Captain's Quarters -

It appears that our skins function is down after the move to the new server. I have help-desk requests into Hosting Matters and m2webstudios for immediate attention, and hope to have the problem resolved as soon as possible. It looks like that is the only problem so far, and that all data is accessible.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

UPDATE: On the other hand, it looks like trackbacks are working again!

Egypt has stepped into the Palestinian morass with both feet today, warning Hamas that they expect the election winners to recognize Israel and adhere to previous accords -- and they have instructed Mahmoud Abbas to delay asking Hamas to form a new government until Hamas agrees:

Two top Egyptian officials called on Hamas to recognize Israel, disarm and honor past peace deals Wednesday, the latest sign Arab governments are pushing the militant group to moderate after its surprise election victory.

Separately, an Israeli Foreign Ministry official said that Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has told Egyptian officials he would hold off on asking Hamas to form the next Palestinian government until Hamas renounces violence.

The Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, cited Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman as saying that Abbas had made the decision after a meeting with Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak.

Suleiman could not immediately be reached to verify the statement. But earlier, he told journalists in Cairo that Egypt intends to tell Hamas leaders that they must recognize Israel, disarm and honor past peace deals. Hamas won Palestinian parliamentary elections in a landslide last week.

This will serve as a blow to Hamas' hopes of replacing Western aid with money from Arab nations. It won't have any impact on Iran, but Egypt's demand for Palestinians to stick to their agreements will set the tone for the rest of the Arab League. No one pretends that the Palestinians have much popularity with Arab nations any more, although they still like to exploit the "Palestinian question" as a rationale for their own oppressive regimes.

Without significant assistance from Arab nations, Hamas has to be completely reliant on Iran for its funding -- and that might well disappear once economic sanctions are in place. The Quartet can put a stranglehold on that funding by freezing Iranian assets and international transfers, making the Iranians a highly unstable partner. They will go bankrupt very quickly if that happens, and it looks like it could happen at any time.

Where does that leave Hamas? They will control the government, which Fatah shrewdly refuses to join, at the very moment it stops functioning. They will fail to meet payrolls, meaning the services for which they supposedly got elected will disappear. The army they want to raise won't march on promises for long. They will find themselves in charge while their world collapses around them, and their electorate will learn a lesson about electing unrepentant terrorists as a government. Hopefully, this lesson will not be undercut by Western nations stumbling over themselves yet again to save the Palestinians from their own stupid choices.

Hamas apologists insist in the media, and in comments to this blog, that the US has it all wrong. The Palestinians didn't elect Hamas because of their stance on terror; they elected them to clean up government and start delivering services promised by Fatah. Count Richard Cohen among the unconvinced:

While it is probably true, as everyone says, that Hamas won the recent Palestinian elections not because it promised to wipe out Israel but because it promised to pick up the garbage in Gaza City (all politics is local, etc.), it is also true that the prospect of increased violence did not deter the average Palestinian from voting for Hamas. We have seen this sort of thing before, and it is not very comforting. The rule -- the only rule -- is to take zealots at their word.

History speaks on this matter. If you asked a random German in, say, 1932 whether by voting for the Nazis he was voting for the murder of Jews and a destructive European war of unimaginable scope and horror, he would have said, " Nein !" What he really wanted was an end to the brawling in the streets, a robust foreign policy and a big thumbs-up to traditional German culture -- no more of this smutty modern art and filthy plays: " Willkommen , Bienvenue , Welcome." Not any more. The cabaret is closed! ...

Unfortunately, the men who were supposed to implement one sort of Nazi program were determined to implement it all. They had made no bones about it; it was all in their bible, "Mein Kampf," and in their rallies and speeches. It took some effort to overlook it, but a considerable number of people managed to do so and later professed shock at what happened. They looked into the abyss, saw nothing that concerned them personally -- and emitted a yawn of contentment.

Zealots do not listen to reason; they do not moderate when given total power. How often do we have to learn that before these truths get accepted? Communism did not moderate; Maoists did not moderate; the Khmer Rouge did not moderate; radical Islamists won't moderate either, in or out of power. In fact, they have an outer-directed influence that none of the other zealots had that makes moderation even less likely -- they believe they are commanded by Allah to rid the land of Jews.

In the end, the Palestinians know this as well as anyone, and they elected these murderous lunatics into power. The responsibility is theirs, and so are the consequences. Issuing apologetics for Hamas in advance only enables yheir worst instincts and entrenches the danger ever deeper in Southwest Asia. Read all of Cohen's column.

After getting kudos from free-speech activists for its courage, the French magazine Soir reversed itself and sacked its managing editor for publishing Danish caricatures of the prophet Mohammed. The owner fired his editor in order to placate the rage of French Muslims:

France Soir and Germany's Die Welt were among the leading papers to reprint the cartoons, which first appeared in Denmark last September.

The caricatures include drawings of Muhammad wearing a headdress shaped like a bomb, while another shows him saying that paradise was running short of virgins for suicide bombers.

France Soir originally said it had published the images in full to show "religious dogma" had no place in a secular society.

But late on Wednesday its owner, Raymond Lakah, said he had removed managing editor Jacques Lefranc "as a powerful sign of respect for the intimate beliefs and convictions of every individual".

Mr Lakah said: "We express our regrets to the Muslim community and all people who were shocked by the publication."

The president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), Dalil Boubakeur, had described France Soir's publication as an act of "real provocation towards the millions of Muslims living in France".

The BBC reports that other publications have stood firm on their decision to reprint the Danish cartoons that have started a firestorm of protest from Europe's Muslim community. The newspapers and magazines remain steadfast in their right to publish satire on any topic of interest -- and certainly the rise of militant Islam makes it an open target for just such treatment. These publishers, sans M. Lakah, have shown more backbone and resolve in facing down the radical Islamists than their governments have shown thus far. Perhaps their courage might finally fire their politicians into showing more backbone.

Some commentators wonder whether the satirical value of these cartoons really outweigh the insult to Muslims that it represents. The religion forbids depictions of humans in art or sculpture (as does Judaism), and even the most sympathetic rendition of the Prophet is considered sinful. A few people have already reminded backers of the cartoonists of Christian outrage over Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ", a picture of a crucifix dunked into a beaker of urine. Other artistic depictions of Christian iconography have also gathered vitriol from religious and conservative circles, such as Chris Ofili's "Holy Virgin Mary".

However, the two issues differ in one important aspect. The exhibitions of the two artists mentioned received federal funds for staging these pieces of "art", and the reaction to their poor taste came from the support of the National Endowment for the Arts. No one disputed the right of the artists to create their offensive displays, but what really rankled most was that their money went into funding their exhibitions. Although both artists offended me with their creations and I firmly believe that government should have no part of funding them, I would absolutely fight against any attempt to censor them or to stop them from painting or photographing what they consider art.

These cartoons have been privately drawn and published by privately-owned enterprises. That is the essential nature of free speech. The Danes understand that, and I find the European impulse in supporting them the most hopeful sign from the Continent in a long time, Soir's surrender notwithstanding.

For more on this subject, please read Judith Klinghoffer, who has followed this story much more closely than me, and Michelle Malkin for more links. In the meantime ...

Apparently last night's State of the Union speech kept the Capitol police rather busy last night. They arrested Cindy Sheehan and ejected Rep. Bill Young's wife, both for wearing t-shirts that had political messages on them. The actions had Capitol police backpedaling this evening, issuing apologies and suggesting that officers might need more training:

Capitol Police dropped a charge of unlawful conduct against anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan on Wednesday and apologized for ejecting her and a congressman's wife from President Bush's State of the Union address for wearing T-shirts with war messages.

"The officers made a good faith, but mistaken effort to enforce an old unwritten interpretation of the prohibitions about demonstrating in the Capitol," Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer said in a statement late Wednesday.

"The policy and procedures were too vague," he added. "The failure to adequately prepare the officers is mine."

The extraordinary statement came a day after police removed Sheehan and Beverly Young, wife of Rep. C.W. "Bill" Young, R-Fla., from the visitors gallery Tuesday night. Sheehan was taken away in handcuffs before Bush's arrival at the Capitol and charged with a misdemeanor, while Young left the gallery and therefore was not arrested, Gainer said.

"Neither guest should have been confronted about the expressive T-shirts," Gainer's statement said.

I suspect that CQ readers will disagree with me on this one, but I concur with Gainer. Neither woman should have been arrested or made to leave the gallery on the basis of their t-shirts, especially at a public event like the SOTU speech. I don't think that the two women had equivalent standing, nor do I think that Mrs. Young's t-shirt would have been as potentially distracting as Mrs. Sheehan's. However, the point is that as long as both women behaved themselves, their t-shirts would have had no disruptive effect on the speech. Yes, I know that there is a tradition of restraint in the gallery, but politicians of both parties make extensive use of those guest passes for political purposes during SOTU speeches. Every president in the television age put people up there that they used to emphasize major points of their speech, and no one barks about that exploitation of the gallery.

When I first heard that Sheehan had been arrested, the reports said that she had attempted to unfurl a banner in the gallery. That kind of action certainly would have justified the removal of Sheehan from the gallery but hardly qualified as a criminal act, especially under the amorphous terms of "unlawful conduct." Having to face charges for wearing a t-shift with a slogan on it is flat-out ridiculous. What laws does that "conduct" break? And since when have we become so fragile that the wearing of a protest t-shirt become so unsettling?

Both women should have reconsidered their wardrobe for the speech. However, a fashion crime should not equate to police action, and arresting someone for wearing a dumb t-shirt should not happen in America.

UPDATE: Capitol police, not DC police; according to CQ reader Scott Crawford, they are two different entities.

It didn't take long for Justice Samuel Alito to make news from the bench, although the news is different than either Democrats or Republicans would have predicted. Alito voted yesterday to uphold a stay of execution for a Missouri death-row inmate, aligning himself for his first vote with Ginsburg and Stevens rather than Thomas and Scalia:

New Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito split with the court's conservatives Wednesday night, refusing to let Missouri execute a death-row inmate contesting lethal injection.

Alito, handling his first case, sided with inmate Michael Taylor, who had won a stay from an appeals court earlier in the evening. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas supported lifting the stay, but Alito joined the remaining five members in turning down Missouri's last-minute request to allow a midnight execution.

Not being a supporter of the death penalty myself, this ruling doesn't bother me much, but I imagine that some people on the Alito's side during the hearings might already be wondering if they supported another Souter all along. I doubt that this one case will give anyone a reason to worry. This doesn't amount to a final ruling on Missouri's death penalty nor on the Taylor case itself. It allows the lower court to review the use of lethal injection as a potentially cruel and unusual punishment, a decision which the Supreme Court will undoubtedly see on appeal from either side afterwards.

It's worth noting the Justice's independence of thought and consideration of the law. This should embarrass every Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well as everyone who took part in anti-Alito smears. It didn't take long for Alito not only to prove them wrong but to expose them for the hysterics and McCarthyite wretches they are. Will they apologize? No way; in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they take credit for expanding Alito's vision of the law with their disgraceful conduct in the hearings.

This may not be the last surprise from Justice Alito and his independent streak. One Republican Senator wondered aloud whether Alito would overturn Roe if given the chance during an off-the-record chat in Alito's confirmation week. The only prediction I can make is that Alito will rule within the law and give a lot of deference to legislatures and the executive -- and that is enough of an improvement for me.

The GOP took a step forward on tackling entitlement spending, narrowly squeaking out a victory in the House yesterday on a $40-billion cut to Medicare and other federal programs. It represents the first effort in almost a decade to reform programs that threaten to grow unchecked until they gobble up almost the entire federal budget:

House Republicans eked out a victory on a $39.5 billion budget-cutting package on Wednesday, with a handful of skittish Republicans switching their votes at the last minute in opposition to reductions in spending on health and education programs. ...

The measure represents the first major effort by lawmakers since 1997 to cut the growth of so-called entitlement programs, including student loans, crop subsidies and Medicaid, in which spending is determined by eligibility criteria. It passed 216 to 214, with 13 Republicans voting against. The Senate, with Vice President Dick Cheney casting the decisive vote, approved the spending cuts in December. The bill now goes to the White House for Mr. Bush's signature.

Coming on the heels of the State of the Union address, the vote was a critical test of Mr. Bush's ability to hold his fractured party together.

Roy Blunt helped reel in the vote, counting carefully enough to release thirteen GOP moderates to cast opposing votes in order to protect their chances in the next election. His leadership on this issue may have made the difference in getting the bill passed and into Bush's hands. Bush is expected to sign off immediately on the bill.

That doesn't mean the debate will end on this. Democrats have already begun to pull out individual provisions of the budget cuts to castigate the GOP as unfeeling towards the sick and elderly. The AARP has already begun a campaign against the rollback, and it will likely continue that campaign through the election cycle. The retirement lobby has a vested interest in the status quo, and it will fight to keep every dime of entitlements it can and to expand them where possible, no matter what the fiscal projections demonstrate.

This will be the challenge for entitlement reform. When the Bush administration took on Social Security reform in the mildest way possible -- transferring payments into private accounts in order to protect contributions from being raided and to minimize the long term contrbutions needed by the federal government -- it caused such a firestorm that Congress ignored the entire problem for another critical year. Now with Medicare and other aid programs, the cuts affect the amount of services that get delivered by the federal government. The nanny-care supporters will drag out every personal anecdote they can find in order to block these cuts and the ones that must be made later in order to keep entitlement spending from careening out of control.

Porkbusting could save us $14 billion for one budget cycle. Entitlement reform requires us to cut back programs over a long period of time, and could save trillions if done properly -- but the American people have to demonstrate the will to make some hard choices about the size and reach of the federal government and the amount of handouts we can afford to give. Unfortunately, politicians do not often get elected for saying "no" to their constituents. We need to educate the voters about the danger of out-of-control entitlements so that we can avoid that problem entirely.

Jimmy Carter made another of his frequent appearances on behalf of thugs and terrorists yesterday, this time arguing for acceptance of Hamas on the Larry King show. The former President told King that Hamas has a "good chance" of becoming a non-violent organization:

Hamas deserves to be recognized by the international community, and despite the group's militant history, there is a chance the soon-to-be Palestinian leaders could turn away from violence, former President Jimmy Carter said Wednesday.

Carter, who monitored last week's Palestinian elections in which Hamas handily toppled the ruling Fatah, added that the United States should not cut off aid to the Palestinian people, but rather funnel it through third parties like the U.N.

"If you sponsor an election or promote democracy and freedom around the world, then when people make their own decision about their leaders, I think that all the governments should recognize that administration and let them form their government," Carter said.

Wrong! If people use democracy to elect hate-filled bigots and murderous terrorists into power, then they should suffer the consequences of that choice, not get a free pass from the world. Hamas explicitly calls for the destruction on Israel in its charter and has refused to change its position, even after its electoral victory. It has conducted attacks on Israeli citizens, both suicide bombings and quasi-military rocket attacks. It gets its funding from Iran due to its Islamofascist goals and activities, and some evidence exists that it partners with al-Qaeda.

None of this matters to Carter, the fool who first allowed Islamofascism into power with his refusal to support the Shah and his subsequent inaction after Iranians sacked our embassy in Teheran. He continues his decades-long effort to follow in the footsteps of Neville Chamberlain, only he refuses to share in Chamberlain's epiphany about appeasement after Munich. Carter also insisted that Yasser Arafat was ready to make peace, and instead we got stiffed at Oslo and at Wye and wound up with two intifadas as a result.

Carter remains America's most embarrassing and dangerous ex-President. With his apologetics for terrorists, one hopes that his credibility will finally dissipate and his advice will be recognized for the foolishness it is.

The House GOP held their leadership election today, and in a decision between staying with business as usual or embracing reform, the Republicans chose a path somewhere in between the two. John Boehner of Ohio becomes the new Majority Leader of the House, beating current Majority Whip and former front-runner Roy Blunt on the second ballot:

Rep. John Boehner of Ohio won election Thursday as House majority leader, promising a steady hand and a helping of reform for Republicans staggered by election-year scandal.

Boehner, who replaces indicted Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas, said the GOP "must act swiftly to restore the trust between Congress and the American people."

He defeated Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri on a vote of 122-109 by House Republicans after trailing his rival on an inconclusive first round.

My preference would have been John Shadegg of Arizona, the true outsider in this race. He had no connection with the Abramoff scandal and has a sterling reputation among conservatives. He's a budget-cutter and a small-government activist. However, he has little experience with party leadership and some in the GOP had concerns about Shadegg's ability to help them get re-elected. Roy Blunt has plenty of experience in both areas and clearly expected those key abilities to carry the day; he bragged for two weeks that he already had the votes for election. However, after the first ballot proved inconclusive, it showed that Blunt was already out of touch with his caucus, who apparently decided that Blunt had too many connections to Tom DeLay and to Abramoff for their taste.

So in the end, they voted for John Boehner. Boehner came to Congress just before the Gingrich Revolution and has his roots in rolling back government. Boehner also has plenty of experience in helping fellow Republicans raise money and get elected. He did well among the bloggers, most of whom praised his openness while still supporting Shadegg -- including me. However, Boehner still faces some criticism over his own connections to the Abramoff scandal, including his refusal to return $30K of campaign funds from Abramoff-represented Indian tribes, all of which came to his PAC and not to his campaigns.

I like Boehner better than Blunt, although except for some tin-eared interaction with QandO, I didn't dislike any of the three candidates. However, the GOP missed an opportunity to make a bold statement on reform with this election. Shadegg had no connection to Abramoff cash despite representing a state with a large Native American population, and he represented a clean break from the past. His election as Majority Leader could have put the Democrats on the defensive and created a bullet-proof, media-friendly face to the GOP caucus. Instead, the Republicans decided on a moderate gesture towards reform, at least in terms of public relations.

My congratulations still go out to Rep. Boehner. Hopefully he will pursue reform and lead the Republican caucus towards arresting the reach of government, which causes the corruption in the first place.

Michelle Malkin, Jim Geraghty, and Debbie Schlussel note the release of a new Turkish film that depicts American soldiers as mass murderers and Jews as organ thieves. This wouldn't come as much of a surprise, except that two American actors went halfway around the world to participate in this disgraceful epoch:

In the most expensive Turkish movie ever made, American soldiers in Iraq crash a wedding and pump a little boy full of lead in front of his mother.

They kill dozens of innocent people with random machine gun fire, shoot the groom in the head, and drag those left alive to Abu Ghraib prison - where a Jewish doctor cuts out their organs, which he sells to rich people in New York, London and Tel Aviv. ...

The movie's American stars are Billy Zane, who plays a self-professed "peacekeeper sent by God," and Gary Busey as the Jewish-American doctor.

Both actors have seen better days. Busey started off his career with a splendid portrayal of Buddy Holly in the biopic The Buddy Holly Story, performing the songs himself and practically burning up the screen with his performance. Unfortunately, it's all been downhill for Busey ever since. He almost died from driving his motorcycle without a helmet over ten years ago, recovering fully if almost miraculously, but his career has been in a coma ever since. I thought the nadir of his descent occurred with the unbelievably bad reality show, I'm With Busey, but this proves that failure can plumb ever-darker depths.

Billy Zane also showed promise in his career, if not as much initial success. He started off playing a strangely attractive psychotic in the Australian film Dead Calm, with Sam Neill and a young Nicole Kidman, and is best known as the snobbish heavy from Titanic. Apparently, the ship wasn't the only thing that sunk in the film, if Zane's appearance proves anything.

People will claim that Zane and Busey are nothing worse than working actors looking for a payday as an argument in their defense. Well, everyone needs to pay the bills, and given what we've seen of Zane and Busey lately, their needs may be more acute than some. Most people will agree, however, that any sense of citizenship should have caused them to think twice about their participation in a film designed to exploit anti-American sentiment in the Middle East by adding to the propaganda that perpetuates it. People who sell themselves out to exploitation merchants such as the producers of this film can properly be termed "whores".

Debbie calls for a boycott of both Busey and Zane. Fortunately, neither one has enough of a career left in American entertainment to make that a difficult proposition.

Palestinians in the Gaza Strip sent a message to Europeans that belies the latter's belief in the desire for freedom in the former. Gunmen forced the EU office in Gaza City to close and warned that it will remain shut until the EU apologizes for several publications running caricatures of Mohammed and Muslims this week:

Palestinian gunmen Thursday shut down the European Union's office in Gaza City, demanding an apology for German, French and Norwegian newspapers reprinting cartoons featuring the prophet Mohammad, Palestinian security sources said.

The gunmen left a notice on the EU office's door that the building would remain closed until Europeans apologize to Muslims, many of whom consider the cartoons offensive. ...

Masked members of the militant groups Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian's former ruling party, Fatah, fired bullets into the air, and a man read the group's demands.

Palestinian officials said the gunmen were threatening to kidnap European workers if the European Union did not apologize.

The Europeans might want to rethink the entire oppressed-Palestinian meme right about now. Israel no longer occupies Gaza, and yet the terrorism there continues to grow unabated. Now the people who they insist want nothing but peace have warned that they will kidnap Europeans until they foreswear freedom of speech.

Perhaps the Europeans could ask the Palestinians about their own issues with cartoons. For instance, if they find this offensive --

-- then maybe they can explain this, which appeared in the Palestinian newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida on March 22, 2000:

Pope: "Peace on Earth!" Satan/Jew: "Colonies on Earth!"

And if they consider this insulting to their honor --

-- then they can explain why the same paper published this in December 1999:

Old man: "20th Century" Young man: "21st Century" Above dwarf Jew: "Disease of the Century"

Those who protest the entire idea of satire and derision should not themselves indulge in it. Their actions reveal themselves as the terrorist thugs that they have always been.

And I note, as does Michelle Malkin and Judith Klinghoffer, that none of the major American media outlets have bothered to display these controversial cartoons. So much for the protectors of free speech and the people's right to know.

Another day brings yet another statement from Hamas that they will never recognize the "Zionist state that was established on our land," making it ever more difficult to insist that the terrorist group will moderate their position. The good news? They've offered Israel a hudna:

Defying international pressure, the militant Islamic group Hamas said on Friday it will never recognize Israel but might be willing to negotiate terms for a temporary truce with the Jewish state.

Khaled Meshaal, the top leader of Hamas which won last week's Palestinian parliamentary election by a landslide, made the offer to Israel via a column titled "To whom it may concern," published in the al-Hayat al-Jadida newspaper.

"We will never recognize the legitimacy of the Zionist state that was established on our land," Meshaal, the Damascus-based head of the political and military wings of the militant Islamic group, wrote in the column. ...

They have said they might heed a truce with Israel as an interim measure that could include the establishment of a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and occupied West Bank, but would not abandon a long-term goal to destroy Israel.

"If you (Israel) are willing to accept the principle of a long-term truce then we will be ready to negotiate with you over the conditions of such a truce," Meshaal wrote.

I see this as the Dread Pirate Roberts offer of peace. Fans of the movie The Princess Bride will recall that Wesley tells Buttercup about his uneasy relationship with his captor after being made the pirate's valet. Every night as Wesley went to bed, the pirate told him, "Good night, Wesley. Fine job. I'll most likely kill you in the morning."

The Hamas offer is the most honest attempt at a hudna that Muslims have recently made. The truce only lasts while the Muslim can take advantage of it and strengthens his position at the expense of his enemy. It does not lead to peace, but only postpones conflict until the time of the Islamist's choosing. Hamas insists that they will eventually destroy Israel, but wants to offer peace as long as Hamas can consolidate its power in Gaza and the West Bank.

Elsewhere, Reuters reports that the US will probably start releasing funds so that Hamas does not turn to Iran for funding. That's almost as dumb as accepting a hudna. The point isn't to co-opt Iran as a bankroller of terrorist groups -- the point is to stop terrorist groups from getting funding at all. Hamas already gets money from Iran anyway. Receiving American dollars on top of that won't lead to moderation on the part of Hamas, but embolden them towards more aggression, and give them the means to pay for it as well.

Cut off the funds to Palestine. Make the people there understand that with democracy comes responsibility for the choices made -- and that choosing a terrorist group to run one's country brings severe consequences to one's global standing.

Muslims around the world have banded together to violently protest the publication of cartoons depicting Mohammed and other aspects of Islam, threatening attacks on Europeans and their newspapers if apologies do not come soon, the Guardian (UK) reports. European leaders have taken their normal stance in defence of Western freedoms; they're apologizing for them:

Europe's political elite were scrambling last night to contain the furore across the Arab world at the publication of caricatures of Muhammad, with leaders stressing that freedom of the press did not mean freedom to cause offence.

With newspaper editors in half a dozen countries unrepentant at the decision to republish cartoons depicting the prophet, EU commissioners stepped in to berate the press and try to calm Muslim anger.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the prime minister of Denmark, where the cartoons were first published last autumn, said in an interview with al-Arabiya television that there had been no intention to offend. "We deeply respect all religions, including Islam, and it is important for me to tell you that the Danish people have no intention to offend Muslims," he said.

The EU also entered the fray. Peter Mandelson, the trade commissioner, said that newspapers had been deliberately provocative in republishing the drawings. Franco Frattini, the EU justice commissioner, said that the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten had been "imprudent" to publish the 12 cartoons on September 30. Publication was wrong, he said, "even if the satire used was aimed at a distorted interpretation of religion, such as that used by terrorists to recruit young people, sometimes to the point of sending them into action as suicide bombers".

Even Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, was drawn into the debate, saying that freedom of the press should not be an excuse for insulting religions.

But not everyone was acquiescent. France's interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, said he preferred "an excess of caricature to an excess of censure".

I'm no fan of excessive offense against religion, but the civilized method of protest is boycott and debate, not threats of violence, kidnapping, and murder. In the Palestinian territories, bands of armed thugs raided hotels looking for Europeans to hold hostage. Iran demanded explanations from the Austrian ambassador (Austria holds the EU presidency). In Indonesia and Pakistan, the protestors demanded violence against Denmark and France, and Muslim nations around the world spent their legislative time condemning the cartoons.

It is beyond disappointing that the EU and national leaders in Europe do not show the same courage as the editors of these publications. How difficult is it to defend free speech? If the Muslims don't like it, let them use the same freedom of speech to protest the publication by arguing against it on its merits, not by threatening death to anyone who breaks the tenets of their faith.

And while we're at it, let's ask our Exempt Media why they suddenly have too much "respect" to show images that might provide religious offense. Where were they when Chris Ofili created his dung-filled portrait of the Virgin Mary, or when Andres Serrano dunked a cruficix into a beaker of his own urine and called it art? They spent their efforts on publishing those images and praising the courage of the artists. Oh, but wait, there was one difference: Christians called for boycotts, not kidnappings and murders for the editors.

Perhaps the Exempt Media could at least publish this one cartoon that portrays Mohammed as smarter than most of his followers:

Too bad the protestors can't take this advice. Too bad that EU leadership and the American media show such reluctance to defend free speech and the people's right to know when it needs defending most. Too bad that these bastions of Western thought could be so cowed by the Cartoon Network.

