Mookie Gets Brave

"Fiery" Muslim cleric Moqtada "Mookie" al-Sadr has cut his visit to Iraq, where he actually supposedly lives unless he's hiding in Iran, short. He has, according to US Military sources, set a land speed record for "fiery" clerics and beat feet back to Iran to hide.

BAGHDAD, July 8 (Reuters) - Fiery Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has gone back to neighbouring Iran, U.S. military sources in Baghdad said on Sunday.

Earlier this year, U.S. officials said the anti-American cleric was hiding in Iran to avoid a major security crackdown in Baghdad, although his aides say he never left Iraq.

"Our sources do show Moqtada in Iran," one U.S. military source said, declining to speculate on why Sadr had gone back.

A senior aide to Sadr denied the cleric had left Iraq.

Sadr disappeared from public view shortly before the launch of a U.S.-led offensive in Baghdad in February but re-emerged in the holy Shi'ite Iraqi city of Kufa on May 25.

Analysts had speculated Sadr had returned to reassert his authority over his Mehdi Army militia, which the U.S. military says has begun breaking into splinter groups.

The United States accuses Iran of fuelling sectarian violence with its support for Shi'ite militias such as the Mehdi Army. Tehran rejects this, accusing Washington of fomenting instability in the region.

Sadr has said nothing about where he had been while he was out of public view for months other than to describe it as a "successful disappearance".

There is no word about how the "fiery" one managed to make his break. But the example of other "fiery" islamist clerics gives an indication of how it is usually done in the "fiery" circles. It has something to do with putting on ladies dresses and hanging around in bars. We hasten to add that we are not accusing the "fiery" one of having latent transvestite tendencies.

Only of being a stone physical coward who pushes others to fight to the last drop of their blood for him - while he beats feet when things get tough.

The Good Life

Jack Nicholson style:

It takes a very special sort of fitness regime to keep Jack Nicholson in his current shape.

Exercise One: Take an extra-large baguette stuffed with your favourite filling and raise it to the mouth. Lick lips. Eat.

Exercise Two: Wash it down with a Diet Coke.

Exercise Three: Light up a cigarette. Exercise Four: Do some gentle stretching exercises (not too vigorous, now) watched by bikini-clad lovelies.

Result: One of the most impressive manbooband-belly combinations currently to be seen in the Mediterranean sun.

Nicholson, 70, has always enjoyed the attentions of the fair sex and he was in his element aboard a speedboat off Saint Jean Cap-Ferrat, in the South of France.

And they have pictures. I count five bikini-clad occupants of the boat. Nicholson is not one of them.

Funniest Quote Yet

This has got to be the funniest 'man in the street' quote yet from someone who attended the Live Earth goregasm in Sydney, Australia:

"This is what happens when you let hippies organise a big event."

Out front, Crowded House were getting reacquainted, Missy Higgins made a cameo with Paul Kelly, and a beamed message from the "former next president of the United States", Al Gore, told the 45,000-strong throng they had the power to halt climate change.

But out back, where revellers go to buy their fluids and to get rid of them, and where big events often live or die, there was a different kind of drought. Faced with record beer queues, thirsty fans at Saturday's Live Earth concert at Sydney's Aussie Stadium were seen by the Herald offering others $50 for their beer rather than wait an hour to buy refreshments.

Thousands, deprived of the traditional rock 'n' roll accompaniment, went to a Coca-Cola stand, forgetting that its manufacturers had been under fire in India for allegedly creating water shortages and pollution around their bottling facilities.

Scores were seen leaving within the first two hours of the nine-hour festival, fed up with the lack of basic services, cutting their losses on a $99 ticket. Gate attendants were heard telling the human tide that they should complain to the promoter.

$50 for a beer because they could not get to a vendor. That is one poorly organized venue. Pamplona does a much better job of it.

Sara Newey, 23, and Rene Armstrong, 25, from Perth, Australia, recounted everything they had to drink in the past twelve hours: a bottle of Jack Daniels, several bottles of sangria, six beers each.

Ah well, Gore is still a legend in his own mind. (The world press is not exactly singing his praises right now. Even Reuters slammed him hard over the events.)

UPDATE: Please go take a look at the roundup that A Blog For All has done. He's got a priceless link (via Instapundit) to the take Colby Cosh has on this whole ruckus. And the first commenter to that piece nails the Gore sycophants to the wall.

