Captain's Quarters -

The Left has long held up the Balkans intervention as a model for American intervention -- low footprint, low investment, and practically ignored, although like the Iraq War, also unsanctioned by the UN and actively opposed by Russia and China. They claim that the use of overwhelming force in Iraq has created a "training ground for terrorists" and that American troops only add to the recruitment of more terrorists. I expect, then, an explanation of how this differs from the recruitment and training of mujaheddin in Bosnia, where Islamists have built cells specifically to infiltrate heavily Caucasian nations for terrorist activities:

In particular, Islamic radicals are looking to create cells of so-called white al Qaeda, non-Arab members who can evade racial profiling used by police forces to watch for potential terrorists. "They want to look European to carry out operations in Europe," said a Western intelligence agent in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and Montenegro, adjacent to Bosnia. "It's yet another evolution in the tools used by terrorists."

Parts of the Balkans, stuck in lawless limbo after years of war in the 1990s, are ripe recruitment territory for Middle East radicals, intelligence officials say. Bosnia is still divided among Muslim, Croat and Serb population areas, even if nominally united under the 10-year-old Dayton peace agreement that ended ethnic warfare.

Muslim enclaves in Serbia are restive, and Muslim-majority Kosovo remains an estranged province campaigning for independence six years after NATO bombing forced out Serb-dominated Yugoslav troops. The Balkans have long been a freeway for smugglers of cigarettes, drugs, weapons and prostitutes. "All the conditions are present. Embittered Muslims, arms, corruption -- everything underground operators need to get established," said the Western intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The real quagmires have come from inaction, from an inability or an unwillingness to face unpleasant tasks in resolving international disputes. The Balkans have been left to sit for over a decade now with no permanent resolution of the political disputes which led to their civil wars -- over 600 years of them -- and only by the intervention of a bombing campaign did the combatants get pushed into their corners. The lack of direction over the remaining period of time has allowed the depleted Islamists in the area to rebuild and redirect their efforts not so much against their local enemies, but against the West in general.

The same held true in Iraq for a dozen years. We allowed Saddam to remain and for the status quo to exist in a fugue state, through sixteen ultimately meaningless UN Security Council resolutions demanding Saddam's compliance on disarmament and recognition of human rights. During that time, Saddam simply allowed the infrastructure of Iraq to rot, keeping as much money as possible for himself in order to finance his own security and well-being at the expense of the people, especially the Shi'a. (He couldn't reach the Kurds after the end of the Gulf War, thanks to Anglo-American protection.) He hosted Islamist conferences openly attended by al-Qaeda leadership and welcomed terrorists such as Abu Nidal and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to Baghdad to live openly, for a time without fear of capture or deportation. Saddam openly paid the families of suicide bombers for their craven acts of murder, and we failed to respond until March 2003, after twelve years of dithering over what to do with Iraq.

Waiting around for difficult choices to magically get swept away clearly doesn't work. The creation of Iraq as a terrorist recruitment ground happened because we lacked the political will to finish Saddam and his sociopathic sons in 1991. Bosnia and Kosovo have turned into Islamist training grounds for Caucasian terrorists because we intervened in a fight without a clue as to the terms of the civil war, which side fought for which principles, and what to do with them after the shooting stopped. In Iraq, we had a plan, which we have followed relentelessly: create democratic structures, get the people to start voting for their own native government, and create a native security force that will eventually become strong enough to defend it -- and only then do we leave. In Kosovo, no one can even say whether the province should be independent, let alone what kind of government and security force should develop there. No wonder the natives are restless! After six or ten years of limbo, who wouldn't be?

The Iraq model shows what happens when the Americans manage the post-war process. We may experience some hiccups, but we push for progress and execute a plan for long-term success. When we leave it to the UN to manage, as happened in the Balkans, the committee approach only defends the status quo and never makes a decision to move forward towards a resolution. That approach leads to disaster, as the terrorist infiltration of the Balkans clearly shows.

The House condemns the government for its arrogance in refusing to compromise with the opposition parties over the timing of the next general election and for its 'culture of entitlement,' corruption, scandal and gross abuse of public funds for political purposes and, consequently, the government no longer has the confidence of the House.

The above words finally brought down the Liberal government in Canada on Monday evening, a stunning indictment by all three opposing political parties of Liberal involvement in the Sponsorship Programme scandal and its various attempts to dodge responsibility for corruption and abuse of power. While the no-confidence motion itself sounds surprisingly harsh – originally, the parties agreed on simpler language that just expressed a loss of confidence – the fall of the Liberal government comes as no surprise to anyone who has followed the developments in Canadian politics over the past month.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t include the American media, which has consistently ignored the scandal and the events north of its border. The morning papers all reported on the fall of the Canadian government, of course. They did manage to notice when the entire forest fell, but they missed each single tree as it occurred. And if the American media doesn’t hear a tree fall in the forest, it’s as if the forest itself doesn’t exist.

The New York Times, for instance, reported on the fall of the government but wound up giving as much coverage to Prime Minister Paul Martin’s hysterical slander charges against Conservative leader Stephen Harper (two paragraphs) as they did the entire Adscam scandal at the heart of the no-confidence motion. Speaking of forests and trees, the Times did manage to mention the softwood tariff dispute in its report, gave a paragraph to the Liberal platform without mentioning anything about the Conservative position, and assumed that the Liberals would win a minority government again. The Washington Post didn’t even bother to write its own copy on the collapse, posting a wire service story in its on-line version instead. Instead of in-depth reporting and analysis, we have received the most superficial of coverage possible without missing the story entirely.

And two days later ... the story has completely disappeared from the American media. It's as if the Toronto Star reported in August 1974, "Today the President of the United States resigned. He has been dogged by reports of complicity in a politically-motivated burglary two years ago at a Washington business park," giving no coverage before or after to the worst political scandal of its largest trading partner.

Bloggers have long since outreported the American major media on the developments in Canadian politics. Captain’s Quarters may have helped get the ball rolling for American interest in Canadian politics, but in the months since the Gomery testimony blew the story open in April, bloggers both north and south of the 49th parallel have kept readers engaged in the story. And the significance of the collapse has not been lost on those who have faithfully watched the workings of the complicated four-party political machinations since the spring. When the estimable blogger-journalist Austin Bay comments that Martin has become the “Nixon of the North”, American media consumers may realize that they have missed a major story thanks to the apathetic nature of the response from domestic news agencies to the scandal.

The no-confidence motion should not have taken anyone by surprise. The Conservatives originally tabled the motion on Thanksgiving, giving the media some catch-up time to bring Americans up to date on the political situation. Did they bother to apprise their constituencies of the alignment of the different opposition parties? Have any of them analyzed the Gomery Inquiry report itself, or even bought an analysis from one of the Canadian newspapers? Or have they shown their usual disdain for anything north of the border, as if our neighbors above the parallel have become completely irrelevant?

Canada’s relevance, despite the American media’s judgment, will only grow more significant as Islamofascist terror remains focused on the US and China grows into a more traditional opponent on the international stage. Before this week, the last time the Canadian government got much mention at all was when they started negotiating with Beijing on a sweetheart oil deal that eventually fell through. Most Americans probably don’t realize that the US imports more crude from Canada than Saudi Arabia, running neck and neck with Mexico for top honors. Their proven oil reserves come second only to Saudi Arabia in the global market. Shouldn’t the stability and direction of the Canadian government concern Americans on this key issue alone?

How about border policy? Much attention got paid to the latest speech by George Bush on protecting the southern border and on illegal immigration. However, Canada and the US share the largest undefended national border system in the world – and we need an active partnership with Ottawa to keep Islamists from exploiting that system. That means we need to influence Canadian immigration policy, or at least stay aware of the direction in which their governments take it to ensure that terrorists cannot easily enter either country, and transit in either direction to hit North American targets. The issue gets some mention from Republican hard-liners for whom immigration remains the most important domestic issue, but it doesn’t equate into any interest or reporting on how Canadians feel about border protection.

What positions do the four major political parties take on immigration? Border security? Cooperation with America on continental defense issues? The media has had all weekend to start informing American readers and viewers about the answers to these questions. In fact, they have had months to bring their customers up to date on the politics and the policies of our closest ally, since Adscam first threatened to take the Liberal executive down in May.

Managing those issues with a stable and reasonably clean government in Ottawa would have its challenges. Watching the Martin government fall due to its corruption of the Sponsorship Programme should concern us. Will a new election push the Canadians farther to the European position on Iraq? Does the emergence of Bloc Quebecois as a partner to the Conservatives signify greater autonomy for Quebec if the Tories win the upcoming election, a move which might anger Alberta enough to start its own separatist movement?

Americans should have at least some idea of the issues that this election and the fallout of Adscam will have on Canadian politics. The failure of the American media to cover our closest ally could have disastrous consequences for American security and economic growth. If the media takes itself as seriously as it claims when dismissing citizen journalists as unresourced, narrowly-focused political zealots, then perhaps they should look outside their own telescoped version of global politics as a continuum between Washington DC, Turtle Bay, Brussels, and Baghdad. The upcoming election cycle in Ottawa gives them the perfect opportunity to remedy their Canadian political illiteracy and move us closer in understanding to our most strategic trading and security partner.

If not, then the blogosphere may well serve them with yet another no-confidence motion of our own.

A new poll by AP-Ipsos, based on a survey done during the debate over the no-confidence motion, shows that the Liberals have dropped into a dead heat with the Conservatives on a national basis. This data has not received wide release -- in fact, I had to buy a membership at Ipsos in order to see the data. Based on a sample of 1,000 adults -- a sampling type that normally would overreport Liberal support -- the results surprisingly mirror those of the private Robbins Research poll taken earlier this month. Both parties get 31% of the national vote, and NDP picks up 18%. BQ gets 14%, all of it from Quebec.

However, the details have to disturb Liberals who hope to return to power in the next Commons. Their support base in Ontario appears to have seriously eroded. Earlier polls show that the Liberals once enjoyed a double-digit lead in their power base. Now that lead has collapsed into a statistical tie with the Conservatives, 37%-35%. The NDP appears to have taken advantage of Liberal slippage, moving up to 21% support in the province. The Tories now outstrip the Liberals in British Columbia, where the Liberals had made inroads in provincial voting last March; the Tories have a 34%-28% advantage on the West Coast province. Liberals only have an outright plurality in the Maritimes; they lead the Tories 24-7 in Quebec but get trounced by Conservative partner Bloc Quebecois, 58-24, showing that the Liberals can expect to lose seats in the region most touched by Adscam.

If these trends continue, it would appear that the Tories will have a chance to form a minority government in January. I'll keep a close eye on the polling and the subsidiary results. If anyone wants to toss in some loose change to help support the Ipsos membership, my Paypal link is on the sidebar.

UPDATE: I received an update and correction from Ipsos, which has been terrific in terms of customer service already:

First, AP doesn't do any political polling in Canada, with the exception of their quarterly Globus poll. Rather Ipsos Reid is the pollster of record for the CanWest News Service and its flagship news broadcast Global National News and flagship daily the National Post. All of these polls, including the one you quoted, are reported in these outlets which have national audiences here in Canada. In addition, we release the results over a national wire service and post the results to our website. FYI Ipsos Public Affairs is the polling partner of the AP and conducts regular political tracker polls in the U.S. So Ipsos Reid does Canadian political polling for CanWest and Ipsos Public Affairs does U.S. political polling for the AP. Hope this helps ...

Happy to add the correction, and thanks for the assistance!

My good friend Kevin McCullough has a great idea going at his blog. Since the ACLU seems intent on taking Christmas out of the holiday season, he wants to get as many bloggers to promote his idea to teach them what the season really means. His idea? Have as many readers as possible send Christmas cards to the New York office of the ACLU:

We are excited to be launching the opportunity today...between now and Christmas we are asking you to send the ACLU direct "MerryChristmas" cards.

And we aren't talking about these generic "happy holiday" (meaning nothing) type of cards...

Go get as "Christmas" a Christmas card as you can find... something that says.. "Joy To The World", "For Unto Us A Child Is Born", but at least "Merry Christmas", put some of your own thoughts into it, sign it respectfully and zip it off in the mail to:

ACLU
"Wishing You Merry Christmas"
125 Broad Street
18th Floor
New York, NY 10004

Be nice -- we want to show the Grinches why Christmas is a positive event, not leave rude impressions. Just make sure that the card specifically mentions "Christmas".

Sincerity, filmmaker Samuel Goldwyn once said, was the most important quality for an actor; once one learned to fake it, everything else came easy. Unfortunately, in real life credibility is a commodity that cannot withstand fakery once exposed. The question for the Pentagon in the past day is whether Army and/or Marine Corps brass have paid off Iraqi newspapers to carry articles written by American servicemen under false pretenses as news stories for the Iraqi public, trying to spin the war to American advantage:

As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq.

The articles, written by U.S. military "information operations" troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor, according to U.S. military officials and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

Many of the articles are presented in the Iraqi press as unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists. The stories trumpet the work of U.S. and Iraqi troops, denounce insurgents and tout U.S.-led efforts to rebuild the country.

Though the articles are basically factual, they present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments, officials said. Records and interviews indicate that the U.S. has paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of such articles, with headlines such as "Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism," since the effort began this year.

The operation is designed to mask any connection with the U.S. military. The Pentagon has a contract with a small Washington-based firm called Lincoln Group, which helps translate and place the stories. The Lincoln Group's Iraqi staff, or its subcontractors, sometimes pose as freelance reporters or advertising executives when they deliver the stories to Baghdad media outlets.

On one hand, it's easy to dismiss this as a tempest in a teapot. What we're talking about with this kind of effort is propaganda, and in a war on terrorism, this could be one of the least lethal battlegrounds we'll face -- but one of the most important. The terrorists certainly understand the way to play this game. They've faked news during the war to gain advantage, usually by spreading rumors about the treatment of people under our protection but also in posing as victors in battles that never took place. Once such incident apparently occurred today, when al-Qaeda used staged video to transform a single hit-and-run operation with a single RPG into some type of capture of Ramadi from several thousand American troops.

The problem with propaganda is that it only works for a short time, until it gets discovered. When that happens, the propagandist soon discovers that their ability to tell the truth has been hopelessly compromised. No one will believe them. Any number of examples will suffice, but the one with whom Americans will have the most familiarity is Baghdad Bob, the mouthpiece of Saddam who claimed that Americans were nowhere near Baghdad, that the Iraq Republican Guard was in the process of slaughtering them on the outskirts of the city, and that they would never be able to hold the city once it fell.

In order for our long-term relations with the Iraqi people to remain strong, we must not just be seen as another bull-tosser in a long line of bull-tossers; we need to maintain our credibility. That goes doubly true for the relationship between the administration and the American public, which has the American media as a big enough handicap without adding fake journalism as an additional reason for mistrust. If these charges are true -- and it certainly seems that at least it's partially true -- the use of covertly-sourced journalism could do tremendous damage to the trust we need to keep the Iraqis on our side and to build domestic confidence in our prosecution of the war.

The White House has taken the right steps in this issue. They have started an investigation into the allegations, and they should. The Commander in Chief has to answer for the conduct of the troops and the brass, and Bush has to make sure that everyone has learned from the Armstrong Williams debacle. Anyone who participated in an effort such as the Times described in yesterday's edition should have their career ended. It may not be as egregious as torture, murder, and videotaped beheading, but it destroys our moral authoritiy to lead and govern, and to report the facts. If anyone doubts this, just ask Leni Riefenstahl. Seven decades after shooting films at the behest of her beloved Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, she could never find work again as a documentarian. Credibility rarely survives when truth gets sold as a commodity, Goldwyn's advice to the contrary.

UPDATE: A couple of notes based on reactions from readers. One comment on the post notes that the Allies often used propaganda to fool Germans on military manuevers, especially D-Day. Actually, the military used elaborate ruses for that purpose, spoofing German spies. I don't recall American soldiers writing stories under the by-lines of British journalists and the Americans paying off editors of the dailies to run them as legitimate news articles. If someone has that kind of information on WWII, I'd love to see a link. If we did so with the Germans -- well, of course they were our enemy, where in Iraq we're trying to make the Iraqis our allies, a difficult enough proposition without allegedly corrupting their supposedly independent press. (It's important to remember that these allegations haven't been corroborated yet outside of the LA Times.)

One other reader takes me to task for my objection, saying that almost all news comes from PR releases that get rewritten by staff writers, and that there is no difference. Actually, there is a huge difference. CENTCOM puts out plenty of press releases, all of which would be available to Iraqi journalists to quote at their will for free. What the accusation here is that American soldiers write articles, and the PR firm then pays off the editors to run the stories under someone else's by-line without acknowledging the source or the real writer. Imagine if the LA Times had run articles written by Bill Clinton's staff under the by-line of Ronald Brownstein, or at the Washington Post under Dana Milbank or Walter Pincus. It would have become a huge political meltdown, and rightly so.

A former solicitor general lashed out at Chuck Schumer yesterday for his attack on Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito based on a memo that should never have been released in the first place. Charles Fried, who represented the Reagan administration during Reagan's second term in office and who now teaches at Harvard Law School, said that the memo written by Alito not only provided nothing more than casual advice but also qualified as a privileged document that should have remained sealed:

The former U.S. solicitor general who authored a Reagan-era brief against the abortion ruling Roe v. Wade lashed out yesterday at one of the Democratic senators who will be voting on Judge Samuel Alito for saying the Supreme Court nominee should have told senators about work he did on the brief.

Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School and President Reagan's lead attorney in front of the Supreme Court from 1985 to 1989, told The New York Sun that a 1985 memo in which a 35-year-old Samuel Alito offered him advice in arguing the administration's case against Roe v. Wade does not qualify as the kind of work a nominee should send to the Judiciary Committee for review. ...

"This is a real red herring because the solicitor general's office is a small one," Mr. Fried said. "We all helped each other and looked over each other's work. He had no formal role in writing that brief, and I can't imagine anything sillier than someone taking credit for a brief where that's the role they had." ...

Mr. Fried, who supports abortion rights, said that while he does not think memos from the solicitor general's office should be released, he also thinks Judge Alito was not being furtive in not mentioning his work on the 1985 abortion brief.

"I have never head of anyone who worked in the solicitor general's office who would list all the cases where they wrote memos," Mr. Fried said. "There are hundreds of these. It's just absurd. It's one of these typical cases, and I'm afraid Senator Schumer is guilty of this, that if you can't get someone on the merits, you bring up some phony lack of candor argument. He should be ashamed of himself, but he is shameless. And you can quote me on that."

It looks like the Democrats may try to Estradafy Alito, a silly proposition -- rather, a sillier proposition this time around than when they succeeded with it on Miguel Estrada and failed with John Roberts. In both of those cases, Democrats argued that they needed access to privileged records because neither candidate had an extensive track record as a jurist. Now those arguments have been exposed as unconconsionable intrusions on attorney-client prvilege in their demands of the same kind of release for Alito. This nominee has many years of experience on federal appellate courts and thousands of written opinions establishing his legitimacy and temperament. This attempt by Schumer and the other Democrats reveal a threadbare attempt to find any hook at all on which to drum up phony issues with which to unify the opposition to anyone named by the Bush administration to the bench.

And what of this memo, which relates to work that Alito never even performed himself? The Bush administration didn't authorize its release, and yet it found its way into the National Archives. The New York Sun's Brian Maguire suggests that the release came years ago during the Clinton years as a pre-emptive strike against anyone that a subsequent GOP administration might want to pick for just this position. Alito had been elevated to the federal appellate bench by Bush 41 and was seen as a rising star. Since they had the power to waive privilege at the time, they could easily have done so with a number of documents selectively culled to provide little caches of ammunition for hearings on Alito and others who worked in the White House Counsel or Solicitor General offices.

Schumer has decided once more to go fishing, probably using a map provided by his fellow Senator from New York and her husband to torpedo a well-qualified nominee on the basis of political partisanship. The faux outrage should generate real disgust at Schumer's tactics, not any serious debate on Alito's qualifications for the Supreme Court.

Speaking of shameless ... has Chuck explained how his staff got Michael Steele's credit history yet, and whether any other Republican candidate has to worry about other truly illegal acts against them by the Schumer-led DCCC?

The supposed unity of the Democrats on Iraq continued to unravel further yesterday, with more Democrats speaking out in favor of the cut-and-run strategy favored by Jack Murtha, while others insisted that none of them supported running away from the fight. The Post gives a pretty good scorecard for the confusion which once more bolsters the national perception of a party unworthy to hold responsibility for national security. Nancy Pelosi's wholehearted defection from the lawyerly constructions emanating from the Democratic caucus in the Senate has exposed the Democrats' disarray on an issue which seemed to resonate so well for them until the GOP forced their hand in the House two weeks ago:

For months now, Democratic leaders have grown increasingly aggressive in their critiques of President Bush's policies in Iraq but have been largely content to keep their own war strategies vague or under wraps. That ended Wednesday when Pelosi (D-Calif.) aggressively endorsed a proposal by Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq as soon as possible, leaving only a much smaller rapid-reaction force in the region.

The move caught some in the party by surprise. It threw a wrench into a carefully calibrated Democratic theme emerging in the Senate that called for 2006 to be a "significant year of progress" in Iraq, with Iraqi security forces making measurable progress toward relieving U.S. troops of combat duties. Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said last month that "it's time to take the training wheels off the Iraqi government."

What's more, House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) issued a statement Wednesday that was in marked contrast to Pelosi's. "I believe that a precipitous withdrawal of American forces in Iraq could lead to disaster, spawning a civil war, fostering a haven for terrorists and damaging our nation's security and credibility," he said.

The resulting confusion has led to some pretty amusing moments. The Post quotes Democratic strategist Davd Sirota as calling opponents of immediate withdrawal as "insulated elitists ... most of whom have never served in uniform" and in the same breath hailing the "courage" of Pelosi and Jack Murtha in calling for a retreat. Did Pelosi serve in combat? I had no idea. Perhaps Sirota can explain how it is that he insists that only those who served in uniform have the necessary skills to assess the situation, but then hold Pelosi as an expert and a courageous military analyst.

Also, Jonathan Weisman quotes an anonymous Democratic pollster who tells him that Murtha and Pelosi have convinced themselves that they have their fingers on a grassroots pulse that will elevate the Democrats to victory through retreat. How do they know this? Murtha got a standing ovation at a Starbuck's in Dallas last week. Aren't at least half of the people in a Starbuck's at any one time standing anyway?

John Kerry, predictably, has blown all over the place since the Murtha demand for immediate withdrawal came up again last month. During his presidential campaign, Kerry flirted with all kinds of strategies for the war before coming up with one in the final days that most closely resembled the plan already in place by George Bush -- except that Kerry demanded an increase in American troops. Now, he wants a phased withdrawal, but insists that he isn't asking for a timeline:

Some Democrats continued yesterday to finesse their position. At a White House appearance after an event honoring civil rights leader Rosa Parks, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said: "If you just continue along the road we're going now without a more concrete transfer of responsibility -- a target schedule by which you begin to turn over provinces, by which you specifically begin to shift the responsibility -- I think a lot of people fear that it's going to be more of the same."

He added: "I'm not asking even for the specific timetable of withdrawal. I'm asking for a specific timetable of transfer of authority."

So he's demanding a specific timetable for transfers of authority, which means that we hand over entire provinces to the Iraqis whether they're ready or not -- but that's not the same thing as a specific timetable for withdrawal. No, but it's a great recipe for disaster, especially since the terrorists will simply lay back and gather their strength for the transfer dates rather than continue to get outclassed by the American military. Kerry, as he did so often during the presidential election, talks out of both sides of his mouth and manages to get the worst of both worlds in doing so. Thanks to Pelosi, he will get no credit from the Leftists, and thanks to Joe Lieberman, he still looks like a cut-and-run politician who just knows how to dress it up better than his colleagues.

When did Karl Rove return from his leave of absense, anyway?

It doesn't come up often at CQ, but most long-term readers know that I do not support the death penalty. I respect the enactment of it by the legislatures and feel that the penalties should not be subject to excessive legal and extralegal machinations, however, until such time as the people finally decide to get rid of executions altogether. Up to now, I've left the Tookie Williams controversy to those with more passion about carrying out his sentence, but Eugene Robinson wrote an excellent column for today's Washington Post that sums up my feelings on the subject. Titled "No Special Break For Tookie", death-penalty opponent Robinson lashes out at the celebritization of a thug and murderer by entertainment elite:

Big-time Hollywood stars, including Jamie Foxx, Snoop Dogg and Danny Glover, are leading a high-profile campaign to persuade another big-time Hollywood star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to save the life of a convicted murderer on California's death row named Stanley Tookie Williams. Sorry, but I can't join the glitterati in showing the love.

Williams's case is about the power of redemption, his supporters say, but I think it's more about the power of celebrity. The state shouldn't execute Williams, but only because the state shouldn't execute anybody -- the death penalty is a barbaric anachronism that should have been eliminated long ago, as far as I'm concerned. But it can't be right to save Williams just because he's a famous desperado (or former desperado) with famous friends, and then blithely go back to snuffing out the lives of other criminals who lack his talent for public relations. ...

He was convicted of the 1979 murders of four people in two separate robberies -- convenience store worker Albert Owens, 26; and motel owners Yen-I Yang, 76; Tsai-Shai Yang, 63; and their daughter Yee-Chen Lin, 43. Williams has been on death row since 1981; that he has consistently maintained his innocence of all four killings hardly makes him unique. There's no dramatic new DNA evidence or anything like that to cast doubt on his guilt.

What does make him special, according to his supporters, is that he has been so lavishly repentant about the culture of violence he helped create. ... Of course, there are hundreds of other men on death row who repent of their crimes and would appreciate a little executive clemency, but they don't have movie stars pleading their cases. Oh, and also lacking a publicity machine are the four people Williams was convicted of killing.

Robinson has more faith in real redemption on Death Row than I do, but that's not the basis of my objection to the death penalty anyway. (I don't believe that the state should deliberately kill anyone who presents no imminent danger to the internal peace of society, and an LWOP sentence in a properly run institution should guarantee that.) Whether or not Tookie sincerely repents of his crime to me is immaterial. He committed the crime, and four people are dead because of it -- four murders in two separate crimes, mind you. He did that knowing that the penalty for that action was death and he did it anyway. The people have the right to set that penalty, and it was properly implemented.

I would hope that at some time, the people of California will reject the death penalty. In the meantime, this selection of the Murderer Du Jour to lionize insults those of us who object to its application. I don't oppose the death sentence because I think Mumia got framed or that Tookie is the next Mohandas Gandhi, a truly repellent notion. Tookie Williams is exactly where he should be -- in a maximum-security facility -- and he should die there as well, of old age. He killed four people, four non-celebrities who never did anything to Tookie except stand between him and some cash that didn't belong to him.

(One other point: does anyone else notice that three of four of Tookie's victims were Asian shopowners? Angelenos know what that entails for the gang culture of LA. These weren't just gang-banging murders but hate-crime executions, just the same as the dragging death of James Byrd. I notice Danny Glover and Jamie Foxx aren't clamoring for those murderers to get clemency from the governor of Texas, so why are they arguing for Tookie?)

I don't support the death penalty. Unlike the clueless Hollywood celebrities who manage to hijack this issue, I don't view the condemned as victims and moral guideposts, either. The elevation of Tookie to philosopher disgusts and sickens me, and it undermines the efforts to convince people of the uselessness and overreach of the death penalty.