The State Department has decided to give its opinion of free speech as it applies to the publication of cartoons satirizing Islam and Mohammed in Europe. Surprisingly, the department that represents America and its ideals of freedom abroad has decided to take this opportunity to scold the publishers rather than the angry mobs calling for violence:

Washington on Friday condemned caricatures in European newspapers of the Prophet Mohammad, siding with Muslims who are outraged that the publications put press freedom over respect for religion.

By inserting itself into a dispute that has become a lightning rod for anti-European sentiment across the Muslim world, the United States could help its own battered image among Muslims.

"These cartoons are indeed offensive to the belief of Muslims," State Department spokesman Kurtis Cooper said in answer to a question. "We all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression but it must be coupled with press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable."

Is that how free speech works? We have the right to say and print whatever we want ... until it offends someone, and then it's unacceptable? I'm not advocating that the State Department should have endorsed the cartoons themselves, but one would expect America to at least stand for the right of publication and the necessity of sometimes offending people in order to produce the necessary change for progress.

Would the State Department have apologized to Nazis in 1938 for depictions of Hitler as a lunatic? It would have offended millions of German fascists. Have they demanded an end to artists' depictions of Jesus and Mary in elephant dung and urine? No, and they shouldn't. Let the Christians protest these artists and boycott those who exhibit their wares, but America should at least acknowledge the rights of the artists to produce and others to privately publish these images.

If this is some sort of lame attempt to win credibility among Muslims, it's pathetic on two counts. First, it simply won't work -- we've interceded on their behalf before (in the Balkans, for instance) and it didn't win us any brownie points at all. More importantly, it sells out a critical component of what makes America and its freedoms so compelling. Volunteering for dhimmitude does nothing but encourage the Islamist lunatics, something we'd hoped that the State Department had learned by now.

Iran threatened to walk away from a potential deal with Russia that would have supposedly kept Teheran from enriching its own uranium if the EU and the US force the IAEA to refer its case to the UN. However, it does not appear that the latest Iranian gambit will have much play with the IAEA board, which looks to overwhelmingly support the referral:

Javad Vaeidi, the deputy head of Iran's National Security Council, said "there will be no way we can continue with the Russian proposal" if the Security Council becomes involved.

Mr Vaeidi acknowledged that referral seemed unavoidable, telling reporters: "This is an adopted draft. It means that the US and the EU-3 [Britain, France and Germany] are intending to kill two issues: first to stop diplomacy and second to kill the Russian proposal," he said.

Iranian officials are due in Moscow on 16 February for talks on the Kremlin's proposal to enrich uranium for Iran's nuclear programme on Russian soil. The offer, backed by the United States and the EU, is intended to make it more difficult for Tehran to develop weapons. Iran has welcomed the proposal but says it needs work, leading to suspicions that it is stalling.

Mr Vaeidi also reiterated earlier threats that Iran will resume full-scale work on uranium enrichment and stop honouring an agreement giving IAEA inspectors broad powers to conduct short-notice inspections of his country's nuclear programme if there is a referral to the Security Council.

China also did its best to undermine the effort to contain Iran, announcing that it will oppose economic sanctions against Iran "on principal". No one really expected an oil-hungry China to go the distance on containing Iran, but this early exit from the unified front exposes their lack of farsightedness on the threat that Iranian nuclear power constitutes. Iran doesn't just threaten the West, nor does it just threaten Israel; it threatens the entire region, including southern Russia, and therefore threatens the entire Southwest Asian oil supply and its exportation to all oil-hungry nations, including China.

The bigger news is that almost all of the rest of the IAEA board has thrown their lot in against Iran. Only the incorrigibles still hold out in opposition to a referral: Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria appear to lead the small contingent that wants to leave Iran to its own devices. The Western alliance that wants the referral asked for a one-day extension to get more of the board members to vote "yes" rather than abstain on the motion, but its passage looks like a lock at this point.

Will the Security Council do anything significant to stop Iran -- impose economic sanctions at least? China would probably use its veto to stop it. However, the exercise might give Tony Blair and George Bush enough political cover to justify other action against the Iranians, especially a stepped-up covert campaign to push Iranian democracy activists to rise up against the mullahs. The presence of the Coalition forces in Iraq will shortly start declining, and with them will go a significant amount of Anglo-American leverage. If such action will take place, it should do so very quickly, while we have the necessary elements for pressure at hand.

Tomorrow we will discuss this topic with Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute on the Northern Alliance Radio Network. He will be on between 2 and 3 pm, the last hour of our four-hour show, which begins at 11 am CT on AM 1280 The Patriot. If you're not in the Twin Cities, you can listen on the web stream at the link, and join the conversation with Michael and all of us by calling 651-289-4488.

One of the more inspiring stories of the two teams vying for the Super Bowl win has been the relationship between the teams and their home-town fans. Everyone knows that Pittsburgh lives and dies each week with their beloved Steelers, more so than with any of their other professional teams, and that the character of the team itself reflects the character of its home town: gritty, hard-nosed, blue-collar, sometimes down but never out. For the Seahawks, the team doesn't necessarily share in the same qualities as its setting, but this season the team forged a special bond with its fans at home. The 12th Man flag, raised at every home game and its logo sold on towels, t-shirts, and other merchandise, reflected the team's appreciation for fan support making them almost invincible at home.

However, Texas A&M now says that the Seahawks are the ultimate Stealers, er, thieves -- because the 12th Man has been an Aggie tradition for over 80 years, and a trademarked one at that:

Here at Texas A&M University, a school obsessed with tradition, there's no more sacred a ritual than standing during an entire football game, just in case you're needed on the field as the 12th Man.

So when the Super Bowl-bound Seattle Seahawks embraced the "12th Man" theme this season, the school moved decisively: A&M took the Seahawks to court, arguing that the 84-year-old Aggie tradition is so central to the school's identity that the phrase has been trademarked — twice. ...

The 12th Man tradition at A&M dates to 1922, when a student was pulled from the stands to suit up for a game in case the injury-plagued Aggies needed an assist.

The idea has evolved into a seriously regarded commitment by fans to stand ready to support the team. The school sells 12th Man merchandise, a 12th Man Foundation supports the athletic program, and the stands at Kyle Field are adorned with giant letters that read "Home of the 12th Man."

The Seahawks' history with the 12th Man dates to the mid-1980s, when raucous fans raised the roof at the now-demolished Kingdome. In honor of fans, the team retired the number 12 in 1984.

Ironically, this story appears in the Los Angeles Times, a city so inept that it managed to lose two NFL franchises within a decade because only 12 people would pay to see the Rams and Raiders play football. But I digress.

The Aggies have little choice but to pursue this legally if the Seahawks continue to use their trademarked phrase without gaining a license from the university. Trademarks have to be defended when infringed, or else the owner can lose them and they pass into the public domain. Coca-Cola used to threaten lawsuits every time a restaurant called any of their non-Coca Cola products "Coke". Xerox did the same when publications used its name as a generic term for photocopying. Cellophane used to be a trademark, but has long since passed into the public domain thanks to careless maintenance of the trademark.

Not too surprisingly, the Aggies got a Texas court to issue an injunction, one which the Seahawks have roundly ignored. The 'Hawks got the case moved to federal court this week but did not get the injunction vacated, so technically the Aggies could ask to have all Seahawks merchandise with a "12th Man" mention confiscated tomorrow in Detroit. It's rather hard to imagine that a federal court will uphold this trademark, despite the Aggie's tradition; the phrase has long been used by sports announcers to describe boisterous home fans, and I doubt even longtime football fans have any idea about A&M's claim on the phrase. Still, until a federal court rules that the phrase has passed into the public domain, the trademark remains in force -- and the Seahawks technically have stolen it.

My prediction for tomorrow: Watch the Steelers -- the Pittsburgh Steelers, that is -- jump out to a 14-point lead quickly, perhaps on an opening drive and a Seattle turnover, and then ride that to a 27-14 win over the Seahawks. Shaun Alexander will get held to under a hundred yards and maybe one touchdown, while the Steelers' bigger offensive line will set up a rushing attack for its two featured backs (Bettis, Parker) that will result in almost 200 yards on the ground. Roethlisberger goes 20-28 and two TDs, while Hasselbeck goes 24-36 with a TD and two picks. Seattle's a great home team, but only average on the road, while the Steelers have thrived on travel. Detroit will be a Pittsburgh-friendly venue, and the Steelers have already knocked off one team that went unbeaten at home (Denver).

And I'd better be right. I made a bet with Hugh Hewitt last night, on the air. If the Steelers lose, on Monday you'll read a Hugh Hewitt post here at CQ rubbing salt in my wounds and probably talking about how great the Cleveland Browns really are despite not having won a championship in half a century. If I win, I'll be posting my picture of Hugh wearing my Steeler's cap. (He's not letting me on his blog if I win, which should tell you how confident he is in his selection of Seattle as the winner tomorrow!)

Today is the First Mate's birthday, and unfortunately, we'll be spending the morning celebrating at the Fairview University transplant clinic. She's still not improving, but we're trying one more round of IV treatments before the doctors give up entirely on the transplanted kidney. We also found out that her anemia flared up again, and now she needs two units of blood to get her oxygenation back to normal levels.

Fun way to spend a birthday, huh?

I'm blogging from the clinic while she gets her IV and keeping her company. The nurses always ask me whether I'm working when I pull out the computer, which gets a laugh from the First Mate and a tortured explanation from me. "Yes ... well, no, it's more fun than work ... but sort of, I guess ..."

On a happier note, I plan on taking the FM out to a big steak dinner later tonight -- have to fight that anemia, and what better way than filet Mignon at Axel's? After that, we may take in a movie if there's anything out worth paying money to watch. Tomorrow we'll go to Khoury's for their excellent and elegant brunch, with the rest of the family joining us. She may not be chipper enough to join in the Super Bowl festivities later on, but knowing how she feels about football (except for Notre Dame football, natch!), it won't put a dent in her day to miss it.

A big happy birthday to Mitch's son Zam, who turns 13 today. Now Mitch has two teenagers at home, God help him.

The Guardian reports that American crops have been left to rot in the fields, thanks to a sudden dearth of migrant workers for farm work. Is this the result of better border enforcement? No -- it turns out that the illegal immigrants that do the work Americans don't want have decided they don't want them either:

After 15 years working in the fields of California for American farmers, Mr Camacho has found a new life: two months ago he started working at the Golden Acorn Casino.

"It pays better," he says. "In the fields you work all hours, it's cold and hard and you don't get more than $7 [about £4] an hour. With this job I have regular hours, I know when I'm going to work and I know what I'm going to earn."

Mr Camacho is not unique. Agricultural labourers, almost exclusively Latinos and at least two-thirds of them undocumented, are moving into more stable, less harsh employment.

The migration from agriculture is taking its toll on one of the largest industries in the US - and particularly on California's $32bn a year sector. Faced with an exodus of labour to the construction industry as well as to the leisure and retail sectors, farmers are struggling to get their crops in. Ten percent of the cauliflower and broccoli harvest has been left to rot this year, and some estimates put the likely loss of the winter harvest as high as 50%. ...

Mr Lopez - known to admirers and detractors as The Dog - has been working in the Imperial Valley around Calexico for 39 years. Each day he hires 600 to 800 workers, but this year he's been unable to meet the farmers' demands. "There's lots of work and very few people," he says. "We never make up our teams. You could pay them $10 an hour and it wouldn't make any difference." Most of the workers are paid $7.25 an hour, above the minimum wage of $6.75.

This has not been widely reported in the United States and rebuts the Bush Administration's argument that the migrant workers take jobs that Americans are unwilling to do. It also undermines the union allegations that the migrants depress wages -- it looks like salaries have jumped considerably regardless of the influx of labor. That also has been reflected in the labor statistics, where the jobless rate has dropped to its lowest in almost five years, 4.7%.

So what does this mean? It shows that illegal immigrants aren't just interested in working the farms, nobly putting food on our tables and keeping its cost low. They share the same goals as American workers: less work for more pay. American businesses want greater efficiency at less cost, and so continue to employ these workers, even while their salary demands start to rise. It also shows the silliness of raising the minimum wage; in a healthy economy, labor gets its market-based value. Cutting off the flow of extra workers over our southern border would do more to increase the base wages for Americans than any artificial controls imposed by government anyway.

Economic justifications for guest-worker programs do not appear very credible. At some point, we have to wonder why Americans wouldn't choose to work at casinos for anything north of minimum wage. The immigrants have indeed put themselves between legal residents and paying jobs, and we're still not getting the crops harvested. Why would we want to make this a permanent condition?

It appears that the controversy over the Prophet cartoons has been somewhat artificially enhanced by Muslim imams in Denmark, according to the London Telegraph. Numerous readers and commenters have pointed towards this article by Charles Moore, who reports that not only did these cartoons appear months ago, but the Danish imams included a few more than European newspapers never printed in order to fuel the outrage of their followers:

The complained-of cartoons first appeared in October; they have provoked such fury only now. As reported in this newspaper yesterday, it turns out that a group of Danish imams circulated the images to brethren in Muslim countries. When they did so, they included in their package three other, much more offensive cartoons which had not appeared in Jyllands-Posten but were lumped together so that many thought they had.

It rather looks as if the anger with which all Muslims are said to be burning needed some pretty determined stoking. Peter Mandelson, who seems to think that his job as European Trade Commissioner entitles him to pronounce on matters of faith and morals, accuses the papers that republished the cartoons of "adding fuel to the flames"; but those flames were lit (literally, as well as figuratively) by well-organised, radical Muslims who wanted other Muslims to get furious. How this network has operated would make a cracking piece of investigative journalism.

Now the BBC announces that the head of the International Association of Muslim Scholars has called for an "international day of anger" about the cartoons. It did not name this scholar, or tell us who he is. He is Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. According to Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, Qaradawi is like Pope John XXIII for Catholics, "the most progressive force for change" in the Muslim world.

Yet if you look up Qaradawi's pronouncements, you find that he sympathises with the judicial killing of homosexuals, and wants the rejection of dialogue with Jews in favour of "the sword and the rifle". He is very keen on suicide bombing, especially if the people who blow themselves up are children - "we have the children bomb". This is a man for whom a single "day of anger" is surely little different from the other 364 days of the year.

Hugh Hewitt has posted thought-provoking comments today on how he imagines Winston Churchill would have reacted. Hugh has argued for the past two days that we should uphold the right of European newspapers to print the cartoons, but not endorse their publication in a knee-jerk reaction to the violent Muslim protests worldwide. He asks us to recall how we Christians feel about negative depictions of Jesus and how often we've protested anti-Christian media portrayals. And he has a point, for which I recommend CQ readers review his posts over the last couple of days to consider.

However, the point is not the offense to religious sensibilities, especially in light of the gasoline poured on this fire by Muslims themselves. It isn't the restriction of idolatry, either; as Moore points out, plenty of artwork depicting the Prophet exists in the ummah. Muslims are angry because these cartoons criticize followers of Islam and the actions of the Prophet.

Editorial cartoons exist to challenge political thought and expose hypocrisy. Among religions, Islam should be the least protected from this form of speech, as it insists on involving itself in temporal political matters wherever it is practiced. Indeed, it insists on dictating political and legal matters, usually in the most extreme terms, and it uses the life of Mohammed as its claim on political and legal supremacy. Christianity hasn't taken that position in centuries, focusing on the spiritual and individual rather than group diktat. Judaism hasn't had the means to develop that kind of theocratic position for over two millenia until the establishment of Israel, and even then the Chosen have chosen a liberal democracy for themselves rather than rule by the high-priest descendants of Aaron.

That insistence on dictating terms of temporal power makes criticism, by cartoonists or editorialists, absolutely necessary in order to combat the stultifying reach of sharia. Islam sets the terms of debate. It cannot insist on temporal rule based on Mohammed and the Qu'ran and then expect people to refrain from criticizing either one. Christians understand this, even if they don't pursue the thought intellectually to its end. If we Christians insisted on basing all government and laws explicitly on the four Gospels, we would necessarily be forced to intellectually defend each and every passage, as well as the life and actions of Jesus and his disciples and their assumed infallibility to rule on human activity.

For this reason, we must support the publication of the cartoons by European news organizations. Islam wants to impose its tenets on us, and if we give up the option of political criticism, we have moved more than halfway towards surrender to the Islamists. For those individuals who cross the line into unnecessary offense, the option to use free debate to argue the point will remain open as long as we defend free speech.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin worked all night on a video presentation that connects a few dots. Be sure to watch it.

Iran got the expected referral to the United Nations Security Council over its intransigence on nuclear power today, with only three of the 35 board members supporting the mullahcracy:

The United Nations nuclear watchdog has voted 27 to three to report Iran to the UN Security Council over its resumption of nuclear activities.

Teheran immediately reacted to the vote, saying it would curb UN inspections of its nuclear plants and pursue full-scale uranium enrichment.

Today's decision by the board of the 35-nation International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) marks a significant step on the road towards possible economic and political sanctions against Iran.

But no further action is expected until March, when Mohamed El Baradei, the IAEA chief, delivers a formal report on his inspectors' inquiries in Iran to the Security Council.

The delay came at the request of Russia and China, both of whom want to give Iran a few weeks to cool off and start acting rationally. The three no votes came from the further reaches of the lunatics, and five abstentions from the appeasers: Cuba, Syria, and Venezuela voted no, and Algeria, Belarus, Indonesia, Libya and South Africa all decided not to decide.

Does this mean sanctions and isolation will come soon from the UNSC? Doubtful. As I said yesterday, the Chinese appear not to care about a nuclear-armed Teheran on its border. A CQ reader pointed out that it would just be the fourth nuclear power on China's border -- but it would be the first with an Islamist government that celebrates suicide and martyrdom, not exactly a rational actor on the world stage. Russia may or may not participate in sanctions. It would like to keep Iran as a client state in Putin's attempt to restart the Great Game, but Iran also funds and supplies the Islamists in the Caucasus that bedevil Russian rule in its southern territories.

What the referral does is provide a replay of the Iraq debate for this year. The US and UK, this time joined by the French and Germans, will insist on action against Iran. If the UNSC passes such a resolution and actually enforces it, it will prove a significant victory for the US/UK alliance. If not, it will provide another example of UN uselessness on terrorism and nuclear proliferation, and give the US/EU partners an opening to accelerate their efforts to topple the mullahcracy from within.

We'll discuss this development with Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute on the Northern Alliance Radio Network. He will be on between 2 and 3 pm, the last hour of our four-hour show, which begins at 11 am CT on AM 1280 The Patriot. If you're not in the Twin Cities, you can listen on the web stream at the link, and join the conversation with Michael and all of us by calling 651-289-4488.

Europe may not have the opportunity to impose economic sanctions and isolation on Iran -- because its president has decided to inflict it on his own country instead. Mahmoud Ahmedinjad has decreed the cancellation of all economic contracts in nations where the Prophet cartoons have been published:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ordered the cancellation of economic contracts with countries where the media have carried cartoons of the prophet, the ISNA news agency reported.

The report said the hardline president had ordered the creation of an official body to respond to the cartoons, saying the regime "must revise and cancel economic contracts with the countries that started this repulsive act and those that followed them." ...

The list, which already included Denmark, where the 12 caricatures first appeared last year, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Spain, expanded Saturday to take in New Zealand and Poland.

The mullahcracy should be proud of their accomplishments since they arranged the election of the former mayor of Teheran to the presidency. In a few short months, the Iranians have all but declared war on Israel and the US, forced a showdown over their nuclear plans, and now face almost complete isolation from their former European economic partners.

One hopes that Iranians will see the coming collapse of their standard of living, as well as the foolishness of generating so many enemies all at once, and act to remove the mullahs and their mouthpiece from power.

The AP covers the inner working of Hamas and inadvertently shows the folly of recognizing Hamas as a political party instead of the terrorist group that it is. In a piece titled "How Hamas Works," the wire service explains the management process of the new Palestinian majority in Parliament. In the first two sections, titled Who Makes Decisions and Supreme Leader, the AP reviews the Hamas by-laws and their command structure.

It's the third section that grabs the reader's attention:

WHO DIRECTS ATTACKS:

The general guidelines and policy on attacks are first approved by the political leadership, but the military wings then have autonomy in carrying them out. The overall commander of Hamas forces in the West Bank and Gaza is Mohammed Deif. Subordinate to him are district and local commanders. Hamas units are organized into cells with a maximum of seven members. That, and the fact that local commanders have the authority to decide when and how to launch attacks, are meant to reduce the chances of security leaks, which might enable the Israelis to stop an operation.

The Hamas by-laws control the direction of attacks? Is that something one sees in the Democratic or Republican by-laws as well?

Perhaps when Hamas wants to get serious consideration as a political party, they'll at least have the good sense to remove the regulations for conducting terrorist attacks from their charter.

If you haven't been listening to the Northern Alliance Radio Network on our Internet stream Saturdays, then you have missed some terrific original broadcasts. Not only have we had great guests, such as Michael Ledeen today or Victor Davis Hanson last week, but we regularly offer original and entertaining political commentary.

I'm not kidding ... Where else will you find this kind of rebuttal to Harry Belafonte's latest lunacies? I've added this to the CQ podcast, which can be accessed through I-Tunes now or through any RSS feed reader. It's blessedly brief, and it explains why I never made a career out of my high-school musical training.

Be sure to catch the NARN show on Saturdays, from 11 am to 3 pm CT, and replayed again in its entirety on the same Internet stream starting Sunday evening at 9 pm CT.

Tonight, CNN and the AP report that Al "Grandpa" Lewis, who appeared on The Munsters in his signature role, died yesterday at the age of 83:

Al Lewis, the cigar-chomping patriarch of "The Munsters" whose work as a basketball scout, restaurateur and political candidate never eclipsed his role as Grandpa from the television sitcom, died after years of failing health. He was 83.

Lewis, with his wife at his bedside, passed away Friday night, said Bernard White, program director at WBAI-FM, where the actor hosted a weekly radio program. White made the announcement on the air during the Saturday slot where Lewis usually appeared.

"To say that we will miss his generous, cantankerous, engaging spirit is a profound understatement," White said.

Apparently, AP and CNN have a mathematics problem, because Lewis was born in 1910 -- making him 95 years old, not 83. Had he been 83, he would have only been 41 when he started appearing as Grandpa Munster on the TV show in 1964. It really didn't take much research to come up with the correct date of his birth and therefore his correct age, although it did create some confusion at Wikipedia. They resolved it by finding a 1997 interview in which Lewis himself gives his birth year as 1910, and explains that he went into show business in 1923. That took me ten minutes on the Internet to resolve after finding this story on CNN; I had heard the news earlier on the radio, along with his correct age.

Why couldn't the reporter at the AP and all the editorial checks and balances at both AP and CNN do something as simple as verify a well-known actor and wannabe politician's birthdate? Remember this when we hear the next lecture about how bloggers don't get fact-checked like reporters at mainstream media outlets.

UPDATE: Not to mention that he would have been 82 if he was born in April 1923, not 83. The AP's Larry McShane now says that his son claims he was born in 1923, but somehow fails to explain why they wouldn't just use Lewis' own claimed birthdate as the most accurate:

Al Lewis, the cigar-chomping patriarch of "The Munsters" whose work as a basketball scout, restaurateur and political candidate never eclipsed his role as Grandpa from the television sitcom, died after years of failing health. He was 82. The actor was widely reported to have been born in 1910, but his son Ted Lewis said Saturday that his father was born in 1923.

It does give the AP some excuse for getting this wrong, if the man's family can't be consistent with the date.

UPDATE II: The controversy rages ... even more reason to cut the media some slack on this one.

Interpol officials have now verified that a number of convicted al-Qaeda operatives escaped from a Yemeni prison by digging a tunnel -- and included among them was the mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole:

A man considered a mastermind of the USS Cole bombing that killed 17 sailors in a Yemeni port in 2000 was among 23 people who escaped from a Yemen prison last week, Interpol said Sunday. ...

Interpol said in a statement that at least 13 of the 23 escapees were convicted al-Qaida fighters, who escaped via a 140-yard-long tunnel "dug by the prisoners and co-conspirators outside."

Yemeni officials confirmed to Interpol that a man considered a mastermind of the Cole attack, identified as Jamal al-Badawi, was among those who escaped.

Al-Badawi was among those sentenced to death in September 2004 for plotting the USS Cole attack. Two suicide bombers blew up an explosives-laden boat next to the destroyer as it refueled in the Yemeni port of Aden on Oct. 12, 2000.

They dug a tunnel? Was this a prison or a tent camp?

Let's make a deal with the various governments in the region. We'll take custody of AQ terrorists captured from now on, and they can use these high-security prisons for some other purpose .... perhaps training their guards about how to detect big holes being dug out from underneath them.

The Israelis have decided to rely on the technicality that Hamas has not yet taken over the government of the Palestinian Authority to make its payment of tax revenues to the PA, an amount that comes to $54 million. Israel had held the money for a week while deciding whether to allow one of its intractable enemies access to funds that will likely go to financing more attacks on its citizens:

Israel agreed to make a crucial payment of $54 million in tax and customs revenues to the Palestinians, but officials said future transfers will be halted once Hamas militants form the next Palestinian government.

The decision was taken shortly after a flare-up of violence. Israeli forces pounded the northern Gaza Strip with missiles and artillery fire, killing three Palestinian militants. Hours later, a Palestinian assailant killed one woman and wounded four other people in what police called a politically motivated stabbing in central Israel.

Israel collects millions of dollars in taxes and customs duties for the Palestinians, transferring the funds to the Palestinian Authority each month. Israel delayed the most recent payment last week to protest Hamas' victory in Palestinian legislative elections, deepening a financial crisis for the cash-strapped Palestinian Authority.

Putting money in the hands of terrorists is a mistake no matter what the circumstances are. In this case, it will not do anything to convince the Hamas lunatics to moderate; all it will do is emphasize the weakness of the West, which does not want confrontation and will believe almost anything as long as it allows them to maintain the appearance of the status quo.

The excuse that Hamas has not yet formed a government provides an excellent example of this tendency. Hamas may not have formed a government, but the Palestinians gave them a majority in their Parliament, which means that they will not find it difficult to accomplish. The money given to the PA will have to go through Hamas under any circumstances, a group that refuses to even consider rethinking its public goal of the annihilation of Israel.

Israel wants to appear reasonable by paying this month's tax collections. However, they wind up appearing as weak as a parent who keeps threatening dire consequences to their children for misbehavior but then hands them candy at the same time. The child learns not to take the parent seriously, and Hamas understands that Israel wants international approval much more than Hamas does. It's a lesson that requires twice as much effort to undo than that required to simply withhold the money the first time.

Michelle Malkin notes that the left-wing protest group World Can't Wait, dedicated to the overthrow of the Bush administration, staged a demonstration yesterday in Washington, DC. She posts a picture of a protestor holding a sign that depicts a disembodied head of President Bush being held by a hand, blood spurting out of his severed neck, as a political statement (courtesy of Free Republic, which has more photos here). It's about as honest of a depiction of WCW that can be captured on film, especially the creepy smile on the signholder's face:

They differ only slightly from the Islamofascists that have burned down three embassies in protest of editorial cartoons originally published last year. They insist on political supremacy and call for the murder of those who oppose them, openly and gladly. It's small wonder that they cannot convince multitudes to join their protest, but even the 1,000 or so who gathered should be embarrassed to be associated with this.