When Bedfellows Turn

This is almost too pathetic to post about. Cindy Sheehan is now threatening to run for the House against Nancy Pelosi unless the Speaker introduces articles of impeachment against President Bush. Apparently, Sheehan could not stand being without media attention to validate her existence. Now she turns on the hands that fed her.

Sheehan said she will run against the San Francisco Democrat in 2008 as an independent if Pelosi does not seek by July 23 to impeach Bush. That's when Sheehan and her supporters are to arrive in Washington, D.C., after a 13-day caravan and walking tour starting next week from the group's war protest site near Bush's Crawford ranch.

"Democrats and Americans feel betrayed by the Democratic leadership," Sheehan told The Associated Press. "We hired them to bring an end to the war. I'm not too far from San Francisco, so it wouldn't be too big of a move for me. I would give her a run for her money."

Sheehan announced in May that she was leaving the anti-war movement and selling her 5-acre Crawford lot. She said that she felt her efforts had been in vain and that she had endured smear tactics and hatred from the left, as well as the right.

That is actually the shortest article I think I have ever seen where Sheehan was involved. Could it be that Sheehan has worn out her welcome even with the press? Could be. She sure isn't going to be very welcome in Nancy Pelosi's office. Here's a cold dose of reality for the strident screechers on the left: impeachment does not mean removal from office. All it means is indictment, the trial is in the Senate. Bill Clinton was impeached. He served his full term regardless. And there is zero chance Bush will be removed by a trial in the Senate. But lets say the left tries and succeeds. Then what happens?

President Cheney.

Wow, that is really super line of reasoning for a group that has done its level best to demonize Cheney. Go home, Cindy. You are tiresome. Oh, and Nancy: your pigeons just came home.

UPDATE: Jim Lynch points out one thing I didn't. According to Sheehan, Democrats are different from Americans.

"Democrats and Americans feel betrayed by the Democratic leadership," Sheehan told The Associated Press.

Others: Sister Toldjah, Gateway Pundit,

Still More Bad News

Close on the heels of the revelation that the Animal Uprising™ has perfected the Bear-Bot® comes even worse news. They have unleashed yet another weapon on the human race. The fiends have set the Desert Moose® loose.

A moose was spotted in the Mid-Columbia desert this week in what's believed to be the first sighting in the area.

Motoring back down the Columbia River after a fishing trip Thursday, Benton City's Robert Vickerman, his son Mark and a fishing buddy came up on a Hanford Reach island when they spotted a moose standing in the shade, grazing on willows.

"We were just amazed," Robert Vickerman said.

So they began snapping pictures of the beast as it watched them float by.

Later, they showed them to Mark's wife Janie, a project specialist for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland. She began circulating them at work Friday, creating a buzz among the scientists who work there.

"I knew they'd be excited about it," she said.

It's believed to be the first moose sighting in the area. But Corey Duberstein, a PNNL biologist, said that while such a sighting is rare in a place so distant from natural moose habitat, it's not unprecedented.

Oh, sure it's "natural". Except that the Hanford Reach receives a whopping 6 to 7 inches of rain annually. The place is a desert. Moose do not live in deserts. Camels live in deserts. Therefore, logically, the beast they photographed is either a camel disguised as a moose or is a genetically engineered product of the mad scientists of the Animal Uprising™. Now, normally we wouldn't rule out the camel-in-a-moose-suit theory but camels are notoriously bad actors. They'd never be able to pull it off. The reviews they got for their revival of Mame is proof enough.

Seeing The Forest

The old saying about not seeing the forest for the trees comes to mind when reading this story from the Sunday Times. Scientists in Britain are using lidar to see through the forest entirely and discover the terrain beneath. That includes all the archaeological sites that have been hidden by the trees. Lidar, which works in much the same way as radar except that it bounces a laser beam off the target, can strip away the interfering vegetation and let researchers clearly see what is underneath.

Hundreds of archaeological relics are being uncovered by a laser reading technique that can see through trees to reveal the landscape hidden by forests.

Trees and undergrowth are stripped away by the aerial detection system to show the remains of structures. Among the features uncovered by the system are a missing section of Offa’s Dyke, a Roman road and suspected Iron Age field networks.

