Libertarian Jeremy Lott identifies the issue we really should be caring about in the Larry Craig case.

Hat tip to John Brewer.

AP:

The 118-year-old cylinder that is the international prototype for the metric mass, kept tightly under lock and key outside Paris, is mysteriously losing weight – if ever so slightly. Physicist Richard Davis of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, southwest of Paris, says the reference kilo appears to have lost 50 micrograms compared with the average of dozens of copies.

“The mystery is that they were all made of the same material, and many were made at the same time and kept under the same conditions, and yet the masses among them are slowly drifting apart,” he said. “We don’t really have a good hypothesis for it.”

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont offers some interesting advice to President Bush on his choice of a new attorney general to replace the unfortunate Alberto Gonzalez.

Leahy contends that

The attorney general is the people’s lawyer, not the president’s.”

which is an amusing piece of sophistry. Of course, “the people” don’t actually play any role in the federal system after elections are concluded. “The people” cannot decide what side the Justice Department will choose to take on an abortion case. “The people” cannot decide on whether or not Microsoft should be prosecuted for an alleged monopoly. And “the people” cannot decide whether 8 federal attorneys or all 93 need to be replaced.

What Senator Leahy means by “the people” is obviously what Thomas Sowell likes to call the consensus of the elect, the collective viewpoint of the mainstream media, the liberal democrat congressional majority, the establishment punditocracy, and so on.

The Senate has the Constitutional right to advise and consent on presidential appointments of ministers of state and officers of government, but executive power is vested by the Constitution in the president not in “the people” nor in Congress nor in the consensus of the liberal establishment. Cabinet officers really do work for the president.

Senator Leahy goes on to urge President Bush to select a candidate for attorney general, who is neither notoriously partisan nor divisive.

Above all, the new attorney general cannot interpret our laws to mean whatever the president wants them to mean. The departing attorney general showed a lack of independence from the president and the White House. We have seen the disastrous consequences.

The next attorney general must uphold the rule of law on behalf of all of the American people.

The president begins this process. Through his choice for attorney general, he can be a uniter or a divider. For the sake of the Department of Justice and its vital missions on behalf of the American people, this would be an excellent time to work with us to unite the nation.

And how does the last democrat president’s choice of attorney general measure up to Pat Leahy’s proposed standards?

Janet Reno was anything but a uniter, and it is difficult to imagine a possible Republican choice who could be equivalently offensive to the other party. Reno was a leftwing extremist , who many people believed misused her Dade County Prosecutorship on behalf of her own political agenda. She was appointed by President Clinton despite a record of ideologically-motivated, questionable prosecutions in Florida, and despite her dubious moral character and life-style.

Janet Reno went on to compile arguably the most controversial record of any attorney general, presiding over the federal massacre of Seventh Day Adventists in Waco, Texas, the seizure by machine-gun-wielding federal agents of a six-year-old refugee for deportation to Communist Cuba, and –of course– the unprececented and completely partisan firing of all 93 US Attorneys.

Juliusz Kossak, Sztandar proroka [The Prophet’s Standard]
1882. Watercolor. 22 x 37.2″ (56 x 94.5 cm)
National Museum, Warsaw.

Adam Zamoyski describes the relief of the Siege of Vienna:

He’s badly camped — we shall beat him!” said (King Jan III Sobieski), turning to his generals. …

Just before dawn on the following day, 12 September 1683, the King of Poland attended Mass in the ruins of an old convent on the Kahlenberg and then dictated the ordre de bataille. The left wing was given to the Duke of Lorraine. It consisted of three corps of Imperial and Saxon infantry under Count Caprara, the Duke of Baden, and the Elector of Saxony, supported by a large force of Polish cavalry under Stanislaw Lubomirski. It was to advance along the Danube to relieve Vienna itself. The centre, under the Prince of Waldeck, was made up of troops from Franconia and Bavaria — with the young Elector going into his first battle as a mere soldier. The right wing, lost from sight throughout most of the day as it swept round through the Vienna Woods, consisted of Polish infantry and cavalry under Stanislaw Jablonowski. Only the Polish artillery had been nimble enough to haul their ordnance over the mountain roads, so their twenty-eight guns would have to race about from one corner of the battlefield to another- at one stage they were to run out of wadding and had to commandeer the fine wigs of some indignant French gentleman-volunteers. Only about one third of the 68,000 troops were Polish – the rest were Germans, Italians, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Scots and Irishmen. It was a crusading army, come together from all corners of the Christian world to face the Infidel, and in its ranks fought no fewer than nine sovereign princes.