My new Daily Standard column comes out today, titled "Morning In Canada?", in which I argue that the new elections will stand or fall as a referendum on Stephen Harper. The task for the Tory leader is to go over the heads of the media, a la Ronald Reagan, and deliver a campaign reminiscent of the "Morning In America" effort that won Reagan a landslide:

How likely is a return of Liberal rule after the Gomery disaster? After twelve years of Liberal control, first as a majority and then as the plurality in the Commons, the Tories bear the burden of convincing Canadians to cross the aisle--and Gomery alone may not be enough to break the Liberal hold on power. Stephen Harper, the Conservative leader, has to convince voters that Tories offer more than just a gainsay of Liberal policies. Harper needs to deliver a "Morning in Canada" agenda, one that promises a transformation for the nation.

Two G&M reports from their latest polling offer contradicting prospects on Harper's ability to do that. The first reports that Harper's negatives still remain high; however, it also shows that the positive message has gotten through to Canadian voters. The second development is a trend among minorities to support Conservatives over the Liberals, in some cases because of the latter's support for same-sex marriage. The G&M polling still shows a five-point advantage for Liberals, even with Ipsos and others showing the election at a dead heat, something to consider when reviewing the G&M take on the numbers.

Harper just released his plan for a GST cut, which should boost his numbers in the next round of polling. We'll see if the media reports on those numbers any better than they did with Ipsos.

The military has come forward to explain its actions in the so-called propaganda scandal that erupted earlier this week, the AP reports in a late-breaking news item on ABC. Army spokesman LTC Barry Johnson told Congressional leaders and later the media that the program described in separate articles in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times had not intended for the articles in question to be offered clandestinely under anyone else's by-line. Instead, the contractor, Lincoln Group, had been tasked to pay for advertising and editorial space -- apparently the practice in the nascent Iraqi press -- and offer the articles openly as written by American military personnel to get their stories out to ordinary Iraqis:

Military officials for the first time Friday detailed and broadly defended a Pentagon program that pays to plant stories in the Iraqi media, an effort the top U.S. military commander said was part of an effort to "get the truth out" there.

But facing critics in the United States including lawmakers from both parties the military raised the possibility for the first time of making changes in the program.

"If any part of our process does not have our full confidence, we will examine that activity and take appropriate action," said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a military spokesman in Iraq. "If any contractor is failing to perform as we have intended, we will take appropriate action."

Col. Johnson still isn't sure that Lincoln did anything else other than that. That should get investigated immediately to determine what exactly Lincoln did, but the program itself certainly sounds reasonable. After all, the enemy has used propaganda for its own purposes, and the American media has done a piss-poor job of representing the military's point of view to the world, let alone the Iraqi people. As long as the source of the writing gets proper and true attribution and the payment gets disclosed properly in the custom of the Iraqi market, then it shows some good, creative thinking on the part of the military. If Lincoln did anything else, then they should get fired.

So why use Lincoln at all? Why not just have the Pentagon market the stories to the Iraqi newspapers, paying them directly for the advertising space? Apparently, the planners worried that direct payments would cause retaliatory attacks on the publishers if word got out how the articles got space in the paper. However, that explanation lacks some credibility, as properly attributed articles would expose the relationship between the paper and American military personnel as soon as the articles were read. It sounds more like Lincoln, which has an unrelated $100 million contract with Special Operations Command -- the same outfit that ran Able Danger -- got a sweetheart deal for some extra third-party work.

The explanation seems to take some steam out of the scandal, though. Ted Kennedy still wants a DoD investigation, which appears to agree with the stance taken by the White House and Congress as well. Kennedy says that the program appears to hide the involvement of the American government, and that much does seem to be true. The notion that the Pentagon ran a massive propaganda effort appears to have fallen flat, though.

UPDATE: The Washington Post has more, with a headline that seems a bit misleading ("Military Says It Paid Iraq Papers for News"). The military says it primarily paid for placement of advertising and opinion pieces in accordance with common Iraqi practice for their press. The Post explains the existence of Lincoln as a go-between a bit better, but also reports that Lincoln did have some articles ran under false bylines, apparently against the guidelines of the program:

Officials familiar with the Lincoln Group's contract said it allows the firm to pay to have articles placed in the Iraqi press. The contract reportedly says nothing about disguising the origin of the articles, but some military officers defended the practice as a necessary security measure, to protect the Iraqi journalists used to deliver the accounts and the Iraqi news organizations that print them.

If it were known that the journalists and the news organizations were carrying information provided by the U.S. military, these officers said, insurgents would surely target them. Indeed, at least two of the Iraqi newspapers cited in initial news reports as having printed the articles in question have since received threats from insurgents, according to military officials.

Proponents of such tactics argue that different standards should be applied to what is permissible in a combat zone such as Iraq than, say, in the United States or other stable democracies. Although the idea of the military using covert methods to get favorable information into print appears unethical at home, the argument goes, there are mitigating circumstances justifying such tactics in Iraq.

This still comes back to building credibility with the Iraqi people. The free press in Iraq is a vitally important part of building the democratic structures necessary to make Iraq into a strong and free ally in the Middle East -- an example of how Arabs can lead themselves, without the traditional strong-man rule of dictator or emir. While exploiting newspapers to surreptitiously get out our point of view might seem like a smart tactical move to counter al-Qaeda propaganda, it's probably a huge mistake strategically in the long run. We're already teaching the Iraqis that their press is nothing more than paid mouthpieces for hidden Powers That Be, feeding into the common Arab predilection for grand conspiracies.

We have the resources and the werewithal to get our message out openly to the Iraqi people. We could buy air time on Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, or simply open our own Arabic news service and buy transponder time on their satellite system. The US could operate Radio Free Iraq from inside the country and add broadcast television service. We could use that money to publish our own newspapers, or use it the way the program intended and just make sure that our essays are clearly identified. Private groups like Spirit Of America have been doing this since the fall of Saddam in April 2003; it shouldn't be a mystery to the Pentagon.

This incident hardly qualifies as the scandal of the month, but it does need correcting. America stands for ideals, and one of those ideals is honesty in government -- and right now, we're a vital component of the Iraqi governing structure while the Iraqi security forces rebuild. We want to win this war by transferring the ideals of democracy into the hearts of the Iraqi people and make them believe that they can put them into practice and defend them against their enemies. Undermining them as a short-term tactic might be understandable, but it's unadvisable in the long run. I'd rather focus on the 99% of the Iraqis who aren't insurgents and tell them the truth, than lie to them all and hope that the 1% of the Iraqis comprising the insurgency reads the newspaper.

The Pakistani army reports that one of Osama's lieutenants has hit his jackpot of 72 virgins Thursday after getting blown up with four of his colleagues in North Waziristan. Abu Hamza Rabia, a co-equal of Abu Faraj al-Libi in the AQ executive and rumored to be the fifth-highest ranking member of AQ, ran international operations for Osama bin Laden:

Abu Hamza Rabia, an Egyptian credited with heading al Qaeda's international operations, was among five militants killed in an explosion at a house where they were hiding in North Waziristan on Thursday.

Musharraf, arriving in Kuwait on an official visit, confirmed Rabia had been killed.

"Yes indeed, 200 percent. I think he was killed the day before yesterday if I'm not wrong," Musharraf told reporters.

While officials said the blast was caused by explosives stored in the house for bomb-making, residents said a helicopter fired rockets into the house at a village near Mir Ali in the tribal agency. ...

Intelligence officials earlier on Saturday told Reuters that Rabia was using the alias 'Nawab', and they subsequently intercepted a message passed between militants saying Nawab was dead.

They said Rabia had escaped an attack by Pakistani security forces on November 5 in the same region but eight people, including his wife and children, were killed in that operation.

It doesn't make much difference to me whether Rabia blew himself up or got assistance from the Pakistani Army in dying; his death puts us closer to cutting Osama and Ayman al-Zawahiri completely. The more of these senior commanders that die, the more Osama and Ayman need to stick their necks out to get things done -- and that presents more opportunity to capture and/or kill them.

However, if Rabia did die accidentally from a bomb backfire, it calls into question how much AQ has left in its tank in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Why would a senior commander build his own bombs, dangerous work under the best of circumstances, or even be in the same area where that work took place? With its assets dwindling, AQ in that region may not have any more explosives experts to spare, and so the senior commanders might have to do double duty. If the Pakistani reports are accurate, it looks like AQ has lost its best assets in the region and are barely clinging to life in the border region of Waziristan.

UPDATE: Even better news -- MS-NBC says the CIA took out Rabia:

While Pakistani officials publicly said Rabia died in a blast caused by explosives stored in a house for bomb-making, officials speaking on condition of anonymity told NBC News he was killed by a CIA missile strike carried out by an unmanned Predator airplane.

Pakistan's government has always been reticent to admit that Predators are used in Pakistani airspace to hunt down al-Qaida operatives.

Here's a picture of a calling card from Uncle Sam to al-Qaeda during this holiday season:

If they flip that over, I'd love to think that an inscription says, "You can run, but you can't hide forever." The CIA must have gotten some good intel from a series of captures that followed that of al-Libi earlier. That should shake up the rest of the AQ commanders who think they're tucked safely away in Waziristan, and perhaps get them on the move again -- an opportunity for us to take out a few more.

Kevin Brock, the Deputy Director of the new National Counterterrorism Center, told the AP that al-Qaeda has not established a "significant operational capability" in America since 9/11 -- and the only attempted AQ operation since then fell apart due to the incompetence of its cell leader. Brock also said that while the American effort to secure itself must remain vigilant due to the changing nature of the Islamist threat, the actual effort of terrorist operations have been directed elsewhere:

Brock said he doesn't believe the invasion and war in Iraq can be blamed for the threat reports that come into his center each day. "That would be too simplistic," he said. "There is too much of a diverse nature to these threats."

Had the U.S. not invaded Iraq, Brock said, terrorists would still carry out attacks. "But now they are mostly carried out in Iraq. That is where most of the people willing to commit suicide are going."

That flypaper strategy that has almost disappeared from debate over the past two years apparently worked as planned. We drew AQ into the open in Iraq, because they understand (better than some American politicians) that establishing a democracy in the crossroads of Southwest Asia represented an existential threat to Islamofascism. The AQ 'philosophy', such as it is, argues that the only legitimate way of life for Muslims is to live under brutal and intractable tyrannies appointed by Allah himself, and so are unchallengeable and unaccountable for their brutality. Once democracy shows that Arabs can choose their own leaders and hold them accountable for their actions and simultaneously practice their religion without interference, they will overwhelmingly choose democracy. AQ could not allow that example to establish itself.

So why fight in Iraq, rather than Afghanistan? They tried a stand-up fight in Afghanistan and lost -- badly. They got surprised by the quickness of the American response and the speed in which the Taliban mismanaged the war. They've tried some of the same tactics in Afghanistan that they use in Iraq, but the Afghanis already know what living under the Taliban's rule was like and have no illusions about wanting it to return.

The Iraqis, however, knew what Saddam's secular Ba'athist dictatorship was like, not an Islamic theocracy, which might have had more attraction for Iraqis, at least at first. When AQ attacked Americans, some Iraqis might have supported them. However, as more AQ assets died in that effort, the terrorists turned their attention to Iraqi recruits for security forces and lost any sympathy they may have had.

Now they mostly kill Iraqis while having almost no support even among the Sunni (who favor the native "insurgents" but spurn "foreigners" of any stripe) and don't even pretend to be liberating Iraq any more. They want to stop democracy and explicitly say so, calling it a heretical doctrine. AQ flocks to Iraq to fight us there, because that front matters most now. And if we don't fight them there, AQ would be freed up to attack us anywhere else around the globe -- including here at home.

I'd rather fight them in Iraq and put the democracy in their backyard that even they acknowledge would present a tremendous defeat for Islamofascism. Too bad that some here can't acknowledge what even AQ admits.

We're on the air already -- and we're talking about the necessity of getting the White House to push its successes on a more consistent basis, as well as other topics. If you're in the Twin Cities, tune us in at AM 1280 The Patriot, and if you're outside of the area, you can tune in on our Internet stream at the link. Join the conversation at 651-289-4488!

Tomorrow, I'll be appearing on CNN's Reliable Sources at 9 am ET, talking about the coverage of Bush's Iraq speech and the kerfuffle over the information campaign in Iraq.

Condoleezza Rice will confront European queasiness with covert operations head-on during her tour of EU nations this week, according to the London Telegraph, by staunchly defending American transit of suspected terrorists on CIA chartered flights that sometimes refuel in EU nations. The revelation of such flights and secret detention centers in Eastern Europe caused some consternation among Europeans, who have protested the practice:

Condoleezza Rice, the United States Secretary of State, will urge European governments to back off in the continuing row over alleged secret terrorist detention camps in Eastern Europe and clandestine CIA "prison plane" flights.

Dr Rice, who begins a four-country European tour tomorrow, is preparing a "robust" defence of American treatment of terror suspects, as Washington belatedly comes out fighting on the controversy, senior European diplomats told the Sunday Telegraph.

Although Dr Rice is keen to improve diplomatic relations with Europe, she will use her visit to argue that unorthodox tactics are needed to obtain information from detainees and to prevent terror attacks.

The problem with our European friends and allies is that they still refuse to believe that we're fighting a war. They claim to believe it, but then they act as though one should treat terrorists the same as fugitive bank robbers. Our intelligence services need time and access to get information from the detainees so that we can prevent further attacks, not just on Americans here and in Iraq but on Europeans in London, Madrid, Paris, Vienna, and so on. That intelligence then needs to get checked out in the field and corroborated or disproved to determine whether the detainee has helped or hindered our efforts and to possibly extend the intelligence with more captures of key terrorist personnel.

Publicly identifying the flights on which these transitions occur and the centers where the CIA interrogates the terrorists only will add to the security risks presented. The flights themselves will come under attack, as will the centers. The notion of making those flights public, or simply not moving detainees at all for intelligence review, shows a lack of seriousness on the part of Europeans about the nature and scope of this war. That doesn't exactly come as breaking news to Americans, who have long since resigned themselves to European cluelessness even after two major attacks on European capitals over the past three years. The Brits understand the nature of the war, and most Eastern European nations understand the stakes based on their collective experience of oppression for most of the past 60 years. As for the rest -- they have always preferred to assume the worst about American efforts, and this just presents them with one more opportunity to do so.

Rice needs to make clear that our war effort wasn't designed to make terrorists feel comfortable and imbued with legal options after capture. We need to know what they know as fast as possible, and we're going to continue to make every effort to ensure that. The Geneva Convention does not cover them, and our treatment of them has remained humane; that's as much as they will get. We are fighting this war to win it, not to look good while losing it, and if some Europeans can't deal with that, that will be their problem, not ours.

According to the London Telegraph, the American ambassador to Iraq received administration authorization to review border status with the hard-line Iranian government in an attempt to stabilize the long eastern border between Iraq and Iran. Zalmany Khalilzad will also discuss supressing the Iraqi insurgency and stopping the flow of explosives and weapons from the Islamic Republic, which seems as futile as asking Saddam to remove his army from Kuwait was in 1990:

The American initiative, a further indication that the secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's more moderate diplomacy has replaced the hardline foreign policy of Mr Bush's first term, follows another recent shift of tactics towards Iran.

For the first time, America is offering active support to European and Russian officials in their efforts to end the deadlock with Iran over its nuclear programme, after previously adopting a hands-off approach - to the alarm of prominent neo-conservatives who back regime change in Iran.

They believe that given Iran's track record of duplicity in international negotiations, talks will be futile and interpreted as a sign of American weakness.

Unless the talks are just a sop to European tendernesses, it's difficult to understand this exercise in terms of any real or perceived benefits. The Iranians stoke the insurgencies because they want to make it difficult for American troops to stay in the area, and they understandably want to influence Iraqi development towards their own model of government for their own security purposes. They fought a long, brutal war with Iraq two decades ago and don't want another. They also don't want 160,000 American troops on their border for any reason whatsoever. And those are just the rational reasons.

The new Ahmadinejad regime has taken the mask off of the nature of Iranian rule as implemented by the Guardian Council. Their explicit goals are to wipe out Israel, and afterwards come after the United States. Ahmadinejad held a forum on those topics just a couple of months ago and has steadfastly refused to back down from its implications. We could have issued a diplomatic ultimatum on those points alone, had we desired it and had we any kind of diplomatic contact with Teheran now.

Why should Khalilzad get involved in direct negotiations with such a regime? The only result will be a general perception that we have softened our stance on Ahmadinejad and the mullahcracy for which he fronts. If the Iraqis want to negotiate border issues, then they should do so -- but with their eyes open about the nature of their counterparts. We should refuse to recognize the criminal rule of both Ahmadinejad and his GC enablers and tell the Iranians through the press to either fix their border problems or be prepared to suffer serious consequences. That's as much "dialogue" as we need with the world's biggest state sponsor of terrorism.

I will be on Howard Kurtz' Reliable Sources today at 10 am ET, talking about the so-called propaganda scandal that already seems to have lost steam this weekend and coverage of George Bush's speech on Iraq. I may have given the wrong time yesterday, so be sure to re-check your times. I'll be on with John from Americablog, so we should have some fun with each other.

Also, it looks like my trackbacks might be working again, so give it a shot.

UPDATE: Just got home and watched my segment on the TiVo. Not too bad, I think, and the people at CNN treated me very well. Howard Kurtz gave me plenty of time to talk. As it turned out, John Aravosis and I didn't really disagree that much on the topics involved (I thought John did a good job as well, although I didn't know he was in studio with Howard until later -- I thought he was also connected remotely). We still had a lively conversation, and I hope I can do it again sometime soon. Let me know what you think, if you caught it.

If the Political Teen didn't catch the video, I may try to copy and post it myself.

UPDATE II: The White House apparently agrees with me, according to Stephen Hadley:

President Bush is disturbed by the U.S. military's practice of paying Iraqi papers to run articles emphasizing positive developments in the country and will end the program if it violates the principles of a free media, a senior aide said Sunday.

"He's very troubled by it" and has asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to look into the pay-to-print program, national security adviser
Stephen Hadley said.

"If it is inconsistent with the policy guidance it will be shut down," Hadley said on ABC's "This Week."

Hadley acknowledged there is a need to counter the disinformation campaigns of U.S. enemies in
Iraq. "But the message we need to get out has to be truth and facts," Hadley told "Fox News Sunday."

Even if the stories are factual, "it's got to be done in a way that reinforces a free media, not undermines it," Hadley said.

I think that the program doesn't represent a huge moral or ethical problem the way some bloggers have pushed it. However, I think it will prove detrimental to our long-term strategy of creating a model democracy to change the dynamic of the Middle East. Part of that mission means supporting the establishment of an independent media. The Middle East is filled with news outlets that wind up as mouthpieces for different hidden powers -- we don't need to create more of the same. If we need to create more opportunities to get our message out, we have the resources to do it properly and above-board.

UPDATE III: I will be on the air with the guys at Pundit Review tonight at 8:20 ET, so I have the opportunity to do two classy shows in one day. Be sure to tune in over the Internet and call your questions into the show!

UPDATE IV: I had a blast on Pundit Review tonight -- I hope plenty of CQ readers got a chance to listen to the show. Let's hope that bloggers all over make this a regular Sunday night download! Also, the Political Teen did get the CNN video, and CNN has the transcript up at its site (h/t: Newsbeat1).

Okay, I had planned on mostly staying out of the Christmas Wars this season, a madness where "Happy Holidays" has now reached the status of a war cry. However, while the First Mate and I went out for our first whack at Christmas shopping, we stopped for lunch at Applebee's. They had a music channel on that rotated through various holiday songs, mostly pleasant if forgettable pop covers of the classic carols.

One, however, couldn't be forgotten if we tried. Right in the middle of the last chorus of the song, the singer paused and added "Happy Kwanzaa" in the pause.

The song? Incredibly, it was "The Christmas Song" -- you know, the one that starts, "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire..." I don't know the artist who provided this cover, but the irony and the stupidity made me laugh out loud, while the FM's jaw dropped, aghast. Here's the chorus:

And so I'm offering you a simple phrase
To kids from one to ninety-two
Though it's been said many times many ways
Merry Christmas ...
Happy Kwanzaa ...
Merry Christmas ... to you.

What's next? "The Little Drummer Boy" playing his drums for Caeser Augustus? Give me a break. The song itself refers to Santa being on his way -- hardly a reference to Kwanzaa. Can we just sing Christmas carols, even these secular ones, for what they are? Especially one specifically named for the holiday?

UPDATE: CQ reader Dan notes that the Christmas carol madness continues, although along an entirely different front:

It's pretty bad. Especially considering at my 'conservative' christian college, (Whitworth College, Spokane, Washington) the Whitworth Choir is required to sing, "God rest ye merry *people*."

Never mind tradition. We don't wanna rankle people with a *sexist* Christmas Carol. What's next?

- “Frosty the Snowperson?”
- “I’m dreaming of a multicultural Christmas?”
- “Rudolph the differently-abled Reindeer-American?”
- ’Jolly’ Mature Morally-Gifted Nicholas?”

Dreaming of a multicultural holiday, Dan. Back to the Gloria Steinem Re-education Camp for you! (And wasn't it "Rudolph the Recovering-Alcoholic Reindeer"?) Seriously, Dan, thanks for the laughs and hang in there.

The BCS has announced the game lineups for the major bowls this season, and the big news isn't that the USC Trojans will meet the Texas Longhorns for the national championship; that merely fulfills a foregone conclusion after yesterday's results. No, the big news is the return of Notre Dame to the ranks of the major bowls with an invitation to the Fiesta Bowl to face the Ohio State Buckeyes on New Years Day:

In his rookie season as Notre Dame coach, Weis has the Fighting Irish (9-2) in the BCS for the first time since they lost the 2001 Fiesta Bowl 41-9 to Oregon State. They automatically qualified for a spot by finishing sixth in the BCS standings.

"I think it's a great tribute to our coaching staff and our players that they were able to turn it around that fast," Weis said.

While some complain that Notre Dame has bulked up this season on a weak schedule and gets too much credit for a 34-31 loss to USC, the Fighting Irish are college football's top drawing card.

The only people who don't appear to appreciate this matchup are Oregon fans, who complain that they have one more win than Notre Dame and Ohio State and should get a BCS matchup. They should talk to the writers who rank the teams -- or better yet, take their complaints to the NCAA. They have yet to explain why Division III teams have a playoff system but their top division somehow can't survive with a rational post-season system. In my opinion, the NCAA could easily build a 16-team or 32-team playoff system that allows for all division champs and a limited number of at-large teams to play in the bowl games as rotated by the BCS now.

The other conflicted person is Hugh Hewitt, whose beloved Buckeyes play against his favorite Fighting Irish. I knew that this dissonance would drive Hugh crazy, and indeed it has. He has adopted the Jerry Brown Fan Rationing System, only rooting for the Irish on even-numbered days, while cheering for the Buckeyes on odd-numbered days. That means on January 1, he will be backing Ohio State instead of God's Own Team. He may forgive Hugh, but the Irish will make Hugh serve a difficult penance on New Years Day.

Step back from the brink, Hugh. We're here to help.

John Hawkins has announced the results of the 2005 Warblogger Awards at Right Wing News. A stellar cast from the blogosphere has reviewed the bloggers under consideration, and CQ ended up in the top ranks in a couple of different categories. Thanks to all the bloggers who voted for CQ! (And a big thanks to John Hawkins for creating and hosting this set of awards.)

UPDATE: I have been nominated for Best Blog in the 2005 Weblog Awards at Wizbang. This poll allows voters to cast their selections for their favorite blog once every 24 hours. Check out the competition -- I'm up against some brilliant bloggers -- and make your selection every day until the 15th. And drop Kevin Aylward a note thanking him for all his work in setting up the Weblog Awards.

The Navy has determined that it must start expanding its shipbuilding immediately, after years of drastic reductions in the post-Cold War era has left the service at half of its peak strength. The New York Times reports that even a modest increase in ship-building may not get the necessary funding from Congress, however:

The plan by Adm. Michael G. Mullen, who took over as chief of naval operations last summer, envisions a major shipbuilding program that would increase the 281-ship fleet by 32 vessels and cost more than $13 billion a year, $3 billion more than the current shipbuilding budget, the officials said Friday.

While increasing the fleet size is popular with influential members of Congress, the plan faces various obstacles, including questions about whether it is affordable in light of ballooning shipbuilding costs and whether the mix of vessels is suitable to deal with emerging threats, like China's expanding navy.

"We are at a crisis in shipbuilding," a senior Navy official said. "If we don't start building this up next year and the next year and the next year, we won't have the force we need." The officials would not agree to be identified because the plan had not been made public or described to members of Congress.

The Navy's fleet reached its cold war peak of 568 warships in 1987 and has been steadily shrinking since then. Admiral Mullen's proposal would reverse that, expanding the fleet to as many as 325 ships over the next decade, with new ships put into service before some older vessels are retired, and finally settling at 313 between 2015 and 2020.

The Navy will never get back to its former strength, thanks to the wholesale destruction of entire fleets of ships as part of the "peace dividend" that we took, primarily in the 1990s. Most of those ships had remained in service too long, but the Navy never got enough money to sufficiently replace them before the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union. Instead, many had gone through extensive refits, making their retirement a rather easy decision at the time.

Now that we have all discovered that history did not end in 1990 and that existential threats not only remained since then but thrived on our ignorance, the time has long since passed to bolster the Navy to ensure the security of both coasts. In a decade, the Chinese fleet may surpass our Pacific fleet in firepower, a dangerous imbalance not only for us but for our Pacific Rim allies such as Japan and South Korea. That shift in power will signal not just Beijing but other regimes and terrorist bands that the US has lost its primacy on the seas -- and that will exponentially expand our problems.

Interestingly, one of the major proponents of expanding the Navy's inventory is Susan Collins of Maine. Her support comes from more practical considerations, however; shipbuilders make up a large part of her constituency. The sometimes-Republican Senator wants George Bush to push Congress to increase the budget necessary to start putting her voters to work. I'd tend to agree with her in this instance, but the White House will surely feel a strong impulse to take advantage of the situation to get Collins on board in support of other Republican initiatives before committing to her pet project. That's how power politics get played in DC, after all.

The White House should resist that urge in this case. The Navy needs to start now on its rebuilding effort if we hope to maintain our power gap, especially in the Pacific. Playing politics with this particular issue of national security will make the GOP look less than serious about defense and erode our credibility on these topics, just when we may have repositioned the party for its 2006 run.

The trial of Saddam Hussein picked up where it left off, with yet another disruption from the defense team and Saddam himself, a development from which observers could practically set their watches. In this case, the entire defense team walked out when the court initially ruled that Ramsey Clark had no standing to address the court in session, and Saddam chanted Arab slogans in protest of the court's decision:

The court reversed an earlier decision not to allow Ramsey Clark, the former US Attorney General and member of the defence team, to make a statement challenging the legitimacy of the trial.

Rizgar Mohammed Amin, the judge, said that only Saddam's chief lawyer could address the tribunal under laws established by an elected Iraqi government, which led the defence team to walk out of the court room.

But after a 90-minute recess, Mr Amin allowed Mr Clark and another of the defence team, Najib al-Nueimi, to speak on the legitimacy of the trial and safety of the lawyers.

The former US Attorney General finally got his moment in the sun, for which he has slavished devotion on Saddam since his capture two years ago. He argued that the court needed to bring reconciliation to Iraq and not division, saying that if the court was not universally perceived as fair, it would divide Iraqis.

He waited two years to say that? That's his big revelation? Any trial that doesn't end with Saddam at the end of a noose would be "unfair" to the thousands of Iraqis who died on his command simply for the crime of being Kurdish or Shi'ite, or for opposing his dictatorial rule. The only suspense will be whether they wait until Saddam gets tried on all counts, or whether they will execute him after the first guilty verdict -- assuming he gets convicted of his crimes. The only open question now comes from how many of these victims Saddam created. Thousands? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions, as suggested by National Geographic?

