Mr. Joseph Rago, the assistant editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal, yesterday attacked bloggers, putting the lot of us in our place with a quotation from Joseph Conrad written by fools to be read by imbeciles, originally intended by Conrad to apply to newspapers.

Jerry Jackson, the Chicago Sun Times’ Wednesday conservative editorialist, responds to Lanny Davis’ recent Wall Street Journal editorial which expressed surprise at finding so much “scary hatred” (aimed at Joe Lieberman) emanating from the left. (Lanny is a red-diaper baby, named after Upton Sinclair’s “progressive” agent Lanny Budd.) Scary hatred, in Lanny Davis’s view is a natural monopoly of the political right.

When I discuss Rush (Limbaugh) and others with some of my liberal friends, they all repeat the same worn out phrases. He (Rush) is full of hate, cuts people off if they disagree and in general spews vitriol against liberals. I then ask them if they ever listen to Rush, and to a person they always answer “of course not, but I know all these things because I read about him and hear these comments from my friends”.

Rush maintains an audience of somewhere between 20-25 million people because he delivers a quality program with lots of good humor and bases his comments on considerable research. He encourages calls from those that disagree and some days takes calls only from those who have a different philosophy.

Does Rush make fun of the liberals and make their immature ideas sound ridiculous? Absolutely. Does he do research to prove their talking points are without logic? You bet! Does he use vulgar phrases and emit hate in every word? Never.

For years now the progressives have tried to offset Rush with their own left leaning performers, and they went through a number of lefties that bombed on the air. Those have included Mario Como, Hightower, Al Gore and many others.

A few years ago the lefties thought they had the answer, and with enormous financial backing from such stalwarts as George Soros, created a whole network to feature the left and called it Air America. This network is 24 hours a day of Bush bashing, hate, vulgarity and out and out stupidity. Since I criticize the Limbaugh bashers who have never heard his program, I felt it was my duty to listen to Air America. I have done so over a period of about three months and here are some comments from just two 90- minute sessions:

1) “The entire Bush crime family should be executed.”

2) “George Bush is a g.d. lying s.o.b.” (by the host) There was no use of initials in this quote.

3) “Bush and Cheney are gleefully causing gas prices to go sky high to benefit their big oil friends.”

4) “Why didn’t Cheney turn the shotgun on himself after he wounded his friend?” (by the host)

5) “The Bush Administration planned and executed 9-11.”

6) “Rumsfeld should be hung by his thumbs and subjected to all the torture that was given to the alleged insurgents.”

7) “The Bush government purposely did not capture bin Laden because they wanted an excuse to go to war.” (by the host)

8) “We can hope that the insurgents will get information on Bush’s travel plans so they can shoot down his airplane.”

9) “Bush and the government planted explosives in the World Trade Center and that’s why the Twin Towers collapsed.”

On this latter point one of the hosts asked how this could be so since we all saw the airplanes fly into both towers. The answer to this was simple. One of the listeners explained that this was a conspiracy between Bush and the major TV networks. Through trick technology they transposed these airplanes onto the TV screens to fool all America – and on and on and on.

So these are all the peace loving, tolerant, well educated and so informed progressives and liberals that are trying to redirect America. If the subject wasn’t so serious, it could be great comedy. If you want something to keep you up at night, these patriots with their brilliance and liberal elite-ness vote in all the local and national elections.

The good news is that Air America is having a very tough time staying afloat. They have lost their radio outlets in New York and several other major markets. This network cannot raise enough advertising dollars to promote this brand of vicious propaganda. Eventually George Soros and other sponsors will no doubt tire of funding such trash and they will be required to compete in the free market.

The Wall Street Journal celebrates the twenty fifth anniversary of Ronald Reagan signing the Economic Recovery Tax Act by noting the significance of the impact of Reagonomics on the US and World economies and the breadth of his philosophy’s current acceptance. Russia today has a 13% flat tax.

Twenty-five years ago this weekend, Ronald Reagan signed the Economic Recovery Tax Act. The bill cut personal income tax rates by 25% across the board, indexed tax brackets for inflation and reduced the corporate income tax rate. The anniversary is worth commemorating as a seminal moment that continues to influence policy for the better in the U.S., and around the globe.