It's not just the bloodthirstiness, either, but the stupidity. Someone thought they'd be clever and make up this sign tying the NSA program to a call for Bush's impeachment (via Rogouski.com, which has a number of hilarious pictures of the rally posted on his site):

I assumed that the WCW protestors had the foresight to buy the toll-free number listed to assist in spreading their message. I called the number to hear what they had to say, but instead got quite a surprise. The phone number for 800-IMPEACH actually belongs to Principle Business Enterprises, which manufactures Tranquility incontinence products.

It's the perfect sponsor for a protest group that can't hold its water and wait for the electoral process to work.

Why is this man smiling? Perhaps Hugh Hewitt understands that Pittsburgh had a date with destiny tonight, surviving a subpar performance by Ben Roethlisberger and its running game to eke out a Super Bowl championship over the surprisingly good Seattle Seahawks, 21-10 tonight:

The Pittsburgh Steelers finally gave coach Bill Cowher some Super Bowl satisfaction. Moments after the Rolling Stones rocked a Ford Field filled with Terrible Towels, Willie Parker broke a record 75-yard touchdown run, sparking Pittsburgh's 21-10 victory Sunday over the Seattle Seahawks.

Not only did the Steelers earn that elusive fifth championship ring and their first since 1980, but they completed a magic Bus ride that made Jerome Bettis' homecoming and likely farewell a success.

And they provided sweet validation for Cowher with a title in his 14th season as their coach, the longest tenure in the NFL.

As a sixth seed, no less.

The Steelers won four successive road games in the playoffs, beating a third seed, a second seed, and two #1 seeds to win the championship. No team in NFL history ever had that kind of run to a championship, and none likely will ever do it again. Jerome Bettis won't do it again. He announced his retirement while holding up the Lombardi Trophy, saying, "I think the Bus ... will make its last stop in Detroit."

The Seahawks dominated the first half but could not put points on the board. The Steelers, meanwhile, looked tight and inept for much of the first half, not even getting a first down until midway through the second period. Roethlisberger never looked comfortable in the entire game, but he did get the Steeler offense in gear at the end of the first half and the beginning of the second half. He played just well enough to win his first championship in his second year, and hopefully the experience will allow the young phenom more opportunities to play better in future Super Bowls.

The Seahawks' Matt Hasselbeck outplayed Roethlisberger but made one critical mistake late in the game. He had an opportunity to put Seattle in the lead, but instead threw a pick that took the air out of the Seahawks. It led to a reverse option for Antwaan Randle El to throw a TD pass to eventual MVP Hines Ward. If nothing else, he showed guts and determination, but he couldn't overcome a resilient Steelers defense that truly was the MVP for this game.

I suspect that Hugh will have plenty to say about this game, especially about the close calls from the referees. I'll be sure to call him Monday evening to get his reaction. Expect to hear a reminder about the spectacular run this team had over the last two months to even get into the playoffs, let alone win the championship.

Congratulations, Pittsburgh. Thanks for a great season, a great championship, and one of the greatest franchises in pro sports.

As if its daily pronouncements about refusing to change its goal of Israeli annihilation, Hamas gave a more tangible sign of its support for war against the Israelis yesterday:

Ismail Haniyeh, the front-runner to be the next Palestinian prime minister, appeared yesterday at the graveside of three Fatah militants in what was seen as a signal of continued support for armed resistance.

Mr. Haniyeh postponed a vital trip to Cairo to attend the funerals for the three men, who were killed Saturday night in an Israeli helicopter strike. It is highly unusual for a Hamas leader to attend the funeral of fighters from the rival Fatah movement.

"These killings will increase the citizens' unity, and boost their steadfastness and their resistance against the Zionist occupation," said the Hamas leader, who walked with the cortege amid intermittent gunfire and the blaring martial music in praise of Fatah's Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

Ahmed Hilles, the Fatah secretary-general for the Gaza Strip, stood alongside Mr. Haniyeh as relatives and Fatah gunmen, some wearing masks, shoveled brown clay over the three bodies that had been wrapped in shawls emblazoned with Fatah's emblematic crossed rifles and a hand grenade. Many green Hamas flags were also in evidence.

"The presence of Haniyeh is something strange. We have not seen this before," said Hazem Abu Shanab, a professor of political science at Al Azhar University of Gaza. "I think Hamas did try to send a signal also that they are supporting the Palestinian activists sticking to resistance activity. 'I am so close to you.' "

Now we have Hamas and the martyrdom organization of Fatah making overtures towards each other, with the former's leader attending their funerals now. It demonstrates that the incoming Hamas power structure wants to emphasize the armed struggle aspects of their group and not the diplomatic or even the social-services efforts that Hamas has made. Hamas and Fatah have long been bitter rivals with a similar end goal, but dissimilar motivations. Fatah has operated as a secular movement, more of an ideological group of fanatics that more resembled European communist terror groups that sprang out of the 1960s along with the PLO.

Hamas, on the other hand, has always been Islamist and considers itself more pure -- a feeling borne out by Fatah's managemen of the Palestinian Authority, with its rampant corruption. Hamas also considers Fatah fatally corrupted by its negotiations with the "Zionist entity". All of that leads to Haniyeh's attendance at the funeral yesterday as a singular event, and not to be dismissed lightly for its propaganda value. He helped lead the procession. That was meant to communicate a message to the West, as well as to Fatah members throughout the territories -- Hamas intends to fight and wants all of the martyrdom operations to unite under its banner, or at least under its leadership.

If people still refuse to acknowledge the consequences of this election, it becomes increasingly obvious that the refusal is willful. Hamas has done everything but take out Super Bowl ads announcing its intention to continue making war until the Israelis die or leave. The US and Europe need to cut the Palestinians off from the flow of money as long as these radicals stay in charge.

The ruckus over the Prophet cartoons continued to inspire violence over the weekend, with two Danish (Lebanon, Syria) and one Norwegian (Syria) consulate burnt down in Southwest Asia, victims of angry mobs. The idea that these mobs formed spontaneously and erupted in anger gets disputed by today's Guardian (UK), which calls the protests the result of some "well-planned spontaneity":

It was one of those unpredictable Lebanese Sunday mornings. The ski slopes in the mountains overlooking Beirut would have been crowded with skiers enjoying the brilliant winter sunshine. Walkers were out along the Corniche, strolling in designer tracksuits. Downtown, the chic restaurants were preparing for lunchtime. And there were a few men on scooters riding around town broadcasting an imminent protest.

It wasn't long before the heavily-laden coaches and minivans began to arrive from Beirut and the rest of Lebanon. They were all full of young, often bearded men who wore headbands and carried identical flags with calligraphic inscriptions in Arabic such as: "There is no god but God and Mohammad is his Prophet" and "O Nation of Muhammad, Wake Up." ...

The police seemed to know the demonstrators were coming and had turned out in force with barriers, barbed wire fences and several large fire trucks. ... By 11am, the Lebanese police and army were firing tear gas at the crowd. The protesters threw volleys of stones. Some stuffed cotton wool into their nostrils to stifle the effect of the gas.

One group overturned a car and set it alight. Sunni clerics in robes tried to calm the young men down. They were ignored. One cleric, Ibrahim Ibrahim, said his pleas were met with stones and insults. "They are hooligans," he said.

The police finally withdrew and allowed the crowd to burn down the Danish embassy. Although they set the building alight, they had time and the forethought to bring a large banner to place on the building before it burnt down, announcing that the protestors were ready to offer their children in sacrifice to Mohammed. (That is a strange expression of human sacrifice for a monotheistic religion, but a theme that has become much more pronounced in radical Islam since the rise of Islamofascism thirty years ago. It's almost as if Islam got the story of Abraham and Isaac but missed the ending entirely.) That message delivered, the mob then went into the most affluent Christian neighborhood and began vandalizing property all along the way, smashing windows and damaging vehicles.

Suddenly, the protest stopped. The police and Islamic clerics couldn't stop it -- but one of the leaders announced that the demonstration was over and that the crowd needed to go home. And it did; the streets were cleared within minutes, leaving the area back in police control and the residents of the area to clean up after the violence. The protestors went back to the buses that brought them into the area, similar to tourists trying to attend a cultural event.

In fact, the tourist notion sounds like an apt analogy. This demonstration and the arson at the Danish embassy was nothing more than tourist-style outrage on behalf of radical Islamists. They have no real street following; instead, they have to bus their people into the area in order to get any attendace whatsoever, and their swath of destruction got as much planning as a three-star tour of the Holy Land. The only aspect missing was the color brochures and the timetables.

I knew Hugh would find a way to make a Steeler victory in the championship into a silver lining somehow. Hugh noted that Lynn Swann got a thunderous ovation from Steeler fans -- and Pennsylvania voters -- when he ran onto Detroit's Ford Field in pre-game introductions:

[The worst Superbowl moment] had to be Ed Rendell's when he saw Lynn Swann run on to Ford Field with other past Superbowl MVPs. Swann got a thundering reception from the pro-Steelers crowd. Let's see --tired, old party hack versus fresh face superstar with charisma. Rendell's got a money advantage, but Swann is already pulling ahead in the polling.

It is the Arnold effect --someone new, someone not defined by the battles of the past dozen years. Unlike Arnold, Swann's also liked by the GOP base.

Swann's been charging past Rendell in the polls for some time, and the Steeler victory certainly won't hurt the former Pittsburgh great in his run against Rendell for the governor's seat. Swann will also help Rick Santorum campaign in the Philadelphia area where he faces some tough numbers. So far, Santorum has a hard task ahead of him, but with Swann gracefully ascending over Rendell, he may be able to ride that momentum for a victory as well. The two of them in combination may even make the Keystone State go red in 2008, a feat the Republicans nearly accomplished in 2004.

No wonder, then, that Hugh seems so cheerful in this photo:

Instapundit links to a new website, We Are Sorry, that has issued an apology to Denmark and Norway for the rioting and the violence directed at them by mobs of Muslims around the world. Purportedly set up by moderate Muslims, the website makes a well-written and eloquent apology to those harmed by the protests over a series of editorial cartoons:

We whole-heartedly apologize to the people of Denmark, Norway and all the European Union over the actions of a few, and we completely condemn all forms of vandalism and incitement to violence that the Arab and Muslim world have witnessed. We hope that this sad episode will not tarnish the great friendship that our peoples have fostered over decades. ...

Anyone offended by the content of a publication has a vast choice of democratic and respectful methods of seeking redress. The most obvious are not buying the publication, writing letters to the editor or expressing their opinions in other venues. It is also possible to use one’s free choice in a democracy to conduct a boycott of the publication, and even a boycott of firms dealing with it. Yet an indiscriminate boycott of all the country’s firms is simply uncalled for and counter-productive. We would be allowing the extremists on both sides to prevail, while punishing the government and the whole population for the actions of an unrepresentative irresponsible few.

We apologize whole-heartedly to the people of Norway and Denmark for any offense this sorry episode may have caused, to any European who has been harassed or intimidated, to the staff of the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish Embassies in Syria whose workplace has been destroyed and for any distress this whole affair may have caused to anyone.

Powerful words, and certainly an astute observation of the ridiculous nature of the protests currently reverberating through the Islamic world. This would be an encouraging sign of moderation -- if we knew who authored and sponsored it. The whois information for this domain reveals nothing about the owners of the site, except that the domain itself came from GoDaddy. The site has no signature, no sponsoring organization, no links to identifying materials; it is as anonymous as a site can get.

This leaves us with two options. Either the owners of this site aren't Muslim at all and just want to gain attention (and possibly dial down the heat), or the Muslims that sponsor the site intend on remaining anonymous. If the former is true, then this site means nothing. If the latter is true, it shows the marginalization that moderates within Islam feel when criticizing the Islamists -- which demonstrates why we have to support the publishers of criticism despite the outrage it provokes. Until we support the Danes and others who dared to criticize radical Islam and its claim on temporal as well as spiritual dominance, moderate Muslims will have no reason to stand up to the Islamists and risk their own safety.

James Carville and Paul Begala write a lengthy editorial for the Washington Monthly, offering their view of campaign reform. It should come as no surprise that their preferred method of reform involves turning elections into yet another expensive government program, but what is so amusing is that they make it into such a Byzantine affair that it practically turns into self-parody.

First, the pair make the argument that members of Congress are underpaid:

First, we raise congressional pay big time. Pay 'em what we pay the president: $400,000. That's a huge increase from the $162,000 congressmen and senators currently make. Paul, especially, has been a critic of congressional pay increases. But he is willing to more than double politicians' pay in order to get some of the corrupt campaign money out of the system. You see, the pay raise comes with a catch. In return, we get a simple piece of legislation that says members of Congress cannot take anything of value from anyone other than a family member. No lunches, no taxi rides. No charter flights. No golf games. No ski trips. No nothing.

It's always amusing when Democrats routinely castigate people who make six figures as the "rich", but then claim that politicians making $162K somehow have a claim of poverty. That salary doesn't include per diems, nor does it include staffers, which in many cases include family members to max out the benefits for holding electoral office. Nor does it take into account that some of these people have their own businesses back home, to which they tend when not in session. Carville and Begala make it sound as if their abject poverty causes corruption, a ludicrous notion, and one that would cost taxpayers $127,330,000 per year to fix.

After that, they decide that incumbents need to be handicapped in running for re-election. They insist that elected officials should never raise funds, but that challengers can raise however much they want from whatever sources they want. How would that work? Well, that's where the fun starts:

No president or member of Congress could accept a single red cent from individuals, corporations, or special interests. Period.

Challengers, on the other hand, would be allowed to raise money in any amount from any individual American citizen or political action committee. No limits, just as the free-market conservatives have always wanted. But here is the catch: Within 24 hours of receiving a contribution, the challenger would have to report it electronically to the Federal Election Commission, which would post it for the public to see. ...

The day after [disclosure], the U.S. Treasury would credit the incumbent's campaign account with a comparable sum—say 80 percent of the contribution to the challenger to take into account the cost of all the canapés and Chardonnay the challenger had to buy to raise his funds as well as the incumbent's advantage. ...

What if the incumbent wants to spend her own money? After all, the Supreme Court has made it clear that the Constitution does not allow restrictions on how much money a candidate—challenger or incumbent—can spend. No problem. Uncle Sam would write the challenger a check for an equivalent amount.

Why not just ban private donations altogether and simply provide public financing for all elections? I don't believe that's compatible with freedom of speech, but at least it's coherent. The Carville-Begala mess appears to have been a committee creation tasked with finding a middle ground between public financing and full disclosure. This hybrid is a laughable product that reminds one of the silly Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercials from the 1970s, where two people collided and someone stuck a chocolate bar in a jar of peanut butter. It only resembles a coherent strategy on the most superficial level.

I agree that we need to reform political processes that protect incumbents, but the problem with incumbency comes from apportionment processes that have become seriously derailed, not with campaign financing. Carville and Begala need to go back to Scream TV and let more rational minds develop reform strategies.

Congratulations to our good friend Paul Mirengoff at Power Line for making Dick Durbin look like ... well ... Dick Durbin. Read Paul's own account here. Mark Tapscott replies to his rhetorical question in this post, which sounds more and more true all the time ...

Stephen Harper took office yesterday as the 22nd Prime Minister of Canada and formed his new Cabinet -- a move which resulted in immediate controversy. In a scene reminiscent of Paul Martin's seduction of Belinda Stronach, Harper included a newly-elected Liberal MP as his international trade minister:

He lured a Vancouver Liberal star, David Emerson, to become his international trade minister and made an unelected Montreal businessman, Michael Fortier, a Senator and public works minister in one fell swoop.

Emerson - re-elected as a Liberal just two weeks ago - drew gasps as he arrived at Rideau Hall to be sworn in. He took the oath while still in possession of a Liberal party card.

Fortier, a former Progressive Conservative party president, didn't run for Parliament but was the party's election campaign co-chair. He has agreed to run in the next election and will hold a temporary Senate seat until then.

Harper later told the press that he wanted to ensure that the urban areas had representation in his cabinet. The Tories came to power mostly on the basis of rural and suburban ridings, where the Conservative influence grew after the string of Liberal scandals. The Grits held onto the urban centers of Canada, where they have long held sway. That resulted in an awkward imbalance where the Tories would have had no urban representation in their leadership -- leading them to negotiate for Emerson's defection from the Liberals.

Harper made a smart move in offering the position to Emerson. The Tory leader obviously has his eyes on the next election, and he needs to build party support in the cities if the Conservatives hope to form a majority government at some point. Emerson's switch also gives wavering Liberals some reason to rethink their affiliation. And voters in Montreal and Vancouver, who may have thought themselves written off after backing the losing horse, will find themselves still engaged in the governing process. Finally, including a former Liberal as the international trade minister sends a message that change will be incremental, at least at first, which should alleviate some nervousness about Harper's rule among Canadian voters.

The press, meanwhile, did their best to spin this as a betrayal of principle. However, after Belinda Stronach's switch to the Liberals, the Tories only complained that the portfolio she was given was nothing but a sinecure, a payoff for keeping the Martin government afloat. The Tories do not face a no-confidence vote, and cannot be accused of paying Emerson off for his switch. Besides, Emerson doesn't share a bed with a Liberal leader the way Stronach did with Tory deputy leader Peter MacKay, making hers a dual betrayal.

Harper showed some nerve yesterday in his selections. He may be more of a political visionary than anyone expected.

The Heritage Foundation has released a report that shows the federal budget in crisis, and pork only tells part of the story. Titled Federal Spending - By The Numbers, the Brian Riedl report gives an easily-accessible look at the growth in federal spending during the Bush administration that should sober any drunken Congressman right up. It also demonstrates without a doubt that the tax cuts enacted by Bush have nothing to do with this crisis.

Tax revenues, in fact, have steadily increased during the tax cut period, and overall have more than doubled since 1990. In 2000, the last full year of Bill Clinton's term, tax receipts came to $2.025T. They dipped in 2001 and 2002 with the recession, dropping to a low of $1.783T in 2003, when the tax cuts got implemented. They have jumped in the last two years, to $1.88T and $2.154T, the last a 14% increase and the highest amount of federal tax dollars collected in history. By comparison, the tax receipt figure in 1990 was a "modest" $1.032T.

However, federal spending has kept the pace of the expansion in revenues. Last year's budget came in at $2.472T, and this year we expect to spend $2.77T, according to estimates released this week. Of that money, $969B comes in so-called discretionary spending, up $300B since 2001. But by far and away the worst of the bill comes in entitlement spending, which went to $1.32T last year, up from $1.009 in 2001. As a measure of the rate of increase in both areas, discretionary spending has increased 93% since 1990, but entitlements have gone up 132%, while revenues have increased by 109%.

Where has the increase come? Some of it has gone to national defense, but not all of it. In fact, the federal budget has grown across the board since 2001, outstripping inflation (12% overall) in several categories, such as Education (137%), Community and Regional Development (342%), Medicare (58%), Housing and Commerce (58%), Medicaid (49%), and Water Transportation (46%). Do you like the idea of nationalized health care? We may be heading there by default, as the federal budget for Health Research and Regulation has grown by 78% since 2001 and now consumes $76B of our budget.

It's these numbers and this growth that accounts for the budget crisis we face, but the root cause is a growing belief in America that government should deliver all services and provide a completely risk-free environment to its constituents. This leads to a simple yet unanswered question: who pays? The numbers make the answer clear -- we all pay, and we will all start paying much more unless these trends are reversed. Federal programs have become an addiction, not just to politicians looking to pork up home districts to guarantee re-election, but to all of us. What started as noble programs to assist the truly disadvantaged have now become bloated socialist nanny-care programs, floating everyone and relying on a decreasing work force to prop up the Ponzi scheme for just one more generation before the collapse comes.

It may not yet be here, but we can see it coming. We need to wean people off the public dole and make clear that the costs outstrip the benefits one will eventually realize. If we don't, Riedl's analysis shows where we will soon head. Read it all.

The political realignment in Canada last month may be more significant than first thought. When Canadians elected Stephen Harper and the Conservatives as a minority government, their modest victory was thought to have chiefly been the result of the series of financial scandals surrounding the Liberals. An Ipsos-Reid poll shows, however, that the electorate may instead have become more conservative than previously thought. Majorities in Canada would not object to the Tories pursuing a broad and controversial agenda in their new government:

A majority of Canadians say they would not support the opposition parties voting the Conservatives out if they try to cut the GST or pass legislation banning same sex marriage:

* 57% would not support bringing down the government if they “try to pass a law to cut the GST by 2% over their term” (39% would support bringing the government down if they tried to do this).
* 54% would not support bringing the government down if they “try to pass a law that makes same sex marriages illegal” (41% would support bringing the government down if they tried to do this).

Slim majorities would not support bringing the government down over sending troops to Iraq or limiting access to abortion.

* 51% would not support bringing the government down if they “send Canadian troops to fight in Iraq” (44% would support bringing the government down if they did this).
* 50% would not support bringing the government down if they “try to pass a law that limits a woman’s access to abortion” (45% would support bringing the government down if they tried to do this).

The only exception is on the issue of health care.

* Canadians are divided over whether the government should be brought down if it “moves to give private for-profit health care a bigger role in Canada”. Forty-six percent say the government should not be brought down while a slightly higher number (48%) say it should.

It's important to note that this does not translate into majority support for these proposals. It does mean that Canadian voters are open to debating the issues instead of treating them as holy dogma and unfit for political review. That indicates more flexibility and openness to traditional Conservative positions than was first thought from the election results. The Tories do not need to walk on eggshells or hide their values when working in Parliament; Canadians want an open process and appear willing to consider any reasoned point of view.

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence wants to reopen a question on what it calls "postwar" intelligence that both Congress and the administration would prefer to remain closed -- whether Saddam Hussein had WMD in late 2002. Its chair, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, says that mounting evidence and testimony point to Saddam's possession of the banned weapons prior to the final UN debates on the invasion, and that untranslated documentation holds the answer:

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is studying 12 hours of audio recordings between Saddam Hussein and his top advisers that may provide clues to the whereabouts of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The committee has already confirmed through the intelligence community that the recordings of Saddam's voice are authentic, according to its chairman, Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, who would not go into detail about the nature of the conversations or their context. They were provided to his committee by a former federal prosecutor, John Loftus, who says he received them from a former American military intelligence analyst.

Mr. Loftus will make the recordings available to the public on February 17 at the annual meeting of the Intelligence Summit, of which he is president. On the organization's Web site, Mr. Loftus is quoted as promising that the recordings "will be able to provide a few definitive answers to some very important - and controversial - weapons of mass destruction questions." Contacted yesterday by The New York Sun, Mr. Loftus would only say that he delivered a CD of the recordings to a representative of the committee, and the following week the committee announced that it was reopening the investigation into weapons of mass destruction.

The audio recordings are part of new evidence the House intelligence committee is piecing together that has spurred Mr. Hoekstra to reopen the question of whether Iraq had the biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons American inspectors could not turn up. President Bush called off the hunt for those weapons last year and has conceded that America has yet to find evidence of the stockpiles.

Mr. Hoekstra has already met with a former Iraqi air force general, Georges Sada, who claims that Saddam used civilian airplanes to ferry chemical weapons to Syria in 2002. Mr. Hoekstra is now talking to Iraqis who Mr. Sada claims took part in the mission, and the congressman said the former air force general "should not just be discounted." Mr. Hoekstra also said he is in touch with other people who have come forward to the committee - Iraqis and Americans - who claim that the weapons inspectors may have overlooked other key sites and evidence. He has also asked the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, to declassify some 35,000 boxes of Iraqi documents obtained in the war that have yet to be translated.

Hoekstra has gotten little assistance from the intelligence community. Sada's testimony resulted in little follow-up by intelligence agencies, and the entire question of WMD gets treated like a bad dream in political circles. Yet as Stephen Hayes has repeatedly written in the Weekly Standard, most of the documentation from the Saddam regime on its weapons and defense systems has yet to be translated at all. The entire US government appears to have leapt to a conclusion far ahead of a complete review of the postwar evidence.

We need to support the Hoekstra effort, even if it never finds a WMD. We need to base history's conclusions on the most complete and accurate data we have in our possession. And if we find out that the WMD did exist, we'd better start looking for it -- before it finds us first.

The Germans seem to have a problem in keeping terrorists behind bars. For the second time in as many months, Germany has freed a convicted terrorist, this time a man connected to the 9/11 attacks. Mounir el Motassadeq will walk out of prison for the second time, freed by German appellate courts:

Germany's Federal Constitutional Court ordered the 31-year-old Moroccan released from prison where he had been serving a seven-year sentence following a conviction by a Hamburg court. Carsten Grote, a Hamburg judicial spokesman, did not give a reason for the release and did not indicate when Motassadeq would be let free.

Authorities have long suspected Motassadeq of having belonged to the Hamburg terror cell led by Mohammed Atta. He arrived in Germany in 1993 and learned German in the university town of Münster before attending a technical university in Hamburg and eventually getting a job at the same school. He admits that he knew Atta in Hamburg but insists he knew nothing of his planned attack until seeing the events of 9/11 unfold.

Motassadeq got sprung the first time because the US refused to extradite Ramzi Binalshibh for courtroom testimony. American authorities send extensive documentation of Binalshibh's interrogation for Motassadeq's second trial, but he only got convicted of membership in a terror group -- and only got seven years for that crime. No one knows why the German court ordered him freed at this point, but he has only served a year of his sentence.

After watching the murderer of Navy diver Robert Stethem walk free earlier, we should have become used to German indifference to terrorism, but after watching them work so hard to free a convicted al-Qaeda member, it still proves shocking. Obviously relying on European law enforcement as an ally in the fight against Islamofascist terror will get us nowhere.

E. J. Dionne, one of the best liberal columnists in America, suffers from a strange attack of amnesia in today's Washington Post. He argues that the tax cuts have crippled the American budgeting process, which I'll get to momentarily, but he also lays the blame on George Bush's father for disavowing his compromise with Democrats on taxes in 1990:

The roots of our fiscal madness, on display once again yesterday with the unveiling of President Bush's new budget and its deficit in excess of $350 billion, were planted on Oct. 27, 1990.

Ironically, that's the day when the first President Bush embraced the last genuinely bipartisan budget reduction package to include both tax increases and spending cuts.

It can be seen in retrospect as one of Bush 41's admirable long-term achievements. (Another, of course, was his success in driving Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.) In tandem with Bill Clinton's tax increases three years later, the 1990 agreement set off a decade of fiscal responsibility and exceptional economic growth.

But Bush 41 could not embrace his budget victory as a triumph, because the agreement split his party and because he had won election just two years earlier promising "no new taxes." So he backed away from his achievement as soon as it was in hand.

Er, that isn't all that happened, and either Dionne has a bad memory or has slipped into uncharacteristic disingenuity by claiming this. Dionne leaves out two important points. The first fact omitted is that the tax increase in 1990 resulted in a sudden recession, which the Gulf War made worse by driving up oil costs temporarily. In fact, the increased rates flattened tax receipts; it did not result in any significant increase to the Treasury.