I understand that Saddam should get legal representation, but the long, strange trip of Ramsey Clark has always been about Ramsey Clark and had little to do with Saddam Hussein or the rule of law. Only a man perverted by his own vanished celebrity would use the trial of a genocidal maniac to get his name in the papers in one last, pathetic attempt to rejoin the "A" list of political activists. His participation in the staged disruptions of the Iraqi attempt to hold their former tyrant accountable to the law, avoiding the understandable urge to just kill him and deliver justice, will forever stain the record of Clark. It is an all-time low, even for a man of his ambulance-chasing reputation.

Fortunately, the trial continued this morning and the first of the witnesses has already taken the stand. With any luck, even Clark will lose interest in himself and leave, ending the embarrassment for himself and Americans that once respected him for his role in the Johnson administration.

The Indian government, under the Congress Party, may fall due to connections described in the Volcker Report on the Oil-For-Food program. The AFP reports that a key minister faces parliamentary ire for his corruption by Saddam Hussein, and that the ruling party's blocking of parliamentary procedure may create a backlash among MPs:

India's opposition piled pressure on the government in parliament over new charges that the former foreign minister and the ruling Congress party joined a scam to profit from the UN oil-for-food programme in Iraq.

Trouble erupted within minutes of parliament assembling as MPs belonging to the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) jumped to their feet to demand the resignation of ex-foreign minister Natwar Singh, now serving as cabinet minister without portfolio.

Speaker Somnath Chatterjee said the opposition could discuss later the new charges that Singh and the Congress party received special vouchers to purchase oil cheaply from Baghdad in 2001 in return for political support.

But the opposition, whose campaign to embarrass the government in parliament fell short last week, voiced determination to capitalise on the disclosures about the scandal made on Friday by Congress insider Anil Matherani.

Chatterjee first adjourned the parliamentary session for 30 minutes, then till later in the afternoon and finally for the day.

Singh served as foreign minister for India during the latter years of Saddam's rule; he crafted and delivered the policy of opposition to the war on Iraq. Now, as Volcker has revealed, we all know he received over four million barrels of oil. Not only did Singh himself received that sum, but also the ruling Congress Party itself got a similar allotment of Iraqi oil. It looks like a payoff, and a profitable one at that.

Now CP wants to shut down the Indian parliament to keep debate from returning to accountability on why Saddam would have given Indian government officials that much oil. I doubt that will create a particularly trustful atmosphere for the government. Indians will not long resist the urge to toss out the executive and hold new elections, if that's what it takes to get answers to these questions. Expect the CP to stop its obstructionism and offer up some sacrificial lambs, and quickly, before momentum builds to replace the CP with others less involved in Saddam's corruption.

John Kerry appeared yesterday on the CBS talking-head show, "Face The Nation", to discuss the war in Iraq with Bob Schieffer. Just as in his speeches on the Viet Nam War, Kerry has slipped into deep Left-speak in an attempt to gain national traction for his pose as a party leader. In fact, in language reminiscent of his infamous "Genghis Khan" speech before the Senate in April 1971, he yesterday referred to American soldiers as terrorists -- and then suggested that we leave terrorism to the new Iraqi army.

From page 3-4 of the CBS transcript, emphasis mine (h/t:CQ reader Dave Z):

SCHIEFFER: All right. Let me shift to another point of view, and it comes from another Democrat, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. He takes a very different view. He says basically we should stay the course because, he says, real progress is being made. He said this is a war between 27 million Iraqis who want freedom and 10,000 terrorists. He says we're in a watershed transformation. What about that?

Sen. KERRY: Let me--I--first of all, there is so much more that unites Democrats than divides us. And Democrats have much more in common with each other than they do with George Bush's policy right now. Now Joe Lieberman, I believe, also voted for the resolution which said the president needs to make more clear what he's doing and set out benchmarks, and that the policy hasn't been working. We all believe him when you say, `Stay the course.' That's the president's policy, which hasn't been changing, which is a policy of failure. I don't agree with that. But I think what we need to do is recognize what we all agree on, which is you've got to begin to set benchmarks for accomplishment. You've got to begin to transfer authority to the Iraqis. And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the--of--the historical customs, religious customs. Whether you like it or not...

SCHIEFFER: Yeah.

Sen. KERRY: ...Iraqis should be doing that. And after all of these two and a half years, with all of the talk of 210,000 people trained, there just is no excuse for not transferring more of that authority.

Kerry thinks that the American soldiers are the terrorists in Iraq, applying that unique gift of his for moral relativity once again to indict an entire deployment of soldiers as criminals of the same order as our enemy. And Bob Schieffer sat there, without even raising an objection to Kerry's smear. Had Kerry not shown a long track record of this kind of rhetoric in the past -- and had to answer for it repeatedly during last year's presidential election -- one could possibly believe it came out as a slip of the tongue. However, he obviously has never stopped believing that the American fighting man and woman represents the same relative evil as the Viet Cong, the Khmer Rouge, and al-Qaeda.

The Democrats need to answer for this outrage. Is it really the party position that American soldiers terrorize Iraqi civilians? Do they want the Iraqis to do it instead of us? Kerry has unmasked himself and his fellow anti-war zealots for the hypocrites they are.

Yesterday, Tom DeLay won an impressive ruling from Judge Pat Priest in his trial on money-laundering and conspiracy charges surrounding the transfers of cash between local and national GOP organizations three years ago. Priest dismissed the original indictment of DeLay, the grand jury bill in which prosecutor and DeLay's personal Jauvert Ronnie Earle felt so confident that he immediately went out and burned through two more grand juries to get a different indictment just to be sure he could get something that stuck. However, if one reads the Washington Post and the New York Times this morning, it would appear that DeLay lost yesterday -- because both papers leave out a significant portion of the story.

Both papers get this much correct:

A Texas judge dismissed one charge against Representative Tom Delay on Monday but let stand two more serious charges, complicating Mr. DeLay's hopes of regaining his post as House majority leader when Congress resumes in January. (NYT) ...

Senior District Judge Pat Priest, who took over the case after DeLay's lawyers objected to another judge on political grounds, did not rule in his 11-page decision on the issue of DeLay's culpability. In a slap at Texas prosecutor Ronnie Earle, who oversaw the DeLay inquiry, Priest said a grand jury had erred in indicting DeLay for conspiracy when that crime was actually not covered by the state election law when it occurred. (WaPo)

Here's what the NYT hides until the last paragraph of its coverage, and what the Washington Post doesn't bother to report at all except as a potential delay to a trial:

Judge Priest also said he had yet to rule on a defense motion of prosecutorial misconduct.

The motion regarding prosecutorial misconduct relates directly to the two remaining charges. If the judge rules that Earle acted unethically or illegally in getting the indictment, the remaining charges will also get dismissed -- and it seems a fair bet that it will happen, especially since Priest hasn't yet dismissed the motion out of hand. Earle went out after the first grand jury refused to indict DeLay on money-laundering charges and tried to get a second grand jury to bring an indictment. When that failed, he formed a third grand jury without ever telling them (or the court) about the second grand jury and got the indictment within four hours of forming the third pool. That bill comprises all the remaining charges against DeLay.

Now, perhaps Ronnie Earle has a really good explanation for his frantic grand-jury shopping, but what it most shows is an inordinate desire to find any charge at all with which to kneecap a political nemesis. After all, Earle had done fund-raising tours for the Democrats based on his efforts to put DeLay in the dock. A failure to get an indictment that would hold up on first exposure in court -- a failure easily predicted and one which Judge Priest made reality yesterday -- would expose Earle as a partisan hack of the worst kind, one who abuses his authority to defeat opponents he or his party can't defeat legitimately.

And so here we are, with the first bill of indictment completely dismissed and the second only affirmed in that the law cited in the indictment actually existed and covers the allegations made by the third grand jury. The judge warned everyone that despite his ruling on dismissal on the basis of the defense's original motion to quash, he still had prosecutorial misconduct under consideration -- and all that the dismissal meant was that the charges could go to trial, not that DeLay had been found guilty of anything. Amazingly, both newspapers offer reports this morning that avoid the pending ruling on prosecutorial misconduct and treat the ruling as a body blow to DeLay.

Talk about spin! Earle got humiliated yesterday with the loss of his primary indictment and the announcement that Priest has apparently found the motion on misconduct interesting enough to continue his deliberations. That is a result that the NY Times and Washington Post cannot hide from informed readers no matter how much they attempt to bolster Earle's campaign against DeLay.

Yesterday, the leader of the major American opposition party called the war in Iraq "unwinnable", compared the supposed scandal over intelligence -- the same intel that Congress had seen since the Clinton administration -- with Watergate, and issued a demand that Bush immediately withdraw half of the forces in Iraq -- and yet the major newspapers could not be bothered to write their own articles about the story or include it in their print versions today. Neither the NY Times nor the Washington Post gave any kind of comprehensive report to Howard Dean's shrieking for retreat and surrender, nor to his ridiculous notion of how to fight against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as told to WOAI radio in San Antonio:

Saying the "idea that we're going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong," Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean predicted today that the Democratic Party will come together on a proposal to withdraw National Guard and Reserve troops immediately, and all US forces within two years. ...

"I think we need a strategic redeployment over a period of two years," Dean said. "Bring the 80,000 National Guard and Reserve troops home immediately. They don't belong in a conflict like this anyway. We ought to have a redeployment to Afghanistan of 20,000 troops, we don't have enough troops to do the job there and its a place where we are welcome. And we need a force in the Middle East, not in Iraq but in a friendly neighboring country to fight (terrorist leader Musab) Zarqawi, who came to Iraq after this invasion. We've got to get the target off the backs of American troops.

Dean didn't specify which country the US forces would deploy to, but he said he would like to see the entire process completed within two years. He said the Democrat proposal is not a 'withdrawal,' but rather a 'strategic redeployment' of U.S. forces.

First, from these comments Dean makes clear that he has no idea of the difference between a strategic redeployment and running away. The former refers to a rearrangement of tactical positioning, including tactical retreat in some cases, in order to regain the initiative for a bigger push later on. "Redeployment" by disengagement with no intent to return to the battlefield has another term in military parlance: full retreat. Dean also exposes his utter lack of comprehension of the situation in Southwest Asia when he suggests that we can easily find a "friendly nation" to host 80,000 American troops while our country lacks the political will to allow them to fight. Exactly who will want to board Americans when the terrorists come after us in our new bivouac? And would Dean and the Democrats allow them to fight then, or will they claim that we're still the root cause of the terrorist activity and give up the Middle East altogether?

Dr. Dean, which country would sign up for that duty? The only nations large enough to host 80,000 American troops would be Turkey (which won't do it), Kuwait (which is on the wrong side of Iraq to easily address the issues in the west and center of Iraq), and Saudi Arabia (which is where we supposedly offended the Islamofascists initially).

Most laughably, the leader of the Democrats and the man responsible for coordinating their electoral efforts then claims that by pulling American troops out of Iraq and outside of the range of Zarqawi, we'll be better prepared to fight the insurgents -- even though we will no longer have assets on the ground gathering intelligence and conducting the kinds of patrols necessary to find and engage the enemy on our terms. Instead, Zarqawi will simply start taking over towns like Falluja and Ramadi all over again and operating in the open to spread his lunatic Islamofascism across central Iraq.

The embarassment of Dean's military analysis would make clear that the Democrats have no business conducting foreign affairs and national security for the US in this age of Islamofascist terrorism. That's why the newspapers buried Dean's comments on their web sites. They had plenty of time to write their own copy, or at least to include the AP story in their print edition. However, the NYT and the Washington Post obviously hope that Dean's comments get quickly forgotten. (The Los Angeles Times doesn't bother to mention it at all, despite the longer lead time for their newspaper.)

Perhaps this comes as no surprise -- it doesn't surprise me -- but the national media has long since decided it needs to downplay Dean if the Democrats are to survive 2006. The Democrats still haven't gotten the same message.

UPDATE: Thanks to Michelle Malkin, QandO, and The Anchoress for their links. Be sure to check out their takes on this issue as well. I'll have more on this tomorrow ...

The trial of Saddam Hussein resumed yesterday after numerous disruptions from the defense threatened to derail the proceedings. The first of the witnesses offered their testimony after a 90-minute pout by Saddam and his defense toadies, now apparently led by American leftist and supposed idealist Ramsey Clark, who then had to listen while witnesses described the horrors inflicted on the townspeople of Dujail after an assassination attempt in 1982:

Ahmed Hassan Mohammed was the first witness to testify in the murder and torture case against Saddam, highlighting an emotional day in which the former dictator repeatedly yelled at the judge and the defense team briefly walked out in protest over the proceedings. ...

Mr. Mohammed was 15 when hundreds of families from his village were tortured and killed after an assassination attempt against Saddam. The witness said his family was among the hundreds taken to a Baghdad jail.

"I swear by God, I walked by a room and ... saw a grinder with blood coming out of it and human hair underneath," said Mr. Mohammed, who allowed his face to be shown on camera despite the risk of retaliation by Saddam's supporters.

"My brother was a student in high school, and they took him and my father to be interrogated. They tortured him with electric shocks in front of my 77-year-old father," said a sobbing Mr. Mohammed.

"Some were crippled because they had arms and legs broken," he added.

The meat-grinder image will undoubtedly remain in the minds of the judges as well as Iraqis and others who listen or follow the testimony in court. Obviously Saddam knew this as well; he began to get disruptive during this testimony, shouting slogans about Iraq while his brother-in-law yelled that the witness needed a psychiatrist. In a Western court, defense attorneys would advise clients not to react so violently to such testimony, as it only confirms the impression of the defendants' arrogance and disdain for any authority other than their own.

The testimony continues this morning, with a Dujail woman describing her treatment as a teenage girl after the roundups. She described the beginning of her four-year ordeal inside Saddam's prison camps:

Saddam sat stone-faced as the woman, identified only as "Witness A," told the court from behind a light blue curtain that she was taken into custody after the 1982 assassination attempt against the former Iraqi president in the town of Dujail.

The woman often cried during her testimony and repeatedly said she was forced to undress, implying that she had been raped but not saying so outright.

"I begged them, but they hit with their pistols," she said. "They made me put my legs up. There were five or more and they treated me like a banquet ... He [IIS officer Wadah al-Sheikh] continued administering electric shocks and beating me," she said.

Following Witness A came Witness B, an elderly woman who had been in her early 50s during the Dujail incident. The emotional testimony of these survivors apparently have settled the defendants down to a mostly silent state, although they will still interject accusations of lying occasionally. It doesn't work; the defendants with their disrepectful tactics have already alienated the judges to some degree, with Saddam particularly being provocatively condescending. He called one of the witnesses "son" while warning the witness not to interrupt him, a silly and needlessly arrogant reaction that brought a rebuke from the court.

Now people can see Saddam for what he is, not just through the testimony but from his own actions in court. It is this man's rule -- the tortures, rapes, wholesale murders, and grinders for the broken bodies of his real and perceived enemies -- which some people still think would have been better to allow to continue than to give the Iraqis a chance at freedom and liberty. Now the Iraqis hold Saddam responsible for his actions, but the public nature of the trials will also beg the question for the international community as to why they waited twelve years and through seventeen UNSC resolutions demanding change to do something about this abomination. The real shame is that some still wanted him left alone to continue grinding his victims into bloody chunks and would never have lifted a finger to stop Saddam.

The Daily Mirror dishes out some Harry Potter gossip that will likely have fans buzzing for the next year or so while they wait for the final installment of the Potter series to apparate at their local bookstores. Jim Dale, who provides the voice of Harry Potter for American audio books, claimed that author JK Rowling has tired of the Potter phenomenon and wants to kill off the character in the final installment (h/t: Hugh Hewitt):

HARRY Potter may die in the next book in the series because author JK Rowling wants to kill him off, it was claimed last night.

Actor Jim Dale - the voice of the teenage wizard in the US audio books - believes the seventh and final instalment will spell the end for Harry.

He made the astonishing claim after meeting with the writer to discuss his characterisation of the parts.

The revelation will shock millions of die-hard Potter fans.

He said: "She's lived with Harry Potter so long she really wants to kill him off." Predictions about the fate of Harry in the seventh book have enthralled millions worldwide.

I suspect that she may really consider this a possibility, but I'd still be surprised if she did it. Supposedly the death of a minor character in book 4 and a more central one in book 5 brought Rowling to tears -- and it would be hard to imagine her being detached enough at this point to put her teen and pre-teen readers through the emotional wringer that his death would bring. Still, it could go somewhat like Frodo's passing from Middle Earth -- the bittersweet realization that one had saved a world that one could no longer rejoin has resonated as a theme since Moses. That would give the series a literary touch that its popularity has not quite yet bestowed on the tales from Hogwarts.

On the other hand, we could also explore what others might do to justify Harry's death. Suppose, for example, that Rowling let Howard Dean write the last volume. We could then get treated to Voldemort as a misunderstood victim, or perhaps a bad guy but no worse than the arrogant and arbitrary Albus Dumbledore, who tried to control the wizarding world just as surely as Tom Riddle. Why, Dumbledore taught Voldemort almost everything he knew! And the Ministry of Magic spent years denying Voldemort's danger, so obviously they are to blame for all that has happened, not the evil wizard (as if there is any such thing as evil). Harry, therefore, is little more than a fool that chose the wrong horse and got himself killed for it. Good thing, too, because if he survived, he would get blamed for all the deaths that occurred just because he found it necessary to oppose Voldemort.

Now that would make one creepy ending for a delightful series.

The voting continues at the 2005 Weblogs Awards, and so far it looks like the Daily Kos will run away with the Best Blog award, the category in which CQ competes this year. Many fine blogs have been nominated for this honor, and it's terrific just to be mentioned in the same category as them. I don't want to get too far into recommendations for specific awards -- I have a lot of friends in the blogosphere, and some of them compete against each other this year. However, I'd like to at least draw your attention to a few:

Best Canadian Blog - Near and dear to my heart this year. Be sure to check out Small Dead Animals, Angry in GWN.

Best New Blog - All Things Beautiful; Alexandra is a class act all the way.

Best Conservative Blog - Jeez, I love all these guys. Vote for a new one each day, but blogroll them all.

Best Liberal Blog - They picked a good selection for these finalists as well. I think TalkLeft (Jeralynn Merritt) and Matthew Yglesias might be the most consistently well-written of the group, and Ezra Klein makes the best arguments for the liberal cause. Right now, Americablog is hot, and I expect John Aravosis to win, which would be all right, too. I'd vote for Pennywit, but I don't know why he's not nominated ... and yes, I do read the liberal blogs (the intelligent ones) to keep up with the debate.

Best Religious Blog - Evangelical Outpost. Joe Carter always gets my vote, but if they'd have put The Anchoress here, I would have had a tough time with that one. (I think she would have a better shot at competing here, too.)

Best Media/Journalist Blog - Several of these are excellent, but Lileks is a friend of mine, so he gets my vote. Michael Yon should win here, and he deserves it.

Best Military Blog - Blackfive should top a great list of bloggers here. Visit them all.

Best Humor/Comics Blog - Day By Day gets my vote, but just barely over Protein Wisdom, Scrappleface, and Iowahawk. They're not the only deserving ones on this list, either. Blogroll all of them for much-needed laughs.

Who do you like in this contest? Drop me a comment and let me know.

Apparently not satisfied with the results of his constant interruptions and disrepectful outbursts in court, Saddam Hussein has decided to escalate his manipulation of his trial and the media coverage by refusing to attend. The trial found itself at a standstill this morning when the former dictator refused to go into court, leaving the nonplussed judges wondering what to do next:

Saddam Hussein's trial was delayed Wednesday after the ousted president refused to attend the session, court officials said. Defense lawyers huddled with the judges in hopes of resolving the latest test of wills in the often-unruly trial.

An angry Saddam threatened at the end of the Tuesday court session to boycott the next day's proceedings after complaining that he and the seven other co-defendants had been mistreated by the "unjust court."

Court officials on Wednesday said Saddam was sticking by his vow, and the judges were trying to decide whether to proceed without him.

If the differences cannot be resolved, an official said the court might hold a closed session to search for solutions.

The resolution of this issue should be simpler than when Saddam kept disrupting the court. A defendant has a right to attend court and face his accusers, to cross-examine witnesses and to argue on his own behalf. That doesn't equate to a necessity of the defendant to attend the trial. If a defendant refuses on his own accord to show up and exercise those rights, then the People still have a right to continue the trial. Even if the defendant does want to attend, the rights of the defendant to participate do not automatically override the rights of the People to a fair trial. Disruptive behavior can and should result in removal of the defendant from court when it becomes contemptuous of the court's authority.

The Iraqis should get tough on Saddam. They've shown him deference; now they need to show some steel. If he prefers to putter around in his cell and let his lawyers deal with his trial, so be it. This is an attempt -- an all-too-successful attempt, in all likelihood -- to get the headlines off of the testimony of the victims by making himself the center of attention again. In one sense, it's typical behavior from a sociopath, but in terms of PR in Iraq, it's the only smart strategy left to him. The court needs to make sure that his absence winds up backfiring on him by continuing to present witnesses to Saddam's atrocities, this time without Saddam's running commentary distracting the global media covering the event.

Let him rot in his cell. I don't need to hear much from Saddam anyway, and I wouldn't trust anything he says unless it came accompanied by a video and corroboration from the Archangel Gabriel. The court should plow ahead and reveal Saddam's foolishness as well as his ghoulishness.

UPDATE: The show must go on, even without the uplifting presence of Uncle Saddy glowering from the dock:

Saddam Hussein's trial resumed Wednesday after a delay of several hours with the deposed Iraqi leader absent from the courtroom.

Chief Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin opened the session at 3 p.m. (7 a.m. ET), about four hours late, and called the first witness.

Hussein's chair sat empty at the front of the dock, and his chief lawyer thanked Amin for continuing the proceedings.

So Saddam took his marbles and went back to his cell. Let him throw his tantrums there. Let's keep the trial moving from now on.

A few CQ readers sent me a surprising story this morning regarding a decision by some "megachurches" to close their doors for Christmas. The AP reports that pastors at these large, non-denominational Christian houses of worship have decided that one of the more holy days for Christians should give way to secular celebrations instead:

This Christmas, no prayers will be said in several megachurches around the country. Even though the holiday falls this year on a Sunday, when churches normally host thousands for worship, pastors are canceling services, anti-cipating low attendance on what they call a family day.

Critics within the evangelical community, more accustomed to doing battle with department stores and public schools over keeping religion in Christmas, are stunned by the shutdown. ...

Cally Parkinson, a spokeswoman for Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., said church leaders decided that organizing services on a Christmas Sunday would not be the most effective use of staff and volunteer resources. The last time Christmas fell on a Sunday was 1994, and only a small number of people showed up to pray, she said.

"If our target and our mission is to reach the unchurched, basically the people who don't go to church, how likely is it that they'll be going to church on Christmas morning?" she said.

Among the other megachurches closing on Christmas Day are Southland Christian Church in Nicholasville, Ky., near Lexington, and Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas, outside of Dallas. North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Ga., outside of Atlanta, said on its website that no services will be held on Christmas Day or New Year's Day, which also falls on a Sunday. A spokesman for North Point did not respond to requests for comment.

Given that the "war on Christmas" has been pushed by churches such as these, I find these decisions rather stunning. As a Catholic, my experience has proven just the opposite: more people show up for Christmas and Easter (the holiest Christian celebration) than any other time of the year. Closing the doors due to a drop in attendance on Christmas morning would never get consideration at a Catholic parish, nor I suspect at most mainline Protestant churches either.

If the remarks made by Parkinson are representative, it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the Christian mission by the megachurches. The point of operating a church isn't just to convince the unchurched to attend -- it's to build and minister an entire community, including those who are "churched' -- to keep them in that status. In order to do that, the ministry has to take the mission seriously. What kind of message does it send when the church closes its doors and does not offer the opportunity for even a part of its community to gather and pray on one of the most holy celebrations in the Christian calendar? It sends a message that popularity trumps truth and secular concerns supercede spirituality.

It says, "We give up."

I'm sure that the people who work at these churches want to spend the day with their families, and the lower attendance makes them feel that their efforts have less worth. That only remains true, though, if one considers popularity an accurate measure of the mission. Most churches do not -- they understand that the mission requires churches and ministers to take a stand for the principles of Christianity, including the sacrifice for which it calls, of which attending a 90-minute service on Christmas historically represents the least of sacrifices made for the mission. Church doors should remain open to force sinners and the "churched" alike to remember this truth.

If Christian churches want to reclaim Christmas for themselves, then they need to literally show up to do so. Closing the doors is nothing less than surrender.

Barbara Streisand discovers why we bloggers mistrust the Exempt Media and write for ourselves. She's miffed because she wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times and they had the audacity to edit her letter when they published it. Babs presents the letter as written on her website, and then reproduces the resulting publication. I won't excerpt it here; you should read it for yourself.

I have to admit that she has a point about the hack editing job done on her letter. Unfortunately, she wrote a hack letter in support of a hack columnist (Robert Scheer) who should have been terminated years ago. Be that as it may, the resulting edit removed the key point of her letter -- that she felt strongly enough about the Chicagoization of the LA Times that she had canceled her subscription. It shows that people on both the right and the left have come to a similar conclusion about the cluelessness of Tribune management of the LA paper, and apparently that charge hits a little too close to home to get published in the Letters section of the Times.

Now, after complaining about editorless bloggers, Babs finally gets to experience the frustration that launched a million blogs. Now if she would only discover permalinks, she'd be all set. (via The Corner and an amused Jonah Goldberg)

Just when it appears that the GOP's efforts to unseat Hillary Clinton have collapsed with District Attorney Jeanette Pirro's wobbly candidacy for the Senate seat, Clinton may face even more challenge from the Left. Another anti-war candidate has announced his intention to run against Clinton, and this one has some union clout:

A longtime labor advocate launched his challenge to Senator Clinton's reelection while another anti-war Senate hopeful yesterday suggested the two join forces against Mrs. Clinton in the 10-month lead-up to the Democratic primary.

A former head of the National Writers Union, Jonathan Tasini, announced his bid in a 20-minute speech to supporters and members of the press at the W Hotel in Union Square. The address largely focused on his opposition to the Iraq war: He said Mrs. Clinton and other Democrats who voted for it "abdicated their responsibility to the American people and to the values of the Democratic Party."

This could bode well for a serious GOP challenger to the Senate seat Clinton currently holds. By forcing Hillary to address her left flank, it keeps her from preparing for her 2008 candidacy by claiming the middle ground. She will have to convince the anti-war factions that she has their interests in mind -- which could lead to statements and promises that will make great fodder for the Republicans in 2008. If she loses too much ground to the challengers, her star may soon fade from the Presidential sweepstakes, even though her re-election to the Senate seems assured. A close election next year probably reduces serious consideration for her Presidential candidacy.

If she can't shake these guys off early, watch for Clinton to start embracing that "immediate strategic redeployment" theme offered by Howard Dean this week. That will be Hillary's jump-the-shark moment, if it occurs.

General Hugh Shelton confirmed that the Able Danger program had backing from the highest levels of the military and that he had at least two personal briefings on the progress of the program tracking al-Qaeda prior to 9/11 -- again raising the question as to why the 9/11 Commission ignored this program entirely in its supposedly thorough look into American preparedness for a terrorist attack:

In his first public comments on the initiative, which some former intelligence officers now say was code-named Able Danger, Shelton also confirmed that he received two briefings on the clandestine mission - both well before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Right after I left SOCOM (Special Operations Command), I asked my successor to put together a small team, if he could, to try to use the Internet and start trying to see if there was any way that we could track down Osama bin Laden or where he was getting his money from or anything of that nature," Shelton said Tuesday in an interview. ...

