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June 03, 2004
Reuters Bias? I'm Shocked!
Dan Dickinson thinks he has detected some evidence of a small bias at Reuters too.
WHEN THE IRAQI GOVERNING COUNCIL announced the appointment of British educated neurologist and anti-Saddam dissident Iyad Allawi as Iraq's new Interim Prime Minister on May 28, you would think that many Iraqis would have approved of the choice, or at least seen Allawi's selection as a sign that the U.S. led occupation was at last starting to wind down.
But that's not how Iraqis saw it, at least according to Michael Georgy, a Baghdad reporter of the British owned Reuters, a 153-year-old institution that bills itself as the world's largest multimedia news agency. In a "man on the street" piece, Georgy couldn't find a single Iraqi who had a good thing to say about Allawi, or, for that matter, the United States. "Iraq is the same as under Saddam Hussein," said one hotel manager whom Georgy reports "refused to give his name." "I reject him," declared Hassan Ali, a policeman.
Just a few days earlier, President Bush outlined his commitment to a free Iraq and an end to the occupation in an address seen in both the U.S. and Iraq. The Iraqis, this time according to Reuters' Alastair MacDonald, didn't like that, either. "Bush is a scorpion. He is a liar," opined policeman Ayman Haidar. Again, no one could be found to say a good word about anything the Coalition does.
Nor is this detestation of all things American a recent development in Reuters' reporting. Indeed, from the start of the war, Reuters' quotes make it very clear that virtually everyone in
this country of 25 million, with its contending ethnic groups and its history of enduring one of the twentieth century's most savage dictatorships, is united in at least one respect - they all hate Bush and America. No matter whom Reuters talks to, be they Sunnis, Shiites, or Kurds, male or female, they are all mad as hell, and they are not going to take it any more. Collectively, they are the "Angry Iraqi."
THE ANGRY IRAQI first made his appearance at the start of the war, as Coalition troops raced through Umm Qasr on their way to Baghdad. While reporters from other organizations saw crowds giving Coalition troops the thumbs up and people tearing Saddam posters off the wall, Reuters found the Angry Iraqi. "We don't want Americans here," said one Hussein to Reuters correspondent Rosalind Russell. Another defiantly pulled a picture of the dictator out of his waistband. "Saddam is our leader. Saddam is good." Did anyone favor liberation? Clearly, if anyone did, Russell couldn't find them. On the same day--March 23, 2003--up the road in Shiite Safwan, Reuters' Michael Georgy had a real scoop. A few days into the war, Iraqis already had decided that the occupation was a failure. "I swear it was better when Saddam was here," claimed one Jamal Kathim, whose "angry friends" all nodded in agreement. "The Americans and British said this was going to be a liberation but it is an occupation," said one Majid, who, at age 15, was clearly a good source for sophisticated geopolitical analysis.
ONCE COALITION FORCES had taken Baghdad, to the seeming jubilation of at least some, Reuters' Angry Iraqi was unimpressed. Following the looting of the Iraqi National Museum, an event that would later turn out to be far less serious than initially reported and mostly an inside job, Reuters quickly determined who was responsible. The looters? Certainly not, at least according to Tareq Abdulrazak, whom Reuters identified as a "scientist." "The Americans watched this happen. It is not enough to destroy our buildings, our people? Now our history, too?"
By April 23, some three weeks into the occupation, the Angry Iraqi was back at it, declaring that it was time for the Coalition to shove off. Reuters' Rosalind Russell, in a rare admission, reported that most Iraqis were glad to be rid of Saddam. But now it was time for us to leave. Americans are "stupid people," claimed a medical student. "They are treating us badly." Americans go home!" chanted a demonstration of the "National Front of Intellectuals," who was mad at the arrest of their leader, which they described as "a brutal, terrorist act." Why was their leader arrested? Just what is this "National Front" and what is their agenda? Reporter Russell showed little curiosity about that, just as Reuters reporters are uniformly uninterested in the truth of reports of American atrocities and abuses. In story after story, the most outrageous anti-Coalition charges are voiced. Time after time, there are no follow up questions, and claims are never checked out. If someone
says he's been abused, to Reuters is must be so.
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NY Times Bias? I'm Shocked!
Thomas Sowell suspects there may possibly be the tiniest bit of bias at the Grey Lady.
It was refreshing recently to see a front page of the New York Times that was not full of editorials disguised as "news" stories, undermining the war and the president. However, it was a souvenir front page, reprinted from the New York Times of June 6, 1944 -- reporting on the invasion of Normandy that day.
Things went wrong with that invasion, as things have gone wrong with wars as far back as there are any records of wars. Yet no one called it a quagmire when American forces were pinned down by German fire on Omaha beach and taking heavy casualties. No one called the generals or the president incompetent or stupid.
One of the many reasons war is hell is that there is seldom adequate time or adequate information to forestall disasters.
In a desperate attempt to help U.S. troops unable to break out of the Normandy beachhead, Allied bombers launched massive air raids on the area -- accidentally killing more than a hundred American soldiers. But no one called it a quagmire.
No one demanded a timetable showing how much longer the war was going to last or an accounting table showing how much it would cost in dollars and cents. People of that era have been called the greatest generation. They were, at the very least, an adult generation -- which certainly cannot always be said for our present generation or its media representatives.
The Iraq war was not a month old before the word "quagmire" began appearing in the media, when a sandstorm stalled the drive toward Baghdad. Before the year was out, there were stories of our "war-weary" troops.
When Allied troops landed at Normandy, Americans had already been fighting for two and a half years of bitter defeats and costly victories -- and the British even longer. Yet no one called them "war-weary" and the news stories were about what was being accomplished, even as they told of the cost of those accomplishments in blood and lives.
To follow the news out of Iraq from the headlines and photographs on the front page of today's New York Times, you would have a hard time finding out what has been accomplished. There was a time when the electricity was out in Iraq, when schools and hospitals were closed, when there was no oil flowing.
Did all those things fix themselves, like self-sealing tires, or did the Americans have to do some things, at considerable cost and risks, and despite organized sabotage and terror?
It has been hard to know from the Times' front-page coverage of unhappy reservists being called up for duty and all the photographs they could find of coffins or of terrorists gleefully holding up the boots of ambushed Americans they had killed.
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The negativism and carping of today's New York Times has even been applied in retrospect to the general in charge of the invasion of Normandy, Dwight D. Eisenhower. The television drama "Ike," has been denounced in the New York Times as "macho swagger."
Anyone who has actually seen the depiction of General Eisenhower by Tom Selleck as a thoughtful, troubled man, having to make painful decisions under impossible conditions, will know that this was no Patton swagger. The television drama ends, in fact, just before the invasion of Normandy itself.
It ends with Eisenhower, coming back in a car from having spoken to the troops before their embarkation and writing the famous note in which he takes all the blame for the failure of the invasion -- a note to be made public if in fact the landing at Normandy had ended in disaster, as many feared it would.
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The ideological agenda becomes painfully clear when the New York Times' reviewer criticized Eisenhower for his later policies as president, which is not what the TV drama was about.
Even after the Normandy invasion was successful, the Germans later caught the Allies by surprise with a massive counter-attack that led to the bloody "battle of the bulge." But no one called it a quagmire. They called it war. They were adults.
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Don't Know Much 'bout History
Betsy links to an article about how most schools now teach WWII history emphasizing social history over military history and relates her personal experiences teaching history to high school and middle school students.
As an American history teacher who has taught at the middle school level and now teaches honors high school American history as well as Advanced Placement history, I can testify to the emphasis on social history in the curriculum. The textbooks will usually have a brief summary of the military progress of the war. But there are several obligatory sections for every war: how the war impacted women, blacks, and other minorities. For World War II, the section on Japanese internment is always a major curriculum point. The military history is a minor point in comparison. When I taught in middle school, I didn't have to worry about a state test and was able to spend 3 or 4 weeks on World War II. I put a lot of emphasis on the 1930s because I wanted the kids to understand how the international community backed down time after time when the chances of stopping Hitler or Japan would have been a lot easier than in 1939. Even Hitler was amazed that the French and British allowed him to move into the Rhineland with no opposition. I also spent a lot of time on the military history. Kids love studying that, both the boys and girls. It's like a movie to them but it is real. Of course, we covered the social history, but, for most kids that is the least interesting part. Women working in factories just doesn't measure up with the fatal five minutes at Midway in piquing an 8th grader's interest.
Now I teach in high school. I have much more time pressure and concern about teaching the curriculum since my kids have to take a standardized test. For my Advanced Placement kids, we do almost zilch on military history for any war we study. That is not part of the AP curriculum. They need to know what leads up to a war and what resulted from it as well as the major turning point battles. For example, for the Revolution, they need to know Lexington and Concord, Saratoga, and Yorktown and zip, they're done. Never mind that Trenton or Cowpens are riveting stories. We just don't have time for that. For World War II, they probably need to know Pearl Harbor, Midway, and D-Day, and that's about it. But the social history....that's another story. They better know how every single war impacted women and families, blacks and other minorities, civil rights, the economy, the role of the federal government, and politics. Every single AP test will probably have a social history question. And, as I tell my kids, when you see "social" on an AP test, think women and blacks, and you'll be able to come up with a good answer. And for World War II, throw in Japanese internment and the Zoot Suit riots, and you're doing great. But for military history, they'll need to take my elective on the Revolution and the Civil War to get some real military history other than a brief skimming of the surface.
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Too Good for Us
Now this is a good way to encourage our youth to excel:
At age 11, Anthony Seblano has a fiery fastball that's a blessing and a curse.
The Brooklyn sixth-grader, nicknamed The Rocket, was recently yanked off the mound and banned from pitching against the St. Athanasius Youth League team - all because he's too good.
The 4-foot-9, 80-pound lefty is the ace of the Joe Torre Little League's traveling team. But when the squad traveled to Borough Park to play St. Athanasius last Friday, St. Athanasius officials had the pint-size hurler marched off the mound.
"Most of the time I just throw strikes. I never walk anybody," Anthony said yesterday. "I really don't think this is fair, because my teammates depend on me."
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"He [Anthony] blows away the competition, so he is what we consider an illegal player," said Gambino.
Gambino noted Anthony has thrown a perfect game and two no-hitters against St. Athanasius players.
"He is an overwhelmingly, powerful pitcher. It's a very unfair advantage," Gambino said.
Ah, yes, we don't want to make our hitters try too hard or have their feelings hurt by being struck out. We don't want equality of opportunity but rather equality of results.
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Ice Fishing for Columbine
I await the Michael Moore film about the culture of violence and greed that exists in Sweden:
Two teenagers detained by police last month amid allegations they planned a Columbine-style massacre at their high school were charged with conspiracy to commit murder, court officials said in Stockholm.
The teenagers, 16-year-old Jacob Roya and 17-year-old Niklas Ekberg, were detained by police in Malmo, 382 miles southwest of the capital, Stockholm, when their classmates and teachers claimed the pair planned to bring a gun to Slottsstaden School and kill several students and teachers and then blow it up.
In court documents outlining the conspiracy charges, prosecutors said the two teens allegedly planned to emulate the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in which two student gunmen killed 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves.
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Sperm Shortage II
Actually this seems to be a fairly widespread problem. A quick google reveals:
A SPERM shortage could jeopardise Tasmania's IVF program, leading Hobart fertility specialists said yesterday.
Gynaecologist Steve Sonneveld, who works with Dr Watkins, said it was difficult to attract new sperm donors because men were concerned about anonymity and possible legal obligations.
Experts treating infertility at a Scottish hospital have offered patients sperm imported from England because of a national shortage.
It has been reported that fears of a legal change, lifting restrictions on the identity of donors, may be responsible for the decline in Scottish sperm donations.
>Canada could face a serious shortage of sperm for artificial insemination because of legislation that would ban payment to donors, critics say.
At least the Canadians are doing it for the money. Scotland may soon have to look elsewhere, however:
International News | British Sperm, Egg, Embryo Donors To No Longer Remain Anonymous Under New IVF Guidelines
[Jan 21, 2004]
British Public Health Minister Melanie Johnson on Wednesday announced that individuals born as a result of fertility treatments using sperm, eggs or embryos donated after April 1, 2005, in the United Kingdom will be able to learn the identity of their biological parents after they turn 18, the Associated Press reports (Associated Press, 1/21).
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Unintended Consequences
Dutch women seeking sperm donors are having a hard time:
New Dutch legislation scrapping the possibility for sperm donors to remain anonymous has resulted in a shortage of donations, forcing an increasing number of Dutch women to go to Belgian clinics.
After 10 years in the making, new legislation means that from 1 June it is no longer possible for Dutch sperm centres to allow anonymous donations. Children born from a donation can therefore obtain the identity of their father when they turn 16.
But the number of men willing to donate their sperm in the lead-up to the new regulations has thus declined and women are facing a waiting list of up to two years at a Dutch sperm bank, Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant reported on Tuesday.
The Bijdorp clinic in Barendrecht has seen its list of donors fall from 135 to just 15. "I have just placed an advertisement for donors, but got zero reactions," Dr Jan Karbaat said, who has also considered paying for donations.
Now does the law only effect men making donations at sperm banks or does it require men to give their full details to women before one-night stands also?
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Ghazi Al-Yawar
Zayed has some trenchant comments about the new Iraqi president and cabinet.
Sheikh Ghazi Ajeel Al-Yawar was announced yesterday as the first Iraqi President in post Saddam Iraq. I have to say that I have mixed feelings about Yawar. I found it a bit troubling that the head of the state is a tribal figure. Tribalism has been without doubt the most significant problem in Iraq (and the ME) for centuries, one that has been plaguing our urban societies and infecting them with a multitude of social diseases that have proven almost impossible to cure, problems that on the surface may seem to be dissipating from time to time, but which also have a high rate of recurrence . I might be judging the man harshly, since this may not neccessarily apply to him personally, and I'm not denying his expertise and western education, however he will always be regarded as a symbol of our largely tribal society (maybe they were just being realistic?). Shortly after he was announced president, I noticed a few sheikhs following him around wearing the traditional Iraqi tribal dress, which is not a good sign at all.
