist hierarchy, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri downward(Bin Laden’s Egyptian deputy); the soldiers of extremism have all traveled a similar path: past membership of the Muslim Brotherhood, a secular education, rejection of mainstream Muslims, a hatred for the West and ultimately taking up arms against peoples and governments.

The rank-and-file of Islamist organizations, the precursors to terrorism, are filled with activists with a technical education. The instructor of my first secret cell in Hizb ut-Tahrir in London was a town planner; my second cell-leader was a medical doctor. Even today, medical doctors manage the British arm of Hizb ut-Tahrir-a global Islamist political party working for the re-establishment of an Islamic caliphate: doctors Nasim Ghani, Abdul Wahid, and Nazreen Nawaz. Globally, the central leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir is a Jordan-based engineer, Abu Rishta. The story of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is similar. When Islamists graduate to jihadist terrorism the profile is equally chilling.

Osama bin Laden ran a construction company in Saudi Arabia and later, the Sudan. His deputy, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, is a Cairo-trained paediatrician. The mastermind behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, is a mechanical engineer who studied at North Carolina University. The lead hijacker, Mohammed Atta, was a student of urban planning in Hamburg.

In the Arab world, the parental and social pressures on young people to pursue medical and engineering careers only compounds the misery of creative young minds, forced to study subjects under duress. Thousands of undergraduates seek greater meaning in life, an experience beyond the mundane necessities of medicine, and a purpose that occupies their free time. Islamist networks neatly slot into this void.

As a teacher at the University of Damascus in Syria, I listened to the frustrations of my students who yearned to study subjects that interested them: literature, philosophy, theology, history, or art. But becoming a doctor was the only way to please their parents, attain high social status and in many cases escape the Arab world and live in the West. Sadly, often that “escape” radicalizes young Arabs.

When in Britain, for example, they become misfits among English cultural exclusivity and develop their own socio-religious networks. Suddenly there appears a need to display their being excessively Muslim: beards grow longer, trousers shorter, music condemned, confrontational politics advocated and the company of women shirked. The terror suspects arrested in Britain all manifested these traits. This turning to Wahhabi Islam, an austere form of Saudi religiosity, combined with political Islamism, has proven to be a lethal cocktail. What we call ‘Al Qaeda’ is only one manifestation of that mindset.

In the past, Muslims did not pronounce on religious matters without the endorsement of trained theologians, the ulama. The ulama were the bastion of religious knowledge that operated in an informal yet consensual method of intellectual plurality, interpretational elasticity, and maintained a centuries-old chain of transmission of sacred knowledge, known as the ijaza. Before modern-day terrorists turned to destroying buildings and killing innocents, they violently rejected this millennium-old Muslim tradition of learning. …

Just as their bombing techniques are amateur and desperate, often destined to failure, so is their reading of scripture and warped justification for suicide bombings and killing humans. They approach the Qu’ran as though it were an engineering manual, with instructions for right and wrong conduct. Literalism and ignorance dominates their readings. This flaw is deepened by the haughty mindset of the engineer or medical doctor that academic achievement, a place at a university, now qualifies him to approach ancient scripture without the guidance of the ulama. To the Islamist engineer, centuries of context, nuance, history, grammar, lexicon, scholarship, and tradition are all lost and redundant. The do-it-yourself (DIY) attitude to religious texts, fostered by doctors and engineers of secular colleges, produces desperate, angry suicide bombers devoid of spiritual guidance.

The P-51 Mustang, the best fighter of WWII, has recently become a collector’s item and status symbol for the very rich. One owner calls flying it “somewhat of a religious experience.”

3:11 video

Senator Joseph Lieberman agrees with Never Yet Melted on the proposition that there is no possibility that US forces can be defeated by our adversaries on the ground in Iraq, and that if the war is lost, it will be lost in the domestic war for public opinion.