In Washington, sometime between 1999 and 2001, Shelton received a more extensive briefing from Defense Intelligence Agency officers involved in the program.

Shelton said he doesn't recall hearing or seeing Atta's name in those briefings or at any time before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"To be candid, there were not many specifics in it," Shelton said of the later briefing. "There were no names that surfaced that had not surfaced before through normal intelligence channels. There was no identification of any new players, or anything of that type."

Shelton, though, said that a CIA representative and an FBI representative were present at the second briefing. And he said, "I know for a fact that I was told that they had been a part of the effort" to track al-Qaida through computer data-mining.

That puts a much different light on the status of the program. Up to now, we've heard that the FBI knew nothing of AD and its efforts. Now we have the FBI attending high-level briefings on its progress. No one before this, to my knowledge, has shown any operational awareness of the program on the FBI's part prior to the 9/11 attacks. Doesn't that beg the question of why the FBI never followed up on AD and any information it might supply?

Check out AJ Strata for more, and we'll stay on top of this as developments warrant.

In my latest Daily Standard column, I argue that the Democrats have in their desperation finally come up with a war strategy -- only they had to reach back 140 years to find it. "Rally Round the (White) Flag, Boys!" notes the discomforting and embarrassing similarities of the Democrats' current stance on the war in Iraq and their take on the Civil War in 1864:

Not even during the Vietnam War did a major American party position itself to support abject retreat as a wartime political platform. For that, one has to go back to the Civil War, when the Democrats demanded a negotiated peace with the Confederate States of America and a withdrawal from the South. Celebrating the popularity of former General George McClellan, who had come from the battlefield to represent a party whose platform demanded a negotiated settlement (which McClellan later disavowed), the Confederates assumed that the war could be over within days of McClellan's presumed victory over the controversial and hated Abraham Lincoln. Even some Republicans began to question whether Lincoln should stand for reelection--until Sherman took Atlanta and exposed McClellan as a defeatist and an incompetent of the first order.

Murtha's demand for a pullout gave the party's leadership a chance to openly embrace defeatism, much as McClellan did for Northern Democrats in 1864, using McClellan's field experience for the credibility to argue that the American Army could not hope to defeat the enemy it faced.

The column recounts the hysteria and confusion among Democrats over the past few days, especially the declaration of defeat made by Democratic Party chair Howard Dean as an argument to elect more Democrats. The result is the adoption of the white flag as a party banner. The title of this post, however, refers to an old joke about a remarkably successful military commander who demanded his red shirt whenever he went into battle so that his men would not get demoralized if he was wounded and started to bleed. I'll leave it to CQ readers to figure out why he wore the brown pants.

AJ Strata has more on the Able Danger story tonight, following the release of a National Journal article at Govexec.com that might fill in some of the blanks on why the program lost its backing in mid-2000, just when it appeared to make headway against al-Qaeda. As Shane Harris reports, the second dry run of the data harvest that eventually spawned Able Danger turned up more politically difficult names in connection to Chinese espionage:

The experiment "went well," the former IDC employee said. "Unfortunately, it went too well." During construction of those link diagrams, the names of a number of U.S. citizens popped up, including some very prominent figures. Condoleezza Rice, then the provost at Stanford University, appeared in one of the harvests, the by-product of a presumably innocuous connection between other subjects and the university, which hosts notable Chinese scholars.

William Cohen, then the secretary of Defense, also appeared. As one former senior Defense official explained, the IDC's results "raised eyebrows," and leaders in the Pentagon grew nervous about the political implications of turning up such high-profile names, or those of any American citizens who were not the subject of a legally authorized intelligence investigation. Rumors still abound about other notable figures caught up in the IDC's harvest. "I heard they turned up Hillary Clinton," the official said. The experiment was not continued.

"We determined that there were significant methodological problems," Hamre said of the IDC's techniques. Data-correlation analyses on raw information "produce impossibly large numbers of potential correlations. The numbers are too large to be operationally helpful."

But it appears not everyone in the military establishment agreed. Over the next several months, Kleinsmith estimated he gave more than 200 briefings on the IDC to members of Congress, generals, and senior government officials. "I could tell in three to four minutes if someone 'got it,' " Kleinsmith said. Hamre got it, he noted. And so, it seems, did officials with the Army's Special Operations Command, who, despite the unease over the China experiment, came to the IDC asking for information about a then-shadowy organization called Al Qaeda.

This history of LIWA and Able Danger makes the timelines a bit more clear than in the past. The Pentagon ran the Chinese experiment in 1999, during the height of the impeachment backlash and well after the worst of the Chinese campaign-funds scandal. Turning up Hillary as part of the research would not have been all that dramatic, as speculation about how closely the Chinese had tied themselves to the Clintons through the efforts of their intelligence agents. In fact, it probably would have culled John Kerry's name as well.

I doubt that the data proved anything about Hillary other than the connections to the already well-known Johnny Chung and Liu Chaoying. Nevertheless, as the results got wider exposure in Washington, the pressure of having all these important political players sitting in a database must have triggered a case of nerves at the Pentagon. A year later, as the IDC went through the Able Danger exercise using the same data harvest as part of its information, the order came down to kill all data that contained American citizens -- and one would have to presume that everyone understood that citizens such as anyone named Clinton would get especial scrutiny. That data cull crippled the ongoing effort to find al-Qaeda assets inside the US, although the AD team continued to focus outside the country for more terrorists using the technology.

Read the rest of this piece for an excellent rundown of Able Danger and the context from which it sprang, and then recheck AJ Strata's excellent analysis of the information. I'd put this as confirmation of some of the most interesting theories about the program, but it still doesn't explain why the FBI never went back and rechecked on the status of this promising counterterrorism program.

The United Nations high commissioner for human rights took the occasion of Human Rights Day to scold the United States for its conduct of the war on terror, instead of focusing on such enlightened nations as Syria, Myanmar, Zimbabwe -- and Turtle Bay itself. Louise Arbour's focus on the US resulted in a slap back from John Bolton, who warned the UN that the lack of credibility demonstrated by such actions would damage efforts to reform the UN:

Louise Arbour, the high commissioner for human rights at the United Nations, presented the most forceful criticism to date of U.S. detention policies by a senior U.N. official, asserting that holding suspects incommunicado in itself amounts to torture. ...

She also expressed concern in a news conference with efforts by some U.S. policymakers to exempt CIA interrogators from elements of the U.N. Convention Against Torture. Vice President Cheney's office has sought to block efforts by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and other lawmakers to subject CIA personnel from the 1984 convention's ban on the use of cruel or degrading treatment of detainees. ...

John R. Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, criticized Arbour, calling it "inappropriate" for her to choose a Human Rights Day celebration to criticize the United States instead of such rights abusers as Burma, Cuba and Zimbabwe. He also warned that it would undercut his efforts to negotiate formation of a new human rights council that would exclude countries with bad rights records.

"Today is Human Rights Day. It would be appropriate, I think, for the U.N.'s high commissioner for human rights to talk about the serious human rights problems that exist in the world today," Bolton told reporters. "It is disappointing that she has chosen to talk about press commentary about alleged American conduct. I think the secretary of state has fully and completely addressed the substance of the allegations, so I won't go back into that again other than to reaffirm that the United States does not engage in torture."

He added: "I think it is inappropriate and illegitimate for an international civil servant to second-guess the conduct that we're engaged in in the war on terror, with nothing more as evidence than what she reads in the newspapers."

Eighteen months after reporters and investigators began finding evidence of exploitation of refugees in almost every camp run by the UN, Arbour makes an odd choice by attacking the United States. UN-run refugee camps have turned into seraglios for UN staffers, with women and even little girls forced to give sexual favors to staffers and peackeepers alike in order to get food and medicine. It routinely selects countries like Libya and Cuba to sit on and lead its committees on Human Rights, akin to putting the inmates in charge of the asylum. In some sick and twisted way, it makes sense for Arbour to use the occasion of Human Rights Day to attack America rather than focus on all the ways the UN has promoted and allowed human-rights abuses over the past decade or more.

Bolton has it right. This demonstrates the lack of serious thought for reform at the UN. Arbour should have spoken out of humility about the UN's proven track record of abusing those under its protection and what the organization intended to do to correct it. The fact that Turtle Bay instead expanded the accepted definitions of torture to find a way to criticize us rather than clean up their own house shows that we need to issue ultimatums for reform now. No more money for UN operations of any kind should get paid until those responsible for corruption, graft, and abuse of refugees resign or get fired, from Kofi Annan all the way down to the lowliest staffers in Liberian, Congolese, Balkan, and other refugee camps who forced little girls to turn tricks or starve.

Once the UN does that and starts using occasions like Human Rights Day to hold real bloodthirsty nutcases like Robert Mugabe accountable, then we can start taking the UN seriously again. As it is, Arbour only confirms that the UN has become a useless joke with no more credibility than the Mugabes it protects and emulates.

The CIA should find itself embarrassed by the article in today's New York Sun on how CIA flights in Europe got exposed. The explanation unearthed by Josh Gerstein shows little imagination and even less care in covering the tracks of what supposedly amounted to a top-secret operation, and should concern Americans about the competence of the CIA in protecting wartime operations:

In May 2004, the Swedish show reported on the CIA's involvement with the expulsion of two men from Sweden to Egypt in December 2001. The tail number of an aircraft involved in the transfer led quickly to information about at least six other occasions on which the same small Gulfstream V jet was used to move prisoners from various locations to countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. "Once we had the identity of the plane, which we were able to find out in many ways - a plane leaves a lot of traces - it was obvious the plane was fishy," Mr. Laurin said.

When a producer working on the broadcast called one of the American firms involved in leasing the plane, the call was returned 15 minutes later by the Swedish intelligence service, which said it was calling at the request of its "U.S. cooperation partners."

Mr. Laurin said almost every name linked to the company that appeared to own the aircraft, Premiere Executive Transport Services Incorporated of Dedham, Mass., seemed to be fake. "You weren't able to trace the name to any living individual," he said. "They were all living in post office boxes in Virginia."

One has to wonder whether the CIA deserves its reputation for the way it conducts intelligence operations these days, or if it just has coasted on the hard-earned respect it earned during its halcyon days of the Cold War. The ease in which the Swedish press blew the CIA cover makes one wonder whether the CIA even cared that its European assets could get exposed. The Swedes say that American taxpayers should get upset and demand that the new CIA director fire everyone involved, which doesn't sound like a bad idea considering the results here.

With efforts like this, I could even start believing that the CIA intended Valerie Plame to remain NOC-listed even after having her drive to the Langley offices to work for the last several years.

The excuse given by intelligence observers is that the CIA didn't think about the way information could get pooled in the Internet age and how amateurs could start connecting the dots. Well, why the hell not? The US started running their own data-mining operations in the 1990s (LIWA, Able Danger among them. Shouldn't that proven capability have tipped them to strengthen their covers instead of shrugging their shoulders and hoping for the best? A former CIA mission head notes that the countries involved knew the nature of the flights and therefore the flights would not have been considered clandestine, but that hardly makes sense. The CIA doesn't assess the need for secrecy based on the status of our friends but the threat from our enemies -- or at least that should be how they assess it.

I suggest we convert the Langley PO boxes into recruitment addresses for those involved in keeping this operation under wraps, and Congress should ask Porter Goss if peek-a-boo has been added as a supposedly effective method of hiding agents in the last ten years. My three-year-old granddaughter seems to think it works, and she's the only one who might have been fooled by the cover arranged for these CIA flights in Europe.

In a mind-boggling decision, a Dakota County judge allowed a Level 3 sex offender -- the kind most likely to re-offend -- to walk out of a courtroom after spending two months without making required contacts or registering his whereabouts with the police. Jeremy Queen had turned himself in after a two-month search for the chronic parole violator and spent Tuesday night in jail. Thanks to Dakota County judge Ed Lynch, by Wednesday morning he had won release on his own recognizance:

A convicted sex offender wanted by police for failing to report his whereabouts turned himself in to the Dakota County jail on Tuesday night, only to be released the next morning by a Dakota County District Court judge.

Prosecutors, dismayed by the decision, said Jeremy John Queen, 26, has a long history of ducking authorities and violating par-ole. Dakota County Attorney James Backstrom said he will ask the judge to revise his decision and impose bail on Queen, considered one of the county's most dangerous sex offenders.

Queen, who was convicted when he was 17 for having sex with a 12-year-old girl, moved into a house near Apple Valley High School in January but disappeared two months ago. ...

On Tuesday night, after an article appeared in the Pioneer Press and related television coverage, Queen walked into the lobby of the jail in Hastings and surrendered.

After spending the night behind bars, Queen was arraigned before Dakota County District Judge Ed Lynch, who ordered him released on his own recognizance until his next court appearance, scheduled for Feb. 13.

Do we never learn? This man has been diagnosed as the most dangerous kind of sex offender, has twice been convicted for sexual offenses, and has consistently refused to meet the requirements of his release. He hacked off an electic bracelet meant for house arrest once in order to keep police from tracking his movements. Queen moved into a house less than a mile from his old high school. During his absence, a parent tipped police that she recognized him as the man her teenage daughter had recently befriended.

I'm not sure how many red flags Ed Lynch needs, but apparently the poor man must be colorblind as well as utterly lacking in sound judgment. Once the system managed to get Queen back under its control, it should have made damned sure he would stay there. Instead, despite his violations of the law, we have Queen roaming freely among the residents of Dakota County -- myself, my wife, my daughter-in-law and my granddaughter among them.

Here's a picture of "Q-Ball", one of Queen's aliases. He's 26 years old and has a history of hanging out with 12-15 year old girls. Thanks to Ed Lynch, he's not wanted for anything any more, but if you see him hanging around arcades or middle- or high-school facilities or functions, better warn potential victims to keep their distance. In the meantime, we can't get rid of Ed Lynch as a judge, but the next time his name appears on a ballot to reconfirm him as a Minnesota jurist, let's all remember who he set free among us and vote accordingly.

Last month I posted about a potential new scandal brewing for the Liberal Party in Canada involving insider trading on speculation about tax policy. Now it appears that more evidence and testimony gives credence to the charges that the government leaked advance warning on its tax policy to certain investors, allowing them to take advantage of the information to maximize their profits at the expense of other investors:

In the two weeks since Canada's Finance Minister announced a tax cut to dividend-paying stocks, the big question in financial and political circles is whether some people had advance notice of his Nov. 23 announcement. A CTV Whistleblower investigation into what happened that day has found that may have been the case. ...

Ralph Goodale's announcement was good news for income trust investors -- and those who buy dividend-paying stocks. He reversed his earlier plan to possibly tax the trusts. He also decided to cut taxes on dividends, to help dividend-paying stocks look as attractive to investors as the popular income trusts do.

But, some of those stocks jumped inexplicably late in the afternoon, hours before Goodale told the Canadian public anything about his plan. CTV found more evidence of a possible leak than just that jump in trading.

First, several credible sources in financial circles confirmed to CTV they heard definitively -- before the markets closed -- that an announcement would be coming after the close of trading that day.

Many people were exchanging emails, about an anticipated 5 p.m. news conference. That seemingly advance notice contradicts the Finance Department's position that they told no one -- not even privately -- about the timing of the hotly anticipated announcement, not the day or the hour it would come.

Hours before the government announced its decision, people began posting rumours of the impending decision on bulletin boards and in e-mails. In language very close to that used in Goodale's announcement, two people posted at 11:14 and 3:59 -- the latter two hours before the announcement -- that Goodale would announce a reduction in dividend taxation to "level the playing field" and that the reduction would take the form of an increase in the dividend tax credit. Later that evening, Goodale did eventually announce that the government would "help to level up the playing field as between corporations and trusts and we're going to be doing that by ending double taxation on dividends," when he met with the press.

This could still be coincidence, but some market analysts disagree. They claim the text match is too specific and that the pre-release activity show certain investors working off of a plan that specifically took advantage of this policy just before its announcement. So far, the RCMP and the Ontario Securities Commission have yet to investigate, but given the earlier corruption of Adscam, it would appear that this warrants some kind of check before the evidence disappears altogether.

It's not unusual during this time of year to get nostalgic for Christmases past -- when life resembled the Norman Rockwell images of American culture and children enjoyed simpler pleasures and more innocent pastimes. It seems like so much of Christmas these days has not just disappeared under waves of commercialism, but now of politically-correct bickering that makes even the phrase "Merry Christmas" a statement pregnant with purpose, rather than just a celebration of the season. The burden gets heavy enough to tire even the most fervent optimist at times.

For instance, when my sister and I were small, we waited impatiently for the Christmas television specials as an indication that the season had truly arrived. For us, Christmas season began with "A Charlie Brown Christmas", or "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Frosty The Snowman". Even when we got a little older and I tried to act as though I was a bit too cool for the baby stuff, "The Grinch That Stole Christmas", featuring Boris Karloff's baritone narration never failed to draw me back in.

Now, of course, we can watch these whenever we want, thanks to the advances of technology -- but in doing so, they lost a bit of their charm. That's the one quality we gave up when we grew older and demanded instant access to our touchstones of childhood. Tonight, however, the First Mate and I had the wonderful experience of watching these classics through the use of that technology with the Little Admiral, who at three understands the basic themes now of these programs. It brought back the wonder and anticipation that we used to feel as children. She loved the DVD set we bought of "Rudolph" and "Frosty" (which also included "The Little Drummer Boy" and "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town", which we saved for later). She also, to my surprise, really enjoyed the Peanuts Christmas special that I TiVo'd from ABC this week, especially the music -- which really surprised me.

I couldn't help but wonder whether we will be able to make this a holiday tradition for her the way our parents made it for us, and in what form she will pass it on to her kids and grandkids when the time comes. Time brings change, and not all change is bad. But having the opportunity to share that tradition with my granddaughter tonight reminded me that the important point to remember is that while circumstances change, we can continue to share the same qualities and values as we have at this time of year with our loved ones across the generations.

Tory leader and PM candidate Stephen Harper called for the resignation of Ralph Goodale over allegations of Liberal involvement in insider trading based on early warning of policy decisions by Goodale. The Finance Minister's office stands accused of leaking information to selected investors in order to allow them to profit off of policy statements before being made public:

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper called today for Finance Minister Ralph Goodale to resign his cabinet post, saying that there is "growing evidence" that there was a leak of policy changes for income trusts that sparked trading in financial markets and that the information "may have leaked from senior Liberal sources."

"I would say that given the revelations we now have, given the information we now know, that in any country, in any other advanced democratic country where we had a government that operated according to normal ethical standards, the finance minister would have already resigned, rather than continuing to deny and stonewall information," Mr. Harper told reporters at a campaign stop in North Bay, Ont.

"I hope they'll take responsibility, Mr. Goodale will step aside, and we'll get to the bottom of this."

Mr. Goodale announced on Nov. 23 a reversal of the freeze of tax rulings on income trusts, but there was a flurry of trading in the trusts on financial markets hours before the announcement. Mr. Goodale has denied any leak, and said there are authorities to investigate such allegations.

This scandal appears to have escalated rather quickly, as opposed to the slow build of interest in Adscam over the past year. Investor's Voice has also called for a public investigation by the Ontario Security Commission in order to restore public trust in the FMO. Diane Urquhart, the investor advocate, appeared on the television show Business Morning to demand an annoucement so that Canadians can continue to have faith in the investment markets (video here). Goodale has denied releasing any information prior to his speech, but market specialists like Urquhart suspect something happened; the pattern of exploitation appears too strong to be coincidental.

At the very least, Urquhart has it right -- Canada needs an independent investigation that follows the money of those who benefited from these transactions and find out the connections of those involved. This could get bigger than Adscam.

The Treasury Department has identified the Islamic Society of Boston and its founder, the now-imprisoned Abdurahman Alamoudi, as major financial contributors to the al-Qaeda network and a conduit for Saudi funds to radical Islamist terrorism. The New York Sun's Meghan Clyne reports that the politically-connected Muslim group has several connections to terrorism, not just al-Qaeda -- revelations that will prove embarrassing for both political parties:

In July, Alamoudi was cited in a Treasury Department press release designating the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, a U.K.-based Saudi oppositionist organization, led by Saad al-Faqih, as providing material support for Al Qaeda. MIRA "received approximately $1 million in funding through Abdulrahman Alamoudi," the statement said.

"According to information available to the U.S.Government," the statement continues, "the September 2003 arrest of Alamoudi was a severe blow to Al Qaeda, as Alamoudi had a close relationship with Al Qaeda and had raised money for Al Qaeda in the United States." The Treasury Department has declined to provide further information, saying the material is classified.

Alamoudi, an Eritrean-born naturalized American citizen, was arrested in 2003 on charges of having participated in a Libyan assassination plot against Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah, an allegation to which he admitted in the 2004 plea agreement with federal prosecutors. He was also stripped of his American citizenship after admitting to having obtained it fraudulently. ...

Before his arrest, Alamoudi enjoyed extensive connections to Washington lawmakers as the founder and president of the American Muslim Council. During the Clinton administration, according to press accounts, Alamoudi often visited the White House to meet with and advise President Clinton, now-Senator Clinton, and Vice President Gore. In 2001, Alamoudi appeared with President Bush at a prayer vigil for victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks just days after the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon.

This may deal a significant blow to American Muslims, many of whom might have no idea that these large organizations exist to funnel their money to radical causes overseas. In the case of ISB, al-Qaeda did not constitute its only beneficiary. One of the listed trustees for the group in IRS filings was Yusuf al-Qaradawi, identified as a trustee for tax years 1998-2000. Qaradawi lost his visa for entry to the US for his open support of Hamas and its activities in the Palestinian territories. ISB claims that Qaradawi's inclusion on its forms was an "administrative oversight", but the inclusion of such a person as one of Alamoudi's partners in the management of ISB sounds more like a pattern of terrorist support.

The ISB has threatened to sue almost everyone who has written anything critical about their operation. Andrew McCarthy, one of the prosecution team for the first World Trade Center attack, says that this is no coincidence. The lawsuits are intended to keep people from learning too much about their finances, including the millions of dollars that the Saudis and others have poured into ISB to establish its mosques in the Boston region -- and to further legitimize the organization within the US. ISB already has a sweetheart deal from Boston for development in Roxbury, an arrangement challenged by a local resident in a lawsuit regarding state support of religion. That lawsuit led to investigations by the Boston Herald and Fox TV, spurring ISB lawsuits for defamation against both media outlets.

Alamoudi has a 23-year sentence to serve, and when he finishes it he should get deported immediately. If the Treasury Department has the evidence it says it does, it should seize all assets of ISB and freeze their accounts in order to ensure that no more money gets into the hands of our enemies both here and abroad. Lastly, it is long past time for these Islamic societies to declare which side of the war they support -- the side of the radical Islamists who want to impose a global theocracy of shari'a, or the side of the nations that have allowed them to worship freely and live among others as equals and not dhimmis.

Condoleezza Rice has reversed what the media tried hard to blow up into a crisis between the US and its European partners by challenging their commitment to security and their unfounded suspicions of illegal activity by American interrogators of captured terrorists. European leaders have given Rice a resounding vote of confidence. The Washington Post dutifully reports this -- on page A16:

European foreign ministers attempted to make peace with the United States on Thursday over the controversy concerning treatment of terrorism suspects, with many saying they were satisfied with visiting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's explanations of U.S. policy. ...

Some ministers, such as Bernard Bot of the Netherlands, had indicated they still had deep concerns over U.S. policy, despite a week-long effort by Rice to defuse the tensions. But afterward, ministers reported that they were satisfied with the U.S. position.

"Secretary Rice has covered basically all of our concerns," Bot said, adding that if the secret prisons existed -- which he called "pure speculation" -- Rice "has made it quite clear" that the United States did not violate international law in such facilities.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier added that Rice "has reiterated that in the United States international obligations are not interpreted differently than in Europe."

NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer declared at a news conference that Rice had "cleared the air" and that he considered the issue closed. "You will not see this discussion continuing" at NATO, he said.

The report by Glenn Kessler provides an amusing, if desperate, attempt to keep the kerfuffle alive by reminding us every other paragraph that the Dutch might not be completely satisfied with Rice's representations. However, after making a point of the Dutch effort to open its own detention facility in Afghanistan -- which would not concern American interests in the least, as the information gathered there would still get shared with us -- Kessler quotes the Dutch foreign minister in complete contradiction to his assertion, three paragraphs later. The Post then buries the entire story in the back of their news section after covering the story on CIA detentions at or near the front page for the last few weeks.

What supposedly started as a blockbuster story turns out to amount to nothing more than common sense. The CIA detains terrorists -- what a shock! They interrogate their prisoners! They don't want people to know where these terrorists are held so that we can get intel from them to uncover attack operations against us and our allies! Stone The Crows! The American media, starting with the Post, somehow still have not put these operations in the context of the war being fought by America, the UK, Australia, and a number of other nations against Islamofascist terrorist organizations and their state sponsors. If they had thought for a moment about that, then the revelation that the CIA interrogates enemy operatives captured in battle areas hiding among civilian populations should cause no more surprise than a historian discovering that the OSS interrogated infiltrators during World War II, usually in secret locations and without worrying about Miranda rights.

Dr. Rice deserves our congratulations for reminding Europe that the fact that we detain terrorists for interrogation does not equate to a policy of torture, and the foreign ministers should be congratulated for recovering from an overdose of American media hysteria. The Post and the other outlets who followed their folly should take a couple of chill pills and come up for air before blowing the next story way out of proportion. And if they want to be taken seriously, then they should put the denouement of their sky-is-falling narratives in the same place they put them when the story broke: A-1.

The GOP has made no bones about taking the gloves off after spending the last few months pretending to rise above the ankle-biting rhetoric about the Iraq War from the Democrats. After watching them slowly tip over the edge in the past month, openly calling for a recognition of defeat in Iraq and an immediate evacuation of troops from the region, the Republicans have opened up on Democratic Party leaders such as their chairman, their Congressional leadership, and their last Presidential nominee for their vacillating and pusillanimous responses. I covered most of this recent history in my last Daily Standard column, "Rally Round The (White) Flag, Boys!"

For their part, the Democrats loudly responded that they have been quoted out of context. Drudge now reports that the Republicans intend on fixing that problem with a few web ads, using the actual recorded statements of each to show the nation that the Democrats have given in to defeatism:

A Democratic strategist who had the web ad described to her said, “This is way over the top but we have no one to blame but Dean, Kerry and others who continue to pander to the anti-war activists within our party.”

The web video advances the Republican contention that the Democrats only have a “retreat and defeat” message on the war in Iraq.

The video highlights the effect Democrats can have on the morale of U.S. soldiers.

One Republican strategist familiar with the ad said, “The Democrats, especially Howard Dean have a way of trying to turn the tables and say ‘that’s not what I meant’ – its just those ‘evil Republicans’ This video will make them crazy – it reinforces what they really believe with what they actually said – and that is devastating for the Democratic Party.”

This comes as Iraqis predict an even greater turnout for their elections next week, the first under their new constitution that will bring a regularly elected democratic nation to life where a genocidal tyranny existed less than three years earlier. Even the Sunnis predict a heavy turnout among Saddam's former elite, as they have belatedly realized that the armed struggle for supremacy over the Kurds and Shi'a had no chance of even getting off the ground, let alone achieving any success:

A top Sunni party official predicted yesterday that Sunnis would vote in large numbers in landmark elections next week in spite of a campaign of violence that intensified yesterday with more than 30 people killed in a bus bomb and the first reported killing of an American hostage in more than a year.

