Shock And Dismay

clipped from liberalfascism.nationalreview.com As a liberal Democrat I hate to say this.  I do, however, find something unsettling about the way the left finds it perfectly appropriate to use fear-mongering about global warming to scare up votes, but then reacts in shock and dismay when Republicans use fear of terrorism to scare up votes. I'm not sure why "if you vote for Republicans temperatures will rise and Florida will sink into the ocean" is any better than "if you vote for Democrats terrorists will win and a nuclear bomb will go off in New York City."  To be sure, I find the later much more distasteful, but I'm not sure I can think of an intellectually satisfying reason why.

Whoops

clipped from littlegreenfootballs.com Yesterday we posted about the businesswoman in Saudi Arabia who was arrested, strip-searched, and threatened by the Saudi religious police because she was out in public with a male colleague. Today Fox News reports that two weeks before being arrested, the same woman had been boasting about how wonderful things were for women in Saudi Arabia—to President Bush’s brother Neil: American Woman Boasted of Saudi Freedoms To Bush Brother Before Arrest at Starbucks. Two weeks before Yara, an American businesswoman, was arrested by Saudi Arabia’s religious police for sitting with a male colleague at Starbucks, she said she strolled past the very same cafe with another businessman: Neil Bush. But on Monday, Yara learned that she had been wrong. She was thrown in jail, strip-searched, threatened and forced to sign false confessions by the kingdom’s “Mutaween” police. “When I was arrested, it was like going through an avalanche,” she said. “All of my beliefs were completely destroyed.”

They Lie To Each Other But Not To Us?

clipped from littlegreenfootballs.com A distinguishing characteristic of many militant Islamic fanatics is that they’re easily led by pride and ego to reveal things they shouldn’t: Hamas: We’re Allowed to Lie. (IsraelNN.com) Hamas leaders spoke to the Arabic language Ash-Sharq il-Awsat newspaper recently and explained that as Muslims, they are allowed to lie.  In an interview printed on Thursday, senior Hamas terrorists explained, “A Muslim is permitted to say things that oppose his beliefs in order to prevent damages or to be saved from death.”  This approach, known in Arabic as “taqiyya,” was behind several Hamas leaders’ recent public expression of support for Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, they explained. The sources quoted in Ash-Sharq il-Awsat explained that the Samarian terrorists’ announcement was not a sign of dissent within Hamas ranks, but rather a permitted use of “taqiyya” to deceive Abbas and avoid prison sentences.

The Nexus

clipped from www.captainsquartersblog.com The massive loan may not seem unusual given Mitt Romney's self-funding, but Mitt has plenty of his own money. Where did Hillary get $5 million to loan a presidential campaign? Bill and Hillary have done well on the speaking circuit, and Bill recently got $20 million or so for backing out of his partnership from Ron Burkle. At the time, speculation had Bill wanting to eliminate any potential conflicts between Burkle's business and Hillary's election. Now, however, one has to wonder whether Burkle may have attempted to float money into Hillary's campaign while bypassing campaign-finance regulations. Did the $20 million, which came just two weeks ago, actually represent a fair-market settlement for Clinton's services and ownership stake in Yucaipa? Or did Burkle inflate it in order to allow Hillary to "loan" herself $5 million to keep pace with a surging Obama campaign? The Clintons always seem to live at the nexus of questions regarding cash and politics.

Good Luck To You, Senator

clipped from www.cbsnews.com As I noted, I initially believed you shared that goal. But I understand how important the opportunity to lead your party’s effort to exploit this issue must seem to a freshman Senator, and I hold no hard feelings over your earlier disingenuousness. Again, I have been around long enough to appreciate that in politics the public interest isn’t always a priority for every one of us. Good luck to you, Senator.

Pining For Che'

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Finally, young Cubans use internet video to embarrass the Communist dictatorship. I especially enjoyed an innocent question by a "self-avowed revolutionary" who wondered why Cubans aren't allowed to travel. She said she "would very much like to visit the place in Bolivia where Ernesto 'Che' Guevara was killed." My kind of revolutionary.

