Not To Subjugate

clipped from www.frontpagemagazine.com Despite the changing imagery, however, one thing remained constant. From his earliest days, Arafat was clear that the PLO’s aim was “not to impose our will on [Israel], but to destroy it in order to take its place . . . not to subjugate the enemy but to destroy him.” The Palestinian nationalism that he and his Communist advisers created would be the only national movement for political self-determination in the entire world, and across all of world history, to have the destruction of a sovereign state and the genocide of a people as its only raison d’etre.

This one is a must read. Antonio Gramsci is beaming in his grave...

Bigoted Misogynistic Ignoramuses -- An Update From Pat

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Clinton Light

clipped from freemanhunt.blogspot.com A very nice man, yes. A very fiscally conservative man, no. This is a must read story and pretty much sums up my feelings about Huckabee. Betsy Hagan, Arkansas director of the conservative Eagle Forum and a key backer of his early runs for office, was once "his No. 1 fan." She was bitterly disappointed with his record. "He was pro-life and pro-gun, but otherwise a liberal," she says. "Just like Bill Clinton he will charm you, but don't be surprised if he takes a completely different turn in office." ... "He has zero intellectual underpinnings in the conservative movement," says Blant Hurt, a former part owner of, and columnist for, Arkansas Business magazine. "He's hostile to free trade, hiked sales and grocery taxes, backed sales taxes on Internet purchases, and presided over state spending going up more than twice the inflation rate." You'll have to scroll to the bottom of the table to find Huckabee as he was one of only nine governors to receive an F.

The Primitive Sacrifice

clipped from onecosmos.blogspot.com To put it another way, if you toss aside our Judeo-Christian "wisdom tradition," as secular scholars have done, then you also throw out our traditional way of discussing the reality of man's role as cosmic metaxy. You end up with mere de-mythologized horizontal history, and ultimately with a "particularization" of historical events, divorced from the cosmic Universal. This is a kind of intellectual Fall that ends in the tin growl of deconstruction, multiculturalism, "diversity," moral relativism, and leftist totolerantarianism. In turn, this is why secularism is not just anti-religion, but a substitute "religion of darkness" for unfertile eggheads in their ovary tower. When you worship at the altar of political correctness, you are engaging in a kind of primitive sacrifice of the One. It is a violent dismembering and therefore disremembering of Unity, and as as result, anti-human in the extreme.

The Sahwa Wild Card

clipped from www.realclearpolitics.com But Ali Hatem - and other sheikhs with whom I spoke - are looking at an awakening that goes beyond groups of fighters. They talk of forming a new political party - nonsectarian - built on a tribal base that includes Sunnis, Shiites and others. "The political people in authority in Iraq have failed," he says. "We cannot wait." Such a development may have to wait until Iraq holds provincial elections. But the ferment aroused by the sahwa movement is already shaking up Iraq's political scene. No one knows whether the movement will morph into one or several parties, or into job banks and army units or new militias. It has become the new military and political wild card in Iraq.

Henry Points Out The Obvious

clipped from www.realclearpolitics.com The NIE holds that Iran may be able to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon by the end of 2009 and, with increasing confidence, more warheads by the period 2010 to 2015. That is virtually the same timeline as was suggested in the 2005 National Intelligence Estimate. The new estimate does not assess how long it would take to build a warhead, though it treats the availability of fissile material as the principal limiting factor. If there is a significant gap between these two processes, it would be important to be told what it is. Nor are we told how close to developing a warhead Tehran was when it suspended its program or how confident the intelligence community is in its ability to learn when work on warheads has resumed. On the latter point, the new estimate expresses only "moderate" confidence that the suspension has not been lifted already. Intelligence personnel need to return to their traditional anonymity.

Failing (Into) "Intelligence"

clipped from pajamasmedia.com The new stereotype is that of a generation of history, and English BAs—who failing to get their law or advanced academic degrees—went into intelligence. Once there they got angry that their genius was not appreciated and their liberal worldviews were not heard, and then began leaking and molding intelligence to fit preconceived notions—even as they claim they were squeezed by right-wingers wanting to bomb someone. A thorough mess we have at present. Partisanship shapes intelligence analyses, and dissidents leak and spin to the media to undermine views they do not embrace.

