New Palestinian Ceasefire Claims Five Lives

Once again, warring Palestinian factions prove that they have no concept of what the word 'ceasefire' means. (Hint: it does not mean yelling, "Cease!" then "Fire!") Five have died so far in the latest "ceasefire". And Hamas is seeking to draw Israel into the conflict as well.

Two Fatah activists and three Hamas militants died in separate shooting incidents in the lawless coastal strip, hours after president Mahmud Abbas and Hamas premier Ismail Haniya agreed on the fourth ceasefire in as many days, amid fears of a full-scale civil war.

Overnight Wednesday, unknown gunmen opened fire on Haniya's home in Gaza, his office said. His bodyguards returned fire and the gunmen ran off. Nobody was injured in the attack.

Seven security force members loyal to Abbas's Fatah were earlier wounded by mortar fire that Palestinian officials said came from Hamas fighters, casting doubt on the survival of the Hamas-Fatah two-month-old coalition government.

Three previous ceasefires agreed upon by the rivals since fighting flared on Sunday collapsed within hours of their taking effect.

In a move set to further spiral the violence that has killed more than 40 people in four days, Israel carried out two air raids in Gaza, killing four people, medics and witnesses said.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ordered a "severe response" to the continuing rocket fire from Gaza, which has seen 26 projectiles land inside the Jewish state since Sunday, wounding four civilians.

People in the West continue to preach that there must be a Palestinian state and continue to ignore the apparent inability - apparent complete inability - of the Palestinians to manage themselves as individuals much less governing a state. This is directly attributable to the West refusing to make the Palestinians accountable for their own actions. The more blame is always heaped on Israel, the less motivation the Palestinians have to clean up their own act. How many will die in the next ceasefire? The one after that? Accomodation of terrorism does not work.

Bo Diddley In Intensive Care

Bo Diddley has suffered a stroke while performing in Western Iowa. He is in the intensive care unit at a hospital in Omaha, Nebraska, listed in guarded condition.

The 78-year-old singer-songwriter-guitarist and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer was listed in guarded condition at Creighton University Medical Center in Omaha, Neb., said Susan Clary, a publicist for the musician's management team.

Diddley, who has a history of hypertension and diabetes, was hospitalized Sunday following a concert in Council Bluffs in which he acted disoriented, she said.

Tests indicated that the stroke affected the left side of his brain, impairing his speech and speech recognition, Clary said.

Clary said she has no other details on Diddley's condition or how long he would be in intensive care.

Diddley, with his black glasses and low-slung guitar, has been an icon in the music industry since he topped the R&B charts with "Bo Diddley" in 1955. His other hits include "Who Do You Love," "Before You Accuse Me," "Mona" and "I'm a Man."

May you have a speedy recovery, Bo. A clip from 1966 of his signature Bo Diddley beat:

Power Grab

Before the election, the litany from the left was that the arrogant Republicans shut the minority Democrats out of the legislative process in the House. But they never once tried what Nancy Pelosi is now trying. She is trying to force a rules change to House procedures that have remained unchanged since 1822. The move, if passed, will strip the minority party of any way to stop or question spending. This is a power grab on an unprecedented scale.

In English, that means that Speaker Pelosi and the Democrat leadership are proposing a massive change to the current House rules regarding the Republican right to the motion-to-recommit bills to Committees for improvement.

This rules change is a historic infringement on the rights of the Minority-it is the first change in this House rule since 1822.  The RSC Floor Action Team, under the leadership of Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, have requested a series of procedural votes every 30 minutes in response to this power grab by the Majority.  More details are likely to follow as the situation unfolds.

The sheer arrogance of this move is stunning. Pelosi is acting as if the House will never change hands again. That rule protects the minority from being ridden roughshod over. This turns the House over to mob rule - exactly what the rule was designed to prevent. Democrats are really going to come to regret Pelosi's reign. It will come back to haunt them.

UPDATE: Powerline reports that Pelosi has backed off and dropped the proposed rule change. Amazing how a little sunlight works.

David, Goliath And FUD

No, not Elmer Fudd. FUD as an acronym for a marketing technique know as Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. That's what Amanda McPherson, marketing director for the Linux Foundation is labeling Microsoft's claims that open source software is violating Microsoft patents. Sun Microsystems also responded to Microsoft very rapidly.

