Al Qaeda And Bomber's Remorse

The Scotsman reports that al-Qaeda finds itself on the political defensive after the bombings of three hotels in Amman, Jordan touched off massive anti-Islamist demonstrations. AQ supposedly has found itself surprised by the hostility of the Jordanians after bombing three of its hotels in its relatively peaceful capital:

AFTER years of al-Qaeda terror attacks in which thousands have been killed, many of them Muslims - the people they wish to recruit - voices of dissent are starting to be heard in the Middle East.

As moderate Muslims dare to protest at daily death tolls, even the prospect of one of Osama bin Laden's most feared cohorts, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, being handed over is being discussed. ...

At first al-Qaeda announced that "a group of our best lions" had carried out the attacks to punish Jordan for supporting "the Jews and Crusaders".

Then late at night it posted a second statement on the internet "to explain to Muslims part of the reason the holy warriors targeted these dens." It said it had ordered the suicide attacks on the hotels "only after becoming confident that they were centres for launching war on Islam and supporting the Crusaders' presence in Iraq and the Arab peninsula and the presence of the Jews on the land of Palestine."

A third statement on Friday also had a defensive tone. It said the bombers were four Iraqis, who had chosen the hotels "after a month of surveillance and information gathering".

Forgive me if I remain skeptical about this. Zarqawi has slaughtered Muslims by the thousands in Iraq for two years, a well-known fact in the Arab world. They killed dozens in Egypt in a recent bombing of a resort hotel, as well as many more in Morocco and Turkey during the same time. Those attacks did not specifically target Western interests either. The attacks in 1998 on American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya obviously meant to kill Americans -- and they did kill a dozen -- but almost 200 Muslims died in those attacks.

Nor did Zarqawi ever profess any love for his native Jordan. He escaped the Hashemite Kingdom with a bounty on his head, and he has openly announced his intention to attack whenever possible. He had an opportunity to do so with chemical weapons earlier, but Jordanian intelligence stopped the attack shortly before it launched. AQ might regret the deaths of Palestinians in the latest attack, but Palestinians probably comprised at least some of the deaths at Sharm el-Sheikh and the Sinai last year.

I doubt that AQ leadership will lose much sleep over the anger in the Jordanian street protests. However, the West counted on this kind of reaction eventually arising from the long string of attacks on Arabs. Jordanians have joined the majority of Iraqis in discovering that the butchery of AQ has no limit and no real loyalty to Islam, either. Such road-to-Damascus moments provide some hope that the Muslims of the ummah will reach a level of disgust for radical Muslims throughout the region.

AP Misses Story On French Media Coverage Of Riots

The AP has a report out this afternoon regarding the supposedly cautious approach of the French media on reporting the riots. Elaine Ganley notices the toned-down news coverage of the social unrest and violence, but misses at least one large part of the reason why the French media have started to play down the story:

At least two television stations scaled back broadcasting images of flaming vehicles — a mainstay of coverage — to avoid stoking violence. Some channels decided not to provide daily police figures on the number of cars burned overnight, in the thousands since troubles began Oct. 27.

Is it self-censorship? Or a sense of responsibility?

Television stations that are holding back deny any influence from police, who insist publicity for the riots has fueled "copycat" violence. Instead, the stations say they don't want to play into the hands of rampaging youths seeking coverage of what they see as their exploits.

Perhaps that is what some of the French media told Ganley. She apparently missed the coverage in the Guardian (UK), in which the director of the news service LCI admitted that he had directed a low-key approach to keep leftist politicians in power:

Mr Dassier said his own channel, which is owned by the private broadcaster TF1, recently decided not to show footage of burning cars.

"Politics in France is heading to the right and I don't want rightwing politicians back in second, or even first place because we showed burning cars on television," Mr Dassier told an audience of broadcasters at the News Xchange conference in Amsterdam today.

That quote came from Thursday's conference -- incidentally, the same annual forum that has produced some of Eason Jordan's allegations against the US and Israeli militaries. The admission by a news executive that news presentations get deliberately skewed to suit the political preferences of news executives apparently will not capture the interest of news agencies outside of the Guardian.

Judith Miller's colleagues only suspected her of having some sympathies for the Bush administration and wound up savaging her on the pages of her own New York Times and other newspapers for weeks. Why have these same guardians of journalistic independence remained silent about Jean-Claude Dassier? It seems that the sin is not journalistic bias, but rather a suspected bias towards conservatism that evokes ire from the craftspeople of the trade.

Riders Of The Mark!

Hugh says he's a Numenorean. For my part I am ...

Rohirrim


To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
brought to you by Quizilla

I'm guessing Mitch is a Wild Man of the Plains. John Hinderaker would be a Dwarf, I'm almost positive ...

Riots Move To The City

The BBC reports that riots have moved out of the darkness and into the city center in Lyon this afternoon. A show of force by police in the hours before a curfew was due to be imposed did not get its intended dampening effect:

Police in the French city of Lyon have fired tear gas to break up groups of youths who hurled stones and bins hours before a curfew was due to begin.

Police on the city's famous Place Bellecour square made two arrests in what state news agency AFP says is the first rioting in a major city centre. ...

The trouble in Lyon began at about 1700 (1600 GMT) on Place Bellecour where a large number of riot police were on duty as a preventative measure. About 50 youths attacked stalls and damaged vehicles, witnesses were quoted as saying by Reuters news agency.

Tonight might show an even greater shift for the riots back to the center of French cities and political life. Rioters in Lyon apparently had some idea of what to expect from the police and had already prepared their counterstrategy. If anything will happen, the action will emerge in the next few houras. At the least, the French notion that the violence had lost momentum appears to be nothing more than wishful thinking.

Will Steele Split The Black Vote In Maryland?

The candidacy of Michael Steele for the Maryland Senate seat vacated by Paul Sarbanes has some Democrats worried about a split in their most loyal constituency -- the African-American vote. Steele became the first black candidate to win statewide office when he ran for Lieutenant Governor, and now his run for Sarbane's seat may have Maryland voters in a quandry:

Black Maryland Democratic leaders say Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele's run for the U.S. Senate could put them at odds with black voters who would question their endorsing a white candidate, such as U.S. Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin, over the black Republican.

"I think at that point I'd be saying that I am endorsing the Democratic ticket," said Delegate Obie Patterson, Prince George's County Democrat and former chairman of the General Assembly's black caucus.

"It would be a much more difficult task to rally the troops to get out and vote for a single person such as Ben Cardin," he said. "It would be easy for me to sell it as a Democrat supporting Democrats. ... Whether I can do that actively enough to bring over all my friends, I'm not sure."

Former state Democratic Party chairman Isiah "Ike" Leggett predicted almost every black Democratic official would remain loyal and endorse whoever gets the party nomination.

But "among rank-and-file African-American Democrats, some may be torn, especially if there are no blacks [on the Democratic ticket] in other significant elected positions," said Mr. Leggett, a black Democratic candidate for Montgomery County executive.

The short answer for this problem would be to remind people that they should vote for the person whose policies best represent what's best for the nation, the community, and themselves, preferably in that order. Unfortunately for the Democrats, they have generally failed to enumerate policies which address those points. Instead and especially with the black community for the past four decades, the Democrats have relied on racial politics and smear campaigns to keep a lockgrip on that constituency. The Democrats in Maryland argued just last week that such attacks on Steele would continue in this campaign.

Another solution would be to nominate Kweisi Mfume as the Democratic contender, but his campaign has severely lagged due to disinterest and prior ethical baggage. That might be good news for Steele but not for Maryland Democrats. Mfume could remove race from the campaign altogether -- he was one of the few who came out strongly against the "Simple Sambo" tactics of the Maryland Left against Steele last week -- and return the election to an honest debate on issues, if he chose to do so.

Instead, they will likely have Cardin go up against Steele, and the dynamic Republican might start peeling away enough of the traditional Democratic bloc to prevail in the general election. If so, it bodes very ill for Democrats hoping to capture the state in 2008. Once black conservatives begin to gain legitimacy in the African-American community, they will show the voters there that the Republican platform has much to recommend for their benefit, including school vouchers, tax incentives for private investment in the community, and more.

French Riots Gain Steam Again Over The Weekend

Although no one would know this by reading American newspapers, which now follow the French lead and refuse to report on the ongoing uprising, but the riots in France once again started to rise in intensity, even by the odd metric given by police. The BBC reports that over 500 cars got torched last night despite a heavier police presence that resulted from intelligence that points to a massive demonstration sometime this weekend:

A ban on all public meetings likely to provoke disturbances has come into effect in the French capital. The move - imposed under new emergency measures - started at 0900 GMT and will remain in force until Sunday morning. ...

Rioting that erupted two weeks ago is now less intense across France, but unrest continued on Friday night, as more than 500 cars were set on fire.

Two police officers were wounded and 206 people were detained across the country. This was an increase on the previous night, when 395 vehicles were torched and 168 people were arrested.

The arrests have not stamped out the nightly riots, and neither has a heavy police presence, although the latter seems to displace the violence to other, less-patrolled areas. The French now have suspended speech and assembly rights in its capital to avoid further protest, but have shown little ability over the past two weeks to enforce it. After all, they have hardly been able to enforce the existing laws against arson.

An early and forceful response to this unrest would have stopped it in its tracks. Now, however, the French have once again exposed themselves as ineffectual and uncommitted to their own defense. Their media now refuses to inform their customers of the continuing failure of their government in order to keep the vacillators from getting kicked out of office.

The peak of the rioting passed as the wannabes and the bandwagoners have gone back to their own lives. The core of this uprising has not left at all, and in fact appear to be once again gaining momentum despite more police in the streets. These riots have organization, resilience, and structure -- and where those elements exist, so does strategic thinking. The media may chalk this up to youthful frustration over unemployment and discrimination, but that fails as an explanation more with each passing day.

When do the American media plan on reporting this again? Sometime after the Champs-Elysees burns?

Dean Flopping At DNC

A party chairman has two main functions, interrelated but not the same: building the voter base and raising funds. In the former role, the chair has to reach outside the base to bring in new voters while maintaining good relations with the people already inside the tent. The latter role gets measured more in opposition to what the other major party accomplishes during the same period.

In both tasks, it looks like the Howard Dean experiment has failed. Dean has spent most of the past year playing to a radical base with statements like "I hate Republicans and everything they stand for," instead of working with liberal Republicans and center-minded independents that eschew that kind of hatred politics. Today, the Washington Post reports that Dean -- whom the DNC selected for his prodigious fundraising ability in the last presidential primary season -- has allowed another huge funding gap between the DNC and RNC to arise on the cusp of the mid-term elections:

The former Vermont governor and presidential candidate took the chairmanship of the national party eight months ago, riding the enthusiasm of grass-roots activists who relished his firebrand rhetorical style. But he faced widespread misgivings from establishment Democrats, including elected officials and Washington operatives, who questioned whether Dean was the right fit in a job that traditionally has centered on fundraising and the courting of major donors.

Now, the latest financial numbers are prompting new doubts. From January through September, the Republican National Committee raised $81.5 million, with $34 million remaining in the bank. The Democratic National Committee, by contrast, showed $42 million raised and $6.8 million in the bank. ...

Several Washington Democrats not favorably inclined toward Dean said the party was willing to gamble on his "potential for hoof in mouth disease" -- in the words of one lobbyist -- because of the unexpected fundraising prowess he showed in the 2004 race.

Well, they got the disease in spades, but the money has mostly failed to arrive. With the midterm primaries less than three months away, the GOP has four times as much money in the bank as the Democrats, and they have done much more work in reaching outside of their traditional base for both voters and candidates. Ken Mehlman has drafted Lynn Swann to run as a Republican for the Pennsylvania governor's race, and convinced Michael Steele to campaign for the Senate. What has Dean done to convince pro-life moderates to run for the Democrats, or even to vote for them?

By any measure, the Dean chairmanship has been a failure of embarrassing proportions for the Democrats, but now they're stuck with him for at least one electoral cycle. If they fire him now, his radical-left base may well bolt to the Greens, and the Democrats can't afford that at this point with so many of their other constituencies in flux. The other option will be to force a new staff on Dean that will reduce his role to that of a national figurehead while competent fundraisers and party builders take their orders from someone else. Expect Democrats to take the latter option and try to play catch-up to Mehlman and the GOP over the next 90 days.

Post: George Bush Homer Gets Roger Maris Treatment

Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus "analyze" the President's speech last night and try to rebut some of the details, claiming that "asterisks dot" the argument throughout the speech. Already used in the comments here in CQ, Milbank and Pincus -- the latter especially lacking any credibility after his depantsing by Joe Wilson's misinformation campaign -- still can't deny the overall truth of Bush's speech and the despicable hypocrisy at the center of the Democratic Party's campaign to smear him as a liar:

The administration's overarching point is true: Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this belief before the war began in 2003. Indeed, top lawmakers in both parties were emphatic and certain in their public statements.

Milbank and Pincus argue that Bush had access to more information than Congress did, such as the PDBs that he didn't share with many outside the NSA circle, and that Bush's staff overstates the scope of the later Congressional investigations into the use of the intelligence pre-war. Both of these get answered in two pretty simple steps:

1. None of the Security Council nations concluded that Saddam had disarmed, either. Even staunch anti-war voices such as France, Russia, and Germany didn't claim that Saddam had no WMD before the war started. They just argued that sanctions had enough strength to keep him from using them. All three countries have their own intelligence services; did Bush "mislead" them as well? And of course, the sanctions that they insisted we trust turned out to be a smokescreen for those three nations to stuff Saddam's pockets full of cash for opportunities to buy cheap oil for themselves.

