PrairiePundit

Perry vs. Hutchison

2009-11-20T21:05:00.002-06:00

Both ads will probably appeal to Texas voters. The Perry ad seems to have more energy, but Hutchison's ad delivers on the problems with Democrat rationed health care schemes.

Figure and intelligence in women

2009-11-20T19:12:00.002-06:00

BBC:

Women with curvy figures are likely to be brighter than waif-like counterparts and may well produce more intelligent offspring, a US study suggests.
Researchers studied 16,000 women and girls and found the more voluptuous performed better on cognitive tests - as did their children.
The bigger the difference between a woman's waist and hips the better.
Researchers writing in Evolution and Human Behaviour speculated this was to do with fatty acids found on the hips.
In this area, the fat is likely to be the much touted Omega-3, which could improve the woman's own mental abilities as well as those of her child during pregnancy.
Men respond to the double enticement of both an intelligent partner and an intelligent child, the researchers at the Universities of Pittsburgh and California said.
The findings appear to be borne out in the educational attainments of at least one of the UK's most famous curvaceous women, Nigella Lawson, who graduated from Oxford.
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My experience is that a woman's figure has little to do with intelligence. The most important factor in successful women is the same as that of men, a desire to achieve. For some women that desire also leads them to exercise and workout to maintain a figure they desire.

Michael Moore beware

2009-11-20T18:43:00.001-06:00

From the Scotsman:

Jungle murder gang 'drained fat from victims for cosmetics'

Does it matter whether the fat comes from the unattractive?

Emails reveal globo warmer consipracy to suppress evidence?

2009-11-20T15:27:00.004-06:00

James Delingpole:

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

...

But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

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There is much more including excerpts from various emails. If true this will be very embarrassing for the globo warmers, but I predict they will ignore the facts and keep on spinning.

The NY Times coverage of the emails is here. It tends to give the side of those whose emails' were exposed, but I did not find their arguments all that convincing. But, then I am a skeptic about global warming as well as the purported consequences of global warming. Since I like warmer weather I am sure I can tolerate the increased temperature if it happens, and I think opening the Northwest Passage would be an economic benefit to the US and Europe. Canadians and Russians as well as Alaska would have more land available for farming. I have also seen stories indicating that the Shara desert would become green because of global warming.

I think the worse thing we could do is make a futile expensive attempt to stop it instead of adapting to it if it actually occurs. Putting control freaks in charge of the energy economy will be a disaster. Green jobs are a mirage at this point, and strangling the domestic production of oil, gas and coal by the Democrats is a gift to those who hate us.

Harry Reid's Enron accounting

2009-11-20T15:03:00.002-06:00

Jeffrey Anderson:

SENATE Majority Leader Harry Reid is touting the Senate's latest health-care bill as costing $849 billion over 10 years. But this uses the same accounting trick as past versions: 99 percent of the costs don't kick in until the fifth year of that "10-year" period. The true 10-year costs are well over twice what Reid's advertising: $1.8 trillion.
The Democrats cite the bills' projected costs from 2010-19. Yet, as the Congressional Budget Office reports, the bill would cost just $9 billion total from 2010 through 2013 -- versus $147 billion in 2016 alone. In the first 40 percent of what the Democrats are calling the bill's "first 10 years," only 1 percent of its costs would yet have hit.
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The Democrat politics of fraud is not going to be cheap for tax payers.

What is price for Mary Landrieu--$100 million

2009-11-20T14:57:00.002-06:00

ABC News:

...

On page 432 of the Reid bill, there is a section increasing federal Medicaid subsidies for “certain states recovering from a major disaster.”

The section spends two pages defining which “states” would qualify, saying, among other things, that it would be states that “during the preceding 7 fiscal years” have been declared a “major disaster area.”

I am told the section applies to exactly one state: Louisiana, the home of moderate Democrat Mary Landrieu, who has been playing hard to get on the health care bill.

In other words, the bill spends two pages describing would could be written with a single world: Louisiana. (This may also help explain why the bill is long.)

Senator Harry Reid, who drafted the bill, cannot pass it without the support of Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu.

How much does it cost? According to the Congressional Budget Office: $100 million.
...

That makes Cold Cash Jefferson look like a cheap date. But, it want take Louisiana long to burn through that amount with the new patients that will be covered by the rationed health care bill.