The Race Condition

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com Whether or not an explicit attitude towards Islamic doctrine has any practical effect on fighting Islamic terrorism is a question has been discussed in earlier posts. But the question of how to think about the issues Coughlin raises creates thorny issues. While it is certainly conceivable that Islam itself is hostile to Western civilization any official acknowledgment of the possibility would be politically explosive. So Coughlin's questions are examined in a parallel process. The concept, familiar to programmers, happens when multiple threads with different code executes on the same data. In this case official strategy is "constrained" -- as Coughlin puts it -- to process Islamic doctrines with a 'politically correct' algorithm. Parallel processing, following the analogy, has known pitfalls. Their outputs may clash when they attempt to merge. Or the conclusion of one thread pre-empts the other by finishing ahead, the so-called 'race condition'.

Moving On

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com You would think that politicians would see horror scenarios coming faster than the feckless characters of B-movies. But that is apparently not the case. They didn't see either of the World Wars coming until it was too late. Politics, like cheap wine, does not improve with age. Baer writes: Walls aside, what Israel sorely misses is the capacity to strike fear into its neighbors, deterrence. The Winograd Commission spelled it out in bleak terms in its report on Israel's failures during the 34-day war. "Israel cannot survive," the official statement said, unless it is able to deter its enemies — teach Hamas and Hizballah a lesson they won't forget. Forgetting -- or "moving on" as it is now called -- is the politician's stock-in-trade. If voters remembered everything they would forgive nothing. No. In our mutable world "never again" means "never mind".

A Fine State

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com The biggest spectacle of the week, was the “breakout” from Gaza of several hundred thousand Palestinians, after Hamas agents took out much of the high wall that separates the Gaza Strip from Egypt, in a series of explosions after months of undermining the structure with acetylene torches and similar labour-intensive tools. The media accounts of this event were incoherent, and understandably so. For even people in the Bush administration were puzzled, and I found myself being asked if I could explain it to more than one of them. When the people who supposedly control the CIA and the State Department are reduced to asking armchair journalists to explain breaking news, well: the world is in a fine state, isn't it? My first comment, at least to them, had to be: “So why did you fire all your neoconservatives?”

The Unadmitted 30s ... And Counting ...

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com While President Bush was throwing money into a recession in Washington, unprecedented Islamist demonstrations were erupting across Egypt, almost unreported in our media. As I was beginning to explain in my Saturday column, it is not generally appreciated that Hamas, which controls Gaza, is of Egyptian descent. And by the brilliant stroke of blowing down the wall at the Egyptian border, they have now invaded Egypt proper. Among the slogans being shouted in Egypt's streets: “Arm us, train us, send us to Gaza!” The rhetorical target is Israel. The actual target is the “moderate” Egyptian government, and the response to these rallies, from the authorities, and from Egypt's formerly-articulate “middle class,” is panic. In Egypt as elsewhere, to say that “the great majority of Muslims are peaceful, unaggressive people, just trying to get on with their lives” is to utter something deeply fatuous. The great majority of Germans were likewise, in the 1930s.

We Can Only Hope

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com The Iraqis in Anbar have completely rejected Al Qaeda. A while back I told the police chief in my town that I thought the reason the terrorists are weak is because their ideas have been rejected. He said, "In 2002 and 2003, we thought Al Qaeda was just another Muslim group. Now, you can go far out into the desert and talk to even a shepherd, and he will tell you that he hates Al Qaeda. One hundred years from now, you will be able to go into the desert and talk to a shepherd and he will still tell you that he hates Al Qaeda." So, having rejected extremism, what is left? They are still Muslim in my town, but I wouldn't call them devout -- they go to the mosque and pray, and mention God in everyday conversations -- as do I to them -- and granted, I certainly don't know or interact with all of them, but I don't think that "moderate Islam" fully captures who they are. In fact, religion is almost irrelevant in the conversations I have with local leaders.