Ala'a Makky, a member of political bureau of the Sunni Islamic Party, said in an interview that he thinks the Sunni turnout will be much higher this time than in elections to an interim parliament in January. "I think most of the Iraqi population is now convinced that the elections and political solutions and reconciliation are the only solutions for the current problems," he said. "I think the Iraqi people will go ahead and vote in the elections, as it is so critical," he said. "I don't think [Zarqawi] can disrupt this process."

David Satterfield, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, also said yesterday that attempts to draw Sunnis into the political process were working. "Sunnis have come into the political process and they've come into it in a big way and they've come into it in an overwhelming way, in terms of numbers," he said during an telephone interview conducted from Washington. Having spent most the past year boycotting the political process, Sunnis "will be elected proportionate to their population," Mr. Satterfield predicted

The irony for the Democrats is that they have relied so heavily on making George Bush the focus of their electoral strategy that literally any good news from Iraq now completely discredits them. That's why people like Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi have ratcheted up the hysteria in the last several weeks approaching the next election; if successful, it demonstrates that they had sold out the US for their own petty electoral interests. They need a failure in Iraq, thanks to the stupidity of their strategy through two electoral cycles. Instead of taking Joe Lieberman's advice in 2004 and accepting the Iraq War as a bipartisan effort, so that they could focus the election on domestic issues, the Democrats took up the International ANSWER banner and argued for the most radical positions available.

Now they want to bug out just before the Iraqis make it impossible for them to declare defeat any more, the last tactic open that will ensure a failure that they can then hang onto Bush. A few prominent Democrats have started to balk at this, notably Lieberman himself, Steny Hoyer, and even Hillary Clinton to a smaller degree. They understand that the Democrats have just launched themselves off the cliff, and the GOP is about to ensure that they can't reach back for a parachute for an easy landing.

Longtime CQ reader Monkei gave me a great idea this afternoon. With the end of the year coming up, Time Magazine will shortly be selecting its Man (or Woman) of the Year, an always-controversial topic among its readers and in the blogosphere. Monkei suggested the US Coast Guard, but didn't explain it -- maybe he'll throw in with a comment. Who would you like to see Time "honor" as the person who made the biggest difference in the world in 2005? George Bush? Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? Condoleezza Rice? Paul Volcker?

Nominate your suggestions in the comments section, and we'll pick six or seven by Sunday that appear to be the most popular as finalists. I'll post a poll afterwards that we can run until Time makes their own selection known and see how close we got. Please note that this is not an open thread, and so comments should reflect nominations and best cases for them. Feel free to offer seconds (and thirds and fourths, etc) on nominations -- that's how we'll narrow down the choices.

My own suggestion? The purple-fingered Iraqi, of course -- but that's just one man's opinion. Let the debate begin!

The Iraqis took a major step forward today towards freedom when the plain folks of Ramadi captured and handed over a major al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Amir Khalaf Fanus, known as "The Butcher of Ramadi":

Iraqi citizens turned over a high-ranking Al Qaeda member known as "the Butcher" to U.S. forces in Ramadi Friday a military statement said.

Amir Khalaf Fanus was No. 3 on the 28th Infantry Division's High Value Individual list for Ramadi, wanted for murder and kidnapping in connection with his affiliation with Al Qaeda in Iraq.

"He is the highest ranking Al Qaeda in Iraq member to be turned into Iraqi and U.S. officials by local citizens," Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool said in a statement released from Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi. "His capture is another indication that the local citizens tire of the insurgents' presence within their community."

The critics of the war have long remarked that the Iraqis have not done enough to fight the terrorists themselves, that they've left that to Americans, and that they secretly want the terrorists to drive us out. Ramadi supposedly comprised one of the insurgent's power bases. Yet the people there took it upon themselves to go through the danger to detain one of the leaders of the Zarqawi network and hand him over to the Americans. That seems passingly strange, if one accepts at face value the assertion of the Democrats that 80% of Iraqis want Americans to leave and 45% find the killing of American soldiers acceptable.

In truth, the Iraqis have seen the fruits of freedom and while they probably don't care for the necessity of foreign troops, they understand the necessity while lunatics like Fanus run around killing Iraqis. They want to enjoy their new-found ability to choose their own leaders for a government that serves their needs rather than one that feeds them into meat grinders. After living with Saddam for over thirty years of torture and terror, Zarqawi and his minions have little chance of scaring them away from their freedom. At any rate, they don't scare the Iraqis anywhere near the extent they scare the Democrats half a world away, and they proved it today.

Congratulations to the Iraqis of Ramadi that refused to be cowed by wannabe Islamofascist tyrants like Fanus. May we continue to be inspired by your example of courage and hope.

The terrorist group Hamas, which has emerged as the most popular political group with Palestinians over the past year, has shifted its position on truce with the Israelis again. Khaled Meshaal, Hamas' leader, claims that the truce has Hamas ... well, rather bored:

The leader of Hamas said Friday his group was growing weary of its pact with the Palestinian Authority to avoid conflict with Israel.

"There is no room for truce. I say to our brothers in the [Palestinian] Authority that we are witnessing political stagnation," Khaled Meshaal said in a fiery speech at a rally in the Syrian capital of Damascus.

"I say it loud and clear, we will not enter a new truce. Our people are preparing for a new round in this struggle," Meshaal said.

Hamas much prefers blowing up women and children in pizzerias than the actual work of statecraft, ie, building political consensus and campaigning for support on issues like sewage systems, monetary policy, and so on. That type of work requires erudition and intellect, after all, while strapping a bomb on a teenager only takes a little salesmanship and the complete lack of a soul. Apparently Hamas' terrorist core has discovered what the rest of us already knew -- that they qualify in spades for the latter but by and large lack most of the former.

The excuse du jour results from the hoary triangle offense that the Palestinians have used for years. This time, as is often the case, Islamic Jihad sat out the truce so that they could continue to launch rocket strikes into Israel. Israeli response against IJ then allows the other two terrorist groups -- Hamas and Fatah -- to claim that the Israelis broke the truce and then all three resume their attacks on Israeli civilians. However, this may be the first time that Hamas has come out and admit that without war, they have no reason to exist and no interest in politics other than as a means to conduct the annihiliation of Israel.

We need to press the Europeans to list Hamas as a terrorist group and to cut off their funding once and for all. They will never be a partner for peace -- and neither will the Palestinian Authority which coordinates with both Hamas and IJ to continue the cycle of violence. Until the Palestinians themselves decide they want peace instead of war, they will get what they deserve -- and we should stop holding back the Israelis from walling out the Palestinians on their own terms in the absence of serious attempts to resolve the issues. They have paid for that policy with far more terrorist attacks on civilians than our nation would ever tolerate. We should quit demanding that the Israelis show forebearance any longer.

David Kaspar at Medienkritik notices a Bloomberg dispatch that should have Germans in the streets, demanding an explanation from the SPD for years of misguided policy favoring Russian interests over that of their longstanding friendship with the United States. Gerhard Schroedoer, who narrowly lost his position as Chancellor in the last election and the resulting formation of the new German executive, has managed to land on his feet -- working for the Russians on a program then-Chancellor Schroeder approved just three months ago:

Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder will lead the shareholders committee for a German- Russian gas-pipeline project to pump gas under the Baltic Sea, OAO Gazprom Chief Executive Alexei Miller said today.

State-controlled Gazprom began building the more than 4- billion-euro ($4.7 billion) North European gas pipeline project today in the town of Babaeyvo in Russia's Volodga region, north of Moscow.

The pipeline will allow Gazprom to ship gas directly to Germany, bypassing Poland, Ukraine and Belarus. It will carry 27.5 billion cubic meters of gas a year in 2010 and twice that much by 2012, Miller said. Gazprom will raise gas exports to Europe 4.1 percent to 151 billion cubic meters in 2006 following a 3.1 percent jump this year as demand and prices rise.

Well, kiddies, can we say quid pro quo? Gazprom is a nationalized company, which means they report to Vladimir Putin -- with whom Shroeder negotiated the pact which made the pipeline possible. The Gazprom project, as David notes, creates an even heavier reliance on Russian deliveries of oil, already considered dangerously high and in need of diversification. This negotiation for the project took place while Schroeder and the SPD trailed badly in the polls.

It certainly looks as if Schroeder negotiated himself a sweetheart position with Putin for his retirement, and paid for it with a pipeline from German wallets to Putin's bank accounts. Remember Schroeder's insistence that he would never join Merkel's coalition in any other ministry except the Chancellory? Now we know why -- he had his golden parachute already strapped to his back, and it bears the label, "Made In Russia".

Congratulations, Germany. The entire nation spent years following Schroeder and his anti-American Pied Piper routine, and now the country has awoken in the Merkel era to find out that they got sold out to Russia and Vladimir Putin. Have fun with your new friends.

UPDATE: Don't forget Medienkritik is competing in the 2005 Weblog Awards in the Best European Blog category. I'd put it as a toss-up between them and No Parasan, and the voters so far agree -- but no one covers the critical area of Central Europe like Medienkritik.

The United States and the UK have prepared themselves for a massive security effort for the upcoming Iraqi elections, which will replace the interim government with its first democratic, constitutional four-year Assembly and executive and promote Iraq to the ranks of the liberal democracies. Some Sunni leaders think that the security effort may prove superfluous, as they have convinced themselves that even Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has given up on intimidating the now-committed Sunnis from participating in the electoral process. Jonathan Steele at the Guardian reports that the same problem faces the native "insurgencies":

Their candidates have been assassinated, their party offices attacked, but hopes are mounting among Iraq's Sunni Arab politicians that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, will not make a serious effort to disrupt next week's national elections.

Despite threatening to block previous votes, this time the Jordanian militant, believed to be responsible for most of the suicide bombings in Iraq, has been silent. "He's changed his strategy because he has discovered how confident and determined we are to vote," Azhar Abdel Majeed al-Samarrai, a leading candidate for the Iraqi Consensus Front, an alliance of the main Sunni parties, told the Guardian yesterday. ...

But the clear desire of many Sunnis to vote next week has changed the dynamic within the insurgency. "Zarqawi is in a dilemma because many Sunnis want to vote," a senior western political official said this week. The same dilemma confronts Iraq's homegrown insurgents, who rely mainly on the Sunni population for support and recruits.

A Sunni cleric from the influential Association of Muslim Scholars told worshippers at Baghdad's Umm al-Qura mosque yesterday it was a "religious duty" to vote next week. "The date of December 15 is a landmark event. It is a decisive battle that will determine our future. If you give your vote to the wrong people, then the occupation will continue and the country would be lost," he said.

This story has not made it into the American media, and one can readily understand why. It explains why Zarqawi has started to put a bit more focus on targets outside of Iraq, while still maintaining some operations within the Sunni Triangle. The murder of a Sunni politician two weeks ago resulted in a massive funeral and an outpouring of anger so large that Zarqawi's network wound up issuing a statement denouncing the assassination, an unusual move for someone who supposedly has marked anyone cooperating in the election for death. The assassination has not endeared the American occupation to the Sunnis he represented, but it cut severely into the support the Consensus Party had given the insurgents.

That political momentum shift had been predicted all along as a long-term effect of pushing for a democratic post-war future for Iraq, predicted by the Bush administration and the so-called neocons that see democracy and freedom as the only long-term strategy for triumphing over Islamofascist terrorism. In less than a year, we will have successfully engaged all major ethnic/religious factions in Iraq into the new political system, one which guarantees enough access that no two can shut out a third. The Sunnis have already experienced the futility of a boycott and will not repeat that huge mistake again. They intend on not only participating, but voting in large enough numbers to catch the Kurds and Shi'a napping in political complacency, and Zarqawi and the insurgents don't appear to daunt them at all.

Despite the desperate rhetoric coming from the Democrats in Congress the past month, this looks very much like victory to those of us who understand the overall strategy and plan for the war on terror. Once the elections take place, we can speed up the training of the Iraqi army and get them to hold towns in the Sunni areas of Iraq, forcing the insurgencies out, and allowing the Iraqis themselves to capture people like Amir Fanus, demonstrating their desire for peace and freedom over theocracy and tyranny. It will likely not even matter if Zarqawi "stands down" during the elections -- and that irrelevancy is exactly what we want for all of the lunatic Islamofascists still on the loose.

Now -- when will the American media cover these developments? Anyone? Anyone?

In the zero-sum game that has consumed our national politics in general and the Democrats specifically over the last month, Joe Lieberman has arisen as a new prize to be claimed -- or shunned. The Washington Post reports on the political damage that he may have done to his own party in coming back from Iraq and informing the nation that the Bush strategy has worked and will deliver victory if Democrats would simply not lose their nerve. Amazingly, the word "maverick" never once appears in Shailagh Murray's analysis:

The Connecticut Democrat's strong public defense of Bush's handling of the Iraq war has provided the White House with an invaluable rejoinder to intensifying criticism from other Democrats. In public statements and a newspaper column, Lieberman has argued that Bush has a strategy for victory in Iraq, has dismissed calls for the president to set a timetable for troop withdrawal, and has warned that it would be a "colossal mistake" for the Democratic leadership to "lose its will" at this critical point in the war.

Lieberman's contrarian behavior is not out of character -- he is far more hawkish than the majority of Democrats, and he has vigorously backed invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein from the beginning. But the latest defense of Bush and his stinging salvos at some in his own party have infuriated Democrats, who say he is undercutting their effort to forge a consensus on the war and draw clear distinctions with Republicans before the 2006 elections.

We can stop there for the moment. The Democrats never wanted to draw clear distinctions, which caused their current predicament in the first place. Their strategy was to shower the Bush administration with criticism on the war policy but to keep it as general as possible in order to avoid having to offer specifics on an alternate plan. That went out the window when Jack Murtha got a little overzealous about his assigned task and started talking about strategic redeployments over a six-month window, an "over-the-horizon" retreat that assumed another country in the region would happily host 150,000 American troops whose government no longer had the will to fight for the mission in the region.

When Murtha went specific, the Republicans finally took the initiative and forced a vote in the House on immediate withdrawal. Murtha complained that he didn't mean "immediate" -- at least at that time -- but the logistics of disengaging 150,000 troops on active missions and evacuating them and their equipment and support from the theater of battle would take at least that long under the most expedited of schedules. That folly resulted in the abandonment of Murtha and the notion of retreat on a devastating 403-3 vote, or at least so we thought. We thought the Democratic leadership would finally act responsibly out of sheer survival instinct, but instead they became more unhinged -- forcing voices of reason within their own ranks to publicly oppose the defeatism they espouse so passionately.

That brings us to Joe Lieberman, a tough man to love. He has long been a voice of conscience in the Democratic Party. He was the first to officially denounce Bill Clinton's activities with Monica Lewinsky, making his stinging rebuke on the Senate floor while still speaking against impeachment. That led to his partnership with Al Gore for the 2000 election, and the resulting mess when Gore tried to sue his way into the White House. (Yes, it started with an Al Gore lawsuit because he wanted to change the rules for recounts; you can look it up. They lost the initial lawsuit, too.) Instead of acting as a conscience, Lieberman silently assented to this bald attempt to take through the courts what the Democrats failed to take at the polling stations, a verdict eventually reached in three separate recounts, the last conducted by the media themselves.

How did the Democrats repay Lieberman for his loyalty? They shunned him in 2004, when he should have been the leading candidate for the presidency. He waited too long, perhaps, to announce his candidacy, wanting to give Gore another shot at running so he could endorse the former VP. Gore then shivved Lieberman by endorsing Howard Dean instead of his own former running mate -- just three weeks before Dean's campaign completely collapsed. The Democrats could have waltzed into the White House on a Lieberman-led ticket, but instead chose John Kerry and ignominious defeat at the hands of their most hated enemy.

One has to wonder why, under the circumstances, Lieberman hasn't left the party that so obviously has left him. His dogged loyalty probably explains that, and that makes his latest stand all the more remarkable. Lieberman is no babe in the political woods; he understands perfectly what his statements did to the Democrats. Instead of openly wondering what motivated Lieberman to take this kind of action, Reid and other Democrats in party leadership should ask themselves why they made it necessary for him to do so.

In the meantime, the Bush administration should continue to show Lieberman respect -- not just as an ally on Iraq war strategy, but also the respect due an honorable and formidable political opponent. Lieberman is not and will not be a Republican if he hasn't switched by now, and the GOP should remember that.

We'll be on the air today between noon and 3 pm CT, talking about Joe Lieberman, the new Copperheads, advances in the Iraq war that the media hasn't covered -- and that's just the first hour. If you're not in radio range of AM 1280 The Patriot, tune us in on our Internet stream. Join us by calling the station at 651-289-4488!

Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin may face more questions about personal ethics in the exploding scandal surrounding the alleged insider trading involving the Finance Minister's office and the announcement of monetary policy two weeks ago. Blogger MK Braaten has done some investigative reporting on the winners the day the policy got announced -- and found out that one of the biggest traded its shares at 3400% its normal volume in the hours prior to the announcement:

According to STOCKTRENDS.ca, the day before the Goodale income trust announcement, the trading volume of Medisys Income Trust was 226,500, with a value of $2,604,750, average trade was $37,750, and a total of 68 transactions. According to StockTrends.ca, this stock was listed as trading at “Unusual Volumes“. Click here for the report.

The volume of shares traded for Paul Martin linked Medisys Income Trust shares the day before the Income Trust announcement is way to high to be a ‘co-incidence’. The volume increased 3400% from the prior day, and the following day, dropped back down about the same amount.

Its said that Paul Martins personal doctor started a medical company called Medisys Income Trust, a chain of private health care clinics located across Canada.

The day before the Goodale income trust announcement, the volume of Medisys shares traded for the day went from 5,714 on November 21, to 203,953 on Novemeber 22. On November 23, the shares traded dropped back down to 6,220.

Amazingly, the sale of shares at thirty-four times their normal rate came just two days after a negative assessment from a respected stock analyst, Jennings Capital. Angry in GWN picks up on this:

In fact, in 2005, from a peak $15.21 in the summer, Medisys was on a downward trend, dropping 30% of its value until late November, earning another negative report on November 21, just two days before the income trust announcement.

I can only assume no one from Ralph Goodale's office called Jennings Capital Inc.

Whoever decided to ignore that negative report and picked up an astonishing 200,000 shares really picked exactly the right time.

I bet Dr. Elman will have a big smile on his face when Paul Martin comes for his next visit.

Indeed. When Jennings Capital issued its report, Medisys traded at $10.80. After the big trades -- in only 68 transactions, by the way -- the price had risen to $11.02, and as of last Friday had come up to $13.25. That represents a profit of somewhere north of $400,000. It seems as though someone knew that Ralph Goodale would issue a report favorable for income trusts and got into the market just ahead of most everyone else.

Read Angry and MK Braaten at the above links for more on this issue. In the meanwhile, the National Post reports that Goodale had a meeting with investment directors and discussed income trusts hours before he announced the new policy, a meeting which Goodale didn't reveal:

Finance Minister Ralph Goodale had an hour-long meeting with senior representatives of Canada's investment community at which the issue of income trusts were discussed only hours before his decision on the issue was announced, CanWest News Service has learned. ...

``There was a very vague, very general discussion,'' Embury said, adding that it dealt with the association's planned submission on the income trusts issue. ``They left the meeting no wiser than when they came through the door.'' ...

Conservative finance critic Monte Solberg expressed surprise when told of the meeting.

``The minister should be completely candid and release a list of all the people he had meetings with that week on the income trust issue,'' Solberg said. ``One of the things that I find frustrating is that it's only after information drifts out that they admit that they met with this group or that group, or that somebody got some kind of a phone call.

``This doesn't do anything to instil confidence in the minister or the minister's office,'' Solberg said, adding that his party will continue to ``push'' for an investigation into the issue by the Ontario Securities Commission or the RCMP into the issue.

I don't know about anyone else, but I find the assertion that senior representatives of the investment community had a meeting with the Canadian finance minister and wound up no wiser about investments a hilarious explanation. Is Ralph that incompetent that an hour of his time gains no one any insight into Canadian markets? Obviously, though, someone got wise that day. For a stock that normally trades in the low four figures on a daily basis, having over 200,000 shares transacted in just 68 purchases shows either an amazing coincidence or, more likely, a handful of individual investors got advance warning that Goodale would favor the exact kind of income trust that Paul Martin's personal friends had founded.

This story has legs, especially since there seems now to be a connection to Martin and his friends. Will the RCMP and/or the OSC start an investigation into the manipulation of the income-trust market? We'll not hold our breath ...

The upcoming issue of the Weekly Standard has two excellent articles that provide people with absolutely essential information on the war in Iraq. First is Stephen Hayes' report on the documents that the DIA refuses to release under a Freedom of Information Act request which appear to refute the conventional narrative of the war. Hayes has gained access to the index for these documents, but even though the documents remain unclassified, the DIA refuses to release them or to provide access for Hayes:

FOR THE SECOND TIME IN recent weeks the Department of Defense has denied a request from The Weekly Standard to release unclassified documents recovered in postwar Iraq. These documents apparently reveal, in some detail, activities of Saddam Hussein's regime in the years before the war. This second denial could also be the final one: According to two Pentagon sources, the program designed to review, translate, and analyze data from the old Iraqi regime may be shuttered at the end of December, not just placing the documents beyond the reach of journalists, but also making them inaccessible to policymakers.

As a consequence, the ongoing debate over the Iraq war and its origins is taking place without crucial information about the former Iraqi regime and its relationships with presumed U.S. allies and known U.S. enemies. Despite the determined shredding and burning efforts of regime officials in the dying days of Saddam Hussein's government, much of this information still exists--in handwritten documents, in videotapes and audiotapes, in photographs and satellite images, on computer hard drives. All told, the U.S. government has in its possession more than 2 million "exploitable" items from the former Iraqi regime (the intelligence community's term of art for information it thinks might be useful). According to sources with knowledge of the project, now two and a half years old, only 50,000 documents have been translated and fully exploited. Few of those translated documents have been circulated to policymakers in the Bush administration. And although one of the translated documents was leaked to the New York Times last summer, none of the others has been released, formally or informally.

The result: Much of today's debate about the threat posed three years ago by Saddam Hussein's Iraq is based on past assessments by U.S. intelligence agencies that we now know had no real sources on the ground in Iraq.

Here are a few descriptions of documents Hayes has discovered in the captured Iraqi documents:

* Intelligence coded memo by two IIS officers containing info on various topics; weapons boat, Palestinians training in Iraq, etc.

* Concerning mass graves found in the south: Check for nuclear radiation, identify bodies, ensure that CNN is the first news agency onsite. Any funerals should have an international impact. Signed by Hussein.

* Various correspondence e.g. visa forms, trade delegations, full reports on the connections between Abu Sayaf and the Qadafi Charity Establishment. Report on a certain individual traveling to Pakistan and involvements with bin Laden.

Palestinians training in Iraq? I thought that Iraq had no connections to terrorists, according to the media. Of course, by media I mean CNN -- the agency that Saddam Hussein wanted to ensure got first access to gravesites in case the mass graves ever got found. Presumably Saddam ordered this because in February 2001 (when this order was written), Eason Jordan had corrupted the media outlet enough that Saddam could trust CNN to broadcast a cover story blaming the bodies on the American use of depleted-uranium shells during Gulf War I. The third appears to connect Iraq not just to Osama bin Laden but also to the al-Qaeda linked Islamic terror efforts in the Phillippines.

Read all of the frustration Hayes has suffered trying to get the DIA to release these documents. While you're there, be sure to read Fred Barnes' demolition of the poll numbers that Democrats have thrown around in their debate over the past month about the 80% of Iraqis who want the Americans to immediately withdraw from their country:

If we knew the "internals" of the poll's sample, we could say for sure whether 82 percent of a representative sample of Iraqis said they favored immediate withdrawal. I contacted Rayment, who broke the poll story, and learned the sample size (1,264 Iraqis), but not the breakdown of Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds. That remains unknown, at least publicly. It matters, though. If the sample consisted disproportionately of Sunnis, for example, that would explain a high number of respondents who want U.S. forces to withdraw immediately. However, it wouldn't be a faithful reflection of overall Iraqi opinion.

Earlier polls tell a different (and clearer) story, though still not one that's favorable to keeping American troops in Iraq indefinitely. In March 2004, a BBC poll of 2,500 Iraqis found that 51 percent opposed the continued presence of coalition troops in their country. And in May 2004, a poll in six Iraqi cities, including ones with significant Sunni populations, put the percentage of Iraqis who want coalition forces to "leave immediately" at 41 percent. And 55 percent said they would feel safer if those forces left.

Be sure to read the entire analysis. Until we know more about how this survey got conducted and the sample used, it seems prudent to treat this as an outlier at best, and potentially dishonest.

Richard Pryor died today at 65, after suffering from long bouts of multiple sclerosis, heart disease, drug abuse, and what appeared to be a decades-long death wish. Pryor overcame the pain and illness of his life to change an entire entertainment form -- stand-up comedy -- from a series of jokes and witty third-party observations to a review of his life and his pain that seemed almost Freudian at times, even while making us cry with laughter.

Pryor started off trying to be the next Bill Cosby -- another American original -- but Pryor soon discovered that he could not spend his life ignoring his own viewpoint. While I would hardly claim to agree with much of what Pryor said and did in his life, he never quailed at talking about his failures and making them part of his always-hilarious act. His brutal honesty towards his own shortcomings made his pointed barbs at others around him easier to take and to get a laugh. He inspired two generations of comedians and helped pioneer stand-up into an art form.

Pryor also made a number of films, with varying success. He played serious roles such as the piano player in "Lady Sings The Blues", but mostly stuck with comedies. The one he should have had but wound up losing was Sheriff Black Bart in "Blazing Saddles", a role that the late Cleavon Little made into a classic. Pryor wrote the script along with Mel Brooks, but apparently the studio felt that Pryor brought too much controversy to the screen for the movie. Instead, Pryor made classic comedies with Gene Wilder such as "Silver Streak" and with Eddie Murphy and Redd Foxx in "Harlem Nights". He even appeared with Jackie Gleason in the extremely disappointing "The Toy", a shame given the talent the two comedic titans shared between them.

Later, as Pryor left the pain and the abuse behind him, life dealt him one last blow in the form of multiple sclerosis. Typically, he made it part of his act, refusing to allow the disease to keep him off the stage. Eventually, however, Pryor had to retire from the work he loved and transformed, and we were the poorer for it. Today, the world is poorer for his leaving it -- but we will have the work he left behind.

Rest in peace, Mr. Pryor, and thank you.

UPDATE: I should have known that Roger Simon would have had an anecdote or two to add.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist warned Democrats today that any attempt to filibuster the confirmation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court would result in the Byrd Option, which would strip the minority of the filibuster tool permanently for confirmations on appellate-court nominations. His statement gives the strongest indication yet that the GOP has counted heads and determined that enough Senators will back the rules change to make it a reality:

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Sunday he is prepared to strip Democrats of their to ability to filibuster if they try to stall Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court.

"The answer is yes," Frist said when asked if he would act to change Senate procedures to restrict a Democratic filibuster. "Supreme Court justice nominees deserve an up-or-down vote, and it would be absolutely wrong to deny him that."

