Did Ted Turner Buy Fox News?

I'm watching Fox News and in the middle of an interview with former hostage Tommy Hamill, when suddenly they just brought in Jesse Jackson who wants to equate the Iraqi elections with the Civil Rights Act of 1965. Laughably, he says that democracy can't be conducted under occupation. Just how did he think that the 1965 CRA got enforced, anyway? How did the public schools in Arkansas and the university in Mississippi get integrated? It seems to me that having the National Guard federalized and providing security had more than a little to do with the initial success of desegregation in the South.

Why did Fox think that Jesse had anything germane to add to the Iraqi election story? Good Lord.

Car Bombing In Western Baghdad

The first reports of an attack have come in at the 90-minute mark. Fox News reports on its televised coverage that a polling station in western Baghdad has suffered a suicide car bombing. They're crediting Reuters for the report, which says that it resulted in one casualty, an Iraqi policeman.

More when I get a wire report.

UPDATE: Fox News reports "multiple blasts" in central Baghdad.

UPDATE II: The first explosion appears to have come from the Monsour area, which according to the Fox News expert houses some ambassadors and VIPs. The attack apparently occurred at the checkpoint and not the polling station itself -- which tends to give confidence that the security arrangements have made the elections safer.

UPDATE III: Some link love. Slant Point's Scott Sala is up late and writing with his usual panache. Brant at SWLiP weighs in on the Andrew Sullivan-Mickey Kaus feud with a lengthy and meaty swipe at Sullivan (and well-deserved; John Cole joins in with an old-fashioned fisking). Friends of Democracy promises to be the clearinghouse for blog coverage, so don't miss it.

UPDATE IV: One empty polling station was leveled by one of the explosions. The other, the Mansour bombing, was a walk-up suicide bomber who killed one Iraqi Army troop and wounded four other Iraqi security personnel. No civilians were wounded in that attack.

NYT Promotes Terrorist Threats, Buries Iraqi Defiance

While we wait for more updates on the Iraqi elections, a look at coverage in the mainstream American media could shed some light as to what we can expect for post-election spin. The New York Times runs a typical story for its morning edition, telling us for the umpteenth time this week about how the terrorists plan on creating a bloodbath but virtually burying the defiance of Iraqis in the face of those threats:

Anticipating a wave of violence on election day, Iraqi soldiers and the police, backed up in places by American troops, erected checkpoints across the major cities of northern, southern and central Iraq. American attack helicopters and jets circled overhead, and election workers wrapped voting sites, many of them schools, in barbed wire. The streets of Baghdad and Mosul were mostly deserted.

Iraqi officials predicted that 8 million of the country's 14 million eligible voters would cast ballots on Sunday, a turnout of roughly 57 percent, in the country's first multiparty elections in more than 50 years. But with insurgents threatening to kill Iraqis who vote and to bomb polling places, and with most leaders of the country's Sunni minority calling for a boycott, that statement, by the Independent Election Commission of Iraq, appeared to be as much an expression of hope as it was a prediction.

Of course, none of this is news, and yet it precedes some interesting quotes from Iraqis who appear to defy Zarqawi and his band of bloodthirsty lunatics:

"I voted under Saddam - it was bogus - and now I am ready for a real election," said Mohsin Abdul Ruda, a 50-year-old shopkeeper, who lives down the street from a girls' school that will serve as his neighborhood's polling place. "Everyone in the neighborhood is going to vote."

As he spoke, three loud explosions echoed nearby.

"There is no fear," Mr. Ruda said, waving his hand. "Only cowards will be afraid to vote." ...

At the Obqa Ibn Nafi secondary school in Baghdad, Iraqis spent much of the day finishing preparations for the vote in a converted classroom. Four cardboard voting booths stood against one wall, and there were two clear plastic boxes for the finished ballots. On the blackboard were instructions for last week's geography lesson.

Here, too, the election workers were predicting a good turnout, even among the neighborhood's Sunnis.

"Those people who are trying to stop the election, they are agents of the devil," said Ziad Mohi, one of the election workers. "But the people will come anyway."

The Washington Post reported earlier in the week on Iraqi enthusiasm, but buried the story on page A-13. Now we see the NYT report on the election on the eve, and they bury the enthusiasm at the bottom of the article. You can bet that the MSM will continue to bury those elements which don't fit within the predetermined narratives of failure, or simply ignore them altogether.

First Hour -- Looks Light But Clear

I'm watching Fox News while keeping an eye on the news wires for updates on the Iraqi elections, and so far the news looks pretty good. While the Fox cameras show light traffic at the Green Zone polling station, the first hour of the election has passed without any major attacks:

Voters trickled into polling stations under tight security Sunday in Iraq, casting ballots despite promises by insurgents to sabotage the country's first free election in a half-century.

Iraqi President Ghazi al-Yawer was one of the first to vote at election headquarters in the heavily fortified Green Zone, calling the action his country's first step "toward joining the free world."

Across the nation, the nearly 5,200 polling stations opened on schedule, with workers checking voter identifications and police standing guard. Turnout was expected to be slow in the early hours. Most attacks occur in the morning, and many Iraqis were likely to wait to see whether rebels carry through with threats to kill them.

There were no immediate reports of attacks, but an explosion was heard at the U.S. military base at Kirkuk in the north. Scattered small arms fire was heard near another U.S. base close to Baghdad's airport.

Baghdad's streets were deserted at dawn. The only activity on one stretch of empty roadway was an American Humvee racing in response to a burst of gunfire.

I watched as al-Yawer voted, wearing his flowing robe while he cast the first vote at the station. His vote went out over live television in Iraq as well, showing his fellow Sunnis that it is possible to vote safely. Afterwards, several people came in and voted quickly. The parliamentary style of government and the proportional representation method ensures that Iraqis can get in and out quickly of the polling stations; they simply vote for one slate of candidates rather than different offices.

The haze of the morning would appear to give the terrorists the cover necessary to stage attacks. Earlier, a group of seven terrorists attacked the US embassy in the Green Zone. However, an American drone picked up the attack and followed the idiots back to their house, where the American military captured them almost immediately. That has also received extensive airplay in Iraq, serving as a warning that American technology stands ready to identify and neutralize terrorist operatives.

If the terrorists can't stage attacks in the early hours, one can expect large turnouts later on. Of course, this really only applies to Baghdad, Mosul, and a few other locations. Most of the country does not face these issues and will likely see very heavy turnout. Zarqawi's nutcases may wind up suppressing Sunni influence even further than expected considering their proportion of the population.

Keep checking back for updates.

German Government Transforms Itself Into Pimps

The German government has told an unemployed woman that unless she agrees to take a job offer from a licensed Berlin whorehouse as a prostitute, her unemployment benefits will be cut off:

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year. ...

The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.

She received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her "profile'' and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel.

Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest since reunification in 1990.

The Germans refused to create exceptions in its unemployment laws for licensed brothels, which creates a moral problem for young German women who find themselves looking for work. (The Germans claim that distinguishing between brothels and bars is too difficult for their bureaucracy.) They have to enter their information into a job database in order to collect unemployment benefits, and those databases give access to all employers paying federal taxes.

In other words, German women have to provide their private information to a system left wide open to sexual predators, and instead of protecting the women, the Germans pimp them out. Shame on them.

Some people argue for legalizing prostitution in the US, part of an expanded view of privacy and a paleo-libertarian philosophy. One state, Nevada, has no state laws against prostitution and leaves the issue to counties and cities, which allows some licensed brothels to operate freely. However, as the German experience shows, really stupid things happen when limited libertarianism meets socialism.

Iraqis In Saddam Home Area Looking Forward To Vote

The AP reports that Iraqis in Alam, near Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, can't wait to vote in tomorrow's elections. They understand that a free Iraqi government provides the only method of seeing the American troops leave:

Many Iraqis living near Saddam Hussein's hometown said they will vote Sunday because the ballot — not violence — will end Iraq's occupation by U.S.-led coalition troops. ...

The local leader of one of Iraq's largest clans here is bidding for a seats in the 275-member National Assembly that will govern the country and draft a permanent constitution.

Mashaan al-Jbouri, who heads the 37-member Liberation and Reconciliation Front, has said the country can be freed from occupation only through peaceful means.

Hasan Mohammed Khazaal, a 24-year-old university student, backed that notion.

"We will have a new constitution and I can get rid of the occupiers through elections. This is the only way to evict the occupiers," said Khazaal, who had decorated his car with posters of al-Jbouri, the local chief of the Jbour clan.

Not all of the above sounds like good news, but I think that it demonstrates a healthy attitude by the people of Alam. They don't like America and want to see us leave, certainly. But what's missing is the conspiracy-theory notions that have made some Iraqis susceptible to the dark attraction of groups like Zarqawi's Tawid and Jihad. The Alamites have a firm grip on reality; they may not like the fact that the Sunnis won't maintain the monopoly on power they had under Saddam, but they intend on being part of the new power structure nonetheless, even if it's motivated by a desire to see us leave.

The second part of the good news is their acknowledgement that America has the resolve to face down the terrorists. Iraqis like Jbouri and Khazaal know that Zarqawi's method only results in dead Iraqis and tougher security measures, not any sign of American retreat. In fact, that acknowledgement shows that despite the best efforts of idiots like Ted Kennedy, our tenacity gets better communication than any signs of surrender from the defeatist Left.

That dawning realization, along with the general momentum of the election in Iraq and the notable enthusiasm that it has generated, will account for a large turnout in the next few hours. Love us or hate us, the Iraqis understand that only elections will give them their freedom.

Milwaukee Election Fraud May Still Not Convince Dem Governor On Reform

Wisconsin voters who have reacted with alarm and outrage over the incompetence and probable fraud in the Milwaukee election. State legislators also want to ensure that this fiasco doesn't repeat itself, and plan on introducing a new requirement for a state-issued photo ID to cast a ballot. Unfortunately for the real voters, the Democratic governor apparently wants to keep the system just the way it is:

The mounting evidence this week of irregularities in Milwaukee has caused concern around Wisconsin that will result in new pressure for reform, said Rep. Jeff Stone (R-Greendale), one of the authors of the photo ID bill, which is to be introduced Monday.

State residents may worry about their votes being, in effect, negated because of questions surrounding thousands of votes in Milwaukee, he said.

Lawmakers tried tightening the security on elections in 2003, but Governor Jim Doyle vetoed the bill. The Assembly did not have the votes to override the veto, and with Doyle openly opposing the bill in this session, no one knows of any new votes to override his expected encore with the veto pen.

The bill now has 30 co-sponsors and the momentum of a scandal to put pressure on Doyle, but one has to wonder why he would support voting reform. After all, Milwaukee is the Democratic power base for Wisconsin; Kerry topped Bush by over 120,000 votes in 277,000 cast, when he only won the state by 11,000. Restoring sanity to elections in Wisconsin would do nothing to change the political environment in Milwaukee, but it could have a devastating effect on Democrats running for state office -- like Doyle's.

It appears that these calculations weigh heavily on Doyle's mind, instead of ensuring fair and competent elections for his constituents. Wisconsin residents should express their sentiments directly to Doyle and their Assembly representatives to make sure they understand that Doyle's calculations represent bad math, bad policy, and bad politics.

Power Line Back

I got a couple of e-mails this morning about Power Line being hacked. I started to post a confirmation on this -- the site redirected to a weird whois page -- but I checked again and it appears to be back up. I don't know what caused the problem, if it was a hack or just a glitch in a DNS server somewhere. Hopefully it won't happen again.

New Pancreas A No Go

Thanks to all who kept my wife in prayer last night -- we certainly appreciate your efforts and the comments and e-mails we received. Unfortunately, this situation didn't turn out to be the right fit. We found out early this morning, and we spent the intervening time catching up on our sleep.

Pancreas transplants are more problematic than kidney transplants. For the most part, as long as the donor is or was healthy, the kidney will make a good transplant. Pancreases are more sensitive, both in condition and age, and the donor was just at the outer edge of the age band anyway. Not only that, but the surgery for the recipient is more extensive and tougher to ensure that rejection doesn't occur. When the organ was removed, the doctors decided that the health of the organ would not be worth the risk to use for a transplant, for the First Mate or anyone else.

We have only been on the pancreas transplant list for about four weeks, so the call came as a complete surprise to us. We expected to get to the top of the list sometime in the summer. While we're disappointed that this one did not work out, we're not crushed and we're actually optimistic that we will get another one soon, and hopefully that one will work out.

Meanwhile, a family on the East Coast (as specific as the transplant team got) mourns the loss of a loved one. Please pray for comfort and support for them today.

Need Prayers

We just got a heads-up from the transplant center that they may have a good match on a pancreas for the First Mate. I'll let you know what happens. I may be hospiblogging this weekend ... Keep us in your prayers!

UPDATE: We don't know if we're a go quite yet, and it looks like we'll know early tomorrow morning. The pancreas is at least a three-antigen match, about what one would expect from a sibling, so the match is very good. What isn't known is the general condition of the pancreas, and that can't be determined until it's been removed from the donor. Like I said, I'll know more in the morning.

Which reminds me -- we're not the only ones who need prayer tonight. The family of the donor needs your prayers more than we do. Of course, we don't know anything about them, but just ask God to give them comfort and care in this time of loss.

Why Afghanistan Fell Off The Map

A curious phenomenon happened after the fall of the Taliban and the initial preparation for the Iraq invasion -- Afghanistan disappeared. Oh, not physically, perhaps, although judging from the paucity of news coverage from the newest democracy in Southwest Asia, one could be tempted to reach that conclusion. Now American Journalism Review reports on the vanishing Afghanis and the reason why we hear nothing of their progress:

Once a journalism hot spot, Afghanistan was all but left behind when the media's spotlight turned to the conflict in Iraq. In June/July 2003, AJR reported that only a handful of reporters remained in the struggling country on a full-time basis, while other news organizations floated correspondents in and out when time and resources permitted.

A year and a half later, Afghanistan has become even more of an afterthought. Only two news organizations--Newsweek and the Washington Post--have full-time reporters stationed in Kabul, the capital. Other major newspapers, such as the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, rely on stringers in Afghanistan and correspondents based in New Delhi, India, to cover the region, a stark contrast to the hundreds of reporters pouring into Iraq since the war began. The New York Times uses a stringer, albeit a full-time one. Television networks have nearly disappeared.

With the establishment of a new government and building of infrastructure, a continuing U.S. military presence and the hunt for terrorists, Afghanistan is rife with stories of long-term consequence. Roy Gutman, a veteran Newsday correspondent who became its foreign editor in July, has long criticized the media for their lack of solid, in-depth coverage of what he calls one of the major conflicts of our time and the true beginning of the battle against al Qaeda. Now that major fighting is over, "it's very important to keep a spotlight on Afghanistan to see whether the U.S. government is able to manage it and able to succeed," he says.

Indeed it is, and the Afghanistan phase has had its victories and defeats. Gutman says he's concerned about the supposedly systematic abuse of Afghani prisoners by American militar, but mostly we'd like to get more information on how the new democracy has performed for Afghanistan. The introduction of a self-governing republic in that region, and a fairly secular one at that, should be one of the best stories in the past century. Historians should be sharpening pencils and furiously taking notes, as what has for centuries been a hardscrabble source of upheaval transforms itself (hopefully) into an exporter of democracy.

Instead, the journalists and their corporations have decided that nothing bleeds in Afghanistan any longer, and the attention span and political biases of their masters force a shift of resources to Iraq. I have no problem with Iraq receiving extensive coverage, although I would hardly characterize what we get as particularly deep. We see and hear about bombings, shootings, and beheadings all day long, but the lack of any news outside the most troubled areas of the Sunni Triangle wind up getting the Afghanistan treatment. The result is a skewed, overly pessimistic and unrealistic picture of our progress in Iraq as a whole -- and an almost-complete blackout of Afghanistan as well.

How bad has the mainstream media retreat been? Kim Hart gives the numbers at the end:

Full time in January 200[5]
Washington Post: 1 reporter
New York Times: 1 full-time stringer
Newsweek: 1 reporter
ABC: 1 full-time freelance producer

Full time in May 2003
Washington Post: 1 reporter
New York Times: 1 full-time stringer
Associated Press: at least 3 reporters
Chicago Tribune: 1 full-time stringer
Christian Science Monitor: 1 reporter
CNN: a team of 4, including 1 reporter
NBC News/MSNBC: 1 reporter-producer
NPR: 1 correspondent
Reuters: a team of 5, including 3 print staffers

The lack of resources in covering what should still be considered a theater of war is appalling. The media have abandoned their responsibilities in reporting the news, instead focusing on the headlines that fit their predetermined narrative. Obviously, Afghanistan no longer fits in that strategy -- which may tell us far more than any of their coverage would have in the first place.

Smoking Something At The UN

In yet another example of moral obtuseness, the UN's "special rapporteur" of human rights in Southwest Asia has accused Israel of war crimes, apartheid, and insists that Israel will remain an occupying power in Gaza even after Israel pulls out:

International law will continue to view Israel as an occupying force in Gaza, even after its planned withdrawal, says a United Nations human-rights envoy.

John Dugard said Israel would remain responsible for Palestinian civilians in the territory, as it planned to retain control of Gaza's borders.

Dugard, a South African law professor, claims that Israel wants to retain its "grip" on Gaza even after the pullout, although the BBC doesn't explain how a retreat equates to an occupation. As far as the moronic notion that guarding an international border equates to occupying one's neighbor, the entire world would exist in a state of mutual occupation if Dougard's advice carried the day. Does Pakistan occupy India? Does Syria occupy Israel? Israel guards the border in order to keep Gazans from crossing over and killing Israeli civilians by suicide bombings in pizzerias.

If the UN takes that position, why should Israel withdraw at all? They might as well force the Palestinians out and annex Gaza instead.

Mr Dugard also spoke out against the barrier Israel has built along the West Bank, which it says is a defence against infiltration by suicide bombers. Palestinians regard it as a land grab.

"The restrictions on freedom of movement imposed by the Israeli authorities on Palestinians resemble the notorious 'pass laws' of apartheid South Africa," he said.

How very hip of Dugard to reference apartheid, but as a South African must know, the term has no application between two different states. The Palestinians aren't interested in limited autonomy within Israel; they claim Gaza and the West Bank as separate territory. In fact, one cannot be both an occupying power and a practitioner of apartheid simultaneously. Either the West Bank and Gaza rightfully belong to Israel, which means there is no occupation, or they don't, which means separation of the populations make sense -- especially when one side keeps attacking the other.

The wall isn't meant to keep Palestinians out of Israel, as a number of them work in Israel on a daily basis. It's meant as a border control to keep people from unauthorized entry into Israel as protection against terrorist attacks. As such, it's been pretty effective, which is why the Palestinians gripe and Dugard does his best to undermine it. Since the UN's position has been that the occupation must end in a two-state solution, Israel's wall makes perfect sense. Dugard could dispute its location, but then he can't call it apartheid.

He also said Israel's policy of responding to militant attacks by destroying Palestinian homes was a form of punishment forbidden under the Geneva Convention. "It is difficult to resist the conclusion that punitive house demolitions constitute serious war crimes," he said in the report.