The achievement of Reaganomics can only be fully understood by recalling the miserable state of affairs a quarter-century ago. Newsweek summarized the national mood when it wrote in 1981 that Reagan “inherits the most dangerous economic crisis since Franklin Roosevelt took office 48 years ago.”

That was no exaggeration. The economy was enduring a cycle of rising inflation with growing levels of unemployment. Remember 20% mortgage interest rates? Terms like “stagflation” and “misery index” entered the popular vocabulary, and declinists of various kinds were in the saddle. The perception of American economic weakness encouraged the Soviet empire to ever bolder adventures, as reflected by Soviet tanks in Kabul and Communists on the march in Nicaragua and Africa.

The reigning Keynesian policy consensus had no answer for this predicament, and so a new group of economic ideas came to the fore. Actually, they were old, classical economic ideas that were rediscovered via the likes of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, Arthur Laffer, Robert Mundell, and such policy activists in Washington as Norman Ture and Jack Kemp, among others. These humble columns under our late editor, Robert Bartley, led the parade.

For every policy goal, you need a policy lever, Mr. Mundell likes to say. Monetary restraint was needed to break inflation, while cuts in marginal tax rates would restore the incentives to save and invest. With Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve and Reagan at the White House, those two levers became the essence of the “supply-side” policy mix.

The results have been better than even some of its supporters hoped. The Dow Jones Industrial Average first broke 1,000 in 1972, but a decade later it was barely above 800 — one of the worst and most enduring bear markets in history. In the 25 years since Reaganomics, however, the Dow has climbed to about 11,000, accounting for an increase in national wealth on the order of $25 trillion. To match that increase in percentage terms, the Dow would have to rise to some 150,000 in the next quarter century. American living standards have risen steadily, and U.S. businesses have created entire industries that didn’t exist a generation ago…

Adherents of Rubinomics — after Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin — are still not converts, arguing that tax increases are virtuous if they reduce the deficit. We’ve addressed that argument many times and will again. But even the Rubinites haven’t dared to repeal indexing for inflation (which pushed taxpayers via “bracket creep” into ever-higher tax rates), and even the most ardent liberals don’t propose to return to the top pre-Reagan income tax rate of 70%. They also now understand that, at some point along the Laffer Curve, high rates begin to yield less tax revenue. The bipartisan consensus in favor of sound money has also held.

Thus today, the top marginal personal and corporate tax rates are 35%, compared with 70% and 48% in 1981. In the late 1970s the tax on dividends was 70% and the capital gains rate was 50%; now they’re both 15%. These reductions have increased the rate of return on capital, and hence some $3 trillion more was invested by foreigners in the U.S. between 1981 and 2005 than was invested by Americans abroad. One result: 40 million new jobs, more than the rest of the industrialized world combined.

The rest of the world, meanwhile, has followed the Gipper down the tax-cut curve. Daniel Mitchell of the Heritage Foundation finds that the average personal income tax rate in the industrialized world is now 43%, versus 67% in 1980. The average top corporate tax rate has fallen to 29% from 48%. This decline in global tax rates has been the economic counterpart to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Most of Eastern Europe has adopted flat tax rates of 25% or lower, and the Russians now have a flat income tax of 13%. In Old Europe, Ireland’s corporate and personal income tax rate cuts have helped generate the swiftest economic growth in the EU.

Not bad for a President dismissed as a dreamy former actor. In his 1989 farewell address, Reagan said that “People say that I was a great communicator. It would be more accurate to say that I communicated great ideas.” He was right, and a remarkable global prosperity has followed in his wake. The challenge for current and future political leaders is not to forget it.

The Blogosphere was filled today with howls of savage satisfaction at the sudden death of Ken Lay.

How can I not respond?

My wife is persuaded of Lay’s villainy, having read two of the books produced by journalists in the aftermath of Enron’s demise.

I wouldn’t read those books, but I remember reading the attack story spread across the front page of the Wall Street Journal by members of its leftwing news side, and I remember being unpersuaded that pushing the edge of the accounting practices envelope was necessarily either illegitimate or criminal.