Pigs A Leapin'

clipped from littlegreenfootballs.com What’s gotten into Newsweek magazine? This article by George Weigel is way off their usual politically correct line: The War Against Jihadism. What kind of campaign is this? Six-plus years after 9/11; while the Taliban attempts an Afghanistan comeback; as Islamist terrorists cause mayhem in Algeria and occupy huge swaths of tribal Pakistan; despite “United 93” and “The Kite Runner,” a library-full of books, presidential commissions, congressional hearings, and four election cycles—despite all of that, a strange, Victorian reticence about naming the enemy in the contest for the human future in which we are engaged befogs this political season. Such reticence is an obstacle to victory in a war we cannot avoid and in which we must prevail.

Houses Like ATMs

clipped from instapundit.com SO I'M WATCHING MCCAIN TALK ABOUT THE SUBPRIME CRISIS, and how there may be some "greedy people on Wall Street who need to go to jail." But I heard a typically sad-toned NPR story on subprimes tonight, and despite their best efforts to evoke the Joads it was a story of people who "used their houses like ATMs," taking out home equity loan after home equity loan when they started with a subprime mortgage, only to wind up owing far more than their houses were worth and unable to make the payments. Boo hoo. Shouldn't there be a price for being an idiot? And -- despite not being on Wall Street -- a greedy idiot? Why does McCain want to bail these people out? Why does he want to put Wall Street people in jail?

The Political Storm (Worm)

clipped from blog.washingtonpost.com Dmitri Alperovitch, director of intelligence analysis and hosted security for San Jose, Calif.-based Secure Computing, said federal law enforcement officials who need to know have already learned the identities of those responsible for running the Storm worm network, but that U.S. authorities have thus far been prevented from bringing those responsible to justice due to a lack of cooperation from officials in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the Storm worm authors are thought to reside. Alperovitch blames the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the political influence of operatives within the Federal Security Service (the former Soviet KGB) for the protection he says is apparently afforded to cybercrime outfits such as RBN and the Storm worm gang. when you have the whole money aspect injected into it, this changes the playing field and may make it a bit more difficult to track down who it might be or prove more succinctly that they wrote it."

One Bomb State Update

clipped from drsanity.blogspot.com Here is an interesting news item regarding Israel's analysis of Iran's nuclear capability: Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said, in an interview published Saturday, that Iran is "quite advanced" in its work on atomic weapons and may already be fashioning a nuclear warhead. "Our interpretation is that clearly the Iranians are aiming at nuclear capability," he said. "It's probably true that ... they may have slowed down the weapons group in 2003, because it was the height of American militarism." But he said Israel now believed that Iranians "are quite advanced, much beyond the level of the Manhattan Project." Call it the Tehran Project, if you will.

Kick The Can (Part 72355)

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com There seems to be a bipartisan political consensus not to examine the subject of political Islam publicly. It is the most verboten of foreign policy subjects. But like other "open secrets", its exclusion from formal discussion doesn't banish it from public consciousness. It merely pushes it underground, like Barack Obama's middle name. The key problem with subjecting the question of political Islam to debate is that every other conclusion except that of regarding it as a "religion of peace" implies consequences no one dares face. Concluding that Islam is a 'religion of war' would precipitate a revolution in diplomacy, energy policy and military strategy. It's a bottle of nitro nobody wants to shake; it's a can of worms nobody wants to open: not a Republican administration and most especially not a Democratic one.