The technology, called lidar, bounces laser beams off the ground from an aircraft 3,300ft (1,005m) above and records the minute differences in time it takes for the light to return to build up a three-dimensional picture of the landscape beneath the trees.

The system uses specially designed computer software to distinguish between the laser light bouncing off leaves and the light bouncing back from the ground. The technology dates back to the 1960s but it is only in the past five years that it has been sufficiently well developed to allow archaeologists to start mapping land covered by forests.

It is expected to reveal thousands of previously unknown or unmapped ancient settlements, fortifications, farms and features in Britain over the next decade. Lidar is a laser version of radar, and was tried out at Welshbury in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, where an Iron Age hill fort was known to be hidden by trees. With the trees stripped away by lidar, the embankments of the hill fort were clearly defined.

That's kind of a neat application. Here are a couple of the images derived from the technology at the English Heritage website. It includes links to others involved in the research.

Pakistan Edges Closer To Assault

Pakistani authorities appear to be getting ready to launch a full-scale assault on the extremists holed up inside the Red Mosque in Islamabad. Spokesmen are saying that there is a real fear that the "brave" jihadis will begin executing women and children in an effort to get the government to allow them to escape. It does not appear likely that the government will sit by and let that happen or give in to the demands.

Government forces tightened the noose on day six of the siege of the Red Mosque, after a top commando died in an operation to blast through the wall around the complex and allow the alleged "human shields" to escape.

Officials said some foreign rebels were barricaded in the building, along with Pakistani militants from a group linked to the beheading of US journalist Daniel Pearl and attempts to kill President Pervez Musharraf.

Religious Affairs Minister Ijaz-ul Haq said the government believed the mosque's firebrand deputy leader, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, had effectively been deposed by the extremists.

"The hardcore militants are in control of the mosque," Haq told AFP. "Our fear is that they may start killing the women and children to press for their demand for safe passage."

Haq said that one or two militants from Uzbekistan were among those believed to be in the mosque.

Uzbeks, Arabs and Chechens formed the backbone of an Al-Qaeda force that fled into Pakistan's troubled tribal areas after the US-led invasion of neighbouring Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks in the United States.

Military ruler Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz spoke by telephone on Sunday to weigh up the government's options after so far delaying a raid on the mosque.

"They have discussed how to bring the crisis to a swift end, including possible assault on the compound," a top official familiar with the issue told AFP.

The "brave" jihadis think nothing of taking women and children hostage to use as human shields. Or bravely trying to disguise themselves as women to try to escape like "Auntie Aziz" did. (My son reminded me that Auntie Aziz was apparently acting out the "Lumberjack Song" from Monty Python's Flying Circus.) They also think nothing of killing Muslims in the name of their twisted political ambitions masquerading as religion. It really is time for the world to start denouncing these actions - especially the Muslim world.

An Exposion Of Earmarks

The Washington Post reveals the total number of earmarks that members of Congress are trying to insert into funding bills this year:

32,684. An average of 75 requests for each politician on Capitol Hill.

BEFORE LAST week's recess, Republicans and Democrats went at each other over earmarks. The flash point was a plan by House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey (D-Wis.) not to put earmarks in individual spending bills this year when they were considered on the House floor. Under the Obey plan, now abandoned, the earmarks would have been added only after the measure was in conference. This was a problem, as Republicans legitimately pointed out, because conference reports aren't subject to amendment, just an up-or-down vote. Republicans accused Democrats of backtracking on their promise to usher in a new era of transparency and accountability. The outrage was a bit hard to take from a crowd that presided over an explosion of earmarks and excelled in last-minute provisions airdropped into conference reports. But the Democrats were right to back down: Two spending bills passed without earmarks, but the remaining ones will have the specific projects included.

Howls of outrage from all quarters forced the Obey plan to be abandoned. It is time to start howling even more. This has got to stop. Regardless of what party, if any, you belong to, this kind of spending is irresponsible and needs to be halted. Insane spending under the Republicans is one factor that led to their defeat in 2006. It would be a good idea for the Democrats to remember that.

The New York Times Supports Toatalitarian Genocide

Don Surber absolutely nails the New York Times with his post today. I cannot possibly say it better than he has.

The New York Times today called for U.S. troops to surrender Iraq to the insurgents and al-Qaida in an editorial, “The Road Home,” that was long on words, short on logic, and absent of heart.