In America, when the hound pack of the Press chases a conspicuously wealthy defendant, the prosecutor/huntsman always wins. The readily-provoked envy of the masses invariably ensures a guilty verdict. And such was Ken Lay’s unhappy fate.

The honest WSJ editorial side was skeptical of the prosecution’s case as well:

There is no doubt that Mr. Lay is guilty of bad management. He admitted Thursday that his trust in Mr. Fastow was misplaced, and there must have been other missteps. But Mr. Fastow had plenty of help in covering his tracks, both within Enron and from its outside accountants. In a criminal trial, it is not enough to say that Mr. Lay should have known. No CEO can know all that is going on in a large corporation, and the fraud at Enron was so complex that it took prosecutors more than two years to unravel.

The government’s Exhibit A will presumably be a videotape of Mr. Lay’s now-famous pep talk to employees in August 2001, telling them Enron was still “doing extremely well” and encouraging them to hold on to their stock. Many followed his advice and ended up losing much of their life savings. That aroused an understandable anger with the CEO, who was paid salary and bonuses in the millions.

But Mr. Lay was also putting his money where his mouth was. During the long slide of Enron’s share price, he continued to keep the vast majority of his personal wealth in the stock and even bought more shares, selling only when forced by margin calls. This is not consistent with the theory that he knew the company’s true situation and was out to defraud shareholders.

Mr. Lay’s co-defendant, former CEO Jeffrey Skilling, claimed that he resigned from the company for personal reasons and allegedly made $89 million in profits from selling Enron stock. By all accounts Mr. Lay came back to the company to replace Mr. Skilling as CEO because of his personal connection to it. He then did what captains are supposed to do, which is go down with his ship.

I’m not sure I believe the heart attack story, but I see no reason to inquire. The young boy from Tyrone, Missouri who delivered newspapers and mowed lawns made good, made a lot of money, lived the good life, and like many a good man was brought low. If he escaped prison and degradation by his own hand, good for him.

Perhaps Ken Lay behaved in extremis as the ancient Romans did, when Fate turned on them. Thinking of Ken Lay today, I remembered the end of Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurian:

For there remained also, for the old earthy creature still within him, that great blessedness of physical slumber. To sleep, to lose one’s self in sleep–that, as he had always recognised, was a good thing. And it was after a space of deep sleep that he awoke amid the murmuring voices of the people who had kept and tended him so carefully through his sickness, now kneeling around his bed: and what he heard confirmed, in the then perfect clearness of his soul, the inevitable suggestion of his own bodily feelings. He had often dreamt he was condemned to die, that the hour, with wild thoughts of escape, was arrived; and waking, with the sun all around him, in complete liberty of life, had been full of gratitude for his place there, alive still, in the land of the living. He read surely, now, in the manner, the doings, of these people, some of whom were passing out through the doorway, where the heavy sunlight in very deed lay, that his last morning was come, and turned to think once more of the beloved. Often had he fancied of old that not to die on a dark or rainy day might itself have a little alleviating grace or favour about it. The people around his bed were praying fervently–Abi! Abi! Anima Christiana! [“Depart! Depart! Christian Soul!”] In the moments of his extreme helplessness their mystic bread had been placed, had descended like a snow-flake from the sky, between his lips. Gentle fingers had applied to hands and feet, to all those old passage-ways of the senses, through which the world had come and gone for him, now so dim and obstructed, a medicinable oil. It was the same people who, in the gray, austere evening of that day, took up his remains, and buried them secretly, with their accustomed prayers; but with joy also, holding his death, according to their generous view in this matter, to have been of the nature of martyrdom; and martyrdom, as the church had always said, a kind of sacrament with plenary grace.

Michelle Malkin has an amusing new video, focussing on those leaking leftwing newspapers, which includes a WWII Private Snafu cartoon, written by Dr. Seuss and featuring the voice of Mel Blanc.

History professor Joyce Lee Malcolm discusses, in the Weekend edition of the Journal, the unwillingness of the British government to defend its subjects against crime rising comcomitantly with its determination to prevent their defending themselves.