Microsoft is targeting Sun Microsystems for patent violations in its open-source software, claiming OpenOffice.org breaches 45 of its patents. Sun wasted no time in responding to the claims coming out of Redmond.

"You would be wise to listen to the customers you're threatening to sue — they can leave you, especially if you give them motivation," Sun's President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz wrote in his blog. "Remember, they wouldn't be motivated unless your products were somehow missing the mark." The open-source community, he added, is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company.

Could the intent of Redmond's callout be to broker licensing deals with free software developers? Or is the software giant bound to sue any infringing party it can find with deep enough pockets to make a court battle worth its while? Few analysts believe that Microsoft actually will file suit, but the company doesn't seem to be planning to let alleged infringers have a free ride, either.

Call it extortion by lawyer. Analysts are saying that Microsoft is trying to squeeze revenue out of a market it can't play in by itself. But the Linux Foundation is warning that Microsoft should tread lightly. They may have even more to lose by starting a lawsuit war:

The Linux Foundation isn't too concerned about lawsuits. Microsoft is too smart to take a page out of the SCO handbook and sue its own business partners and customers, said Amanda McPherson, the foundation's marketing director. She then posed a question of her own: Is Microsoft certain it has not infringed upon the patents of the companies that represent the entire open-source ecosystem?

"Microsoft will need to be careful what it starts, given that it cannot know where this will end. I think most knowledgeable software users see this posturing for what it is: empty threats from a scared giant whose monopoly is being challenged," McPherson wrote in the foundation's blog, alleging further that Microsoft has a monopoly on operating systems and productivity software.

Threatening to sue users of open source software will not garner good press for Microsoft. It hasn't so far.

Here's Jonathan Schwartz's blog entry on the subject. It's actually worth reading. I had no idea that Sun's open source code now makes up 25% of the average Linux distro. His concluding words are memorable:

All of which is to say - no amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software (they are the same, after all). The community is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company. And you will never turn back the clock on elementary school students and developing economies and aid agencies and fledgling universities - or the Fortune 500 - that have found value in the wisdom of the open source community. Open standards and open source software are literally changing the face of the planet - creating opportunity wherever the network can reach.

And here's the Linux Foundation blog entry by Amanda McPherson. Her parting shot is also memorable:

Microsoft, our members and software users know that a patent war guarantees only one sure outcome: mutually assured destruction for all involved. By leveling vague threats against open source, Microsoft hopes to extend their monopoly a little longer. Given that every day Microsoft makes $34,000,000 in profit, it’s not surprising Microsoft resorts to a well-orchestrated, well-funded PR campaign to scare software users, especially when those software users are recognizing that open source is simply a better way to develop software.

29-67

That was the final vote tally in the US Senate on the showboating political posturing of the Reid-Feingold amendment that made the Senators stand up and provide an up or down vote on defunding the troops in the field. Now, stop playing games with the money. You got your show vote and you failed to even get close to a majority. Enough.

Fund the troops.

It isn't money just for Iraq. The money is also needed for Afghanistan - even the pandering Pelosi-Reid regime in Congress says Afghanistan is a "good" war. But they are denying funds to that effort just to pander to their lovely friends in the anti-war left.

The vote was a loss for Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., and other Democrats who want to end the war. But the effort picked up support from members, including presidential hopefuls previously reluctant to limit war funding — an indication of the conflict's unpopularity among voters.

The proposal lost 29-67 on a procedural vote, falling 31 votes short of the necessary votes to advance. Of the 67 senators who opposed Feingold's proposal, there were 19 Democrats, 47 Republicans and Connecticut Independent Joseph Lieberman. Of the 29 supporting, 28 were Democrats and Vermont Independent Bernard Sanders.

The Senate also narrowly rejected a proposal by Republican moderates intended to challenge President Bush's war policy, after Democratic lashed out against the proposal as too weak. The 52-44 vote fell eight votes shy of the required 60.

Enough. Fund the troops. Now.

Take It Off, Hand It Over

In today's terpsichorean ecdysiast news:

Norwegian authorities have announced that they have absolutely no intention of actually obeying their own laws as interpreted by their own courts. That's right, they are going to tax strippers.