The house demolitions may indeed be problematic in terms of international law, although in my opinion they don't amount to war crimes. But here's the real crux of the problem: Dugard talks about all of these issues without any inclusion of the context in which they occur -- the ongoing attacks on Israeli citizens by Palestinian terrorists! Once again, the UN attacks Israel for not following Marquess de Queensbury rules while it turns a blind eye to the bloodthirsty bombers who deliberately target women and children for murder. Dugard continues this moral equivalence -- nay, moral inferiority -- of knocking down homes to purposely killing babies on civilian buses.

It provides us yet another glimpse of the moral decay that eats at the heart of the United Nations.

Oregon U's Sticker-Ban Update

Kevin McCullough has a fresh column out on WND updating his readers on the University of Oregon decision to ban "Support Our Troops" magnetic stickers on university vehicles. Apparently, the outcry has had quite an impact on the administration:

The university also admitted the situation had created a public-relations problem (as was cited in the New York Times) but believed it to be based on less-than-factual accounts being reported by said talk-radio shows and blogs. (This was complete nonsense as even a minimal reading of the blog coverage proves.) Additionally, the university said "someone" had "yellow ribboned" the trees encircling the administration building. And when asked what would happen to the ribbons on those trees the university said plainly that they did not break the rules so they would be allowed to remain up.

On Wednesday afternoon, "William the brave" as he is now called, turned whistleblower on the university. "William the brave" was the employee (who is not Pete Baker) who had "ribboned" the office building. While university officials were telling the media the ribbons would be allowed to remain up, "William the brave" told the rest of the world the truth – that the ribbons had already been removed. He also publicly stated that numerous Kerry-Edwards signs and stickers had been affixed to all kinds of state-owned property throughout the entire election year.

No one doubts that the university has the right to determine the materials affixed to their own vehicles, but to claim that Oregon was forced to remove "Support Our Troops" stickers in order to remain politically neutral, which was their first excuse, is as ridiculous as it is false. Kevin's update (which links back here) demonstrates that Oregon not only has played with the facts more than once, but also had no preparation for the onslaught of publicity this generated. Oregon alumni and legislators might need to take a closer look at the administration to determine whether it understands its role and responsibilities and has the capacity to shoulder them. Right now, they appear to be floundering.

Just How Much Juice Has Abbas Got?

Gaza held its local council elections, the first elections ever that included the terrorist group Hamas as a political organization. After boycotting the presidential election earlier this month, these council elections promised to give a better look at the internal politics of the Palestinians. As I reported last night, the Hamas candidate appeared poised to win big, and the BBC confirms that Hamas took over two-thirds of the seats it contested:

Palestinian militant group Hamas has won a huge victory in local polls in Gaza, unofficial results indicate. Seen in Israel as a terrorist group, Hamas appears to have won roughly two-thirds of the seats it contested. ...

In elections held in 10 districts of Gaza this week, Hamas appears to have won 77 out of 118 seats. The ruling Fatah faction of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas won 26 seats.

The BBC is quick to caution that these elections were for city council seats only -- but without a doubt, they have to embarrass the Fatah faction that Abbas represents. Fatah went to great lengths to create the illusion of a mandate, so great that 46 election officials walked off the job to protest the massive election fraud. And Fatah didn't even face serious competition in that election, perhaps one reason why the initial turnout was so low.

In the late hours of polling, observers reported that only 30% of eligible voters had come out to cast ballots. Shortly afterwards, the hours were extended and identification requirements loosened, and the voter turnout more than doubled in that extended time. However, if Gaza gives any indication, it now looks like the Hamas boycott of the presidential election worked. The initial vote got the 30% who voted Fatah, just as in Gaza's council elections; the extended hours allowed the same voters to come back and create Abbas' "mandate".

With Hamas contesting the council elections, that becomes more clear. The Palestinians want the more radical approach of Hamas in dealing with Israel than the supposedly moderate Fatah program. That dovetails with a number of polls showing widespread support for the intifada, as high as 75% in October 2003. While the BBC is right to put the council elections into context, the overall theme appears to have changed little.

This creates serious questions about Abbas' ability to deliver any kind of peace with the Israelis, even if one gives him the benefit of the doubt as to his intentions. It looks as though Abbas only can count on half the popular support that Hamas receives, which means in a truly open election with Hamas' participation, Abbas would get wiped out and Fatah would operate as a minority, opposition party. Ariel Sharon may prefer Abbas as a negotiating partner, but he knows that Abbas is only a middleman. The decision for peace rests on the radical terrorists of Hamas, and that doesn't sound promising in the least.

I Didn't Know Al Gore Was British

The inventor of the World Wide Web received an award for outstanding achievement in science and technology for Britons, the London Telegraph reports this morning. Imagine my surprise to find out that Al Gore is British! Actually, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who first engineered the architecture of HTML and created the first browser that launched the commercial Internet, received the first annual honor that promotes British achievement:

Sir Tim, 49, who now lives and works in America, where he heads the World Wide Web Consortium, accepted his accolade by video link.

In an interview with The Telegraph, he said he was "chuffed to bits'' to win the first of what is intended to be an annual award.

The internet had already been in existence for 20 years when Sir Tim, a physicist then working in Geneva, developed the web in 1991 as a way of enabling people to share information. Despite its huge impact, he was for many years largely unknown in his own country before he was knighted last year.

He wasn't unknown after being knoghted and afterwards included in Time Magazine's 100 Most Important People Of The Century list:

[H]e cobbled together a relatively easy-to-learn coding system — HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language) — that has come to be the lingua franca of the Web; it's the way Web-content creators put those little colored, underlined links in their text, add images and so on. He designed an addressing scheme that gave each Web page a unique location, or url (universal resource locator). And he hacked a set of rules that permitted these documents to be linked together on computers across the Internet. He called that set of rules HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol).

And on the seventh day, Berners-Lee cobbled together the World Wide Web's first (but not the last) browser, which allowed users anywhere to view his creation on their computer screen. In 1991 the World Wide Web debuted, instantly bringing order and clarity to the chaos that was cyberspace. From that moment on, the Web and the Internet grew as one, often at exponential rates. Within five years, the number of Internet users jumped from 600,000 to 40 million. At one point, it was doubling every 53 days.

Berners-Lee heads the W3 Consortium, a non-profit that keeps the Internet open-source rather than allow software developers to Balkanize it with competing, exclusive standards. Berners-Lee never cashed in on his invention, either; he works at MIT, preferring academia for his contribution. No wonder he's "chuffed" at getting 28,000 pounds Sterling, although of course it's the honor that thrills him most.

I think all of us owe a debt of thanks to Sir Tim. We probably should apologize to him for Al Gore's claim to have created the Internet, too.

Zarqawi Network Collapse Continuing

The Iraqi government announced the capture of two more lieutenants of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi today as the Coalition continues to roll up Zarqawi's networks. The Iraqis say one of the men was Zarqawi's chief operational officer for Baghdad:

The government on Friday announced the arrests of two close associates of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, including the chief of the terror mastermind's Baghdad operation. The announcement came two days before historic elections that extremists have vowed to subvert. ...

Qassim Dawoud, a top security adviser, told reporters that the arrests of the al-Zarqawi lieutenants occurred in mid-January but gave few details. Dawoud said one of the men, Salah Suleiman al-Loheibi, headed al-Zarqawi's Baghdad operation and had met with the Jordanian-born terror leader more than 40 times over three months.

The other was identified as Ali Hamad Yassin al-Issawi.

The announcement brings to three the number of purported al-Zarqawi lieutenants arrested this month. The announcement appeared aimed at bolstering public confidence in security forces in advance of Sunday's election.

Violence still continued in Iraq today, with six polling stations coming under fire and three more bombings. The arrests of the terror leadership still means operatives exist at large, and they will attempt to fulfill their specific missions unless intercepted. However, with the leadership arrested and communications degraded, their ability to coordinate will disappear, and the operatives will increasingly get themselves killed as they operate farther into the open.

The terrorists will certainly give the security forces, Iraqi and American both, lots of trouble in the next few days. It appears, though, that the security forces have given Zarqawi and his gang of thugs much more trouble than they anticipated -- and if the Iraqis keep getting good intelligence, the leadership may have to run for the hills soon to keep themselves from falling into Coalition hands.

More Evidence Of Iraqi Enthusiasm, Part II

The news of Iraqi enthusiasm in advance of their first free elections after decades of oppression keep leaking through the indifference of the mainstream media. In this case, the Times of London sent their correspondent, Richard Beeston, to Baghdad in order to gauge public sentiment. Surprisingly, he reports a palpable sense of historical change:

FOR decades, voting in Iraq meant taking part in a national exercise of state-enforced adulation, as 99 per cent of the electorate would dutifully turn out to tick the box beside the name Saddam Hussein.

Yesterday the contrast could not have been starker, as the campaign for Sunday’s elections picked up pace and voters were presented with a dizzying selection of dozens of candidates and parties.

Notwithstanding insurgent terror aimed at wrecking the polls, there is finally a palpable sense in Baghdad, and other Iraqi cities, that the country is entering a new era. ...

“I think that despite everything, many Iraqis will vote on Sunday,” Fadel Alfatlwi, the head of the Iraqi Institute for Peace and an independent candidate, said. “With the occupation and all the horrible things that have happened, people dream that they will be wealthy and happy. That dream starts with the election.”

Beeston includes several anecdotes from what has been painted as a free-fire zone by American media showing that serious political campaigning has been conducted in Baghdad. Tribal sheikhs attend speeches lauding the strong leadership of Iyad Allawi. Kurds in Baghdad celebrate the upcoming elections with chocolate cake, dancing, and reminders to vote. Children have paying jobs passing out literature and putting up posters -- and, as Beeston wryly notes, taking some down as well. Multiple and diverse interests are represented on the Iraqi ballot, including Islamists, monarchists, secular Shi'a and religious Sunni, and even Communists, who paradoxically have been democracy's biggest supporters.

Contrast this with the image of Baghdad we receive daily from American media, most of whom can't or won't staff the city with their own reporters. Americans are told over and over again that the city is so wracked with violence that Iraq's largest city can't possibly be included in its first parliamentary election. And yet here we have plenty of political activity, even celebrations of it, occurring out in the open. None of the above happened spontaneously, after all; they needed some planning and publicity to succeed.

It shows that the Iraqis have the courage to see the elections through, as they clearly understand that the only way to truly set themselves free is to take power into their own hands. They have braved the car-bombing cowards and stand on the edge of a tremendous victory over them. Too bad so many Americans have so little faith in these Iraqi democrats.

Milwaukee Can't Account For Gap

Lisa Artison keeps digging the hole deeper in Milwaukee. The Milwaukee election commission announced yesterday that they have determined that 1,305 same-day voter registrations from the November 2 election could not be verified, instead of the 10,000 estimate Artison reported earlier. However, as the Journal-Sentinel's Greg Borowski reports, that leaves over 7,000 more votes than registered voters in Milwaukee:

Milwaukee officials said Thursday that 1,305 same-day voter registration cards from the Nov. 2 election could not be processed, including more than 500 cases where voters listed no address and dozens more where no name was written on the card.

But the revelation of the actual number of cards that couldn't be processed, far lower than previous estimates of 8,300 or more, raised new concerns, because it leaves a clear gap of more than 7,000 people who voted on Nov. 2 and cannot be accounted for in city records.

An audit earlier by Borowski showed an additional 1,200 registrations that came from non-existent addresses. Yesterday, the commission upped that number to almost 3,000, as cards from apartment buildings have come back as undeliverable (the J-S could not verify apartment addresses due to database issues). Almost half of the new set of 1,305 didn't even have an address and/or a name on them. And the gap between registered voters and the votes cast in Milwaukee is larger than the 7,000 one gets from simple subtraction, as Borowski has found a number of instances of multiple voting.

Shown in this scan is a registration card from "Randal Jarosch". Note that Jarosch filled out the card as a new voter in the precinct -- and yet supplied no address at all, despite having supplied a Wisconsin driver's license as ID. He signed the card, as did the poll worker, who also supplied a voter number, which means Jarosch got his ballot. The poll worker never bothered to check the address against the ID, meaning Jarosch could have driven in from Hudson if he wanted.

Have the city leaders taken any ownership of this fiasco? No -- they've started shifting the blame away as fast as possible:

Lisa Artison, executive director of the city's Election Commission, said "layer upon layer" of human error likely is to blame for the problems, which came as election workers faced a crush of voters, tens of thousands of whom registered at the polls. ...

Mayor Tom Barrett reiterated his confidence in Artison and pledged that the process will be improved. "We will look at all options to see what we can do," said Barrett, who was elected in April. "Obviously, it's a system I inherited."

Artison wants people to simply accept that "mistakes were made" and move on. Barrett also says that these issues don't convince him that photo-ID should be required for voting. Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle has threatened to veto any bills with that requirement.

Is this the kind of leadership Wisconsin voters wanted? Either massive incompetence or serious fraud has completely undermined the state's choice of electors in a Presidential election, and yet the simplest preliminary fix has been taken off the table by the state's executive, and the two people on the scene responsible for conducting the election refuse to take any responsibility for its failure. In such an environment, it's easy to see why this incompetence or corruption flourishes. (see also The American Mind)

Gaza Going For Hamas Instead Of Abbas

The BBC reports that in early exit polling, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have elected Hamas majorities in local councils. These results would appear to offer a surprising repudiation to the newly-elected president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas:

The Palestinian militant group Hamas is reported to have done well in local elections in the Gaza Strip.

One exit poll indicates that it is likely to take three out of the four biggest districts in territory. ...

Opinions polls suggest that Hamas - which also runs charities and is regarded by many Palestinians as untainted by corruption - has about 25% support.

Just over a third of Gaza's councils are being contested, and turnout is reported to have been high.

The government will release official results tomorrow, although the Abbas administration already disputes the exit polling. A Hamas victory in Gaza on the scope that the BBC describes will communicate a distrust of Abbas and a continuing radicalization of Gaza residents, making the prospects of peace even after an Israeli pullout rather dim. With established authority over the Gaza Strip, the confidence of the Israelis to rely on local police to prevent terrorist attacks will not be terribly enhanced ... since the terrorists will be in charge of the local police.

Of course, after the shenanigans in the last Palestinian presidential election, we may see a miraculous recovery for Fatah candidates by tomorrow morning. I get the feeling it may not matter much either way.

Memogate Three Still At CBS

The New York Post notes that the three people asked to resign in the wake of the Thornburgh-Boccardi investigation into Memogate still have yet to comply:

THE three CBS News execs asked to resign earlier this month over the embarrassing Memogate scandal still haven't quit. Instead, they've hired lawyers. Unlike veteran producer Mary Mapes — who was fired outright for using bogus documents in a George Bush-bashing Dan Rather report on "60 Minutes" — the three were asked for their resignations. CBS is still waiting.

According to the Post's blurb, their lawyers are still negotiating their exit from the network or laying the groundwork for wrongful-termination lawsuits -- probably both. CBS cannot afford to go to court over Memogate and have their internal probe and documents fully revealed, and so we can expect that either the request for resignations gets withdrawn or the three will have the means to live comfortably and independently the rest of their lives when they go. Whenever that happens, of course.

The best part of the Post's coverage is the last line, in which CBS engages in the most hilarious unintentional irony of the month:

A spokesman said, "CBS refuses to comment on speculation."

Had CBS followed that policy all along, they and the Memogate Three wouldn't be bickering over resignations.

When Corporations Go Insane, Government Will Follow

Normally I don't have a tremendous amount of sympathy for smokers. I used to smoke cigarettes for several years and gave it up when I got engaged to the First Mate (although I wasn't much of a nicotine addict -- I'd go through one or two packs a month on average). I still smoke an occasional cigar. Even when I smoked, I considered it a silly, self-destructive habit.

However, it remains a fully legal self-destructive habit, and as long as people smoke in their own space and don't toss their refuse all over the place, I have no issue with silly choices. The BBC reports that a Michigan health-care company feels otherwise and wants to not only ban smoking from its premises, but require that its employees do not smoke anywhere else either:

Four workers in the United States have been sacked after refusing to take a test to determine if they were smokers. They were employees of Michigan-based healthcare firm Weyco, which introduced a policy banning its staff from smoking - even away from the workplace. ...

The firm says that, as its business is to help other firms save money and improve employee health through its benefit plans, it is only natural it should take a lead on the issue.

"For every smoker who quits because of it, there will be many people - family members, friends, co-workers - who are very thankful the person won't be going to an early grave," said Weyco President Howard Weyers, in a message on its website.

Weyers gives new meaning to the phrase dictatorial management style. Workers owe their employers their work and loyalty during working hours, and if Weyco doesn't want people smoking on company property inside or outside, that's certainly their business. However, forcing employees to take urine tests to determine if they've engaged in essentially lawful activities anywhere and on their own time goes far beyond reasonableness or even sanity.

CQ readers may well ask, "Where does this intrusive, nanny-office mindset end?" It doesn't end with smoking; Weyco also wants to force its employees to change their eating and exercise habits as well. They claim that smoking and obesity costs them extra money in health-care coverage, and if employees want those benefits -- a reasonable expectation given Weyco's business -- then Weyco employees need to bend to Weyer's demands.

Besides being a warning to avoid doing any kind of business with Way-Out Weyers, this should serve as an example of the same kind of treatment we can expect to get from a government-run healthcare system. Ted Kennedy wants the federal government to provide health insurance to everyone, and you can bet your last Krispy Kreme donut that once it happens, we will find all sorts of restrictions imposed on us for our own good. Congress will get pressure to put taxes on "bad" food in order to drive up its costs. Food-industry corporations will get sued into oblivion, a possibility even now. Government will intrude further and further into our lives, reducing our choices and making us little more than children, reliant on the nanny-state for even our most basic decisions.

Weyers and Weyco need to get a life, and the rest of us need to stay wary of those who profess a need to assist us by taking our choices away -- even the silly ones.

Shafer Misses The Revolution

Jack Shafer writes today at Slate that blogs have received too much attention as a revolutionary device in communications. He argues that similar technological advances have occurred in communications before, hyped as the One True Change that would topple media empires, only to find that they had little effect at all:

A long, long time ago—OK, it was 33 years ago—Michael Shamberg and a clutch of other video visionaries from the Raindance Corporation visited my college campus to preach their gospel of the coming media apocalypse. Waving a copy his book Guerrilla Television, Shamberg prophesied that the Sony Porta-Pak—an ungainly video camera wired to a luggage-size tape deck carried over the shoulder—would herald a media revolution greater than the one fomented by Gutenberg's moveable type.

Once the People got their hands on the video power and started making decentralized, alternative media, the network news programs would collapse under the weight of their own lies, Shamberg said. The Hollywood industrial entertainment complex was going down, too, man, and would be replaced by street stories recorded by Porta-Pak-toting freaks. The multiplexes out by the freeway would be shuttered and sold to neighborhood theater groups. ...