Mullah Omar flees to Karchi to avoid Hellfires

2009-11-20T06:50:00.002-06:00

Washington Times:

Mullah Mohammed Omar, the one-eyed leader of the Afghan Taliban, has fled a Pakistani city on the border with Afghanistan and found refuge from potential U.S. attacks in the teeming Pakistani port city of Karachi with the assistance of Pakistan's intelligence service, three current and former U.S. intelligence officials said.
Mullah Omar, who hosted Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders when they plotted the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, had been residing in Quetta, where the Afghan Taliban shura -- or council -- had moved from Kandahar after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
Two senior U.S. intelligence officials and one former senior CIA officer told The Washington Times that Mullah Omar traveled to Karachi last month after the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. He inaugurated a new senior leadership council in Karachi, a city that so far has escaped U.S. and Pakistani counterterrorism campaigns, the officials said.
The officials, two of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the topic, said Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the ISI, helped the Taliban leaders move from Quetta, where they were exposed to attacks by unmanned U.S. drones.
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We need to get resources in place in Karachi to find and eliminate Mullah Omar. He is a leadership target that needs to be destroyed. We also need to find out who at the ISI is helping him.

Palin phobes

2009-11-20T06:37:00.003-06:00

Jonah Goldberg:

Slate magazine is just one of the countless media outlets convulsing with St. Vitus' Dance over that demonic succubus Sarah Palin. In its reader forum, The Fray, one supposed Palinophobe took dead aim at the former Alaska governor's writing chops, excerpting the following sentence from her book:

"The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn't work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle."
Other readers pounced like wolf-sized Dobermans on an intruder. One guffawed, "That sentence by Sarah Palin could be entered into the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest. It could have a chance at winning a (sic) honorable mention, at any rate."
But soon, the original contributor confessed: "I probably should have mentioned that the sentence quoted above was not written by Sarah Palin. It's taken from the first paragraph of 'Dreams From My Father,' written by Barack Obama."
The ruse should have been allowed to fester longer, but the point was made nonetheless: Some people hate Palin first and ask questions later.
My all-time favorite response to John McCain's selection of Palin as his running mate was from Wendy Doniger, a feminist professor of religion at the University of Chicago. Professor Doniger wrote of the exceedingly feminine "hockey mom" with five children: "Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."
The best part about that sentence: Doniger uses the pronoun "her" -- twice.
Just this week, a liberal blogger at the Atlantic who has dedicated an unhealthy amount of his life to proving a one-man birther conspiracy theory about Palin's youngest child (it's both too slanderous and too deranged to detail here) shut down his blog to cope with the epochal, existential crisis that Palin's book presents to all humankind. The un-self-consciously parodic announcement seemed more appropriate for a BBC warning that the German blitz was about to begin, God Help Us All.
Indeed, some of us will always be sympathetic to Mrs. Palin if for nothing else than her enemies. The bile she extracts from her critics is almost like a dye marker, illuminating deep pockets of asininity that heretofore were either unnoticed or underappreciated.

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I think they hate her because they hate the rest of us who agree with many of her positions on the issues. She is right on energy policy and national security issues and those happen to be my main decisions points for a candidate. Obama is wrong on those issues as is Al Gore. Their supporters hate her for disagreeing with them and have the conceit that if she were really intelligent she would agree with them.

Whether she is a candidate will depend not on this book tour but whether she can develop support in the primaries of 2012, should she choose to run. She seems to be realistic about that too. It is too bad her critics are not.

Planning for defeat in Afghanistan

2009-11-20T06:13:00.003-06:00

WSJ:

President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown have turned the focus of Afghan war planning toward an exit strategy, publicly declaring that the U.S. and its allies can't send additional troops without a plan for getting them out.
The shift has unnerved some U.S. and foreign officials, who say that planning a pullout now -- with or without a specific timetable -- encourages the Taliban to wait out foreign forces and exacerbates fears in the region that the U.S. isn't fully committed to their security.
"It's not a good idea," said Rep. Ike Skelton (D., Mo.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

"When the area has been stabilized...then it's time to go home. But to set up a timetable for people in that neck of the woods, they'll just wait us out," said Rep. Skelton, a prominent supporter of proposals by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Kabul, to send more troops for a counterinsurgency campaign.
...
... the administration wants the Pentagon to identify key milestones for Afghanistan to meet, in its governance and the capability of its security forces, and then give a rough sense of when each objective is likely to be achieved. Reaching these goals would allow the U.S. role to shift away from direct combat, allowing troop levels to decline.
Mr. Obama said Wednesday in a CNN interview that he believed his new Afghan policy needed to include an "endgame" because "unless you impose that kind of discipline, [U.S. policy] could end up leading to a multiyear occupation that won't serve the interests of the United States."