OSLO (AFP) - Tickets to striptease shows in Norway, until now exempt from value-added tax (VAT) because they were considered to be an art, will be subjected to a 25 percent levy, the government said Tuesday.

In the 2007 revised budget bill, Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen proposed changing the law to make striptease shows a commercial activity liable to VAT.

The move is seen as a way of circumventing two court decisions in 2005 and 2006 which ruled that striptease was an art.

In both cases, the judges found in favour of the owner of the Diamond Go Go Bar in Oslo, who argued that striptease was an art like opera or ballet and therefore refused to add VAT to ticket prices.

The art of circumventing the law in pursuit of tax revenue. Meanwhile in other striptease news, the government of Peru is investigating a party, held in one of their judicial buildings. It seems the court finds it unseemly that a troupe of strippers entertained the party goers.

LIMA (Reuters) - Peruvian officials launched an investigation on Tuesday into a Mother's Day striptease performance by a dance troupe in a Lima auditorium owned by the national judiciary.

Peru's Superior Court, just one step below the Supreme Court in the judicial hierarchy, issued a statement condemning what it described as a "shameful incident."

The striptease took place last week during an event organized by a trade union which represents judicial workers.

We're trying to confirm the reports that the Norwegian Finance Minister has booked a flight to Lima in search of revenue. Which brings us to the las item, completing a nude news trifecta. Sophia Loren has said that she will celebrate if her soccer team wins a promotion to the higher level league. By performing - you guessed it - a striptease.

MILAN (Reuters) - A striptease by 72-year-old actress Sofia Loren could be one of the more outrageous ways that Napoli fans will celebrate if the team are promoted to the Italian top flight this season.

Loren, a movie sex siren from the 1950s and 1960s, is a big fan of the Naples club who have fallen on hard times since winning their first Italian championship 20 years ago.

"I hope that Napoli win these last few games. You watch if we go up I will do a striptease," she told Gazzetta dello Sport in an interview on Tuesday. "The fans have a total passion, the city deserves promotion."

We're trying to confirm the rumor that the entire Norwegian Parliament has booked a charter flight to Italy.

Trains In Vain

No, no, no. Not the song Train in Vain by the Clash - but here's a video of a live performance of that song just for fun. This about real trains. You'll get the "vain" part after you read the post.

Passengers on a train in India found that their hopes for an uninterrupted journey were in vain when the train stalled in a "neutral zone" or an area where there was no power to the overhead lines. So the engineer told the passengers to get out and push.

PATNA, India (Reuters) - Hundreds of Indian rail passengers got more than they had bargained for when the driver of their train asked them to get out and push.

It took more than half an hour to move the stalled electric train 12 feet so that it touched live overhead wires and was able to resume its journey, officials said on Wednesday.

The incident occurred in the eastern state of Bihar on Tuesday after a passenger pulled the train's emergency chain and it halted in a "neutral zone," a short length of track where there is no power in the overhead wires.

At that, they were really rather lucky. They only ran out of power, they still had tracks, which would have made an effort to push the train vain. In Germany, they might not have. There, enterprising thieves took 2-1/2 miles of the tracks from a disused train line and sold them for scrap. Obviously, this was no small project since the rails stolen weighed around 500 tons. The men posed as legitimate track workers and even handed out fliers to local residents apologizing for the noise of the operation.

The court in the city of Marburg said Tuesday the men, aged 26 to 29, pretended to be working for the national rail operator Deutsche Bahn when they began carving up a disused line between nearby Niederwalgern and Lohra with blowtorches.

"They even went around handing out leaflets to locals asking for understanding about the noise," a court spokesman said.

"The stolen tracks were worth about 170,000 euros ($230,000) altogether, but they'd collected less than 100,000 euros by the time they were caught."

Trains in vain, indeed.

Learning Lessons

Jonathan Gurwitz enumerates four lessons that can be gleaned from the recently foiled plot by six men to attack Fort Dix. People in this country , especially the politicians, would do well to think about these four lessons when considering what needs to be done.

From the foiled terrorist plot at Fort Dix, we can learn at least four important lessons.