Even though video cameras continued to shrink in size and price throughout the '70s, '80s, and '90s and have now proliferated to the point of ubiquity, the guerrilla uprising Shamberg and his comrades plotted never progressed much beyond the unwatched public-access channels at the high end of the dial. Their revolution was televised, but nobody watched.

Shafer likens the advent of the blogosphere with the same kind of fervor for portable video, and in an entertaining but fundamentally flawed analysis, concludes that the changes will be minor and evolutionary. Unfortunately, Shafer misses the one important point in the lesson. The video evolution failed to become a revolution because the technological change focused on production and not distribution. Portable video did indeed free the masses to produce their own material, but CBS, Paramount, and the like still controlled the means of distribution, and in most areas they still do.

The Internet, especially cheap broadband access, changed all of that. As Kevin Maney at USA Today wrote earlier this week, bloggers are essentially pamphleteers, at least at the most basic level -- citizens who want to speak out. Before, one needed to own a printing press or pay to access one in order to have any hope of distribution at all, let alone anything that could challenge the mainstream distribution of newspapers, magazines, and so on. And as for broadcasters and cable producers, they have an access point in 98% of all American homes -- making any distribution outside those channels almost impossible to start.

Now, however, that fast Internet connection renders all sites essentially equal. Once one has toured the Internet, the fact that all sites are essentially equal becomes quickly apparent. The CNN page differs only from Captain's Quarters in the amount of product they can distribute -- but we're sharing the same distribution channel now. The distribution, not the product, is the revolution -- and bloggers thrive off of their ability to out-pace and out-react the mainstream media, which for the most part remains stuck on the notion of a full-day news cycle.

In fact, now that the distribution channels have opened up to the end-user as well as the media moguls, that long-awaited video revolution may not be far behind. Videobloggers have already popped up, promising not just opinion and news but also independent entertainment. As the capacity for broadband increases, filmmakers will have the ability to download their latest movies direct to consumers over the Internet, without having to spend money on the physical media or kowtowing to theater-chain owners. We may see this in the next five years -- and citizen newscasters may push today's bloggers to a subsidiary position in the Internet hierarchy.

Will this mean the end of the New York Times, as Crichton predicted thirteen years ago? Probably not, but it will mean the end of the full-day news cycle. Those who don't recognize that fact will die a slow death in the fast-paced market for news that the blogosphere demands. Instant distribution means that reporters and editors need to file stories when they happen, not just in time to put the paper to bed. For the NYT that appears to be around 8 pm ET, which is when their RSS versions of their next-day reports appear on the Internet. If the Times can't catch up with the wire services and the other resources (such as on-site reporting from bloggers themselves), they risk their obsolescence

The revolution has already been blogged. We may exaggerate our importance at times, but if Shafer thinks that the news and entertainment industries will remain essentially unchanged ten years from now, he may be one of the last casualties of the revolution.

UPDATE: Give Jack Shafer credit; he's using Technorati to track the reaction to his column -- and he's updating at the bottom with a balanced set of excerpts, including one from CQ. Keep checking back to see if he updates any more. (Full disclosure: I didn't get a dollar from Jack. Damn.)

DHS Dumps Civil Service For Performance-Based System

The Department of Homeland Security will jettison its civil-service pay system in favor of a performance-based compensation and evaluation system, starting next January, according to the Washington Post. The move comes two years after the issue caused former Senator Max Cleland to hold up passage of the bill creating DHS in a futile attempt to block such a move, eventually costing Cleland his Senate seat:

The Bush administration unveiled a new personnel system for the Department of Homeland Security yesterday that will dramatically change the way workers are paid, promoted, deployed and disciplined -- and soon the White House will ask Congress to grant all federal agencies similar authority to rewrite civil service rules governing their employees.

The new system will replace the half-century-old General Schedule, with its familiar 15 pay grades and raises based on time in a job, and install a system that more directly bases pay on occupation and annual performance evaluations, officials said. The new system has taken two years to develop and will require at least four more to implement, they said.

The Bush administration would like to expand this system across the entire federal government, a move that makes union officials nervous. They plan on performing essentially useless gestures as a means of protesting the elimination of the job security the civil service system guaranteed their members, regardless of their performance:

Leaders of federal employee unions, however, immediately denounced the new DHS system and any plans to expand it government-wide. They said the system would undermine the morale of homeland security employees and make it harder to attract and keep talented workers. They said they would file a lawsuit to block its new restrictions on collective bargaining and employee appeals. They conceded that such a move would do nothing to curtail the new pay system, however, which by 2009 will cover at least 110,000 of the department's 180,000 employees.

"They are encouraging a management of coercion and intimidation," said John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees. He added: "This is not a modern system. This is a step backward."

They laughably told the Post that a performance-based system would discourage the best and brightest from joining the DHS and other areas of the government. However, most people who can make a living in the private sector choose to do so precisely because of the performance-based pay and promotion systems in the marketplace. Energetic and motivated employees who have to wait twenty years until someone retires before getting promoted do not last long in government service. The result of tenure systems overall is an unmotivated bureaucracy of clock-watchers.

I don't need that kind of unresponsive work force guarding the United States and my family. I want -- we all should want -- men and women who work hard and get rewarded as a result, encouraging even more hard work and creative thought. I want the DHS to be able to clear non-performing deadwood quickly so that our security doesn't suffer as a result. In fact, that seems so obvious to me that I have trouble comprehending why anyone would want to offer job protections and regular raises to people whose performance has little to do with their compensation for any government function.

This should provide some laughs for the 2006 election cycle. Let's see who lines up behind the idea of tenure-based systems for national security workers. Keep the names handy for next fall.

Sensenbrenner Pushes Border Security

In response to the omission of border security from the Senate GOP's agenda, James Sensenbrenner has taken up the slack in the House. The Los Angeles Times reports that Sensenbrenner will force the White House to honor its pledge to him over the compromise in last year's intelligence reorganization by supporting border-security improvements in this session:

In a move that could put him at odds with President Bush, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee introduced legislation Wednesday that would effectively deny driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants, tighten requirements for political asylum and complete the border fence between California and Mexico.

Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) said the measures would help secure the nation from attacks like those carried out by Al Qaeda on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He unveiled his legislation shortly after Bush, at a White House news conference, reaffirmed that immigration reform was one of his legislative priorities this year.

The White House pressured Sensenbrenner to drop these issues from the intelligence bill last year as the Bush campaign did not want to get embarrassed by a failure to enact the 9/11 Commission reforms that had broad bipartisan support. In exchange, the GOP pledged to support the bill in 2005, and Sensenbrenner plans on ensuring they do.

Of course, that means that the same people who tried to tar Sensenbrenner as a raving xenophobe get a second shot at it. Already some have cast the bill as "anti-immigrant":

Sensenbrenner's bill drew immediate criticism from immigrant rights advocates, who said that its provisions were anti-immigrant.

"None of the provisions that are in the bill will make us safer," said Kevin Appleby, director of migration and refugee policy for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Denying licenses to undocumented immigrants will "make our roads less safe," Appleby said, because many will drive without a license or insurance.

Appleby said that tightening asylum criteria by requiring a person to prove that they were persecuted in their home country and allowing immigration judges to reject an application if it was determined that the applicant was not credible "could lead to the rejection of valid claims."

Unfortunately, there is a large difference between being anti-immigrant in general and specifically opposing illegal immigration. The LA Times uses the more politically-correct term of "undocumented immigrants", but the fact is that a driver's license conveys governmental approval of a person's residence in the US. Possession of government ID greatly reduces the chances that illegal alien's true status will be correctly deduced. The vast majority of them probably want nothing more than a job. However, the open sieve on the Rio Grande doesn't do anything to ensure that -- and it only took 19 people to kill 3,000 on 9/11, which is why the 9/11 Commission made border security such a high priority in its report.

Appleby calls the use of administrative judges for cases of claimed political asylum a "shotgun approach," a clever case of projection. In fact, right now the INS determines the validity of the cases based more or less on country of origin, and that's about it. Having a hearing in front of a judge at least gives the opportunity for an opposing point of view and specific evidence to be examined. Sensenbrenner's proposal corrects the current shotgun approach.

Besides, where do you think oppression occurs? Places like Cuba and China, of course, but also Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Syria, and so on. Doesn't anyone think it might be a good idea to correctly identify asylum-seekers and check them out a bit first in our adversarial system to ensure we're not welcoming al-Qaeda operatives in our asylum program?

I'm not sure if I like everything about Sensenbrenner's proposals; I had my doubts last year on some of the specifics. What I want is better control on our borders and some rational debate about it. Sensenbrenner gives us the opportunity for that, while Appleby just gives us the same old PC demagoguery. The White House needs to ensure that the Senate doesn't just bury this at the bottom of its list of priorities.

WaPo Playing Petty Games With Inaugural Speech

Rarely will readers experience the level of intellectual dishonesty that Glenn Kessler and Scott Wilson reach in their report today on a jailed Jordanian dissenter and President Bush's reaction to a question about him. During his press conference, a reporter asked the president about Ali Hattar, currently jailed on slander charges in Jordan:

President Bush was stumped yesterday when he was asked at his news conference about the plight of a Jordanian man who faces a two-year prison term for slander after giving a lecture last month calling for a boycott of American goods and companies. "I'm unaware of the case," he said.

The circumstances are somewhat murky, but in many ways the case signifies the difficult choices and trade-offs inherent in Bush's call in his inaugural address for the right to dissent and protest around the world. ...

"Freedom has to include the freedom to criticize the United States," [HRW spokesman Tom] Malinowski said. "If Bush would stand up for this guy, people who doubt his sincerity would be impressed. It is an opportunity for the administration."

In the days following Bush's ringing call for promoting democracy as a moral and national-security solution for the world's ills, one could almost see the wheels turning in the mainstream media. First the media picked apart the references to God as too much Christian triumphalism, and then scoffed at the scope of Bush's vision, ignoring his warning that it would take "generations" to eradicate tyranny.

Now we see yet another strategy to discredit Bush: toss out the names of dissenters in authoritarian countries that dislike America and see if Bush knows who they are. When he doesn't recognize the name, they write analysis pieces on page A-4 in the Washington Post. If he really cared about human liberty, we are to say, then why doesn't he care about [insert obscure name here]?

Unfortunately, even in this case, Kessler and Wilson pick a pretty poor test case for their gotcha game. The American embassy in Jordan has already questioned Hattar's detention. And Hattar hardly represents the cause of freedom in the Hashemite Kingdom:

Hattar is not a democracy activist, nor would he be considered an appealing figure by many Americans, but he has been charged under a type of vague law frequently used to suppress dissent across the Middle East. ...

Hattar -- who Qadi said is a Christian -- belongs to Jordan's professional association of engineers, whose membership is made up mostly of men of Palestinian descent and is among the most politically militant in the country. He is a delegate of the group's "anti-normalization committee," which lobbies against Jordan's 1994 agreement to establish diplomatic relations with Israel, a decision he and others have demanded be reversed.

What's more, Hattar's charges don't exclusively deal with his call for a boycott of America, if they do at all. Hattar has been jailed for slandering the Jordanian government, which contends that he told audiences that the monarchy planned a genocide against its own subjects. Hattar doesn't even tell the truth about this, a factoid that Kessler and Wilson leave for the last paragraph of their article:

But government officials said at the time of his arrest that the charges against him were related to his contention that the Jordanian government was buying U.S. weapons for use against its own people. At the time of his arrest, Hattar said he did not mention Jordan in his speech. But in the following question period, he said he used Jordan as an example of developing countries buying U.S. weapons for use against "their own people."

In other words, Hattar is a Palestinian radical who indulges in the kind of lunatic conspiracy theories that terror groups use to legitimize attacks on Israel, America, and their own governments. Hattar isn't in the streets advocating democracy; he's advocating for the destruction of Israel and probably the replacement of the Jordanian monarchy with a PLO-style terrorocracy.

This piece is written in such a transparently deceptive manner that desperation can be the only explanation. Apparently, the president's speech had a stunning effect on leftist journalists, who now will stoop to attempts like this to discredit it. Pathetic.

Friedman: Listen -- To The Same Old Song

Thomas Friedman advises George Bush to make a silent tour of Europe when he meets with leaders on the Continent in February. Friedman believes that the only way for Bush to get people to like him is for the President of the United States to do his Marcel Marceau impression:

Let me put this as bluntly as I can: There is nothing that the Europeans want to hear from George Bush, there is nothing that they will listen to from George Bush that will change their minds about him or the Iraq war or U.S. foreign policy. Mr. Bush is more widely and deeply disliked in Europe than any U.S. president in history. Some people here must have a good thing to say about him, but I haven't met them yet.

In such an environment, the only thing that Mr. Bush could do to change people's minds about him would be to travel across Europe and not say a single word - but just listen. If he did that, Mr. Bush would bowl the Europeans over. He would absolutely disarm and flummox people here - and improve his own image markedly.

His rationale? If Bush gives no public speeches and instead sits while Europeans gripe about American policy, then "pundits" will have no ammunition with which to write clever editorials picking apart Bush's words. Apparently, all European op-ed columnists do is peruse transcripts of Bush speeches for subject matter. Likewise, European politicians would fight over what to say to Bush, even though mouthing off at America has never been a shrinking industry in Europe.

Friedman then goes on to cite examples of Eurowhining that the Silent Treatment will somehow improve. Mostly, they seem to bemoan the fact that we woke up to the twenty-five year attack on American interests by Islamist terrorism:

Tim Kreutzfeldt, the bar owner, said to me: "Bush took away our America. I mean we love America. We are very sad about America. We believe in America and American values, but not in Bush.["] ... The Bush team, he added, is giving everyone in the world the impression that "somebody is coming to kill you."

Did Kreutzfeldt consider the fact that people are coming to the US to kill us? Perhaps he missed that fact on 9/11, when 3,000 of us died in four attacks by people who came to the US, ostensibly as visitors. We continue to catch people coming into our country to kill us, Tim, which is why we're getting serious about making sure we do catch them first. I don't feel like getting killed by Islamist nutcases just so you can feel better about America.

The only other person Friedman includes in his piece has the exact same complaint, which undercuts the notion that the European reaction to Bush has any merit or breadth at all:

Stefan Elfenbein, a food critic nursing a beer at our table, added: "I know many people who don't want to travel to America anymore. ... People are afraid to be hassled at the border. ... We all discuss it, when somebody goes to America [we now ask:] 'Are you sure?' We had hope that Kerry would win and would make a statement, 'America is back to what it was four years ago.' We hoped that he would be the symbol, the figure who would say, '[America] is the country that welcomes everybody again.' [But] now we have to wait four more years, hopefully for somebody to give us back the country we knew and liked."

Funny, Stefan, most of us voted against John Kerry for that same exact reason. Kerry, Kreutzfedlt, and Elfenbein all want to live in that September 10th world, where most of America remained ignorant of the threat to its citizens and the world could exploit our open borders for their own purposes. This is the so-called "squandered goodwill" that the Left loves to bemoan about the aftermath of 9/11. Europe loves us when we don't ask anything of them, but they adore the idea of America's passive victimization and loathe our refusal to play that role.

Too long have we remained silent about global threats before 9/11. The solution to the problem isn't silence, but continually challenging the European electorate to rouse themselves from their defeatism and knee-jerk pacifism. They don't like George Bush because he reminds them that the European public can't even defend themselves any more, let alone assist us in our security issues.

But if Friedman likes the idea of silence so much, I recommend he follow his own advice -- especially when he has so little to say.

UPDATE: Read Outside The Beltway's hilarious parody of Friedman.

The Cheese Is Not Silent Now

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has a flash announcement on their website that local, state, and federal resources will combine to investigate voter fraud in Milwaukee in November 2004:

Local and federal law enforcement authorities are finalizing a task force that is to look into potential fraud in Milwaukee in the Nov. 2 election, sources confirmed today.

The details are being worked out between Milwaukee County District Attorney E. Michael McCann, U.S. Attorney Steve Biskupic, Milwaukee Police Chief Nannette Hegerty and the local office of the FBI.

The task force comes in the wake of Journal Sentinel revelations that more than 1,200 votes came from invalid addresses and that there were other problems with how the election was run in the city.

Greg Borowski promises more in tomorrow's edition. I suspect that Lisa Artison may have a sleepless night tonight. (via Power Line)

UPDATE: The story has been updated at the link above, with more background. The new investigators include one Democrat (McCann) and one Republican (Biskupic), which should minimize partisan bickering. The state audit will also be announced today.

Now, the question is whether a federal investigation into electoral fraud in Wisconsin will actually get any national media coverage.

To Be Or Not, Homey

Andrew Lloyd Webber, the creator of a string of hit musicals that have delighted audiences around the globe, reportedly wants to sell his four West End theaters, and one of the people interested in buying them is American Sean "Puffy" Combs. Rumor has it that Combs wants to convert the theaters into hip-hop nightclubs. However, in the best traditions of British satire, Alexis Petridis writes a howler of a parody about what P. Diddy might do with the jewels of West End theater in The Guardian:

The season, entitled We Invented the Theatre, contains what Combs describes as "classic drama, adapted by one of the all-time great hip-hop lyricists, producers and performers - I mention no names - to reflect the hustle and the game in 2005. We got 'Tis Pity She's a Ho. We got Hamlet, but we kind of moved the action from Denmark to NYC, and shifted the lead character slightly so he now one of the all-time great hip-hop lyricists, producers and performers, looking to avenge the death of his vastly overweight former crack-dealer protege. He don't stab no one in the arras, he record a hip-hop cover of a Sting song in tribute instead." ...

Perhaps the most ambitious of Combs's projects sees his former paramour Jennifer Lopez taking the lead role in Berthold Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children. ... ["Y]ou know, it all depends on how you want your Verfremdungseffekt served up. Me, I want it served up by a honey with a phat-ass donk, and I expect my man Michael Billington will agree."

What's funnier is that initially I missed the disclaimer at the top, and it wasn't until the Verfremdungseffekt reference that I realized the whole thing was a put-on. The Brits can get very snooty, but they also know how to skewer someone with panache. Read the whole thing.

The New York Times Responds On Biden, Rice

Last week, the New York Times published an editorial cheering the treatment given to Condoleezza Rice by Senator Barbara Boxer and to a lesser extent Senator Joe Biden during her confirmation hearings. While most of the editorial stayed in the safe zone of opinion, albeit a rather childish one, one passage in which the Times quoted Biden in order to accuse Rice of dishonesty was so inaccurate that I wrote public editor Daniel Okrent requesting a correction.

This was what the Times wrote:

Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat of Delaware, asked Ms. Rice how big an Iraqi security force had actually been trained. When Ms. Rice, the national security adviser, offered an absurdly inflated 120,000, Mr. Biden said the people doing the training put the total at 4,000. He then suggested that Ms. Rice "pick up the phone or go see these folks," as if that has not been her job all along, especially in the year since the administration said that all information on operations in Iraq would flow through her.