He said so on Bill Bennet’s radio program. And one of the Talking Points Memo crowd captured Senator Lieberman’s radio comment and packaged it as a YouTube 0:48 video for the left blogosphere to spit and hiss over today.

mcjoan at Daily Kos typically treats Lieberman’s observation as a gratuitous attack on Harry Reid, and (naturally) proceeds to play the left’s sad old tune about the sufferings of the American soldiers they are busily stabbing in the back.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the Chicago Tribune that he “has a gut feeling” that al Qaeda is planning to attempt a major US attack this summer.

I believe we are entering a period this summer of increased risk,” Chertoff told the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board in an unusually blunt and frank assessment of America’s terror threat level.

“Summertime seems to be appealing to them,” he said of al-Qaeda. “We do worry that they are rebuilding their activities.”

Still, Chertoff said there are not enough indications of an imminent plot to raise the current threat levels nationwide. And he indicated that his remarks were based on “a gut feeling” formed by past seasonal patterns of terrorist attacks, recent al-Qaeda statements, and intelligence he did not disclose.

There is an assessment “not of a specific threat, but of increased vulnerability,” he added.

There have been reports already that suggest intelligence warnings at a similar level to the summer before Sept. 11, 2001 and that al-Qaeda may be mobilizing.

In recent days, ABC news reported that a secret law enforcement report prepared for homeland security warns that al-Qaeda is preparing a “spectacular” summer attack. On Tuesday, ABC News also reported that “new intelligence suggests a small al-Qaeda cell is on its way to the United States, or may already be here.”

Chertoff sternly echoed those sentiments at the Tribune.

“We’ve seen a lot more public statements from Al Qaeda,” he said. “There are a lot of reasons to speculate about that but one reason that occurs to me is that they’re feeling more comfortable and raising expectations.

“We could easily be attacked,” Chertoff added. “The intent to attack us remains as strong as it was on Sept. 10, 2001.”

And similar hints were made by unnamed officials to ABC News:

Senior U.S. intelligence officials tell ABC News new intelligence suggests a small al Qaeda cell is on its way to the United States, or may already be here.

The White House has convened an urgent multi-agency meeting for Thursday afternoon to deal with the new threat.

Top intelligence and law enforcement officials have been told to assemble in the Situation Room to report on:

–what steps can be taken to minimize or counter the threat,

–and what steps are being taken to harden security for government buildings and personnel.

“It suggests they have information that the cell or cells coming this direction want to attack a government facility,” Brad Garrett, a former FBI agent and ABC News consultant, said.

But John Amato, blogging on the left, knows better, and is demanding that Chertoff be fired for issuing warnings inconvenient to the left’s political agenda.

What gives Chertoff the right to tell the country that he has a “gut” feeling that we’re going to be hit with a terrorist attack this summer? …

This is a calculated move to ratchet up the terror in this country to help Republican candidates—PERIOD. They are far behind in raising money and in all the polls. He should be fired, but of course since he’s being instructed to say these things (sounds like a Cheney/Rove play) he won’t be. What a tool…

His comments are priceless, too:

Jr says:

Chertoff will say anything to scare the mouth-breathers into giving their last few freedoms away

Alexander M. Haig Jr. pulls no punches in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Donald Rumsfeld’s departure and the decision to pursue counterinsurgency in Iraq required fresh commanders. But the administration overlooked a new source of military talent in, of all places, the U.S. Senate. The Senate Majority Leader, for example, asserts that the war is lost and that Gen. Petraeus is detached from reality in Baghdad. He and other equally qualified lay military experts are busily setting dates certain for troop withdrawal, oblivious of the consequences. Some have questioned the constitutionality of such Congressional resolutions. I question their wisdom. We need a debate on how to win, not how to lose. That would be a good topic for the presidential candidates. It’s certainly not what they’re talking about now.

