There is a thought. A good one. Well turned out by Jonah Goldberg.

Well, I don't buy any of it. There are two kinds of people when it comes to foreign policy after 9-11: those who think we have the luxury to take chances and those who don't.

And that's not even the best part.

For lunch, you had a salad, a smothered pork chop, mashed potatoes, a dinner roll, and cabbage. And a piece of cheesecake for dessert.

And a glass of iced tea so sweet it could induce insulin shock.

And it cost $5.00.

And by the register, there is a card you can take, encouraging you to reelect a man named "Hoot."

About Allah.

I have had comments today from two eminences of the blogosphere - James Lileks and Donald Sensing.

Either that, or somebody is funning with me.

UPDATE: Checking the IP on the Lileks comment, it resolves to "Star Tribune Newspaper" = must be real!

Read this:

RESTON -- A stand-off in Reston has ended with police discovering a dead man inside a home. The trouble began around 10 a.m. when a Fairfax County sheriff's deputy tried to serve an eviction warrant at a house on Lakeport Way.

The deputy heard what he believed to be a gunshot, and that started a stand-off that lasted about five hours.

Police finally went into the house and discovered the body. A spokeswoman could not immediately say if the gunshot the deputy heard was the man killing himself.

No police or deputies were hurt.

This took place about 300 yards from where I ate lunch today. While I ate lunch, before and after, too, as it was a 5 hour event. An eviction gone bad, a gunshot, no injuries to police. Okay.

However, when I left lunch, I drove past the entrance to Lakeport Way. There were, easily, 40 police cars there. A dozen motorcycle cops. A half dozen news crews. The bomb squad truck. The Crisis Negotiation Team bus. The Fairfax County Tactical Headquarters bus. The major road in front was closed for 2 hours - just after I passed by.

Either there is a lot more going on than this story reports, or it was a real slow day at the police station.

Tuesday Bleats are an issue for Lileks because he has 4 deadlines for Tuedays. Today, he fisks the Hokey Pokey.

And then he touts the marketing hype of the new Mac OS. People lining up for an OS! I guess he has forgotten all about the release of Windows 95 (The Best Buy in Augusta, Georgia, opened up at midnight that day so people could buy the new OS). Hype and marketing are supposed to be one of the reasons why Microsoft is evil. But now that Mac does it, its all good.

Andrew Sullivan writes this morning:

There's not much point in sugar-coating what happened. It was a great victory for the Baathists and international terror. If they can keep this up, the chances of a peaceful reconstruction in Iraq look more remote than they did last week. Why? Not because this was that sophisticated an attack, but because it was relatively unsophisticated. Not so much because the Baathists can win, but because they don't have to. All they have to do is prevent the coalition from winning, which keeps Iraq in limbo, and tilts American public opinion against the war. I'm not an expert but obviously we need a more successful military strategy to defeat these insurgents.

Well, there is no point in sugarcoating it - it was bad people doing bad things. (Sorry for the simplisme.) But there is no point in hyping it, either - this was no "victory" for Baathists or al Qaida or whoever was behind it. It was not an attack on the US (or the Coalition) or our interests. It was an attack on Iraqis and international relief organizations. These were soft targets because the hard targets - us - are too expensive for them to go after in force. The President is right about this - it is a measure of their desperation. They truly fear that we are winning with the Iraqi people - and that is why they attacked them.

UPDATE: Michele gets it.

And this pisses Mike off.

Donald Sensing gets it, too.

Dozens dead. Hundreds hurt. An ambulance used to blow up the Red Cross.

Any questions about who the bad guys are again?

Looks like DoD is getting on the ball. Rich Galen, publisher of Mullings, is off to do some good work. As Rich writes:

My principal duties will involve helping Americans understand better the work which is being successfully accomplished in Iraq.

As an example, a Civil Affairs Reserve unit from Chicago was recently the subject of a Stars & Stripes article for the work they did rebuilding an elementary school which had been looted and ransacked just off the Baghdad Airport property.