Deja Vu All Over Again

clipped from www.americanthinker.com Like the Jedi Knights in Star Wars, much of Israel's safety depends on an absurdly small number of daring pilots and their jet planes. The Israel Air Force has managed to use that capacity with amazing skill and daring, as it showed last September when a dozen fighter bombers and support aircraft jammed Syria's Russian-supplied air defenses and destroyed a secret nuclear facility on the Euphrates river --- not far from Iran.  The nature of that target has still not been revealed, but it must have been important enough to risk triggering a missile attack from Syria. That means the target was believed to be very important: most likely a joint Iranian-Syrian-North Korean nuclear facility. In a very odd move, the Syrians are now rebuilding that mysterious concrete cube in exactly the same location --- even though the whole world knows about it now.  Why should they spend vast amounts of money doing that, if it would only become another fat target?  One possibility is that it's a trap

Looking For That Outreach Award

clipped from www.nysun.com Well, yes, one sort of sees what she means. Killing thousands of people in Manhattan skyscrapers in the name of Islam does, among a certain narrow-minded type of person, give Islam a bad name, and thus could be said to be "anti-Islamic" — in the same way that the Luftwaffe raining down death and destruction on Londoners during the Blitz was an "anti-German activity." But I don't recall even Neville Chamberlain explaining, as if to a five-year old, that there is nothing German about the wish to terrorize and invade, and that this is entirely at odds with the core German values of sitting around eating huge sausages in beer gardens while wearing lederhosen. Still, it should add a certain surreal quality to BBC news bulletins: "The Prime Minister today condemned the latest anti-Islamic activity as he picked through the rubble of Downing Street looking for his 2008 Wahhabi Community Outreach Award.

Report From Hell

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com Surprisingly, being cut off from the outside world was actually somewhat enjoyable for the five days I spent in North Korea. I quite liked the freedom of not being tied to my cell phone and email and relished in the ignorant bliss of not being exposed to troubling international news. This isolationist cocoon where the state controls everything you hear and see, however, would not have been fun for too long. Living an entire life under such conditions would be hell.

The Same Name

clipped from onecosmos.blogspot.com Consider the "great" Rousseau, who had five children with his companion, but abandoned them all without a moment of remorse. In a letter, he casually commented that they were all "put out as foundlings. I have not even kept a note of their dates of birth, so little did I expect to see them again." None of his contemporaries -- including enemies -- chided him for this. Even under the best of circumstances, about half of children had lost at least one parent by the time of adolescence. So to say that attachment, bonding, and intimacy could not flourish under such circumstances is not to criticize them. Again, the great mystery is how modern people broke through that emotional barrier and became.... modern people. In fact, multiple children would often be given the same name, assuming that only one would survive to carry it into the future.

As I recall, even my mother recounted the story of how "the first Audora died".

Amazing

clipped from eddriscoll.com Yes, how did the Swift Vets, on their budget, talk Industrial Light & Magic into digitally inserting Kerry into footage of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations back in 1971, and pay Rich Little for doing an outrageously over-the-top Boston Brahmin accent? (But c'mon Rich--JJJJJennnghis Kahn? isn't that a bit too much? Nobody will believe it!) To complete the ultimate scam, ILM then digitally inserted Kerry, much like Hollywood's Forrest Gump a decade ago, onto the set of the Dick Cavett Show from that same year. And they talked C-Span into running that footage in 2004. Amazing!

Derangement Reconsidered

clipped from www.captainsquartersblog.com Earlier this morning, I noted that some Democrats have discovered that the Clintonian Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy meme may actually have been drizzly pap. In the Los Angeles Times today, Jonathan Chait reluctantly comes to that conclusion. He writes that the conservatives who have long railed against the lies and dirty tactics of the Clintons have been somewhat vindicated by the primary campaign tactics of Bill and Hillary: The Clinton campaign is trying to make it seem as if the complaint is about negativity, and it is pointing out that Obama has criticized Hillary as well. That's what politicians are supposed to do when they compete for votes. But criticism isn't the same thing as lying and sleaze-mongering. Lying. Sleaze-mongering. False claims. Well, no one can say that conservatives didn't warn everyone -- repeatedly -- about these Clinton characteristics.

