When Irish Eyes Are Crying ...

Well, that certainly hurt! Notre Dame got an old-fashioned butt-whupping from the Michigan Wolverines at South Bend today, losing 47-21 and looking poor in almost every facet of their game. Even Fighting Irish head coach Charlie Weis had to admit it:

No. 11 Michigan finally put a Big Blue bruising on the second-ranked Fighting Irish in a 47-21 rout Saturday -- the most points scored against Notre Dame at home in 46 years.

"They deserve their just due," Irish coach Charlie Weis said. "I think it's important to understand that team just came and whupped us pretty good."

Indeed, they did. Chad Henne threw three touchdown passes to Mario Manningham, and Michigan intercepted Brady Quinn three times, forced him to fumble and shut down the rest of the Irish offense.

Michigan ended a two-game losing streak against the Irish and a three-game slide at Notre Dame Stadium. The win likely silenced doubters who questioned Michigan after a 7-5 season and two less-than-impressive wins to open this season.

The loss could hardly have been any more devastating. Brady Quinn misfired most of the day, tossing three interceptions and barely moving the Irish offense at all. Receivers dropped balls and the running game never got on track. Meanwhile, the Wolverines ran all over the vaunted Irish defense and rolled up 340 total yards within sight of Touchdown Jesus. Five turnovers killed any Irish hopes of a comeback.

Needless to say, the national-title hopes went down the drain, along with Quinn's contender status for the Heisman Trophy. Only the eighth time that the Irish have given up 40 or more points at home in their entire history, the result will likely push the Irish all the way out of the Top Ten ... and deservedly so.

Next week, the Irish have to go on the road to face Michigan State, which has given them no end of trouble over the years. They need to regain their composure and their A-game quickly if they expect to compete for a BCS bowl bid this year.

Victor Davis Hanson And John Hawkins On NARN Today

The Northern Alliance Radio Network returns to the airwaves today with a couple of very special guests. At 2 pm CT, we will have the extraordinary Victor Davis Hanson joining us, talking about ... well, whatever he wants to discuss! We will definitely discuss the analysis of the term "Islamic fascism", which seems to have academia in an uproar lately, as well as the erupting controversy over the Pope's remarks. He also has a post regarding the new deal to quintuple the number of Saudi students in the US, and we'll get to that topic, I'm sure.

At 1:30 CT, we'll call John Hawkins of Right Wing News to discuss the progress on the latest Rightroots push. He's been the organizing force behind this effort to support targeted races in order to secure a Republican majority in the next Congress, and he'll have updates on the candidates endorsed by the conservative blogroots.

As always, we appear from 11 am to 5 pm CT at AM 1280 The Patriot in the Twin Cities. If you're not in town, the station's website has an excellent Internet stream, and you can join the conversation from anywhere in the US by dialing 651-289-4488. We're looking forward to having you with us!

Note: this post will ride on top most of the day, so be sure to scroll down for newer posts.

Na Na Ney Ney Goodbye

Bob Ney became the first lawmaker to admit corruption in connection with Jack Abramoff yesterday, pleading guilty to conspiracy and false statements regarding gifts he received. Ney came up with a new excuse for his abrupt fall as he entered his plea:

Representative Bob Ney of Ohio admitted Friday that he had effectively put his office up for sale to corrupt Washington lobbyists and a foreign businessman in exchange for illegal gifts that included lavish overseas trips, the use of skyboxes at sports arenas in the Washington area and thousands of dollars worth of gambling chips from London casinos.

In a plea agreement announced by the Justice Department, Mr. Ney, a six-term Republican who once seemed poised to rise far in the House leadership, admitted to a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy and to making false statements about the gifts.

With the agreement, Mr. Ney became the first member of Congress to acknowledge criminal acts in the investigation of the former superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, an inquiry that threatens to ensnare other Republican lawmakers and dim the party’s hopes in the November elections.

Although Mr. Ney could face up to 10 years in prison, federal prosecutors said they would recommend a 27-month sentence for the lawmaker, who announced last month that he was abandoning his campaign for another term. He could also face up to $500,000 in fines.

Ney's actions demonstrate the corrupting influence that the power of earmarks and secret appropriations bring. He accepted thousands and thousands of dollars in gifts and even cash for gambling in exchange for the pork he delivered to Abramoff's clients. The ability to designate funds to specific no-bid contracts and unchallenged grants attracts the worst elements in politics and transforms our legislative system, especially regarding appropriations, into a garage sale where the highest bidders get the treasures of the nation on the cheap.

Of course, in this age of victimhood, Ney had to come up with an explanation to pull on our heartstrings even as he admitted selling us out to corruption and self-enrichment. The Congressman announced that he has entered a treatment center for alcoholism this week, while the statement (made through his attorneys) insisted that his dependency didn't excuse his actions. However, the statement didn't address why he felt it necessary to announce his alcoholism in practically the same breath as his guilty plea.

Ney suffers from a dependency, all right: an addiction to power and money. Alcoholism doesn't force people to take bribes and sell out their offices for their personal benefit. That impulse comes from another flaw -- greed.

Just as with Randy Cunningham, nothing he did benefitted Congress as much as his departure.

JAGs Were Not Coerced

After the White House produced a letter signed by the leaders of the Pentagon's lawyers supporting a clarification of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the Republican Senators opposed to the effort accused the Bush administration of coercing the statement. The New York Times reports today that the signatories did not get forced into signing anything:

The lawyers, known as judge advocates general, had been pivotal players in years of debate over detention, interrogation and prosecution.

They had repeatedly sparred behind the scenes with Mr. Haynes, the top civilian lawyer in the Defense Department. This summer, the judge advocates general emerged in public after the Supreme Court struck down a Bush administration plan to take an important role in opposing parts of a White House effort to resurrect military commissions for terrorism suspects in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

But at the meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Haynes sought to enlist the lawyers on the administration’s side by asking whether any would object to signing a letter lending their support to aspects of the White House proposal over which they had voiced little concern.

The lawyers agreed, but only after hours of negotiating over specific words, so that they would not appear to be wholly endorsing the plan.

What followed reflected poorly on all sides, but mostly on the judgment and ethics of those Senators who tossed accusations of impropriety without a shred of evidence, insulting not just the administration but also the honor of the Pentagon officers who signed the letter.

It started after the ad-hoc committee of JAGs hammered out the language in the letter with William Haynes, which supported clarification in general but left open whether the administration's definitions would be best for the effort. The White House then took the letter to the Hill, overstating the intention of support by the JAGs. Instead of reading the letter and parsing the difference, however, the opposition accused the White House of browbeating the endorsement from these career military professionals, slandering them with the indirect accusation of cowardice.

The Times shows that the JAGS are fighting back against this smear. General Charles Dunlap, deputy JAG of the Air Force , told the Times that he had no problem signing the statement as written, although he doesn't endorse the administration view of its intent. Dunlap also dismissed the notion that any White House could strong-arm military professionals into signing statements against their will and opinions. Dunlap was the only principal involved who would go on the record, but the Times' other sources corroborate his statements.

The JAGs agree with the administration that a clarification is required for Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention if military and intelligence are to continue doing the tasks this war requires. The group did not agree among themselves about the definition proposed by the White House, however, and instead used language that said they "do not object" to the proposal, rather than saying they endorse it. It took the collected attorneys "hours" to negotiate this language among themselves, which shouldn't surprise anyone who has worked with a collection of attorneys over a legal statement. I've seen corporate efforts to form mission statements take far longer than that.

What everyone at the Pentagon supports is a specific clarification of Common Article 3, in a form that Congress and the White House will enforce. Allowing a vague legal standard of "shocks the conscience" to remain the only guideline practically guarantees that any technique outside of that approved for local police forces will result in attempts to hold interrogators criminally and civilly liable for their actions in defense of the nation. Those men and women deserve a specific set of rules in which they can work that allows them to perform their jobs and to get the necessary information to save American lives. Without that, they will likely refuse to interrogate in any effective manner, and they could hardly be blamed for their refusal if Congress doesn't have the courage to produce any rules on their own.

Democratic Fecklessness On Entitlements

The Washington Post calls out Democrats on their inability to address entitlement reform in today's editorial. After noting that Congress has shown signs of backing away from the containment of health-care inflation for the third year in a row, they puzzle over Democratic resistance to means-testing for Medicare:

The second announcement was that the richest 4 percent or so of retirees will face steep increases in Medicare premiums. Until now, all patients have paid a premium equal to 25 percent of the value of the benefits that the average retiree receives. In the future, the most affluent will pay more, though they will still be paying less in premiums than they take out in benefits. This modest reform, which won't affect the premiums 96 percent of retirees pay, is expected to raise an extra $20 billion for Medicare over the next decade. That's a fraction of the program's long-term funding shortfall, but it's still worth having.

That's not the way some Democrats see it, however. Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.) is pushing a bill that would repeal the higher premiums, arguing that rich retirees should not be hit with increases because they have already contributed generously to Medicare via higher taxes. This is like arguing that the tax code is in danger of becoming too progressive -- a strange position for a Democrat. Ms. Lowey also worries that premium hikes may be extended to a broader swath of retirees, perhaps even to those with incomes of $30,000 or $40,000. That might raise harder questions. But we are not there yet, and it's worth remembering that retirees with that sort of income still are among the richest third of Medicare beneficiaries.

The entitlement programs are not going to be fixed without some hard decisions. If Democrats oppose modest changes that hit only the rich, how will they find the courage to support far-reaching reforms?

Neither party has made much effort to pursue entitlement reform of late, but at least the Bush administration had the courage to attempt a national dialogue on the crisis facing Social Security. While his partial privatization didn't win many converts, he told Congress that he would be willing to discuss a wide range of solutions, if they bothered to develop any at all. Republicans in the end could not overcome a refusal from Democrats to consider the issue, as well as resistance from within their own ranks to expose themselves politically on a touchy issue, even in a non-election year.

So while neither political force appears willing to address entitlement reform in a larger sense, the Democrats refuse to address it even in moderate measures intended to incrementally lessen the coming catastrophe. Lowey's argument reveals entitlements for the Ponzi scheme they've become; she refuses to raise the premiums for those most able to pay because they've paid enough through higher income taxes, an interesting take regarding progressive tax codes, but one which Democrats might regret later. As the Post notes, the higher premiums still remain less than the benefits it buys, which means that succeeding generations are still subsidizing present-day care, only not quite as much. Lowey wants the deficit to remain as is -- because these people are entitled to that level of contribution.

Entitlement programs will go broke over the next couple of decades thanks to this kind of thinking. The available solutions to deficit spending are very limited: either spend less or find more revenue. Lowey refuses to do either, which demonstrates the entire problem with the Democrats on entitlements. Unfortunately, we have no Plan C to address deficits, and the Democrats refuse to adopt either Plan A or Plan B.

The Limited Reluctance Of Israel

Israel has warned Lebanon that a failure to disarm Hezbollah will lead to a war with Lebanon if Hezbollah attacks Israel again. Tzipi Livni, Israel's Foreign Minister, told the Washington Post that the stakes will go up considerably if the terrorists attempt more provocations along the Blue Line:

The Lebanese government must fully implement a recent U.N. resolution requiring the disarming of the militant Shiite group Hezbollah or Israel will be less reluctant to attack the Lebanese state if Hezbollah resumes hostilities, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said yesterday.

Livni, in an interview with editors and reporters of The Washington Post, said that when the fighting began in July after Hezbollah seized two Israeli soldiers, Israel heeded calls from world officials not to undermine the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora because the formation of the government and the subsequent withdrawal of Syrian troops was an "achievement of the international community."

Israel launched attacks across southern Lebanon, Hezbollah's base, and it demolished bridges to Syria and bombed Beirut's airport. Livni said Israel's efforts to keep the military campaign limited made it more difficult to achieve its objectives.

"The result is it was more difficult to find these terrorists among civilians, compared to attacking a weak Lebanon," Livni said. "We could have done Lebanon in a few days, I think, if we had decided to attack Lebanon as a state."

"Now there is a need to implement fully and completely 1701," Livni said, referring to the resolution passed by the U.N. Security Council that led to the cease-fire between Israeli and Hezbollah forces. "If Israel will be attacked, this is the Lebanese responsibility."

This clearly escalates the problems facing the Siniora government in Beirut. Israel has now explicitly made the point that Siniora's sovereignty requires him to take control of all Lebanese forces, including armed militias that want to make war on his neighbors. Livni notes that the reluctance to undermine Siniora's democratically-elected government will come to an end in the next rocket attack, and Siniora will pay the price for any act of war in the future.

That warning was not just for Siniora's benefit, either. Several countries have troops in Lebanon now, helping to implement those portions of 1701 that they like while ignoring others. Kofi Annan and all of the contributing nations (along with Lebanon) have claimed that they are not responsible for disarming Hezbollah. The Israelis have responded by assuring them that an attack by Hezbollah on Israel will be considered an act of war -- and that if their troops happen to be in the way, then they'd better leave or take cover. If Israel has diminishing reluctance to sack Lebanon, then troops who lack the resolve to disarm terrorists will not present much deterrence, either.

It's hard to misunderstand talk this blunt and unvarnished. If the UN and the international forces cannot keep Hezbollah from rearming and starting their provocations, Israel will go to war with Lebanon itself and will not restrain themselves in the manner of the last war. Ehud Olmert at least learned that much in the previous conflict, and his government will be much less open to entreaties from international organizations that refuse to hold terrorists and their enablers to the terms of the cease-fires they impose on Israel.

Perhaps this blunt language will motivate the UN to implement the terms of their own pronouncements with at least a modicum of vigor. If not, it's not like they weren't warned.

Pope Apologizes For Being Prophetic

Pope Benedict XVI apologized more clearly for any offense taken from his speech by Muslims that decried violence in relgious proselytization, as Muslims burnt two churches in the West Bank. Benedict now says that he hoped Muslims would understand the core meaning of his speech, which appears extremely unlikely:

In a statement read out by a senior Vatican official, the Pope said he respected Islam and hoped Muslims would understand the true sense of his words. ...

The BBC's Christian Fraser in Rome says the speed with which the Vatican has reacted shows just how seriously it views the situation.

Reading the statement, new Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said the Pope's position on Islam was in line with Vatican teaching that the Church "esteems Muslims, who adore the only God".

"The Holy Father is very sorry that some passages of his speech may have sounded offensive to the sensibilities of Muslim believers," the statement said.

Meanwhile, the "esteemed Muslims" continue to escalate their demonstrations, providing the perfect example of what Benedict meant when he said that "The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature." A group calling itself the "Lords of Monotheism" firebombed two Christian churches in Nablus today:

Two churches in the West Bank were hit by firebombs early Saturday, witnesses and clergy said, and a group claiming responsiblity said the attacks were meant as a protest against comments by Pope Benedict XVI about Islam.

The firebombs left black scorch marks on the walls and windows of a Roman Catholic and an Anglican church in the West Bank city of Nablus. Father Yousef, a priest at the Anglican Church, said several firebombs hit the church's outside wall.

These were not the only churches in the Palestinian territories to suffer attacks. Michelle Malkin notes that a Greek Orthodox church in Gaza got hit with two separate bombs and a concussion grenade. The Jerusalem Post reports that the priest couldn't understand why Muslims would bomb his church, since it has no connection to Rome -- but the Anglican priests could say much the same thing.

People use words to criticize Islam; Muslims use stones, fire, and eventually bombs to protest back. When was the last time Christians threw firebombs at a mosque to protest Muslim imams characterizing Christianity as polytheistic? When have we seen Jews firebomb mosques for Muslim leaders calling them the descendants of pigs and monkeys, a common insult from both religious and secular Muslims in the Middle East? Muslims have proven Benedict prophetic, and don't think for a moment that this wave of violence has peaked.

Political leaders and opinion makers will soon start calling for Benedict to withdraw his remarks, even though he never aimed them at Islam specifically (only as an example from 600 years ago) and even while Muslims prove him correct. The New York Times put itself on the leading edge of this impulse yesterday, to the shame of their stockholders, but they will not be alone long. Soon and very soon, calls will come from around the world, even within the Catholic Church, for Benedict to withdraw his remarks altogether and apologize for having implied that Muslims use violence to spread their religious beliefs -- even while the evidence of Benedict's truth continues to expand all around them.

We have no end of dhimmis. We need men like Benedict and other leaders to tell the truth, rather than to submit to Islam's violent outbursts. His predecessor did the same when he challenged the evil of Communist oppression, speaking out against its totalitarian demands and standing up to its agents of violence. He almost paid for that with his life, but his example helped demonstrate the truth he spoke to a world that was only too eager to collaborate in order to save themselves from violence -- and in the end, truth won out over both Communism and violence.

The dhimmis will not have to stand alone. Will Benedict? Or will Western leaders and opinion makers finally realize that the freedom of criticism is at stake in these battles over speeches and editorial cartoons, and stand with Benedict and freedom instead of the rioting Muslims and their silencing violence?

I think you know where I stand. Where do you stand?

UPDATE: I know where The Anchoress stands:

Lancing a boil or two is messy work, so no right-thinking person can think we are headed for days of sweetness and light, but I am a little peeved at the way Benedict’s speech has been presented by some - I say some - in the press.

