Thanks And Praise

(Photograph Michael Yon, used by permission)

A Muslim man had invited the American soldiers from “Chosen” Company 2-12 Cavalry to the church, where I videotaped as Muslims and Christians worked and rejoiced at the reopening of St John’s, an occasion all viewed as a sign of hope.

I have no words. Others do:

The Anchoress: What I see in this picture is something more than a historic moment - I don’t even know if that’s what we should call it - I see the sort of thing people do when they are neighbors……

Michelle Malkin: Thanks to the lens of Michael Yon, we can see a fuller, truer picture of Iraq than the “grim milestone”-driven legacy media lens allows us to see.

Belmont Club: All just wars are about the restoration of peace. But it's important to remember that the flag raising on Suribachi occurred on the fourth day of a campaign that would last a month longer.

Transterrestrial Musings: If things continue to go well, this photo should win a Pulitzer.

Wizbang: Michael Yon has done it again. He snapped this photo of Muslims and Christians placing a cross on the top of a church that is so moving that the only way you can't see the importance of it is if you have a heart of stone….

Wake Up America: We are still there for a reason, and this is a clear example of what that reason is. Rebuilding.

Confederate Yankee: The symbolism of an ending sectarian conflict…

Urban Grounds: This photo deserves and needs to be as widely published and seen as possible.

Powerline: It's way too early to be triumphant about what is happening in Iraq, but it's not too early to be hopeful……

Bits Blog: Peace is not an absence of war; Peace is a product of winning the war.

Babalu Blog: The Hypocritical Silence of the MSM

Jules Crittenden: Unlike the Saddam shot, an image of tearing down the old evil, Yon’s captured the Iraqis putting something up, restoring something good, themselves.

Sundries Shack: But this picture, perhaps more than any others I have seen, illustrates the simple decency of neighbor and community that we have prayed would soon come to Iraq.

Classical Values: With a message like that it is a wonder our main stream media hasn't picked up the photo.

Tigerhawk: If it had been taken by a wire service photographer it would be on the cover of newspapers all over the country.

No, I do have a few words. Michael Yon has made this picture available - for free - to the media. I emailed for permission to post it and had two versions of it emailed back in less than an hour. If the national media does not run this picture, they are fools or worse.

Some Praise For….Chuck Schumer?

Michael Goodwin praises Chuck Schumer today for daring to buck the far left wing of his party. In voting for Michael Mukasey, Schumer is now enduring the adoration of the nutroots. Which is lot like being savaged by badgers - only more rabid.

With rabid lefties calling for a protest outside his Brooklyn home and with costumed demonstrators holding up signs behind him in Washington saying things like "united we torture," Schumer earned his title as New York's senior senator. By saving Mukasey's nomination in the 11-to-8 Judiciary Committee vote, Schumer and the only other Democrat to join nine Republicans, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), also saved their party from the clutches of the fanatical fringe.

Schumer said he was voting for Mukasey because "the Department of Justice - once the crown jewel among our government institutions - is a shambles and is in desperate need of a strong leader." And saying Mukasey had promised him to enforce the law independently, he added that "from a Bush nominee, this is no small commitment."

We can excuse that cheap shot because of the stakes. Had Schumer and Feinstein followed the party line, Mukasey would have been defeated and the leaderless, demoralized Justice Department would have been left to twist in the wind. And the partisanship that has crippled Washington would have won again over the national interest.

Schumer's vote for the man he recommended to President Bush could still cost him because, as the head of the party's Senate campaign committee, Schumer has to raise money from some of the groups blinded by their hatred of Bush. No doubt Schumer will have some explaining to do for his crucial vote.

Yet it's really the lefties who owe the rest of us an explanation. The extensive praise that even Dems showered on Mukasey's record and integrity should have concluded with a yes vote. But the eight other Democrats on the panel seized on the issue of waterboarding as a reason to vote against him. And not because Mukasey supports it, but simply because he refused to say it was illegal without knowing more about whether it is used by the CIA and under what circumstances.