And One Would Be Wrong

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com One would think that countries that signed the Kyoto treaty are doing a better job of curtailing carbon emissions. One would also think that the United States, the only country that does not even intend to sign, keeps on emitting carbon dioxide at growth levels much higher than those who signed. And one would be wrong. The Kyoto treaty was agreed upon in late 1997 and countries started signing and ratifying it in 1998. A list of countries and their carbon dioxide emissions due to consumption of fossil fuels is available from the U.S. government. If we look at that data and compare 2004 (latest year for which data is available) to 1997 (last year before the Kyoto treaty was signed), we find the following. * Emissions worldwide increased 18.0%. * Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21.1%. * Emissions from non-signers increased 10.0%. * Emissions from the U.S. increased 6.6%.

The Proper Priorities Pope

clipped from www.dailymail.co.uk Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology. The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering. The German-born Pontiff said that while some concerns may be valid it was vital that the international community based its policies on science rather than the dogma of the environmentalist movement. His remarks will be made in his annual message for World Peace Day on January 1, but they were released as delegates from all over the world convened on the Indonesian holiday island of Bali for UN climate change talks. The 80-year-old Pope said the world needed to care for the environment but not to the point where the welfare of animals and plants was given a greater priority than that of mankind.

Not Anyone With Common Sense

clipped from attackmachine.com Astute readers remember (better than the AP) that in 1997, the US Senate voted 95-0 to oppose any climate treaty that excluded China, India and other developing nations. John Kerry was one of the 95. Now he’s in Bali: Kerry gravely told the group that he was delighted to be in Bali at this “transformational moment.” He thanked the nations that persevered to push the Kyoto Protocol without the participation and leadership of the United States. Let’s give Kerry the benefit of the doubt and interpret the Byrd-Hagel resolution, not as a rejection of Kyoto, but as an attempt to steer the negotiations. Does anyone believe that China, which is due to bring some 400 new coal-fired generating plants online, would agree to Kyoto? A liberal might believe that, but not anyone with common sense.

Tails We Die

clipped from pajamasmedia.com “Tehran’s expectations of reciprocal good will have been dashed by American condemnation of perceived provocations in other arenas, as when Iranian support for objectives in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks was rewarded by President Bush’s inclusion of Iran in the “axis of evil.” Do they not know that the mullahs were playing both sides of the table? At the very moment Tehran was sitting at the negotiating table with us to discuss the future of Afghanistan, Iranian-guided terrorists were trying to kill Americans on the ground. Just as they are today, in both Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s kind of a template for the nuclear program: on the one hand they make a friendly gesture, on the other hand they continue to produce the ingredients of their atomic bomb. Heads they fool us, tails we die.

Consequences

clipped from www.estatevaults.com “Now,” the old Japanese said, “I will tell you why I invited you here. It is because I have something to say to you, and to all Americans.” He was out of breath and his face was full of color from the whiskey he had drunk, and I thought, “Well, here it comes.” Yamagishi said, “Thank you. Thank you for defeating Japan. If you Americans had not done so, this village would be as it always was. The militarists would never have let us have democracy. But the Americans built the road; my nephews and nieces have cars and television sets, and they see their children every day. In one of my novels a political idealist asks Paul Christopher what he believes in. Christopher replies, “I believe in consequences.” In the novel, as in politics and in life itself, you can’t know what the consequences of any act will be until you come to the end.

The Decline Of The West

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Clouseau Again

clipped from www.slate.com At a time when Congress and the courts are conducting important hearings on the critical question of extreme interrogation, and at a time when accusations of outright torture are helping to besmirch and discredit the United States all around the world, a senior official of the CIA takes the unilateral decision to destroy the crucial evidence. This deserves to be described as what it is: mutiny and treason. Despite a string of exposures going back all the way to the Church Commission, the CIA cannot rid itself of the impression that it has the right to subvert the democratic process both abroad and at home. Its criminality and arrogance could perhaps have been partially excused if it had ever got anything right, but, from predicting the indefinite survival of the Soviet Union to denying that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait, our spymasters have a Clouseau-like record, one that they have earned yet again with their exculpation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Serenade For A Madman

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Soon thereafter signs began to appear that the Bush administration was dedicating diplomatic efforts to send the New York Philharmonic to North Korea. Reading the tea leaves, Terry Teachout wondered: What would you have thought if Franklin Roosevelt had encouraged the Philharmonic to accept an official invitation to play in Berlin in the spring of 1939? Do you think such a concert would have softened the hearts of the Nazis, any more than Jesse Owens's victories in the 1936 Olympics changed their minds about racial equality? Having failed to rein in North Korea's nuclear program, Bush administration diplomats now work to serenade a madman. Reflecting the deep thought underlying American diplomacy, Donald Kirk pronounces it a triumph. Perhaps the Philharmonic string section can take a shot at getting us word on the North Korean contribution to the Syrian installation that the Israelis destroyed in September.