Benedict’s speech is not easily compressed into a 30-second soundbite, I grant you. And the print media must pluck the ripest phrases from any speechmaker’s text and build a story around it. But the headlines count. They matter. And some in the press - not all, but some - could not resist the urge to provoke precisely these violent and angry reactions and these predictable, camera-ready burnings in effigy from a people the press knows they can rouse to fury in less than three notes.

I mean, when isn’t the “Muslim world” furious, enraged, raising its sword and setting fire to flags or images? When isn’t some Muslim cleric demanding a retraction of what he perceives to he “harsh” words? When a few cartoons can be turned into worldwide protests, resulting in death to too many and literally cowing the media into relative silence, does the press not understand that a snarky headline or a careless phrase can cost lives?

Of course the press realizes this. That's why the New York Times demanded that Benedict apologize.

The Pope's Real Threat

Many people have written about the controversy over Pope Benedict's recent remarks at the University of Regensburg, where he quoted a medieval emperor about the barbarity of forced religious conversions. In a replay of the Prophet Cartoon madness, Muslims only escalated their rhetoric after the Vatican apologized for any offense the quotation may have given followers of Islam. Despite apologizing Wednesday for quoting Manuel II's words from 1391 (but not for its argument against violence in religion), Muslims burnt effigies of the Roman Catholic leader and staged demonstrations around the world:

Protesters took to the streets in a series of countries with large Muslim populations, including India and Iraq. The ruling party in Turkey likened Pope Benedict XVI to Hitler and Mussolini and accused him of reviving the mentality of the Crusades. In Kashmir, an effigy of the pontiff was burnt.

At Friday prayers in the Iranian capital, Teheran, a leading ayatollah described the Pope as "rude and weak-minded". Pakistan's parliament passed a motion condemning the head of the Roman Catholic Church. Ismail Haniya, the Palestinian prime minister, criticised him hours after a grenade attack on a church in the Gaza Strip. ...

The head of Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Mohammed Mahdi Akef, said the remarks "aroused the anger of the whole Islamic world".

Similar comments were made in other Muslim capitals, raising fears of a repetition of the anger that followed the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper earlier this year.

All this has shown is that Muslims missed the point of the speech, and in fact have endeavored to fulfill Benedict's warnings rather than prove him wrong. If one reads the speech at Regensburg, the entire speech, one understands that the entire point was to reject violence in pursuing religion in any form, be it Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or Bahai. The focal point of the speech was not the recounting of the debate between Manuel II and the unnamed Persian, but rather the rejection of reason and of God that violence brings (emphasis mine):

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practise idolatry.

This is really the crux of the argument, which is that argument, debate, and rhetoric are absolutely essential in forming any kind of philosophy, including religious doctrine. The words of sacred text do not cover all situations in the world, and therefore development of a solid philosophical body of thought is critical to growth and wisdom. That requires the ability to challenge and to criticize without fear of retribution, a difficulty that most faiths struggle to overcome.

Islam, on the other hand, doesn't bother to try. Benedict never says this explicitly, but Islam's demands that all criticism be silenced turns doctrine into dictatorship, which rejects God on a very basic level. A central tenet of most religions is that humans lack the divine perfection to claim knowledge of the totality of the Divine wisdom. Islam practices a form of supremacy that insists on unquestioned obedience or at least silence of all criticism, especially from outsiders, and creates a violent reaction against it when it occurs.

Islam bullies people into silence, and then obedience. We saw this with the Prophet Cartoons, a series of editorial criticisms that pale into insignificance when seen against similar cartoons from the Muslim media regarding Christians and especially Jews. It is precisely this impulse about which Benedict warns can occur in any religion, but modern Muslims show that they are by far the widest purveyors of this impulse.

Unfortunately, the Muslims are not the only people who missed the point. The New York Times editorial board joins Muslims in demanding an apology and an end to criticism of Islam:

There is more than enough religious anger in the world. So it is particularly disturbing that Pope Benedict XVI has insulted Muslims, quoting a 14th-century description of Islam as “evil and inhuman.” ...

Muslim leaders the world over have demanded apologies and threatened to recall their ambassadors from the Vatican, warning that the pope’s words dangerously reinforce a false and biased view of Islam. For many Muslims, holy war — jihad — is a spiritual struggle, and not a call to violence. And they denounce its perversion by extremists, who use jihad to justify murder and terrorism.

The Vatican issued a statement saying that Benedict meant no offense and in fact desired dialogue.

The Times missed the point, too. They aren't satisfied with the explanation offered by the Vatican. They want a "deep and persuasive apology" for Benedict's temerity in criticizing the use of violence and rejection of reason in religion, and specifically using a six-hundred-year-old quote that insulted people who regularly insult everyone else, including other Muslims. The Times counsels surrender to the threats and the violence.

Benedict opposes both. That's the real threat behind the Pope's speech, and don't think the radical Muslims don't understand it.

UPDATE: Satnley Kurtz at The Corner says that the Gray Lady has insulted Catholics, and demands a "deep and persuasive apology":

In the most provocative part of today's editorial, The New York Times uses the Pope's opposition to Turkey's entry into the European Union as proof that the Pope did in fact mean to offend Muslims, despite his protestations to the contrary. Of course, the conviction that national or regional boundaries ought to take account of significant cultural differences cannot and should not be stigmatized as offensive and bigoted. Yet the Times expanded this already provocative line of argument by implying that traditional Catholics are intolerant, and incapable of interfaith dialogue. The Times also intentionally confused the boundary between deliberate offense and unintentional offense based on carelessness or misunderstanding.

Well, if the Times wants to play these games, so can the rest of us. Be sure to post the nature of how Pinch's editorial board has offended your faith in the past so that we can start a list of apologies owed by the Times.

Since When Has Geneva Protected Our Troops?

The arguments employed by the opponents of George Bush's plan to establish specific definitions for Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions make one argument over and over again, and rarely get challenged on it. They claim that any redefinition or apparent backsliding on the Geneva Conventions will put our own troops at risk; Colin Powell made the same argument yesterday. However, they fail to explain how the GC has ever protected American troops during wartime:

Colin L. Powell, Mr. Bush’s former secretary of state, sided with the senators, saying in a letter that the president’s plan to redefine the Geneva Conventions would encourage the world to “doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,” and “put our own troops at risk.” ...

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, warned the administration against taking on Mr. McCain, a former prisoner of war.

“They’re trying to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions,’’ Mr. Levin said, “but the best expert on that is somebody who has very personal experience with those who violate Geneva, and that’s Senator McCain.”

Senator McCain is hardly the only American POW who had experience with GC violations, and that's the point. We have yet to fight against a wartime enemy that followed the GC with any consistency at all. The Germans routinely violated it even before Hitler began issuing orders to shoot captured pilots, and the massacre at Malmedy only crystallized what had been fairly brutal treatment at the hands of the Nazis for American prisoners (the Luftwaffe was one notable exception). The Japanese treatment of POWs was nothing short of barbaric, both before and after Bataan. The same is true for the North Koreans and the Chinese in the Korean War, and McCain himself is a routine example of the kind of treatment our men suffered at the hands of the Vietnamese.

In this war, this argument seems particularly despicable. We have been treated to images of broken and tortured bodies of our soldiers on television and the Internet, courtesy of the animals who oppose us in this war. No one suffers under the delusion that captured soldiers will ever return alive, let alone receive Geneva-approved treatment. Our enemy doesn't even fight according to the GC, so why should they treat our soldiers any better than they treat the civilians they target for their attacks?

If Powell and Levin and McCain can name one modern conflict where our enemies gave POWs treatment in accordance with the GC, I'd be glad to post it right here on my blog. Don't expect that kind of an update any time soon.

Congress wants the Bush administration to follow the GC in handling terrorists, and that's a legitimate position to take. If that's what Congress wants, then it had better be prepared to define acceptable and unacceptable practices with more precision than "shocks the conscience". That kind of loose, easily-manipulated legal standard only puts our men and women at risk for all sorts of courtroom mischief and misdirected prosecutions. We can follow the GC while defining what it specifically means into American law; it isn't the Constitution, and other treaties get incorporated into American law all of the time. Hiding behind that nonspecific standard is an abdication of Congressional responsibility, and the argument of reflexive treatment is a canard that these men are using as a red herring to hide that abdication.

UPDATE: I see via Technorati that a number of bloggers haven't bothered to read past my post title. I'm not advocating torture, as more than one of them stated. I'm saying that Congress had better define exactly what interrogation techniques will violate Common Article 3 if it wants to hold the military and the CIA to that standard in their efforts to glean intel from captured terrorists. Their failure to define that beyond the "shocks the conscience" language is a clear abdication of their responsibilities. They rightly demanded their prerogative in exercising checks on the executive branch, and now they have to do so responsibly.

I'm not arguing for torture anywhere in this post; I'm pointing out the intellectual vacuity of claiming that a legal definition of interrogator responsibilities within Article 3 will put our troops at any more risk than they face now, or that they faced in the last 70 years of warfare. Intellectual vacuity appears contagious.

Rightroots Push Continues

We're continuing our push for 100 contributions for each candidate in our Rightroots campaign, which has a slate of excellent candidates in competitive races for both the House and Senate in the upcoming midterm elections. As of this post, we have raised over $66,000 for the list, and we're just getting started. In order to make the stakes clear regarding the candidates, I'd like to highlight the two Minnesota races Rightroots supports.

Mark Kennedy has served in Congress for three terms and now wants to win the seat from which Mark Dayton will retire. Kennedy has a solid conservative voting record and wants to pursue national security and open government issues when he moves to the Senate. His opponent, Amy Klobuchar, has a small but consistent lead on Kennedy in the polls. Klobuchar has served as the District Attorney for Minneapolis without getting her hands dirty by actually prosecuting cases, and watched violent crime increase significantly during her eight-year tenure. She has Bill Clinton and Nancy Pelosi raising funds for her in Minnesota, and Mark needs to outpace her in the next few weeks.

Michele Bachmann has built a reputation for conservatism in her years at the Capital as a state senator, and now she wants to fill Mark Kennedy's seat in the Sixth Congressional District. Her opponent, Patty Wetterling, lost to Kennedy in 2004 for the same office, but she has plenty of backing from Emily's List, Pelosi, and the entire Leftist elite. Wetterling has a lot of name recognition for the courageous work she did for missing children after the heartbreaking (and unsolved) abduction of her own child. However, she has adopted a far-Left position on issues that will fundamentally change the nature of Congress if she replaces Kennedy. She also spent the last two months ducking Bachmann, refusing to debate her.

Bachmann is a reliable conservative, a tax attorney who opposes any tax increases, and a staunch supporter of the need to defend the United States. On a personal level, Bachmann is one of my favorite political figures -- a warm and friendly woman who raised 23 foster children with her husband Marcus, who enjoys meeting people and talking about any subject that comes up, and who can light up a room or a political gathering with equal charm and grace. I'll try to dig up our interview during the fair and podcast it tonight.

Rightroots has plenty of candidates like Mark and Michele to support. This weekend, be sure to drop a few dollars at the website and help keep Republican control on both chambers this fall.

Bush Ratings Rally Contributing To GOP Support?

With the midterms approaching, George Bush's approval ratings have started peaking, Rasmussen reports, with a 47% approval rating. That's his best rating since mid-February, and Rasmussen says that's no coincidence. In February the White House took a beating over the abortive Dubai ports deal, a story that broke just days before that last peak. That issue caused massive conservative outrage, probably unfairly, and dropped Bush into the 30s, where he spent most of the spring.

Now he has rebounded, and in time for the elections -- and that's no coincidence either. With control of Congress at risk, conservatives have rethought their anger towards the Bush administration. Rasmussen notes that 85% of Republicans now approve of Bush's performance, a large improvement from the mid-60s. Whether that comes from 9/11 retrospectives or from a renewed sense of Bush's commitment to the war on terror, it seems to have some coattails.

For instance, Rick Santorum has had his own renaissance in the same period as Bush. Once twenty points down to Bob Casey, Jr in his election bid, Santorum has now pulled within four. Democrats have hung Bush around his neck like a millstone, or so they thought. With Bush rebounding, Santorum has apparently benefitted from the improvement. Also showing signs of a comeback, Virginia's George Allen has rebounded from his verbal gaffe. Rasmussen will report today that Allen has now put seven points between himself and challenger Jim Webb, who tried to tie himself to the Reagan legacy and got scolded by its gatekeeper, Nancy Reagan. He's back at 50% and moving away from Webb.

These are moderate shifts, but for Democrats who hoped to ride the momentum of anger and mistrust into power this November, that momentum appears to be ebbing away. If George Bush continues to rally, they may find it more difficult than they had anticipated.

Border Barrier The New Berlin Wall: Democrats

Apparently in desperate need of a history lesson, Democrats yesterday described the border security barrier bill passed by the House yesterday "another political gimmick" and called the barrier a new Berlin Wall:

The House yesterday easily approved building 700 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border in an effort to get major border-security legislation on President Bush's desk before November's elections.

"The time to address the border-security emergency is now, before Congress leaves for the November election," said House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, applauding the Republican-backed measure and introducing a slate of new border-security measures that he hopes to pass this month.

Yesterday's border-fence bill was approved on a 283-138 vote. The vast majority of House Republicans were joined by 64 Democrats to support the measure. Six Republicans voted against it. ...

Democrats dismissed the vote as "another political gimmick" by House Republicans who passed a tough border-security bill last year but have since been unable to persuade the Republican Senate to take it up. The Senate remains intent on its own bill that tightens border security but at the same time grants citizenship rights to some 10 million illegal aliens and creates a guest-worker program that will usher hundreds of thousands more foreign laborers into the U.S.

Yesterday, House Democrats called the 700-mile fence a new "Berlin wall" and expressed concern that it would drive illegal crossers deep into the dangerous desert in search of an unimpeded crossing. Rep. Loretta Sanchez, California Democrat, added, "It does nothing to secure our northern border."

The Republicans have, as I predicted, latched onto the border issue as a defining point for the midterm elections. Bill Frist has told us on more than one occasion that while immigration reform would not be on his agenda in the new session, national security would dominate -- and that includes the southern border. Expect Frist to push for a companion bill to endorse the barrier before the month runs out in an attempt to assure restive conservatives that the GOP has not forgotten one of their biggest issues.

The Democrats appear intent on assisting the GOP in making this a defining issue. Loretta Sanchez may have a good point about the northern border, but that's hardly an excuse for ignoring the southern border, where a great many more people flood across on a regular basis. The adoption of the Berlin Wall comparison by the entire caucus gives the Republicans an early Christmas present -- a rhetorical club which they should use repeatedly in campaigning this fall. Someone needs to explain to the Democrats that the Berlin Wall was designed to lock people into Berlin, not to keep Westerners from flooding the Communist zone. Comparing a respectable tool that allows the Border Patrol to become more effective at interdiction to the wall that turned East Berlin into a penal colony shows that Democrats understand neither border security nor the history of freedom and Communism in the late 20th century -- the latter of which they amply demonstrated during the 1980s.

The same obstacles still exist in the Senate as did before: the insistence by a minority of members that border security has to be tied to normalization for the illegals already inside the US. However, that insistence may fade as we get closer to the election. The House vote showed some progress in attracting former opponents. Harold Ford, Alan Mollohan, and James Moran led the more than 20 Democrats who switched their positions to approve the border wall. All of them face tough elections this fall, with Ford vying for Frist's seat in the Senate. Only Moran refused to acknowledge the pressure of the upcoming election on his decision.

Frist has solid electoral gold coming to him from the House. He will not let it sit unused before the election. He will ensure that lines get solidly drawn on border security before the midterms arrive, and the Democrats will continue to oblige him by reminding conservatives of all the reasons they need to flock to the polls this November.

Now This Is Surrender

Pakistan has removed all doubt about its tenacity in fighting terrorism. The London Telegraph reports that Pervez Musharraf has released thousands of Taliban fighters caught in the five years since the US drove their government out of Afghanistan:

Pakistan's credibility as a leading ally in the war on terrorism was called into question last night when it emerged that President Pervez Musharraf's government had authorised the release from jail of thousands of Taliban fighters caught fighting coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Five years after American-led coalition forces overthrew the Taliban during Operation Enduring Freedom, United States officials have been horrified to discover that thousands of foreign fighters detained by Pakistan after fleeing the battleground in Afghanistan have been quietly released and allowed to return to their home countries.

Pakistani lawyers acting for the militants claim they have freed 2,500 foreigners who were originally held on suspicion of having links to al-Qa'eda or the Taliban over the past four years.

The mass release of the prisoners has provoked a stern rebuke to the Musharraf regime from the American government. "We have repeatedly warned Pakistan over arresting and then releasing suspects," said a US diplomat in Islamabad. "We are monitoring their response with great concern."

This doesn't just call into question Pakistan's stomach for opposing radical Islam, it calls our entire relationship with Pakistan into question. We had worked with Musharraf because he promised to take a hard line against the terrorists, and for five years he had pretty consistently met that expectation. That hard line allowed us to rely on his forces to contain and capture jihadists in his territory, which until now meant that they stayed out of the fight.

The release changes the equation. We have a more natural affinity to India than Pakistan, especially considering the autocratic nature of the Musharraf regime. While Musharraf kept faith with the terror war, we engaged his regime and maintained military and diplomatic assistance. Now that Musharraf has essentially surrendered to the jihadists, we will feel much less constrained towards pursuing our natural alliance with an established and credible democracy.