On the other hand, I perceive that the majority of Iraqis have accepted him as president, even welcomed the decision, of course there will always be naysayers but for the first time in months I feel there is almost a consensus among Iraqis of all backgrounds. Also Yawar is known to have good relations with Kurds, is trusted by the Shia, is respected by other Arab nations, has a clean record, and belongs to a powerful wealthy well-known Iraqi family that leads the Shimmar tribal confederation, one of the largest tribes in Iraq, with both Sunni and Shi'ite clans, and spanning several neighbouring countries (such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey). That may be a unifying factor and one that Iraqis need badly at this moment of their history. After all the presidency is almost a symbolic title.
The cabinet is impressive. We now have 5 female ministers, which is an unprecedented step in the region. Just as Iraq was the first Arab country to have a female minister in 1958, it is now also the first Arab country to grant a larger role for women in the government. I expect a much larger percentage of women in the future National Assembly or parliament. The majority of ministers are independent politically, they are mostly technocrats, and come from all Iraqi social, ethnic, religious, and sectarian backgrounds. Many old players are absent such as Chalabi's INC. Also another interesting observation is that four of the ministers are also tribal figures.
So, perhaps I'm a bit optimistic today? Maybe. But Iraqis need to be optimistic at such a critical moment. There is no use in shrugging your shoulders and saying "I don't care.." anymore. You will be left behind along with the dark forces that insist on killing more Iraqis and disrupting the new changes. I'm confident that the Arab world is now watching Iraq with eyes wide open (or wide shut). Some Iraqis are saying the new government will be just a copy of the GC. It depends. Another problem is that I can already feel that the majority of Iraqis are expecting miracles from this new and young government. Unrealistic expectations tend to create endless problems and frustrations. Just like when the GC was formed, or when the Americans first entered Baghdad and people expected that their decades long problems would be fixed in a week.
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Roger L. Simon
NRO has a profile with one of our favorite blogfellows, Roger L. Simon.
We are seated in the kind of comfortable, southwestern-style Hollywood Hills home with a magnificent view that is the rightful entitlement of every successful Hollywood player. This one belongs to Roger L. Simon: Oscar-nominated screenwriter, award-winning crime novelist, influential weblogger. And right now he can't stop smiling at some private joke.
Pressed, he reveals the source of his amusement: "I may be the first American writer who was profiled both by Mother Jones and the National Review," he laughs.
From the 1960s until somewhat recently, Simon was a radical left-winger who supported every trendy cause of the era: the civil-rights movement, Vietnam War protests, the Black Panthers, Latin American revolutions, Chairman Mao, Fidel Castro. He hobnobbed with other leftist writers and frequently traveled to Communist countries.
His first big break as a struggling novelist came with The Big Fix, featuring lead character Moses Wine, a one-time hippie turned private eye who exuded a hip, liberal attitude and dealt with the hot-button social issues of the day.
At a time when most other crime writers were still mired in pale Philip Marlowe knock-offs, Simon's radical twist appealed to '70s Hollywood, which was then engrossed in subverting traditional genres much as Simon had done with his novel.
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Nowadays, however, this lanky, genial writer with many hats (and one favored fedora, in which he is pictured on his website) is better known for yet another career. With over 200,000 visitors a month, he's rapidly become one of the most popular political bloggers on the Internet.
Simon's somewhat glamorous background helped in the beginning. "It gave me a leg up on the average blogger," he says. But what really turned heads was his remarkable political transformation — from a former radical leftist into a die-hard Bush supporter. His blog entries make frequent mention of his own amazement at this 180-degree change of heart.
One recent entry reads: "I can't believe that these days I turn to The Wall Street Journal before The New York Times, but I do. (Hey, I used to rely on the alternative press — what can I say?)"
Simon elaborates on this in our interview. "I grew up a New York Jewish boy. To those people the New York Times is right behind the Bible — sometimes ahead of it."
Some of Simon's popularity undoubtedly stems from his ability to render complex, deadly serious subjects in a disarmingly breezy, conversational writing style. Simon believes his blog took off because there are so many others searching for a home somewhere between traditional conservative and doctrinaire liberal.
"It caught on because I'm a disaffected liberal," he muses. "There's a lot of others like that out there."
He also stands out as one of the few Hollywood players who support the war on terror, including the war in Iraq. Has this affected his career in any way? "I don't know," he responds frankly.
Despite his avid support for Bush's reelection, though, Simon doesn't consider himself a conservative. In fact, he hates ideological labels. "They're just an excuse not to think," he declares.
On foreign policy and defense, Simon is a fierce hawk. On economic issues, he says, "I am puzzled. I'm more pro-market than I was. I'm pro-free trade, pro-NAFTA. Socialism has failed. There's no denying it; it's empirical. "
But when it comes to social policy, he continues to lean hard to the left. "I'm very liberal on social issues: pro-gay marriage, pro-choice, separation of church and state," he says. "I think racism and sexism are the greatest evils in the world."
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Iraq / Al Qaeda III
Deroy Murdock lays out the evidence for Mohammed Atta's meeting with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague shortly before 9/11.
According to his May 26, 2000 Czech visa application — submitted in Bonn, Germany — Atta called himself a "Hamburg student." He had studied urban planning for seven years at Hamburg-Harburg Technical University and launched an Islamic club there in 1999.
Atta apparently had pressing business in Prague. With his visa application pending until May 31, Atta nonetheless flew to Prague International Airport on May 30 and remained in its transit lounge for about six hours before flying back to Germany. Czech officials suspect he may have met someone there. Two days later, on June 2, he returned to Prague by bus on Czech visa number BONN200005260024. He stayed there for some 20 hours, and then flew to Newark, New Jersey, on June 3.
During the summer of 2000 — as the Los Angeles Times detailed on January 20, 2002 — at least $99,455 flowed from financial institutions in the United Arab Emirates into a Florida SunTrust account Atta shared with his roommate and fellow hijacker, Marwan Al-Shehhi. That August, they began flight lessons at Venice, Florida's Huffman Aviation.
On April 4, 2001, the FBI says, Atta departed Virginia Beach's Diplomat Inn with Al-Shehhi and cashed a SunTrust check for $8,000. No American eyewitness saw Atta again until April 11.
Atta next was observed April 8 by an informant of BIS, the Czech Secret Service, who reported that Al-Ani met an Arabic-speaking man in a discreetly located restaurant on Prague's outskirts. Atta is believed to have returned to America the following day.
While skeptics dismiss this encounter, Czech intelligence found Al-Ani's appointment calendar in Iraq's Prague embassy, presumably after Saddam Hussein's defeat. Al-Ani's diary lists an April 8, 2001, meeting with "Hamburg student." Maybe, in a massive coincidence, Al-Ani dined with a young scholar and traversed the nuances of Nietzsche. Or perhaps Al-Ani saw Mohamed Atta and discussed more practical matters.
For his part, Al-Ani was jettisoned from Prague on April 22, 2001 for allegedly plotting to blow up Radio Free Europe's headquarters there, also home to Radio Free Iraq. (Al-Ani's predecessor, Jabir Salim, defected to England in December 1998. He said Baghdad gave him $150,000 to arrange the car bombing of RFE, but he could recruit no one to complete the mission.) American forces arrested Al-Ani last July 2 in Iraq. Not surprisingly, he denies meeting Atta.
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Czech authorities have defended their story despite the American media's valiant efforts to discredit it.
On October 21, 2002, the New York Times reported on its front page that "The Czech president, Vaclav Havel, has quietly told the White House he has concluded that there is no evidence to confirm earlier reports that Mohamed Atta, the leader in the Sept. 11 attacks, met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague just months before the attacks on New York and Washington, according to Czech officials."
Havel quickly spurned the Times's creative writing. Within hours, his spokesman, Ladislav Spacek, dubbed the Times story "a fabrication." He added, "Nothing like this has occurred."
That same day, Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross reasserted his government's finding, complete with unique spellings of the names of two key characters:
"In this moment we can confirm that during the next stay of Mr. Muhammad Atta in the Czech Republic, there was the contact with the official of the Iraqi intelligence, Mr. Al Ani, Ahmed Khalin Ibrahim Samir, who was on the 22nd April 2001 expelled from the Czech Republic on the basis of activities which were not compatible with the diplomatic status."
Two days later, America's so-called "Paper of Record" retreated. On October 23, 2002, it quoted Spacek, Havel's spokesman. "The president did not call the White House about this. The president never spoke about Atta, not with Bush, not with anyone else."
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Bush
As even prominent conservatives grow weary of Dubya he still has some supporters. As Joshua Muravchik writes, his admiration for Bush has grown during his presidency.
George W. Bush's approval ratings are at a low. Some liberals, reports New Republic Editor Jonathan Chait, find Bush's very existence to be "a constant oppressive force in their daily psyche." Now even conservatives — such as columnists George Will, David Brooks and Robert Kagan — are pouring forth despair over the president's Iraq policies.
But my admiration for the man — for whom I refused to vote in year 2000 — grows ever higher.
A president's chief duty is to keep the nation safe in the dangerous tides of international politics. In 2000, I found candidate Bush too little engaged with this challenge. But since 9/11, he has offered the kind of leadership that ranks him with the greatest presidents of my lifetime, Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan.
Like them, Bush is taxed with having a weak intellect and little mastery of policy details. Maybe so. But what Bush has, as they had, is a clear-eyed recognition of a great threat to our country, the courage to face that threat and a willingness to risk his political standing for the policies he deems essential to our security.
Sept. 11 was a watershed, but it was new only in scope, not in kind. For three decades, Middle Eastern terrorists had assassinated our diplomats, brought down our airliners, blown up our servicemen in their bunks and berths. They even bombed the World Trade Center. Yet as long as they were killing us in small batches, we responded with passivity, fearing to stir up more trouble.
Even Reagan, tough as he was, decided to slink away when Hezbollah murdered 241 of our Marines in their barracks in Beirut.
On 9/11, however, the terrorists managed to kill us by thousands at a swoop, and what Bush understood was that our policy of passivity, like the West's efforts to appease Hitler in the 1930s, had only invited more audacious attacks. He saw that we had no choice but to go to war against the terrorists and their backers. If we did not destroy them, the terrorists would set their sanguinary sights higher until they succeeded in killing us by the tens or hundreds of thousands.
He saw too that this war would be, as President Kennedy described the Cold War, a "long, twilight struggle" waged on many fronts and by many means. This meant that we would fight and some of us would die on his watch, but that victory could not possibly be achieved within so short a time as to enable him to claim credit.
Has our occupation of Iraq gone smoothly? Far from it. Have mistakes been made? No doubt.
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In the occupation of Japan, we made mistakes too: trying to impose federalism, which was alien to the Japanese; purging so many collaborators with the old regime that it crippled economic recovery and stirred deep resentment.
Perhaps even the decision to take on Iraq after Afghanistan was a strategic mistake in the larger war. It might have been better to have concentrated on overthrowing Iran's mullahs or forcing Syria out of Lebanon. In World War II, Allied leaders and commanders debated fiercely which fronts to concentrate on and in what order.
But the real issue is not about tactics or even the larger strategy but whether to fight at all. The alternative is to soothe ourselves with half measures — tightening borders, tracking funds, sharing intelligence, courting unfriendly governments — hoping against hope that a disaster even bigger than 9/11 will not be visited upon us.
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Would some other president have made the same brave choice as George Bush to shoulder this "long twilight struggle"? Not Bill Clinton, whose eye was always on the electoral calendar. Not the elder Bush, who didn't think much of "the vision thing." And surely not John Kerry, who tells us that he voted against the Iraq war of 1991 although he was really for it and voted for the Iraq war of 2003 although he was really against it. Kerry offers, in short, all the leadership of a whirling dervish. Truman? Reagan? Perhaps. But 9/11 came when George W. Bush was in office. He has risen to the challenge of a vicious enemy. I wish I could vote for him twice this time — to make up for having underestimated him so badly in 2000.
This largely reflects my own evolving view of Bush. I did vote for him in 2000 but only as an anti-Gore vote. (Since I live in NY I knew it would be a wasted vote anyway) I largely expected him to be an uninspiring and status quo milquetoast like his father. But 9/11 was a transforming event for him and he rose to the occasion (which from Gore's recent rantings I doubt he would've had he become President). Like some of his conservative critics, I agree that his domestic policy is horrid. A conservative president should be ashamed to put out the budgets and expand the federal government the way he has. But despite that I will continue to support him because of his commitment and seriousness regarding the 'big' issue. We can deal with the budget later. We can deal with the cutting of civil rights corners later. But it requires that we are alive and not subject to constant threat of horrific terrorist attacks. The civil libertarians who object to every little piece of the Patriot act and who in general I am of like mind, fail to miss the bigger threat to civil liberties which is that if we have another two or three 9/11 size events (and much worse scenarios are easy to imagine) then there will be a massive public groundswell of support for much more severe curtailment of civil liberties. And in the end the guarantees of freedom come not from the Bill of Rights, but rather the people's belief in the Bill of Rights. As I've mentioned here before, I do consider this fight akin to WWII and I will vote for Bush because of the 'big' issue just as I would've voted for FDR in 40's against the isolationist Republican opponents even though I likewise disagreed with most of his domestic policy initiatives. I would also point out to the Bush-haters, many of whom regard FDR as a demigod, that FDR's curtailments of civil rights make Bush's look tame by comparison. Can you say "Japanese Internment Camps"?
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Following the money
Saddam began constructing his offshore operation in 1968 in Switzerland.
A detailed analysis of Saddam Hussein's secret money-laundering techniques shows here for the first time how he used the same offshore money launderers as Osama bin Laden. That covert money network, based in the tax havens of Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Panama and Nassau, helped bankroll the war machines of both Iraq and al-Qaeda
Read all the details here
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Show Me the Money
And in what may be further evidence of Iraq/Al Qaeda links, comes this report that Saddam and Osama used many of the same offshore money laundering sources.
A detailed analysis of Saddam Hussein's secret money-laundering techniques shows here for the first time how he used the same offshore money launderers as Osama bin Laden. That covert money network, based in the tax havens of Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Panama and Nassau, helped bankroll the war machines of both Iraq and al-Qaeda.