The Black Knights Of KyoTwo

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Lead author David Douglass elaborates: The observed pattern of warming, comparing surface and atmospheric temperature trends, does not show the characteristic fingerprint associated with greenhouse warming. The inescapable conclusion is that the human contribution is not significant and that observed increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases make only a negligible contribution to climate warming. So far, science hasn't had much to do with the global warming debate. I still think, though, that when voters understand that the "cure" for alleged anthropogenic global warming is for them to get poorer, interest in the scientific validity of the theory will be piqued.

Just a flesh wound no doubt...

Along Our Road

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com The effect of the NIE puts me in mind of Churchill's words in Parliament condemning the Munich Agreement. Referring to the relief felt by the people of England to the temporary avoidance of war with Germany, he avowed that "they should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road[.]"

The Absolute Worst

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com "Su Wei, a top climate expert for China's government attending the U.N. Climate Change Conference, said the job belongs to the wealthy. He said it was unfair to ask developing nations to accept binding emissions cuts and other restrictions being pushed for already industrialized states." He said the United States and its fellow industrial nations have long spewed greenhouse gases into the atmosphere while newly emerging economies have done so for only a few decades. "China is in the process of industrialization and there is a need for economic growth to meet the basic needs of the people and fight against poverty," Why have things come to the point where the most stable and prosperous democracies in history must vie for the approval and acclamation of the Chinese bureaucrats and self-appointed nongovernment organization inspectors? It is in part because Western "intellectuals" who should know better have submitted the moral judgment of the relative best to the absolute worst.

The Tragedy

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com The Times Online reports: A British imam's daughter is living in fear of her life under police protection after she received death threats from her family for converting to Christianity. The young woman, aged 32, whose father is a Muslim imam in the north of England, has moved house 45 times to escape detection by her family since she became a Christian 15 years ago. And who's taken up the cudgels for the woman? The women's liberation movement? The Left? Why it's ... The Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, will claim "freedom to believe" is under threat in Britain because of Islamic hostility to conversion. The story is interesting because it advances two conjectures. First the native Western liberal intellectual elite is going betray every principle it espouses to a) bash America; b) keep itself "safe". As I have often said, the War on Terror has been a tragedy for the Left in a way that it has never been for conservatives.

I Will Miss Israel Greatly. New York And Washington Not So Much...

clipped from pajamasmedia.com it will be taken as confirmation of the view that we should not do anything mean to the mullahs. We should talk to them instead. And that’s just what the Estimate says: …some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways, might–if perceived by Iran’s leaders as credible–prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program. Incredibly, the authors of the document claim they can prove all this: “The impact of international pressure is beyond dispute, the officials said, a “cause-and-effect” relationship backed up by an ‘evidentiary trail.’ “ But any good student who has taken Psych 101 will tell you that it’s nigh unto impossible to determine someone else’s intentions, especially when presented by “analysts” who think that Ayatollah Khamenei and President Rafsanjani are as rational as the rest of us.

No Such Scrutiny

clipped from pajamasmedia.com No matter: the contemporary campus almost habitually serves as fierce critic of society with the understanding that no such scrutiny should ever apply to itself—whether that be tuition that rises higher than the rate of inflation, faculty governance that ensures no outside auditors dare question teaching competency or productivity, lifelong employment through tenure that has resulted in uniformity of belief rather than encouraged mavericks, and the steady erosion in common skills and basic education shown by recent college graduates.

Stalemate: A Perspective

clipped from www.americanthinker.com General George Marshall is noted for his famous economic assistance "Marshall Plan" commencement speech at Harvard in 1947. However, less appreciated was his "Stalemate Strategy," which George Kennan called "containment." General Marshall pointed out that we made a serious mistake after World War I by pulling our troops out of Europe, and allowing strife to be renewed. Prevention of large scale fighting must never again be allowed, he said, and the developed nations must collaborate in its prevention. Unfortunately, prevention is a multiple step process of transition from dictatorship to a democracy. It usually takes generations, and involves a sequence of stages.                 Fighting....Exhaustion     STALEMATE.....Negotiation.....Democracy The critical stage is "stalemate," which requires the immediate availability of a superior garrison military force, to be used if needed. Stalemate can then encourage a process of negotiation,