As they began their descent from the Kahlenberg, a Turkish force came out of the camp to face them. The janissaries took up defensive positions on hillocks, along gullies and in vineyards, and the Christian troops had to pick their way through difficult terrain to dislodge them. It was a sweltering day, and by early afternoon when the Christian army had pushed the Turks off the last foothills, the men were thoroughly exhausted. Around three o’clock there was a lull in the fighting, as they consolidated their new positions and the Turks fell back to regroup.

The king felt tempted to put off the decisive battle to the following day, even though this would give the Turks time to turn the heavy guns bombarding Vienna to face his army. Through his telescope he saw fresh Turkish regiments being drawn up and a red tent being put up behind them. Beside it stood a pole bearing the horse-tails which were the sign of the Grand Vizir’s rank. At about four o’clock Kara Mustafa unfurled the banner of the Prophet, emblem of Ottoman victory, to loud cries from the ranks of Janissaries. Instinct made the king change his mind, and he sent a galloper to Jablonowski on the right wing. Then he rode forward himself.

As Sobieski’s mounted figure appeared on a prominent hillock in the front line, over to the right the leafy gloom of the Vienna Woods burst into blossom, as a few, then a few hundred, then a few thousand brightly-coloured lance-pennants thrust out between the branches. One by one, the glittering squadrons of the Polish heavy cavalry, the Husaria, detached themselves from the mass of the woods and trotted forward. Led by senators and senior dignitaries of the Most Serene Commonwealth of Poland, its ranks made up exclusively of the highest-born, this great war-machine shimmered with the wealth of vast acreages. Each rider was helmeted and plumed; his breastplate encrusted with gold and gems; cloaked with leopard-skins; winged with great arcs of eagle-feathers rising over his head; mounted on a magnificent charger caparisoned in silk and velvet embroidered with gold. Each husarz carried sabres and pistols with jewelled handles, and a twenty-foot lance with streaming pennant. As they broke into a lumbering canter and lowered their lances, the pennants and the wings on their backs set up an evil hiss while the ground shook with the pounding of fifteen thousand hooves.

Selim Girey, Khan of the Crimean Horde, had been waiting to pounce on the right wing of the Christian attack. When he recognised the Polish king and the winged riders who had defeated his Tatars before, he turned about and led his riders away. Everything now hinged on whether the janissaries could stand firm against the Husaria, which lumbered on purposefully, sparing its horses, diagonally across the whole battlefield, making for the landmark of the Vizir’s tent. Idle soldiers on both sides stared in disbelief at the slow, mesmeric charge. Then the Husaria broke into a wild gallop and the heavy mass of men and horses cascaded over the Turkish ranks, bowling over the first, slicing through the second, surging on towards the exquisite red tent, before which the Grand Vizir sat and watched. He saw the Pasha of Aleppo fall and the horse-tail banner of Kara Mehmet of Mesopotamia go down in the fray. Next came the turn of the Pashas of Silistria and Buda. Their janissaries hesitated for a moment, then turned and fled, followed by the rest of the army. The Grand Vizir leapt on to a horse and made his own escape moments before the winged riders thundered up to the tent and the banner was struck.

The entire Christian army moved forward and the king rode into the Turkish camp to take possession. One of the Vizir’s servants handed him a jewelled stirrup which had broken offas Kara Mustafa heaved himself into the saddle to flee. A true galant, the king gave it to one of his young gentlemen, bidding him ride hard all the way to Krakow: to lay it at the feet of his French queen. Another messenger was sent to Rome, to the Pope, bearing the standard of the Prophet; the Jihad had been defeated by the last Crusade.