In recent weeks, Senate Democrats have questioned whether Alito, a federal appeals court judge, has the proper judicial temperament and ideology to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

Several Democrats have said that Alito's views on issues such as voting rights and abortion could provoke a filibuster unless he allays their concerns about his commitment to civil rights. Alito's confirmation hearings begin Jan. 9 in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Alito has had his share of abuse come at him from the media over the past two months, most of it written out of whole cloth by axe-grinding "journalists" who fail to do even a minimum of research before publishing their opinion as fact. The latest and perhaps most egregious example came from Knight-Ridder's Stephen Henderson, who claimed that he could not find a ruling in a discrimination case in which Alito ruled for an African-American woman. Hugh Hewitt spent thirty minutes checking a law-system database and came up with three examples proving Henderson wrong.

The sound and fury coming from Democrats on Alito has been so hypocritical that the removal of the filibuster will seem like an anticlimax, a way to keep them from gumming up the works and one less opportunity to embarrass themselves. Democrats confirmed Alito to a seat on the federal appellate court fifteen years ago without demanding to review every scrap of paper from the Reagan Administration; back then, they seemed less interested in partisan bickering than fulfilling the traditional role of the Senate in confirming qualified nominees. Now that Alito has fifteen years of judicial experience on the bench, what do the Democrats want to review -- his hundreds of written opinions or thousands of decisions on the bench? No -- now they want all the Reagan-era privileged communications as a way to evaluate him as a judge.

It's a moronic approach on its face. The Democrats should be embarrassed to employ it, but if they do, then the GOP will be happy to restrict the debate that it creates and take away the one point of leverage that the Democrats still have in case John Paul Stevens or Ruth Bader Ginsburg leaves the court during Bush's term. Does anyone really think the Democrats are foolish enough to risk that? I certainly didn't -- but that analysis relies on Democrats acting rationally, an assumption that may give them too much credit these days, considering their current leadership.

New York Times Magazine, according to Editor & Publisher, had a report on the blogosphere that would create a storm of controversy. The Michael Crowley report would show that while liberal blogs outnumbered and in some cases outdraw conservative bloggers, the right side has more effect on politics because of the nexus of talk radio and Drudge.

As it turns out, that's all Crowley had to say. He should sue E&P for lifting his entire 283-word article for their 360-word description of it. Crowley offers no support, no research, not even a hyperlink to the two bloggers he mentions in his threadbare blurb. As for his central assertion -- that conservatives have superior message discipline because of orders received on high from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Drudge -- Michelle Malkin takes that down with a series of of references to high-tension debates on the right this year, primarily the abortive Harriet Miers nomination earlier this fall.

If any one article proved how out of touch the Exempt Media truly is regarding the blogosphere, Crowley's is it. And if E&P wanted to demonstrate that its reputation for news analysis is vastly overblown, they've managed to do it here.

The London Telegraph reports that the Iraqi "insurgencies" may come to loggerheads this week when the Iraqis go to the polls. The native Iraqis have made it clear to the Zarqawi faction that they intend to provide a clear road for Sunni voters to cast their votes and get the representation they need in the new, regular National Assembly:

Iraqi insurgents have signalled a major shift on January's parliamentary elections, urging Sunni Arabs to vote and warning al-Qa'eda militants not to attack polling stations. Ba'athist loyalists boycotted Iraq's last set of elections and intimidated would-be voters out of participation.

Now guerrillas in the volatile Anbar province say they are prepared to protect voting stations from al-Qa'eda fighters.

Ali Mahmoud, a former army officer and rocket specialist under Saddam's Ba'ath party, said: "We want to see a nationalist government that will have a balance of interests. So our Sunni brothers will be safe when they vote."

The rhetoric sounds even tougher than one would imagine between competing factions of an effort with the same primary goal -- to remove the Americans from Iraq by scaring them out of the country, a tactic that so far has only been effective against the Democratic Party leadership. One of the former Ba'athist leaders of the Saddamite remnants has openly called Zarqawi an "American, Israeli and Iranian agent who is trying to keep our country unstable so that the Sunnis will keep facing occupation". It doesn't sound like the Iraqis who went underground have appreciated Zarqawi's attempts to exchange one foreign occupation with another foreign tyranny.

It demonstrates that the Iraqis, even the Sunnis, have begun to understand the importance of the upcoming elections and the fact that Americans won't leave until the country has been secured for democracy. They're not ready to turn in their weapons yet, but a strong showing for the Sunnis at the ballot box might result in a deal for the native Iraqi insurgency to turn in their weapons to the new Iraqi Army. That will place even more pressure on the Zarqawi network to give up and get out.

It's beginning to look a lot more like victory -- everywhere but in Howard Dean's office and the American media, which continues to ignore these developments.

Many of our CQ community come from a younger demographic than I sometimes imagine. Although I have been interested in politics since Watergate, when I was ten years old, most people don't start finding politics and policy debate very exciting until they have gone through at least an election or two as a voter. As you may imagine, I'm always pleased to hear that young men and women in high school and college follow CQ and other blogs, keeping up with the latest in politics.

One of our regular readers, Sean Skelton, has also had time to be active in the Boy Scouts of America, serving his local community as well as participating in ours. I heard from his family that Sean has passed his final BSA review and will shortly receive his Eagle Scout award. As a former Scout myself -- one who only made it to First Class before getting involved in other extracurricular activities -- I know how hard one has to work to achieve the ultimate rank in the Scouts. Not only must the Scout win a significant number of merit badges, but he must perform three community-service projects. Only after that and a review of his work will the BSA grant the rank of Eagle. Needless to say, not many make it, but those that do invariably are a credit to their families and their community, all of whom benefit from such a fine young man.

Congratulations, Sean, and be sure to send us a picture of your ceremony.

So much for the Liberal concern for the poor and downtrodden. Liberal Party leader Paul Martin will have a lot of explaining to do about comments made earlier by two of his aides on the Tory plan to give cash back to families for child care expenses. Trying to discredit Stephen Harper's new initiative for child-care tax credits, Martin aides Scott Reid and John Duffy told Canadian television viewers that the money would probably go for beer and popcorn instead of child care:

The federal Liberals scrambled Sunday to control the damage from their first serious gaffe of the election campaign after a top aide to Paul Martin suggested Canadian parents could blow any extra child-care money they get from Ottawa on beer and popcorn. ...

The Conservatives would provide tax credits worth $250 million a year over five years to private companies and non-profit day-care operators. But the centrepiece of their program would be to pay parents annual allowances of $1,200 per child under age six.

That money could be used to pay for child care, but Reid noted there's no guarantee that would be the case. "Working families need care that's regulated, safe and secure," he said. "Don't give people 25 bucks (a week) to blow on beer and popcorn. Give them child care spaces that work."

Duffy saw nothing wrong with the comment - and in fact repeated Reid's assessment and stretched the reasoning a little further. "'There is nothing to stop people from spending (the Tory cash allowance) on beer or popcorn or a coat or a car or anything," he said.

Canadians might be shocked to hear the Liberals assume that poor and working-class people would rather spend money on beer and popcorn than care for their children. However, conservatives of all stripes understand that leftists naturally assume that everyone except the anointed few have no ability to run their own lives, making regulation necessary so that government makes all the decisions for these poor, benighted folks. Rarely do liberals -- or Liberals -- come right out and say this as Reid and Duffy did today. It gives a rare honest look into the paternalistic nonsense that modern liberalism espouses, if usually a bit more smoothly than this.

Martin, who has to explain Adscam and now a burgeoning scandal involving possible insider trading benefitting a friend's income trust company, can add this foolishness to the baggage his desperate party has put on itself this election season. He tried to express his confidence in the ability of Canadians to make the right choices to adequately care for their own children, but whan a party leader has to come out and actually explicitly make that statement, it's not a good harbinger for the rest of their electoral season.

Another anti-Syrian Lebanese politician died in a car-bomb attack this morning, a day after the UN heard the latest report on the last victim of Syrian assassination, Rafik Hariri. The circumstances provide an eerie sense of deja vu in the case of this journalist-turned-MP:

Gebran Tueni, a prominent politician and journalist, was among those killed in a car bomb attack in Lebanon, police have said.

Mr Teuni's armoured SUV car exploded as it was driving through the mainly Christian Mekalis area of east Beirut.

Three other people also died and 10 were wounded in the blast.

Mr Tueni, 48, was a well-known journalist and fierce critic of Syria. He was elected to parliament in this year's election.

Tueni had only just returned to Lebanon from Paris, where he had published his anti-Syrian newspaper in hiding from Assad's security forces. The 48-year-old journalist had been back in his native country for just hours when the bomber struck. His newspaper, An-Nahar, lost another reporter in June to a car bomb in Lebanon as well, Samir Kassir.

That sounds like a long string of coincidences -- or a pattern which points in only one direction: Damascus.

In yet another "coincidence", UN investigator Detlev Mehlis presented his latest interim report on the murder of Hariri to Kofi Annan. The BBC reports that it confirms Syrian government involvement and includes "concrete evidence" implicating high-ranking officials in the Assad regime. The UN should release that report shortly, although this time I suspect someone will take the time to convert it to a PDF rather than leave it in Word format. It will demonstrate a pattern of arrogance and oppression that Assad could not abandon when he retreated from Lebanon in the face of American and French ultimata.

The Syrians must pay for their transgressions in Lebanon. Clearly, the threat of further UN investigations has not terrified them into stopping their assassinations of hostile Lebanese politicians. The Americans and the French must demand a complete withdrawal by the Assad regime of both Lebanon and Iraq of Syrian intelligence personnel immediately. Any failure to comply should be met with a couple of shots across the bow -- perhaps a nighttime air raid that takes out the Syrian air force as a starting point, just to get Assad's attention. It's time to start looking at the next state sponsor of Islamist terrorism and clearly a direct actor in international terror themselves.

The Washingtom Post reports today on the missing 800-lb gorilla in the national debate on the Iraq War. Hillary Clinton has largely made herself AWOL from the debate, testing various formulations of vague anti-Bush criticisms without tipping over into anti-war rhetoric. That has led to criticism from both liberals and conservatives and left most wondering exactly where she stands on the war and the strategy needed. Hillary, however, isn't talking about it:

At a time when politicians in both parties have eagerly sought public forums to debate the war in Iraq, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has kept in the shadows.

Clinton has stayed steadfastly on a centrist path, criticizing President Bush but refusing to embrace the early troop withdrawal options that are gaining rapid favor in her party. This careful balance is drawing increasing scorn from liberal activists, frustrated that one of the party's leading lights has shown little appetite to challenge Bush's policy more directly and embrace a plan to set a timetable for bringing U.S. forces home.

Clinton is confronting the Democratic Party's long-standing dilemma on national defense, with those harboring national ambitions caught between the passions of the antiwar left and political concerns that they remain vulnerable to charges of weakness from the Republicans if they embrace the party's base. But some Democrats say, the left not withstanding, her refusal to advocate a speedy exit from Iraq may reflect a more accurate reading of public anxiety about the choices now facing the country.

In truth, Clinton is doing nothing of the kind. She's keeping her mouth shut as much as she can on the topic in order to avoid getting drawn into the battle -- a kind of political cowardice that will likely backfire on her in 2008. She hasn't confronted anything or anyone, at least not in the way that Joe Lieberman has, and to a lesser extent Steny Hoyer. Those two have attempted to resurrect the Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic Party, taking a realistic view of the progress in Iraq and recognizing the stakes involved.

Lieberman hasn't gone in for the "if I knew then what I know now" ploy that Kerry and others have used over the past two years. First, as everyone saw from the results of the 2004 elections, that dog doesn't hunt. In 1998, safely part of a Democratic majority, all of these people voted to make regime change in Iraq the official US policy and used not just WMD but Saddam's genocide, oppression of his people, and the promise of change that democracy would bring as reasons for their vote. Hillary's husband signed it into law. The only two things that changed since 1998 was that the Republicans took over the government and, after 9/11 and the realization that threats couldn't fester into imminence before taking action, demanded that Saddam meet the terms of the cease-fire and his international obligations -- and then implemented what had been US policy for five years.

Lieberman says he'd still vote for that action, regardless, because the world is better off without Saddam in power in the Middle East. The counter argument inevitably leads back to arguing for Saddam's continued rule in Iraq, in continued defiance of his obligations. Hillary has nothing to say on that topic. "Confronting"? What a laugh! She's busy retreating, pulling her own version of a cut-and-run in order to save her own political skin -- and her allies and opponents have all begun to realize it.

If she has a plan for Iraq, this is the moment to offer it, because events are about to overtake the Democrats very quickly. The voting for the new, constitutional National Assembly has already started. The insurgencies have started to fall apart, struggling against each other while both lose relevance in an Iraq where even the Sunnis have begun to embrace the ballot over the bullet. By 2008, the only perspective will be retrospect, and Hillary's subterranean record will not provide much opportunity for "told you so" in either direction. Kerry, Dean, Pelosi, and others will be discredited -- but only the Liebermans and the Hoyers will reap the benefits. The debate dodgers will have little or no credibility and will have exposed themselves as singularly lacking in leadership when their party most needed it.

Hillary, in other words, exposes herself as a lightweight. If she doesn't want to talk about policy, then her only reason for being in politics is sheer greed for power. Democrats should remember that, both in 2006 and in 2008.

UPDATE: "regime change in" Iraq, not Iran. Thanks, Blank:NoOne for catching that. (Note to self: find eyeglasses before posting.)

A new poll by ABC/Time shows that the Iraqi polling numbers tossed around by Democrats for the past month in defense of their cut-and-run "strategy" were bald-faced lies. The Oxford study underwritten by the network and news magazine determined that not only has Iraqi optimism increased dramatically throughout 2005, more than half of those polled believe that the US should stay in Iraq until Iraqi security services have been fully trained:

An ABC News poll in Iraq, conducted with Time magazine and other media partners, includes some remarkable results: Despite the daily violence there, most living conditions are rated positively, seven in 10 Iraqis say their own lives are going well, and nearly two-thirds expect things to improve in the year ahead.

Surprisingly, given the insurgents' attacks on Iraqi civilians, more than six in 10 Iraqis feel very safe in their own neighborhoods, up sharply from just 40 percent in a poll in June 2004. And 61 percent say local security is good — up from 49 percent in the first ABC News poll in Iraq in February 2004.

Nonetheless, nationally, security is seen as the most pressing problem by far; 57 percent identify it as the country's top priority. Economic improvements are helping the public mood.

Average household incomes have soared by 60 percent in the last 20 months (to $263 a month), 70 percent of Iraqis rate their own economic situation positively, and consumer goods are sweeping the country. In early 2004, 6 percent of Iraqi households had cell phones; now it's 62 percent. Ownership of satellite dishes has nearly tripled, and many more families now own air conditioners (58 percent, up from 44 percent), cars, washing machines and kitchen appliances.

There are positive political signs as well. Three-quarters of Iraqis express confidence in the national elections being held this week, 70 percent approve of the new constitution, and 70 percent — including most people in Sunni and Shiite areas alike — want Iraq to remain a unified country. ... Preference for a democratic political structure has advanced, to 57 percent of Iraqis, while support for an Islamic state has lost ground, to 14 percent (the rest, 26 percent, chiefly in Sunni Arab areas, favor a "single strong leader.")

This looks like the progress that Joe Lieberman mentioned when he returned from his last visit from Iraq and tried to explain to his colleagues that preaching disaster and falling skies simply didn't match reality. Another point also demonstrates the lies that Democrats have used in trying to scare the American public into losing the war. It turns out that 80% of Iraqis don't want the Americans out "right now", but only 26%. In fact, 52% want the US to leave no sooner than when their army and security forces have received adequate training to handle internal and external threats by themselves -- which is exactly what the Bush administration plan requires.

Will we see Jack Murtha apologize for using bogus numbers provided from biased sources? Highly doubtful. Instead, I predict that Murtha will continue to spout the obviously bad survey numbers as he clings to the remnants of his national relevance, and that the Democrats try to bury these new numbers as soon as possible.

Earlier in the Captain's Quarters archives, I wrote about the threshold of democracy in relation to Afghanistan. The measure of a democrat, I wrote, isn't whether he supports the results when he wins, but when he loses. Until one accepts the results of elections even when they go against their wishes, they do not practice democracy but hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy oozes from Salon's latest effort from Cary Tennis, and the magazine itself should explain the reason for their continued presentation of Tennis. Not only does his latest "advice" show him as a pseudo-democrat, but singularly lacking in basic understanding of the American political system:

At a certain point in the near future, if the current oligarchy cannot be removed via the ballot, direct political action may become an urgent and compelling mission. It may then be necessary for many people in many walks of life to put their bodies on the line. For the moment, however, although pressing and profound questions have arisen about whether the current government is even legitimate, i.e., properly elected, there still remains a chance to remove this government peacefully in the 2008 election. (Or am I living in a dream world?)

I do think this regime's removal is the most urgent matter before the country today. And I do think that at a certain point the achievement of that goal might take precedence over our personal predilections for writing, teaching and the like. We might be called upon to go on general strike, for instance. We might be called upon to set up camp in the streets for weeks or months, to gather and remain in large public squares as the students in Tiananmen Square did, and dare government forces to remove us or to slaughter us in the streets.

This is all terrible and rather fantastic to contemplate. But what assurances have we that it is not all quite plausible? Having discarded the principles that Jefferson & Co. espoused, the current regime seems capable of anything. I know that my imagination is a feverish instrument. But are we not living in feverish times, in times of the unthinkable?

First, let me state the obvious. George Bush and his "regime" will be out the door on January 20, 2009. Bush cannot run for a third term in office, and Dick Cheney is as likely to run as he is to get elected -- in other words, almost no chance at all. Even middle-school students know that Presidents can only serve two terms. Tennis' vapidity demonstrates that he knows less about the topic than most children, a reality that reflects on Salon's continued publication of Tennis.

Second, if the opposition party had fielded a candidate that appealed to more voters than Bush in 2004, he wouldn't be President now. They had ample opportunity to select a presidential hopeful from a wide range of candidates, including Joe Lieberman, who I think could have beaten Bush. Instead, the radical wing of the Democrats first tried pushing Howard Dean, and when that failed rallied behind John Kerry, who perhaps embodied the worst of the Democratic field in 2004. Vacillating and arrogant, Kerry never appealed to any other instinct except not being George Bush. Negations don't win presidential elections in America -- never have, and likely never will. Blame Democrats for choosing poorly.

The level of hostility towards democratic choice by Tennis boggles the mind. In his piece, he openly endorses violence against the duly elected government as a rational option when elections don't go his way. Does Salon endorse that view? Do their advertisers, such as NY Times Select, the History Channel, and United Airlines?

Salon should be ashamed to have published this dreck, and owes an explanation and an apology to its readers. (h/t: Instapundit)

I have received a few e-mails objecting to the MS-NBC ad running in the Premium strip, asking me why I approved the graphic and/or why I don't cancel it. It's a fair question, and I'll throw the comments open for debate on the topic.

First, on the ad itself, the graphic shows the outline of a female torso and the word "Porn". I don't find the outline objectionable; I've seen bra ads that reveal much more. In fact, the ad just above it features a woman modeling an anti-ACLU T-shirt that has more curve (and a much more realistic image), and yet I don't consider that objectionable either. The word "porn" has appeared on this blog in the context of discussion and debate; I don't shy away from it, although sometimes I spell it "p0rn" to keep the Googlebots from delivering me fresh readership under false pretenses.

MS-NBC has made an initial ad buy with Henry Copeland of BlogAds that could assist him in opening up blog advertising to Fortune 500 companies on a regular basis. As a client of BlogAds, that means a larger and more lucrative advertising market for CQ and a better opportunity to expand the work I do here as a result. We were warned ahead of time on the MS-NBC ad, told that it would be as tasteful as possible but would probably still generate some controversy, and given the opportunity to opt out. I felt that as long as we didn't display realistic nudity, it would not create a serious problem.

The ad itself is due to rotate out either tonight or tomorrow, I believe, in favor of another topic altogether. In the meantime, if any CQ readers find the image offensive, I understand your feelings. However, I don't agree, and I hope that those who disagree with me can respect that as much as I respect their differing opinions.

The comments section is now open for the debate ...

Stanley "Tookie" Williams has run out of options for avoiding his long-delayed execution, having lost both his bid for clemency and his final appeal to the US Supreme Court this evening. Retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor likely got the call, as the 9th Circuit comes under her jurisdiction, which might cool the ardor for her from the Judiciary Committee Democrats at the Alito hearings next month, but really means nothing much at all. Since no one had any significant new arguments to present on Williams' behalf -- supposedly one witness surfaced after over a quarter-century that might have had something to say about one of the four murders that put him on Death Row -- the only hope Tookie had was clemency, and the Governator terminated that possibility earlier in the day:

Schwarzenegger said he was unconvinced that Williams had had a change of heart, and he was unswayed by pleas from Hollywood stars and capital punishment foes who said the inmate had made amends by writing children’s books about the dangers of gangs.

“Is Williams’ redemption complete and sincere, or is it just a hollow promise?” Schwarzenegger wrote less than 12 hours before the execution. “Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings, there can be no redemption.”

He added: “The facts do not justify overturning the jury’s verdict or the decisions of the courts in this case.”

Again, I oppose the death penalty, primarily on two grounds: religious and practicality. I don't think the state should take a life unless the person represents a present threat to the safety and security of the public, or a threat to the national security of the US or our allies. I also don't think that the death penalty saves us any money, and needlessly clogs our appellate courts with frivolous motions and delaying tactics. When we have the person locked up, he should stay locked up -- and I mean locked up for good, and none of the Club Fed treatment, either. Three hots and a cot, and anything else depends on how well the prisoner behaves. That to me settles the entire case in a relatively expeditious manner without having twenty years of legal motions keeping the case alive.

So why am I not up in arms about Tookie? As I wrote earlier, the people of California decided that they do want the death penalty. It has withstood challenges from political opponents because it has a bipartisan appeal to Californians, with some estimates as high as 70%. One day, perhaps, they will change their mind and commute the sentences of people like Williams to LWOP. Until then, the people deserve to get the justice they've chosen.

More than that, however, I'm disgusted by the actions of the celebro-activists that continually degrade the anti-execution cause by attempting to transform murderous thugs like Tookie Williams into misunderstood geniuses who deserve special consideration after murdering people in cold blood. Tookie executed his victims brutally and without a hint of compassion. To this day, he has not shown any remorse for the crimes which got him on Death Row. Instead of remembering the victims, the Hollywood moral midgetry has once again decided that the criminal is their hero -- and it appalls me even though I disagree with his execution.

Tookie Williams spent his life victimizing his community, creating criminal gangs that would kill thousands in turf wars, and brutalizing the defenseless, taking at least four lives by his own hand that could have contributed meaningfully and positively to the community. For that track record, he deserves to spend the rest of his life in a small cell contemplating how he wasted his own life and others. Perhaps he might truly repent at some point, although he obviously hasn't now. However, for that list of crimes, the only redemption can be found in the next life, not here -- and certainly co-authoring a few "Just Say No To Gangs" kids' books weighs pretty lightly against the maelstrom of destruction for which Tookie is responsible.

If the celebrities want to do something about the death penalty, I'd suggest trying to convince Californians that LWOP means no release, ever, under any circumstances except innocence. They could start by ending their peculiar practice of promoting the murderers as heroes and ignoring their victims. Once the public no longer has to listen to ridiculous arguments about the brilliance and courage of people who shoot helpless victims in the back and can focus on the issues of the death penalty itself, then perhaps we can convince people that we can live without executions and all the lunacy they entail.

UPDATE: Baldilocks has a must-read post on this from the Ground Zero Tookie helped to create:

Leaving aside those who oppose the death penalty for moral/religious reasons, few of you have seemed motivated to move into my South Central LA neighborhood to see what “Tookie” and his Crip co-founder Raymond Lee Washington (who’s burning in Hell right now) have wrought for the last thirty-odd years. And I know that you won’t be choosing to live here anytime soon. That’s understandable; however, don’t tell me that we should coddle these TERRORISTS like “Tookie” and those he created if you don’t have to put up with them. (Okay, you can tell me, but you can expect a barely polite response and that’s if I’m feeling generous.)

Secondly—and this is especially for people like Jeremy: black people are thinking, functioning humans who, when adult and without some actual mental deficiency that they can’t control, are just as responsible for their actions as are members of any other race of people. We’re not murderers by nature (that is, any more than any other set of humans are). Therefore, we don’t need a separate, lower standard of behavior in any area, whether it’s education, employment or criminal justice.

When black people do well, they deserve recognition; when they do wrong, they deserve the consequences—no more or no less than any other.

Read the rest; the target of her ire is a 19-year-old clueless commenter, but it might just as well be the celebrities that have elevated Tookie to martyr status. Also check out the Anchoress, whose angst at her indecision on the death penalty results in some fine introspection.

Gerhard Schroeder lashed out at his critics yesterday after accepting a cushy job with the Russian state=owned oil company Gazprom just weeks after approving a major project while still Chancellor. He threatened to sue anyone accusing him of "sleaze", while new Chancellor Angela Merkel says she wants a debate on a code of conduct for politicians re-entering the marketplace:

In remarks made to the Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, Mr Schroeder says the allegations against him are "nonsense" and announces that he is taking legal action - although he does not give any details about this.

Mr Schroeder and President Putin signed the deal to build the gas pipeline underneath the Baltic Sea 10 days before the general election in September - earlier than originally planned.

Politicians and the media have suggested there was a conflict of interest, with Mr Schroeder allegedly feathering his nest while acting in a public capacity. "Schroeder ruins his reputation" was one front-page headline on Tuesday. But Mr Schroeder said he was only offered the job on Friday last week, the same day that his appointment was announced.

And if anyone believes that, Honest Ger has a bridge he can sell you over the Rhine.

Even if Schroeder can be taken at face value here and we buy the notion that his résumé just happened to get to Gazprom through Monster.com, the fact that a former Chancellor of Germany airily dismissed an opportunity to take over a ministry in a unity government to lick the boots of Vladimir Putin has to appall ordinary Germans.

At least, we hope it does. The Germans certainly deserve better than this.

My posts on the Stanley Williams execution and my opposition to the death penalty has generated a number of comments and e-mails. One e-mail comes from a prosecutor who wrote such a good argument that it deserves a wider exposure, even though he disagrees with my position. I suspect it speaks for a number of CQ readers.

I'm a big fan of yours, and I read your blog daily. As a prosecutor in Los Angeles, I appreciated your comments today regarding the disgusting glorification cum martyrdom of Tookie Williams, particularly as you are personally opposed to the death penalty.

I'm not a good enough theologian to even try to convince you of the moral propriety of the death penalty, but I would like to take a stab at the LWOP argument. It seems to me that it isn't enough to say that the people of California could have simply chosen to keep a killer like Tookie locked up forever. Getting rid of the death penalty means that we have to also consider the foreseeable consequences of guaranteeing criminals that they can kill as many innocent people as they want, for whatever reason at all, without even facing the theoretical possibility of placing their own lives at risk.

A few examples to make my point: Suppose we have a career criminal with a long record of violent felonies, what we in California would call a "three-striker", who knows that he will be sent to prison for the rest of his life if he is ever caught committing a new offense. When he goes to rob the local convenience store, he doesn't want to hurt anyone - he just wants the money. But he also knows that, as there is no death penalty, he will face the exact same punishment (life imprisonment) whether or not he kills the clerk, the only witness to his crime. He would be a fool not to do so. If he happens to bump into a police officer on the way out, he may as well kill him too - there is no extra charge, so to speak.

If we somehow manage to catch the "three-striker" and place him on trial, it will be in his best interest to sabatoge his own trial by killling witnesses, jurors, prosecutors or judges. After all, if we can't convict him, he goes free. (Remember that scene from the movie Traffic, where the druglord walks?) And even if we manage to successfully prosecute him for one of these new murders, he will still only face the same life sentence that he was sure to get in the first place.