John Quincy Adams warned us against going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy,” and some argue that the war on terror is just such a case. I disagree. On 9/11, the monster found us asleep at home and will continue to find us inadequately prepared unless we muster more strength and more wisdom. Unless we break with illusionary democracy mongering, inept handling of our military resources and self-defeating domestic political debates, we are in danger of becoming our own worst enemy.

And when domestic defeatism forces US withdrawal, and the religious fanatics spill oceans of innocent blood, the leftwing punditocracy will explain it is all the fault of George W. Bush for disturbing the peaceful idyll of Baathist dictatorship.

The Sun catches the New York Time editorial page engaging in characteristic hypocrisy.

The New York Times waited just hours after President Bush commuted the sentence of Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., before issuing an editorial condemning the president’s decision. It puts the paper in the position of favoring a judge’s decision to impose a 30-month prison sentence on a person whose main crime, if there was one, stems from his effort to protect his ability to serve as a source for a New York Times reporter. Does the New York Times think its readers have forgotten the tenacious legal and public relations battle the paper fought to prevent the special prosecutor in the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, from wringing from its reporter Libby’s name? Or the stream of top executives from the paper who visited the reporter in jail while she was refusing to give up her source? …

The Times editorial made much of the supposed hypocrisy of the tough-on-crime right in supporting the decision to commute the sentence. It ran out its editorial under the headline “soft on crime,” though it has been soft on crime for years, save for when Republicans are in the dock. Its support for throwing a public official in jail for 30 months for the crime of trying to deflect attention from his having talked to a Times reporter, after going to the mat on behalf of the Times reporter’s right to keep the source’s name a secret — well, it’s a Times classic, one to make New Yorkers recognize that the hypocrisy in this case isn’t on the right wing.

They weren’t recorded, registered, taxed, or regulated. Naturally, urban-dwelling environmentalists hated the river shacks of rural South Carolina, and they recently succeeded in persuading the Palmetto State’s greasy pols to impose a permit system incorporating a sunset law completely eliminating these private refuges of individual freedom from South Carolina’s waters in five years. The state’s governor expressed regret at the death of a rural tradition, but he wouldn’t stick his neck out by vetoing the new law.

These days, Huck Finn would not be permitted to raft down the river to get away from Aunt Polly and her civilized regime of rules. Old ladies of both sexes have long since taken care to extend the jurisdiction of the Leviathan state right down every river’s main channel, and up every tributary and every backwater, lest some free American escape from civilization and its discontents, or evade its taxes and its rules.

New York Times:

For who knows how long, people have plopped these river shacks into watery coves and curves along the South Carolina coast. They permanently anchor their shacks miles from the nearest landing and use them to fish, hunt or just get off the grid for a while. Some contraptions are so modest that to call them shacks is too kind, while others are so well appointed that they all but cry out for granite countertops and potpourri.

It all sounds so innocent, so idyllic — so American, in a Huck Finn kind of way. That is, until you consider that the river shack owners are essentially laying claim to public property without paying license fees, taxes or, in some cases, even respect. A few people use the river as their personal toilet; others abandon their shacks, leaving the structures to rot amid the natural splendor.

But environmentalists who see these shacks as an affront to the concept of resource management recently succeeded in lobbying for their extinction. This spring the state passed a law requiring owners to seek permits for the structures — recent surveys counted at least 170 on several rivers and Lake Marion — with the stipulation that in five years all shacks must be removed from the water. …

The issue even posed a dilemma for Gov. Mark Sanford, who ultimately decided to allow the river shack bill to pass into law without his signature. While he supports land preservation, he explained in a letter to legislators, he wonders about increasing gentrification, and “the idea that someone could tie a bunch of 55-gallon drums together and stake out a house on the waterway is representative of what I would consider the magic of ‘old time South Carolina.’ ”

But Patrick Moore, a lawyer working for the Coastal Conservation League, which led the legislative fight against river shacks, sees no dilemma. “The idea that these shacks are some sort of entitlement of our natural heritage is, frankly, an insult to that very heritage,” he says.

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