In my response to the Times and Daniel Okrent, I pointed out that the Washington Post had reported the previous month that the Pentagon had 94,341 Iraqi security troops as "trained/on-hand" status, and that news was four weeks old and could be expected to be larger now. I also wrote:

Senator Biden and the New York Times editorial board failed to do sufficient research on this topic and inadvertently passed along a ludicrously low number in order to play "gotcha" with Dr. Rice. Prior to implying that Dr. Rice is incompetent or untruthful, one would expect a news organization to do its homework. The result now implies that the New York Times is the organization that needs to worry about its competence and its truthfulness.

I hope to see a retraction and an apology from the editorial board to its readers. Thank you for your time.

I heard nothing from this request until today, a week later, when deputy editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal sent this reply. I'll post it in its entirety:

Your email to Dan Okrent about the editorial on the Iraqi security forces and the hearing on the Rice nomination was passed on to me. I don't agree that we made an error, or as you put it, compounded Senator Biden's error. The Senator asked Ms. Rice to tell him how many Iraqi security forces have actually been trained, not just someone who had been given a uniform and put through an initial training session, but actually trained and capable of taking up the work now being done by the American military.

If you read the transcript, you will find that Ms. Rice did not answer in much of a useful way. But she did set the bar back far below where Senator Biden was setting it, to those who had been given "initial training," and went on to talk about desertion rates, no-show rates, the lack of leadership and other problems. She said that the leadership training program that the Administration has been talking about for months has not yet been set up, and so on. Mr. Biden made it clear that he was talking about trained forces, "I mean real, live guys that our Marines -- I was -- spent four hours in Fallujah -- our Marines are not real anxious to stand next to and count on a lot of Iraqi forces, except the few that were trained as Special Forces. Now, how many do you really think are trained that Allawi can look to and say, 'I can rely on those forces.' What do you think that number is?"

Ms. Rice's reply to that question was 120,000, which is by any measure, wildly inflated. The numbers you cite from the Pincus article simply confirm this.

The numbers he cited for "trained/on hand" do not meet the criterion of actually trained forces. Many of these people do not show up for duty, or desert in the face of fire, and in any case are hardly the sort of trained forces that can take over for the American military. They are simply not prepared to, as Mr. Biden put it, "shoot straight, kill and stand their ground."

By the way, this is the lead on that article by Mr. Pincus: "Pentagon figures show that the training of Iraqi military and police units has improved since the summer but that those forces will not be prepared to undertake security missions on their own until late 2006 at the earliest, according to a study released yesterday by the Center for Strategic & International Studies."

And lower down, he points out that 75 percent of the Iraqi troops deserted during the Fallujah operation last November. He says: "Iraqi National Guard troops 'dropped from 1,100 to 300 in hours,' with two companies abandoning their equipment."

It was, and is, our view that Ms. Rice's answer was a wild exaggeration, and not responsive remotely to Mr. Biden's questions. She came up with a figure that was clearly well beyond even the Pentagon's inflated numbers. Even if you took the "trained/on hand" figures, which are not really relevant to this discussion, she inflated the number of troops by 25 percent. We expect more accuracy and honesty from our public officials.

We quote her accurately and Senator Biden accurately, and characterized her use of numbers accurately. What's left is opinion, and yours and ours clearly differ. But that's not a matter for correction.

I appreciate the fact that Mr. Rosenthal gave such a lengthy and substantive reply, even if I disagree with most of it. For one thing, Mr. Rosenthal supplies context to me that the editorial denied the readers. He instructs me to "read the transcript," but the original editorial didn't bother to quote it to support their argument. In fact, all it said was this:

Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat of Delaware, asked Ms. Rice how big an Iraqi security force had actually been trained. When Ms. Rice, the national security adviser, offered an absurdly inflated 120,000, Mr. Biden said the people doing the training put the total at 4,000.

The Times made not a single mention of the quality of the troops or the training, and in fact Rice's numbers come much closer than Biden's. And if Mr. Rosenthal took his own advice and read the transcript, he'd find out that even Senator Biden acknowledged that fact:

BIDEN: The same goes for the way you answered my questions, in my view, about training Iraqi security forces. It is true: There's probably 120,000 people in uniform. But the question really is -- and I'll end, Mr. Chairman, I know my -- I'm going over my time.

The question really is, how many of those forces could supplant American forces? How many of them we could trade off for an American soldier? Because that's ultimately, again, the exit strategy: Get enough Iraqis there so we don't need American troops there.

Had Mr. Rosenthal also provided some context for Rice's answer, he would have seen that she addresses the very point Mr. Rosenthal makes in his reply back to me:

RICE: Senator, I have to rely on what I get from the field.

And by the way, I think that the trips that you've made and the trips that the others have made have given us information that we can go back with. And I appreciate your doing that.

We think the number right now is somewhere over 120,000. We think that, among those people, there clearly continue to be questions about on-duty time, that is, people who don't report for duty. And so this is being looked at.

We are trying to provide for some of these units mentors who can help, trying to provide leadership from the Iraqis themselves that can help these people.

But this is the reason that Gary Luck has gone out, at Secretary Rumsfeld's direction, to take a hard look at the training program to see what General Petraeus, who, as you say, is a terrific soldier and has a lot of experience in Iraq, what he's been able to achieve; to work with the Iraqis to address some of these problems of leadership and morale and desertion in the armed forces and in the police forces; and to look at some of the equipping of the police forces.

In other words, Mr. Rosenthal attacks me for not acknowledging a context for Senator Biden's question that the Times never bothered to provide -- and then strips all context out of Condoleezza Rice's answer. How honest and ethical is that?

Most of these troops have been trained in the last six months, which also has a lot to do with their readiness. The American troops in Iraq are the best-trained, best-equipped, and best-led armed forces in the world. I wouldn't trade any of them off for an American soldier, especially not just a few months out of boot. Experience and seasoning will improve the Iraqis battle readiness, just as it does for American soldiers, and expecting that to come in a couple of weeks is nothing short of idiocy. And in the American armed forces, new soldiers join more experienced troops, which allows for continuity of performance. The Iraqi security troops are building from the ground up.

That was what the Pentagon tried to explain to Biden in an anecdote he tells here, and Biden typically misses the point:

When the chairman and I were in Iraq with Senator Hagel, right after Saddam's statue went down, we asked the military as well as the police trainers, "How long would it take you to train a military force that's necessary?" They talked about 40,000. And they said, at least two, maybe three years.

"How long would it take you to train a police force capable of policing the country to replace the 79,000 thugs that were called police before?" They said, three to five years.

That's one of the reasons why we're staying in Iraq until at least the end of 2006 -- to make sure that the training sticks and that we get them the experience and command structure they need to survive. We have 120,000 trained Iraqi troops, and that's a great start. Now we need to get them seasoned and well-led.

What's more, I think Mr. Rosenthal knows that his and Biden's numbers are flat-out wrong. That's why he goes on to state that "75%" of the ICDC deserted in the second battle of Fallujah, a number that changes an awful lot. NPR had it at two-thirds, while others have it higher or lower. According to Mr. Rosenthal, that means that we should presume the entire force consists of 75% who would desert at the first action, which makes Biden and the New York Times correct. Unfortunately, 25% of 120,000 is still 30,000, not 4,000. The argument also demonstrates a lack of logic, as Iraqi troops have performed better at other times, such as in Najaf, and with more training and experience will continue to improve. And again, note that wasn't the question Biden asked.

The Times gave me its answer today, and quite frankly, I don't see how Mr. Rosenthal thinks that this is any kind of defense. In fact, when looking further into their editorial, it loses even more credibility and looks more like shabby ankle-biting all the time.

New Evangelical Blog Awards!

Reverend Eric at the Evangelical Underground informs me this afternoon that he will be hosting the 1st Annual Evangelical Blog Awards. Fans of evangelical blogs should definitely put in their nominations in the 10 categories. Nominations will remain open until February 14th, and voting on finalists will go from February 16-18.

Be sure to check out the site often -- and also those blogs you may not have read before!

McCain: Democrats "Sore Losers"

As Condoleezza Rice finally won her confirmation for Secretary of State despite the hijacking of the process for Democrats to extend their failed 2004 presidential campaign on the Senate floor, John McCain delivered the scolding that perhaps only he had the stature and the spine to dole out:

On the Senate floor Wednesday, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., suggested Democrats are sore losers. Rice had enough votes to win confirmation, as even her Democratic critics acknowledge, McCain said.

"So I wonder why we are starting this new Congress with a protracted debate about a foregone conclusion," McCain said. Since Rice is qualified for the job, he said, "I can only conclude that we are doing this for no other reason than because of lingering bitterness over the outcome of the election."

Rice eventually received 85 votes to confirm, with 13 votes against, the highest number ever for a Secretary of State. Those who voted against Rice's confirmation include the chief Sore Loser, John Kerry, as well as Ted Kennedy, Evan Bayh (IN), Babs "Crybaby" Boxer (CA), Robert Byrd (WV), Brave Sir Mark Dayton (MN), Richard Durbin (IL), Tom Harkin (IA), Frank Lautenberg (NJ), Carl Levin (MI), Daniel Akaka (HI), and Jack Reed (RI). "Independent" Jim Jeffords (VT) tossed in his usual wasted vote for a dying cause as well.

All Americans can thank these Senators for wasting a full day of the taxpayer's time and money to continue their griping about the same issues that lost them the last presidential election and four seats in the upper chamber. I'd discourage them from doing it again, but I'm curious if the GOP can actually reach a 60-vote majority in the Senate in 2006. If the Democrats keep up the stupid and pointless gestures, that possibility will continue to grow.

UPDATE: For those, like CQ reader TG Harris, who wonder about the red-state Democrats up for re-election in 2006, only Robert Byrd voted against Rice's confirmation -- and he's likely to retire in 2006. If not, his egregious attack on a black female nominee (to add to his opposition to the only two black nominees to the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas) will not play well in the hills of West Virginia.

However, one name not on the red-state list that voted no was Brave Sir Dayton, the ever-retreating Senator from my state. Even though Minnesota went to Kerry, Dayton appears to be very vulnerable -- and his hysterical screeching on this nomination will not help him look any better.

Otherwise, all the rest of the red-staters managed to keep their skirts clean on Rice. I suspect that they understand how vulnerable they've become, especially after spectacles such as this. I expect Reid will not be able to sustain filibusters in this session on any nominations, when even newly-elected Democrats like Ken Salazar publicly calling for up-or-down votes on all nominees.

Saudis Funding Iraqi Media For Propaganda?

The Guardian (UK) reports on documents filed as part of a slander case in London which show millions of pounds transferred from the Saudi royal family to the "Rupert Murdoch of Iraq," the first independent Iraqi media mogul. At question is the motives of Saad Al-Bazzaz in publishing untrue stories about the wife of a Qatar emir in 2001:

Iraq's first independent media mogul has been running his empire with millions of pounds secretly provided by the Saudi regime, according to allegations made in the high court in London.

Based on documents lodged with the court, Saad Al-Bazzaz - dubbed the Rupert Murdoch of Iraq - was alleged to have received the money for the launch of his newspaper Azzaman, which is now the most widely read daily in Iraq. Mr Bazzaz also controls Iraq's first private satellite TV channel.

The papers emerged during a libel action in which Mr Bazzaz, a former exile in London, was accused of running a sophisticated covert propaganda operation funded by Saudi Arabian intelligence.

Bazzaz' attorneys don't dispute the payments, but claim that they didn't affect the independence of Bazzaz' reporting. However, the Saudi funding, while not unexpected, raises serious doubts about the motives of the Saudis and the reporting on the ground from his organization during the upcoming elections. The Saudis didn't want Saddam removed at all, at least not by us, and the last thing they want is a functioning representative democracy on their northern border.

The Wahhabists rely on strict authoritarian rule to keep their populace in line, and the mullahs use the West as a lightning rod for the resentment which builds from it. Only lately have the Saudis seen that terrorism and rage can turn quickly against those who use it as a tool, and so have taken a few steps to modernize their system, such as modest municipal elections. The Saudis will want the Iraqi elections discredited, not to embarrass the Americans or to see Zarqawi take over the country, but simply for the long-term survival of the House of Saud's position and control of Arabian oil.

In any case, just as in the Armstrong Williams kerfuffle, when one receives government money to publish, credibility is the first casualty. Now that Bazzaz has been unmasked as a mouthpiece for the Wahhabists, he may not only go into history as the first Iraqi media mogul, but also as the first to lose everything he's built.

CBS Documents Expert Outraged At "Defamation"

Expect to see this potential explosion of embarrassment settled out of court. Marcel Matley, the documents examiner that CBS dragged in front of them as a human shield in the days following the Memogate report, claims that the Thornburgh-Boccardi panel report defames him and has caused him professional damage:

Marcel Matley, one of four document experts consulted by CBS News while reporting its Sept. 8, 2004, report on Bush, is demanding a slew of corrections in the report, which was issued earlier this month. In an interview with E&P, he referred to the report's treatment of him as "defamation." ...

In an e-mail to Thornburgh's office on Jan. 13, obtained by E&P, Matley criticized the report as containing "certain incorrect statements affecting me and which are derogatory and/or damaging to me professionally." He also asks that the panel issue corrections for each of the errors he contends are in the report and distribute the corrections.

"It is professional defamation," Matley, a 20-year document expert, told E&P, from his home in San Francisco. "When you are in a court of law, it can make the difference between being considered credible or not."

He said the report has already hurt his professional reputation, claiming it was mentioned last week during his appearance in a Modesto, Calif., courtroom on a probate case. "Someone brought it up that I was the one who made the mistake in the '60 Minutes' case," he said. "I've already had this thrown at me."

Matley's rhetoric sounds carefully couched in legal terms, aimed at building a case for a lawsuit against CBS and the Memogate panel. Matley, who appeared on the CBS Evening News to help Dan Rather declare the documents genuine, now says that the report and its less-than-complimentary conclusions absolve him of all confidentiality agreements -- a warning shot across Les Moonves' bow.

Matley has only two specific and objective complaints:

* The report says that Matley is not a typography specialist (see footnotes on page 75). However, it does include Matley's assertion that courts have accepted his expertise while also describing Matley's training in the field as a "self-study" program, some private training, and completely lacking in government instruction.

* Matley says he never used the phrase "consistent inconsistencies". The panel report footnotes its description of Matley's testimony with this exhibit, but the phrase doesn't appear in Matley's handwritten notes.

The rest of Matley's gripes come from the subjective conclusions of the panel report. He doesn't like the recommendation that CBS keep a list of expert document examiners, claiming that the recommendation infers that he doesn't qualify -- but the panel never said that Matley should be excluded, although it notes that none of the four retained by Mapes and CBS had "extensive" typographical expertise (page 77). He objects to the characterization of himself as "timid", although that is just a quote from Gil Schwarz' testimony to the panel (page 163); likewise, he doesn't like being called "hostile", but that word never appears in the report.

Matley, it seems, just doesn't like the idea that he has become associated with one of the more notorious frauds of letters since the Howard Hughes autobiography hoax by Clifford Irving. Unfortunately for Matley, he played a critical role in obfuscating for CBS when they needed a human shield against the blogosphere, and he shouldn't act surprised to come away from the battle with a few dings.

Islamist Terrorists Start Their Election Playbook

The Zarqawi-led terrorist insurgency started running its game plan today as outlined in a missive from an Arabic Internet forum, attacking polling stations in areas where they hope to suppress the Sunni vote especially and discredit the election results:

Insurgents staged attacks against U.S. forces, schools to be used as polling stations and political party offices on Wednesday, as they pressed a bloody campaign to undermine Iraq's weekend elections. A U.S. Marine transport helicopter crashed in western Iraq.

Three car bombs exploded Wednesday in Riyadh, a tense town north of Baghdad, killing at least five people, including three policemen. One of the car bombs targeted a U.S. convoy but there was no report of casualties, police said. ...

U.S. troops found at least six bombs at different locations around Baghdad, the military said. Iraqi police discovered two more bombs in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where turnout in the Sunday national elections is expected to be high.

In a statement, the U.S. command said the six bombs were discovered early Wednesday in widely scattered areas of the Iraqi capital.

In the New Year's Day instructions from "Mudad Iluj", the mujahedin were urged to to the following:

2. It is known that election committee [lists] are published prior to voting – one, two or a few days before the date of the elections -- and you must attack these offices to seize all documents, voter lists, and the [voting] boxes. Destroy all election-related supplies a day or two before the voting because it will be difficult to replace these supplies just before the elections.

Terrorists also kidnapped three election workers from Mosul and had Al-Arabiya television broadcast them in captivity as a warning to others who assist in allowing Iraqis to determine their own government. That covers item 1 from the plan, as well as the overall strategy of co-opting the media for their platform of terror.

The terrorists promised us a war for January 30th, and it looks like they plan on delivering. The American and Iraqi forces also appear to be responding well, stopping six attacks and protecting the polls and the workers in those areas. It won't be perfect, and it will get bloody. However, as our own history tells us, freedom is worth the fight. The Iraqis believe it, even if some of us no longer do.

UPDATE: Matt Cardens noticed the same thing.

Milwaukee Election Office Reneged On False-Address Agreement

Milwaukee's Elections Commission reneged on a settlement with the Wisconsin GOP to block voting from scores of non-existent city addresses, Greg Borowski reports in today's Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Lisa Artison finds herself in the middle of another controversy about the mishandling of the presidential election with the revelation:

The votes came from addresses that were among 5,619 the state Republican Party challenged less than a week before the election as non-existent. The city Election Commission rejected the claim, saying the party hadn't met the high legal standard for removing names from poll lists.

That led GOP officials to question Tuesday whether the city complied with its later agreement to have poll workers seek identification from anyone who attempted to vote from those addresses.

"I don't think there should have been anyone voting from the 5,600 addresses," state GOP chairman Rick Graber said. "We had an understanding. We had an agreement. For whatever reason, the city did not live up to its end of the bargain."

Artison has changed her rhetoric in the past couple of days as more examples of incompetence or worse arise from Milwaukee's polling data. Yesterday she reversed her previous antagonism to the city's investigation by claiming to welcome anyone willing to help Milwaukee "improve the election process." She may soon get more help than she expects:

Meanwhile, the state is moving closer to an audit of election procedures that is expected to include a major focus on the problems in Milwaukee.

The statewide audit, which had already been approved by the Legislature, has been accelerated, and a "scope of audit" - the step that formally launches the state probe - could be approved as soon as Thursday.

The Journal-Sentinel reviews the outstanding issues thus far in the Milwaukee debacle, adding more details as well. For instance, the mystery votes don't just appear for presidential elections. Last year's mayoral race in April saw 3,500 votes from same-day registrations that could not later be verified, or about 2% of the total 161,000 votes cast and about a third of that from the presidential election. (The Milwaukee Election Commission and its state counterpart do not have the number of same-day registrations from the spring election available.) The MJS also determined that 75% of the 1200 addresses that appear to be false came from same-day registrations.

With that in mind, Wisconsinites should question their governor to see if he pays any attention to the fraud and/or incompetence occurring in his largest city. They should also question his honesty:

Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle, who opposes a photo ID requirement, said Tuesday he believes most of the issues raised could be traced back to processing problems, not fraud.

"I think we have a pretty good system," Doyle said. "If you register at the polls, you have to show appropriate identification to show that you are who you claim to be and that you reside at that location."