Ed Morrisey pointed out yesterday that the Democrats had already scored a political victory with Mukasey's nomination in the first place. Then the left decided to force the issue and turned it into a triumph for the White House. It is getting too close to the general election to keep pandering to the far left, though. Some Democrats are at least starting to put on the brakes.

Fraud Alert Update

Thanks to Quilly Mammoth in the comments to the original post, I now have a website for the presumed fraudster - or someone has framed him perfectly. His address info:

Location: Machynlleth, Powys, United Kingdom

Which is identical to the Whois:

Admin Name:David Thorpe
Admin Organization:David Thorpe
Admin Street1:Cyberium
Admin Street2:
Admin Street3:
Admin City:Machynlleth
Admin State/Province:Powys
Admin Postal Code:SY209HA
Admin Country:GB

He also links Cyberium on his sidebar.

Oh well, it's busted wide open right now. And all over the search engines as such.

The Two Faces Of John Murtha

Jonathan Gurwitz, writing in the San Antonio Express News, points out that certain supposedly anti-Iraq war Congressmen can't afford to let the Iraq war end. *cough* John Murtha *cough*.

You know the situation in Iraq has improved when the U.S. military starts to receive criticism for inflating security threats.

That's what happened last month when the Defense Department asked Congress for $1.4 billion in emergency spending to combat sniper attacks.

As USA Today reported, the Pentagon based its request on the assertion that sniper attacks have quadrupled over the past year and eventually might outpace improvised explosive devices as the top killer of U.S. personnel. USA Today questioned the data and, after a review, discovered the rate of sniper attacks has actually declined slightly in 2007. During the past four months, it has declined precipitously.

A Defense Department official conceded that the quadrupled claim was a mistake. The Pentagon modified the justification for the spending request. And since Kongsberg Defense and Aerospace, a Norwegian company that supplies the Army with countersniper technology systems, has a plant in Johnstown, Pa., the hometown of appropriator in chief Rep. John Murtha, it's a safe bet the request will survive.

As Gurwitz points out, there are earmarks at stake, and Murtha is the pork king. More importantly, Gurwitz also points out how the entire debate has changed:

It's also a lesson, more importantly, about the changing terms of the debate surrounding the Iraq war. Back in March, the new congressional majority bandied about resolutions calling for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq by August 2008, March 2008 and even, as stipulated in the Iraq Redeployment Act of 2007, within 180 days, which means the United States would by now have abandoned the Iraqi people.

Remember the logic of those resolutions? The presence of American troops was the destabilizing source of Iraq's deplorable security situation. The insurgency was the understandable homegrown response to military occupation. The surge would, therefore, only make matters worse by increasing instability and stoking the insurgency.

That, of course, has not happened. Instead the new tactics along with the increased number of troops has actually changed things quite a lot. It is not all rosy and there is still much to do. But even Democratic candidates are shying away from calling for the troops home now.

After all, there's pork for Murtha at stake.

Another Post From My Son

(Ed. Note: My son sent me this commentary on an article he read in USA Today. It gives a soldier's eye view of the article. Regular readers know he is in the Army Reserve and has completed two tours of duty in Iraq.)

Greetings, fellow crab fans. I have returned to give you all a piece of my mind about a subject very near to my heart.

First, an apology.  I've been conspicuously absent from this site for some time now, due to a combination of personal shakeups in my life and a budding career. I won't promise to do better, because I'm not sure I can, but when something catches my eye I'll do my best to let you know about it.

I passed a newspaper dispenser today and found an article on the front page that I could not ignore. I dug three quarters out of my pocket and started reading. When I got home I managed to find it online as well and below is the link for your discretionary perusal.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2007-11-06-eod_N.htm

The article is entitled, "Commanders pushed to make bomb disposal choices." In summary, it describes  a situation most people probably don't even know exists: the issue of whether to dismantle and examine or simply destroy IEDs in Iraq. First, allow me outline for you how this has worked in the past. Engineers in "sweep teams" patrol the roads of Iraq at a low speed, attempting to spot IEDs before the convoys behind them run into them. Upon finding and IED, the engineers call in the Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) teams to dismantle
and/or destroy the IEDs (I apologize for the acronym overload).