First: Stop blaming America. Four of the six accused conspirators are ethnic Albanians from the Kosovo region of the former Yugoslavia. A decade ago, Kosovo was the scene of a bloody struggle between Serbian nationalists and Albanian Muslims.

The Clinton administration made determined diplomatic efforts to end the violence in Kosovo, as elsewhere in the Balkans. When diplomacy collapsed in 1999, Bill Clinton compelled America's European allies to take military action in support of the Albanians.

NATO — which effectively meant the United States — launched a 78-day bombing campaign of Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia. Gen. Wesley Clark commanded the operation.

By mid-June, the American-led effort halted the ethnic cleansing of Albanian Muslims. KFOR, a NATO security force for Kosovo, arrived. Some 1,700 Americans still serve in Kosovo, constituting about 10 percent of KFOR's troop strength.

That a group of Albanian Muslims would conspire to slaughter American soldiers on U.S. soil is evidence that goodwill efforts and public diplomacy will never win the hearts and minds of Islamic extremists.

Irrespective of what the United States does in the world, their belief system requires them to destroy the forces of liberalism and modernity, of which the United States is the foremost exponent.

Why do they hate us? Because they subscribe to a hateful ideology, not because of American actions.

Read the other three lessons as well. Gurwitz, obviously, also touches on the illegal immigration aspect. As I continue to point out, getting control of the borders must be the first order of business. The first presidential candidate who gets that will reap a substantial number of votes. That three of the six plotters were illegally in this country should be a wake-up call. Immigration is a national security issue, first and foremost.

The most important of the lessons is that America has real enemies out there. The enemies are not influenced or driven by our actions at all. They are motivated by their own agendas. To assume that we are the cause of all that is evil - or good for that matter - in the world is cultural hubris. Other people in other countries have their own motivations and their own independent choices and beliefs that have nothing to do with what we, as a nation, say or do. As Gurwitz says, they hate us because they subscribe to a hateful ideology.

Historical View

Bernard Lewis, no a professor emeritus at Princeton, is a very smart, well-respected historian. His special area of expertise is, of course, Islam and the interaction of Islam with the West. In today's Opinion-Journal he tries to sound the alarm about what is really at stake in Iraq. There are real - and deadly - consequences if the terrorists are handed a victory by politicians in th US.

During the Cold War, two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: "What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?"

A few examples may suffice. During the troubles in Lebanon in the 1970s and '80s, there were many attacks on American installations and individuals–notably the attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, followed by a prompt withdrawal, and a whole series of kidnappings of Americans, both official and private, as well as of Europeans. There was only one attack on Soviet citizens, when one diplomat was killed and several others kidnapped. The Soviet response through their local agents was swift, and directed against the family of the leader of the kidnappers. The kidnapped Russians were promptly released, and after that there were no attacks on Soviet citizens or installations throughout the period of the Lebanese troubles.

These different responses evoked different treatment. While American policies, institutions and individuals were subject to unremitting criticism and sometimes deadly attack, the Soviets were immune. Their retention of the vast, largely Muslim colonial empire accumulated by the czars in Asia passed unnoticed, as did their propaganda and sometimes action against Muslim beliefs and institutions.

Most remarkable of all was the response of the Arab and other Muslim countries to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Washington's handling of the Tehran hostage crisis assured the Soviets that they had nothing to fear from the U.S. They already knew that they need not worry about the Arab and other Muslim governments. The Soviets already ruled–or misruled–half a dozen Muslim countries in Asia, without arousing any opposition or criticism. Initially, their decision and action to invade and conquer Afghanistan and install a puppet regime in Kabul went almost unresisted.

Read the whole thing, it's important. I wrote about the "last helicopter" strategy that is driving most of the terrorist's agenda and efforts. They expect us to leave. They expect us to abandon our allies and our principles. Because politicians in this country are increasingly unable to think beyond the next election. There is absolutely no thought being given to what the long-term consequences of the current Democratic leadership's agenda. The bloodbath that will ensue - not even discussed by Pelosi. The terrorist Disneyland that will result? Nothing Reid is interested in. The effective undermining of the constitution of Congress attempting to usurp the power to conduct war? Never mind. The long-term cost to this country? Not even one synapse firing over that for the Democratic leadership. Lewis is trying to sound the alarm here.

Is anyone else listening?