It may also mean that we will cease our deference to Musharraf's borders. While a full-scale invasion from Afghanistan would not be in the offing, we have refrained from sending any forces across the frontier to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda elements fleeing Afghanistan. The Bush administration worried about undermining Musharraf by creating restiveness among the hard-line Islamist tribes. With Musharraf gone squish, we will care much less about his continued political health. That could mean hot-pursuit missions and perhaps more effective suppression of the AQ terrorists.

If we get word on Osama bon Laden's location, you can bet we'll cross the border now, even if some may have advised against it before. In that sense, Pakistan didn't just free up the Taliban fighters, it freed up options for US forces in Afghanistan. If that undermines Musharraf, then that's his problem and apparently ours no longer.

A Bad Start For Al-Qaeda?

For the fifth anniversary of 9/11, al-Qaeda's executive officer Ayman al-Zawahiri celebrated by publishing a video that threatened a new phase in the group's offensive against the West. In this new effort, the Egyptian terror leader told viewers that AQ would now target Gulf states, including oil facilities, that cooperated with the infidels. Foiled attacks on a Yemeni refinery and a Canadian-Yemeni storage facility appears to have launched the AQ offensive, but both failed to achieve their mission objectives:

Suicide bombers tried to strike two oil facilities in Yemen with explosives-packed cars, but authorities foiled the attacks and four bombers and a security guard were killed, the government said Friday.

Friday's attacks happened 35 minutes apart, targeting a Yemeni oil refinery in the northeast province of Mareb and a Canadian-Yemeni oil storage facility at the Dubba Port in Haramut province — scene of a 2002 attack on the French tanker Limburg, an Interior Ministry statement said.

The statement said an investigation was under way to determine the identity of the "terrorist elements" behind the attacks.

Unlike the amateurish attack on the US Embassy in Syria, which looks suspiciously like a Syrian ploy, this attack does resemble an AQ attack. Multiple locations and coordination, along with target selection, seems much more in line with previous AQ operations, and given Zawahiri's statement, matches the goals of the terrorist group. The tape must have been the signal for the cells to complete their missions, and we can expect more such attacks in the coming days.

It appears as if AQ wanted more than just an economic target in Yemen. The president, Ali Abdullah Seleh, has ruled the Gulf state for almost thirty years, and the upcoming election promises a tough fight for him to keep his post. His cooperation with the West and the sale of oil to the West has attracted AQ's attention, and a successful attack might have undermined Saleh.

Fourteen AQ terrorists who escaped earlier this year still have not been found. The four terrorists who died in the botched attack could have come from this group, or perhaps lead the cell that undertook this mission and others. Whoever planned and executed it, the failure of the mission gives AQ a black eye and underscores their lack of effect in the years between 9/11 and its fifth anniversary. The scale of their attacks has increasingly declined, and their reach appears to have shortened considerably. That may have been the reason that Zawahiri announced the targeting of Gulf states and the Western assets there, rather than attacks in the US and Europe; they may no longer have the resources to carry out any other kinds of attacks.

It seems as though AQ has recently run across a cash and competence deficit, while the West has gained in intelligence and prevention. The end of the latest air attack shows that we have used the tools available to us to effectively penetrate their conspiracies, and the failure of that mission may have convinced Zawahiri to aim closer to home, thinking that security could be more easily compromised. It appears he still came up short.

He will try again, though, and he only has to get lucky once in order to get oil traders nervous all over again. Zawahiri is determined to commit himself to an economic war, and he's picking the right targets for it, even if he can't hit them.

Will Gas Prices Continue Tumbling?

As I drove home from work yesterday, I noticed that local gas stations now sell regularl unleaded at $2.17 per gallon, a level I have not seen in many months, perhaps before Hurricane Katrina took a large part of our production off line. Now analysts predict that oil prices may start a free-fall if the winter proves mild, perhaps sending pump prices to levels not seen in years (via Power Line):

The recent sharp drop in the global price of crude oil could mark the start of a massive sell-off that returns gasoline prices to lows not seen since the late 1990s — perhaps as low as $1.15 a gallon.

"All the hurricane flags are flying" in oil markets, said Philip Verleger, a noted energy consultant who was a lone voice several years ago in warning that oil prices would soar. Now, he says, they appear to be poised for a dramatic plunge.

Crude-oil prices have fallen about $14, or roughly 17 percent, from their July 14 peak of $78.40. After falling seven straight days, they rose slightly Wednesday in trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, to $63.97, partly in reaction to a government report showing fuel inventories a bit lower than expected. But the overall price drop is expected to continue, and prices could fall much more in the weeks and months ahead.

Why will the prices fall so low? It comes from the speculation involved in commodities trading. Over the past couple of years, traders have built a lot of catastrophe into oil prices, betting on future disruptions of serious scale due to bad weather, war, diplomatic difficulties, and bad economic conditions. However, it turns out that most of the risks either have fizzled or were overstated -- and now the market is somewhat flooded in oil.

Demand hasn't really changed much from expectations. China still commands more and more oil as its economy expands through modernization and limited privatization. Iran still may present a major problem to oil supplies, especially if the US gets sanctions imposed. However, China looks more and more unlikely to join in sanctions against Teheran, which means that other sources will not get taxed at any rate near to expectations.

Production has not caught up with this new dynamic. Thanks to the fevered hoarding of traders, production has remained at high levels even as surpluses mount, with the expectation that the high demand and global volatility would keep demand high. Now it looks like the high supply levels will start a tumble that may not stop for several months, as OPEC and other producers wait to see what production levels they need to meet to support pricing.

I doubt we'll see $1.15 per gallon. That's what I paid for gasoline 25 years ago -- and I don't mean that in adjusted-for-inflation terms. The instability in the region during the war on terror will keep the floor higher than that. However, cheaper oil will bring several salutary effects, not the least of which is the lessening of impact that any al-Qaeda attacks on production facilities might have. It will also reduce the partisan politics that currently surround energy prices, perhaps allowing some wisdom in determining a more sane policy for energy independence, one that relies on a massive expansion of nuclear power for electricity.

If the price drops below $2 per gallon, Democrats will have few outlets for their electoral hysteria before the midterms.

McCain Supports Rightroots Campaign

The big push has continued this week for the Rightroots campaign, and it has added a rather significant name in support -- Senator John McCain. Patrick Hynes, who works for McCain as well as blogs at Ankle Biting Pundits, reports that the presidential contender wants to use Rightroots to help maintain Republican control of both chambers of Congress. He also includes an entertaining video clip in which McCain uses humor to separate rally attendees from the GOP money that still resides in their wallets.

The Rightroots effort is in the middle of a push to get 100 new contributions per candidate between now and the 20th. Of course, every donation helps, but we really want to show that the conservative blogosphere can adopt a grassroots enthusiasm and support key candidates in the midterms. I can tell you that the endorsed slate include very winnable races for the GOP, and that running the table with these folks will guarantee another session of Republican control of Congress.

John Hawkins, one of the organizers behind Rightroots and the blogger who helms Right Wing News, will appear on the Northern Alliance Radio Network this Saturday to discuss the progress of the campaign. Help give him some good news to report this weekend!

The Momentum For Open Government Grows

The House has become the latest showcase for the building momentum for openness and accountability in federal appropriations. New rules for the House that require the listing of all earmark sponsors in the Congressional Record passed by a much wider margin than first thought, 245-171. The rule takes effect immediately and will apply to a wide range of legislation and conference reports, forcing earmarkers to own their pork instead of dodging responsibility for the pork.

The vote shows who on the Hill gets the new paradigm, and who still lives in the passing age of pork. Democrats voted 147-45 to defeat the new rule, and that included their leadership. Among those opposing the identification of earmarks are Nancy Pelosi, Sheila Jackson-Lee, Patrick Kennedy, Tom Lantos, Dennis Kucinich, John Conyers, Betty McCollum, Allan Mollohan, Barney Frank, Henry Waxman, and Ike Skelton, some of whom have been named as committee chairs if the Democrats retake control of the House this fall. Alcee Hastings voted to continue the practice of secret earmarking, no surprise given his impeachment for bribery that removed him from the federal judiciary, and the Democrats want to put him in charge of the Intelligence Committee. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the committee now, voted to support the rule.

In contrast, only 24 Republicans voted against the rule, and all but two of those are appropriators. Twelve GOP appropriators voted for reform, however, including Ray LaHood, a surprise supporter of the rule.

The White House was pleased by the result:

I applaud the House of Representatives for voting again this week in support of greater transparency and accountability in government. H.Res. 1000 would shine a brighter light on earmarks by requiring disclosure of the sponsors of each provision. This reform would help improve the legislative process by making sure both lawmakers and the public are better informed before Congress votes to spend the taxpayers' money.

It looks like the politicians in DC have started to hear the message. The paradigm has shifted, but the new tools we have received have to be used vigorously in order to ensure that the gains we have made are not lost. If the searchable databases never get searched and porkers never have to answer for their abuses, then we have won little. We need to see the birth of 10,000 blogs in order to keep a laser focus on the use of earmarks for political cronyism and bribery and eliminate them from our politics.

Ben Franklin responded to a question about the Constitutional Convention by saying, "A Republic, if you can keep it." We now have the tools to bring more openness to our government ... if we can keep them.

Arabs Increasingly See Lebanon As A Loss

At the imposition of the UN Security Council cease-fire resolution, the West almost unanimously considered the war in Lebanon a disaster for Israel. Most analysts insisted that Israel's failure to destroy Hezbollah amounted to a humiliation and worried about the energizing effect Hassan Nasrallah's victory would have on radical Islam's popularity in the region. These analysts would be surprised to learn that Arabs increasingly view Hezbollah's war as a disaster as well -- but a disaster for Arabs:

At the height of the war, as Hizbullah rockets regularly sent hundreds of thousands of Israelis scurrying to the shelters like "rabbits and mice," as some of the Arab media noted with undisguised gratification, the mood tended to be militantly euphoric, buoyed by the widely broadcast images of Israeli suffering and humiliation. But as the war came to its conclusion and life in Israel returned pretty much to normal, opinion in the Arab world has shifted to more sober analysis, as Lebanon, Hizbullah and the Shi'ites face the daunting task of what will probably be years of multi-billion dollar reconstruction.

Even a cursory perusal of the Arab press, will reveal that Hizbullah's status in Lebanon has changed for the worse, as many Lebanese come to the rather shocking realization that the south of their country, unknown to them, had in fact been transformed into an Iranian and Syrian launching pad against Israel posing an existential threat to their own livelihoods and to their entire country. Hizbullah is now on the defensive, trying to protect its political assets against a more assertive Lebanese domestic majority, that seems more determined than ever to contain Hizbullah's "state within a state," so that they are not drawn again into a destructive war with Israel, without as much as a word of consultation.

Many in Lebanon, especially non-Shi'ites, but also some important Shi'ite spokespersons, are calling for an end to the armed phase of Hizbullah's development and its integration into the Lebanese political system, like all other political parties, lest further provocation of Israel will expose Lebanon to even greater devastation in the future. In other words, they are demanding the disarming of Hizbullah.

Muna Fayyad, a Shi'ite professor at the University of Lebanon, and the Mufti of Tyre, Sayyid Ali al-Amin, for example, both questioned the right of Hizbullah to bring disaster on the Shi'ites of Lebanon, by dragging them into an ill considered adventure they never wanted, in the interests of a foreign power like Iran, about whom they were never consulted.

The war stripped more than a few masks from the players in the region. Nasrallah now has to contend with the fallout from his impatient attack on Israel, from the Lebanese and also from the Iranians who had wanted Hezbollah and their rockets as a threat to be feared, not an attack to be weathered and then discounted. His image as the protector of Lebanon has been shattered, and the Lebanese now see him as a threat instead of a savior. After years of Syrian control, they now have to recognize that a large portion of their country is under de facto Iranian occupation, and they're not happy about it.

This has eroded the veneer of victory that Nasrallah placed on the cease-fire. Western commentators and no shortage of Israeli pundits pointed to Nasrallah's claims to have prevailed as a devastating propaganda offensive that would make Israel and the West look weaker than ever. Arabs have taken a more realistic view of the war's results, including the fact that Nasrallah has to make those claims from undisclosed locations to this day. They scoff at his bravado, noting that Nasrallah's vaunted rocket attacks killed more Israeli Arabs than anyone else and proved singularly ineffective as a deterrent to the Israeli incursion.

The Jerusalem Post notes several indicators that the Arabs now discuss that hardly supports the idea that Nasrallah triumphed over Israel:

* Hezbollah lost almost a quarter of its ground forces and had to flee the sub-Litani region; Israel lost 100 men.

* The war left multibillion-dollar damage throughout Lebanon; Hezbollah barely dented Israeli infrastructure.

* Hezbollah lost a number of command-and-control centers that Israel destroyed during its incursion, and will not likely be allowed to rebuild them.

* Almost all of its long- and medium-range rocketry and launch materiel has been destroyed, and the short-range rockets that they have in large numbers proved completely ineffective, both militarily and as a political/terror deterrent. In fact, the failure of the rocketry to force Israel out of the war has severely damaged Hezbollah's main purpose for the Iranians, which wanted Hezbollah and its rockets to serve as a psychological weapon and deterrent against any military action. Now that the Israelis have weathered the worst of Nasrallah's attacks, no one fears them any more.

Instead of manipulating a cowed Lebanon, Nasrallah now must watch as the Lebanese Army marches into what had been Hezbollah's exclusive domain for the past twenty years. Only the Shi'ites still support him, and even that appears tenuous. The rest of Lebanon, looking around the ruins of their nation that came from a war they never wanted, have a much clearer perspective than anyone credited for the calculations of victory and defeat, and Nasrallah's underground boastings have not convinced anyone except Nasrallah.

As I wrote at the time, Nasrallah can claim anything he wants. As the smoke clears, people will understand the real results of his war, and they have begun to do so -- to his detriment.

Ellison Gets The 10-Foot Pole Treatment From Democrats

After Keith Ellison won the primary for the nomination for Minnesota's heavily-Democratic Fifth Congressional district, one would have expected a hail of congratulatory statements from fellow party members. However, Minnesota Democrats appeared very cautious about associating with the former Nation of Islam officer as only a handful of his peers endorsed his candidacy in the election's aftermath:

Usually, everybody loves a winner.

But some Democrats had little to say Wednesday about DFL primary winner Keith Ellison, who seems to have a good chance to become Minnesota's first black congressman, and the first Muslim in Congress.

Among those who maintained their silence: Rep. Martin Sabo, D-Minn., who has had a 28-year hold on the seat Ellison is seeking. Sabo was backing his chief of staff, Mike Erlandson, who finished second. ...

Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn., like Sabo, declined to comment on Ellison's victory in the overwhelmingly Democratic district, which is anchored by the city of Minneapolis.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi did not respond to requests for comment, although the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee put out a statement calling Ellison a "strong voice" to continue Sabo's work in Congress.

Mel Watt attempted to run some interference for Ellison and cast Ellison's connections to Louis Farrakhan as innuendo. He told the press that Ellison is Muslim, he's Presbyterian, and none of it makes any difference. However, if Ellison has ties to Farrakhan's group, and it appears he does, then that history becomes very apposite indeed. Racial and religious bigotry should disqualify candidates for high political office among voters who want to endorse tolerance, regardless of the politician's party affiliation. Being an organizer for Farrakhan's Million Man March and then trying to disclaim any connection to the notorious anti-Semite and segregationist is simply not credible. In fact, as NPR points out, Ellison himself spent time arguing for separatist policies, writing a column for the University of Minnesota's newspaper while attending law school favoring Farrakhan's approach to race relations.

The Republicans will have a field day with Ellison's background. Power Line wrote a series of posts about Ellison and continue to add to that archive. The Star Tribune has Senator Norm Coleman, Minnesota's leading Jewish politician and a former Democrat, aghast at the spectacle of Ellison's primary win in MN-05:

Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., who is Jewish, said Ellison "clearly brings a troubled background" to the race and that "voters will have to judge that."It's not old stuff -- - it is who Mr. Ellison has been," said Coleman. "And I think folks in the Jewish community are going to have to look closely at that, with his associations with Farrakhan. The DFL is going to choose their candidate. But the people of Minneapolis, I hope in the end that they simply don't pull a lever because they're born and raised in a single-party."

National efforts to build a Democratic majority in the House will, in all likelihood, pass over MN-05. Nancy Pelosi has wisely remained silent on Ellison's candidacy, because it's a no-win situation for her. The district itself will probably not need national help to remain in Democratic hands, not unless Ellison's past politics and his penchant for ignoring parking tickets and tax bills start to take a toll in this normally secure district. The party will want to keep Ellison at arm's length while they count on him to hold the seat. It's duplicitous and it's hypocritical, but it will almost certainly succeed.

Israeli Arabs a 'Fifth Column'?

Israeli Arabs have come under unprecedented criticism in the last few weeks, undermining their political position in the nation. While majorities still see native Arabs as Israelis, growing percentages of Israelis want them to emigrate out of Israel, with even Knesset members expressing hostility towards them. The potential for increasing racism have some politicians worried, especially Israeli Arab MKs. However, as the Jerusalem Post reports, they have done the most damage to their image themselves:

Unsurprisingly, this trend worries Israeli Arabs. MK Azmi Bishara (Balad) complained of a "season of incitement against Arab MKs" during the recent Lebanon war. Bakar Awada, director of the Center Against Racism, said the poll showed that "racism is becoming mainstream…. This is a worrisome development."