Seems like a good system, until you take into account the fact that it can take anywhere from a half hour to several hours for EOD to show up on the scene. Once they do arrive, it can take several more hours for them to take the IED apart and clear the route for travel. This is where the convoys come in.

Road travel in Iraq is strictly regulated. Once a route is made "red," i.e. unable to be traveled upon, no more convoys are allowed to come out of forward operating bases until the status is updated to "amber." Routes go red as soon as an IED is found and reported on that path of travel. For the convoys still in camp, this means an irritating delay. If convoys have already left camp, though, they are stopped behind the sweep teams until the IED is cleared.

Imagine being stuck for hours, unable to let down your guard for fear of being attacked while you're sitting still behind an IED cordon. What if the sweep team missed secondary devices that are now sitting directly outside your doors? What if the IED that stopped traffic is really not an IED at all, but a hoax designed to lure the convoy into an ambush? From personal experience, I can tell you it feels as though a giant, day-glo target has been painted on your truck.

The article in question examines the possible loss of valuable intelligence gained by dismantling IEDs. It even directly likens the work done by EOD to that of the forensic technicians on the television show CSI. I'm not here to tell you anything different. Intelligence is gained, and sometimes it leads the military directly to the bomb-maker and every so often, a huge cache of IEDs and related components. Sometimes.

There are also times when the delays caused by an IED cordon result in an ambush by insurgent attackers, or 60mm mortars being walked in on convoys that have nowhere to go, completely boxed in between the IED and convoys that have come up behind them. I've personally seen as many as nine convoys stuck over a distance of several miles behind a cordon. I've been caught in a mortar attack like the situation I've previously described.
I was blessed never to have been stuck in an ambush, though several of my Fellow soldiers in the company I served in were, on more than one occasion.

There is also a great deal of posturing in the article, describing the "superiority" of EOD techs over engineers and how under-qualified said engineers are to detonate IEDs. Having seen some of their handiwork, I can tell you engineers are quite proficient at blowing things up safely. This argument is elitism, pure and simple; it's the same kind of elitism that flares up when the Army is chosen to take an objective over the Marines. It's the mindset that they are the baddest of the bad, and as such only they should be trusted to deal with the
threat. It's a mindset EOD needs to get over, on the double, for the good of the mission.

Oh, and of the article's statement that engineers have caused unnecessary harm to friendly forces in the past with their ordinance clearing, I'd like to see what EOD's record is, because I guarantee it's not perfect either. War is hell, and sometimes things go very wrong very fast, and the only way to stop that from happening is to stop going to war.

This new order puts commanders in the field in charge of the situation, as it always should have been. If the sweep team commander is sitting on an IED in an area where there is an imminent threat of attack, he or she should have the option of destroying that IED to facilitate movement on the roads without fear of  being reprimanded or removed from duty for making that call.

This is actually a very informative article, but it only really shows one side of the issue, a woefully common occurrence these days. Where is the testimony of the grunts on the ground who are depending on these decisions, which sometimes have dire ramifications? From my point of view, this order finally
sets right a wrong that's been pervasively affecting logistical operations for years.

Fraud Alert

I just got an email that urged me to denounce "scandalous treatment" of some climate change dissenters.

Dear Gaius,
 
I admire your site - thank you for everything you do.
 
I would like to draw your attention to the really scandalous treatment of some academic colleagues by what seems like a kind of 'climate change mafia'. I am an astrophysicist with an interest in issues related to climate change. But please do not mention my name to anyone in connection with this.
 