Keeping the public eye on an exit strategy -- rather than on how many new troops would be deployed, the subject of much of the U.S. public debate so far -- could also help Mr. Obama sell his strategy at home.
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It may help him with his anti war puke base, but not with those of us who want to defeat the enemy. That is the only exit strategy that makes any sense. Skelton is right about the downside to the Obama strategy. That is why the Taliban say "You have the watches, we have the time." We need to not give them a gift of an exit strategy.

Sec. Gates has indicated he opposes any time lines.

Numbers working against Democrats

2009-11-20T05:51:00.002-06:00

Politico:

Counting to 60 in the Senate is only the beginning of the tough math that bedevils Democrats these days as they try to pass health reform, survive a bad economy and appeal more to the middle-class voters whose support they’ll need in the 2010 elections.

The giant health care bill rolled out Wednesday night by Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is laced with puts-and-takes aimed at easing the burden on families in the $60,000-to-$80,000 income range.

But just around the corner next month, Reid’s Democrats face immediate new challenges, including a $925 billion debt ceiling increase and a social safety net that’s unraveling even as unemployment has topped 10 percent.

Expanded federal jobless benefits — hastily authorized under the economic recovery bill last February — are due to expire in January and will cost $85 billion to renew for the coming year. And this says nothing about a backlog of year-end spending bills and President Barack Obama’s decision on the Afghanistan war, which threatens to eat up whatever savings are coming from the troop withdrawals from Iraq.

For the first time, Democrats are talking seriously about going back and rechanneling portions of their $787 billion stimulus bill to help jump-start job-creation initiatives — such as a long-delayed highway bill.
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There is something of an admission that the stimulus bill did not accomplish its objectives and has made us worse off. These other items are also going against the voters objections. Control freak economics is not working and is pushing the US ever deeper into debt. It is probably going to have to take an election to stop the evils of liberalism that the Democrats are pushing.

Venezuela troops destroy bridges to Colombia

2009-11-20T05:45:00.003-06:00

Bloomberg:

Venezuelan troops blew up two foot bridges that connect the country with Colombia, aggravating tensions along the border that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has said could lead to war.
Venezuelan soldiers dynamited rope suspension bridges crossing the Tachira River near the Colombian hamlet of Ragonvalia, in the northeastern province of Norte de Santander, Colombian Defense Minister Gabriel Silva said in a statement yesterday on the ministry’s Web site. Venezuelan Vice President Ramon Carrizalez said the bridges were used to move contraband.

“It’s almost like somebody’s hitting a piece of flint trying to get a spark going,” said Adam Isacson, director of the Center for International Policy in Washington. “The minor incidents are coming fast and furious. If you’re looking for a casus belli, something is coming up almost every day.”

Chavez last week told his military to prepare to resist an invasion by Colombia, which signed an agreement last month to give U.S. troops access to Colombian bases. Colombia’s government has denied any intention of attacking Venezuela and says the U.S. accord will help fight drug trafficking and domestic terrorism.
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Footbridges are a very unlikely invasion route, and besides that, Colombia has indicated zero intention of invading Venezuela. It appears to be just another provocation by Chavez to distract from his incompetent command economy which is dragging Venezuela down in a way that no invasion force is ever likely to accomplish.

Ironically it may inhibit one of Venezuela's income streams as a transit point for exporting FARC drugs to Europe through Africa.

Democrats' recipe for a weak recovery

2009-11-20T05:30:00.002-06:00

Jeb Hensarling and Paul Ryan:

One of the strongest factors promoting recovery from our 10 post-World War II recessions was an unshakable conviction that, regardless of the immediate trouble, the American economy is fundamentally strong. Based on this underlying confidence, recessions and recoveries roughly conformed to the principle of the bigger the bust, the bigger the boom, and vice versa.

Thus real growth in the four quarters following postwar recessions averaged 6.6% and 4.3% over the following five years. As the chief economist for Barclays, Dean Maki, said in this newspaper on Aug. 19, "You can't find a single deep recession that has been followed by a moderate recovery."

That may no longer hold. Since the current recession has lasted a record seven quarters—and has been marked by a near-record average GDP decline of 1.8% per quarter—we should be witnessing the start of a powerful and sustained recovery. Yet forecasts of a 2% recovery in growth are only one-fourth as strong as postwar experience suggests. Meanwhile, unemployment sits at a generational high of 10.2%.

Why all the pessimism? The source appears to be a growing fear that the federal government is retreating from the free-market economic principles of the last half-century, and in particular the strong growth policies that began under Ronald Reagan. A review of the economic policies instituted by President Barack Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress lends credibility to this concern.

