Huge Victory

There was a huge victory for the anti-Chavez forces in Peru today. Bet you didn't read about it in the MSM, either. Publius reports it was a victory for the "least worst" style of picking a candidate. A theory we here in the Crabitat endorse.

Oh heck, where will Cindy Sheehan go for a photo-op now?

Read This

Christopher Hitchens:

There is no respectable way of having this both ways. Those who say that the rioters in Baghdad in the early days should have been put down more forcefully are accepting the chance that a mob might have had to be fired on to protect the National Museum. Those who now wish there had been more troops are also demanding that there should have been more targets and thus more body bags. The lawyers at Centcom who refused to give permission to strike Mullah Omar's fleeing convoy in Afghanistan—lest it by any chance be the wrong convoy of SUVs speeding from Kabul to Kandahar under cover of night—are partly responsible for the deaths of dozens of Afghan teachers and international aid workers who have since been murdered by those who were allowed to get away. If Iraq had been stuffed with WMD warehouses and stiff with al-Qaida training camps, there would still have been an Abu Ghraib. Only pacifists—not those who compare the Iraqi killers to the Minutemen—have the right to object to every casualty of war. And if the pacifists had been heeded, then Slobodan Milosevic, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein would all still be in power—hardly a humanitarian outcome. People like to go on about the "fog" of war as well as the "hell" of it. Hell it most certainly is—but not always so foggy. Indeed, many of the dilemmas posed by combat can be highly clarifying, once the tone of righteous sententiousness is dropped.

In Which The New York Times Degenerates

I wondered earlier today whether there had been a coup at the New York Times. They actually published several things that made me wonder what was going on. But never fear, lefties! The good old NYT you all know and love is back with probably one of the most vile and ghoulish articles I have read recently. Mudville Gazette covers it rather well, so I won't link to the NYT directly on this one.

Let's just put it this way, to long for the good old days of photos of dead American soldiers stacked like cord wood, is disgusting and shows how deranged some reporters can be these days.

It must have been just a hiccup today with the other items.

UPDATE: Others blogging. The Real Ugly American, Riehl World View and The Belmont Club.

UPDATE: Also Ninth State. Thank you very much indeed for the hat tip on this.

It Doesn’t Matter

It doesn't matter if you are liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. Sebastian Mallaby believes the government owns your money when you die. Oh sure, you paid all the taxes due on it when you earned it, but when you kick the bucket don't even think of passing it on to your kids. Because it belongs to the government then. It is not your's or your heirs', it's mine, all mine.

It doesn't matter if you are liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. There is no possible excuse for doing what Congress is poised to do this week: Abolish the estate tax.

The federal government faces a future of expanding deficits. Thanks to the baby bust and medical inflation, spending is projected to rise by nearly 3 percent of gross domestic product by 2030, a growth equivalent to the doubling of today's Medicare program. What is the dumbest possible response to this? Take a source of revenue and abolish it outright.

Let's see; stop stealing money from a law-abiding taxpayer just because they died? Sounds about right to me. There is one extraordinary part in Mallaby's rather silly "give me the money" rant:

But now the House has voted to repeal the estate tax, and the Senate may do the same this week. Republicans are picking up support from renegade Democrats, such as Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Bill Nelson of Florida, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Max Baucus of Montana. Several more may go over to the dark side if a "compromise" bill, which would achieve nearly everything that abolitionists dream of, is introduced in the Senate. President Bush, who has already muscled a temporary repeal of the estate tax into law, would be delighted to sign a bill making abolition permanent.

You see, in Mallaby's world if your are a Democrat who does not favor excessive taxation you are a renegade. If you want to cut taxes you are joining the "Dark Side". Quick, Luke Sebastian! Hand me my light saber!

UPDATE: Others taking a somewhat dim view of Mallaby's arguments: Outside the Beltway, QandO, Carol Platt Liebow and The Sundries Shack.

A Heaping Helping Of Chesapeake Ray

The cownose ray is making quite a pest of itself in the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. The voracious critters swim north from Florida and munch their way through the oyster beds on the bay. They also do extensive damage to other shellfish like scallops. Folks down there have come up with a plan to start a commercial fishery of the pests, though.

In late spring, they migrate from southern Florida into the bay, churning up the bottom to feast on oysters and other shellfish.

But now, the rays might have met their match: humans and their ever-evolving quest for new tastes from the sea.

Scientists, regulators and commercial seafood representatives met recently at a workshop to find markets for ray wings and filets.

A commercial ray harvest could protect delicate attempts to restore pollution-filtering oysters, reduce damage to ecologically valuable seagrass beds and create jobs.

"I find a ray of hope for this project — finally," said Shirley Estes of the Virginia Marine Products Board.

Named for their distinctive heads, cownose rays glide through the water on wings sometimes mistaken for shark dorsal fins. They protect themselves with a poisonous stinger and grind shellfish inside their powerful mouths.