The Awkward Fit

clipped from corner.nationalreview.com Any researchers who haven't fully signed on to the "social stigmatization" argument might like to dust off the reports following the stabbing in 2002 of Paris' first openly gay mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, by a Muslim immigrant, Azedine Berkane. Le Monde reported the views of M Berkane's neighbors: “He was a bit like us,” said one. “We’re all homophobic here, because it’s not natural.” “It’s against Islam,” said another. “Muslim fags don’t exist.”  As I say somewhere in my book: If you think Iraq's Kurds and Arabs, Sunni and Shia are incompatible, what do you call a jurisdiction split between post-Christian secular gay potheads and anti-whoring anti-sodomite anti-everything-you-dig Islamists? If Kurdistan’s an awkward fit in Iraq, how well will Pornostan fit in the Islamic Republic of Holland?

Iraq = D.C.

clipped from blogs.dailymail.com The left’s demand for instant democracy is laughable. “In Baghdad, politics are a mess. Critics of Bush’s policy complain that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite fundamentalist, has not reached out with sufficient vigor to Sunni Arabs to seek reconciliation. In fact, the situation is far worse than that,” Cole wrote. Oh? Two months into the fiscal year, Congress has yet to pass a federal budget. Critics of Harry Reid complain that “he has not reached out with sufficient vigor to” Republicans “to seek reconciliation. In fact, the situation is far worse than that.” Congress mirrors conditions in the Iraqi parliament because of the left’s refusal to accept victory.

I've been saying this for a while now...

One Man's Terrorist ... Is Every Sane Man's Terrorist

clipped from littlegreenfootballs.com In an effort to get close enough to murder Benazir Bhutto, one of the Islamist attackers reportedly strapped his explosives to a one-year old infant. Meanwhile, horrifying new details emerged last night of the attempt by suicide bombers to kill Ms Bhutto on her return home from exile last month. Investigators from Ms Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party said yesterday they believed the bomb, which killed 170 people and left hundreds more wounded, was strapped to a one-year-old child carried by its jihadist father. They said the suicide bomber tried repeatedly to carry the baby to Ms Bhutto’s vehicle as she drove in a late-night cavalcade through the streets of Karachi. “At the point where the bombs exploded, Benazir Bhutto herself saw the man with the child and asked him to come closer so that she could hug or kiss the infant,”

I'm no friend of Benazir Bhutto. But whether she knows it or not, she IS facing terrorists. That's spelled M-U-R-D-E-R-O-U-S L-U-N-A-T-I-C.

The Perfectly Fine Adventures Of Him/Her/It In Iran

clipped from pajamasmedia.com Remember Ahmadi-Nezhad’s boast at Columbia University that there were no gays in Iran? Well, it turns out that at a recent “peace” conference, Mohsen Yahyavi let it slip that, while there might be none, if the regime laid its hands on a homosexual, they killed him/her/it. Homosexuals deserve to be executed or tortured and possibly both, an Iranian leader told British MPs during a private meeting at a peace conference, The Times has learnt. Mohsen Yahyavi is the highest-ranked politician to admit that Iran believes in the death penalty for homosexuality after a spate of reports that gay youths were being hanged. I don’t expect this story to make headlines, but hey, it’s in the London “Times” so you never know. Let’s hope. It is one of those dazzling statements that, so to speak, tears the veil away from the illusion the mullahs try to cultivate in Western circles.

The Despair

clipped from www.nysun.com Capitalism requires careers that are open to talent: successful investment banks need to be run by the best brains rather than the best pedigrees. At the same time, capitalism produces social change. Competition leads companies to invest in new technologies. Great social cataclysms like the industrial and information revolutions change the way people live. Some cultures, some societies, tolerate this kind of diversity and upheaval better than others. Jewish society, with a culture shaped by millennia of exile, encountered capitalist modernity with the ability to maintain a sense of identity and continuity in the face of change and has generally adapted well to the new conditions. Wasps, with cultural roots in a form of Protestant Christianity that is individualistic and future-oriented, have also managed to negotiate the challenges of liberal modernity relatively smoothly. the "Anglo-Judaic" synthesis remains the despair of our enemies.