In calling for abandoning Iraq, the Times has abandoned the underpinnings of liberal principles: that the government exists to protect the poor, the elderly, the infirm and women.

While I believe that government exists to protect the rights of its citizenry, I respect that contrarian position.

The Times would leave that principle on the battlefield in its bizarre call to flee at once — “It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.”

The Times argument is the war is unpopular so we should. That is childish. Was the war right because it was popular at the time? Should we execute criminals because that is popular? The Times has too long a history of unpopular things that it supports to make the “applause-o-meter argument.”

He lays the Times out for this childish line of reasoning. The Times even admits that a bloodbath "could" ensue. Absolutely will is the correct term. Go read the rest of what Don wrote. Giving up liberal principle to support totalitarian genocide is a frightening thing. The Times is wrong here.

A Voice From The Gulag

Natan Sharansky, who spent nine years of his life imprisoned in the Soviet gulag for being a political dissident, knows a bit about totalitarianism. In today's Washington Post, he points out the disturbed reasoning too many are using when thinking about Iraq. And about the debate over real consequences that is being avoided by the pandering politicians.

As the hideous violence in Iraq continues, it has become increasingly common to hear people argue that the world was better off with Hussein in power and (even more remarkably) that Iraqis were better off under his fist. In his final interview as U.N. secretary general, Kofi Annan acknowledged that Iraq "had a dictator who was brutal" but said that Iraqis under the Baathist dictatorship "had their streets, they could go out, their kids could go to school."

This line of argument began soon after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. By early 2004, some prominent political and intellectual leaders were arguing that women's rights, gay rights, health care and much else had suffered in post-Hussein Iraq.

Following in the footsteps of George Bernard Shaw, Walter Duranty and other Western liberals who served as willing dupes for Joseph Stalin, some members of the human rights community are whitewashing totalitarianism. A textbook example came last year from John Pace, who recently left his post as U.N. human rights chief in Iraq. "Under Saddam," he said, according to the Associated Press, "if you agreed to forgo your basic freedom of expression and thought, you were physically more or less OK."

The truth is that in totalitarian regimes, there are no human rights. Period. The media do not criticize the government. Parliaments do not check executive power. Courts do not uphold due process. And human rights groups don't file reports.

For most people, life under totalitarianism is slavery with no possibility of escape. That is why despite the carnage in Iraq, Iraqis are consistently less pessimistic about the present and more optimistic about the future of their country than Americans are. In a face-to-face national poll of 5,019 people conducted this spring by Opinion Research Business, a British market-research firm, only 27 percent of Iraqis said they believed that "that their country is actually in a state of civil war," and by nearly 2 to 1 (49 percent to 26 percent), the Iraqis surveyed said they preferred life under their new government to life under the old tyranny. That is why, at a time when many Americans are abandoning the vision of a democratic Iraq, most Iraqis still cling to the hope of a better future. They know that under Hussein, there was no hope.

Discussion of the consequences of a withdrawal are avoided like the plague by the politicians. They should at least address this honestly.

Importing Death

Mark Steyn, who has long been warning of the demographic crisis in Europe, takes a look at the recent terrorism arrests of a group of jihadi doctors in Britain and points out how that is related to that demographic catastrophe. The British National Health Service, so admired by the likes of Michael Moore, is so desperate for doctors that it is taking anyone, from anywhere. Because Brits will not take the jobs.

There are many things wrong with U.S. health care, as there inevitably are with any health care system. The question is whether America wants to go down the British-Canadian-Cuban route, to name three government medical systems that Michael Moore admires in his new film "Sicko." Cuba, of course, is a totalitarian state, and even Hollywood celebrities, though they like to visit, wouldn't want to live there. (Incidentally, the best health treatment available on Cuba is at Gitmo.) The United Kingdom, by contrast, is a free society, but last week's incendiary Jeep Cherokee at Glasgow Airport has shone a rare light on the curious character of its government health system.

Of the eight persons arrested as of Friday in the terrorist plot, seven are doctors with the National Health Service (the eighth is the wife of one, and a lab technician at the same hospital). The bombs failed to go off because a medical syringe malfunctioned. I don't mean it malfunctioned as a syringe (even in the crumbling NHS, the syringes usually work) but as a triggering mechanism, to which it had been adapted, though evidently not too efficiently.