The one lesson everyone can take from the Silence Of The Cheese is that Wisconsin has a demonstrably lousy election system. If you take the results at face value, their largest city has to register a third of its voters on Election Day, leading to all sorts of errors. Further, Doyle overstates the requirement for registration. The only identification necessary at the polling station is another registered voter willing to vouch for his or her (or their) authenticity. If he doesn't know that, then perhaps he should refrain from commenting on Wisconsin election law until someone explains it to him.

At least now it looks like the Wisconsin legislature plans on getting some answers, thanks to the dogged reporting of Borowski and the insistence of Rep. Jeff Stone. Mayor Barrett's cheesewash panel should be put on permanent hiatus.

Gallagher: Not Another Williams

Drudge reported earlier tonight that conservative columnist Maggie Gallagher took money from the Department of Health and Human Services to promote George Bush's marriage initiatives, mirroring the Armstrong Williams scandal. Drudge got a head start on the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz and tried to scoop him.

Unfortunately, Drudge screwed up the report by excerpting passages out of context, and in doing so, created an unfortunate backlash against Maggie Gallagher. The real Kurtz report makes the differences between Gallagher and Williams clear:

Gallagher failed to mention that she had a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to help promote the president's proposal. Her work under the contract, which ran from January through October 2002, included drafting a magazine article for the HHS official overseeing the initiative, writing brochures for the program and conducting a briefing for department officials. ...

Gallagher received an additional $20,000 from the Bush administration in 2002 and 2003 for writing a report, titled "Can Government Strengthen Marriage?", for a private organization called the National Fatherhood Initiative. That report, published last year, was funded by a Justice Department grant, said NFI spokesman Vincent DiCaro. Gallagher said she was "aware vaguely" that her work was federally funded. ...

"I don't see any comparison between what has been alleged with Armstrong Williams and what we did with Maggie Gallagher," said Horn, who founded the National Fatherhood Initiative before entering government. "We didn't pay her to write columns. We didn't pay her to promote the president's healthy marriage initiative at all. What we wanted to do was use her expertise."

Gallagher should have revealed her working relationship with HHS, both to her readers and her publishers. NRO editor Rich Lowry told Kurtz that he would have preferred to know about the relationship in order to include it in her bio on the site, and that's understandable. Moreover, I think Gallagher's glib response to the question of an ethical violation -- "I don't know, you tell me" -- shows a contempt for reality that damages her credibility more than her undisclosed consultancy for HHS.

However, unlike Armstrong Williams, Gallagher did not sell her column space to HHS, nor did she push others to cover the proposals or solicit positive commentary as a contractual duty. Gallagher wrote some of the brochures for the program, most of which went unused, and ghost-wrote an essay for program chief Wade Horn. She also spoke to program officials about marriage, which amounts to nothing much more than a stop on a lecture tour. She exercised some poor judgment and should apologize (which she already has), but it's a much different situation than Williams.

Full disclosure should be the lesson that pundits on all sides should take from this chapter. Don't wait for Kurtz, or especially Matt Drudge, to do it for you.

Note: Lest you think that I consider such arrangements as no big problem, here's what I wrote about Armstrong Williams.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! La Shawn Barber adds her thoughts, and says to the mainstream media, "Hire this thus-far-scandal-free conservative writer." Hell, hire me, too.

Ready To Vote In The Sunni Triangle

CNN reports on a town that most other mainstream journalists seem to have missed in their reporting from Iraq. Nine miles from the former heart of the insurgency, the town ironically named Karma intends to prove that Iraqis are ready for democracy:

The concept of democracy appears to have taken root in the dusty town of Karma, a predominantly Sunni community of 75,000 people about nine miles (15 kilometers) northeast of Falluja. ...

Although most say they don't know who the candidates are or where to go to vote, they say they will vote come January 30.

Shakir Jiyad Aswad, father of 10, said Karma residents want to elect a nationalist, someone to preserve religion and defend holy places. "We want one Iraq," he said. "I'll probably vote for [Iraq's interim President Ghazi] al-Yawar." ...

Farther down the road, Iraqis are also preoccupied with what's lacking. They tell Col. Tucker they want to vote but don't know who to vote for.

"We get our information from the TV. But then the power goes out and we have no TV," one man says. Abd Al-Khadar Ali Khayab, a butcher and father of nine, says he'll vote for one of the sheiks of his tribe he has heard is running. But he doesn't know which list he's on or who any of the others on the list are.

Kudos to CNN and Arwa Damon for going out and actually talking with Iraqis, who have told anyone who will listen that they want to vote and usher in a new era of democracy. The people of Karma want the opportunity to determine their own leaders, to select those who will represent their interests instead of living under the oppression of the greedy and genocidal.

How difficult is it to report that? How difficult is it to believe that? For the mainstream media, apparently almost impossible, especially when reporters don't actually go out and talk with the people they'd rather consign to a long, dark night of tyranny rather than admit that Bush might be right. Every once in a while, though, a bit of light sneaks through the media blackout. In this case, CNN even made it the headline on its website. I have to admit -- I'm impressed.

Temper Tantrum Continues In Full Senate

As hard as I tried, I just couldn't get worked up about the day-long temper tantrum staged by the Senate Democrats in today's debate for the confirmation of Condoleezza Rice. Yes, the debate wasted time and money that could have been put to better use -- but probably wouldn't have been. The Democrats called Rice a liar and a Bush stooge, but that's been their level of rhetoric for two years now, and continually pointing it out grows wearisome.

After a while, I have to start finding humor in the fact that the Democratic leadership has become so clueless as to completely miss the fact that they just staged a day-long parody of their last presidential campaign. It confirms for the American public that the Democrats have learned nothing from three successive electoral-cycle defeats and are likely to learn nothing after the next one, either.

So, let's move on to the Democratic Follies, where the ever-shrinking Democratic caucus does their sob-and-dance for C-SPAN and your amusement. First, we have Robert Byrd, whose status as the only Senator to have run on his Klan membership didn't keep him from jumping at the opportunity to block the confirmation of a black woman for Secretary of State:

"Accountability is not a negotiable commodity," Mr. Byrd said, arguing that to confirm Ms. Rice would be to approve policies that had isolated the United States, made it more vulnerable to terrorism and cost American lives under false pretexts.

Would that be anything like making isolationist statements like saying he would never fight "with a Negro by my side. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds"? Could it be that Byrd himself committed a few terrorist acts as Kleagle, burning crosses as part of his civic activities? Or how about his rambling lecture on "white n****rs" from March 2001:

I think we talk about race too much. I think those problems are largely behind us. ... There are white niggers. I've seen a lot of white niggers in my time; I'm going to use that word.

We just need to work together to make our country a better country, and I'd just as soon quit talking about it so much.

While you're pondering that, we move on to our next moments of comedy, this time courtesy of Brave Sir Dayton of Minnesota, our hometown boy. Brave Sir Dayton says Condi lied to him!

Mr. Dayton said Ms. Rice had helped to construct a foreign policy based on a false foundation "by hiding the truth, hiding the truth in matters of life and death, war and peace."

"I really don't like being lied to, repeatedly, flagrantly," Mr. Dayton said.

Minnesota voters will roar with laughter at that assertion, not just because Dayton is lying now, but because we all remember Brave Sir Dayton scurrying home from Washington DC due to a supposedly grave threat of terrorist attack in the nation's capitol. That occurred shortly before the election, but as it turns out, no other Congressman followed Dayton as he beat his very brave retreat. Some of his own caucus called him "paranoid" and "ridiculous". Oddly enough, Dayton returned to DC the day after the election, pronouncing the city secure enough for his exalted presence.

You don't suppose that the same Mark Dayton obsessed with the truth today lied to his Minnesota constituents when he bugged out of DC, and did it to show up George Bush for the election?

Once you catch your breath, let's check out the comic stylings of a true heavyweight, Ted Kennedy. Kennedy pontificated on how Rice "misled" America on WMD. Of course, even Kennedy told Johns Hopkins in 2002 that Saddam had WMD, even if Kennedy didn't consider that notion particularly troubling:

We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction. Our intelligence community is also deeply concerned about the acquisition of such weapons by Iran, North Korea, Libya, Syria and other nations. But information from the intelligence community over the past six months does not point to Iraq as an imminent threat to the United States or a major proliferator of weapons of mass destruction.

In public hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March, CIA Director George Tenet described Iraq as a threat but not as a proliferator, saying that Saddam Hussein — and I quote — "is determined to thwart U.N. sanctions, press ahead with weapons of mass destruction, and resurrect the military force he had before the Gulf War." That is unacceptable, but it is also possible that it could be stopped short of war.

By Kennedy's own words, Rice hardly misled anyone, unless Kennedy did the same. They both had the same information from Western intelligence agencies, but drew different political viewpoints from it. Now, this may not be as hilarious as Kennedy lecturing Alberto Gonzalez on the effects of drowning and the effrontery that waterboarding inflicts on the Massachussetts Senator as a human being:

KENNEDY: Well, just as an attorney, as a human being, I would have thought that if there were recommendations that were so blatantly and flagrantly over the line in terms of torture, that you might have recognized them. I mean, it certainly appears to me that water boarding, with all its descriptions about drowning someone to that kind of a point, would come awfully close to getting over the border, and that you'd be able to at least say today, There were some that were recommended or suggested on that, but I certainly wouldn't have had a part of that, as a human being. But as I understand you are saying now that no matter what they recommended or what they discussed, there was not going to be anything in there that was going to be too bad or too outrageous for you to at least to raise some objection.

Most of you may be laughing, but I can assure you that Mary Jo Kopechne's family isn't.

Now, of course I'm being satirical when I describe what happened in today's Senate session as comedy. I'm not kidding around when I describe the idiocy of using these three to call Condoleezza Rice a liar and a stooge as laughable, nor when I deduce that Democratic leadership is a joke. No one's laughing, except possibly Karl Rove.

A Preview Of The Insurgency's Plan To Disrupt Elections

A friend of CQ forwarded an e-mail from a family member serving in Iraq and working on the elections slated for Sunday. In his e-mail, he alerted his friends and family to these instructions on the Arabic forum "Lion's Den" frequented by terrorists and their sympathizers, giving instructions on how to disrupt polling on January 30. None of the following is terribly surprising, but it shows how sophisticated and detailed their plans have become.

"Mudad Iluj" instructed the Iraqi dead-enders last January 1 on specific tasks to wreak havoc:

My brothers the mujahidin in the Land of the Two Rivers.

And know that by disrupting the elections process, you disrupted Bush's last endeavor in Iraq after the failure of all his previous operations.

While I cannot translate Arabic, the military people working the election have taken this seriously, at least according to my source.

What I find most fascinating is the terrorist reliance on the media and their confidence in manipulating journalists to the terrorist ends. They know from previous experience that the mainstream media salivates over reporting a story of failure in the Iraqi elections, especially at the hands of the insurgency. The sophistication of the planning shows that they have thought this through carefully, and I suspect they've talked with reporters to find out what exactly they need to "prove" the elections have failed.

This missive makes clear that the bombings are just a prelude, a softening of the opposition, in advance of the main attempt to dismantle the elections. In the next two or three days, we need to watch for the following:

1. Sudden withdrawals of large numbers of candidates from the elections just before the ballots go out to the polling stations

2. Ballots stolen before and after the election in large quantities

3. Mainstream media stories showing stolen ballots

4. Of course, all-day attacks on polling stations.

We're just five days away from Election Day, and from this message, it looks as if we can expect these operations to begin as early as tomorrow or Thurday. Forewarned, however, is forearmed.

Who Knew The Oscars Were More Balanced Than The Media?

The AMPAS announced the Oscar nominations this morning, and ironically enough, neither film championed by the right and left got nominated for Best Picture. The Passion of the Christ wound up with three nominations, for best score, cinematography, and make-up. Fahrenheit 9/11 got nada, spurned by the Academy after Michael Moore deliberately held the film out of the feature-length documentary category.

Who knew the Academy was so balanced in their approach?

Senate GOP Agenda Missing Illegal Immigration And Gay Marriage

The conservative wing of the GOP will not delight in the Senate's agenda for this session of Congress. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist left illegal immigration and gay marriage of of the list of top Republican issues:

Senate Republican leaders outlined their 10 top legislative priorities yesterday, focusing mainly on cutting taxes and restructuring Social Security. But two notable omissions -- changes to immigration laws and a ban on same-sex marriage -- underscored tensions with their conservative wing. ...

The Senate Republicans' top 10 list calls for adding private accounts to Social Security, extending President Bush's tax cuts, limiting personal-injury lawsuits and expanding domestic oil exploration. But GOP Senate leaders moved cautiously on more contentious issues, including abortion, same-sex marriage and immigration.

This will be news to conservatives like Rep. James Sensenbrenner, who eventually signed onto the 9/11 Commission "reforms" even though they included nothing about illegal immigration. The Bush administration and GOP leadership promised Sensenbrenner that the issue would be taken up in the next session of Congress. Now it looks like Frist wants to drop it from the radar screen. He doesn't even have the nerve to explain it himself; he sent Rick Santorum to deliver the bad news:

Although their House counterparts are preparing to offer anti-terrorism legislation that includes broad crackdowns on illegal immigration, Senate Republicans did not mention immigration in the legislative agenda they outlined for reporters yesterday. With several Republican senators supporting expanded guest-worker programs, "we don't have a consensus" in the Senate GOP caucus, said its third-ranking leader, Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.).

What is Frist thinking? Santorum already has problems with conservatives in Pennsylvania, thanks to Frist pushing Santorum to support Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey in the Republican primaries last spring. Now he's using Santorum to shield himself from conservative wrath over the retreat on border security. That should help the Democrats grab Santorum's seat in 2006, as it almost guarantees a primary fight with Toomey or someone that Pennsylvania conservatives can trust.

In an age of terror and in a time of war, there should be no higher priority than securing our borders, one way or another. I understand that some may have different ideas of how to accomplish it -- but dropping it to a secondary or tertiary position on the agenda is unacceptable. It not only discounts national security, but it's just plain political stupidity. The omission allows Democrats to seize it as a way to establish national-security credentials at GOP expense.

After watching Frist get pushed around on judicial nominations last year, I wondered if the GOP leadership in the Senate needed a backbone transplant. I'm thinking that the entire central nervous system needs replacing now.

Fundraising Effort Behind Oregon U's Sticker Ban?

Kevin McCullough remains on the story from the University of Oregon, where school administrators forced an employee to remove a "Support the Troops" sticker from his campus truck, claiming it violated their ban on political speech. That assertion fell apart yesterday and the question of Oregon's motivation remained open. Now, Kevin sees that Oregon has embarked on an ambitious fun-raising drive, and thinks that the university known as the Berkely of the North wants to establish its leftist credentials in order to boost donations:

On Sunday - the University of Oregon went public on its goal of seeking donations in record form - 600 million. The univeristy's own press release calls it "the most ambitious in state history":

"The University of Oregon has a long and proud tradition of competing with the best, but competing is not enough -- we must excel," said Frohnmayer, who made the announcement at news conferences in Eugene and Portland. "Our future is our choice, and we choose distinction. That is the mission of Campaign Oregon. We have a very ambitious goal for the dollars we seek in this campaign and an even more ambitious goal in the legacy we hope to leave: a great university for Oregon for generations to come." ...

"Campaign Vice Chair Tim Boyle of Portland added that the success of the campaign so far shows that "the University of Oregon has a group of visionary supporters who can see that the university is poised for great leaps forward in teaching, research and service and who are willing to contribute their own resources to make that happen."

"Visionary Supporters" were the words that jumped out at me from that quote.

Was it in fact a "visionary supporter" who was say "anti-war/anti-American" who then decided to complain to the administration about the harmless magnetic ribbon that had been attached to the vehicle?

In fact, the press release I linked above lists some of the sponsors already on board. I looked up a couple of them for the 2004 cycle:

Keith Thomson: $3,000 in contributions to Oregon Democrats

Julie and Rocky Dixon: $2500 to Democrats. Also, John Dixon, who works at the same company as Rocky Dixon, contributed $5500 to Democrats.

The other names are either foundations or too vague to check. It certainly appears that they intend to market their campaign to a narrow political market -- which makes their decision to ban the stickers more understandable, and more of an indictment of Oregon and its supporters.

Truly Tasteless Tsunami Tackiness

The FCC should investigate the use of public airwaves to air racist and just plain tasteless material by New York City's HOT 97, which repeatedly aired a disgusting parody of tsunami victims to outraged audiences (via Drudge):

A New York radio station apologized on Monday for repeatedly airing a joke song that ridiculed victims of the recent tsunami in South Asia and used racial slurs, saying the piece was in poor taste. New York FM radio station WQHT, or HOT 97, ran the segment on its "Miss Jones in the Morning" show. The piece used racial slurs to describe people swept away in the disaster, made jokes about child slavery and people watching their mothers die.

"You can hear God laughing, 'Swim you bitches swim,'" was one line in the song.

Or maybe we should just cut them a break. After all, it isn't like a quarter of a million people died ... oh, wait, yes it is. Apparently the soulless mouthbreathers at HOT 97 find that incredibly funny, including the morning-show jock that played the song repeatedly, Tarsha Jones. Inexplicably, however, station owner Emmis Communications kept the staff at HOT 97 employed, issuing a statement that all seven people associated with Miss Jones' show would donate one week's salary to tsunami-relief efforts. I have a better idea: tell them to keep the money. As severance pay.

New Yorkers have demanded that the FCC fine Ennis, including prominent state Democrats such as Assemblyman Jimmy Meng from Queens, apparently not a fan of Miss Jones' antics. Perhaps that would be the only way Emmis Communications will comprehend just how disgusting their broadcast was.

UPDATE: As CQ commenter Thomas Pfau notes, the story doesn't get better on further examination:

Before one airing of the song, the station's news reader, Miss Info, who is of Asian descent, objected to the song, only to be attacked by Jones and her cohorts.

"That song is really offensive to me, and I opted not to involve myself," Miss Info said.

Jones replied, "I know you feel you're superior because you're Asian, but you're not." Later, co-host Todd Lyn, incensed at Miss Info's criticism, said, "I'm going to start shooting Asians."

Councilman John Liu (D-Queens) said it was outrageous that the station, owned by Emmis Communications Corp., aired the song for four days [emphasis mine -- CE].

Four days of race hatred at HOT 97! Is that what the FCC considers a public service to the community in exchange for Emmis Communications' broadcast license?

Senate Democrats Extend Obstructionism To Cabinet Appointments

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid apparently learned nothing from his predecessor's defeat in last year's elections. The Democratic minority has decided to express its frustration at the marginalization they inflicted upon themselves by imbibing in the hair of the dog that bit them:

Trying to show that they remain a force despite their reduced numbers, Senate Democrats on Monday threatened new hurdles for President Bush's cabinet choices and expressed deep misgivings about the planned Social Security changes at the heart of this year's Republican agenda.

Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota said he was mulling whether to try to stall consideration of Michael O. Leavitt, Mr. Bush's choice for health secretary, unless Mr. Dorgan was guaranteed a vote on allowing importation of cheaper prescription drugs.