The Forgiveness Question

clipped from pajamasmedia.com The President is challenging the world with a new order. There is always passionate opposition to change. Have grievous mistakes been made? Yes. But just as Wilson, FDR, Truman, Kennedy, and Reagan laid the foundations for fighting and prevailing in the Cold War, Bush has responded to 9/11 with a foreign policy revolution of similar magnitude: a reorganization of government institutions and appropriate legislation to meet the emerging threats. Containment and deterrence are ineffective in this brave new world. There is no containment if you can’t see the enemy; there is no deterrence if the enemy desires death. I believe the President’s critics are profoundly mistaken. I believe they misunderstand how he’s trying to protect us. I believe they misunderstand the nature of the threat. I believe they misunderstand history. If they succeed in dismantling what President Bush has set in motion, the results may well be catastrophic and history will never forgive them.

Shame And Obsession

clipped from opinionjournal.com Do you know what leadership is all about? Leadership is all about restoring that perspective that this country is truly an exceptional country that has great things that it is going to accomplish in the future that will be as great and maybe even greater than the ones we've accomplished in the past. If we can't do that, shame on us. This is exactly right, and we hope Giuliani keeps hammering home the point. In the conservative circles in which we usually travel, we hear far too much depressive, alarmist talk. And the left is much worse. They are so scared of terrorism that they have constructed an elaborate system of denial. They lash out at anyone who takes the terror threat seriously (see Glenn Greenwald's silly attack on the Giuliani speech for an example), but their complacency is obviously phony, as evidenced by their lurid and obsessive fantasies about torture, tyranny, global warming and all other manner of unreal horrors.

Whoops

clipped from littlegreenfootballs.com Robert Spencer links to an FBI report on US “hate-motivated crimes” during 2006, showing the truth behind the constant claims of victimhood from Islamic advocacy groups: FBI hate crimes report for 2006: Jews suffer over 5 times more attacks than Muslims. Anti-Black 3,136 Anti-Jewish 1,027 Anti-White 1,008 Anti-Male Homosexual 881 Anti-Hispanic 770 Anti-Female Homosexual 192 Anti-Islamic 191

The Obscenity

clipped from www.americanthinker.com Max Dimont in his 1962 book, Jews, God and History, observes that Nazi propaganda had been anti-Christian since 1919, and that Jews sent to concentration camps were met there by Christians of conscience who arrived before the Jews. Dimont is not defending Christianity as a Christian and he certainly is not condemning his own faith or denying the mass murder of his own Jewish people in the Holocaust, which his book explains in great and awful detail.   What Dimont does in his book, written only seventeen years after the end of the Second World War, is to show that blaming the Holocaust on Christian "anti-Semitism," is not just wrongheaded, but obscene.  Professor Schapiro, an eminent Jewish professor, in his 1940 college textbook on European history observed that the only opposition to the Nazis came from Protestant and Catholic clergy, who stood their ground despite persecution.

MAD RIP Update

clipped from www.commentarymagazine.com We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world. But this is not new. Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot also had their apologists who saw them as “nationalists” with “legitimate grievances.” So much for the allegation that the Khomeini quotation is “non-existent.” But there is another quotation I have cited repeatedly in the course of showing why Iran would not be deterred by the fear of retaliation. This one is a statement by the supposedly moderate former President Rafsanjani: If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession . . . application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel, but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.

Before, Not After

clipped from pajamasmedia.com Still the idea of BBC broadcasts that might have warned any Germans who participated in the extermination process that they would be prosecuted as war criminals, broadcasts that left no doubt in the mind of every single German, every single European (since most European nations were complicit in the execution of the Holocaust) that they would be held accountable. Even if they weren’t, the fear of it might have had some effect, the putative broadcasts might have made a difference. Still among all the stories of warnings ignored, or disbelieved, rescue action denied or delayed till too late, this struck me as a not-impossible lost chance. And a reminder that the time to stop a nation from committing genocide is before it starts not after it’s finished.

Long Out Of Fashion

clipped from opinionjournal.com For its own protection, and thus that of Europe, Germany could more closely integrate and where appropriate reintegrate itself into the expeditionary and nuclear retaliatory structures of the U.S., Britain, and France without moving nuclear weapons forward to German soil; end leniency for terrorists; step up defensive measures as if it is just about to be hit; and embrace limited missile defense against potentially nuclear-armed Iranian intermediate-range ballistic missiles rather than accept the Russian thesis that 10 interceptors will perturb the nuclear equation. What are the chances of this? Though the West comprises the richest grouping of nations the world has ever seen, it has somehow come to believe not only that it is not entitled to its customary defenses but that it cannot afford them. And looking ahead strategically so as to outmaneuver crisis and war has, unfortunately, long been out of fashion.