Last month, rays ruined an oyster restoration effort on the Piankatank River, eating most of about 750,000 oysters.

Man, that's a lot of oysters. You begin to see the extent of the problem. Anyway, seafood companies are looking into exporting the rays to South Korea, which has quite an appetite for ray. They import around $18 million worth of rays annually. In addition they are trying to expand the market in the US by marketing them under the name "Chesapeake Rays" which sounds a bit better than "cownose". Look for it in a seafood restaurant near you! Tell them Blue Crab Boulevard sent you.

101st Blog Of The Day

My ongoing project to visit one member of the fighting 101st each day led me over to The American Mind today. Sean Hackbarth posts on a number of the same things that capture our attention over here in the Crabitat.

The Surrey With The (Lunatic) Fringe On Top

There was a conspiracy theorists extravaganza this past weekend in Chicago. Some 500 firm believers in a 9/11 conspiracy gathered together to reinforce their derangement. It was, according to the New York Times, quite a spectacle.

In Salon Four, there was a presentation under way on the attack in Oklahoma City, while in the room next door, the splintered factions of the movement were asked — for sake of unity — to seek a common goal.

In the foyer, there were stick-pins for sale ("More gin, less Rummy"), and in the lecture halls discussions of the melting point of steel. "It's all documented," people said. Or: "The mass media is mass deception." Or, as strangers from the Internet shook hands: "Great to meet you. Love the work."

Such was the coming-out for the movement known as "9/11 Truth," a society of skeptics and scientists who believe the government was complicit in the terrorist attacks. In colleges and chat rooms on the Internet, this band of disbelievers has been trying for years to prove that 9/11 was an inside job.

Whatever one thinks of the claim that the state would plan, then execute, a scheme to murder thousands of its own, there was something to the fact that more than 500 people — from Italy to Northern California — gathered for the weekend at a major chain hotel near the runways of O'Hare International. It was, in tone, half trade show, half political convention. There were talks on the Reichstag fire and the sinking of the Battleship Maine as precedents for 9/11.

(The reference to Oklahoma City was what brought the title of this post to mind, by the way). So they all gathered in one spot. Darn it, the black helicopter guys missed their big chance to bag the lot. So much for government efficiency.

At the lectern Friday night, beside a digital projection reading "History of Government Sponsored Terrorism," Mr. Jones set forth the central tenets of 9/11 Truth: that the military command that monitors aircraft "stood down" on the day of the attacks; that President Bush addressed children in a Florida classroom instead of being whisked off to the White House; that the hijackers, despite what the authorities say, were trained at American military bases; and that the towers did not collapse because of burning fuel and weakened steel but because of a "controlled demolition" caused by pre-set bombs.

According to the group's Web site, the motive for faking a terrorist attack was to allow the administration "to instantly implement policies its members have long supported, but which were otherwise infeasible."

The controlled-demolition theory is the sine qua non of the 9/11 movement — its basic claim and, in some sense, the one upon which all others rest. It is, of course, directly contradicted by the 10,000-page investigation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which held that jet-fuel fires distressed the towers' structure, which eventually collapsed.

You know, I spent a lot of time in the nuclear industry. One of the things we had to address as part of the response to the Brown's Ferry fire was to fireproof a lot of structural steel to prolong the time it could withstand a fire. Not to make it immune, mind you, just to prolong the time. Because buildings collapse when the steel gets weakened by fire.

But, carry on. It's certainly amusing to watch.

UPDATE: A Blog For All also has something to say about this.

UPDATE: Newsbusters is also on this one.

Today’s Uproar

Today's big tempest in the blogosphere appears to be over this article in the LA Times.

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans "humiliating and degrading treatment," according to knowledgeable military officials, a step that would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.

The decision could culminate a lengthy debate within the Defense Department but will not become final until the Pentagon makes new guidelines public, a step that has been delayed. However, the State Department fiercely opposes the military's decision to exclude Geneva Convention protections and has been pushing for the Pentagon and White House to reconsider, the Defense Department officials acknowledged.

Now there's already an enormous amount of hyperventilation going on over this article, but there's a serious issue that deserves to be addressed. The Geneva Conventions were designed to cover traditional wars of nation against nation. Article 3 (the one under discussion right now) was specifically designed to cover combatants in a civil war type situation.

The Conventions simply were not designed to cover terrorists.

For decades, it had been the official policy of the U.S. military to follow the minimum standards for treating all detainees as laid out in the Geneva Convention. But, in 2002, Bush suspended portions of the Geneva Convention for captured Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Bush's order superseded military policy at the time, touching off a wide debate over U.S. obligations under the Geneva accord, a debate that intensified after reports of detainee abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

Among the directives being rewritten following Bush's 2002 order is one governing U.S. detention operations. Military lawyers and other defense officials wanted the redrawn version of the document known as DoD Directive 2310, to again embrace Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention.