Yet Israeli Arab leaders apparently still see no connection between this growing anti-Arab sentiment and their own behavior. And in fact, their behavior is the main impetus for this trend.

Last weekend, for instance, Bishara's Balad faction traveled to Damascus, thereby violating the law prohibiting travel to enemy states. While there, he publicly praised Syria's "struggle to free occupied Arab land" and its "resistance against occupation" - i.e., its support for anti-Israel terror. Moreover, he makes such statements frequently, as in a 2001 speech praising Hizbullah's "guerrilla war" against Israel, the "losses" (casualties) it inflicted on Israel and its "victory" over Israel.

THUS BISHARA openly advocates terror attacks against the country in whose parliament he sits, rejoices when it suffers casualties and cheers when it loses battles ("Hizbullah won, and for the first time since 1967 we have tasted the taste of victory"). Is it surprising that such behavior provokes cries of "fifth column" and "traitor"?

Or take Balad MK Jamal Zahalka's explanation for the trip: "We don't see Syria as an enemy state."

During wartime, many claims of unpatriotic behavior get cast on some fairly harmless actions. These, however, appear to be close to the real thing. Traveling to Damascus while their proxy made war on their nation certainly looks like giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Cheering the terrorist attacks and hoping for their success absolutely qualifies as such. And it's not just limited to Bishara, as Evelyn Gordon reports.

One might expect that kind of rhetoric from fringe players, like university professors and newspaper columnists. When it comes from Israel's elected officials, who represent their communities, it makes the Israeli questioning of their allegiance and that of their constituents much more understandable.

I find that when I discuss the differences between Israel and its neighbors, most people express surprise to hear that Arabs sit in the Knesset. The differences, alas, apply within Israel as well, which indicates that the Israelis may have plenty to fear from their Arab citizens, regardless of their political sufferage.

Maybe They Should Get A Room

Yesterday, the prosecutor in the trial of Saddam Hussein demanded that the chief judge step down for refusing to stop Saddam from ranting in out-of-order outbursts. The judge demurred, stating that he had no bias towards Saddam and that he merely wanted to ensure that the record showed the defendant received a fair hearing. Today, however, the judge managed to make the prosecutor appear prescient in an exchange that had everything but flowers:

Questioning a Kurdish witness Thursday, Saddam said, "I wonder why this man wanted to meet with me, if I am a dictator?"

The judge interrupted: "You were not a dictator. People around you made you (look like) a dictator."

"Thank you," Saddam responded, bowing his head in respect.

Awwww. Poor Saddam meant to rule as a benevolent father to his subjects, but it was those meanies he hired to cut people's tongues out, chop off their hands, rape women in their cells, drop chemical weapons on the Kurds, bulldoze 3800 of their villages, put hundreds of thousands of Iraqis into mass graves with coup de grace bullet holes in their skulls, invade Kuwait and destroy their oil wells on the way out, develop nuclear and biological weapons, pull a Lidice on Dujail, assassinate critics at home and abroad, murder his sons-in-law, and unleash his spawn-of-Satan sons onto the Iraqi people that made him look like a dictator.

Well, that explains it. How could the prosecutor have ever thought this judge was biased?

The Media As Yenta

Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match...

Given the tensions in the world today, one would think that newspapers covering Condoleezza Rice's visit to our northern neighbor might focus on our foreign policy, especially war policy in Afghanistan, where Canadians continue to fight with distinction. Her meeting with Foreign Minister Peter MacKay should have prompted diplomatic inquiries about the softwood lumber dispute or continuing negotiations regarding passport requirements and border security. Instead, prurience trumped professionalism as reporters spent their time wondering how to get these two wonderful kids together, according to the Times of London:

In the latest demonstration of the perils of being an attractive, articulate, female — and single — Dr Rice, the US Secretary of State, returned from an official visit to Canada yesterday with the North American press obsessed with one issue. It was not the number of Canadian troops in Afghanistan.

After spending two days in the company of Peter MacKay, Canada’s handsome, athletic — and single — foreign minister, Dr Rice’s aides were, not for the first time, dismissing fevered speculation about her relationship with a diplomatic counterpart.

“No, there were no candles,” Sean McCormick, a State Department spokesman replied with tired resignation when reporters asked about a working dinner that Dr Rice and Mr MacKay shared on Monday night. “It was a well-lighted [sic] dinner, with electricity-based lighting.”

He added that it was hardly an intimate affair, as 14 aides and six security guards also attended.

I don't think Americans or Canadians really want to consider the implications of a cross-border romance, especially given MacKay's luck with women in the workplace. It gives a bad connotation to the previously innocuous phrase diplomatic relations.

All kidding aside, this points up two problems with the media: they cannot keep from fixating on Rice's marital status and they cannot be relied upon to remain serious. If Rice looked like Helen Thomas, the first problem may not even arise, but her appealing physical appearance and lack of a wedding ring seem to have become an obsession with the media. During the 2004 election, some speculated that she considered George Bush her "husband", so close was their professional relationship. Apparently the media is convinced that a woman cannot remain single and still refrain from sexual entanglements in the workplace -- a rather chauvinistic attitude for such a supposedly enlightened profession.

If Rice even had an inclination to date these days, she wouldn't choose to do so in such a public forum, not with these Yentas around. A serious woman wants none of the Hollywood gossip treatment, especially a woman trying to hold together an anti-terror coalition that always appears on the verge of splitting apart. The main main in her life right now would most likely be Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and it won't be because of his wit and sparkling personality.

We're a nation at war. Perhaps North American journalists need some outside diversion, but the rest of us don't follow Rice's activities because we're hoping Brad Pitt will join her on the sly. The times are interesting enough without the high-school snickering.

Ask. Tell. Enlist.

Once again, the issue of gays in the military has arisen during a tough recruiting period and questions about the reserve strength of the armed forces. The New York Times reports that gay-rights groups have seen this situation as a potentially propitious moment to breathe new life into the debate, five years into the war on terror:

As the Pentagon’s search for soldiers grows more urgent, gay rights groups are making the biggest push in nearly a decade to win repeal of a compromise policy, encoded in a 1993 law and dubbed “don’t ask, don’t tell,” that bars openly gay people from serving in the military.

The policy, grounded in a belief that open homosexuality is damaging to unit morale and cohesion, stipulates that gay men and lesbians must serve in silence and refrain from homosexual activity, and that recruiters and commanders may not ask them about their sexual orientation in the absence of compelling evidence that homosexual acts have occurred.

The push for repeal follows years of legal setbacks, as well as discord among gay rights groups about how, or even whether, to address the issue. Now, rather than rely on the courts, advocates are focusing on drumming up support in towns across the nation, spotlighting the personal stories of gay former service members and pushing a Democratic bill in the House that would do away with the policy.

In fact, gays serve openly in the military now; they do it in Britain. American and British troops have served together in Afghanistan and Iraq without this causing damage to morale and cohesion. They also serve openly in the IDF, one of the finest fighting forces in the world, although their leadership could use a refresher course after Lebanon. Both armies work jointly with American forces, and 22 other nations also allow gays and lesbians to serve without hiding themselves.

Readers of CQ and I often disagree on this point. However, everyone should agree that we now employ one of the dumbest and most hypocritical policies ever devised: "don't ask, don't tell". This policy allows gays and lesbians to serve in the military -- one study puts their numbers at 60,000 -- as long as their orientation remains a secret. It's an implicit acknowledgement that gays can serve effectively in the forces as long as no one else finds out their secret. Somehow exposure transforms them into undesirables, even though their nature has not changed at all.

If gays and lesbians were the cause of degraded morale and unit cohesion, then that damage would occur regardless of whether they kept quiet or not. If the Pentagon argues that the revelation causes the damage, then the problem isn't the gays or lesbians, but the bigots in the ranks that suddenly find out about them. That sounds exactly like the problem that the Pentagon had when it considered desgregating the services after World War II, and they finally rejected the option of coddling the bigots.

So should we now. Perhaps wartime makes for a difficult circumstance for a policy change, but this war will likely be generational, and we need as much support as we can muster.

Britain has allowed gays to serve openly for years, and they still field strong military forces. In fact, the British turn to gay-rights groups to help them recruit for the British Navy. Israel can beat any force except ours and the British that dare fight them in open warfare. Obviously gays have not eroded their combat effectiveness. Why should we continue to keep able and willing men on the sidelines when we can use all of the otherwise-qualified volunteers we can get? Barry Goldwater said it best when he declared that the only consideration that mattered to him was whether soldiers could shoot straight. Let's stop playing hypocritical games and allow patriotic men and women to wear the uniform and defend the nation.

Novak Tees Off On Armitage

The other shoe has dropped in the Armitage-Plame scandal, and I don't mean Valerie Plame's addition of Richard Armitage to her lawsuit. Robert Novak, now free to discuss the sourcing for his infamous column that unmasked Plame as a CIA "operative", says that Armitage has gotten stuck in the spin cycle in his mea culpas over the past two weeks. In facr, far from the inadvertent disclosure between friends that Armitage paints it, Novak explains that the disclosure was quite deliberate:

A peculiar convergence had joined Armitage and me on the same historical path. During his quarter of a century in Washington, I had no contact with Armitage before our fateful interview. I tried to see him in the first 2 years of the Bush administration, but he rebuffed me — summarily and with disdain, I thought.

Then, without explanation, in June 2003, Armitage’s office said the deputy secretary would see me. This was two weeks before Joe Wilson surfaced himself as author of a 2002 report for the CIA debunking Iraqi interest in buying uranium in Africa.

I sat down with Armitage in his State Department office the afternoon of July 8 with tacit rather than explicit ground rules: deep background with nothing said attributed to Armitage or even an anonymous State Department official. Consequently, I refused to identify Armitage as my leaker until his admission was forced by Hubris, a new book by reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn that absolutely identified him.

Late in my hourlong interview with Armitage. I asked why the CIA had sent Wilson — lacking intelligence experience, nuclear policy or recent contact with Niger — on the African mission. He told the Washington Post last week that his answer was: ‘‘I don’t know, but I think his wife worked out there.’’

Neither of us took notes, and nobody else was present. But I recalled our conversation that week in writing a column, while Armitage reconstructed it months later for federal prosecutors. He had told me unequivocally that Mrs. Wilson worked in the CIA’s Counter-Proliferation Division and that she had suggested her husband’s mission.

As for his current implications that he never expected this to be published, he noted that the story of Mrs. Wilson’s role fit the style of the old Evans-Novak column — implying to me it continued reporting Washington inside information.

Other bloggers have quoted the lead paragraphs of this column, but I find this the most revealing of the piece. Armitage spent decades in DC rebuffing Novak, who has a reputation for a rather passionate brand of conservatism. Armitage made it clear during his tenure at State working for Colin Powell that he disdained partisans, making that painfully and publicly clear both during and after his time in that position. He never hesitated to criticize the Bush administration's handling of the terror war, and after Powell left office made it clear that he despised people like Karl Rove, who he saw as rivals of Powell and himself.

However, all of a sudden, Novak doesn't just get a call returned, Armitage's office contacts him looking for an interview. Despite being a public official and having little reticence about publicly criticizing Bush policy, he swears Novak to anonymity, refusing to even allow the columnist to identify the source as coming from the State Department. Having arranged the interview and established complete anonymity, Armitage tells Novak all about Plame, Wilson, how he got the CIA assignment -- right down to the department in which she worked.

Three months later, only after the CIA referred the matter to the Department of Justice, Armitage suddenly recalls that he might have been Novak's source? Riiiiiiiight.

This does prompt some other questions. Novak's column explicitly shows Armitage deliberately planting the story, and given the odd circumstance of the interview, it cannot have been anything but. Why would Armitage do it? He certainly had no motivation to protect the Bush administration's Iraq policy from Wilson's fact-deficient attacks. He didn't like the Iraq war, either. Could Armitage have thought that Plame's involvement bolstered Wilson's case? Perhaps, but in the end it undermined his credibility after Wilson denied that she had any connection to his odd selection as an investigator.

Novak's column casts serious doubt on Armitage's protestations that he merely got too chatty with a professional contact. He and his staff went way out of their way to meet with Novak, and that makes the disclosure very deliberate indeed. He knew exactly what he did -- and that means he could have resolved the entire scandal at any time between July and October, before the investigation got under way. More than ever, Armitage has been revealed as a manipulator and a fundamentally dishonest person. That's not a crime, but it makes the entire Plame scandal a farce.

Senate, House Agree On Final Spending Database Bill (Updated!)

** Updated -- see below! **

Senator Tom Coburn's office has announced that the Senate has just passed a new bill to replace the language of the original S.2590, which establishes an on-line searchable database for federal spending. This action will expedite the legislative process and may put the bill on President Bush's desk by tomorrow:

The Senate just passed an amended version of the Coburn-Obama database bill based on our agreement with the House. Following House passage of the bill the measure will go to the president for his signature. Tonight’s action in the Senate means the Senate will not need to revisit the measure as the House will vote on this identical measure tonight or tomorrow.

The Senate, under Bill Frist's guidance, simply took the modified language under consideration in the House and passed it themselves first, apparently by acclamation. This eliminates the need for a conference committee and avoids any delay after the adoption of the bill in the House. That will come at the same time as their consideration of the rule change on earmarks that I noted this morning, although we have heard that some Representatives have tried to take the proposal off the agenda. If you have not yet done so, call your Representative and make sure that they understand the need for sunlight on earmarks.

This fast-tracking process reflects election-year politics, to be sure. No one wants to openly oppose reform legislation, especially when so many activists come from such a wide range of political perspectives to endorse it. However, it also shows that we can change the political paradigm and that there is hope for a pork-free tomorrow.

UPDATE: The bill passed the House tonight, and the bill is on its way to the White House for Bush's signature already. The White House released a statement tonight, although they hadn't realized that the Senate passed the same bill earlier in the day:

I applaud the House for today's passage of S. 2590, the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, and look forward to final passage by the Senate soon. This legislation demonstrates Congress' commitment to giving the American people access to timely and accurate information about how their tax dollars are spent.

This bill builds on existing Administration initiatives to help ensure Federal agencies clearly reflect how they spend the taxpayers' money. Expectmore.gov is one such resource, allowing Americans to see which Federal programs are successful and which ones fall short.

In addition to these reforms, I urge the Senate to follow the House in passing the Line Item Veto, a critical tool that will help rein in wasteful spending and bring greater transparency to the budget process. I call on the Senate to pass this important legislation this month.

Final Senate passage has already occurred, and the bill could become law as soon as tomorrow. Now, I think we can finally break out the champagne.

New Effort At Earmark Reform In House

The House will take up a new rule tomorrow regarding earmarks that will force earmarkers to identify themselves with their targeted appropriations. The new rule, which only requires a simple majority, will also require conference reports to list their "airdropped earmarks" -- those appropriations that got added to bills after their individual adoption by the House and Senate by the conference members.

Last night, I had an opportunity to talk to a leadership staffer on the Hill. Currently, the House has no rules on earmark additions or identification. Previous reform efforts aimed at legislation failed on the differences in approach between the House and Senate, as well as differences on the exact definition of "earmark". Appropriators rejected any controls on appropriations alone, noting that earmarks occur in other legislation. Instead of trying to hammer all of the issues into legislation that would satisfy both chambers of Congress and the White House, the GOP leadership in the House decided to use a rule change to accomplish the effort.

The new rule will apply to all legislation, and would define earmarks as any amount of money designated to a non-federal entity for a purpose, regardless of the nature of the bill or report. Importantly, it also applies to any tax benefit intended to apply to a single entity. It does not apply to a class of beneficiaries, as Congress would not be directing funds to a specific target but making funds available to any qualifying entity.

How does this differ from the Coburn-Obama database? It would not create a searchable website for these earmarks, but it would require Representatives to be identified with each earmark in the Congressional Record. While Coburn-Obama applies to the executive branch, as the earmarks get paid through federal agencies, this new rule would apply to direct Congressional spending outside of executive-branch spending.

I asked about a new effort by Rahm Emanuel to amend this rule with more language that would prevent Representatives from adding earmarks where they have a personal connection to the recipient. The staffer reminded me that amendments to rules changes are almost always out of order, and that the GOP leadership did not want to create the need to referee the earmarking process. In my opinion (and not that of the staffer), such a rule may sound fine but would likely result in earmark trading. In other words, two or more members would simply propose earmarks for another, expecting that his earmarks would follow in return, which would make accountability for influence that much harder to track. The GOP approach would simply allow citizens to know who earmarked funds for whom, and let the voters hold politicians accountable.

Emanuel will attempt to offer the amendment during the debate, but will most likely be found out of order. The Democrats will then claim that the Republicans are not serious about earmark reform and use the refusal in the upcoming midterm elections. However, people should remember that Emanuel's proposal could simply be offered as a separate rule change and get its own vote. If it doesn't conflict with the pending rule change, both could be adopted and applied. If Emanuel doesn't offer the change separately, then we will know he never took it seriously.