Second and more to the point, the Democrats with whom the President consulted and compromised used his efforts to castigate him as unfaithful to his promises in the 1992 general election. I find it hard to imagine that Dionne cannot recall the "Read My Lips' commercials that the Clinton campaign used to devastating effect in that election, which showed Bush promising to hold the line on taxes -- and blamed him entirely for raising them later. The Democrats stabbed Bush 41 in the back for working with them, and that's the lesson that 43 learned from the experience. Compromise with Democrats, and they will use it to attack at the first opportunity.

In terms of the actual issue of tax cuts and their effect on the budget, Dionne also neglects to mention that since the inception of the tax cuts in 2003, tax revenues have actually increased -- and increased sharply. The OMB, in fact, shows tax receipts at their highest point ever for this year (page 3). The reason for the deficit isn't the tax cuts, which provided the spark for the economy that has driven tax revenues far past the $2T mark for 2005. The deficit comes from increased federal spending, which both parties have increased on almost a straight line ever since that budget agreement in 1990.

Dionne is rightly concerned about the federal budget and the deficit, but he seems to have a hazy memory about its origins and its underlying causes. His call for bipartisanship in solving the problem is also laudable, but instead of castigating Republicans for a lack of intestinal fortitude in handling its fiscal conservatives, perhaps Dionne should scold the Democrats who twisted Bush 41's bipartisanship into a character flaw and the moderate Republicans who join with the Democrats in their inability to stop spending our money.

UPDATE: It's a little off the topic, but Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly claims that I've misrepresented the 1990 tax increase. He argues, as does some of his readers in the comments, that the 1990 tax increase actually rescued the American economy from a recession. That flies in the face of the actual numbers, and it also misrepresents the political climate at the time. I had an opportunity to briefly interview Brian Beach at the Heritage Foundation, who confirmed my original analysis that (a) the economy had not been in a recession when Bush 41 finally caved and agreed to negotiate for increased tax revenues in mid-1990, and (b) the immediate result was a slowdown in the economy. Brian also recalled that the need for the increase, according to the Democrats in control of Congress at the time, was not to reverse a recession but to balance the budget. Bush agreed to consider tax increases in May 1990, and by June had agreed in principle to do so.

If people have forgotten, then these numbers should recall the economic climate. The Bureau of Economic Statistics shows that the 1990 Q1 GDP performance shows a 4.7% annual growth rate, and the previous four quarters had performed at 1%, 2.6%, 2.6%, and 4.1% respectively. Even Q2, when Bush committed in principle to "increase tax revenues", grew at an annual rate of 1%. After announcing that he would raise taxes, and then doing so in November 1990, the economy stopped its slower growth and slipped into outright recession. GDP stood still in 1990 Q3, and then dropped in Q4 (-3.0%) and again in 1991 Q1 (-2.0). As recessions went, it was a shallow one, but the resulting anemic recovery -- and the Democratic attacks on Bush 41 as untrustworthy for having reversed himself on taxes -- cost Bush 41 his re-election.

King Banaian, the chair of the economics department at St. Cloud State University (and one of the nicest men you'll ever want to meet), provides an excellent analysis at SCSU Scholars. Read the whole thing, but here's the money quote, if you'll pardon the pun:

[I]f the tax increases were really going to lead to the recovery and growth of the economy, why did the resulting expansion take so long to take hold that 21 months had to pass before the recession's end was found?

And they did nothing for revenues either. Indeed, at the beginning of the Andrews AFB negotiations of summer 1990, the projected FY 1992 budget deficit was $101 billion. By the time of Bush's 1991 SOTU speech, it was $318 billion. (Source.) If tax increases were to stimulate the economy, how could they have been so anemic both to economic growth and to tax revenues?

Revenues, in fact, grew very anemically over the next two years. In 1990, the year the tax increases went into effect, revenues only grew 2.2% in 1991, not even matching the average inflation rate for that period. Revenues only grew 3.4% the next year (1992). Deficits, however, continued to expand, because Congress and the Democrats reneged on their promise to Bush 41 and continued to expand federal spending (5.7% in 1991 and 4.4% in 1992). The deficits only came under control in the mid-90s because the Republicans took over the House and brought the expansion of federal spending under 4% for the rest of the decade.

All of this strays a bit from my original post, but the responses given by Washington Monthly and the commenters here show the short and fact-deficient memories of the Democrats when it comes to the effect of tax increases, as demonstrated by E.J. Dionne and Kevin Drum. It also reinforces the lesson that sucking money out of the private sector for redistribution by a bloated federal government does not generate growth, but instead kills investment and disrupts markets. The lesson from every tax cut and every tax increase is that only the former truly works to increase federal revenues.

I suppose after having watched the Paul Wellstone funeral here in Minnesota four years ago, I shouldn't be shocked by Democrats turning bipartisan shows of respect at memorial services into partisan sniping. President Bush and his family had to endure the bad taste of several speakers who used Coretta Scott King's funeral as a forum to snipe at his politics:

Speakers took a rare opportunity to criticize U.S. President George W. Bush's policies to his face at the funeral on Tuesday of Coretta Scott King, widow of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

Civil-rights leader the Rev. Joseph Lowery and former President Jimmy Carter cited Mrs. King's legacy as a leader in her own right and advocate of nonviolence as they launched barbs over the Iraq war, government social policies and Bush's domestic eavesdropping program. ...

Lowery, former head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which King helped found in 1957, gave a playful reading of a poem in eulogy of Mrs. King.

"She extended Martin's message against poverty, racism and war / She deplored the terror inflicted by our smart bombs on missions way afar," he said.

"We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there / But Coretta knew and we knew that there are weapons of misdirection right down here / Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war billions more but no more for the poor."

Jimmy Carter, for his part, went out of his way to note that the Kings suffered from "secret government wiretapping and other surveillance," an allusion to the NSA program under George Bush. He of course neglects to mention that the wiretaps were approved by Bobby Kennedy, one of the saints of his party, and that the reasons for it had nothing to do with national defense. He lectured about the lack of progress in civil rights, saying that all one had to do was look at the faces of those victimized by Hurricane Katrina to know that more progress had to be made. It's the first time I've ever heard God be called a bigot -- unless Carter somehow has evidence that Bush ginned up a hurricane to deliberately attack the Gulf Coast.

The Anchoress was not surprised:

No, none of it was surprising. It was not surprising that President Bush went, knowing - as he had to know - that a few opportunists and insecure old men would try to take their shots in an attempt to ingratiate the rabble and make the news shows. It was not surprising that both President Bushes spoke with class and humility. It was not surprising that Bill Clinton got the room rocking, and got just a little dramatic, as ever, appealing to the emotions -and he does it very well. It was not surprising that Hillary stood there nodding before plodding. It wasn’t even surprising to me that Hillary got to speak last - in essence giving her the “keynote” spot. In a crowd for whom everything is political and everything is calculated, that was completely predictable.

It's not surprising ... but it is sad that the Left cannot allow a single moment to pass without partisan rancor marring what could have been a marvelous bipartisan show of unity, in respect for a woman who deserved it.

Former journalist Mark Tapscott takes another look at the effect that Paul Mirengoff had on Capitol Hill this week and wonders what could happen if we had six bloggers working full time, supervising Congress. All I know is that it sure looks like fun to me ... but not as much fun as Paul's more lunatic critics seem to imagine!

Former lieutenant governor Bill Scranton has bowed out of the race for governor in Pennsylvania, leaving the endorsement to the frontrunner and last remaining candidate, Lynn Swann. The former Steeler great will have no further Republican competition before the primary on May 16th:

Bill Scranton dropped out of the governor's race Tuesday after it became clear that Republican Party leaders planned to endorse former Pittsburgh Steelers star Lynn Swann for the nomination.

Swann is seeking to become Pennsylvania's first black governor. Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell is running for a second term in November.

Swann had locked up more than enough unofficial support to win the endorsement of GOP leaders Saturday.

Scranton exits after having watched his campaign manager commit the season's most spectacular blunder so far. James Seif had engaged in a TV debate with Swann campaign aide Ray Zaborney, during which he claimed that "the rich white guy in this campaign is Lynn Swann." Rather than climb down from that ludicrous statement, Seif defended it when a caller objected to the characterization, responding that "[Swann's] the guy at the country club that hangs around the country club, plays golf with the legislators and is the inside candidate." (Link to video here.) Besides being an ignorant statement and an appalling judgment on the "blackness" of Swann by the Caucasian Seif (on behalf of Scranton, also white), it's simply untrue. Scranton has been a politician much longer than Swann, who's running for his first political office, and the attempt to sell Scranton as an outsider in comparison was almost as stupid as calling Lynn Swann the whiter of the two candidates.

Scranton fired Seif, but the damage was already done, as apparently was Scranton himself. It doesn't change much, except that it clears Swann to consolidate his Republican support early in the campaign, allowing him to conserve his campaign money for the battle against Ed Rendell. He has a slight lead already according to Rasmussen (45%-43%) and may gain a boost from the Steeler's victory for some extra momentum heading into the election campaign. A sitting governor polling only 43% looks particularly vulnerable, and without a primary to handicap his run, expect Swann to outrun Rendell just as he did with so many defenders during his elegant and graceful NFL career.

The New York Times reports today on the problems facing the Democrats, who hope to gain enough seats in the upcoming midterm elections to take back control of Congress. Although the midterms for a second-term President usually see a significant gain for the party out of power, Democrats have a sneaking suspicion that they have not positioned themselves to take advantage of the situation:

Democrats described a growing sense that they had failed to take full advantage of the troubles that have plagued Mr. Bush and his party since the middle of last year, driving down the president's approval ratings, opening divisions among Republicans in Congress over policy and potentially putting control of the House and Senate into play in November.

Asked to describe the health of the Democratic Party, Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said: "A lot worse than it should be. This has not been a very good two months."

"We seem to be losing our voice when it comes to the basic things people worry about," Mr. Dodd said.

Democrats said they had not yet figured out how to counter the White House's long assault on their national security credentials. And they said their opportunities to break through to voters with a coherent message on domestic and foreign policy — should they settle on one — were restricted by the lack of an established, nationally known leader to carry their message this fall.

As a result, some Democrats said, their party could lose its chance to do to Republicans this year what the Republicans did to them in 1994: make the midterm election, normally dominated by regional and local concerns, a national referendum on the party in power.

What was the difference between 1994 and now? A number of corruption and ethical issues had dogged Congress in the previous years, but that hadn't been enough to dislodge the Democrats from the power they held for over four decades in the lower chamber. The difference came when the Republicans put together an extensive and detailed plan for reforming Congress and shrinking government called the Contract With America. Newt Gingrich started the Republican revolution that eventually crescendoed into the control they have now over both the House and Senate.

In contrast, what have the Democrats offered? They have put forth no coherent plan, no strategy for leadership. The only recognizable plan that Democrats have put in front of the American electorate for five years is the "I Hate Bush" platform that sells well with the activist base but disgusts a wide swath of the rest of the electorate. This problem does not restrict itself to the base, either; party leaders like John Conyers and John Kerry have both argued that a Democratic majority would take action to impeach George Bush, making a preconceived coup d'etat the issue for the national referendum in the fall. Its incoherence gets magnified by Nancy Pelosi, whom the Times quotes as proud that the Democrats don't offer anything but gainsay to American voters:

"It's absolutely required that the party talk about things in addition to the Abramoff scandal," said Martin Frost, former leader of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "I think the climate is absolutely right to take back the House or the Senate or both. But you can't do it without a program."

And Mr. Bayh said, "I don't believe we will win by just not being them."

Ms. Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, did not dispute that argument. But, pointing to the Democratic strategy in defeating Mr. Bush's Social Security proposal last year, she said there was no rush.

"People said, 'You can't beat something with nothing,' " she said, arguing that the Democrats had in fact accomplished precisely that this year. "I feel very confident about where we are."

Democrats -- The Party of Nothing. It doesn't make for an exciting campaign slogan, but it's enough for Nancy Pelosi, the party leader in Congress.

Until the Democrats stand for something other than a naked lust for power, they will remain out of the mainstream. As long as they continue arguing out of both sides of their mouth on national security -- for example, screaming about checking international communications during wartime while calling for the program's continuance -- no one will trust them with leadership. And as long as they keep making the upcoming midterms a referendum on impeachment, they will find themselves more marginalized than ever.

The latest offering from Anne Applebaum attempts to play to an imaginary center in the cartoon fracas by castigating liberal-leaning newspapers that refused to reprint the supposedly offensive Danish cartoons and balancing that with an attack on the right-wing blogosphere. Applebaum rewrites history, apparently an industrial hazard at the Washington Post, in comparing the cartoon controversy to the Newsweek Qu'ran-flushing story:

Remember the controversy over Newsweek and the Koran? Last year Newsweek printed an allegation about mistreatment of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base that -- although strikingly similar to interrogation techniques actually used to intimidate Muslims at Guantanamo -- was not substantiated by an official government investigation. It hardly mattered: Abroad, Muslim politicians and clerics promoted and exaggerated the Koran story, just as they are now promoting and exaggerating the Danish cartoon story. The result was rioting and violence on a scale similar to the rioting and violence of the past week.

But although that controversy was every bit as manipulated as this one, self-styled U.S. "conservatives" blamed not cynical politicians and clerics but Newsweek for (accidentally) inciting violence in the Muslim world: "Newsweek lied, people died." Worse, much of the commentary implied that Newsweek was not only wrong to make a mistake (which it was) but also that the magazine was wrong to investigate the alleged misconduct of U.S. soldiers. Logically, the bloggers should now be attacking the Danish newspaper for (less accidentally) inciting violence in the Muslim world. Oddly enough, though, I've heard no cries of "Jyllands-Posten insulted, people died." The moral is: We defend press freedom if it means Danish cartoonists' right to caricature Muhammad; we don't defend press freedom if it means the mainstream media's right to investigate the U.S. government.

Perhaps Applebaum has hung around American newsrooms too long to notice the difference, but editorial cartoons express opinion, while news reporting is supposed to deliver facts. Newsweek didn't publish a cartoon of a GI flushing a Qu'ran down a toilet. They reported as fact that American soldiers had done so, with the thinnest of sourcing and without attempting to corroborate the information. Newsweek didn't investigate at all -- they just took the word of a single source and put it in their magazine.

The right-wing blogosphere defends the freedom of the press to express opinons, when labeled as such, and to report facts when delivering news. It doesn't mean that people can't criticize either action when necessary. No one in the "right-wing blogosphere" argues that the American media shouldn't investigate the government, but we certainly argue that such investigations should be done properly, without endangering national security, and reported fairly with properly corroborated allegations, if and when they are to be made.

This is yet another of the tiresome examples of writers at the Post attempting to appear reasonable by finding some basis on which to attack all sides of a controversy. Applebaum's reach exceeds her grasp on this point, and she made up for it by trying to rewrite the Newsweek debacle by turning it into a debate on the First Amendment -- a conflict that never arose when Newsweek botched its reporting. It's just another form of pandering, no less than the capitulations she decries earlier in her essay by the media outlets who issue statements of "respect for Islam" that would never appear about any controversy involving Christianity or Judaism.

The Post reports on yesterday's appearance by President Bush at Coretta Scott King's funeral and provides an analysis that seems more than a little off the mark in its details. Michael Fletcher decides that Bush has finally started reaching out to the black community as a result of Hurricane Katrina, but in the details notes that Bush has "reached out" to the black voters all along -- but chose to bypass the political leadership that had opposed him so bitterly in 2000:

It was the type of eloquent tribute that Americans have come to expect from their president when an iconic figure passes. But the presidential gesture took on added significance because it marks the latest step in the administration's effort to repair its frayed relations with many black civil rights and political leaders.

"President Bush was where he should have been," said Bruce S. Gordon, the new president of the NAACP. "Coretta Scott King is a very important figure in black American history and American history. I thought it was appropriate for the president to be there to honor her."

Bush all but ignored many black civil rights and political leaders during his first four years in office. Instead, he focused on building inroads to African American leaders through the pastors of black evangelical churches and business leaders who were not identified with the traditional civil rights agenda.

Bush became the first president since Herbert Hoover to serve a full term without addressing the NAACP, which many acknowledge as the nation's leading civil rights organization. At the same time, Bush's relations with the Congressional Black Caucus were frosty, contributing to a growing gulf between the administration and black voters.

Fletcher ignores a bit of significant history in this analysis, and comes up with the "growing gulf" characterization out of whole cloth. In 2000, when Bush ran for president, he made a point to speak at an NAACP meeting in order to "reach out" to the leadership. He was rewarded for his effort by an NAACP ad campaign that attempted to pin the James Byrd lynching on Bush, who had resisted hate-crime legislation in Texas. The despicable ads never mentioned that Texas had captured, tried, and convicted the men responsible and sentenced them to death -- underscoring Bush's point about the superfluousness of hate-crime laws. The NAACP just wanted to tar Bush with the lynching to smear him as a closet bigot.

After that ad came out, Bush garnered 9% of the African-American vote, but won office anyway. The NAACP then spent the next five years whining about Bush refusing to visit them. Why should he? They proved to have no appreciation for his earlier appearance, his first attempt to "reach out", and they effectively marginalized themselves with an insulting, degrading, and unfair smear campaign. Bush decided to "reach out" in other directions, bypassing old-line organizations like the NAACP and leaders like Jesse Jackson and instead appeal directly to the communities themselves, through the churches and other organizations. It had a small effect: his share of the African-American vote rose to 11% in 2004.

So much for the "growing gulf".

Bush went to King's funeral because of the stature of her life and the work she accomplished during it. Again, he "reached out" -- and what happened? The political leaders on the left turned the funeral into an embarrassing recapitulation of the Wellstone funeral, using the corpse of King as a soapbox to harangue a President who had simply come to pay his respects. Instead of focusing on a moment of unity, when people from all walks of life and political persuasions could meet and agree that Coretta Scott King had made a positive difference for America, they turned it into a partisan sniping show, with the ever-bitter Jimmy Carter making himself the center of attention, as always.

Some people never learn.

CNS News reports that John Bolton and Kenneth Timmerman have been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize (h/t: CQ reader Maggie):

John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is one of two Americans who have been nominated for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. ...

Bolton and Kenneth R. Timmerman were formally nominated by Sweden's former deputy prime minister Per Ahlmark, for playing a major role in exposing Iran's secret plans to develop nuclear weapons.

They documented Iran's secret nuclear buildup and revealed Iran's "repeated lying" and false reports to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a press release said.

Bolton formerly served as U.S. undersecretary for arms control and international security, and he authored the Proliferation Security Initiative, an international effort to block WMD shipments. The effort eventually unmasked the secret nuclear network directed by Pakistan nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan.

Timmerman, an independent researcher, has written extensively on Iran's nuclear activities for more than 20 years. His report for the Simon Wiesenthal Center in 1992 first detailed Iran's ties to A.Q. Khan. His most recent book, "Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran," was published last year.

I guess that means that the Left will soon line up to insist that Bolton receive confirmation for UN ambassador, right? After all, a Nobel nomination convinced them that Stanley "Tookie" Williams was really a great guy who deserved not just commutation of his death sentence but also high praise for his humanity, or at least that was the argument they made. I'll just hold my breath until they start the picketing outside the DNC headquarters in support of Bolton.

I sometimes get rebuttals via e-mail rather than comments, mostly due to either some difficulties with the Typekey authorization interface or just the length and depth of the rebuttals themselves. I received two today that deserve special mention on posts I wrote early this morning.

On my post about Lynn Swann and the exit of Bill Scranton from the governor's race, I received this e-mail from a political activist in PA who wishes to remain anonymous:

I read your blog daily, and have nothing but the utmost respect you for you. However, when I read your post this morning on Bill Scranton’s having dropped out of the Gubernatorial race, I could have smashed my head through a wall. With all due respect, this is what happens when campaigns are viewed and analyzed “from afar.” I’m a blogger and political consultant in Pennsylvania, and I can tell you that your characterization of Scranton as the insider and Swann as the outsider is patently wrong. Bill Scranton is a former Lt. Governor, you are correct. However, he has angered all of the Republican party leadership in PA with his message of reform. Swann, on the other hand, was recruited into this race by State Senate President Pro Tem Bob Jubelirer, the pro-choice, pay raising, tax raising, corrupt, big government Republican from the 30th District (my district). Swann’s campaign manager, Ray Zaborney, is even the boyfriend of Jubelirer’s campaign manager. Swann was set to get the endorsement of the Republican State Committee precisely because he is the leadership’s hand-picked lapdog. ...

Again, I love your blog and agree with you 99% of the time. However, not only is Swann not the right candidate, he doesn’t stand a chance of beating Ed Rendell.

This person suggested that people check out this Pennsylvania political blog to get a taste of the electorate. I'd note that while Jubelirer is pro-choice, Swann has already stated that he is pro-life, and it's not uncommon for people in the same party to share connections between campaign staff. I think that the recruitment of Lynn Swann came from people a few pay grades above Jubelirer as well, remembering that Swann got podium time at the Republican convention in 2004 (and did a nice job as well). However, it's good to hear from folks in PA and I'll be keeping a closer eye on the issues that the commenter raises.

The second rebuttal regarded my post about the Anne Applebaum column this morning, and it came from Applebaum herself, who thinks I treated her unfairly and harshly in my post. I consulted with a couple of people I trust, who thought I could have treated her a bit more kindly and thought that accusing her of deliberately distorting history was unfair. I'll let the readers decide. I've offered Ms. Applebaum an opportunity to rebut me on the blog, but I'm not going to reproduce our correspondence as I didn't get the chance to ask her if she felt comfortable with that. I'd encourage CQ readers to read her entire column and then post your assessment in the comments on this post.

UPDATE: And in a new feature here at CQ, we have Rebuttal Rebuttals^TM! Here's a comment from a seasoned PA media consultant who takes issue with the above rebuttal, again anonymously (ellipses in original):

The tone of the e-mail you received from the "blogger and political consultant" sounds to me as if it was written by a bitter Scranton supporter. I've heard disparaging comments from lobbyists I know, and one of the low-level Scranton folks, that Swann has no government/executive experience. Sounds to me like the entrenched bureaucracy (R's, D's, doesn't matter which) is fearful of what a real government outsider will bring to the table (i.e., fear of any change in status quo). And I wish I had recorded/written this down...but two days before then-campaign manager Jim Seif melted down on statewide TV, I briefly chatted with Mr. Seif at the Pennsylvania Press Club luncheon in Harrisburg...and in front of me he said to another person (they appeared to know each other) something to the effect that they had some good dirt on Swann and were going to exploit it....could this Zaborney-Jubelirer thing be that dirt? I have no clue....just something else to consider....but if it IS the dirt Seif talked about, that for me would be further evidence that your e-mailer is an angry Scranton supporter. Finally, my understanding of the Swann-Rendell poll numbers is that such a tight race, this early, is almost unheard of in PA gubernatorial history. I interpret that as a good sign for Swann, although I acknowledge that so far he has been overtly non-specific as to how he'll govern and what policies he'll support/propose--Swann clearly needs to sharpen his focus/attack on Rendell as the campaign unfolds.

Here's my analysis: it's a good thing that Pennsylvania Republicans aren't going to have that primary, because it looks like that might have turned into one bloody mess -- and Ed Rendell would have been the beneficiary.

My concern is when we use national moments to reflect and to mourn and to be respectful and we turn them into political diatribes, you know, against the president or, you know, against the Democrats or whatever. It’s just disrespectful; and that’s not what the family wanted, that’s not what the nation wants to see. That doesn’t help heal people. That doesn’t help bring people to a better place. It just exacerbates wounds and makes things more, I guess, poisonous, if you will. And, it just left a bad taste in my mouth and I was hoping for better than what I saw. -- Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, Tony Snow Show, 2/8/06

Many in the blogosphere have begun to debate the Coretta Scott King funeral, with some on the right arguing -- as I did earlier -- that it turned into another partisan exploitation in the same manner as the Paul Wellstone memorial here in Minnesota four years ago. Others on the left argue that the memorial for Mrs. King was appropriate, given the political life she led, and that President Bush's appearance at the event was political.

In a way, both sides are right about this. Bush and his family attended the King funeral at least in part because not attending would have been a political mistake. Bill and Hillary Clinton attended because both had come to know Mrs. King pretty well, but also because all living ex-Presidents were invited. (Gerald Ford is still too ill to travel, I believe.) The King family themselves made this a political event by making the memorial so public -- and it was entirely appropriate to do so. After all, she fought a long struggle for civil rights as well as her husband, and she had to carry the banner for him after his assassination as well as raise her family. Not honoring her political life would have been outrageous.

However, the difference is the partisanship on display, mostly by Jimmy Carter and Reverend Lowery. Politics and partisanship are two different things, although some apparently cannot divorce one from the other. It is entirely possible to have a political event and handle it on a non-partisan basis. Bush attended the funeral, as one CQ commenter stated, as the representative of the nation. That was a moment for all to come together to honor Mrs. King and her achievements, all of which are political, and by avoiding partisanship make them a gift to all Americans.

Instead, Rev. Lowery decided to make snide jokes about WMD, and Carter made barely-veiled allusions to the NSA program he opposes. Both men have ample standing and media access to make those arguments at other times. In this venue, however, the President did not represent himself or his agenda but spoke on behalf of the entire nation. He did what the other speakers should have done: he avoided talking about himself and instead focused on Mrs. King. The other two gentlemen used her death to score petty partisan points and should be ashamed of themselves. (Unlike others in the blogosphere, though, I can't fault Bill Clinton, whose only "crime" was to make a joke about his wife's ambitions for the White House; previous speakers had used humor, and the joke was at no one's expense.)

Perhaps in the future, when statesmen and stateswomen pass away, the politicians they leave behind will learn to put aside their partisanship for a few hours and allow us to focus on the achievements of the deceased, rather than the agendas of the present.

Judith Klinghoffer notes that the Saudis have snubbed the Danes by disinviting them to the Jeddah Economic Forum to be held in the Saudi city this weekend. Arab News reports that the JCCI disinvited the Danish delegation after the publication of the Prophet cartoons by private Danish newspapers -- four months later, actually -- although apparently no other European countries have been barred despite their media republishing the editorial cartoons:

The organizers of the Jeddah Economic Forum 2006 decided yesterday not to invite the Danish delegation at the annual event.

The organizers made the decision in the wake of Muslim anger over the publication of the blasphemous caricatures published by a Danish newspaper on Sept. 30. ...

The Council of Gulf Countries’ Chambers and the Council of Saudi Chambers of Commerce & Industry have praised the positive reaction by businessmen in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf in responding to the deliberate humiliation of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).

Condemnation of the cartoons mocking the Prophet published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten has been voiced throughout the Muslim world and in the past few days has taken the form of demonstrations and attacks on some Danish and other Western embassies.

