Yet Another Twisted Headline

ABC News Blares: Three in 10 Call SCOTUS 'Too Conservative'. All they need is three exclamation points or maybe all caps to make it more sophomoric. Because you could also screech: Two in 10 call SCOTUS 'Too Liberal'. Or the most accurate headline of all - which would better capture the polls actual finding: Five in 10 call SCOTUS 'balanced'. In other words, a solid majority think the Supremes are doing just fine.

Three in 10 Americans say the Supreme Court is "too conservative," up sharply from two years ago and now substantially more than call it "too liberal." Just under half say the court is about balanced ideologically in its decisions.

Thirty-one-percent call the court too conservative, compared with 19 percent in July 2005 — a period in which Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito have joined the court, replacing William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Connor.

Considerably fewer, 18 percent, call the court too liberal. Forty-seven percent say it's balanced, down from 55 percent in 2005.

Naturally there are sharp ideological differences in these views. Fifty-one percent of liberals see the court as "too conservative," compared with 36 percent of moderates and 10 percent of conservatives. Indeed a third of conservatives call it too liberal.

The only thing this poll shows is that there is - surprise - polarization in the body politic. I guess that's why you have to juice up non-news with a fancy - and frankly juvenile - headline that makes it sound like a real story. Two data points do not define a trend.

Oh Deer

One of the enforcers for the Animal Uprising™ conducted a daring daylight raid on a hardware store in downtown Farmington, Michigan Friday. The deadly deer, obviously on steroids, knocked the store's front door completely off the hinges.

It wasn't the usual stomping grounds for an adult deer, who decided to do a little window shopping in downtown Farmington on Friday afternoon.

At about 1:45 p.m. the deer broke through the front door of the new Ace Hardware store in the Downtown Farmington Center on Grand River, east of Farmington Road.

"At first, I thought that it was a large dog bumping against the front door," assistant manager Christopher Husk said.

"The door didn't break, it just fell off the hinges."

Stunned, the deer reportedly waited a bit and then leapt through the front window, startling the dozens of customers inside.

Some people tried to hold the deer in the back of the store.

But the deer was smarter than the folks trying to pin him. He bolted out the open delivery door out back. What the article does not mention is that the deer also shoplifted several items, including rope and a Sawzall. We don't know what they're building but we are very worried.

“There Is Only One, United Iraq”

The words of an Iraqi policeman celebrating the victory of the Iraqi soccer team over Saudi Arabia. The Iraqi team has placed first in the Asian Cup matches. A huge boost to the people of that country.

BAGHDAD - Defying orders from authorities, celebratory gunfire resounded across Baghdad and revelers poured into the streets after Iraq beat Saudi Arabia to clinch its first Asian Cup soccer championship on Sunday while mosques broadcast calls for the shooting to stop.

Security forces, meanwhile, enforced a vehicle ban in an effort to prevent a repeat of car bombings that killed dozens celebrating Iraq's progress to the finals in Asia's top soccer tournament.

Iraqis welcomed the victory as a chance to show the world they can come together and expressed frustration that their politicians couldn't do the same.

"Those heroes have shown the real Iraq. They have done something useful for the people as opposed to the politicians and lawmakers who are stealing or killing each other," said Sabah Shaiyal, a 43-year-old policeman in Baghdad. "The players have made us proud, not the greedy politicians. Once again, our national team has shown that there is only one, united Iraq."

Something as simple as a soccer game can bring people together, at least for a time.

Tragedy

At 0014 hours on July 30, 1945, the American heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis was hit by two torpedoes launched from the Japanese submarine I-58. The ship capsized and sank in 12 minutes. The Indianapolis had just completed delivery of the "Little Boy" atomic bomb to Tinian and was sailing in secrecy. The captain of the Indianapolis, Charles Butler McVay III, had not been informed that the waters he was ordered to sail through were known to be infested with Japanese submarines.

About 300 men died in the initial attack, the rest of the crew, nearly 900 men, went into the water. Four days later, the survivors were spotted - by accident - and rescued. Only 321 men remained alive, 317 of those survived. Most died from exposure, apparently, and there are accounts from people who were there that dispute the claims that sharks attacked and killed many of the survivors. (There were multiple reports of mass hallucinations, however.)