On the first day of school, the children arrived in their best clothes and took turns thanking the soldiers after which the principal presented the company commander with a bouquet of flowers.

If I had been on the ground and operational, we would have taken a camera crew to the first day of school, put together a package, and fed it back to Chicagoland TV stations.

That isn't spin, it isn't deception, though I suppose in the most technical sense, it is propaganda. It is getting the message out that good things are happening. And it is a spectacularly good idea. Excerpt from what I wrote on July 22d:

We are making great progress in the War on Terror, but the story of "soldier killed in an ambush" every other day sounds like we are losing the battles - in the absence of another story.

This is not just the President's problem. This is the Army's problem, or more accurately, CENTCOM's problem. In the absence of a story of a win, stories of losses will proliferate. And while long term we are making a difference in Iraq, without concrete achievements, people who don't spend a lot of time thinking about it may not grasp the larger story. Concrete achievements like today's firefight that killed Saddam's sons.

Obviously those events cannot be planned that way. They can't announce "next Tuesday we will capture or kill Saddam Hussein." But they can establish modest goals for the near term that can be achieved and shown to be victories. Things that have to be done and would be done anyway. But that happen now unheralded.

posted by blaster at 12:29 AM | Comments (0)

This time I am off to Mississippi. Any bloggers in the Columbus, MS, area?

Click to make it biggerer.

James Taranto links to Frank J. Well deserved, but I like this better:

* The partial-birth abortion ban has passed the Senate and Bush said he will sign it. I'm against this. If you can't suck the brains out of baby's head, what rights do we have left?

* And Jeb Bush stopped Terri Schiavo from starving to death. It's a whole "not killing people" epidemic now.

Those dang Bush brothers. Can't make anyone happy. People complain when they kill people, and they complain when they save them.

I am late to the party on this, I know. Everyone is hyperventilating because there is a Christian in the Army. God forbid! At any rate, my thought is that if Saudi funded apologists for terror don't like the Defense Department's intelligence chief, that's a good thing. I mean, I bet the Germans didn't like Patton, either.

And love her or hate her, Ann Coulter gets it.

Or is it just me?

The entry below talks about the terror probe of a network of Saudi charities based in Northern Virginia. I drove by and took a picture of the building the headquarters for the organizations was housed in - apparently gone now:

Not a fortress of doom - just a standard issue suburban office building. About a mile away from what used to be the building for Network Solutions, and near a bunch of other tech companies.

It isn't just the military at Guantanamo that has been infiltrated. It is much bigger than that. The Washington Post story about the Saudi "charities" here in Northern Virginia (first spotted it on Instapundit) made me take a few quick tours of the web. First of all, the addresses of these places from Mapquest (address not actually given in the post article, but easy enough to find). The Safa and SAAR office is less than 7 miles from where I am now sitting. Also among the organizations targeted are the Sterling Management Group, which apparently does a lot of things. Among those things is investments. Looks like they created funds to invest and make money. Could be legit business or money laundering or trying to make money for terrorists. Who knows? At any rate, one of the investments is in Lynuxworks. It appears that it must just be an investment, as there are no Sterling Management people on the board or in the management of Lynuxworks. Which is good, because look at the business Lynuxworks touts - Homeland Security and Defense applications.

That might actually be news. Glenn wrote, "The big news isn't that Saudis are funding terror, which has been obvious for a long time. It's that here -- and with the FBI story from yesterday -- the U.S. government is admitting it." Not exactly - all of these organizations had been targeted by Operation Greenquest in early 2002. This seems to be the results of Greenquest. Another Greenquest target was Ptech, a company raided by the FBI last December. On the board of Ptech was the CEO of Sterling Management Group. I don't think the story is that the government is just admitting it - I think the story is the scope. This could be huge.

Oh, and I guess Mar-Jac Poultry's libel lawsuit isn't going anywhere....

No, not about Easterbrook getting fired from CNN. About the prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, making that speech. You know, the one where he said:

"The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them."