More than 1,000 pages of confidential corporate, bank and legal documents show how the network functioned. The papers come from court cases filed in several European countries, from corporate records, from investigations by Italian police, from a report of the Kroll international investigative agency, and from private sources. The documents are the basis of further investigations coordinated in Europe by the prosecutor of Milan.
They show, for example, that a father-and-son team in Liechtenstein, whose business is setting up shell companies and secret bank accounts, worked to move the money of both Saddam and al-Qaeda. Engelbert Schreiber and his son Englebert Schreiber Jr. are listed as founder or board member of Mediterranean Enterprises Development Projects, Tradex, Techno Service Intl., Saidomin and Executive Flight Assistance, all Liechtenstein companies that handled arms sales and payoffs for Saddam. They also are listed on corporate documents for Nasreddin International Group Ltd. Holding (Liechtenstein). Ahmed Idriss Nasreddin, on the U.S. terrorist blacklist, was a founder of Al Taqwa, the bank that moved money for al-Qaeda and which was closed down by the United States after 9/11. The Schreibers declined to respond to numerous requests for comment.
One of the men linked in documents to several Panama shell companies used in the Saddam laundering network was Baudoin Dunand, a Swiss lawyer who is administrator of the Saudi Investment Co. (SICO), the Geneva investment affiliate of the bin Laden family conglomerate, run by Osama bin Laden's half-brother Yeslam Binladen. (They spell their names differently.) Dunand declined to respond to repeated requests for comment.
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The horror of honor killings
I'm still waiting for the outcry, the anger from the peace and justice crowd.
Honour killing in Jordan hospital
A Jordanian man has reportedly shot his unmarried cousin dead as she recovered in hospital after delivering a baby.
The 35-year-old who has not been named then surrendered to police, saying he acted to "cleanse his family's honour".
Stunned medical staff were present as the suspect and his two brothers ran into the woman's room and opened fire.
The 25-year-old mother was hit by six gunshots, the Jordan Times reported, quoting official sources. The day-old baby lying next to her was unharmed.
The two brothers reportedly turned themselves in later on. None of the people involved were named by the paper.
The newborn baby - who was delivered by Caesarean section on Monday - was sent to a government social institution, the official source was quoted as saying.
The main suspect is to be charged with premeditated murder and his brothers with being accessories to premeditated murder, the source said.
Jordan Times says this is the third case of so-called "honour" killing in the country this week. It also quotes official figures which say that nine women have died in such killings this year. No explanation is given for the apparent rise in deaths.
Campaigners say Jordanian courts often hand down very lenient sentences for male relatives who commit honour crimes.
Last year, the Jordan Times reported that a man received a four-month prison sentence for murdering his younger pregnant sister "in a fit of rage".
Parliament has twice rejected proposed changes in the law that would impose harsher punishments for "honour killings". (BBC NEWS)
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Iraq / Al Qaeda
Stephen Hayes, whose new book "The Connection" about the links between Al Qaeda and Saddam I have recently bought but haven't read yet, offers a short summary on the subject in this week's Weekly Standard. He also notes how the mainstream media's tune has changed on this subject.
"THE PRESIDENT CONVINCED THE COUNTRY with a mixture of documents that turned out to be forged and blatantly false assertions that Saddam was in league with al Qaeda," claimed former Vice President Al Gore last Wednesday.
"There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever," declared Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism official under George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, in an interview on March 21, 2004.
The editor of the Los Angeles Times labeled as "myth" the claim that links between Iraq and al Qaeda had been proved. A recent dispatch from Reuters simply asserted, "There is no link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda." 60 Minutes anchor Lesley Stahl was equally certain: "There was no connection."
And on it goes. This conventional wisdom--that our two most determined enemies were not in league, now or ever--is comforting. It is also wrong.
In late February 2004, Christopher Carney made an astonishing discovery. Carney, a political science professor from Pennsylvania on leave to work at the Pentagon, was poring over a list of officers in Saddam Hussein's much-feared security force, the Fedayeen Saddam. One name stood out: Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. The name was not spelled exactly as Carney had seen it before, but such discrepancies are common. Having studied the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda for 18 months, he immediately recognized the potential significance of his find. According to a report
last week in the Wall Street Journal, Shakir appears on three different lists of Fedayeen officers.
An Iraqi of that name, Carney knew, had been present at an al Qaeda summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on January 5-8, 2000. U.S. intelligence officials believe this was a chief planning meeting for the September 11 attacks. Shakir had been nominally employed as a "greeter" by Malaysian Airlines, a job he told associates he had gotten through a contact at the Iraqi embassy. More curious, Shakir's Iraqi embassy contact controlled his schedule, telling him when to show up for work and when to take a day off.
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THERE WAS A TIME not long ago when the conventional wisdom skewed heavily toward a Saddam-al Qaeda links. In 1998 and early 1999, the Iraq-al Qaeda connection was widely reported in the American and international media. Former intelligence officers and government officials speculated about the relationship and its dangerous implications for the world. The information in the news reports came from foreign and domestic intelligence services. It was featured in mainstream media outlets including international wire services, prominent newsweeklies, and network radio and television broadcasts.
Newsweek magazine ran an article in its January 11, 1999, issue headed "Saddam + Bin Laden?" "Here's what is known so far," it read:
Saddam Hussein, who has a long record of supporting terrorism, is trying to rebuild his intelligence network overseas--assets that would allow him to establish a terrorism network. U.S. sources say he is reaching out to Islamic terrorists, including some who may be linked to Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi exile accused of masterminding the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa last summer.
Four days later, on January 15, 1999, ABC News reported that three intelligence agencies believed that Saddam had offered asylum to bin Laden:
Intelligence sources say bin Laden's long relationship with the Iraqis began as he helped Sudan's fundamentalist government in their efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. . . . ABC News has learned that in December, an Iraqi intelligence chief named Faruq Hijazi, now Iraq's ambassador to Turkey, made a secret trip to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden. Three intelligence agencies tell ABC News they cannot be certain what was discussed, but almost certainly, they say, bin Laden has been told he would be welcome in Baghdad.
NPR reporter Mike Shuster interviewed Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the CIA's counterterrorism center, and offered this report:
Iraq's contacts with bin Laden go back some years, to at least 1994, when, according to one U.S. government source, Hijazi met him when bin Laden lived in Sudan. According to Cannistraro, Iraq invited bin Laden to live in Baghdad to be nearer to potential targets of terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. . . . Some experts believe bin Laden might be tempted to live in Iraq because of his reported desire to obtain chemical or biological weapons. CIA Director George Tenet referred to that in recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee when he said bin Laden was planning additional attacks on American targets.
By mid-February 1999, journalists did not even feel the need to qualify these claims of an Iraq-al Qaeda relationship. An Associated Press dispatch that ran in the Washington Post ended this way: "The Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has offered asylum to bin Laden, who openly supports Iraq against Western powers."
Follow the link to read the whole thing. You can find an addendum piece here.
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Ladies Night
New Jersey's director of the state Division on Civil Rights has ruled that Ladies' Nights are unlawful.
Cheaper drinks for women at New Jersey bars could soon be a thing of the past. Or maybe not, if Gov. James E. McGreevey has his way.
The director of the state Division on Civil Rights ruled Tuesday that Ladies' Night at a Cherry Hill bar and restaurant was unlawful.
"The decision makes it pretty clear that this bodes trouble for bars that have ladies' night and similar programs in New Jersey," said J. Frank Vespa-Papaleo, the author of the decision.
McGreevey, however, called the ruling "bureaucratic nonsense."
"It is an overreaction that reflects a complete lack of common sense and good judgment," McGreevey said in a statement.
The governor does not have the authority to directly rescind the ruling, but McGreevey met yesterday with Attorney General Peter C. Harvey and told him the civil rights division had better things to do with its time, according to Micah Rasmussen, a spokesman for the governor.
Hmmm...what about senior discounts? Discounts for children under 12? Did the civil rights director actually ask any men, who go to bars to meet women which is why bar owners have Ladies Nights so they can entice women to come and thereby bring in more men, whether any of them objected to Ladies Night. Unlike civil rights bureaucrats, most business owners stay awake nights trying to think of ways to increase the number of customers they have and to increase their profit margins. Contrary to the constant accusations of discriminatory behaviour that are leveled against businesses, most business owners (and all rational ones) will sell to anyone who wants to buy from them and will attempt to charge a price which maximizes their total revenue (# of customers x price customer will pay), so if they are offering discounts to women it is not to discriminate against their overwhelmingly male clientele, but rather to encourage more women to come to their bar.
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Cutting the Budget
The Cato Institute has issued a study (summary here) suggesting ways to cut federal spending by $300 billion per year.
The federal government is headed toward a financial crisis as a result of chronic overspending, large deficits, and huge future cost increases in Social Security and Medicare. Social Security and Medicare would be big fiscal challenges even if the rest of the government were lean and efficient, but the budget is littered with wasteful and unnecessary programs.
In recent years, mismanagement scandals have occurred in many federal agencies, including the Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Department of Energy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Even the National Zoo in Washington has recently been shaken by scandal. The $2.3 trillion federal government has simply become too big for Congress to oversee.
The good news is that Americans do not need such a big government. Most federal programs are unconstitutional, unnecessary, actively damaging, or properly the responsibility of state governments or the private sector. This study analyzes programs that could be cut to create annual budget savings of $300 billion. If these cuts were phased in over five years, the budget would be balanced by fiscal year 2009 with all of President Bush's tax cuts in place.
Some reform ideas should be applied throughout the government. Business subsidies should be terminated, and commercial activities should be privatized. Also, federal grants to the states should be scaled back. Currently, a complex array of 716 grant programs disgorges more than $400 billion annually to state and local governments, which become strangled in federal regulations. That form of "trickle-down" economics is very inefficient.
Such reforms were on the agenda in the Reagan administration and in the Republican Congress of the mid-1990s. But the need for spending cuts is even more acute today because of the large fiscal imbalances that loom from projected growth in entitlement costs. Spending cuts would not just balance the budget; they would also increase individual freedom and expand the economy. All federal spending displaces private spending, but many federal programs actively damage the economy, cause social ills, despoil the environment, or restrict liberty as well.
Given the government's record of mismanaged and damaging programs reviewed in this report, policymakers should be far more skeptical about the government's ability to solve problems with higher spending.
My only complaint is that they were far too restrained. Awhile ago I did my own little back-of-the-envelope list of federal programs we could cut. I didn't actually add up all the cost savings but they come to a good deal more than $300 billion.
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Too Much Time on Their Hands
Lileks in fine form today with this little rant about folks with nothing better to do with their time.
If this keeps up, I’m going to end my days as a holy-rolling snake handler. I wouldn’t join a movement that wanted to add a cross to a public seal. But I am dead-set stone-cold opposed to those who, in this instance, want to take one off. Who worries about these things? Who, in 2004, can look at world where some madmen want to shove a crescent down our throats and decide that the most important thing they’re going to do is take the crosses off the city seal?
The crosses represent California’s history - but of course that’s no defense. History, alas, is full of inconvenient details. History can offend. The mere recognition of a historical truth can offend. Apparently that’s the worst thing you can do nowadays: offend. But it has to be a particular kind of offense. Lenny Bruce was celebrated for offending the right people, and this enshrined the act of offending as some sort of brave stance against The Man, The Grey-Flannel Suited Establishment, the whole Ike-Nixon Axis of Medieval, the straights. Gotta offend the straights or you’re not doing your job. The only function the bourgeouise have is to sit there with their mouths open, Shocked. If they’re having a good time, someone’s not doing his job.
But. Imagine if the seal had two female mythological symbols of Peace and Progress, holding hands, and a religious group sued because they said this was a clear example of the state promoting lesbianism. "But, um, historically and allegorically, that’s not what it’s about." Don’t care! We’re offended! We bleed, you heed1 Take it off! No one would give them a second thought, nor should they. But when the ACLU musters a phalanx of lawyers to erase a historical symbol from the city seal, the burghers quail. The burghers fold. In the end the national anthem is John Cage’s “4’33,” which gives everyone an interval of empty silence in which they can construct their own appropriate sentiments.
Boil it down to this: a piece of paper with the city seal comes down the pneumatic tube. Winston Smith places masking tape over the crosses, picks up his speaking tube. “MemRec insert, city seal doubleplus ungood possible thoughtcrime godsign, new file city seal ungodsign postdate.”
And the crosses on the seal go down the memory hole.
What compels these people? How small are their lives that they worry about this?
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June 02, 2004
Working Poor
Thomas Sowell punctures some myths about the "working poor".
BusinessWeek magazine has joined the chorus of misleading rhetoric about "the working poor." Why is this misleading? Let me count the ways.
First of all, Census data show that most people who are working are not poor and most people who are poor are not working. The front-page headline on the May 31st issue of BusinessWeek says: "One in four workers earns $18,800 a year or less, with few if any benefits. What can be done?"
Buried inside is an admission that about a third of these are part-time workers and another third are no more than 25 years old. So we are really talking about one-third of one fourth -- or fewer than 10 percent of the workers -- who are "working poor" in any full-time, long-run sense.
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As for "What can be done?" that is a misleading question because the article is about what other people can do for the "working poor," not what they can do for themselves, much less what they did in the past -- or failed to do -- that led to their having such low earning capacity.
The theme is that these are people trapped by external circumstances, and words like "moxie" and "gumption" are mentioned only sarcastically to be dismissed, along with "Horatio Alger." But the cold fact is that what the intelligentsia call the American Dream is no dream.
An absolute majority of the people who were in the bottom 20 percent in income in 1975 have since then also been in the top 20 percent. This inconvenient fact has been out there for years -- and has been ignored for years by those who want more government programs to relieve individuals from responsibility for making themselves more productive and therefore higher income earners.
While the economy is "rewarding the growing ranks of educated knowledge workers," BusinessWeek says, this is not so for "workers who lack skills and training." In a country with free education available through high school and heavily subsidized state colleges and universities, why do some people lack skills and training?