Baron Bodissey commemorates his admirable blog’s theme, thusly:

On this day in 1683 King Jan Sobieski of Poland arrived at Vienna to break the siege of the Turks and rescue the Christian West from the Hosts of Mohammed. The rout of the Ottoman troops before the gates of Vienna by the Polish hussars gave us a little breathing room, a coffee-and-croissants break that lasted for the next three hundred and eighteen years.

But no longer. From now on in, every day is September 11th.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

The democrat crazies in the California legislature strike again.

San Diego Union Tribune:

The Assembly sent the governor a bill yesterday requiring that the next generation of semiautomatic handguns stamp identifying serial numbers on spent shell casings.

The legislation that would establish the first law of its kind in the nation could have a lasting impact on the war on crime, according to backers. But the limited application of the bill does not figure to be felt for several years.

The bill covers only new models or brands of semiautomatic handguns approved for sale in the state after Jan. 1, 2010. That excludes nearly 1,300 different semiautomatics already sold in the state. Revolvers, which do not discharge shell casings, also are not covered.

Nonetheless, supporters said tagging microscopic codes on ammunition fired from the guns of choice for gang members and violent criminals could prove invaluable to law enforcement.

“Chiefs of police from Stockton to San Diego, from Fresno to National City, 65 of them standing together in support of this bill because they see the potential to solve gun crime,” said Assemblyman Mike Feuer, a Los Angeles Democrat who carried the measure, AB 1471. …

But in a passionate debate between gun-control Democrats and gun-rights Republicans, critics dismissed the technology as unreliable, expensive and easily thwarted. They warned that it would drive up the price of guns and drive manufacturers out of the state.

“There is nothing like this is any other state, and no other state is seriously considering this because they know it doesn’t work,” said Lawrence Keane, general counsel of the National Shooting Sports Council, an industry trade association.

The Assembly approved the bill on a 43-29 vote that fell largely along party lines. The Senate narrowly passed the bill last week. All involved are now closely watching for a signal from Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has taken no position on the bill.

Oh yes, California’s gang violence over drug distribution turf invariably takes the form of an Agatha Christie-style country house murder, in which Sherlock Holmes needs an assist from Rube Goldberg in determining if it was Colonel Mustard who shot Professor Plum in the library by identifying the true owner of the still-smoking Webley found smack in the middle of the oriental rug.

And no one less wily than Professor Moriarity himself would ever think of taking a file to their proposed-stamping mechanism in order to thwart those cunning legislators. Right!

Doug Patton thinks he’s identified one.

..the core, the heart, the base of the Democratic Party has become a loony gaggle of special interest groups on the fringes of American civilization.

They are driven by far-left ideology, and they are represented by the likes of paranoid billionaire George Soros and the organizations he supports. MoveOn.org, a web site originally founded to defend Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, has morphed into a collection of political crazies, as has the Daily Kos, the Huffington Post and a number of others.

These hateful organizations represent the views of the hardcore voters who participate in Democrat primaries, and many of them are not happy with today’s crop of Democrats. Hillary Clinton, who has spent the last forty years of her life devoted to a left-wing ideology, is not liberal enough for many of these people. Her realization that she cannot win a general election without offending them has given some in her campaign heartburn.

Barrack Obama is too militaristic for them after his threat to invade Pakistan. Recently, even the traditional idols of the left, the Kennedys, have run afoul of some in the blogosphere’s hate machine. It seems that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and his Uncle Ted are opposed to the construction of a wind farm on Nantucket Sound because it would be visible from the area where they sail their yachts.

So who can a leftist wacko really love these days? It has to be someone who, first and foremost, hates George Bush. That’s a given. Then there is the requirement that the United States surrender to al-Qaida and leave Iraq immediately.

Of course, this person has to view America as a blight on the rest of the world, especially on all the wonderful, peaceful people of the planet, from Native Americans to the North Vietnamese to the Iraqis. Blaming America first for virtually everything is an absolute requirement. Environmental extremism is an important part of the agenda, so this political savior would have to spout the PC line on global warming. And, of course, capitalism must be regarded as a bane that has brought misery to all who have ever suffered under it.

But what leader could possibly fill the bill for American lefties? Why, Osama bin Laden, of course. The world’s most famous terrorist has delivered a new message, via videotape, much of it to the American people.