As you can see here, Daniel Klein and colleagues have published a paper which completely shatters the theory of ‘manmade global warming’:

I'm not going to publish the link, but the sender(s) constructed an elaborate website, complete with editorial, article, contacts, logo, etc. A couple of things set the alarm bells ringing, but suffice it to say that when I tracked down the Whois, it was kind of a dead giveaway:

Domain ID:D21379999-LRMS
Domain Name:GEOCLIMATICSTUDIES.INFO
Created On:02-Nov-2007 14:50:19 UTC
Expiration Date:02-Nov-2008 14:50:19 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:Tucows Inc. (R139-LRMS)
Status:TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:turLDvUkPFjmOK1C
Registrant Name:Hiroko Takebe
Registrant Organization:Dr Hiroko Takebe
Registrant Street1:Climatological Department, Okinawa University
Registrant Street2:
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:Okinawa
Registrant State/Province:Okinawa
Registrant Postal Code:OK-184NJ
Registrant Country:JP
Registrant Phone:+81.9845791066
Registrant Phone Ext.:
Registrant FAX:
Registrant FAX Ext.:
Registrant Email:
Admin ID:tuT6jKg9v6VinjbX
Admin Name:David Thorpe
Admin Organization:David Thorpe
Admin Street1:Cyberium
Admin Street2:
Admin Street3:
Admin City:Machynlleth
Admin State/Province:Powys
Admin Postal Code:SY209HA
Admin Country:GB
Admin Phone:+44.1654761590
Admin Phone Ext.:
Admin FAX:
Admin FAX Ext.:
Admin Email:

The site is five days old. There is no Daniel Klein at the University of Arizona. There is no search engine presence for a Climatological Department, Okinawa University. Cyberium.co.uk is a web designer that appears to work on "green" things pretty much exclusively. And there appears to be someone with entirely too much time on their hands and an agenda.

Any blogger interested in the original email, contact me and I will forward a copy to you.

UPDATE: New post with additional information here.

Democratic Shakedown

The Washington Post has a rather astonishing article, one I would not have suspected that they would run. It details a split in the Democratic party over tax policy. The leadership pledged to do something about the Alternative Minimum Tax - which was inflicted on taxpayers by the Democrats in the first place. But with Washington totally addicted to tax money, they have to find a way to replace any revenue lost to a reform. Hence the idea to tax hedge funds. Which in turn leads to a pretty naked attempt to influence tax policy by contributing large sums of money to Democrats.

In early June, as the Senate Finance Committee began examining how a new breed of Wall Street titan could be paying a special low tax rate on executives' salaries, one of the richest of them, hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen of SAC Capital Advisors, cut the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee a check for $28,500.

Just days later, with DSCC Chairman Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) equivocating on legislation to raise taxes on publicly traded equity firms, hedge fund giant James H. Simons, who earned $1.7 billion last year at his Renaissance Technologies LLC, donated another $28,500 to the DSCC.

By late July, Schumer was off the fence — and on the side of the hedge funds and private-equity firms in opposing the Democratic legislation.

Later this week, Democrats will face more scrutiny over that choice. The House is to vote on a bill to stave off growth of the alternative minimum tax for a year, offer new tax breaks to middle-class homeowners and expand tax rebates for low-income parents — paid for largely by nearly $50 billion in tax increases on the burgeoning hedge fund and private-equity industries.

The measure has deeply divided Democrats, pitting a rank and file that has railed for years against inequities in the tax code against the party's money men, who are reluctant to bite the hand that has generously fed them. Hanging in the balance is the AMT, enacted in 1969 to ensure that the wealthiest Americans pay at least some taxes. Instead, it has increasingly affected middle-class taxpayers.

"If you're a Democrat and you have to choose between the alternative minimum tax and the hedge fund industry, that's one tough ideological choice," said Viva Hammer, who recently left the Treasury Department's Office of Tax Policy and is now a tax partner at the law firm Crowell & Moring. "It's a choice between your votes and your wallet."

Note that story does detail a rather blatant tax loophole that hedge fund managers exploit to dodge paying the same tax rates as others do. But the rather naked shakedown - and a pretty obvious quid pro quo - is not something I would have that the Post would publish.

Remember that talk of Democrats cleaning up Congress? They're cleaning up alright. Just not the way people thought they would.

Discovery Over America

Space shuttle Discovery is scheduled to land today and will be flying directly across the center of the country on its way to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. If the shuttle makes its first possible window, the route will be as follows:

On orbit 238, Discovery will cross the western coast of North America at 12:39 p.m. EST (9:39 a.m. PST), just north of Vancouver, British Columbia. 