I saw only one shark. I remember reaching out trying to grab hold of him. I thought maybe it would be food. However, when night came, things would bump against you in the dark or brush against your leg and you would wonder what it was. But honestly, in the entire 110 hours I was in the water I did not see a man attacked by a shark. However, the destroyers that picked up the bodies afterwards found a large number of those bodies. In the report I read 56 bodies were mutilated, Maybe the sharks were satisfied with the dead; they didn't have to bite the living. (Oral history of CAPT Lewis L. Haynes, chief medical officer of the Indianapolis who was in the "lifejacket group".)

We had sharks, or rather they had sharks down there [in the life preserver group]. We know that because we have two survivors who were bitten by sharks and as I told this one boy in the hospital. I said "You'd better take some castellan paint and put on that thing before it heals up because nobody will ever believe you've been bitten by a shark. You might as well outline the teeth mark and you will have it for the rest of your life and can say `I know I was bitten by a shark'." (Oral history of Captain Charles B. McVay, III.)

Captain McVay survived and was court martialed for the loss of his ship. The court convicted him despite evidence that should have exonerated him. It took many years for Congress to recognize the wrong done to McVay. But it came too late for him. He committed suicide in 1968.

The Discovery Channel will present Ocean of Fear: Worst Shark Attack Ever  about the Indianapolis tragedy tonight at 9pm EDT. It, of course, plays up the shark attack angle.

Unexploded Ordnance

British authorities were forced to close off a large area surrounding a construction site when an unexploded V-1 missile was discovered.

LONDON (Reuters) - Police closed streets near London's Canary Wharf financial district on Saturday after an unexploded German flying bomb from World War Two was found on a construction site.

Bomb disposal experts were called in to make the V1 missile safe after it was unearthed close to the east London complex that houses 80,000 office workers during the working week, police said. At weekends the area is busy with shoppers and visitors.

Police closed several roads around the site in Millharbour, a road in the former docklands.

Things like this turn up all the time in Britain, of course. There is a lot of unexploded ordnances all over the country. The V-1s were the forerunner of today's cruise missiles. Almost 10,000 of them were launched at Britain during the war. Around 2,400 of those hit London, killing some 6,000 people, mostly civilians.

Change Of Tone

There appears to be a change in tone over at the Washington Post about withdrawing from Iraq. Even David Ignatius - not someone you would call a supporter of the war - is pointing out that the strident voices of the politicians pandering to the left are damaging American credibility in the world.

A good start would be for Washington partisans to take deep breaths and lower the volume, so that the process of talking and fighting that must accompany a gradual U.S. withdrawal can work. Some members of Congress argue that pressure for an American troop withdrawal will persuade the Iraqis to put aside their sectarian agendas, but the opposite is more likely to be true.

Try for a moment to put yourself in the place of the Iraqi Shiite warlord Moqtada al-Sadr. The American representatives in Baghdad, Crocker and Petraeus, keep calling on him to disarm his Mahdi Army militia and defuse Iraq's sectarian war. But Sadr can read the stories coming out of Washington. He sees the daily clamor for American troops to come home, and he knows that in the brutal reality of Iraq, this is the time to stockpile weapons for his militia, not disband it.

Even the good news that people have been touting in Iraq — the new willingness of Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province to ally with the United States against al-Qaeda — is in part a warm-up for the civil war that's coming. The Sunni leaders are working with the Americans so that they, too, can stockpile arms for the coming conflict. We are, in effect, arming both sides for this sectarian battle. And not for the first time, either — recall U.S. military support to both Iraq and Iran during their brutal war in the 1980s.

Extricating the United States safely from Iraq will be difficult under the best of circumstances. But it will be impossible if the necessary bargaining takes place against a backdrop of continual congressional demands for a faster withdrawal. In that situation, the Qomis and Sadrs will take the admonitions from Crocker and Petraeus as just so much hot air — and a bad situation will get even worse. Why should they listen to us today if we will be gone tomorrow?

Ed Morrisey agress that the "troops out now" rhetoric is killing American credibility, but he disputes - rather strenuously - Ignatius' central point that America has too short an attention span to deal with a long war.