What's the big deal? Honestly, he could be my Congressman! (This is what Jim Moran, D-VA, said: "If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this.") The 9/11 terrorists who attacked the Pentagon lived and obtained their drivers licenses illegally in this district, and bin Laden's brother used to run an Islamic "charity" right down the street from there, so Mahathir might have a constituency.

The blogosphere is almost universally against it. I am too, but I can understand why some Senators voted the way they did. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, for example, said something to the effect that it was very hard to explain to his constituents why US taxpayers should get stuck with the bill when the people who financed Saddam Hussein - namely France, Germany, and Russia - will get paid back.

I understand it, though I don't agree with it. It is a bad idea, as is. And I agree, partly, with John Cole's assessment that it isn't a position to bargain from with Saddam's financiers, but not because it puts us in a position of weakness.

The reconstruction of Iraq has to be done. And it doesn't matter - on reconstruction, anyway - what the weasel position on the debt is. But it does matter here at home. I think we should grant the money for Iraq, but also make it clear that debt relief from the weasels (and Kuwait) must be done. I wouldn't expect all $200B or so to be written off, but I would expect to see at least the $20B we are putting in the kitty matched. But this bill isn't the mechanism to make that happen.

Does anyone remember why Saddam invaded Kuwait? No, not because April Glaspie told him to. Because the Kuwaitis loaned Saddam money, about $25B, for the war against Iran. Hussein wanted that debt forgiven, and the Kuwaitis said no, so he said, fine, I'll get mine.

The Kuwaitis still want that money back. They could write it off and not miss a thing. And as for the weasels, if we said we wouldn't repudiate that debt so we could get their votes on the UNSC resolution, then it was a bad deal, because they still won't pony anything up.

Seems to me that the State Department could really help out by getting some of the creditors to announce their clearing of some of that debt....

I am sure you heard about the boxcutters and other stuff found on the Southwest airliners today. This is from the Southwest Airlines statement on it:

A note in both packages indicated the items were intended to challenge the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoint security procedures.

There is a suspect:

The man, described as a college student, had previously informed the Transportation Security Administration (search ) via e-mail that he planned to put packages on planes in an effort to expose gaps in aviation security.

Hey, we are all concerned about security. But that is just stupid.

This is the kind of thing that erodes my faith. Next up - I expect the ACLU will be defending his actions on First Amendment grounds....

The War on Terror will be long. We obviously have the military might to win, the only question is do we have the will to win. That the leading Democratic candidates don't is a little disturbing, but they are still losers in the grander scheme, so it isn't so bad, and Ted Kennedy is just full of it anyway. President Bush said "We will not tire, we will not falter, we will not fail." And that is my article of faith in this war. That regardless of how things look, regardless of news reports hyping bad events, regardless of stories of Homaeland Security being a joke - regardless of all of that, there is a serious man at the helm, who is pursuing this War on Terror for all of us. We will prevail.

And then I see while perusing LGF:

Yesterday, on the same day three Americans were killed by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza, President Bush once again signed a waiver allowing the PLO to continue operating in the US by granting them an exemption from the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1987.

The link goes to this memorandum:

SUBJECT: Waiver and Certification of Statutory Provisions Regarding the Palestine Liberation Organization

Consistent with the authority vested in me under section 534(d) of the Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2003, Public Law 108-7, I hereby determine and certify that it is important to the national security interests of the United States to waive the provisions of section 1003 of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1987, Public Law 100-204.

The same day that Palestinians targeted and killed 3 Americans. "Allah is in the House" is a joke, but the truth of this joke is almost too painful to bear:

The other glorious development is that the Palestinian mujahedeen have been granted a de facto license to kill Americans. Seriously, kufr, you know it, they know it, Allah knows it, even Bonzo knows it. The world's only hyperpower is not going to bully The World's Most Oppressed People for knocking off a few of its citizens here and there. Allah figures that so long as the killing is confined--for now--to the West Bank and Gaza, he can count on most Americans to shrug and mumble something about how the victims should not have been there, etc.

My faith is a bit shaken. If we do not care to defend ourselves, we do not deserve to survive.