More important, what is likely to cause them to get skills and training -- pay differentials or largess in money or in kind from the taxpayers as "entitlements"?
This is an agenda article and facts that get in the way of the welfare state agenda get little attention, if any. Meanwhile, notions that have no factual basis are asserted boldly.
For example: "Working one's way up the ladder is becoming harder, not easier." Evidence? Wage rates for people in the bottom 20 percent have not risen much over the past 30 years.
The fallacy here is that it is not the same people in the bottom 20 percent over the past 30 years. Most people in the bottom 20 percent do not stay there even one decade, much less three. Young, inexperienced beginners do not remain young or inexperienced or beginners their whole lives.
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The Threat of Freedom
Linda Chavez explains why even a moderately democratic government in Iraq is a threat to the status quo in the entire region.
The freest Arabs in the Middle East currently live in Israel, where over 1,000,000 of them hold full citizenship, electing their own representatives to the Knesset and enjoying other freedoms enjoyed by all Israeli citizens. In no other country in the region do Arabs, or anyone else, for that matter, live freely. Just look at Iraq's neighbors.
In Saudi Arabia, to the south, the Saudi royal family rules with no institutional check on its authority. Although the Saudi government has announced some limited reforms, Saudis cannot elect their own leaders, do not enjoy freedom of religion, a free press or freedom of assembly. Women in the kingdom may not obtain identity cards or an exit visa, nor can they be admitted to a hospital without permission of their fathers, husbands or, in the case of widows, their sons. According to Freedom House, which rates civil and political rights around the world, Saudi women may not study engineering, law or journalism, and are not permitted to drive automobiles or travel outside the home unless accompanied by an adult male family member.
Syria, to the west, is ruled by one of the most repressive governments in the region, despite early hopes that Bashar Assad, son of the tyrannical Hafiz Assad, would loosen the Baathist Party's grip on the people when he took power after his father died in 2000. It didn't happen. Not only do Syrians enjoy no civil or political liberties, but the Syrian government is one of the chief sponsors of international terrorism in the world. What's more, Syria essentially controls its neighbor Lebanon, which was once one of the freer nations in the Middle East.
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Speaking of Islamists, the mullahs who rule Iran on Iraq's eastern border -- though not Arab -- share many of the other characteristics of the area's tyrants. Although Iran boasts an elected parliament, the country is actually governed by the Council of Guardians. These Shiite clerics control the judicial branch and must approve all legislation passed by the parliament and choose which candidates may run for elected office.
When Iraqis choose their own government in free elections, it will mark the first time in history when ordinary Arabs can claim to control their own destiny in their own nation. Syria's Assad, the Saudi royal family, even Jordan's Abdullah must be nervous as they watch events unfold. If the Iraqi people are capable of governing themselves, why not the Syrians, the Saudis or the Jordanians? Likewise, the radical clerics who control Iran must also be nervous as they watch events unfold in Iraq. Both Syria and Iran are believed to be funneling aid to the insurgents trying to prevent Iraq from its democratic future. Let us hope the Iraqi people will prevail against these obstacles -- for their sake and ours.
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A Dime for Your Thoughts?
Bill Safire has a little rant today on the penny and its uselessness.
Because my staunch support of the war in Iraq has generated such overwhelming reader enthusiasm, it's time to re-establish my contrarian credentials. (Besides, I need a break.) Here's a crusade sure to infuriate the vast majority of penny-pinching traditionalists:
The time has come to abolish the outdated, almost worthless, bothersome and wasteful penny. Even President Lincoln, who distrusted the notion of paper money because he thought he would have to sign each greenback, would be ashamed to have his face on this specious specie.
That's because you can't buy anything with a penny any more. Penny candy? Not for sale at the five-and-dime (which is now a "dollar store"). Penny-ante poker? Pass the buck. Any vending machine? Put a penny in and it will sound an alarm.
There is no escaping economic history: it takes nearly a dime today to buy what a penny bought back in 1950. Despite this, the U.S. Mint keeps churning out a billion pennies a month.
Where do they go? Two-thirds of them immediately drop out of circulation, into piggy banks or — as The Times's John Tierney noted five years ago — behind chair cushions or at the back of sock drawers next to your old tin-foil ball. Quarters and dimes circulate; pennies disappear because they are literally more trouble than they are worth.
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The penny-pinching horde argues: those $9.98 price tags save the consumer 2 cents because if the penny was abolished, merchants would "round up" to the nearest dollar. That's pound-foolish: the idea behind the 98-cent (and I can't even find a cent symbol on my keyboard any more) price is to fool you into thinking that "it's less than 10 bucks." In truth, merchants would round down to $9.95, saving the consumer billions of paper dollars over the next century.
I couldn't agree more. For one thing money taken out of circulation constitutes, in essence, an interest free loan to the government (although the amounts involved in this case are peanuts compared to the stacks of $100 dollar bills horded by drug dealers and Russian mobsters). Secondly, what does it cost to produce a penny these days? I would have to imagine its coming pretty close to costing a penny to make one.
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Tiananmen Remembered
Nicholas Kristof recounts events in Tianamin 15 years ago.
n Friday, it will be 15 years since I stood at the northeast corner of Tiananmen Square and watched China go mad.
The Communist Party was answering the demands of millions of protesters who had made Tiananmen Square the focus of their seven-week democracy movement. The protesters included students, Communist Party members, peasants, diplomats, laborers — even thieves, who signed a pledge to halt their "work" during the demonstrations.
I was in my Beijing apartment when I heard that troops had opened fire and were trying to force their way to Tiananmen. So I raced to the scene on my bicycle, dodging tank traps that protesters had erected.
The night was filled with gunfire — and with Chinese standing their ground to block the troops. I parked my bike at Tiananmen, and the People's Liberation Army soon arrived from the other direction. The troops fired volley after volley at the crowd on the Avenue of Eternal Peace; at first I thought these were blanks, but then the night echoed with screams and people began to crumple.
The Communist Party signed its own death warrant that night. As Lu Xun, the great leftist writer beloved by Mao, wrote after a massacre in 1926: "This is not the conclusion of an incident, but a new beginning. Lies written in ink can never disguise facts written in blood."
So, 15 years after Tiananmen, we can see the Communist dynasty fraying. The aging leaders of 1989 who ordered the crackdown won the battle but lost the war: China today is no longer a Communist nation in any meaningful sense.
Political pluralism has not arrived yet, but economic, social and cultural pluralism has. The struggle for China's soul is over, for China today is not the earnest socialist redoubt sought by hard-liners, but the modernizing market economy sought by Zhao Ziyang, the leader ousted in 1989. The reformers lost their jobs, but they captured China's future.
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Gucci Radicals
While popular leftist lecturers may preach the evils of capitalism to the brethren, it doesn't stop them from asking very hefty speaking fees in exchange for imparting their wisdom and excoriating the greed of the fat cats as Jacob Laksin reports.
Care to hear Noam Chomsky skewer America's soulless, capitalist wealth and privilege? It will set you back $12,000, roughly one-fourth of the average MIT student's tuition. And Chomsky's leftist academics-in-arms have similarly immodest asking prices. Take Princeton's resident race baiter, Cornel West. With an official per-lecture fee of $15,000 plus first-class traveling expenses, West ranks among the priciest academics. Recently he spoke at Denver U. for $35,000. For one hour.
West's pal Jesse Jackson also demands the big bucks. When not extorting money from Nascar (the "last bastion of white supremacy"), Jackson demands between $10,000 and $20,000 for appearances. This is the same Jesse Jackson who spent the Sixties urging the nation to accept socialism, a "person-centered" rather than a "profit-centered" economy. Today, it seems, he's discovered that profit isn't all that bad.
Nor is he alone. Few may be shocked to learn that Michael Moore's speaking fee, like Moore himself is, well, hefty. The left-wing filmmaker asks $15,000 to $20,0000 per speech. Similarly, the fact that "comedian" Al Franken doesn't joke around about his $25,000 fee is unlikely to raise many eyebrows. (He has to make up for his gratis performance on Air America somehow.)
Slightly more surprising is the fact that even the Greens, the Left's self-styled "principled" base, like to see green. Look at Winona Laduke, Ralph Nader's running mate in the 1996 and 2000 elections. She will help college students save the earth -- for only $8,500. But then fellow Green Party activist Jello Biafra, will do the same speechfor onl $7,500. Enviro-activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s cash intake is nearly double that, at $16,000 bills. (So much for saving the trees.) As for perennial Green nudnik Ralph Nader, he comes with a price tag anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000. (Staff at his D.C. campaign headquarters were none too eager to specify an exact amount.)
That goes for leftist "journalists," too. Socialist essayist Barbara Ehrenreich, who groused about spending a year working minimum wage jobs in her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, is a long way from the $7-an-hour experience now. She charges $15,000 (plus hundreds of dollars in expenses) for speaking engagements. The better to pontificate about class inequality, one assumes.
Radio lefty Nina Totenberg's NPR salary doesn't prevent her from charging $15,000 a pop to lecture the kiddies. Lefty scribbler Molly Ivins, meanwhile, has been known to ask a very unprogressive $25,000 for an hour of her conspiracy theories. Molly Ivins Can't Say That -- unless there's a paycheck involved.
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The selfless leaders of the Left don't just speak for the money, of course; there are also the perks. The director of one D.C.-based booking agency tells me her leftist clients require the works from their hosts (usually colleges): a room at one of the area's nicer hotels, meals, travel fare and a car. Lest you think they're all closet high lifers, she helpfully notes that, in some instances, the car "doesn't even have to be a limousine."
But, then again, some pigs are more equal than others.
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The Greatest Danger
Ralph Peters reminds us that many more battles in history have been lost by loss of resolve rather than military failure.
THROUGHOUT history, far more battles have been lost by a failure of nerve than have been won by military genius. Today, the greatest danger to American efforts in Iraq remains the collapse of our will.
It's time to get a grip. For the past few months, the Bush administration has made painful errors, not least in sparing terrorists and insurgents. The revelation of a few nauseating incidents at Abu Ghraib prison became a media feast, an endless broadcast miracle of loaves and fishes. And the Iraqi Governing Council — a monster we created — has proven far more interested in perpetuating the power of its members than in representative democracy.
But the sky isn't falling. And the blunt truth — so bitter to those on the left — is that, even if the sky eventually does fall in Iraq, it will fall on the Arabs (again), not on us.
At great expense, we put an entire country into rehab. While the Kurds are already clean and sober, if Iraq's Arabs choose to backslide into the regional addiction to corrupt governance, it's a lick on them, not on us.
The fact remains that we have done a great thing. We removed a murderous dictator and gave 26 million people a chance at freedom. Nothing changes that — even if the government that ultimately emerges in Iraq disappointments us.
Nor is it inevitable that Iraq will fail to find its way to democracy. As this column has long maintained, we will not begin to see the deep results of this war for at least a decade. Our focus on day-to-day events in an election year only distorts our vision.
As for the Iraqi people, their complaints about the occupation will always find an eager media outlet. But the Iraqis don't yet know how they'll view our efforts in the end — it will take them years to sort out their emotions and conclusions.
Iraqis have experienced revolutionary, disorienting change. Expectations often had little to do with reality. Still confused and frightened, they don't quite know how they feel about themselves, our troops or their country's future. Only time will tell.
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June 01, 2004
Iran's interventions
It is important to keep an eye on other happenings in the Middle East to maintain an accurate perspective on what we will face. Here is a brief rundown of Iran's activities.
By AMIR TAHERI (NY Post)
June 1, 2004 -- RECENT actions by Tehran have led to questions about whether Iran was trying to play the Shiite card in Iraq's post-Saddam power game.
Tehran's state-controlled media have launched a campaign to incite Shiites in Bahrain against the kingdom's reform process. And Iran has ordered its clients, notably the Iraqi branch of Hezbollah, to step up disruptive activities to make the transition from occupation to Iraqi sovereignty as difficult as possible.
All this has led to suspicions against Shiites in several Arab countries. That is unfortunate.
The present Iranian regime is based on the ideology of Khomeinism - which is as far removed from Shiism as it is from other mainstream "ways" of Islam.
The first victims of that ideology have been Shiites. The Khomeinists have executed over 100,000 Iranians, mostly Shiites. They also caused the deaths of almost a million other Shiites in the eight-year long Iran-Iraq war. Over 3.5 million Iranians, most of them Shiites, have gone into exile.
That ideology has also divided Shiite communities everywhere.
When Khomeinism arrived in Lebanon for the first time in 1980, it immediately set out to destroy Amal, the united political movement of the Shiites. Having failed to do so, it created the Hezbollah as a rival to Amal.
By the 1990s, the Lebanese Hezbollah was showing some independence. Its religious leader, Sayyed Muhamad-Hussein Fadhlallah, refused to recognize the Iranian "Supreme Guide" Ali Khamenei as "the leader of all Muslims" as is claimed in the Khomeinist Constitution.
Tehran's response came in the form of support for splinter groups within Hezbollah. In a recent speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said that Tehran did not "limit its alliances in Lebanon" to the Hezbollah.
In Iraq, Tehran's policy over the past decade has aimed at splitting the Shiite community. Now Tehran is working hard to prevent a unified Iraqi Shiite front backed by the seminary at Najaf. The three-way split in the Dawa party was partly due to Iranian intrigues. And right now Iranian elements are working hard to split the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
It's no mystery that the shenanigans of Muqtada al-Sadr have been largely financed and encouraged by Tehran.
The Khomeinists were also responsible for splitting the Shiite community in Afghanistan. They backed the Shoeleh-Javid (Eternal Flame) group, a Maoist outfit whose members were of Shiite birth, against the Hazara Shiite establishment. During the communist rule in Kabul, the Khomeinists prevented the Hazara from fighting the Soviet occupation.
And when the Taliban started massacring the Hazara Shiites, Tehran did nothing but issue empty threats.
Nowhere has the divergence between Shiism and Khomeinism been more clearly manifested than in Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan is a majority Shiite country that won its independence after the disintegration of the Soviet Empire a decade ago. Yet for the past 10 years Tehran has backed Christian Armenia against Shiite Azerbaijan in the conflict over the enclave of Karabach.