Some may question the use of House rules rather than legislation. My source told me that negotiations to cast this into law still continues, but this will bring immediate sunlight on the process. House rules technically only last for each session, but the next Congress almost always adopts the previous session's rules in toto as one of its first tasks. The earmark rule would have the same permanence as any other House rule, and it's doubtful that any future House could get a majority to vote for secrecy in earmarking.

The rules should get posted to the Rules Committee website today in preparation for the debate tomorrow. Be sure to contact your Representative to push for the adoption of the rule requiring openness and honesty in federal appropriations.

UPDATE: The text of the proposed rule is here. Tim Chapman has more on this, and Red State has Majority Leader John Boehner blogging about it.

Palestinians May Walk Away From Self-Government

The Washington Post reports that the newly-declared unity government might not last very long if its leaders cannot convince Israel and the West to lift economic sanctions imposed after Hamas took power earlier this year. More Palestinians believe that the Palestinian Authority should collapse if it cannot meet its payroll:

Created a dozen years ago to administer the occupied Palestinian territories, the frail political system called the Palestinian Authority is now broke, paralyzed by months of partisan infighting and depleted by Israeli arrests. A growing number of Palestinians -- a group that has expanded in recent months from a core of secular intellectuals to include officials from the leading political movements -- have begun advocating openly for the authority's dissolution.

Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, facing a strike by civil servants over unpaid wages, agreed this week to form a power-sharing government with Fatah and other factions in hopes of restoring international aid. Whether a new government will revive foreign financial support, which accounts for nearly half the authority's budget, could help determine whether the authority itself remains viable in the face of mounting unrest and disillusion in the territories.

The unity government platform would commit Hamas to accept past agreements signed by the Palestine Liberation Organization that recognize Israel. It would mark the first time that Hamas, which does not belong to the PLO and has long opposed the 1993 Oslo peace accords that created the Palestinian Authority, would tacitly accept a two-state solution to the conflict.

But Hamas has so far refused to renounce violence or explicitly recognize the Jewish state -- two of the three conditions set by the United States, the United Nations, Russia and the European Union for a renewal of aid. Israeli officials indicated Tuesday that Israel would not release hundreds of millions of dollars in frozen tax revenue it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority or support an easing of international sanctions against it unless those terms were met.

Israel has little to gain from recognizing an entity that refuses to recognize it. The tax revenues flow directly from the Oslo agreement, and the new Hamas government rejected Oslo as soon as it took office. In fact, Hamas rejected every agreement between the PA and Israel -- and then stood by in wonder as its international financing dried up. While it's getting more difficult to predict whether Israel will pursue appeasement these days -- it seems to be Ehud Olmert's new hobby -- it would be political suicide to release tax revenues to the PA while it still refused to abide by all treaties and agreements, including the Olso requirement to recognize Israel's legitimacy.

The Palestinians want to force Israel to start paying for its occupation directly rather than channeling the money through the PA. They argue that dissolving the PA would force Israel to spend billions on health care and the rebuilding of Palestinian infrastructure under international law governing occupations. The total cost of ignoring the territories would create so much economic pressure on Israel that they would be forced to give massive concessions to the Palestinians to rid themselves of the white elephant.

If the Palestinians implement this strategy, they may find themselves in for a shock. Israel pulled out of Gaza on its own, leaving behind a political mess for the Palestinians to fix. They no longer occupy Gaza. The Israelis can do the same thing to the West Bank, if necessary, and let the Palestinians figure it out on their own there, too. And as long as terrorist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad continue to attack Israel, they will continue to respond, only without the restrictions of an occupation to limit their wartime tactics. The Palestinians saw how that worked in Gaza this summer, and Israel isn't around to pick up the pieces.

They may provoke another reaction by bailing out of the PA. Western nations, including the US, have pushed for a two-state solution for a generation and argued that the PA formed the nucleus of a state. Without the PA, without popular support for its existence, the two-state solution vanishes as well, and the Palestinians wind up at Square One all over again. Western nations surely will not transfer aid to Fatah and Hamas without a legitimate government structure, nor will they abide Israel's funding of either group, even for an occupation.

The Palestinians prove that they are the worst-led people on the planet. Rather than abandon the PA, they would be much better served by voting for statesmen and not terrorists of any stripe. Instead, they're looking to abdicate responsibility ... again.

Yes, Russell, There Really Is A 1st Amendment Problem In The BCRA

In an editorial in yesterday's Examiner, former Federal Elections Commissioner Bradley Smith demolishes a recent assertion by Senator Russ Feingold that his Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act does not trample on First Amendment rights. Smith, who had a front-row seat to the implementation of McCain-Feingold, assures him that telling people when they can and cannot publicly criticize politicians is an egregious limitation on free speech:

Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., takes issue with The Examiner’s editorial criticism of the McCain-Feingold bill and its “ban” on certain broadcast ads. The indignant senator responds that the law “doesn’t ban or censor any speech.”

Feingold’s position is disingenuous. For just a few sentences after telling us the law “doesn’t ban or censor any speech,” he tells us that McCain-Feingold was necessary to prevent some voices from being “drowned out” by others. As McCain-Feingold does nothing to affirmatively create or encourage speech — it offers no subsidies or platform for political speech — the only way it can prevent anyone’s voice from being “drowned out” is through the suppression of other speech — and that is indeed what McCain-Feingold does, as the senator must know. ...

Sen. Feingold can say what he wants, but he cannot deny that the explicit purpose of McCain-Feingold was to reduce the political speech of American citizens. After four years, what have we gained for surrendering this freedom? Is Congress less corrupt? Less controlled by special interests? Is public policy better? Are campaigns more focused on issues? What tangible benefit has been gained? I submit that the answer is none.

For most civil libertarians, the notion that the government should determine which political speech has more value than others is a giant step on the way to totalitarianism. Feingold says that some speech would swamp out other speech, but that's a determination for a free market in speech to make. The blogosphere erupted as a reaction to market impediments to speech, and now features the most open political debate in American history.

This is at the root of our analysis of the BCRA as an incumbency protection racket. Our nation was founded on the principle that those in power should be held to great scrutiny. The BCRA stands that principle on its head by forbidding a range of criticisms against politicians just when that scrutiny has the most effect: in the 60 days prior to an election to either uphold or replace them. Without being able to offer specific critiques, the ability for citizens to speak out in an effective manner against incumbents almost guarantees their re-election.

As Smith reports, Feingold's answer to this problem is to advise people to form political action committees to allow them to speak out. I must have missed the part of the First Amendment that required people to register with the IRS in order to have free political speech. In an era where PACs have allowed candidates to avoid responsibility for electoral messaging, John McCain and Russ Feingold want to see more of these "speech shelters" and less actual grassroots campaigning.

Smith has delivered an indictment on Feingold's violations of the Constitution. With any luck, Wisconsin voters will provide the conviction.

NATO Chief: Members Not Pulling Their Weight

NATO's Secretary-General has publicly scolded member nations for reneging on their commitments to supporting the mission in Afghanistan, apparently despairing of getting the promised level of troops. The rebuke comes as a demonstration of a consistent refusal of Europe to fight the war on terror, even against the Taliban of Afghanistan, which most Europeans concede was a necessary step after 9/11:

THE political head of Nato appealed yesterday for alliance members to provide hundreds more troops for the mission in southern Afghanistan.

With most of the fighting burden falling on the shoulders of the British, US, Canadian and Dutch troops in the South, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the Secretary-General of Nato, said that some countries had failed to live up to their promises on troop numbers.

In an interview with the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, he said that he could not accept a scenario in which Nato members would fail to supply the necessary troops. Alliance foreign ministers will meet in New York next week to discuss the crisis.

Mr de Hoop Scheffer said: “I am calling for alliance solidarity because some nations are carrying more of the burden than others.” He was speaking out after The Times revealed that many Nato members had made it clear they had no intention of sending more troops. General James Jones, the American Supreme Allied Commander Europe, has asked for another 2,500 soldiers for southern Afghanistan.

Britain can hardly do more. The UK has over 5,000 troops in Afghanistan already and many more than that in southern Iraq. The Italians now have troops in both countries as well as Lebanon. Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Turkey have shrugged their shoulders, and now NATO wants the Poles to fill the gap that the rest of the alliance has ignored.

Perhaps people might recall the insistence of Europe and many here in America on engaging Afghanistan and Iraq through international alliances. We tried in both cases, and we had a lot more support from our allies with Afghanistan, as it had created much less controversy than the war against Saddam Hussein. Our relief by NATO was supposed to show America the benefits of "true" international coalitions in dealing with the complex problems of Southwest Asia.

However, once again, we see that the global community lacks the fortitude to make good on their promises and meet the challenge of their own demands. The same nations that scolded us over our supposedly unilateral approach now refuse to answer the phone when NATO calls on them to meet their pledges of troop support. The French do not belong to NATO, but the rest of Europe will blithely sit and watch Afghanistan's new democratically-elected government fall victim to a resurgent Taliban rather than lift a finger to help. Even Germany, with 2700 troops stationed in the quiet north, refuses to redeploy to assist the US, UK, and Canada in the more volatile southern region.

As with Lebanon, we hear a lot of posturing from Europe on how to conduct war and demands to implement their peace strategies. When it comes time to put themselves on the line for their strategies and goals, they increasingly go AWOL.

Sistani Kills Federalism Plan

In a move that belies earlier reports that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani had withdrawn from Iraqi politics, the widely respected Shi'ite imam scotched a plan by Shi'ite political groups to transform Iraq into a loosely-knit federation of three autonomous states. The Shi'ite-controlled legislature will table the proposal indefinitely, and the third-ranking official in the government pronounced the plan dead:

The speaker of the Iraqi parliament said Tuesday that a controversial plan to partition the country into three autonomous regions is politically dead.

Mahmoud al-Mashhadani said in an interview that legislation to implement a concept known as federalism, which threatened to collapse the country's fragile multi-sect government, would likely be postponed indefinitely after a meeting of political leaders on Wednesday.

The federalism plan would create a Shiite region in southern Iraq much like the autonomous zone in the north controlled by the Kurds. Sunnis have generally opposed the plan, on grounds that it would leave them only with vast swaths of desert in the country's middle, devoid of the oil reserves in the other regions.

Curiously, given all of the press devoted to Sistani's complaints about his political isolation and his threats to give up on national politics, the Washington Post waits until its eleventh paragraph to report on Sistani's involvement in this decision. For a man whom the press had labeled all but superfluous a week earlier, Sistani showed some potent clout in this debate.

The Shi'ites had jealously viewed Kurdish semi-independence for years and eagerly pursued this proposal. With hardly any effort, Sistani swatted it down almost immediately. His pronouncement, as announced by Mashhadani, ordered the leading faction's politicians to stop considering the plan, and Mashhadani sounded happy to comply. He acknowledged that the country did not have a strong enough security apparatus to hold together in such a structure, and his allies quickly fell into line.

Iraqi's Shi'a have a different idea of federalism than its practice in the US. Their concept more closely parallels our Articles of Confederation, which survived for only six years before being replaced by our Constitution -- and even then, it took 76 years to ensure that the federal government would rule the individual states and not the other way around. That plan would create civil war between the three protostates, especially since the Sunnis would be left with no natural resources or stable industry. An independent Kurdish state in the north would provoke a Turkish response, and the Shi'ite state would inevitably gravitate towards Iran, defying the Najaf-based Shi'ism of Sistani and embracing the more activist Qom school that produced Ruhollah Khomeini and the current slate of mullahs in Teheran.

Sistani does not want to see Iran prevail and squash the recently-freed Najaf version of Shi'ism, and he doesn't want to see his rival Moqtada al-Sadr rise to the top of a new regional political structure. Sistani knows that the only hope for his moderate brand of Shi'ism to survive and to flourish is to support the secular and democratic government that holds the entire nation together as one. Only by combining resources can the nation see its way towards a modern and moderate polity, and only that will allow Iraqis to control all of their own resources and exploit them for their own benefit.

Sistani's back in the game -- and I doubt he ever really left.

Primaries Offer Few Surprises

The final series of primaries swept through several states last night, and unlike in previous years, they featured interesting and competitive races in many places. None of them produced any big surprises, however, as the frontrunners won across the board.

In Rhode Island, Lincoln Chafee kept his re-election bid on track by holding off a surprisingly strong bid by Cranston Mayor Stephen Laffey. The final margin of victory appears to have been around eight points, indicating a tough race for Chafee in November. Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse has kept a thin lead over Chafee in polling over the last few months, but his margin has narrowed in the last few weeks. Laffey has promised to support Chafee and endorsed him last night in his concession speech, but that may not be enough to get Republicans who have tired of Chafee's voting record to come to the polls.

I had endorsed Laffey early in the race, and am disappointed in his primary loss. I'd prefer Chafee over Whitehouse, and would encourage Republicans to ensure that they support Chafee's caucusing, if nothing else.

In Maryland, Democrats chose Benjamin Cardin over Kweisi Mfume to face Michael Steele in the race to fill Paul Sarbanes' open Senate seat. Democratic money went to Cardin early in the race while Mfume stalled at the starting blocks, dealing with minor personal scandals. By the time Mfume got his act together, Cardin had established an insurmountable lead -- but Mfume made it close enough that no one called the win until early this morning. The margin turned out to be eleven points, but Cardin could not win a majority of Democrats in a multiple-candidate field, indicating some vulnerability.

Cardin has polled better against Steele than Mfume, but that may soon change. The Democratic Party's shunning of Mfume's candidacy has not played well with black voters there, and even if they don't vote for Steele, they may not bother voting for Cardin. Steele has picked up some endorsements with hefty political clout, including entertainment mogul Russell Simmons, and he has an opportunity to score big in the Democrats' last demographic bastion. If he does, Cardin will lose in November.

Meanwhile, here in Minnesota, the evening went as predicted. All of the major candidates won, and won convincingly. In this state the party endorsement does not guarantee a place on the ballot in the general election, because we have both a caucus and a primary, and endorsements have a spotty record of success in our primaries. Last night, however, they proved accurate. Keith Ellison, vying to replace Martin Sabo as Congressman in MN-05, took over forty percent of the vote in a crowded field.

Given the record of the vote in MN-05, Ellison will almost certainly win the general election -- but he has a lot of baggage. The Strib mentions that Ellison would be the first Muslim to serve in Congress, but that tells only part of the story. Ellison isn't just a Muslim, he was an official in Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. Power Line has done a magnificent job in uncovering these ties to the notoriously anti-Semitic Nation in a series of devastating posts, as well as numerous unpaid parking tickets and failures to pay taxes. In a rational district, Republican moderate Alan Fine would win an a walk, but this is MN-05, so that seems unlikely.

All of the preliminaries have finally come to an end, and now we can look forward to the general election with greater clarity.

Angelides Staff Hacks?

Last week, anonymous sources released an audio file of a telephone conversation in which Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made reference to a Latina legislator as "very hot". The heat may now focus on the Governator's political opponent in the upcoming election, as the campaign of Phil Angelides acknowledged that they released the audio:

The campaign of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Democratic rival acknowledged Tuesday that it downloaded — and leaked to the media — a recording of a private meeting in which the governor described a Hispanic legislator as having a "very hot" personality.

But Cathy Calfo, campaign manager for Democrat Phil Angelides, said the campaign had done nothing wrong because the file was available publicly on the governor's Web site.

"No one hacked," Calfo said at a news conference to address the role played by the Angelides campaign, first reported by The Sacramento Bee. "They accessed information that was available to the public."

Schwarzenegger spokesman Adam Mendelsohn said someone would have had to snoop to find the audio file.

"The file that was leaked to the Los Angeles Times was in a private area of the governor's server not accessible to the public without manipulation of information," he said.

The Schwarzenegger campign has called the California Highway Patrol -- the state's equivalent to state troopers -- to investigate the incident. If the audio file was stored in a secure section of the server, then the campaign staffers can be prosecuted for hacking, which is a felony. Other laws may also have been broken by the publication of the call, which technically requires the approval of at least one of the parties in most jurisdictions.

However, even if the file was not properly secured, it hardly reflects well on the Angelides campaign, and their response is even worse. The proper response should have been the immediate termination of anyone involved in either the theft of the file or the leak to the newspaper, and an apology for the use of a dirty trick. Arguing that their campaign did nothing wrong as long as they didn't need a password to snoop around Schwarzenegger's servers demonstrates that the Angelides campaign has no sense of ethics at all. It's the equivalent of explaining away Watergate -- which featured a burglary of political offices to gain access to private data -- by saying no one bothered to lock the office door.

If Calfo and Angelides continue to employ these sneaks, Californians should wonder what other kinds of political snoopery they can expect from an Angelides administration. Voters in the Golden State should recheck their locks and protect their data more zealously than ever.

UPDATE: My friend and former blogging partner Dafydd at Big Lizards has more on this story:

If we follow Weintraub's reasoning, that means if I forget and leave my front door unlocked, you have the legal right to burgarize the joint.

Morally and ethically, whenever an unauthorized person is trolling around the private area of someone else's website, he is hacking -- whether security was adequate or not. It's completely irrelevant, no matter what the law says.

The lack of good security procedures does not release Democrats from the necessity to act in a morally responsible way, any more than the lack of a good lock releases them from moral responsibility for black-bagging Republican campaign offices and Xeroxing donor lists.