Enjoy the ummah, people.

Amazing how many residents of my blogroll are on Hosting Matters. Lotta folks I can't read now.

UPDATE: Dean Esmay says its a DoS attack.

A massive explosion ripped apart a U.S. diplomatic vehicle in Gaza Wednesday, killing three Americans and wounding one in the first attack on a U.S. target in three years of Israel-Palestinian fighting.

Don't make us angry. You won't like us when we're angry.

I wrote before that the administration needs to get the word out that we are being successful in Iraq. And they are doing just that - major speeches from the President, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld, and Cheney. All of them. And even though I have only seen bits and pieces reported, even on Fox, and even though it is always reported as part of a PR campaign, even on Fox, it seems to be working - Andrew Sullivan thinks that the PR campaign (though he calls it what it is rightly - "the administration's spirited defense of its Iraq policy" - another odd note, when all the Democrats criticize the President, it is never called a PR campaign) is behind the rise in the President's poll numbers. And Susanna at Cut on the Bias notes how mad the mainstream media are getting because the President is going around them. That has to be a good thing.

So, a couple of weeks ago, I criticized the Administration for not having a "spirited defense" of its policies, and now they are out there swinging, and it is working. Good on 'em.

John Cole takes on some more lies. Mike Hendrix has a big ole roundup of them. (I guess we have to give some credit to Al Franken - where would we be without his book?)

* So are we going to beat the crap out of Syria, or are we just going to let Israel do it?

* Israel is also going to bomb Iran. I didn't know there was a race to beat the crap out of terrorist states. We need to get back on the ball before Israel shows us up.

Sweet.

I wondered before what Clark's position on the draft was. We may be getting a clue. He has proposed a "Civilian Reserve." On Fox, they said that it was similar to other volunteer programs, except that people could be mandatorily mobilized. Here is how he put it in his speech:

Under circumstances of grave national emergency, the president would have the authority to issue a mandatory call-up. But this would be exceedingly rare.

Sprinkled throughout his speech are references to national service. Service to the nation is a good thing - I volunteered and served. And national service is one of those mom and apple pie issues that can't be argued against. Compelling people to serve is another thing altogether. Clark couches his programs here in volunteerism, but he said this:

This New American Patriotism recognizes that it's not enough to say you're an American; you have to live it - with action, deed and commitment.

It recognizes that we as Americans owe our strength to certain values and principles - liberty, equality, and the freedom to debate - and it calls on our willingness to sacrifice for those principles.

On its face, this is unobjectionable - the old rights have responsibiities argument. But on closer examination, it is wrong. It is enough just to say you're an American. We get our rights from God, not from government, and certainly not as a reward for being patriotic, newly or otherwise. But then again, this former economics professor believes that this country was founded on the concept of progressive taxation.

Also, Clark says he supports the Kennedy-McCain-Bayh proposed bill on national service, which among other things creates some shorter term enlistments for the military, but does not raise the number of people on active duty, which will actually make it harder to get people onto active duty.

The CNN report on this speech includes this:

This community-service component of the general's platform was honed in large part by Clark's campaign chairman Eli Segal, who in a past life founded and headed President Clinton's AmeriCorps.

Segal has been described as "a key adviser" in shaping the general's upcoming policy speeches, particularly today's remarks on service and volunteerism.

"But Gen. Clark has had his own ideas on national service that he's developed over 38 years," Israel says. "Eli Segal recognizes that Wesley Clark puts a high premium on national service. They're pretty much allied forces in this regard."

Segal pioneered volunteers for pay - now he is behind mandatory volunteerism.

I said before that the draft can become the central issue in the next election. It is important to find out, now, what Clark's position is on it. Charles Rangel has endorsed him and supports reinstating the draft, and these statements certainly make me suspect that Clark does too.

