NY Times Reports On FEC Rulemaking

The New York Times reported the ongoing controversy over the FEC's requirement to regulate political speech over the Internet, heavily borrowing from Bradley Smith's C-NET interview and the rebuttal from the Democratic commissioners. However, their rebuttals did not explicitly rule out regulation, and in fact Ellen Weintraub's comments leave enough loophole room for a Mack truck.

Anne Kornblut covers the outlines of the controversy but provides little analysis, allowing the dueling commissioners to define the problem:

Anyone who decides to "set up a blog, send out mass e-mails, any kind of activity that can be done on the Internet" could be subject to Federal Election Commission regulation, Bradley A. Smith, a Republican commissioner, said in an interview posted Thursday on the technology news site Cnet.com.

"It becomes a really complex issue that would strike deep into the heart of the Internet and the bloggers who are writing out there today," said Mr. Smith, who opposed regulating Internet activity when the commission originally addressed it in 2002. ...

"People should not be alarmed," said Ellen L. Weintraub, a Democratic commissioner.

"Given the impact of the Internet," Ms. Weintraub said, "I think we have to take a look at whether there are aspects of that that ought to be subject to the regulations. But again, I don't want this issue to get overblown. Because I really don't think, at the end of the day, this commission is going to do anything that affects what somebody sitting at home, on their home computer, does."

Weintraub wants people to relax, but that argument won't fly. Having the authority to regulate the speech in the first place is what has us worried, and if Weintraub chooses not to use it, that's fine. However, a precedent has been set that the FEC has that ability to determine whether online pamphleteering equates to campaign contributions -- and notice that she's careful not to eliminate that as a possible end solution.

In fact, the commissioners told the New York Times that they would likely debate that very idea:

Commissioners said they could consider several questions, including whether political Web sites are technically coordinating with official campaigns by posting links to a candidate's Web site, and whether partisan bloggers are making in-kind contributions by donating their expertise and computer equipment to a campaign.

By law, contributions over $1,000 or services of an equivalent value must be made public. Individuals are permitted to volunteer their time, and there is an exemption for newspapers, broadcast networks, magazines and other periodicals. It is unclear whether political news sites would meet the exemption requirements for the news media, or whether the F.E.C. would go beyond regulating simple Internet advertisements bought by the campaigns. ...

"One really good question that needs to be asked is, 'How do you value this stuff?' " she said. "Because we only track money - campaign money that people spend on campaigns - not their thoughts or their beliefs or their statements. Just when they spend money. So if something is done really cheaply, it's not going to rise to the level where it will meet our regulations anyway."

The Republican commissioners interviewed agreed that it would be difficult to place a value on most political activity conducted online, and thus to determine whether it fell under the campaign contribution limits. "If you have a very successful blogger who attracts a lot of attention based on the commentary he or she is undertaking, and maybe that activity is coordinated with a candidate, what is the value of that?" said Michael E. Toner, the third Republican member of the commission.

So to answer the Campaign Legal Center's advice for all of us to stop worrying and trust Big Brother, the commissioners all appear to acknowledge that they can and probably will consider the value of links, reposts, and recommendations, especially by the larger bloggers. In fact, logically they have little choice, thanks to the BCRA.

John McCain and Russ Feingold insisted when they drafted and pushed this legislation that money did not equal speech, and they wanted to get the money out of the system. The Internet actually does a better job of that, providing a cheap resource which reaches vast numbers of people, with very little start-up cash required. The surprise came when MoveOn and Howard Dean turned that into an ATM machine for their campaigns with small donors giving money in droves. The blogs spawned allied blogs, or existing blogs volunteered, in essence, by linking and promoting the campaign blog sites and their messages.

That, in turn, drove even more traffic to the campaign blogs and created virtual grassroots networks on the Internet -- but hardly from active coordination. What it amounted to was a pixilated word-of-mouth system, simply people speaking their minds and offering their opinion, analyses, and endorsements as citizens freely expressing their own political beliefs. But to John McCain and Russ Feingold, seeing such a freely operating system of debate represented a threat to the system of regulation they carefully built to protect incumbencies, political party leadership, and the mass media's exemptions from regulation and their unchallenged power in the final days of electoral campaigns to get in the last word.

How does the FEC propose to separate the campaigners from the individuals working from home? They don't even realize that the campaigners work from home now. Scalpels don't exist that could cut through the distinctions necessary to differentiate from a Blogs for Bush and a Captain's Quarters -- and in fact, since I happened to write for both sites during the election, I would certainly be one of their targets, as would all of my co-bloggers at B4B.

Do not make the mistake of allowing Weintraub's soothing responses fool you, although she may well be sincere about it. Government rarely denies itself power once granted to it, at least not without some effort from the electorate. Since this power protects incumbent politicians most of all, the FEC will come under tremendous pressure to cast its nets widely. If this set of commissioners don't take the bait, the next set may. The solution is the repeal of the repellent BCRA and repudiation of John McCain and Russ Feingold, and all who would regulate political speech in America.

NARN On The Air Today!

The Northern Alliance will broadcast live from the White Bear Lake Superstore this afternoon from noon to 3 PM CT. If you're in the Twin Cities area, come on down to the best car dealership in town and meet the NARN, as well as State Senator Michelle Bachmann, who will run for Congress in the 6th CD in 2006. If you can't come down to the site, listen to us on The Patriot or over our Internet stream.

Any way you can -- be sure to join us!

Zarqawi Ought To Be In Pictures

CNN has new pictures of terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, updating the psycho-lunatic photo commonly used with reports on his activities with a kindler, gentler image:

CNN recently obtained new pictures of a man believed to be terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose network in Iraq has been responsible for attacks on military and civilian targets. Al-Zarqawi is thought to be a close associate of Osama bin Laden, and has pledged his allegiance to bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network.

In the photos, he is chatting and laughing with unknown men. ...

Intelligence officials said this week that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has enlisted the help of al-Zarqawi to plan new attacks inside the United States. Sources tell CNN the man in the photos is indeed al-Zarqawi.

It's not SOP for terrorists to have their pictures taken at parties, which makes me wonder about the circumstances of this release. Did Zarqawi mean for these pictures to be released? Or did someone in his inner circle intend to send a message? After all, Zarqawi has to move anonymously in Iraq in order to avoid capture. Having one's smiling face on CNN creates some difficulty in maintaining that anonymity.

One thing is probably certain: the guy who took the picture at this tea party probably won't be getting many invitations to Zarqawi functions in the future, unless it's his own wake.

Al-Reuters Can't Even Spin Coherently

The news service Reuters appears almost apoplectic today as it tries to gin up a diplomatic meltdown between Italy and the US after the wounding of a freed hostage and the killing of an Italian commando yesterday by US forces at a checkpoint. As MS-NBC noted yesterday, the shooting commenced because the Italians refused to slow their car down as it approached a military checkpoint near the airport -- not exactly a bright idea in a country where terrorists attack checkpoints with carbombs on a regular basis.

Silvio Berlusconi called the American ambassador to his office to request a full investigation, which President Bush publicly announced would take place. For our stout Italian allies, nothing less would suffice; however, even from preliminary information, it appears that the shooting could have been avoided had the Italians exercised some common sense and better communication with the Americans.

However, Reuters issued two reports, which didn't even get out of the editing process before making the wires this morning, omitting all mention of the context but wildly exaggerating the diplomatic rift. The first appeared at 7:23 CT and has not been updated since (via the milblog Phone Home). Here's how it starts:

The United States and its staunch Iraq war ally Italy face their worst falling out in years after U.S. troops killed an Italian secret service agent and wounded an Italian reporter.

The shooting in Iraq on Friday, as the reporter was being whisked to freedom after being held hostage for a month, was sure to fuel anti-war activists in Italy and put pressure on Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Berlusconi, who defied widespread public opposition to the Iraq war and sent 3,000 troops, took the rare step of summoning U.S. ambassador Mel Sembler to his office.

He demanded the United States "leave no stone unturned" in investigating the incident. President Bush was quick to call Berlusconi and promise a full investigation.

I don't know what the headline writer or the Philip Pulella, the reporter, was thinking, but it's hardly unusual under these circumstances for Berlusconi to call for an investigation. It certainly doesn't amount to a diplomatic crisis of the scale Pulella imagines. Just to top off the hysterical nature of the account, here's how the Reuters account concludes:

The agent had helped free Sgrena a month after she had been kidn

That's it; it stops in mid-sentence, which one could simply chalk up to a coding error. However, the second was even worse than the initial report:

The United States and its staunch Iraq (news - web sites) war ally Italy face their worst falling out in years after U.S. troops killed an Italian secret service agent and wounded an Italian reporter.

The shooting in Iraq on Friday, as the reporter was bein

That's all they wrote. It appeared on the wire at 8:30 am CT and as of 8:52 had not been updated or completed.

Obviously Reuters employs no editors or fact-checkers. Do they not even have copy desks any more to make sure they have complete sentences -- or even words? Remind me again how the mainstream media has a higher quality output with all of their checks and balances that we bloggers sadly lack.

Syria Losing Control Of Lebanese Army?

CNN reports that the Lebanese Army has taken positions around the Syrian intelligence headquarters in Beirut, an ominous development in the Cedar Revolution:

Lebanese army troops and armored vehicles took up positions Saturday around the Syrian intelligence headquarters in Beirut.

The move comes ahead of an expected announcement from Syrian President Bashar Assad, within a few hours, that he will withdraw some troops from Lebanon and redeploy others within the country. ...

Lebanon's defense minister Abdul-Rahim Murad said he expected Assad to announce a pullback of troops to the Bekaa region in eastern Lebanon, near the Syrian border, but not a full withdrawal from the country, The Associated Press reported.

When asked whether the redeployment meant a full withdrawal, Murad answered, "No."

This could mean one of two things. It could mean that the Lebanese Army plans on protecting Syrian intelligence assets as the Syrian Army pulls out, a scenario that appears most likely given the close nature of the Syrian and Lebanese military up to this point. It could, however, also mean that the Lebanese Army has decided to impose its own will on the Syrians to up the pressure on Bashar Assad to not only withdraw all of its army but their spies as well.

If the former is the case, the demonstrators in the streets of Beirut should redouble their peaceful efforts to remove the last vestiges of the collaborationist government and elect new leaders as soon as possible. They need to know if the Army can be trusted not to start taking orders from Syria's Mukhabarat and attempt a military coup to put Assad back in the driver's seat by proxy.

On the other hand, if this move by the Lebanese Army demonstrates that they intend to throw in with the Cedar Revolution, Assad and his Mukhabarat are finished, and not just in Lebanon. Getting chased out of Beirut in three weeks by a few thousand civilians and the Lebanese Army will destroy any credibility Assad has left, including domestically, leaving him vulnerable to enemies across the spectrum of Syrian and Arabian politics. There won't be any more talk of a pullback or phased withdrawal -- the Syrians will have to retreat, and retreat quickly, in order to avoid a military clash that would threaten to bring in the Americans from the east and possibly the French from the west, over the Mediterranean.

Either way, the situation has just about reached critical mass in Beirut. The rest of the weekend should provide some answers.

Pakistan Gathers More AQ Assets

Operating from new intelligence, the Pakistani Army attacked a suspected al-Qaeda hideout in North Waziristan, capturing eleven foreigners and killing two other suspected terrorists:

Pakistani troops raided a hideout of suspected al-Qaida militants Saturday in a remote tribal area near Afghanistan, triggering a shootout that left two foreigners dead, an army spokesman said. Eleven people were arrested.

The troops also seized a large number of weapons in the raid near Miran Shah, the main town in northwest Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal region, said Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan.

Miran Shah is near the Afghan border, in a region known for its sympathies to the Islamists. The Pakistanis had recently come to terms with the tribal chiefs in the area and had quit attacking on a broad front in both North and South Waziristan. While they weren't satisfied that the al-Qaeda operatives in the area had all been rounded up, they promised that the tribes would no longer act to protect them. The Pakistanis then turned more of their effort to the cities, where AQ appeared to have moved in an effort to blend into larger populations for better security.

It appears that the deal with the chiefs may have borne some fruit. The AP reports that a tip initiated this latest raid, and it would seem unlikely that a pizza boy would have just stumbled across a hideout on a delivery. If Pervez Musharraf has managed to convince the tribes to act on Pakistan's behalf instead of providing cover for the terrorists -- or even if AQ suspects that may now be the prevailing wind -- it makes it much more difficult for their leadership to use the border lands to transit in and out of Pakistand and Afghanistan. They would have to use the regular roads, airports, and seaports, which hold a much greater risk of discovery.

We'll keep watching to see if more such raids turn out as successful as this one.

Day By Day In The Age Of McCain-Feingold

Chris Muir gets it, as usual:

Even in silence, Chris speaks volumes.

Bradley Smith/NRA News Interview At Redstate

Redstate has a transcript of FEC commissioner Bradley Smith's interview with Cam Edwards of NRA News. Smith explains why the ruling in their courtroom loss could mean bad news for bloggers:

CS: Well, let me tell you some of the potential ramifications. I mean, some of the folks now, uh McCain and some of his allies, are out saying, “Well, this would only apply to paid ads.” That’s ju—the FEC already treats paid ads as subject to the act. But nothing in the judge’s decision limits it to paid advertising, and it, she says anything that’s coordinated, for sure we have to regulate. Now, what is coordinated under FEC regulations? Any republication of campaign material counts as a coordinated complication. That means, for a blogger, if you put up anything, or ah, from a campaign onto the blogsite, that’s going to be republication of campaign material. If you get an email from a campaign because you’re on their list, and you then forward it to 50 or 100 friends, that would be potentially subject to the act. ...

CS: Well, I, I don’t want to comment on, on Judge Koller-Cotella’s opinion, I mean, it speaks for itself. She orders us to regulate the Internet, again what I point out is -- it is in no way limited to paid advertising. In fact, it would be contrary to the tone of the opinions limited only to paid advertising. In another part of the opinion, she struck down one of our regulations where we exempted unpaid advertising. So, I, you know, this was, it’s – it’s in no ways limited to unpaid advertising. Beyond that, I don’t want to comment on what she was thinking, her opinion, I guess, can speak for itself. Uh, but it requires us to do some regulating here, and we did not have the votes to appeal that portion of the opinion.

What's at issue is whether blog posts, hyperlinks, and excerpted text -- or in some cases, fully copied position points -- could be considered unpaid advertising. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out that it could. In fact, with blogs so easy to start and so difficult to trace, the FEC would have to look at them for the so-called unpaid advertising eventually. Otherwise, campaigns could easily start phantom blogs with anonymous authors to drum up traffic, or at least they could co-opt known blogs for that purpose without revealing the business connection. We saw some of that in 2004 already.

Some have said that the FEC won't have the personnel to track down these kinds of violations, even if they did make them illegal, a valid point. However, all that means is that they will rely on complaints to reveal violators -- a system that in itself provides the biggest danger to bloggers. People who want to sabotage a particular blogger only need to organize a swarm of FEC complaints about the blog; enough complaints, and the FEC will eventually make its way to investigating the blogger.

Based on the ruling and the general attitude of bureaucracies, I don't doubt for a second that the blogger would be forced to prove the negative and satisfy the FEC that no coordination exists, rather than the FEC having to prove it does. Either way, those bloggers who find themselves caught in the FEC's net would have to spend significant amounts of time and money defending themselves from what boils down to a campaign audit. The spectre of that much red tape and time wasted will discourage all but the most obsessive bloggers from participating in the political arena.

Keep checking back at Redstate for more of the interview as they transcribe it.

An Open Letter To The United States Senate

Following the example of CQ reader Erp, I wrote a letter to Senators John McCain and Russ Feingold, and copied all 98 other Senators to express my outrage over the direction that the FEC has been forced to take in regulating political speech on the Internet. I encourage you to get involved and do the same, in your own words, in order to serve notice that we will not allow them to silence us.

To the honorable Senators McCain and Feingold, et al:

I have read with considerable dismay the effect that your recent lawsuit against the Federal Election Commission, upheld by Judge Colleen Kollar-Ketelly, will have on political speech on the Internet. I write a political media-watchdog blog, Captain's Quarters, which enjoys a not-insubstantial daily readership. No one pays me to do this; I operate my site and write on topics purely from personal convictions and a deep desire to improve the world around me and make the nation stronger. I can unequivocally say the same about my many colleagues in the "blogosphere", both liberal and conservative.

Now we understand from Bradley Smith, one of the FEC commissioners, that your lawsuit forcing them to regulate speech on the Internet will have the effect of turning our efforts into in-kind contributions, especially when we provide hyperlinks back to candidate sites for referencing their positions and excerpt text from their on-line documents. Hyperlinks allow our readers to check our references to ensure our accuracy and context, and perform the hygienic task of holding our politicians accountable for their campaign practices. All of this not only should fall under the protection of the First Amendment, but it should be the primary reason for the First Amendment -- to protect and encourage free political speech and foster genuine debate.

Your legislation and the accompanying lawsuit that forced the FEC to regulate Internet political speech threaten all of that. If my links to political sites such as Georgewbush.com and Johnkerry.com counted as contributions and I was forced to accept responsibility for the cash value that the FEC designated to them, I would have been charged with several misdemeanors and possibly felonies, as I provided many such links during the past election cycle. During this cycle, my blog published over 680 essays on the presidential election. In fact, I linked to Senator Kerry's site four times as often as President Bush's site, which would have meant to the FEC that I was a major contributor to his campaign -- when in fact I opposed Senator Kerry and supported President Bush. These regulations would have forced me to retain the services of a full-time accountant and retain an attorney to understand when and where I overcontributed. At the very least, the burden of proof would be on me to make the FEC believe that my blog does not constitute in-kind contributions subject to the limits imposed on both hard and soft money contributions.