With Great Britain now the world’s most violent developed country, the British government has hit upon a way to reduce the number of cases before the courts: Police have been instructed to let off with a caution burglars and those who admit responsibility for some 60 other crimes ranging from assault and arson to sex with an underage girl. That is, no jail time, no fine, no community service, no court appearance. It’s cheap, quick, saves time and money, and best of all the offenders won’t tax an already overcrowded jail system.

Not everyone will be treated so leniently. A new surveillance system promises to hunt down anyone exceeding the speed limit. Using excessive force against a burglar or mugger will earn you a conviction for assault or, if you seriously harm him, a long sentence. Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer jailed for killing one burglar and wounding another during the seventh break-in at his rural home, was denied parole because he posed a threat to burglars. The career burglar whom Mr. Martin wounded got out early.

Using a cap pistol, as an elderly woman did to scare off a gang of youths, will bring you to court for putting someone in fear. Recently, police tried to stop David Collinson from entering his burning home to rescue his asthmatic wife. He refused to obey and, brandishing a toy pistol, dashed into the blaze. Minutes later he returned with his wife and dog and apologized to the police. Not good enough. In April Mr. Collinson was sentenced to a year in prison for being aggressive towards the officers and brandishing the toy pistol. Still, at least he won’t be sharing his cell with an arsonist or thief.

How did things come to a pass where law-abiding citizens are treated as criminals and criminals as victims? A giant step was the 1953 Prevention of Crime Act, making it illegal to carry any article for an offensive purpose; any item carried for self-defense was automatically an offensive weapon and the carrier is guilty until proven innocent. At the time a parliamentarian protested that “The object of a weapon was to assist weakness to cope with strength and it is this ability that the bill was framed to destroy.” The government countered that the public should be discouraged “from going about with offensive weapons in their pockets; it is the duty of society to protect them.”

The trouble is that society cannot and does not protect them. Yet successive governments have insisted protection be left to the professionals, meanwhile banning all sorts of weapons, from firearms to chemical sprays. They hope to add toy or replica guns to the list along with kitchen knives with points. Other legislation has limited self-defense to what seems reasonable to a court much later.

Although British governments insist upon sole responsibility for protecting individuals, for ideological and economic reasons they have adopted a lenient approach toward offenders. Because prisons are expensive and don’t reform their residents, fewer offenders are incarcerated. Those who are get sharply reduced sentences, and serve just half of these. Still, with crime rates rising, prisons are overcrowded and additional jail space will not be available anytime soon. The public learned in April that among convicts released early to ease overcrowding were violent or sex offenders serving mandatory life sentences who were freed after as little as 15 months.

And the slackening of law enforcement continues to stimulate the Labour Government’s erosion of the ancient liberties which were always England’s pride.

…a host of actions have been initiated to bring about more convictions. At the end of its 2003 session Parliament repealed the 800-year-old guarantee against double jeopardy. Now anyone acquitted of a serious crime can be retried if “new and compelling evidence” is brought forward. Parliament tinkered with the definition of “new” to make that burden easier to meet. The test for “new” in these criminal cases, Lord Neill pointed out, will be lower than “is used habitually in civil cases. In a civil case, one would have to show that the new evidence was not reasonably available on the previous occasion. There is no such requirement here.”

Parliament was so excited by the benefits of chucking the ancient prohibition that it extended the repeal of double jeopardy from murder to cases of rape, manslaughter, kidnapping, drug-trafficking and some 20 other serious crimes. For good measure it made the new act retroactive. Henceforth, no one who has been, or will be, tried and acquitted of a serious crime can feel confident he will not be tried again, and again.

To make the prosecutor’s task still easier, he is now permitted to use hearsay evidence — goodbye to confronting witnesses — to introduce a defendant’s prior record, and the number of jury trials is to be reduced. Still, the government has helped the homeowner by sponsoring a law “to prevent homeowners being sued by intruders who injure themselves while breaking in.”

It may be crass to point out that the British people, stripped of their ability to protect themselves and of other ancient rights and left to the mercy of criminals, have gotten the worst of both worlds. Still, as one citizen, referring to the new policy of letting criminals off with a caution, suggested: “Perhaps it would be easier and safer for the honest citizens of the U.K. to move into the prisons and the criminals to be let out.”