This isn't any little backwater conference, either. The Saudis have invited high-profile people from around the world for seven years to the JEF, hoping to take leadership on economic development, especially in the Gulf region. In fact, theArab News lists some of the participants expected this weekend, and a couple of very familiar names pop up (emphases mine):

According to JEF 2006 Chairman Hassan Enany, global speakers include Irish President Mary McAleese, Congo Brazzaville President Denis Sassou N’Guesso, Gambia President Al Hajji Jammah, Ghana’s former President Jerry Rawlings, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, former US Vice President Al Gore, human rights lawyer Cherie Blair, Forbes Inc. President & CEO Steve Forbes, Forbes Magazine Editor in Chief Peter Roberston, Vice Chairman of Chevron Corporation, Abdul-Salam Al-Majali, former prime minister of Jordan, Haifa Al-Kaylani, founder and chairman of Arab International Woman’s Forum, Mohamed Alabbar, director general of the Department of Economics Dubai and Chairman of Emaar Properties, Bahia Hariri, member of the Lebanese Parliament and sister of Rafik Hariri, Andre Azoulay, counselor to King Mohammed VI of Morocco.

Al Gore and Steve Forbes, both of whom have run for President of the US on at least two occasions, plan on speaking at this conference. Cherie Blair may be a human rights lawyer, but she is better known as the wife of Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister and George Bush's partner in the war on terror. Gerhard Schroeder just got kicked out of office for his incompetence, despite his anti-American rhetoric based on our supposed disregard for international law and foreign policy.

Do these Westerners still plan on attending the JEF now that the Saudis are using it as a means to stir up more protest against the Danes? Does Al Gore and Steve Forbes intend on endorsing the position that the Danish government should have suppressed their media from publishing their opinions? I find it hard to fathom what made Cherie Blair decide to attend an economic conference in a nation that doesn't even allow its women to drive -- but does she plan to attend after this protest against free speech? And Germans will have yet another reason to re-evaluate their former Chancellor more negatively if he temporarily relocates his lips from Putin's posterior to that of the Saudis by tacitly approving of the ejection of the Danes from this conference.

All of the above like to talk about human rights, dignity, and freedom. I wonder if any of them will literally put their money where their mouths are.

New polling numbers have shown that Stephen Laffey, the Not One Dime candidate for the GOP nomination in Rhode Island's Senate race, does not do as well against expected Democratic competition as does Lincoln Chaffee, the current incumbent and GOP gadfly. In preliminary polling, Chaffee holds a razor-thin edge against both Democrats, but Laffey trails both rather badly:

Chaffee/Whitehouse: 40%/34% (38%/25% in September)
Chaffee/Brown: 38%/36% (41%/18% in September)

Laffey/Whitehouse: 29%/44% (25%/35% in September)
Laffey/Brown: 24%/47% (26%/30% in September)

These numbers show a couple of issues. First, it demonstrates that Matt Brown has tremendous momentum right now against Sheldon Whitehouse. In four months, Brown turned a 32-16 deficit against the then-frontrunning Whitehouse into a 31-25 lead. His is the campaign that will give the GOP the biggest headache, apparently, and the numbers reflect that. Even the incumbency doesn't get Chaffee out of the margin of error against him, even though Chaffee at one time led Brown by 23 points, head to head.

Normally, one would look at the difference in the matchups between the two Republicans and determine that Chaffee was the better candidate for GOP support. However, in this case I disagree, for two reasons. The first is that if the Brown momentum continues, he is likely to out-poll the dry and dull Chafee by a considerable margin in the general election, and secondly Chafee's support for the national program of the GOP is so tepid that the loss will prove rather painless anyway. Chafee voted against the confirmation of Samuel Alito, joined the Gang of 14 last year, publicly announced that he would vote against his party's nominee for the White House in 2004, and in general has been a Republican out of convenience rather than any philosophical or true political connection.

If Brown remains ascendant, then the GOP needs to develop its bench in Rhode Island. Laffey comes much closer to the GOP mainstream than does Chafee, and so far the Republicans have no other stars on the horizon. The party needs to consider its post-Chafee options. Sinking tons of cash in a vain attempt to re-elect a Senator who rarely supports them when most needed seems almost masochistic, and actively attacking one of the few candidates that could one day replace him borders on the insane.

I know from discussions with people around DC that the White House considers Chafee worth supporting. As it was expressed to me, they would rather deal with a Senator who frequently frustrates them on the agenda than one who actively caucuses against them -- and that Chafee is lower-maintenance than some other GOP Senators with more popularity outside the Beltway. If Chafee was a lock for re-election, then perhaps the White House view should prevail, but if Chafee can't cut it in the general election, it's time to develop the bench. Perhaps the White House may find that by fully supporting Laffey, he might gain enough strength to overcome Brown by energizing Rhode Island conservatives who feel ignored by Chafee and the odd GOP support for his incumbency.

My column in the Daily Standard appears today and discusses the differing treatment of Muslim and Christian outrage and the consequences they portend. Entitled "Fear Factor", it notes that the threat of violence encourages a certain "respect" from Western media that does not appear when non-violent groups protest the mocking of their religion:

The differing reactions of Muslims and Christians to perceived slights is worth examining. ...

THERE IS the curious website We Are Sorry, which appeared this week attempting to apologize on behalf of moderate Muslims for the violent response to the cartoons. The apology on the site not only sounds sincere, but gets to the heart of freedom of speech ... These are powerful words that would go a long way to healing the breach between the Muslims in the street and the Western world--if they truly represented the viewpoint of moderate Islam. Unfortunately, we cannot tell that, because the people behind We Are Sorry have remained anonymous. ...

In each of these cases, fear might well be the difference maker. Western artists can mock Christians with impunity, and so they do. Western new organizations don't self-censor when it comes to non-Muslim faithful because they are not afraid of violent repercussions. And in the West, differing religious factions feel free to make their cases in broad daylight, comfortable in the knowledge that those of the opposite view will not issue fatwas against them.

Speaking of the folks at We Are Sorry, they have expanded their repertoire to include some interesting dhimmitude on behalf of Danes. In a new section of links, the still-anonymous sponsors of the website now offer this apology from a similarly unnamed Dane:

Dear Muslim citizens in Denmark and the World

I wish to state the existence of another Denmark: A Denmark that wants to live in peace with the Muslim world. There is another Denmark, which hopes for and believes in respect and tolerance between religions and different groups of people. As a Dane I have no responsibility for what a single and privately owned Danish newspaper chooses to publish. Even so, I strongly condemn the actions of Jyllands-Posten that have offended muslims around the world, and I understand the need for an apology from the newspaper.

We all have a responsibility for treating each other, our religious faiths, and convictions with dignity and respect. By publishing the caricatures of Muhammad, the newspaper Jyllands-Posten failed their obligation to exercise with care and consideration the right of freedom of speech.

This ignores the fact that Jyllands-Posten already apologized for running the cartoons, but the sellout goes deeper than that. Nowhere does the mysterious Dane acknowledge that Islamic papers run much worse caricatures of Jews for their editorial cartoons, nor does he or she even address the fact that free speech has to include the right to offend. Also, if the newspaper is privately owned, an apology by someone with no connection to it is meaningless. It also demonstrates a cowardice among Westerners, an impulse that comes out when violence is threatened that makes bystanders all cower and point to the one person courageous enough to speak out against the bomb-throwers.

Also, one cannot imagine the establishment of mea culpa sites such as these if Danish newspapers ran editorial cartoons poking fun at the political efforts of fundamentalist Christians. Christian protests would be met either with editorial glee or, more likely, a rousing round of indifference. The only reason for web sites such as Another Denmark is because of the real threat of violence coming from Islamists and the millions of Muslims they've inspired.

This is the real Fear Factor. It's why the Western press won't even show the cartoons so that people can determine for themselves if they crossed over into tastelessness -- which, in my opinion, they did not. It's why bystanders like Another Denmark feel the need to point out that the offense came from only a few Danes working at a private enterprise. It's why everyone wants to show "respect" in this case instead of actually informing people and standing up for free speech.

UPDATE: The domain registration for Another Denmark is as anonymous as the one for We Are Sorry. However, it does have a name quoted at the top -- Claus Jacobsen.

The standoff between Congress and the White House has apparently started to slowly subside, as members in both houses assuage themselves by drafting new legislation to broaden Congressional oversight on the agency's actions. Meanwhile, a key Democrat admits that the program's reality did not match the hyperbole spouted by its opponents after a White House briefing yesterday:

Responding to congressional pressure from both parties, the White House agreed yesterday to give lawmakers more information about its domestic surveillance program, although the briefings remain highly classified and limited in scope.

Despite the administration's overture, several prominent Republicans said they will pursue legislation enabling Congress to conduct more aggressive oversight of the National Security Agency's warrantless monitoring of Americans' phone calls and e-mails. Recent disclosure of the four-year-old program has alarmed civil libertarians and divided the GOP, with many Republicans defending the operation and others calling for more information and regulation.

Yesterday, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and former NSA director Michael V. Hayden briefed the House intelligence committee, behind closed doors, for nearly four hours. The panel "was given some additional procedural information to provide a fuller understanding of how carefully tailored and monitored this program is," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

The Democrats, of course, initially wanted to hanh Bush from a yardarm over this program, but quickly ran into a problem: the White House had kept key Democratic leaders abreast of the program since its 2001 inception. They then wanted to get the public irate over what they kept calling "domestic spying," but eventually realized that the public thought it reasonable to check on international calls from suspected al-Qaeda terrorists during a war against them. Now they have settled for the most reasonable position yet -- that Congress should have some method of weighing the risk/benefit ratio of warrantless wiretaps, even in a time of war. It may still not meet the terms of the Constitution, but politically it's the most resonant message that Democrats can make.

The White House knows this, which is why they changed their position and decided to fully brief both Intelligence Committees in full, rather than just the leadership as they have done throughout the program. It has already paid dividends, although this hasn't received much attention from the media so far. The AP reported that the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Oversight Committee has publicly stated that the program doesn't represent the Big Brother nightmare that its critics have painted it:

At least one Democrat left saying he had a better understanding of legal and operational aspects of the anti-terrorist surveillance program. But he said he still had a number of questions.

"It's a different program than I was beginning to let myself believe," said Alabama Rep. Bud Cramer, the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee's oversight subcommittee.

Expect Congress to pass legislation, either through FISA or a new structure, that deals with the collection of intelligence in wartime. As long as impeachment talk stays off the table and Democrats continue exercising a more reasonable tone on the subject, then the White House may play along as long as possible without actually signing it. My prediction will be that in two months, people will have to dig through the archives to even recall why intelligence collection during wartime caused such a stink in the first place.

Rasmussen reports that its polling shows support for a presidential run by Hillary Clinton at its lowest point in over a year. Only 27% would "definitely" vote for the former First Lady, while 43% have no intention of ever casting a vote for her:

Support for Hillary Clinton's Presidential bid has slipped over the past month to the lowest levels recorded in two dozen surveys over the past year.

Today, just 27% of Americans say they would definitely vote for the former first lady while 43% would definitely vote against. Still, 59% of Americans believe it is somewhat or very likely that she will be the Democrat's nominee in 2008.

Among Democrats, the number who would definitely vote for Clinton dropped 11 percentage points over the past two weeks.

Eleven points in two weeks is more than a statistical anomaly -- that's quite a meltdown. Hillary has had an eventful fortnight or so in politics, however. She not only publicly opposed the Alito nomination, but she also joined in the failed filibuster. She referred to Congress as a "plantation" run by mean Republicans. Her recent speeches on religion and abortion designed to position herself to the center apparently does not stand up to her more revealing actions and rhetoric elsewhere.

It also might reflect a decline in Democratic fortunes altogether. The party embarrassed itself in its zeal to smear Justice Alito and in the performance of the specific Senators who took part in their latest in a series of Judiciary psedo-lynchings. It also miscalculated terribly on the NSA intercept program, which not only once again painted them as soft on national defense but gave George Bush an opportunity to rebound from a polling collapse of his own. With Bush now at an improved 47% approval rating, the Democrats not only missed their opportunity but reinforced their image as weak and out of touch -- an image that most seriously affects their frontrunner for 2008.

Will Democrats learn? Perhaps; they've already abandoned their initial position on the NSA program. They will probably need a new front-runner to promote a badly-needed image change. They should start looking outside of the Northeast.

Yesterday I wrote a post criticizing Anne Applebaum's latest column in the Washington Post, which resulted in a series of e-mails between Anne and myself. I offered her an opportunity to respond to my criticism, and today she accepted. I've posted her entire rebuttal to my criticism (and Power Line's) below:

1. You and many others who selectively quoted from the column missed its two other points, which were criticisms of the State Department's initial, grovelling reaction to the cartoon fracas, as well as criticism of U.S. newspapers which are queasy about reprinting the cartoons but not queasy about printing images offensive to Christians in this country. The only reason I can see for quoting selectively is to be able to write something crass about the supposedly far-left Washington Post, whose editorial page might surprise you if you actually read all of it.

2. The Newsweek affair continues to bother me, because of the widespread assumption, perpetuated on the Right, that the magazine (with which I have no personal association) "lied" in order to smear American soldiers, and therefore deliberately endangered our troops. In fact, they repeated a story - about throwing a Koran in a toilet - which came from Guantanmo inmates, and erroneously claimed the story would be confirmed by an official investigation. That's very, very different from lying in a deliberate attempt to endanger Americans.

Besides, the real truth was more complicated. As I wrote at the time, official reports did actually confirm that U.S. interrogators used dogs, nudity, sexual advances and fake menstrual blood in attempts to offend Muslim prisoners. My point, in writing that, was to note that deliberately offending Muslims is a pretty stupid way to spread democracy in the Middle East - but then I also believe, having spent six years writing a book about Soviet concentration camps, that torture is not only immoral, but bound to produce bad information.

Nevertheless, I was then, and still am now, bombarded with email from people who felt it was anti-American to write such things, and who wanted the press to keep quiet about bad U.S. policies and stupid mistakes. You can read a version of this very argument on Powerline, which repeated it yesterday in another lopsided, selective criticism of my column. I quote:

And the Newsweek story was part of a media assault on the American armed forces. American newspapers, magazines and television networks, over a period of more than a year, relentlessly and falsely depicted American soldiers as sadistic thugs. The prime exhibit in this campaign was Abu Ghraib, the most over-hyped news story of modern times.

Yes, I call that an assault on press freedom. Should we have all kept quiet about Abu Ghraib? Would that have served our troops, our war on terrorism, our democracy?

3. Finally, the parallel between the Muslim's world's overreaction to this story and the Muslim world's overreactions to these cartoons is indisputable. In both cases, the original sources of controversy - a sentence in a magazine, a cartoon in a Danish newspaper - were blown up to a ludicrous degree by clerics and politicians who actually wanted to cause riots. (The Washington Post actually has a pretty good story about how this is being done, and in whose interests, today). But when Newsweek was the proximate cause, the parochial Right was mostly interested in using the incident to blame the "mainstream media," and for the most part completely missed the bigger story, which is the impact of global media on an extraordinarily volatile Muslim world. Now you get it - but you didn't then.

In my opinion, Applebaum still hasn't addressed the main part of my criticism, which was that she indicted the entire "right-wing blogosphere" by claiming that we all said that it was wrong for the media to investigate government malfeasance. (I quote: "Worse, much of the commentary implied that Newsweek was not only wrong to make a mistake (which it was) but also that the magazine was wrong to investigate the alleged misconduct of U.S. soldiers.") That was not our argument then, and it isn't our argument now. What we said was that Newsweek should have corroborated their single source before publishing that rumor, and that reprinting allegations by terrorist detainees of abuse without any corroborating evidence of their truth was highly irresponsible. It's a far cry from publishing these baseless allegations as fact -- and the basis of what turned out to be a non-existent pending report of proven misconduct -- and publishing editorial cartoons that express an opinion.

Applebaum did not provide a single example in her original column of this argument from the right-wing blogosphere, but just assumed that all of us issued the same opinions. She also assumed in her original column, as she does here, that all of us have the same opinion about the cartoons now, which is not true. Hugh Hewitt and others have argued that the cartoons were unnecessarily provocative and the editors should not be defended on the basis of free speech, but scolded for a lack of sensitivity to religious beliefs.

Where I went overboard, though was accusing Anne of rewriting history, which was too hyperbolic and -- given her work on the Soviet gulag system earlier -- particularly provocative, and I regret it. I still disagree with much of what Anne wrote in this column, but I thank her for engaging me and CQ readers in an honest and professional debate, and encourage everyone to show their support by making a point of reading her columns ... in their entirety, of course.

After weeks of harping on the emerging Jack Abramoff scandal as an example of the Republican "culture of corruption" and debating for the last day about the proximity to George Bush that Abramoff had, Democrats may find the investigation hits too close to home to continue celebrating. The AP reported earlier today that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid intervened on four separate occasions on behalf of Abramoff clients and that Reid coordinated on legislative efforts with the lobbyist's office:

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid wrote at least four letters helpful to Indian tribes represented by Jack Abramoff, and the senator's staff regularly had contact with the disgraced lobbyist's team about legislation affecting other clients.

The activities _ detailed in billing records and correspondence obtained by The Associated Press _ are far more extensive than previously disclosed. They occurred over three years as Reid collected nearly $68,000 in donations from Abramoff's firm, lobbying partners and clients. ...

Abramoff's records show his lobbying partners billed for nearly two dozen phone contacts or meetings with Reid's office in 2001 alone.

Most were to discuss Democratic legislation that would have applied the U.S. minimum wage to the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory and Abramoff client, but would have given the islands a temporary break on the wage rate, the billing records show.

Reid also intervened on government matters at least five times in ways helpful to Abramoff's tribal clients, once opposing legislation on the Senate floor and four times sending letters pressing the Bush administration on tribal issues. Reid collected donations around the time of each action.

This isn't the first time that Reid's connections to Abramoff have come up, but the AP has drawn much more clear lines between Reid and Abramoff than was known before. The AP also reminds its readers that Abramoff hired a former Reid staffer as one of its lobbyists, who promptly held fundraisers for Reid from the lobbyist's offices -- fact we noted seven months ago. Reid took over $40,000 from Abramoff clients for his enthusiastic bargaining on their behalf.

Again, without a doubt, Abramoff spent more money and effort on courting the GOP; after all, they are the party in power, and have been for a few years now. Democrats have made themselves look foolish by trying to convince people that the corruption only affected the GOP, though, and the revelations about their party leader will make that hypocrisy even more transparent.

The Telegraph reports that the EU may not have the stomach to stand up for free speech, despite the best efforts of several newspapers on the Continent. Ironically, the EU commissioner for justice, freedom, and security wants European news organizations to adopt a voluntary pledge of censorship to send a message of sensitivity to Muslim concerns:

Franco Frattini, the European Union commissioner for justice, freedom and security, revealed the idea for a code of conduct in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. Mr Frattini, a former Italian foreign minister, said the EU faced the "very real problem" of trying to reconcile "two fundamental freedoms, the freedom of expression and the freedom of religion".

Millions of European Muslims felt "humiliated" by the publication of cartoons of Mohammed, he added, calling on journalists and media chiefs to accept that "the exercising of a right is always the assumption of a responsibility". He appealed to European media to agree to "self-regulate".

Accepting such self-regulation would send an important political message to the Muslim world, Mr Frattini said.

Yes, it would indeed send an important political message to the Muslim world. That message would be "we surrender".

The papers can certainly be criticized for their editorial decisions. That is also an expression of free speech. However, demanding that European newspapers adopt some parallel to a Hays Code because Muslims cannot abide criticism without generating murderous mobs around the world only encourages more pressure later for further concessions to their sensitivities. One should expect more from a Western commissioner supposedly dedicated to justice, freedom, and security.

Michael Kinsley at the Washington Post understands the stakes involved in the controversy surrounding the Prophet cartoons. He points out the spectacular flop of a cartoon depicting Anne Frank in bed with Adolf Hitler circulated by European Muslims as a tit-for-tat response to their outrage over the Jyllands-Posten editorial cartoons, and argues that the Muslims aren't demanding equality in any case:

Meanwhile, whatever point these European Muslims were making with their cartoon of Hitler and Anne Frank is more or less disproved by their very exercise. No one tried to stop them from putting the cartoon on the Web. The notion that jokes about Frank are beyond the pale is provably false. ...

By contrast, in a spectacular exercise of self-censorship, almost every major newspaper in this country is refraining from publishing the controversial Danish cartoons, even though they are at the center of a major news story that these papers cover at length every day. An editorial in the Times on Wednesday said that not publishing the cartoons was "a reasonable choice" because they would offend many people and "are so easy to describe in words." ...

Of course it is not Western values that are trampling freedom of expression, it is the ayatollah's own values, combined with the threat of violence. The other problem with his little joke about double standards, and with the whole, supposedly mordant, comparison between denying the Holocaust and portraying the prophet is that the offended Muslims do not want a world where people are free to do both. They don't even want a world where people are not free to do either, which would at least be consistent. They want a world where you may not portray Muhammad (even flatteringly, slaying infidels or whatnot), but you may deny the Holocaust all day long.

Freedom of speech necessarily means that people will be offended by its exercise. It makes no sense to guarantee free speech and then demand "voluntary" speech codes designed to take all of the potentially offensive speech out of the marketplace of ideas. Under those circumstances, what freedom does anyone have left? Those who want to exercise speech now have to meet everyone's threshold of offense, which in a global community means 6.5 billion standards.

Of course, what we're talking about here isn't refraining from offending everyone, anyway -- we're just talking about meeting the threshold of a group of people based on their capacity for violence. After all, as Kinsley points out, the Muslims themselves have routinely printed the most foul accusations and cartoons about Jews, Christians, and Westerners in general, and they're not proposing to stop. All they're demanding is that we don't offend them, and they're killing people in order to make their point.

Offering respect and restraint in response to violence isn't an act of "maturity" or responsibility, as some argue; it's a surrender, and more dangerously, it's an invitation for the violence to spread. After all, when people see that the way to earn "respect" from the West and its media is to commit violence and riot in large numbers, that behavior will begin to repeat itself. That is exactly the reason we don't negotiate with terrorists of any stripe -- and this is no different.

If newspapers print offensive opinions, let the offended protest, boycott, and use free speech to counter with their own opinions. Those actions are a proper exercise in a free society. When the free societies start giving up their right to speak out because of violence, they give up their freedom and tacitly endorse the rule of the bullet and the bomb. In the end, we will all wind up as dhimmis if we allow that to happen.

UPDATE: It's not often when Michael Kinsley and Charles Krauthammer agree on a topic, especially on the same day -- but on this topic they are united:

What passes for moderation in the Islamic community -- "I share your rage but don't torch that embassy" -- is nothing of the sort. It is simply a cynical way to endorse the goals of the mob without endorsing its means. It is fraudulent because, while pretending to uphold the principle of religious sensitivity, it is interested only in this instance of religious insensitivity.

Have any of these "moderates" ever protested the grotesque caricatures of Christians and, most especially, Jews that are broadcast throughout the Middle East on a daily basis? The sermons on Palestinian TV that refer to Jews as the sons of pigs and monkeys? The Syrian prime-time TV series that shows rabbis slaughtering a gentile boy to ritually consume his blood? The 41-part (!) series on Egyptian TV based on that anti-Semitic czarist forgery (and inspiration of the Nazis), "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," showing the Jews to be engaged in a century-old conspiracy to control the world?

A true Muslim moderate is one who protests desecrations of all faiths. Those who don't are not moderates but hypocrites, opportunists and agents for the rioters, merely using different means to advance the same goal: to impose upon the West, with its traditions of freedom of speech, a set of taboos that is exclusive to the Islamic faith. These are not defenders of religion but Muslim supremacists trying to force their dictates upon the liberal West.

We have a choice in this instance - we either will declare that we will be ruled by fear or remain free, a freedom we offer all people regardless of their religion or ethnicity.

It didn't take long for Stephen Harper to generate controversy in his new role as Prime Minister. As noted earlier here, Harper offered a ministerial post to Liberal David Emerson, and he switched parties to take the international trade portfolio. Having just won re-election in his riding as a Liberal, however, several members of that party and the NDP objected. Now some Tories have joined them:

International Trade Minister David Emerson is under increasing pressure from some of his new Conservative colleagues to resign and run in a federal by-election.

Several Tory MPs publicly criticized his defection from the Liberal Party and appointment to Stephen Harper's cabinet as they took part in orientation meetings yesterday on Parliament Hill. ...

The most vocal critic among the Conservative MPs yesterday was Garth Turner, from Halton, Ont., who said the public was justified in being concerned about the controversial appointments of Mr. Emerson and Michel Fortier, the unelected party organizer who will be a Quebec senator and Public Works Minister.

"My own view would be I think a by-election would be a great idea," Mr. Turner told reporters when asked about Mr. Emerson. "This kind of thing actually grates a lot of people the wrong way."

Garth Turner, as it turns out, has his own blog -- and he's not shy about sharing the fallout of his remarks. He doesn't regret them, but he acknowledges that they came at a cost.

Americans probably won't relate to the outrage that Turner and others feel. We don't require people to change parties when they get Cabinet-level appointments. Bill Bennett was still a Democrat when Reagan picked him to be Secretary of Education, according to Bennett on his show. Bill Clinton picked a Republican to be Secretary of Defense for the last term of office (William Cohen). Usually such appointments are made to offer an olive branch to the opposition and to garner bipartisan support for key portions of the agenda.

At least one can understand the reaction of the Tories, who got bypassed for a ministerial position in favor of Emerson. It seems rather striking that so much controversy would arise on behalf of other MPs from a cross-partisan appointment at the beginning of the term. Harper doesn't need to count seats and the motivations would appear more straightforward than with Belinda Stronach's stroll across the aisle that rescued the Martin government -- for a few more months. Martin had much more to gain by inducing Stronach to cross over, and the ministerial position appeared to be much more of a bribe for Martin's personal sake than with Emerson -- but the NDP and the Liberals choose now to become outraged by this behavior.

The sauce, in Liberal/NDP circles, is not as tasty for the gander as it was with the goose, I suppose.

Internet giant Yahoo! joins Microsoft and Google in bending to the Chinese autocracy, only this time they helped jail an activist for freedom in the nominally Communist nation. The London Times reports that Yahoo! coughed up records used to send a dissident to prison for ten years:

THE American internet company Yahoo! provided evidence to Chinese police that enabled them to imprison one of its users, according to allegations that came to light yesterday.

The disclosure marked the second time in months that the company had been accused of helping China to put someone in jail. Li Zhi, a civil servant, was imprisoned on charges of trying to subvert state power after he criticised corruption and tried to join the dissident China Democracy Party. ...

Yahoo! said that it could not comment on an individual case. However, it said that it turned over to governments only legally required information. Mary Osako, at Yahoo! headquarters in California, said: “We would not know whether a demand for information focused on murder, kidnapping or another crime.” She added that Yahoo! regarded the internet as a positive force in China.

The journalist Shi Tao may not agree. He was jailed for ten years last year on charges of leaking state secrets after Yahoo! supplied Chinese police with his user identification.

Julien Pain, an internet expert with the Paris-based Reporters without Borders, believes that the revelation that Yahoo! had co-operated in two cases could be the tip of an iceberg. He said: “The problem is how many (cases) do we not know about? Probably dozens, given how hard it is to get information from China. Yahoo! should release a list of people they helped to jail.”