Appeasement: Deja Vu All Over Again

clipped from littlegreenfootballs.com Wait a minute; Spain withdrew all her troops from Iraq after the Madrid train bombings, and Spanish politicians have been doing their best to bash Israel and appease resident Islamists ever since. So why the suicide bombing plot? MADRID, Spain - Police acting on a tipoff that a radical Islamic group was plotting suicide attacks in Barcelona moved against the cell last week even though it had not amassed enough explosives to make bombs, Spain’s police chief said Thursday. “They had the will but not the means,” National Police chief Joan Mesquida said a day after a judge in Madrid sent 10 suspects to jail pending further investigation. Judge Ismael Moreno said the cell had been planning suicide attacks last weekend on the public transport network in Barcelona, Spain’s second-largest city.

Chinese Cherish Copperheads (Part 92635)

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com The Chinese would first launch “concentrated and unexpected” attacks ... Chinese fighter jets would scramble to intercept aerial refueling tankers and cargo planes sent to shuttle in fuel, munitions, supplies or troops. High-explosive cluster bombs would target pilot quarters and other personnel buildings. But these would take out only a fraction of American combat power. Most US strength is deployed far back. In fact, Chinese military planners have expressed the professional opinion that any such surprise attacks would be like “throwing an egg against a rock.” If so, why are the Chinese even contemplating such scenarios? Because the American public is “abnormally sensitive” about military casualties, according to an article in China’s Liberation Army Daily, killing U.S. airmen or other personnel would spark a “domestic anti-war cry” on the home front and possibly force early withdrawal of U.S. forces.

Memory Hole: The Collapsing Context

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com Janes reports that North Korea is in a bad way -- in a really bad way -- bad even by its own abysmal standards. "Kim Jong-Il's regime could collapse within six months, bringing chaos to North Korea, observers and intelligence sources in Asia have told Jane's. ... The centrally controlled economy has also now ceased to function and the food distribution system is near breaking point. With loyalty to the regime at an all-time low, another sign of trouble is the regime's diminishing ability to prevent people from leaving the country." But the most alarming sign involves Kim Jong-Il himself. "Tellingly, the 'Dear Leader' is in the process of moving financial resources to ensure that his assets are portable should he have to go into exile, according to some sources." Kim, who amended the North Korean constitution in 1996 to declare himself "president for eternity" is estimated by the CIA to have "$5 billion in Swiss bank accounts, six villas in Europe, one in Russia and one in China".

Condi Jong-Il's Memory Hole

clipped from pajamasmedia.com A note about that terrific speech on North Korea, delivered last Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute by the U.S. special envoy for human rights in North Korea, Jay Lefkowitz. In his speech, Lefkowitz broke ranks with the State Department’s charade of progress in disarming Pyongyang. Explaining that four years of Six-Party Talks on North Korea have been a failure, he urged a change of course. Coming from someone at State, it was an extraordinary exercise in facing facts; more in my post last Friday on “Man Bites Dog — State Department Envoy Speaks the Truth About North Korea.” On Friday, as can still be found in the cached version on google, Lefkowitz’s speech was posted on the State Department web site, as an entry under “Remarks” for 2008. But today — hey, presto! — the speech has vanished! As I write this, there are no Lefkowitz “Remarks” for 2008. They’re down the Memory Hole.

The Faker?

clipped from www.cbsnews.com Saddam still wouldn't admit he had no weapons of mass destruction, even when it was obvious there would be military action against him because of the perception he did. Because, says Piro, "For him, it was critical that he was seen as still the strong, defiant Saddam. He thought that [faking having the weapons] would prevent the Iranians from reinvading Iraq," he tells Pelley. He also intended and had the wherewithal to restart the weapons program. "Saddam] still had the engineers. The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there," says Piro. "He wanted to pursue all of WMD…to reconstitute his entire WMD program." This included chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, Piro says.