In addition, a growing number of Democrats are raising issues about the selection of Alberto R. Gonzales as attorney general, a nomination initially headed for quick approval.

The political problems for the nominees arose after Democrats last week blocked a quick vote on the approval of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state. As many as a dozen Democrats intend to use the Senate floor on Tuesday as a platform to lay out their objections to Ms. Rice, tying her to what they see as the administration's mistakes in Iraq.

"The honeymoon is over and we are now in the full throes of our new marital arrangement here," said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic whip, after he and other Democratic leaders introduced a priority list on Monday sharply at odds with that put forward by Republicans.

Dorgan's baldly obvious quid pro quo underscores the Democratic approach to "advise and consent" that they have developed over the past four years. Even when a nominee passes through committe on a bipartisan vote -- Rice won recommendation 16-2 -- they intend on hijacking the process, delaying the transition, in order to score some cheap hours for debate. North Dakotans in particular should pay attention to Dorgan's cheap theatrics and extortionate techniques; they voted to support Bush and his agenda by 27 points, and their representative continues to block their will. Dorgan runs for re-election in 2006, and North Dakotans should start considering their options.

In fact, the entire exercise smacks of a desperate need to remain relevant. Tantrums like these lead to stupid mistakes, like having an ex-Klansman like Robert Byrd block a confirmation vote on the first black female Secretary of State. Have the Democrats decided to become Dixiecrats again in 2005? No, although they have no excuse for the long tenure of Byrd, who should have been dumped decades ago. They merely see no other way to get their names in the paper:

Yet they also demonstrated a willingness to use procedural weapons to make their points, even at the risk of being branded obstructionists.

In some respects, said one Democratic lawmaker who asked not to be named because his words were so blunt, they have little choice given their predicament as the party far out of power. "The truth is, you have no place else to go when your back is against the wall," he said.

The truth is that their backs are against the wall precisely because of these stupid and pointless gestures. In the end, Rice, Gonzalez, Leavitt, and others will win confirmation, probably by acclamation or at least a significantly bipartisan vote. So instead of just getting on with business and applying procedural brakes on bills, where the practice could be justified, they uselessly block nominations in order to opine endlessly on their rants of the day. Does the Senate really need an hour of Byrd's bloviations or Barbara Boxer's bawling?

An even better question: do the Democrats? Mature and wise leadership would advise against conducting ridiculous and embarrassing spectacles such as these. Harry Reid, in his short tenure as Minority Leader has demonstrated a lack of capacity for either quality. The obstructionism rejected soundly by voters across the nation in 2004 will once again be before them in 2006, and Reid may find himself the leader of a much smaller minority after that election if this keeps up.

CORRECTION: Dorgan just got re-elected. ND's Senator up for re-election is Conrad (D), not Dorgan. I'd say that North Dakotans need to keep a close eye on both Senators, and issue their mandate in Conrad's re-election bid.

Invalid Addresses Add To Milwaukee's Voter Irregularities

Greg Borowski at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has conducted a review of votes cast in the last presidential election and found that over 1,200 of them came from voters at non-existent addresses. These votes add to the total of the same-day registrants whom the city cannot verify, raising even more questions about the competency of city election officials:

A review of Milwaukee voting records from the Nov. 2 presidential election has found more than 1,200 ballots cast from invalid addresses in the city, including many cases in which the voter could not be located at all. ...

The newspaper’s review, the most extensive analysis done so far of the election, revealed 1,242 votes coming from a total of 1,135 invalid addresses. That is, in some cases more than one person is listed as voting from the address. Of the 1,242 voters with invalid addresses, 75% registered on site on election day, according to city records. ...

Already, the newspaper has reported that about 8,300 more votes were cast than the number of people recorded by the city as voting. This appears to be due to cases where cards from those who presented identification and registered on election day could not be processed, a gap that the city’s own estimates had put at more than 10,000.

In any case, those are not included in the city database and are not part of the paper’s review, which involved checking each voter’s address against two separate lists of properties in the city.

A spot check of addresses that came back as invalid found cases where the address in question is a park, a baseball diamond and at or near the W. Wisconsin Ave. bridge. In most cases, though, there simply was no building at that address.

The additional 1200 voters only accounts for less than one percent of all votes cast in the city. Combined with the unaccountable same-day registrations, however, the additional votes provide an uncomfortable coincidence; the total comes to almost exactly John Kerry's margin of victory for the entire state. It also contributes to the growing consensus that Milwaukee's voting system has broken down, mainly due to the wild same-day registration laws and a lack of competency in the election office.

Lisa Artison, the executive director of the city's Election Commission and a strange addition to the supposedly independent panel investigating its performance, didn't hesitate to make excuses when informed of the new issue:

Lisa Artison, executive director of the city Election Commission, said simply: “The results you obtained make it clear the new statewide voter system is very badly needed and long overdue.”

But that system, to be online late this year, will do little to safeguard against problems with same-day voter registration, or with the flood of registration cards the city received in the final days before Nov. 2.

And it wasn't like Artison and the city hadn't been warned about the problem, either:

Questions about the accuracy of the city’s voter rolls, and whether adequate safeguards are in place to prevent fraud, were raised before the Nov. 2 election.

Six days before the election, the state Republican Party challenged 5,619 addresses on the city voter rolls as non-existent, including vacant lots, a billboard and a gyros stand. The challenge, though, was rejected by the city Election Commission, which said the GOP had not met the high legal standard for dropping names from voter rolls.

A review by the city attorney’s office found many cases where the addresses did exist, but could be explained by errors such as numbers from registration cards that were transposed. In other cases, though, officials agreed that addresses on the GOP list didn’t exist.

These issues reflect the incompetence of Artison in addition to the fraud that Milwaukee's flood of same-day registrations in two successive presidential elections suggest. It demonstrates even further the need for Wisconsin's legislature to prevent the cheesewash that Mayor Barrett and Artison plan. The legislature must investigate this themselves with a truly independent board of inquiry, if not a criminal investigation.

UPDATE: I just checked my e-mail, and I see Sean Hackbarth at The American Mind has weighed in on this new development:

The Journal Sentinel's Greg Borowski continues to put together some fine work on Milwaukee's Election Day problems. His latest find is that 1,242 votes came from voters whose addresses do not exist. Reporters found a park, a baseball diamond, an alley, and a bridge at addresses voters claimed in order to vote. What isn't surprising is that 75% of those bad addresses came from same-day registration. Mayor Barrett's chief of staff Patrick Curley took the ostrich approach and said this was no sign of fraud. If it wasn't fraud then why would a voter use a non-existent address?

There's little doubt that the individual voters committed election fraud. Normally, one would say that it doesn't prove a conspiracy to throw an election. However, the numbers of unaccountable voters here have added up to a significant portion of the Milwaukee election -- four percent overall -- and it looks like more than just a collection of petty frauds. That doesn't even count the fact that almost a third of all Milwaukee voters registered on Election Day, an astronomical number. Something stinks in Milwaukee, and it ain't the cheese.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! For a complete run-down of my posts on this matter, click here. To see some of the work done by other bloggers besides myself and Sean Hackbarth, check out Michelle Malkin, Pull On Superman's Cape, Polipundit, and Boots and Sabers, whose work on the story precedes mine.

American Medical Advances Causes Infant Mortality Rate Hiccup

Two weeks ago, Nicholas Kristof wrote a column on the first increase in the American infant-mortality rate in decades, taking the opportunity to excoriate Americans and the Bush administration as uncaring and unresponsive to the deaths of children. He compared the US unfavorably with Cuba and China, conveniently forgetting that the former hardly has a track record in reliability and the latter routinely kills babies as part of a forcible one-child policy.

At the time, I posted a harsh critique of Kristof's use of statistics and his overall argument. Some commenters postulated that the aggressive nature of American perinatal care created more opportunity for infants to survive just long enough to be counted as neonatal fatalities when they die just after birth. Now Steve at Secure Liberty notes that the Center for Disease Control has come to that same conclusion:

Overall, there were 27,970 infant deaths in 2002 compared with 27,568 in 2001. In 2001, there were 6.8 deaths per 1,000 live births. In 2002, there were 7.0 infant deaths per 1,000 live births.

During that same time period, the numbers of very low birthweight babies increased by almost 500 births. This increase occurred among mothers aged 20 to 34 and across most racial and ethnic groups, the report shows.

Though infant deaths had been declining for these vulnerable, small babies, the majority of babies born at this weight still die within the first year of life. ...

Technological advancements have also played a role, MacDorman notes.

The increased use of assisted reproductive therapies (search), like in-vitro fertilization (search), has been linked with an increase in multiple-birth pregnancies and low birth weight babies. Changes in labor and delivery technologies, and aggressive treatment of premature rupture of membranes, may also be boosting the numbers, MacDorman writes.

Also, advances in neonatal medicine have prompted doctors to alter their perception of a very small infant’s chances of survival. In fact, what might have been reported as a “fetal death” may now be reported as a “live birth,” writes MacDorman. “Because these very high risk infants are likely to succumb within the first few hours or days of life, any significant shift in reporting could result in an increase in the infant mortality rate.”

In other words, babies that would die in the womb or at stillbirth elsewhere are born alive in the US. Many of these survive completely, but because of their precarious state, they tend to die at higher percentages than normal births. That's why the numbers rose slightly for 2002. The CDC doesn't expect to see another increase like it.

Next time, Kristof should check his assumptions before hitting the panic button. He also might want to rethink holding China up as an example for the world in infant care while they kill thousands each year in forcible abortions and infanticide.

Mussolini Willingly Assisted The Holocaust: Book

A new book by Italian historian Michael Sarfatti may change the conventional wisdom that Benito Mussolini only grudgingly assisted Hitler in his genocide against the Jews. The London Telegraph reports that newly-discovered correspondence between Il Duce and the Fascisti of Salo shows that Mussolini understood exactly what would happen to the Jews he sent there, and enthusiastically continued to do so:

Rather than being a reluctant participant in the Holocaust, The Shoah of Italy argues that "Il Duce" forged a secret deal with Hitler to hand Jews to the SS and was far more anti-semitic than once thought.

Mussolini was voicing anti-semitic views as early as 1936 and his Racial Laws of 1938 reflected the regime's "biological racism", the book's author, Michele Sarfatti, claims.

Until now, the passing of the laws that made Jews second-class citizens has been written off as an attempt to curry favour with the Führer. ...

Correspondence between officials from Mussolini's puppet Republic of Salo and the police suggests a pact under which the fascists would transfer Jews to the Germans and death in the camps, Mr Sarfatti says.

If the evidence that Sarfatti claims to have can be substantiated, it puts quite a different spin on the Italian participation in the Axis and World War II. Even the eminent historan and journalist William Shirer in his seminal book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, excused the Italians from the worst of the Nazi excesses, saying that the Italian people were too down-to-earth to fall for Hitler's rhetoric. He described Mussolini's fascism as merely a philosophical excuse to attempt a new Roman empire, a rallying cry an not much more.

I'd like to see more about the correspondence and its suggestive nature before deciding whether it holds water. I find it interesting, though, that at the same time that British schoolkids are found to be ignorant of the Holocaust and Germans want people to quit reminding them of it, at least some Italians are willing to look closer at their own culpability.

Did Andy Rooney Confirm Rather Bias?

Howard Kurtz reports in his Media Notes column that veteran CBS correspondent Tom Fenton pulls few punches in his upcoming book Bad News, including shots across the bow of Dan Rather himself:

The book's instant headlines will probably come from "60 Minutes" commentator Andy Rooney, who tells Fenton there is "no question" the media are liberal and takes a swipe at Rather: "I think Dan has been -- I don't know why; he may not be as smart as they think -- but he has been so blatantly one-sided. . . . He uses little words that are absolute clues, giveaways to his political opinions. Like saying 'Bush,' instead of 'President Bush' or 'Mr. Bush.' . . . A couple of years ago I heard him refer to 'Bush's cronies.' Well, Jesus, 'cronies' -- oh dear!"

That's more than the CBS investigative panel ever said about Memogate's root cause. I find it fascinating that Rooney has more courage to speak out against Dan Rather's excesses and to identify the bias at the heart of his work than Dick Thornburgh or Louis Boccardi ever did. Rooney still collects a paycheck from CBS, while Thornburgh and Boccardi were supposedly independent. Why couldn't the lauded "independent" panel find the bias when Andy Rooney pointed it out for the world?

Fenton's book aims centrally at CBS, but on broader grounds than Memogate or bias. His main complaint is that corporate greed has killed the broadcast news industry, as network expectations of profit got sharper and staff cutbacks became a regular occurence:

Fenton blames "corporate greed" for the decline, saying he was "beaten down by the corporate bean counters" and had "so many of my stories rejected" in the decade before 9/11. CBS's London bureau, he writes, "doesn't do much reporting any more. What it does is called packaging," assembling video and facts gathered by outside organizations.

Likening the practice to Dan Rather's use of what Fenton calls "phony" memos in the discredited story on President Bush's National Guard service, Fenton says the networks "take it on trust. Don't shoot it, don't report it -- just wrap it up and slap the CBS eye on it."

However, as we saw in the Memogate debacle, CBS screws up its in-house reporting as well. Mary Mapes didn't just buy the Killian memo story from some stringer; she went out and pursued it, employing several CBS resources to get whatever she could about Bush and the TexANG. She vetted the story and the source as a CBS producer, not an independent -- and the story turned out to do more damage than anything Fenton describes.

Fenton may have some good points about how the broadcast news business has fallen apart in the past generation. However, if he pretends that the issue is a lack of budgetary resources, he's kidding himself and us. He should listen more carefully to Andy Rooney, and that's advice I don't give out very often.

Me! Me! I'm Unintelligible! No, I Am!

Hugh Hewitt traveled to New York, braving hours of delay, to make two short appearances on national TV this morning. He first appeared on Fox and Friends, which I think I TiVo'd for later viewing. Hugh went from there to CNN and an appearance on American Morning. Unfortunately, his appearance there was all too brief:

HEWITT: Well, I've been a broadcast journalists for 15 years. I've worked in print and television and radio. And the blogosphere is by far the most accurate and the most objective in terms of accountability. Because the moment you make a mistake, you get jumped on by your colleagues and your adversaries in the blogosphere. Dan Rather got brought down by bloggers.

O'BRIEN: I was going to ask you about that.

HEWITT: Yes. Powerline found it. A number of us jumped on to the story, (UNINTELLIGIBLE) and others.

All right -- who wants to take credit for being "Unintelligible"?

Don't forget to order your copy of Blog, soon to be available in audio CD as well.

Dems Wooing Popular Candidate For Run Against Santorum

Democratic heavyweights have apparently settled on their first choice to run against Senator Rick Santorum in 2006, probably the most vulnerable of the GOP caucus up for re-election in the midterms. Yesterday's Tribune-Review reported that Senators Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer have encouraged Pennsylvania stats treasurer Robert Casey, Jr. to toss his hat into the ring:

Based largely on the fact that Casey received 3.35 million votes in the treasurer election in November -- the largest vote total for any candidate running for any office in state history -- Casey is being wooed to run by some heavyweight Dems.

The Philadelphia Daily News reported last week that Casey has been contacted by U.S. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee head Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York. Casey also is slated to discuss a possible Senate campaign this week with [Governor Ed] Rendell.

Santorum may find re-election a bit difficult, especially since his conservative base may hold a grudge for his support of Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey in last year's primaries. Casey has shown the ability to campaign across the state and build a large coalition of voters. That makes him a top-drawer candidate for the Democrats, who need to take away a couple of seats in 2006 just to keep up with their projected losses and maintain the current gap.

Casey wants to run for governor, but I suspect that he'll not be too displeased with a detour into the Senate. If Reid and Schumer can get him $25M for a campaign fund, which I doubt they'll have much trouble doing, he'll bite. Santorum may need to start educating Pennsylvanians on Casey's record and his connections with Reid and Schumer in the next few weeks.

Shawcross Calls Out The West

William Shawcross launches an attack on so-called democrats who remain AWOL on the upcoming Iraqi elections in today's Guardian (UK). Shawcross goes directly to the heart of the issue -- which side are these people on?

Just look at who is trying to stop Iraqis voting and by what methods. That alone shows how important this week's elections are to Iraq.

The horrific war against the Iraqi people is being run by the same people who oppressed and tortured them for decades - Saddam's henchmen and gaolers. They are more than ably abetted by the Islamofascist jihadists led by Osama bin Laden's Heydrich in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Elections really do matter to people - especially to people who have been denied them. We saw that in 1993 when millions of Cambodians braved threats from the Khmer Rouge. We saw it in Algeria in 1995, when the government, almost overcome by years of Islamist terrorist assault, called elections and the silent majority defied the terrorists' threats and voted en masse.

We saw it much more recently in Afghanistan, where the people confounded the western critics and scoffers and, despite Taliban threats, voted overwhelmingly to put the curse of the Taliban's Islamic extremism behind them.

And we are seeing it most brutally and clearly in Iraq today, where everyone associated with the attempt to give the Iraqi people a decent future risks being murdered.

Will the elections be perfect? Of course not. We don't have perfect elections in the US, but only lunatics and Democrats hold perfection as the standard (and the latter only in states that vote Republican). Shawcross spoke with Carlos Valenzuela, the head of the UN task force on elections in Iraq and a Colombian with plenty of experience with electoral violence. His own country regularly holds elections in the midst of insurgencies and rebel violence, but Valenzuela reminds us that the world considers their elections legitimate. Why do they view the Iraqi elections any differently?

In fact, Shawcross would like an answer to that as well:

It is shocking that so few democratic governments support the Iraqi people. Where are French and German and Spanish protests against the terror being inflicted on voters in Iraq? And it is shocking that around the world there is not wider admiration of, assistance to and moral support (and more) for the Iraqi people. The choice is clear: movement towards democracy in Iraq or a new nihilism akin to fascism - Islamist fascism.

Shawcross details the forces that want to subvert the Iraqi elections and deny self-government to a long-oppressed people. In fact, the main leaders of the so-called insurgency are the same genocidal subtyrants that worked for Saddam Hussein, funded now by their Ba'athist cousins in Syria. They feed off of the fear of their former subjects and inmates, and Western indifference allows that fear to grow like mushrooms in the dark.

The only cure for oppression and fascism are free elections. The only complete victory against terrorists like Zarqawi will be the freely-elected federal government of Iraq taking the reins and exposing the Zarqawis as nothing more than serial killers wrapped up in a long-failed ideology. The failure of some Western democrats to see this shows a fundamental lack of faith in the power of popular rule as opposed to convenient despotism.

University Of Oregon: No Support For Troops On Campus

One of the most tepid and meaningless phrases that has sprung up during the war on terror has been "Support The Troops". Both sides of the partisan divide claim to "support the troops," even while some on one side continually denigrate their mission and demand a retreat. The phrase itself has enough generality to be imbued with almost any meaning desired.