The effect of this would have been to force me to shut down my blog, or convert it to something else. In fact, it would have caused me less legal heartache to convert my site to a porn blog and do nothing but post hard-core pictures all day long. In the twisted environment of the McCain-Feingold Act, that kind of website would enjoy greater First Amendment protection than my political speech, a result for which every single Senator should feel shame and outrage.

Each of you should read the Constitution you swore to uphold and defend, and reflect on the unequivocal language of our forefathers:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

We may debate about the effect of unregulated cash on our electoral system, but if this new FEC effort comes to pass, the only people debating will be the corporate-owned media and the politicians. The rest of us will have been effectively bound and gagged, unable to contribute in any way thanks to the efforts of those who fear their own constituents. You can be assured that none of us in the blogosphere will fail to recognize those who do not act to defend our rights to free and unfettered political speech, and regardless of political party, none of us will rest until those voices of repression are stripped of office by the voters they hold in such low regard.

I, for one, will not be daunted by your attempts to stifle us. My many friends and colleagues on both sides of the political aisle stand as ready as I to defend the Constitution. We demand a hearing on McCain-Feingold, with open testimony before the press and our colleagues, and we demand action to reform or repeal this dangerous and un-American muzzle on political speech.

We await your response, sirs.

Edward Morrissey
Captain's Quarters

UPDATE: A lot of these e-mails have bounced back. Apparently, our public servants don't like direct e-mail and require people to hit their websites to send them messages. At Town Hall, they have a Web form set up to do this, but many of the autoresponses indicate that they will not reply to messages sent from constituents outside their state.

Thank you for your continued support!

UPDATE and BUMP: I'm keeping this at the top of the blog all day today. As I get specific responses, I'll be sure to post them here for everyone to see.

McCain & Co. Counterattack, But Don't Disclose Previous Interests

Democracy Project notes that the campaign-finance reformers have come out to meet the blogswarm forming around Bradley Smith's revelations about the FEC and their new drive to regulate Internet speech as part of their "reforms". They now claim that Smith overstated the issue, that he has partisan motivations, and that he has always opposed campaign-finance reform anyway.

However, here's what they don't tell you about those who are leading this counterattack:

Let's say you favor, either through conviction or employment demands, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, commonly known as McCain-Feingold. You're stunned by a blogswarm born of a candid interview one of the commissioners of the FEC grants to an Internet publication. What do you do? Send out a press release written by a man who served on Al Gore's legal team during the Florida recount controversy in 2000, perhaps? A man who's employed by a lobbying firm headed by the former general counsel to Senator John McCain (not that you'll learn that from his official company bio.)? Who is also the former commissioner of the FEC?

Well, perhaps that's not what you would do, but it's what the forces working to ensure that the "reform" of our campaign laws isn't weakened, and that it indeed will be applied to the Internet, in fact did. I'm sure I wasn't the only blogger who, having posted yesterday on FEC Commissioner Bradley Smith's interview with CNET, received a press release, "Setting the Record Straight: There is No FEC Threat to the Internet," late last night from Mark Glaze (more below). The stated purpose of the release is to deny the validity of Commissioner Smith's charges that, thanks to McCain-Feingold, the FEC may be forced to regulate blogging. It does anything but that, however, and in the process accuses Bradley Smith of distorting the truth, an act that, outside of Washington, is known as lying[.]

One of the organizations pushing for the BCRA (McCain-Feingold) is the Campaign Legal Center, headed by Trevor Potter and fronted by PR spokesperson Mark Glaze, who ran Al Gore's recount efforts in Florida. They support their argument by pushing people to read the court decision in Shays, Meehan v FEC (PDF file), which they claim as proof that the BCRA has no effect on Internet speech. However, in just skimming the document, I found this relevant passage:

As already noted, Congress did not expressly include the term “Internet” in its statutory definition of “public communication,” but it did include the phrase “any other form of general public political advertising.” 2 U.S.C. § 431(22). While all Internet communications do not fall within this descriptive phrase, some clearly do. Consequently, it is difficult to argue that the statutory terms evidence Congressional intent for the Internet, or any other forms of communications that constitute “general public political advertising,” to be excluded wholesale from its definition of “public communication.” ...

Accordingly, the Court finds that under Chevron step one, Congress intended all other forms of “general public political advertising” to be covered by the term “public communication.” What constitutes “general public political advertising” in the world of the Internet is a matter for the FEC to determine [emphasis mine].

This appears to leave the field wide open for the FEC to determine what kinds of speech on the Internet fall under its domain. The same thing appears to apply in regard to defining "coordination" as this passage implies:

As discussed supra, when Congress repealed the coordination regulations, it did so out of concern that the definition of “coordination” in the then-existing rules was too limited in the types of conduct necessary to render a communication to be “coordinated.” The fact that the legislative history contains no discussion about the content of such communications is not surprising, since, as explained supra, under the existing campaign finance law and judicial precedent interpreting that law, a communication’s content was irrelevant to the determination of whether or not a communication was coordinated. Indeed, the whole rationale behind the distinction made for coordinated expenditures is that if a candidate or political party coordinates an expenditure with an outside person or entity, that expenditure is presumed to be aimed at assisting that candidate or political party. To allow such expenditures to be made unregulated would permit rampant circumvention of the campaign finance laws and foster corruption or the appearance of corruption.

So you can run afoul of coordination bans simply by conducting speech that looks like it was coordinated -- in other words, the burden of proof is on the accused and not the accuser.

The opinion gets rather arcane, but the word "blog" and "journal" are nowhere found in this opinion. It appears to me that the judge's action leaves the FEC lots of room to define "campaign activity" and "coordination", and that the intent is to force the burden of proof onto the accused. Certainly nothing in this decision that strips the Internet exemption from BCRA protects us. The reformers would have us trust the FEC not to use the powers handed to it to regulate us in the future, a gamble I for one am not willing to take.

The BCRA is bad law, unconstitutional, and an unconscionable infringement on free political speech. My objections still stand.

UPDATE: Paul Rodriguez interviewed FEC Commissioner Bradley Smith on Rightalk. Here's a link to the audio, which I have not yet heard. Also check out an excellent post by Mike Krempansky at Redstate.org. Trevor appears to be talking out of both sides of his mouth on this issue.

UPDATE II: Do we have a lawyer in the house who has some election-law experience to review this decision? I'd be happy to post their thoughts on it.

John Cornyn Has Robert Byrd's Number

Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) has written a detailed rebuttal to Robert Byrd's argument on the Senate floor earlier this week, when (apart from the abhorrent Nazi analogies) the former Klan recruiter took on the mantle of the protector of minority rights. Cornyn demolishes Byrd's arguments that the GOP's attempt to change precedent on filibusters has any Hitlerian overtones by pointing out the specifics of when Byrd himself successfully did the same thing:

Recall that it was Sen. Byrd who led the charge to establish new Senate precedents in 1977, 1979, 1980, and 1987 - including a number of precedents that were designed specifically to stop filibusters and other delay tactics that were previously authorized under Senate rules or prior precedents ...

In 1980, Senator Byrd led the establishment of a new precedent to require an immediate vote, without debate, on any motion to go into executive session to consider a particular nomination. His new precedent was specifically designed, in his words, to "deal with a filibuster on the motion to proceed" to a nomination. Previously, a motion to proceed to a particular nomination was debatable. The new precedent was sustained by a vote of 54-38, and yet the precedent did not “rob a senator of the right to speak out against an overreaching executive branch,” as Sen. Byrd claimed in his op-ed. ...

And I think he was very clear in 1979 when he claimed exactly the opposite of what he averred in today’s op-ed:

“This Congress is not obliged to be bound by the dead hand of the past. . . . . The first Senate, which met in 1789, approved 19 rules by a majority vote. Those rules have been changed from time to time.... So the Members of the Senate who met in 1789 and approved that first body of rules did not for one moment think, or believe, or pretend, that all succeeding Senates would be bound by that Senate. . . . It would be just as reasonable to say that one Congress can pass a law providing that all future laws have to be passed by two-thirds vote. Any Member of this body knows that the next Congress would not heed that law and would proceed to change it and would vote repeal of it by majority vote.”

--U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd, Jan. 15, 1979

Read all of Senator Cornyn's excellent essay on Byrd's hypocrisy or amnesia on his own Senate record. It makes a powerful argument for West Virginians to exercise some term limits on their perpetual embarassment of a senior Senator.

Please note: For FEC purposes, I must ask you not to donate to John Cornyn's campaign fund while visiting his website, nor do I endorse the Senator in any re-election bid. Unless he and his colleagues take some action to reverse McCain-Feingold, I'm afraid I'll be writing this about every politician currently in office.

Look Who's Reconsidering The Bush Strategy On Terror

A number of Bush critics have watched the wave of popular demand for democratization sweep across the Middle East since the staging of the Iraqi elections on January 30th and have started to question their previous assumptions. The New York Times did this, with reservations, in its unsigned editorial last Tuesday. Today, the Christian Science Monitor published an opinion piece wondering if Bush has been right all along. Try to guess who wrote this:

The movements for democratic change in Egypt and Lebanon have happened since the successful Iraqi election on Jan. 30. And one can speculate on whether Iraq has served as a beacon for democratic change in the Middle East.

During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, President Bush said that "a liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region."

He may have had it right.

That conclusion came from the pen of Daniel Schorr, senior news analyst at National Public Radio. This is the man who wrote that the war "lacked a rationale" in September 2003, implied in November 2003 that Bush wanted to abandon Iraq before our 2004 presidential election, and argued in December 2003 that Libya's abrupt reversal on WMD had nothing to do with Bush's invasion of Iraq and capture of Saddam Hussein.

Interestingly, Schorr's Iraq commentary appears to have ended at NPR just over a year ago. In the meantime, it looks like he has been doing some research and opening his mind a bit more.

Bush: No Baby Steps For Baby Assad

George Bush has kept the pressure on Syria by completely rejecting Bashar Assad's attempt to resurrect the long-dead Taif Accord as an excuse to take his time leaving Lebanon. Bush insisted that Syria had to completely withdraw from Lebanon in order to meet its international responsibilities under the controlling UNSC resultion:

"There are no half-measures at all," Bush said during an event here on his Social Security proposals. "When the United States and France say withdraw, we mean complete withdrawal, no halfhearted measures."

During a speech Saturday to his parliament, Syrian President Bashar Assad was expected to announce a troop pullback to eastern Lebanon near the Syrian border — but not a full withdrawal, according to Syrian and Lebanese officials.

"We need to see action, not words," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said a day ahead of that speech.

A fellow Arab nation, Saudi Arabia, has also called on Syria to pull out. On Thursday, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah told Assad their relations will suffer if Syria doesn't start soon on a complete withdrawal, a Saudi official said.

Assad still wants to play for time, perhaps because a headlong retreat might mean the collapse of his political support in Syria and the end of his regime. Some critics of the Bush administration want to give Assad a face-saving way out of Lebanon, but that completely disregards Bush's strategy in the Middle East. He doesn't want to play the old "stability" strategy any longer; that just means that dictatorships still oppress people and stir up rage, hatred, and extremism. Bush wants to topple the dictators, or better yet, set the conditions so that the dictators topple from within based on popular uprisings -- just as is happening in Lebanon.

Why would Bush want to go backwards now, just when his strategy has started to pay off? The more we see of George Bush and his vision, the more we also see that the people who stridently and axiomatically oppose his every move lack any kind of intellectual or moral stature, arguing for appeasing oppression and propping up the worst kind of dictatorships. Even in the West, apparently, some people just never learn.

Does British Airways Only Own One Airplane?

CNN reports that British Airways has had another in-flight engine failure that they ignored to complete the flight on time. Remarkably, the plane involved is the same one that blew an engine on takeoff last week, ran out of fuel, and forced to make an emergency landing in Manchester -- and the engine that failed yesterday was the replacement for the first failure:

British Airways jet that continued on an 11-hour flight from Los Angeles to London after one of its four engines lost power also flew on three engines on a later flight from Singapore to London, the airline said Friday.

The Boeing 747 left Singapore on February 25 and landed at London's Heathrow Airport the next day, arriving only 15 minutes behind schedule, BA spokesman Jay Marritt said.

Three hours into the 14-hour flight, an oil pressure indicator showed there was a problem with one of the engines, which the captain shut down as a precaution, Marritt said. It was the captain's decision to continue with Flight 18, which was carrying 356 passengers, he added.

"It's still very safe to fly a 747 on three engines," Marritt said. "It is certified to do so."

Yes, that's what BA kept telling its passengers as it coasted towards Manchester on fumes after having passed up numerous opportunities to land and get serviced in the US and Canada last week. Now we find out that the plane hardly even got a routine maintenance check and got fitted with a faulty replacement for the passengers that BA claims are its first priority. Their spokesman insists that this is just all a strange coincidence, but it appears much more likely that British Airways is simply incompetent to operate a transoceanic service.

I honestly thought when I read this story at first that CNN was reporting on the earlier story and had the facts incorrect. I started thinking about how to fact-check the article when I finally realized that this was a separate incident involving the same plane. I could not believe that British Airways would do the same thing twice in a week, with the same aircraft.

Again, I'd like to see the FAA force BA's corporate officers or their families to sit on every transoceanic flight for the next six months as a requirement for allowing them access to US markets. Perhaps when their own safety is at stake, British Airways will discover the importance of competent management decisions.

Another Ukrainian Minister Kills Himself

The Orange Revolution, a bloodless exercise in people power which overthrew a proto-puppet government, has not gone as bloodless as thought. The reversal of Viktor Yanukovych's fraudulent electoral win and the subsequent victory of Viktor Yushchenko has removed the political protection for the highly-ranked allies of Yanukovych -- and they seem to all have the same exit strategy in mind:

Ukraine's former interior minister has been found dead of an apparent suicide on the day he was to be questioned about the killing of an opposition-minded journalist, officials said.

The Security Service of Ukraine, the SBU, confirmed Friday that Yuri Kravchenko's body was found at his country house and that a preliminary investigation suggests he committed suicide, CNN's Jill Dougherty reported.

Kravchenko was due to be questioned Friday by prosecutors in connection with the murder of investigative journalist Georhiy Gongadze.

Some criticized the West for its insistence on free and open Ukrainian elections and the December do-over that elected Yushchenko. People believed that such action undermined Vladimir Putin when we need his assistance in fighting terrorism, and possibly made Russia more dangerous and more likely to retreat from democracy. Now that the election has kicked over the stones of the previous government, the worms that crawled beneath during the long Kuchma presidency don't appear capable of withstanding sunlight.

Kravchenko is the second of former Kuchma and Yanukovuch ministers to have died either from suicide or unknown causes in the past three months. Heorhiy Kyrpa, the transportation minister, was found dead days after the election with a bullet in his head, reportedly self-inflicted. Both ministers were targets of investigations into widespread corruption, and Kravchenko also was linked strongly to Gongadze's murder. Kravchenko, had he not died, might have provided links to higher-ranking Ukrainian politicos in the Gongadze case, as CNN reports:

His death sparked months of protests against then-President Leonid Kuchma. Critics implicated Kuchma in the murder, citing secretly recorded audio tapes in which Kuchma allegedly ordered his staff to get rid of the journalist. Kuchma vehemently denied those charges.

In the tapes, Kuchma was overheard repeatedly complaining about Gongadze's reporting and ordering Kravchenko to "drive him out, throw (him) out, give him to the Chechens."

The high-profile murder was never solved during Kuchma's presidency. Recently elected President Viktor Yushchenko has made the case a high priority and vowed to solve it.

"Give him to the Chechens"? That must be the Ukrainian equivalent of "sleeping with the fishes". It wouldn't be the first time thata similarity between the Kuchma government and Russian-influenced Ukrainian politics and The Sopranos has been noted (see King Banaian for much more on this topic). One thing is sure: Kravchenko won't give testimony that might implicate former President Kuchma now. How coincidentally fortunate for Kuchma.

Yushchenko may want to put the rest of Kuchma's cabinet on suicide watch for a while, just to be on the safe side.

Texas Radio Stands With Blogosphere

Instapundit links to an expression of support for bloggers of all political stripes this morning from Dan Patrick of KSEV 700 AM and the blog Lone Star Times. Dan writes:

LoneStarTimes.com is affiliated with KSEV 700 AM, an independently owned talk-radio station in Houston, TX.

As such, we believe that we enjoy the "broadcast exemption" that prohibits the federal government from regulating our speech in the manner they are proposing for "mere" citizen bloggers.

While we still need to talk to some sharp lawyers and nail down the details, if these restrictions come to pass, KSEV and LST are committed to working out a legally sound way in which individual bloggers– of every ideological persuasion and partisan affiliation– can somehow register with us and be credentialed as a press representative of KSEV and LST.

Like Raoul Wallenberg handing out passports, we will start issuing press credentials to any blogger that asks for one.