And this is where Ignatius gets it wrong, at least historically. He quotes retired Air Force General Chuck Boyd as saying that we have never won a war that lasted longer than four years, with the exception of the Revolutionary War, when we were the insurgents. That's simply not true. In fact, we won the first war we fought in the Middle East, in the so-called Barbary Pirates war. It took us eighteen years to force submission from the radical Islamists in North Africa. It took us several years of Reconstruction (overly brutal years) to subdue the South after four years of civil war, which in large part was a counterinsurgency campaign. We prevailed in both Korea and Vietnam, although in the latter a Democratic Congress betrayed an agreement to support the South Vietnamese after we agreed to defend them if Hanoi violated the peace accord in 1973.

And we won the Cold War, which lasted 45 years, and we did that just 17 years ago.

Americans can show fortitude when needed. We need to do so now, or the result of our withdrawal will be a disgrace that will make Rwanda and Srebrenica look like schoolyard fistfights, in a region where we have critical national interests.

I agree with the good captain on this. But back to the change in tone. WaPo is also running this article today:

As Recess Nears, Disputes Linger

Rep. Dan Boren (D-Okla.), whose frustration with the war has been growing even as he has bucked his leadership's efforts to end it, last week joined his friend and fellow conservative Democrat in the Senate, Ben Nelson (Neb.), to support legislation in the House that would mandate a change of mission in Iraq, without setting firm withdrawal dates for troops.

Moderate Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) may not have made headway in her push to begin bringing troops home, but a bipartisan breakfast meeting Tuesday with senators fed up with recrimination and deadlock over the war gave her hope that the Senate may yet find a way out of its own quagmire.

WaPo appears to be backing away from a troops out mentality and leaning toward a compromise position. They have already recognized that a sudden withdrawal would unleash a genocide on Iraq. It would appear that they are changing course in how they cover the news. From the above article, it would appear that they are going to be giving negative coverage to those politicians that pander to the left, just as they will to those leaning right.

The Dictator Of New York

Michael Goodwin is positively pulling out the stops to go after New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. In fact Spitzer's fall from grace in the wake of the recent scandal that revealed that his office had used state police to falsify charges against New York State Senate Majority leader Joesph Bruno has been remarkable. A vast majority of the voters want Spitzer investigated over the actions his staff took. And Spitzer's apparent grab to become the single power in New York has fallen apart with all the revelations.

But as Week 2 of the "Eliot Mess" begins, Spitzer is in a free fall. The definition of "scarce" in Albany is anybody of either party who believes the governor's claim he had nothing to do with the dirty tricks plot his office concocted against Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno. The public is similarly skeptical. Up to 80% of voters want Spitzer to testify under oath about what he knew, with 50% saying they don't believe he has been honest, according to a Marist Institute poll.

The astonishing collapse is one of the fastest falls from political grace in memory. And Spitzer has only himself to blame…..

…..Such fine distinctions about the governor's role go to the heart of the trust issue because the stakes were so high for Spitzer. The plot was aligned perfectly with comments he often made about getting rid of Bruno. With Democrats enjoying a huge majority in the Assembly, and with Speaker Shelly Silver mostly abdicating his leadership role to Spitzer, Bruno was the last man willing to say no to the governor. With only a two-seat GOP majority, the feisty Bruno could still block legislation, hold up appointments and deny confirmation to Spitzer judicial picks.

But with Bruno gone, Spitzer would hold vast power over all three branches of government.

Spitzer has a real problem on his hands. Goodwin and others will not let this pass unchallenged. The New York Times, on the other hand, is reliably in the pocket of the Spitzer administration. Today they publish his self-serving public apology.

The worst thing that could happen now would be for this to stop our progress, preventing us from building on our many successes of the past six months: health insurance for every child; historic investment in our schools tied to accountability; the largest property tax cut in history; ethics, lobbying and campaign finance reform; breaking the impasse at ground zero; and a 20 percent cut in workers’ compensation rates that will save New York businesses $1 billion and make our state more competitive.

In other words, whatever you do, don't investigate me. Which is absolutely the wrong answer. The voters want - and deserve - to know what involvement Spitzer had in this. He insists no laws were broken. Possibly, but ethics and lapses thereof mean a lot to the voters. Spitzer appears to have tried to eliminate all opposition to him by whatever means necessary. That needs looking into. New York does not need a dictator.