2. The intelligence had not changed, but the circumstances did. The Post notes an inconsistent threat analysis on Iraq in the Bush administration but never explains why:

Even within the Bush administration, not everybody consistently viewed Iraq as what Hadley called "an enormous threat." In a news conference in February 2001 in Egypt, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said of the economic sanctions against Hussein's Iraq: "Frankly, they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction."

Note when this assessment was given: one month after taking office. In the first few months of the Bush administration, the policy towards Iraq remained the same as it did during the Clinton administration -- vigourous containment based on the sanctions, with support for humanitarian assistance through the Oil-For-Food program initiated during the Clinton term. Bush had a rushed transition and had hardly begun to go through all the information on Iraq.

So what changed after that? Three thousand Americans died on 9/11 in the worst terrorist attacks in history, and the twelve-year quagmire of Iraq that tied up our military in the region which launched the terrorist impulse had to get resolved one way or the other. No Democrat went on record to say that we should release Saddam from his obligations to disarm and simply allow him to regain complete control once again, I notice. Some argued for a maintenance of the status quo -- a status quo that, post-invasion, we now know had been thoroughly corrupted through the offices of the UN and efforts by our supposed French, German, and Russian allies for kickbacks and cheap oil. Most understood that our military had to take action, and that as long as Saddam Hussein remained in power, he would present a powerful threat on our flank no matter what else we did in Southwest Asia. Strategically, tactically, and politically, the war on terror went through Baghdad -- and Democrats and Republicans alike voted for that very policy in late 2002.

This Post argument does nothing but take small peripheral points out of context and try to spin them into major points of contradiction. It fails to make any point whatsoever, and it especially fails in rebutting the central argument from Bush yesterday. The Democrats had the same intelligence as the Republicans, the British, the French, the Russians, the Germans, and everyone else. They also came to the same conclusions as everyone else, and supported the Bush policies that sprang from those conclusions -- when it was politically beneficial for them to do so. Now that they think they can score a few cheap shots at the President, they claim they got hoodwinked by manipulated intelligence. It's a cowardly and despicable strategy, especially during a war which they voted to start when it suited their purposes, and no amount of anklebiting by Milbank and Pincus can cover that up.

The Post needs to seriously explain why Walter Pincus still works on intelligence stories involving Iraq for the newspaper after his involvement with Joe Wilson. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence clearly shows that Pincus wound up as a dupe, at minimum, for Wilson's leak of disinformation on Niger. At worst, Pincus might have acted as a willing participant in that effort. The Post has never given an explanation of Pincus' role in working with Joe Wilson on that story, nor have they even bothered to investigate it, as far as I'm aware. Until we get an explanation from the Post, any story (and especially "analyses") involving intelligence on Iraq that carries Pincus' byline will automatically be suspect.

French Media: We'd Rather Publish The Lies

Yesterday's Guardian (UK) published an interview with Jean-Claude Dassier, a TV news executive who admits that the French media has colluded in presenting a skewed version of the suburban uprisings that continue even tonight. Dassier told an Amsterdam conference of news broadcasters that he would rather lie about the riots than allow the truth to promote a right-wing agenda:

Jean-Claude Dassier, the director general of the rolling news service LCI, said the prominence given to the rioters on international news networks had been "excessive" and could even be fanning the flames of the violence.

Mr Dassier said his own channel, which is owned by the private broadcaster TF1, recently decided not to show footage of burning cars.

"Politics in France is heading to the right and I don't want rightwing politicians back in second, or even first place because we showed burning cars on television," Mr Dassier told an audience of broadcasters at the News Xchange conference in Amsterdam today.

It's good of Dassier to admit the obvious. The American media should take their cue from Dassier, as they have clearly done with his idea of news coverage, and also admit that they want to avoid reporting the story properly in order to keep their consumers from understanding the truth of what's happening in France.

Bush Goes Back To Offense On Veterans Day

After months of crescendoing criticism over the intelligence which led to the war, George Bush has finally heard enough. Regardless of whether his relative silence on the subject of pre-war intelligence came from a desire to allow Patrick Fitzgerald a nonpartisan environment in which to investigate the Plame leak or a desire to look forward and not ahead, clearly his political enemies -- not just opponents, but very obviously political enemies -- wanted to do neither. More than 30 months after the fall of Saddam, Bush today reminded the nation that the intelligence from which he operated had not much changed from 1998 when Congress and President Clinton used it to justify an ineffective attack on Saddam Hussein and to declare regime change the official policy of the United States. In fact, the only significant change that did occur was the circumstances in which Bush had to consider the intelligence:

One of the hallmarks of a free society and what makes our country strong is that our political leaders can discuss their differences openly, even in times of war. When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support. I also recognize that some of our fellow citizens and elected officials didn't support the liberation of Iraq. And that is their right, and I respect it. As President and Commander-in-Chief, I accept the responsibilities, and the criticisms, and the consequences that come with such a solemn decision.

While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began. Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs.

They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein. They know the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions citing his development and possession of weapons of mass destruction. And many of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: "When I vote to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security." That's why more than a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate — who had access to the same intelligence — voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.

The only people twisting intelligence are the ankle-biters who gladly talked up the dangers of Saddam's WMD capability when few took either Saddam or terrorism seriously enough to do anything about it. It made all of the fools who now accuse Bush of "misleading us into war" look like national-security hawks to profess alarm in 1998 about Iraqi stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons for which UN inspectors could not account. Supporting the firing of a few Tomahawks at Saddam's presidential palaces, almost the ultimate in empty American gestures, supposedly gave people like Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden a veneer of credibility for foreign policy, and they gladly relied on that same intelligence that they now claim Bush twisted four years later.

The truth? Thanks to an over-reliance on SIGINT in American intelligence services that declined through the 1990s as we celebrated "peace dividends", the end of the UNSCOM inspections in 1998 meant the end of reliable intelligence on Saddam's WMD programs. As even Hans Blix reported, Iraq had not accounted for thousands of chemical and biological weapons and tons of precursor materials for their creation and deployment by that late date. Saddam thumbed his nose at the international community, which all had the same intelligence analysis: Saddam still had his WMD stocks. Even when Blix returned in early 2003, the only finding he could report was that the Iraqis still wouldn't cooperate with inspectors.

The only change, then, was the circumstances in which we viewed the intelligence, and 9/11 had changed those forever. As Bush told the nation, we could not afford to wait for a threat from a WMD harborer to become imminent. Saddam had over sixteen opportunities in a dozen years to fully cooperate and demonstrate his compliance with UN Security Council resolutions and the cease-fire agreement that kept him in power in 1991. He chose to obstruct, lie, hide, cheat, and violate instead. After 9/11 and given his undeniable connections to terrorists, allowing Saddam to continue in power would have been suicidal -- especially since he had already shown no compunction against using WMD, against the Iranians and on Kurdish civilians in a genocidal attack on his own citizenry.

Now that Saddam has been deposed and the Iraqi people liberated based on the bipartisan support of Congress, based on the exact same intelligence that both parties used to justify their foreign policy goals, Bush's enemies want to somehow rewrite history to make it look like Republicans wrote the reports themselves and misrepresented them to the American public. Put simply, that's not only a lie, but it's political cowardice and it's morally reprehensible. It shows the depths of chicanery to which some Democrats will stoop to regain power, even at the expense of American security and the cost in Iraqi lives.

Those so-called national leaders have turned themselves into national disgraces. Bush finally took the gloves off today and exposed them as such. Perhaps more responsible members of the Democratic Party will take over the leadership of the opposition and stop the Stalinesque revisionism that seems to be the only alternative the Democrats have offered America for the better part of the past three years.

CQ Thanks American Veterans For Their Sacrifice

CQ flies the flag that defied the terrorists at the Pentagon on September 12, 2001. Thank you to all who serve or have served our nation by laying your lives on the line for our freedom and safety.

This flag now hangs in the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington DC.

Special thanks to our fathers:

* Edward T Morrissey Sr, Army, Korean War - 1951-53 (now Admiral Emeritus at CQ!)

* Paul Flesch, USMC, World War II (1944-45), Korean War (50-52?), deceased 1991

And a happy belated birthday to the men and women of the Marine Corps, which celebrated its 230th anniversary yesterday. Semper Fi!

He's Ba-aaaaack ....

SCENE 157. A graveyard at dusk.

Slo-mo with handheld. Howard DEAN walks through the gates of a cemetery, a handful of posies in his hand. He looks nervously to either side of the fog-shrouded graveyard, seeing no one. He continues until he stops at a headstone, where wreaths of fog clear away enough for the audience to read KARL ROVE, 1999-2005. Shaking his head, DEAN places the posies on the grave just in front of the headstone --

CUE SHRIEKING MUSIC --

when a gray hand shoots out of the fresh earth and grips DEAN'S arm. A panicking DEAN cannot get any air to scream and cannot pull away. His efforts only seem to assist the corpse from its grave as more of the arm breaks clear of the surface. Just when it looks like the head must appear, DEAN finally screams --

SCENE 158: DEAN'S Bedroom.

Camera pulls back as we see MRS DEAN shaking DEAN, who keeps repeating "Yeee-aaaaaaaargh!" as we ... FADE TO BLACK.

Unseen by the camera in this clip is the Anne Kornblut report on Karl Rove's appearance at the Federalist Society and his emergence back at the White House as political coordinator par excellence. Now appearing unhindered by any legal complications, Rove reportedly has dived back into GOP strategic planning at a time when the White House has never seemed more adrift:

Hunkered down for almost all of October while a grand jury considered his fate, Karl Rove has rebounded as a visible presence at the White House over the last two weeks, according to administration officials and Republican colleagues. He is running meetings and pursuing candidates for the 2006 elections - and, associates say, devising long-term political plans that suggest he does not believe he will face future legal trouble despite the C.I.A. leak investigation in which he has been involved. ...

"I've noticed a big difference," said one Republican in regular contact with Mr. Rove who declined to speak for attribution because the White House did not authorize it. "There's a spring in his step, more focus, more - something. Some sort of weight off his shoulders."

White House officials have insisted that the legal complications did not subtract from Mr. Rove's ability to do his job in recent weeks - disputing, among other things, that the botched response to Hurricane Katrina and the Harriet E. Miers nomination resulted from the political director's distractions. Nonetheless, Republican officials are now relieved to be able to demonstrate how engaged Mr. Rove is. Several have gone so far as to suggest that Mr. Rove's recovery is a harbinger of brighter days for the administration.

"I think he's focused on a lot of things - working to help people at the White House and talking to people on the Hill about the agenda next year, and he's certainly focused on the '06 elections," said Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, who filled in for Mr. Rove at the Oct. 15 event for Jerry Kilgore, Virginia's attorney general.

With the squishes in Congress abandoning ANWR and unable to pass even a slight spending restriction, as well as a White House which said, "Harriet Miers? Why not?", Rove's fully engaged presence has never been more valuable. Expect better times ahead? Perhaps, but at least we will see a better-organized response to adversity with Rove focused on his job. Second terms have always been rocky affairs for every president since Eisenhower, the last one to have a more or less free ride on the second pass. It takes talent and skill and a cohesive vision to get through it, and Rove brings all of that to the Bush administration.

I may not expect better times, but I do expect more Dean screams, and that will be enough for now.

No One Pops The Bubbly At The Federalist Society

The New York Times reports on the mood at the Federalist Society, the gathering of conservative attorneys that found itself having to defend its existence twice this year as the White House inadvertently fed a media bias against them as extremists. Despite the confirmation of one well-regarded conservative jurist to the Supreme Court and the nomination of another, David Kilpatrick describes a rather guarded sense of accomplishment by the conservatives at the heart of the movement to return the court from its direction as a superlegislature:

These might seem the best of times for the Federalist Society, the conservative lawyers' group established two decades ago to counter what its founders considered the liberal bent of law schools, bar associations and the federal courts. ...

But at the convention, among the 1,500 scholars, advocates and judges, a number of whom had been on the shortlist for the Supreme Court, the mood was anything but jubilant.

"What is there to be jubilant about?" asked Edward Whelan, the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a former clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia. "We have a Supreme Court that has been essentially lawless in so many respects for decades now, and a lot of work has to be done to restore it to its proper role."

I think the mood is appropriate to the occasion. After all, despite what appears to have been two very successful nominations (sandwiching a mystifying third, failed attempt for a political operative), the truth is that Bush has mostly played on home turf with the Supreme Court. Much has been made about replacing O'Connor as a swing vote, but O'Connor more often went right than left during her tenure when swinging away. The damage she did sprang from her inconsistency, a great example of what happens when a jurist approaches precedential law without a philosophical point of view on the role of the Court and the law.

That, among other reasons, was what created so much objection to the Miers nomination.

Bush won't get a chance to move the court to the right in a significant manner unless one of four liberal judges retire during his term of office -- Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer, or Stevens. Being 85 years old, Stevens may provide the best chance for Bush to make a sea change at the Supreme Court, and that will temper any calls for a filibuster on Alito. The Democrats will need to keep the threat to force a moderate appointment from Bush to replace Stevens if the occasion arises. The Federalists, meanwhile, recall the Miers nomination and the way the White House threw the Federalists under the bus during the last two nominations -- and don't hold much hope for a Luttig or McConnell nomination for any subsequent opening.

Still, we have added two high-quality and compelling young conservatives to the court, and that beats what we would have seen from a Democratic president or a DNC-controlled Senate. We need to keep an eye on the bench over the next two years and act in 2006 to protect a conservate majority in the Senate with the requisite courage to support a Janice Rogers Brown or a Luttig to the next opening for the Supreme Court. Otherwise, we will find ourselves back to the Souters and Kennedys, at best.

American Media Quit The French Riots Story

If an American consumer read today's newspapers, he would assume that the riots in France have ended. None of the major newspapers that had covered the uprising have any specific updates today on the story, despite the continued overnight violence and an increase in the oddball metric of burnt cars in Paris. Other than an a long-overdue address to the nation by Jacques Chirac and an analysis that repeats the same line the press has taken since the beginning of the crisis, nothing would inform readers that the streets of France remained ablaze last night.

Reuters carries the more factual update:

Police went onto high alert in Paris on Friday as France began a holiday weekend likely to test a downward trend in two weeks of violence by youngsters angered by conditions in rundown suburbs.

The country's worst unrest in four decades has receded since
President Jacques Chirac's government adopted emergency measures including curfews on Tuesday, but there was a rise in violent incidents in neighborhoods around the capital overnight.

Police said 463 vehicles were set ablaze across France, a slight fall from the previous night, but the number of vehicles torched in the areas around Paris rose from 84 to 111.

Paris has attracted more attention, and yet the media have nothing much to say about it. The French authorities have heard Internet and instant-message chatter that a big demonstration designed to recharge the uprising will be held in the next couple of days. CQ received an e-mail from an anonymous source that contains a rather specific plan and date for a demonstration, although I'd prefer not to pass it along and assist in getting the word out.

Clearly, though, the measures taken by the French have had mixed results at best. Curfews have convinced the joyriders to stay home, but hardcore rioters remain out in the street. An overnight arrest total of 201 across the country has dampened but not put down the uprising, and the police expect more, not less, this weekend.

And what does our media report on the subject? Craig Smith in the New York Times provides the media's approved narrative on the subject and nothing in the way of an update on the uprising:

[M]illions of French citizens, whether immigrants or the offspring of immigrants, feel rejected by traditional French society, which has resisted adjusting a vision of itself forged in fires of the French Revolution. The concept of French identity remains rooted deep in the country's centuries-old culture, and a significant portion of the population has yet to accept the increasingly multiethnic makeup of the nation. Put simply, being French, for many people, remains a baguette-and-beret affair.

Though many countries aspire to ensure equality among their citizens and fall short, the case is complicated in France by a secular ideal that refuses to recognize ethnic and religious differences in the public domain. All citizens are French, end of story, the government insists, a lofty position that, nonetheless, has allowed discrimination to thrive.

Smith doesn't bother to even mention Islam until almost the end of the analysis, and even then does not correlate the Islamist movement nor the warnings prior to the riots by the Algerian Islamist group GSPC to the violence. Smith only concedes that in such a despairing economic climate, the "youths" in the ghettoes -- always called "suburbs" in these articles -- can be excused for finding an identity in radical Islam.

Smith also reports that Chirac will only address France after the violence dies down, a rather remarkable position for an elected head of state, and that the violence has dropped "dramatically":

But the level of urban violence has dropped dramatically since Tuesday, when the emergency measures were announced. Five of the 25 regional departments that the government permitted to impose curfews under the state of emergency have done so, including towns on the French Riviera along the Mediterranean coast and in the northern city of Amiens. While the violence had already begun to subside before the state of emergency, many people believe it has had a damping effect. Only 482 vehicles were burned Wednesday night by rioters, down from 617 the night before. There were fewer clashes with the police, Mr. Gaudin said.

But Smith fails to mention Thursday night's continuing violence, nor does he mention the increase in Paris last night. Both of Smith's stories get buried in the back of the International section of the website (the footer says they're stories 25 and 23 of 29, respectively). Molly Moore only gets page A18 for her update in the Washington Post, where she explains that parental tears stopped the riots, not the French response:

While arsons and clashes with police are continuing in dozens of cities across France, fires have not burned in Clichy-sous-Bois since Monday night.

"The tears of our mothers stopped us," said Maldini, 26, a stout, French-born son of Algerian immigrants. He declined to provide his family name for fear of police harassment. "The parents, the mothers and fathers were all crying."

In the Paris suburbs and across the country, the incendiary rage of gangs of youths appears to be slowly subsiding. Using one barometer, police said 487 cars were set alight Wednesday night, a significant decrease from the 1,408 vehicles burned at the height of the frenzy Sunday night. ...

Even though the Paris suburbs have quieted significantly, the rampages are continuing in other towns. In France's second-largest city, Lyon, in the southeast, vandals attacked two power stations and caused blackouts Wednesday night, according to police. Schools were set ablaze in several places.

Again, no notice of anything that happened last night, nor of the increase in violence from Wednesday to Thursday using the same burning-car metric the press has used all along. All Moore can sneak in at the back of the A section of the Post is that the violence has not abated in other cities and towns.

Does the American media suffer from ADHD and find themselves incapable of following an important story for longer than ten days? Or do they find themselves increasingly unable to explain the serious and continued violence despite the bribery and politically-correct strategies employed by French security forces? It seems to me that the media cannot bring themselves to admit that the uprising has more behind it than bored youths looking to blow off some steam and acting spontaneously and unilaterally. The riots have a purpose, and they have a central control structure -- and that means someone wants to make specific gains from attacking France.

Who could that be? Don't count on the Times or the Post to find that out for you.

Alito's Conflict Of Disinterest And The Blogocon That Settled Nothing

For the past two days, the Samuel Alito nomination to the Supreme Court has made small news by actually finding a controversy that involves a factual issue. During his confirmation to the appellate court in 1990, Alito apparently promised to avoid presiding over cases involving the brokerage house Smith Barney, the investment firm Vanguard, and his sister's law firm because of his personal and financial connections to each. Years later, Alito failed to recuse himself from a case involving the first two parties, and Democrats now want to argue that Alito cannot be trusted now with a seat on the Supreme Court.

Based on the urging of Judiciary Committee chair Arlen Specter, Alito responded in writing to the committee:

Alito said a 1990 questionnaire he filled out for the panel covered his plans for "initial service" as a judge on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

"I respectfully submit that it was not inconsistent with my questionnaire response for me to participate in two isolated cases seven and 13 years later, respectively," he wrote. ... When he listed the companies in the 1990 questionnaire, "my intention was to state that I would never knowingly hear a case where a conflict of interest existed. ... As my service continued, I realized that I had been unduly restrictive," Alito said.

The White House and the GOP held a blogger con this afternoon, and fortunately I scheduled my lunch out late enough to join in. I took some notes, but Professor Bainbridge and Decision '08 has them laid out better. In my opinion, the conference call went long on invective and short on useful information. The organizers didn't give us much background on the cases themselves, nor did they tell us why Alito's participation did not constitute a conflict of interest. As a presentation, it lacked substance -- which is why most of the questions asked covered other subjects.

For my part, I don't find the argument at all compelling. Mutual fund management, as a number of arguments attest, does not equal a material interest in the broker who arranged the sale. I wish I could read the questionnaire itself to see the context in which Alito's alleged promise of recusal came; rarely do jurists promise to recuse in absolute terms for a hypothetical situation. I agree that issues of recusal in specific cases such as Vanguard should get discussed and debated in the Judiciary Committee with a nominee as it goes to judicial judgment and temperament. The bottom line for me is whether Alito has a pattern of operating from a conflict of interest and if any evidence shows that these skew his court rulings. Clearly in this instance, as his rulings were upheld after his later recusal, this conflict did not.

In fact, no one seriously argues that it did. Even if one concludes that Alito should have recused himself from Vanguard on the basis of his earlier promise if not the requirements of the law, he reached the correct rulings as a matter of law, rulings later upheld on a rehearing by other jurists. "Ruth Bader Ginsburg may have violated a federal law 21 times since 1995," the AP reported in 1995 regarding conflicts of interest over her husband's money -- and we all helped make her a Supreme Court jutice regardless. Her conflicts turned out to be inadvertent and harmless, which is the worst that can be said for Alito's as well.

As scandals go .... bo--ring.

Haaretz Fails As A Source

One would suspect that of all news sources that would have some sensitivity to urban legends regarding secret Jewish conspiracies, Haaretz might be primary among them. Unfortunately as bloggers discovered today, they apparently aren't. They started what will surely become an urban legend of advance Jewish knowledge of the Amman bombing, even with al-Qaeda claiming responsibility today, by falsely claiming initially that Jordanian intelligence evacuated Israelis from the targeted hotels minutes before the bombs went off in yesterday's attack.

Haaretz posts a "correction" at the link they used to spread what turned out to be an unsubstantiated rumor, but don't bother to apologize for it. Instead, Yoav Stern reports on the false rumor as if Haaretz debunked it themselves:

There is no truth to reports that Israelis staying at the Radisson SAS hotel in Amman on Wednesday were evacuated by Jordanian security forces before the bombing that took place there.

The Israelis were escorted back to Israel by Jordanian security personnel only after the attacks had taken place, contrary to earlier reports.

Al Qaida said Thursday that it had carried out the triple suicide bombings at the Radisson, Grand Hyatt and Days Inn hotels in downtown Amman, in which at least 57 people, including an Israeli, were killed.

Shame on Haaretz for publishing the rumor and then failing to apologize for its role in distributing it. For my part, this is the first moment I've been able to update the blog since readers and commenters informed me that Haaretz changed its story. I'm going to update my original post as well as publish this correction. I did say at the time that I found the report awfully strange:

This sounds quite peculiar to me, almost like the germination of an urban legend, but Haaretz has Jordanian intelligence escorting Israelis back to Israel.

If this is true, then why wouldn't Jordanian intelligence simply close the hotels and evacuate the guests somewhere else? I'd tend to consider this a bit unreliable unless we hear more confirmation later.

In the future, I will consider Haaretz a dubious source at best, and will likely not link to any breaking news there unless substantiated somewhere else as well.

Weldon Covers Able Danger Details On Busy News Day

As I reported on Tuesday night, Curt Weldon held a press conference to keep the spotlight on Able Danger. His timing, as AJ Strata notes, left a little to be desired; the testimony of oil executives guaranteed the better part of media attention would be diverted, and the later bombing in Amman would soon supercede everything else. AJ has a great review of the conference.

It garnered little media coverage, in any event, and what little it did tended to repeat what we already know. Weldon once again asserted that Able Danger gave the Pentagon two week's notice on the USS Cole bombing, as reported in the Myrtle Beach Sun:

Citing information provided to him by Navy Capt. Scott Philpott, the former manager of the Able Danger project, Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., said that two weeks before the Oct. 12, 2000, attack - and then again two days before - the intelligence unit uncovered evidence of a plot against an unnamed U.S. target in Yemen.

"They saw information that led them to unequivocally understand that something was going to happen in the port at Yemen involving an American entity," said Weldon, vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

"Two days before the attack, they were jumping up and down because they knew something was going to happen ... at the port of Aden," Weldon told a Capitol Hill news conference.

Lou Dobbs had Weldon as a guest on his CNN show later yesterday, and noted that Slade Gorton remarked that Able Danger was "simply irrelevant" to the 9/11 probe. That set Weldon off:

Slade Gorton is into what the 9/11 commission is doing, Lou. It's called c, y, a. Cover their butts, pretend it didn't happen.

How can you say something is historically insignificant that
Louis Freeh just two weeks ago on national TV said Able Danger
information was the kind of intelligence that could have
prevented the hijackings.

That's Louis Freeh saying that two weeks ago. Able Danger was
briefed to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in January
of 2001. How could you call that historically insignificant?

Lou, this is a cover-up. It's not a third-rate political
burglary. It's a cover-up of information on the largest attack
in the history of the country.

With the DIA smearing one of the whistleblowers and the Pentagon blocking Congressional investigations, it certainly appears that Weldon is right about the cover-up. If Able Danger was "simply irrelevant", we would have had a hearing in no time on it and allowed it to pass discredited into history. Instead, both the Pentagon and the Congress appear scared to death of Able Danger. Why?

Will The DoJ Probe The CIA For CYA?

A joint call for Congressional investigations into a rash of recent CIA leaks by Speaker Dennis Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist may get pre-empted by a criminal probe at the Department of Justice, Jonathan Allen reports for The Hill today:

Rank-and-file members of the House and Senate intelligence committees said they were in the dark yesterday about the timing and logistics of a possible joint investigation into alleged leaks from the Central Intelligence Agency, and there were strong indications that congressional action could be preempted by a potential Justice Department probe. ...

The Washington Post reported last week that the CIA has been operating secret prison camps in foreign countries to interrogate detainees. Many lawmakers said they could neither confirm nor deny the existence of such “black sites.”

At least two lawmakers, including the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said yesterday that the intelligence panels should defer to the Justice Department, which is determining whether to launch a criminal investigation into the matter, according to the Associated Press.

A House source familiar with discussions of the proposed congressional probe said he had been told that the Justice Department would be the primary agent for an investigation.

A Justice investigation would create considerably more pressure on the CIA. First and foremost, the FBI would certainly take over the investigation. The FBI's traditional rivalry with the CIA might be just what's needed in rooting out the increasingly transparent effort by some within the agency to undermine the elected government through selected and contextless release of classified information on ongoing operations. Also, the Justice Department will not prove as hesitant to use subpoena power to compel witnesses into court and force them to testify under oath.

As an added benefit, it will remove the incentive for some politicians in Congress to grandstand this into a political circus instead of solving a longstanding cancer in the midst of our intelligence service. The Niger dodge pulled off by Joe Wilson and his wife Jane Bond Valerie Plame only gives a taste of the capability for mischief that an entrenched bureaucracy can create, and apparently does create now, for an administration whose policies don't kowtow to their world view.

Blowing sensitive missions during wartime like the detention facilities and the airline cover can easily cost lives of valuable agents, not to mention the loss of critical information regarding enemy capability and movements. Overt acts that release such information are felonies and require vigorous prosecution, once the perpetrators are identified. It certainly provides a better use of prosecutorial time than an investigation to determine the person who leaked the status of a CIA employee who staged her husband's political credentials so that he could seriously misrepresent the little intelligence the CIA had bothered to gather in the wake of British analysis of Saddam Hussein's efforts to find uranium.

The recent rash of leaks intends on throwing the spotlight off of the CIA's effort with Wilson to derail Bush and turn Plame's husband into a CIA proxy for the 2004 election. Instead, the leakers just found out how much hardball the Bush administration might play to preserve the notion of executive control of foreign policy and protect the American electoral system from government interference.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers, and thanks Glenn for the compliment on the headline ....

Promise Them Santa Claus, But Give Them Paul Martin

Paul Martin pulled out Santa Claus as a reason to avoid a no-confidence motion this month in the Commons and to save his shaky grip on power for at least another two months. Meanwhile, the NDP and the Tories came closer to agreeing on a strategy that will guarantee an election in the winter that should closely follow the release of the second Gomery report:

Mr. Martin said he didn't understand the current rush for an election. Mr. Martin has promised to call an election within 30 days of the release of the final report from Judge Gomery on the sponsorship scandal. That report is due in February. He also said Canadians don't want a Christmas election.

"You know, they want to see Santa Claus, they don't want to see politicians," Mr. Martin said. ...

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper told reporters on Wednesday it was now clear that any agreement between the Liberals and the NDP had fallen by the wayside and he called the NDP proposal "innovative."

"I spoke to Mr. Layton," he said. "He is committed to bring down this government. It's a very innovative proposal that tries to address some of the concerns that we do share about the business of Parliament and the timing of the election."

Layton's plan would use an NDP opposition day to demand new elections from the executive. Instead of relying on a traditional no-confidence motion, the motion would be non-binding but could be used to build a precedent for a subsequent binding demand for an immediate call for elections. That would allow Parliament to remain in session for several weeks to get business accomplished. The timimg would force Martin to stick to his promise to have elections within 30 days of the next Gomery release.

Harper and the Conservatives appear to endorse this approach, which may be a mistake. They had an opportunity to end the Martin government directly and on the main issue of corruption simply by calling for a new government in a no-confidence motion, an honest and ethical approach that would contrast not only with Liberal behavior during Adscam but also with NDP's dirty agreement with the Liberal power brokers last spring -- the same ones in key positions during the height of the Sponsorship Programme, not so coincidentally. Playing footsie now may turn out to be necessary, but it does diminish the ethical quality of the electoral demands Harper so eloquently made earlier this week.

French Riots Abating Or Adopting New Tactics?

The media reports today indicate that the two-week-long French uprising has started to decline in intensity based on the number of cars torched, a strange echo of wartime calculations of casualties. The violence continued in the larger towns and cities, however, and the tactics have changed:

France's worst civil unrest in decades abated a day after the government toughened its stance by imposing emergency measures and ordering deportations of foreigners convicted of taking part in the riots that have raged for two weeks.

Over the past two nights, there was a notable decline in the number of car burnings — a barometer of the intensity of the unrest, police said Thursday. ...

Hamon said the rioting, which had spread throughout France, now appeared to be concentrated in certain cities, including Toulouse, Lille, Lyon, Strasbourg and Marseille.

And the AP finally mentions the "M" word:

But the fact that such extraordinary measures were needed has prompted national soul-searching about France's failure to integrate its African and Muslim minorities — seen as a key reason behind the rioting.

None of the major American media has much to add to the French riots today, as most of them have shifted their gaze towards Amman and the al-Qaeda bombings in Jordan. The only mention in the Big Three comes from the New York Times, which profiles Chirac as out of touch and possibly seriously ill, as his detached demeanor has caused some pundits to declare him irrelevant:

...[I]n the face of the most serious social crisis of his 10-year presidency, the 72-year-old French leader has become the invisible man. Even his declaration of a nationwide state of emergency on Tuesday was presented not in a sober, televised presidential speech in prime time, but read aloud to journalists by the government spokesman after Tuesday's cabinet meeting. ...

The only public utterance that Mr. Chirac has made about the unrest was a brief statement televised live on Sunday that expressed faith in republican values and a determination to restore order. His distracted demeanor prompted rumors that he might be in ill health (he suffered what is believed to have been a minor stroke in September). On Wednesday, Jerome Bonnafant, Mr. Chirac's spokesman, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Chirac's health was "excellent" and that he was carrying on in an "absolutely normal way," adding, "He has been far from absent; he has been present every day and nothing has been done without his personal input."

Does anyone remember the outcry that occurred when George Bush didn't get on TV in the 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina and make a personal expression of sorrow? That outcry resulted from a natural disaster, not a threat to the authority of the government. Chirac has yet to make any significant speech to his country as head of state in the face of a direct challenge to French sovereignty. It's as if the entire French command structure has forgotten why it exists. Instead of standing for French law and order and defense of French interests -- the natural role of the executive in any form of government -- Chirac has gone into hiding and his staff has prepared a slate of bribes.

They also want to claim success for their much-delayed response, but that may prove difficult to demonstrate. The rioters in these areas have begun targeting the French infrastructure instead of just parked cars. The rioters caused blackouts in Lyon by attacking two power stations. In Toulouse and Belfort, schools went up in flames, one by having its entrance rammed by a flaming car. Two days ago, the Lyon subway system got firebombed, although it apparently did not get damaged badly enough to shut the system down.

No doubt that the curfew had an effect on the riots. The French should wonder why it took the Chirac government twelve days to impose the easy first step in addressing the issue of rioting "youths". It will eliminate the copycat and bandwagon burnings. Adding in a threat of deportation might offer some deterrent for foreigners to join in the overt rioting rather than just the coordination and instigation, but most of the Muslims from the sink estates are French citizens, and most of those natural-born citizens to whom deportation does not apply.

What we have seen in France over the past two days doesn't appear to be the end of a riot, which usually burns itself out in a few days, nor does it appear to be an intensity drop among those still "rioting". It looks more like the wannabes have tired of the fun and games now that the French have actually taken some steps to confront the situation. That clarifies the identity of the enemy that France faces, but it hasn't stopped their violence at all. While the French count cars lost as their metric for success, the rebels count cities controlled through violence and mayhem. So far, with at least five major cities at the mercy of the attackers, it still looks like the momentum belongs to the Muslim uprising.

The End Of A Strange Interlude

One of the strangest chapters in the modern mainstream media came to a close today with the resignation or termination of Judith Miller from the New York Times. No one will be sure which actually happened, because in an extension of the he said/she said dynamic that has highlighted their relationship, neither Miller nor NYT executive editor Bill Keller can agree on reality. Here's the Paper of Record on the end of the relationship:

The New York Times and Judith Miller, a veteran reporter for the paper, reached an agreement yesterday that ended her 28-year career at the newspaper and capped more than two weeks of negotiations.

Ms. Miller went to jail this summer rather than reveal a confidential source in the C.I.A. leak case. But her release from jail 85 days later, after she agreed to testify before a grand jury, and persistent questions about her actions roiled long-simmering concerns about her in the newsroom and led to her departure.

Bill Keller, the executive editor, announced the move to the staff in a memorandum yesterday, saying, "In her 28 years at The Times, Judy participated in some great prize-winning journalism."

In a statement, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The Times, said: "We are grateful to Judy for her significant personal sacrifice to defend an important journalistic principle," adding, "I respect her decision to retire from The Times and wish her well."

From the way Keller put it and the language in the lead paragraph, it sounds much more like the Times insisted on the departure and had to negotiate a parachute with Miller to get that "retirement" Pinch mentions in his statement. Reading further into the story, the Times makes this more clear in its description of the negotiations:

Kenneth A. Richieri, The Times lawyer who negotiated the severance agreement for the paper, said one thing was clear to both sides from the start of those talks. "What made the deal possible was that shared understanding that she couldn't continue to report on national security matters for The New York Times," he said. "She'd become so much a part of the story."

Catherine Mathis, a spokeswoman for the paper, said it had been made clear to Ms. Miller that she would not be able to continue as a reporter of any kind, not just one covering national security.

In other words, unless Miller wanted to start pushing a broom around the newsroom at night, the Times had no job for her to perform. Some may call that "retirement," and as a euphemism, it will do. However, newspapers should concern themselves with reporting truth and not hiding behind euphemisms. One would hardly expect the Times to have accepted such PC drivel from a government official describing the departure of a close advisor under fire as a "retirement" -- so why does Pinch rely on such a laughable assertion, one which his own paper clearly reveals as a lie?

Miller makes it sound as though her departure was a resignation and the termination happened at her own instigation:

Partly because of such objections from some colleagues, I have decided, after 28 years and with mixed feelings, to leave The Times. I am honored to have been part of this extraordinary newspaper and proud of my accomplishments here – a Pulitzer, a DuPont, an Emmy and other awards – but sad to leave my professional home.

But mainly I have chosen to resign because over the last few months, I have become the news, something a New York Times reporter never wants to be.

According to the Times, she didn't "choose" to leave at all, nor does she agree with Pinch's characterization of the process as a "retirement". It doesn't take two weeks to negotiate a resignation, either. Miller got fired, and the two parties spent the last two weeks determining how much Miller wanted for a quiet end to her employment. It speaks volumes that neither side can bring themselves to report honestly about the end of her employment.

As both sides report, however, this ends an equally strange period during her incarceration and especially afterwards, when she agreed to testify to the grand jury. While she sat in prison, she hardly garnered the respect of her peers, who believed she got too cozy with her government sources. After her release, Keller and Sulzberger initially hailed her as a heroine for the free press. They quickly changed their tune, later publicly calling her credibility into question and suggesting that her reporting could not be trusted.

And yet -- the Times made no move to get rid of her for weeks. They kept her on staff all through the rest of the grand jury process, apparently only starting to negotiate her exit just before Fitzgerald's mandate ran out. The Times, which had defended the credibility of Jayson Blair right up until they fired him, put themselves in the unusual position of continuing to employ a reporter that they themselves now said was not to be believed. In e-mails that eventually made their way out (and can be read on Miller's website), Keller and Byron Calame accused her of all sorts of vague conflicts of interest.

If all that were true, why didn't the Times just fire her?

Nothing has ever made much sense when it comes to Judith Miller and the NY Times. Her departure distinguishes all of the major players in much the same manner.

AQ Targets Amman, Kills Muslims (Updated!)

A series of three bombs exploded almost simultaneously at American-owned hotels in Amman, Jordan today, killing over 50 people. Given the nature of the attack -- multiple bombs, suicide-based attacks, targeting the tourist industry -- experts believe that al-Qaeda staged the terrorist attack, probably Abu Musab al-Zarqawi from across the border in Iraq:

Suicide bombers carried out nearly simultaneous attacks on three U.S.-based hotels in the Jordanian capital Wednesday night, killing at least 57 people and wounding 115 in what appeared to be an al-Qaida assault on an Arab kingdom with close ties to the United States.

The explosions hit the Grand Hyatt, Radisson SAS and Days Inn hotels just before 9 p.m. One of the blasts took place inside a wedding hall where 300 guests were celebrating. Black smoke rose into the night, and wounded victims stumbled from the hotels. ...

A U.S. counterterrorism official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the strong suspicion is that al-Zarqawi was involved because of his known animosity for Jordanian monarchy and the fact that it was a suicide attack, one of his hallmarks.

In February, U.S. intelligence indicated that Osama bin Laden was in contact with al-Zarqawi, enlisting him to conduct attacks outside of Iraq, noted another U.S. counterterrorism official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. Jordan has arrested scores of Islamic militants for plotting to carry out attacks and has also sentenced many militants to death in absentia, including al-Zarqawi.

Despite the ownership of the three major chain hotels, Muslims comprised most of the victims killed in the attack. Most came from a wedding party at the Radisson, which had a large guest list of primarily Jordanians. However, the Radisson also is popular with Israeli and American tourists, which may have been the reason why it was included on the AQ target list. One might have expected the bomber to have realized that the wedding party consisted of Jordanians -- fellow Muslims -- if indeed that mattered at all to the Islamofascist lunatics who commit these obscene and disgusting crimes.

Haaretz reports that the lack of Israeli victims came from an eleventh-hour evacuation of Israelis from Amman hotels after a specific threat came to Jordanian intelligence (h/t: Hugh Hewitt). This sounds quite peculiar to me, almost like the germination of an urban legend, but Haaretz has Jordanian intelligence escorting Israelis back to Israel.

If this is true, then why wouldn't Jordanian intelligence simply close the hotels and evacuate the guests somewhere else? I'd tend to consider this a bit unreliable unless we hear more confirmation later. Update -- this was an unsubstantiated and false rumor that Haaretz later withdrew. See this post for my reaction.

UPDATE: The hotels are not corporate owned, but franchises owned by Palestinian families. DW West has the details in the comments. Also, Fox News reports that al-Arabiya claims three Iraqis have been arrested in connection with the bombings, but I have not yet found anything on the wires regarding any arrests.

Falluja-sur-Seine

My new Daily Standard column discusses the ongoing violence in France, which escalated yet again on its 13th straight night well past the notion of localized riots. With over 300 French towns targeted by well-coordinated tactical attacks, the "disaffected youths" meme can only find acceptance among the media and the French government. The media has gone so far as to ignore its own reporting in assuring us that Islamists have nothing to do with the French uprising:

Various media reports have described the coordination of activities and evasive tactics via cell phones, web pages, and instant messaging. French police have discovered at least one bomb-making facility in the riot zone near Paris and suspect that more exist elsewhere. Despite this rather sophisticated infrastructure of support for the riots and the warnings just prior to the outbreak of the riots they themselves published, the Washington Post's editorial page--and most of the rest of the media--seems stuck on the notion that poverty and a lack of opportunity alone must account for this sudden and growing uprising.

FRANCE--like much of the media--stood foursquare against Bush's interventionist policy in Iraq. So if Islamists have targeted France as their next front in an attempt to establish "no-go" territories in the center of Europe, it might call into question much of the anti-Bush narrative. Instead of Muslim anger being caused by America's policies of intervention, Islamofascism might really be a worldwide movement against Western interests.

I wrote most of this column yesterday in the early morning, and nothing that has been reported since contradicts the column yet. I predict that even a negotiation with French imams for autonomy in the sink estates will fail to budge the media from their lockstep analysis of the French uprising.

Let's Talk About Leaks

After watching the Democrats go nuts for the better part of weeks after their much-ballyhooed "Fitzmas" fizzled out with one indictment for perjury and obstruction of justice, the Republicans have decided to climb aboard the anti-leak bandwagon. Congressional leaders have now demanded investigations into the leak of an actual CIA operation to the Washington Post, which promises more subpoenas for reporters and plenty of headlines for a CIA that has been increasingly exposed as a political player for the Democrats during the Bush administration:

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee noted that the leak, which said the CIA-run prisons are used to interrogate terror suspects, could threaten national security.

"If accurate, such an egregious disclosure could have long-term and far-reaching damaging and dangerous consequences, and will imperil our efforts to protect the American people and our homeland from terrorist attacks," they wrote in a letter to the committee chairmen.

The note calls for a look into who made the leak, what damage was done to the United States and its partners in the war on terror, and whether the information was accurate.

The Washington Post reported last week, citing anonymous U.S. and foreign officials, that the CIA for the past four years has run a covert prison system that has included sites in eight countries. Details of the locations of the prisons, referred to as "black sites," are closely guarded among U.S. and foreign officials.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said the Republicans' call to investigate the leak was "only a play to the press, that's all this is."

Only a play to the press? Reid has to be joking. The Democrats have done nothing but play to the cameras since the Grinch stole their Fitzmas. First Reid unilaterally threw the Senate into a Rule 21 secret session for the first time in 25 years, ostensibly to discuss classified material but most obviously to grandstand after the Alito nomination threatened to steal media attention from Scooter Libby's indictment for not cooperating with a probe into an alleged crime that never took place. Yesterday Reid and Chuck Schumer, whose staffers still have not explained their felonious conduct in getting Michael Steele's credit report, held a press conference to air their demands that Bush not pardon Libby -- despite the lack of any suggestion that he might do so.

All of this foolishness arises from a leak of a CIA employee's name, who may or may not have been covert six or more years ago but has driven to Langley headquarters every day since then to perform analytical work -- when she isn't busy getting her husband plum assignments overseas so that he can launch political broadsides against the administration on his return. That has resulted in at least two Congressional investigations and a special prosecutor, none of which found any criminal problems except Libby's stupidity in trying to lie his way through his grand jury testimony.

Now we have a leak of an ongoing CIA operation involving the detention and interrogation of enemy prisoners during wartime -- and Reid considers a call for its investigation a PR stunt?

Talk about tone deafness! Reid provides another reason why the Tantrum Party has no business leading this country in their current state during a period where we find ourselves under attack by radical Islamists.

Hastert and Frist need to pursue this vigorously. The CIA seems strangely willing to interfere with civilian administration of the government during wartime, and it's about time we find out who seems to want to run a shadow government out of Langley.

NoKos Restarting Construction On New Reactor

The North Koreans appear to have started working on their once-abandoned reactor site, and have said that they could complete the 50-megawatt reactor within two years. This new development belies the agreement reached two months ago, when Pyongyang announced its intention to stop all pursuit of plutonium development:

North Korea has said it plans to finish building a 50-megawatt nuclear reactor in as little as two years, allowing it to produce enough weapons-grade plutonium for 10 weapons annually, according to the first public report of an unofficial U.S. delegation that visited Pyongyang in August.

The new reactor would represent a tenfold leap in North Korea's ability to produce fuel for nuclear weapons, which could give it significant leverage in talks aimed at dismantling its nuclear programs. North Korea tentatively agreed in September to "abandon" its programs, but the talks -- which resume today in Beijing -- must still resolve how quickly Pyongyang gives up its weapons and what types of incentives it will receive. ...

North Korea has said it has an urgent need for electric power, and Ri told Hecker the electricity generated by the 50-megawatt reactor would go into North Korea's electrical grid. Hecker said Ri acknowledged that such graphite-moderated reactors are not very efficient for electricity, but make very good weapons-grade plutonium.

The Institute for Science and International Security said that in June 2005, commercial satellite imagery did not show significant construction activity at the 50-megawatt site. But a more recent photograph from Sept. 11 indicated preparation for construction, including restoring a building near the reactor.

Rather than an overt act in defying the previous agreement, the North Koreans probably want the rest of the six-nation panel to give Pyonyang further concessions to stop construction -- likely hard currency, as the Kim regime has its insatiable appetites. It still should give pause to the negotiators who worked with Pyongyang to get the interim agreement, as well as China as a neighbor to the unstable Kims. The move underscores the necessity and the difficulty of wrapping up the details of an agreement quickly, and to start the verification process immediately afterwards.

A Good Night For Democrats

Democrats executed a near-sweep in state elections last night, winning every contest except the mayor's race in New York City, where liberal GOP incumbent Michael Bloomberg's re-election has been a foregone conclusion for weeks. In the single bright spot for Republicans, Bloomberg won a fourth straight GOP victory in NYC (Rudy Giuliani also served two terms) and broke Giuliani's record margin of victory by beating the hapless Fernando Ferrer by 20 points.

Other than that lone accomplishment, the Republicans took it on the chin. As expected, the New Jersey governor's race went to Jon Corzine, but not before his ex-wife got a chance to take a couple of below-the-belt shots at Corzine at the last moment. Despite some polling showing GOP candidate Doug Forrester pulling into a dead heat, Corzine sailed to an easy 11-point victory over Forrester.

At best, the Republicans had only a longshot chance in New Jersey, but they should have been competitive in Virginia's gubernatorial race. Bush won Virginia just a year ago and the GOP controls the legislature and most of the statewide offices. However, outgoing two-term governor Mark Warner has built up tremendous popularity for the Democrats. In the end, Tim Kaine won by six points over Jerry Kilgore while the GOP candidates for Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General edged out victories over their Democratic counterparts.

These races went in expected directions for the most part, although the GOP thought they could retake Virginia's executive until the final few days. The real humiliation came three thousand miles away, where the once-Golden Boy Arnold Schwarzenegger suffered a humiliating defeat on an election he created for referenda he championed. Every single measure he sponsored and for which he vigorously campaigned went down to defeat, and most of them didn't come close to winning.

The one which managed a close showing required a 48-hour waiting period for minors seeking abortions, a measure which lost by 4.6%. Reform of teacher tenure lost by almost nine points, while the restriction on political use of union dues lost by seven. Arnold's redistricting reform, which would have taken redistricting away from the gerrymandering fools in the state Legislature and handed the process to a panel of unaccountable retired judges, lost by almost 20 points.

That kind of thumping will have the GOP hurting for months. It underscores the loss of mandate that Schwarzenegger has suffered since taking over the state in a wild recall election two years ago. He may still win re-election next year just based on his personal connection to the voters in California, but his platform just got a huge no-confidence hole blown into it by the electorate.

What does this mean for the midterms next year? It shows that the GOP can expect a tough time trying to hold their margins. They need to understand why they lost in Virginia most of all; they let the Democrats steal the center away from them. California may be a lost cause, but the lessons there will be to pursue incremental success and not swing for the fences every single time an issue comes up. Calling costly special elections doesn't help build an image of fiscal responsibility, either.

Best of all, it should wake the Republicans to the fact that the successes of the last three cycles will not last forever, especially if the party does not unite to work towards a clear message and responsible goals. Star power and ex-wives don't win elections, and in the end, we should all be grateful for that rather than disappointed.

French Violence Escalates Despite Bribes, Curfew

The French will have to go back to the drawing board after their attempt to halt the riots have come up far short of their goal. Instead of reducing the violence, the rioters instead changed tactics yet again and attacked the subway system in Lyon with gasoline bombs:

France declared a state of emergency Tuesday to quell the country's worst unrest since the student uprisings of 1968 that toppled a government, and the prime minister said the nation faced a "moment of truth" over its failure to integrate Arab and African immigrants and their children.

Rioters ignored the extraordinary security measures, which began Wednesday, as they looted and burned two superstores, set fire to a newspaper office and paralyzed France's second largest city's subway system with a gasoline bomb. ...

Officials were forced to shut down the southern city of Lyon's subway system after a gasoline bomb exploded in a station, a regional government spokesman said, adding no one was hurt.

Late Tuesday, rioters looted and set fire to a furniture and electronics store and an adjacent carpet store in Arras, in the northern Pas-de-Calais region and set fire to the Nice-Matin newspaper's office in Grasses, in the southeast the Alpes-Maritimes.

Nine buses were set ablaze at bus depot in Dole, in the eastern Jura region, and a bus exploded in Bassens, near the southwest city of Bordeaux after a gasoline bomb was thrown into it.

So new social programs don't work, and a heightened yet tentative police response has prompted a more significant attack on French infrastructure. Torching cars might signify localized discontent run amok; firebombing the subway system looks a lot more like a terrorist attack.

Will the media understand the significance of the tactical adaptation, or will it continue to pretend that this is nothing but youth running wild?

Tories Refuse To Play NDP Games

The Conservative leader, Stephen Harper, drew a line in the sand today and dared Jack Layton to finally push the Martin executive over it. Harper told Canadian journalists that he would not allow the NDP to use the Tories as a "bargaining chip" to extort a better deal on health care from the Liberals and PM Paul Martin, while Layton continued to stall on whether he would support an explicit no-confidence vote early in the next session of Parliament:

During Tuesday's speech — a campaign-style address which focused mainly on Liberal shortcomings and the findings of the Gomery inquiry into the sponsorship scandal — Mr. Harper noted that his party had tried to defeat the Liberals in the spring.

He said that effort was born out of concern over revelations at the Gomery commission but was ultimately unsuccessful because the NDP struck a deal with the Liberals. Right now, he said, he can't win a confidence vote in the House of Commons without the NDP support.

"I have no intention of allowing a conservative motion to be a bargaining chip in a parliamentary poker game," Mr. Harper said.

"If Mr. Layton wants now or at any time to bring down the Liberal Party and to bring it down clearly over their corruption, their overall record as a government, including their corruption, if he wants to do that and initiate measures, I can assure you he will have our support and our co-operation with that effort."

If that doesn't happen, he added, that "Canadians will have to assess his [Mr. Layton's] ambivalence on corruption."

Voters already know that Layton made a deal with the devil in the spring, a deal that allowed Martin to just barely survive a no-confidence motion on a budget bill -- one to which Martin added $4 billion in social spending to buy Layton's support. It shouldn't take much to remind Canadians of that rather spectacular escape that Layton's sellout allowed. However, it appears that Layton wants to remind people anyway, and his public game of footsie with the disgraced Liberal leadership has so far proven that strategy successful.

Harper, in this case, has the right idea. While the Liberals have done a pretty good job of selling Harper as a scary Conservative with some kind of hidden agenda, Layton has actually played the role out publicly to Martin's benefit, at least so far. As long as Harper shows that he will not accept such politicking and insists on an honest and straightforward no-confidence vote on the real issues -- and everyone knows that to be Adscam and Liberal corruption, not some technical problem in budgeting -- it lessens the effect of the "hidden agenda" smear.

Harper could be PM in two months if he played ball with Jack Layton, but the integrity of the process means more to him than the result. Harper needs to seize on that message and drive it home. Not only will that resonate with scandal-weary Canadians, but it will serve to shame Layton into doing the right thing when the no-confidence motion gets mooted. Canadians will see that a man who stands up for the integrity of the process even when a shortcut could bring him the success he craves rarely can also have a hidden agenda for dark purposes. If Harper makes that the theme of Commons in this session, he will eventually lead his party back to power ... and he will have done it with the honesty and openness that the corrupt opposition only wishes it could proclaim.

Another Set Of Able Danger Documents To Surface?

Another shoe may drop in the Able Danger story tomorrow, when Rep. Curt Weldon plans on holding a press conference to announce new developments in the case. Weldon's office released a statement today announcing the media event tomorrow at 12:30 PM ET, which can also be found on his website, I believe. Weldon's invitation promises the following:

The latest findings include: information Able Danger provided to defense officials about terrorist activity in the Port of Aden prior to the terrorist attack on the USS Cole back in October 2000; a discovery of another Able Danger member who confirms a set of Able Danger data not accounted for by the Pentagon; recent statements by the 9-11 Commission about Able Danger; and the latest efforts by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to smear Able Danger member Lt. Col. Shaffer who broke the silence about the Pentagon's efforts to track al-Qaeda worldwide prior to September 11 [emphases mine -- CE].

We already know about the smear attempt, and also the DIA's railroading of Shaffer in stripping him of his clearances for picayune offenses that go far back into his past -- which should have already been part of his security reviews several times over. I won't get a chance to listen into the press conference, but I will be following up with great interest later in the evening.

CQ Media Notes

I will be appearing on the Lars Larson show at 6:30 PM CT to discuss the French riots. Lars has tried to make arrangements to have me on the show for a long time now, and it finally looks like it worked out for tonight - and I'm delighted to join him. I hope CQ readers will be able to listen in ... more later.

UPDATE: I had a great time talking with Lars -- he and his producers run a very tight, professional ship, and Lars gave me plenty of time to talk through my points. If any CQ readers had a chance to catch the segment, let me know what you think about it.

Demographics Are Destiny

The above title actually came from the lips of David Walker, who used the phrase to show the eventual time bomb of Medicare on the American financial system. However, it could have also headlined Michael Gurfinkiel's article in today's New York Sun regarding the ongoing uprising in France. Despite the collective silence by the Exempt Media on the ethnic and religious components of the riots that have engulfed the French, the fact remains that the areas where the violence originated and where it still flourishes find themselves with a common demographic component:

It is one thing to know in theory that France has undergone major ethnic changes over the past 30 years and another thing altogether to confront a mass ethnic insurgency. The figures are inescapable. There are about 60 million inhabitants in continental France, plus 2 million citizens in the overseas territories (essentially the French West Indies and La Reunion island in the Indian Ocean). About 20 million, most of them white and Christian, are over 50.

Out of the remaining 40 million or so, 10 million or so belong to the ethnic minorities: Muslim North Africans, Muslim Turks or Near Easterners, Muslim Black Africans, Christian West Indian, African or Reunionese blacks. When one regards to the youngest age brackets, the proportion is even larger. It is estimated that 35% of all French inhabitants under 20, and 50% of all inhabitants in the major urban centers, belong to the ethnic minorities. Islam alone may claim respectively 30% and 45%. Since war is essentially the business of youths, the combatant ratio in any ethnic war may thus be one to one.

Which brings us to a second question: How ethnic is the present violence in France? Liberal commentators, both in France and abroad, tend to say that poverty and unemployment, rather than race or religion, are the driving force behind the riots. Mr. Villepin himself tends to share this view, at least in part. He said yesterday on TV that he is earmarking enormous credits for housing rehabilitation, education, and state-supported jobs in the areas where the unrest has developed. But the fact remains that only ethnic youths are rioting, that most of them explicitly pledge allegiance to Islam and such Muslim heroes as Osama bin Laden, that the Islamic motto - Allahu Akbar - is usually their war cry, and that they submit only to archconservative or radical imams.

The fact also remains, according to many witnesses, that the rioters torch only "white" cars, meaning white owned cars, and spare "Islamic" or "black" ones. One way to discriminate between them is to look for ethnic signs like a sticker with Koranic verses or a picture of the Kaaba in Mekka or a stylized map of Africa. Further evidence of the animating influence in the riots lies with the French rap music to which the perpetrators listen. Such music obsessively describes White France as a sexual prey.

Why does the media decide to play this down? The Washington Post editorial board dimissess such talk altogether without even bothering to argue it, a disappointment considering that their newspaper was one of the only American media outlets discussing any Islamist connections to the violence. It's doubly ironic, as their own John Ward Anderson warned Post readers just a fortnight before the riots that French citizens had been trained in urban-warfare techniques in the Middle East the past few months, including bomb making and mobile attacks on police.

The Sun's reporting gives a better look at the demographics involved in the riots and the areas in which the violence occurs than any other media so far, and more than suggests that the French and the media elite want to fool themselves as well as us that poverty alone explains why all of France has been on fire for the past several days. We shall see with whom the French wind up negotiating an end to the riots to determine whether they had it right.

The Ramadan Offensive?

The Islamists appear to have coordinated a worldwide attack plan for Ramadan celebrations this year. While France burns in riots originating out of mainly Muslim ghettoes, Australia barely escaped a large-scale attack on its transportation systems yesterday, making over a dozen arrests just after the passage of a new anti-terrorist law that made the detentions possible:

Police arrested 17 terror suspects in Australia's two biggest cities Tuesday in raids authorities said foiled a plot to carry out a catastrophic terror attack. A radical Muslim cleric known for praising Osama bin Laden was charged with masterminding the plot.

More than 500 police backed up by helicopters were involved in raids across Sydney and Melbourne, arresting eight men in Sydney and nine in Melbourne and seizing chemicals, weapons, computers and backpacks. ...

"The members of the Sydney group have been gathering chemicals of a kind that were used in the London Underground bombings," Maidment said. "Each of the members of the group are committed to the cause of violent jihad."

He said they underwent military-style training at a rural camp northeast of Melbourne.

The Australian police told reporters that they considered this effort to have cut it very close to the actual target date of the attack. Muslims around the world celebrated the end of Ramadan on November 3rd (2nd in the US). It seems as though the Islamists among them want to celebrate with bonfires and fireworks -- at least, bonfires and fireworks in the Osama bin Laden style.

The Ramadan offensive, if it turns out to be such, would have had the West fighting not just on one front but many, taking advantage of the asymmetrical approach to warfare that the terrorists require. The French will have to address 300 fronts in its own nation alone, while the Australian attacks would have tied up their security forces for weeks. All of that would sap Western support efforts for the upcoming elections in Iraq, where focused and strong assistance will be needed to ensure a free and fair election throughout the nation. People have expected to see an increase in violence within Iraq to distract the Coalition partners and undermine efforts to establish democracy. It could be that the Islamists have thought better of attacking American or Iraqi forces head on and instead spread their efforts across the entire Western world to erode our collective will.

UPDATE: Ramadan ended November 3rd; thanks to CQ reader Piers in the comments.

Curfews Don't Stop Rioting

The riots in France continued for a twelfth straight night as the French have turned to a two-pronged plan of curfews and offers of new social programs to stop the violent uprising that has originated from primarily Muslim neighborhoods. The new curfew laws come under the authority of a state of emergency called by the French cabinet and grant broad powers to the police to conduct raids on suspected weapons caches:

After a 12th night of violence, Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister, said state of emergency laws would be used to quell the disturbances.

"We will now be able to act in a preventative manner to avoid these incidents," Mr Sarkozy said. "We will monitor, bit by bit, the evolution of events."

Among other powers, police will be able to conduct raids if they suspect weapons are being stockpiled, Mr Sarkozy said.

He did not say where or how curfews might be imposed or how long they might last, but a French government spokesman said the curfews will come into effect at midnight tonight.

The action follows a night in which almost 1200 cars were lost to arson, down just a bit from the previous night's total of 1500. The violence appears to keep spreading, however, even with the slightly lower car loss from the previous night. Yesterday the uprising claimed its first death in Stains, a Parisian suburb, and the Los Angeles Times reports that it hardly made an impression on the people in the riot zone:

Le Chenadec was part of the aging native French population that lives warily alongside the children and grandchildren of North African, Asian and black immigrants. Told they are French but treated as outsiders, the youths are adrift in joblessness, crime and, more than ever, unfocused rage.

The beefy, white-mustached Le Chenadec, 61, was a retired auto worker and a leader of the residents' council in his building. On Friday, he went outside with a neighbor to check on a fire ignited in garbage cans — a spark compared with the walls of flame that have swept this depressed region north of Paris.

A man of about 20 approached and exchanged words with the two residents. Then he knocked Le Chenadec to the pavement with a crushing punch. The assailant has not been captured. ...

No one on the boulevard admitted participating in the riots. Nor did they excuse the death of Le Chenadec. But one muttered that the dead man had a reputation for belligerence and comments with a racist tinge.

"The kind of French guy with a mean dog who was always saying, 'This is my building, back off,' that kind of thing," said a neighbor who asked to remain anonymous.

The Guardian (UK) presumes that Le Chenandec confronted the rioters before having been beaten into a coma -- without benefit of any quotes or sources -- where the LAT report at least digs up some witness testimony that suggests the man's only problem was a reputation for irascibility when it came to trespassers and troublemakers. The Guardian also reports that the French government has targeted that same segment for a new, sweeping social program designed to mollify what it sees as the leading cause of the social unrest over the past fortnight:

Mr de Villepin added that the government aimed to give more funds to community associations, accelerate housing renovation, offer individual attention to jobseekers, and ensure France's education was better suited to the needs of the suburbs, by offering apprenticeships from age 14 for those failing at school, and scholarships to those succeeding. "We have to offer hope," he said.

Meanwhile, the Guardian took the rare step in the media to check on what the Muslim community leaders were doing regarding the violence. The paper states that Muslim leadership is "unlikely" as an organization linked to the Muslim Brotherhood issued a fatwa against violence earlier during the rioting. However, that fatwa was rejected by the nation's Muslim Council and the Grand Mosque of Paris -- and the notion that the Muslim Brotherhood suddenly stands for peace and violence-free, spiritual jihad seems rather ludicrous.

The French may hope to ride out the violence and buy off some of the leaders with a few new social programs they can ill afford, considering the problems they have paying their bills now. However, the escalating violence and the direct confrontation shown towards French security forces -- and the latter's unwillingness to engage -- shows a serious threat to French stability that has much more than the over-eager energies of youth as a cause. No one still wants to talk about the Algerian threats from six weeks ago, nor the follow-up intelligence reported by the Post that points to Islamist instigation of the uprising. The media has remained silent on these points despite having all but connected the dots towards an eventual attack on France as late as October 19th, less than a fortnight before the uprising.

Until the French take the threat seriously, every offer they make of social programs and concessions to autonomy will only encourage the violence to continue until the Islamists get the Bantustans they want in the heart of Europe -- ministates from which they can launch an all-out offensive against the West, similar to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the Middle East. The French seem to be betting that they can outlast the violence. Islamists, however, do not tire easily.

A Visit From Royalty

In case CQ readers might wonder why I haven't posted anything tonight, I had the good fortune to get a visit from royalty. Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, you say? Nay, knave!

Due to travel and the FM's illness, we missed the Little Admiral and her Halloween costume this year. Her daddy surprised us and brought her over tonight. She loves this outfit and insisted on having her wand and purse for the pictures.

It's hard to believe, but the royal visit, complete with a half-hour Disney Princess videotape and a coloring book session, beats blogging by a mile.

French Riots Come After Multiple Warnings Of Islamist Attacks

The riots in France have little connection to the Islamist terrorist offensive against the West, if the American media coverage gives any indication. However, alert CQ reader Mr. Michael points out that both American and French media sources warned of coordinated Islamist action against France in the weeks before the riot. Agence France Presse even had a quote from the maligned Nicolas Sarkozy noting the imminent nature of the threat in its 9/27 dispatch:

An Algerian Islamist organisation, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), has issued a call for action against France which it describes as "enemy number one", intelligence officials said Tuesday.

"The only way to teach France to behave is jihad and the Islamic martyr," the group's leader Abu Mossab Abdelwadoud, also own as Abdelmalek Dourkdal, was quoted as saying in an Internet message earlier this month.

"France is our enemy number one, the enemy of our religion, the enemy of our community," he was quoted as saying. ... Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday that the risk of terrorist attack in France is "at a very high level... There are cells operating on our territory."

The French government took that warning seriously enough to make a sweep of Paris for GSPC operatives. It didn't make a dent, however, according to the Washington Post. On October 19th, John Ward Anderson reported to American readers that the Islamists had recruited French citizens for Middle East training in jihad, with the intention of having them initiate warfare within France:

French police investigating plans by a group of Islamic extremists to attack targets in Paris discovered last month that the group was recruiting French citizens to train in the Middle East and return home to carry out terrorist attacks, sources familiar with the investigation said.

One French official said the extremists were using a virtual "underground railroad" through Syria to spirit European and Middle Eastern citizens into and out of Iraq. A senior French law enforcement official, who declined to be quoted by name because he was speaking about classified information, said French citizens had undergone terrorist training at camps in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

"There's always been an enormous jihad zone to train people to fight in their country of origin," the official said. "We saw it Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and now we're seeing it in Iraq."

That prelude certainly seems more than a mere coincidence to me. Within six weeks of the GSPC announcement, we see a massive and coordinated uprising originating from the ghettoes in which Algerian and other Muslim refugees and their families live. The "riots' have sophisticated coordination between cell leaders, using the Internet and instant messaging as well as cell phones -- an odd tool for a spontaneous demonstration where one neighborhood would hardly have those phone numbers at the ready.

The Islamist connection might get ignored by the media now, but when it involved Iraq as a training base (as the Post article did), they had no hesitation in writing about it. One wonders why they have suddenly developed amnesia about it now.

LA Times Analysis: Alito Not An Ideologue

One of the remarkable political stories this weekend was the lessening forces of the winds surrounding Hurricane Alito. Two leading Democrats in the Senate signaled that they will not filibuster Alito, and one -- Ted Kennedy -- said that he might even vote for Alito's confirmation. While some saw this as a ploy to lull Republicans into overconfidence, the Senators may have already done their research and determined, like the Los Angeles Times, that Alito's record shows a careful and thoughtful jurist that cannot easily be pigeonholed into a specific category:

Although liberal activists are portraying Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. as a right-wing extremist, his 15 years' worth of legal opinions do not promise fealty to any ideology. Though many of his rulings favor business or prosecutors, they are often narrow — and a sizable number cut the other way. Accordingly, Democrats in the Senate are cautious, and there is little or no talk of a filibuster. ...

• In February, Alito wrote an opinion that reopened the case of a black murder defendant in Pennsylvania because the prosecutor had removed 13 of 14 blacks from the jury pool. This strongly suggests racial bias had infected the trial, Alito said.

• Last fall, overturning a federal judge, Alito ordered a school district to allow an emotionally troubled New Jersey boy to transfer from a school where he was harassed by "bullies" who called him fat and "queer" and threw rocks at him outside class. Alito said school officials had ignored the effect of "the severe and prolonged harassment" on the young man.

• In April, he spoke for the appeals court in reopening the asylum request of a Chinese woman who showed evidence she had been forced to have an abortion before fleeing China.

• In September, Alito ruled for public housing tenants in Philadelphia who said officials had violated their contract by raising their gas rates during the year.

The LAT even has answers for the three cases that the left uses in its zeal to derail Alito's nomination. David Savage and Maura Reynolds shows how the Casey decision came from a lack of direction at the Supreme Court, and how four years later he wound up joining a majority that eased access to abortion in sn unrelated case. The Brady gun-control group faulted him for a decision he wrote that held that mere possession did not fall under Congress' oversight of interstate commerce. It also offers a bit more perspective on the Doe v Groody case, where Alito dissented and voted against allowing the lawsuit to proceed.

This might well have been an article that could have found room in the Washington Times or New York Post. Why has the Los Angeles Times (and for that matter, the New York Times below) suddenly decided to play nice on Alito? It appears that they have reached the same conclusion as some leading Democrats -- that they cannot argue Alito as a scary, strict ideologue. His track record after 15 years on the appellate bench shows far too much nuance and thoughtful, narrowly crafted decisions and dissents to paint him as an extremist -- and that they run the risk of looking like idiots again, as they did with Roberts, if they attempt to challenge him as such during his hearings.

Barring a scandal of some kind suddenly coming to light, it appears that George Bush will have another smooth sail on a Supreme Court confirmation.

A Lifetime Perspective On Alito

The New York Times' Janny Scott offers a surprise for Gray Lady readers and gives a fair, in-depth look at Samuel Alito in today's edition. She delves into the personal history of Alito and discerns that his conservatism has much more to do with his nature and little to do with ideology. Scott also finds that his brilliance has won over many supporters across the ideological spectrum, most of whom warn that Alito will likely have his own ideas on how to judge cases other than any strict ideological approach:

Throughout his life - at Yale Law School, as a government lawyer, as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals - Judge Alito has earned respect, even friendship, across the political spectrum. Some who describe themselves as liberals say they admire what they call Judge Alito's meticulousness and fair-mindedness - traits he appears to have come by early in life.

In high school, classmates called the studious youth Mr. President - and not simply because he was student council president. In the Reserve Officers Training Corps, he smudged his Princeton University affiliation off his helmet to avoid standing out. At Yale, his powers of artful argument were such that he won a moot court contest taking one side of a case that was before the Supreme Court. A few weeks later, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 for the other side.

Friends describe Judge Alito as disinclined toward small talk but brilliant in debate. He lives in suburban West Caldwell, N.J. - a quiet homebody with simple tastes married to a live wire and occasional practical joker. ...

J. L. Pottenger Jr., a friend of Judge Alito's at Princeton and Yale who is now a professor at Yale, said: "The reason I'm hoping he gets confirmed, even though I am a liberal, maybe an ultraliberal, is because I think he's an honest, well-intentioned guy who believes in judicial restraint in the model of Supreme Court Justice John Harlan and I can't really argue with that as a judicial philosophy. I don't think he's an ideologue. I don't think he's going to be out there trying to roll back the clock."

Scott provides excellent background on the Supreme Court nominee, including numerous quotes from the people who knew him in school and in the Reagan-era Office of Legal Counsel. It goes on in some length and detail about Alito and his personal journey; it may be the best look yet at a man whose overall approach appears to be allowing people to judge him based on his work alone. That kind of approach certainly sounds encouraging for a Supreme Court justice.

The Soft (And Quiet) Landing Of Gas Prices

One of the major media stories over the past two months has been the explosion of gasoline prices. Starting with the Iraq War but exacerbated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, gasoline prices have more than doubled over the past three years and have blown by the $2/gallon and $3/gallon milestones in record time. The media used gas pricing as a baseball bat on George Bush's energy policies and foreign policy. However, since the rebuilding efforts began after the twin hurricanes in the Gulf, prices have steadily fallen, but the media hasn't done much reporting on their decline. USA Today provides one exception:

Retail gas prices plunged an average of 23 cents nationwide in the past two weeks, marking a return to pre-Hurricane Katrina levels, according to a survey.

The weighted average price for all three grades declined to $2.45 a gallon on Friday, said Trilby Lundberg, who publishes the semimonthly Lundberg Survey of 7,000 gas stations around the country.

Self-serve regular averaged $2.43 a gallon nationwide. The price for midgrade was $2.53, while premium-grade hit $2.63.

In the Upper Midwest, the price of a gallon of gas has fallen by almost a third from its peak just a month or so ago. We had seen regular unleaded go as high as $2.99/gallon in October, but this weekend, Minneapolis pricing had dropped to the $2.05/gallon range. With more of the Gulf refining capacity coming back on line and action taken this week in Congress to expand exploration and refining capacity in the next few years, expect the pricing to drop even further.

Why has the media remained so silent about the drop? The superficial reason is that people don't complain about cheap gas, and all consumers can see quite clearly that it has dropped; the price improvements don't qualify as news. However, the quick response by the Bush administration to the disasters in waiving all regional special formulation requirements and in issuing a strategic but small release of crude from the National Reserve allowed the markets to balance themselves, keeping the nation from panicking into price controls or hoarding, both of which could have touched off long gas lines and out-of-control secondary market behaviors.

The media, so far, hasn't reported on these successful manuevers, nor has it reported on the psychological impact that expanded American exploration will have on foreign oil markets. The last time an American president allowed more robust oil exploration, the Arabian-based oil cartel OPEC nearly came apart under the weight of low market prices and the loss of one of its main markets. While ANWR drilling and extraction remain economical (even while theoretical), that threat of greater independence will press oil futures down, keeping the price lower for American consumers at the pump.

Don't expect the mass media to report this, however. It would demand an answer from politicians as to why it took so long to get ANWR and other exploration efforts going -- a question that eventually will be asked of the media itself, which provided much of the anti-ANWR hysteria that kept us from tapping our own oil stocks and buying from the Saudi royal family instead.

From Riot To Revolution?

On the eleventh night of spreading and intensifying violence, French rioters shifted tactics as the French finally began to respond. Last night, the mainly Muslim rioters fired on French police, wounding 30 and transforming the unrest into something more overt:

Last night about 30 police were reported injured by buckshot in Grigny, south of Paris. Youths seized a bus in Saint-Etienne and set it alight. In Rouen a burning car was pushed against a police station while cars were burned in Nantes, Rennes and Orleans.

Mr Chirac, speaking after an emergency security meeting at the Elysée Palace, said: "The last word must go to the law." He warned the rioters that they would be brought to justice, but also sought to show understanding for the plight of youth in poor suburban areas.

The law, however, appears incapable of answering. With riots breaking out all over the country and seemingly led by Islamists and drug dealers within Paris, the police could do nothing last night to stop the violence. More than 800 cars went under the torch overnight and firebombs were thrown at churches and schools as well. French security forces appear stunned and incapable of handling the situation, leading to calls for curfews and the mobilization of the Army to take over law enforcement in France:

"They really shot at officers," said one officer after about 200 youths attacked his colleagues in Grigny. "This is real, serious violence. It's not like the previous nights. I am very concerned because this is mounting." ...

The police union Action Police CFTC urged the government on Monday to impose a curfew on the riot-hit areas and call in the army to control the youths, many of whom are French-born citizens of Arab or African origin complaining of racial discrimination.

"Nothing seems to be able to stop the civil war that spreads a bit more every day across the whole country," it said in a statement. "The events we're living through now are without precedent since the end of the Second World War." ...

Reacting to official suggestions that Islamist militants might be orchestrating some of the protests, one of France's largest Muslim organizations issued a fatwa against the unrest.

That certainly makes this sound much worse than the French government or the American media has so far admitted. The police union has thrown in the towel and demanded that the Army supercede its own officers in enforcing the law. That voluntary surrender of privilege speaks volumes about the morale of French police and their willingness to participate in Nicolas Sarkozy's efforts to re-establish a rule of law in the so-called no-go areas in France -- areas which have expanded exponentially over the past twelve days.

And what of this fatwa and the "official suggestions" that Islamists have led this unrest from its inception? The American media have studiously ignored any such suggestions. Only the Washington Post has reported significantly on the Muslim component of the uprising, and even then only intermittently. The New York Times laughably reports this morning that:

Though a majority of the youths committing the acts are Muslim, and of African or North African origin, the mayhem has yet to take on any ideological or religious overtones. Youths in the neighborhoods say second-generation Portuguese immigrants and even some children of native French have taken part.

In an effort to stop the attacks and distance them from Islam, France's most influential Islamic group issued a religious edict, or fatwa, condemning the violence. "It is formally forbidden for any Muslim seeking divine grace and satisfaction to participate in any action that blindly hits private or public property or could constitute an attack on someone's life," the fatwa said, citing the Koran and the teachings of Muhammad.

Craig Smith never explains why an "influential Islamic group" finds it necessary to issue a fatwa against the violence if it has not taken a "religious overtone", or even what kind of Islamic group this is, an omission the AP makes as well. In fact, this is the first time the NYT has even associated the riots with Muslims at all, a remarkable run considering the official suggestions coming from France that alleges a connection between the two, as the AP reports -- and as anyone with half a brain and knowledge of the Parisian slums knew from the first night of the riots.

This kind of multi-culti blindness will cause France and the West to lose the war on terror. The Islamists are playing for keeps, and the media organs of the West want to pretend that all religions are equal and that only "youths" cause unrest. Until the Islamists have the French government under the knife, we can expect the global media to continue its apologism for terrorists who use legitimate social concerns to start armed insurrections in the heart of the West. Even with guns and bombs aimed against the French, the media will not recognize a war when they see it.

Movie Review: Shopgirl

Now that the FM's health has improved somewhat, I thought it would be a good time to go see a movie. One of the more difficult choices, though, is whether any movie really generates enough interest to spend the time and money on seeing it in the theaters. Most of the time, they appear to rehash the same ground that other films have already covered. One film, however, looked unusual enough to get us into the theater -- Shopgirl, based on a novella written by one of its stars, Steve Martin, whose work I have always enjoyed.

** Some Spoilers -- Beware **

Clair Danes stars as Mirabelle, a clerk at Saks working the glove counter who moved to Los Angeles to pursue an art career and find love. At the beginning of the film, neither appear to have shown much promise. She meets Jeremy, played by Jason Schwartzman, a crude and clueless klutz who nevertheless she finds just interesting enough to give a chance -- at least until the older, more suave Ray Porter (Martin) arrives.

Mirabelle sleeps with Ray, who shortly afterwards tries to convince her -- and himself -- that he does not want a long-term romantic entanglement. Most of the film has to do with their strangely distant relationship, where the wealthy yet emotionally barren Ray gives himself to Mirabelle in every way but the one she truly wants. In the meantime, Jeremy goes on the road with a band and learns how to act in a relationship -- and when he returns, he has literally transformed himself from an awkward teenager into a recognizable human being.

Shopgirl has a lot to recommend. All three main characters have mulifaceted personalities, although in Jeremy's case they get reduced to quirks. The acting is uniformly terrific, and the writing by Martin provides cliche-free dialogue -- except for the irritating narration, also provided by Martin, in which he attempts to sound like John Irving on a bad day and mostly succeeds. It gets in the way so badly that it almost acts as an insult to the audience. It's as if Martin doesn't trust the audience to understand the genius of the film, and he has to act as his own Greek chorus to explain the ending to us.

Shopgirl is a very good but flawed film, overall. Martin is especially good in the role of Ray as a man who doesn't recognize love when he has it until it is far too late. Clair Danes breaks our hearts as a woman who sees the good in Ray but cannot make him see it. Jason Schwartzman is hilarious as Jeremy, but Jeremy's transition is the one major false note in an otherwise painfully honest film. His earlier crudity is much too broad to buy into his transformation later. Had he been simply clueless, his self-improvement would have some resonance, but the earlier Jeremy was too rude and self-absorbed. We never see any hint of why that changes, except that the singer buys him some relationship books on tape.

I would still recommend the film for people looking for an adult look at dating and romance. Shopgirl shows the awkwardness and the illusions inherent in both, sometimes with a touch of humor, but more often with more than a brush of wistfulness and regret. Except for the narration, the film treats the audience with respect and provides a great antidote to the normal silliness and political correctness that has killed the great American box office this year.

Filibuster Momentum Dying Out

The political momentum of a Democratic filibuster appears to have dissipated over the weekend after a momentary corrective earlier this week. Last weekend, two key GOP members of the Gang of 14 asserted that they would not only support the confirmation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court but that they would also vote for the Byrd option eliminating filibusters on judicial nominations if the Democrats attempted to block a full Senate vote. By mid-week, the Gang had officially returned to wait-and-see mode instead, but comments today by two of the most combative members of the Democratic caucus make it clear that a filibuster has become a dead issue:

"My instinct is we should commit" to an up-or-down vote by the full Senate, said [Senator Joe] Biden, a member of the Judiciary Committee. "I think the probability is that will happen.

"I think that judgment won't be made ... until the bulk of us have had a chance to actually see him and speak to him," Biden told ABC's "This Week."

The bigger surprise came from Ted Kennedy on Meet The Press this morning. Kennedy went further than Biden, saying that he might even consider voting to confirm Alito. His only reservation at this point, he told MTP, was that the people who wanted the nomination of Harriet Miers withdrawn now seem so enthusiastic about Alito. If that's the basis of Kennedy's analysis, it demonstrates the shallowness of his intellect. He can't trust himself to determine the character and quality of the nominee in front of him -- a candidate for whom he has voted to confirm to the federal bench on two separate occasions -- so he instead focuses on those who support Alito in order to make a third judgment on the same candidate.

People should find it easy to come to a judgment on Alito's qualifications. Unlike Harriet Miers, he has a long track record of working on constitutional law as well as a solid career as a litigator, first as a prosecutor and later as an appellate attorney. He has spent the last 15 years as a federal jurist and has written plenty of opinions on many cases. This record shows him to have a splendid judicial temperament, excellent commitment to the law, a high level of legal erudition and scholarship, as well as having a more originalist/conservative philosophy of jurisprudence on the bench.

Why that record can't be enough for Ted to consider can only be definitively answered by Ted and his staff, but those of us who watched the Roberts hearings have a pretty good idea. Ted has no capacity for focused thought, as his mumblings and attention deficits during the hearings amply demonstrated. Expect the senior Senator from Massachussetts to have many more of those senior moments during the Alito hearings as well.

The lack of passion coming from the Democratic caucus while they can still control the media perspective on Alito suggests that they understand the risks involved in attacking an eminently qualified jurist. They attempted a number of smears against Roberts through their proxies at NARAL and PFAW, only to have egg on their face when Roberts very publicly took them to school during the hearings. None of the Democrats want to wind up looking like Fred Smoot talking trash to Steve Smith the week before getting his butt kicked all over the field on national television. The Democrats already had that happen once, and apparently they've learned a lesson from it.

You Have To Break A Few Humans To Prevent An Omelette

Dafydd at Big Lizards notes this Robert Novak column blurb about an exchange regarding ecoterrorism at the US Senate last week. Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) interrogated ecological activist Dr. Jerry Vlasak about the aims of the radical environmental movement. Novak has the key, chilling exchange that reveals the utter lack of perspective that produces ecoterrorists:

Dr. Jerry Vlasak of North American Animal Liberation was quoted as saying at an animal rights convention: "I don't think you'd have to kill, assassinate too many. I think for five lives, 10 lives, 15 human lives, we could save a million, 2 million, or 10 million non-human lives."

Questioned by Inhofe whether he was "advocating the murder of individuals," Vlasak replied: "I made that statement, and I stand by that statement."

That, however, gives only part of the story. Americans for Medical Progress has more of the transcript, which oddly does not appear readily accessible on the Senate's website. (Animal Crackers has the entire exchange archived, along with pungent and dead-on commentary.) Inhofe only got the ball rolling. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) becomes more and more disgusted with Vlasak as the hearing progresses, finally demanding that the witness be removed from his presence. But first, Inhofe makes sure that Vlasak hasn't been misunderstood:

Sen. Inhofe: So you call for the murder of researchers and human lives?

Vlasak: I said in that statement and I meant in that statement that people who are hurting animals and who will not stop when told to stop, one option would be to stop them using any means necessary and that was the context in which that statement was made.

Sen. Inhofe: Including murder, is that correct?

Vlasak: I said that would be a morally justifiable solution to the problem.

And now Lautenberg has his moment of epiphany:

Sen. Lautenberg: Dr. Vlasak, you approve of these dastardly acts in the name of liberation, of a liberation movement?

Vlasak: Yes.

Sen. Lautenberg: Do you have any children?

Vlasak: I have no children. And may I – Just to be clear, I don’t approve of any unnecessary suffering and I wish these things didn’t have to happen…

Sen. Lautenberg: You do, and what you said confirms this, so I just want to go there. I want to know who you are and what makes you tick, because it is so revolting to hear what you say about murder. These aren’t extermination camps. What is being done whether you like it or not is to try and improve the quality of life for human beings. This isn’t Germany. How do you feel about the people? You said you think that people who have a cause have a right to violence. How about the guys who kill our soldiers and who killed the people in the Trade Towers? They have a cause. Is that okay with you?

Vlasak: No the unnecessary loss of life is never okay with me. But I extend that loss of life to animal life, non-animal (sic) life as well.

Sen. Lautenberg: You are the super moralist. You are deciding where it is right and where it is wrong. There are many people who have causes. Some of them are justified, but to take tactics like the intimidation of people, to spoil their lives or spoil their ability to make a living is an outrageous thing to propose. You are anti-social in your behavior, obviously. But to sit here so smugly and be proud of the fact that you stand by this statement about five or ten lives…if those lives were your kids…maybe you don’t have anyone you love. Maybe you don’t have any kids.

Now here's the most frightening part of all. Vlasak claims to practice medicine on live human beings while arguing for murder as a political solution to end animal suffering. Lautenberg presses him for a CV to confirm this:

Sen. Lautenberg: Where do you practice now?

Vlasak: I practice in the Los Angeles area.

Sen. Lautenberg: You practice at a hospital.

Vlasak: I do, at a number of hospitals.

Sen. Lautenberg: What is your favorite – what is your dominant hospital?

Vlasak: I practice at several hospitals in the Riverside and San Bernardino area.

Sen. Lautenberg: Name one.

Vlasak: Uh, Loma Linda University. ... I deal in trauma patients, I see people die everyday. I save lives, but I lose lives sometimes as well. I see these people…

Sen. Lautenberg. But you are willing to take lives. That is the anomaly here. You are willing to say that somebody you don’t know, somebody’s kid, somebody’s parent, somebody’s brother, somebody’s sister – take that life, that’s okay.

Vlasak: These are not innocent lives.

These are not innocent lives. Where have we heard that before? It has all the echoes of Ward Churchill and his assertion that 9/11 victims at the WTC were "little Eichmanns" who had death coming to them. The ecoterrorists have the same mindset as the antiabortion lunatics who thought themselves justified in assassinating doctors who disagreed with them and performed abortions. In those cases, the lunatics at least thought they were protecting human life, although murdering to support a pro-life position sounds almost as dumb and deranged as one person can possibly get. Vlasak manages to provide the one position more deranged than that.

And bear in mind that Vlasak is the ecoterrorist spokesperson -- the supposedly legitmate mouthpiece that advances their case, similar to the role Gerry Adams played for the IRA. Vlasak supposedly provides the rationality that will convince the world of the rightness of their cause.

Murder humans, save rats. It sounds like the natural progression for the radical environmentalists -- and don't be surprised to see them start this kind of strategy soon.

Crossing The Von Choltitz Line

Violent riots in France have spread throughout the nation and now have crossed into Paris proper after remaining on the outskirts for ten days. The police have not yet shown any ability to contain the rioting, nor has the government come up with much of a strategy to oppose the escalation of the arson and protest. Last night's violence generated the most destruction yet, including a the loss of a police station to firebombers:

Saturday night's rioting was the most destructive so far as 1,300 vehicles were set alight and 349 people arrested, despite an enhanced police presence.

So far more than 800 people have been arrested and 3,500 vehicles torched, mainly in the working-class, high-immigration outer suburbs of Paris where unemployment is as high as 20 percent.

Cars were burned out in the historic centre of Paris for the first time on Saturday night. In the normally quiet Normandy town of Evreux, a shopping mall, 50 vehicles, a post office and two schools went up in flames.

The London Telegraph reports that police have found a bomb-making factory on the southern end of Paris, with enough gasoline to make scores of Molotov cocktails and plenty of hoods for hiding rioters' faces, showing that the rioting -- at least at this point -- has some organization to it. The police now believe that the entire uprising has central control via the Internet and cell phones. However, even the Telegraph waits until the penultimate paragraph to inform its readers that the suspected organizers of the riots are comprised of Islamist militants and drug dealers ... quite a different picture than what the media has painted for the last week, of a spontaneous protest based solely on economics.

The New York Times still completely avoids the "M" and "I" words in its report on the escalation of the uprising in France, but the Washington Post appears to have finally conceded the point in its coverage:

While French politicians say the violence now circling and even entering the capital of France and spreading to towns across the country is the work of organized criminal gangs, the residents of Le Blanc-Mesnil know better. Many of the rioters grew up playing soccer on Rezzoug's field. They are the children of baggage handlers at nearby Charles de Gaulle International Airport and cleaners at the local schools.

"It's not a political revolution or a Muslim revolution," said Rezzoug. "There's a lot of rage. Through this burning, they're saying, 'I exist, I'm here.' "

Such a dramatic demand for recognition underscores the chasm between the fastest growing segment of France's population and the staid political hierarchy that has been inept at responding to societal shifts. The youths rampaging through France's poorest neighborhoods are the French-born children of African and Arab immigrants, the most neglected of the country's citizens. A large percentage are members of the Muslim community that accounts for about 10 percent of France's 60 million people.

One of Rezzoug's "kids" -- the countless youths who use the sports facilities he oversees -- is a husky, French-born 18-year-old whose parents moved here from Ivory Coast. At 3 p.m. on Saturday, he'd just awakened and ventured back onto the streets after a night of setting cars ablaze.

"We want to change the government," he said, a black baseball cap pulled low over large, chocolate-brown eyes and an ebony face. "There's no way of getting their attention. The only way to communicate is by burning."

Rezzoug wants people to believe that Islam has nothing to do with the riots, but the Post gets closer to the truth in pointing out what has been obvious since the start of the violence. Muslims comprise the largest component of the rioters by far, the riots started in Muslim communities, and they began after the deaths of two Muslim youths who may or may not have been chased by police before they accidentally electrocuted themselves while climbing into an electrical substation. It doesn't take a math major to add two and two, although for the better part of ten days, it has appeared that attending j-school made that kind of arithmetic almost impossible.

Molly Moore gets even more detail for the Post in her latest report. (Moore so far has made herself into the must-read reporter on the French riots.) Cars have not been the only targets in this civil uprising. In just one suburb, the riots have destroyed a gymnasium and a youth center. Across France, the damage has begun to get spectacular and worrisome, and shows no sign yet of abating. Even for a nation that feels as though it has to have some kind of violent social uprising once a generation just to remain relevant, this spell of insanity seems like something different.

Is this the beginning of the war for Eurabia? So far, the purported Islamist leaders of the uprising have kept a low profile, but if this violence proves successful, they will have no hesitation in loudly demanding their spoils of victory: autonomy of authority in the sink estates, a recognition of sharia law in the Muslim enclaves of France, and the creation of de facto proto-states where Islamist lunacy can breed and produce even more Eurabian terrorists. Until the French get serious about protecting themselves and their national interest -- and that means meeting violence with a swift and crushing response, not handwringing and dithering -- the Islamists will grow more and more emboldened by the lack of French will to fight for their own land.

The Shock Of Taking Political Stands In Business

Newsweek covers a story that has percolated a while in the blogs and at a lower profile in the media recently -- the backlash against the American Girls line of dolls produced by Mattel. Designed to provide a more wholesome image than the whore-image Bratz line and a more realistic image than mechanically impossible Barbie dolls, American Girls has had phenomenal success, especially among families that consider themselves more sensitive to self-image issues. Primarily, the AmGirl market focused on more socially conservative families.

Unfortunately, AmGirl made the mistake of going overtly political by donating a $50K to Girls, Inc, which used to be known as The Girls Clubs, and promoting its charitable outreach. Girls, Inc explicitly promotes the upholding of Roe v Wade and homosexual rights on its website, which AmGirl devotees soon learned. Now AmGirl and GirlsInc executives proclaim themselves "shocked" that the partnership has created such a controversy:

American Girl, which prides itself on being the antidote to our Paris Hilton impulses, was blindsided by the reaction. The religious right has long been alert to even the most tenuous hints of homosexual cues in popular culture (see outing of Tinky Winky), but American Girl intends to sponsor math, science and athletic programs at Girls Inc. The company is horrified by the thought of an anti-abortion demonstration. "Given this group's focus on family values, we will find it particularly shocking and ironic if they choose to use graphic images in front of innocent little girls," says American Girl spokesperson Julie Parks.

Girls Inc. was caught off guard, too. The last time it got into trouble was in 1999, when some of its members questioned a partnership with Barbie, fearing the svelte dolls would create body-image issues among the girls who played with them. Founded 141 years ago, Girls Inc., which used to be known as Girls Clubs, offers after-school programs to underprivileged girls on subjects ranging from pregnancy prevention to substance abuse. And on its vast Web site, amid proclamations of empowerment, Girls Inc. states its support for girls who might be questioning their sexuality, as well as a woman's right to an abortion. "We went into this feeling so great and so positive about this partnership," says Girls Inc. president Joyce Roche. "We have been shocked."

Let's get this straight. I have no problem with corporations making donations to whatever cause their sharholders and their representatives (board, executives) deem fit. However, it seems to me that promoting a line of little girls' dolls to conservatives and then connecting the profits to a group promoting abortion comes as close to economic stupidity and hypocrisy as one can get. One could expect that kind of linkage with Bratz girls; considering what kind of lessons that line of dolls teaches, Planned Parenthood may as well produce the dolls themselves as promotional materials anyway. But perhaps it would be best for manufacturers like AmGirls to just stay out of politics in the first place -- or to remain consistent about their politics if they want to keep their customers happy.

For their shock, shock! at finding their self-selected conservative market unhappy and rebellious at their support of abortion, the AmGirls and GirlsInc executives get the Captain Louis Renault award from CQ. My guess is that the bright AmGirl marketing exec who came up with the idea of linking the two organizations will soon receive a different kind of award from the bosses.