Exhibit A is the economic stimulus package signed into law by President Barack Obama in February. Even among previous stimulus efforts, the 2009 stimulus stands out for its ineffective targeting and sheer size. With interest, it is $1.1 trillion, double the size of Roosevelt's New Deal spending as a percentage of GDP.
Virtually none of the stimulus spending was directed towards encouraging broad-based private investment, and thus failed to encourage true economic growth. An analysis by economists John F. Cogan, John B. Taylor and Volker Wieland, published on this page on Sept. 17, suggests that while the stimulus succeeded in temporarily and marginally increasing disposable personal income, it left personal consumption spending virtually unchanged.

Meanwhile, $112 billion of its $300 billion tax relief was in the form of payments to people who paid no income taxes. These payments, akin to a one-time welfare check, do not change the incentives to save and invest, and do not effectively promote broad-based economic growth.
Exhibit B is tax policy going forward. It is a near certainty that Democratic-controlled Congress will allow most of the tax cuts of 2001-2003 to expire on Dec. 31, 2010. Marginal income tax rates, capital gains rates, dividend rates and death-tax rates will increase—significantly. Hardest hit by these increases will be small businesses that file under the individual income tax code as sub-chapter S corporations, partnerships and proprietorships. Yet these are the very people whose investment and hiring decisions either drive or starve recoveries.

Exhibit C is the administration's intervention in the GM and Chrysler reorganizations. Upsetting decades of accepted bankruptcy law, the administration leveraged TARP funds to place unsecured and lower priority creditors like the United Auto Workers union in front of secured and higher priority creditors. This intervention has arguably had the effect of stifling investment as wary investors watched political considerations trump the rule of law.
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There is more including cap and trade and health care reform. Both will do great harm to the economy.

We lnow and the American people know that tax cuts and spending cuts are the way to boost the economy, but Democrats have an aversion to them because they are control freaks who fear letting the American people make the choices in the type of economic growth we achieve. They want to have theri thumb on the scales to try to control how the economy grows and to give benefits to their constituency groups.

Enforcement of immigration laws decline under Obama

2009-11-20T05:22:00.002-06:00

Washington Times:

Arrests of illegal immigrant workers have dropped precipitously under President Obama, according to figures released Wednesday.
Criminal arrests, administrative arrests, indictments and convictions of illegal immigrants at work sites all fell by more than 50 percent from fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2009.
The figures show that Mr. Obama has made good on his pledge to shift enforcement away from going after illegal immigrant workers themselves - but at the expense of Americans' jobs, said Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the Republican who compiled the numbers from the Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE).
Mr. Smith, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said a period of economic turmoil is the wrong time to be cutting enforcement and letting illegal immigrants take jobs that Americans otherwise would hold.
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Replacement workers at plants which had enforcement action were US citizens, so they have a point on the jobs front. More importantly, the lack of enforcement action means there are few consequences to coming here illegally, which means that it will encourage more illegal immigration.

I am pro immigration, but it must be legal immigration. We need to uphold the rule of law and control our borders.

Bad news for Democrats on new stimulus

2009-11-19T18:44:00.003-06:00

Rasmussen Reports:

As the policy debate has unfolded in Washington this year, voters have consistently believed that tax cuts would do more than increased government spending to stimulate the economy and create jobs. Now that the nation’s unemployment rate has reached 10.2%, voters continue to hold that view.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 62% believe tax cuts are a better way to create jobs and fight unemployment. Only 21% believe that additional stimulus spending is a more effective tool. Earlier this year, as the first stimulus package was being debated in Congress, 62% of voters wanted the plan to have more tax cuts and less spending.
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Canceling the remaining spending under the current plan drew 51 percent of those polled. It appears that the majority of voters favor the solutions on jobs that the Republicans have been pushing. This should be good news for the GOP in 2010. Independents also break for tax cuts and spending restraints by a slight majority.

Hasan email--'I can't wait to join you in afterlife'

2009-11-19T18:37:00.002-06:00

ABC News:

United States Army Major Nidal Hasan told a radical cleric considered by authorities to be an al-Qaeda recruiter, "I can't wait to join you" in the afterlife, according to an American official with top secret access to 18 e-mails exchanged between Hasan and the cleric, Anwar al Awlaki, over a six month period between Dec. 2008 and June 2009.

"It sounds like code words," said Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, a military analyst at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies. "That he's actually either offering himself up or that he's already crossed that line in his own mind."

...