Am I an anachronism? Is it now the general belief in America that it's morally acceptable to lift anything not literally nailed down? That if there isn't a secure enough lock, then it's all right to steal? Is that the logical end result of teenagers "ripping" music they want to hear but don't want to pay for?

Morally and ethically, the California Democratic Party gave up the ghost yesterday.

A Strange Perspective On Pork

Today the media gave us two decidedly different takes on porkbusting. USA Today's Richard Wolf lauded the 'blogosphere' -- the quotes demonstrating that we pesky kids still haven't quite made it yet! -- for pushing for greater government oversight and uniting across partisan lines to fight pork-barrel politics:

When watchdog groups that monitor federal spending wanted more information on 1,800 "pork barrel" projects buried in a House appropriations bill, they listed them on the Internet and asked readers to dig deeper. Within days, details began pouring in.

The same thing happened when Porkbusters.org enlisted readers of its website to find out which senator had blocked legislation that would create an online database of federal grants and contracts. One by one, senators were eliminated until Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., were uncovered.

The two episodes illustrate the latest trend in government oversight: More light is being thrown on Congress, not just by the media and public interest groups, but in the "blogosphere" where Internet users meet.

"It's probably the biggest expansion of government oversight that we'll ever have," says Thomas Schatz of Citizens Against Government Waste, one of the groups pioneering the effort. "It will turn every American into a watchdog."

It would be nice to have an article about the blogosphere that didn't use the quote marks around the term. However, since USA Today still puts them around pork barrel, I don't see much hope in progress at Gannett.

That aside, Wolf does a nice job demonstrating how an Internet database could help revolutionize appropriations in future Congresses. The article reports on specific projects that bloggers and blogreaders have discovered and the uproar that exposure has caused. Anyone who has followed the efforts to push the Coburn-Obama legislation through the Senate will not find any new information, but it does inform a much wider readership of our efforts --and our successes.

That's why the second article seems so incongruous. Bradford Plumer argues in an essay at The New Republic that liberals should preserve the pork-barrel spending process and give up on reform efforts. When he explains his reasoning, it will make your jaw drop:

But is pork really that bad? Since the age of Jefferson, members of Congress have been earmarking money in spending bills for local projects that might not otherwise receive attention from federal agencies--and doing it to win votes back home. (James Monroe warned that pork would be "productive of evil.") And, while it's easy to see why small-government conservatives and knee-jerk deficit hawks dislike earmarks, there's a liberal case for supporting pork. It's not because pork projects are defensible on the merits, although they sometimes can be. It's not because they create jobs, although they can do that, too. Rather, it's because, without pork, activist government would wither and die. ...

The point is this: Any big-government program on the progressive wish list will likely prove even more difficult to pass than the 1986 tax reform or 1993 budget. Single-payer health care? Card check for unions? Reductions in carbon emissions? It won't get done without an orgy of earmarks to entice the inevitable skeptics in Congress. That won't be pretty, but if the price of, say, universal insurance is a bit of borderline corruption here and there, it's a tradeoff worth making. And, while it's also true that conservatives can use earmarks to pass their own massive spending programs--the prescription-drug benefit comes to mind--in the long run, institutional mechanisms that are biased toward activist government will favor liberals.

Conservative think tanks know this full well. Why else would they obsess over a practice that constitutes a miniscule portion of the federal budget? According to The Hill, the 1,800 earmarks in the Labor-HHS bill, after all, total a mere $496 million--less than half of one percent of the total bill.

Plumer's entire essay should be read in order to ensure that CQ readers understand exactly what he says here. Plumer's argument amounts to an admission that the kind of big-government, intrusive spending that will come from perennial policy stands of progressives has no chance of succeeding through democratic means. The only way in which single-payer health care and greater federal protections for unions can ever pass is to have a built-in bribery mechanism to sway enough votes for massive growth in the federal government.

I agree with him on that point, and it demonstrates the corrosive nature of pork better than anything I've previously written. Fundamentally, pork undermines democracy. It greases legislation that clearly could not command a majority into law, not through superior rhetoric or demonstrated competency but through payoffs and extortion. The use of earmarks to allow politicians to either benefit constituents with grants and contracts or to shield them from the very laws the pork buys -- Plumer uses the reform of corporate tax loopholes in 1986 to show how it works -- creates a government of the pork rather than of the people.

Plumer scoffs at the $496 million in pork, but that's just from one appropriations bill. Pork runs into the billions of dollars, and as his own example shows, it doesn't always come from money that would have been appropriated anyway. However, it's more than just the money, and Plumer is disingenuous when he shrugs at any other reason. Bribery and extortion are wrong, whether one believes it to be in a good cause or not. Government should reflect the true will of the people, and not the will of special interests who score big money through pork.

If Plumer can't see that, then he has made himself part of the problem. If the Left cannot convince a majority of the people of their wisdom, then they should not have an option to buy the public policy they desire.

Just Kidding!

Iran apparently has withdrawn its earlier offer to suspend uranium enrichment for an eight-week period to resolve the diplomatic standoff over its nuclear ambitions. They reversed themselves shortly after making the offer:

Iran still refuses to suspend nuclear enrichment before the start of talks on its nuclear program - a key demand by the six nations locked in a diplomatic standoff with the Islamic republic, officials said Tuesday.

Tehran offered over the weekend to suspend enrichment, which can produce fissile material for nuclear warheads, for up to two months. The willingness to consider such a halt was seen as an important opening.

But officials from delegations familiar with the outcome of the weekend's negotiations between Iranian and European negotiators said Tuesday that Iran had also made clear it would not halt enrichment before broader, six-power talks aimed at persuading Iran to agree to a long-term moratorium. They demanded anonymity in exchange for divulging confidential information.

So let's get this straight. They were willing to suspend uranium enrichment for eight weeks in order to boost the negotiations, but they want the negotiations first -- and then might agree to suspend their enrichment efforts? Riiiiiiiiight.

When does the global community realize they're being played? Certainly our own State Department should realize this by now. We know George Bush does. He said as much during his speech last night:

If we do not defeat these enemies now, we will leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons. We are in a war that will set the course for this new century — and determine the destiny of millions across the world.

The mention of nuclear weapons was no accident. Bush knows that the Iranian threaten the stability of the entire region, and that they will use these weapons in one form or another if they manage to create them. The Iranians are not interested in MAD doctrines; they want to annihilate the Israelis and the Americans. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad held an entire conference in Teheran this year on precisely this topic.

Nations such as Russia and China have a choice between appeasement and unity. We can avoid another destructive war if we can get the UN Security Council to place effective economic sanctions against the mullahcracy, which will not survive a serious economic downturn in Iran. They need trade to survive. If the Russians and Chinese prove as feckless as ever, they will do more than anyone to guarantee that this conflict will not get resolved through non-violent means ... just as they did with Iraq. (via It Shines For All and The Corner)

Syria Foils Attack On US Embassy

Syria shot four men trying to detonate a car bomb outside the US embassy in Damascus, killing three and wounding the other, the BBC reports. One bomb detonated but so far no American casualties have been reported:

A bomb attack on the US embassy in Damascus has been foiled by local security forces, Syrian officials say.

Attackers tried to drive two cars at the embassy compound but three men were killed by guards and a fourth was captured, the interior minister said.

One car bomb went off but a second failed, he told Syrian state TV, adding that it was being examined for clues.

A member of Syria's security forces was also killed but there are no reports of US casualties.

The attack started as the perpetrators ran towards the embassy compound, firing automatic weapons and shouting religious slogans, witnesses reported. They threw grenades at the wall and at some point tried to set off the car bombs, but were foiled in that attempt by Syrian security forces. Two of them ran into a nearby building, but the Syrians gunned them down.

Coming on the heels of the statement by Ayman al-Zawahiri of their new intention to target Gulf states as well as American interests in the region, one has to wonder whether this was an al-Qaeda event. It seems very unlikely. This attack appears very ill-conceived, hardly the model of planning and coordination that AQ attacks usually use. The foolishness of a daylight frontal attack on a guarded embassy also goes outside the pattern of AQ attacks, in that they usually target unarmed civilians who can't shoot back at the brave jihadis.

At first blush, this looks like an operation planned and executed by people with more emotion than intellect. Perhaps they thought the Syrian security forces might join them in an act of war against the United States, but if so, their last moments on this mortal coil showed them the error of their judgment.

Gas Prices Tumbling

In another bad omen for Democrats hoping to ride a wave of voter anger into power, gas prices have dropped dramatically over the last few weeks. USA Today reports what every driver has noticed when they hit the pumps:

Gasoline prices continue to tumble, almost free-falling toward levels not seen in five months.

The nationwide average for regular was $2.618 a gallon, the Energy Information Administration reported Monday. That was 10.9 cents lower than a week earlier.

"The reason prices are going down so far so fast is that they shouldn't have been that high in the first place. Two reasons they were: fear and speculation," says Mike O'Connor, president of the Virginia Petroleum, Convenience and Grocery Association. It represents gasoline distributors who operate about 4,000 stations. ...

Although motorists worried that once the $3 barrier was pierced, prices never would fall much, the current drop-offs are logical, Gamson says: "The driving season is over. There's plenty of gasoline in inventory and crude oil prices have been dropping a lot. It's mainly market fundamentals."

Market fundamentals ... gee, that sounds familiar ...

Oil, as I have written previously, is a commodity, and it responds to normal market forces. A number of factors play into this drop in price. First, as the article notes, the summer driving season has passed. Gas prices normally drop after Labor Day as children go back to school and family vacations make their way to the scrapbook. Also, this season has seen much lower levels of violent weather, and while we're not out of hurricane season yet, the chances of a really damaging storm in the Gulf of Mexico gets less likely with each passing day. Traders buy oil on futures, which means their speculation now extends past the hurricane window -- and since they had built bad weather into previous pricing, it makes sense that we would see a sharp drop now.

Fear and nervousness always play hob with commodities markets. Unfortunately for the Democrats, they built it into their political stocks as well by claiming that high oil prices were some sort of Republican plot. Few Democrats have familiarized themselves with the market or the calendar, and they will now pay the price. If prices continue to drop through November, their Chicken Little rhetoric will appear even more shrill and hysterical than it does now.

None of this means we should stick with an oil economy in the long term. We need to move to other energy sources and use our own resources to allow us to make the transition. The recent find in the Gulf of Mexico of a massive oil and natural-gas reserve gives us an opportunity to do so. We need to transition our electrical generation to nuclear power and our vehicles either to electricity afterwards or to a safely-delivered hydrogen system that would replace the gas stations we have now. Energy independence is a requirement for national security in both the near- and long-term. The sooner we quit putting money into the pockets of Middle Eastern authoritarians, the better off we all will be, including those trapped in kleptocracies and mullahcracies in that region.

Zogby: Santorum Within Range

The internal poll leaked from the race for the Pennsylvania Senate seat late last week appears to have been accurate. According to a new Zogby poll, Rick Santorum has come from twenty points down to a 47-43 gap, almost within the poll's margin of error. Bob Casey, Jr has squandered a massive lead and has lost the momentum. In fact, Republicans have suddenly gained momentum almost across the board:

In two of the other hottest Senate contests this fall, vulnerable GOP incumbents have suddenly closed the gap on their challengers. Republicans Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Mike DeWine of Ohio, both of whom were down by wide margins essentially all year, have suddenly narrowed the edge of their Democratic challengers to four points. The survey shows that in Pennsylvania, the presence of third-party candidates suggests an even closer race, with left-wing candidates siphoning votes from moderate Democrat Bob Casey Jr. ...

The online polls of Senate and gubernatorial races in 26 states find Democrats, who began this election cycle hoping to capture the Republican-held House and Senate, losing ground in New Jersey. There, incumbent appointee Bob Menendez suddenly finds himself running dead-even with Republican Tom Kean Jr. Menendez had been leading since a June poll.

Democrats depended on winning Pennsylvania as part of their effort to win control of the Senate. At one time, it appeared that the Keystone State seat would drop into their laps, as Santorum's closeness to the Bush administration was deemed to be a millstone which would sink him. Rather than run against the White House, Santorum embraced it -- and the timing apparently worked. Bush's approval ratings have slowly climbed all year; Rasmussen now has him at 44%, the highest since mid-July. Casey's disastrous performance in their debate has had an effect on his own support.

The race in New Jersey poses a new problem for the Democrats. That seat had been considered fairly safe, with an incumbent and a fairly Democratic electorate. Menendez has had his own problems with campaigning, and the ethical problems of Governor Jon Corzine's appointee as Attorney General has given the Democrats a black eye. Thomas Kean, Jr has a well-known family name and a lot of energy -- and his opposition to Donald Rumsfeld probably didn't hurt, either.

Republicans may win both seats, or may win neither, but they have made both races much more competitive than the Democrats expected. This will force the Democrats to spend more money and effort, especially in New Jersey to hold what they already have, and distract them from other races -- not exactly what they'd hoped.

The Return From The Lion's Den

I had to laugh this afternoon after I received an e-mail from my mother, who occasionally posts here as Vayapaso, regarding my appearance at Macalester College for the forum on Iraq. She said, "You're walking into a den of lions tonight," and from the comments, she wasn't alone in that observation.

I'm glad to report back that no one got devoured tonight and that the evening went very well indeed. As most people guessed, the audience and the panel were (for the most part) highly opposed to my point of view. However, they all treated me rather graciously, even if they did not agree with me on almost anything I said -- save for my remarks about democracy, at least as it applied in the United States.

I won't get into the nitty-gritty of the debating positions. I don't think they would be surprising on either side to CQ readers, and I didn't hear anything tonight I hadn't read before in the Independent and Rolling Stone. (For that matter, they didn't hear anything from me that they hadn't read in the Weekly Standard -- which I hope they read, anyway.) I think all of us made an effort to keep the forum from descending into a tit-for-tat sniping session, and with one silly exception regarding my use of the phrase "one man, one vote", all succeeded.

Perhaps the person who did the best tonight was the moderator, David Perry, who tried to ensure that all of us got mike time. I know I felt a little off my game. I overshot my time limit on my opening remarks, so the last quarter of it went unheard. Fortunately, I posted them and several people promised to check the blog out tonight.

For my part, I focused on my own points and refrained from getting caught up in the answers of others. I tried to focus on the salutary effects of democracy, and stayed with that theme as much as possible. I didn't try to fake what I didn't know, and I admitted my unease with the present situation in Iraq. The most fun I had came when David posed a question from the audience to me about the "dark days" of Democratic control, if it comes to pass after the election. I replied that such control would give me plenty of material for the blog and wouldn't be all bad, which got a good laugh, but again I underscored my respect for the wisdom of democracies.

The response was pleasantly surprising. No one shouted anything out from the audience, and while I heard groans, they were ... polite groans. Afterwards, a number of people who I knew disagreed with almost everything I said came up to thank me for my participation and my gracious manner (their description, not mine). I told them honestly that I had enjoyed the evening more than I expected -- and it felt good to participate in a political debate where people didn't descend to personal attacks and gotcha wordsmithing, or not much in the case of the latter.

Most gratifying was how many of my friends and family turned up. I took the First Mate, but my radio partner Mitch showed up for a portion of the evening. My son and daughter-in-law brought the Little Admiral, who made her grandpa proud by listening carefully to every word I said. Our "in-laws" were there as well, Missy's parents and her aunt and uncle -- Sean from Everything I Know Is Wrong. A number of other friends from The Patriot and the blog came by as well: Jane, Chris, Dale, Katherine ... thanks for being there. I know I'm missing a couple, so please forgive me if I did.

In the end, I feel gratified with my part in the debate. I don't think anyone had their mind changed tonight on the topic. I hope that everyone had their mind opened about engaging with people on political differences, rather than retreating into the kind of political tribalism that we so often employ.

Iraq War Forum: Opening Remarks

As I announced earlier, I will take part in a Macalester College forum on the Iraq War this evening. I'm posting my opening remarks to the forum so that CQ readers who could not attend can read my speech and my arguments. I hope they inspire a healthy and rational debate here in the comments section. I'll let you know if they did the same at the forum.

The War In Iraq

Good evening, and thank you for your hospitality.

A few weeks ago, Grace Kelley e-mailed me asking if I knew anyone in the area that would defend the decision to invade Iraq for tonight’s forum. I think I surprised Grace when I volunteered to do it myself. She had been unable to get anyone to commit to speaking in this forum, and while I do not know the individual circumstances of those she approached before, I do know the heat and vitriol this topic sometimes inspires. I’m certain that some may have felt that this forum might generate too much of both to be useful in any rhetorical sense.

I feel differently. I do not believe that I will change minds here tonight, at least not about the topic at hand. I plan on offering my opinion on the war, honestly and forthrightly, and expect to be challenged on it. To me, the value of this forum comes not in the opportunity to “prove” myself right or to sway people from deeply-held beliefs. The value comes from meeting my fellow citizens and publicly airing our differences in a positive and rational manner so that we can make our choices freely and openly.

For this opportunity, I thank Democracy for America, my fellow panelists, and our moderator. I also thank the audience for their patience and forbearance, and at the least I hope to prove that all of us can disagree publicly without being disagreeable. At the very least, I’m hoping to emulate the scene from the movie “Patton” where George C. Scott says, “I thought I would stand here like this so you could see if I was really as big a son of a bitch as you think I am.”