When Grizzly Bear Suits Attack

Well, this should make people think hard about what they are watching on television. What you see may not be at all what you think you are seeing. Or being told you are seeing. The British Broadcasting Company and the American Discovery Channel have both shown "survival expert" fakery and passed it off as truth to their viewers. The latest revelation about the Discovery Channel series Man Vs Wild is just plain embarrassing. They used a guy in a bear suit to fake up a bear "attack" on host Bear Grylls.

To the viewers, it was the moment TV adventurer Bear Grylls narrowly escaped the attentions of a hungry wild bear.

Yet it seems he was not in quite as much danger as those watching might have thought.

Grylls was menaced by nothing more threatening than a colleague in a fancy-dress bear costume, according to a survival expert present at the filming.

Grylls, whose daredevil antics have entranced viewers of his Channel 4 series Born Survivor, had filmed a sequence for another show in which his makeshift camp seemed to be invaded by a grizzly bear in the middle of the night.

Apparently in great danger, he bravely filmed a black shape rustling around the embers of his campfire, before telling viewers of the dangers of wild bears and fleeing the camp.

Yet survival expert Ron Hood has claimed the black shape seen in the show was not a man-eating grizzly but actually a colleague in a costume.

The Discovery Channel, which aired the show, insisted that the pantomime bear outfit was hired "as a prank" by the crew and no footage which included the bear costume was broadcast.

But the programme does include a shot of a dark black shape, rustling in the camp a few feet away - something Discovery was unable to explain.

The Daily Mail also obtained the script for the show  - which clearly shows the "bear attack" was pre-planned. They initially tried to hire a trained bear but when they could not, they rented the bear suit instead. The Mail article contains photographs of the "bear". There have been a string of revelations about this show and fakery this week:

Last week it was revealed that episodes of Born Survivor screened on Channel 4 included faked or set-up scenes. One showed Grylls making his own raft while stuck on a desert island.

In fact it was built by a team led by a survival expert, and the island was in Hawaii - within close reach of a motel.

Grylls didn't sleep out in the wild, either. He slept in comfy hotels. Frankly, the Discovery Channel is not handling this the right way at all. They should not reedit the shows as they have announced they will do. They should pull the shows, fire the production company involved and apologize to viewers. It is their reputation that has been damaged by the fraud here and they need to fix that first.

Crime Yes, “Hate Crime”, No

Tom Maguire has a post up about an arrest at Pace University. A man was arrested for the "hate crime" of throwing a koran down a toilet.

I Guess He Should Have Just Burned A Flag

This will make for a fascinating prosecution:

Hate-crime arrests in Quran desecrations at Pace University
July 27, 2007, 8:33 PM EDT

   NEW YORK (AP) _ A 23-year-old man was arrested Friday on hate-crime charges after he threw a Quran in a toilet at Pace University on two separate occasions, police said.

Stanislav Shmulevich of Brooklyn was arrested on charges of criminal mischief and aggravated harassment, both hate crimes, police said. It was unclear if he was a student at the school. A message left at the Shmulevich home was not immediately returned.

Maguire points out that burning a flag or submerging a Christian crucifix in urine are perfectly acceptable, legally-speaking. Dan Riehl points to something which is apparently left out of the quoted article: the koran was stolen. In which case there was a crime, but not a hate crime.

It's in this story. I'm against hate crimes legislation as a rule. And if someone wants to toss their copy of a Koran, or a Bible in the toilet, go for it. But if you lift same from someone else and then do it, you are indeed guilty of a crime. Spare me the hate crime, but I have no problem with him being arrested. Frankly, he sounds more like a nut, than anything else.

Fine, then. Prosecute Shmulevich for the theft of the book and the vandalism, but this must not be allowed to be treated as a hate crime. The koran does not - and should not - enjoy special protection under the US constitution or under US law. Robbie at Urban Grounds and Rich Horton over that Michael Van Der Galien's place also have some thoughts.

UPDATE: LGF has even more about this. Shmulevich is being charged with felonies here, not misdemeanors. This is absurd.

Do we still live in a country that values free speech? This case is pretty good evidence that we do not. Mr. Shmulevich is caught in a Kafkaesque nightmare right out of the Soviet Union, and it’s all happening at the demand of the Muslim Student Association and the Council on American Islamic Relations.

These are the tactics of a police state, this is not how America is meant to be.