Toothpaste In Venezeula

Hugo Chavez, heir apparent to Fidel "Still Dead" Castro is working hard to be elected president-for-life of Venezuela. So hard, in fact, that he has his loyal minions promoting his candidacy on the floor of the soon to be unnecessary national assembly by distributing toothpaste. Yes, really, toothpaste.

His adversaries complained that government grocery stores are distributing a toothpaste called "10 Million Smiles" — produced by a local cooperative — which they call a veiled reference to Chavez's campaign slogan "10 Million Votes."

Chavez, who has promised a socialist revolution to end poverty in the world's No. 5 oil exporter, has promised to garner 10 million votes in the upcoming elections.

"That's not within the norms and it is absolutely prohibited," National Electoral Council Director Vicente Diaz told the local El Nacional newspaper in comments published on Sunday. "And we are going to open an investigation … of the supplier of that product."

The toothpaste flap started last week, when local media reported that legislator Berkis Solis had distributed the toothpaste on the floor of the National Assembly.

Diaz promised to investigate Solis as well as the government-subsidized supermarket chain, Mercal.

Due to the tireless efforts of our selfless photographers at the Magic 8-Ball Photography and Online Casino, we have obtained this Reuters Grade™ evidence of Chavez's message to Venezuelans!

Heartwarming democracy in action.

Sanity?

It is far too early to say that some sanity may finally be breaking out in the West. But there are, I think, some signs that maybe, just maybe, some people are saying, "Enough". Enough whining about being a victim. Enough moral equivalence. Enough excuses.

Muslims have a problem. It is the Islamists. Not the majority of people who want to be left in peace to try to better themselves. The people who believe they have an absolute right to force their beliefs onto everyone else are the problem. The people who think it is their destiny to rule the world are the problem. The people who would kill their own children to further their agenda are the problem. It has to stop, or the world will go through a cataclysm.

This was hardly a Western war against Islam. Britain and America spent much of the Nineties trying to prevent conflicts or to resolve them. At worst, as shamefully in Rwanda, they simply ignored them. They were transparently not running a conspiracy to trample the Muslim faithful underfoot. The people who depicted it that way were a tiny minority telling lies to justify murder.

But things have changed. The argument that terrorism is, in fact, a response to Western actions overseas has gained currency. It was voiced most recently on Saturday in an open letter by a number of influential British Muslim leaders to Tony Blair. The Prime Minister's policy in the Middle East, they said, puts British lives at risk. The implication is that the young Britons who last week were accused of plotting to blow up passenger planes in mid-air would have been less susceptible to al-Qaeda recruitment had Britain not fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Policy should be changed, they said, to avoid giving ideological 'ammunition to extremists'.

There is indeed a plausible argument that military action in recent years has made Britain less, not more, secure. In particular, the conduct of the war in Iraq, regardless of the virtues of removing Saddam Hussein from office, has been riddled with error. The absence of weapons of mass destruction, removal of which was the premise for war, has undermined trust in the Prime Minister. Meanwhile, engagement in Iraq has made it harder to secure victory in Afghanistan, where the anti-terror justification for war was rock solid.

But even within the bleakest possible analysis of Mr Blair's foreign policy, it is still simply not true that the West is waging war on Islam. Just as it is not true that the CIA was really behind the 11 September attacks or any other arrant conspiratorial nonsense that enjoys widespread credence in the Middle East and beyond. It is also a logical and moral absurdity to imply, as some critics of British policy have done, that mass murder is somehow less atrocious when it is motivated by an elaborate narrative of political grievance.

More Muslims have been saved from death in the past decade by the Western governments than by the Muslim governments. More Muslims have been killed by the Islamists than by the Western governments in the past decade. The Islamists are a sick, sick group of people. Muslims have to stand against this threat or be brought to their level.

Have Western governments made hideous mistakes in their dealings with Muslims through the centuries? Of course. Is that a reason to keep on doing the same things over and over? Of course not. The past is the past. But the future may not be quite what the Islamists think it will be.

If the West realizes that appeasing Islamists is a very, very bad idea, indeed, then the outcome will not be at all what the Islamists expect. That will be a tragedy for those who do not believe as the Islamists do. It is past time for some sanity to break out.