Now, however, even that thin cheer for our men and women on the front has come under attack at the University of Oregon. After a single complaint, the university's administration ordered all school vehicles freed of the magnetic "Support The Troops" ribbons that have enjoyed popularity among a wide swath of the public (via Kevin McCullough, ellipses in original):

A yellow ribbon sticker that says "Support The Troops" has created a big stir at the University of Oregon.

A day after a campus employee was told to remove the sticker from his maintenance vehicle -- people on campus are reacting.

It all started after a university employee complained.

Some think the university may have gone too far. But for now... all the stickers are gone.

It's hard to know how seriously to take this report, which easily qualifies as the worst-written story I've ever seen in the mainstream media. KEZI is the local ABC affiliate in Oregon, and the article looks more like a bad blog post than anything written by a professional reporter. The article goes on to report that Oregon state law prohibits the use of state resources by public employees for political purposes, but gives no citation or background on the law itself.

If the University of Oregon thinks that asserting support for men and women who defend this country constitutes political activism, especially given the vanilla texture assigned to this particular phrase over the past two years, then Oregonian academia has truly lost its soul. If anyone has more or better information, please send it to me.

UPDATE: Much more on this from Myopic Zeal and Cheese and Crackers. The Univeristy's policy statement makes pretty clear what is considered political activity:

Title: Prohibited Political Activities

Purpose: To describe limits and prohibited political activity on the University of Oregon campus

Policy:

In compliance with ORS 260.432, the following notice required by statute is published:

"The restrictions imposed by the law of the State of Oregon on your political activities are that 'No public employee shall solicit any money, influence, service or other thing of value or otherwise promote any political committee or promote or oppose the nomination or election of a candidate, the adoption of a measure or the recall of a public office holder while on the job during working hours. However, this section does not restrict the right of a public employee to express personal political views."

"It is therefore the policy of the state and of your public employer that you may engage in political activity except to the extent prohibited by state law when on the job during working hours."

Since the magnetic stickers proclaiming support for men and women in our armed services hardly promote a political committee, a candidate for political office or a recall, or an adoption of a measure, the stickers should have remained on the vehicles. At the very least, restrictions on political activity by public employees would not cause the university to ban them, by their own policy statement.

It's true that the trucks belong to the university, and that they can determine what should and should not be placed on them. However, they can't use the law as an excuse. They don't want the stickers on the trucks because they don't like the idea of supporting the military at the University of Oregon. Too bad they don't have the guts to just come out and say it. Of course, if they had any intestinal fortitude at all, they'd appreciate the sacrifices made by the "troops" and would have seen the pettiness of the original complaint. Cowards will never appreciate heroes; heroes remind cowards of their own failings.

Two More Zarqawi Lieutenants Captured

The Iraqi government announced today that they captured a key lieutenant of terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi last month -- a man responsible for dozens of car-bombings in the Sunni Triangle:

Iraqi forces have captured one of al Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's top bomb-makers in Iraq, the prime minister's spokesman said Monday.

Sami Mohammed al-Jafi, known as Abu Omar al-Kurdi, is accused of being behind some 32 car bombings since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, it said. ...

Iraqi forces said they also captured another insurgent earlier this month, Nayef Abbas al-Zubaydi, who heads the Abu Talha group linked to the Jordanian militant Zarqawi in the lawless northern city of Mosul, Naqib said.

Zubaydi, known as Abu Moawiya, was captured barely two weeks after the arrest of the previous leader of the group, Zain Abdallah Salah Khalaf al-Jib, or Abu Karam.

The rate of captures in Iraq continues to climb, even though the leader has thus far eluded their grasp. Chances are that these two high-level captures are what led to the rumors of Zarqawi's arrest this weekend, but it still shows that momentum remains on the side of the interim government and the Iraqi elections. Note the second arrest and the timing involved; the quick identification and acquisition of Abu Karam's replacement indicates a high level of intelligence on insurgent operations.

The insurgents are running out of time and leadership in their race to stop the completion of Iraq's liberation from tyranny. Zarqawi's public statements of total war still indicate a high level of danger, but an even higher level of desperation.

No Explanation For Weeping Madonna: Panel

Despite my status as a practicing Catholic (definition of practicing: one who struggles to get it right), I do not usually put much stock in the more mystical aspects of my religion. The Age of Miracles seems to me a distant set of events from which we are meant to draw meaning, comfort, and inspiration. I tend to emulate Doubting Thomas when told of modern-day events.

That approach, on rare occasions, gets jolted by events that defy explanation. The AP reports on one such potential development in Italy, where scientists and theologians alike can provide no explanation of a statue of Mary that appeared to cry human blood for tears:

A review of the probe into a statue of the Madonna said to have shed tears of blood a decade ago concluded that the phenomenon has no human explanation, a newspaper reported Sunday.

The Civitavecchia diocese ordered theologians, historians and doctors to review the case and compile their conclusions in a document, according to Corriere della Sera, which published what it said was a summary of the findings.

Corriere, Italy's leading newspaper, said the document presented a critical analysis of all the testimonies given at the time, as well as all possible explanations for the phenomenon.

"Everything — they (the experts) say unanimously — indicates that in that corner of the Earth, at the gates of Rome, an event took place that has no human explanation and points at the mystery of the supernatural," Corriere wrote.

CAT scans and X-rays found no structure within the statue that could harbor and/or squirt out any substance, an important point, as eyewitnesses have seen the blood come from the eyes of the statue. The statue has wept at least 14 times. Scientists analyzed the blood and determined it to be that of a human male.

The Vatican remains quiet on this issue, as is normal; their position is that the Word has been completely revealed in Christ and needs no further revelation, but that God will choose to work in His own way when He sees fit. They likely will have little to say at all on the weeping Madonna. However, for those of us who tend to discount the mystical in favor of the practical, the questions raised by the Madonna of Civitavecchia will cause us to question our approach to faith just a little bit -- perhaps just like Thomas.

Hillary Can't Find Leadership Under Her Upturned Nose

Hillary Clinton told a Florida audience that America's leaders lack vision, scant days after one of the most inspiring and visionary inaugural speeches in decades. Laughably, she turned to her husband as an example of what America needs:

"I don't see that thoughtful, visionary direction that got us where we are today," she told the crowd of hundreds. "The history of America is... to make sacrifices today for a better tomorrow. The progress that then occurred moved everyone forward.

"That progress is at risk today," she said.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower left a legacy of highways, John F. Kennedy the excitement over space exploration, and Lyndon B. Johnson created the legal framework for civil rights, Clinton said. "What are we investing in today?"

"I believe that on both political and substantive grounds, my husband did it just right," she said, referring to former President Clinton. "The deficit reduction act didn't get one single Republican vote. He took on the gun lobby with the Brady Bill. He took on health care. He took on hard issues that we pay a president for. Frankly, it is not that hard cutting people's taxes."

Oh, where to start with Hillary? The deficit-reduction act from Clinton didn't address the real issues, and it wasn't until the Democrats lost control of Congress during Bill's first term that he even addressed the deficit. The Republican Congress balanced the budget, chiefly by driving a stake through the heart of the Clinton single-payor health-care system. That beast, Hillary's pet project, threatened to add trillions of dollars in debt to the federal budget.

Worse yet, Clinton failed to lead in the primary purpose of the executive branch: keeping America safe, at home and abroad. Despite several terrorist attacks overseas and in the US (the first World Trade Center), Clinton refused to lead the world by unleashing American power against those who want to kill us by the millions. He had several opportunities to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, all of which came after WTC 1; Sudan even offered to hand him over. The Clinton response? His administration questioned whether a jury could convict bin Laden and passed.

When he did commit American troops, in the Balkans, he hardly provided leadership. He allowed a White House intern to sexually service him while on the phone to members of Congress discussing the mission and objectives of the American servicemen in harm's way. He allowed the American military to serve the political ends of his European friends and eventually the UN, which led to a years-long stalemate, especially in Kosovo. We're almost six years into the intervention there, and no one has a clue what the political solution will be. Clinton didn't even insist on free elections; he just sent in our forces and gave it a big shrug.

As far as taxes go, Hillary would love to have people think that "anyone" can cut them, but Democrats have proved that false. In order to get Congress to allow Americans to keep more of the money they earn, it took silly sunset-legislation compromises that still have not been removed, even though the tax cuts have fueled the strongest recovery in a generation. Democrats want to keep increasing taxes, in part to pay for the nationalization of entire industries, like HillaryCare in 1993.

If this is the leadership that Hillary misses and the Democrats offer, they should plan on working from the minority for many years to come. Ignoring security threats, oral sex from interns in the Oval Office, and confiscating more of our private property sounds like a recipe for bloated self-indulgence, not leadership.

I'll take Bush's vision of America's mission to spread democracy and human liberty over the Clintonian self-indulgence any day. Good luck to Hillary selling that historical revisionism.

Babsy's Crying (Again)

Barbara Boxer must run through cases of Kleenex every week, crying her eyes out over the oddest issues. The tears this week come from her claims of victimhood at the hands of Condoleezza Rice after last week's confirmation hearings. Boxer claims that Rice "attacked" her when all Babs wanted was a nice, friendly little chat:

Sen. Barbara Boxer says she is the real victim of last week's confirmation hearing for Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice, yet continued yesterday to question the national security adviser's honesty. "She turned and attacked me," the California Democrat told CNN's "Late Edition" in describing the confrontation during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. "I gave Dr. Rice many opportunities to address specific issues. Instead, she said I was impugning her integrity," Mrs. Boxer said.

Did Rice beat up on poor, sensitive Babs in an unkind manner? Let's go to the transcripts, shall we, and see exactly what Babs said to provoke such an outrageous statement:

When Senator Voinovich mentioned the issue of tsunami relief, you said -- your first words were "The tsunami was a wonderful opportunity for us."

Now, the tsunami was one of the worst tragedies of our lifetime, one of the worst, and it's going to have a 10-year impact on rebuilding that area.

I was very disappointed in your statement. I think you blew the opportunity. You mentioned it as part of one sentence. ...

So in your statement, it takes you to page three to mention the word Iraq. Then you mention it in the context of elections, which is fine. But you never even mentioned indirectly the 1,366 American troops that have died or the 10,372 who have been wounded, many mentally. There's a report that I read over the weekend that maybe a third will come home and need help because of what they saw. It's been so traumatic to them.

And 25 percent of those dead are from my home state. This from a war that was based on what everyone now says, including your own administration, were falsehoods about WMDs, weapons of mass destruction. ...

And I think the way we should start is by trying to set the record straight on some of the things you said going into this war. ...

And I personally believe -- this is my personal view -- that your loyalty to the mission you were given, to sell this war, overwhelmed your respect for the truth. And I don't say it lightly. ...

And I will be placing into the record a number of such statements you made which have not been consistent with the facts. ...

So here you are, first contradicting the president and then contradicting yourself. So it's hard to even ask you a question about this, because you are on the record basically taking two sides of an issue. ...

In other words, before Boxer ever even asked a question -- remember, she actually exhausted her time with her opening statement -- Boxer had called Condi Rice an insensitive liar six times. Perhaps Boxer lacks the intellectual capacity to comprehend her own statement, but I can assure the feeble-minded California Senator that Condi Rice does not. She knew exactly what Boxer said to her, and she responded appropriately. Boxer wasn't just attacking the policies she referenced; in fact, when one reads the transcript, it's obvious that Boxer had set out to discredit Rice in a personal way.

Unfortunately for Boxer, she went into that battle of wits completely unarmed. Rice ran rings around Boxer, mostly by deft counterstrokes. It's taken a few days for that to sink in with Babs, and now she wants sympathy for bullying someone who fights back. Nice try.

Kevin McCullough gets straight to the chase, as always:

This is the problem with those on the Left. They play so fast and loose with truth that they can't even see for themselves how an accusation like Boxer's does challenge someone else's integrity.

I think most of them do see it; they do it deliberately. One would have to be dumber than a box of rocks not to see it. Babs, unfortunately for Californians, meets that intelligence requirement.

Iraqis: No Shi'ite Clerics In Government

The New York Times reports today that another argument from the Left against the Bush Administration's efforts to spread democracy throughout Southwest Asia has collapsed. Before and after the Iraqi invasion, the media and the Left screeched warnings that free Iraqi elections would result in an Iranian-style mullahcracy seizing power. However, the largest umbrella Shi'ite political party in Iraq has now rejected theocratic rule:

The senior leaders of the United Iraqi Alliance, the coalition of mostly Shiite groups that is poised to capture the most votes in the election next Sunday, have agreed that the Iraqi whom they nominate to be the country's next prime minister would be a lay person, not an Islamic cleric.

The Shiite leaders say there is a similar but less formal agreement that clerics will also be excluded from running the government ministries.

"There will be no turbans in the government," said Adnan Ali, a senior leader of the Dawa Party, one of the largest Shiite parties. "Everyone agrees on that."

The decision appears to formalize the growing dominance of secular leaders among the Shiite political leadership, and it also reflects an inclination by the country's powerful religious hierarchy to stay out of the day-to-day governing of the country. Among the Shiite coalition's 228 candidates for the national assembly, fewer than a half dozen are clerics, according to the group's leaders.

Why? Not out of any sense of altruism, certainly, but for a number of practical reasons. First, the Iraqi version of Shi'a comes from Najaf (Sistani is one of its adherents), and that sect counsels against clerical involvement in government. Sistani himself has declined to even endorse candidates, although he has been active in ensuring that elections take place. Second, most people, including the Shi'ites, recognize that clerics tend toward impracticality and that makes for difficult governing. As the article states, even the Iranians advised against it:

The conviction that the Iranian model should be avoided in Iraq is apparently shared by the Iranians themselves. One Iraqi Shiite leader, who recently traveled to Tehran, the Iranian capital, said he was warned by the Iranians themselves against putting clerics in the government.

"They said it caused too many problems," the Iraqi said.

Another force at work is the ongoing murder spree of Islamofascists who want that Iranian-style or Wahhabist dictatorship imposed on the Iraqis. If people had any significant affection for a strict Islamist government in Iraq prior to the insurgency, they now see what would come from it and have recoiled at the thought. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his henchment have given Iraqis a sneak peek at their vision of Iraq, prostrate before a bloodthirsty Caliph in Baghdad -- in other words, Saddam without the socialist rhetoric. The Iraqis may fear the bombs, but they're not stupid enough to choose the bombers.

Mostly, though, the politicians understand that the Iraqis would reject such a theocracy imposed on them, regardless of it benignity. That's why free elections are so important, and the need to explain this to the American Left should shame all of them. The Iraqi politicians now understand that they have to follow policies that the people will support. The candidates for next week's elections comprehend their accountability to the people of Iraq. They will be held responsible for their positions on issues for the first time ... well, ever.

No longer will power be imposed on the Iraqis; now its springs from the people. With over 80% planning on voting in the election, the politicians have to consider the best compromises to make as many people satisfied with the government the new parliament will create in its first session. Otherwise, they will answer for any failures by losing their jobs. That's the promise of free elections -- and why the Bush strategy of employing democracy as a shield will provide the only real solution to the impotency and rage that creates and fuels the terrorist impulses in that region of the world.

In The Face Of Evil: Reagan Retrospective Coming To DVD

Stacy Harp at Media Soul has launched a new initiative to market the upcoming DVD release of In The Face Of Evil, a 2004 documentary on Ronald Reagan. She's gathering a network of bloggers to publicize and sell the DVD to its readership. I have yet to see the documentary (full disclosure: I'm getting a complimentary copy), but I do look forward to it. I think that the mainstream media has ignored the Reagan legacy, and independent conservative documentarians will probably be the only way Reagan and his presidency gets any kind of realistic overview.

Keep checking in at Media Soul. I'll let you know about the documentary when I get a chance to watch it.

AQ Branches Out To Insurance Scams For Funding

In a sign that the global effort to dry up terrorist funding has had an impact, the Germans arrested two al-Qaeda operatives allegedly planning an attack in Iraq. Before the attack, however, one planned to fake his death in order to use insurance money to fund AQ operations:

German police arrested two suspected al-Qaida members Sunday believed to have plotted a suicide attack in Iraq — with a side venture in insurance fraud, taking out a policy on the suicide bomber to use the money to fund the terror organization.

The chief suspect, 29-year-old Iraqi Ibrahim Mohamed K., is also believed to have tried to obtain nearly two ounces of uranium in Luxembourg.

He also "played a not unimportant role in al-Qaida, because he showed signs of contact with Osama bin Laden and met with Ramzi Binalshibh," one of the plotters of the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United States, chief federal prosecutor Kay Nehm told reporters.

The Iraqi took out a million-dollar life insurance policy on his partner, who planned on faking his death in Egypt to get the policy cashed out. The pair planned on passing the money up the chain of command for further attacks. This kind of plan has a much higher risk than their traditional money-laundering through Islamic charity organizations. The paper trail for insurance policies keeps the trail alive after the crime. Also, insurers routinely assign investigators to check out large payouts, and any attempt to collect the benefits of this policy would have had red flags popping up all over the place.

Now that the plan has been exposed, it seems likely that more such policies will be discovered in the months ahead and international investigators may uncover more AQ connections. Terrorist leaders had to know that involving insurance companies created far more risk than they've assumed in the past. They may have miscalculated just how much exposure could result -- or they may simply have had little other choice for funding.

By the way, the Iraqi's mission was to recruit suicide bombers for Iraq to disrupt the elections. Guess who his partner was?

The other suspect, a 31-year-old Palestinian, identified as Yasser Abu S., was allegedly recruited by the Iraqi to be a suicide bomber in an attack in Iraq. The Palestinian is a Bonn medical student, who was born in Libya and has an Egyptian passport, Nehm said.

A Palestinian as a suicide bomber? No kidding! Who'd have thought it?

Abbas Gets Hamas And Islamic Jihad On Board: Guardian

New Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has reached an agreement with all three major terrorist organizations in the West Bank and Gaza to commit to a cease-fire if Israel halts counterterrorist activity in Palestinian areas, according to the Guardian (UK). Abbas warns that the agreement will not hold long if Israel does not agree to its terms:

Hamas and Islamic Jihad have agreed to suspend attacks on Israel in order to give the new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, time to secure international guarantees for a comprehensive ceasefire that would end more than four years of intifada. Mr Abbas told Palestinian television yesterday that it was "essential" that Israel reciprocate by ending its targeting of armed Islamist groups. He said he had made "significant" progress in talks with Hamas and Islamic Jihad and expected to reach a comprehensive agreement with them soon on an array of political and security issues that would effectively end their war on Israel.

Mr Abbas's principal negotiator with Hamas, Ziad Abu-Amr, yesterday said the armed Islamist factions pledged to hold off from attacks while the Palestinian leader attempted to secure assurances of Israeli reciprocity, and negotiates final terms of a deal to bring the groups into the political process.

"There is a Palestinian tranquillisation. This is a Palestinian initiative intended to be a prelude to a ceasefire but there have to be conditions for a ceasefire," said Mr Abu-Amr. "There has to be reciprocity [from Israel] and that means no attacks on Palestinians, no incursions or chasing militants."