Dan, I want you to know that I'd be proud to carry the credentials issued from KSEV any time. I'm just unhappy that Senators Feingold and McCain seem to think that I need a license to practice free speech in America. Fortunately, we have patriots like yourself looking out not just for those people with whose politics you agree, but for all Americans and their right to speak out and hold the powerful accountable for their actions.

If you would also like to express your appreciation for Mr. Patrick, you can drop him an e-mail at his site, or to make it a bit easier on him, you may just want to leave your comments here.

Assad Still Doesn't Get It

Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, an opthalmologist by trade, keeps proving that he can't see his way around the worst political crisis of his career. According to Lebanese political sources at Reuters, Assad will announce a partial withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, according to the Taif Accords that have lain dormant for sixteen years:

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is expected to announce on Saturday the pullout of some Syrian troops from Lebanon and the redeployment of the rest close to the border, a Lebanese political source said on Friday.

Assad, who delivers a speech at Syria's parliament on Saturday, is expected to declare the move in line with the Taif Accord which ended Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war, the source said.

Taif stipulates Syrian forces redeploy to the eastern Bekaa Valley and then the Lebanese and Syrian governments agree on a timeline on how long these forces would stay.

The problem with following the Taif Accord is that Taif is dead, killed by Syria's abandonment of it in favor of continued exploitation of Lebanon. The Lebanese have changed the ground situation for good, but Assad wants to pretend that it is still 1990 and he can simply pick up where he left off.

Unfortunately, that won't work any more. The US will not sit back and allow Assad to just tone down the tyranny temporarily, nor will France. Both have shown a unity of purpose rare in this generation to liberate what used to be one of the most cosmopolitan of Middle Eastern states. Egypt and Saudi Arabia want no more people power demonstrations in the street to inspire and motivate their own oppressed populations -- they want Syria to leave immediately as well. Even Russia, Syria's most strategic ally, has told them that the occupation must end now.

Assad is simply stalling for time with this proposal. He wants to make a show of moving uniformed personnel back to the border while his intelligence services try to gin up another puppet government with which to renew the slow, phased withdrawal of Taif. The Lebanese won't stand for it, and the US and France will make their impatience known on Syria's eastern border, using the Iraqi insurgency and Damascus' assistance towards it a well-justified reason to do so. The UNSC will slap crippling sanctions onto Syria, and they won't have a neighboring ally to undermine it as they did for Saddam.

Perhaps Assad thinks of himself so highly that he presumes he can overcome all of these obstacles. If so, he won't remain around long enough to try. Eventually, the same powers that prop him up now will tire of his incompetence, and he will be lucky to find himself making spectacles of anything but himself.

Letterman Sucks Up To CBS, Rather

I recall the movie made by HBO about the late-night television war set off by Johnny Carson's Retirement, The Late Shift, in which Kathy Bates played Jay Leno's voracious and self-destructive agent/manager. One criticism of Leno -- one he later acknowledged as valid -- was that he made no mention of Carson or his support of Leno over the years on Leno's first broadcast as Carson's replacement. In the movie, Bates tells the head of NBC that she refuses to let Jay thank or even mention Johnny, telling him, "That's suck-up. Jay doesn't do suck-up."

Well, now we know David Letterman does suck-up, and he sells out pretty easily too. Last night, Letterman hosted Dan Rather on Rather's farewell tour from the CBS Evening News, and tossed softball after softball to allow Rather to misrepresent the Memogate fiasco that cost four of Rather's colleagues their jobs. Les Moonves had to be smiling through this -- and why not? He bought it, he owns it:

LETTERMAN: So let me go back to two points. They said, one, it was not motivated by political bias?

RATHER: That's right.

LETTERMAN: So CBS News and yourself and others cleared of that, and that seemed to be a great point of criticism, did it not, that there was political bias here, that...

RATHER: People had their own political motivations and agendas, and some people who didn't have that, who were asking the question. That's one reason the panel was appointed. That was one of their conclusions.

LETTERMAN: That charge has been erased by the fact-finding committee?

[RATHER]: That was their conclusion.

LETTERMAN: Did not exist. That evaporated. Secondly, they could not prove the documents were false. They could not prove they were true and accurate, but they also could not prove they were false

RATHER: That's correct.

LETTERMAN: That's a push right there.

RATHER: Some people would not regard it, but you've summarized it correctly. They had a lot of other findings. Those were among the findings. ...

LETTERMAN: If you take a look at the "new york times," a few years ago and for quite a lengthy period of time, it looked like that newspaper was falling apart. All they had left was the classified pretty much.

( Laughter )

It was one thing after another, guys making up stories and phony headlines and on and on and on, yet still I think it's regarded as the finest newspaper in the country. So you do have to accept and make changes and continue and that's what you and the network are doing.

Anyone who considers the New York Times the "finest newspaper in the country" after having a ringside seat for the Jayson Blair embarassment -- indeed, using it as an example of its greatness -- has either lost his mind or is desperate to get his network off the hook. I wonder exactly how far up Letterman's back, ventriloquist-style, Moonves was actually able to get his hand, because this is by far one of the worst cases of corporate shilling I've yet to see an entertainer do on his own show.

Michelle Malkin, channeling a bit of David Letterman herself (in a good way), wonders why Letterman simply didn't offer the Top 10 to explain to his audience why CBS blew it? Here are Michelle's first three of the Top 10 Reasons CBS Has No Credibility:

1. The failure to obtain clear authentication of any of the Killian documents from any document examiner;

2. The false statement in the September 8 Segment that an expert had authenticated the Killian documents when all he had done was authenticate one signature from one document used in the Segment;

3. The failure of 60 Minutes Wednesday management to scrutinize the publiclyavailable, and at times controversial, background of the source of the documents, retired Texas Army National Guard Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett[.]

Read the rest, and also catch Power Line's take on it here. If you want a history of the CBS Memogate fiasco and an analysis of what Letterman and Rather refer to as a "doorstop", you can check my archives on the subject in the CBS category.

UPDATE: Edited for a somewhat less graphic description of ventriloquism, ifyouknowhatImean, Vern.

McCain-Feingold May Shut Down CQ

I have long railed against the back-door First Amendment violations of the McCain-Feingold Act, which purports to reform campaign financing but in reality acts to criminalize political speech. Now Federal Election Commissioner Bradley Smith explains exactly how MFA could mean the end of political blogging, as we get intimidated by the massive legal requirements that MFA might impose on CQ and other sites:

Bradley Smith says that the freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over.

In just a few months, he warns, bloggers and news organizations could risk the wrath of the federal government if they improperly link to a campaign's Web site. Even forwarding a political candidate's press release to a mailing list, depending on the details, could be punished by fines.

Smith should know. He's one of the six commissioners at the Federal Election Commission, which is beginning the perilous process of extending a controversial 2002 campaign finance law to the Internet.

Most of this interview will have CQ readers shaking their head. The FEC, thanks to a John McCain lawsuit, will have to calculate the value of a link on a political website in order to determine whether the owner has overdonated to a campaign -- in other words, committed a felony. Bigger blogs will come under closer scrutiny, which means that any expression of support on CQ with a referential hyperlink may well get valued at more than the $2,000 maximum hard-cash contribution.

In order for me to operate under those conditions, I will need to hire a lawyer and an accountant to guide me through the election laws and calculate my in-kind donations on almost an hourly basis. How many bloggers will put up with that kind of hassle just to speak their minds about candidates and issues? John McCain and Russ Feingold have effectively created an American bureaucracy dedicated to stamping out independent political speech, and the courts have abdicated all reason in declaring it constitutional.

Please contact your representative or Senator in Congress to get this terrible infringement on free political speech reversed. When the American government threatens to prosecute people for simply speaking their minds, we have truly lost our way. Shame on McCain and Feingold for this treachery, shame on George Bush for signing the bill, and shame on the Supreme Court for not stopping it when it had the chance. (via Michelle Malkin, who has lots of links.)

UPDATE: McCain and Feingold have managed to foster real bipartisanship -- they've gotten liberal and conservative bloggers alike to detest them. Jerome Armstrong at MyDD, Atrios, and DailyKos all agree -- this legislation has become a serious threat to political speech, and John McCain and Russ Feingold have become two of the most dangerous politicians to American liberty since Huey Long. Jerome makes the point that the problem at the moment are the three Democratic FEC commissioners who appear intent on enforcing the law as McCain and Feingold insist, but both parties had a hand in creating this fiasco. Both should work to eliminate it and tell John McCain and Russ Feingold to shut the hell up -- and see how they like it.

CQ Reader Survey Bleg

In conjunction with my advertising service, I'd like to ask CQ readers to take 5 minutes to complete this reader survey to gauge how our advertisements match up with our audience. Please make sure you note on question 16 that you've been referred by Captain's Quarters.

Thank you for your help!

Saudis Get Direct With Assad: Leave Lebanon Now

Bashar Assad must feel as though he's auditioning for a remake of The Lonely Guy this week, as his international political support has crumbled in a flash. The Egyptians earlier today alluded to Saudi expectations for a Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, and now the Saudis have spoken for themselves (via Instapundit):

Saudi officials told Syrian President Bashar Assad on Thursday that he must fully withdraw troops from Lebanon and begin soon or face strains in Saudi-Syrian ties. Assad promised only to study the idea of a partial withdrawal by later this month.

The kingdom took a tough line as Assad met with the Saudi leader, Crown Prince Abdullah, and other officials in Riyadh. So far, Damascus has resisted Arab pressure for a quick pullout from Lebanon.

Saudi officials told Assad the kingdom insists on the full withdrawal of all Syrian military and intelligence forces from Lebanon and wants it to start "soon," according to a Saudi official who spoke by telephone from Riyadh.

The Saudis probably never had much love for the Assad regimes anyway, as their socialist and mainly secular military dictatorship doesn't appeal to the traditional notion of Islamic monarchy favored by the House of Saud. Nonetheless, this demand has not been heard in the past from Riyadh, and the Saudis have never been all that keen on supporting native democratic reforms, for good reason; successes -- as we see now -- tend to provide momentum in other countries for the same purposes.

The Saudis don't want to see a native Syrian popular revolt for democratization, as having one in Iraq provides enough destabilization for their taste. They want Assad out of Lebanon in order to localize the phenomenon to Lebanon and keep it far away from Saudi Arabian borders. They also want Assad's meddling and his sponsorship of terrorism to stop providing the West a casus belli.

It hardly matters to Assad, though, what the Saudis want. Their blunt demand to retreat from Syria only piles the pressure on Damascus, and if enough of it builds up, Assad may have to flee for his life as Syrian power brokers rethink their support for his regime.

UPDATE: Clarity update; I implied that Syria borders Saudi Arabia, which it doesn't.

The Asymmetrical Offense

The recent impulse for democratization has surprised and delighted the West as oppressive regimes thought untouchable have suddenly rethought their strategies in the face of popular discontent. The most dramatic example would be Egypt and Lebanon, two countries which suffered under some of the most constraining dictatorships in Middle East after the departure of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. The two controlling regimes, Mubarak and Assad in Syria, have reacted in opposite directions, at least at first, but the movements have continued to pressure for democracy regardless. They join with the popular will of the Iraqis, the Afghanis, and even a watered-down impulse of the Palestinians. Even Saudi Arabia has a nascent democratization program, and Iran has had street demonstrations for the past two years or more demanding freedom.

The wave of democratization promises to free the Muslim world from the grip of kleptocracies and mullahcracies, a welcome development all on its own. However, it also does something else that we have mostly missed: it creates a multi-front war for Islamofascists that threatens to exhaust their resources.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan saw that the Soviet Union had no economic capacity for an extended struggle and that "peaceful coexistence" only benefitted the Soviets, as it allowed them to conserve scarce capital resources for life support. Reagan initiated an economic war with the Kremlin designed to bankrupt them by not only escalating our defense spending, but encouraging democracy movements wherever the Soviets had taken control. He openly supported Solidarity, putting pressure on the Soviets through Poland and encouraging the Baltic states to awaken, and he took on the Sandanistas in Central America, forcing them eventually to hold real elections -- and out of power.

George Bush looks to have done the same thing. After decapitating the Taliban, he deprived al-Qaeda of its safehouse. Removing Saddam Hussein gave Bush the military high ground in Southwest Asia, but the elections in both countries created a new, philosophical front that directly opposed that of the Islamofascists. Terrorists still operate within Iraq and to a lesser degree Afghanistan, but now their war on democracy has suddenly sprouted into a five-front war: Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Lebanon, and even Syria, where activists have begun to stir for the first time since the slaughter at Hama.

How many fronts can AQ and its affiliates fight at once? And if Lebanon and Egypt transform successfully into fairly liberal democracies, can they continue their philosophical battle with the West with any credibility for the purple-finger majorities? It's doubtful, since the elimination of the dictatorships will simultaneously create a more moderate electorate and eliminate the main source of funding and protection for the terrorist groups.

George Bush's strategy of democratization doesn't just relate to moral values; it creates an asymmetrical offense to combat the asymmetrical warfare of the terrorists. He intends to economically and philosophically bankrupt our enemies in much the same way Reagan did with the Soviet Union. And while the wave has just started to gain momentum, it looks hopeful that Bush may well succeed in doing so.

Note: I've updated this to be more concise about the term "Southwest Asia", an area which may include Egypt politically but obviously not geographically.

Byrd's Incoherent Defense

Senator Robert Byrd's office issued a defense of his remarks comparing Republican attempts to bar filibusters on judicial nominations with Naziism in the Senate earlier this week. Unfortunately, it appears that Byrd's staff suffers from the same incoherence that afflicts their boss most of the time:

Sen. Robert Byrd's description of Adolf Hitler's rise to power was meant as a warning to heed the past and not as a comparison to Republicans, a spokesman for the West Virginia Democrat says. ...

"Terrible chapters of history ought never be repeated," said Tom Gavin, spokesman for Byrd. "All one needs to do is to look at history to see how dangerous it is to curb the rights of the minority."

Put aside all of the historical inaccuracies that one has to swallow for that argument to work, such as the fact that the Enabling Law basically abdicated the Reichstag and made Hitler a dictator, and that the Brown Shirts had driven most of Hitler's political opponents out of the Reichstag by that time anyway. If we are to take Byrd's comments at face value, how can we not come to the conclusion that he sees the GOP as a malevolent threat on the order of Hitler? After all, if Republicans simply represent legitimate political opposition in Byrd's mind, then he would argue against their position based on the merits of the case. That's not what Byrd did. He deliberately and repeatedly mentioned Hitler and the Nazis to imply that as the end result we would face if the Republicans limited debate on judicial nominations.

If he had meant to say that taking away the filibuster would lead to the tyranny of the majority, then all Byrd would have to use would be the lower chamber of Congress as an example, and not the Nazis. That has really been the issue with a few traditionalists in the Senate; they don't want to be a senior House and like their ability to extend debate. However, for Byrd to argue that, he would have to defend his record for changing the cloture rule four times to suit his own purposes during his tenure as Majority Leader two decades ago.

No, Byrd meant to smear the GOP as a second coming of the goose-stepping Nazis, but perhaps he thought that the speech would garner notice only from the DC inside circles and the Democrats' MoveOn base, which didn't exactly shy away from making the same comparison all during the presidential election (or even afterward, as Janeane Garofalo proved after the State of the Union speech). His mistake was getting caught -- and his office's mistake will be in resisting an apology for it.

Byrd occupies no leadership positions in the Democratic Senate, but his seat comes up for election next year. All indications are that Byrd intends on running for re-election. Perhaps this episode will finally convince West Virginians to retire this doddering old fool.

Air Marshals Claim Flight Numbers Have Been Padded

Signs keep appearing of widespread discontent from the Federal Air Marshal service. In today's Washington Times, sources within FAMS tell Audrey Hudson that FAMS management routinely pads numbers to demonstrate coverage mandated by Congress, sometimes doubling the actual number of protected flights -- and even the inflated numbers fall short of 10%:

Flight reports by the Federal Air Marshal Service show that federal agents were on less than 10 percent of the nation's flights in December, a number several air marshals say was inflated to make it appear to Congress that commercial air travel is better protected than it is.

"The numbers reported to headquarters come back higher than originally reported and are sometimes upwards of double the number of what is actually flown," an air marshal said. "Everyone knows they are padding the numbers."

FAMS flight reports for December, obtained by The Washington Times, show air marshals were on about 9.4 percent of the nearly 30,800 daily domestic and international flights.

But the marshals say that figure is impossible, because more flights are reported as having armed agents aboard than the service's 21 field offices can deploy.

The marshals say the numbers are manipulated upward to make it appear as if the agency has met staffing levels that Congress mandated.

When the Times brought these complaints to FAMS spokesman Dave Adams, he initially refused to comment without seeing the documentation, using the CBS Memogate debacle to cover his refusal. When the Times called his bluff, he responded -- by not responding:

FAMS spokesman Dave Adams initially refused to comment on the methods used to count missions unless a page of the monthly reports containing the data was faxed to him for verification.

"When CBS had accusations about President Bush's reserve-duty time, CBS gave them the courtesy to review the document before commenting on it, and I would like the same courtesy," Mr. Adams said.

After reviewing the document, he only said: "For obvious security and operational reasons, we never comment on the specific locations or numbers of federal air marshals employed around the country on any given day."

"At the same time, we can neither confirm nor deny the accuracy of the information provided to reporters purporting to detail the locations and deployment of air marshals," he said.

Congress needs to look into what FAMS management is doing with transportation security. FAMS has enraged its agents with picayune dress codes that appear designed to help terrorists identify them on flights as well as grandstanding with people like Lyle Lovett at their training facilities while demanding secrecy from the rank and file. Now agents claim that the FAMS service has lost almost half of its workforce through a "mass exodus" due to their treatment by Thomas Quinn, going from 4,000 to 2,200 agents. Since they must travel in pairs, the reported flight coverage range of 2,000 - 3,400 flights daily appear to impossible:

At one time, FAMS employed the 4,000 agents mandated by Congress, but the number has been halved, marshals say. Based on the number of guns issued, there are about 2,200 marshals stationed nationwide to fly seven days a week. ...

Marshals always travel in teams -- a minimum of two agents and sometimes as many as four per plane. This means a minimum of 1,100 teams protect domestic and international flights. With sick days, regular days off, vacation and medical leave, it is statistically impossible to cover even the minimum number of flights listed by the report on any given day, the marshals say.

"The numbers don't add up; it's way too much," a marshal said. "Several field offices have complained about it and were told to shut up. This is a scam."

More than 2,600 flights were listed as covered on Christmas Eve, 2,039 on Christmas Day and 2,893 on New Year's Eve.

"The numbers are impossible," said another air marshal.

Obviously, someone is lying -- either Quinn and his management team or the agents in the field. If it's the former, then Congress needs to haul them in front of a committee hearing pronto for an explanation. If it's the rank and file, then Quinn still needs to answer why his agents have become so discontented with FAMS. Either way, we face a management debacle at FAMS that directly threatens the security of the United States. Congress and the White House need to act now to determine the truth and get it fixed. (via Michelle Malkin)

Arabs Tell Syria To Get Out Of Lebanon

In another signal that exasperation with the Assad regime may run closer to Damascus than Assad would prefer, members of the Arab League have joined the chorus telling Syria to get out of Lebanon at the earliest possible moment:

Arab leaders launched a flurry of diplomatic activity Thursday, including a trip by Syrian President Bashar Assad to Saudi Arabia, as they sought to control a political storm over Syria's role in neighboring Lebanon. ...

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said Wednesday night after meeting with his Saudi counterpart, Prince Saud al-Faisal, that they had discussed how to "find a mechanism to implement" last year's U.N. Security Council resolution that called for all foreign forces to leave Lebanon.

"Egypt is encouraging Syria to settle the situation surrounding Lebanon as soon possible," Aboul Gheit said.

The League does not plan on putting the Cedar Revolution on its foreign-miniter agenda for this conference, and neither Syria's nor Lebanon's foreign ministers have been invited to attend. Still, having Eqypt and Saudi Arabia (indirectly) tell Assad that his time has run out has to come as a shock, and not just to Assad. Hosni Mubarak last week suddenly committed Egypt to multiparty elections for the first time in decades, a move that has received plenty of skepticism. This statement on behalf of the pro-democracy activists indicate Mubarak might be serious about leaving a legacy of freedom in the Middle East. Having Saudi Arabia join Egypt in demanding a withdrawal from Lebanon, even indirectly, is worse for Assad: even committed dictatorships don't support his expansionism any longer.

The calls from two Arab nations opposing Assad's policies amount to an amazing vote of no-confidence in the former optometrist, who may have some problems seeing the writing on the wall. His political opponents in Damascus, and perhaps even some of his followers, may have clearer political vision. If Assad can't get in front of this wave of democratization and liberalization in Southwest Asia to take ownership of it, as Mubarak obviously intends to do, then Assad's days are numbered -- and in Syria, that could well be literally.

Russia Tells Syria: Leave Lebanon

Bashar Assad's hope of holding onto some international political cover for his continued operation in Lebanon took a body blow this morning, as his normally reliable trading partner Russia told him that Syria should leave Lebanon as soon as possible:

Russia has increased the pressure on its ally Syria by joining calls for Damascus to withdraw its troops from Lebanon.

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said: "Syria should withdraw from Lebanon, but we all have to make sure that this withdrawal does not violate the very fragile balance which we still have in Lebanon, which is a very difficult country ethnically."

America, supported by France, has led international pressure on Syria, particularly through a UN resolution demanding the removal of foreign forces from Lebanon.

Russia has, of late, been somewhat of an apologist for the Syrians, openly questioning the identification of Damascus as a center for terrorists and of Syrian involvement in Palestinian and Iraqi attacks. One would imagine that the sudden discovery last week of 30 ex-Saddam functionaries operating a support network for the carbombing lunatics in Baghdad, including Saddam's half-brother, might have disabused Russia of its inclination to give Assad the benefit of the doubt. Still, Russia plans on selling anti-aircraft missiles to Assad despite concerns about their use by terrorists to attack civilian as well as military planes.

Perhaps this is one reason that George Bush has actively sought to focus on the Syrians, which he had begun to do even before Assad or his intelligence services made the terrible decision to assassinate Rafik Hariri and touch off a nationalist Lebanese freedom movement. His European tour did not do much to convince Putin to stop selling arms to Syria (or nuclear technology to Iran, for that matter). Bush may have instead decided to focus on the customer end of that transaction, trusting that the Iraqi elections would wake Syrians from their torpor and start a demand for democratization. Little did he know that Assad would do Bush's work for him, and in a stunningly effective manner.

Surprisingly then, Russia has joined the international chorus pushing for Syrian withdrawal, even though it threatens to destabilize the Assad regime. Putin may have feared diplomatic isolation on this point, as France has partnered with the US for the first time in ages on a point of international politics, and Germany's Gerhardt Schroeder has also publicly demanded a Syrian withdrawal. With Europe and the US tightly united on Syria, Putin may have decided that backing Assad has become a losing bet.

UN Peacekeepers Go On Offense

Last Friday I noted that nine UN peacekeepers were killed in an ambush in the Congo by rogue militia elements. After more than ten years of running from fights, I wrote that the UN would have to start fighting back if it wanted to retain any credibility. Apparently, someone at the UN has reached the same conclusion:

United Nations peacekeepers have gone on the offensive against a militia group in Congo, deploying helicopters and killing nearly 60 people in the biggest battle fought by the world body in more than a decade.

But criticism of the operation was mounting yesterday when it emerged that up to a third of the dead could have been civilians used as human shields by the group that was the attackers' intended target.

The latest hostilities began when a battalion of Pakistani soldiers advanced on the militia base in the Ituri district, the scene of some of the worst atrocities in the country, where more than three million people have died since war erupted in 1998.

In this latest skirmish, the UN has explained that the UN peacekeepers reacted to incoming fire from one of the militia groups in the area. Instead of their normal retreat, the UN fought back in force and killed 60 people, although some of the casualties may have been human shields employed by the militias. The rebels, from the FNI, bear the responsibility for the deaths of any civilians they employ as shields, however, and critics of the UN for defending themselves are wrong. In fact, they're part of the reason why the UN never takes action to defend themselves or anyone else when they come under fire, a policy that has led to the massacres of thousands of civilians.

The UN Security Council wasted little time in endorsing the actions of the peacekeepers, approving a resolution that encouraged "continued robust action in pursuit of its mandate." Perhaps the UNSC has also had a sea change thanks to the developments in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein. The wave of democratization that has accompanied the steel will of George Bush to enforce the terms of the cease-fire and UNSC resolutions involving Saddam has changed the demeanor of the tinpot dictators of Southwest Asia; it may have inflamed the ire of the Europeans in the short term, but it put a lot of credibility into American warnings.

The UN has lost that credibility after a decade of fleeing at the first shot, and if they want to regain any ability to actually keep peace, they need more examples of this kind of reaction to provocation. This is a good start.

CNN's Inside Politics Covers Byrd's Nazi Remarks

CNN jumped into the fray over Senator Robert Byrd's Nazi reference in its Inside Politics look at the blogs. Hugh Hewitt played the segment on his show tonight as Judy Woodruff, Jacki Schechner, and Abbi Tatton reviewed the Byrd scandal through CQ and Radioblogger:

WOODRUFF: ... Time now to check what's going on in the blogosphere. And with me once again today to talk about what they are talking about, CNN political producer Abbi Tatton and Jacki Schechner. She's our blog reporter.

So, Jacki, I bet it's not baseball.

JACKI SCHECHNER, CNN BLOG REPORTER: No, it's more like Byrd. We've already heard what Senator Robert Byrd said on the floor of the Senate, comparing Republican tactics to Adolph Hitler's rise to power. Conservative blogs all over it.

Over at Captain's Quarters, he's got plenty to say, including this comment: "Byrd, with his attempted filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, is the last person who should be standing in the well of the Senate calling anyone a Nazi." As some people may remember, that filibuster [lasted] 14 hours.

ABBI TATTON, CNN POLITICAL PRODUCER: So the conservative bloggers linking to this last night, and outraged for a couple of reasons. First of all, the comments by the senator himself, like what he actually said, but also the coverage of those comments. Radio Blogger here looking at how the mainstream media has covered what Senator Byrd said. He goes through newspapers, cable news channels, left-wing blogs, other news channels as well, saying that there's no mention of Byrd.

Kudos again to Inside Politics for reporting on the stories making the rounds on the blogs, even when we cover what the mainstream media seems to ignore.

UPDATE: Reuters has added coverage as well:

A U.S. Senator's likening of Republican strategy on blocked judicial nominees to Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany drew condemnation on Wednesday from top Republicans and the Anti-Defamation League.

Sen. Robert Byrd on Tuesday compared Republican threats to change Senate rules to outlaw procedural hurdles that have blocked 10 of President Bush's judicial candidates to Hitler jamming legislation through the German Reichstag.

"Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side," the Democrat from West Virginia said. "Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal."

Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a member of the Republican leadership, said in a statement, "Senator Byrd's inappropriate remarks comparing his Republican colleagues with Nazis are inexcusable."

UPDATE II: The New York Times carries an earlier AP report in its Thursday edition, which omitted the Anti-Defamation League condemnation of Byrd:

A Jewish Republican group accused Senator Robert C. Byrd on Wednesday of making an "inappropriate and reprehensible" reference to Hitler in criticizing a Senate Republican plan to block Democratic filibusters:

A Jewish Republican group accused Senator Robert C. Byrd on Wednesday of making an "inappropriate and reprehensible" reference to Hitler in criticizing a Senate Republican plan to block Democratic filibusters.

No mention is made of any other independent calls for apologies and retractions, such as Abraham Foxman's statement earlier today.

Posted by Ed Morrissey at 7:50 PM | TrackBack

Jewish Groups Denounce Byrd's Nazi Remarks

Two Jewish groups have denounced Senator Robert Byrd for his equating Hitler and the GOP and have demanded an apology and a retraction, the AP reports today, in a development that may signal a crack in the media disinterest that has marked Byrd's antics up to now. The first group to criticize Byrd was the the Republican Jewish Coalition, a group that Democrats could dismiss as partisan. However, the second group, the Anti-Defamation League, will not so easily be disregarded by Byrd's colleagues:

Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said Wednesday that Byrd's remarks showed "a profound lack of understanding as to who Hitler was" and that the senator should apologize to the American people.

"It is hideous, outrageous and offensive for Senator Byrd to suggest that the Republican Party's tactics could in any way resemble those of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party," Foxman said.

The leader of the Republican Jewish Coalition called on his Democratic counterpart, Ira Foreman, to condemn the minimization of Hitler's atrocities to a simple political dispute. Ira Foreman has no comment at this time. Perhaps when Harry Reid gives him access to his manhood, he'll think of something to say about how a former Klan member just reduced American politics to the level of genocide, hijacking the deaths of millions of Jews just to score a cheap political shot.

Now that the ADL has made demands for apologies and retractions, maybe we'll also see editors discover their own guts and start reporting this old fraud the way he should be exposed. We'll know more tomorrow morning.

UPDATE: Check out what the Democrats have decided to complain about instead:

Nevada Democrats are decrying remarks by U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons condemning "tree-hugging, Birkenstock-wearing, hippie, tie-dyed liberals" for their opposition to the war in Iraq.

Gibbons, a possible Republican contender for governor in 2006, made the remarks at a Lincoln Day dinner Friday in Elko, according to the Elko Daily Free Press. ...

Sean Sinclair, a political adviser to Assembly Speaker Richard Perkins, D-Henderson, also an early entry into the governor's race, called Gibbons' remarks "disappointing."

"He is so far to the right of where this state is and where most of the country is," Sinclair said. "It is these kind of bombastic statements that stopped him from being in leadership positions in Congress. Folks haven't been able to trust what he is going to say next."

Not that Gibbons' remarks shouldn't get criticized (if they're inaccurate), but it's interesting that calling someone a "hippie" gets one disqualified for leadership in Congress, but having an ex-Klansman calling his opposition Nazis doesn't. That's Howard Dean's Party of Hate for you.

Byrd Compares Republicans To Nazis On Senate Floor

Senator Robert Byrd, defending the minority's right to filibuster on the Senate floor today, wound up his speech by comparing Republican efforts to eliminate the hijacking of the Senate on the Constitutional duty of confirming federal judges to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Not only did Byrd imply that the GOP equates to the worst mass murderers of the 20th century, he's so proud of doing so he's posted the speech to his own website:

Many times in our history we have taken up arms to protect a minority against the tyrannical majority in other lands. We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men.

But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends. Historian Alan Bullock writes that Hitler’s dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law. Hitler needed a two-thirds vote to pass that law, and he cajoled his opposition in the Reichstag to support it. Bullock writes that “Hitler was prepared to promise anything to get his bill through, with the appearances of legality preserved intact.” And he succeeded.

Hitler’s originality lay in his realization that effective revolutions, in modern conditions, are carried out with, and not against, the power of the State: the correct order of events was first to secure access to that power and then begin his revolution. Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal.

And that is what the nuclear option seeks to do to Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate.

Let's stop the history lesson here for a moment. By the time the Enabling Law came up for a vote, the SA (Brownshirts) had effectively terrorized the Reichstag into giving Hitler everything he wanted. Hitler did not come to power through purely democratic means, nor did he care all that much about the sheen of legality. His SA by that time numbered into the millions, and they had already blazed a trail of violent chaos, attacking all of their political opponents, assassinating a number of them; that's how the Nazis came to power. So when Byrd speaks about how the Nazis used legal means to secure their dictatorship, rest assured that the Senator takes that completely out of the context in which it occurred.

More important is the disgusting and deranged implication of death camps and genocide towards Byrd's political opponents just because they propose to change the Senate's rules -- not laws, just the internal rules -- to allow for majority rule on one particular task. Perhaps this point eludes someone who spent the Nazi years belonging to a group that paralleled the same racial philosophies of Hitler himself, but Byrd should know better than to demean the millions of victims of the real Nazis by invoking them as an insult to people who simply oppose Byrd politically.

Byrd, with his attempted filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, is the last person who should be standing in the well of the Senate, calling anyone a Nazi. Why the Democrats have defended this doddering old embarassment for decades is beyond any explanation but the most base and cynical: he votes the right way. Republicans shunned Trent Lott for waxing nostalgic for an old Dixiecrat on his birthday. Will the Democrats do the same for the lunatic who has befouled the political environment with this intellectually, morally, and historically bankrupt foolishness?

Don't bet on it. It takes strength of character to hold your allies accountable, and so far, the Democrats haven't shown an ounce of it. Even their own party chair goes around proclaiming his "hate" for Republicans, who comprise at least 35% of all registered American voters. With "leadership" like this, we can expect the Democrats to dissolve into a parody of a political party, tossing around insults instead of ideas and lies instead of truth. (via Hugh Hewitt)

UPDATE: A complete fisking of Byrd's insanity can be found at Radioblogger.

UPDATE II and BUMP TO TOP, 3/2: I suspected that this would not get much coverage in the mainstream media, and I was correct. The Los Angeles Times covers the nomination flap, but the lead is Colorado freshman Senator Ken Salazar's betrayal of William Myers; Henry Weinstein covers the debate over the so-called "nuclear option" but mentions nothing of Byrd's Nazi references.

The New York Times, meanwhile, doesn't mention anything about the debate over the cloture rule in its piece by Neil A. Lewis, which screams in its headline that Democrats "pummeled" Myers. Their subsidiary, the Boston Globe, doesn't even cover the confirmation hearing. (And what's with that Campaign 2004 banner, anyway? The election's over, folks.) The Washington Post mentions Byrd's Nazi reference but not his equating the GOP to the Nazis.

Broadcast networks haven't touched it, either. NBC, ABC, and CBS all remain silent. Only Fox News gave any coverage at all, and they had the sense to report it properly:

Senate Republicans are game to see several of President Bush's judicial nominees confirmed for the bench but Democrats oppose many of them. On Tuesday, Sen. Robert Byrd compared Republican tactics on nominees to Adolph Hitler's use of power in Nazi Germany. ...

Byrd compared the move, not yet undertaken, to Hitler's abuse of power. "Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality. He recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side," he said.

Looks like another mainstream media blackout designed to protect one of their own. The Democrats and Republicans both combined to out one old segregationist who made an off-the-cuff remark at a birthday party that the media missed. Apparently the media doesn't cover the Senate, either.

UPDATE: I missed this entry by Jon at QandO where he shows that Hitler was significantly less interested in legality, cloaked or otherwise, during his grip on power.