What, besides the temptation of the cash, causes American ventures to cave to Chinese demands in curtailing free speech and free expression? These companies made their billions here taking advantage of the capitalist system of free enterprise, and their success should be applauded. However, now that they have cornered the Western markets on their slices of the Internet, they've turned themselves into tools -- in every sense of the word -- for dictators to enforce the antitheses of the freedoms that allowed them to exist in the first place.

Have these corporate managers no shame at all? Do they feel proud of their success in China, knowing it comes at the expense of courageous people like Li Zhi and Shi Tao, among others about which we have not yet heard? How long will these companies and their major stockholders continue to sell out freedom and its foot soldiers in order to kiss up to the Chinese government?

Janis Joplin once sang, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." It appears that attitude has infected the Internet giants, who value the blood money they get from helping to oppress the Chinese people than the freedom that gave them the opportunity to exist. Shame, shame, shame.

UPDATE: Bruce Kesler at Democracy Project has more thoughts on this -- he's been covering the Chinese front of the Internet for some time. Be sure to scroll through his many posts.

A story hot off the presses at the AP involves President Bush's appearance at a Republican conference of Congressmen earlier today. Unbeknownst to Bush, the microphones used by the press earlier remained on when he began to address the conference in its closed session. Sounds like a reporter's dream come true? It must have seemed that way when he began talking about the NSA surveillance program after asking the attendees to keep the remarks to themselves.

So what secrets did Bush tell them about the wiretaps? Let's just say it shocked the press:

The eavesdropping tables were turned on President Bush on Friday. The president apparently believed he was speaking privately when he talked about listening in without a warrant on domestic communications with suspected al-Qaida terrorists overseas. But reporters were the ones doing the listening in this time.

The incident happened at a House Republican retreat. After six minutes of public remarks by the president, reporters were ushered out. "I support the free press, let's just get them out of the room," Bush said, intending to speak behind closed doors with fellow Republicans and take lawmakers' questions.

When reporters left, Bush spoke about the National Security Agency program that he authorized four years ago and which has drawn criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike.

However, the microphones stayed on for a few minutes. That allowed journalists back at the White House to eavesdrop on Bush's defense of the eavesdropping. His private statements were basically no different from what he's said in public.

Wow ... what a shock! The press had a golden opportunity to nail Bush -- but they discovered that he tells the same story behind closed doors that he tells the American public. They discovered that the GOP has no great conspiracy ... just a President trying his best to defend his country from terrorist attacks.

Bet this doesn't make the front page tomorrow.

CQ's unofficial lawyer in New York, Eric Costello, tells us that Senator Chuck Schumer became incensed earlier this week when reviewing Homeland Security funding. According to the New York Post on February 7th, Schumer railed about the amount of funding that went to the US Virgin Islands. He pointed out that the DHS expenditure for the USVI came to $29 million since 2001, infuriating the Empire State's senior Senator:

Sen. Charles Schumer blasted Homeland Security officials yesterday for sending millions in federal funds to fortify the idyllic U.S. Virgin Islands against a terror attack.

The Post reported yesterday that the feds have doled out $29 million in the last four years to secure the island paradise - spending $42 for each territorial resident, or almost three times the $15 per New Yorker.

"It is just incredible that the Virgin Islands would get more money than New York," said Schumer.

"I have not read once that the Virgin Islands has security threats. It just shows the mindset of throwing the money up in the air and seeing where it falls down."

It seems a bit strange to explain math to one of the people responsible for the federal budget -- well, maybe not -- but if the DHS spent $15 per New Yorker, it comes to a hell of a lot more money than $29 million. If Schumer just refers to residents of the Big Apple, that would come to $120 million, more than four times what was spent on the Virgin Islands. More likely Schumer meant residents of his state, which would push that total to $285 million. Both figures come to far more than what DHS spent on the Virgin Islands.

And if Schumer doesn't know of any security issues on the Caribbean island group, that only proves that he hasn't a clue about the Virgin Islands. On the island of St. Croix sits a state-of-the-art oil refinery that produces a significant amount of the fuel used on the Atlantic seaboard, apparently including New York. It refines up to 495,000 barrels of oil a day from all over the world, but primarily from Venezuela, which has an ownership stake in Hovensa. Since the US refines 16 million barrels a day, this comes to 3% of the daily oil refinery capacity of our country ... which makes it a key strategic asset for the United States.

Normally, we'd expect a Senator to understand this before shooting his mouth off. Instead, he reveals himself as nothing more than a home-state porker unhappy that national-security interests keep federal funding from stoking his re-election credentials.

UPDATE: The refinery is on the island of St. Croix, not St. Thomas, as a couple of e-mailers have noted. I've edited the post to make the correction.

I have to respond to the ridiculous notion that Eric and I have somehow revealed a secret to terrorists with this post. As Eric says in his comment, this information is readily available on the internet. It's also well known to Virgin Island residents, anyone who has any knowledge of refinery issues in the US, and one might hope Congress as well. Chuck Schumer might have thought to do some research on the specific security risks involved in the Virgin Islands before publicly proclaiming his ignorance of both security issues and simple mathematics.

Imagine that the federal government almost never took into account the market reactions to the economic and tax policies it proposed. Instead of calculating the changes to behavior due to the regulatory changes, imagine that Washington based its presumptions of revenue and economic impact on the notion that people would never change their habits to meet the new environment. Politicians might make those presumptions of change, but the bureaucracy responsible for analyzing the effects of the change never took them into account.

If you can imagine that, then you've just identified the way DC has conducted economic analysis -- until now. William Beach at the Heritage Foundation points out that the new Bush budget proposal contains funding for a new office in the Treasury for what the government calls "dynamic analysis", or what Beach calls "economics":

So why is this news? Hasn’t the government been studying the effects of tax policy on the economy all along? Aren’t Washington policymakers routinely advised about how tax changes will affect jobs and output and how those, in turn, will affect government revenues?

Surprisingly, the answer is often no. Until very recently, no official Washington agency produced estimates of the economic and tax-revenue effects of proposed tax policies. ...

Dynamic scoring might not prevent bad tax policy from becoming law, but it would help. Furthermore, reporting the economic consequences of tax proposals will be enormously helpful in redesigning the tax system. The President has called for fundamental tax reform, and he and Congress will find fundamental reform a much easier exercise if routine and sophisticated dynamic scoring is in place when that task is tackled.

Meaningful tax reform cannot take place unless people understand the true consequences of the policies they propose in relation to the policies they would replace. It's amazing that Treasury didn't have anyone responsible for this kind of analysis in the past, but at least the Bush administration recognizes its significance now. Instead of sitting around and inagining what tax incentives, increases, and cuts might do to the economy -- in other words, pulling numbers out of thin air -- Treasury will have solid analysis to help develop positive economic policy in the future.

Sounds like progress to me!

Vladimir Putin broke with most Western nations by inviting Hamas to the Kremlin for talks after their election. Despite the united front that most nations had taken on insisting that Hamas recognize Israel's existence and forswear terrorism before gaining any diplomatic standing, the Russians have decided to invite the Islamists to Red Square for talks. Now France has endorsed the Russian initiative, leaving the US and other European nations surprised:

France on Friday endorsed Russia's decision to hold talks on the Middle East conflict with Hamas, the radical Islamist Palestinian group, saying the discussion "can contribute to advancing our positions."

Other European countries distanced themselves from the French statement, which appeared to be in defiance of the American and European view that Hamas is a terrorist organization and therefore should not be officially recognized. Israel condemned it. ...

The United States considers Hamas a terrorist group, and American officials are forbidden to talk to the organization. The European Union's policy on talks is not as clear, several officials and diplomats said in interviews. But none said their countries would talk with Hamas.

Just when Hamas had really been stuck in a corner, forced by Fatah to form a government on its own and faced with economic disaster for its terrorist policies, Russia rides in to extend its gamesmanship in Southwest Asia. Israel erupted with an anger infrequently seen in diplomatic circles, calling the Russian initiative a "knife in the back." Israel has been forced into a long war with Hamas, which it (rightly) sees as an Iranian/Syrian proxy in the territories, and has endured countless attacks on civilian targets by the so-called "political" party. For Israel, the election of Hamas into power by the Palestinian people provided a rare moment of clarity for the world to recognize that the Palestinians are not prepared to accept a peaceful settlement in the region.

Instead of pressuring the Palestinians on the basis of their electoral choices, Russia decided to once again let them off the hook and deal directly with the terrorists they elected. And France, who should know better after the season of rioting they endured, has followed suit and encouraged the diplomacy. It violates one of the more trumpeted and lately most-violated tenets of the West: no negotiations with terrorists. And it will have its usual effect, which is to pump up the standing of the terrorists in Hamas and extend the war rather than bring it to an end.

Western nations need to rethink their entire approach to the Palestinians. They had several opportunities to get a two-state solution in the 1990s, starting with Oslo and ending at Wye. Bill Clinton, in one of his better moments, hammered out a deal for them that no one else could have extracted from the Israelis, and all it took was a signature from Yasser Arafat. He answered with an intifada that took thousands of lives.

Some argued that the PLO had a death grip on power and that the average Palestinian just wanted peace. After Arafat's death, Mahmoud Abbas tried working towards that end, either honestly or as a pretext, but even the pretext inflamed Palestinians. Hamas and Islamic Jihad continued their attacks on civilian targets while Israel received nothing but criticism for building a defensive wall to keep the terrorists from blowing up women and children on buses and in pizzerias. Now, after ten years, the Palestinians finally had a moderately fair election -- and they overwhelmingly elected terrorists to power.

When does the world finally listen to what the Palestinians say through their actions and their votes? They do not want peace; they want a war of annihilation, and they elected the party most likely to deliver it. It's time to quit engaging the Palestinians and let Israel give them the war they so desperately want. After four decades of trying to solve their problem, the world owes nothing to the Palestinians. Let them lie in the bed they have made.

The Kosovars elected a new, more moderate president to continue its efforts to free the enclave from the Serbians, despite being stuck in a limbo status since Western intervention in 1999. Fatmir Sejdiu proclaimed Kosovo's independence "non-negotiable", while the Serbs responded that any proclamation of independence would result in an effort by Belgrade to liberate the province from foreign occupation:

President Fatmir Sejdiu told The Associated Press Friday that he would not abandon the ethnic Albanian majority's push for independence from Serbia. But he pledged in his acceptance speech to make Kosovo a state that guarantees minority rights and is "at peace with itself and its neighbors."

"Kosovo's independence is non-negotiable," Sejdiu said in an interview at his modest house in Pristina. "For us it is very important that this road to independence is a quick one," he said. ...

Tomislav Nikolic, leader of the extreme nationalist Serbian Radical Party, said no politician in Serbia would accept Kosovo independence.

"If someone declares an independent Kosovo ... we will declare that an occupation and use all means to revoke that state of occupation," Nikolic said.

Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica and President Boris Tadic also have rejected independence for Kosovo.

Kosovo has not progressed an iota since US and European troops occupied the province to stop the Serbs and Kosovars from killing each other. The intervention occurred without any plan for a political solution to the centuries-old dispute; it developed from the earlier NATO involvement in Balkan politics. NATO gave responsibility for the resolution of the Kosovo situation to the UN almost immediately, which has done absolutely nothing to create any kind of plan or proposal for a peaceful resolution to the standoff. In fact, the UN announced four months ago that it planned on scheduling talks to finally resolve the problem.

Four months ago. After six years. And they finally scheduled the talks for February 20th in Vienna. In all that time, we still have the same problem we did when we first intervened: ethnic Albanians in Kosovo want their independence, and the Serbs refuse to allow it.

I'm tempted to ask what the UN has been doing for almost seven years in Kosovo, but Claudia Rosett probably has more of those answers than we care to know. This is just another chapter in the ongoing incompetence of the UN to actually move from a status quo to real resolutions in disputes. It its way, the UN offered Kosovo no more than a hudna, but in this case a truce in which both sides could gather their strength for a future conflict. Contrast this with Iraq and Afghanistan, where despite ongoing violence, both nations have created democratic governments and appear well on their way towards standing on their own without a form of martial law being imposed indefinitely by the UN.

And some people wonder why we believe the UN is useless, and in some cases even worse than that, as Congolese women and girls could explain at length.

The Patriot Act appears headed for an easy renewal after the White House and Senate Republicans reached a compromise on a few minor tweaks to aasuage civil-liberties concerns. House Speaker Denny Hastert signaled that the House would back the new version, and even the man who bragged that he'd killed the law said he'd now vote for it:

Legislation to renew the anti-terror Patriot Act was cleared for final congressional passage Friday when House Speaker Dennis Hastert blessed a day-old compromise between the White House and Senate Republicans.

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid also indicated he will vote for the bill when it comes to a vote, possibly next week.

The legislation gives federal agents expanded powers to investigate suspected terrorists in the United States, and the Bush administration has said it is one of the key weapons in the war on terror. ...

The changes, worked out over several weeks of talks, specifically with the office of White House counsel Harriet Miers, covered three main areas:

* Under the first, recipients of court-approved subpoenas for information in terrorist investigations would have the right to challenge a requirement that they refrain from telling anyone.

* The second removes a requirement that an individual provide the FBI with the name of an attorney consulted about a National Security Letter, which is a demand for records issued by administrators.

* The third clarifies that most libraries are not subject to National Security Letter demands for information about suspected terrorists.

Reid and California Senator Dianne Feinstein both indicated that they would now vote for this bill, a far cry from two months ago when the Minority Leader crowed to the press about his role in killing the extension. He tried to explain himself away in a Fox News appearance shortly afterward as nothing more than an attempt to extend the debate and blamed the administration for not agreeing to a three-month extension. But that doesn't undo the image of Reid grinning from ear to ear, taking credit for "killing" legislation that most Americans support as a key component of our national defense. It's the same tin-eared approach that Reid has used on judicial confirmations, and all it does is point out how out of touch Reid and the Democratic leadership has become with the American people.

Now with these minor changes, Reid meekly declares his support -- but the obstructionism that he fostered on national defense still lives on. Presidential candidate Russ Feingold of Wisconsin has declared himself opposed to the compromise and wants to filibuster the Patriot Act again. He may garner a significant amount of his caucus to support him, although with Reid and Feinstein already pledged to support the bill, the filibuster has little chance of success. It will, however, once more solidify the image of Democrats as completely irresponsible demogagues on national security.

The Northern Alliance Radio Network will be on the air today between 11 am and 3 pm Central time on our local radio station, AM 1280 The Patriot. The first two hours feature Brian "St. Paul" Ward and Chad "The Elder" Doughty from Fraters Libertas and John Hinderaker from Power Line, who will interview our guest, author John McWhorter, at noon. McWhorter will be discussing his new book, Winning the Race : Beyond the Crisis in Black America, with the crew.

Starting at 1 pm, we switch to Mitch Berg from Shot in the Dark, King Banaian from SCSU Scholars, and myself, as we discuss the week's news and blog eruptions. You can join us on our Internet stream from The Patriot's website, and call in to give us your perspective at 651-289-4488. We also take comments on our e-mail, comments@northernallianceradio.com, and frequently read the best of our e-mail on air.

Join the fun at the NARN today!

UPDATE: La Shawn Barber will join us shortly to talk about CPAC -- tune in now!

UPDATE II: Hope you caught La Shawn's segment. We had a blast with her. I'll podcast the segment later tonight!

Despite former President Jimmy Carter's pointed jabs at the Bush administration over the NSA surveillance program this past week, it turns out that Carter has more familiarity with warrantless eavesdropping than he let on. Today's Washington Times reports that Carter and his Attorney General authorized warrantless electronic surveillance on two suspected espionage agents, one of whom was an American citizen:

Former President Jimmy Carter, who publicly rebuked President Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program this week during the funeral of Coretta Scott King and at a campaign event, used similar surveillance against suspected spies.

"Under the Bush administration, there's been a disgraceful and illegal decision -- we're not going to the let the judges or the Congress or anyone else know that we're spying on the American people," Mr. Carter said Monday in Nevada when his son Jack announced his Senate campaign. ...

But in 1977, Mr. Carter and his attorney general, Griffin B. Bell, authorized warrantless electronic surveillance used in the conviction of two men for spying on behalf of Vietnam.

The men, Truong Dinh Hung and Ronald Louis Humphrey, challenged their espionage convictions to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which unanimously ruled that the warrantless searches did not violate the men's rights.

In its opinion, the court said the executive branch has the "inherent authority" to wiretap enemies such as terror plotters and is excused from obtaining warrants when surveillance is "conducted 'primarily' for foreign intelligence reasons."

Not only does Jimmy Carter betray his hypocrisy here, but his Attorney General told Congress when it debated the FISA law in 1978 that FISA would not impede the president from exercising precisely this power under the Constitution. The Times also notes that Jamie Gorelick said much the same thing in 1994. In any case, the appellate court certainly agreed with both Bell and Carter in 1980, even after passage of FISA the year after the surveillance took place.

Keep in mind that this surveillance took place to fight a simple espionage case, not to defend the country against an enemy that has already attacked American assets on numerous occasions and killed 3,000 civilians in one attack on American soil. Carter did not get an authorization for the use of military force against Viet Nam -- can you imagine him asking for one? -- and yet still claimed Constitutional authority for warrantless surveillance on Ronald Humphrey, an American citizen. And the courts agreed with Carter.

That gives a very strong precedent for Bush's argument that both Article II and the AUMF against Al-Qaeda gives him the authority to surveil international communications that may involve American residents without a warrant. It certainly has more common-sense standing than the case against Truong and Humphrey, which the 4th Circuit upheld and for which the Supreme Court denied cert, giving it the authority of precedent. It also shows what a complete hypocrite Carter has become in his bitter pursuit to damage George Bush in any way possible.

I wonder where all the Democrats who hailed stare decisis during the Alito and Roberts confirmation hearings have gone. My guess is that we won't hear from them about this precedent. (via The Anchoress)

UPDATE: Power Line noted this case earlier in its argument for the NSA program. It's good to have sharp lawyers on your side.

I have a fresh podcast of our interview with La Shawn Barber from CPAC here. Her cell connection was a bit troublesome, but it was a fun interview. We'll have La Shawn back on the show sometime soon!

The UN will celebrate an important and singular milestone tomorrow. Its International Criminal Tribunal will mark the fourth anniversary of the start of the Slobodan Milosevic trial. The unique aspect of this anniversary comes from the fact that the trial is still underway:

The war crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic enters its fifth tedious year Sunday, and though international interest in the tribunal has waned, it has proved a useful tool in educating Serbs. ...

Milosevic is charged with genocide and crimes against humanity in last decade's bloody Balkans conflict, and for four years, he has dragged out judicial proceedings with his political grandstanding and health-related absences.

The U.N. Security Council established the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1993, and Milosevic was charged with 66 counts involving war crimes during the Balkan wars.

The prosecution has 293 witnesses testifying to Milosevic's war crimes and genocide, but the real timewaster has been Milosevic himself. He has avoided appearing in court, wasting 66 trial days in four years with health-related complaints. He has represented himself in court and has engaged in obstructive tactics designed to drag the trial out long enough to either outlive the witnesses or whatever interest his crimes evince.

However, a four-year trial with no end in sight has to be some kind of record. Milosevic's sick days cannot account for all of the delay. In order to get that strung out, one has to find incompetent prosecution and ineffective courtroom management from the judges. It also requires that the certifying agency give no useful direction or oversight to the court itself. Once again, the UN shows itself as a monumental waste of time and effort, and not for the first time nothing more than a stage on which the criminals and monsters of the world can manipulate nations that are too afraid to take positive action to put an end to their antics.

We'll see you around in a year, when Milosevic will gain an extra week of vacation and full vesting of the retirement benefits from his tenure at the trial.

According to the London Telegraph, the United States has begun serious planning for a military strike on Iran that will incapacitate its nuclear program. This game-planning appears more serious than just a normal update of security options, and the revelation of the planning will most likely create a further polarization of the mullahcracy from the rest of the diplomatic world:

Strategists at the Pentagon are drawing up plans for devastating bombing raids backed by submarine-launched ballistic missile attacks against Iran's nuclear sites as a "last resort" to block Teheran's efforts to develop an atomic bomb.

Central Command and Strategic Command planners are identifying targets, assessing weapon-loads and working on logistics for an operation, the Sunday Telegraph has learnt.

They are reporting to the office of Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, as America updates plans for action if the diplomatic offensive fails to thwart the Islamic republic's nuclear bomb ambitions. Teheran claims that it is developing only a civilian energy programme.

"This is more than just the standard military contingency assessment," said a senior Pentagon adviser. "This has taken on much greater urgency in recent months."

The prospect of military action could put Washington at odds with Britain which fears that an attack would spark violence across the Middle East, reprisals in the West and may not cripple Teheran's nuclear programme. But the steady flow of disclosures about Iran's secret nuclear operations and the virulent anti-Israeli threats of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has prompted the fresh assessment of military options by Washington. The most likely strategy would involve aerial bombardment by long-distance B2 bombers, each armed with up to 40,000lb of precision weapons, including the latest bunker-busting devices. They would fly from bases in Missouri with mid-air refuelling.

The Democrats have recently taken up the argument that Iran poses the worst national-security threat in the world at the moment, and that has allowed the White House much more room to consider military options. Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton both have called for immediate action to keep Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon, although the latter has been more vague about the action requested. Politically, it would appear that George Bush has enough bipartisan clearance -- I wouldn't call it support -- to launch a limited strike on Iran that targeted known nuclear facilities, at least domestically.

What would the international reaction be? Had Ahmedinejad not gone public with his genocidal rants about Israel, Bush would have immediately isolated himself. Even Britain would probably have declined to openly support such an attack, no matter what the pre-emptive value might be. However, with the Iranian leadership regularly issuing such hostile and irrational statements, along with its long history of supporting Islamofascist terrorism, that may no longer be the case. Certainly we would damage our relationship with Russia and China, but since they have proven rather useless in the war on terror (especially China), the loss may not be terribly significant. Western Europe can be counted on to object, but Eastern Europe will understand that they live within easy range of the Shahab-3 rockets at the mullah's command. They may not cheer the decision, but they will understand it.

All of that aside, will that bring us closer to our goal of democracy throughout Southwest Asia? It's doubtful. Iran has a large population that wants closer ties to America and more openness and freedom in Iran. They do not want America to invade Iran to bring it to them, but they want the support and assistance needed to overthrow the mullahcracy. Bombing their nation will do more to inflame anti-American sentiment than to bolster the democrats. I'm afraid, and we may lose a golden opportunity to inspire yet another velvet revolution.

The bombing plans may serve to push the Iranian democrats into action; if so, then they will have served their best purpose. The US may be signalling the activists that the time has come to rise up and topple the regime -- and if they can't, we will take the steps necessary to ensure that the mullahs' evil remains within Iranian borders from now on.

As our good friend Michael Ledeen often pleads .... faster, please.

After all of the debate and effort to give aid and debt relief to poor African nations, some people still did not believe we went far enough. We tied assistance to true political reform as a prerequisite for this relief, and many thought that such requirements were too harsh. In the end, the results satisfied few on either side of the question.

Of the few, however, the Congolese president must have been the most satisfied, if his spending habits give any indication. The London Times gives us a look at the Lifestyles Of The Rich And Subsidized:

THE leader of one of Africa’s poorest countries paid more than £100,000 in cash towards a £169,000 hotel bill run up by his entourage during last year’s United Nations summit in New York, according to court documents obtained by The Sunday Times.

Aides to President Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Republic of Congo startled staff at the Palace hotel on Madison Avenue by pulling out wads of $100 notes to settle a bill for 26 rooms.

Sassou-Nguesso, who is chairman of the African Union, representing all the continent’s governments, is negotiating with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to cancel many of his country’s debts on the grounds that it cannot afford to repay them. Yet the president spent a week last September in the Palace hotel, one of Manhattan’s most prestigious addresses.

He paid $8,500 (about £4,875) a night for a three-storey suite with art deco furniture, a Jacuzzi bathtub and a 50in plasma television screen. His room service charges on September 18 alone came to more than £2,000.

I suppose if one was to negotiate an end to debt, the smart option would be to run it up to the max before presenting the bill to one's deliverers. And the stress of asking for money must have weighed terribly on the Congolese president, especially on September 18th. It sounds like he needed quite a bit of food to relieve the tremendous pressure of asking for money, since he paid almost $4,000 in room service that day.

By the way, if you're keeping score, that $4,000 comes to the amount of money made by about 3200 of his citizens in the same time period. At least it does for some of his citizens, although it probably doesn't apply to the butler, his personal photographer, his wife's hairdresser, and the rest of the entourage that took up 25 rooms at the five-star hotel in New York.

The best part? President Daniel Sassou-Nguesso has held his office since the end of a civil war in 1997, but had originally come to office in 1992. As a Marxist. How many Marxists pay their $177,000 hotel bill in cash?

Last year, I supported the debt-relief initiative for African nations that cleaned up their corruption and reformed their governments through open elections and democratic institutions. If this demonstrates the effectiveness of that reform, then I suggest that the G-8 send Sassou-Nguesso back home, along with his bill, and tell his constituents that they still have a mortgage to pay.

CQ reader Peter A in Denmark sends this rather sharp editorial from the Danish newspaper at the center of the Prophet cartoons controversy, and also translates it into English for us. It speaks to the voices of moderation that extol free speech while at the same time scold Jyllands-Posten for exercising it. The author, Per Nyholm, wants the world to know that if freedom of speech has to come with a huge "but" attached to it, it's not freedom at all.

I'm posting the translation in its entirety:

We are being pissed upon by Per Nyholm

I think it was the long departed H.C. Hansen, one of last century's great Danish statesmen who once - while the communists were demonstrating in front of Christiansborg [Ed: the seat of parliament] - threw his gaze across the palace square and remarked: "I will not be pissed upon."

Then he did what was necessary.

I feel that currently my beloved country is being pissed upon rather too much. Denmark has not been neglecting its duties on the international stage. We have supported poor people with acts and advice, we have worked for peace, we have sent soldiers, policemen and experts to all the far flung corners of the world. We have democracy, a state of law and a welfare state. Not all is perfect, but we harbor no malice to our fellow man.

And yet Denmark is being pissed upon. The spokesman of the US State Department is pissing on Denmark, the British Secretary of Foreign Affairs is pissing on Denmark, the President of Afghanistan is pissing on Denmark, the Goverment of Iraq is pissing on Denmark, other Moslem regimes are pissing on Denmark. In Gaza, where Danes for years have provided humanitarian relief, crazed Imams encourage people to cut off the hands and heads of the cartoonists who made the caricatures of Mohammed for the Jyllands-Posten newspaper.

Excuse my choice of words, but all this pissing is pissing me off.

What's happening? I am not so much referring to the threats against Danish citizens and Danish commerce. Nor are the burnt down Embassies what occupies my mind. I am thinking of a word that keeps popping up whenever the Mohammed cartoons are mentioned.