That provision — known as a "common" article because it is part of each of the four Geneva pacts approved in 1949 — bans torture and cruel treatment. Unlike other Geneva provisions, Article 3 covers all detainees — whether they are held as unlawful combatants or traditional prisoners of war. The protections for detainees in Article 3 go beyond the McCain amendment by specifically prohibiting humiliation, treatment that falls short of cruelty or torture.

So, how can these protections be reconciled with the fact that the terrorists do not, and never will, follow the Conventions themselves? I think that question needs to be discussed, but for now there's a bit too much uproar to have a lucid discussion.

UPDATE: James Joyner thinks we may not be living up to our standards. He also found a stunning quote from Zarqawi on the whole uproar. Kind of.

UPDATE: Really good discussion of this over at Winds of Change as well. Read the whole thing because it is asking what I have been wondering myself.

Oh, Please

Writing in the Washington Post, Jackson Diehl informs us that in an off the record remark an Iranian official wants the American president to follow the example of Richard Nixon going to China.

In the middle of a tirade about the pointlessness of talking with the Bush administration, a senior Iranian official I met in Tehran last month abruptly paused and asked if he could speak off the record. Then he said: "What we need is an American president who will follow the example of Richard Nixon going to China."

There in a nutshell is what this Iranian government, and most Iranians I've spoken to, fervently desire from the United States: not the tactical talks offered last week by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice but strategic recognition of Iran as a great civilization and a regional power that must be treated, like China, as a "stakeholder" in global affairs. Grant us that, said the Iranian official I saw, and "just as with China, you'll find a government that is more responsive to your concerns, more willing to play a cooperative role."

And there you have it in a nutshell, indeed. Iran believes itself to be a regional power. Furthermore they fully believe they deserve to be one. If I were Iran's neighbor, I'd be getting very nervous right about now.

It’s Not Just The VA

It's not just the Veterans Administration that is having problems hanging on to confidential data. If you were a customer of Hotels.com in 2002, 2003 or 2004, your personal information may be at risk.

SEATTLE - Thousands of Hotels.com customers may be at risk for credit card fraud after a laptop computer containing their personal information was stolen from an auditor, a company spokesman said Saturday.

The password-protected laptop belonging to an Ernst & Young auditor was taken in late February from a locked car, said Paul Kranhold, spokesman for Hotels.com, a subsidiary of Expedia.com based in Bellevue, Wash.

"As a result of our ongoing communication with law enforcement, we don't have any indication that any credit card numbers have been used for fraudulent activity," Kranhold said. "It appears the laptop was not the target of the break-in."

The laptop was stolen in February but the theft was not reported to Hotels.com until May 3rd. Ernst & Young has arranged free credit monitoring for people who may be at risk. I'd say that's the least they could do.

UPDATE: Thanks to the Big Dog for linking.

Challenging Control Of The Narrantive

It's actually refreshing to see the White House finally challenging the way the media has directed the narrative of events in the world. It's something long overdue. Peter Wehner again has a column up in the Washington Post.

By now Americans know the litany: The nation is engaged in a difficult and costly war in Iraq; Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon; gas prices are high; the costs of reconstructing the Gulf Coast region are huge; illegal immigration is a major problem — and more.

These issues are real and pressing. But they aren't the whole story — and they ought not color the lens through which we see all other events. We hear a great deal about the problems we face. We hear hardly anything about the encouraging developments. Off-key as it may sound in the current environment, a strong case can be made that in a number of areas there are positive trends and considerable progress. Perhaps the place to begin is with an empirical assessment of where we are.

The article goes on to describe what going right in America - and it's actually quite a lot.

Social Indicators: We are witnessing a remarkable cultural renewal in America. Violent crime rates remain at the lowest levels in the history of the Bureau of Justice Statistics' survey (which started in 1973). We are experiencing the sharpest decline in teen crime in modern history. Property crimes are near the lowest levels in the history of the federal survey. Welfare caseloads have declined almost 60 percent since 1996. Both the abortion rate and ratio are at the lowest levels we have seen in the 30-year period these data have been tracked. African American and Hispanic fourth-graders posted the highest reading and math scores in the history of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test. The use of illegal drugs by teens has dropped 19 percent since 2001, while the use of hallucinogens such as LSD and ecstasy has declined by more than half.

The teen birth rate has fallen for a dozen consecutive years. The percentage of high school students who reported having had sex is significantly lower than in the early 1990s. The divorce rate has fallen steadily for over a decade. And teen smoking has dropped by almost 50 percent since the late '90s.

There are areas of concern, to be sure. Births to unmarried women are at an all-time high, and in many respects our popular culture remains a cesspool. But context is important. Between 1960 and the mid-'90s virtually every social indicator got worse — and in many cases staggeringly worse. Then things began to turn around, almost as if a cultural virus created its own antibodies.