Ukrainians Arrest Man Carrying Uranium At Airport

Reuters reports that Ukrainian security personnel detained a man at Kiev's airport carrying 1.28 pounds of uranium-238 in his car:

Ukraine's SBU security service arrested a man at Kiev's airport who had a case containing radioactive uranium-238 in his car, the Emergencies Ministry said Tuesday.

It said the man was detained at Boryspil airport, Ukraine's main international gateway, with 582 grams of uranium. It did not say when the arrest took place or whether he had been attempting to leave the country. ...

Depleted uranium, where uranium-238 is normally found, can theoretically be used to make nuclear "dirty bombs," but it is often used in gun ammunition and armor because of its high density.

Ukraine still has a heavy reliance on nuclear power, even after the Chernobyl disaster, and depleted uranium doesn't necessarily make good material even for dirty bombs. Still, one has to wonder what the man intended to do with that amount of uranium and why he thought he could just bring it to the airport. On the other hand, the Ukrainian security services appear to be on the ball, which gives some confidence that they can control the material they use in their commercial power production. Since they rely so heavily on Russian oil -- one of the reasons that Putin could pressure the Kuchma government in the past -- pushing them off of nuclear energy won't be possible in the near term. That security will have to stay focused to prevent any other attempts to smuggle even the smallest amounts of radioactive material outside Ukraine.

Dear Colorado, I Lied. Love, Ken

The Los Angeles Times reports today that the new Democratic Senator from Colorado, Ken Salazar, didn't take long to betray one of his "centrist" positions from his election campaign. After telling conservative Coloradans that he supported Bush's judicial nominees during his election, he now has sent a letter to Bush telling him to withdraw said nominees, including one Salazar pointedly said he would support:

Hopes that the Senate could rapidly confirm some troubled judicial nominations ran into a roadblock Tuesday when one of the moderate Democrats expected to support a vote by the full Senate on the nominees instead called on President Bush to withdraw the 10 candidates he resubmitted last month.

The move by Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.), a newcomer to the Senate, surprised both sides in the rancorous debate and came just hours after the Senate Judiciary Committee held a second testy hearing for one of those nominees — Idaho attorney William G. Myers III, whom Bush has tapped for the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. ...

Salazar's initiative surprised even people who are intensely involved in the judicial nomination issue. As Colorado's attorney general, he signed a letter of support for Myers last year, as did a dozen other state attorney generals. After he was elected to the Senate, however, he told a Colorado newspaper that he would reevaluate the issue from his new perspective.

Salazar appears to have perfected the bait-and-switch so common to those who want to appeal to the center during a general election and then suck up to the money the rest of the time. (See Hillary Clinton as another example.) The Coloradans who voted for Salazar over the GOP's Pete Coors figured that the two didn't have much difference in policy and that Salazar had more experience. Perhaps they should have checked into Salazar's character a little more closely instead.

One can't fault the GOP votecounters for assuming Salazar would remain a man of his word. After all, Salazar was a Democrat when he took the overt action of writing a letter in support of Myers. He went out of his way to show support for a nominee that has unfairly been targeted as an extremist, as Salazar's letter shows. Now Salazar has to explain to Coloradans how he came to repudiate himself in such a short period of time. Either he has to say that he didn't look into Myers' record -- which makes his letter a demonstration of ignorance and incompetence -- or he has to own up to the fact that he caved under pressure from Harry Reid, making a mockery of his proclaimed independence.

Thanks to Colorado, we're stuck with Kaving Ken for another six years. The GOP should ignore anything Salazar has to offer from this point forward, as he's proven his word is unreliable.

British Airways Passenger Describes Flight

Yesterday, I wrote about the decision by British Airways to continue a flight from Los Angeles to Heathrow despite blowing an engine at takeoff from LAX. The flight almost ran out of fuel due to the lower altitude forced on it by the engine loss and had to make an emergency landing at Manchester. It turns out that BA forced the pilots to continue despite several attempts by American air controllers to get them to land simply to avoid cash penalties for flight delays which kick in at the five-hour mark.

One of the passengers on that flight just happened to be my cousin, Mike Reger, who tipped me to the Times of London article on the flight. Mike followed up with a description of the flight:

As a 50 year old seasoned traveler all seemed fine on this excursion at first ...

We lifted off from LAX and all seemed normal but then the plane shook violently and passengers on the left side of the plane started saying, "There are flames coming out of that engine!!!" Seemed to abate and then came back -- but worse. Cabin staff was active in the cabin and, after a bit, the pilot came on the intercom and announced that we had a problem [Editorial note: Duh!] and we were going to circle LAX while we figured out what to do. [Editorial note (2): I'm thinking to myself, "I KNOW what to do, pal ..."]

After some minutes, the pilot came back on the intercom and told us that we were going to proceed to Heathrow on three engines, the 747 was a safe plane, blah, blah, blah. [Editorial note (3): Thinking to myself, hey, this is America -- and a democracy: shouldn't we get a vote on this? But nooooooooo.]

Eastward ho!

Sometime about when we were over Ireland, the pilot comes back on the intercom and say, "I'm afraid we have more bad news. Coming over on three engines has left us without sufficient fuel to make it to Heathrow. We need to land in Manchester." So we do and there are emergency vehicles to greet us, etc.

Now, I still need to get to Cambridge ... have to wait for another flight to take us to Heathrow. The flight will land at Heathrow at 7:00PM. Instead, we're still on the tarmac in Manchester at 7:30PM waiting for more passengers to get on the flight.

We finally land at Heathrow around 8:30PM -- more than 5 hours after our scheduled arrival time of 2:55PM. I (finally) get a taxi and make it to Cambridge.

Since that time, I have contacted British Air customer relations twice -- via their we site and have yet to receive so much as a response.

Lovely.

So after risking the lives of the passengers and crew, British Airways passengers still wound up with the five-hour delay that the airline avoided while purportedly making the decisions with their interests in mind. Not only that, but BA's overwhelming concern for these passengers somehow doesn't rise to the level needed to respond to their feedback regarding the risking of their lives for a few pieces of silver.

British Airways needs new management. I'd think twice about getting on board any of their flights while the same people who made these decisions still work there.

Milwaukee Election Official Resigns

CQ reader Joe K brings me up to date on a story line that has gone quiet the past couple of weeks. The embattled head of elections for Milwaukee responsible for the fiasco of last year's presidential balloting has abruptly resigned after spending the last month on sick leave:

Under a blitz of criticism over the city's handling of the Nov. 2 presidential election, Lisa Artison resigned Tuesday as executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission after four weeks off the job on sick time.

Artison faxed a one-sentence note of resignation to the mayor's office Tuesday. She could not be reached for comment.

In recent days, speculation grew that Artison would leave the post she held since July, when she faced sharp questions about her qualifications from aldermen at her confirmation hearing.

Her mysterious resignation probably has to do with the independent investigation launched by a combination of the state legislature, the local DA, and the FBI. Artison started taking her assigned sick days shortly after the mayor's committee on the Election Day fiasco -- on which Artison inexplicably got to sit -- got superceded by the new independent panel. City officials get 30 days of sick leave and earn more as the year progresses, based on service, and it's pretty apparent that Artison saw the writing on the wall after she and her patron, Mayor Tom Barrett, lost control of the investigation.

Next item for Milwaukee residents: an explanation of how Barrett chose Artison in the first place. Her selection last summer to this post stirred up controversy as Artison had no experience other than as a Barrett campaign volunteer and being the wife of a local talk-show host. She barely made it past her confirmation with the aldermen, squeaking by on a 9-6 vote. The six opposing her now look like geniuses, and Barrett should be held accountable for handing out important appointments to unqualified people in order to curry favor with local opinion-makers.

Iraqi Judge Killed Not The One Outed By Robert Fisk

Despite the early report by NBC News, promoted by the Drudge Report, the Iraqi Special Tribunal judge assassinated today by terrorists was not Raid Juhi, the presiding judge. NBC has corrected its preliminary reporting with an update from the same reporter that originally reported it was Juhi:

A judge working on the special tribunal established to try Saddam Hussein and other senior officials in his toppled regime was assassinated Tuesday in Baghdad, but U.S. officials told NBC News that initial reports that the victim was the presiding judge were erroneous.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the person killed by unidentified gunman was not Ra’id Juhi, the 35-year-old chief investigative judge of the special tribunal set up to try Saddam and senior officials, but was another judge working for the tribunal.

The officials did not immediately identify the victim.

None of this lets the ever-execrable Robert Fisk off the hook. Fisk first revealed Juhi's name in his report for the British newspaper The Independent last summer, putting the judge and the tribunal itself at unnecessary risk:

The Iraqi Special Tribunal had asked the media to protect his anonymity. But he was named by Robert Fisk, foreign correspondent of The Independent.

Downing Street warned that the judge now faced reprisals from Saddam loyalists. A Foreign Office source added: "Obviously this shows questionable judgment about an individual's safety." When TV footage was broadcast yesterday, censors made sure the judge was pictured only from behind.

Simon Kelner, editor of The Independent, defended his decision, saying: "This was not a British court, it was an Iraqi court. We don't want to compromise the judge's safety but the cameras showed side views of him and he was instantly recognised by many Iraqis."

Fisk has been a rotten, biased, and discredited shill for the radical left for years, but in this case he actively assisted the enemy in targeting Iraqi officials. His editor's smarmy excuse that Juhi's nationality made his safety less of an issue should repulse anyone who has watched the Iraqis brave bombs and bullets to rebuild their nation. (hat tip: Molten Thought)

Meeting The Proof Threshold

Hugh Hewitt notes that Ed Kilgore, filling in yesterday for Joshua Micah Marshall at Talking Points Memo, scoffs at the notion that the Cedar Revolution this week in Lebanon has anything to do with the Bush administration:

But it literally never crossed my mind that Bush's fans would credit him with for this positive event, as though his pro-democracy speeches exercise some sort of rhetorical enchantment.

This is the kind of thinking, of course, that has convinced God knows how many people that Ronald Reagan personally won the Cold War. It's the old post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) logical fallacy. This is a president and an administration that chronically refuse to accept responsibility for the bad things that have happened on their watch--even things like the insurgency in Iraq that are directly attributable to its policies. Barring any specific evidence (provided, say, by Lebanese pro-democracy leaders)that Bush had anything in particular to do with Syria's setbacks in Lebanon, I see no particular reason to high-five him for being in office when they happened.

I warned that this would be the Left's reaction to being so wrong about the forward strategy of democratization to end Islamofascist terrorism. They simply would refuse to acknowledge reality and claim that the entire effort would just be a huge coincidence. Fortunately, as Hugh notes, Kilgore gave us a standard of proof, one that Kilgore would have known had already been met had he paid any attention to the story at all. David Ignatius's Washington Post column from February 23rd has this assessment from one of the Lebanese democracy activists:

The leader of this Lebanese intifada [for independence from Syria] is Walid Jumblatt, the patriarch of the Druze Muslim community and, until recently, a man who accommodated Syria's occupation. But something snapped for Jumblatt last year, when the Syrians overruled the Lebanese constitution and forced the reelection of their front man in Lebanon, President Emile Lahoud. The old slogans about Arab nationalism turned to ashes in Jumblatt's mouth, and he and Hariri openly began to defy Damascus...

"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," explains Jumblatt. "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world." Jumblatt says this spark of democratic revolt is spreading. "The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

So here we have a Muslim in Lebanon, normally inclined towards skepticism towards George Bush, giving Bush the credit for sparking the Cedar Revolution through the liberation of Iraq.

Paging Ed Kilgore ... reality on Line 2. Please answer.

Assad: We'll Be Gone No Later Than A Few Months

Syrian dictator Bashar Assad has told Time Magazine in an interview that the Syrian presence will be gone in "a few months," the AP reports:

"It (withdrawal) should be very soon and maybe in the next few months. Not after that. I can't give you a technical answer. The point is the next few months," he told Time magazine.

Joe Klein has the story for Time, and the blurb on their site has plenty of weasel room, but the commitment is explicit:

TIME: Could you give me a timetable?

ASSAD: It's a technical issue, not political. I could not say we could do it in two months because I have not had the meeting with the army people. They may say it will take six months. You need to prepare when you bring your army back to your country. You need to prepare where you will put the troops.

Assad still claims to need the Lebanese buffer zone against Israeli invasion, but that excuse wore thin over a decade ago when his father signed the Taif accord to completely withdraw, back in 1989. The only thing that's changed has been the American will to enforce international demands for accountability, which has allowed the Lebanese the opening to demonstrate so effectively in the streets of Beirut for Syria's ouster.

Assad knows that Syria is through in Lebanon. He may drag it out to June or July, but he's finished there, and he knows it. The Lebanese may not allow them to wait to the end of March to get out, "technical" issues or not. Those demonstrators won't stop until Syria leaves, and Assad knows the US won't let up either.

Great Moments In Air Safety

The Captain's cousin writes today that he traveled to England last week on a no-frills British Airways flight. When he says no-frills, he really means it. British Airways saved £100,000 on his flight by cutting back on such luxuries as engines and common sense:

A BRITISH AIRWAYS jumbo jet carrying 351 passengers was forced to make an emergency landing after an 11-hour transatlantic flight with a failed engine.

The fault occurred on take-off from Los Angeles but the pilot declined all opportunities to land in the US and instead continued on three engines for 5,000 miles to Britain.

The incident happened three days after a European regulation came into force requiring airlines to compensate passengers for long delays or cancellations. Under the new rules, if the pilot had returned to Los Angeles, BA would have been facing a compensation bill of more than £100,000.

So to save themselves £100,000, the pilot refused to land the airplane anywhere inside the United States and insisted on going on to London. It's not as if the pilot didn't understand the nature of the malfunction, either, as the Times of London describes the action pretty plainly:

Air traffic controllers at Los Angeles spotted streams of sparks shooting from the engine and immediately radioed the pilot. He attempted to throttle the engine back but was forced to shut it down after it continued to overheat. The plane then began circling over the Pacific while the pilot contacted BA’s control centre in London to discuss what to do. They decided the flight should continue to London even though it would burn more fuel on just three engines.

The Boeing 747 was unable to climb to its cruising altitude of 36,000ft and had to cross the Atlantic at 29,000ft, where the engines perform less efficiently and the tailwinds are less favourable. The unbalanced thrust also meant the pilot had to apply more rudder, causing extra drag.

The pilot realised as he flew over the Atlantic that he was running out of fuel and would not make it to Heathrow. He requested an emergency landing at Manchester and was met by four fire engines and thirty firefighters on the runway.

The BA spokesman insisted that the decision to fly on to England was made with the best interests of the passengers in mind. Somehow BA never quite explains how running out of gas over the Atlantic benefits the passengers, nor how an engine blowing out on takeoff for a transcontinental flight doesn't warrant a stop somewhere before the plane goes across 5,000 miles of ocean. One of the passengers that British Airways held in such high regard (besides my cousin) happened to be an aviation-security specialist, who pronounced himself "disgusted" by BA's pence-pinching.

Perhaps we need to add a new regulation to transcontinental flights which require a corporate officer or a member of their immediate family on all such flights. Do you suppose for a moment that BA would have just kept going to London had Martin Broughton's children been on board that flight? Not on his life, although apparently on just about everybody else's.

Revolution!

Michael Ledeen puts the dizzying series of events occuring in Southwest Asia into perspective in today's National Review. He points out that the current revolution towards democracy started in a European state that had stagnated under the last Western dictator, but only took flight when America elected a visionary leader to nurture its development:

We are living in a revolutionary age, that started more than a quarter century ago in Spain after the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. At that time, hardly anyone believed it possible to go from dictatorship to democracy without great violence, and most Spaniards feared that the terrible civil war of the 1930s — which ended when Franco seized power and installed a military dictatorship — would begin anew. Instead, thanks to a remarkable generation of political leaders, some savvy priests, and the grossly underrated King Juan Carlos, Spain passed smoothly and gracefully into democracy.

It was the beginning of the Age of the Second Democratic Revolution. Spain inspired Portugal, and the second Iberian dictatorship gave way to democracy. Spain and Portugal inspired all of Latin America, and by the time Ronald Reagan left office there were only two unelected governments south of the Rio Grande: Cuba and Surinam. These successful revolutions inspired the Soviet satellites, and then the Soviet Union itself, and the global democratic revolution reached into Africa and Asia, even threatening the tyrants in Beijing.

The United States played a largely positive role in almost all these revolutions, thanks to a visionary president — Ronald Reagan — and a generation of other revolutionary leaders in the West: Walesa, Havel, Thatcher, John Paul II, Bukovsky, Sharansky, among others.

There was then a pause for a dozen years, first during the presidency of Bush the Elder, who surrounded himself with short-sighted self-proclaimed "realists" and boasted of his lack of "the vision thing," and then the reactionary Clinton years, featuring a female secretary of state who danced with dictators. Having led a global democratic revolution, and won the Cold War, the United States walked away from that revolution. We were shocked into resuming our unfinished mission by the Islamofascists, eight months into George W. Bush's first term, and we have been pursuing that mission ever since.

Absent 9/11, we may still have Bush 43 emulating Bush 41, giving into the Scowcroftian "realists" who dampered the democratic revolution in the late 80s and all through the 1990s. Unfortunately, just as with the New York Times editorial board, we continue to hear the songs of the reactionary harpies instead of those whom events have proven correct. Politicians continue to press for concessions to Iranian mullahs, as Ledeen points out, when we should be pushing democracy from the ground up to replace them. Realpolitik continues in vogue in the circles of the Left, even though twenty-five years of the advance of democracy and the peace it brings has thoroughly discredited it.

Ledeen signs off with the perfect distillation of this excellent analysis:

Faster, please. The self-proclaimed experts have been wrong for generations. This is a revolutionary moment. Go for it.

Make sure you read the whole article.

Maybe His Book Isn't Selling Well Enough

Turkmenistan's strange dictator Niyazov has ordered the closing of all hospitals and libraries throughout his country, the BBC reports, except for those in the capitol, Ashgabat. This order is only the latest in a string of increasingly weird actions by the self-styled Father of All Turkmens as he continues his main policy of self-aggrandizement at the expense of his oppressed subjects:

Reports from Turkmenistan say President Niyazov has ordered the closure of all the hospitals in the country except those in the capital, Ashgabat.

The order, announced by a government spokesman, is part of the president's radical health care policies. Thousands of medical workers have already been sacked under the plan. ...

President Niyazov apparently took the decision to close the hospitals at a meeting with local officials on Monday. "Why do we need such hospitals?" he said. "If people are ill, they can come to Ashgabat."

After building numerous statues and monuments to himself around Turkmenistan and sinking a good portion of his country's assets into a marble-and-gold mosque in Asgabat, Niyazov has apparently run out of money for the luxuries, such as a medical industry. Perhaps this reflects a failure of his Eurocorporate toadies to sell his book in sufficient numbers to the Western masses, or maybe Niyazov believes that bringing sick people to Ashgabat to gaze upon his shrines to himself will miraculously cure them. We can now expect a health-care crisis to arise from untreated sick Turkmen in the outskirts of the country, a situation that will spread to nearby Afghanistan and Uzbekistan as people flee for medical care, if not Iran, which probably has better border patrols.

If ever a man needed a purple finger these days, it would be a Turkmen. I suspect they'd know exactly what to do with that finger, given half a chance, too.

A Healthy Dose Of Crow At The Paper Of Record

The New York Times editorial board must have experienced considerable pain when they opined today on the momentum building throughout Southwest Asia for democratization. After all, after deriding the Bush administration for two years over its "neocon" strategies designed to do exactly what we now see, the board had to publish this:

Still, this has so far been a year of heartening surprises - each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing. The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances. It boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when few in the West thought it had any realistic chance. And for all the negative consequences that flowed from the American invasion of Iraq, there could have been no democratic elections there this January if Saddam Hussein had still been in power.

It misses the point entirely, however, on Lebanon and elsewhere. It talks about developments there and in Egypt as if they were completely disconnected to events in Iraq, instead of the logical flow of events coming from the realization by the dictators in the region that (a) Bush got re-elected and will have four more years to command the armies that have split Southwest Asia, and (b) he means what he says instead of blowing hot air. The NYT wants Bush to continue pressuring Syria for a withdrawal; do they think for a moment that Bashar Assad would even consider it without having 150,000 increasingly available American troops on his eastern border? Do the editors think that Assad's intelligence and military would have stood for a Cedar Revolution two years ago, or even today without that massive military threat on their border?

Ditto Egypt. The Times expresses some doubt about Hosni Mubarak's sincerity in offering multiparty elections for the first time, and rightly calls for the release of Mubarak's main opposition figure from prison. They entirely miss the point that without the demonstration of American will in the region, missing since 1991 and only half-baked even then, Mubarak would have been content to die in office and pass the dictatorship on to the next flunky.

The last passive-voice paragraph says volumes to those that recall the NYT's stand on Central America, especially Nicaragua, during the Reagan administration:

Over the past two decades, as democracies replaced police states across Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America, and a new economic dynamism lifted hundreds of millions of eastern and southern Asia out of poverty and into the middle class, the Middle East stagnated in a perverse time warp that reduced its brightest people to hopelessness or barely contained rage. The wonder is less that a new political restlessness is finally visible, but that it took so long to break through the ice.

It's hard to buy cluelessness by the barrel, but the NYT editorial board manages to do it. Democracies didn't just replace dictatorships in Central America -- US intervention had a lot to do with it, intervention that the Left (again) despised. We supported the Contras while the limousine liberals protested. We forced the Sandanistas to the voting booth and the Salvadorans to do the same while our actions were widely derided by such political luminaries as John Kerry and Ed Asner -- and watched as both countries used those elections to transform themselves into self-sustaining democracies. The Gray Lady opposed those efforts then as well.

The wonder is not that it took so long to break the ice in the Middle East. The wonder is that after twenty years, the New York Times still refuses to learn from history, and truly, even to acknowledge it.

Has Musharraf Prepared For Democratization?

Agence France-Presse reports this morning that Pakistani dictator General Pervez Musharraf has created a website to explore his "softer side" -- a professionally-produced site that combines a bit of tourist-baiting with an undeniable sense of a serious campaign effort:

His favourite food is a spicy lentil dish, the best book he read recently was on Richard Nixon and he was nearly court martialed in 1965. Welcome to the world of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, via the Internet.

Pakistani officials say a slick new website devoted to the general, which mixes moments of unusual frankness with a glowing, hagiographical tone, puts the country's people a mere mouse-click away from the "man behind the leader".

But according to analysts, the aim is not so much to reveal the truth about Musharraf as to project a softer image of both the president and his country, after years of foreign media coverage focused on Al-Qaeda, nuclear weapons and his own unelected status since coming to power in a bloodless 1999 coup.

AFP probably has the target audience correct; the site is entirely in English, which ordinary Pakistanis probably wouldn't understand, although the intellectual class certainly would. However, the effort is what interests me. How many dictators feel the need to explain themselves on the Internet, especially to outsiders instead of their own people? Musharraf includes snippets of his thoughts on a variety of topics, little more than sound bites for future campaigns, as well as longer policy statements and press releases. He also provides a section called Thoughts and Philosophy that includes topics like Chivalry and Character, the latter of which might jar the average Muslim visitor:

As Quaid said: "We Muslims have got everything - brains, intelligence capacity and courage - virtues that nations must possess. But two things are lacking and I want you to concentrate your attention on these... We have lost the fullness of our noble character. And what is character - highest sense of integrity conviction incorruptibility, readiness at any time to efface oneself for the collective good of the nation." Today I ask you to put that national character at the service of your state. Lets prove to ourselves that that noble character is built upon and not lost.

Think of that as the Pakistani equivalent to "Ask not what your country can do for you," a call to service for Muslims to replace the call for jihad coming from the madrassas. Read through as much of Musharraf 2005 as you can; it makes for fascinating web-surfing. Obviously Musharraf has learned to respect the power of the American "street", especially on the Internet and I suspect the blogosphere. He wants to project a statesmanlike image to moderate calls for his ouster, especially after seeing how a laserlike American focus prompts our politicians to demand action.

Musharraf sees the wave coming from far off, and he's building surfboards instead of sandbags. That's all right; at least he's preparing himself for the inevitability, which bodes well for a return to Pakistani democracy.

Of course, the French news agency simply could not resist tossing an inaccurate and wholly superfluous insult at George Bush in the middle of this article:

The general appears even more forthcoming on his own failings in his early army career -- in stark contrast to the reluctance of his close ally US President George W. Bush to disclose his own military records during a controversy over his National Guard service.

Does AFP mean the President who requested the release of all his records via executive order and released all that could be found to the press? Could they mean the President who always noted that he transferred to another post to pursue politics? The one who accumulated three times the number of service points required for discharge? Or perhaps AFP has Bush confused with another American candidate who, despite all promises, has yet to sign his Form 180 so we can see his complete military record -- you know, the one who met with the enemy while in the reserves and traveling overseas.

What the hell does George Bush's military records have to do with Pervez Musharraf's website? Talk about institutional bias!

Has The Gray Lady Found Something About The Bush Doctrine To Love?

The New York Times reports on the Cedar Revolution from Beirut in uncharacteristically pleasant tones, rather than the traditional pessimism (or silence) normally reserved for events that prove George Bush's policies correct. Of course, the Times neglects to mention -- even once -- the Iraqi elections that provided the confidence needed to get people out onto the street, but Hassan Fattah does draw comparisons to the Bush-supported Ukrainian demonstrations that collapsed the Russian puppet government there:

Lebanon's prime minister, Omar Karami, resigned Monday, dissolving the country's pro-Syrian government and setting the stage for an intense struggle over the relationship between Syria and Lebanon.

The surprise resignation came as the streets of Beirut were filled with tens of thousands of flag-waving protesters and hours after a grueling no-confidence debate in the Lebanese Parliament. Pressure on both the government and Syria has risen steadily since the car-bomb assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri two weeks ago, for which government opponents blame Syria.

The Lebanese opposition has demanded a full investigation of Mr. Hariri's assassination, the resignation of the government, and an immediate pullout of Syria's 14,000 troops from Lebanon. Opposition leaders say they have consciously imitated the popular uprising in Ukraine, where demonstrators forced the government to call a new election after accusations of corruption.

Marches over the past two weeks here culminated in a huge demonstration at Martyr's Square on Monday in open defiance of an Interior Ministry order against the gathering, as the parliamentary session began.

Lebanese soldiers circled much of the city center with barbed wire and barricades on Sunday evening to block the Monday demonstration, but to little avail.

Instead of explaining how the Iraqi elections set the stage for the wave of demands for democratization in the Arab world, the Times instead compares the Cedar Revolution favorably to other protests -- American anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s. No, really:

In scenes reminiscent of protests in the United States in the 1960's, protestors rushed to get to the site of the demonstration, just yards away from Mr. Hariri's grave, and camped through the night, waving Lebanese flags as anthems played on. Many handed flowers to the soldiers and beseeched them to cooperate with them. Despite orders to prevent demonstrators from entering the area, soldiers eventually relented to the flood of largely young protestors on Monday, and the demonstration carried on peacefully.

Yes, that connection appears so obvious to me now! Just as in Lebanon, Americans in the 1960s suffered under an occupation by a foreign government and risked their lives by demonstrating against the fascist occupation of their country. Most readers will discern my sarcasm, but apparently the irony-free denizens of the Paper of Record would truly believe that tripe. Yikes.

However, maybe I shouldn't quibble. At least they're covering it, and at least they're showing some enthusiasm for the movement. Anyway, self-delusion so profound that it accidentally leads to some form of truth happens so rarely that it must be seen to be appreciated.

The Cedar Revolution, In Pictures

The BBC has a few pictures of the Cedar Revolution that started today and continues to this hour, as the demonstrators refuse to leave until pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud resigns and the Syrians completely withdraw from Lebanon. Reports have the crowds now numbering over 200,000 and still growing. Let's hope they all have flowers and that the security forces remain on the sidelines.

Rats Jumping Aboard Sinking Ships

Jack Shafer at Slate notes that despite editorial proclamations of opposition to anonymous sourcing, the phenomenon appears to have worsened. Shafer put his skepticism of the editorial boards of the New York Times and Washington Post to the test and searched their product for the so-called "anonymice", and found growing rats-nests among most broadsheets:

Like insatiable vermin eating and rutting their way through a bulging grain elevator, anonymice continue to multiply in the pages of the top dailies. This proliferation comes despite the public promises made by some newspapers to stamp out—or at least reduce—the number of anonymous sources quoted.

Last year, for instance, the New York Times and the Washington Post amended their anonymous source guidelines with tighter, more restrictive language. "The use of unidentified sources is reserved for situations in which the newspaper could not otherwise print information it considers reliable and newsworthy," asserts the Times policy. "We must strive to tell our readers as much as we can about why our unnamed sources deserve our confidence. Our obligation is to serve readers, not sources," reads the Post's. ...

I figured a Nexis dump would trap a few of the contemptible rodents, and I was right. The worst offender over this interval was the Los Angles Times, followed by the New York Times, the Washington Post (owned by the company that owns Slate), the Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Globe. The good news is that I found no infested clips in USA Today, which is more vigilant than most papers in eradicating anonymice, and none in the Wall Street Journal via its subscription site.

For those of us who read these sources regularly, Shafer's study shouldn't surprise us but warn us of the gossip on which their journalism is based. Nor do most of the information gleaned by these anonymice shed much light on the stories the media report. Shafer includes a number of examples he found in his Nexis, most of which provide little or no edification whatsoever. One anonymouse got included in a Los Angeles Times for the purpose of telling Times readers that when diplomatic talks get characterized as "frank", it means "bad". A Boston Globe reporter used an anonymouse to support her reporting on the breakthrough postulation that Bush wanted to get commitments from NATO members to help out more in Iraq.

Don't you feel better informed now?

Shafer includes a number of such examples, written in his entertaining style, and asks why such vapid and bland statements require quoting at all, whether on the record or off. My answer? Anonymice serve the reporter and not the story; it makes people like Elisabeth Bumiller and Edwin Chen appear as if they have some sort of special inroads into the halls of power. Every reporter who has come into the business after Watergate wants to believe that they have their hands on the next Deep Throat. All they need to do is gather enough never-named inside contacts and they can write the next "All The President's Men". It's about ego over story, style over substance -- and it is one of the reasons why the mainstream media that employ gossipers have lost credibility and reader loyalty.

Oscar Viewership Down 2 Million: AP

Despite earlier reports, the viewership of last night's Oscar telecast attracted significantly less viewers than the year before, with the biggest loss in suburban and rural viewers, David Bauder reports for the AP.

A total of 41.5 million viewers tuned in Sunday to watch "Million Dollar Baby" take the Oscar for best picture. That's down 2 million from last year's show, which honored "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," according to Nielsen Media Research.

ABC undoubtedly hoped for better, after preliminary figures released earlier Monday from the top 56 markets were the strongest they were in five years.

The drop in total viewership was an indication that this year's Oscar ceremony was more popular in the big cities than rural areas, more so than an average Academy Awards, said Larry Hyams, vice president of audience analysis and research for ABC.

ABC and the Academy aimed at younger urban viewers with this year's broadcast, which led them to hire Chris Rock as emcee of film's biggest night. My opinion of Rock's performance has been captured in my live-blog of the event. However, even critics who might have been enamored of Rock's political rants felt the selection harmed the broadcast, and his abrasive and divisive pre-broadcast comments about people who do and don't watch the Oscars may have had an effect on the audience's collective yawn.

I'd like to see the full Nielsen analysis, to find out when people started to tune out. I suspect that Rock lost many people during his opening monologue who simply waited until the end of the broadcast to come back for the final few awards.

Why Now?

In the past two months, we have seen an explosion of momentum in Southwest Asia for political reform and democratization. Despite European warnings that democracy cannot be imposed at gunpoint, two longtime tyrannies (Afghanistan and Iraq) successfully held popular multiparty elections for the first time in their histories, freeing almost 50 million people from two of the most oppressive governments in modern history. Just before that, Ukrainians took to the streets to bring down a puppet government and a sham election that would have perpetuated it, and now we see popular demonstrations for liberty where we would least have expected it -- on the streets of Beirut and Cairo. The pro-Syrian puppet Lebanese government has fallen today as a result, while Hosni Mubarak has managed to stay one step ahead by promising multiparty elections later this year for the executive.

After watching nothing but stagnation for decades and an Arab populace that appeared resigned to oppression all along, one has to ask: what changed? Why now? The answer, history will show, will be two men: George Bush and Tony Blair, with John Howard of Australia playing the unsung hero.

For twelve years, the international community sat on its hands while Saddam Hussein, the Assads in Syria, and other tinpot dictators openly oppressed their people and defied international calls for reform. All of that changed for the US after 9/11, when the product of all that simmering rage at political repression took out 3,000 of our citizens who committed the sin of going to work on Tuesday morning. Bush, Blair, and Howard correctly calculated that continuing with so-called realpolitik and cutting deals with the oppressors only created more risk and more opportunity for terrorist groups.

So the Anglosphere changed directions and demanded accountability from the dictators of the worst area for political oppression -- Southwest Asia. After giving the Taliban one chance to cough up the masterminds of 9/11, Bush decapitated them despite opposition predictions of 19th-century quagmires and anarchical results. Within two years, the Afghans had held their own elections and started governing themselves, a story that the Western media has largely ignored despite its historic significance.

Once the Taliban had been driven off, the Anglosphere turned its sights onto Saddam Hussein. Many on the left have argued that Saddam had been effectively "contained" (some used the phrase "in his box") by UN sanctions, but ultimately Saddam had continued to defy UNSC resolutions -- 16 of them -- to disarm, stop committing genocide on his own people, and provide proof of the destruction of his WMD programs. Saddam refused to do any of this. His intransigence demonstrated the UN's inability to act in its own interest, and as we later found out, the UNSC states themselves helped Saddam undermine the containment they argued to continue. Saddam's continued grip on power showed the UN to be helpless to do anything to enforce its own resolutions.

That provides part of the oft-asked question of Why Saddam and why not Iran/North Korea/Syria et al? This map provides the other part:

Geographically and militarily, Iraq holds the key to Southwest Asia, and the Anglosphere leaders proved they can read maps even if their political opponents cannot. Iraq still had the region's most potent military, and after the necessary first strike against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, all further operations in the Gulf region required neutralizing both Saddam and his army. His defiance provided all of the justification necessary for such a step, and the Anglosphere took it. They destroyed the region's best and most battle-tested military in less than three weeks, despite opposition predictions of desert quagmires and holy-war catastrophes. While the Iraqis themselves didn't welcome us with flowers and chocolates -- a product of our 1991 betrayal -- they proved less than two years later that they wanted to choose their own leaders by braving bombs and bullets to vote in surprisingly large numbers.