While we are at it, let's look at one that I see around a bit, and that is the whole Dick Cheney said Iraq had nuclear weapons! thing that some people are using to bolster the "imminent threat" claim. Eugene Volokh did a big takedown of that in NRO back in June. In short, the argument is that Cheney said "nuclear weapons" and not "nuclear weapons programs" at the end of a long discussion on nuclear weapons programs. The Vice President could not possibly have meant that Hussein had reconstituted nuclear weapons when we know quite well that Hussein never had them - nuclear weapons - to begin with.

Some of that "psychological pressure," I guess. But even when corrected on that point, the Left still says that, well, Cheney was lying to drum up irrational fear. Hmmm. What exactly did he say?

And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.

Now "we" here is the government of the United States, not a neocon cabal. Did the United States actually believe that Hussein had reconstituted nuclear weapons programs? Well, the National Intelligence Estimate prepared in October of 2002 says this:

Since inspections ended in 1998, Iraq has maintained its chemical weapons effort, energized its missile program, and invested more heavily in biological weapons; in the view of most agencies, Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.

Now we aren't arguing the definition of "is," here. The Vice President said that the view of the United States government was that Iraq had reconstituted nuclear weapons programs, and lo and behold, in the NIE, we find that very same conclusion. In the view of most agencies. Should the President and Vice President have ignored the judgement of most intelligence agencies?Imagine that sitting in the vault and a dirty bomb going off in New York or Washington. What do you think the first inquiry would be?

The question, it answers itself.

If you haven't stumbled across Allah is in the House yet, get over there quick. You'll be hooked by the very first paragraph:

What is happening today, infidels? Everywhere Allah goes he is surrounded by Italians. Has the United Federation of Organ Grinders called a strike or something? No matter. The point of Allah's blog is not to make gratuitous ethnic slurs; the point of Allah's blog is to make ethnic slurs in a carefully constructed narrative framework.

Also added Michael Ubaldi's uBlog - I had followed it for awhile, then lost it in the streams of the blogosphere, and got reacquainted through the comments sections. Into the blogroll so it doesn't get lost again.

In the Independent. Purportedly a scorecard on the state of Iraq after 6 months. It appears to be a mixed bag, some good, some bad. But some of the bad are, well, lies.

Child deaths

Infant mortality has nearly doubled since the war. An independent survey last month showed 103 child deaths per 1,000 live births compared with 57 deaths per 1,000 in 2002.

Hmmm. What an astounding statistic! I mean, I thought that the US was killing Iraqi children with sanctions (funny, the world didn't think that multilateral action was all that justified, either), so it seems strange that child deaths have doubled in the past 6 months. So let's see what the Independent had to say during the sanctions:

The number of babies and young children dying in Iraq has doubled since the Gulf conflict and the introduction of United Nations sanctions.

Hmmm. The details of the article are pay archives, so a similar report from the BBC at the same time - which is free - supplies the details:

They found that in south and central Iraq, infant mortality had risen to 108 per 1,000 between 1994 and 1999, while child mortality - covering those between one and five years - rocketed from 56 to 131 per 1,000.

So, yes, that is 1999, maybe things got that much better by 2002. Looking up the infant mortality rate in Iraq, we find that the CIA World Fact Book reported that infant mortality was indeed 57 deaths per 100 live births in 2002. However, the Independent says that infant mortality rate was 57 last year, but the child mortality rate was 103 after the war in Iraq. Infant and child mortality rate are not the same thing. If you look at the World Health Organization statistics for Iraq, we see that the child mortality for Iraq in 2001 show males at 122 and females at 11, or an average of 117 or so. So comparing actual child mortality to child mortality, we are looking at an improvement of better than 10%!

And now other lefty outlets like Mother Jones are spreading the lie.

And then there is this one:

Education

Iraq has 15,000 schools and 1.5m secondary school pupils. The United States says 7,000 schools needed repair before the war. So far, 175 have been repaired.

Well, that doesn't sound right, either - I've heard that the 101st has done more than 175 alone. According to Paul Bremer:

Six months ago, all of Iraq's schools were closed. Today, Bremer said, all 22 universities and 43 technical institutes and colleges, as well as almost all primary and secondary schools, have reopened their doors. The coalition exceeded by 500 its goal of rehabilitating 1,000 schools by the time school opened, he said.