There is a lot more, and it is well worth the time to read it all. My post about Wehner's earlier column here.

I Only Have Eyes For Zoo

Must be zoo day in the news today.

Item: A jobless South Korean man decided to draw attention to his plight by climbing into an enclosure holding two rhinoceroses at the Seoul Zoo. The rhinos are reputed to be very mean tempered, even for rhinos. The man was lucky to have escaped with his life.

Police and zoo officials said Monday that the man, identified only by his family name Lee, went to the zoo in the capital Seoul over the weekend and tried at first to draw attention to himself by breaking into an enclosure housing giraffes,

Zookeepers prevented him from climbing the fence of that enclosure, but he broke free and scaled the fence of a pen housing a pair of rhinos known for having a mean streak, the officials said.

Lee spent only a few moments with the rhinos and climbed a tree in the enclosure where he remained for about four hours, shouting out to visitors about how he had lost his job and other bad breaks in life, they said.

There is no word on what job the man had held prior to his recent problems. We're guessing it was one that didn't require a lot of brain power, though.

Item: Meanwhile, in Kiev, a man decided to see whether or not God exists. Shouting that "God will save me if he exists," the man climbed into an enclosure at the Kiev zoo that holds lions.

"The man shouted 'God will save me, if he exists', lowered himself by a rope into the enclosure, took his shoes off and went up to the lions," the official said.

"A lioness went straight for him, knocked him down and severed his carotid artery."

The man died. Maybe he should have kept his shoes on. Or gone to visit the rhinos.

(Waiting for the trifecta here - we just know there will be another zoo story!)

Sadists

This is positively inhuman. The types of people who would subject their fellow citizens to this type of torture should be put away for long periods of time. There simply is no excuse for this cruelty. In order to clear hot-rod driving hooligans out of an Australian parking lot, authorities have decided to install loudspeakers and pipe music to the area. The idea is that the music will bother the hoods so much that they will go somewhere else.

But the choice of music is abominable. Beyond sadistic.

Barry Manilow. Oh the humanity.

What’s Taking So Long

It's been over two months since the matter of Cynthia McKinney's assault on a Capitol Police officer was referred to a grand jury. There is still no word on whether an indictment will or will not be forthcoming.

Washington – The grand jury investigation of 4th District Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney enters its third month today with no hint from the federal prosecutor about how much longer it will take to settle a case that legal experts said should have been wrapped up in a matter of days.

McKinney was accused of striking a Capitol Hill police officer March 29, and the case was referred to the grand jury April 5. The drawn-out process of deciding whether she should be charged with assault has police fuming that the DeKalb County Democrat is getting preferential treatment from a politically motivated prosecutor.

Frankly, I'm surprised McKinney herself (or her lawyer) has not been negotiating with the US Attorney to get this over with. She already did make a public apology, you'd think she'd rather put the entire thing behind her.

More Details On The Canadian Jihadis

The New York Times just keeps surprising me this morning. They actually mention that the Canadians arrested over the weekend in an anti-terrorism sweep mostly attend the same mosque. It's not buried at the end of the article, either.

Several of the people arrested by Canadian authorities in a huge counterterrorism sweep over the weekend regularly attended the same storefront mosque in a middle-class neighborhood of modest brick rental townhouses and well-kept lawns.

The eldest of the 17 Canadian residents arrested in the sweep, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43, was described by his lawyer as an active member of the mosque, the Al-Rahman Islamic Center for Islamic Education, though not its leader.

"He's on the board, he's there regularly, but he's not an imam," said Anser Farooq, the lawyer representing Mr. Jamal and three other people from this Toronto suburb who were arrested Friday night and who also attended the same mosque. "He's one of about a half dozen people who lead prayers at the mosque."

Authorities in Canada and the United States continued today to piece together information from the lengthy investigation that culminated in one of the largest counterterrorism strikes in North America since the Sept. 11 attacks.

There's one thing in the article that bugs me, though. That is the reported response of some of the Islamic community leaders:

Islamic community leaders in the Toronto area were surprised by the arrests and raised concerns that some of the younger men picked up in the sweep may have been led to participate in a suspected plot by older, more radical Muslims, like Mr. Jamal.

"I do not think of him as an imam," Tareeq Fatah, the communications director of the Muslim Canadian Congress, said. "People like him are freelancers. I don't fear imams. I fear freelancers who are creating a Islamacist, supremacist cult."

If you are worried about this why are you only speaking out about it after the arrests? Why not step up and address this issue before it gets to a point where arrests are necessary? Whether the younger suspects were "led astray" is irrelevant. That the situation has been allowed to fester is not.

UPDATE: And now the New York Times praises the Toronto Star's coverage - has there been a coup at the NYT?