On the heels of that surprising success, Bush specifically called Syria out as his next focus during his annual State of the Union speech. I don't think even Bush could have predicted Bashar Assad's stupidity in assassinating a tremendously popular figure in Lebanon as Rafik Hariri, but Bush demanded a complete Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon during that speech. Combined with his inaugural speech ealier and the success of Iraq's election, his words have had a powerful effect on Lebanese developments. The purple fingers of Iraq have led to the red-and-white banners demanding freedom today in the streets of Beirut and the capitulation of Egypt's president-for-life, Hosni Mubarak, to multiparty elections.

Nor have we seen the wave of democratization crest yet. Looking back at the map above, that wave threatens to crash across Syria from two directions now, especially with its Kurdish minority paying close attention to their Iraqi cousins. Syria, long an undeniable exporter of terrorism, either has to ride that wave to a peaceful transition to true representative government or drown in an attempt to stand fast. The collapse of Syria and a transformation of Egyptian politics would severly undercut the terrorist impulses of populations who have been fed radical anti-Westernism by their oppressors for decades as a means to rechannel their rage towards anyone else but the dictators themselves.

More horizons beckon, notably Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan, but these will follow in time. One question that arises still is, why now? Was this really the work of the Anglosphere? The answer lies in the 150,000 troops currently stationed in Iraq and the will to act that put them there. Does anyone think that Syria would have stood still for a spontaneous demonstration against their puppet government if Saddam Hussein was still defying the UN in Baghdad? Would Hosni Mubarak have suddenly transformed into a democrat without watching the Anglosphere demonstrate a will to act rather than just continue talking tough?

Would the people of the region had the undeniable personal courage to stand up to their oppressors as they have in Cairo and Beirut if they had not seen the Iraqis and their purple fingers, freely voting for their own government, with their own eyes?

Make no mistake. This transformation didn't just happen to coincide with the terms of Bush, Blair, and Howard. Expect the mainstream media to sell that meme in the next few weeks -- how George Bush, especially, got lucky to just happen to be President when all of this happened. Don't buy it for a second. He saw how to change the world and eliminate terrorism over the long haul and more importantly had the political courage to act in that regard.

Pro-Syrian Lebanese Govt Resigns Under Pressure

Reuters reports that the pro-Syrian Lebanese government has resigned under pressure from the unprecedented demonstrations of dissent in the streets of Beirut today, giving an opportunity for activists of liberty to wrest control of Lebanon from Damascus for the first time in decades:

Lebanon's Syrian-backed Prime Minister Omar Karami, under popular pressure after the assassination of an ex-prime minister, said Monday his government was resigning.

"Out of concern that the government does not become an obstacle to the good of the country, I announce the resignation of the government I had the honor to lead," Karami told parliament in Beirut.

The government came under fire in parliament Monday over the assassination of Rafik al-Hariri in a huge bomb two weeks ago, while streets away thousands defied a protest ban to demand it stand down.

The debate had been expected to close with a no-confidence vote in the government, but after a lunch break Karami took the podium to announce the resignation of the government.

The collapse of the puppet government in such a short period of time gives testimony to the depth and power of the spontaneous freedom movement inspired by the truly stupid assassination of Rafik Hariri earlier this month. The resignation of Karami and the withdrawal of his government exposes the Syrian power behind the green curtain at Anjar, and protestors lost no time demanding that Damascus get the hell out:

"Today the government fell. Tomorrow, it's the one huddled in Anjar," opposition leader Elias Atallah told the crowd to cheers, referring to the Syrian intelligence chief based in the eastern Lebanese town of Anjar. He said the opposition will continue its actions until all demands are met.

The protesters went further, immediately shouting for the resignation of pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud.

"Lahoud, your turn is coming!" they said.

Others in the sea of red, white and green flags chanted, "Syria Out!" and "Freedom, sovereignty, independence!"

Lahoud's six-year term was renewed in September by Parliament, under apparent Syrian pressure to change the constitution, which banned further terms. A U.N. resolution demanded Lebanon hold presidential elections, Syrian troops pull out of Lebanon and Syria stop interfering in Lebanese affairs.

"The battle is not over. It is just beginning. We want to know who killed Prime Minister Hariri," opposition legislator Faris Saeed said, addressing the crowd. The crowd responded loudly and in unison: "Syria! Syria!"

In other words, if Assad thought that Karami's departure would satisfy the Lebanese, he has made another mistake. Assad or his intelligence services have provided a spark with the Hariri assassination that has turned into a firestorm of Lebanese nationalism, one that has united all of the factions in demanding a complete and immediate Syrian withdrawal. Momentum has turned into an avalanche, one that threatens to bury Assad and his Ba'athists in Damascus.

This is Assad's worst nightmare come true. With the Syrians, especially the Kurds in the northeast, watching the Iraqis vote in the first free multi-party elections ever on their east and the Lebanese on their west showing how fragile the Syrian grip on power truly is, the Assad government may wind up facing similar demonstrations in the streets of Damascus, demanding free multi-party elections -- which would end Assad's grip on power, unless he got in front of the effort immediately.

Will Assad get ahead of history and lead Syria out of Lebanon and into a freely-elected, multiparty democracy? Or will he dither and stand pat and attempt to survive the avalanche headed his way? These are the choices that the Anglo-American strategy of democratization have left with Assad. His father would choose the latter; Bashar might just be smart enough, like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, to opt for the former. Either way, he only has weeks, possibly even days, to make his choices before the choices are made for him.

Defiance!

Beirut took to the streets this morning to protest the continuing occupation of Lebanon by Syrian military and intelligence forces and the existence of the puppet Lebanese government, despite a ban on such demonstrations and the intimidation of armed forces cordoning the city:

Defying a ban on protests, about 10,000 people demonstrated against Syrian interference in Lebanon on Monday, as opposition lawmakers sought to bring down the pro-Damascus government two weeks after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Hundreds of soldiers and police blocked off Beirut's central Martyrs' Square, but there was no violence, even as more and more protesters managed to evade the cordon and join the demonstration.

Protest leaders urged their followers not to provoke the security forces, who refrained from trying to disperse the crowd.

The Syrians must know now that the world has finally focused on their oppression in Lebanon. For over a decade, Lebanon was the dirty little secret that everyone knew and simply winked at. Now, after the brutal assassination of a leading dissident, the world has discovered the machinations of the Assad regime, and the Lebanese know that this is their one chance to be heard. They have marched past the Syrian soldiers and braved the bombs of Hezbollah to demonstrate against the Ba'athist occupation of their country -- and they need the world's help to free the Lebanese from the yoke of Syria's tyranny.

Will the world continue to listen? Assad hopes not. Let's make sure Assad doesn't get his wish.

La Shawn: Chris Rock "Ignorant And Vulgar"

La Shawn Barber has some words for Chris Rock and the idiots who decided he'd make a good host for the Academy Awards last night. As I wrote during my live blog, the only classy moments came during the tribute to the people who had passed away last year, especially the tribute to Johnny Carson, which reminded everyone above drinking age what the Oscars missed so terribly last night. La Shawn has more specific objections:

Under Hollywood’s de facto affirmative action policy, this is what they come up with. Such behavior would be unacceptable for anyone else, but when a black big-mouth does it, people snicker. They’re not really laughing with him; they’re laughing at him, but he’s too busy clowning to the know the difference.

They couldn’t find a dignified black person, one who exuded grace and charm, for the occasion? Or one who wouldn’t dream of playing to the stereotype of the ignorant Negro in a monkey suit, loud and obnoxious, profanity spewing out of his mouth?

La Shawn also wondered at the number of conservative bloggers, such as me, who live-blogged the event last night. I think that La Shawn may be considerably younger than me -- at least she looks it! -- but I recall when the Oscars exuded class and when films mattered more. Now I watch to ensure that some record be kept of Hollywood's excesses and political inanities that these events always produce. I don't think it's healthy for conservatives to cut themselves off from cultural events, even those which we know will be explicitly hostile to us, and perhaps especially those.

Make sure you read all of La Shawn's commentary.

Israel Plays Daniel

Israel plans on doing something rather remarkable today, an act of faith that has echoes of Daniel in the lion's den. Israel will request that the United Nations Security Council condemn the terrorist bombing that killed four people in Tel Aviv this weekend and demand that the Palestinian Authority dismantle the terrorist groups operating in its territories as a prerequisite to further negotiations on autonomy:

Israel will ask the U.N. Security Council today to condemn a weekend suicide bombing in Tel Aviv and press Palestinians to act against militants, marking a rare diplomatic offensive in the international forum by the Jewish state, officials said.

In Israel yesterday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said he had stepped up military measures against terrorists in response to the attack at a seaside nightclub that killed four, and would condition future peace talks with the Palestinians on concrete steps to fight terrorism. ...

The U.N. foray is a departure for Israel, which is more accustomed to being isolated on Middle East security issues. It hopes to get a declaration condemning the attack in an "unequivocal" manner, while pressing Mr. Abbas to take "tangible" steps, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev.

"Usually, we're used to playing defense at the U.N.," said Mr. Regev, who added that a successful outcome would mark a shift in Israel's fortunes at the world body.

That's putting it mildly. The UN has been little more than a temple to hypocrisy when it comes to Israel since the 1967 war -- initiated by the Arabs -- that created the occupation. The UN has repeatedly scolded Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians without ever noting the deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians by Palestinian terrorists. There doesn't appear to be much hope of getting such a resolution passed; just recently, another UN resolution condemning Israel exclusively got floated and died only with the promised US veto.

However, the UNSC should understand that Israel has a practical point. If the Palestinian authority cannot lay claim to the only legitimate use of force in their own territories, then they cannot govern. While two or three other factions exist that can match or exceed that of the PA, then a state cannot arise. A state must have a monopoly on legitimate organized uses of force, or it no longer functions as such, and instead turns into a Somalia-style geographical construct run by warlords. And just as in Somalia, the world will see what kind of nutcases such an environment will export.

Good for Israel, however, for laying this back at the feet of the UNSC. Either they have to act to pressure Abbas to drive out the other actors of violence, or the UN will abdicate its role in peacemaking altogether.

The Party Of Abortion, Imposed On You By Hollywood

Rhode Island Democrats and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committe have focused on a candidate to challenge liberal Republican Lincoln Chaffee in next year's elections. Congressman Jim Langevin appeals most to Rhode Island voters, the DSCC has determined, and they have decided to work with him to unseat Chaffee. However, a group of people 3,000 miles away has decided that Langevin does not toe the abortion line sufficient to their tastes and have decided to inject themselves into Rhode Island politics.

Guess where they live?

Victoria Hopper, wife of the actor Dennis Hopper, enlisted 16 actors, producers and philanthropists to sign a letter objecting to the potential candidacy of Representative Jim Langevin, who is being recruited for the 2006 race by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

The letter writers say they support the primary candidacy of Matt Brown, Rhode Island's secretary of state, for the seat now held by Lincoln Chafee, a Republican.

"This is even more important than one precious Senate seat; it is a fight to protect women and families, and a fight for the core and soul of our party," Ms. Hopper wrote in the letter. "Unbelievably, some conservative D.C. Democrats have recruited Representative Jim Langevin, a radically anti-choice candidate." ...

Ms. Hopper's letter included a roster of big Hollywood donors, including Chris McGurk, vice chairman of MGM; Cindy Horn, wife of Alan Horn, president of Warner Brothers; the actors Camryn Manheim, Christine Lahti, Kathy Najimy and Heather Thomas; Susie Tompkins Buell, a founder of the Esprit clothing company; and Callie Khouri, the screenwriter of "Thelma and Louise."

The only name missing is Mrs. Larry David, who hosted a hate-in for the Democrats in December 2003 which she called the "Hate Bush - 12/2 Event". Other than that, it's all the usual suspects. Hollywood, having learned nothing from the 2004 campaign, intends on driving the Democrats over a cliff by radicalizing them along the MoveOn/International ANSWER policy dogma.

Let's take Langevin as an example. First, the man has a 10% rating from NARAL, which casts that as pro-life, and Langevin has apparently described himself as such, although I couldn't find that reference myself. In 2000, however, these are the votes NARAL found so objectionable and caused the 10% rating:

* Making it a crime to harm a fetus during another crime
* Banning partial-birth abortion
* Ban on human cloning (even though he supports embryonic stem-cell research)
* Funding health care providers who decline to give abortion info

Inside Hollywood, these votes indicate a radical right-wing agenda. Outside of Hollywood, where the limousine liberals apparently rarely travel, they're considered indicative of moderation. Many people who otherwise support abortion understand the restrictions of not allowing others to kill or injure the fetuses of pregnant women without penalty, and oppose the idea of late-term abortions, especially ones in which doctors essential birth the baby and kill it midway through.

Even John Kerry, one of the more radically liberal Senators still left in office, understands the need for Democrats to start finding moderate ground on abortion in order to gain credibility with centrists who have tired of the "not an inch" dogma. Hollywood, however, insists on throwing its money everywhere to ensure that Democrats select only the most radical candidates available. Let's hope they can overwhelm the centrists at the DSCC and DLC, and help Democrats into losing even more ground as the GOP expands its big tent in 2006.

Lebanese Protestors Defy Syrian Ban

Thousands of protestors in Beirut have defied a ban on public demonstrations to protest against the Syrian occupation and the Damascus-backed government:

Thousands of demonstrators massed in central Beirut overnight to defy a government ban on protests on Monday ahead of a fiery debate in parliament over the assassination of the country's former prime minister.

Opposition groups have called a demonstration at central Martyrs Square and a one-day strike to coincide with the debate on Rafik al-Hariri's killing on Feb. 14 that for many recalled Lebanon's bitter 1975-90 civil war.

Interior Minister Suleiman Franjieh called on security forces in a statement on Sunday "to take all necessary steps to preserve security and order and prevent demonstrations and gatherings on Monday."

The Syrians still want to hang onto the illusion of control in Beirut, but they may wind up setting off another public-relations nightmare instead. US Deputy Secretary of State David Satterfield will visit Beirut to check on the status of Syria's withdrawal, and the Syrians and their puppet government have planned their own "spontaneous" demonstrations in an attempt to sway world opinion back against democratization.

The two demonstrations have a good chance of coming together, with potentially disastrous results. The Syrians would like nothing better than to have a situation arise where they can justify a use of force, but if they think that will convince anyone outside of their Iranian allies, then Assad truly has lost his mind.

Lebanon has slipped away from the Assad regime, and no amount of force and diversions will get it back. They can try delaying the inevitable, but the American troops in Iraq will continue to trump all of Assad's cockeyed political ploys. Eventually the Syrians will get forced out of Lebanon if they don't leave on their own. Assad should emulate Hosni Mubarak and take the first opportunity to pretend it's his idea if he plans on salvaging his international position.

North Korea To Return To The Bargaining Table

North Korea has apparently ended its tantrum, noticed that no one got very unnerved by their antics, and has decided to return to the six-party talks. Not only that, but Pyongyang apparently has committed to reaching an accord with the US by October:

North Korea has told officials in South Korea it is willing to take part in six-party talks on its nuclear arms program in June, a Japanese newspaper reported.

Pyongyang also said in its message, which was conveyed to South Korea by unofficial routes and then to Japan by Seoul, that it was willing to sign a treaty with the United States by October, the conservative Sankei Shimbun said on Monday.

North Korea declared on Feb. 10 that it had nuclear weapons and that it was pulling out of the talks, which include Japan, Russia, China and the United States as well as the two Koreas.

The Kim regime had apparently hoped to scare up enough defeatism in the United States to allow the North Koreans to force Bush into bilateral talks, the kind of negotiating the Democrats wanted to promote during the presidential campaign. However, Bush wants North Korea's neighbors to have stakes in the process and outcome, and also want to impress upon the Chinese that if Pyongyang goes nuclear, the US can arrange for Japan and Seoul to do the same.

So once again the grown-ups at the Bush White House have won another round of diplomacy where the Democrats wouldn't have had the nerve to play. It's yet another reason why we're better off with Bush serving a second term than having John Kerry bringing back Madeline Albright for an encore.

Live Blog: The Academy Awards

I will be live-blogging the Academy Awards tonight on this post, so if you're looking for running commentary to spice up the broadcast, look no farther. I also intend to do a little bit of regular blogging during the broadcast.

Be back at 7:30 PM CT! ...

7:20 - Why live-blog the Oscars? I'm looking more towards political idiocy rather than the choices made for the awards. I'm banking on Chris Rock to say something stupid -- probably several things -- and on at least a few winners to go after the Bush administration. I just want to capture it for posterity when it happens. I don't have any favorites among the films this year, unlike last year, when I wanted nothing less than a sweep for Lord of the Rings -- and got it!

7:30 - They start on time with an intro from Dustin Hoffman. They're not going to end on time, though ...

7:34 - "Sit your asses down!" Yeah, that's a classy way to start.

7:39 - Bush bashing at nine minutes, and now it's going on two minutes. "Just imagine you work at the Gap." For Chris Rock, that's not too much of a stretch.