This report follows the breathless announcement earlier that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade agreed to suspend attacks -- a strange development, since they report to the same Fatah organization that Abbas now runs. The Guardian report has some promise for a positive turn in the stalemate between Israel and the Palestinians, if true. Usually, only one or two of these organizations will agree to a cease-fire, allowing the third to attack and all three to blame Israel for the failure of diplomacy when Israel retaliates.

Until the cease-fire actually occurs, however, I'll treat this story just like the occasional Zarqawi capture rumors: interesting enough to report about, but far too unreliable to count on.

CNN: WaPo Report On Military Spy Unit Incorrect On Key Details

The Washington Post dropped a bombshell this morning with a report that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had formed a special intelligence unit in the armed forces that operated outside of CIA and Congressional oversight and reported directly to Rumsfeld. CNN now has a report confirming the existence of the intelligence unit, but contradicts the Post in several critical areas:

He confirmed the SSB was formed after the September 11, 2001, attacks "to have as much flexibility as possible" and in response to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's ongoing concerns expressed at the highest levels of the department that the Pentagon did not have the capability to gather intelligence in the field on its own.

The official confirmed that the SSB reports to Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, director of the DIA, but that policies are set by Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, one of Rumsfeld's most senior aides. ...

When SSB teams are deployed in the field, as a practical matter, they report to the combatant commander, or the commander of the region, though the official could not say this happens all the time. For example, in Iraq, the unit would be under the supervision of Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command.

The official acknowledged that some observers may view the SSB as an effort by Rumsfeld to expand Pentagon intelligence operations at the expense of the CIA, which traditionally has conducted both clandestine and covert intelligence operations. He said that, though SSB operations do not require permission from the CIA, the military still coordinates with the CIA. ...

The official said Congress had been notified about the formation of "this kind of activity," but might have been told of the program several months ago when it had a different name.

So we don't have Rummy running his own special-ops intelligence spooks answerable only to him, the commanders in the theater have operational command, and the CIA does get coordination with the teams in the field, even if they're not in charge. According to CNN's source, Congress has been informed of the program before. That's quite a different picture than the Post painted, even if CNN won't say that in its report.

Quite frankly, I fail to see the problem here. I want our special-ops forces to get all the human intelligence they can in order to conduct the operations necessary with as much safety and success possible. We know that the CIA has had its problems in giving us that. The DIA has filled this role before. Now the Pentagon has made their role more robust, a reasonable and welcome development in wartime, especially in this kind of war.

I wish John McCain and Chuck Hagel would do their jobs and get more information before recklessly commenting on the Sunday morning talk shows. This looks like a non-story, only fueled by their depressingly familiar grandstanding.

Goodbye, Johnny

I found out earlier today that Johnny Carson passed away at 79 from emphysema. I haven't blogged about it as I couldn't immediately articulate my thoughts about Carson and his impact on our culture, or at least not in any way that hadn't already been written elsewhere.

Like Mitch Berg, I came late to the Carson fan club, and at first his utter domination of late-night television appeared to me to spring from a lack of competition than anything Carson did. Sure, he could make me laugh, but lots of people make me laugh. I kept expecting someone to knock Carson from his perch, and I watched luminaries like Pat Sajak, Joan Rivers, Alan Thicke, and the execrable Chevy Chase (after Carson's retirement) try and fail miserably. Only Arsenio Hall managed to carve a niche against Carson, but only among an urban demographic Carson didn't reach anyway.

During the 80s, I came to realize why Carson couldn't be duplicated and probably never challenged. He exuded a generous and genuine nature, both in his comedy and with his guests. He didn't fawn over them, but treated them with respect and friendship. Likewise, he treated his audience the same, always giving us the feeling that we were in on the joke. His understated, Jack Benny-esque comedy style always had a sly undertone, a winking appreciation for the intelligence of the audience. He never treated anyone like an idiot, and he never abused the trust that America put in him over a 30-year run.

Sure, he made mistakes. Who doesn't? He once had Paul McCartney on the show and in a rare display of unpreparedness, got several Beatle stories incorrect and pulled out a guitar that wasn't strung for McCartney's left-handed play. Mostly, though, Carson could turn his mistakes into comic gold, simply by being honest with his audience about them. With a single look or a mock golf swing, he could turn the biggest turkey into a huge laugh. He never lost confidence in himself or us.

It's not as if people didn't appreciate Carson when he ruled late night, but we got an idea how difficult the job was when he retired. I like both David Letterman and Jay Leno, so I have always been an agnostic about the big late-night wars of 1993-4. Both men make me laugh, but more to the point, neither really filled Carson's shoes. Jay tries too hard in his monologues, selling his jokes rather than letting them win on their own. Often, he winds up stepping on his own punch lines. Letterman's hip cynicism sometimes edges too far into cruelty, a place Carson never went. Neither man interviews guests with the talent Carson displayed, although Letterman probably has the edge here.

In his retirement, we often heard hints about new projects for Carson, but in the end he wisely thought better of it. He went out on top and earned his retirement and his privacy. Anything less than brilliant would have added tarnish to his sterling career, and despite his troubled personal life, he didn't need the money. He may not have been Garbo, but his disappearance was complete, and blessedly untroubled by the media.

Carson left us a long run of brilliance and grace, and we will be ever grateful for it. Thanks for everything, Johnny. You will be missed.

Steelers Vs. Patriots: Live Blog

I'll be live-blogging the Steelers-Patriots game, a last-minute decision since I've not had particularly good nights when I've live-blogged my teams. (See Notre Dame vs USC, and talk to Folsom James, who's still laughing.)

5:45 - Patriots up 3-0 after a Ben Roethlisberger interception. The defense held the Pats to a single first down, but it was still good enough for the FG.

5:47 - Yeah, let's stick to the Bus for a while.

5:51 - Fourth and 1? Go for it!

5:52 - Dammit, quit listening to me.

5:53 - I should mention that the Philadelphia Eagles finally beat the hex and the Atlanta Falcons today, 27-10, finally advancing to the Super Bowl. I'm hoping for an all-Pennsylvania Super Bowl. Any Penn bloggers out there hoping for the same thing?

5:56 - 10-0 Pats after a pretty pass play down the middle. Yikes.

6:01 - Fourth and two? Don't go for it.

6:07 - Good defensive series by the Steelers, and the offense starts in NE territory. We need some points now.

6:12 - 10-3 Pats after a Steelers FG. Roethlisberger still looks out of rhythm, but he threw a nice first-down pass. They should try more of that.

6:22 - Another good defensive series for Pittsburgh. NE has an edge on field position now, and I suspect R'berger will be passing on first down to try to stretch the field a bit and open up the run.

6:24 - Yes, they stopped listening to me. Good.

6:30 - Both defenses appear to be stiffening. After a good roll on the punt, the field position has returned to a more neutral state. If the Steelers can get a three-and-out, they may have a better shot in their next series.

6:35 - 17-3 Pats. Two big plays did in the Steelers defense, and the Pats are playing like champs tonight.

6:39 - Duce Staley gets three up the middle. It's been a while since we've seen Jerome Bettis. Maybe Cowher's saving Bettis for the second half? Nice first down for the Steelers.

6:44 - 24-3 Pats. Rookie mistakes by R'berger and a cunning play by the Pats secondary to pick the pass and return it for the TD. This is what we all feared after the Jets game.

6:54 - Halftime. 24-3. I recall that the USC Trojans beat Notre Dame in 1977 (nope, 1974. HT: pflefler) 55-24 after being down 24-6 at the half ... but that's one hell of a long shot here. The Pats have dominated on defense.

7:11 - The Steelers' D comes to play in the second half. Two straight plays pushing the Pats backwards on a three-and-out. The announcers talk about Tommy Maddox coming in for Roethlisberger, but I think you have to play with the one who brung ya. Let's see if he can turn it around in the second half.

7:17 - Turnaround? The Bus provides the Steelers with a U-turn and takes the ball into the goal. 24-10 Pats, but at least it looks like the Steelers are back in the game.

7:30 - I predict the turnover gets overturned by the replay challenge.

7:32 - The Pats get the ball back, and the next play they take it to the house. The verrrrry quite house. Pats 31-10.

7:45 - Phone calls -- it may be a few more minutes before I can post.

8:15 - I'm back. 34-20 Pats. I think the Steelers have played better this half, but not well enough to turn the game around. They need a quick strike and a defensive big play.

8:28 - This is getting rather depressing. The Steelers' D can't keep up with Tom Brady, even if they've stuffed Corey Dillon all night long.

8:35 - That puts an end to the game, for all purposes. Deion Branch scores the killer TD on an end-around to make the score 41-20. I don't see how these guys can be beat in Jacksonville, either.

8:43 - At least the Steelers and Roethlisberger didn't lay down. They scored a trash-time TD to bring the score back to a 14-point gap.

I think the Steelers and R'berger are still one or two years from being dominant, but the question will be if R'berger can handle the big-time loss in the offseason. He has plenty of talent and looks like he's got the heart. We'll see next season.

Dems Run GOP's Anti-Dean Playbook

How desperate are the Democrats to prevent Howard Dean from becoming chair of the Democratic National Committee? Desperate enough to validate practically every argument made by Republicans and conservative commentators during the early primary season in 2003-4, according to Howard Fineman in Newsweek today:

Last week the search for a surefire Dean-stopper (if there is one) reached new levels, NEWSWEEK has learned, with several governors—among them Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania and Bill Richardson of New Mexico—trying to gin up a last-ditch plan: let Dean be chairman, but confine his role to pure nuts-and-bolts duties by layering him with a new "general chairman" spokesman for the party. They abandoned the idea after realizing that they didn't have the votes to change the rules—and because the person they wanted to take the new role, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, told them she had no interest.

That left the anti-Dean forces with only one clear strategy: recycling the long list of his provocative statements. Among them: that we shouldn't judge Osama bin Laden until he has a jury trial; that America won't always have the strongest military; that "if Bill Clinton could be the first black president, I can be the first gay president." The ABD forces were also pointing reporters to an off-the-record Harvard seminar in November, at which Dean is rumored to have facetiously suggested that Democrats leave Wyoming rather than put up with anti-gay attitudes there.

Does anyone find it interesting that the man who appeared to have the support of the majority of Demomcrats until his Iowa meltdown now causes such "fear and loathing" among the party's leaders? Had he won Iowa, they would have gladly lined up behind Dean to elect him as leader of the free world. Now he's not even good enough to lead the primary strategy committee for their party, and they're so afraid of him that they want to keep changing the rules to keep his hands off the wheel without adult supervision.

(Memo to Dean: Changing rules mid-election is a time-honored Democratic election fraud tradition. Get used to it.)

If Dean is this dangerous, why did Democrats like Tom Harkin and Al Gore endorse him? If Dean represents such a destructive force, why did he raise $40 million and get the notorious Hollywood activists behind him? Barbra Streisand, Rob Reiner, Steven Spielberg and others apparently either have gotten too radical for the Democrats -- we wish -- or the Dems had no problem foisting Dean on America while wanting him excluded from their exclusive tete-a-tetes.

I guess we'll never go broke betting on Democratic hypocrisy. In the meantime, I'll suggest that the DNC read through my DeanWatch category for ammunition against the Vermont Strangler.

First We're Stingy, And Now We Cause Corruption Through Generosity

I wish the United Nations would make up its mind. In the aftermath of the tsunami and its resultant devastation, UN undersecretary for disaster relief Jan Egeland called Western nations "stingy" in their assistance to poorer nations. Today, however, the UN released a report which blames the corruption endemic in their assistance programs on the money given them by the same group of wealthy nations:

The ravages of modern warfare are too often compounded by ill-conceived and expensive post-war reconstruction projects that fuel a "feeding frenzy" of corruption and profiteering, according to a U.N.-funded report.

The report, citing graft from Liberia and Bosnia-Herzegovina to Lebanon and Afghanistan, said the overwhelming international response after wars was simply to pump large amounts of money into rebuilding programs without proper control.

"What is difficult enough to try to manage in times of peace becomes even more problematic in post-war situations where the sheer scale of works...and the weakness of public oversight create opportunities for the corrupt of historic proportions," it said.

Managing a flood of money can create its own difficulties, which we saw in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The charities involved sent money into other programs or into unrelated management expenses, and in some cases, nowhere near the victims or their families. It took oversight and the publication of the misuse of these funds to correct the corruption and misappropriation. (While I'm not a big fan of Bill O'Reilly, he really forced the issue to the front pages and deserves a lot of credit for getting the problems resolved.)

What we see in this UN report is an attempt to shift blame for corruption from the UN to the donors. It would be analogous to declaring the 9/11 funds corruption the fault of everyone who opened their wallets to the victims instead of the organizations grabbing the money. After all, money is essentially amoral; it's a tool to use for whatever use its owner sees fit. The UN refuses to accept responsibility for managing these vast sums from "stingy" nations, which explains one reason why we get stingy when the UN sticks its hand out, despite the legitimacy of the cause.

Instead of blaming the donors, the UN should have looked into the reasons it can't run aid programs without everyone in creation wetting their beak in the trough. The lack of accountability within the organization, from the Secretary-General on down, has been made crystal clear in the Oil-For-Food scam run out of Turtle Bay by Kofi Annan's crony Benon Sevan and assisted by Annan's son Kojo. Where accountability is absent, corruption inevitably follows, regardless of the sums of money involved.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The UN answers to no one and controls billions of dollars in various aid programs. To blame the resultant corruption on the money clearly demonstrates what an ethically bankrupt organization the UN has become, and why we should endeavor to make it a financially bankrupt one as a result.

Exhibit A Of Bush's Inaugural Address

In what should be seen as the first example of the new policies articulated in Bush's inaugural speech, Viktor Yushchenko assumed office as President of Ukraine today. As Yushchenko noted on his own inauguration, his presidency would not exist had it not been for countries like the United States dumping realpolitik to stand fast for democracy:

Viktor Yushchenko became Ukraine's president Sunday and vowed to seek a full place in Europe for the people he led in a peaceful revolt against a rigged national election and pressure from Russia.

Watched by Secretary of State Colin Powell, seven presidents of ex-communist states and relatively minor dignitaries from Moscow, Yushchenko took the oath of office in parliament to cap his two-month "Orange Revolution." ...

"I want to assure you that you will continue to enjoy the full support of the American government and the American people as you move forward to undertake the efforts that the Ukrainian people are expecting," Powell told Yushchenko after their talks.

Yushchenko told Powell, soon to step down, that his victory would not have happened "if we didn't have partners that are advocating democratic principles and shared democratic values."

Consider the Bush administration's support for Yushchenko in relation to his bold declarations that redirects America's foreign policy towards the promotion of "human liberty" above all other issues. Bush has had a privileged relationship with Vladimir Putin, Russia's president and a key ally in the war on terror. Putin wanted Yushchenko's opponent, former PM Viktor Yanukovych, to take over in Kyiv and continue Russia's strong influence over Ukrainian affairs. Yushchenko had already committed to an immediate withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the Iraq coalition, which makes Bush's strategy all the more difficult for the upcoming elections and in keeping other coalition members on board. Moreover, Yushchenko may lean towards the West, but in actuality his economic and political viewpoint is Eurocentric, with strong ties to the more socialist policies of the French and Germans than the free-market impulses of his closest East European neighbors.

If Bush operated under the old "stability" doctrine, his choice should have been to support Putin and Yanukovych. It would have been easy enough to downplay the reports of widespread corruption -- just look to see how easy it was in the Palestinian Authority elections earlier this month. He could have shored up his relationship with Putin and assured a strong hand in the Caucasus against Islamofascists gathered there.

Instead, Bush chose to support democracy, and made sure that he diplomatically made clear that the American government would only accept a clean election in Ukraine. Bush gave us an advance look at what he meant in his inauguration speech when he told the world, "When you stand for liberty, we will stand with you."

Some people now claim that Bush didn't mean what he said -- that the speech was little more than pretty words on a cold day in January. I submit that not only did he mean to fulfill those words in the future, he already had changed the course of American policy to match his soaring rhetoric. That most people have missed this just shows that Bush continues to be the most underestimated American statesman since Ronald Reagan.

Milwaukee Democrats To Face Felony Charges In Election-Day Conspiracy

Two sons of prominent Democratic polticians and three paid party activists will face felony charges as a result of a widely-publicized attempt to keep Republicans from voting on Election Day in Milwaukee. The charges will be filed on Monday, highlighting the other unrelated issues of voter fraud in Wisconsin's largest city and Democratic stronghold:

The investigation into the Great Tire-Slashing Caper will end Monday with felony charges against the adult sons of two prominent Milwaukee politicians - U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore and former Acting Mayor Marvin Pratt.

Sources close to the 83-day-old probe said Sowande Omokunde, Michael Pratt and three other paid Democratic activists will each be charged with a single felony count of criminal damage to property, legalese for vandalism.

Omokunde, also known as Supreme Solar Allah, is the 25-year-old son of the rookie congresswoman. Pratt, 32, worked on Kerry's local campaign, which was chaired by his father.

Pratt, Omokunde and the other staffers will be accused of cutting the tires of some 20 vans and cars rented by the state Republican Party to usher the party faithful to and from the polls on election day. The charges will state that the damage to the vehicles was well in excess of $2,500 - the minimum required to merit a felony.

Originally police reported one arrest, that of Opel Simmons III, a Democratic activist working for John Kerry. Cary Spivak and Dan Bice now report that Simmons will face no charges and has returned to his home in Virginia. The initial report gave the impression that the tire-slashing was an isolated act by one person out of control. Now, however, the district attorney's actions indicate that this was a conspiracy, even if the specific charge isn't included.

I wonder why the DA is so reluctant to include a conspiracy complaint. If five people come together to plan a felony and then commit it, does that not constitute a conspiracy -- especially when the intent of the felony is to deprive people of a vote in a presidential election? Spivak and Bice note that federal charges are unlikely if the charges match up against the state charges in this case, but if Wisconsin doesn't charge them with the conspiracy, then the feds should file a civil-rights criminal case against the five.

Why did the Milwaukee DA decide to just focus on the felony vandalism? It could be the powerful parents of the two men. That also could explain why the investigation dragged on for over two months. But the reluctance could be credited to the connections back to the Kerry campaign and the uncomfortable questions that raises. According to Spivak and Bice, the campaign headquarters hardly thought about civil rights and disenfranchisement when they heard about the slashings:

Sources say that investigators caught a break in the case because the slashings quickly became the talk of the Kerry headquarters on the morning of Nov. 2.

"People came back and bragged about what they did," said one source.

Added a second: "Ultimately, they didn't see this as a badge of shame that they needed to hide from their co-workers."

So the Kerry campaign staff knew exactly who committed the crime, and yet it took over two months to bring charges against the quintet? It sounds like a lot of people in Kerry's office became accessories after the fact. One could presume that investigators asked the staff about the slashings; if they protected the five slashers or remained silent about what they knew, that could form an obstruction of justice charge, too.

We need to know much more about the Kerry campaign's involvement in this incident, either before or after the fact. We also need to know why the DA seems intent on charging these men with the minimum necessary for trial. The FBI should remain on the case and refer it to the US district attorney and take jurisdiction from Milwaukee in order to ensure that local politics haven't played a role in the investigation.