Traveling on a southeast trajectory, the orbiter will be passing over northwestern Montana just a minute later (10:40 a.m. MST).  Four minutes later (11:44 a.m. CST), Discovery will be streaking over southern Nebraska.  After another two minutes have elapsed, it will be racing over Springfield, Missouri, and by 11:49 a.m. CST it will be over central Alabama.  At 12:55:16 p.m. EST, the shuttle will decelerate to two and a half times the speed of sound (mach 2.5), dropping to an altitude of 80,000-feet just to the northwest of Cape Canaveral.  Touchdown is scheduled for 1:01:50 p.m. EST.  

NASA has a tracking map up at their Shuttle Page:

(NASA Image)

The shuttle should be visible to the naked eye, appearing to be about as bright as Venus - but moving very fast. Even if you don't see it, you may well here the sonic booms if you are anywhere close to the flight path. 

Not-So-Great Moments In Engineering History

On November 7, 1940 The Tacoma Narrows Bridge, nicknamed Galloping Gertie by locals, galloped for the very last time. It is one of the best documented engineering disasters in history, since cameras recorded the entire, spectacular end of the span.

Compound Fracture

Mickey Kaus notes that Hillary Clinton is still flailing over her support for Eliot Spitzer's Licenses for Lawbreakers® scheme a full week after her misstep in the debate. This presents two equally unflattering possible reasons why:

It's the possibility that a) she panics in adversity–a point Levin emphasizes or b) she's too vain to let herself be perceived as having given a wrong answer, so she goes back to correct it even when that only compounds the damage.

The Levin Kaus refers to is Yuval Levin, writing at National Review Online:  

It is astonishing to watch the continuing inability of the Clinton campaign to sustain a modest blow. Her debate performance last week wasn’t that bad, and the attacks against her weren’t so harsh, and the questions she got weren’t unfair at all. She didn’t handle them very well, which happens. But since then she, her husband, and her campaign team have been in a kind of panicked stupor about it which has not abated much in a week and has continued (needlessly) to draw the worst kind of attention to the candidate and provide fodder for her opposition…….

Frankly, I'm astonished that Hillary and her campaign are mishandling this whole thing so badly. I figured this would become a major issue in the general election, but she is actually damaging herself in the primaries at this point. If she and her advisers can't handle this, what does that say about how they would react in a national crisis?

The Radioactive Rising Star

The New York Observer notes the stunning speed with which Eliot Spitzer went from rising star to politically radioactive. The article catalogs a long list of political missteps that spell out how Spitzer managed to squander huge approval ratings. He is also not welcome on stage with local Democratic candidates. That tells you a lot about how few allies he has left.

Nor did Mr. Spitzer make any Election Day appearances in Suffolk County, where a number of competitive races were to determine control of the county legislature and a number of key town-wide offices.

From the perspective of local Democratic officials, this was just as well.

Schaffer, the Democratic county chairman in Suffolk, said that Mr. Spitzer’s nonappearance was “not surprising.”

Asked what would happen if Mr. Spitzer were to appear in Suffolk, he said, “I think he would be standing by himself.”

Since his lopsided election as governor late last year, Mr. Spitzer has somehow gone from rising national star to radioactive liability. The governor’s achievements in this regard were as systematic as they were well-documented.

In January, he picked and lost a fight with the powerful Democratic majority in the State Assembly over the appointment of a state comptroller. In February, he led a largely unsuccessful charge against the powerful health care worker’s union in a bid to contract the state’s hospital system. Starting in July, he has gotten the worst of a running feud with State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, managing the incredible feat of simultaneously triggering multiple public investigations into his own office and turning the cantankerous upstate conservative into a sympathetic figure.

Then, in late September—in what was surely a bid to change the subject—the governor first proposed a sweeping plan to allow illegal immigrants to obtain state driver’s licenses (enraging conservatives and vulnerable Democrats in swing districts), then reversed himself by watering it down to comply with the Bush administration’s wishes (enraging pro-immigration liberals).