Iran provided logistical support for the Armenian force that invaded and conquered Karabach and has been holding it since 1992. The trucks that drove Karabach's 80,000 Shiite Azeris out of their homes, in a little reported instance of ethnic-cleansing, were provided by Iran.
Everywhere, the Khomeinist aim is that Shiites should not be able to unite and act in their interests without receiving orders from Tehran. They should always remain divided and dependent on Tehran.
Although Khomeinism uses part of the Shiite mythology, religious vocabulary and iconography, it must be treated as a distinct doctrine with specific characteristics.
The key slogans of Khomeinism make this clear.
Everywhere in Iran one sees giant slogans reading: God, Quran, Khomeini!
Or: Allah Akbar, Khomeini Rahbar (God is the Greatest, Khomeini is the Leader!)
Inspired by North Korean and Maoist models, images of Khomeini have been carved in mountains or grown as mini-forests, visible even from the skies - a cult of personality bordering on idolatry.
Under the new Iranian school curriculum, the study of Khomeini's life and thoughts receives as much time (two hours per week) as the study of the Koran. The official Iranian calendar includes 26 days that are associated with Khomeini while the Prophet Muhammad gets only two days. Khomeini's tomb has been turned into a shrine.
In Iranian Shiism, the title of Imam is exclusive to Ali Ibn Abi-Talib, the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law, and 11 of his male descendants. In Khomeinism, however, the late ayatollah bears the title of Imam.
The Islamic Republic Constitution gives the "Supreme Guide" the power to suspend even the basic rules of Islam if he so wishes. And that, of course, is as abhorrent to Shiites as to other Muslims.
There are more Shiite clerics and students of theology in prison in Iran than at any other time in history. Khomeinism has also driven thousands of Iranian Shiite theologians into exile.
In short, Khomeinism is a cocktail in which Shiism is an accidental ingredient. Similar ideologies have developed in non-Muslim cultures in the developing countries. Its basic ingredient is a hatred of the West, especially the United States. It is also influenced by Marxism, especially with such ideas as thought control, single-party rule and the command of the economy by the state.
Some Shiites have adopted Khomeinism as their ideology. Hundreds have moved to Iran and taken up Iranian nationality. But there is no evidence that Khomeinism is supported by the broader Shiite communities in the Arab countries or elsewhere in the Muslim world.
Here is what Sabah Zangeneh, Iran's former Ambassador to the Organization of Islamic Conference had to say in Kuwait last week: "As far as matters of religion are concerned, the ulema of Najaf, especially Grand Ayatollah Ali-Muhammad Sistani, may have more influence in Iran today than Iranian mara'je [religious leaders] may have in Iraq."
The Arab governments would be wrong to equate Khomeinism with Shiism.
Amir Taheri is reachable via www.benadorassociates.com.
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June 4, 1989
That great people's democratic experiment in commitalunism (Communism where you keep the dictatorship but allow some free market activity so as to avoid the vast famines that kill off large swathes of the population) is now defending its massacre of large numbers of unarmed protesters.
China on Tuesday defended its June 4, 1989, crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing, saying that the country is more stable and prosperous as a result.
"It was political turmoil no matter what you call it," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao. He said the crackdown "played a very good role in stabilising the situation, which enabled China to develop its economy, and made contributions to the peace and development of the world".
Liu's comments came three days before the 15th anniversary of the assault by Chinese troops on the demonstrations that centred on Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing.
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"The Chinese government took decisive measures to stabilise the situation in the interest of the foreign policy of China and the people's livelihood," Liu said at a regular news briefing.
Hundreds, if not thousands, died in the attack. The Chinese government has never issued a death toll and has detained and harassed activists who have tried to compile lists.
The Communist Party has rejected appeals to overturn its ruling that the protests were a counter-revolutionary riot.
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Where's the sign with the finger?
An idea this stupid could only have come from a government official (or university professor).
CARS could be fitted with "I'm sorry" lights or signs in a bid to reduce road rage in Victoria.
A parliamentary inquiry into road rage will consider apology signs to prevent communication breakdowns on the road.
"It has been proposed that cars be fitted with some kind of mechanism, such as a light or sign, that can be activated by a driver when they wish to apologise for their actions," a discussion paper released by the Drugs and Crime Prevention Committee stated.
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Another Hint of Where Canadian Sympathies Lie
As many of us know, Canada is becoming a haven for terrorists. They have a relatively open immigration policy and have allowed many with questionable pasts through its doors. However, they recently chose to deny entry to one former terrorist. So why did they choose to exclude him? Because he is former PLO terrorist who is now pro-Israel and actually speaks against terrorism. It's funny, a government that refused to call Hezbollah a terror organization bars a former terrorist who renounced terrorism from coming into the country to speak.
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Vitamin B
Learning to Expect the Unexpected
”We are not made for type-2 randomness. How can humans take into account the role of uncertainty in our lives without moralizing? As Steven Pinker aptly said, our mind is made for fitness, not for truth – but fitness for a different probabilistic structure. Which tricks work? Here is one: avoid the media. We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. It is a very dangerous thing, because the probabilistic mapping we get from watching television is entirely different from the actual risks that we are exposed to. How can we live in a society in the twenty-first century while at the same time have intuitions made for a hundred million years ago?"
That’s author and mathematical trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb, talking about the problems inherent in the way many people think and act in the face of uncertainty in a recent edition of John Brockman’s ’Edge’. Some readers may be familiar with Taleb’s provocative book Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life, which was published a few years ago and continues to receive enthusiastic reviews from investors all over the world.
Taleb is a professional trader whose views I respect highly. Many financial academics dislike Taleb for his outspoken views on the use of mathematics in finance and economics. Taleb believes that the hard problem of randomness may be insoluble. He argues that many of the mathematical models financial academics use to capture uncertainty work in a casino and gambling environment, but they are not applicable to the complicated social world in which we live.
Much of what happens in financial markets and throughout history, says Taleb, comes from what he calls ‘Black Swan dynamics’ – that is, very large, sudden, and totally unpredictable ‘outliers,’ while much of what investors and analysts usually talk about is almost pure noise (i.e., useless information). He notes that the expert’s track record in predicting black swan-type events is dismal. As Taleb puts it, many investors are drivers looking through the rear view mirror while convinced they are looking ahead.
Taleb believes that one of the reasons people are so bad at understanding Black Swan dynamics or alternatively type-2 randomness, is that part of our brain is designed for the Pleistocene era and not the 21st century. As he points out, our risk machinery is designed to run away from tigers; it is not designed for the information-laden modern world. Indeed, much of the research into humans’ risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world.
Taleb believes that in order to defend ourselves against black swans we must first acquire general knowledge. His mission today is to aggressively promote his skeptical brand of probabilistic thinking into public intellectual life.
We wish Nassim Taleb all the best in his mission.
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Armchair Warmongers
Mark Steyn notes the defeatism prevalent among many who supported the war in Iraq a year ago and sees it not as evidence of their pragmatism, but rather evidence of their inherent unseriousness.
A year ago, Anatole Kaletsky was buoyant and sunny: "The vast majority of Iraqis will soon find themselves incomparably freer and better off than at any time in the past 50 years." Now he's sunk in his own columnar quagmire: "Iraq will indeed now replace Vietnam as the byword for America's military humiliation, its strategic incompetence, its wayward moral compass," etc, etc.
His Times colleague Mary Ann Sieghart has flounced off, too: "That's it! I've had enough. I'm fed up with justifying the war in Iraq to sceptical friends, family and acquaintances." The standard rap against us armchair warriors is that we can't stand the heat of real war, but poor Mary Ann can't stand the heat of real armchairs. The chap on the sofa at that dinner party was just too beastly and sceptical.
Tony Parsons, hitherto the token non-anti-American at the Daily Mirror, feels cheap and used. "Tony Blair fooled me," he says bitterly. "I see now it was all a pack of lies."
With moulting hawks all around squawking their forlorn chorus of "I'm No Longer Such An Ugly Duckling", it's tempting to join the mass ecdysis. But this is one leopard who won't be changing his spots. Fourteen months ago, there were respectable cases to be made for and against the war. None of the big stories of the past few weeks alters either argument.
The bleats of "Include me out!" from the fairweather warriors isn't a sign of their belated moral integrity but of their fundamental unseriousness. Anyone who votes for the troops to go in should be grown-up enough to know that, when they do, a few of them will kill civilians, bomb schools, abuse prisoners. It happens in every war. These aren't stunning surprises, they're inevitable: it might be a bombed mosque or a hospital, a shattered restaurant or a slaughtered wedding party, but it will certainly be something.
... the aberrations of war have nothing to do with the only question that matters: despite what will happen along the way, is it worth doing?
I say yes. It is already worth it for Iraq. There are more than 8,000 towns and villages in the country. If the much predicted civil war had erupted in any of 'em, you'd see it. Not from the Western press corps holed up with its Ba'ath Party translators at the Palestine Hotel, but from Arab television networks eager to show the country going to hell. They cannot show it you because it isn't happening. The Sunni Triangle is a little under-policed, but even that's not aflame. Moqtada al-Sadr, the Khomeini-Of-The-Week in mid-April, is al-Sadr al-Wiser these days, down to his last two 12-year-old insurgents and unable even to get to the mosque on Friday to deliver his weekly widely-ignored call to arms.
Meanwhile, more and more towns are holding elections and voting in "secular independents and representatives of non-religious parties". I have been trying to persuade my Washington pals to look on Iraq as an exercise in British-style asymmetrical federalism: the Kurdish areas are Scotland, the Shia south is Wales, the Sunni Triangle is Northern Ireland. No need to let the stragglers in one area slow down progress elsewhere. Iraq won't be perfect, but it will be okay - and in much better shape than most of its neighbours.
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The End is Nigh
As a cheery start to the new work-week, here is a rather large collection of end-of-the-world scenarios.
Some samples:
First, there's some kind of freakish UFO hovering over the planet. Then it's pow, blast, boom. And then? Then we're all dead.
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Some call it the main cause of death for life in the Universe. Right or wrong, we should consider ourselves lucky that so far, the most violent natural phenomenon of all has left our planet alone. If it one day does strike, better say goodbye. We don't stand a chance against the infamous `gamma ray bursts' (GRBs).
It's like a lottery, really. Every day, somewhere in the Universe, there's a HUGE explosion. Within seconds, an amount of energy sets free that equals the amount of energy the Sun would emit in its entire lifetime. In fact, some of the blasts are bigger than the energy of all stars combined. No, you just DON'T want to be around when such an explosion occurs.
Strangely, the explosions are usually invisible to the human eye. You would need gamma ray vision to see them. We're talking gamma ray bursts here: cosmic super explosions that throw an awful amount of gamma- and X-radiation into the Galaxy.
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Whether you call it the Big One, the Great Exterminator, Lucifer's Hammer, or Extinction Level Event -- there's much to be said about big chunks of space rock slamming into the earth. One thing's for sure, however. It happened so many times before, that it's only likely it will happen again...
It all comes about within moments. Suddenly, there's a big, fiery ball in the sky, just for a few seconds. And then: impact.
The atmosphere will be on fire. A huge column of fire and debris towers up miles into the sky. Hundreds of thousands die instantaneously. For thousands of miles around, everyone outdoors is incinerated. People nearby simply evaporate.
The impact sends out a shockwave around the globe, just like a stone thrown into a pool makes a circle of waves. But this wave rolls through the Earth's crust itself, causing death and destruction everywhere. There are massive earthquakes. Huge tsunamis. Volcanoes popping open. Millions die, cities are shaken into oblivion. On the opposite side of our planet, the waves of destruction slam into each other again, causing the earth's crust to tower up, forming a massive mountain-ridge within seconds.
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It's odd: you can worry about meteors and cosmic explosions all you want, but the biggest killer of all times is already here -- and is doing fine. In fact, life's oldest and most deadly enemy is preparing for yet another devastating attack on the human race. Diseases -- don't ever underestimate them.
Humans and germs have always lived side by side. But every once and a while, the germs attack. Then, suddenly, there's AIDS, or SARS, or what-have-you.
And SARS is still a relatively mild, merciful disease. The Black Plague killed hundreds of millions of people, at its high-day ridding Europe of a quarter of its population. The Spanish flu that ran rampant in 1918 killed twenty to forty million men, quadrupling the death toll of World War One. In the US alone, the epidemic killed more people than World War II, the Korean war and the Vietnam war combined.
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May 31, 2004
Walmart
William L. Anderson examines the widespread hostility toward Wal-Mart (and other similar enterprises) and wonders why so many resent the free choices made by employees and consumers.
In a recent poll on the CNN website, viewers were asked the "poll" question of whether or not they believed that Wal-Mart stores were "good" for the "community." Perhaps it is not surprising that a large majority answered "no."
Now, this by itself does not mean much, since these online "polls" are not scientific and reflect only the views of the moment by people who choose to participate. What is more significant, however, was the anti-Wal-Mart content of a speech recently given by Teresa Heinz Kerry, John Kerry's wife and an influential person in her own right. Speaking at a Democratic Party rally, Mrs. Kerry declared that "Wal-Mart destroys communities."
Indeed, Wal-Mart bashing is in vogue. Whether one journeys to the sight of Sojourners Magazine or reads even mainstream news publications, the charges against Wal-Mart abound. According to the consensus of the critics, Wal-Mart is guilty of the following:
- Paying low wages to workers, and generally abusing them.
- Intimidating shoppers by having them "greeted" by an elderly person at the door. (As one writer said, the real purpose of that greeter is to let shoppers know that they are being watched.)
- Putting small stores out of business, as shoppers stop patronizing the little "mom-and-pop" boutiques for the big box, thus "destroying" the look of "Main Street" in small towns and cities.
- Purchasing low-priced goods from abroad, which puts American workers out of jobs.
- Contributing to that allegedly harmful disease known as "consumerism," in which Americans are constantly purchasing goods that the Wal-Mart critics insist that they really don't need. As the bumper sticker of one of my faculty colleagues proclaims: "Mal-Wart: The Source of Cheap Crap."