If we do manage to put a murderer like Tookie away for life, he can then kill anyone he wants to - inside or out of prison - with complete impunity. What are we going to do to him - give him two life terms? In California, we presently have something like 30,000 inmates serving life terms (29,999 as of 12:01 AM!) Most of them have little or no prospect of ever being paroled. I would not like to be there on the day that they are told that they have been given a license to kill.

In short, we can be unreasonably tolerant in granting appeals and delays which put off the actual day of reckoning for decades or more (in California, were looking at about a 25-year process), but I cannot see how we can get rid of capital punishment altogether without creating powerful incentives for criminals to commit murders that they would otherwise not do. I would not want to be the legislator who had to explain to a prison guard's widow that we knew that we had created a system of justice that refused to set any punishment for the lifer inmate who killed her husband. I take these situations, where potential killers are facing or already serving life sentences, to be the "rare or practically non-existent" cases for which the Catholic Catechism permits the use of the death penalty.

CQ reader Jeff Norris also sends this link by e-mail from The Atlantic Monthly, which covers a Brookings Institute study that surprisingly finds that each execution deters eighteen potential murders:

Support for capital punishment is, of course, usually associated with the political right. But the lead author of a new paper making what might be termed the "big government" case for the death penalty is the noted liberal scholar Cass Sunstein. The paper draws in part on a study conducted at Emory University, which found a direct association between the reauthorization of the death penalty, in 1977, and reduced homicide rates. The Emory researchers' "conservative estimate" was that on average, every execution deters eighteen murders. Sunstein and his co-author argue that this calculus makes the death penalty not just morally licit but morally required. A government that fails to make use of it, they write, is effectively condemning large numbers of its citizens to death—a sin of omission like failing to protect the environment or to provide adequate health care. "If each execution is saving many lives," they conclude, "the harms of capital punishment would have to be very great to justify its abolition, far greater than most critics have heretofore alleged."

The Palestinian Authority has done something remarkable the past few days; they have arrested dozens of islamic Jihad operatives in response to attacks on Israel, a unique demonstration of authority that PA president Mahmoud Abbas had long avoided:

Masked Palestinian security forces have arrested dozens of Islamic Jihad activists in a series of overnight raids across the West Bank in recent days — an operation the Palestinian Authority says is aimed at bringing those behind attacks on Israel to justice.

However, the biggest crackdown on militants since Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas took office a year ago has netted only low-level operatives, and some suspect the goal is to appease the United States and Israel rather than crush the militant group.

At the same time, analysts and Israeli security officials said the arrests have sent an important message to the Palestinians — and Israelis — that militant groups can no longer operate with impunity.

"It is a symbolic way to tell everybody, 'I am serious,'" said Israeli security analyst Boaz Ganor.

Has Abbas finally gotten the message from Israel and the US that his continued defiance of his obligations to disarm the militias made him and the PA irrelevant in future negotiations? Perhaps. With Ariel Sharon moving ahead with his unilateral securing of Israel and redefinition of the borders between the West Bank and Israel proper -- including Jerusalem -- Abbas could watch the doors close on his opportunity to influence the literal parameters of his proto-state as well as the figurative parameters of peace. The US has made clear that we would prefer to negotiate these points with a serious partner for peace from the Palestinian side -- but that so far, we haven't found one.

Islamic Jihad gives Abbas the safest route to pick up some sorely needed credibility. They have the most radically Islamist philosophy and have the lowest political backing in the territories. Even so, it looks like Abbas has carefully picked his detainees to ensure that he doesn't overly anger IJ commanders -- who I suspect will see their street thugs back under their command soon enough anyway. Abbas doesn't have the juice to go after Hamas, whose political popularity probably surpasses his own Fatah faction and would touch off a civil war.

Can Abbas play this game for long? Unfortunately for him, no. The Palestinians have made it clear that they do not want peace with their neighbor -- they want a war of annihilation, and Hamas and IJ give them that chance. Abbas' only hope is to make a deal quickly with the Israelis and the US and hope it's good enough to convince ordinary Palestinians to change their minds. Otherwise, one way or the other, Abbas will shortly be out and the war will be back on again.

I'll be on the air with Rob Breckenridge in a few minutes at CHQR, the Calgary radio station that has often been kind enough to invite me on their show. I hope you can listen in on their Internet stream -- and check out Rob on a regular basis.

UPDATE: Sorry for the short notice, folks -- but I had a series of appointments and couldn't post this until just before air time. We talked about Stanley Williams and his execution, and Rob gave me plenty of time to discuss it with his audience. Calgary has a fine show in The World Tonight -- I hope that more people discover it through their website.

The blogosphere has long resigned itself to the lack of coverage given by the Exempt Media to positive developments in Iraq. While we have read about increasing enthusiasm for voting on the milblogs and some of the secondary professional media outlets, the market leaders such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post have almost exclusively focused on body counts and bombings while ignoring everything else. When the Gray Lady sees fit to start reporting that even the Sunni of Saddam's hometown have committed themselves to democracy in the upcoming elections, it might indicate that defeatism has finally jumped the shark:

The guerrilla war found fertile ground in Tikrit, and defiant Sunni Arabs boycotted the elections in January.

But turnout in the parliamentary elections on Thursday is expected to be high, reflecting the shift in attitude of many Sunni Arabs toward the American-engineered political process.

"Last January, the elections were quite different than they are now," Wael Ibrahim Ali, 61, the mayor of Tikrit, said as he strode Tuesday along the grounds of the palace where Mr. Hussein used to celebrate his birthdays. "The people refused to vote, and now they see it was a wrong stand or wrong position."

This Sunni-dominated province of Salahuddin had a 29 percent turnout in January, one of the lowest in the country. In the past year, though, Sunni Arabs, who make up a fifth of Iraq's population, realized they had shut themselves out of the transitional government.

While this story appears at the top of the NYT's web version, the links on it indicate that the story ranks 11th out of 16 for the Times' International section -- below such articles as the amazing face-transplant story from France and the de-facto legalization of prostitution in Tijuana, hardly a development at all for the unfortunate border town of Mexico. Still, Edward Wong's piece reveals that the media has now recognized that with the vote underway, their depiction of Iraq as a irretrievable shambles will not long stand up to the coverage coming this week.

In this case, even the soul of Saddam's support base, Tikrit, has prepared for life in a democratic Iraq. They have a good political motivation for their efforts, of course; their earlier boycott left them to the tender mercies of the Kurds and the Shi'ites over whom they once ruled with Saddam's iron fist. After spending a year chafing miserably with almost no one representing them in the interim Assembly, the last thing any of them want is four more years of disenfranchisement. They will turn out in droves this week to the polls for the simplest of reasons, and the one that makes democracy work in any pluralistic society: self-interest.

It doesn't mean that they don't miss the old days of favor under the dictator in Tikrit, but they do recognize that those days will not return. Now they hold their election with politicians promising to push for better security in order to "end the occupation", a sentiment that the Coalition would not dispute. Their embrace of the ballot over the bullet will create an expectation that their politicians must follow through on their promises or be held accountable, and even the Sunni of Tikrit might learn to appreciate their ability to influence policy much more directly, and debate it much more openly, than when Tikrit's most notorious son utterly dominated Iraqi politics for over three decades.

The Sunni participation puts the last of the building blocks in place for the establishment of a consensus democratic republic. The reporting of the Times indicates that the American media might finally start recognizing what will shortly become obvious to all whether they do so or not: that a free Iraq exists, thanks to an administration that steadfastly refused to listen to the Chicken Littles of the opposition and the whiners of the Exempt Media at home. The war may finally have turned the corner in the only place it could be lost -- here in America.

Baseball has decided to embrace a world vision this year by creating an international tournament of national teams, based loosely on the format used by the Olympics in past years. Instead of those Olympic competitions, which occurred in the middle of the major-league season and wound up as amateur and minor-league tournaments, the World Baseball Classic will feature the best players in the world competing for their native countries -- the US, Japan, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Canada, Mexico, and others. The venues will be in Japan, Puerto Rico, and the US, with the final games in San Diego's Petco Park.

MLB has selected one of my favorite baseball legends for its ambassador to the first WBC: Tommy Lasorda. As I wrote in a comment on his site, who better to represent the love and passion we Americans have for our national pastime than the Hall of Fame manager who has devoted his entire life to baseball -- especially Dodger baseball? The only regret I have is that the WBC missed an opportunity to hold at least some of its games at Dodger Stadium, still the most beautiful of all MLB ballparks -- and privately financed, I might add. If they had played a couple at Chavez Ravine, I could have at least seen the stadium while I watched the games on television.

Congratulations, Tommy. I know you've wanted to see a true World Series for many years, and this will get us as close as we can get. I think the US will have a tough time making it into the finals against the global competition that we have encouraged for years, but you will remain to remind everyone that the sport has been an American gift to the world.

The Syrian regime of Bashar Assad will not comply with any more investigations into a continuing series of political assassinations in Lebanon of anti-Syria politicians, if the reaction of their UN ambassador gives any indication. Speaking in closed session, Fayssal Mekdad compared murdered MP Gibran Tueni to a 'dog' and blamed Israel for the suspicion under which the Assad regime finds itself:

Syria's ambassador to the United Nations, Fayssal Mekdad, likened slain Lebanese legislator Gibran Tueni to a dog yesterday and indicated that Israel leads American policy on his country. American and French officials, meanwhile, vowed support for Lebanon, but shied away from pushing for sanctions against Syria in the aftermath of yet another damaging report on that country's role in Lebanon.

America's U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, said he would ensure that international pressure on Syria is "unrelenting." When asked why he did not refer specifically to sanctions, which the U.N. Security Council has decided to employ against individuals involved in the killing of a former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, he said only, "The council's word is at stake now." Mr. Bolton's words seemed designed to challenge some in the 15-member body who have advocated a softer line on Syria.

Mr. Mekdad blamed Israel for his country's increased isolation and dismissed the Lebanese Cabinet's request to expand the Hariri investigation to probe six other alleged political assassinations. The request came after Monday's bombing in Beirut that left four people dead, including Tueni, an anti-Syrian legislator and journalist. It was endorsed last night in a French proposal for a Security Council resolution.

"So now every time that a dog dies in Beirut there will be an international investigation?" Mr. Mekdad said to an Arab diplomat during a closed-door council session, according to a diplomat who heard the conversation but asked to remain anonymous.

Mr. Mekdad will need to report back to his government that the American and French representatives at the Security Council both back a Lebanese request to expand the Hariri probe to include Tueni's murder -- and that 'dogs' that use car bombs will wind up leaving their paw prints at the door of Bashar Assad. Syria had jollied the US along up to a few months ago, but with the Iraqi elections under way, they know the time has grown short for their regime. Soon the US will have a massive force on the Syrian eastern frontier, free to take action if desired by George Bush to continue prosecuting the war on state-sponsored Islamofascit terror -- and Assad knows that only two major targets still exist for Bush in that conflict. The continued attacks on Lebanon will not just give Bush an extant reason to select Damascus for the next phase, but may finally pull France in as an ally, given French interests in freeing Lebanon from Syria's political and economic grip.

Tick tock, Bashar.

The Confederate Yankee catches the New York Times with its pants down, reprinting rumor as fact and getting caught on a single-sourced story that attempts to discredit the upcoming Iraqi elections. Dexter Filkins reported this morning that trucks inbound from Iran had carried forged ballots for the Iraqi elections with the intention of skewing the results for the Shi'ites:

Less than two days before nationwide elections, the Iraqi border police seized a tanker on Tuesday that had just crossed from Iran filled with thousands of forged ballots, an official at the Interior Ministry said. ...

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the Iranian truck driver told the police under interrogation that at least three other trucks filled with ballots had crossed from Iran at different spots along the border.

The official, who did not attend the interrogation, said he did not know where the driver was headed, or what he intended to do with the ballots.

The seizure of the truck comes at a delicate time in Iran's relations with both Iraq and the United States. The American government has said Iranian agents are deeply involved in trying to influence events in Iraq, by funneling money to Shiite political parties and by arming and training many of the illegal militias that are bedeviling the country.

Now this would be quite a story, if true. The Iranians want to see a Shi'ite-dominated government rise up from the ashes of Saddam's Sunni-led military dictatorship, presumably one that can get warped into a theocracy that would bring the Kurds and the Sunni under their heel. The Kurds feel reasonably autonomous now and probably do not have too many worries about this, but the Sunni -- already suspicious of the Shi'ites and their thirst for revenge -- will be ready to believe the worst. This development could undermine the entire election process and put Sunni intransigence back into high gear ... if it was true.

Well, apparently it isn't, according to Reuters:

The head of Iraq's border guards denied police reports on Wednesday that a tanker truck stuffed with thousands of forged ballot papers had been seized crossing into Iraq from Iran before Thursday's elections.

"This is all a lie," said Lieutenant General Ahmed al-Khafaji, the chief of the U.S.-trained force which has responsibility for all Iraq's borders.

"I heard this yesterday and I checked all the border crossings right away. The borders are all closed anyway," he told Reuters. ... "I contacted all the border crossing points and there was no report of any such incident," Khafaji said. ...

Iraq's frontiers are closed for the period of the election.

Oops! I guess Dexter Filkins and the several layers of editors at the Paper Of Record^TM didn't think to check out the well-reported fact that the roads in and out of Iraq on both the Iranian and Syrian borders had been closed. That makes it pretty difficult for eighteen-wheelers to sneak in and out of the country. They tend to get bogged down in the sand and dirt otherwise, making it hard to put the ballots into the polling places. And how exactly were these tankers supposed to get the ballots into the boxes anyway -- pump them into election stations with a hose? The boxes are watched by election judges and a few thousand outside auditors.

It turns out that Filkins' source either works for the Defense ministry's intelligence unit or passed along a rumor that got sourced from there. Stories based on anonymous, single sources can do tremendous damage, especially to a reporter's reputation and that of his newspaper. Perhaps the Gray Lady should think about that before jumping in with both feet to repeat stupid and easily-debunked urban legends such as these.

When we first went into Afghanistan to take out the Taliban, the action had the backing of Europe, which promised its support for the effort and its aftermath. The operation got handed to NATO in a move lauded by the American media as a model of how we should have handled Iraq. Now it appears that NATO has botched the mission, with the various European countries that pledged their support to help build the newly democratic nation reneging on their promises, according to The Scotsman:

BRITAIN is set for a U-turn on its commitment to send thousands of troops to fight in Afghanistan next year, with some in the army now questioning whether the mission should be abandoned altogether.

Military commanders say that lessons have not been learned from the run-up to the Iraq war and that political prevarication has left them unable to make adequate preparation for the mission, which had been expected to involve up to 5,000 troops.

Instead, an additional fighting force of only about 1,000 soldiers - almost certainly paratroops - is expected to be sent to Helmand province, in the south of the country, probably backed up by Apache helicopter gunships.

The US brought NATO in when the UN would not cough up troops, and it did so under pressure from Congress and the media to be less "unilateral" in the war on terror. Without US leadership, however, the entire effort has become "shambolic", as one British officer called it, and those nations that demanded a voice in how the war got waged have walked away from their responsibilities. The Dutch refuse to send their contingent of 1,000 men at all unless the United States provides them with "security", for instance. Does the Netherlands have such a weak fighting force that they cannot deploy without having someone else do the firing for them when challenged? Apparently they do -- but that doesn't keep them from telling us how to wage war, it seems.

How about the Germans? The Germans pledged to train the Afghanistan security forces, a task that started after the fall of th Taliban, well before we started handing over sovereignty to the Iraqis in June 2004. Since that time, the Americans have trained over 200,000 Iraqi security troops, with over 45,000 able to operate independently with American logistical support. They have taken charge of a number of military bases in their own country and hold their own territory against steadily-weakening insurgents. In comparison, the Germans have trained all of 200 police officers since December 2001 -- all of which disappeared in Kabul shortly after their release into the field.

So much for the notion of military leadership by international committee. If America, the Brits, and the Australians assume leadership of the War on Terror, it's because we know how to fight and win it. The uselessness of the biggest complainers in Europe has never been made more clear. It also shows that we took the right path in Iraq and have worked wonders in a very short period of time to get the country and its security back on its own feet -- and that leaving it to others to finish the job will result in disaster.

Democratic Senator Carl Levin has pledged to block an appointment for President Bush's choice of Pentagon spokesman based on the supposed attitude problem of the nominee, J. Dorrance Smith. What has caused this political obstructionism to rise again, this time in the Senate Armed Services Committee? Senator Levin doesn't appreciate what Smith thinks about ... al-Jazeera:

J. Dorrance Smith, the nominee, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in a closed session about an opinion article in which he accused U.S. television networks of helping terrorists through the networks' partnerships with al-Jazeera.

The article has sparked concern among committee members and has prompted Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) to pledge to defeat Smith's nomination to be assistant secretary of defense for public affairs.

"I have deep concerns about whether or not he should be representing the United States government and the Department of Defense with that kind of attitude and approach," Levin said after yesterday's hearing.

What got Levin's knickers in a twist? Smith wrote this about al-Jazeera and its influence on American media:

In an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal in April, Smith wrote: "Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and al Qaeda have a partner in Al-Jazeera and, by extension, most networks in the U.S. This partnership is a powerful tool for the terrorists in the war in Iraq."

Smith also singled out U.S. networks, saying: "Al-Jazeera has very strong partners in the U.S. -- ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN and MSNBC. Video aired by Al-Jazeera ends up on these networks, sometimes within minutes."

Does Levin dispute this? The AJ network often shares its video with the American outlets, who then rush to get it on the air. AJ also maintains open contacts with Islamofascist terror groups, a well-known fact and one which usually nets it access to the latest in al-Qaeda propaganda straight from Osama or his number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Smith, in other words, gave an accurate depiction of the flow of information. So what's the problem?

Well, Levin represents Michigan, which has a significant Arab-American and Arab-immigrant population, and al-Jazeera has some credibility in that community. Levin wants to pander for their support, and rather than simply allow Smith to become spokesman for the Pentagon -- a political post that will disappear when Bush leaves office -- he wants to play petty politics instead. All it does is make Levin look ridiculous. He wants to chew up political capital to keep a qualified candidate from talking at a podium? Unbelievable.

Of course, if successful, it means that the Pentagon will need a spokesman. Fortunately, I know someone with experience at that position ...

This should convince Levin to lighten up.

Day is dawning at this moment in Iraq -- Election Day, when the Iraqis freely select their first constitutional government in decades. Some estimate a turnout of ten million voters in the elections today, and while the biggest concerns will be about security, no one believes it will discourage anyone from making their way to the polling booth. Just the same, like a broken record, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi issued his traditional Election Day threat, making the even seem more official:

With Iraqi exiles starting to cast their ballots, including in Zarqawi's home town of Zarqa in Jordan, a statement issued by his branch of al-Qa'eda announced "a blessed conquest to shake up the bastions of non-believers and apostates and to ruin the 'democratic' wedding of heresy and immorality".

There were sporadic shooting and bombing attacks at polling stations yesterday, and several candidates have been killed in recent weeks. But overall the level of violence seemed to have dropped in the run-up to the poll. ...

In Tahrir Square posters were hung depicting Zarqawi dressed as a blood-red monster with the motto: "He wants to destroy elections, democracy, progress." There are growing signs that Sunni Arabs, who have led the insurgency for more than two years, will vote in unprecedented numbers.

Even with the media relentlessly focused on death tolls and bombings, it began to appear that the rate of violence had scaled down significantly. That may have come from a temporary pause in operations among the Ba'athist insurgents, the remnants of the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. Those forces, primarily Sunni, have instead switched to defending the Sunni minority in order to guarantee a high turnout for Sunni voters and their slate of candidates. The rumored strong turnout appears to have been encouraged by these native terrorists, keen on ensuring that the Sunnis get represented in the four-year government in much better proportion than their boycott left them last January.

We will find out soon enough whether that strategy paid off and whether the Sunni make themselves a part of the new and democratic Iraq. Hopefully the results will encourage these native "insurgents" to give up the bullet for the ballot permanently, further isolating al-Qaeda and Zarqawi. It won't fail for lack of courage on the part of the ordinary Iraqis, who proudly display their purple fingers as the new symbol of defiance and courage. The cowardice of the terrorists cannot hope to triumph over them.

At this point in the Iraqi election polling, it appears that the day has provided a smashing success for democracy. Christiane Amanpour of CNN reported moments ago from Baghdad that the turnout in Sunni areas has been surprisingly high, compared to what she experienced in the last two elections. Here's a rough transcript of her report, coming at midday in Baghdad, talking live with anchor Soledad O'Brian:

SO: What are you seeing there?

CA: Well, Soledad, we are at a polling place at a school not far from our office here in Baghdad, which has been turned into a polling station. There are police outside, there are Iraqi Army outside. These people have been maintaining the security -- in fact, they have been sleeping at these polling stations for several days before the election. .... All day, it's been quite a steady stream of people coming to vote. In Baghdad, we're not so surprised because we've seen this, particularly in the Shi'ite and mixed areas in the last two elections. There was January and the referendum in October.

But what really surprised me was the turnout in the Sunni population. We went to a place called Dura in southern Baghdad. It's quite a violent place, it's quite a poor place, it's mostly Sunni, but the turnout was high there. They said that they had made a mistake, basically, by sitting out the last election. They wanted their voice heard, they wanted to be counted, and so they're going to the polls today. ... The one thing most people have said is that they don't want a religious state here or a religious government.

Nic Robertson also reports from Ramadi that the violence has not kept the voters there from going to the polls -- a major shift from January, when only one person cast a ballot in this Sunni terrorist area. The "militias" have provided the Ramada residents with security to get them to the polls, and Robertson reports that a celebratory atmosphere has developed at these stations.

Part of the reason for the high turnout and relatively low violence over the past few days appears to be secret negotiations between the American military command and some native insurgent groups for a cease-fire, according to the Washington Times. The truce got approval from the highest ranks of the US command in Iraq and looks to have been mostly successful, although the policy did not have unanimous support among the command officers:

After months of painstaking dialogue, U.S. officials have persuaded most of the main insurgent groups to cease violence for today's election and its immediate aftermath, U.S. officials said yesterday. In return, the U.S. military agreed, despite severe internal disagreements, to halt "offensive operations" during the period, U.S. Embassy officials said on the condition of anonymity.

Polls opened today at 7 a.m., as expected, for the historic vote, but moments later a loud blast sounded in the capital, according to witnesses quoted by wire services. There were no immediate reports of any casualties or damage. ...

The decision to negotiate, taken by the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, met with resistance from several of his fellow officers. It was then decided to make no public statement, but simply to act on the new orders in secret.

U.S. forces are thought to be fighting dozens of different insurgent groups, making it difficult to measure the effort's success. Moreover, the time frame for the agreement, which also included several days prior to the vote, is not clear. Nevertheless, the agreement has generally held up, despite some notable exceptions, such as Tuesday's killing of a leading Sunni politician in Ramadi. On the same day, U.S. forces raided the city.

Casey rolled the dice on this election day, hoping that the time had finally come to encourage the native "insurgency", which has a more anti-foreigner than Islamist bent, to buy into the political process. Those left out of the negotiations, such as the Zarqawi faction, obviously will continue to attempt their operations to disrupt the elections, but the lack of widespread violence may indicate that Zarqawi's ability to conduct such operations has been severely curtailed. Casey may have chosen wisely here -- and the vote might finally convince the Sunni to either lay down their weapons or to join the new Iraqi security forces and serve the newly elected democratic republic, under the civilian command of the National Assembly.

A few more tough hours remain, and then the courage of the Iraqi people will have taken the voting itself as far as it can go. After that, it falls to the election workers and the interim government to bring the results to fruition as Iraq prepares for its first peaceful and civilian transition of power in its history.

Sensing a chance to exploit the always-present undercurrent of resentment towards Canada's southern neighbor and largest trading partner, Prime Minister Paul Martin took an opportunity given to him by American ambassador David Wilkins to sound tough and stand up to Wilkins' rebuke earlier this week that "the US is not on the ballot" in the upcoming election. Tory leader Stephen Harper backed away from Wilkins' criticism of Martin (who went unnamed in Wilkins' statement), claiming that the ambassador's speech had been "inappropriate":

Paul Martin enthusiastically tore into an election-time spat with the United States yesterday, firing nationalist rhetoric from a B.C. softwood-lumber mill only one day after U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins warned Canadian politicians against campaign chest-thumping.

At the same time, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, in his first comments on the issue, called the ambassador's intervention "inappropriate" -- as federal party leaders appeared to calculate that rebuking the United States is good electoral politics.

NDP Leader Jack Layton, whose party has been losing support to the Liberals, came closest to defending the U.S. ambassador. He said Mr. Wilkins discovered Mr. Martin's electioneering bent when he started "whipping up the rhetoric" to get elected after failing to deliver results on Canada-U.S. issues.

Unfortunately for Martin, he wound up with his foot in his mouth when he made his attack on the American ambassador. The Prime Minister, who should have worked closely with the envoy of his largest trading partner since his appointment last April, couldn't even get his name right for his prepared speech yesterday:

Mr. Martin, however, made tough talk against the United States his theme of the day. At a softwood-lumber mill in Richmond, he fired shots over the continuing trade dispute around U.S. tariffs and then, misnaming the U.S. ambassador, made no apologies.

"Ambassador Williams is a man for whom I have the greatest respect," Mr. Martin said. "All I will simply say is I am going to deal with issues that are important to the Canadian people. . . . I will deal with them as they arise and I will call it as I see it."

He couldn't ask someone to double-check Wilkins' name? Martin supposedly has held high-level contacts with the American ambassador for months on the softwood lumber issue and other NAFTA concerns. Perhaps part of Canada's problem stems from Martin's inability to recall exactly who represents the other side of those negotiations. When George Bush ran for president in 2000, the media ridiculed him as a bumpkin because he couldn't name every world leader of every country; I believe he missed Musharraf in Pakistan at the time. Here we have a sitting head of government who can't even properly name the most key ambassador in the diplomatic corps in Ottawa -- for prepared remarks.

That leads me to my Daily Standard this week, "Liberal Party Meltdown". It recounts the opening missteps of the ruling party's efforts to campaign for its continued grip on power in Canada and their unusually self-destructive remarks that include Scott Reid advising the media that "Alberta can blow me". Apparently, the foot-in-mouth disease starts at the top in this election.

The New York Sun reports that the "grass-roots" efforts by PFAW and Alliance for Justice to generate a groundswell of opposition to the confirmation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court has so far failed miserably. A nationwide 'educational' tour has generated almost no interest at all, and on-line petitions have only received 55,000 endorsements instead of the targeted million or more:

A grass roots effort aimed at fueling opposition to Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel Alito has become a target of mockery for the nominee's conservative allies instead - the latest skirmish in an ongoing turf battle among interest groups almost four weeks ahead of the confirmation hearing.

Earlier this month, the liberal activist group Alliance for Justice kicked off a nationwide tour against Judge Alito in which members travel from town to town distributing literature and organizing events against the nominee. Starting in Colorado, the so-called "Rolling Justice" tour stopped in 26 cities in nine days.

But, according to conservative activists, the tour is a disaster. They point to a companion Web site, www.rollingjustice.org, where supporters can follow the tour and post comments online: After more than a week of postings from a tour leader, the site has generated one response, from a woman named "Kendra Sue," who wrote: "Oh my goodness. You are really braving the cold for a good cause. Keep up the good work ..."