Bin Laden rambles through his latest screed reciting the same kind of nonsense made famous by America haters across the Internet and even in public life. He blathers on about how Donald Rumsfeld was somehow responsible for killing two million people in Vietnam. He tells us how concerned he is about America’s sub-prime mortgage “crisis.” He blames the U.S. for global warming. He criticizes congressional Democrats for continuing the war in Iraq and warns that America will lose. He invites us all to embrace Islam. And most important, he excoriates the American people for electing George W. Bush to a second term, telling us that we are “not innocent.”

Osama bin Laden embodies everything liberal Democrats love in a leader. In fact, if he were standing on the stage at one of their presidential debates, spouting the same ideas he put forth in his latest video, he would be a bona fide hit among their base.

AFP:

An archaeologist using radar technology said Monday he has found the outline of what he believes is a 1,000-year-old Viking longship under a pub car park in north-west England.

Professor Stephen Harding used Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) to trace the outline of a vessel matching the scale and shape of a longship, perhaps from the time Vikings settled in Meols, on the Wirral peninsula in Merseyside.

Meols has one of Britain’s best preserved Viking settlements, buried deep beneath the village and nearby coastal defences.

Harding, from the University of Nottingham in east central England, is now seeking funds to pay for an archaeological dig to search for the vessel which lies beneath two-to-three metres of waterlogged clay.

“The next stage is the big one. Using the GPR technique only cost 450 pounds but we have to think carefully about what to do next,” Harding said.

“Although we still don’t know what sort of vessel it is, it’s very old for sure and its Nordic clinker design, position and location suggests it may be a transport vessel from the Viking settlement period if not long afterwards.”

The ship was first uncovered in 1938 when the Railway Inn was demolished and rebuilt further away from the road, with the site of the old pub turned into a car park.

Workers unearthed part of an old clinker-built vessel but were told by the foreman to cover it over again to keep construction on course.

Harding said he believes it might be possible to access the vessel from the pub cellar, where the public could eventually view it.

Gyrinophilus porphyriticus porphyriticus

A single Northern Spring Salamander spotted across the road from the site of Jake Halpern‘s family’s intended vacation retreat in 1988 resulted in a building ban twelve years later, two years of negotiations with the state, a compromise involving the construction of two bridges, one 76 feet (23.16 meters) long.

Then, Massachusetts took the Spring Salamander off its Endangered Species list.

Victor Davis Hanson reflects on the Al Qaeda leadership’s strategic dependence on the West’s internal culture of treason.

I remember reading the accounts of a smiling bin Laden, fresh off from buying his fifth wife for $5,000 (a 15-year-old girl no less). At that very moment in Afghanistan, always the inveterate liar, he was haughty after his recent cowardly murder of the far better fighter Massoud.

That day bin Laden snickered to the radio reports of his 9/11 jihadists, now holding up a finger for each plane’s impending crash to his adoring acolytes in Afghanistan — and soon to be alternately denying culpability in his fear, then boasting of it in his hubris.

Then there were the incomprehensible statements of our own that followed — of Michael Moore, the later darling at the Democratic Convention, claiming that a Democratic city’s blue-state, anti-Bush voters ipso facto should have won an exemption from the killers’ target list.

We heard too from the now apparently warped novelist Norman Mailer, at last relieved that his aesthetic skyline was cleared of the bothersome looming towers (“two huge buck teeth”) — and with them, for Ward Churchill at least, the ashes of the “Little Eichmanns,” of his “technocrats of empire.” …

It was the particularly evil genius of bin Laden to see not that we are militarily weak as he alleged — indeed the United States is more powerful than ever — but that we are apologetic over the source of our bounty and the reasons for our success, to the point of a collective stasis.

The more we push for democratic change abroad, the more the democracy-hating terrorists slander us that we do not. The more we accommodate the religion and culture of detainees, the more the beheaders and bombers cry to the world that we are savage while musing among themselves that we are weak. The more that we tolerate the great asymmetry of reciprocity between Islam and the West; the more we are supposed to apologize for just that tolerance and liberality. The more we pay for outrageously priced oil, the more we are to concede that we are stealing it.

Our shock, and again their insight, is not that they level such absurd charges, but that they do so in such utter confidence that they will find a receptive audience in the West, an audience that has the desire and ability to curtail the American response.