Of course, what really bugs the critics is that people choose to shop at Wal-Mart instead of the places where they would want people to spend their money. (Activists on both left and right often will invoke the name of the "people" when their real goal is to restrict the choices of those "people.") Yet, while up front I question the real motives of the Wal-Mart haters, it still behooves us to answer the charges using economic logic, since many of the arguments against this chain store also appeal to economics.
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Nearly all of us would accept higher payment for our services, and Wal-Mart employees are no exception. Yet, that condition alone hardly makes a company's pay scales illegitimate, as Bolton and other critics contend. If my employer were to double my pay tomorrow (which is highly doubtful), I doubt I would object, although I'm sure that most of my colleagues would see the event in a different light. That Frostburg State University does not make that offer to me does not make my current salary illicit, nor does it make my employer the second coming of Silas Marner.
The point is this: payment for services involves mutually agreeable exchanges. They are not manifestations of power, as some would say. No one is forced to work at Wal-Mart; people who choose to work there do so because they prefer employment there to other circumstances.
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In places like Southern California, where there are numerous employment opportunities, to say that workers are "forced" to work at Wal-Mart for "slave wages" is ridiculous. As noted before, the fact that workers there would be willing to accept higher pay is not evidence that they are enslaved. That they would prefer more to less simply means that they are normal, purposeful human beings.
One can easily dismiss the charge about the "greeter" at the door—unless one truly is intimidated by the presence of a diminutive 60-year-old grandmother. (What I have found is that if I select merchandise and actually pay for it, then no one there bothers me at all. If activists are upset that Wal-Mart does not like individuals to steal goods from their shelves, then they are advocating theft, and one does not have to pay attention to their arguments at all.)
The "Wal-Mart destroys the community" charge, however, needs more attention. It goes as such: Wal-Mart enters a geographical area, and people stop shopping at little stores in order to patronize Wal-Mart. The mom-and-pop stores go out of business, the community is left with boarded-up buildings, and people must leave the small businesses and accept lower wages at Wal-Mart. Thus, while a shiny new store full of inexpensive goods is in the locality, in real terms, most everyone actually is poorer.
Again, these kinds of arguments appeal to many people. For example, all of us have heard of the theoretical owner of the small, independent hardware store who had to close his shop when Wal-Mart or Home Depot moved into his community, then suffer the indignity of having to go to work at the very place that put him on the streets. The former owner has a lower income than before, which is held up as proof that the "big boys" create and expand poverty.
A few items need to be put in order. First, no one forced the hardware owner to close his shop; he closed it because it was not profitable enough for him to keep it open. If the new chain store meant that many of his former customers had abandoned him, that is not the fault of the new store. Instead, consumers faced with choices and lower prices that they had not previously enjoyed freely chose to patronize the new store.
Second, while the owner of the smaller store has suffered a loss of income, everyone else has gained. Third, if the employees of the smaller store go to work at the new chain store, it is almost guaranteed that their pay will be higher than before and they will enjoy new benefits that most likely had not been available to them previously.
Third, the presence of Wal-Mart means local consumers will pay lower prices for goods than before, and also will benefit by having a wider array of available items than they had previously. (And they save on time by being able to stay under one roof while shopping for different items.) Whatever the reason, we can safely assume that consumers in that particular locality are exercising their free choices, choices that they perceive will make them better off than they were before the store existed. Activists may not like their reasoning, but that is irrelevant to our analysis.
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In fact, I would like to make a reverse argument; Wal-Mart and stores like it add to the quality of life in large and small communities because they provide consumer choices that otherwise would not be available. Take the area near Cumberland, Maryland, where I live, for example.
Cumberland is something of a time warp, a place that 50 years ago was a manufacturing center and was the second-largest city in Maryland. Today, most of the large factories are long shut down and the population is less than half of Cumberland's heyday numbers. Furthermore, the area has a relatively high unemployment rate and many jobs do not pay very well.
The presence of Wal-Mart and Lowe's (a large hardware store), along with some large grocery chains, however, means that people here can stretch their incomes farther than we would if those stores did not exist. If they suddenly were to pull out, one can be assured that our quality of life here would not improve in their absence. Furthermore, the fact that Wal-Mart and other large stores are willing to locate in smaller and poorer communities also makes these areas more attractive for people who wish to live here but do not want to have to give up all of the amenities of living in a larger city.
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French Humility
On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, Gerard Henderson reviews the military history of the French and decides that they have much to be humble about.
At a time when the "give-peace-a-chance" mantra is again prevalent in the land, it is worth recording that Adolf Hitler's regime was crushed by military force and that the D-Day landings were led by the Americans and the British. No member of any pacifist society, nor any member of any international organisation, ever troubled Hitler's Reich. What's more, despite Charles de Gaulle's attempt to rewrite history, the French played only a small part in their nation's liberation in 1944 and 1945.
The presence of so many leaders at the one place provides an occasion for some discussions about Iraq before the handover of authority to Iraqis, which will take effect from July 1. There is still a degree of tension between Bush and Chirac concerning France's announcement early last year that it would veto any UN Security Council resolution which would have facilitated an invasion of Iraq by the coalition of the willing.
This is understandable from the coalition's perspective. Early last year Chirac's Government believed that Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons of mass destruction. By refusing to support Bush and Blair, France effectively sent a message to Saddam that he had little reason to fear an invasion. In other words, if Iraq had WMD it could keep them - for the short term, at least. And if it did not have WMD, there was no reason to abide by numerous mandatory Security Council resolutions and declare this.
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Last year Chirac gave megalomania a real nudge. During the course of a few months, he criticised the US, lectured Britain and dressed down the new members of the European Union from Central and Eastern Europe. For all Chirac's grandstanding, the French conservatives did poorly in France's regional elections last March.
The events of June 6 serve as a reminder of the fact that over the past century or so, French governments have spoken loudly but carried a small stick. The French fought bravely to turn back the German invasion in 1914 but by 1917 the country's military forces were of little consequence. The German Army was defeated in the field in late 1918 primarily by Commonwealth nations (in which Australians played an important role). The US decision to enter the war in 1917 also put pressure on the German High Command.
In 1940 France was defeated by Germany. There followed widescale collaboration in the German-occupied zone (i.e., in the north-west, centred on Paris) and the unoccupied zone (i.e., in the south, centred on Vichy). The degree of collaboration - which included the deportation of tens of thousands of French Jews to Nazi death camps in the east - was effectively ignored for decades after the war.
The extent of collaboration - on the right and left of French politics - was first revealed by the US historian Robert Paxton in the early 1970s. Recent works in this genre include Adam Nossiter's France and the Nazis, Robert Gildea's Marianne in Chains and Michael Curtis's Verdict on Vichy. Certainly there was some resistance but this mainly became a factor as a German defeat (on the Eastern and Western fronts) seemed evident.
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Added to all this is the fact that the overregulated French economy (along with that of Germany) is holding back European economic growth. The evident fact emerges that Chirac is in no position to lecture the world. Especially in foreign policy where France preaches multilateralism to the US and Britain but practises unilateralism when it sees fit. In Rwanda (on the wrong side of the civil war), the Ivory Coast and even New Zealand (remember France's terrorist attack on the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour?).
Here's hoping this D-Day kick-starts some modesty on the part of the French political class. But don't bet on it.
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Iraq Situation Improving
Unlike Ted Kennedy and Michael Moore, even other Arabs realize that things are much better in Iraq post-Saddam.
Despite war and occupation, Iraq has seen a surge in human rights organizations, political parties and independent newspapers -- entities almost unheard of under Saddam Hussein, said a report by an Arab think tank.
The report by Egypt's Ibn Khaldoun Center for Development Studies welcomed the promise of elections, the freedom of expression and independence of the media but was careful not to credit the Americans for the progress.
"Even though all indications of political rights and human rights mentioned in this report clearly illustrate that the situation in Iraq after occupation is much better than Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the truth remains that any situation would have been better than Saddam Hussein," the report said.
The report, "Civil Society, Democratic Transformation and Minorities in the Arab World," issued in late May, covered the changes in the country until December 2003.
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Fallujah
Robert D. Kaplan, correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and the only journalist accompanying the Marines when they entered Fallujah, recounts what actually happened and wonders why the administration is not doing more the publicize actual events in Iraq.
Whenever the Marines with whom I was attached crossed the path of a mosque, we were fired upon. Mosques in Fallujah were used by snipers and other gunmen, and to store weapons and explosives. Time and again the insurgents forfeited the protective status granted these religious structures as stipulated by Geneva Conventions. Snipers were a particular concern. In early April in nearby Ramadi, an enemy sniper wiped out a squad of Marines using a Soviet-designed Draganov rifle: "12 shots, 12 kills," a Marine officer told me. The marksmanship indicated either imported jihadist talent or a member of the old regime's military elite.
By the standards of most wars, some mosques in Fallujah deserved to be leveled. But only after repeated aggressions was any mosque targeted, and then sometimes for hits so small in scope that they often had little effect. The news photos of holes in mosque domes did not indicate the callousness of the American military; rather the reverse.
As for the close-quarters urban combat, I was in the city the first days of the battle. The overwhelming percentage of the small arms fire--not-to-mention mortars, rockets and rocket-propelled grenades--represented indiscriminate automatic bursts of the insurgents. Marines responded with far fewer, more precise shots. It was inspiring to observe high-testosterone 19-year-old lance corporals turn into calm and calculating 30-year-olds every time a firefight started.
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We live in a world of burning visual images: As Marines assaulted Fallujah, the administration should have been holding dramatic slide shows for the public, of the kind that battalion and company commanders were giving their troops, explaining how this or that particular mosque was being militarily used, and how much was being done to avoid destroying them, at great risk to Marine lives. Complaining about the slanted coverage of Al-Jazeera--as administration officials did--was as pathetic as Jimmy Carter complaining that Soviet Communist Party boss Leonid Brezhnev had lied to him. Given its long-standing track record, how else could Al-Jazeera have been expected to report the story? You had the feeling that the Pentagon was reacting; not anticipating.
And had the administration adequately explained to the public about what the Marines were doing after Fallujah, there might have been less disappointment and mystification about quitting the fight there. But instead of a gripping storyline to compete with that of the global media's, spokesmen for the White House, Pentagon, Coalition Provisional Authority and the Baghdad-based military coalition, in their regular briefings about events in Iraq, continue to feed the public insipid summaries, with little visual context, that have all the pungency of watery gruel.
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Without a communications strategy that gives the public the same sense of mission that a company captain imparts to his noncommissioned officers, victory in warfare nowadays is impossible. Looking beyond Iraq, the American military needs battlefield doctrine for influencing the public in the same way that the Army and the Marines already have doctrine for individual infantry tasks and squad-level operations (the Ranger Handbook, the Fleet Marine Force Manual, etc.).
The centerpiece of that doctrine must be the flattening out of bureaucratic hierarchies within the Defense Department, so that spokesmen can tap directly into the experiences of company and battalion commanders and entwine their smell-of-the-ground experiences into daily briefings. Nothing is more destructive for the public-relations side of warfare than field reports that have to make their way up antiquated, Industrial Age layers of command, diluting riveting stories of useful content in the process. Journalists with little knowledge of military history or tactics and with various agendas to peddle can go directly to lieutenants and sergeants, yet the very spokesmen of these soldiers and Marines themselves--even through their aides--seem unable to do so.
The American public can accept 50 casualties per week if the path to some sort of success is convincingly laid out. If it isn't, the public won't accept even two casualties per week. It could not be helped that the shame of My Lai, as awful as it was, should have been allowed to blot out American heroism at places like Hue: The phenomenon of the media as we know it was new back then. But if the stain of Abu Ghraib, for example, is not placed in its rightful perspective against everything else that soldiers and Marines are doing in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Colombia and many other places in the War on Terrorism, then it won't be the media's fault alone.
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Cautious Optimism
William Safire reports that contrary to what the bulk of the press is reporting, there is reason for cautious optimisim in Iraq.
Have you read the encouraging headlines from Iraq? "Monthly U.S. Combat Deaths Down by Half in May" is one. "Radical Shiite Cleric's Militia Decimated in Holy Cities" is another, and finally: "Iraqi Leaders, Defying U.S. and U.N. Dictates, Choose Prime Minister."
No, those were not headlines anybody could see. In Gloomy Gus newsrooms, good news is no news. And as Handover Day arrives in a month, casualties may well rise, the semi-truce with al-Sadr's force in Najaf may break down ("decimated" means reduced by 10 percent), and — most likely — political bickering may break into the open in the selection of an Iraqi sovereign transition government. But consider the possibility, for a change, that on our Memorial Day, we have cause for cautious optimism.
Rather than admit this, our dovish defeatists have turned themselves into the hardest of hardliners. They ask: Why haven't we stormed Falluja instead of making a deal with the Sunni devils? Why don't we wipe out the Sadr Shiite rebels, as we threatened to do, even if it means shooting up mosques being used as arsenals?
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But the naysayers were astounded, along with the U.N.'s Lakhdar Brahimi and the White House's Robert Blackwill, when Iraqi leaders started acting last week like Iraqi leaders. No thanks, they said to the U.N.-U.S. notion of an interim government of toothless technocrats, and rejected Brahimi's choice for the top slot. Like real politicians, they cut a few deals and chose one of their own — a secular Shiite, not an Islamist or a Sunni or a Kurd — to be prime minister.
Iyad Alawi is the Acceptable Arab. At the Ambrosetti conference in Italy last year, he and Adnan Pachachi — a Sunni in his 80's close to the Saudi royals — were the only Iraqis present. They spent most of their time in close consultation with Amr Moussa, head of the Arab League. Pachachi, whose exile ended with our overthrow of Saddam, was overtly ungrateful to the Americans.
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The purpose of all this jockeying is to form an organization capable of holding an election in a country beset by Saddam loyalists and terrorists determined to block that election. This will take Iraqi politicians courageous enough to risk their lives, sensible enough to work closely with coalition generals to protect the voters from the killers, and persuasive enough to enlist many more Iraqis to join the fight for freedom.