Federal investigators have found that Hasan donated $20,000 to $30,000 a year to overseas Islamic "charities." As an Army major, his yearly salary, including housing and food allowances, was approximately $92,000. A number of Islamic charities have been identified by U.S. authorities as conduits to terror groups.
Two FBI task forces, in Washington and San Diego, received the intercepted messages, but deemed them innocent.
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This email does not sound that benign, at least in hindsight. It is all the more revealing when you consider the addressee. If these emails had been seen teh context of what he was saying to his peers it would have been a very big red flag.

Democrats lose independents on al Qaeda trials

2009-11-19T17:52:00.003-06:00

Fox News:

A slim majority of Americans think five accused Sept. 11 plotters should be tried by a military tribunal rather than a civilian court -- and nearly half are concerned that their federal trial will "turn into a circus," a Fox News poll finds.

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The latest Fox News national poll finds 52 percent of Americans think the appropriate place to try the five detainees is in a military tribunal, while 40 percent think they should be tried in the U.S. system. Democrats are more likely to favor having the trial in a U.S. court (55-37 percent). For Republicans, it's just the opposite, as a majority thinks a tribunal is the right way to go (64 percent tribunal/29 percent court). Among independents, 60 percent say a tribunal and 33 percent U.S. court.

Click here to see the poll.
When the question is framed as Attorney General Holder's decision to transfer the detainees to New York City to stand trial in a civilian court, more voters say it was a bad idea than a good idea by 49-42 percent. Republicans (60 percent) and independents (60 percent) are much more likely than Democrats (32 percent) to view this action as a bad idea. (Emphasis added.)
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This is another example of where Democrats have lost the independents. You add this to the trend on health care and the stimulus and it bodes ill for Democrats in 2010.

Hasan's supervisor wrote damning memo in 2007

2009-11-19T10:34:00.002-06:00

NPR:

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On May 17, 2007, Hasan's supervisor at Walter Reed sent the memo to the Walter Reed credentials committee. It reads, "Memorandum for: Credentials Committee. Subject: CPT Nidal Hasan." More than a page long, the document warns that: "The Faculty has serious concerns about CPT Hasan's professionalism and work ethic. ... He demonstrates a pattern of poor judgment and a lack of professionalism." It is signed by the chief of psychiatric residents at Walter Reed, Maj. Scott Moran.
When shown the memo, two leading psychiatrists said it was so damning, it might have sunk Hasan's career if he had applied for a job outside the Army.
"Even if we were desperate for a psychiatrist, we would not even get him to the point where we would invite him for an interview," says Dr. Steven Sharfstein, who runs Sheppard Pratt's psychiatric medical center, based just outside Baltimore.
Sharfstein says it's a little hard to read the evaluation now and pretend that he doesn't know that Hasan is accused of shooting dozens of people. But he says if he had seen a memo like this about an applicant, Sharfstein would have avoided him like the plague.
The memo ticks off numerous problems over the course of Hasan's training, including proselytizing to his patients. It says he mistreated a homicidal patient and allowed her to escape from the emergency room, and that he blew off an important exam.
According to the memo, Hasan hardly did any work: He saw only 30 patients in 38 weeks. Sources at Walter Reed say most psychiatrists see at least 10 times that many patients. When Hasan was supposed to be on call for emergencies, he didn't even answer the phone.
Sharfstein says the memo doesn't suggest that Hasan would end up shooting people, but it warns that Hasan was "somebody who could potentially put patients in danger."
"There are all kinds of warning signs, flashing red lights, that, in terms of just this paragraph, you'd say, 'Oh, no, this is not somebody that we would take a chance on.' "
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What I find curious about this information is that after it was written Hasan was promoted and sent to Fort Hood. Usually a bad fitness report will scuttle promotions, and this one was certainly bad.

This reminds me of one of my Dad's old jokes about the preacher who was caught embezzling from the church collection plate. When one of the church leaders was asked what they did about, he replied, "We made him stay here and preach it out."

A look at the Palin crowd

2009-11-19T09:46:00.002-06:00

BBC:

Whatever happens in American politics in the course of the next three years, we will remember this as the day when Hurricane Palin blew through the normally placid streets of Grand Rapids Michigan.
And there are plenty of supporters of Sarah Palin who are hoping we will look back on it as the day when the opening shots of Campaign 2012 were fired.
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So, let's consider the evidence.
Mrs Palin's book is a little light on ideology and big ideas but that probably does not matter very much in modern America where politicians run on their life stories and their ability to relate it to the lives of voters.
It worked for Barack Obama (although he did throw in a bit of ideology) so there is no reason why it should not work for Sarah Palin.
The book tour too looks a little like a campaign swing - running as it does through key marginal areas, regions of high unemployment and a couple of places (like this bit of Michigan) where any credible Republican contender for the presidency will have to do pretty well.
She is a little coy on the matter herself, but then these are early days and so is everyone else.
She talks of working to support other conservative candidates for office in the 2010 mid-terms when Republicans might do rather well.
And of course as she points out, you can serve the public without holding public office.
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But the most compelling evidence of all that there is plenty more to come from Sarah Palin was in the nature of the crowd she drew here.
Her followers do not merely agree with her, they love her and, while she may alienate other Americans in equal or greater numbers, that makes her a force to be reckoned with.
Whatever other American politicians may say about her, however hard she may be for foreigners to understand and regardless of the pundits, any rival candidate looking at the crowds in Grand Rapids - and the crowds to come - will be envious. And perhaps a little worried.