Russians ≠ Islamists

Mr. Krushchev said we will bury you
I don't subscribe to this point of view
It would be such an ignorant thing to do
If the Russians love their children too

How can I save my little boy
From Oppenheimer's deadly toy
There is no monopoly of common sense
On either side of the political fence

We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology
Believe me when I say to you
I hope the Russians love their children too

There is no historical precedent
To put words in the mouth of the President
There's no such thing as a winnable war
It's a lie we don't believe anymore
(Sting, Russians)

For nearly fifty years, the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD kept the sound of nuclear weapons limited to nuclear testing. After 1963, the sound was never heard again above ground when the Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests In The Atmosphere, In Outer Space And Under Water (commonly called the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty) entered into effect. MAD worked because the Russians did love their children, I suspect. As did the Americans. As close as we came to the brink during the Cuban missile crisis, that love kept us from stepping off the edge.

Love of the children may no longer be enough.

AUSTRALIA'S top police officer has described an alleged plan to use a baby in the foiled British terror bombing plot as a chilling development.

But Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty has backed away from tougher security measures at airports, saying the idea of testing infant's milk before air travel should be left up to regulators.

Scotland Yard police are questioning a husband and wife who allegedly planned to hide a liquid bomb in their baby's bottle to bring down an airliner.

They are among the 23 suspects arrested over the plot to blow up airliners headed for the United States in mid-flight.

Mr Keelty today expressed dismay at the alleged plan to use a child in a suicide mission.

"The phenomena of suicide bombings as a new way of taking part in terror attacks is in itself concerning, but to think or imagine that anybody would use an innocent child to join them is even more disconcerting," he said on Channel 9.

"And I think it just goes to show you the sorts of difficulties that we're now facing in the environment that we're all in."

But Mr Keelty was cautious about the state of airport security and brushed aside the question of testing babies' milk.

"That's an issue for the regulatory authorities, for the airline operators, you know, we've got to think about a lot of people here, a lot of interests," he said.

"We've got airlines that need to fly, we've got a lot of people employed by airlines and in the airline industry.

"We need to take advice from the airline operators and also the regulatory agencies like the Department of Transport and Regional Services."

This is barbarity. That Hezbollah has been using children as human shields is obvious to any but the willfully blind or utterly stupid. But this is a new level of depravity. This descends to a level the West will have great difficulty in dealing with.

Islamists do not love their children. They are merely tools. We have a major problem.

UPDATE: Planck's Constant: MAD, not a deterrent, an inducement.

The Black Panther

French authorities are searching frantically for a huge black cat seen stalking the Northern town of Boulogne-sur-Mer. Witnesses have seen it in a number of places including on the beach and in a cornfield. While reports say the beast appears to be a pure black panther over four feet long, authorities assure residents it's not an inch over three feet.

BOULOGNE-SUR-MER, France (AFP) - Scores of policemen, some armed with shotguns, are hunting a mysterious big black feline spotted in northern France, officers said.

The operation was launched Wednesday near the town of Boulogne-sur-Mer after several panicked people first raised the alarm on seeing what they described as a "panther" about 1.2 metres (four feet) long on a popular beach.

Some 80 officers and a helicopter were immediately deployed on a search, and the beach was closed for a day, but they failed to find their quarry.

Belgian tourists and residents then reported seeing the black beast on Friday, and on Saturday people out strolling saw it in the middle of a cornfield.

Police finally spotted it through binoculars.

"It's a black or dark feline, fairly hefty, not very high but pretty long. It's not a panther. It's a big cat with at least a metre in length," one officer said.

Police have so far not been able to get close enough to actually catch the beast. There was a similar sighting in 1986, and the authorities had no luck catching it then, either. Accordingly, the police have requested help from the only officer on the force with any experience dealing with panthers.

Bleak Assessment

Mark Steyn has a bleak assessment of what is happening in the world right now.

And that indifference to the state can be contagious. Lebanon's Christians may think of themselves as "Lebanese," but most of Hezbollah's Shiite constituency don't. Western analysts talk hopefully of fierce differences between Sunni and Shiite, Arab and Persian, but it's interesting to note the numbers of young Sunni men in Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere in recent weeks who've decided that Iran's (Shiite) President Ahmadinejad and his (Shiite) Hezbo proxies are the new cool kids in town. During the '90s, we grew used to the idea that "non-state actors" meant a terrorist group, with maybe a few hundred activists, a few thousand supporters. What if entire populations are being transformed into "non-state actors"? Not terrorists, by any means, but at the very minimum entirely indifferent to the state of which they're nominally citizens.