Present Iraqi leaders like Alawi are clearly asserting themselves. We will not like all they insist upon. But they are lurching toward a democratic decision, and despite the hand-wringing of Gloomy Gus & Company, that's real progress.
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Memorial Day
Steven Taylor of Poliblog provides a list of worthwhile Memorial Day essays from the blogosphere.
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Gunmen Allowed to Escape by Saudis
This is not too surprising. After a terrorist attack, the Saudi authorities let the terrorist escape because they were "worried" about the rest of the hostages. What a load of crap. There have been hostage situations all over the globe, how many security forces purposely let hostage-takers escape? The Saudi sympathies with these terrorists is obvious. And sickening. Plus, considering that the Saudi economy is based on the work of these guest workers you would think the Saudis would do more to keep them safe. I guess they hate us non-believers more than they love their economy.
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May 30, 2004
Helping 1300 a day get into the U.S. illegally
Ignoring immigration law and perhaps aiding terrorists get into the country. These "so- called" humanitarians are willing to do anything to feel better about themselves and raise your tax bill.
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May 29, 2004
The Day After Tomorrow
The NYT Book Review is in overdrive with global warming hype this weekend.
Verlyn Klinkenborg, who writes editorials for The Times, says, "Several significant new books on the environment are ... about to appear ... and they could settle the debate" about global warming "right now -- if people take the trouble to read them. They range from anecdotal, first-person accounts of vanishing Peruvian glaciers and Pacific islands slipping beneath a rising ocean, like Mark Lynas's 'High Tide' ... to profoundly sobering studies, like James Gustave Speth's 'Red Sky at Morning.'"
According to the authors of the updated "Limits to Growth," writes Klinkenborg, "the ecological burden of humanity had already outstripped the carrying capacity of the earth two decades ago -- as the first edition of this book, originally published in 1972, warned it would." "What is news is the nature of the evidence. There are signs that global warming and environmental degradation are accelerating much more quickly than anyone expected even 10 years ago."
Ross Gelbspan, a former Boston Globe reporter and editor, "argues that on matters of scientific fact, journalists employ an essentially unfair idea of 'balance' -- treating global warming as though it were still a matter of open conjecture."
"One With Nineveh" reports that "we are well past the threshold of inevitable change and on the cusp of climate destabilization," says Klinkenborg.
Firstly, I've never read anything in the NYT or any other mainstream press which refers to global warming as anything other than accepted, written in stone fact, contrary to Mr. Gelbspan's assertions. The big problem is that there is a complete lack of balance on the issue. Evidence against global warming as a phenomena or as a natural as opposed to human caused phenomena or if it exists whether or not it will be a disaster or a boon is almost entirely lacking in the press. And as for the authors of the updated "Limits to Growth" and the Ehrlichs, how frequently and consistently must people be wrong before they are no longer paid any attention to. I guess if you preach the leftist gospel of imminent doom which requires massive government interference to halt, then 30 years of bad opinions aren't enough. For some balance and a few alternate viewpoints you can look here, here, here, here, here, here, here or here.
Now, this is not to claim that global warming doesn't exist or even that it may not be a problem. I am not a climate scientist, but I was trained as a physicist and know enough about science and its processes to know that when someone, particularly a reporter like Mr. Gelbspan who was most likely a journalism major and never took a science course in his life, claims that something as vastly complicated and with so many unknown (and unknowable) variables as climate science is not subject to debate, that he is full of shit and has not a clue of what he is talking about. And as for Ehrlich who received his degree studying the structure and genetics of butterfly populations has proven time and again that he is full of shit. Even if warming is a real secular trend and not just a transitory effect or merely and reversion from a unusually cool period there is no evidence that a slightly warmer earth would not generate large benefits in increased food production, larger species diversity, etc... as it has in past warmer periods (can you say Renaissnance?). So before we engage in massive, growth and technology limiting restrictions we better be damn more sure than NYT and other reporters think we are about the actual parameters of the problem. Because one thing I do know for sure is that lower growth rates and less technology will mean more future deaths, shorter lives, more health problems and worse living conditions for many if not most of the people on the planet.
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The 9th Circus Court strikes again
Slain Postman's Mother Can Sue Weapon Makers
Ruling in case resulting from a 1999 Valley rampage brings strong dissent from some appeals court judges.
By Henry Weinstein, LA Times Staff Writer
The mother of letter carrier Joseph S. Ileto, who was slain by a white supremacist, is entitled to move forward with her lawsuit against manufacturers of weapons used to kill her son, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled Friday.
The ruling brought a strongly worded dissent by several of the court's judges, who said the precedent it set could threaten many manufacturers other than gun companies.
On Aug. 10, 1999, Buford O. Furrow Jr. sprayed a Jewish community center in the San Fernando Valley with automatic weapons fire, wounding five people. Later in the day, he shot Ileto. The families of three children wounded by Furrow joined Ileto's mother, Lilian, in suing Glock Inc. and China North Industries Corp., which made the guns Furrow used.
The families contend that the gun companies produced and distributed significantly more guns than possibly could be purchased by law-abiding customers. The suit alleges that many of the weapons are sold at gun shows and through so-called kitchen table dealers, who may be licensed but are loosely regulated.
Manufacturers frequently hawk their products with the illicit market in mind, the suit alleges. In particular, the case points to Glock's promotion of its 9-millimeter "pocket rocket" concealable handgun, the one Furrow is believed to have used to shoot Ileto.
Last fall, a three-judge panel of the appeals court ruled that the case could go forward to a trial, but Glock asked the full 26-member court to reconsider the ruling. Friday's decision by the full court came without a formal opinion. But eight of the 26 judges signed the lengthy dissent, predicting dire consequences for the state's economy if the decision stands.
"The potential impact of the … decision is staggering," wrote Judge Consuelo Callahan for the eight judges, who are generally considered among the court's more conservative members.
The problem, the dissenters said, is that the ruling allows a company to be sued if a customer uses one of its products in an illegal manner.
Under the court's decision, "any manufacturer of an arguably dangerous product that finds its way into California can be hauled into court in California to defend against a civil action brought by a victim of the criminal use of that product," Callahan wrote.
In the initial three-judge panel decision, Judge Richard Paez had said there was an important rationale for allowing such trials to take place: prompting gun manufacturers to take more care in overseeing how their products are sold.
"The social value of manufacturing and distributing guns without taking basic steps to prevent these guns from reaching illegal purchasers and possessors cannot outweigh the public interest in keeping the guns out of the hands of illegal purchasers and possessors who in turn use them in crimes," Paez wrote.
Friday's ruling was hailed by gun-control groups and a lawyer for the city of San Francisco. That city is one of several in California, including Los Angeles, that have filed a separate major lawsuit against gun manufacturers, alleging similar theories of liability. Their claim is on appeal.
"I'm pleased and excited," said Donna Finkelstein of Chatsworth, mother of Mindy Finkelstein, who was working as a counselor at the North Valley Jewish Community Center and was wounded in the leg by Furrow. Loren Lieb, mother of Joshua Stepakoff, who was 6 when Furrow shot him in the leg, also said she was pleased that the suit was moving forward.
"Today's decision is a victory for the victims of this terrible crime, and a powerful rebuke to those who consider 'frivolous' efforts to hold the gun industry accountable for reckless actions," said Joshua Horwitz, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence, the nonprofit organization that played a key role in the filing of the suit. "When the actions of gun makers and distributors put public safety at risk, they must be held accountable."
The ruling was criticized by attorneys for the gun manufacturers, who said they had not yet decided whether to ask for review in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Christopher Renzulli, Glock's New York attorney, said he was confident that the manufacturer ultimately would prevail. San Diego attorney Colin Murray, who represents China North Industries, expressed disappointment in Friday's ruling and said he thought the dissenting opinions "more accurately reflect the state of the law in California."
Furrow, a convicted felon with a history of mental instability, had an arsenal of assault-style weapons in his possession when he shot up the Jewish center in Granada Hills and later killed Ileto, who was delivering mail in Chatsworth.
Among the weapons were an Austrian-made Glock 9-millimeter handgun and a 9-millimeter rifle with an illegally shortened barrel made by China North Industries.
In March 2001, Furrow was sentenced to five life terms in prison after negotiating a plea agreement that spared him a possible death sentence for Ileto's slaying.
So far, people who have tried to sue gun manufacturers for damages caused by gun crimes have not had much success, said UC Hastings Law School professor Marsha N. Cohen.
Friday's ruling, like an earlier one by the Ohio Supreme Court that permitted a suit by the city of Cincinnati to move forward against the manufacturers on a similar theory, is significant, she said.
f the suit ultimately succeeds, she said, it could have an effect on the marketing practices of the manufacturers.
"There's nothing like the loss of profits to focus your mind," Cohen said.
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Sharia law
Sharia law comes to Canada. While Christians can be accused of a hate crime for citing certain Bibilical tenets.
"This is an abuse of multiculturalism, says Ms. Hogben. "There is a lack of courage [on the part of governments], and also a fear of offending Muslim sensitivities."
"I chose to come to Canada because of multiculturalism," says Ms. Arjomand, who gave up a career in medical science to work with women who are victims of abuse. "But when I came here, I realized how much damage multiculturalism is doing to women. I'm against it strongly now. It has become a barrier to women's rights."
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Some Perspective
Max Boot puts the current difficulties in Iraq in historical perspective.
The panic gripping Washington over the state of Iraq makes it clear we have been spoiled by the seemingly easy, apparently bloodless victories of the last decade. From the Persian Gulf War of 1991 to the Afghanistan war of 2001, we got used to winning largely through air power. There were casualties, of course, but few of them were on our side. In Kosovo, we managed to prevail without losing a single person. We forgot what real war looks like. Iraq is providing an unwelcome reminder of how messy and costly it can be.
By comparison with the wars of the last decade, what's happening in Iraq appears to be a terrible failure. Things look a little different if you compare it with earlier conflicts.
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Casualties. As of Wednesday, we've lost 800 service people in Iraq (666 of them from hostile fire), and more than 4,500 have been wounded (of whom 1,769 returned to duty within 72 hours). At least 200,000 soldiers and Marines have served in Iraq — including many who have since left — so that amounts to a total casualty rate of about 2.5%. If you add Air Force, Navy and logistics personnel supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom (at least 150,000), the casualty rate drops to 1.5%.
How does that compare with previous U.S. wars? By my calculation, using data from Information Please and the Oxford Companion to American Military History, the losses we've suffered in Iraq are so far among the lowest of any of our major conflicts. Comparing the number of U.S. wounded and dead with the size of the force deployed, in Vietnam the casualty rate was 6.2%; in World War I and World War II, just above 6.5%. On D-day, June 6, 1944, more than three times as many servicemen were lost as died in Iraq in the past year.
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Nation-building. No, we haven't established a liberal democracy in Iraq. But it's only been a year. We occupied West Germany for four years after 1945, Japan for seven years. We occupied the Philippines for almost half a century after the Spanish-American War. More recently, Bosnia is still occupied by the international community nine years after the end of hostilities, as is Kosovo five years later.
It takes a long time to bring order out of chaos. The most successful examples of nation-building, such as the British in India, required hundreds of years. No one is suggesting that the United States should occupy Iraq nearly that long, of course, but it's unrealistic to expect too much in only a year. The fact that an interim Iraqi government will be established June 30, and elections held by Jan. 30, is actually pretty speedy by historical norms.
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Abuses: I make no excuses for the sadistic creeps at Abu Ghraib whose misconduct deserves the harshest possible punishment. But let's be serious. For all the media's coverage, this is no My Lai (1968) or No Gun Ri (1950) — both instances in which innocent civilians were gunned down by U.S. troops. Nor is this comparable to the abuses that occurred during the Philippine War (1899-1903), when Brig. Gen. Jacob Smith instructed his men to turn the island of Samar into "a howling wilderness" and kill "all persons … who are capable of bearing arms."
In Iraq, there is no evidence of the kind of systematic torture employed by the French in Algeria (1954-62) or the kind of "concentration camps" invented by the British in the Boer War (1899-1902). U.S. troops haven't simply leveled whole towns, as the Russians did in Chechnya (1994-95) or the Syrians in Hama (1982). Even in World War II — the "good war" — there were numerous instances of Americans shooting enemy soldiers trying to surrender, to say nothing of the carpet-bombing of German and Japanese civilians.
On the historical scale of abuses, the misconduct of a few soldiers in Iraq ranks pretty low. Most soldiers and Marines actually have exhibited great restraint in the face of an enemy that hides behind civilians and fires from mosques.
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Rules of Combat
Alan Dershowitz argues that the rules of the Geneva convention are not appropriate for dealing with terrorists and that we need to develop new guidelines.
THE GENEVA Conventions are so outdated and are written so broadly that they have become a sword used by terrorists to kill civilians, rather than a shield to protect civilians from terrorists. These international laws have become part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.
Following World War II, in which millions of civilians were killed by armed forces, the international community strengthened the laws designed to distinguish between legitimate military targets and off-limit noncombatants. The line in those days was clear: The military wore uniforms, were part of a nation's organized armed forces, and generally lived in military bases outside of population centers. Noncombatants, on the other hand, wore civilian clothing and lived mostly in areas distant from the battlefields.
The war by terrorists against democracies has changed all this. Terrorists who do not care about the laws of warfare target innocent noncombatants. Indeed, their goal is to maximize the number of deaths and injuries among the most vulnerable civilians, such as children, women and the elderly. They employ suicide bombers who cannot be deterred by the threat of death or imprisonment because they are brainwashed to believe that their reward awaits them in another world. They have no "return address."
The terrorist leaders - who do not wear military uniforms - deliberately hide among noncombatants. They have also used ambulances, women pretending to be sick or pregnant, and even children as carriers of lethal explosives.
By employing these tactics, terrorists put the democracies to difficult choices: Either allow those who plan and coordinate terrorist attacks to escape justice and continue their victimization of civilians, or attack them in their enclaves, thereby risking death or injury to the civilians they are using as human shields.