This is an unusually positive story from the BBC where a conservative is the subject matter. While the writer may not necessarily like Palin's politics, He does comprehend her appeal. That is something that many in the US media still do not get.

Grand Rapids greets Sarah Palin

2009-11-19T08:52:00.001-06:00

Sarah Palin appears at Grand Rapids book signing

It is a nice reception.

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Inside the bookstore, Starbucks barristas are told by a frantic employee "This might be the most important drink you ever make!"

They were ordered to make a perfect "Tall Skinny Mocha" for Palin.
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They are enemies first, not defendants

2009-11-19T08:38:00.003-06:00

Joshua Filler:

The decision to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a federal court in New York could go down as one of the most misguided in the history of U.S. jurisprudence. The reasons are numerous, but one in particular will have serious consequences on our ability to collect intelligence to prevent attacks against the U.S. at home and abroad.

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Osama bin Laden, Mohammed and their al-Qaeda cohorts do not have the civilian constitutional right to remain silent, to have an attorney, to a speedy trial, to be judged by a jury of their peers and so on. By categorizing these men as mere criminals, we have incongruently tried to merge war-fighting tactics with the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure and the Federal Rules of Evidence. On the one hand, we drop bombs on al-Qaeda using Predator drones and, on the other, we have to "Mirandize" them if captured. This is nonsensical.

What happens if bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, are captured overseas? They should be treated as unprivileged enemy belligerents, held and interrogated not for the purpose of building a civilian criminal case against them, but for the purpose of collecting intelligence in order to thwart future attacks. To achieve the latter may require us to engage in tactics, far short of waterboarding, that would nonetheless violate the constitutional rights of a traditional criminal defendant. This could result in the suppression of evidence and even the dismissal of cases. To avoid that from happening will hamstring our ability to collect intelligence and disrupt attacks.
The Justice Department's reasoning for this decision is incoherent. On the one hand, it declares that those captured on the battlefield for attacks overseas, especially against military targets, will be handled largely through military commissions. It cites the example of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, charged with masterminding the attack on the USS Cole. But Mohammed was captured in Pakistan, and he has confessed to attacking the Pentagon. If you attack and kill thousands of civilians and military personnel on U.S. soil in violation of the laws of war, you will be afforded civilian constitutional due process rights, but if you attack our warships overseas, you get a military commission? What if the Cole had been docked in San Diego when it was attacked?

Finally, if Bin Laden and Zawahri are simply wanted criminal fugitives, any use of military force against them might be a violation of due process, calling into question the legality of our war against al-Qaeda. But we tried to treat our fight with al-Qaeda as a purely law enforcement operation with the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, and it failed miserably in stopping future attacks.
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Incoherent is a good description of Holder's position. Illogical is another. When Sen. Graham asked Holder about whether bin Laden would be entitled to a Miranda warning, Holder did not really have an answer. That is because, if we capture this guy he is going to be intrrogated to find out what plots are afoot.

What Filler is pointing out is why the lawfare strategy was such a failure in the 90s.

Hasan is new face of terrorism

2009-11-19T08:09:00.002-06:00

Daniel Henninger:

If it accomplished nothing else, the Obama administration's announcement last Friday to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in lower Manhattan blew the Nidal Hasan murders out of the news. The KSM fiasco deserves all the attention it gets. What Hasan represents, however, is a more immediate concern.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is an old-school jihadi. They sit in far-off redoubts, assembling terror teams of foreign nationals who now must figure out how to get themselves and their plot inside the U.S. Not impossible, but harder than before 9/11.

Hasan is new school. He is what's known as a homegrown terrorist. Virtually all the Islamic terrorist plots thwarted here in recent years were homegrown, not designed from afar by a KSM.

Najibullah Zazi, the Colorado airport-shuttle driver arrested in New York this September and charged with conspiring to detonate bombs, came to the U.S. in 1999.
The Fort Dix Six, convicted in December of conspiring to attack U.S. military personnel, were mainly ethnic Albanians whose family came to New Jersey in the 1980s.