And Here's Why Bill Is An Economic Moron

clipped from mjperry.blogspot.com The top chart above shows the decline in the U.S. share of world stock market capitalization from more than 50% in 2001, to less than a third in 2007 (32.8%), using data from the World Federation of Exchanges. Even though the U.S. Stock market capitalization has increased in each of the last five years, the explosive growth in many of the emerging markets has caused the U.S. share of world stock value to decline. In other words, the relatively poor countries are getting richer, and the relatively rich U.S. gets richer, but the "poor" are getting rich even faster. That's great. Likewise, even though U.S. GDP has increased this year at a healthy 3.1% rate, our share of world GDP growth has fallen below 30% (see bottom chart above), due to the even greater growth in the emerging economies like China and India.

The Big Guilt Hits Bill

clipped from corner.nationalreview.com According to the front-page of today’s Wall Street Journal, Bill Gates is issuing a clarion call for a kinder capitalism to aid the world’s poor. Mr. Gates says he’s grown impatient with the shortcomings of capitalism. He thinks it’s failing much of the world, and he’s slated to say as much in a speech later today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. This from a guy worth around $35 billion. (Give or take a billion.) It appears Gates is ignoring the global spread of free-market capitalism that has successfully lifted hundreds of millions of people up from poverty and into the middle class over the last decade or so. Think China. Think India. Think Eastern Europe (and maybe even France under Sarkozy). Gates wants business leaders to dedicate more time to fighting poverty. But the reality is that economic freedom is the best path to prosperity. Period.

The Iceberg

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com Perhaps one reason why the West has proved so helpless in the face of threats like al-Qaeda is that it is culturally unable to resist, or even to condemn, extremist Islamic agitation in its pre-militant phase. By fighting only those who have crossed the sharp legal border between religious hate-mongering (which is tolerated as a multicultural right) and actual belligerency it is permanently restricted to chipping away at the tip of the iceberg, while nine-tenths of it is allowed to grow unchecked beneath the surface. The West Point analysis points out that many of the problems which beset Iraq have their origins elsewhere; in so-called allied countries and even within communities in the West. A foreign suicide bomber is man who by definition was ready to explode before he even got to Iraq. The country itself provided him with a graveyard, but the process which gave him birth is still in full swing.

Ignorance Is Strength

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com "I think the Pope's visit is not a good thing because science doesn't need religion. The university is open to every form of thought but religion isn't," said Andrea Sterbini -- a computer science professor who was one of 67 academic signatories of a document protesting the pope's visit. In those two sentences my reader may see exposed the grounding assumption of every politically-correct proposition in the post-modern, so-called “liberal” mind. The speaker assumes there is an official "open-minded" position, that must be protected by law or force. He then insists on banning any deviation from this official “open-minded” position. George Orwell made it his life's work to expound the way in which the plain meaning of any English word could be inverted in minds contaminated by ideology. The “open mind” becomes indistinguishable from the closed one. “Peace” means war. “Freedom” means slavery. “Ignorance is strength.”

Welcome To Canada -- Land Of Kangaroos

clipped from littlegreenfootballs.com A great Mark Steyn piece on the insanely Orwellian Canadian “human rights” commissions: It’s all very odd, ‘that’s for sure’. Who has availed themselves of the “human rights” protected by Section XIII? In its entire history, over half of all cases have been brought by a sole “complainant,” one Richard Warman. Indeed, Mr. Warman has been a plaintiff on every single Section XIII case before the federal “human rights” star chamber since 2002 — and he’s won every one. That would suggest that no man in any free society anywhere on the planet has been so comprehensively deprived of his human rights. Well, no. Mr. Warman doesn’t have to demonstrate that he’s been deprived of his human rights, only that it’s “likely” (i.e. “highly un-”) that someone somewhere will be deprived of some right sometime. Who is Richard Warman? What’s his story? Well, he’s a former employee of the Canadian Human Rights Commission: an investigator. Same as Shirlene McGovern.