Where They Excel

clipped from www.redstate.com The slide to success can only be stopped by the Democrat Congress cutting off funding now. The sad fact of the matter is that they may just do it. All they have to do is nothing. They are excelling at that right now. It would trigger a massive debacle if they carry through with it. The only good that would come of it is the destruction of the Democrat party for decades to come. However, as much as I would like to see the Democrats do that to themselves, it is not worth the cost, and I do not think they would commit party suicide willingly. However, they may be too blind or stupid to realize they are doing it to themselves until it is too late I am afraid. Gosh, the "what if's" can give a person a headache!

Because W Did It Of Course...

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Several other Democrats voiced similar sentiments, but Obama's chief rivals pounced on his answer, suggesting that it sounded weak. What they should have said is that it sounded like George Bush. It is President Bush who has has been saying since 2002 that the longstanding Western policy of accommodating corrupt dictatorships in the Arab world has contributed to the rise of terrorism, and that the only long-term solution to the problem of Islamic terrorism is our effort to bring modernity, including democracy, to the Muslim world. This was the chief reason for overthrowing Saddam Hussein, and those who share Bush's view of the matter are conventionally called, for no very good reason, "neocons." What is weird about Obama and other Democrats who pay lip service, at least, to the value of democracy is that they seem willing to apply the principle to every country in the world except Iraq.

#177? (!)

clipped from www.theaviationnation.com TSA Office of Intelligence Comment: Although there is no information that the aircraft was being specifically targeted for a future terrorist attack, the actions of the four passengers are highly suspicious. FFDO confirmation of possible tampering of the lavatory mirror in one of the lavatories could be indicative of an attempt to locate concealment areas for smuggling criminal contraband or terrorist materials.  In this case, it appears the left lavatory was the sole area of interest for the passengers. One subject's excuse that the right lavatory was dirty when it was confirmed to be clean shows the four passengers had a specific, operational objective. Although unconfirmed at this time, this incident has many of the elements of pre-operational terrorist planning.  Source: TSA Suspicious Incidents Report #177 Unless there have been 177 such incidents in the past fifteen months, one wonders when TSA Suspicious Incident Reports #1-#176 occurred — and what information they contain?

Yes. And The Swiss Were "Neutral" In WWII Also...

clipped from www.captainsquartersblog.com Has an opening appeared for a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear weapons standoff? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad acknowledged that Iran might have a neutral third party such as Switzerland perform their uranium enrichment in order to appease Western nations who insist Iran wants to develop nuclear weapons: Iran's President President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Dow Jones Newswires Sunday that he would be consulting with Arab nations on a plan to enrich uranium outside the region in a neutral country such as Switzerland.

The Weak Horses (And Stomachs)

clipped from www.captainsquartersblog.com Blair says he has no regrets over removing Saddam Hussein, but clearly he sees 2003 as a missed opportunity for the UN. He tells the Times that in the end, the permanent UNSC members seemed more interested in hamstringing the US than they ever were in resolving the problem of Saddam Hussein. It points to a problem at the basis of the war on terror -- the lack of stomach in the West for the fight. “The enemy that we are fighting I am afraid has learnt . . . that our stomach for this fight is limited and I believe they think they can wait us out." So far, with the exception of George Bush and Tony Blair and perhaps now Nicolas Sarkozy, that mostly appears correct. UPDATE: As CapQ commenter C Cage points out, I forgot John Howard of Australia.

Our Corrupt "Betters" (Part 92365)

clipped from www.captainsquartersblog.com Jazz Shaw at Middle Earth Journal noticed a story buried at the Washington Post regarding the biggest embarrassment in the House of Representatives, William "Dollar Bill" Jefferson. The man who commandeered a National Guard detachment to act as his personal moving company during Hurricane Katrina and who kept $90,000 in bribe money in his freezer had new allegations of corruption filed in federal court on Friday. Nancy Pelosi does not have her hands tied in this case. The House has the ability to expel members who act unethically, even absent a criminal conviction. It rarely happens; the only two in the last 150 years to be expelled were James Traficant in 2002 and Michael Myers in 1980, and both had to get convicted of bribery first to get the boot from their colleagues. Neither party has proven very courageous in protecting Congress and the People from the corrupt. Denny Hastert even filed a lawsuit to keep the FBI from using material seized in Jefferson's Capitol Hill offices