That word is BUT. A sneaky word. It's used to deny or relativize what one has just said.

How many times lately have we not heard people of power, The Formers of Opinion and other people say that of course we have freedom of speech, BUT.

They have said it, all of them, from Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General to our own Bendt Bendtsen [ed: Danish Politician]. Once we had to be sensitive of the easily hurt feeling of the Nazis, then came the communists, now it is the Islamists. The reason I say 'Islamists' is that I don't for a moment believe all the world's Moslems are pissing on us. I think we are dealing with thugs, fools and misled people. Those are the ones we have to deal with, and then the chickenshit politicians.

The cartoons are no longer something the Jyllands-Posten can control. They have already been manipulated and misrepresented to the point that few know what's going on and fewer know how to stop it. This affair is artifically kept buoyant in a sea of lies, suppressions of the truth, misconceptions, lunacy and hypocrisy, for which this newspaper bears no blame. The only thing the Jyllands-Posten did was that it with a pin-prick made a boil of nastiness explode. It would have happened sooner or later. That it happened more than four months following the publication of the cartoons, raises a question of its own.

Are we dealing with random events or with a staged clash of civilizations? One might hope for the former yet expect the latter.

That's why I say: Freedom of Speech is Freedom of Speech is Freedom of Speech. There is no but.

Initially I was doubtful of the timeliness of publishing the cartoons. Later events have convinced me that it was both just and useful. That they are consistent with Danish law and Danish custom seem to me less important than this: that we now know that remote, primitive countries deem themselves justified in telling us what we can do. Unfortunately we also have to recognize that governments close to us agree with them in the name of expedience.

The just is in the offensive this newspaper has launched in the name of Freedom of Speech, the useful in our newly acquired knowledge. Welcome to a brave, new world, where even our Prime Minister - in spite of his laudable firmness - must gaze out upon a scorched political landscape. It's true, as is custom, his friend in Washington, George Bush, condemns the torching of our embassies, but his Department of State alludes to us being the guilty ones in this case. The suggestion that Danish troops might benefit the democratization is buried under the charred remains of our diplomatic representations in Beirut and Damascus.

Perhaps it's time we started mopping up this mess. Perhaps Editor-in-Chief Carsten Juste ought to remove his apology which has gone stale sitting so long on the front page of our internet edition and which does not seem to interest madmen. Perhaps our government ought to announce to Mona Omar Attia, the strange Ambassador of Egypt, that she is persona non grata.

Perhaps it ought to be announced to the ambassadors that have been called home to fictive consultations in the Middle East that they may spare themselves the cost of the return ticket.

To the degree it is possible, The Lying Imams ought probably to be expelled. And then we ought to make an effort for the Moslems who in a difficult situation have proven themselves to be true Citizens.

We, for our part, have no wish to be a burden for the arab governments. We will happily withdraw our soldiers, policemen and diplomats. If they think our money smells, we will stop our aid. Our trade must make do as well as it can. We promise to not bear a grudge and, in time, we will be glad to return, but we are through with the hypocrisy. We have better things to do than being pissed upon at our own expense.

Turn down our activity in the Middle East. This world holds other opportunities.

I have a couple of responses to this. One, we here in the US understand that the State Department has its own agenda, and in this case their agenda was set by the Arabists at Foggy Bottom. They want to make nice and try to be seen as moderate. Can one be moderate in defense of free speech? Per Nyholm doesn't think so, and I agree with him.

Second, if Denmark feels that it has been pissed upon despite all of its efforts to assist Arabs in general and Moslems in particular, welcome to the club. We helped free Balkan Muslims from a genocidal aggressor in Serbia, and we got rewarded by 9/11. In other words, Demark, we feel your pain -- been there, done that, got the T-shirt. I think Nyhom's response is the correct one; cut off the aid and the support and let the countries promoting these violent demonstrations get along without Danish assistance.

If only all of Europe could show such steel in response.

UPDATE: Yes, that should have read "without Danish assistance." Thanks to the several readers who alerted me to that error!

In an appearance during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the always-provocative Ann Coulter did what she does best: infuriate, provoke, and amuse. In doing so this time, however, she crossed a line that reflects poorly on conservatives in general, and she deserves the criticism she's received.

When we oppose a group of people, there is a temptation to give them a demeaning nickname or slur to make them a little less human. That's unfortunate, and in this case -- as it often is -- it's inaccurate. "Ragheads" is a slur that could refer to a number of Arabic and non-Arabic people; Sikhs, for instance, wear turbans and are not Arabic or Muslim. Not all Arabs are Islamofascists, nor are all Islamofascists Arabic. Using that term is not only rude and childish, it's entirely off the mark. And attempting to bury the humanity of Islamofascists in terms like "ragheads" is to assign them a status that strips them of the responsibility of their actions.

I don't think that Coulter should get tarred and feathered for this bad choice of rhetoric, but it does serve as a reminder that the slack can only get cut to a point, even with our favorite provocateurs. When the line gets crossed by one of our own, it becomes our responsibility to point it out and insist that it doesn't happen again.

UPDATE: I should have noted that I picked this up from Michelle Malkin's outstanding post. Be sure to read it all.

I'll be appearing on Pundit Review Radio tonight at 8:30 pm Central time tonight. I'll be talking with Kevin for about a half-hour, if he can dig himself out of the foot-plus of snow that hit Massachussetts this weekend. Be sure to tune in!

I wasn't going to comment on Vice President Dick Cheney's hunting accident this weekend; I figured enough people would hyperbolize this that another voice would be superfluous. However, as CQ reader Alan Blake pointed out in an e-mail, the AP had to have dug deep in their photo library to find a picture of Cheney with this scary look on his face:

Austin attorney Harry Whittington survived being hit with the shotgun blast from Cheney, only suffering some lacerations and bruises from the pellets. Cheney has a medical staff and an ambulance on standby wherever he goes, and Whittington got immediate medical attention. Even though Whittington is no spring chicken -- he's 78 -- he's expected to make a full recovery.

I'd expectg a lot of Dick Cheney jokes in the next few days, and perhaps the AP started with this selection for the wire-service report.

Earlier this week, I pointed out that the Jeddah Economic Forum had disinvited the Danes after their publication of the Prophet cartoons. Arab News reported that Al Gore and Steve Forbes had agreed to appear at the JEF prior to Denmark's exclusion, and several bloggers wondered whether they would endorse the Saudi position and attend after such a move.

Not only did Gore attend, but he sold out the US in order to suck up to the Islamists:

Former Vice President Al Gore told a mainly Saudi audience on Sunday that the U.S. government committed "terrible abuses" against Arabs after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and that most Americans did not support such treatment.

Gore said Arabs had been "indiscriminately rounded up" and held in "unforgivable" conditions. The former vice president said the Bush administration was playing into al-Qaida's hands by routinely blocking Saudi visa applications.

"The thoughtless way in which visas are now handled, that is a mistake," Gore said during the Jiddah Economic Forum. "The worst thing we can possibly do is to cut off the channels of friendship and mutual understanding between Saudi Arabia and the United States."

I'm stunned almost to speechlessness. We held mass roundups of Arabs? When? Where? What exactly were the "unforgivable" conditions of which Gore speaks? And as far as the visas go, when exactly did Saudis have a right to enter the United States at whim without any consideration of security? Perhaps the former VP has forgotten, but most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis.

In truth, Gore sold out the United States and any notion of freedom by appearing after Denmark got barred from attending an economic forum for the publishing decision of one of its privately-owned newspapers. Just showing up was bad enough. To make accusations about some mythical internment program for Arabs in the US just plays into the hands of the conspiracy-addicted Arabian press.

Thanks, Al. You've gone from a respectable politician to a Saudi suck-up in one of the worst political meltdowns in American history.

UPDATE: Tigerhawk notes that "[t]his business of prestigious American politicians attacking the United States from abroad is repellant, because it serves no legitimate purpose. It is one thing to attack our policies in front of American voters -- that's how the system works -- and quite another to do it from deep into the heart of Wahhabism." Read the rest of his scathing critique as well.

For me, that is a major part of the sell-out, but not all of it. Al Gore could have said this in New York and I would still call it a sell-out and a betrayal of his nation. He spouts the worst conspiracy-theory garbage, without any supporting evidence, which feeds into the propaganda of our enemies. The fact that he did it on stage in Jeddah in a forum which had already booted the Danes for daring to stand up to Islamists only emphasizes the craven and self-involved character of the former VP.

The Canadian magazine Western Standard decided to reprint the Prophet cartoons to give its readers the oppotunity to see what has caused all the fuss, an opportunity few Western media outlets have given their own readers. In response, Muslim groups in Canada plan to push authorities into prosecuting the Standard's editors for hate speech:

The Western Standard, a political magazine based in Calgary, will today reprint eight of the 12 Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed that have caused riots and controversy around the world, and one Canadian Muslim leader warns that hate-crime charges may follow.

Western Standard publisher Ezra Levant, a former Reform and Canadian Alliance activist, calls the cartoons "innocuous" and accused Canada's "mainstream media," including The Globe and Mail, of failing to stand up for free speech for refusing to print the images.

"I was prepared to see the most outrageous, depraved, blasphemous cartoons," Mr. Levant said in an interview yesterday. "I was surprised by how tame they were."

But the leader of the Canadian Islamic Congress, Mohamed Elmasry, warned yesterday that his organization will seek to have charges laid against the magazine under Canada's laws against distributing hate literature.

"It's unfortunate," said Mr. Elmasry, who had urged Mr. Levant not to republish the images. "I think he really goes against the will and the values of Canadians by this provocative action."

If Elmasry really thought that the publication of the images went against the "will and values" of the Standard's audience, or Canada in general, then he would trust the marketplace to deliver that verdict. Elmasry, in fact, fears the exact opposite: that Canadians, having been robbed of the context on which to judge this controversy, will flock to the Standard's publication of the cartoons in order to make up their own minds about them.

This shows the folly of hate-speech legislation, especially in countries that supposedly support free speech. Truly hateful speech should be met with more speech, not government prosecution, nor the threat of bombings and beheadings. When the latter presents themselves, defenders of free speech need to give up the nuance that leads them to the "pox upon both houses" approach and instead come down foursquare for the right to speak and criticize on principle. It's that nuanced approach that leads to the passage of hate-speech and campus speech codes and creates protected classes of people whom legislators feel should never be criticized.

That, in fact, is exactly the point for which Muslims around the world have demonstrated. They want to create a special class for themselves and their religion that will bar anyone from questioning its tenets and its insistence on temporal supremacy. These rioters do not protest against all religious satirization, but only for that which involves Islam or Mohammed. Their own newspapers produce cartoons about Jews of the type pioneered by Julius Streicher, and yet they seem unfazed by that satirization of religion.

Jyllands-Posten published the cartoons in part as a test exercise into the support of free speech in the Muslim world. Instead, it has become a test of that support in the Western world, a test that most media outlets have failed miserably. The Western Standard, in its insistence on informing its readers of the context in perhaps the year's biggest controversy, has passed that test. Will the Canadian government fail it and prosecute the magazine's publishers for hate speech over a series of tame editorial cartoons that criticizes the very intolerance that Elmasry and other Muslims have demonstrated?

Having failed at turning the NSA program to surveil international calls connected with suspected terrorists into a "domestic" spying scandal, Democrats have reversed course and now want the program to continue but under new Congressional rules. The reversal has shown that President Bush's offensive against the critics, starting with his immediate acknowledgement of authorizing the program, has once again damaged the Democrats on national security and has pushed them to settle the issue quickly:

Two key Democrats yesterday called the NSA domestic surveillance program necessary for fighting terrorism but questioned whether President Bush had the legal authority to order it done without getting congressional approval.

Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.) said Republicans are trying to create a political issue over Democrats' concern on the constitutional questions raised by the spying program.

At the same time, the Republican chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees -- Sen. Pat Roberts (Kan.) and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (Mich.), who attended secret National Security Agency briefings -- said they supported Bush's right to undertake the program without new congressional authorization. They added that Democrats briefed on the program, who included Harman and Daschle, could have taken steps if they believed the program was illegal. All four appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Roberts said he could not remember Democrats raising questions about the program during briefings that, beginning in 2002, were given to the "Gang of Eight." That group was made up of the House speaker and minority leader, the majority and minority leaders of the Senate, and the chairmen and ranking Democrats of the House and Senate intelligence committees.

At the briefings, Roberts said, "Those that did the briefing would say, 'Do you have questions? Do you have concerns?' " Hoekstra said if Democrats thought Bush was violating the law, "it was their responsibility to use every tool possible to get the president to stop it."

The Democrats started their response to this controversy by proclaiming George Bush to be the Second Coming of Richard Nixon and spent their political capital assailing him for spying on "ordinary Americans". However, shortly after the revelation of the top-secret program by the New York Times, George Bush did the unexpected: he used his weekly radio address to not only admit to authorizing the program, but angrily insist that he had the authorization and the responsibility to do so. That took everyone by surprise, as did the fact that Democratic leadership had been briefed on a regular basis about the program since its inception -- and had only questioned its authorization once.

That revealed the Democrats as less than honest about their sudden outrage and appeared to take the wind out of their sails for a moment. Later, they attempted to argue that the nature of the program kept them from expressing their concerns, but that doesn't fly. As Hoekstra notes, they never objected or even questioned the authorization during the briefings themselves, when they could speak freely and discuss the program. They never questioned the program during closed-door sessions of the Intelligence Committees, either, when the ranking members would be free to speak among themselves, at least.

The electorate didn't get fooled by the rhetoric, either. A clear majority supported the surveillance, with or without warrants, and believed it to be within the war powers granted to the President by the AUMF. After all, in what war have we ever required the executive branch to get warrants for espionage against the enemy? And as non-wartime precedents became more well known, especially US v Truong and Humphrey involving Jimmy Carter's warrantless wiretaps in peacetime, the public has not budged in its support for the NSA surveillance.

Now Democrats need to make the NSA program and their hysterical attacks against the President ancient history. They now want people to think that they've supported the surveillance all along, but just want to craft legislation to support it. In truth, all they had to do was to propose that legislation when the Times published the existence of the program, but Democrats instead chose to use it as a political club to beat up the Administration. That effort backfired, and now they need that legislation to avoid being seen as lacking seriousness against terrorists -- a judgment that they have only reinforced in this latest kerfuffle.

The London Times reviews the performance of the presumed front-runner for the Democratic ticket in 2008 and finds her performance wanting. Gerard Baker, the editor for its American desk, notes that Hillary Clinton not only cannot connect well in her appearances but cannot even escape the long shadow cast by her husband and most potent political asset:

Few deny that Mrs Clinton is razor-sharp and politically savvy. But even supporters worry about her personal skills, at least before a large audience. She is a somewhat wooden speaker with a hectoring style at times more reminiscent of Al Gore than her husband. And unlike Bill, she projects a lofty, distant air that has been likened to the Queen of Sheba in a power suit.

Last weekend Ken Mehlman, the Republican National Committee chairman, homed in on Mrs Clinton’s personality, saying that she was too angry. His aim was both to pinpoint her weaknesses and to needle her, and it seems to have worked. ...

The hope in her camp is that people will believe that Mrs Clinton has her husband’s political strengths and none of his weaknesses. The growing fear is that she incites the same level of loathing and suspicion as her husband always did, but has none of the charm and personality to deflect it.

Hillary has always come across as a scold and a cold fish on the stump, where Bill may only truly find himself in that setting. He has always had a grace and flow to his appearances that served him well on most occasions. His charm finds its best and most productive outlet there, while Hillary usually sounds rather tight and forced. The comparisons will not make her look any better, and if she has Bill at the same events with her, he will continue to upstage her every time. That only plays into the suspicion that Hillary will run as an end-around to the 25th Amendment to garner Bill his third term in office.

Democrats need to find a national candidate with less baggage than Hillary. Almost half of the electorate doesn't want anything to with the Clintons ever again, and about half of what's left doesn't think Bill is worth casting a vote for Hillary. Rasmussen's last poll demonstrates that Hillary might win in the primaries, but she will get shellacked in a national election and probably would be the biggest get-out-the-vote incentive for the GOP in years. When the London Times plays Lloyd Bentsen to Hillary's Dan Quayle, her negatives no longer can be portrayed as Republican wishful thinking.

CQ reader Peter A in Denmark sends a translation of a new Jyllands-Posten article that delves into the origins of the Cartoon Wars that have raged around the world for the past two weeks. The true reasons for the manufactured outrage turn out to have more connection to other Danish actions than just the cartoons. The proper context shows that the Muslims in Denmark and elsewhere have much more of an agenda than simply protecting the Prophet from satire and their religious sensibilities from criticism. Be sure to read it all.

JYLLANDS-POSTEN Sunday, February 12, 2005: THE TRAVELLING IMAMS

They said they would send delegations on a tour of the world to convince Moslem countries to participate in a "defense" of the prophet Muhammed. Instead it turned into an attack. The Danes were described as "infidels", who would neither recognize Islam or allow Mosques to be erected. Since, the battle cry "Death to Denmark" has sounded in many cities in the Middle East. Most of the persons who participated in the tour are Danish Citizens. Even so, they believe they did the right thing when they became The Travelling Imams.

THE MUHAMMED CRISIS
By Orla Borg and Lars Nørgaard Pedersen

The evening of Novemer 18, 2005 was when they finally decided. All Danish channels were showing a smiling Anders Fogh Rasmussen opening the doors of Marienborg [ED:Downing Street No 10 in Denmark] to the Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

To the Imams and other representatives of Moslem organizations, who for several weeks had been protesting the Muhammed cartoons in the Jyllands-Posten, it felt like a kick to the face:

So, the Prime Minister welcomed her - this /woman/ who had written the manuscript for "Submission Part 1", a film highly critical of Islam. But the ambassadors of 11 Moslem countries who had asked so pleadingly to meet him regarding the caricatures of the prophet Muhammed, were not granted an audience.

This was the straw that broke the camel's back.

The inflamed Danish Moslems who had organized in the network "Moslems for the Prophet in the Media" decided to enter phase two: The international phase with travelling delegations to the Middle East, since their first strategy - national actions within the borders of Denmark - had led them nowhere.

Since October 2, 2005 - two days after the publication of the drawings - they had tried to make the Jyllands-Posten and the Danish government apologize for the drawings and ensure that there would be no repetitions. They had collected 17000 signatures. They had organized a demonstration numbering more than 3000 on Rådhuspladsen in Copenhagen. They had written to the Ministry of Culture from which they had not even received an answer. And lastly 11 ambassadors had co-authored a letter asking to meet the Prime Minister to discuss the matter.

All in vain.

DEFENSE TURNED INTO AN ATTACK

The 27 organizations called for an emergency meeting where it was decided to put together delegations who would "visit the Islamic World in order to inform them of the danger inherent in the situation and convince them to join
in the defense and the support of our prophet," as the published mission statement of the delegations had it.

But this defensive action evolved into an attack on Denmark - with the connivance of the diplomats of Moslem countries in Denmark.

In the middle of November representatives of the Moslem organizations first met the Moslem ambassadors in Copenhagen. Mona Omar, the Ambassador of Egypt - who was later elected spokesman of the 11 ambassadors - in November received a handful of representatives of the Moslem organizations. They presented to her the plan of sending delegations to the Middle East. The embassy approved of the idea and arranged for them to meet in Cairo
Muhammed Shaaban, an advisor to the Egyptian Foreign Minister, former Ambassador and a member of the board of the Danish-Egyptian institute for Dialogue in Cairo. The Egyptian embassy also helped with visas and provided contact to the League of Arab States in Cairo.

Two main delegations were sent in the first round. The first delegation of five landed in Egypt on December 3, 2005 and returned December 11, 2005. The second delegation comprising four Danish Moslems travelled to Lebanon December 17, 2005 and returned to Denmark December 31, 2005. During that time, Imam Ahmed Akkari from the Lebanon delegation visited Syria to present their case to Grand Mufti Ahmed Badr-Eddine Hassoun. Furthermore a smaller delegation travelled to Turkey while individuals visited Sudan, Morocco and Algeria.

The fact that the two main delegations were sent to Lebanon and Egypt, Imam Ahmed Akkari ascribes to several factors: The Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs supports 'The Arab Initiative', designed to improve cooperation in the
Middle East, and specifically on Lebanon. Furthermore they noted that Lebanon, in spite of civil war, had diverse religious communities, which might increase the likeliness of their being understood. And when Nicholas Sarkozy specifically had visited the Grand Mufti Muhammed Said Tantawi in Cairo during the debate over hijabs - headscarves - in France, it had made a great impression on them. And finally, several of the members of the delegation descend from the two countries: The businessman Ahmed Harby and Nour-Edin Fattah of the first
delegation are of Egyptian descent while Raed Hlayhel and Ahmed Akkari of the second delegation are of Lebanese descent.

43 FULL PAGES

According to Ahmed Akkari, one of the goals of the delegations was to avoid "a new Van Gogh-case" - referring to the Dutch director who was murdered by an Islamist extremist in 2004. "The trip to Egypt was needed to create a response to be used in Denmark," Ahmed Akkari says.

The delegations brought stacks of a document 43 pages long containing pages of text and photos. The document contained the 12 cartoons from the Jyllands-Posten, 10 cartoons from the Weekendavisen and 4 derogatory photos, which according to the Moslems had been sent anonymously to Moslems in Denmark.

The delegation to Egypt achieved a great impact. It was headed by Abu Bashar of The Community of Islam and amongst the leaders were also leaders of Pakistani and Turkish organizations. During the meeting with the League of Arab States, which took place on December 11, 2005, the Danish Imam Abu Bashar showed the photo depicting the prophet as a pig.

Alaa Roushdy, the first secretary of Amr Moussa, participated in the meeting. The two Danish-Moslem representatives described the pig photo. They also talked about an announced movie critical of Islam, to be produced by Denmark, says Alaa Roushdy. The alleged movie was later to be one of many untrue
rumours to circulate in the Middle East.

The delegation also met the presidentially appointed Grand Mufti Muhammed Said Tantawy, who is also the leader of Al Azhar University, one of the world most renowned institutes for higher learning in the Sunni Moslem world.

THREAT OF A FATWA

The Grand Mufti released a statement condemning the cartoons. A fatwa to boycot Danish goods was threatened unless the drawing were withdrawn. And more important: The Egyptian Foreign Minister promised to raise the issue during the coming islamic conference when the 57 countries of the OIC (Organization of the Islamic Conference) was to meet at the end of December. Symbolically, it was to be in Mecca - the home of Muhammed - that things
took a turn.

The second delegation got the Lebanese Foreign Minister, Fawzi Salloukh, to contact his Egyptian counterpart in view of a common response. The third and lesser delegation travelled to Turkey. Led by Zeki Kocer of DMGT - a union of Turkish immigrant organization - it is unknown with whom they met.

In none of the countries visited by the delegations did demonstrators take to the street. But a meeting in Mekka set wheels in motion.

The 57 Moslem countries of the OIC met in the home city of Muhammed in December. The Egyptian Foreign Minister brought the 43 pages from the Danish Delegation. The cartoons of Muhammed circulated in the corridors and became THE topic of conversation during the conference. In the final communiqué, the OIC noted that the 57 countries were worried about the growing hatred against Islam and condemned "the latest incident where the media of some countries have desecrated the holy prophet Muhammed."

Now the case had gained traction.

The end of January saw protests against Denmark erupting volcanically. First came the boycot of Danish products in Saudi-Arabia and Kuwait beginning January 26, 2006 - a boycot which quickly spread to other Islamic countries. After that, the cartoons became the theme of the Friday Sermon everywhere. The same weekend Moslem protesters burned down down the Danish embassy in Syria, attacked the offices of the Danish deputation in Beirut and since then death threats have been made against Danes in several Moslem countries.

Thursday the ninth, the beginning of the Ashura holidays in the Shiite world, the cry went out "Death to Denmark" in Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and Lebanon.

THE INFIDEL DANES

In Denmark criticism of the delegations has grown. They have been accused of showing false cartoons and spreading disinformation. But the 43 pages the delegations brough with them contained a text that has gone unnoticed so far.

The text labels the Danes as "Infidels"

"Though they are nominally Christian, secularization has submerged them to a degree where to say that they are infidels would not be a lie." Furthermore the text contains to specific disinformations.

* Of the situation of the Moslems in Denmark: "Those of the true faith are opressed in a number of ways, mainly the
Islamic faith is not officially recognized in Denmark."

* Of mosques in Denmark: "Which brings about a series of problems; most significantly permissions to build mosques are not granted and Moslems thus have to reuse old commercial properties and storage facilities as places of worship."

This information is wrong:

* The Ministry of Religion recognizes 19 Islamic denominations in Denmark.

* No Moslems are prevented from building Mosques. That it has not happened is caused by fraternal dissent in the Moslem communities: Agreement can not be reached as to who is to run the Mosque and thus sufficient money has not been raised for the building of a mosque.

The debate about the delegations runs high. Few defend them. Some do, including one of the 11 ambassadors which thePrime Minister declined to meet. The Ambassador wishes to remain anonymous but says: "We encouraged none of the actions the delegations took, nor did they encourage us. They made their own choices and none of the ambassadors participated in any of their meetings. People are now trying to pin it on the delegations but it was already an issue when they left for Egypt."

Alaa Roushdy, First Secretary of the influential leader of The League of Arab States in Cairo defends the delegations too: "I have been following the discussion as to whether the delegations hold responsibility for what is happening in the Middle East. But the truth is that the real reaction came one and a half month after their visit." Roushdy adds that the issue would have exploded under any circumstances once the League of Arab States and the OIC had been informed.

Many criticised the delegations. One of their sharpest detractors is Ben Haddou of Moroccan ancestry, a former City Councillor in Copenhagen for the Centrist Democrats and later the Conservatives. He calls the delegations "half treason" and thinks that the delegations and protests have been staged to attract money from the rich Arab Gulf States. "They are fighting for their own Kingdom in Denmark and their own Mosques. Why does the Community of Islam call press conferences? Why do they so want to go with Danish Industry [ED: Umbrella Organization for Danish employers in the indutrial sector] to the Middle East? Why do they want public servants on the trip? Because it will give them a rubber stamp of approval. If they go to the Middle East with Officials of the Danish State, it will be seen as an official mark of approval and then the flow of money from the Gulf States will
be without end."

NOT OUR FAULT

The members of the delegations reject the claim that they carry the main responsibility for the attacks on Danish interests. Most members refuse to comment and refer to spokesman Ahmed Akkari. He has no regrets. "We never wanted this development or the violent actions which we have distanced ourselves from" (SIC).

On the matter of whether the delegations haven't achieved the exact opposite of what they set out to do, if the goal of the delegations was to strengthen the Islamic position in Denmark, answers Ahmed Akkari: "We will not accept that it was our responsibility. When Bush goes to the Middle East it often causes new riots, but nobody tells him not to go. We feel stigmatized as second- or third-class citizens."

Do you feel as a second- or third-rate citizen? "I feel that the public discourse in Denmark is harsh towards the
Muslims and that our voice is not heard. That goes for me personally as well."

But you HAVE been heard the last couple of weeks, haven't you? "When finally we do get our say, we are portrayed as villains. We want to be represented properly," says Ahmed Akkari.

He predicts two endgames for the prophet-case: Either Moslems will be properly and fully recognized in Denmark or else portrayal of them as villains will be intensified. "I believe in the former. I am an optimist."

=======

So it isn't just a case of a few supposedly inflammatory cartoons appearing in Jyllands-Posten that set this off. This has been a deliberate provocation by Danish Muslims to inflame Islam against Denmark specifically and the West in general -- and it would have happened eventually even without the cartoons.

Unlike many of my friends on the starboard side of the blogosphere, I enjoy Dana Milbank's contributions at the Washington Post. In his non-reportorial mode, his snarky and fun analyses often brighten up some dreary topics. Unfortunately, his snarky writing often finds its way into his news reporting as well, and his biases shine through just about everything he writes.

Today's contribution to the MS-NBC show Countdown with the dreadfully egotistical Keith Olbermann brings Milbank to a new nadir in his career, however (via Michelle Malkin):

No, this isn't a tryout for America's Worst-Dressed Nerds; it's Milbank trying to be funny and only succeeding at being funny-looking. Since when do serious journalists pull stunts like this? Heck, most bloggers I know wouldn't be dumb enough to dress like this on national TV even as a joke, not if they wanted to maintain any credibility.

Memo to the Exempt Media: it was an accident. Report it and get over it, and then shut the hell up so that we can listen to the real comedians make fun of Dick Cheney. Anyone want to guess how much higher the ratings for Jay and Dave will be tonight?

And while we're at it, can we all just calm down about the White House waiting all of eighteen hours to release the news of the shooting? When the shooting occurred, I for one am glad that the first thought through Cheney's mind wasn't "Gee, how soon do I need to put out a news release?" I understand that the White House press pool feels put out because the story got covered by a local Corpus Christi newspaper instead of the courtiers in DC, but all this fuss over eighteen hours is sheer silliness. It's not a cover-up, people. It's not even a crime to have a hunting accident, and it's certainly not a crime not to report it to the Exempt Media, no matter how mad it makes them.

Besides, while they're whining about eighteen hours, the same media outlets who stand outraged at the blackout have spent the last ten days hiding the Prophet cartoons from their readers and viewers. I'm less than impressed with their whining about the public's right to know about a hunting accident under the circumstances.

Remember Paul Hackett? He's the Iraq War veteran who got backing from the Democrats and a good chunk of the liberal blogosphere to run in a special election for a Congressional seat and made a respectable showing in a strong Republican district. He announced his candidacy for the Senate race and expected to make a hard run against Mike DeWine in a state that has had its share of GOP scandals. However, Hackett finds himself out of the race and out of politics, the victim of a Democratic campaign to push him out in favor of Sherrod Brown:

Paul Hackett, an Iraq war veteran and popular Democratic candidate in Ohio's closely watched Senate contest, said yesterday that he was dropping out of the race and leaving politics altogether as a result of pressure from party leaders.

Mr. Hackett said Senators Charles E. Schumer of New York and Harry Reid of Nevada, the same party leaders who he said persuaded him last August to enter the Senate race, had pushed him to step aside so that Representative Sherrod Brown, a longtime member of Congress, could take on Senator Mike DeWine, the Republican incumbent.

Mr. Hackett staged a surprisingly strong Congressional run last year in an overwhelmingly Republican district and gained national prominence for his scathing criticism of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq War. It was his performance in the Congressional race that led party leaders to recruit him for the Senate race.

But for the last two weeks, he said, state and national Democratic Party leaders have urged him to drop his Senate campaign and again run for Congress.

Hackett, who once said that GOP leaders had a lot in common with Osama bin Laden, now finds out that Democratic leaders have a lot in common with Machiavelli. He told the New York Times that Reid, Schumer, and others undermined his campaign by convincing donors to withhold contributions to his campaign. When he objected, the same leaders pressed him to break his pledge not to run for the House race, which he refused to do.

Democrats actively sought out Iraq war veterans to run for office in an apparent attempt to bolster their national-security credentials. Once again, they show the superficial concern they have for both national security and the veterans they courted in their clumsy attempt to cut Hackett off at the knees, especially considering the high profile he gave their program last November. Hackett found out a little late that Democrats only pay lip service to veterans and the concerns of national security. I wonder how many of these veterans will stand by and watch their peer get pushed under the bus.

Sherrod Brown, who capitalizes on the torpedoing of Hackett's campaign, had nothing to say about the interference run on his behalf by Reid and Schumer.

UPDATE: The take at DailyKos, which supported Hackett in last year's special election? It's Hackett's fault for not deciding to run until after Labor Day. Of course, he had just worked all year for the Dems running for OH-02, and the election itself took place at the beginning of August. I guess if you can't make up your mind 30 days after an election about your future plans for office, the Dems feel free to walk all over you.

The US and Israel plan on undermining the Hamas-led Palestinian legislature with a series of actions, including embargoes, cessation of aid, withholding of tax receipts, and throwing as much red tape as possible in order to grind economic activity to a halt in the territories. They aim to force a collapse in Hamas' popularity and cause a new election:

The United States and Israel are discussing ways to destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again, according to Israeli officials and Western diplomats.

The intention is to starve the Palestinian Authority of money and international connections to the point where, some months from now, its president, Mahmoud Abbas, is compelled to call a new election. The hope is that Palestinians will be so unhappy with life under Hamas that they will return to office a reformed and chastened Fatah movement.

The officials also argue that a close look at the election results shows that Hamas won a smaller mandate than previously understood.

The officials and diplomats, who said this approach was being discussed at the highest levels of the State Department and the Israeli government, spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.

They say Hamas will be given a choice: recognize Israel's right to exist, forswear violence and accept previous Palestinian-Israeli agreements — as called for by the United Nations and the West — or face isolation and collapse.

Fatah took a more direct approach -- they pushed last-minute legislation transferring most of the power to the presidency, allowing Mahmoud Abbas to rule in effect as a dictator. This is not a new concept for their parliament; it served as a rubber stamp for Yasser Arafat but had taken back its enumerated power after Arafat's death, on the insistence of the Quartet. Hamas protested the new laws and swore to overturn them once they take their seats, but the rules require a two-thirds vote to reverse the action and Hamas falls short in their new majority. It would fall to their high court for a final judgment, but the new law allows Abbas to select the jurists for the court.

The Fatah action will probably make the most difference. Hamas will likely just take over the government regardless of the law, effectlvely created a terrorist coup and either forcing Abbas out or making him irrelevant. If Fatah resists, the action will bring immediate civil war between the two bloody factions. That may help Israel in the short run; both sides will be too busy killing each other to kill Israelis, and the war would thin both ranks and clarify the power structure of its main enemy, that being whichever faction survives.

Outside of that, the notion of undermining the Hamas majority in the parliament does not hold much hope for success. The actions contemplated as part of that strategy are all appropriate in and of themselves; we should not provide aid or economic engagement to terrorists under any circumstances. However, the people turning this into a grand strategy are either naive or hopeless optimists. The Palestinians may have tired of Fatah's corruption, but they didn't elect Hamas to get the trains to run on time. They could have formed a peace party if that reflected the will of the people. The Palestinians elected Hamas knowing full well what that meant on the international stage. Causing a collapse would only make them dig their heels more deeply in their support.

But let's assume it works the way State hopes. Even if it led to Fatah's resurgence, why would that cause Fatah to be "chastened"? What lesson would Fatah have learned -- that they can rip off their people by embezzling the aid we provide, allow their own lunatics to continue their terrorist attacks on Israel, and still get Western support to push them back into power? Well, that's a great strategy. Let's reward both terrorism and corruption!

The best approach is to cut off the Palestinians completely and make it clear that the West washes its hands of them until they grow up and elect responsible leadership. Until the Palestinians insist on having political choices between Terrorist A and Terrorist B, they provide no reason to continue engagement.

Today's Washington Post reviews the cost associated with the turnover created by the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that protects gays in the miltary as long as they keep their mouths shut about their orientation. The Post reports on a UC Santa Barbara study that compares the cost estimates of the GAO and their own research, and determines that the GAO underestimated the cost by about 50%:

The financial costs to the U.S. military for discharging and replacing gay service members under the nation's "don't ask, don't tell" policy are nearly twice what the government estimated last year, with taxpayers covering at least $364 million in associated funds over the policy's first decade, according to a University of California report scheduled for release today.

Members of a UC-Santa Barbara group examining the cost of the policy found that a Government Accountability Office study last year underestimated the costs of firing approximately 9,500 service members between 1994 and 2003 for homosexuality. The GAO, which acknowledged difficulties in coming up with its number, estimated a cost of at least $190.5 million for the same time period. The new estimate is 91 percent higher.

Although it did not take a stance on the effectiveness of the policy, the California "blue ribbon commission" -- which included former defense secretary William J. Perry and 11 professors and defense experts -- found that the military has put millions of dollars into recruiting and training new soldiers and officers to replace those who were removed from their jobs in the services because they were openly gay. The report also cites the costs of losing service members to premature discharge, because of the loss of training "investment."

In short, it appears that the UCSB study considered the costs in the same manner as any corporation would when reviewing its turnover. Hiring costs always include recruitment, orientation, and all training conducted to bring a new hire to a fully functional level. When employees get culled out for any reason, the cost of replacement includes all of those tasks, and whether one accepts the GAO number or the UCSB number, it adds up quickly.

Interestingly, the number of people drummed out of the service during the ten years under review, around ten thousand, is less than half of the number of those who leave due to pregnancy, and less than a third of those who can't make weight. The commission that conducted the study use the data to argue for an end to the current policy and the rejection of homosexuals in the service, but I do notice that they do not use this same data to argue for an end to the induction of women. Nor do they mention any endorsement for tightening weight requirements for new recruits.

Nevertheless, I think the panel has a point about gays in the military. As Barry Goldwater remarked in his later years, the only requirement for soldiers should be whether they shoot straight. It seems like a foolish and irrational burden for the armed services to carry, one perhaps understandable when homosexuality was considered a mental disorder but hard to justify now. The costs really aren't the issue as much as the disruption caused when someone gets outed. I'm sure a few of those ten thousand may have claimed a gay orientation as a quick way out of the service, but most appear to have wanted to serve their country honorably. Without a doubt, many more remain closeted in the military now, doing their jobs without causing a problem but unable to provide the testimony to prove it.

The arguments against lifting the ban seem not only a reach, but also quite reminiscent of arguments used to delay the integration of the services. Putting gays in the ranks will break down discipline -- but no one can explain why we seem to do just fine as long as they keep quiet about their orientation. Recruitment will fall off if gays are allowed to serve -- and many said the same thing about integration, especially about gaining recruits from the South. Well, the South still serves our armed forces, continuing their long tradition of defending the nation, and the resultant integration provided a model for the rest of our country to follow.

Worst of all, the current policy is based on rank hypocrisy. It says, "We're glad to have you as long as you don't tell us what we don't want to know." It acknowledges that gays can serve effective and honorably, as long as they lie about themselves. It seems a rather twisted sense of honor would produce such a formulation. And that's no reflection on the military, but on the political leadership that forced this particular silliness on them.

Let's end the hypocrisy and admit that gays have made good soldiers, sailors, and airmen in the past and present and could contribute to our national defense in the future.

Addendum: I expect to get pilloried on this one, so feel free to fire away in the comments section.

Today's column by E.J. Dionne looks at a place that many consider mythology: the middle ground on abortion. The effect of Roe v Wade has created such polarization that absolutists have held rhetorical attention for years. Only recently have people on both sides attempted to reach out for a pragmatic solution that allows everyone to maintain their political positions while cooperating on reducing abortions, a development that Dionne challenges both sides to support:

[T]here is a new argument on abortion that may establish a more authentic middle ground. It would use government not to outlaw abortion altogether but to reduce its likelihood. And at least one politician, Thomas R. Suozzi, the county executive of New York's Nassau County, has shown that the position involves more than soothing rhetoric.

Last May Suozzi, a Democrat, gave an important speech calling on both sides to create "a better world where there are fewer unplanned pregnancies, and where women who face unplanned pregnancies receive greater support and where men take more responsibility for their actions."

Last week Suozzi put money behind his words. He announced nearly $1 million in county government grants to groups ranging from Planned Parenthood to Catholic Charities for an array of programs -- adoption and housing, sex education, and abstinence promotion -- to reduce unwanted pregnancies and to help pregnant women who want to bring their children into the world. Suozzi calls his initiative "Common Sense for the Common Good" and, as Newsday reported, he was joined at his news conference by people at both ends of the abortion debate.

This new strategy allows the political debate to continue on abortion while government and private resources get used to save the lives of babies in the meantime. It's not the perfect solution, or more accurately, not the perfect resolution both sides want in the long term. In the short term, however, it helps reduce the heat and makes the choice for abortion less common.

Dionne acknowledges that this will not satisfy partisans on either side. As a near-absolutist on pro-life side (I can see exceptions for rape and incest), it doesn't go far enough for me, either. However, it does show progress, and if it saves the lives of babies while the grown-ups sit around and debate the issue, that sounds like a worthwhile effort to me.

As Dionne points out, the end of Roe will not mean an end to abortion. Practically speaking, all it will mean is that abortions will be legal in all states until their legislatures debate and issue new legislation. Most states will probably keep abortion legal, if restricted by age and the stage of pregnancy. Congress could even take up the issue on a federal level. For many, the greater issue for Roe is the corrosive effect of an overly-activist Supreme Court and not the specific issue of abortion, and leaving the latter to the legislatures suits us fine.

If we really want to end abortion, we need to provide support and incentives for pregnant women to keep their children. Surely reasonable people from both sides of the debate can come together to acknowledge that much and gear existing programs and funds towards that goal. Perhaps we can one day make the abortion debate strictly academic.

Despite a rocky week from David Emerson's party switch to join his cabinet, new Canadian PM Stephen Harper has jumped out to a good start with Canadians in the first weeks of his government. His approval ratings have risen well above the percentage of votes collected by the Tories and has crossed over into a majority:

The Conservatives were elected on January 23rd with the support of 36% of Canadian voters. Now, less than three weeks later, a majority (54%) of Canadians say they approve of the new government’s performance so far under the leadership of Stephen Harper. This includes two-in-ten (18%) Canadians who “strongly” approve and 36% who “somewhat” approve. One-in-three (32%) Canadians disapprove of the performance of the Conservative government so far (14% “strongly”, 18% “somewhat”).

The approval does not limit itself to the Tory powe base of Alberta, either. All regions of Canada show a significant spike upwards in approval, notably Quebec (61%), Sasketchewan/Manitoba (57%), and even Ontario (49% approval against 37% disapproval). Even in British Columbia, where two-thirds believe that Emerson should face a new by-election after turning Tory to join Harper's government, the new PM gets a 45% approval rating. Harper wins majorities in all age classes and from both genders as well.

He has a mandate for moving forward. In fact, he may have the most well-supported federal government in recent Canadian history. It will be fascinating to see what Harper can accomplish with it, and how the Canadians react. Stay tuned.

Saddam Hussein attempted to disrupt his trial yet again, in another of his tiresome and pathetic antics in today's session. This time he interrupted the court to announce that he has started a hunger strike to protest the injustice of being held accountable for his crimes:

Saddam Hussein told the court during the latest session of his trial Tuesday that he was on hunger strike to protest tough stances by the chief judge.

The former Iraqi leader shouted his support for Iraqi insurgents, yelling "Long live the mujahedeen," as he entered the courtroom and immediately began a heated exchange with judge Raouf Abdel-Rahman.

"For three days we have been holding a hunger strike protesting against your way in treating us — against you and your masters," Saddam told Abdel-Rahman.

This statement didn't provide all of the comic relief, however. Saddam's co-defendant and half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim, has taken to wearing nothing but underwear to show his contempt for the court. Who knew that Barzan would have so much in common with Larry Flynt?

Apparently, Saddam thinks that starving himself will shock the conscience of the world and garner him some sympathy. Considering all of the children that starved while Saddam pocketed the money intended to feed them, this sounds more like poetic justice. Can we make sure that no one talks Saddam out of his new strategy, please?

It was a year ago today that the First Mate received a pancras transplant that cured her diabetes. That surgery went tremendously well, and for almost an entire year she has not needed an insulin injection or had to test her blood sugars. After more than forty years of living with that dreaded disease, the transplant gave her a new lease on life with complete food independence.

Unfortunately for the FM, she cannot celebrate it much tonight. Her kidney transplant is rapidly failing and it looks as though, barring a miraculous recovery from a polyoma infection, she will need dialysis again soon. Her doctor wants to try one more massive shot of antiviral therapy next week, but after that he says she will need to start planning for a new transplant. Unfortunately, the wait for a cadaver donor in this area takes four to five years on average, which means she will have to hold up through a long trial of dialyzing three times a week.

We had hoped for better news, but unfortunately it is what it is. On the plus side, the polyoma virus does not affect the pancreas, and the FM has been spared that complication. She's feeling down tonight; we couldn't do much for Valentine's Day except eat dinner together and then just relax. She feels all your prayers and wants to thank everyone who's offered them, as well as the kind thoughts and lovely comments.

Note: I also want to send out prayers to John O'Neill, whose wife Anne passed away after a long struggle with chronic illnesses. He sent me some kind words last month of optimism and hope from his experience living with that struggle, and it broke my heart to hear that she passed away last week. Bruce Kesler writes a moving post about Anne on his blog. Her service is tomorrow, and my thoughts and prayers will be with the entire O'Neill family.

Stephen Harper has already made an impact early in his term as Prime Minister on foreign affairs. Distancing himself from Europe in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Harper steered Canada towards the American position on further engagement with the PA:

Future Canadian aid to the Palestinian government will depend on its support for three key benchmarks, says Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

The government of President Mahmoud Abbas must renounce violence, recognize Israel and accept previous Israeli-Palestinian peace agreements, Harper told the Palestinian leader Tuesday during a telephone conversation.

“Future assistance to any new Palestinian government will be reviewed against that government's commitment to the principles of non-violence, recognition of Israel and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations,” Mr. Harper said in a statement released after the phone call.

This common-sense position should surprise no one; as the Canada Press article notes, it follows the same line as the UN Security Council did in its demand to Hamas. However, after Russia's invitation to Hamas for diplomatic exchanges and France's endorsement of their overture, it appears that even the UNSC members cannot abide by those guidelines. It's refreshing to see Canada stand up against terrorism and hold to a tough line with the incoming Palestinian government. After a long interlude where Canadian and American approaches have diverged, this common line promises a new period of partnership.

The American labor movement suffered another blow today as more unions left the AFL-CIO, citing ineffective management, a lack of focus on organizing, and bloated budgets. Over a million members will leave the tottering alliance, leaving the union movement more politically fractured than ever:

The national labor movement suffered a new split yesterday when two major construction unions — the laborers and the operating engineers — announced that they were quitting the Building and Construction Trades Department of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.

The unions also said they would soon announce the creation of a rival building trades group, the National Construction Alliance, that would include the carpenters, the bricklayers, the iron workers and the Teamsters. The new group, officials from the two unions said, would have more than 1.5 million members and would be more vigorous than the Building and Construction Trades Department in unionizing construction workers.

"We cannot stand idly by, tied to a past that promises only further decline for construction workers," said Terence M. O'Sullivan, president of the Laborers International Union of North America, which has 700,000 members. He indicated that his union would soon quit the A.F.L.-C.I.O., following five other unions that have left the federation in the past year.

Mr. O'Sullivan and Vincent J. Giblin, president of the International Union of Operating Engineers, said the Building and Construction Trades Department had been ineffective in stopping a decline in construction union membership. The percentage of construction workers who are unionized has plunged to 13 percent today from 40 percent in 1973.

When the other unions left the alliance earlier, they had many of the same complaints. They also protested that the AFL-CIO had spent far too much of its energy and money in attempts to influence elections instead of organizing workers. The decline in union influence has continued for decades and still accelerates. The lack of penetration into today's labor market creates political conditions where union necessities like closed-shop laws can get overturned and states can pass right-to-work legislation that allows workers to withhold dues from unions regardless of their representation in the workplace.

Part of the issue for unions is that in many industries, they have become an anachronism. The dangers of the workplace now get addressed by government watchdogs like OSHA, and the salary supports come from miminum-wage legislation and local living-wage requirements. Only in areas with inherent dangers do unions make sense, as with coal miners, where the workers cannot wait around for an OSHA inspection to remediate safety issues. In most other areas, unions have lost their grip as government took over protection functions. As a result, unions represent the lowest level of workers in the workforce in decades and have seen their political impact drop dramatically.

The AFL-CIO approach to solving the problem focused on spending more and more money on political campaigning, hoping to elect politicians that would push through labor-friendly legislation. That approach has resulted in fewer wins and more marginalization, with the corresponding decline in membership. The breakaway unions aim to change that dynamic by focusing on increasing membership first, and therefore building more political impact. Neither strategy really deals with the lack of real benefit in organization for most industries and job classes, but the latter approach at least has more hope of success than the AFL-CIO strategy over the last two decades.

In the meantime, the labor split will do nothing to improve their political influence, and will likely damage Democrats' hopes to mount effective Congressional races in those districts that will be competitive this year. The labor vote will be neutered, rendering one of their key constituencies a non-factor in 2006 and perhaps 2008 as well.

Tom Maguire notes that Warren Kinsella, the self-styled "lawyer, consultant and Liberal Party spin-doctor," has filed a libel suit against Mark Bourrie, the proprietor of the Canadian blog Ottawa Watch. The lawsuit, which Bourrie reproduces on his website, involves two actions on Bourrie's part which Kinsella claims "have brought him into hatred, ridicule and contempt[.]" The suit claims:

4. Mr. Bourrie's entry on Ottawa Watch at 4:15 a.m. on January 14, 2006 read, in part:

And they remember Kinsella was executive assistant to Pulis [sic] Works minister (sic] David "I'm entitled to my entitlements" Dingwall. Kinsella was the guy who foisted Chuck Guite on the bureaucracy. He was a key actor in the sponsorship kickback scandal. And that scandal is about half the reason Paul Martin is on the skids.

Kinsella also accuses Bourrie of editing a Wikipedia entry to further libel him:

13. Mr. Bourric has also taken to vindictive tactics. In particular, but without limiting the generality of the foregoing, Mr. Bourrie went to the web site Wikpedia.com which is an on-line encyclopedia that allows viewers to modify entries. The purpose of Wikpedia is to do nothing more than provide readers with relevant background information on various subjects. Mr. Bourrie modified the plaintiff's biography to, inter alia, include the following in relation to the plaintiff's politics.

"Kinsella had his lawyer write a letter threatening libel action against Mark Bourrie, an award-winning; Ottawa Journalist, author and doctoral student, in January 2006, when the journalist published on his blog that Kinsella, when he was a political staffer, was instrumental in the Chretien government's hiring of Chuck Game [note: should be Guité], a key figure in a later political kickback scandal, to run the government's ad system.["]

In regards to the allegation in paragraph 4, it appears that the entire fuss centers on the pronoun he and whether it refers to Guité or to Kinsella. Kinsella argues that Bourrie intended on defaming him as a "major player" in Adscam, but any reasonable reading of the passage appears to clearly reference Guité, not Kinsella, as such. And it isn't as though Kinsella had nothing to do with Adscam or Guité's role in it, although it was more minor. As the Gomery Report notes in one of its seventeen references to Kinsella, he arranged one of the more notorious meetings that made clear that Guité needed to cater to powerful Chrétién cronies (page 284):

As an example of the general impression that Mr. Corriveau was a person of great importance, Mr. Guité recalls an incident in 1994 or 1995 when he was summoned to the office of Mr. Dingwall, then Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, by the latter’s Executive Assistant, Warren Kinsella, who said Mr. Dingwall wanted Mr. Guité to meet someone.2 On arrival, Mr. Dingwall told him that he was going to meet a gentleman named Corriveau who was “a very very close friend of the Prime Minister,” adding, “if ever you find somebody in bed between Jean Chrétien and his wife, it will be Jacques Corriveau,” and that Mr. Guité should “look after him.”This message was repeated on other occasions: “look after this guy” and “look after this firm,” referring to Mr. Corriveau’s business.3

It is interesting to note that when Mr. Guité was introduced to Mr. Corriveau a few minutes later, he was in the company of Jean Lafleur,4 although both Mr. Dingwall and Mr. Kinsella testify that they have never met Mr. Lafleur.5
Mr. Guité has no reason to mislead the Commission about this incident, and his version of it is accepted. It is interesting to speculate about what Mr. Corriveau and Mr. Lafleur may have been discussing, and it is also
interesting to wonder why Mr. Dingwall wanted Mr. Guité to “look after” Mr. Corriveau. Whatever the reasons, Mr. Guité took care to follow Mr. Dingwall’s instructions.6

Nor was that the only effort on Kinsella's part to get Guité more control over advertising monies. On pages 159-161, Gomery reviews a memo that Kinsella wrote trying to throw his weight around and get Guité put in total command of all government communications:

On November 23, 1995, Mr. Kinsella, the Executive Assistant of Mr. Dingwall, who was then Minister of PWGSC, wrote a surprising memorandum to Messrs. Quail and Stobbe, which to be appreciated must be reproduced in full ...

This communication was rightly taken by Mr. Quail to be a highly inappropriate attempt by political staff to interfere in the internal administration of PWGSC, which is entirely within the jurisdiction of the Deputy Minister. The reference to unidentified persons in the PCO and PMO gives the impression that the proposed reorganization of government
communications under Mr. Guité was desired by persons at the highest level. To his credit, Mr. Quail resisted the temptation to take offence ...

The matter died there. Mr. Quail decided that Mr. Kinsella’s memo was a mistake by an inexperienced political staffer who did not know better than to attempt to give direction to a senior public servant on how to organize his department. Mr. Dingwall testifies that he does not remember the incident, but assumes that he must have instructed Mr. Kinsella to write the memo.64 As to why he would have wanted Mr. Guité to be given important new responsibilities, the record is unclear.

But we do know that Mr. Guité and his personnel at APORS were given the whole responsibility for the management and administration of the Sponsorship Program when it came into being in the spring of 1996.
Sponsorship contracts were considered by all concerned to be a form of advertising, and were so defined in Appendix Q , and Mr. Guité was the government’s expert in advertising matters.

When CCSB was created in November 1997, it constituted almost exactly the consolidation of functions that had been advocated by Mr. Kinsella two years previously.

In other words, Kinsella stepped way out of line in attempting to order Quail to put Guité in charge of the advertising for the Sponsorship program -- and Guité eventually became one of the major players in the fraud that wiped out millions from Canadian taxpayers. It may not make Kinsella a major player in the controversy, but it hardly follows that tying Kinsella to Guité creates a libelous situation. Perhaps he didn't push to hire Guité, but the Gomery Report shows that Kinsella spent some effort in promoting him for the top spot.

I expect that Kinsella will regret filing this lawsuit. His role in this scandal appears to have flown under the radar until now, and Bourrie's defense will have a field day answering Kinsella with these quotes.