The executive director of the Committee for Justice, a key White House ally in the confirmation process, Sean Rushton, said photos on the Rolling Justice Web site suggest weak attendance and a lack of press attention. Of the photos on the site, the largest group pictured is sitting at a restaurant table. A link inviting visitors to get involved leads back to the main Rolling Justice page.

The hearings for Alito begin in less than four weeks. So far, as Brian McGuire notes, the two well-funded leftist activist groups have yet to buy any major ad time for their attacks on Alito. Christmas season undoubtedly has something to do with that; not too many people will focus on poltical campaigns, especially on something this esoteric. However, it also seems to show exactly how far outside the mainstream PFAW and AFJ have placed themselves in their incessant politicization of the appellate courts. Just as with the Roberts nomination, they cannot appear to catch fire with their torch procession against Bush nominees.

Why? Perhaps they simply don't understand that a majority of people voted for George Bush in large part because we wanted nominees like Samuel Alito and not Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Both PFAW and AFJ have acted as though the election was some sort of cultural irrelevancy or abnormality, and both pretend that unfettered access to abortion on demand with no restrictions of any kind represents the mainstream position of Americans. It doesn't., and the self-delusion of the Left has once again led to its humiliation.

On the other hand, with the low turnout, the choice of restaurants for photo ops becomes much wider. That's at least a small consolation.

In the days after 9/11, Americans resigned themselves to the inevitability of a series of terrorist attacks on our homeland. We tried to do whatever we could do to minimize the possibility of such an attack, but we all prepared ourselves and tried to do what we could to remain vigilant against terrorists. One element of that vigilance was the PATRIOT Act, which gave law enforcement the same kinds of power to pursue counterterrorism as they do in investigating child pornographers and organized crime suspects.

That proved to be successful; we have yet to experience another successful attack on American soil, more than four years later. After that tremendous success, when key provisions of this legislation have reached a critical expiration date, the Democrats propose to force the calendar back to 9/10 and filibuster the renewal of the PATRIOT Act:

The real fight will be later this week in the Senate, when Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, plans to try to force an end to debate on the bill so it can be voted on before Congress adjourns for the year. The Patriot Act, which was modified in the bill now under consideration, expires at the end of the year.

Other key Democrats such as Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat and ranking minority member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, also have said they will support a filibuster. Four Republicans -- Sens. John E. Sununu of New Hampshire, Larry E. Craig of Idaho, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska -- said yesterday that they will join Democrats in opposing the legislation, even helping block a final vote on its passage. ...

"Last week, Democrat leadership offered a cut-and-run strategy in Iraq," Frist spokesman Bob Stevenson said. "Now they're siding with the ACLU instead of the Fraternal Order of Police in the war on terror."

If a filibuster succeeds and the two sides fail to reach a compromise that the House signs off on, the Patriot Act will expire. The campaign ads against Democrats would write themselves, Republicans said yesterday. But Democrats said they are confident that such a political strategy won't work this time. "Republicans are spinning themselves so hard, they're forgetting that there's bipartisan opposition to this bill," Reid spokesman Jim Manley said.

Really? It passed out of the House on a bipartisan vote of support, 251-174. Reid and his spokesman must have some math issues if they can't determine that Democrats in the House understand the stakes involved. The Senate Democrats have decided on yet another path for their obstructionism, this time on national security. If Democrats think that's a political winner for them, given the four-year track record of PATRIOT keeping us secure without any significant complaint of law-enforcement overreach, then they have proven once again that their party has no business being in charge of national security.

The insider trading scandal continues to fester this week as none of the normal agencies that would have jurisdiction have yet to announce any sort of investigation. The Medisys trades may only have been the tip of the iceberg, according to a CQ reader with knowledge of Canadian financial markets, and a check on the winners from the run on income trusts on November 23rd might demonstrate why Canadians may not get an investigation at all -- at least until the Americans decide to check into the action.

On Tuesday, Ontario House member Michael Prue (NDP - Beaches/East York) stood to query the Minister of Government Service, Gerry Philips, on why he had not initiated an independent investigation into the series of trades on income trusts that took place just hours before Goodale announced an end to taxation on these investment products, boosting their value considerably. Philips replied that the Ontario Securities Commission has the responsibility to perform oversight on any such trades, and that the new chief of the OSC, W. David Wilson, had to make that decision. Prue replied:

Minister, W. David Wilson, your new chair of the Ontario Securities Commission, has been silent to date on this matter. One only has to take a quick scan of the Elections Canada Web site to show that Mr. Wilson is an avid financial supporter of the Liberal Party of Canada, the only party to which he donates money. Mr. Wilson has already been forced to recuse himself from investigations into the Royal Group due to a potential conflict. You agreed with that. Today, Judy Wasylycia-Leis, the federal NDP critic, has asked Mr. Wilson to recuse himself again. I am asking you this question: Will you support the effort and will you order Mr. Wilson to recuse himself in this situation?

It turns out, however, that David Wilson has more reason to recuse himself than just his party affiliation. Wilson received his appointment as chairman of the OSC after working as CEO of Scotia Capital Markets until his official appointment to the OSC on November 1, 2005, just twenty-two days before this event. Why is this important? One of the revelations to come out in the last couple of days is a previously undisclosed meeting that Finance Minister Ralph Goodale held with Investment Dealers Association earlier on the 23rd. Shortly after this meeting ended, unusual volumes began trading in income trusts such as Yellow Pages, Aeroplan, Superior Plus, and BCE (a dividend equity).

A look at the trades for November 23rd shows that Scotia Capital played a large role in moving the shares of these products. Look at Yellow Pages as an example; in the PDF, Scotia Capital is broker #85. SC starts off by selling large chunks of Yellow Pages at $14.12 right from the opening bell. Through 10:30, they're still primarily selling even though the price has moved up to $14.36. Beginning at 11 am, they suddenly begin buying in small amounts, and then at 11:26 start buying in higher volumes -- almost 20,000 between 11:26 and 11:29, even though the price had moved up to $14.50. SC sells off a couple of thousand shares later in the hour at $14.65, and then nibbles most of the next couple of hours. At 14:22, SC suddenly starts selling again at $14.60, dumping several thousand shares while the price drops a few cents. Starting at 14:57 and continuing through the end of the session at 16:00, the stock explodes in volume, with a number of players pushing the stock price over $15.00 by the closing bell.

Or, for that matter, take a look at the trading pattern and volume for equity product BCE. The following large-volume trades took place with the major investment brokers on the Toronto Stock Exchange:

10:15:35 50,000 shares Scotia Capital
10:36:48 100,000 shares Scotia Capital
10:39:21 50,000 shares Desjardins
11:43:45 98,400 shares TD Securities
14:53:08 100,000 shares CIBC World Markets
15:42:59 50,000 shares Blackmont
15:56:36 50,000 shares CIBC World Markets

After the day was over, SC parent Bank of Nova Scotia shares rose to their highest level all year, $47.10, the next day. The stock peaked at $1 per share on the 24th, better than a dollar an hour higher than the stock price on the 22nd, a day before Goodale's meeting. Scotia Capital played a major role in moving large transactions for all four trusts on November 23rd.

All of this could just be a coincidence, of course, but the notion of coincidence keeps getting brought up as a possible defense, one that sounds weaker with each invocation. But unless the OSC decides to pursue an investigation, no defense will be necessary. And it appears that despite Wilson's words that "[d]eterrence is achieved when everyone knows with certainty that the enforcement of regulations will be impartial, swift and uncompromising", the ties to his former company have put the OSC chief in a position where he wants to take as much time as possible deciding whether he wants this investigated at all, let alone independently.

The Conservatives and the NDP should continue to press for a federal, independent investigation into the November 23rd trading activity. However, if they don't get it, the Americans may wind up riding to the rescue. BCE also trades on the NYSE, as does Bank of Nova Scotia. The SEC and its far more independent management might well choose to start looking into any unusual trading patterns inside the American exchanges. That could let Wilson off the hook -- or perhaps make his life a lot more complicated than it already is.

UPDATE AND BUMP: I'll let this one ride on top today. The key part to remember is that either the OSC or the RCMP would have to investigate this if anyone does at all, and unfortunately David Wilson gets to make that call for the time being. Eventually it will fall to the Ontario provincial government if Wilson punts, who will likely not have too much enthusiasm for exploring yet another Liberal Party financial scandal.

It will take weeks for the accurate count of votes cast in today's Iraqi elections to get finalized, but one common strain has come through in all reports during this historic day -- the Iraqis stood together as never before in their history. For a variety of reasons and motivations, all factions except the foreign terrorists of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi embraced the ballot over the bullet for the first time since the British cobbled together the nation of Iraq after the fall of the Ottoman Empire following World War I. Millions of Iraqis from all factions -- ethnic, secular, geographic -- turned out despite the dangers of the Islamofascist lunatics that would rather kill Muslims than see them vote for their own leaders, and in defiance of the skeptics around the world who claim that Iraqis simply aren't worth the bother of liberation.

Look the people with purple-stained fingers in the eye and tell them that. I double-dog dare you.

One voter said: "This is stability, at last". Another, with tears in his eyes, told me: "This is the beginning of a new Iraq. I am so happy." ...

Ali al-Musawi, a Shia Muslim originally from Sadr city said: "Iraq is like a ship in a storm being tossed form left to right, and now we need a new captain to take us to land and to safety."

One man hoped the election would bring an end to the occupation, but this would depend, he said, on maintaining unity. "Stability can only come from unity. When we have stability," he said, " then the Americans can go."

Initial estimates of the vote approach 15 million, about the same number as estimated that are eligible to vote at all. In previous elections, the chaotic nature of the coverage and the exit polling led to somewhat inflated numbers, and I suspect we'll see more of the same here. My guess is that with the Sunni participating enthusiastically and the Shi'ites more engaged in the parliamentary elections than in the slam-dunk plebescite that established the constitution (at least throughout most of their base) in October, the final count will come in around 13 million. That still represents close to a 90% voter turnout -- a mark unequalled for free multiparty elections in the West, and an indication of the thirst for liberty the long-oppressed Iraqis have.

The only losers in this election will be those who have told us over and over again that democracy could not be imposed at gunpoint. That the cut-and-run Coalition of the Gutless could still today stand and make that argument is a testament to the enduring power of freedom: stupidity and cravenness is no crime. The Iraqis didn't get democracy imposed on them at gunpoint at all. They had their oppressors removed at gunpoint -- and then the Anglo-Aussie-Italo-Polish-etc-American coalition kept them from falling prey to even more oppressors by gunpoint while they slowly took charge of their own destiny. No one who has watched the three free elections in Iraq this year could possibly describe the march to the polls as being "at gunpoint". These people rose up as a nation -- perhaps in this election especially for the first time -- in defiance of the guns and bombs of their erstwhile oppressors to take their nation back from them.

In doing so, they made fools of the people around the world who sold them short, who criticized George Bush and Tony Blair and John Howard for having the guts to stick by the Iraqis to make sure they got their chance at freedom. Those purple fingers point in accusation to those who doubt the power and desire of freedom, who claim that all forms of government have legitimacy depending on the kinds of people over which they rule. The purple fingers pull the mask off a global media effort to cast the situation in Iraq in the worst possible light to belittle the effort made by the West to rescue millions from hopeless tyranny and in so doing, keep their own people safer.

The purple fingers point the way to change the Middle East and turn it into a dynamo of philosophy, production, and freedom. They tell us we're winning, if some of us would only listen.

In my post below, I ask whether the world has finally gotten the message that all people of all backgrounds want and deserve freedom, as demonstrated by the Iraqi elections. Media watches might expect that serious newspapers around the world will address the lessons to be drawn from this historic event. Not at the Paper of Record^TM, however; the message -- and the elections -- seem to have escaped the attention of the editorial board at the New York Times.

The RSS feed for the Opinion page at the Times just updated with tomorrow's articles. Here's what readers of the Times will see addressed by the opinion leaders of what was once the most influential of all American dailies:

* Don't rush to renew the PATRIOT Act (even though it's about to expire after four years)
* The Red Cross may not be motivated to fix its problems
* Chad hasn't benefited from its discovery of oil (but then again, neither have we in ANWR)
* A demand for moral clarity on torture

Wait -- perhaps one of their guests addresses it instead. Er, no. Tim Harford talks trade reform to benefit poor farmers, Robert Kennedy really likes wind power until it blocks his view of the stars (more on that later), and Pankaj Mishra writes about the West vs Islam ... in Turkey. Even behind the Times Select Firewall of Sanity, Paul Krugman forgoes his usual Chicken Littlism on Iraq in favor of discussing conflicts of interest in health care.

Did the Times miss the story? Or are they just hoping that the rest of us did?

UPDATE: The Washington Post editorial board passes on the elections as well. Instead, they talk torture, ANWR drilling, and a recount in Virginia's election for attorney general. I guess that Virginia election is much more significant for comment this particular day than Iraq's emergence as a democratic nation in the middle of a collection of Islamic tyrannies and kleptocracies. At least, however, one of their guest op-eds addresses the topic, even if Susan Rice wants to throw a little cold water on the celebration.

The LA TImes doesn't do much better.

One of the more laughable hypocrisies of the environmental movement has been the proposed windmill farm called the Cape Wind project. The proposal involves the installation of hundreds of windmills in an area that should capture enough power to generate a significant amount of clean energy -- the kind of energy that environmentalists normally insist be part of our future. Most of the time, this kind of government spending gets high marks from limousine liberals like Rep. Robert Kennedy Jr, but not when the project gets built where their limousines park, as Kennedy's fine NIMBY whine in today's New York Times explains:

AS an environmentalist, I support wind power, including wind power on the high seas. I am also involved in siting wind farms in appropriate landscapes, of which there are many. But I do believe that some places should be off limits to any sort of industrial development. I wouldn't build a wind farm in Yosemite National Park. Nor would I build one on Nantucket Sound, which is exactly what the company Energy Management is trying to do with its Cape Wind project.

Environmental groups have been enticed by Cape Wind, but they should be wary of lending support to energy companies that are trying to privatize the commons - in this case 24 square miles of a heavily used waterway. And because offshore wind costs twice as much as gas-fired electricity and significantly more than onshore wind, the project is financially feasible only because the federal and state governments have promised $241 million in subsidies.

Cape Wind's proposal involves construction of 130 giant turbines whose windmill arms will reach 417 feet above the water and be visible for up to 26 miles. These turbines are less than six miles from shore and would be seen from Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Hundreds of flashing lights to warn airplanes away from the turbines will steal the stars and nighttime views. The noise of the turbines will be audible onshore. A transformer substation rising 100 feet above the sound would house giant helicopter pads and 40,000 gallons of potentially hazardous oil.

According to the Massachusetts Historical Commission, the project will damage the views from 16 historic sites and lighthouses on the cape and nearby islands. The Humane Society estimates the whirling turbines could every year kill thousands of migrating songbirds and sea ducks.

Kennedy goes on and on like this without once mentioning that the people who would miss the stars in the sky at night have the last name of Kennedy, one of the wealthy families with permanent compounds on Martha's Vineyard. he invites all Americans to come out and visit to understand the view and ecosystem at risk with this project, but I doubt he's willing to put us all up at the family cabin for a couple of weeks. After Kennedy gives a laundry list of why, despite the support of most environmental groups, this project isn't as feasible as an on-shore facility, he then suggests moving it farther off-shore as a solution:

If Cape Wind were to place its project further offshore, it could build not just 130, but thousands of windmills - where they can make a real difference in the battle against global warming without endangering the birds or impoverishing the experience of millions of tourists and residents and fishing families who rely on the sound's unspoiled bounties.

In other words, damn the cost and the 40,000 gallons of hazardous oil, dead birds, and all that -- get the turbines out of my sight and I'll be happy to support Cape Wind.

Let's face facts. Kennedy has a point about the entire project, but doesn't want to make the final connection. The energy created by Cape Wind on any scale will be more expensive, more difficult to transmit, and more difficult to maintain than what gets generated now by unsubsidized commercial generation. It may be cleaner, but the actual manufacture and maintenance of the turbines isn't exactly clean, and the requirement for plenty of lubricant on site will always mean that petroleum is part of the equation and a potential for a minor spill now and then. Wind power will never generate enough electricity to replace any other source of power; at best, it will only add a little more flexibility to the grid.

It's nothing but a boondoggle for the environmentalists, a pork project designed to capture the votes of the limousine liberals who support it. Obviously, as Kennedy proves, that support only extends to the sacrifice of not actually having to see it. Typical.

It may have been a four-way affair, but at the beginning of the first national televised debate in the Canadian elections, it looked more like a tag-team wrestling match, with the three opposition parties taking turns reminding voters exactly why Paul Martin and his Liberals have to go. Martin, for his part, appeared to focus on Bloc Quebecois's separatist sympathies in his rebuttals rather than address the Adscam corruption that stripped him of his grip on power:

The early section of the debate was dominated by the sponsorship scandal. It took just seconds for sponsorship to become a cudgel in the hands of the prime minister's political rivals as they took turns pounding Martin on the topic. Duceppe, in his element in French, led the charge against Martin's scandal-plagued Liberal government, which he described as having "lost the moral authority" to govern.

"The sponsorship scandal is an incontestable issue," Duceppe said during a two-hour question-answer session that was largely civil, focused on policy and devoid of the kind of angry back-forth exchanges that have defined past debates. "Justice (John) Gomery ruled that the Liberal party brought itself into dishonour and that a system of bribes was in place."

Martin shot back that Duceppe and the Bloc were interested in capitalizing on the scandal only so long as it serves to tear apart the country. "They want to put an end to this Canada that generations of Canadians and Quebecers have built, this Canada that is the envy of the world."

Harper may have done himself the most good after giving the Francophones their best look at him for this election. Given a tough question about what he would do if he found out one of his children was gay, he replied that he would love his children unconditionally regardless of their orientation. He also pledged to avoid using the constitution to block gay marriage and to abide by whatever resulted from a free Commons vote on the issue -- a far cry from the radical reactionary that Liberals had attempted to make him on the campaign trail. (A "free" vote is one in which the party does not demand unity from its members, I believe, allowing each MP to vote his or her conscience rather than support a party platform.)

Harper may have performed well enough to shake off some doubt about his readiness to lead Canada. Martin, on the other hand, keeps moving from rage to rage in a transparent attempt to shake off the stain of corruption. Will that work? Not for long, I suspect, especially with the other three leaders apparently determined to hold his feet to the Gomery fires.

As long as we're talking democracy, we can check in on the results of another recent round of elections in the Middle East. In the Palestinian territories, the results of recent municipal voting show that the terrorist group Hamas has gained significantly over the slightly-less-terrorist ruling party of Fatah. Hamas won over 70% of the vote in this last round of local elections before the parliamentary elections which will determine which set of terrorists runs the West Bank and Gaza Strip:

The Hamas militant group won local elections in the West Bank's largest cities, according to preliminary results released Friday, dealing a harsh blow to the ruling Fatah party just six weeks ahead of a parliamentary poll.

Hamas swept more than 70 percent of the vote in the West Bank city of Nablus, highlighting the fierce challenge posed by the group to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party, which suffered a split Thursday when a group of young leaders broke away. ...

A Hamas victory in the Jan. 25 parliamentary poll could torpedo efforts to renew long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, and damage the Palestinians' relationship with the United States. Hamas is sworn to the destruction of Israel and responsible for dozens of suicide bombings. The group is on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations.

"If the Hamas was ever to become a dominant force in Palestinian politics, that would be the end of the peace process," said Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev.

Hamas' welfare programs, coupled with its fierce resistance to Israel's occupation, have won it grass-roots support among Palestinians who are fed up with Fatah's corrupt government and its inability to rein in lawlessness in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Hamas is the reason for the lawlessness in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. That has long been part of their plan to undermine the crumbling Fatah party -- create enough chaos while their own security forces guarantee security for their supporters so that Fatah has no chance to either disarm Hamas nor to establish the rule of law. Only the Israelis could break that cycle, but the international community wanted Israel to butt out. Now the inmates are truly in charge of the asylum, and Israel will eventually be forced to deal with them regardless.

Besides, the Palestinians have made themselves clear in their reasonably free and open elections: they want war and support terrorism. Not only have they consistently voted in favor of the most reliably anti-Israel faction, the lack of a counterbalancing "peace" party makes it clear that Palestinians have no interest in peaceful co-existence with Israel. They have repeatedly chosen the no-negotiation platform of Hamas over that of the Abbas approach, which at least keeps the door open to a negotiated end to hostilities.

It's time the world took the Palestinians at face value. They want a war with Israel. Let them have it -- and let the Israelis fight it without undue restraint, and let it continue until we finally get a resolution to the ongoing headache of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Sorry for the long absence and the silence on the two stories of the day. I've been preoccupied with an unexpected complication for the First Mate all day long and just started to catch up with e-mail and news feeds. The FM has to have some routine maintenance tasks for evaluating her transplants every six to nine months, including a biopsy, which normally is no big deal -- just a half-day in the hospital and an evening of bed rest. In the past, I'd take the day off and hang out, hospiblogging, but today I decided to go into the office and get some work done, as this has always been a non-eventful task.

Until today, of course.

Apparently, the biopsy ruptured a small blood vessel and forced the doctors to stop the other tasks about halfway through the procedure. When the bleeding continued (a very small amount, but just persistent), the doctors decided to admit her overnight and keep an eye on the situation. I bounced back and forth between the office, the dogs at home, and the hospital tonight. The doctors are very hopeful this will all resolve itself in the morning and they can continue the procedures and send her home -- but in the meantime, I'll be bouncing around a bit.

I'll probably miss my MOB party tomorrow, unfortunately, and we'll be putting off the last of the Christmas shopping, but other than that, this isn't a big deal -- more of just an unexpected, Murphy's Law headache. Now that I'm home for the evening and the mutts have decided that they're stuck with Daddy for the night, I can get back to the headlines and find out what the heck happened all day long. I'm sure that CQ readers are way ahead of me on these topics, but that's usually true anyway.

Many in the blogosphere have commented on the two big stories of the day -- the New York Times revelation of the NSA operation to conduct warrantless wiretaps on international communications, and the filibustering of the extension of the Patriot Act. I have read the Times article in depth and read some of the commentary on the leak, including the Power Line demand that the leak get treated the same as the Valerie Plame fiasco-in-progress. I predicted the PATRIOT Act filibuster earlier this week, and considering this new story, am not surprised in the least to see it succeed.

Let's review what the Times has to say on their big scoop, on which they sat until the day after the Iraqi elections:

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches. ...

What the agency calls a "special collection program" began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, as it looked for new tools to attack terrorism. The program accelerated in early 2002 after the Central Intelligence Agency started capturing top Qaeda operatives overseas, including Abu Zubaydah, who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2002. The C.I.A. seized the terrorists' computers, cellphones and personal phone directories, said the officials familiar with the program. The N.S.A. surveillance was intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible, they said.

In addition to eavesdropping on those numbers and reading e-mail messages to and from the Qaeda figures, the N.S.A. began monitoring others linked to them, creating an expanding chain. While most of the numbers and addresses were overseas, hundreds were in the United States, the officials said. ...

Since 2002, the agency has been conducting some warrantless eavesdropping on people in the United States who are linked, even if indirectly, to suspected terrorists through the chain of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, according to several officials who know of the operation. Under the special program, the agency monitors their international communications, the officials said. The agency, for example, can target phone calls from someone in New York to someone in Afghanistan.

Warrants are still required for eavesdropping on entirely domestic-to-domestic communications, those officials say, meaning that calls from that New Yorker to someone in California could not be monitored without first going to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court.

One has to bounce around the article to put this together, in typical NYT fashion, but the core of the issue is this: the NSA and the administration defined international communications as including those where one end -- and one end only -- occurs in the US. Anything else still requires a warrant, as the Times acknowledges. Moreover, this effort did not take place in darkness. The FISA court did get informed of the issue, and the leaders of the oversight committees in both houses of Congress from both parties took part in the decision. It does not appear that the Bush administration sought to hide this from the other two branches of government, but sought to include them in the oversight of the new process as much as possible within the secrecy needed to conduct the program during wartime.

And the program paid off. Information developed during the NSA effort kept al-Qaeda from destroying the Brooklyn Bridge in 2003 when Iyman Faris got captured before he could initiate the attack. He pled guilty to terror-related charges and is now serving a long prison sentence for his part in the conspiracy. If one reads further into the long and detailed article, the Bush administration received precedential decisions from courts that acknowledged the executive authority to wage war included a broader authority to set the parameters of espionage in order to guarantee security. Clearly, the administration has sought to comply with the letter of the law while getting the best possible information as quickly as it could to prevent another devastating terrorist attack.

While the White House played offense in Afghanistan and Iraq in the forward strategy against al-Qaeda terrorists -- in the latter country, we have squared off against the AQ first team for at least two years now -- this proves that the American government has not neglected its defense. It has deployed all of the assets at its hands to keep the terrorists from gaining a toehold inside the US as much as possible to do so. The use of wiretaps against the tech-savvy Islamist terror groups has apparently not only kept them from effectively coordinating for attacks, but it has also led to the discovery and exploitation of unknown AQ and other resources, which led to other domino-style discoveries.

It shows that the four years of attack-free life that Americans have enjoyed since 9/11 was no accident, but the fruits of hard work and delicate intelligence service by dedicated men and women. And now the question is whether that defense has been hopelessly compromised by the NYT leak and publication, as well as the PATRIOT Act filibuster.

After carefully reading through the story, I would say that the revelation of the NSA program doesn't damage our defense nearly as much as a reversal on PATRIOT might, and that hasn't yet happened. In fact, it could serve us well to have this debate now, four years out from 9/11 and outside the pressure of a presidential election during a second term which means that the current administration does not have a stake in a re-election campaign. But let's be clear about the stakes involved in this debate: does the Constitution allow the United States to take the necessary actions to defend itself against asymmetrical warfare without unduly curtailing individual liberties? Does the Constitution require us to sacrifice thousands, perhaps millions, of our citizens to murderers and infiltrators simply because we might not like the idea of international communications being subject to random monitoring?

I would argue that it does not -- and the professional way that the Bush administration handled the NSA program demonstrates that perfectly well. The White House engaged the leadership of both political parties and made partners of the other two branches of government to make this a success. It kept the operation secret as long as possible, it did not use the data to abuse the citizens of the US for any reason; it conducted its operations within the letter of the law, although perhaps outside the spirit that some see it containing. It succeeded at the balancing act required of it, and they deserve great credit in their administration of the project.

I share the mistrust of big government and its power to spy on their own people. One only needs to see the example of the Mukhabarat in Saddam's Iraq to understand that, or for that matter, review some of the more distasteful COINTELPROs of the Hoover dynasty at the FBI. The Times account does not even hint at that kind of corruption and revolting abuse of power at the NSA, but instead a fixed eye on the legal lines and the focus on true national security. People have every right to be nervous about the necessary tactics for defending the nation during this time of war -- but they have the responsibility to give the evidence of the operation a mature evaluation.

In those terms, with my wife, son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter still alive along with the 300 million Americans that Islamofascists have wanted to kill in massive numbers for the past four years and more, I'd say we have struck the right balance between security and liberty for these circumstances. Those who want to strip us of all defenses out of an overstretched notion of the Fourth Amendment should remember that without security, civil liberties do not exist at all.

Addendum: Please see postings at various blogs such as Hugh Hewitt, Michelle Malkin, the threads on The Corner, and numerous links and excellent original commentary at Instapundit as well. I had to save this in stages in order to make sure my virus program updates didn't eat my work, so if you've seen the (cont) note earlier, you know what I was doing ...

One of the Sunni political leaders expected to compete for leadership positions in the next Assembly has predicted that Shi'ite religious parties will not win enough seats to form a government and