Just last week, the BBC was reporting on the success of a “knife amnesty.”

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
–Adam Smith

Brian Carney interviews Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster in the Weekend Wall Street Journal, and finds a man operating a sensationally successful business operation based on an atypical, casting one’s bread upon the waters, model of customer service.

I put the question to Mr. Buckmaster: Google has turned unobtrusive text ads into a multibillion-dollar revenue stream. And posting a Google-type ad or two next to its search results wouldn’t cost Craigslist users one thin dime. So why not cash in?

“In the big Internet boom, thousands of companies were set up,” explains Mr. Buckmaster, who also counts himself as CFO and COO of the company. “With the exception of us, pretty much all of them were set up with the primary objective being to make a lot of money.” And yet, he continues, “Almost all of those businesses went under and never made any money. Even businesses like Amazon still haven’t made any money. They are still, over their entire lifetime, net negative. Here we are, we’ve been in the black since 1999 — six or seven years.”…

Mr. Buckmaster figures that Craigslist employs 21 people, and starts to count them on his fingers. It never brought in venture capitalists with their grand designs and exit strategies. “We didn’t want to have those voices at the table,” he says. So Craigslist has remained beholden to no one — except, as Mr. Buckmaster constantly intones, its “users,” who pay nothing for the privilege of posting or searching the millions of pages of apartment listings, moving sales and personal ads that make up the Craigslist ecosystem. “If it’s not something that users are asking for,” he says, “we don’t consider it.” The money that does come in comes from businesses posting in just two categories of classifieds in three cities — job listings in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles and, this week for the first time, brokered apartment rentals in New York…

We’re much more comfortable charging companies than charging individuals,” Mr. Buckmaster says. “Businesses are better equipped to afford a small fee and businesses can pay for fees out of pre-tax dollars where on average users are less able to pay a fee and they have to pay in post-tax dollars.” Giving users something free and denying money to the government at the same time? This man is no commie. What’s more, he runs a lean outfit. “There are big advantages to focusing exclusively on user wants and needs as we do, and blocking out everything else. That’s one of the ways we keep our staff small and our operations simple.”

As for the banner ads, “It’s not something our users have asked us for,” Mr. Buckmaster deadpans, his 6-foot-8-inch frame slumped in a leather chair in his living room and his eyes fixed on some distant point out the window. It turns out this is something of a mantra for Mr. Buckmaster; what Craigslist’s users want, they tend to get. No more and no less…

When asked whether there’s a Craigslist model that other companies could emulate, the unflappable Mr. Buckmaster, his eyes once more fixed firmly on the horizon out the window, waxes lyrical for a moment: “It’s unrealistic to say, but — imagine our entire U.S. workforce deployed in units of 20. Each unit of 20 is running a business that tens of millions of people are getting enormous amounts of value out of each month. What kind of world would that be?”

Before I have time to object, Mr. Buckmaster comes back to our world. “Now, there’s something wrong in the reasoning there,” he admits. “You can’t run a steel company in the same way that you run an Internet company” — more points for understatement. “But still, it’s a nice kind of fantasy that there are more and more businesses where huge amounts of value can flow to the user for free. I like the idea, just as an end-user, of there being as many businesses like that as possible.” As an end-user, I suppose I do, too.

Buckmaster’s approach to capitalism as an exercise in serendipity clearly works for Craigslist. It could be argued that this sort of business model in which adversarial friction is minimized, and the delivery of value is maximixed, is closer to the original free market ideal than today’s more commonly encountered vastly regimented and hierarchical bean-counting organizations.

Michael Barone, in the WSJ, reflects on the consequences of the habitual misuse of power of the press to delegitimize elected administrations.

It is hard in retrospect to understand why the left put so much psychic energy into the notion that Mr. Rove would be indicted. He certainly was an important target. No one in American history has been as powerful an aide to a president, both on politics and on public policy, as Karl Rove. Only Robert Kennedy in his brother’s administration and Hamilton Jordan in Jimmy Carter’s come close, and neither was as involved in electoral politics as Mr. Rove has been.