Hence that statistic: Seven percent of British Muslims consider their primary identity to be British, 81 percent consider it to be Muslim. By comparison, in the most populous Muslim nation on the planet, 39 percent of Muslim Indonesians consider themselves Indonesian first, 36 percent consider themselves Muslim first. For more than four years now, I've been writing about a phenomenon I first encountered in the Muslim ghettoes of the Netherlands, Belgium and other European countries in the spring of 2002: Second- and third-generation European Muslims feel far more fiercely Islamic than their parents and grandparents.

That's the issue: Pan-Islamism is the profound challenge to conventional ideas of citizenship and nationhood. Of course, if you say that at the average Ivy League college, you'll get a big shrug: Modern multicultural man disdains to be bound by the nation state, too; he prides himself on being un citoyen du monde. The difference is that, for Western do-gooders, it's mostly a pose: They may occasionally swing by some Third World basket-case and condescend to the natives, but for the most part the multiculti set have no wish to live anywhere but an advanced Western democracy. It's a quintessential piece of leftie humbug. They may think globally, but they don't act on it.

This is a profoundly disturbing observation. That there are enough second and third generation immigrants who do not identify with the nations they live in to produce these poll results does not bode well for the future. We're facing a titanic struggle. I wish I could say Steyn was wrong about this.

I rather fear he is not.

War Zone

Michael Totten reports from Northern Israel.

BANG BANG. Earsplitting outgoing artillery shells exploded from cannons just a few dozen meters from where I was standing. Car alarms went off everywhere. Ten thousand volts of adrenaline kicked into my system. I instinctively ducked my head and wondered, for a split second, if I should take cover behind the wall.

Three Katyusha rockets slammed into the side of the mountain on the other side of the valley, all within two minutes of each other.

Rockets often land in clusters. Hezbollah’s rocket launchers are aimed, and several are fired at once. If one hits anywhere even vaguely near you, watch out. More are probably coming.

Real war is not like the movies. At least it isn’t always. It is slow and methodical. I don’t know what the Israeli army was shooting at when they fired their shells into Lebanon. Those who fired the shells didn’t know either. Unlike Hezbollah, though, they were shooting at actual targets. They were not just firing explosives at random toward Lebanese towns. Soldiers on the other side of the border had specific military targets in mind, and they called in coordinates.

Read the whole article. This is some of the best reporting coming out of the Middle East today. Mr. Totten could use our help to keep bringing this kind of writing to us. If you can help, please do. 

Lebanese Government Having Problems

The problems with having terrorists in your government becomes apparent with what is going on in Lebanon right now. It appears that the Hezbollah position is that they simply will not disarm, and the Lebanese army won't make them. Pajamas Media has an exclusive report:

Yesterday at the Lebanese Council of Ministers’ meeting the following positions were taken:

* Mohammad Fneish (Minister of Energy, and one of two Hezbollah in the cabinet): The position of Hezbollah is NOT TO DISARM in any part of the country until the Shebaa farms are liberated.

*Fneish then challenged both the Government and Lebanese Army to search and destroy Hezbollah’s weapons by force — ‘If you are men!’

* Michel Sleiman (General of Lebanese Army) stated that the Lebanese Army will not deploy one soldier until Hezbollah agrees to the whole political and deployment schedule.

Hezbollah has also drastically picked up the pace of rocket attacks today. This frankly does not look like a real end to hostilities will be forthcoming.

Raul Castro Sighted

Hugo Chavez slighted? It appears that Raul Castro briefly appeared in public - sort of - with Hugo Chavez. But it is not at all certain that Chavez actually got to visit Fidel Castro. That was his reason for visiting Cuba in the first place.

With the iconic revolutionary leader Fidel recuperating from surgery, state television showed Raul Castro, 75, appearing relaxed and smiling, in a warm embrace with the leftist Venezuelan leader who is Cuba's staunchest international ally.

No audio was heard as Raul Castro greeted Chavez, also all smiles, in a red shirt.

It was the first time the bespectacled Raul Castro was seen since his bearded brother handed Cuba's leadership to him July 31 officially if temporarily for the first time in almost 48 years.