Does government health care inevitably lead to homicidal doctors who can't wait to leap into a flaming SUV and drive it through the check-in counter? No. But government health care does lead to a dependence on medical staff imported from other countries.

Some 40 percent of Britain's practicing doctors were trained overseas – and that percentage will increase, as older native doctors retire, and younger immigrant doctors take their place. According to the BBC, "Over two-thirds of doctors registering to practice in the UK in 2003 were from overseas – the vast majority from non-European countries." Five of the eight arrested are Arab Muslims, the other three Indian Muslims. Bilal Abdulla, the Wahhabi driver of the incendiary Jeep and a doctor at the Royal Alexandra Hospital near Glasgow, is one of over 2,000 Iraqi doctors working in Britain.

The figures from British medical schools show the problem:

Aneurin Bevan, the socialist who created the National Health Service after World War II, was once asked to explain how he'd talked the country's doctors into agreeing to become state employees: "I stuffed their mouths with gold," he crowed. Sixty years later, no amount of gold can persuade Britons to spend their working lives in the country's dirty, decrepit hospitals (they spend enough of their nonworking lives there, waiting to be seen, waiting for beds, waiting for operations). According to a report in the British Medical Journal, white males comprise 43.5 percent of the population but now account for less than a quarter of students at UK medical schools. In other words, being a doctor is no longer an attractive middle-class career proposition. That's quite a monument to six decades of Michael Moore-style socialist health care.

That says rather a lot about the failings of the NHS. (There is still another disturbing trend that Steyn does not mention: a large percentage of graduates from British schools leave the country and go elsewhere to practice, so the demographics are very likely even more skewed.) That bright and ambitious people are too smart to go into the medical profession in Britain is actually a damning indictment of the socialized medicine system in general. (It would be instructive to see the numbers for Canada as well.)

Give Me Space

Well, the true believers are gathering to mutually reinforce their existing beliefs in an echo chamber. Not, not Live Earth, this is serious. We're talking about the real menace: reptilian overlords.

ROSWELL, N.M., July 7 — Attention, all aliens. Come on down. Because, seriously, this is your crowd. About 50,000 of your closest admirers are expected this weekend for the Roswell UFO Festival, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the nearby crash landing of a flying saucer — and, naturally, the ensuing government coverup.

A weather balloon? Please. We are not fools.

At least that's the thinking here. Not up on the latest ufology? The debate today is all about "disclosure," meaning not if, but when. When is the government finally going to open its top-secret files to reveal its voluminous data on the sightings, abductions and close encounters dating back to at least July 5, 1947. "The anomalies." Here in the desert Southwest. And probably Mars.

"The secret world will fall. We want the truth embargo to end," said Stephen Bassett, the founder of X-PPAC, the first political action committee established to target the politics of UFO/ET phenomena. Bassett spoke at the festival's conference, which, along with the Alien Chase fun run, costume parades and carnival rides (Orbiter, Splash Down), have filled every motel room in Roswell, once the home of the world's only atomic warfare unit and the Enola Gay B-29 bomber.

On Friday night, Bassett told listeners of George Noory's "Coast to Coast AM" radio show, which beamed live from the convention center to 500 stations, that: "I believe the Democrats are planning disclosures in the first months of the next administration."

While in politics a vote is a vote, some supporters are rightfully kept at arm's length. One feels sure that signs reading "Aliens for Clinton" would not be a really welcome sight for her campaign. Dennis Kucinich would be okay with it, though. The good news is that the true believers are getting together to swap ideas on how to get to the bottom of really important issues:

Indeed. If only citizens could get access to the data. Because the people here want to know about the shadow guests, crop circles, shape shifters, crash retrievals, men in black, cattle mutilations, probes and, of course, the antimatter perpetual energy machines that have been kept under wraps in those deep-black special limited access programs run by an international cabal of military-industrial-intelligence-media interests……..

……Other lectures at the festival include "Body Snatchers in the Desert," "Were Early Contactees Ritual Magicians?" and "UFOs and the Occult: Reptilian Overlords, Abductions, Mind Control and the New World Order."

Actually, the folks gathered in Roswell are quite mistaken. The entire UFO thing is not a government coverup. It's actually a disinformation campaign by the real reptilian overlords of the Animal Uprising™.