Still, it was clear early on that the likelihood that Mr. Rove violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act was near zero. Under the law, the agent whose name was disclosed would have had to have served overseas within the preceding five years (Valerie Plame, according to her husband’s book, had been stationed in the U.S. since 1997), and Mr. Rove would have had to know that she was undercover (not very likely). The left enjoyed raising an issue on which, for once, it could charge that a Republican administration had undermined national security. But that rang hollow when the left gleefully seized on the New York Times’ disclosure of NSA surveillance of phone calls from suspected al Qaeda operatives abroad to persons in the U.S.

In all this a key role was played by the press. Cries went up early for the appointment of a special prosecutor: Patrick Fitzgerald would be another Archibald Cox or Leon Jaworski. Eager to bring down another Republican administration, the editorialists of the New York Times evidently failed to realize that the case could not be pursued without asking reporters to reveal the names of sources who had been promised confidentiality. America’s newsrooms are populated largely by liberals who regard the Vietnam and Watergate stories as the great achievements of their profession. The peak of their ambition is to achieve the fame and wealth of great reporters like David Halberstam and Bob Woodward. But this time it was not Republican administration officials who went to prison. It was Judith Miller, then of the New York Times itself.

Interestingly, Bob Woodward himself contradicted Mr. Fitzgerald’s statement, made the day that he announced the one indictment he has obtained, of former vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby, that Mr. Libby was the first to disclose Ms. Plame’s name to a reporter. The press reaction was to turn on Mr. Woodward, who has been covering this administration as a new story rather than as a reprise of Vietnam and Watergate.

Historians may regard it as a curious thing that the left and the press have been so determined to fit current events into templates based on events that occurred 30 to 40 years ago. The people who effectively framed the issues raised by Vietnam and Watergate did something like the opposite; they insisted that Vietnam was not a reprise of World War II or Korea and that Watergate was something different from the operations J. Edgar Hoover conducted for Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy. Journalists in the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s tended to believe they had a duty to buttress Americans’ faith in their leaders and their government. Journalists since Vietnam and Watergate have tended to believe that they have a duty to undermine such faith, especially when the wrong party is in office.

That belief has its perils for journalism, as the Fitzgerald investigation has shown. The peril that the press may find itself in the hot seat, but even more the peril that it will get the story wrong. The visible slavering over the prospect of a Rove indictment is just another item in the list of reasons why the credibility of the “mainstream media” has been plunging. There’s also a peril for the political left. Vietnam and Watergate were arguably triumphs for honest reporting. But they were also defeats for America–and for millions of freedom-loving people in the world. They ushered in an era when the political opposition and much of the press have sought not just to defeat administrations but to delegitimize them. The pursuit of Karl Rove by the left and the press has been just the latest episode in the attempted criminalization of political differences. Is there any hope that it might turn out to be the last?

The Israeli-based purveyor of Intel-gossip Depkafile tells us that Jordanian intelligence provided the breakthrough leading to the successful targeting of Zarqawi.

(It is generally believed that Depkafile functions as a mouthpiece for Mossad, and commonly distributes rumors or even false stories, but this one serves no obvious Mossad agenda, and could possibly even be true.)

The final breakthrough in the long pursuit of the most blood-stained terrorist of them all, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, came from Jordan.

The source was Ziyad Halaf al Karbouli, also known as Abu Hufeiza, one of the lowlifes Zarqawi employed to attack and rob the convoys plying Baghdad’s main supply route across the Jordanian border and murdering their Iraqi or Jordanian drivers. Foreigners riding along were taken hostage. DEBKA-Net-Weekly reveals that he was picked up — not by chance, but in consequence of a well-laid Jordanian sting operation set up and executed by King Abdullah’s old unit, The Riders of Justice of Jordan’s 71st Commando Brigade – and on his orders.

Jordanian intelligence had a score to settle with Zarqawi’s highway robber-in-chief. Last September, he kidnapped a Palestinian called Khaled Da Siko, who was an important Jordanian undercover agent, assigned with penetrating Zarqawi’s following. The abduction took place in Ruthba in western Iraq. When Abu Hufeiza asked Zarqawi what to do with his captive, he was told to execute him forthwith, which he did.