Good On Spencer

clipped from www.jihadwatch.org On November 15 of last year, I wrote this about the controversy over whether anti-jihadists should support the Vlaams Belang party or not: But there is cultural defense and then there is a white supremacism that is based on some idea of racial superiority and inferiority, and has via Hitler a historical link to genocide. They are not the same thing, and a distinction needs to be made between the two. If VB and SD have really made a clean break with the past, make it a complete one: let them deal with the ties to LePen and Haider, and make a distinction between cultural defense and white supremacism that is completely clear and distinguishes their position from the neo-fascists.

Phoney Liberal Update

clipped from www.samizdata.net Thank you for trying to offer us high quality, low cost agricultural products. However I am sorry but we would prefer it if you remain dependent on tax funded handouts from First World governments and their anointed NGOs. And speaking of NGOs, if you People of Colour start getting involved in horrid global trade, what will happen to the people who work for NGOs? We need NGOs so that our children can go work for them in that pesky gap year, helping you poor ignorant dark people with your Third Worldie Problems, and thereby allowing our kiddies to develop self-esteem and feel good about themselves.

The Battlefield Near You

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com Ten new friends have just linked to your profile'. We all get these cheerful notifications from our favorite social networking software. But just who are your friends? And why are they interested in you? The Daily Telegraph reports, "British troops have been warned not to post personal details on internet websites amid fears that they will be targeted by British-based al-Qaeda terrorists. The warning, which states that al-Qaeda cells are increasingly using the Internet to track down potential targets, appeared in a "restricted" military security document distributed to Army units across Britain. The document reveals that troops using the Facebook, MySpace and Friends Reunited sites may potentially be most at risk. The tactic of attacking British military personnel while off duty was used to great effect by the IRA. the Internet plus the radical Islamic diaspora now means that there is no neat distinction between the battlefield and "home".

Go Fred!

clipped from www.captainsquartersblog.com It may have, where it counts, in South Carolina. Via Campaign Spot, the American Research Group poll taken over the last two days has Fred Thompson powering out of the doldrums and into the 20s, good enough for a clean third-place spot: Mike Huckabee leads among Republicans with 37%, followed by John McCain and Fred Thompson with 22% each. McCain leads among self-described independents with 48%. I picked Huckabee because I figured the last-minute pandering on the Confederate flag might be enough to push him over the edge. McCain's paying for his vacillation and final rejection of the issue in 2000. Thompson's score won't be enough for him to gain many delegates, but it does appear to be enough to prevail over Romney for third place, and that should keep him in the race through February 5th.

Yasser's Stage

clipped from www.commentarymagazine.com Joel Pollak (no relation) reports on his blog that Charles Enderlin, the France 2 television reporter implicated in the Mohammed al-Dura fabrication, admitted at a talk at Harvard last night that the famous scenes of Yasser Arafat donating blood after the 9/11 attacks were, like the footage of the IDF killing al-Dura, staged: Enderlin said the event had been staged for the media to counteract the embarrassing television images of Palestinians celebrating in the streets after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. The blood donation story made headlines around the world. It was reported by esteemed news agencies like the BBC, and photographs of Arafat lying with an outstretched arm ran on many front pages. But the whole scene was staged, Enderlin said. Arafat didn’t like needles, and so the doctor put a needle near his arm and agitated a bag of blood. The reporters took the requisite photographs.

Underlings

clipped from corner.nationalreview.com We in California, given the past budget implosions, know the script to follow. We expect that police, fire, prisons, parks etc will be threatened with cut-backs and closure while the state-funded "Center for this" and the "Department of that" will remain untouched, since cutting the essential while protecting the politically-correct superfluous is the only way to scare the voter and achieve higher taxes. At some point we Californians should ask ourselves, how we inherited a state with near perfect weather, the world's richest agriculture, plentiful timber, minerals, and oil, two great ports at Los Angeles and Oakland, a natural tourist industry from Carmel to Yosemite, industries such as Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and aerospace—and serially managed to turn all of that into the nation's largest penal system, periodic near bankruptcy, and sky-high taxes. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings."