Daily Kos Endorses Massive Cheating At The 2004 Weblog Awards

Well, this is rather pathetic. The Daily Kos can't be satisfied with acquiring one of the largest readerships in the blogosphere; they now have to make sure that no one with whom they disagree can conduct a fun contest without ruining it for everyone. Charles at LGF discovered the Kos post that instructs its readers how to write a program that bypasses the reasonable controls that Wizbang's Kevin Aylward implemented to restrict voters to one vote per day per computer, and Kos readers have reacted enthusiastically. They openly brag about their little fraud, congratulating each other for cheating and blaming Kevin Aylward for not making his site more secure.

Let's not just chalk this up to blogosphere immaturity, which undeniably exists on both sides of the blogosphere. Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos' proprietor) is an important fundraiser for the Democratic Party, one of the mid-level movers that got a lot of work in front of the cameras during this last campaign. Moulitsas certainly participated in the Democrats' whining about the supposedly "stolen election" in Florida often enough. Now, this Democratic Party operative is openly encouraging voter fraud for a simple web award that carries no other reward than honor -- a prize that will escape The Daily Kos no matter how many votes they manufacture in this contest.

It's the equivalent of bringing a marked deck to a poker game with matchsticks for stakes. It reveals Moulitsas' character more than anything he writes for his site. Isn't it odd that the same people who claim that Republicans and conservatives spend their time ginning up new and creative ways to cheat in elections have no qualms about screwing Kevin out of an opportunity to do something fun for the entire blogosphere? If not odd, their ease and pride in cheating is certainly instructive.

My friend Rocket Man at Power Line puts it exactly right. Both Rocket and I spent a week with Kevin at the Republican Convention and saw how much effort and pride he puts into his work. It's sad and pathetic that the Kos community takes such delight in pissing on the manger, so to speak, so that no one can enjoy the contest in quite the same way again.

In fact, it's not sad and pathetic ... the people who endorse, commit, or cheer this puerile and meanspirited activity are sad and pathetic. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Having Fun With The Taxpayers League

I came into the studio early for today's Northern Alliance radio show, doing a bit of prep for today's topics, and my friends David Strom and Margaret Martin invited me in for a segment on the Taxpayers League. We chatted about the ridiculous editorial in today's Star Tribune calling Norm Coleman an embarrassment for having the nerve to demand accountability from Kofi Annan for presiding over the worst financial scandal in history, and had a great time laughing about the cluelessness of the editors at the Strib.

Afterwards, I spoke with Dwight Rabuse and I'll also be guesting on his show in the third segment (11:34 CT, on the same stream as our link above) to talk about blogging. If you're interested in how to get your feet wet with your own blog, be sure to tune in. Afterwards, the entire Northern Alliance gang will be in for the normal insanity from noon to 3 PM CT. We'll also be filling in for Hugh Hewitt on Tuesday and Thursday of this week, so be sure to tune us in then as well.

If you get a chance, be sure to check out the 2004 Weblog Awards. So far, I've managed to maintain a lead over LaShawn Barber, a terrific blogger, but there's plenty of voting left (eight days, in fact). Cast a vote every day for all of your favorite bloggers in the multitude of categories provided.

What's The Strib Afraid Of?

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune unleashes its venom on Senator Norm Coleman, who had the audacity (in the Strib's view) to demand accountability from the United Nations and its leader, Kofi Annan. Indulging in its usual namecalling by labeling Coleman an "embarrassment", the Strib seems particularly unhappy that the US has launched an investigation into the world's largest financial-corruption scandal:

The ostensible reason for seeking Annan's resignation? It was on his watch that Saddam Hussein diverted billions from the U.N.-run oil-for-food program designed to relieve the humanitarian burden on Iraqis suffering as a consequence of U.N. sanctions.

Note that no one has the slightest whiff of proof that Annan knew about, condoned or profited from this scandal. Furthermore, when the scandal surfaced, Annan appointed former Fed chairman and man of impeccable honor Paul Volcker to thoroughly investigate the matter. Volcker's report, which both he and Annan have promised will be made public, is still a work in progress.

As Hindrocket at Power Line writes today, the Strib never supports its idea that Annan has been a "splendid" public servant. Instead of offering any evidence of that, the editorial attacks conservatives for attacking the UN as punishment for its opposition to our actions in Iraq, and calls Coleman a lackey for the right in this effort.

Let's think about that for a moment. The United Nations refused to enforce sixteen of its own resolutions, including the supposed ultimatum of 1441, because it argued that the sanctions regime worked to keep Saddam "in his box". George Bush and Tony Blair disagreed; they had some intelligence that Saddam had circumvented the sanctions and was trading oil for arms and doing some skimming as well. The UN tried to stonewall the US and UK, especially Russia, China, and France. Newspapers, including the Strib, argued vehemently that the US had no business initiating military action against Iraq without explicit UNSC approval, basing part of their argument on the sanctions regime rendering the Iraqi threat as minimal.

Only after we captured Baghdad did we find differently. Once the US and UK had the Iraqi Intelligence Services files in their possession, they determined that Saddam wasn't just cheating on oil sales and arms -- he had built a huge apparatus of corruption that included the same people who tried to stop us from going into Baghdad in the first place. Russia, China, and France, not coincidentally the same nations that threatened to veto any enforcement of 1441, stuffed $21 billion dollars into Saddam's pockets through the Oil-For-Food program. The man who Kofi Annan appointed to run the program, and who only reported to Annan, became one of the corruption's beneficiaries, scoring millions on under-the-table oil futures for his astigmatism on OFF corruption. And let's not forget that Annan's own son, Kojo, continued to receive kickbacks from a Swiss firm implicated in the corruption well after he supposedly terminated his relationship there.

Yes, Kofi Annan appointed Paul Volcker to look into the corruption. However, Volcker has no subpoena authority and can only ask people for cooperation into the his investigation. Moreoever, Volcker is not allowed to release the report publicly; he must deliver it to Annan, who then can make any portion of it public that he wishes. He could also choose to keep any portion private. Annan has no accountability whatsoever in his position and he will suffer no penalty if he deep-sixes anything personally embarrassing to himself or his family. Is that the kind of independent investigation that satisfies the Strib's editorial board?

The UN receives approximately one-quarter of its funding from the United States. The American taxpayer pays for this multilateral forum despite a long history of anti-American rhetoric and the overwhelming majority of kleptocracies and dictatorships that comprise the UN. It is entirely appropriate for the US Senate to investigate the use of our funds when the corruption at Turtle Bay has been proven so widespread, so deep, and so breathtaking.

What does the Strib fear from Coleman's efforts? It knows that its editorial position of relying on the sanctions regime will embarrass the Strib when the corruption is completely revealed. The nations that the Strib insisted were our allies instead were busily selling us out. Their beloved UN was busily allowing Saddam to steal food from the mouths of Iraqi children in order to stuff bank accounts around the world, and probably to fund terrorist activities. (Saddam regularly sent money to suicide bombers and their families with the cash.)

In short, the Coleman investigation will reveal the Strib's editorial board to be nothing more than an idiotic, knee-jerk leftist group who will support any corruption as long as it serves the interest of those who oppose Republicans. Coleman isn't the embarrassment here.

The Chinese Indulge In Self-Delusion

In contradiction to earlier reports, China will not allow foreign newspapers to circulate in the Communist nation, which has long tried to close itself off from Western influences. However, they will permit foreign publications to take advantage of cheap Chinese labor and print their newspapers strictly for export:

Foreign newspapers have been given the green light to print in China but they will not be allowed to circulate on the domestic market.

"Foreign newspapers can be printed in China, but all should be exported," Zhu Weifeng, an official with the State Press and Publication Administration (SPPA) told the China Business Weekly.

This "means they are made for export for an international market, so not one copy should be left to enter the Chinese market ... the circulation of overseas newspapers will remain forbidden in China, in the near future."

Beijing has to be in full-blown denial if they really think that China can somehow ensure that "not one copy" will enter the underground market. Those who have worked at printers will remember that copies wind up everywhere, especially those poor copies that can be read but don't meet customer specifications. It's possible to secure against some of the unintended distribution that one gets at commercial printers, but it requires a lockdown and security procedure that rapidly eats into the fat profit that the Chinese hope to earn from these business ventures.

Using a printing press to earn money while forbidding their own citizens the freedom to read what's printed is pretty ironic, and completely self-defeating. Eventually these newspapers will get out, and the populace will suddenly have other sources of information besides the official government news. I think the Chinese are deluding themselves for a few dollars in profit, and they will find the irony more and more bitter as their experiment in the free press backfires on them.

Another Spirit Of America Update

I want to thank everyone who's already donated to the Spirit of America Blogger Challenge on behalf of the Northern Alliance. So far, our team has raised over $7,000, most of that before the challenge had even officially begun. Our competition now is Castle Arrgh!, a team that has raised over $3,000. It all goes to an excellent organization that helps American servicepeople to rebuild Iraq, both physically and in friendship with the United States.

Please give what you can to this worthy charity.

Welcome To Terroristland! It's A Small World (Domination) After All

The London Telegraph reports that Afghanistan plans to make money off of the war that liberated the country from the oppressive rule of the Taliban -- by transforming the notorious hideout of al-Qaeda in the mountains into a tourist trap:

The Afghan authorities plan to invigorate the country's fledgling tourist industry by developing Osama bin Laden's Tora Bora mountain hideout as a visitor attraction.

Dr Hassamuddin Hamrah, the man in charge, believes that the caves which once housed bin Laden and his fighters, together with the remains of mangled Russian tanks and crashed helicopter gunships from the 1980s, will prove a tourist magnet. ...

"We have plans to make a tourist site at the Tora Bora caves. Many Americans wish to go there," Dr Hamrah said. "Our main problem is lack of budget so we are approaching the private sector. We request that anybody, any company, who is interested should contact us."

He added that three Japanese tour company bosses had already visited the site, high in the White Mountains near Jalalabad.

Don't get me wrong; I don't begrudge the Afghanis any honest effort to build a free-market economy. Somehow, though, I have trouble visualizing Tora Bora Land, complete with rides and concession stands in an area that the US military found to be almost inaccessible. Besides, the atmosphere has to be pretty grim in that area, with tribal warriors not far away in Pakistan and the continuing presence of NATO troops to guard against any reinfiltration.

The Afghanis are looking for investors. I wonder if Disney has any interest in that location for a Southwest Asia Disneyworld? They could build a separate, nearby zone and call it the Taliban Adventure, where no one gets to sing or play and roving bands of morality police beat you senseless if you laugh. At the main park -- the one called Terroristland -- the atmosphere could be much more loose, with a song on everyone's lips:

It's a world of torture with lots of deaths,
it's a hopeless world full of cut-off heads,
There's the evil we share
As we bomb everywhere
We're Al Qaeda, after all!

Sounds like a wonderful idea. I know many people want to spend their leisure time taking the Lunatic Bombthrowers Tour. With any luck, the Afghanis can corner the market.

Brave Sir Robin Wonders At Snub (Updated!)

The Star Tribune reports that Senator Mark Dayton alleges that Republicans denied him a trip to Iraq in order to undermine his chances for re-election in 2006. Dayton cannot comprehend a single reason why Republicans would have bypassed him for a slot on the fact-finding tour and the denial of permission to travel separately:

Sen. Mark Dayton wants to make a return trip to Iraq, but his request has been denied, the Minnesota Democrat said Wednesday.

Dayton speculated that his request was denied by the Senate Armed Services Committee because he has criticized President Bush's handling of the war and because he's up for reelection in 2006.

"Either one of those reasons is absolutely wrong, and unjust and unwarranted, and I regret very much the committee's decision," he said in a conference call with reporters.

Perhaps he should re-read the transcripts from his participation in the Abu Ghraib hearings in Congress earlier this year. Scolding General Richard Myers and Don Rumsfeld for sending materiel to a war zone in support of troops under fire does not build one's credibility for fact-finding missions:

You're increasing the number of forces, the number of tanks over there. How can this have anything to do but to escalate the level of violence, the opposition of Iraqis, intensify the hatred across the Arab world to the United States, and more atrocities? How can this have any result other than to put us deeper into this situation and make the conditions there worse for our forces and for our nation and for the world?

Of course, that may not be the reason, although it certainly qualifies as a good reason to keep Dayton as far away from the troops in Iraq as possible. (Can you imagine introducing him to the men and women serving over there? "Let me now introduce the man who questioned why we send tanks in combat zones -- Minnesota'a Mark Dayton!" I doubt we'd get a "hoo-yah" on that one.) It could have been an act of kindness on behalf of both Republicans and Democrats that kept Brave Sir Dayton firmly on US soil. After all, the mere hint of danger sent this brave Senator scurrying back to his Minnesota hidey-hole, the only member of Congress to close his DC offices from fear of a terrorist attack:

Dayton acted after reading a classified memo that was available to all U.S. senators, but said he couldn't discuss its contents. Nevertheless, few _ if any _ other Senate or House lawmakers followed suit, and many were startled by Dayton's actions.

The Washington offices of U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., remains open.

A senior FBI official said that while the bureau remains concerned about an attack before the November election, there is no new information pointing to a time or place. There is also no specific information pointing to an attack on Capitol Hill, the FBI official said.

His bizarre stunt -- which some speculated might have been intended to help John Kerry's campaign by underscoring the remaining terrorist threat against the US -- brought strong reactions from members of his own party:

The surprising response by the freshman senator from Minnesota to the latest in a series of warnings prompted ridicule and a flurry of angry reactions yesterday. Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) said Dayton's decision was "ill-informed." Minnesota's senior senator, Norm Coleman (R), called Dayton reckless. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) compared him to the boy who cried wolf. Colleagues on both sides of the aisle whispered "paranoid." ...

"He's damaged us. He's unnecessarily panicked people across the United States," said Norton, who has often questioned the federal government's security moves in the capital. "Now we have a member of Congress who steps out and says, 'I'm going to tell you something the rest of Congress won't tell you.' That's unfair to the entire security network that is in constant communication about this place."

Paranoid and panicky -- just the kind of man you want tagging along with you in a tense neighborhood. Besides, voters have to ask themselves why Dayton is so keen on going to Baghdad -- still a dangerous place -- when he couldn't muster up the guts to stick around DC a few weeks ago. It sounds like Brave Sir Dayton wants to burnish up his record a bit before 2006, which makes his request to join the group much more political than their wise decision to decline.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt gave this post a long mention on his show, and he challenged me to come up with a photo of Brave Sir Dayton. I'll be using this often in the next two years as his re-election campaign kicks in ...

UPDATE II: Dayton appears to have solved his travel woes:

Earlier this week Sen. Mark Dayton fumed about being left off a Senate trip to Iraq, but on Friday said he's found a way to get there.

The Minnesota Democrat told a KFGO-AM audience that he'll join Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., and others on a trip to Iraq and other nations in January.

I hope the other guys don't tease him about his Kevlar underwear ...

Ed Rendell Puts The Anal In Analysis

Jim Geraghty at the Kerry Spot points out an example of Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell's brilliance on the Paula Zahn show last night. In discussing the results of the presidential election, the Democrat offered this jaw-dropping analysis (emphasis mine):

ZAHN: The president also relied on inside-the-beltway talent. Was the difference Karl Rove and he just had a better strategy? It's not like the president didn't rely on people who live in that neck of the woods.

RENDELL: Yes, although I think the Republicans do a much better job of listening to the grassroots, of listening to the constituents, of listening to people from all different geographic areas, and we don't.

Now, look, I'm not going to wring my hands over this election. If 9/11 had never happened, John Kerry would be president-elect today. I have no doubt about that.

Wow -- what a breakthrough in political analysis! If only history hadn't happened, John Kerry would be president! Rendell fails to mention that the Democrats had actually been informed of the 9/11 attacks. Supposedly, if they thought this event might affect the election, they could have developed policies that would help voters trust that Kerry would actually stand up to the terrorists and their apologists.

You know, it's just a thought. But then, I don't have Ed Rendell's legendary analytic skills.

Here's more of Ed Rendell's political insight:

* If the Republicans had hired better burglars in 1972, Spiro Agnew would have become President in 1976.

* If Teheran didn't exist, Jimmy Carter would have been re-elected to the presidency despite not having been elected in the first place.

* If Ronald Reagan had actually gotten the lead for Casablanca, Fred MacMurray would have become President in the 1980s, ushering in the Golden Age Of Sweaters.

* If George H.W. Bush hadn't tried so hard to push hearing-impaired voters to the polls ("read my lips"), Bill Clinton would still have been pursuing tawdry affairs from female subordinates. He just would have done it in the executive offices of a law firm, where that kind of thing belongs.

* If Al Gore had actually created the Internet, John Kerry wouldn't have had a chance to run for President until 2008.

* If Ed Rendell had anything interesting to say, he wouldn't be appearing on the Paula Zahn show.

Ukrainian Supreme Court Invalidates Election

The Ukrainian Supreme Court has invalidated the second round of the presidential election that has led to a ten-day political crisis in the former Soviet republic. Its ruling also dealt a blow to recent political machinations by the outgoing Leonid Kuchma government by setting a new runoff election between Viktor Yanukovych and Viktor Yushchenko for December 26th:

The Supreme Court declared the results of Ukraine's disputed presidential run-off election invalid and ruled Friday that a repeat vote should be held by Dec. 26, bringing cheers from tens of thousands of opposition supported massed in Kiev's main square.

The short timeframe set for a new vote appeared to rule out the possibility of holding an entirely new election, as sought by outgoing President Leonid Kuchma.

Unless Kuchma can get the Rada to overrule the Supreme Court on the election timing, this decision essentially checkmates Kuchma and Yanukovych. No one believes that Yanukovych can win a replay of the runoff election, especially not after the Kuchma government's attempted steal of the last one. Unless Kuchma calls in the Russians, he's toast and so is his protege.

Keep checking at SCSU Scholars for more news and context as it becomes available ...

2004 Weblog Awards: Voting Begins! (Update)

Kevin Aylward at Wizbang has the 2004 Weblog Awards polls up and running, and blog enthusiasts can cast one vote per day per category. Captain's Quarters has been included as a finalist in at least one category, Best Conservative Blog, and in the extremely early stages, I have a small lead over some very tough competition. I may qualify for one more, Best of the Top 100, although that may wind up capturing some who didn't make the cut in other specific categories. I'll double-check later. (I am a contributor for a group blog, Blogs for Bush, that received at least two nominations in other categories.)

I hope you'll take a look at the embarrassment of riches Kevin supplies for people to explore the blogosphere in more depth. Later on I may publish my votes in different categories, but for now I just want to congratulate those who have been nominated along with me. Pennywit, for example, posts frequent and challenging comments and is just a very nice guy, even though we often disagree. He got nominated in the Best Liberal Blog category. I know Power Line also received multiple nominations, and there are plenty of others.

The contest runs until December 15th. Be sure to check it out!

UPDATE, 12/3: As Kevin explains in the comments to this post, the nominations this year restricted blogs to mostly just one category, which is why voters see some of the matchups they do. I think that's a wonderful idea, and it allows a lot of excellent bloggers to get more exposure and more recognition for their great work.

So far, I've been fortunate enough to build up an early lead against some very tough competition for Best Conservative Blog. Thanks to everyone who's voting for CQ ... and I hope you continue to do so, both at the Weblog Awards and by your visits here.

Hamas Softens Its Stance On Israel

For the first time, Hamas announced that the radical terrorist group would work towards coexistence with Israel and support a Palestinian state in the West Bank, even as their leader called it a "stage", the AP reports from Ramallah:

In an apparent change in long-standing policy, a top Hamas leader said Friday the militant group would accept the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well as a long-term truce with Israel. ...

"Hamas has announced that it accepts a Palestinian independent state within the 1967 borders with a long-term truce," Sheik Hassan Yousef, the top Hamas leader in the West Bank, told The Associated Press, referring to lands Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war.

Yousef said the Hamas position was new and called it a "stage." In the past, Hamas has said it would accept a state in the 1967 borders as a first step to taking over Israel. Yousef did not spell out the conditions for the renewable cease-fire nor did he say how long it would last.

"For us a truce means that two warring parties live side by side in peace and security for a certain period and this period is eligible for renewal," Yousef said. "That means Hamas accepts that the other party will live in security and peace."

This represents a stunning change of direction for Hamas, which swore to boycott the upcoming Palestinian elections as it considered the PA an Israeli construct and a PLO sellout. Of course, Hamas has been hammered by Israel over the past year or more, with their new policy of total war on Hamas leadership creating a revolving door at the top. With their top men getting killed, Israeli intelligence obviously getting excellent information on their security, and the flow of funds decreasing due to the American efforts to stem the flow of cash to terrorist organizations, Hamas needed to adapt in order to survive.

No doubt that this is an encouraging sign, as is Hamas' offer to explore a truce for the Palestinian election and beyond. However, two points should be kept in mind. First, Yousef's characterization of this new approach as a "stage" recalls Yasser Arafat's widely-recognized strategy of establishing a Palestinian state in the West Bank only as a pretense for pushing Israel into the Mediterranean. The "stage" remark may have just been a sop to more radical Hamas factions, but Yousef has to take some concrete steps to assure Israel that his offer isn't another Arafatish Trojan horse.

Next, Hamas is not the only terrorist operation in the West Bank and Gaza. Islamic Jihad also operates rather freely, especially in Gaza, and the Hamas offer may just provide a front for it to join in negotiations while Islamic Jihad continues its terror operations against Israel. If so, any Israeli response to this provocation would allow Hamas to claim itself a wounded party and act in kind. This won't fool anyone except the Palestinians themselves, but that's the target marked for Hamas.

On another note, the AP reports that Egypt's Hosni Mubarak has also changed his tune regarding Israel's Ariel Sharon:

Hamas' statement came as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak described Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as the Palestinians' best chance for peace.

Mubarak's comments could mean warming relations between Israel and an important Mideast peace mediator at a crucial time. It was a marked departure from past comments from Mubarak and other Egyptian officials blaming Sharon for the escalation of violence in the territories.

"I think if they (Palestinians) can't achieve progress in the time of the current (Israeli) prime minister, it will be very difficult to make any progress in peace," Mubarak told reporters.

After more than twenty years of Arab vilification, Mubarak's endorsement of Sharon's government may be even more amazing than Hamas' reversal. Again, Sharon's unilateral proposal to withdraw from Gaza may be paying some diplomatic dividends, and no doubt Mubarak could have had an impact on Hamas' new direction; at the least, he could have threatened to cut off any support for their organization if they didn't start playing ball. Mubarak doesn't need to see any more Tabas in the short years he has left.

I also think that Mubarak realizes that, like Nixon going to Red China, only Sharon has the credibility on the Israeli right to deliver a peace plan. With Sharon's political troubles at home, he also sees that if Sharon is to have the opportunity to deliver, it has to be very soon.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! I share Glenn's view about the big "if". However, if peace ever does come, it will have to start with the big ifs. Verification and progressive ties are the keys to determining whether this is a genuine shift in policy or a momentary shift in tactics.

Who Hired Cornelia Spinner?

Washington DC often complains about its Constitutional status as a protectorate of the federal government and its inability to produce representation to Congress. The city has long campaigned for statehood, a move resisted by a Congress loathe to go through an amendment process and blocked by Republicans who see no need to give Democrats two easy seats in the Senate. Washingtonians don't make their case any easier with their inept management of their city government, either; they notoriously continued to elect Marion Barry to leadership positions despite the repeated embarrassment he caused in office.

The Washington Times reports this morning on another scandal to hit DC. The former director of their education office, who resigned in scandal after an audit found fraudulent travel reimbursements and misuse of federal funds, managed to get another job in education with the city at a six-figure salary -- and no one can figure out who hired her:

The former director of the D.C. State Education Office (SEO) who quit five months ago amid charges of mismanagement was rehired within months to another city government post with a six-figure salary. Cornelia V. "Connie" Spinner resigned June 30 as director of the education office, where city auditors uncovered improprieties in travel expenses and misuse of federal grant dollars. But she was hired Aug. 16 for a $105,393-a-year job running an adult-literacy program, which the city moved that month from SEO jurisdiction to the University of the District of Columbia (UDC). ...

The new job provided Ms. Spinner with fewer responsibilities but a paycheck nearly matching the $105,579 per year that she gave up at the education office. She went from running an agency with an $81 million budget, about 50 employees and 7 programs, to overseeing a single program with a $2 million budget and about 21 employees.

After Spinner's miraculous -- and pricey -- resurrection to a city management post, the mayor's office spent a day trying to determine who hired her back. Mayor Anthony Williams' spokesperson, Sharon Gang, announced that it wasn't them and they had no authority to hire anyone into the position:

"Here's what I found out," Ms. Gang said. "When it was determined that the adult-literacy program would be more appropriately housed and run by UDC, Connie Spinner was hired as a university employee to run the program. She has prior experience in the field of adult education and is qualified to administer the program from UDC."

She has prior experience with funds disappearing, too, which one would think should have an impact on whether a candidate is "qualified" to administer any government program. Apparently, in DC at least, creativity is coveted more than honesty and competecncy.

As for the UDC, no one over there wants to take credit for providing Ms. Spinner with a chance at rehabilitation, either:

"Ms. Spinner came to the university to run the adult-literacy program in the same capacity she held when the program fell under District control," [UDC spokesman] Mr. Andrews said. "The university hired her because she came with the grant that supported the program."

Perhaps DC should hire Ms. Spinner as a procurement agent instead of an education manager. She managed to only lose $200 while whittling her budget responsibilities by 96% and cutting her staff by almost 60%. She should negotiate my terms of employment!

The incompetence of the DC leadership structure should warn Americans from giving DC politicians any higher status than they've managed to achieve. If DC continues to elect drug addicts and appoint incompetents and frauds, none of whom can even keep adequate HR records to determine who hired whom for key management positions, they're clearly incompetent to join Congress. And let me tell you, that's an insult that hurts.

UPDATE: The salary difference was $200, not $2,000 as I originally wrote. I've corrected the post. (Hat tip: krm)

Bush Picks Up Myers' Support For Intelligence Bill

George Bush has decided to make another push to get the intelligence-reform bill through Congress, and he now has new support to undercut objections from GOP House members that have blocked its passage. Joint Chiefs chair General Richard Myers, whose objections have been used to stall the bill from coming to the house floor, announced yesterday that a Congressional conference session addressed all of his concerns and that he now supports its passage:

An Oct. 21 letter written by Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has until now been used by House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) to strengthen opposition to the measure on the ground that it could harm the country's war fighters. ...

"The issue that I commented on, I understand, has been worked satisfactorily in the conference report," Myers said at a breakfast with reporters yesterday. "That part has been accommodated," he said, adding: "I haven't seen the specific language." ...

Bush will reportedly also attempt in his letter to deal with the opposition of House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), who has pressed for the inclusion in the measure of a number of immigration and law enforcement provisions, some of which were opposed by Senate members and were dropped from the compromise bill.

Bush's letter, the administration and congressional sources said, will express support for several of Sensenbrenner's proposals but will say he is pleased that the more controversial issues were dropped for consideration next year.

It would appear that Bush has cut the legs off of Duncan Hunter and probably James Sensenbrenner and will get House speaker Denny Hastert to finally produce the bill for a vote. I believe that the reforms included in this bill will prove damaging to intelligence analysis rather than beneficial, and in the immediate aftermath of the election, I don't see the necessity for rushing it through Congress. The additional bureaucracy it creates will only impede the flow of information to the President and narrow down the options available to him even further than our existing structure does.

However, with Myers withdrawing his objections, I don't see Hunter being able to stand up to an undeniable majority in the House who want to vote on the bill. I expect it to pass Congress in the next week or so and for Bush to sign it into law before Christmas. Congress and the White House, having created this bureaucratic behemoth, will have to watch it carefully to ensure it does not create new breakdowns in intelligence analysis -- or we may find ourselves waiting on another commission report to explain why Washington DC suddenly disappeared in a flash of light.

Ukrainian Rada Presses To Abandon Iraq

In an unpleasant side effect of an otherwise delightful progression of open democracy in Ukraine, the newly-emboldened Rada demanded that the Kuchma government withdraw Ukraine's 1600-troop contingent from Iraq, an unwelcome development so close to the Iraqi elections:

Ukraine's parliament voted to demand the withdrawal of the 1,600 Ukrainian troops from Iraq, the Interfax news agency reported.

The lawmakers voted by 257 out of 397 present in the 450-member chamber to ask outgoing President Leonid Kuchma to pull out the Ukrainian contingent serving in the US-led coalition force in Iraq.

The demand mirrors opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko's campaign position on the war and demonstrates the level of support and courage the Orange Movement has gained in the assembly. As a vote of no-confidence for Kuchma, it's pretty convincing -- roughly a 5:3 ratio of those members in attendance and a 55% majority overall. It gives more evidence that the credibility of the Kuchma government has crumbled.

The vote may cause the ardor for a Yushchenko victory in the political crisis to dim in the White House a bit; it certainly provides an opportunity for Vladimir Putin to smirk an "I told you so" to George Bush. However, as I wrote before, Bush has remained steadfast in his policy of supporting democracy, wherever that road leads. The Ukrainians give the Iraq situation a doubly ironic twist, though, in that they stuck with the effort to democratize Iraq as long as democracy remained an illusion for the Ukrainians. The moment that they've grasped democracy in their hands and have a good chance of retaining it, they vote to abandon Iraq to terrorists and unreconstructed Saddam loyalists.

Crazy world.

Palestinian Leadership Opposes Barghouti

In a sign that the Palestinians may finally be getting serious about making peace and establishing a stable state in the West Bank, leading Palestinians spoke out against the announced candidacy of Marwan Barghouti, the terrorist mastermind currently serving multiple life sentences in Israel. The New York Times reports in tomorrow's edition that influential Palestinians openly rejected Barghouti's entry into the presidential election:

Senior Palestinian figures in the main political group, Fatah, closed ranks on Thursday against the on-again off-again presidential candidacy of the popular Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison.

The old guard was joined by some prominent younger Fatah militants of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, who once saw Mr. Barghouti, 45, as their leader, but now criticize him for putting himself above Palestinian unity.

Outspoken opposition from Israel, including a refusal to release Barghouti and to use him as a negotiating partner, surprises no one. More surprising was the rejection by Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. But the reactions of leading Palestinians have proven most shocking, as they reject a chance to put Israel in a highly defensive position by forcing Barghouti on them. Instead, they've reacted almost angrily at Barghouti's late candidacy and intent on pushing him to withdraw:

Senior Palestinians said there would be new efforts to persuade Mr. Barghouti to withdraw his candidacy. Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian foreign minister, said, "He might later on decide to withdraw in favor of the Fatah candidate, Mahmoud Abbas, to whom he has already pledged his support and total cooperation."

Hatem Abdel Kader, a Palestinian legislator who is close to Mr. Barghouti, said, "We will do all we can in coming days to convince Marwan to remove his candidacy to avoid a split in Fatah."

Tayeb Abdel Rahim, who ran Mr. Arafat's cabinet and is a member of the Fatah central committee, said Mr. Barghouti would have to quit Fatah if he ran as an independent.

Clearly Mahmoud Abbas gets the support for his ability to open doors with Israel, even with the hated Ariel Sharon. This may well vindicate Sharon's insistence on a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. Even if internal Israeli politics derail or delay the pullout, Sharon's signal made it clear that he and Israel are ready to deal with the right Palestinian leadership to finally resolve the four-decade standoff. It also vindicates the Bush Administration's refusal to meet with Yasser Arafat, as his own organization after his death appears to be pressing for a complete reversal of Arafat's strategy, showing that Arafat himself had been the chief obstacle to a peace agreement.

Unfortunately, if Fatah cannot convince Barghouti to withdraw, the Palestinian electorate may not share the Fatah ambition to cut a deal with Israel as quickly as possible. Barghouti enjoys tremendous popularity as a living martyr for the cause, while Abbas did little to affect the suffering of Palestinians during his short tenure as prime minister. With Fatah's endorsement and the Hamas boycott, Abbas may squeak it out -- but such a result would call any mandate for negotiations into doubt. Abbas needs a landslide, and Barghouti would at the least rob him of that. Expect to see more explicit calls for Barghouti's withdrawal over the next few weeks.

Boxer Goes Pro With Her Fiction

The AP reports that Barbara Boxer has broadened her fantasy world beyond her Senate voting record. Boxer will publish her first novel next autumn, a thriller with a leftist Senate heroine and an eeeeeeeeeevil conservatives as antagonists:

Infighting and power, alliances and revenge — it's just another day in the Capitol. California Sen. Barbara Boxer has mined her workplace for a suspense novel in which the main character is an activist senator who does battle with right-wing ideologues.

That may sound familiar to anyone who knows the liberal Democrat's record. But Boxer said the as-yet-unnamed novel, her first, is purely a work of fiction, though the characters and scenes are drawn from her 12 years in the Senate.

"A lot of what is in the book clearly comes from my world," Boxer said. "The clash of the political and the personal, it became very interesting to me, and the role of the media in all of this. And so I took all of those things and I wrote a story."

The main antagonist is a right-wing journalist, an "idealogue" that certainly sprang from Boxer's fevered imagination. Boxer declined to mention how much Chronicle paid her in advance to publish her tome, but perhaps one of the three right-wing idealogues in the real-life mainstream media can find out how much she received for a first novel.

Perhaps I'm being a bit too tough on Ms. Boxer. It's possible that she makes a better author than politician. In fact, I'd say that's almost a lock.

A Manifesto Of Irrelevancy, As Suspected

Earlier this week, when the New York Times provided analysis of the report from a blue-ribbon panel appointed by Kofi Annan to recommend changes to the United Nations, I expressed a great deal of skepticism about the result. Others, including Glenn Reynolds, noted that the report appeared to legitimize pre-emptive military action, in Glenn's case based on a quick analysis by the University of Pittsburgh law school.

However, in reading the actual report, it's clear that the UN intends on stripping nations of their sovereign right to defend themselves by requiring Security Council approval for any pre-emptive military action. A read through paragraphs 188 - 198 demonstrates that the panel basically took John Kerry's global test and plugged it into their report:

189. Can a State, without going to the Security Council, claim in these circumstances the right to act, in anticipatory self-defence, not just pre-emptively (against an imminent or proximate threat) but preventively (against a non-imminent or non-proximate one)? Those who say “yes” argue that the potential harm from some threats (e.g., terrorists armed with a nuclear weapon) is so great that one simply cannot risk waiting until they become imminent, and that less harm may be done (e.g., avoiding a nuclear exchange or radioactive fallout from a reactor destruction) by acting earlier.

190. The short answer is that if there are good arguments for preventive military action, with good evidence to support them, they should be put to the Security Council, which can authorize such action if it chooses to. If it does not so choose, there will be, by definition, time to pursue other strategies, including persuasion, negotiation, deterrence and containment - and to visit again the military option.

191. For those impatient with such a response, the answer must be that, in a world full of perceived potential threats, the risk to the global order and the norm of non-intervention on which it continues to be based is simply too great for the legality of unilateral preventive action, as distinct from collectively endorsed action, to be accepted. Allowing one to so act is to allow all.

The report explicitly states that only the UNSC can legitimize the use of force, transforming the organization from a multilateral forum to a superstate, eclipsing national governments and sovereignty:

196. It may be that some States will always feel that they have the obligation to their own citizens, and the capacity, to do whatever they feel they need to do, unburdened by the constraints of collective Security Council process. But however understandable that approach may have been in the cold war years, when the United Nations was manifestly not operating as an effective collective security system, the world has now changed and expectations about legal compliance are very much higher.

197. One of the reasons why States may want to bypass the Security Council is a lack of confidence in the quality and objectivity of its decision-making. The Council’s decisions have often been less than consistent, less than persuasive and less than fully responsive to very real State and human security needs. But the solution is not to reduce the Council to impotence and irrelevance: it is to work from within to reform it, including in the ways we propose in the present report.

In other words, they want states to defer to the UN while it goes about improving the process, leaving the lives and safety of its citizens to an admittedly corrupt and broken process. But don't worry about it, the panel assures us -- we'll get better. Eventually.

People will look at these paragraphs and rightly wonder why this can't work, at least in principle. Mainly I would reply that the UNSC has no history of success, only of failure, and the twelve-year quagmire in Iraq makes a pretty good example, as does Rwanda, Darfur, Srebrenica, and other recent tragedies. Mostly, though, the problem arises from the structure of the UN. It represents only the governments of its members, has no accountability, and reeks of corruption. Americans created a representative democracy for good reasons -- so that when government failed, we could hold our leaders responsible for their actions. The UN lacks even the mechanisms for holding its officers accountable.

I'll be reviewing the rest of this document later tonight, after a board meeting I have to attend, and I'll post more thoughts at that time.

The Protocols Of The Soulless Of Groningen

Hugh Hewitt addresses the Groningen Protocol debate in his latest Weekly Standard on-line column, "Death By Committee". Hugh has led what little media attention that Groningen Academic Hospital's announcement of killing four babies has generated, and he marvels at the sharp outbreak of widespread apathy he sees:

Incredibly, the nation's elite media has turned a collective blind eye to this story, though the Los Angeles Times did, on the day following the Drudge headline, find time to put on the paper's front page, above the fold, the story that Salmon and Steelhead May Lose Protection, but not a column inch of ink for a radical leap past Kevorkian land into the regions of Mengele.

LAST WEEK I marveled at the casual manner with which the Target Corporation announced that the Salvation Army could no longer place its kettles and ring its bells outside the giant retailer's 1,500+ stores. It was a callous and Scrooge-like act, one that I and thousands of others found sufficiently appalling as to oblige us not to shop at the store this season. I noted the irony of a retailer grown fat on Christmas gift sales tossing the charity most closely aligned with the public's image of Christmas spirit.

How foolish to imagine that actions such as Target's would offend greatly when protocol's such as Groningen's pass without comment before the eyes of editorialists and talking heads.

The reason that the Groningen Protocol fails to rouse much interest relates more to its banality than anything else. We have been killing unborn humans legally for over thirty years in the United States, sublimating any sense of value in their humanity for the expediency of casting off responsibility for them. One can argue that Roe v. Wade caused this, but to be honest, the US had moved inexorably to legalize abortion through legislation before the 1973 decision. If it were set aside today, Congress and most states would immediately ratify abortion, albeit with varying restrictions.

The lack of widespread horror following Groningen's announcement betrays a world where human life only matters for its commercial value, not as a sacred or unique gift. Even the revelation that Groningen proposes to kill children it deems too inconvenient to live despite their parents' wishes, up to age 12, fails to shock a world desensitized to humanity and wrapped up in its so-called secular "humanism".

The more I consider the Groningen Protocol and the lack of any protest to it, the more pessimistic I become about the capacity for the world to recover its soul. A few days ago -- in fact, the day before this story broke -- I watched an excellent movie called Judgement At Nuremberg. An adaptation of a fictional play about the Nazi trials, it used the very real atrocities of forced sterilization of "undesirables" and the slaughter of those the Nazis deemed undesirable to underscore the banality of those who stood trial at the dock. Richard Widmark and Spencer Tracy portrayed Americans whose exposure to these atrocities forever changed them.

Nowadays, it's just another story off the wire.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have not just reached a slippery slope -- we have hit a greased chute, which is what depresses me more than anything else. Now that Groningen has commenced killing the undesirables and the world has answered with a shrug, we will now hear from the chorus of statists telling us that in an era of limited resources, we need to make these hard decisions for the benefit of the families involved and the greater good of society. That child who may never walk or talk will be such a burden on his family, they'll say; the parents are too close to the situation to make an informed decision, so we'll make it for them -- for their own good, of course. And the time wasted on keeping him alive could be used to save other lives. We'll all sound so reasonable while we march living human beings to their death, without their consent or desire, when inconvenience is their only crime.

In twenty years, most of Europe will have their own home-grown Groningers, and the ghouls here in America will scold us for not being as sophisticated as the Dutch, the French, and so on.

We've crossed the Rubicon, my friends. The only hope we have will be to make friends with the committee that decides our worth to society.

Giving Conservatives A Bad Name

An Alabama lawmaker apparently wants to confirm every stereotype available of conservatives, Christians, and the South by proposing a sweeping ban of books that contain gay characters. Rep. Gerald Allen wants such literary materials pulled from public libraries and universities that use public funds:

An Alabama lawmaker who sought to ban gay marriages now wants to ban novels with gay characters from public libraries, including university libraries.

A bill by Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, would prohibit the use of public funds for "the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle." Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the "homosexual agenda." ...

Allen said that if his bill passes, novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed.

"I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them," he said.

Allow me to weigh in with the proper conservative position, which is that the Alabama GOP ought to find Allen a properly padded room somewhere and hand him a copy of William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. (Hey, it's linked on the right column of my blog.) It's one thing to object when public schools use Heather Has Two Mommies as required reading for primary-school children, but to declare a ban on gay characters in all literature available to the public is insane. I'm shocked that an American lawmaker wouldn't already know that.

Not only is Allen's proposal unconstitutional and politically inept, it's just plain mean-spirited and wrong. Conservatives and liberals should both condemn Allen and his initiative. (via Memeorandum)

Tenet Joins Fight Against 9/11 Intelligence Reform

As the debate grows on the 9/11 intelligence-reform bill and the voices of political correctness face increasing challenge, George Tenet added his own voice to the opposition. The Washington Post reports that Tenet objects to severing a national intelligence "czar" from the operatives who collect and analyze the data with an extra level of bureaucracy, a point I made at the time the commission released its report:

Former CIA director George J. Tenet yesterday criticized an intelligence restructuring bill's plan to create a director of national intelligence, saying it would separate the new intelligence chief from direct control over the case officers and analysts who are overseas and "taking risks." ...

A senior administration official echoed that position privately yesterday, asking "who will brief Congress and the president" under the new proposal? "Since the CIA director would continue to supervise all-source intelligence analysis within the government," said this official, who has long intelligence experience, the proposed director of national intelligence would be "a new layer" in the process.

When the 9/11 Commission delivered its report to Congress and the American people, a number of politicians -- chiefly John Kerry -- insisted that Congress and the President enact their recommendations in total and immediately. The media and the 9/11 families have pressured the government ever since to do so. However, blue-ribbon panels do not render infallible judgments, and in this case, the recommendations made appear much more likely to cause more problems than they could possibly resolve.

Taking Tenet's point first, the new intelligence czar position which the commission arrogantly directed to be the primary advisor to the President winds up putting at least one more layer of bureaucracy between the President and the people doing the intelligence collection and analysis. Instead of restructuring the alphabet soup of agencies currently doing this work, the commission just slapped a layer of directors on top of the whole mess and put one person in charge of it all. For a Congress who expressed concern that George Bush did not get enough dissenting opinion, placing two more layers of filtering between the analysts and the PDB only makes this problem worse, not better.

This does not take a rocket scientist to figure out. As bureaucracies grow in either the private or public sector, the people who get farther removed from the ground work hear less and less of the truth. The solution for better analysis is never more management, but more and better analysts with increased access to the decision-makers. The private sector learned this twenty years ago and streamlined their bloated management structures to accommodate it. Unfortunately, the 9/11 Commission consisted of nothing but lifelong bureaucrats who see extended management structures as the solution for all problems.

As I wrote before, we should thank the 9/11 Commission for their hard work and especially for their excellent reconstruction of the events of that terrible day. We should not, however, implement their recommendations simply because they made them. We need to proceed very carefully before we do serious damage to our intelligence and response capabilities.

UN Lacks Authority For Comprehensive Iran Inspections Regime

In a blow to the entire concept of inspections regimes, UN diplomats admitted to Reuters that the UN lacks any authority to inspect areas not explicitly declared by Iran as nuclear sites. While nations collect intelligence detailing Iranian nuclear activities at new locations and the stripping of those facilities that have been declared by Iran, the UN can do little but ask Iran for permission to see for themselves:

Inspectors from the U.N. nuclear watchdog would like to visit a secret military site in Iran that an exile group said was a nuclear weapons site, but they lack the legal authority to go there, U.N. diplomats told Reuters. ...

The New York Times reported Thursday that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) believes satellite photographs show that high explosives are being tested and that procurement records show equipment has been bought that can be used for making bomb-grade uranium, citing unnamed diplomats. The intelligence came from several sources, including nations that are members of the IAEA, the Times reported.

But the military sites the inspectors would like to inspect -- the Parchin military complex southeast of Tehran and Lavizan II in northeastern Tehran -- are legally off limits to the IAEA, which only has the right to monitor civilian nuclear programs.

"The IAEA simply has no authority to go to sites that are not declared nuclear sites," a diplomat close to the IAEA inspection process told Reuters. He said that the IAEA had not asked to inspect Lavizan II, although they would like to.

This demonstrates the problem with inspection regimes in general: they only work when confirming compliance by a nation which disarms willingly. Unless the UN implements an inspections regime in Lichtenstein or The Vatican, nations are too large for inspectors to confirm disarmament with any confidence under existing rules. Saddam played this shell game with the UN inspectors for years, and the UNSCOM teams had more latitude than the IAEA has with Iran. If anyone feels safer because the IAEA has the right to inspect only those facilities that the Iranian mullahs designated as nuclear research sites, raise your hand.

No one? No one?

Inspections work in Libya because Libya wants to show that they've disarmed, and for good reason. Moammar Gaddafi saw what happened when the Anglo-American coalition lost patience with Saddam and decided to conduct final inspections in force. The Western nations, prior to that, had spent the better part of two decades trying to convince Gaddafi to renounce terrorism and drop development of WMD, but he only took it seriously when he saw the consequences of further defiance: getting pulled out of a spider hole is not Gaddafi's retirement plan.

If the West wants to convince the Iranians to comply with the nonproliferation treaty, then the EU has to step aside and allow the process to move quickly through the rest of the nonproductive steps -- like the UNSC -- so that the threat of action can be made clear to the mullahcracy. Just as in Iraq, the delay only allows Iran to build its defenses and stockpile its weapons. Given the US and Israeli viewpoint that Iran cannot be allowed to go nuclear, allowing Iran to stall the West only makes war more likely, not less.

Cannabis Use Leads To Higher Risk Of Psychosis

The Guardian (UK) reports that a new study of habitual marijuana users run a higher risk for psychosis, which in younger smokers could result in a 25% increase in the onset of mental illness:

Some young people who smoke cannabis are at real risk of developing psychotic mental illness, according to a major study announced yesterday.

The new survey of 2,500 young people aged 14 to 24 will be discussed at the start of an international conference today on cannabis and mental health convened by the Institute of Psychiatry in London.

It shows that regular cannabis smoking increased the risk of developing psychosis by 6% over four years.

But there was a substantially greater impact on young people who had already been identified by psychiatrists as having the potential to become psychotic. Regular cannabis smoking raised their risk of developing psychotic mental illness by 25%.

This new study will have an impact on the debate raised by the challenge to California's medicinal-marijuana use law at the Supreme Court, although it has no impact on the legal issues at play there. This dispels the prevailing notion of marijuana as a benign intoxicant. Although the study doesn't put it in the same category as heroin or crystal methamphetamine, any drug having a 6% side effect of psychosis would get pulled from the market, let alone a 25% increased risk with younger users.

Of course, the researchers who performed this study at Maastricht University in the Netherlands claim that these significant side effects argue for marijuana's legalization, so they can then warn people not to use it:

One of the authors of the study, carried out by researchers from the Netherlands, said that although cannabis triggered psychosis in a minority of people, this was a good reason to legalise it, not ban it, so that government can promote advice and information, as it does on alcohol.

Jim van Os, a professor in the department of psychiatry and neuropsychology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, where cannabis is legal, said a ban would be hard. "It is going to be very difficult to tell the whole Dutch population to stop using cannabis because it is bad and you will develop psychotic illness. But perhaps it is better to say if you have a family history or mental instability you are perhaps particularly at risk of negative consequences of cannabis use.

These days, in the Netherlands at least, if you have a family history of mental instability, chronic cannabis use is the least of your worries. You'd be lucky to survive childbirth if you're unfortunate enough to be born at the Groningen Academic Hospital. Beyond that silliness, an argument for legalizing a drug precisely because it has significant risk to cause psychosis merely to educate people about its dangers sounds like the worst kind of circular thinking. Why wouldn't the Netherlands be able to educate its citizens about marijuana's dangers apart from its legalization? And if it requires legalization to spread the truth about its side effects, why not just legalize heroin and crystal meth as well?

Like so much of the rhetoric on both sides of the marijuana debate, this appears to be a lot of smoke designed to hide the facts. The Maastricht study reveals some significant dangers to marijuana users, if the methodology holds up. The focus should remain on the science instead of the psychobabble used by reefer apologists.

Let's Hear The Clintons Explain This

ABC News reports tonight that oil shipping records show that the fugitive financier pardoned by Bill Clinton in the last hours of his presidency played a significant role in Saddam's fleecing of the UN Oil-For-Food program. Marc Rich, who received a pardon from Clinton despite being on the run and over the objections of the Department of Justice, provided a middleman for Hussein and major oil companies looking to keep their hands clean from scandal:

Former American fugitive Marc Rich was a middleman for several of Iraq's suspect oil deals in February 2001, just one month after his pardon from President Clinton, according to oil industry shipping records obtained by ABC News.

And a U.S. criminal investigation is looking into whether Rich, as well as several other prominent oil traders, made illegal payments to Iraq in order to obtain the lucrative oil contracts.

"Without that kind of middleman, the system would not work because the major oil companies did not want to deal with Iraq because there was a mandated kickback," said human rights investigator John Fawcett.

So when Bill Clinton allowed Marc Rich to go free -- coincidentally just after his wife, Denise Rich, donated $450,000 to Clinton's presidential-library fund -- he set loose one of the conduits that helped Saddam steal $21 billion from his own people and funnel it to his military and, probably, Islamist terrorists. Not only did he allow Rich to escape prosecution for his earlier crimes, he also eliminated any chance of trying him for any crime committed before the pardon was issued in January 2001. While the fortune Rich funneled to Saddam gets used to kill American servicemen and Iraqi civilians, Bill Clinton wanders around his presidential library, wrapped in the loving embrace of the American media.

However, I suspect this will make a huge dent on Hillary's chances for the presidency in 2008, especially if this administration manages to capture and try Rich for his part in UNSCAM. After this report, you can bet that they'll be issuing warrants for his arrest and extradition. (via Instapundit)

UPDATE: Deltanine reminds me that I wrote about Marc Rich's inclusion in the Duelfer Report on October 7th:

At the time of the pardon, many people puzzled over why Bill Clinton would pardon a man who fled the country and whose status as a fugitive had been under negotiation with the FBI just prior to Clinton's action. Instead of cutting a deal with Rich to get him back to the US to face charges, Clinton pulled the rug out from under the FBI. Without the leverage of the charges, Rich had no further motivation to cooperate with the DoJ on any outstanding investigations.

At the time, the presumption was that Rich's wife had donated enough money to buy the pardon. Now, however, the question may be whether Clinton knew about the corruption and feared that an aggressive Bush administration policy would uncover Rich's participation in undermining Iraqi sanctions while Rich raised funds for both his presidential library and Hillary's election. Or maybe the issue runs even deeper than that?

Compromise In Ukraine?

The French press service AFP and Postmodern Clog both report that an agreement has been reached between the Ukrainian government of Leonid Kuchma and opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko to bring the standoff in Kyiv to an end:

Outgoing President Leonid Kuchma said the two rivals agreed with the help of foreign mediators to let the court pass judgment on the November 21 vote and then jointly figure out how to resolve independent Ukraine's worst political crisis.

But most agreed that another poll was inevitable and the European Union's troubleshooter Javier Solana said that a month would be needed to set a date for another election -- the third since November 30.

According to AFP, Kuchma finally acknowledged that the election suffered from massive fraud but doesn't quote him on that admission. The agreement supercedes the Rada vote dissolving the Yanukovych government and lays the groundwork for constitutional changes diluting the presidency in the future, strengthing the Prime Minister role instead. While the agreement purports to wait on the Ukrainian Supreme Court to rule on the election challenge, Javier Solana told AFP that everyone expects new elections in some form within the next 30 days.

However, Reuters disputes the reports of compromise:

Ukraine's feuding presidential candidates failed to find a clear way out of a standoff over a contested presidential election that has brought tens of thousands in the streets, but new elections looked likely.

However, Reuters includes most of the same points of agreement in their report that AFP's has, which sounds as though some compromise has been reached. AFP reports that Viktor Yushchenko will call for an end to the blockade of government buildings but not the street demonstrations, at least not until elections are set.

More to come ...

Schroeder Goes Out On A Creaky Limb With Russia

CQ reader Ken Powell directs us to a new English-language version of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, which reports in its latest edition on the diplomatic razor-dance Gerhardt Schroeder has performed lately between the United States, Russia, and the rest of Europe. According to DS, Europeans have become increasingly disenchanted with Schroeder's apologism for Vladimir Putin and accuse him of sacrificing the democratic ideals over which he scolded George Bush for a pocketful of Russian Euros:

Worldwide criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin is mounting -- leaders increasingly doubt his democratic credentials. Except Gerhard Schroeder that is. The German Chancellor continues to stand by his friend and business partner. It may soon get him into trouble. ...

The most-recent questions surrounding the Schroeder-Putin courtship surfaced last week. Following energetic attempts by Putin to influence the elections in Ukraine -- including massive financial support and campaign appearances supporting government candidate Yanukovych as well as premature recognition of a Yanukovych victory despite clear indications of massive fraud -- Schroeder came to Putin's defense. "I am thoroughly convinced that the Russian president wants to transform Russia into a democracy and that he is doing so out of a deeply held conviction," he said. As if that weren't a gem of a quote, a few days earlier Schroeder had referred to Putin as "a flawless democrat."

Criticism of Schroeder's position isn't just coming from the German media -- more and more voices from abroad are questioning his "German path" as Schroeder himself refers to his efforts to become more independent from the United States security umbrella. Russia's best-know human rights activist, Sergei Kovalyov, is livid. He feels Germany is sacrificing long-held beliefs in human rights and democracy for a powerful friend and a few euros. "What the chancellor is doing with Russia isn't just morally wrong, it is also dangerous," he warns.

We're not talking about chump change in this Russo-German relationship, either. German imports from Russia have increased almost 70% over the past five years, and as Germany moves away from nuclear energy, they will need access to cheap oil from Russia. German exports went up by almost 150% in the same period, but still lag far behind their Russian imports; the trade balance ratio favors Russia almost 1000:1.

The economic concerns appear to outweigh any other, and not just in Ukraine. When the entire EU rejected recent elections in Chechnya, Schroeder asserted that he could find nothing wrong with them. Schroeder has remained silent about Putin's crackdown on the press and his hostile assault on Yukos, the Russian oil company Putin has all but stolen. George Bush receives criticism about his relationship with Putin, but Bush doesn't shy from expressing his differences with the Russian leader. Gerhardt Schroeder has elevated toadying to a new level.

In the wake of the American invasion of Iraq and Schroeder's strong rejection of their US allies in that cause, the German leader became for a short while the toast of Europe. According to DS, that has mutated into a strong suspicion that Schroeder may be nothing more than a sellout who cannot be trusted.

Barghouti Reconsiders

Last week I posted about jailed Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti declining to run for the Palestinian presidency. His decision caught me by surprise, as I expected Barghouti to use a presidential campaign to embarrass his Israeli jailers, who convicted him of terrorist acts as the chief of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade (now renamed the Yasser Arafat Martyrs Brigade). His withdrawal appeared to hold out promise that the Palestinians had finally gotten serious about pursuing peace with Israel.

Apparently, my analysis was a bit too optimistic:

Associates of Marwan Barghouti said Wednesday that the jailed Palestinian uprising leader has decided to run for president, reversing an earlier decision and throwing Palestinian politics into disarray. ...

Barghouti's decision came after he met with his wife and two senior Palestinian officials at an Israeli prison where he is serving multiple life sentences, the associates said on condition of anonymity.

Hmmm. The Palestinians either convinced him to run, or could not talk him out of it. Mahmoud Abbas, the former PM who resigned when Arafat blocked him from any real authority, had already announced his candidacy and is clearly viewed as a moderate with whom Israel and the US can work. Barghouti remains wildly popular among Palestinians as a living martyr, imprisoned unfairly in their eyes by the oppressor. Barghouti has a good chance of winning -- which will create a huge amount of pressure for Israel to release him, even with his record of killing women and children in Israel.

In a way, this may wind up as a positive development. If the Palestinians reject Barghouti for Abbas, the world will see that they are serious about peace. If they elect Barghouti, we will know that they seek nothing more than more war and destruction.

Willingham's Defenders Play The Race Card

After three seasons of frustration, punctuated by un-Irish-like blowouts in big games, Notre Dame fired Ty Willingham as its football coach yesterday. Those of us who have watched as the program continued its slide into mediocrity had no illusions about Willingham's status; Irish coaches are expected to win, and certainly not allowed to get blown out of games with traditional rival USC. After the third straight 31-point loss to the Trojans and the second blowout loss this year, anyone who couldn't see this as the end point doesn't know Notre Dame football.

However, that hasn't stopped people from speculating that the Irish fired Willingham because of his race. Understandably, people are sensitive to the lack of African-American head coaches in the NCAA; at the beginning of the season, Willingham was one of only eight, an embarrassing number in a division with 117 head-coaching positions. After the usual exits at the end of the year, only five remain. However, Ty's exit does not make the Irish racists, a point predictably lost on the head of the Black Coaches Association:

Willingham's firing sends a clear message, said Floyd Keith, executive director of the BCA:

"It tells you something is really wrong. And it should tell all of America something is really wrong.

"What's magnified this thing is, there's simply not enough African American coaches out there. People know it's wrong. You have to know it's wrong. You've got such a disparity."

No, it doesn't. Willingham's hiring into the most prestigious head-coaching position in college football told us that progress had been made, and his firing also tells us the same thing. Willingham was held responsible for his performance. He had three years to turn the program around and simply didn't do it. Should Notre Dame have sacrificed its program just to turn Ty into a token? Does the BCA think that would have satisfied Ty Willingham, or helped other schools take black coaches any more seriously?

The Los Angeles Times piece provides balance, with a diversity expert in sports, Richard Lapchick pointing out that AD Kevin Smith had the courage to both hire and fire Willingham, so the issue likely went beyond race. ESPN disappoints in its analyses of the situation. Pat Forde argues that Willingham's firing makes Notre Dame no better than USC in its efforts to provide excellence while emphasizing academics:

The athletic director stressed that the football coach has done wonderful, inspirational work off the field. The academic performance has never been better, he said. The coach is a man of unassailable character who has recruited players of similar ilk.

"In a lot of ways," the athletic director said, "this program hasn't been this healthy in a long time."

Firing Ty Willingham exposed Notre Dame as nothing more than a football factory.

Except for one way. The wins-and-losses way. Which is what truly matters at all football factories.

Forde tells ND fans that they had better face reality -- that Notre Dame is hypocritical in its claim to be any better than USC or Oklahoma in selling their students out to athletic success. Really? A quick look at the NCAA graduation-rate stats shows that Notre Dame graduated 89% of its student athletes, compared to 64% for the Trojans, 55% for the Sooners, and 52% for the Texas Longhorns. (Doesn't ESPN pay their analysts to actually do research before opining?) Forde also says that Notre Dame had better have a "good answer" to allegations of racism -- as if no one at ESPN can read a won-loss record or margin of loss analysis. Bob Davies and Gerry Faust didn't rack up as many blowout defeats in their generally reviled tenures as Willingham did in an abbreviated time frame, and they managed to win a game against USC during their tenures.

In college football, the final criterion will always be the won-loss record. Coaches should already know that, and sports analysts who don't should find work elsewhere.

Ukrainian Rada Tosses Out Yanukovych Government

Ukraine's Parliament, called the Rada, has voted to oust the government of Prime Minister and nominal winner of the presidential election Viktor Yanukovych in a secret ballot, attempting to force an end to the political crisis that has gripped the former Soviet republic for ten days:

Ukraine's parliament Wednesday voted to sack the government of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich to help end a political crisis triggered by his contested election last month as president.

In parliament, 229 deputies, three more than required, voted in favor of sacking Yanukovich, declared winner in the Nov. 21 election, denounced by opposition rival Viktor Yushchenko as being tainted by fraud.

Deputies also voted to create an interim "government of national trust.

This resolution may prove to be of little value; as I've mentioned before, Ukraine's PM is appointed by the executive, not the legislature as in other parliamentary democracies. However, what essentially amounts to a no-confidence vote in the Kuchma and Yanukovych government delivers a body blow to their public-relations efforts. The same Rada earlier rescinded an explicit no-confidence vote in the Central Election Commission when the Communists joined the Kuchma government in an attempt to force Yanukovych into power, but this secret ballot appears to demonstrate that the earlier vote may have been based on some arm-twisting.

The vote also demanded that a new interim government be formed, one of national "trust" to shepherd the political crisis to an end. That means Kuchma will have to name a new PM, one that the inflamed Rada will accept, for the transition to either a recast second round of elections, which is what Yushchenko wants, or a rerun of the entire election, which is what Kuchma holds as his fallback position. It's rather doubtful that anything except the former will convince the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians on the streets to disband.

Kerry Flip-Flops On Concession

For those who argued that an official recount demand from the Ohio Democratic Party did not implicate John Kerry by association, the Kerry campaign removed all doubt by joining in a legal fight to require all counties in Ohio to abide by the recount demands:

Sen. John F. Kerry's presidential campaign asked an Ohio judge yesterday to allow it to join a legal fight there over whether election officials in one county may sit out the state's impending recount.

A pair of third-party presidential candidates, who said that reports of problems at the polls on Election Day are not being addressed, are forcing the Buckeye State to recount its entire presidential vote. But David A. Yost, a lawyer for Delaware County, just outside Columbus, won a temporary restraining order last week blocking any recount there. He told the Columbus Dispatch that a second count would be a poor use of county resources. President Bush won the mostly Republican area handily, unofficial results show.

Lawyers for the Kerry campaign asked to join Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb, Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik and the National Voting Rights Institute in the fight to force the county to participate in the recount. "If there's going to be a recount in Ohio, we don't want it to exclude Delaware County or any other county that might decide to follow Delaware County's lead," Kerry lawyer Dan Hoffheimer said. "It should be a full, fair and accurate recount."

I notice that they're not asking for "full, fair, and accurate" recounts in states such as Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania, where the margin of Kerry's victories were much smaller than Bush's in Ohio. This leaves no doubt that Kerry intends on setting himself up as the frontrunner in 2008 by attempting to delegitimize Bush's victory in the media. You can expect the Kerry campaign to support the recount requests by Badnarik and Cobb in New Mexico and Nevada as well.

UN Proposes New Paths To Greater Irrelevancy

The UN has proposed sweeping changes to its structure and its regulations based on the long-anticipated report from Secretary General Kofi Annan's blue-ribbon team. Those changes include enlarging the Security Council and reforming the Human Rights Commission, but also requires nations to get UN approval before taking pre-emptive action to protect themselves:

The United Nations on Tuesday proposed the most sweeping changes in its history, recommending the overhaul of its top decision-making group, the Security Council, and holding out the possibility that it could grant legitimacy to pre-emptive military strikes.

In this case, however, "granting" legitimacy involves arrogating unto itself all authority to grant permission for action in the first place:

But it acknowledged that a new problem had risen because of the nature of terrorist attacks "where the threat is not imminent but still claimed to be real: for example, the acquisition, with allegedly hostile intent, of nuclear weapons-making capability."

It said that if the arguments for "anticipatory self-defense" in such cases were good ones, they should be put to the Security Council, which would have the power to authorize military action under guidelines including the seriousness of the threat, the proportionality of the response, the exhaustion of all alternatives and the balance of consequences.

Apparently in anticipation of objections from Washington over that requirement, the report said, "For those impatient with such a response, the answer must be that, in a world full of perceived potential threats, the risk to the global order and the norm of nonintervention on which it continues to be based is simply too great for the legality of unilateral preventive action, as distinct from collectively endorsed action, to be accepted. Allowing one to so act is to allow all."

In other words, bring your case to the Security Council, where we will take your time-critical situation and debate it endlessly. If you're still alive when we finally get around to a vote, we'll authorize the use of force, as long as France, Russia, and China don't veto it. If they do -- well, it sucks to be you.

It's the John Kerry global test, minus Kerry's charm.

The rest of the report hardly sounds encouraging, either. While it does attempt to codify terrorism as attacks primarily targeting civilians in an attempt to persuade a government to commit an act or to abstain from one, the text appears so broad that the missile strikes on Iraq in 1998 could conceivably fall under its definition. As I recall, the claim that these strikes equated to terrorist bombings in Haifa pizzarias was endlessly repeated by Islamofascist apologists at the time. Now they would have this questionable clause on which to base their smokescreen allegations.

The changes proposed to the UNSC provide another broadened path to irrelevancy. The panel recommended expanding the Council to 24 members, creating six new permanent seats to the five existing original members. While the new members would not have a veto under the proposed changes, even the New York Times hints that the General Assembly would likely grant the veto when it comes to a vote:

One alternative would add 6 new permanent members - the likely candidates are Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, Egypt and either Nigeria or South Africa - as well as 3 new two-year term members. The other would create a new tier of 8 semipermanent members chosen for renewable four-year terms and one additional two-year term seat to the existing 10.

The right to cast vetoes, a power coveted by the nations seeking permanent status and one they are likely to press for, would continue to be limited to the 5 original permanent members.

The expansion only deepens the likelihood of stalemate on the UNSC, as the divergent aims of dictatorships assuming the extra seats on the council will aim at keeping any positive action for democracy at bay. Can anyone imagine Egypt, for example, supporting the expansion of voting rights and multiparty elections in Southwest Asia?

The fundamental problem with the UN comes from its constituency of oppressors and kleptocrats. Any structural changes in their committees and regulations only amount to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

A Question Of Values

The Netherlands admitted today that Dutch doctors have carried out euthanasia without requests from the patients or their families. The hospital where these killings took place had requested that the government promulgate a "protocol" for killing newborns they judged doomed, and the admission formed part of the request:

A hospital in the Netherlands - the first nation to permit euthanasia - recently proposed guidelines for mercy killings of terminally ill newborns, and then made a startling revelation: It has already begun carrying out such procedures, which include administering a lethal dose of sedatives.

The announcement by the Groningen Academic Hospital came amid a growing discussion in Holland on whether to legalize euthanasia on people incapable of deciding for themselves whether they want to end their lives - a prospect viewed with horror by euthanasia opponents and as a natural evolution by advocates.

Unfortunately, opponents also saw it as a natural evolution, which is why they opposed allowing euthanasia in the first place. When a society loses sight of the special nature of human life by allowing the innocent to be slaughtered for the sake of expediency, the question of where to stop cannot be answered philosophically. The answer only comes at the limit of convenience.

Much has been made of the supposed "values vote" in the last American election, probably too much, as the data on which the speculation is based is too flawed for broad assumptions. However, the euthanasia debate is completely about values: the value of human life and its meaning to human society. It is one thing for a person to take their own life, or for the family of a brain-dead relative to pull life support. What makes this different is the state apparatus taking on that decision for themselves, deciding who among the citizens supposedly under their protection has no worth and eats up too many resources to go on living. It profoundly repudiates millenia of Western thought, which teaches that individual human life has a precious -- the religious would say sacred -- value.

Without this value at the heart of any society, when humans are valued only for their potential production and devalued for their perceived cost, the decision to end those lives deemed inconvenient to the state comes next. At first, the state limits the killing to those who cases find the broadest acceptance: unborn fetuses, terminally ill patients, and the like. After that threshold has been crossed, the next step is for someone to promulgate a protocol for the state to make the decisions about who lives and who dies. Who becomes inconvenient? The mentally retarded. The insane. The chronically ill, especially those who have incurable communicable diseases.

How long is it until we get to the Jews? Political dissidents? Those who don't fit a particular superficial profile, like "non-Aryans"?

I thought about this question quite a bit today, and I believe the problems stems from an aggrandisement of the state. Our founding fathers' genius was in their understanding of the potential for evil in an overly intrusive central government. When government assumes responsibility for all of the choices in individual lives -- when the central government pays all of the bills for their care, for example -- then they reduce individual life to a ledger amount, a profit-and-loss statement. It opens the door to the rationing of such services in order to save resources for "the greater good". That's when we get Groningen Protocols -- and lose our souls.

I'm reminded of the old joke about the man who offers a million dollars to a woman for her sexual favors. When she assents, he pulls out a hundred-dollar bill and gives it to her. When she throws it back at him and asks, "What kind of a girl do you think I am?", he replies, "We've established what kind of girl you are. Now we're just negotiating over the price."

The Netherlands have determined their value of human life. The debate over the Groningen Protocol is just negotiating over the price.

Bye, Ty: Notre Dame Fires Willingham

In a move that could hardly be called unexpected after Saturday's third consecutive beating by USC, Notre Dame fired its football coach, Ty Willingham. Willingham amassed a record of 21-15, but couldn't break .500 over the past two seasons:

Coach Tyrone Willingham was fired by Notre Dame on Tuesday after three seasons in which he failed to return one of the nation's most storied football programs to prominence.

Willingham went 21-15, including 6-5 this season. The Fighting Irish lost 41-10 to No. 1 Southern California on Saturday.

"We simply have not made the progress on the field that we need to make," athletic director Kevin White said. "Nor have we been able to create the positive momentum necessary in our efforts to return the Notre Dame program to the elite level of the college football world."

The university took action just before students planned demonstrations calling for the removal of Willingham, a spectacle that everyone should be glad to have avoided. Willingham managed to spark the Irish in his first season to a 10-3 record, including an eight-game winning streak at the beginning that had everyone hoping for a national championship. Unfortunately, the Irish went 13-15 from that point forward.

Willingham has been successful at all levels of football. He was one of Denny Green's staff with the Minnesota Vikings before going back to Stanford as the head coach. He has the talent to succeed in most areas -- but Notre Dame has elevated expectations. One expectation is that the traditional rivalries will generate wins. After getting blown out by 31 points three successive times against the Trojans, well, the handwriting was on the Dome.

Who's next? The AP report mentions a former Lou Holtz protege, Urban Meyer, currently leading Utah to an unbeaten season. I think that the Irish may want to look for someone who has run a high-profile program before, rather than go after a good coach making his first big stab at the brass ring. I would expect them to approach NFL head coaches who may be looking to return to the college level, someone with proven success but who may no longer fit into their current position. The only problem would be that the Irish need someone in place before January, when recruiting gets into full swing, and the best NFL coaches will be in the playoffs.

Of course, Lou Holtz is now available ....

Note: I got a lot of e-mail on this, but James was the first to let me know about it. Managed to do it without any of that California triumphalism coming through, too ...

How To Help Stephen Gardner (Update: Millenium Responds)

Many people wrote to me after the post about Stephen Gardner's financial woes about how they can assist him during this tough period. I'm sure the best solution would be a good job, but to tide him over -- especially during the holiday season -- Stephen has a PayPal account to which you can donate. Simply log into your PayPal account and send whatever you can afford to this e-mail: sgardner5@carolina.rr.com. You can also snail-mail a check to this address: P.O. Box 908; Clover, SC 29710.

The Power Line guys and Tony Snow are the ones who got this information. (Hey, Trunk's getting a signed photograph -- how does he rate, anyway?) Big hat tips to them for staying on this story. I've already sent my donation; hopefully, many more will follow.

UPDATE: I've corrected the e-mail address, and re-sent my donation accordingly. It's correct as shown now.

UPDATE II: Via Instapundit, Gardner's former employer has responded to the Mary Laney article:

Millennium Information Services is a small business that has been wrongly stigmatized by the Chicago Sun-Times article about Steve Gardner. The article is clearly meant to create the impression that Steve Gardner’s layoff was politically motivated. That just simply isn’t true. It is also important to note that the Sun-Times reporter, Mary Laney, never contacted us regarding this article.

Here are some key facts that correct missing or inaccurate statements made in the Sun-Times article:

For purely financial reasons, we had to reduce management expenses. A decision was made to consolidate field management from five managers to three. The two affected field managers resided in the areas where our business had the most significant decreases. Mr. Gardner was one of those managers. Two additional corporate managers were laid off on the same day. No one in the company’s management was even aware of Mr. Gardner’s connection to John Kerry.

To help offset the elimination of Mr. Gardner’s supervisory position, Millennium offered Mr. Gardner other non-supervisory work, which he decided not to take. Since that time Millennium has offered Mr. Gardner additional work opportunities, which he has also declined.

The Sun-Times article states that Mr. Gardner was terminated via email. That is also incorrect. Mr. Gardner was informed of the layoff in a personal phone conversation with his supervisor. The
email referenced in the article was simply a formal follow-up, not the primary means of informing Mr. Gardner. The only reason he was not contacted face-to-face was because he was an out-of-state
employee.

In the Sun-Times article, Ms. Laney stated that Mr. Gardner had “seen the company advertising his old position.” A simple check of the facts would have shown that to be false. The advertisement placed by Millennium was for a non- supervisory position.

The Sun-Times article does not accurately reflect what occurred with Steve Gardner in regards to his employment with Millennium. It creates an erroneous perception that he was singled out for his
political involvement. That is false. Three other employees also lost their jobs on that day for the same economic reasons.

Millennium as a company does not endorse or support any political position or candidate. We leave those personal decisions to individuals.

We sincerely hope this helps to clarify the truth[.]

Since I've made space for one side of this argument, I felt it fair to provide space for the other.

Ridge Resigns From DHS

The Washington Times reports that Tom Ridge will resign as director of the Department of Homeland Security at a press conference scheduled for 2:45 ET this afternoon:

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has informed the White House and department staff that he has resigned, U.S. officials said today. In an e-mail circulated to senior Homeland Security officials, Ridge praised the department as "an extraordinary organization that each day contributes to keeping America safe and free." He also said he was privileged to work with the department's 180,000 employees "who go to work every day dedicated to making our company better and more secure."

As the Times notes, the US has not had another terrorist attack under Ridge's watch. Despite taking on such a difficult and unwieldy task, he has performed extremely well. We all owe a debt of thanks to Ridge.

Campaign Finance Reform In A Nutshell (Where It Belongs)

A small case of campaign-finance comingling here in Minnesota provides an excellent object lesson as to why the McCain-Feingold reforms do nothing to eliminate checkbook politics. The Star Tribune's Dane Smith reports on a $300,000 personal contribution made by Matt Entenza, the DFL House minority leader, to a 527 that essentially laundered the money:

Faulting both major political parties for an elaborate "shell game," national campaign experts say it may be difficult if not impossible to trace the path of $300,000 that DFL House Minority Leader Matt Entenza contributed to a national "527" organization, which in turn spent generously on campaigns and voter registration in Minnesota.

Minnesota Republican Party officials are trying to build a case that the Entenza donation to the 21st Century Democrats was improperly reported and illegal, and that the money was spent directly on behalf of DFL House candidates in Minnesota through a 21st Century political action committee that paid for field workers.

Entenza and 21st Century officials contend that his contribution was perfectly legal and that not a penny of it flowed to 21st Century field staff on the House campaigns. Rather, they claim, Entenza's money was donated to the Young Voter Project, a separate 21st Century program aimed at turning out students on college campuses and other young voters in several presidential battleground states, including Minnesota.

Here's how the game works. Entenza donated the money in several installments, presumably to keep the total amount from being realized and reported by the press or the state GOP. The money flowed into the general fund of 21st Century, essentially commingling Entenza's money with everyone else's contributions. This so-called "soft money" cannot be used for specific campaigns; it must be used only for party-building activities, such as get-out-the-vote efforts and registration of new voters. 21st Century has these programs, but they also campaigned on behalf of a number of DFL candidates for the Minnesota House. Because Entenza put no earmarks on the contributions, and because 21st Century does not track distribution of specific donations to specific programs, the Minnesota GOP claim that Entenza's donations amounted to a money-laundering operation to get more cash to his House colleagues.

Entenza, of course, denies this and claims that all of his filings were correct and his donations perfectly legal. (He also donated $75,000 to the DFL House caucus fund.) 21st Century also argues that no requirement exists to create separate funds for different efforts; in fact, they note that money is always fungible, and donations without earmarking will always flow to the program most in need of funding, regardless.

Without speculating on any actual wrongdoing, just this description of the black hole that 21st Century represents shows just how sick this "campaign reform" is in operation. Far from preventing checkbook politics, the necessity of allowing 527s to work around soft-money bans creates an entirely new way to launder money in politics, and this smells to high heaven.

In Minnesota, candidates for the House who receive public subsidies cannot spend more than $27,000 on the race. Entenza's money allowed DFL candidates an out to spend an additional $20K on the fifteen swing districts through 21st Century instead of their own campaigns. As the GOP argues, Entenza could have donated that money directly to the caucus -- but then it would have been distributed directly to the candidates, who would still have had to contend with the spending limits or be forced to bust the caps and waive public financing.

If Entenza broke the law, then he should be prosecuted for campaign finance violations; if 21st Century acted criminally, their tax exemption should be revoked. I suspect, however, that what they did was perfectly legal. Cases like this, even on the local level, should convince voters that all John McCain and Russ Feingold created with their "reforms" is another version of organized crime, a shell game as Aron Pilhofer correctly characterizes it.

This system needs to be dismantled, and in its place put full and immediate disclosure and force contributions to go directly to candidates and political parties. That makes the parties and candidates directly responsible for its use, and allows the electorate to immediately determine whose money funds which candidates and causes. Eliminate "soft" and "hard" money distinctions, get rid of tax exemptions for political-action groups altogether, and quit pretending that checkbook politics can be eliminated while adhering to the First Amendment. Otherwise, we will continue to be amazed at the lengths to which people like George Soros and Matt Entenza can go to push their money into the system without a trace of where it went.

Negotiations Collapse In Kyiv

Negotiations that appeared to promise an end to the Ukrainian political crisis, or at least a means to that end, collapsed today as the opposition led by Viktor Yashchenko pulled out of the talks. Yushchenko's allies claim that the Kuchma government used the negotiations to "cheat":

Ukraine's opposition on Tuesday pulled out of talks to try to end a confrontation over last week's disputed presidential election and vowed to use "people power" to secure victory.

"The authorities, Kuchma and Yanukovich, used the talks to cheat," opposition leader Taras Stetskyv told thousands of supporters of losing presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko in central Kiev.

"That is why the Committee for National Salvation (opposition group) has decided to pull out of the talks. We are stopping talks with the authorities. We will talk with them only from the position of people power."

The Reuters report does not make clear what Stetskyv meant by cheating, but the implication is that Kuchma wants to stall as long as possible, perhaps hoping for a friendly decision by Ukraine's Supreme Court. The reference to "people power" sounds ominous -- a threat to seize power via a popular uprising. This surely would be met by Russian military action and would lose the legitimacy that the West has so far provided Yushchenko. It also would result in protestors getting killed, if pressed far enough.

European negotiators from Poland and Lithuania plan on joining Russian counterparts in Kyiv later today. Hopefully they will breathe new life into talks and reach an equitable resolution. Otherwise, Ukraine looks like it may fly apart at the seams, a dangerous and possibly deadly result for all involved.

Don't forget to keep checking with King at SCSU Scholars for more news and deeper context!

Third Circuit OK's Banning Of Military Recruiters From Colleges

The Third Circuit Court of Appeal issued a non-sequitur in its decision yesterday striking down the Solomon Amendment, which barred federal funds from universities and colleges that ban military recruiters from their campuses. In its decision, the court incoherently equated colleges with the Boy Scouts:

A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, found that educational institutions have a First Amendment right to keep military recruiters off their campuses to protest the Defense Department policy of excluding gays from military service.

The 2-to-1 decision relied in large part on a decision in 2000 by the United States Supreme Court to allow the Boy Scouts to exclude gay scoutmasters. Just as the Scouts have a First Amendment right to bar gays, the appeals court said, law schools may prohibit groups that they consider discriminatory.

The 1995 law at issue in the decision, the Solomon Amendment, barred the federal government from disbursing money to colleges and universities that obstruct campus recruiting by the military. As amended and interpreted over the years, the law prohibits disbursements to all parts of a university, including its physics department and medical school, if any of its units, like its law school, make military recruiting even a little more difficult.

First, any campus that bars military recruiters exhibit a bigotry of their own and imply that their student body has less-than-adequate ability to make decisions on their own -- hardly a stunning recommendation for an institution of higher learning. If their students cannot resist enlisting at the very sight of a man or woman in uniform, then perhaps their admissions offices need a housecleaning. Since when is it a university's mission to limit the opportunities provided to its students?

Beyond that, the court got this one wrong from the moment they put pen to paper. No one doubts the ability of the universities to ban military recruiters; that's not just a First Amendment right, but also a Fourth Amendment right as well. However, universities do not have a right to federal monies to operate their institutions. If they deny access to the federal government, then the federal government has the right to disqualify the institution from benefitting from its business. The Third Circuit operates from the belief that universities somehow have an entitlement to federal funds, a judgment that makes a mockery of Congress' control of federal expenditures.

I suspect this silly decision will be overturned, either en banc or at the Supreme Court. In the meantime, the decision should be stayed immediately.

SCOTUS Harshes California's Mellow

The Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday in reviewing the constitutionality of California's medicinal-marijuana laws, and at first blush, it looks as though the justices on all sides view the state's-rights argument with deep suspicion:

The effort by advocates of the medical use of marijuana to link their cause to the Supreme Court's federalism revolution appeared headed for failure at the court on Monday.

During a lively argument, the justices expressed little inclination to view drug policy as a states' rights issue by which California and other states that have adopted "compassionate use" marijuana measures could displace federal regulation of homegrown marijuana distributed to patients without charge and without crossing state lines. ...

Mr. Barnett said that relatively few people would meet the medical criteria for legal marijuana use, and that any impact on the overall market for marijuana would therefore be "trivial." The administration, by contrast, has predicted that 100,000 Californians will avail themselves of the statute if the court upholds the Ninth Circuit's ruling.

Justice David H. Souter asked Mr. Barnett for the population of California. The law professor shrugged. "Thirty-four million," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, a former resident of Sacramento, interjected.

In that case, Justice Souter continued, the government's estimate of 100,000 was "not implausible" and Mr. Barnett's prediction of a "trivial" effect "seems to me insupportable." Justice Souter said the circumstances of the two plaintiffs were "not a realistic premise on which to base constitutional law." His comment suggested that the marijuana advocates' litigation strategy of telling their story through two sympathetic female plaintiffs, especially Ms. Raich, whose physical suffering is evident in her wraith-like features and whose doctor says she would probably die without access to marijuana, might have backfired.

In the first place, earlier Supreme Court precedents have allowed Congress to regulate commerce of goods whose market extends nationwide, even if the transactions involved in the suit are intrastate. Wickard v Filburn (1942) even allowed Congress to regulate wheat produced for the farmer's personal use, a ruling that sounds too far-ranging. It seems to me that the justices have an opportunity to reign in some of Congress' power in this regard, but they're unlikely to do so on behalf of marijuana, if at all.

They certainly won't do it for this somewhat disingenuous presentation by the California contingent. They found the two most sympathetic clients they could provide -- one a media-darling waif who is almost certainly terminally ill with brain tumors. The problem is that the California law does not limit itself to those cases. It allows anyone who gets a doctor's "recommendation" for marijuana to possess and use it, even if its use is intended to treat issues like chronic back pain. The laxity of the requirement makes the government's estimation of 100,000 users -- less that half a percent of California's population -- look like a vast understatement.

Justice Breyer has the right idea. California's medicinal-marijuana proponents should have applied to the FDA for reclassification of marijuana as appropriate for medical use; a denial would have formed the core of a much more substantial lawsuit, as (I believe) the denial would have been found arbitrary. The FDA has never done a thorough vetting of marijuana's potential for medicinal use in the manner in which Ms. Raich applies it, and a denial would have been shown to be both premature and unsupported by any evidence.

I am not unsympathetic to the medicinal-marijuana cause, but California's end-around has always provoked my skepticism and opposition. They want to treat marijuana as a medicine but then allow anyone to self-medicate without the prescription required for almost any other treatment. It also allows anyone to grow their own marijuana, calling into question the quality and the consistency of dosages -- certainly an issue if you're serious about treating marijuana as a medicine. If California wants to treat this more seriously, they need to follow Breyer's advice to have the FDA reclassify it, and rewrite their law to require a prescription for its use, along with a specific set of conditions for which it can be prescribed.

Momentum Builds For New Ukrainian Election

The major players in the Ukrainian political crisis all seem to be moving towards the same solution to defuse the massive rejection of the fraud-ridden polling last weekend. Yesterday, both current President Leonid Kuchma and his protege and nominal winner of the discredited election, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, agreed in principle to a new election. Today, Germany reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to "respect" a new election in Ukraine:

Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed in a telephone conversation with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder on Tuesday to respect the results of any new election in Ukraine, the German government said.

The three-sentence statement from the government suggested a softening of Moscow's position and appeared to increase the likelihood of a new poll to resolve a week-old crisis triggered by the country's disputed presidential election on Nov. 21. ...

"The chancellor and the Russian president were in agreement that the results of a new election, based on Ukraine law and the will of the Ukraine people, would be strictly respected."

Seeing as how Russia and Putin represent the 800-pound gorilla on this particular issue, seeing it finally sit on the side of a new vote demonstrates that even the Russians see the uselessness of insisting that the last vote was definitive. It gives Viktor Yushchenko's opposition more prestige and hope that the situation has moved towards a peaceful solution.

Yesterday, Putin's ally Kuchma and his hand-picked successor had already retreated to the same position:

Ukraine's president and prime minister said yesterday they support a rerun of the country's sharply contested presidential election, even as the Supreme Court began hearing a request that it rule the vote invalid. ... Outgoing President Leonid Kuchma accepted that idea in an announcement yesterday, offering a way out of an impasse that has kept crowds of up to 200,000 in the streets of the capital for a week.

Yanukovych did not go quite as far, only offering to re-poll in the regions where his support was strongest and where allegations of voter fraud crescendoed last week. However, the momentum clearly has built for the protestors in the street who have blockaded government buildings and insisted that the election results be overturned. In fact, Yanukovych's supporters have begun abandoning him publicly:

A dramatic collapse of support for the government from senior officials continued. For the first time yesterday, former President Leonid Kravchuk, who heads the powerful Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (United), said he favored a new election and blamed Mr. Kuchma for the crisis.

Serhei Tihipko, Ukraine's central bank chief who ran Mr. Yanukovych's campaign, unexpectedly resigned from both posts yesterday. He told the Channel 5 broadcast station that if Mr. Yushchenko became president he would become part of a "constructive opposition." ...

Ukrainian diplomats around the world, including those based in Washington, are also supporting Mr. Yushchenko.

Yushchenko announced yesterday that his supporters in Parliament would call for the resignation of the Yanukovych government. Unlike in most Parliamentary systems, the Prime Minister is appointed by the President in Ukraine and Parliament has no mechanism for recalling him. But with Parliament already supporting Yuschchenko and the tide of public opinion drowning Yanukovuch and Kuchma, the call for a resignation may just be successful.

Addendum: Yanukovych's desperation clearly shows in this last-gasp offer to buy off Yuschchenko:

Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, looking increasingly isolated in Ukraine's deepening political crisis, offered again on Tuesday to make his opposition rival premier if allowed to take up the presidency. ...

"If (falsification) is not proven and if the Supreme Court rules in favor of my victory, I am ready... to offer Viktor Andreyevich the post of prime minister."

Yanukovych also made the strange assertion that if new elections are held, neither of them should run for president. One thing is clear -- Yanukovych knows he can't win in a second, cleaner election and will do almost anything to keep from contesting it.

No, Seriously, We Had Our Fingers Crossed The Whole Time

You'll never guess what Iran did this morning:

Iran reiterated Tuesday it was only prepared to freeze its uranium enrichment activities for a few months and would not, as the EU and Washington want, permanently mothball facilities which could make atomic bombs.

The comments, made by Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, were a further blow to European Union efforts to persuade Tehran to scrap enrichment for good and were likely to fuel U.S. concerns that Iran secretly plans to produce nuclear weapons.

Iran, which insists its nuclear program is solely for electricity generation, Monday escaped possible U.N. sanctions after agreeing to suspend all activities which could be used to make bomb-grade material.

What? Iran reversed itself? Why, that's unprecedented! It hasn't happened since as far back as last week.

What exactly have the EU-3 negotiators accomplished in this silly waltz with the Iranian mullahcracy? They had Iran sign off on an agreement which the mullahs immediately discredited, then re-endorsed, after which they asked for an exemption from it. Once denied that, they threated to pull out of the agreement before re-re-endorsing it ... temporarily.

What a brilliant strategy on the part of the Europeans. It's lifetime employment for the diplomats involved.

We need to put an end to the gameplaying that the EU-3 apparently enjoy. The US noted yesterday that any Security Council nation can refer suspected violations of the non-proliferation treaty to the UNSC for sanctions and further action. It's far past time to do so and bypass the incompetency of the current Western negotiators.

The Man O'Reilly Should Be Honoring

Today's Chicago Sun-Times chronicles the aftermath of the election for the most notable of Kerry's Band of Brothers -- the one who openly campaigned against him. Mary Laney reports that Stephen Gardner now finds himself broke and unemployed as a result of speaking out against a man he finds "dangerous":

"They said I had a political agenda. I had no and have no political agenda whatsoever. I saw John Kerry on television saying he was running for the Democratic nomination for president, and I knew I couldn't ever see him as commander in chief -- not after what I saw in Vietnam, not after the lies I heard him tell about what he says he did and what he says others did."

Gardner explains he was sitting at home in Clover, S.C., when he first saw Kerry on television. It was before the primary races. For 35 years, Gardner says, he hadn't talked about his tour of duty in Vietnam. But when he saw Kerry talking about running, he says he got up, called the newspaper in town, called radio stations and "talked to anyone I could about why this man should never be president." Eventually he got a call from Adm. Roy Huffman, who had been in charge of the coastal division in Vietnam, reunited with other swift boat veterans, and the rest is, as they say, history.

That's not all that's history, either. Once Gardner starting making himself heard, the Kerry campaign swung into action. John Hurley, part of Kerry's veteran-outreach program, warned him that the campaign would "look into his finances" if he persisted. Douglas Brinkley interviewed him, falsely claiming to be fact-checking the next edition of Tour of Duty when in fact Brinkley used the interview to write a hit piece about him in Time magazine. All of this attention got him laid off by Millenium Information Services, via e-mail, twenty-four hours after Time published the article.

Now broke and unemployed, Gardner remains defiant about his efforts to tell what he saw as the truth about his former commanding officer:

"I'm broke. I've been hurt every way I can be hurt. I have no money in the bank but am doing little bits here and there to pay the bills," he said. ...

And, even though Gardner is broke and jobless for speaking out, the husband and father of three says he'd do it all over again. He says it wasn't for politics. It was for America.

Bill O'Reilly should be talking about how exercising his freedom of political speech allowed the Kerry campaign to ruin Stephen Gardner instead of issuing blanket smears in defending Dan Rather. We need to find a way to give Stephen Gardner some support, either by finding him a job or helping him sue his former employer for damages, or both. We cannot allow yet another Vietnam veteran get screwed for serving his country. (via Power Line)

O'Reilly Spins For Rather

Bill O'Reilly issues a scathing editorial on all those who dared to criticize Dan Rather over the forgeries used in the 60 Minutes story on George Bush's Air National Guard service. According to O'Reilly, Rather's torment at the hands of critics using (gasp!) the First Amendment to speak out against him shows that the American system of innocent until proven guilty has been utterly discarded.

What a load of horse puckey.

The ordeal of Dan Rather goes far beyond the man himself. It speaks to the presumption of guilt that now rules the day in America. Because of a ruthless and callow media, no citizen, much less one who achieves fame, is given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to allegations or personal attacks. The smearing of America is in full bloom.

The presumption of innocence relates to criminal proceedings, Bill, not media criticism. Criticism doesn't equate to legal action, and the cure is either countercriticism -- which CBS News and Rather apologists delivered in spades -- or admitting the obvious: the documents were forgeries and CBS screwed up. To this date, Rather has only done the former.

That smear came on the heels of the "Swift boat" attacks on John Kerry, an ordeal that may have cost him the election. While some of the Vietnam vets had valid points, more than a few of the accusations against Kerry were simply untrue.

We hear this a lot, but no one who makes that suggestion ever comes up with a single argument from the Swiftvets that was proven false, let alone "more than a few". O'Reilly doesn't back this up, either, making himself a hypocrite for at least the first time in this piece.

Right-wing talk radio in particular pounded Kerry and also bludgeoned Dan Rather for his role in another smear incident - the charges against President Bush about his National Guard service. Again, Rather was found guilty without a fair hearing.

Fair hearing? Rather used the broadcast medium of CBS to constantly defend himself, hardly a mismatch against Rather.

Charges that he intentionally approved bogus documents that made Bush look bad were leveled and widely believed. It was chilling.

Perhaps that's because he told the nation that he personally vouched for the authenticity of the documents, Bill. Even today, after we've found out that CBS's own experts warned them the documents could not be authenticated and every accredited expert in the field has thoroughly debunked them, Rather and CBS have yet to admit they're forgeries. They only admit that they aren't "thoroughly authenticated". Issuing bulls**t statements like that and stonewalling the critics got Rather and CBS in the hot water they're in.

It may be true that Rather did not vet the information supplied to him by producers, but few anchor people do.

Rather is more than the anchor at CBS News, he's also the managing editor. Isn't he supposed to be responsible for what gets broadcast on CBS News? Or is that just a phony title, meant to build up his credibility through fraud?

But holding a political point of view is the right of every American, and it does not entitle people to practice character assassination or deny the presumption of innocence. Dan Rather was slimed.

Oh, grow up. If Dan Rather can't take criticism about how he performs his job, then he should have gotten out of the media business a long time ago. And to reiterate the point, Rather hasn't been charged with a crime, he's being criticized in the same manner that he and his cohorts at 60 Minutes have made careers off of doing to others. As has Bill O'Reilly, for that matter.

Let me ask you something: In the future, do you think potential public servants and social crusaders are going to risk being brutally attacked within this insane system?

Dan Rather is NOT a public servant. He has made a very lucrative career appearing in front of a camera and pretending to be a journalist. If free speech is an "insane system", perhaps you'd like to tell us what you'd replace it with, Bill. Would we all need licenses to dare offer criticism of Dan Rather? Or do you believe we should all sit quietly and watch whatever CBS tells us without a hint of dissent?

Dan Rather did not get what he deserved in this case. He made a mistake, as we all do, but he is not a dishonest man. Unfair freedom of speech did him in. This is not your grandfather's country anymore.

"Unfair freedom of speech" ... I wonder how many of your victims would have said the same thing, Bill. George Bush could certainly make the same claim after the TANG story. If that's your position, then Dan Rather should have been tried for his participation in the story and possibly jailed, or at least silenced by the government, for his role. Is that what you propose for America, Bill?

Get a grip and a clue, O'Reilly. If Dan can't handle the criticism, then perhaps he shouldn't have sat behind the big desk in the first place. If he hadn't personally vetted the material as you say, then this "honest man" lied to the American public when he told us he personally vouched for its authenticity. He still can't bring himself to admit that he lied and his producers knowingly aired a story based on documents that they had been warned were not authenticated. Only through the efforts of Rather's critics did the truth finally come out.

That's what should interest you, Bill -- the truth. If your first priority is to Dan Rather instead of the truth, you're in the wrong business and you should get out. Now.

UPDATE: Read Sissy's succinct take on Bill O'Reilly, too. Winfield Myers has a longer exposition dismantling O'Reilly's piece, and suggests a new phrase for this kind of mental breakdown -- an O'Reilly Fracture. Read his post to get the definition. I like it!

Kuchma Wants Elections

The French news agency AFP reports that outgoing Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma has embraced the idea of re-running the last round of the elections in order to resolve the political crisis gripping Ukraine:

"If we really want to preserve peace and agreement, and really want to build a legitimate democratic society that we so often talk about... then let's hold new elections," the Interfax news agency quoted Kuchma as telling reporters on Monday.

If true, this represents a major victory for Viktor Yushchenko and the pro-Western opposition to Kuchma and his hand-picked successor, Viktor Yanukovych. Much depends on the conditions for a new election -- whether the discredited Central Election Commission runs it again after the disastrous results from its last outing eight days ago. More international observers will be needed, and I suspect that more Western media will attend to the election anyway. Yuschenko and his Orange Movement appear to have gotten exactly what they want.

Don't forget -- King at SCSU Scholars continues to provide the best roundups and insight on the Ukrainian crisis this side of the Atlantic.

Miami Herald Unravels Florida Paranoia

CNN reports that the Miami Herald investigated the latest "stolen election" theories regarding Florida in 2004, specifically that fraud occurred in Democratic counties that wound up going for George Bush overwhelmingly over John Kerry. The Herald's recount of ballots from these counties will disappoint the tinfoil-hat brigade on the Left that remain convinced that Kerry really won Florida:

A newspaper's review of ballots cast in three north Florida counties where registered Democrats far outnumber Republicans showed just what officials reported: The counties' voters did on Election Day as they often do, voting for a Republican for president.

The Miami Herald review goes against Internet-fed rumors questioning whether there was a conspiracy against Sen. John Kerry in those counties. ...

Reporters for the newspaper went over more than 17,000 optical scan ballots cast in three rural counties mentioned by doubters: Suwannee, Lafayette and Union. All three are overwhelmingly Democratic in registration, but chose President Bush.

No one has requested an official recount of the ballots in any Florida county, but the Herald got permission from the county registrars to review the ballots themselves. In all three counties, they found at most a couple of dozen ballots that had been discarded due to the optical-scan systems' inability to read them, although the Herald felt that in some cases the voter intent could still be determined. The vote counts only changed a few votes in either direction, making clear that the results announced by Florida reflected the actual intent of the voters there.

Perhaps this will be enough to silence the Roswell faction of the Left regarding stolen elections, although I doubt that. It should, however, convince the rest of America that these people are delusional and somewhat dangerous to follow. They seem intent on undermining confidence in the electoral process either from a form of mental illness which makes them unable to recognize reality, or out of Machiavellian ambition to delegitimize American democracy. In either case, we need to make sure they remain marginalized.

College Diversity Programs Target The Symptom, Not The Disease

Today's Washington Post editorial decries the sudden dropoff in enrollment for African-Americans at the University of Michigan after a long legal battle upheld the college's affirmative-action programs. The Post tries to blame the publicity surrounding the lawsuit for the stark decline, but in the next breath notes that the falling enrollments belong to a national trend:

Post staff writer Michael Dobbs reports that numerous other large universities are reporting declining black enrollments; these include many campuses in the University of California system, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the private University of Pennsylvania. The University of Georgia experienced a 26 percent drop in African American freshmen this year, Ohio State University a 29 percent drop and the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois a 32 percent drop.

The Post correctly deduces the problem -- a failing public-school system -- but then continues to advocate the same tired diversity policies at the college level for a cure. The Post provides no evidence that discrimination exists at the college level at Michigan or anywhere else. In fact, they note that colleges compete heavily for qualified African-American applicants. So why propose further affirmative action for the problem?

The true cause of falling enrollments is a public-school system that locks children into failing institutions with no hope of upward or outward mobility. Middle-class parents of all ethnicities can move to the suburbs or exurbs, where fewer students and greater resources create a better environment for their children. Upper-class parents can afford to send their children to private schools, where teachers have to produce to remain employed. Other parents remain locked into urban school districts that attract few talented teachers and, because of idiotic state laws, cannot expel troublemakers except under the most critical of circumstances, forcing them to spend money on security that would be better spent on education. And without economic mobility, the children must go to these schools, whether they teach well or not.

School voucher programs would solve most of these problems, even if given limited application to failing school districts. In order to produce students who can succeed at the college level, schools must produce successful students in the primary grades first. Once in high school, the battle is all but over; if they have not learned the basics at that point, they likely will fail there, let alone apply to college.

University affirmative-action programs target the symptom and not the underlying disease, which is failing public-school systems in urban areas where African-American children overwhelmingly live. Until we decide to create competition at the primary level for these children through vouchers and private schools who must live or die on enrollments, the Michigans and UCs will continue to see minority enrollments fall precipitously, and we will condemn yet another generation to a life of failure and bitter disappointment.

Democrats Vulnerable In 2006: Washington Times

Amy Fagan analyzes the Democrats' election chances in the 2006 Senate races and comes to much the same conclusion I did a week ago -- that the worst of the Republican realignment may still be ahead of them:

Democratic senators in the states that President Bush won will face a tough road to re-election in 2006, Republicans say, with their sights set most eagerly on two Democrats named Nelson -- Sens. Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Bill Nelson of Florida. ...

In Nebraska, Gov. Mike Johanns, a Republican, looks like Mr. Nelson's probable challenger for 2006, and Mr. Bush is expected to campaign on his behalf. In Florida, Republicans will be gunning for Mr. Nelson and hope to recruit a big name such as term-limited Gov. Jeb Bush to challenge him.

"These two definitely are going to be watching their backs," said David Mark, editor of Campaigns & Elections magazine. "Particularly on judicial nominees, they're going to be real careful on who they decide to block."

In fact, Democrats have five red-state seats up for contention in the next cycle, while the GOP have only three: Rick Santorum (PA), Lincoln Chafee (RI), and Olympia Snowe (ME). Of the three, only Chafee is at risk, even with a long history supporting liberal causes. Voters may tend to keep him in office in order to maintain influence, since the GOP will remain the party in power, although that may give individual voters a bit too much credit. Pennsylvania went to Kerry by a thinner margin than Ohio went to Bush, and the incumbency gives him an advantage that only a major name could dent (perhaps Ed Rendell?).

More to the point, the Democrats have to defend states that went for Bush in much greater margin than the GOP states went to Kerry. The "Bush Factor" in these states, the margin separating Bush from Kerry, is very significant:

Bill Nelson, Florida - +5.0
Jeff Bingaman, New Mexico - +1.1
Ben Nelson, Nebraska - +33.5
Kent Conrad, North Dakota - +27.4
Robert Byrd, West Virginia - +12.7

The problem actually extends to all of 2006's Senate races. The average Bush factor across the Democrat seats is -1.95, while the GOP has a 12.6 average. This means that the Democrats have much less support in all their races for the blue-state agenda, which forces them to take on a more conservative voting record for survival in 2006. As Fagan correctly analyzes, this means obstructionism is probably dead for judicial nominees for this session. Even if it's tried, the most vulnerable Senators will not be able to sign on, making a filibuster all but impossible to sustain.

The next session of the Senate will have to be more compliant to the Bush Administration's agenda and nominees. Expect to see a flurry of appointments right at the beginning of the term, possibly including at least one Supreme Court justice. If the Democrats have done their homework, they will be very ostentatious in approving the President's selections. If not, they will help to elect a filibuster-proof majority for the GOP in 2006.

My Annual NCAA Playoff Plea

Chris Dufresne's column in the Los Angeles Times provides the springboard for my annual gripe regarding Division 1-A college football. The season winds up this weekend as the last of the regular season peters to an end, bringing us possibly 5 undefeated teams and yet another month of arguing who "deserves" to play for the national championship:

Utah and Boise State have already clinched undefeated regular seasons. Neither has a stake in the national title race because they play in non-BCS conferences — the Mountain West and Western Athletic.

Meanwhile, in the so-called "power" conferences, Pittsburgh of the Big East can clinch a major bowl bid next week even if it loses to South Florida and finishes with a 7-4 record. ...

Two-loss Michigan has already wrapped up a Rose Bowl bid and a two-loss team is going to win the Atlantic Coast Conference and a $16-million bowl berth. If Colorado beats Oklahoma next week, Gary Barnett's Buffaloes win the Big 12 title with an 8-4 record and could face 7-4 Pitt in the Fiesta Bowl.

So we have two teams with eight losses between them going to a major BCS bowl while at least two other teams that may go undefeated wind up at the Liberty Bowl (Boise State and Louisville). Why? Because not all schools in Division 1-A are created equal. The NCAA and the media treat the second-tier schools as if they're the minor leagues. The truth is that Boise State will never, ever get to play for the "championship" of its division. It isn't even eligible for it.

Nor is that the only problem that the BCS has. BCS rankings come from an arcane calculation that takes the record, the strength of schedule, margins of victory, and most of all the AP rankings of eligible college teams to determine the Top 10 teams for bowl assignments. This system works terrific for the AP and the rest of the media; the AP gets plenty of exposure, and the sports media gets to debate endlessly who got screwed by the BCS. Coaches seem to love it as well, since they get an excuse to run up scores on opponents. We saw this in the SC-Notre Dame game on Saturday, when Pete Carroll called a fake punt in the final seven minutes of a game he led by 24 points. College sports supposedly teaches sportsmanship, but that gets chucked out the window if you're in the BCS hunt -- a great lesson for the NCAA to promote through its athletic programs.

Who gets screwed? Colleges who remain outside the BCS orbit despite playing in the same division as eligible schools, and the fans who would like to see teams actually win their way to the championship. BCS supporters claim that the system produces the best two teams every year, but it doesn't do that at all; it merely produces the best two big-market teams, and sometimes not even that. It may be an improvement over the old system, where the AP and UPI simply decided the championship themselves, but that qualifies as damnation by faint praise.

As I say every year, the NCAA needs to come up with a system where each division champion gets to play in a tournament in order to become the national champion. They could include at-large teams in order to fill out a 32-team playoff system, which would require four weeks to determine the national-championship matchup. The NCAA could then seed the major bowls by matching the losing teams at each of the brackets as they descend, allowing the two semi-final losing teams to play each other and the four quarter-final losing teams to do the same, filling in the other three BCS bowls. Others could then be available for the minor bowl games, free agents to go where they please.

Why won't this work? One reason is the NCAA's resistance to the same playoff format it employs for its other football divisions and the rest of its sports programs. Another is the four-week leadup to the bowl games; they claim it will either extend the season too long for the players, or it will shorten the regular season for the schools not eligible for the tournament. Hogwash. Those schools who fail to qualify can certainly schedule one or two more games at the end of the season once it becomes clear they won't get in. Besides, the schools have plenty of bye weeks that they could forgo in order to get their games in before the tournament starts. UCLA played SC this Saturday after having the past two weekends off.

The NCAA needs to dump the BCS system and go with a true playoff system. Until they do, any claim to a national championship must be treated with suspicion for the claimant and contempt for the system that creates it.

UN Warned To Outlaw Terrorism Or Risk Irrelevancy

The London Telegraph reports that a blue-ribbon panel of "wise men" appointed by Kofi Annan will deliver a report on Thursday warning the United Nations to outlaw terrorism and define it as any attacks intended to target civilians:

After decades of argument over whether one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, a group of international "wise men" will this week tell the United Nations to outlaw all terror attacks on civilians or risk losing its moral authority.

In a report to be unveiled on Thursday, seen in part by The Telegraph, a panel appointed to reform the UN said it must send "an unequivocal message that terrorism is never an acceptable tactic, even for the most defensible of causes".

One would think that the UN would already have defined terrorism, but in fact the General Assembly has refused to pass a definition of terrorism -- out of support for the Palestinians and other Islamist causes. They see legitimacy in killing civilians for the excuse of anti-colonialism and have stalled a bill which would define terrorism and expressly make it illegal.

The new report comes from an international panel of diplomats, including Brent Scowcroft, whose sympathies sometimes also lie with the Palestinians. One of the signatories is Amr Mousa, president of the Arab League, whose endorsement is expected to make ignoring the report difficult for the Arab states in the UN. The introduction of the report will create some political pressure, especially from the US, UK, and Russia to quickly adopt the convention on terror that has been held up for eight years.

Don't bet on it getting any new life soon. Too many of the UN's dictatorships and kleptocrats have too much invested in these terrorist causes as a distraction for the multitudes they oppress to allow such a measure to pass. Its failure, however, may finally wake Americans to the irrelevancy the UN has long become and of which the report specifically predicts. If the UN cannot even bring itself to recognize the greatest danger facing the civilization it supposedly represents, it only confirms its own uselessness.

40 Years Later, Germans Confront Their Immigrant Problem

Forty years after opening the floodgates to Turkish immigration -- and allowing them to form their own subculture without either side working towards integration -- the murder of Theo Van Gogh has finally prompted Germany to insist on assimilation from its Muslim population, the AP reports:

Fears that growing alienation between immigrants and majority Germans could lead to strife have prompted politicians including Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to send a message to Muslims immigrants: Learn German, fit in, commit to democratic rules.

In Neukoelln, where 80 percent of elementary school students are not German, some civic leaders say the debate underscores something they have said for some time: Immigrants are not going to conform to mainstream German society over time.

"Pointing out the problem doesn't make you a racist," said Leopold Bongart, who has taught German language courses in Neukoelln since the 1970s.

"We told ourselves that the process in many ways would take care of itself. That hasn't worked."
Fears that growing alienation between immigrants and majority Germans could lead to strife have prompted politicians including Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to send a message to Muslims immigrants: Learn German, fit in, commit to democratic rules.

In Neukoelln, where 80 percent of elementary school students are not German, some civic leaders say the debate underscores something they have said for some time: Immigrants are not going to conform to mainstream German society over time.

"Pointing out the problem doesn't make you a racist," said Leopold Bongart, who has taught German language courses in Neukoelln since the 1970s. "We told ourselves that the process in many ways would take care of itself. That hasn't worked."

Germans allowed themselves to believe that they could import millions of cheap workers without experiencing any social distortion from the culture shock. They allowed ghettos to form, and as the AP report details, a completely separate social structure unconnected from mainstream Germany grew out of this arrogance. Now they want the Muslims to integrate into German society, but 40 years of pushing them into the corner cannot be reversed overnight.

Ukraine May Impose Martial Law

Ukraine's outgoing Kuchma executive may declare martial law in an attempt to end the massive rallies and protests springing from the electoral fraud of last weekend, the Ukrainian news service Ukrayinska Pravda announced:

Yushchenko warns of a possible attempt to break up the rallies and declare emergency law about 20:00.

Victor Yushchenko has warned that the authorities are considering declaring emergency law and moving to break up the rallies in Kiev.

"Already for two days there has been talk about introducing emergency law which would allow them to break up this demonstration and raze the tent city around 20:00" - Yushchenko said at the rally in Kiev's Independence Square.

According to my friend and colleague King Banaian, this may already have come to pass. He's posted links to Tulip Girl on the ground there, and Yuschenko's news service reports further that police have gathered for unknown reasons at the local sports stadium.

This may quickly escalate into a Tiananmen Square-type confrontation. Let's hope cooler heads prevail, but it looks like Yanukovych and Kuchma have determined that their position has become untenable outside the use of force.

Memo To Hysterical American Leftists: This Is What Vote Fraud Looks Like

The London Telegraph reports today on the details of the fraud perpetrated by those at least supporting Viktor Yanukovych in the Ukrainian presidential elections last weekend, and possibly even sanctioned by the Kuchma government. For those Americans who think that voter fraud consists of long lines at polling precincts, this story should provide a revelation:

It was 5.30pm on election day in Ukraine when the thugs in masks arrived armed with rubber truncheons. Vitaly Kizima, an election monitor at Zhovtneve in Ukraine's Sumy region, watched in horror as 30 men in tracksuits stormed into the village polling station.

"They started to beat voters and election officials, trying to push through towards the ballot boxes," he told The Telegraph. "People's faces were cut from blows to the head. There was blood all over."

The thugs - believed to be loyal to the pro-Russian presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovich from his stronghold, Donetsk - were repulsed only when locals pushed them back and a policeman fired warning shots. ...

Maya Syta, a journalist working at polling station 73 in a Kiev suburb, witnessed ballot papers destroyed with acid poured into a ballot box. "The officials were taking them out of the box and they couldn't understand why they were wet," she said. ...

The most common trick was "carousel" voting, in which busloads of Yanukovich supporters simply drove from one polling station to another casting multiple false absentee ballots.

The widespread use of such tactics resulted in an outcry from every international group monitoring the Ukrainian elections. The moral relativism of the US media has focused on little more than the discrepancies between the exit polling and the vote tabulations, making the crisis look like their interpretation of the 2004 American election. The coverage makes George Bush look hypocritical for insisting that the Ukrainian results were invalid and rejecting them outright.

The systematic nature of the fraud and vote theft has mostly gone unrecognized by the American media and the nation. Unlike the wailing and gnashing of teeth we've experienced in the past four years from the Left, Ukraine suffered true voter fraud and a stolen election, and the mainstream media has missed the story. The only hypocrites in this story are those who call themselves journalists.

Pakistan Withdraws From Wana

Pakistan has decided it has done all it can with troops in the South Waziristan area of the border regions with Afghanistan and has withdrawn its checkpoints and most of its troops:

The Pakistani army announced Saturday that it would withdraw hundreds of troops from a tense tribal region near Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden and his top deputy were believed to be hiding.

The withdrawals from the South Waziristan area come after several military operations by thousands of troops against bin Laden's al Qaeda organization and its supporters in recent months.

Although the Pakistanis claim that no trace of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri has been found, some still believe the terror masterminds to be hiding in that region. Pakistan, however, has alienated the local tribes during its missions to seek out and destroy al-Qaeda assets in the region, and this move looks like an attempt to mollify tribal chiefs and encourage them to assist with the effort against terrorism. Their track record suggests that the encouragement will fall on deaf ears.

White House Delays Rice Confirmation Hearings

Does the White House anticipate problems with the nomination of Condoleezza Rice in the US Senate? Richard Lugar told Fox News Sunday that his offer of an early hearing in the lame-duck session was refused, postponing her confirmation debate until the new Senate session takes office in early January:

At the urging of the White House, a key Senate panel will put off consideration of the nomination of Condoleezza Rice to be secretary of state, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said on Sunday.

Sen. Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, said he had suggested "a very early time" for his committee to take up the nomination, which must be approved afterward by the full U.S. Senate.

"The White House suggested that that would not be appropriate -- that is, in December," Lugar said on "Fox News Sunday." "So we'll not be having hearings in December. But we'll have hearings as soon as possible in January."

Lugar told Fox that he foresees no problems for Rice and the White House in confirming her appointment to State, but turning down an offer of an early hearing will raise a few eyebrows. Democrats have made a lot of noise about Bush nominating people for important Cabinet positions that agree with his policies a little too closely, a ridiculous argument in any organization. An executive needs to appoint people who support his vision and plans; doing anything else leads to nothing but confusion, mixed signals, and inertia, results we can ill afford during wartime.

I suspect that Bush wants the delay in order to both get a better majority in the Senate and to avoid the inflammatory suggestion that the popular Colin Powell is being given the bum's rush out of office. The delay indicates the GOP may anticipate more problems than Lugar lets on in getting Rice's nomination through the Senate, and they may be preparing for a replay of the Abu Ghraib hearings, this time on the entire Iraq invasion. It looks like they want as many friends in the room as possible when it happens.

Sistani Fights Delay In Iraqi Vote

One of the topics we left in the green room for yesterday's Northern Alliance Radio Network program was the calls for a delay in the Iraqi elections, now set for January 30. In the end, we felt that the Ukrainian political crisis was a larger and more urgent story, but the general consensus in the studio was that a postponement would be equivalent to a retreat in the face of terrorism. Apparently Ayatollah Ali Sistani agrees with us, and he has made clear that the Iraqi national elections should be held on schedule:

Over the past week, a movement spearheaded by Sunni Arabs to delay the elections has gathered momentum, as they have argued that the nation remains too violent to allow safe voting. Responding to those calls, the Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has insisted on keeping the Jan. 30 date. All along, he has argued that elections should be held as soon as possible. ...

"Sayed Sistani doesn't see any need to delay the election date," an aide, Abu Ahmed al-Mudaffar, said in an interview from the holy city of Najaf, using the honorific reserved for direct descendants of Muhammad. Officials from the Sistani organization made clear that position in phone conversations Friday with Sunni leaders, said a senior official in the Shiite Council, an umbrella political group.

They're also discussing this topic on Fox News as well, with the Washington Post's Ceci Connolly and Juan Williams providing a substantial amount of handwringing over legitimacy. Williams asserts that "forcing" an election will result in a civil war. Fred Barnes and Bill Kristol both point out that elections resolve issues and provide safety valves to blow off the pressure that creates civil wars. Barnes made a great point about El Salvador in the 1980s, when Marxist guerillas held a third of the country and called for a boycott of the general elections, knowing that they would be marginalized in a free plebescite. And that is exactly what happened: the boycott collapsed, and a huge turnout established a democracy that still thrives in El Salvador.

The answer, of course, is that elections must be held. Not only will a freely-elected legislature address the issues through debate that now provoke gunfire, but it will also demonstrate the inexorable certainty of freedom to those who fear terrorism. How can we ask Iraqis to trust our intent to liberate them if we retreat from allowing them to form their own government? As Kristol suggested, waiting this long for elections -- and waiting this long to address the terrorists in Fallujah, Ramadi, Samarrah, and elsewhere in the Sunni Triangle -- may already have been a strategic error that lent credence to the terrorists' claims of American imperialism instead of liberation, at least in some fevered minds.

Sistani represents the majority of Iraqis, a majority that spent the last 40 years being oppressed by many of the same people calling for a delay in the elections. Any acquiescence to those demands will only give those Shi'a the impression that the Sunni minority again will dictate the terms of their government. If that happens, the long-predicted Shi'ite uprising might well become a reality as the safety valve of democracy remains closed.

FBI: Madrid, 9/11 Attacks Linked

The FBI has informed Spain that they have established direct links between the Madrid rail bombings and the 9/11 attacks that touched off the Western response to Islamofascist terror. The AP and ABC reports that the FBI has identified the al-Qaeda leader who helped plan and gave approval to both terrorist plans:

The FBI has told Spanish investigators that one of three men believed to have planned the Sept. 11 attacks from Spain in the summer of 2001 also gave the order to carry out the Madrid blasts, the newspaper ABC reported. ...

Investigators have long concluded that the Sept. 11 attacks were partially planned in Spain in July 2001. Hijacker Mohammed Atta, believed to have piloted one of the airliners that crashed into New York's World Trade Center, visited Spain two months before the attacks and met two men.

One was Ramzi bin al-Shaibah, who is being held by U.S. authorities, while the other was unidentified. ABC said investigators now believe that third man was the one who in December 2003 activated the Qaeda cell that carried out the March 11 attacks, which Spaniards call "our Sept. 11."

Not that this should surprise anyone, but one does have to question the effectiveness of Spanish cooperation in the war on terror if this third man still operated freely in Spain for thirty months after 9/11. The Aznar government provided the US strong political support for our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it appears that they never took the necessary steps to investigate al-Qaeda on their own soil. This isn't just a Spanish issue, either; Germany has been singularly ineffective in capturing and trying AQ operatives, and France hasn't found anyone except their traditional home-grown terrorists, the ETA Basque separatists.

Spain takes the AQ threat more seriously now, of course, even if they have quailed at contributing to the eventual long-term solution of transforming Southwest Asia through democracy. This new information should wake the rest of Europe that al-Qaeda cannot be thought simply as an antagonist of America, but an enemy of Western civilization.