From that moment, Jordanian intelligence never let up on their efforts to lay hands on the kidnapper to exact revenge.

The Riders of Justice infiltrated western Iraq at the beginning of 2006 and scoured al Qaim, Ruthba, Falujja and Ramadi for the wanted man. At some point, they realized that even if they overpowered his bodyguards and killed him, they would never make it back to Jordan past Zarqawi’s killers. It had become necessary to go for the boss, who was in any case under sentence of death in the kingdom.

In early April therefore, a decision was taken in Amman to lure Abu Hufeiza into entering the kingdom in defiance of Zarqawi’s prohibition. Double agents held out an offer of a Jordanian base for al Qaeda, plus information on ways to lay hands on the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through the funding channel between Jordan and Iraq.

Abu Hufeiza swallowed the bait. He was dazzled enough to picture himself handing the rich booty over to Abu Zarqawi and being promoted to his Number Two in al Qaeda’s Iraq hierarchy by his grateful master.

The moment he and his bodyguards set foot on Jordanian soil, all got up as Iraqi businessmen on a shopping trip, the trap snapped shut; they were surrounded by the Riders of Justice and hauled to Amman for questioning.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s counter-terror sources report that Abu Hufeiza held nothing back from his Jordanian interrogators. He was the source of the first real lead to Zarqawi’s location to be made available to the US command and intelligence in Iraq.

Abu Hufeiza also gave away certain members of the Butcher of Baghdad’s command group. Here is a summary of the data the Jordanians extracted from him:

The name of al Qaeda chief’s chief of operations, Yassin Harabi — an Iraqi Sunni codenamed Abu Obeida. Going down the chain of command, he identified Yunas Ramlawi, a Palestinian from the West Bank town of Ramallah, and Muhammad Majid, a Saudi Arabian known as Abu Hamza.

The descriptions he gave the Jordanians were good enough for identikit portraits and betrayed their hideouts, how they stayed in touch with Zarqawi and their movements.

This data haul Jordanian intelligence whipped across to Washington where analysts went to work on it and rushed their findings to American headquarters in Baghdad.

All of a sudden, the US military in Baghdad had an intelligence bonanza instead of chance identities of the odd Zarqawi adherent which was all they had to work with before. From Abu Hufeiza Jordanian intelligence had extracted the first clue to the location of the safe house near Baquba, where Zarqawi was actually in conference with his senior commanders. The next link in the chain came from a senior Zarqawi commander in Iraq, who fell into American hands and was persuaded to part with the final steps that brought two US 500-pound bombs crashing down on Zarqawi’s last address.

At first, some American officers queried these offerings as disinformation designed to trip them up. But when US commander General George W. Casey and American ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad ordered the input examined and cross-referenced, it proved solid enough for direct action.

———————

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a story which appears to be incorporating the Depkafile report:

Perhaps the most important arrest, however, say Middle East and European intelligence agents, was Jordan’s capture last month of an al Qaeda logistics and smuggling agent, Ziad Khalaf Raja al-Karbouly. Mr. Karbouly went on Jordanian television after his arrest and described murdering Jordanian truck drivers moving goods into Iraq. He also described carrying out political assassination of Moroccan and Kurdish diplomats on the orders of Mr. Zarqawi.

The Jordanians worked with agents inside Iraq to draw Mr. Karbouly across the border, Jordanian intelligence officials said last month. And the al Qaeda operative provided Jordanian interrogators with important intelligence on Mr. Zarqawi’s top aides, including his spiritual adviser, Abu Abdul-Rahman. In recent weeks, U.S. military personnel said they monitored Mr. Rahman’s movements and, ultimately, were drawn to Mr. Zarqawi’s hideout near the Iraqi city of Baqubah.

The Jordanian operation “offered a critical link” on al Qaeda’s leadership structure, said a European counterterrorism official.

The Wall Street Journal put the debate on the Death Tax (which costs more to collect than it adds to the Federal coffers).