Venezuela's oil has helped keep Cuba's economy afloat in recent years. And Chavez — the only foreign leader here for the occasion — fancies himself Fidel Castro's anti-US political heir.

Cuba meanwhile marked Fidel Castro's birthday by releasing photos of the communist leader which erased any doubt that he made it through major surgery, though he warned Cubans to be ready for "bad news."

Fidel Castro said he was "happy" and vowed to fight for his health.

The world's longest-serving head of government had not been seen since he underwent emergency surgery and ceded power to his brother Raul, the defense chief, on July 31.

Since then, neither Castro had been seen publicly, fueling some speculation about the president's health.

With a message reading "I feel very happy," pictures in the Juventud Rebelde newspaper showed the revolutionary leader apparently alert after the operation to halt gastrointestinal bleeding.

"To all of you who wished me health. I promise I will fight for it. … The country is moving forward and will continue moving forward perfectly well," Castro added.

The Miami newspaper El Nuevo Herald has reported Castro underwent a colostomy.

And Castro sounded prepared for complications. "I urge everyone to be optimistic and at the same time always prepared for any bad news there may be," he added.

So we have silent movies of Raul and still pictures of Fidel. It is still not at all obvious what is really going on down there.

Marxists March In San Francisco

Genuine authentic Reuters Grade™ photographs! Honest!

With all the apologies in the world to Zombie.

UPDATE: At least our images were Reuters Grade™. One wishes these were.

Hezbollah Increase Rocketing Of Civilians

Despite the "acceptance" of the UN ceasefire by Hezbollah, the number of rockets fired at civilians by the terrorists increased to over 215 on Sunday alone.

Despite the declaration of a cease-fire, Hizbullah appears to have stepped up its rocket attacks on the North, firing at least 215 Katyushas and long-range rockets at northern towns and villages by late Sunday afternoon.

Magen David Adom crews reported that one person was seriously wounded, and four were lightly wounded in the Haifa area. One person was lightly wounded in Acre, and another was lightly wounded near Kiryat Shmona.

Earlier, a 70-year-old man was killed and another person was in moderate condition after a rocket scored a direct hit on a house in the Shlomi area.

The Western press continues to concentrate on Lebanese casualties and do not appear to be at all interested in the ongoing war crimes being committed by Hezbollah. After all, they refer to all Lebanese casualties as "civilians" and all civilians hurt or killed on the other side of the border as "Israelis".

Miracle?

Is it a miracle? A broken water pipe? Natural forces at work? What is causing water to dribble out of a red oak tree in Texas?

SAN ANTONIO - Is it an artesian spring, a broken water pipe or an abandoned well? Lucille Pope's red oak tree has gurgled water for about three months, and experts can't seem to get to the root of the problem.

Pope, 65, has sought answers from the Texas Forest Service, the Edwards Aquifer Authority and nurseries. They have taken pictures and conducted studies, but none have arrived at a firm answer.

"I got a mystery tree," Pope said in Friday editions of the San Antonio-Express News. "What kind of mystery do I have where water comes out of a tree?"

Her son, Lloyd, 47, discovered water leaking from the tree in April. He said it was cool, like it came from the tap. The only damp spot around the tree trunk is where the water lands.

Mark Peterson, a regional community forester from the Texas Forest Service said he believes it could be a spring, but pointed out that would be rare with the drought conditions this summer.

"If it is a burst pipe their monthly bill would be enormous," Peterson said.

Not necessarily. If the leak was before the meter, the water utility would not be billing the homeowner. I'm not a big believer in things like this being miracles, I tend to lean toward the natural phenomenon or leaky pipe theory. Or it could be a weird scientific experiment to develop self-watering plants! Or aliens! That's the ticket, it's a plot by aliens. The trees are being modified to turn the earth into a swamp more suitable for the aliens!

Oh, sorry. Just an attack. I think I need to cut back on the coffee in the morning.

Report From Germany

Hard left support for Islamic terror is quite widespread as this report from David's Medienkritik shows. Between this and Zombie's report from the US it looks like it was a busy day for the lovers of totalitarianism. As David says:

Take a close look at these photos. They represent an important piece of reality festering in today´s European urban centers. The German far-left is increasingly in league with fundamentalist Islamists in a common quest to harm or even destroy Israel and the United States. Just another day in Berlin…

Capitalism Or Terrorism?