“If he continues this style he’s going to alienate enough people so that it will reach a point where he’ll look to his left and he’ll look to his right and he’ll look around and say ‘Oh, my God, who are my allies?” said Jose Peralta, a Democratic assemblyman from Queens who, like many of his colleagues, consider themselves allies of a governor in a situation they never anticipated.

He also provided the weapon that was used to draw first blood from candidate Clinton with his Licenses for Lawbreakers® scheme. If she loses next November, old Eliot can kiss his career aspirations goodbye. Not everyone is against him at this point, but politicians are very, very quick to distance themselves from a liability. At this point, most New York Democrats appear to want Spitzer to move as far away as possible.

The War Weak On Terror

Alan Dershowitz has an op-ed in today's Opinion Journal that spells out the trap Democrats are setting for themselves. At the behest of their far left fringe, they are ardently opposing things in such a way as to make them look weak on National Security. Dershowitz predicts a nasty surprise come next November if they don't curb their pandering to the noisy left.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans may watch Michael Moore's movies or cheer Cindy Sheehan's demonstrations, but tens of millions want the Moores and Sheehans of our nation as far away as possible from influencing national security policy. That is why Rudy Giuliani seems to be doing surprisingly well among many segments of the electorate, ranging from centrist Democrats to Republicans and even some on the religious right.

It may seem strange that a candidate, who came to national prominence as the New York mayor, and one with a mixed record in that job, would be the choice of so many on security issues, despite his lack of experience in the national and international arenas. But the post- 9/11 Rudy conveys a sense of toughness, of no-nonsense defense of America.

I am not suggesting that Democratic candidates seek to emulate Mr. Giuliani. But they cannot ignore his tough stance on national security if they want to succeed in the 2008 election, as distinguished from selected state primaries. Marginal Democratic candidates certainly benefit from moving to the left on national security issues, but serious candidates–candidates who want to have any realistic chance of prevailing in the general election–must not allow themselves to be pushed, shoved or even nudged away from a strong commitment to national security.

Consider, for example, the contentious and emotionally laden issue of the use of torture in securing preventive intelligence information about imminent acts of terrorism–the so-called "ticking bomb" scenario. I am not now talking about the routine use of torture in interrogation of suspects or the humiliating misuse of sexual taunting that infamously occurred at Abu Ghraib. I am talking about that rare situation described by former President Clinton in an interview with National Public Radio:

"You picked up someone you know is the No. 2 aide to Osama bin Laden. And you know they have an operation planned for the United States or some European capital in the next three days. And you know this guy knows it. Right, that's the clearest example. And you think you can only get it out of this guy by shooting him full of some drugs or waterboarding him or otherwise working him over."

He said Congress should draw a narrow statute "which would permit the president to make a finding in a case like I just outlined, and then that finding could be submitted even if after the fact to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court." The president would have to "take personal responsibility" for authorizing torture in such an extreme situation. Sen. John McCain has also said that as president he would take responsibility for authorizing torture in that "one in a million" situation.

Although I am personally opposed to the use of torture, I have no doubt that any president–indeed any leader of a democratic nation–would in fact authorize some forms of torture against a captured terrorist if he believed that this was the only way of securing information necessary to prevent an imminent mass casualty attack. The only dispute is whether he would do so openly with accountability or secretly with deniability. The former seems more consistent with democratic theory, the latter with typical political hypocrisy.

As Massimo Calabresi pointed out in Time Magazine, "The Democrats ….. have an uncanny ability to milk humiliation out of national security debates…"  They are pandering to the left and they look like they are pandering. Rendition programs were active under Bill Clinton's presidency - the Democrats know that full well. Dershowitz's warning, like Calabresi's, will probably go unheeded.

Democrats know full well that in the ticking bomb scenario that they would have to authorize whatever means necessary to get information that could avert the attack. The alternative is taking responsibility for the deaths of American citizens. "Gee, our political posturing is more important than your lives." Try selling that to the American voters. The Democrats are rapidly painting themselves into a very tight corner with their pandering.