So in this "mixed" report card, we find egregious errors, and all on the negative side. If there were no bias, then shouldn't we be seeing mistaken articles talking about how great is in Iraq, too?

One would think that the Left would have plenty of issues to campaign on without making them up. Making up your opponents argument and then refuting it is called attacking a strawman (look, a quote from Lileks on that page!). And speaking of Lileks, today's Bleat is about that mischievious little FBI agent Colleen Rowley, who is so publicly - i.e., in the op-ed pages - critical of her superiors. Being critical gets Ms. Rowley plenty of attention, so coherence in her criticism is not a necessity. Before, she was concerned that Justice wasn't doing enough to catch the Muslim terrorists. Now, however, what gets attention is hating on Ashcroft and the rest of the Bush administration, so now we are doing too much. Among the things she trots out:

It didn’t matter whether you were a career FBI agent, a decorated war veteran, a duly elected congressman or senator, a military general or even a former president, you were labeled a traitor for voicing any criticism of administration policies.

Just like the "imminent" thing, the Left likes to use this to club the Administration, but, just like the "imminent" thing, I have never, ever seen any cites of this actually happening. Noone is called a traitor, or unpatriotic, for "dissenting." Whenever I ask people for an example, I get the same answer we see on "imminent" - it's a "feeling," or an "impression." Jonah Goldberg took this on a few days ago:

But these guys never provide any examples of what they're talking about. It's as if they think everyone who reads them already agrees with them. And, come to think of it, that might be largely true. Regardless, besides one campaign ad against former-Senator Max Cleland in Georgia, which was certainly defensible on the merits, I can't even think of a serious example offered by the Left to back up their constant whining about how their patriotism is being questioned. I loathe these sorts of arguments: but sometimes it's hard not to think that they're complaining so much because they've got something to be insecure about.

This idea is apparently the centerpiece of Wesley Clark's presidential campaign - the tagline on his website is "New American Patriotism," which Clark defines like this:

"We need a new spirit, a new kind of, a new American patriotism in this country. … [T]his new spirit of patriotism should be dedicated to the protection of our rights and liberties. … In times of war or peace, democracy requires dialogue, disagreement, and the courage to speak out. And those who do it should not be condemned but be praised."

Unfortunately, Clark still hasn't answered the question about what he would do for a threat that actually exists - and how he would go about winning the War on Terror.

Those guys are so going to lose.

I watched Senator Jay Rockefeller on Fox News Sunday this morning - what amazing, I dunno, chutzpah, he displayed. He said that Iraq wasn't an imminent threat like the President said it was, and Tony Snow challenged him on that, saying the President never said it was. Snow also put up the Senator's own words from last October, where the Senator said Iraq was an imminent threat. And Rockefeller said that he said that because of the President's speech. Of course, the speech was made in January, after the Senator's comments.

Liar.

As soon as Fox News get's the transcript up, I'll excerpt and link it.

UPDATE: Dang, this is frustrating. The link for the transcript has been up on foxnews.com since about 11 o'clock, and it still goes to a 404 at midnight.

UPDATE II: I would be remiss if I didn't mention Andrew Sullivan has been on this thing all week.

UPDATEThe transcript is up!

So John at Aarghhh!!! links to a SGT Hook photo montage set to the lyrics of Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water." I took the liberty of making it real, and Top approves, so I am offering it up here.

Probably a right click and "Save As" is your friend here. I am working on it for you Mac people.

UPDATE: You can also download it over at Aargghhh!!!

UPDATE II: Aargghhh!!! has the other one up, too. I haven't posted it here, yet.

UPDATE III: Now I have. For Mac people, I am having trouble converting to a decent file size .mov and .mpg are still extravagantly big. Any ideas, Macsters?

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you should be. Tomorrow's (sometimes he posts early) is an excellent example.

I wrote before that the Democrat candidates who were running on Iraq (falsely reported) bad news were expecting nothing to change. Rich Galen makes the point that the same is true on the economic front.

Bring 'em on.