In what has become just a routine pattern, the wife of one of three men arrested with 1,000 cellular telephones is proclaiming the men's innocence. The story she tells is that the three men were simply going to make a $5 per phone profit by selling the phones to a man in Texas.

"They're locked up in jail for something that they didn't do," 20-year-old Lina Odeh told The Associated Press on Saturday.

Her husband, Louai Abdelhamied Othman of Mesquite, along with his brother, Adham Abdelhamid Othman of Dallas, and their cousin Maruan Awad Muhareb of Mesquite, are charged with collecting or providing materials for terrorist acts and surveillance of a vulnerable target for terrorist purposes.

Police found about 1,000 cell phones in the men's minivan. Authorities have not said what they believe the men intended to do with the phones, most of which were prepaid TracFones. But the police chief in Caro, Mich., where they were arrested, said cell phones can be used as detonators, and prosecutors in a similar case in Ohio have said that TracFones are often used by terrorists because they are not traceable.

Odeh said the men were buying the phones to sell to a man in Dallas for a profit of about $5 per phone. She said they were in Michigan because so many people in the Dallas area are doing the same thing that the phones are often sold out.

Odeh said she thought her husband and her relatives were targeted because of their Arab descent. The men's families come from Jerusalem, she said.

The men were stopped early Friday about 80 miles north of Detroit after purchasing 80 cell phones from a Wal-Mart. Police said they found about 1,000 phones in their minivan. The men were arrested Friday afternoon.

No pleas were entered at the arraignment Saturday at a District Court in Caro. A magistrate set bond at $750,000 apiece and the men were being held at the Tuscola County Jail, police said.

"All we did is buy the phones to sell and make money," Louai Othman told the magistrate. He said authorities had previously stopped the group in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Muhareb told the magistrate: "This is a misunderstanding." He said he was selling the phones to earn money to help pay for his brother's college education.

None of which explains why the men were stripping the packaging, chargers and batteries from the phones, does it? Nor why the cell phones were of specific types only. Nor why someone would be willing to pay more than the retail price for phones that have been stripped of the things that come in the package. Those things, taken together, do not indicate a beneficent intent to the activity.

Al Qaeda Leader Captured?

British authorities believe that one of the men arrested in the plot to blow up airliners may also be the head of the al Qaeda organization in Britain. There are fears, however, that there may be yet another plot in the works. At least two suspects have so far escaped the dragnet.

SECURITY sources believe that a man arrested in last week’s anti- terror raids in Britain is Al-Qaeda’s leader in this country.

Home Office officials say that one of those arrested is suspected not only of masterminding the foiled plot to bring down up to nine transatlantic airliners, but also of involvement in other planned atrocities over the past few years.

They believe that he was instrumental in sending the ringleader of at least one previous British terror plot for training at a camp in Pakistan last year. He is described by counter-terrorist officials at MI5 as the senior figure in a British terror network involving Kashmiri, north African and Iraqi cells.

Scotland Yard believes that the plan to bring down airliners involved up to 20 terrorists who were planning to smuggle liquid bomb components in hand luggage onto nine British and American passenger jets.

Their targets were planes leaving Heathrow and possibly three other British airports later this month.

The bombs were to be assembled on board by combining peroxide and acid-based substances into liquid explosives. The plan was to explode the devices simultaneously as the planes headed for cities in America.

Paul Stephenson, deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan police, said it was a plot “to commit mass murder on an unimaginable scale”. It is estimated that as many as 3,000 people could have been killed.

The thwarting of the alleged plot has, however, failed to quash continuing fears among counter-terrorist experts. Senior security officials have briefed ministers that a “second phase” of attacks may be about to be launched.

At least two suspects escaped last Wednesday night’s police raids. Although they are not thought to be significant players, there remain concerns that they may now be galvanised into taking some form of unspecified action.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda’s deputy head, is said to have warned in a message placed on a restricted extremists’ website last month that the terrorist group was planning two large-scale attacks this autumn.

There are certainly reasons to fear that something may be in the works given the five year anniversary of 9/11 coming up.

Beyond Parody

Via Little Green Footballs, another photojournalism exploit by Zombie. One wishes these were photoshops. Unfortunately, they are not.

UPDATE: More frolics from all over the world. Canada,  Canada and Washington, DC.