So let me state some assumptions from which I’ve worked over the years that I have been writing on politics. People who oppose the war in Iraq are not unpatriotic. They are not cowards. The decision to invade Iraq was just that: a policy decision and a strategic wartime decision. It is possible to be on either side of that decision and still be a good American citizen. Vilifying those for disagreeing on this point in either direction does no one any good and only pollutes the political atmosphere.

Obviously, I do believe that invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein was the right decision at the time, and I still believe we are better off for that decision. My support comes from a strategic look at the war on terror and the challenge we faced in fighting it with Saddam still in power.

We have to keep the pressure on the terrorists and radicals in their region in order to keep them from setting the battle to their own advantage. Was Iraq the correct place in which to do this? I believe it was. I say this for these reasons: Saddam continued to make war on the United States during the twelve-year cease fire, and we needed to fight and end that war to have any success in the war on terror. We had tried to engage the entire global community in that effort for twelve years and the community as a whole abdicated their responsibilities.

Saddam Made War on the United States

It’s impossible to overemphasize this. We had 40,000 men and women tied down in and around Iraq at the time of 9/11 enforcing a cease-fire agreement that Saddam Hussein continually violated. His forces fired repeatedly at American and British aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones. They “lit up” our planes with fire control radars on almost a daily basis, in defiance of the agreement that kept us out of Baghdad in 1991. And while it happened years prior, let’s not forget the attempted assassination of George H. W. Bush during Clinton’s first term of office.

Each one of these constituted an act of war.

Our failure to respond in kind not only emboldened Saddam Hussein towards even greater defiance, it sent a message through the region that we would not fight back.

The International Community Failed To Stand Firm

One of the most common criticisms of the decision to go into Iraq is that it was made “unilaterally”. The complaint originates from the failure of the United Nations Security Council to authorize our use of force against Saddam Hussein and to end twelve years of defiance by his regime. We spent twelve years and one month enforcing sanctions against Iraq, a regimen that we later found had been undermined by the same nations that opposed enforcing the sixteen Security Council resolutions that had been issued during that period.

In the weeks before 9/11, nations such as France and Russia were actively petitioning the UN to remove the sanctions against Iraq. Prior to that, they and others had corrupted the UN program designed to allow aid to ordinary Iraqis, instead putting billions of dollars into Saddam’s pockets and reinforcing his grip on power. The international community sent a clear signal that they would do nothing about Saddam’s wars and genocides even when his actions violated a signed cease-fire agreement, and that the only issue that mattered to them was the money they could make on Iraq’s oil.

The Need To Engage The Enemy

The US needs to engage the terrorists in their backyard and not ours. We cannot allow them to construct set-piece attacks as they did throughout the 1990s because we have no completely effective way to defend against them. In a way, this parallels the frustration that Abraham Lincoln felt with his commanders during the Civil War. Too many of them, especially George McLelland, felt that they should hold their fire until the Union had a massive numerical superiority against the Confederacy. This allowed Robert E. Lee to dictate the terms of the war in the first two years, forcing the North to react rather than to define the battle for themselves. In the end, Lincoln picked Ulysses S Grant not just because Grant was a much better general than the rest, but because Grant understood that the Union had to fight Lee to win, and had to fight Lee on his own ground. Grant beat Lee because he used the Union’s superior economic forces and reserves to grind the Confederacy down to defeat.

One of the unfortunate lessons we taught the radical Islamists over the past thirty years has been the lack of fortitude in American resolve. We did nothing while Islamists captured our embassy in Teheran and held dozens of Americans hostage for 444 days. Ronald Reagan retreated from Beirut in 1983 after a Hezbollah attack killed over 200 Marines, and then he negotiated with their Iranian sponsors for the release of hostages in the late 1980s. When the road to Baghdad was wide open in 1991, George H.W. Bush let Saddam stay in power. We retreated from Somalia in 1993 and failed to respond to a series of provocations in that decade, starting with the World Trade Center attack and culminating in the attack on our military – the USS Cole.

We taught the terrorists that we would not fight for our interests and we would retreat when provoked. And Saddam Hussein’s continued defiance reinforced that lesson on a daily basis.

The Results Of The Decision

What have been the results of this decision? The United States has benefited in material ways which has made the nation and the region safer.

1. We deposed a genocidal dictator that had murdered at least 300,000 of his own people, in at least one case using chemical weapons to do so. He had twice gone to war with his neighbors in the past twenty years, invading our trading partner and ally and threatening our oil supply, which forced us to go to war to expel him from Kuwait. With the sanctions regime collapsing and his power more secure than ever, Saddam would have been free to attack American interests around the world as he often threatened to do.

2. Although it had happened a few years earlier, Saddam had attempted to assassinate George H. W. Bush after his term in office, an act of war in itself. Bill Clinton responded with a series of missile strikes while enforcing the sanctions and cease-fire agreements. Had Saddam been freed from his international obligations, he could have tried assassinating American politicians in the future, with potentially greater success. Ending his regime eliminated that possibility.

3. Libya surrendered its nuclear program as a result of the deposing of Saddam. Moammar Gaddafi told Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi that he did not want to end up like Saddam Hussein, and reached agreement with the US and Britain within a month of Saddam’s capture to reveal and destroy its nuclear-weapons infrastructure. In doing so, we discovered that Libya had a more advanced program than previously thought, and also found more evidence of the AQ Khan nuclear-proliferation ring.

4. The presence of 140,000 American troops on Syria’s border had a demonstrable effect after the assassination of Rafik Hariri in 2005. When the Lebanese people demanded the expulsion of Syrian forces from their nation, the Syrians could easily have used their forces to quash the rebellion. Instead, they meekly withdrew without firing a shot, faced down by the US and France in a joint demand for withdrawal.

5. The same presence between Iran and Syria forces both terror-sponsoring nations to take into account our reaction to their actions. It places us in a strategic position to act in our defense or that of our allies if either nation decides to openly attack.

6. Fourteen million Iraqis have embraced the democratic process and elected the first representative democracy in the Arab world. If that democracy can survive, it will have the opportunity to transform the region.

Most of all, we have restored our reputation as a serious nation that will take action to defend itself and to transform the battlefield to our advantage. Terrorists understand that we will act to defend freedom and liberty and to pursue it in the heart of Islamist terrorism. On 9/11, they understandably questioned our resolve to prevail; they can no longer make that mistake. We took the steps necessary to end the long-running war with Iraq that kept Saddam in power and gave us a dangerous image as an impotent power in the region.

Again, I thank you for your time and hospitality. As long as we can meet in these forums and engage in spirited but rational debate, we know that American democracy and freedoms are secure indeed. Terrorists cannot take that away from us; only we can do that to ourselves.

9/11 Remembrance: Ysidro Hidalgo-Tejada

With the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack approaching, I wondered what I would write to honor those who lost their lives in the worst foreign attack on the homeland in almost two centuries. Plenty of stories have already been told about the victims and the heroes, and I wondered what I could add.

Not long ago, I received an invitation from the 2,996 Tribute Project. The organizers want bloggers to remember each one of the dead from that terrible day, and in order to ensure that no one gets forgotten, they assigned a victim to each blogger. The project assigned me Ysidro Hidalgo-Tejada, a food-service worker in the World Trade Center.

I tried doing some research on Ysidro. The messages at the website indicate that he had a family that loved him, a family that the Dominican Republic immigrant supported by working at the Windows On The World restaurant at the top of the North Tower. We have heard something about the situation that the people in the restaurant faced in their final minutes. The restaurant manager called several times to emergency workers, trying to get some assistance and eventually realizing that it would not come. The smoke and fumes were choking those trapped in the restaurant even before the tower fell, but they did their best to hold up until the very end.

We do not know how Ysidro spent those last desperate minutes. We do know that all three stairwells were severed by American Airlines Flight 11. Did he try to make his way out? Or did he die like he lived, helping others and supporting them even after hope ran out? In the end, we have no information on which to judge, just like I could find no information on the life Ysidro lived before the attack that killed him.

It's hard to do justice to Ysidro. I never knew him, his family, or even have an inkling of his life; all I have is his death, and not even enough of that to distinguish him from the other 2,996 victims of the attack. But in a way, Ysidro serves as an example of the people who died that day. All Ysidro did was work hard and support his family, serving the diners who made their way to the highest restaurant in the world in one of the greatest cities ever built. Everyone who died that day just wanted to help people and make life a little better for themselves and those around them.

Ysidro came to the United States because of the promise of freedom and the ability to make his own way in the world. He died because terrorists fear and hate that about America and the West. Ysidro stood for something they could not abide: the ability to make his own decisions and live life his own way. Ysidro deserves to be remembered far more than the lunatics who took his life and all the others.

Godspeed, Ysidro. I'm sorry we didn't get the chance to know you better. The terrorists stole that opportunity from us.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has hers posted already.

UPDATE II: I found a brief portrait of Ysidro's life at the New York Times:

Ysidro Hidalgo-Tejada had a gentle touch that he applied to making dinner for his huge extended family, planting flowers, or taking care of his 90-year-old diabetic mother when he visited his native Dominican Republic.

Mr. Hidalgo-Tejada, who was 50, worked in food preparation at Windows on the World. Even though he worked around food all day, he would often go home and prepare something special for his wife and three daughters, said his eldest child, Anyela Hidalgo, 18.

"I miss him every day," Ms. Hidalgo said softly. "I'm not going to have my dad with me anymore. My little sisters, they don't want to talk about him much. One of the last things we did together was to go to the Statue of Liberty. We had to wait in line for a long time but my dad said it was worth it."

In his down time, Mr. Hidalgo-Tejada enjoyed playing dominos and watching the Discovery Channel. His family kept him busy, too; he had 10 siblings and more than two dozen nieces and nephews.

A gentle man, whose life was snuffed out by vicious and bloodthirsty terrorists. They could never hope to have Ysidro's value as a human being.

Forum On Iraq Tonight At Macalester College

As I announced last week, I have been invited to a panel discussion at Macalester College in Saint Paul this evening on the Iraq war. The debate is sponsored by Democracy for America, which has invited three other speakers to debate the war. The speakers include Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, Univ. of St. Thomas Peace and Justice Studies professor; Phil Steger, Friends for a Nonviolent World director; and Lou Ellingson, Swift Boat retired Navy captain and small business owner. It's my understanding that all three will speak in opposition to the war.

I felt that I owed some effort to defend the positions I've taken in a public forum, even one that has the potential to be as hostile as this might be. The people at DFA have been great, very encouraging and very polite, and I'm working from the assumption that the evening will feature sharp but polite disagreement on policy and refrain from personal attacks; I know I won't indulge them, and I think CQ readers know that from my writings here. If we're going to change minds, we have to talk to people who disagree with us, even if it seems unlikely to have the effect we want.

In a larger sense, this seems the perfect way to honor our loss on 9/11. America is the home of honest and free political debate, and if we want to prevail against fascism secular or religious, we have to retain the courage to speak out even in potentially hostile climates.

If any CQ readers want to lend some support, the panel discussion will take place at Macalester College's Weyerhaeuser Memorial Chapel, at 1600 Grand Avenue in Saint Paul, at 7 pm. Click here for a map to the campus. It's open to the public free of charge, but given the timing, turnout may be somewhat low. I'd be glad to meet CQ readers at the event.

Frist Underscores Border Security In Session Agenda

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist pens a column in today's Washington Examiner regarding the priorities at the top of his legislative agenda. As he promised in our interview, national security will occupy most of the Senate's time, but as I predicted, he will hit border security as a big part of that picture:

Homeland security stands atop my list of remaining priorities. Last month’s arrests in England reminded all of us that, almost exactly five years after Sept. 11, terrorists remain intent on attacking and killing Americans. ...

Congress must also work to secure America’s borders.

While the Republican Congress has already devoted billions of dollars in new spending to border security, our frontiers still need additional protection.

Thus, as we appropriate money, we’ll provide funds to hire new Customs and Border Protection personnel, provide them with necessary equipment, and begin the construction of a mixture of virtual and physical fencing covering every inch of the United States’ southern border.

Conservatives had given up hope that this Congress would address the porous southern border. With the short session upon us and the nationwide immigration hearings stalled, the effort looked dead for this year. However, the overwhelming consensus to secure the border gives Frist and House Speaker Denny Hastert a mandate to address at least that portion of immigration reform.

It will, of course, get resistance from the entire Democratic caucus in the Senate, as well as a few Republican members. As I wrote earlier, the loss of border control as a bargaining chip would mean legalization would never get any support in either chamber. The reformers cannot afford to allow border control to get resolved separately, and they will fight it tooth and nail in the next few weeks.

This is what makes the issue irresistible for Republicans, especially given their testy relations with conservatives of late. If Frist can push through an overhaul of border defenses in the south, then the GOP rank and file will have a long-sought victory and will turn out in greater numbers. If the effort gets blocked by Democrats and moderate Republicans despite the efforts of GOP leadership ... then angry conservatives will turn out in greater numbers to defeat the obstructionists.

I never doubted that the Republicans would miss this low-hanging fruit for the midterms. Expect this effort to be high profile. Read the rest of Frist's column for a good outline of what else we can expect in the next few weeks.

Poison Pregnancy

Ayman al-Zawahiri released a message to the West last night reminding everyone of the nihilism of radical Islam and its central role in the 9/11 attacks, and warned of more to come. The new message, complete with subtitles, warns that Islam is in the family way again:

A lengthy statement from al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks calls on Muslims to step up their resistance against the United States.

"Your leaders are hiding from you the true extent of the disaster," al-Zawahiri says in a statement posted on the Internet late Sunday. "And the days are pregnant and giving birth to new events, with Allah's permission and guidance."

The video appeared on the Web site for Al-Sahab, the terror network's production company, said counterterrorism expert Laura Mansfield.

Al-Zawahiri calls on Muslims to fight U.S. allies in Somalia, where an Islamic militia recently pushed a U.S.-backed alliance of warlords out of the capital, and urges Iraq's Kurds to take up arms against the Americans.

Al-Zawahiri also attacks "collaborators" he says have abandoned Islam.

Zawahiri has plenty to say during this hour-long video, as does As-Sahab, which produced its own 9/11 retrospective for al-Qaeda. The As-Sahab version has interesting comments about media manipulation that should be seen by all, but the Zawahiri version offers more of the same threats we have heard from al-Qeada since 1998, when we failed to appreciate the danger. In fact, Zawahiri goes all the way back to the first World Trade Center attack when he demands the release of Sheike Abdel Rahman, the "blind Sheikh" who guided the first terrorist conspiracy.

For those who doubt that Iraq holds much significance in the fight against al-Qaeda, Zawahiri assures people of its central nature:

“I tell them your leaders are hiding from you the true extent of the disaster which will shick you. And the days are pregnant and giving birth to new events with Allah's permission and guidance. And I tell them, you have provided us with all the legal and rational reasons to fight you and retaliate from you, you have committed ugly crimes and broken the traties which you used ti impose on others. And for our part, we have repeatedly warned you and repeatedly offered a truce with you, and so we now have all legal and rational justifications to continue to fight you until your power is destroyed or you give in and surrender.”

“And I tell them you shouldn't bother yourselves with defending your forces in Iraq and Afghanistan because they are doomed to defeat and are all but defeated fighting their last battles. Rather, you should reinforce your defenses in two regions. The first is the Gulf, from where you will be expelled, Allah willing, after your defeat in Iraq, at which point your economic ruin will be achieved. And the second is Israel, because the Jihadi reinforcements are getting closer to it, with Allah's Help and Power, and your defeat there will put an end to contemporary Zionist/Crusader superiority....”

He sees our defeat and/or surrender in Iraq as the first step towards our economic ruin. Iraq has assumed that position because it signalled our resolve not to abandon the region to terrorists and genocidal dictators. Of all the post-9/11 developments, they fear Iraqi democracy the most. It would light a beacon for freedom that eventually would spread through the region, and that specifically rejects the kind of theocratic fascism that Zawahiri has planned for the ummah. Defeating us and driving us from the region would allow them to take over in Iraq, Zawahiri believes, and take control of the world's oil supplies in an eventual drive across the entire region.

If successful, they would grasp power on an unimaginable scale. Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden see that as Islam's destiny. Their message should remind us on this anniversary of 9/11 exactly what we face in this war, and why we cannot retreat an inch in the face of the enemy.

The Difference Between Israel And Its Enemies

In Israel, Jewish terrorists get tried and convicted:

An Israeli settler who shot and killed four Palestinian civilians in the West Bank in an attempt to scuttle Israel's pullout from the Gaza Strip was convicted Monday in the Jerusalem District Court on four counts of murder.

Asher Weisgan, 38, of the West Bank settlement of Shvut Rachel, who had subsequently called for the
assassination of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, had been found mentally fit to stand trial by a psychiatrist who examined him at court order.

A driver who transported Palestinian laborers, Weisgan grabbed a gun from a security guard at the end of the work day last August after asking him for a drink of water, and then opened fire at the workers in his car at close range, killing three instantly and mortally wounding a fourth, who died later on the operating table at Jerusalem's Hadassah-University Hospital at Ein Kerem.

In the Palestinian Authority, their terrorists vie for power:

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said Monday he would keep his post in a coalition government between Hamas and Fatah, indicating progress in the most recent round of talks.