Americans favor repealing the death tax not because they think it will help them directly. They’re more principled than that. Two-thirds of the public wants to repeal it because they think taxing a lifetime of thrift due to the accident of death is unfair, and even immoral. They also understand that the really rich won’t pay the tax anyway because they hire lawyers to avoid it.

For proof that they’re right, they need only watch the current debate. The superrich or their kin–such as Bill Gates Sr. and Warren Buffett–are some of the loudest voices opposing repeal. Yet they are able to shelter their own vast wealth by creating foundations or via other crafty estate planning. Edward McCaffery, an estate tax expert at USC Law School, argues that “if breaking up large concentrations of wealth is the intention of the death tax, then it is a miserable failure.”

Do the Kennedys or Rockefellers look any poorer from the existence of a tax first created in 1917? The real people who pay the levy are the thrifty middle class and entrepreneurs who’ve built up a modest nest egg or business and are hit by a 46% tax rate when they die. Americans want family businesses, ranches, farms and other assets to be passed from one generation to the next. Yet the U.S. has one of the highest death tax rates in the world.

But two Republican poltroons in the Senate joined the Party of Envy to defeat the repeal 57-41. A 60 vote majority was needed to end a democrat filibuster against basic decency.

Besides Mr. Baucus (D – Montana), three other Democrats voted to end debate and clear the way for a vote on repeal. They were Senator Ben E. Nelson of Nebraska, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida and Senator Blanche L. Lincoln of Arkansas. Two Republicans, Senator George V. Voinovich of Ohio and Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, voted to block the bill.

The Wall Street Journal’s amusement feature today was about the latest Internet phenomenon in the Orient. A passenger on a Hong Kong bus took a video on his cell phone of the six minute tirade by an older man over a request by a younger fellow to lower the volume of his cell phone conversation.

His repeated “I’ve got pressure,” (in Chinese) has become a popular slogan, available on to shirts and coffee mugs.

While riding public bus 68X on the night of April 29, Elvis Ho tapped the shoulder of a passenger sitting in front of him who was talking on a cellphone. The 23-year-old Mr. Ho asked the man to lower his voice. Mr. Ho called him “uncle,” a familiar way of addressing an elder male in Cantonese.

Instead of complying, the man turned around and berated Mr. Ho for nearly six minutes, peppering his outburst with obscenities.

“I’ve got pressure, you’ve got pressure!” the older man exploded. “Why did you have to provoke me?” A nearby passenger who found the encounter interesting captured most of it on video with his own cellphone, and it was posted on the Web.

“Bus Uncle,” as the older man is now known, has since become a Hong Kong sensation. The video, including subtitled versions, has been downloaded nearly five million times from YouTube.com, a popular Web site for video clips.

Teenagers and adults here sprinkle their conversations with phrases borrowed from Bus Uncle’s rant, such as “I’ve got pressure!” and “It’s not over!” (shouted when the young man tried to end the conversation several times by saying, “It’s over”). Also, there are several insults involving mothers. Web sites peddle T-shirts with a cartoon of Bus Uncle and the famous phrases. They are also available as mobile-phone ringtones.

Fans have edited the footage into music-video versions of disco, rap and pop songs that have themselves become popular online. One video projects a slowed-down version of Bus Uncle’s voice over an image of Darth Vader. Another sets Bus Uncle audio clips to Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” beginning with a title that says, “All he wanted to do…was to talk on his phone and relax from his stress…but someone HAD to tap him on the back.”

Jon Fong, the 21-year-old accountant and night-school psychology student who captured the bus incident on his Sony Ericsson cellphone, has become famous, too. Mr. Fong has told reporters that he often takes videos as a hobby, and had just planned to share this one with friends. “Next time, I’ll put myself in the frame,” he told Hong Kong’s Cable TV news.

The Internet has allowed the Bus Uncle video to join a slew of other instant amateur films in attracting a global audience. Here in Hong Kong, it has a special resonance. For many, Bus Uncle personifies the stresses of life in their city.

the video (contains obscenities – uncensored)

the video (cleaned-up subtitles)

Bus Uncle rant set to Sammi Cheng pop song

Motherload of Bus Uncle links