Zakaria Amara, the leader of the Toronto 18, who were planning to blow up skyscrapers in Canada, was born in a Toronto suburb.

In testimony to Congress in September, the director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, Mike Leiter, said the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab includes "dozens of recruits from the Unites States," mostly ethnic Somalis.

How do individuals sitting in Colorado, New Jersey, Toronto or Texas suddenly transform into mass murderers for jihad? Most of the time, they become radicalized by spending vast amounts of time viewing violent Islamic Web sites run from abroad.
...
A violent ideology is just an ideology, and that is protected speech. It requires acts to put in motion aggressive surveillance, such as wiretapping.

I think the Hasan case shows this is wrong, or at least too dangerous. First Amendment law has never dealt with a widely distributed ideology that has as its raison d'être the mass murder of Americans and destruction of American property.

For now this is the way it is: Future Hasans can get jacked up all day on kill-the-Americans Web sites, and we have to wait until they put in motion a conspiracy like Fort Dix or the Colorado jihadists. Or until they start shooting.
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Henninger makes the case that these preachers of hate are engaged in protected speech. I think there is a case to be made that they are engaging in the solicitation of murder and that is not protected speech. Someone recorded trying to hire a hit man can not claim it was protected free speech. Nor should someone soliciting mass murder for Allah attacks.

Preaching mass murder for Allah

2009-11-19T07:39:00.002-06:00

NY Times:

In nearly a dozen recent terrorism cases in the United States, Britain and Canada, investigators discovered the suspects had something in common: a devotion to the message of Anwar al-Awlaki, an eloquent Muslim cleric who has turned the Web into a tool for extremist indoctrination.

Mr. Awlaki, 38, the son of a former agriculture minister and university president in Yemen, has never been accused of planting explosives himself. But experts on terrorism believe his persuasive endorsement of violence as a religious duty, in colloquial, American-accented English, has helped push a series of Western Muslims into terrorism.
Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist charged with killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., on Nov. 5, is only the latest suspect accused of perpetrating or plotting violence to be linked to the cleric.
In 2006, for example, a group of Canadian Muslims listened to Mr. Awlaki’s sermons on a laptop a few months before they were charged with plotting attacks in Ontario to have included bombings, shootings, storming the Parliament Building and beheading the Canadian prime minister.
In 2007, one of six men later convicted of plotting to attack Fort Dix in New Jersey was picked up on a surveillance tape raving about Mr. Awlaki’s audio clips. “You gotta hear this lecture,” said the plotter, Shain Duka. Mr. Duka called the cleric’s interpretation of Muslim duties “the truth, no holds barred, straight how it is!”
Last year, Mr. Awlaki exchanged public letters on the Web with Al Shabaab, a Somali Islamist group that has attracted recruits among young Somali-Americans living in Minnesota. The message from Al Shabaab praised the cleric as “one of the very few scholars” who “defend the honor of the mujahideen.”
“Allah knows how many of the brothers and sisters have been affected by your work,” it said.
Evan Kohlmann, a counterterrorism researcher who has testified in terrorism trials in the United States and United Kingdom, said Mr. Awlaki’s work had also turned up in cases in Chicago and Atlanta and in at least seven in the United Kingdom.
“Al-Awlaki condenses the Al Qaeda philosophy into digestible, well-written treatises,” Mr. Kohlmann said. “They may not tell people how to build a bomb or shoot a gun. But he tells them who to kill, and why, and stresses the urgency of the mission.”
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If that is the case he should be indicted for solicitation of mass murder. We apparently know where to find him and we can surely find room for him at Gitmo.

Obama's plan for a fighting retreat from Afghanistan

2009-11-19T06:09:00.002-06:00

IBD Editorial:

President Obama has made a ringing commitment to fight the Taliban with one foot out the door. Seven years tops, he says, and we're out of there. If he's serious, we've already lost.
The president still seems to have trouble deciding what to do next in the country that he used to call the "central front" in the war on terror. But he's clear about one thing: the need for an exit strategy.

Not a victory strategy, mind you, but a strategy that will ensure an American departure, preferably before he leaves office.

Obama, interviewed this week by CNN, could not have been clearer on this point. "The American people will have a lot of clarity about what we're doing, how we're going to succeed, how much this thing is going to cost, what kind of burden does this place on our young men and women in uniform and, most importantly, what's the endgame on this thing. My preference would be not to hand off anything to the next president. One of the things I'd like is the next president to be able to come in and say, 'I've got a clean slate.'"