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The time has come to revisit the laws of war and to make them relevant to new realities. If their ultimate purpose was to serve as a shield to protect innocent civilians, they are failing miserably, since they are being used as a sword by terrorists who target such innocent civilians. Several changes should be considered:
- First, democracies must be legally empowered to attack terrorists who hide among civilians, so long as proportional force is employed. Civilians who are killed while being used as human shields by terrorists must be deemed the victims of the terrorists who have chosen to hide among them, rather than those of the democracies who may have fired the fatal shot.
- Second, a new category of prisoner should be recognized for captured terrorists and those who support them. They are not "prisoners of war," neither are they "ordinary criminals." They are suspected terrorists who operate outside the laws of war, and a new status should be designated for them - a status that affords them certain humanitarian rights, but does not treat them as traditional combatants.
- Third, the law must come to realize that the traditional sharp line between combatants and civilians has been replaced by a continuum of civilian-ness. At the innocent end are those who do not support terrorism in any way. In the middle are those who applaud the terrorism, encourage it, but do not actively facilitate it. At the guilty end are those who help finance it, who make martyrs of the suicide bombers, who help the terrorists hide among them, and who fail to report imminent attacks of which they are aware. The law should recognize this continuum in dealing with those who are complicit, to some degree, in terrorism.
- Fourth, the treaties against all forms of torture must begin to recognize differences in degree among varying forms of rough interrogation, ranging from trickery and humiliation, on the one hand, to lethal torture on the other. They must also recognize that any country faced with a ticking-time-bomb terrorist would resort to some forms of interrogation that are today prohibited by the treaty.
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Amerikka
Charles Moore examines how Europeans, specifically British, formed their childish views of the great, evil empire Amerikka.
As with most British people, my first impressions of America were formed by television. For my family in the 1960s, this meant the BBC alone. We had one of those "snobbish" televisions, not unusual at that time, that could not get the only other channel, ITV. And the BBC in America at that time meant Charles Wheeler. With his highly educated voice, shock of white hair (I think it was white even then), serious spectacles and face of lean intelligence, he was the perfect posh broadcaster. I believed every word he said.
I still think Wheeler is an excellent journalist and a clever man. But what I - and presumably millions of others - were hearing from him and the BBC was a particular narrative about America. This was that there were good, liberal people who believed in civil rights. If they were white, the good ones came from the northern states and never spoke about religion.
If they were black, the good ones came from the southern states and spoke about religion a lot. These good people were fighting oppression, whether of black people or of the people of Vietnam. The hero was Senator Eugene McCarthy, who failed to get the Democratic nomination in 1968.
The oppressors, the bad people, wanted war and racial segregation. They were fat and ugly and always white and liked having guns. The villain was Governor George Wallace of Alabama, who stood as an independent in the same election, and believed in segregation. The pictures of him that appeared always showed his face darkened with what we were supposed to think of as racial hatred.
This picture of the United States was not all wrong, but it was notable for what it missed out. I learnt very little about the vigour of the freedom provided for under the American Constitution, the country's encouragement of large-scale immigration, its rising living standards. I did not know how well America had reconstructed Germany, Japan and the economies of western Europe after the war.
The BBC did not preach to me about the Soviet threat with the same ardour that it preached about racial prejudice. I therefore thought that America was very violent and very backward, and I could never quite understand why such a country was by far the most powerful in the world. If I asked people why, they would say, "Oh well, it's because it's so rich," as if wealth were something that simply descended upon you without the contribution of human effort. As a result, I understood very little about America.
Today, we are presented with a similar narrative - so powerful that I find that 90 per cent of people here believe it, even those who think of themselves as conservative. The narrative is that America is bullying and naive about the outside world. It is very keen on killing people. George W Bush is taken to embody these characteristics, since he wears cowboy boots and is inarticulate and prays a lot. (Fine for Muslims to pray, not for Christians.)
FTLARTWT. (Follow the link and read the whole thing)
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May 28, 2004
What Geneva Conventions
Police find two more fake ambulances in AzariyehBy
YAAKOV KATZ- Jerusalem Post
Police uncovered overnight Thursday two more fake ambulances, which they suspect were part of a network of fake ambulances used to smuggle Palestinian Authority officers disguised as patients into Israel.
The ambulances were uncovered in the village of Azariyeh, east of Jerusalem, which police said was the center of the network. A second man suspected of involvement with the network - a Palestinian from east Jerusalem with Israeli ID - was arrested overnight Thursday.
Police said the ambulances were sold to people in Azariyeh by Arab Israelis several years ago, after they were no longer safe enough to go on the road.
Police said it is possible the ring, which they believe may have been directly linked to PA Chairman Yasser Arafat, has also smuggled terrorists into Israel using the ambulances as a cover.
Police said members of Arafat's personal presidential elite Force 17 were smuggled in the ambulances, including the head of Force 17, who was smuggled recently in order to hold meetings with officials in east Jerusalem.
The Palestinian "patients" were hooked up to oxygen bags and other medical devices inside the ambulances and would also have ink spilled on them in order to give off the appearance that the officers were wounded and were in need of urgent medical care. Police said that the ambulance drivers carried forged medic licenses and that the vehicle's license plates were also fake.
"There is a strong possibility that Arafat was directly involved in the ambulance smuggling ring," Judea and Samaria Police Spokesman Doron Ben-Hamo said, adding that documents allegedly signed by Arafat and connected to the ring were found during a raid on a Force 17 office in Azzariyeh on Wednesday.
"Soldiers at the checkpoint check to see if there are explosives or anything suspicious inside the vehicles," Ben-Hamo said, in an attempt to explain how the ring succeeded to fool troops stationed at roadblocks leading to Jerusalem. "But, once they are presented with documents that appear to be real and nothing suspicious is found, they let the vehicle through."
Judea and Samaria Police arrested at the beginning of the week one suspect in the case for allegedly posing as an ambulance driver and for smuggling dozens of Palestinians disguised as sick patients into Israel. Police also raided a warehouse in Azzariyeh, where the GMC vans were transformed into ambulances. They said they are investigating the possibility that the vans were stolen from Israeli hospitals.
Palestinian minister Saeb Erekat told Reuters that the accusations were "another attempt to undermine the Palestinian Red Cross and Red Crescent" and noted that Israel stops and thoroughly checks every ambulance that goes through a checkpoint.
"I don't know why such accusations are being leveled at this time, when they are not even allowing patients to reach medical institutions," Erekat said.
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Gore nabbed outside White House with megaphone
Calls On 2,000 government functionaries to resign
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | The White House was the scene of a tense standoff last night as former Vice President Al Gore climbed up a tree on Pennsylvania Avenue and started demanding that over two thousand government functionaries immediately resign.
“Office of Management and Budget Director Joshua B. Bolten should resign! United States Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick should resign!” Mr. Gore shrieked. “Secretary of Agriculture Ann M. Veneman should resign!”
After receiving many complaints from neighbors, the police were dispatched to remove Mr. Gore from the tree, but to no avail.
“We sent a couple of patrol cars down there and basically told him to move on, dot org,” said police spokesman Charles Brill. “That’s when he threatened to jump.”
After Mr. Gore vowed to leap from the tree if Steven R. Blust, the Chairman of the Federal Maritime Commission did not resign, the police brought in an outside negotiator to defuse the mounting crisis: former Vermont Governor Howard Dean.
In an attempt to remind the former Vice President of all the people who cared about him, Gov. Dean used a megaphone to scream a list of the states Mr. Gore carried in 2000.
“California!” Mr. Dean shouted. “New York! Massachusetts! Iowa! New Mexico! Oregon!”
The stalemate finally ended around 2 AM when the two men’s megaphones ran out of batteries and Mr. Gore sheepishly climbed down from the tree.
In a brief statement to reporters, Mr. Gore said, “What the world needs now is a solar-powered megaphone, and that is what I will invent next.”
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Iraq Daily Life
Omar at Iraq The Model translates some opinions offered by Iraqis about the their daily lives. He says that over 70% of them were positive and resembled the examples he offers. Someone should read these to Ted Kennedy the next time he talks about the America Gulag.
What happens these days in Iraq is a natural process as a result from the transfer from dictatorship to democracy.
Ali Ahmed-Baghdad.
I'm an Iraqi citizen and I want to thank president GWB from all my heart for the great service he's done to the Iraqi people by freeing us from one of the worst tyrants in history. This liberation didn't suit the enemies of humanity and freedom, thus we see them committing terrorist acts claiming to resist occupation by killing their own people, but that will not affect the Iraqis lust for freedom. Thanks again GWB.
Kamal-Adhamya-Baghdad.
I won't forget the day when I saw one of Saddam's tanks crushing the heads of 40 She'at Iraqis who were among others arrested for no obvious reason in 1991. Their hands were tied and put on the street for the tank to pass over their heads. The words" No She'at after today" where written on that tank.
I was one of those people. My hands were tied to the back and a grenade was put between them and the safety pin removed. It was positioned in a way that it should explode if I was to make any move, and I was left a lone in a deserted area that was at least 5 Km. from any life. If it wasn't for the kindness of one of the soldiers who came back and rescued me, I would've certainly died soon.
Ihsan Al-Shimmari-Sweeden.
We lived our worst years under Saddam regime, a regime that many Arabs still believe in!We don't know why don't they leave us in peace, especially the Arab media that turns liberation into occupation and criminals into resistant. We, Iraqis, know the truth very well. The situation is much better now for the vast majority of Iraqis. Most of the people are government employees who used to get paid 4 or 6 thousand Iraqi dinars. Now the lowest salary is 100 thousand Iraqi Dinar. We feel free and we don't fear prisons and torture. The Arab media, as expected, made a huge fuss about the prisoners abuse in Abu-Gharib. Shame on them. Where were they when Saddam put explosives around a bunch of young men and blasted their bodies and they all saw that on TV? Where were they?
Saman-Iraq.
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Where's the Chechen Prisoner Abuse Scandal
I hate linking to the same Lilek's bleat twice in the same day but it really is that good:
"Have you read the latest? Steel yourselves:"
Detainees were met by two lines of baton-wielding guards forming a human gauntlet, and received a punishing beating before entering the facility. At least one detaineedied at the facility on January 11, 2000, when an earlier head wound was aggravated during the intake beating.
Detainees were beaten both during interrogation and during nighttime sessions when guards utterly ran amok. During interrogation, detainees were forced to crawl on the ground and were beaten so severely that some sustained broken ribs and injuries to their kidneys, liver, testicles, and feet. Some were also tortured with electric shocks.
At night, guards were given free rein for wanton abuse and humiliation. Often drunk and playing loud music, guards would subject detainees to beatings and humiliating games. Some of the most severe beatings took place at night: detainees report being beaten unconscious, only to be revived and beaten again. Detainees were forced to crawl across rooms with guards on their backs, and were beaten if they performed too slowly. In their cells, detainees were ordered to stand with their hands raised for entire days, and guards used teargas if their orders were disobeyed. Convincing evidence exists that men and women were raped and sexually assaulted with police batons.
Detainees were also met with a gauntlet of soldiers who beat them with batons, and suffered continuing severe beatings while at the detention facilities. Dwere sodomized with batons, forced to walk between ranks of guards while being beaten and kicked, and beaten in their testicles. A doctor in reported receiving a patient who had severely swollen genitals and appeared to have been raped, as he suffered from internal injuries to the colon.
Detainees were often kept in overcrowded prisoner transport vehicles, even during the bitter cold of winter. A nineteen-year-old woman who was believed to be mentally retarded was raped for three days by numerous soldiers at. Men were severely beaten there, including during interrogations, and at least one was tortured with a soldering iron. In April, two badly disfigured corpses were recovered, and it is likely that the two men were tortured and executed at the facility.
"Did I say “latest stories”? My bad. That’s the Human Rights Watch report on Russian prisons in Chechnya. Does that excuse what we did? Not at all. Just balance the world's reaction. We all remember how they dealt with the problem, how Putin called up foreign leaders and apologized, how there were trials, a never-ending global firestorm of publicity and public Russian self-recrimination:"
The Ministry of Justice issued a press release stating that "cases of violence, harassment, torture, and even shootings of persons kept in the investigation ward located in the residential area of Chernokozovo…do not correspond to the [sic] reality and grossly distort the real state of affairs." On March 1, after Andrei Babitsky had been released and made public the treatment to which he was subjected, Minister of Internal Affairs Vladimir Rushailo responded with snide skepticism. "All of [Babitsky's] stories about 250 blows with a baton--I seriously doubt them, as I think we all do."
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More Lileks Goodness
Check this out:
Fun with talk radio: find the exact moment in this call to Medved’s show where the people who liked the caller’s point suddenly said “aw, crap.”
“Yeah, why don’t you play Bush trying to pronounced Abu Ghraib over and over again like you played that sound from Howard Dean? You’re such a Zionist hypocrite.”
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Boston Herald Denounces Gore
Check out today's editorial in the Boston Herald:
He never mentioned Nicholas Berg. Or Daniel Pearl. Or a single person killed in the World Trade Center. Nor did former Vice President Al Gore talk of any soldier by name who has given his life in Iraq. And he has the audacity to condemn the Bush administration for having ``twisted values?''
Gore spent the bulk of a speech before the liberal group MoveOn.org Wednesday bemoaning Abu Ghraib and denouncing President Bush's departure from the ``long successful strategy of containment.''
Yes, the very same strategy that, under Gore's leadership, allowed al-Qaeda operatives to plan the horror of Sept. 11 for years, while moving freely within our borders.
Gore even had the audacity to defend the perpetrators of the prison abuse - by name - while denouncing President Bush [related, bio] for ``humiliating'' our nation.
How dare he. How dare a former vice president of the United States go beyond disagreeing with the current president's policies - a right of anyone in this free country - and denounce Bush as ``incompetent.''
How dare Gore say that Americans have an ``innate vulnerability to temptation... to use power to abuse others.'' And that our own ``internal system of checks and balances cannot be relied upon'' to curb such abuse.
And this man - who apparently has so much disdain for the nature of the American people - wanted to be elected to lead it?
It is Gore who has brought dishonor to his party and to his party's nominee. The real disgrace is that this repugnant human being once held the second highest office in this great land.
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