We laugh that on this sixth anniversary a clownish Bin Laden, in dyed chin-whiskers no less, urges us from a cave in Waziristan to read more Chomsky and Scheuer. We laugh that radical Islam hates us for global warming, corporate profits, and high-priced mortgages. We laugh that its jihadists, as a result of these American “sins,” were forced to kill us for the Neocons, and Richard Perle, and Hiroshima, and the 19th-century Indian wars, and all the other American crimes that Hollywood and the universities have globally peddled into a lucrative industry. But the laugh is not that fascists would so clumsily crib our Left to justify their killing, but that they are convinced that they could do so in such amateurish fashion to such great effect.

So is the joke on them or on us?

Bin Laden and his evil Rasputin Dr. Zawahiri were confident on September 11 that such guilt and self-loathing in our hearts could be seasoned, and that it could then be harvested through their own arts of revisionism, victimization, and lies. And consequently within a brief six years of his murdering, our own voices — indeed the very elites of the West — in the luxury of calm before the next attack, are often emboldened to proclaim that the government of America, not the terrorists abroad, is the real danger.

The great lesson of September 11 was not that the jihadists ever believed that they could kill us all. Rather, they trusted that enough of the West and indeed enough of us here in America, might at the end of the day declare that we had it coming.

In this long war, that belief was — and is — far deadlier even than an unhinged murderer at the controls of an airliner.

Richard Munday, in the London Times, notes the impact of bien pensant gun control policies on British crime.

We are so self-congratulatory about our officially disarmed society, and so dismissive of colonial rednecks, that we have forgotten that within living memory British citizens could buy any gun – rifle, pistol, or machinegun – without any licence. When Dr Watson walked the streets of London with a revolver in his pocket, he was a perfectly ordinary Victorian or Edwardian. Charlotte Brontë recalled that her curate father fastened his watch and pocketed his pistol every morning when he got dressed; Beatrix Potter remarked on a Yorkshire country hotel where only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver; in 1909, policemen in Tottenham borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by (and were joined by other armed citizens) when they set off in pursuit of two anarchists unwise enough to attempt an armed robbery. We now are shocked that so many ordinary people should have been carrying guns in the street; the Edwardians were shocked rather by the idea of an armed robbery.

Hat tip to Frank A. Dobbs.

Chicago Journalist Roger Simon of the Politico (not Roger L. Simon, the mystery writer and conservative blogger) does not like conservative Senator Larry Craig one bit, but even the liberal Simon thinks Craig should fight to keep his Senate seat.

Larry Craig should not resign from the Senate.

He should force the Senate to expel him, which the Constitution provides for, but which the Senate has not done to any of its members since 1862.

If he can, Craig also should withdraw his guilty plea to what police say was “lewd conduct” in a public restroom at Minneapolis airport in June.

I have no doubt that Craig, an Idaho Republican, did what a cop says he did.

But I have a big doubt as to whether any of it was a crime. And I think a jury would have a reasonable doubt that he is guilty as charged.

Larry Craig committed a lewd act in that restroom? Larry Craig committed disorderly conduct in that restroom?

Let the prosecutors prove it in court.

Just because Craig is a jerk doesn’t mean he shouldn’t get civil rights in this country. …

According to the Senate website: “Since 1789, the Senate has expelled only 15 of its entire membership. Of that number, 14 were charged with support of the Confederacy during the Civil War.”

The non-Civil War expulsion was that of William Blount of Tennessee, a Democratic Republican, who was expelled in 1797 for “a plan to incite the Creek and Cherokee Indians to aid the British in conquering the Spanish territory of West Florida.”

Larry Craig is no William Blount.

Larry Craig is a hypocrite, a liar and a fool.

But if we kicked people out of the Senate for that, how many senators would we have left?

Norman Hsu, a bankrupt Hong Kong business, seems to have come to America and set up a shell corporation solely for the purpose of funneling large sums of money to democrat candidates, particularly Hillary.

New York Times story.

Gosh! Who do you suppose was supplying Mr. Hsu’s corporation with cash? Remember the Johnny Chung campaign contributions of the 1990s?