Ignore for a moment the dismissive language — "this thing" — to describe a war in which Americans are dying to defend their nation's vital interests and to keep Afghanistan from falling back into the hands of murderous fanatics. Let's just say it wasn't a Churchillian moment.

But his substantive point, that the "endgame" is the most important part of his strategy, was too clear to be blamed on carelessness, fatigue or whatever. That statement, if he really means it, is as good as waving the white flag.
...

The best exit strategy is victory. Destroying and defeating the enemy makes it much easier to depart with something of value. It also eliminates the threat we went in there to stop to being with. What Obama and the Democrats are attempting is to cover their retreat with rhetoric.

Hatin' Palin

2009-11-19T05:32:00.003-06:00

Victor Davis Hanson:

The AP supposedly hired 11 fact-checkers to discredit Ms. Palin’s memoir (Did Fox News hire 11 to question the very questionable things found in the two Obama memoirs?)

Bloggers post on Palin’s live interviews minute by minute; few, if any, opponents of Barack Obama do the same.

Every statement she makes is parsed, to prove she is ignorant or parochial—though most of her so-called lapses are the sort of things Biden and Obama are accustomed to committing weekly.
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i). Feminists are enraged that her can-do, have a Down’s Syndrome child in her 40s, shoot-moose persona will be used as a paradigm of a liberated women. She is quite attractive, fertile, and married to a Jack-Armstrong 19^th-century man.

Her success as an independent female, who was an up-from-the-bootstraps small-town council member, mayor, state regulator and governor, is antithetical to doctrinaire feminism. The latter devolved into a political and grievance-based creed. It is often whiny, and increasingly dominated by single, childless shrill elites. Many try to equate their own unhappiness in matters of family and sex into some sort of cosmic complaint against male patriarchy—as a way of leveraging influence, access, money, and power or simply justifying now regrettable life choices made in their 20’s and 30’s.
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ii). Liberal elites are, well, deemed elites because they predicate their stature on things such as where they went to school, where they live, how much money they have access to, where their children attend university, and whom they know—all done in a sort of understated, coded fashion. The best snobbery is the least stated.
When a Wasilla, you betcha, no abortion, Christian PTA mom comes on the scene with an Idaho BA, then red flags go up. Poor Sarah—had her mom only been a Colombian aristocrat, she might have at least pulled it off as Sarah Maria Dias-Palin, and compromised some of the furor. Poor Sarah, if she only could speak through nose. Poor Sarah, if she could only show up at her Wellesley reunion.
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Palin must have at her fingertips far more elucidating answers than offered by any liberal icon—or what she showed in the 2008 campaign. If Sarah Palin thinks FDR was President in 1929, or that he could speak on non-existent TV, she is through; if Biden says that, it’s “just old Joe again.” If Obama does not know the first thing about our most prestigious medals, the language of Austria, or diplomatic protocol about presidential bowing, it’s because he is deliberately trying to be cool; if Palin did the same, she’s a buffoon hockey mom. That is the way it is, and her supporters should accept it, deal with, and overcome it. (Emphasis added.)

In other words, Palinites should assume that there is no margin of error for her at all. Like it or not, she must, like Reagan, not only communicate, but also be able to draw on abstract concepts about conservatism. It does no good to say the media is biased, or to review the talking points offered above. She must be better than, not as good as, mainstream Democratic and Republican candidates in matters of foreign policy, gottacha recall, and talking points on health care, taxes, etc. Specificity, detail, and exactness, not generalities or whines about an unfair press, will make her a serious candidate.

The best thing she can do is to go out and talk, take her licks, promote her book, fend off foes, and gain experience in the arena of ideas—while spending her evenings reading and debating wonks and politicians. The marketplace of politics then will decide her fate, not pundits or political insiders. If she swims in the next year, she’s on her way; if she sinks, she will recede from our memory.
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The assault on Palin is an assault on conservatism. It is a form of condescension that has infected liberalism at its core.

Liberals think that if you were really smart you would be a liberal.

Thus you can have Barbara Boxer and Patty Murray saying inane things without criticism. The same is true for Obama and Biden.

Those liberals whose experience has been in the academic or government arena just do not have the real world experience that someone like Palin has. They have no concept of how taxes destroy job creation and business opportunities.

They have never seen or experienced the evils of liberalism. They think good intentions should cover for incompetence when it comes to things like the recent stimulus bill.

You mean it wasn't Bush's fault?

2009-11-18T20:20:00.002-06:00

From the Washington Post:

Judge: Corps' negligence caused Katrina flooding

I think he is talking about the Army Corps of Engineers.