7:43 - "Send our love out to our troops fighting for freedom right now" -- which he just spent two minutes claiming that they weren't doing! Oh, give me a complete break, Chris, you're not fooling anyone. This has been the worst opening for an Academy Awards show since David Letterman. The only moment that even had a glimmer of humor was "They made six Police Academy movies, but no one wanted to make one Passion of the Christ!"

7:55 - Outing cartoon characters. Even Robin Williams can't make that one work. He's reaching back 30 years for his material ... I mean, Elmer Fudd jokes come right off his first album. Yawn.

7:58 - What, no ribbons this year? Did we run out of causes to promote?

8:12 - The inclusion of Albert Brooks in Chris Rock's short film about what films actually get seen was pretty funny, as was Martin Lawrence at the end. But do we need to hear even more acceptance (not "acception", Chris!) speeches, especially from people who clearly have no reason to be in front of the camera?

8:15 - You know, I've always wanted to be in films. I always thought of myself as the strong, silent type -- but never on the scale imagined by Riehl World View, which cast me in High Loon:

SeaQue City was a little blogging town on the right fork of the Red State River that got its name from a famous Kiowa Indian chief. Translated, SeaQue meant "He who slaps at the moonbats" and that's how the chief was called by the soldiers and scouts that had known the Indian for whom the sleepy old town was named. But SeaQue City was more restless than sleepy today. Their almost ex-Sheriff was getting married and heading out of town and taking their school marm, his soon to be bride, Betsy, with him.

Betsy and Ed had been going steady since he wrote her that first love note in a late night instant message right after election day; things were quiet then in the little blogging town. She had printed it out and still carried the scrap of paper around in a small locket just above her heart. ...

"Sheriff! Sheriff!" Curly was running near as fast as he ever had by the time he made the court house - bending over to catch his breath. "Well, what's all the excitement about, Curly?" asked sheriff Ed. The telegraph operator stood up and put his hand on his chest, struggling for air as he began to talk.

"It's, ... it's Rall. He done got himself paroled outta that place he was in up north. I just got a message from up the line that he's comin' in on the Noon train, ... and, Sheriff, ... he's a comin' after you."

Read the whole thang, pard. Dan even provides pictures from the motion picture, including one of the terrifying villain. Do not forsake me, oh my darlin' ...

8:19 - Tim Robbins kept it classy.

8:36 - This has to be one of the most boring Oscars in recent memory. The only entertaining portion so far has been the Johnny Carson retrospective, which only highlights the class of years gone by and its complete absence today. Billy Crystal at least entertains, even if he can't quite match Carson's definitive mastery. Chris Rock tries hard but has no class and no sense of personality. He has been, thus far, a braying ass.

8:43 - It just got worse, with (no surprise here) Adam Sandler. He had Chris Rock pretend to be Catherine Zeta Jones, and not only were the jokes telegraphed, the timing between these two supposed comedy pros made them both look like amateurs at Open Mike Night. This is the best entertainment that Hollywood can provide? No wonder their movies stink.

9:04 - Isn't this the second break where the crew gets spotted scurrying off the stage as the cameras come back live?

9:05 - Too bad Rocket Man decided to read instead of watch, after Rock's opening monologue. Beyoncé Knowles is doing a wonderful job on Learn To Be Lonely and looks lovely, even if she's wearing so much eye makeup, it looks like she bankrupted L'Oreal.

9:07 - Another technical flub, during Jeremy Irons' presentation. I don't know what they're doing backstage, but it increasingly looks like they don't either.

9:26 - Sorry, but Salma isn't doing anything for me, either. To describe Che Guevara in such glowing terms in an era where we should have learned to see terrorists for who they are, regardless of their political affiliations, takes the bloom right off the ol' rose.

9:39 - What is it about lousy Oscar hosts and Oprah Winfrey? First it was Letterman, now Rock. "Oprah is so rich, I saw John Kerry proposing to her an hour ago." Oprah looked back disapprovingly at Rock, who must not have noticed, as he introduced John Travolta as Oprah's "favorite white man". Hell, I think Kerry would have a better shot at that title than the center-right Travolta.

9:51 - So far, the only really classy moments in this broadcast have been the tributes to the dead. Apparently, they left us with lots of wonderful memories but took all the class with them.

9:55 - I missed this, but two CQ commenters noticed that Chris Rock introduced Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayek as "our next four presenters". Tacky, tasteless, and perfectly emblematic of this year's Oscars.

9:56 - Why is P. Diddy introducing anything at the Oscars? Does he appear in films? Or did Rock owe him a favor?

10:03 - Okay, I'm no fan of Sean Penn -- is anyone? -- but he gave Rock a well-deserved scolding for using Jude Law, of all people, as the butt of his joke in his monologue.

10:12 - "The only woman to breast-feed an Apple." Nice way to introduce Gwyneth Paltrow, a woman with more talent in her hair than Rock has in his entire body.

10:25 - Does Jamie get the Oscar? Of course; this was probably the only sure thing tonight.

10:32 - Wow -- Clint Eastwood won for Million Dollar Baby, over Martin Scorcese, who I thought was a shoo-in on sentiment alone. Martin's going to have to wait for a lifetime achievement award, I guess. I haven't seen Million Dollar Baby, but I did see The Aviator, and I don't think it was worth a nomination.

10:38 - MDB won for Best Picture. I think Clint can credit Michael Medved for an assist here; after Michael Medved inadvertently stirred up a controversy by correctly arguing that the movie was being marketed dishonestly, Hollywood circled the wagons around MDB. I'd still like to see the movie, but until then, let me say: Comhairghdeas, a Chlint, agus go mbeannaí Dia dhuit!

Final thoughts: I think this Oscar presentation was nothing short of a disaster. The awards themselves were fine, no real controversies, but the presentation had to be the most inept and classless we've seen in many years. ABC should hire Chris Rock again just for the sheer pleasure of firing him later.

Thanks for everyone who stuck around all night long -- if you haven't seen my other posts tonight, take a look at them before you hit the sack. Oíche mhaith, mo chairde, agus go mbeannaí Dia dhaoibh!

UPDATE: The last means, "Good night, my friends, and may God's blessings be with you" in Irish. Since the Irish language apparently plays some role in the Best Picture, I thought it only appropriate ... but I forgot to provide the translation. Sorry!

Syria Coughed Up Saddam's Brother

As I earlier predicted, the Iraqis got their hands on Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hasan al-Tikriti through the intervention of the Syrian government:

Iraqi officials said Sunday that Syrian authorities captured Saddam Hussein's half-brother in Syria and handed him over to Iraq in an apparent goodwill gesture.

Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan, who was also a former adviser suspected of financing insurgents after U.S. troops ousted the former dictator, was captured in Hasakah in northeastern Syria near the Iraqi border, two senior Iraqi officials told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

The officials did not specify when al-Hassan was captured, only saying he was detained following the Feb. 14 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Beirut, Lebanon, in a blast that killed 16 others.

What did I tell you? With the wave of popular sentiment sweeping across Southwest Asia for democratic self-determination and pressure from both America and France to get out of Lebanon or else, Syria has decided to start playing nice with the new Iraqi government rather than protect Assad's political Ba'athist cousins. Ibrahim hardly made himself an asset to Assad anyway, and with all of the diplomatic heat coming down on Damascus, Assad has belatedly found the Iraqi Ba'athist leadership very disposable.

Jack Kelly wrote earlier that the Iraq War has already been essentially won, with nothing much left than the cleanup. This constitutes a major part of that effort, and as long as the pressure remains on the Syrians, more cleanup will follow after this. It also confirms that Syria indeed had a hand in fomenting the terrorist attacks in Iraq; now, with this revelation and the apparent reversal of course by an extremely nervous Assad, we may see the entire Zarqawi/Ba'athist effort collapse in on itself within weeks.

UPDATE: The AP story has been updated with even better news (emphases mine):

Iraqi officials said Sunday that Syrian authorities had captured Saddam Hussein's half-brother and 29 other officials of the deposed dictator's Baath Party in Syria and handed them over to Iraq in an apparent goodwill gesture. ...

They added that al-Hassan was captured and handed over to Iraqi authorities along with 29 other members of Saddam's collapsed Baath Party, whose Syrian branch has been in power in Damascus since 1963.

So they turned over 30 operatives of Sabawi's network along with Sabawi himself. It's starting to look like an early bout of spring cleaning at Chateau Assad. The Iraqi Ba'athists have become very, very expendable.

And welcome, Instapundit readers!

Step Two Of The Palestinian Triangle Offense

Israel has reacted to the Tel Aviv bombing this weekend by suspending planned prisoner releases, one of the key demands of the militant groups, Reuters reports:

Israel will reconsider whether to free 400 Palestinian prisoners as it had promised before a suicide bombing that killed four Israelis in Tel Aviv, Israel Radio said Sunday.

The radio quoted Justice Minister Tsipi Livni as saying Israel may not release these prisoners that were to have been freed in addition to 500 released last week, following a promise to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at a Feb. 8 summit.

Israeli leader Ariel Sharon demanded Sunday the Palestinians smash militant groups after the bombing Friday, saying he would freeze peace efforts and take military action if they did not heed his call.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad had already criticized the planned releases as too modest for their tastes, demanding the immediate release of all 8,000 Palestinians held in Israeli jails before considering a formal cease-fire. Now that Sharon has frozen even the preliminary releases, the militants have all the excuse they need to declare open season on Israeli citizens again, and Abbas can blame the intransigence of the Israelis for the collapse of the cease fire. Abbas may make some preliminary noise about taking action against the militants, but in a short period of time he will lay the blame against Sharon for undermining Fatah's credibility among the militants.

Some of you think I'm being far too skeptical. I hope to be proven wrong. So far, however, events have played out exactly as expected, and exactly as they have in the past. Only when the Palestinians start electing peacemakers rather than bombthrowers will peace truly come to the West Bank and Gaza.

Jack Kelly: Iraq War Won

Jack Kelly tells us in his column today what really should have been obvious since January 30th -- that the Iraq War has been won, and the media has missed the story entirely:

It will be some months before the news media recognize it, and a few months more before they acknowledge it, but the war in Iraq is all but won. The situation is roughly analogous to the battle of Iwo Jima, which took place 60 years ago this month. It took 35 days before the island was declared secure, but the outcome was clear after day five, with the capture of Mt. Suribachi.

Proof of this was provided by Sen. Hillary Clinton. Iraq is functioning quite well, she said in a press conference in Baghdad Feb. 19. The recent rash of suicide attacks is a sign the insurgency is failing, she said.

"When politicians like [Clinton] start flocking to Iraq to bask in the light of its success, then you know that the corner has been turned," a reader of his blog wrote to Bay.

Kelly wants to know when journalists and media outlets will finally be held accountable for malpractice for getting almost every development in the war on terror wrong. Since I know Jack reads the blogs, I know that question is meant rhetorically -- Jack already has provided the evidence, and the media will get its trial among its activist readership in the blogosphere. Read his whole column, and while you're at it, ask your local paper why Jack's column doesn't appear there. They may not like the microscope Jack aims at their credibility. (via Hugh Hewitt)

When Political Correctness Kills

In a lesson about the danger of political correctness in the age of terrorism, the Germans now face an increasing wave of Muslim "honor killings," the practice of killing women who refuse to live under the thumb of male family members. Unfortunately, Germans feel restrained from investigating threats of such killings for fear of appearing racist. The issue has finally come to the fore after the brutal murder of a woman by her three brothers for the crime of leaving the cousin she was forced to marry at 15, but it hardly is the first such killing in Berlin:

Police records show that 45 "honour killings" have been committed within Germany's two million-plus Muslim community in the past eight years. Now that at least five have occurred in just four months in Berlin alone, the German authorities and local Turkish leaders are desperately trying to find out why.

Karl Mollenhauer, a Berlin police psychologist, blamed Islamic religious leaders for failing to address the problem. Last week, he also suggested that the German authorities were at fault for failing to intervene in case they were branded racist.

"We have silently allowed a parallel society to develop because of fears that we would sow hatred by talking openly about its injustices. The women have paid the price for this," he said.

Even worse, the problem appears to start with the indoctrination of Muslim children in Berlin. In one private Islamic school, the students were asked about their attitudes towards such killings as Sürücü's, and the responses are chilling:

Asked by teachers what they thought of the murder, several 13-year-old pupils are said to have implied that they thought Mrs Sürücü had "earned" her death. "Well, she lived like a German, didn't she?" remarked one. Mrs Sürücü got married in Turkey at the age of 15 but returned with her son to her birthplace, Berlin, more than five years ago. ...

In an open letter last week, the headmaster of the school publicly denounced the attitude of his pupils. Other head teachers in Berlin, however, said that they were not surprised by the children's reaction.

"This type of thinking is latent in their minds," said the head of another predominantly Turkish immigrant school in the district, who asked not to be identified. Their remarks, he said, reminded him of the spontaneous "victory dances" which immigrant pupils at his school had staged after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

The Germans have hate-speech regulations that deter criticism of Muslim practices, although not as strict as those in Sweden, but the political correctness has taken its toll on the protection of Muslim women. The Germans have allowed moral relativism to supplant the one-law construct that Western societies have gradually adopted since the sealing of the Magna Carta, creating a substructure of de facto shari'a to develop in its Muslim community with little pushback from the German government.

That PC instinct spells trouble for Germany in dealing with its Muslim population, and for any country that does not enforce its laws equally among its population -- as American history demonstrates more than adequately in its civil-rights struggles. Germany needs to decide whether it wants to remain a united social construct or allow itself to become balkanized internally, with various minority groups conducting their own law enforcement, legislative, and judicial functions independent of the elected German government. If they do not have the will to enforce German law in Muslim communities, they will have begun the process by which civil wars start. In the meantime, the primary victims of German PCism will continue to be Muslim women, at the hands of their own families.

The Pilgrim Spirit

After missing the Sunday Angelus blessing for the first time in his papacy, the seriously ill John Paul II surprised the crowd outside the Gemelli Hospital by appearing at the window and waving to them:

Pope John Paul II has made a surprise appearance at the window of his Rome hospital to wave to people expecting his traditional Sunday blessing.

Sitting on a wheelchair, the Pope made the sign of the cross to bless the faithful even though he did not speak.

I haven't blogged about John Paul II's latest illness, mostly because it has received such widespread coverage that anything I say would be redundant. This episode will likely provide no exception. However, I think that it shows why this Pope has attracted so much love and respect from the Catholic faithful. His tenacity helped bring down the Iron Curtain and free millions from tyranny when he had all of his physical stamina, and even an assassin's bullet could not stop him from stubbornly pursuing God's will on Earth. For a man who has every excuse to take a day off, his gesture of comfort for the multitudes who have gathered in respect and concern demonstrates those same qualities on a more personal basis.

John Paul II may well be called home soon, but his mission among us will remain as one of the most remarkable of any Pope since the height of the Catholic Church's political power prior to the Reformation. We Catholics of this age have truly been blessed with his leadership.

Saddam's Brother Scooped Up By Iraqis

For the first time in a year, the Ba'athists have lost a card from the American deck of fugitives. This time, the Iraqis themselves have captured the six of diamonds, Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hasan al-Tikriti -- otherwise known as Saddam Hussein's half brother:

Security forces in Iraq have captured Saddam Hussein's half-brother, one of the country's most wanted men and the first top-level Baathist to be caught in a year, the government announced Sunday.

Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hasan al-Tikriti, an intelligence chief and one-time adviser to the former president, was number 36 on the U.S. military's list of the 55 most-wanted people in Iraq -- the six of diamonds.

A statement from Iraq's government did not say when or where he was seized or whether U.S. or Iraqi forces had captured him. Details were expected at a news conference later Sunday.

Last year, Iraqi officials said Ibrahim, who was born to the same mother as Saddam, was one of two former Baath Party officials directing the insurgency from Syria.

As I noted yesterday, after the 1982 assassination attempt by Dawa on Saddam, he increasingly turned to blood relations for his lieutenants. Ibrahim was one of the beneficiaries, a leader in the IIS and presumably behind some of its brutal methods of terrorizing Iraqis who dared challenge or even criticize Saddam. His actions would certainly provide an interesting case for the Iraqi Special Tribunal, and they've surely already gathered evidence and testimony to start.

As a member of the fugitive deck, his capture carried a reward of one million dollars. The Iraqis gave no indication of how Ibrahim fell into their hands -- but the Syrian connection should raise eyebrows. Bashar Assad has come under tremendous pressure to evacuate all of its forces from Lebanon and probably faces UN Security Council action in April if its withdrawal isn't complete by then. It's no secret that the US and France considers Syria to be complicit in the assassination of Rafik Hariri and have allied together to push Syria out of Lebanon, and with 150,000 troops on Assad's eastern border, that alliance looks deadly.

With Assad looking for an edge to blunt the latest diplomatic firestorm and protect himself from a people-power uprising of his own, he may have decided that hosting the so-called insurgency and its brother Ba'athists have become far too much trouble than it's worth. While the terrorists looked like they could destabilize Iraq, supporting them looked like a good bet for Assad. Now that the Iraqi elections have been so successful and the momentum on both sides of Syria has swung so far towards democratization and freedom, Assad may have opted for cutting all ties with the terrorists in Iraq as a way of mollifying the US.

The Iraqis will have more data on Ibrahim's arrest later today. I suspect that we'll hear he got picked up somewhere close to the Syrian border based on tips and intelligence reports. If so, that will be code for "He and his cohorts got too hot for Assad to handle."