But Haniyeh did not say whether the sides had reached agreement on three key issues: recognizing Israel, halting terrorist activity and accepting past Israeli-Palestinian peace deals. Israel and the international community, headed by the United States, has said it would not recognize any Hamas-led government until it accepted the three demands, which Hamas has rejected.

"We have gone a long way and expect within the next few days to create a constitutional mechanism that allows for a national unity government," Haniyeh told reporters in Gaza, without elaborating.

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas returned to the Gaza Strip on Sunday night "to make a final attempt" to reach an agreement with Hamas on the formation of a national-unity government, PA officials said.

"This is Hamas's last chance," one official told The Jerusalem Post. "Either they accept our terms of the establishment of a national-unity government or we will have to form a new government."

Until the Palestinians stop treating their terrorists as heroes, peace will never occur in that region.

Ahmadinejad As Monty Hall

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has decided to play Monty Hall, the Guardian reports. He has offered an eight-week window in which he will refrain from uranium enrichment, a short respite that puts pressure on the West to reach a deal before Teheran opens Door #1:

Iran offered to freeze its uranium enrichment programme yesterday for eight weeks in what looked like a successful tactic aimed at delaying consideration of international sanctions.

In talks at the weekend in Vienna between Iran's national security chief, Ali Larijani, and the European Union's foreign policy supremo, Javier Solana, Tehran appeared to concede enough to prevent a quick move to sanctions by the UN security council.

Washington is pressing for a swift decision on sanctions after Tehran failed to meet the terms of a security council resolution requiring it to freeze its uranium enrichment activities in order to resume negotiations with the west, Russia and China. The weekend talks in Vienna were seen as a final chance to avert a bigger confrontation. But EU officials said yesterday that there would be further talks as a result of the weekend session.

Of course, this could be on the level. Iran has not sold its populace on the need to alienate the West in its drive for the nuclear cycle, and may need to cut a deal or be seen trying to do so for political cover back home. Larijani might even make a good enough deal to renounce the nuclear cycle if the West acted quickly.

However, it seems much more likely that the Iranians want to split the West even further with this latest tactic. Adolf Hitler used to use much the same strategy during the 1930s. He would violate treaties and agreements, and then turn around and offer to sign new agreements that recognized the new status quo. Without exception, the war-weary West agreed, unwilling to use force to hold Germany to its obligations. Ahmadinejad has measured his opponents and found them similarly lacking in fortitude, too anxious for a deal and not willing to apply even diplomatic force to stop Iran.

If we thought the Iranians made this offer in good faith, we'd celebrate this as a breakthrough. However, the narrow window of cessation shows that the Iranian offer is nothing more than a stunt. An eight-week pause means little for their enrichment program. Iran will use it as a Sword of Damocles against the West, a clock ticking while the Europeans rush to give Iran everything and the kitchen sink before the clock runs out.

If I'm wrong, I'd be happy to admit it. If Iran really gives up enrichment, then we'll all be better off. I think there's more chance that the Democratic Party will advertise on tonight's installment of "The Path to 9/11".

Pilots Fight Background Checks For Flight Schools

On the day when we remember the 2,996 people killed by terrorists who used their limited flight-school training to turn commercial airliners into guided missiles, the New York Sun reports that the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association plans to fight a New York law requiring background checks for students at flight schools. In the five years after 9/11, only New York has such a requirement:

The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association is considering filing a lawsuit against New York to block legislation signed by Governor Pataki that would require flight training schools to force its student applicants to undergo background checks before they start instruction.

The Maryland-based association, which had lobbied aggressively against the legislation, is claiming that the state lacks jurisdiction over aviation security requirements for student pilots. It also is warning that the checks would drive away business from New York flight schools by making it more difficult and time-consuming for aspiring pilots to enter into training. "If New York is putting restrictions on flight training, people will just go to other states," the general counsel of the pilots association, John Yodice, told The New York Sun.

Under the New York law, student applicants at flight schools now have to provide any criminal history information to the Division of Criminal Justice Services, which will determine if applicants are cleared for instruction. Applicants in New York cannot begin training until they get clearance from the federal government.

When the law takes effect in two months, New York will be the only state to require student pilot background checks. In 2002, Michigan passed a similar law, which was contested in federal court by the association. The lawsuit was dropped after Governor Granholm repealed the law in 2003.

"We will pursue every possible venue to get this law overturned," the executive vice president of government affairs for the association, Andy Cebula, said in a statement. "We succeeded in changing a similar law in Michigan, and we are committed to fight this in New York."

The federal government currently requires visa and fingerprint checks for foreign students, not American citizens or legal residents. AOPA claims that individual states have no authority to pass stronger requirements than that of the federal government and that such action would largely be ineffective. They have petitioned the Transportation Security Administration for an opinion on the matter, but TSA has already stated that they would not sue New York or any other state that passed more stringent requirements.

I find it amazing that anyone can still get flight training with no background checks five years after 9/11. We have a Constitutional right to bear arms, and that requires everyone to undergo background checks and waiting periods. Most businesses now conduct at least a rudimentary background check on prospective employees. We know from bitter experience that terrorists want to use airplanes as guided missiles, especially commercial jets but given the opportunity perhaps smaller but potent configurations as well.

Why wouldn't we require such background checks, which can usually be performed in just a few days at worst? It seems like such a no-brainer that one has to question why no states have thought to do so. Minnesota, after all, had Zacarias Moussaoui attempt to train himself to participate in similar attacks right here in my town. In an age where home-grown jihadis represent the latest threat, this seems an unusual gap to leave open.

AOPA says that its 650,000 members, acting as eyes and ears for airplane security, can police the field without the intervention of state governments. Excuse me, but after 9/11, I don't think asking people to provide security as a sideline cuts it anymore. Having forty-eight states miss this rather obvious gap in security is embarrassing. Jennifer Granholm's repeal of background-check requirements in Michigan is infuriating. And AOPA's efforts to force New York to abandon its efforts to prevent potential criminals and terrorists from attacking the US with civilian airplanes -- an attack without any effective defense -- is outrageous.

Suck it up, people.

MEMRI Shows Muslim Coverage Of 9/11 And Its Aftermath

Hot Air points readers to an excellent 43-minute documentary by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), hosted by Ron Silver, about the coverage and analysis of 9/11 in the Muslim world. It's an excellent perspective on the widespread paranoia and denial that conspiracy theorizing has brought to the ummah. If you want the short version, here it is: the Jews did it. In fact, some of the assertions made in this video sound uncomfortably similar to rhetoric emanating from far-Left circles.

Also, Allahpundit also recommends this CBS site, which has unedited clips of 9/11 coverage. You'll see many scenes that the broadcast networks had excised for the last five years.

Did The AP Have A Spy For Saddam?

The American Thinker posts a translation of a captured Iraqi Intelligence Service document that intimates a mole for the IIS worked at the Associated Press. Document ISGQ-2005-00026108, translated by the tireless Joseph Shahda, does make an intriguing reference to a source within the AP:

Republic of Iraq

The Presidency of the Republic

The Intelligence Service

Date: 25/7/2000

Number: 6146

Secret

To: 5th / 4th / 13th Directorates

We were informed from one of our sources (the degree of trust in him is good) who works in the American Associated Press Agency [emphasis added] that the agency broadcasted to through computer to its branches worldwide the following ...

The AP has earned plenty of mistrust for its slanted reporting over the years, but I don't think this adds significantly to that record. First, the memo doesn't describe the nature of its source. It could have been a reporter, but could just as easily could have been a copy desk employee or some clerical worker within the office with access to inbound information from their reporters. Second, reporters from all news sources had made a number of contacts with the Saddam regime, and if anyone thinks that information only flows in one direction in those relationships, they are pretty naive.

The date of the memo also calls into question the usefulness of the source. The memo was written on July 24, 2000. However, the UN commissioned UNMOVIC in 1999, eight months earlier. Hans Blix got the assignment as UNMOVIC chief in March 2000, four months prior to the memo. The group began its training for new inspectors on July 11th, almost two weeks prior to the memo. While the AP may or may not have reported the information in this memo publicly, Reuters did on July 14 -- ten days before the memo was written.

I saw this last night and thought it looked too thin for comment. Several of my fellow bloggers seem to think otherwise, but I think they misremember the public nature of UNMOVIC's creation and deployment. Nothing in this IIS memo has any information that anyone with access to the wire services would not have known for days prior to its creation. Their trusted source may have been no more than an Internet news site.

UPDATE: Mark Tapscott has a response to this post that CQ readers should note well. If Saddam did have any kind of source at the AP, it certainly would reflect badly on the news agency, and the memo does indicate that the IIS believed they did. It's just not clear that the source had any access to damaging information.

The Disingenuousness Of Jay Rockefeller

Senator Jay Rockefeller has provided one of the loudest voices decrying the Bush administration after the release of the Phase II reports this week, but last night's headline is simply jaw-dropping. Claiming that the White House "duped" America regarding Iraq and its ties to terrorism, he now says that the US and the Iraqis would have been better off with Saddam still in charge (via AJ Strata):

"The absolute cynical manipulation, deliberately cynical manipulation, to shape American public opinion and 69 percent of the people, at that time, it worked, they said 'we want to go to war,'" Rockefeller told CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. "Including me. The difference is after I began to learn about some of that intelligence I went down to the Senate floor and I said 'my vote was wrong.'"

Rockefeller went a step further. He says the world would be better off today if the United States had never invaded Iraq — even if it means Saddam Hussein would still be running Iraq.

He said he sees that as a better scenario, and a safer scenario, "because it is called the 'war on terror.'"

Does Rockefeller stands by his view, even if it means that Saddam Hussein could still be in power if the United States didn't invade?

"Yes. [Saddam] wasn't going to attack us. He would've been isolated there," Rockefeller said. "He would have been in control of that country but we wouldn't have depleted our resources preventing us from prosecuting a war on terror which is what this is all about."

Sorry, but this simply won't fly. Rockefeller doesn't learn about intelligence from the White House or from press releases -- he's the ranking member of the Senate committee on intelligence. He sees the same raw data that the President gets, and he has access to the same analysts that confer with the White House. The SSCI had ample opportunity for years to question the intel provided to them by the entire range of intelligence agencies regarding Iraq, and most of that well before the Bush administration took office.

Rockefeller cannot say with any degree of honesty that the White House misled him on the nature of the intelligence, unless he wants to claim that Bush stole his capacity for independent thought. Rockefeller saw the same data and reached the same conclusions as the White House. Now that the intel has been proven faulty, he wants to escape responsibility for it by turning the intel failure into a partisan smear campaign.

In fact, Rockefeller even went farther than the White House in describing Saddam Hussein as an "imminent threat". On October 10, 2002, he told the Senate that insisting on further intel would put Americans at risk:

“There has been some debate over how ‘imminent’ a threat Iraq poses. I do believe Iraq poses an imminent threat. I also believe after September 11, that question is increasingly outdated. … It is in the nature of these weapons that he has and the way they are targeted against civilian populations, that documented capability and demonstrated intent may be the only warning we get. To insist on further evidence could put some of our fellow Americans at risk. Can we afford to take that chance? I do not think we can.”

Why did he think that? Let's turn to that Phase II report to see (page 75 forward):

The ability of al-Qa’ida to procure training in chemical and biological weapons (CBW) particularly concerned the Intelligence Community prior to the war. Prewar reporting about training varied in reliability and was often contradictory. Regarding Iraqi provided CB W training to al-Qa’ida, Iraqi Support for Terrorism judged:

Details on training range from good reports from senior al-Qa’ida members to those of second-hand sources of varying reliability, often the result of long and opaque reporting chains or discussions of future intentions rather than evidence of completed training. The general pattern that emerges is of al-Qa’ida’s enduring interest in acquiring
CBW expertise from Iraq.

CIA also stated that:

Some of the most ominous suggestions of possible Iraqi-al-Qa’ida cooperation involve Bin Ladin’s CBW ambitions. Although Iraq historically has guarded closely its strategic weapons information, experts, and resources, Baghdad could have offered training or other support to al-Qa’ida.

The CIA relied heavily on the information obtained from the debriefing of detainee Ibn al-Shaykh al-Lib& a senior al-Qa’ida operational planner, to assess Iraq’s potential CBW training of al-Qa’ida. The January 2003 paper, Iraqi Support for Terrorism, reported that al-Libi told a foreign intelligence service:

Iraq-acting on the request of al-Qa’ida militant Abu Abdullah, who was Muhammad Atif’s emissary-agreed to provide unspecified chemical or biological weapons training for two al-Qa’ida associates beginning in December 2000. The two individuals departed for Iraq but did not return, so al-Libi was not in a position to know if any training had taken place.

The September 2002 version of Iraqi Support for Terrorism stated that al-Libi said Iraq had “provided” unspecified CBW training for two al-Qa’ida associates in 2000, but also stated that al Libi “did not know the results of the training.“ In the June 2002 paper, Iraq and al Qa ‘ida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship, the CIA also stated that al-Libi claimed Iraq had “provided” unspecified CBW training for two al-Qa’ida associates in 2000. That report
omitted the qualification that al-Libi did not know the results of the training.

The CIA provided testimony from a senior al-Qaeda figure claiming that Iraq had provided training in chemical and biological weapons to AQ operatives. The information had at least the same level of provenance as later assertions by captured Iraqi leaders that they did not provide such training, and at any rate the evidence before Rockefeller and Bush at the time appeared very clear. Even al-Qaeda leadership figures claimed that Iraq had provided support for their efforts to expand their arsenals into WMD. Given that testimony, the contemporaneous analysis seems very reasonable. George Tenet himself testified to that very analysis in September 2002.

In fact, the SSCI conlcludes on page 79 that the CIA's conclusions on CBW training were "reasonable" given the intelligence they had at the time. Al-Libi recanted, but after the war had already begun (in January 2004). In February, the CIA revised their estimates based on the recantation -- but that was 16 months after Rockefeller himself declared Saddam an "imminent threat" based on this and other information, and warned that waiting for further evidence would put Americans at risk.

Now let's address the notion that leaving Saddam Hussein in power would have been good for either the Iraqis or Americans. Condoleezza Rice had to address that silly notion on this morning's Fox News Sunday:

The notion, somehow — and I've heard this — the notion, somehow, that the world would be better off with Saddam Hussein still in power seems to me quite ludicrous.

Saddam Hussein had gone to war against his neighbors twice, causing more than a million deaths. He had dragged us into a war in 1991 because he invaded his neighbor Kuwait. We were still at war with him in 1998 when we used American forces to try and disable his weapons of mass destruction. We went to war again with him, day in and day out, as he shot at our aircraft trying to patrol no-fly zones. This was a mass murderer of more than 300,000 of his own people, using weapons of mass destruction.

The United States and a coalition of allies finally brought down one of the most brutal dictators in the Middle East and one of the most dangerous dictators in the Middle East, and we're better off for it.

Rice misses two larger points that make it more clear why we had to dispose of Saddam Hussein in the post-9/11 world. Everything she says about Hussein is true; he's a genocidal dictator who went to war against his neighbors on at least two occasions, and he slaughtered hundreds of thousands of his own people, in at least one case using WMD to do it. That doesn't really make a dispositive case, however, because we don't just declare war on genocidal tyrants, and Sudan provides the latest case in point.

Saddam's Iraq posed special considerations. Mainly, Saddam never complied with the requirements of the 1991 cease-fire. As Rice noted, he would shoot at Coalition aircraft, which should have prompted a massive invasion after the first violation, as an obvious act of war. Firing a few missiles at presidential palaces in response did nothing to correct the problem, and neither did 16 UN Security Council resolutions demanding compliance over a dozen years. His nation also sat between two state sponsors of terrorism in their own rights, Syria and Iran.

The US took out Saddam Hussein in order to establish our credibility in the Middle East. We had allowed Saddam to thumb his nose at us for twelve years, and the sanctions regime had all but collapsed. We either had to resolve the ongoing defiance of Saddam or pull out altogether, especially after 9/11. Had we retreated from Iraq, we would have sent yet another signal that the United States would not risk anything in its own defense. We already had enough examples of this, from Teheran to Beirut to Somalia, when we thought it would decrease the threat against us. We could hardly afford to add another after 9/11 stripped those illusions from us.

It also allowed us to put pressure on the two terrorist supporting states, in two ways. First, having 140,000 American troops on their borders made it more difficult for them to act with reckless abandon; it had a direct impact on Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon after the assassination of Rafik Hariri. Second, the rise of a democracy in the center of Southwest Asia would have an enormous transformative impact on both nations, if successful.

Rockefeller, unfortunately, has succumbed to partisan lunacy rather than realistic responsibility in all its forms.

How About Another Huge Wave Of Saudi Students?

In a move that has more complexities than it seems on the surface, the US and Saudi Arabia have announced a big increase in the number of college students coming from the West's oil partner to campuses near you. Five times more students will get admitted to American universities -- and, of course, America -- than will have been in the country before:

Thousands of students from Saudi Arabia are enrolling on college campuses across the United States this semester under a new educational exchange program brokered by President Bush and Saudi King Abdullah.

The program will quintuple the number of Saudi students and scholars in the United States by the academic year's end. And big, public universities from Florida to Oregon are in a fierce competition for their tuition dollars.

The kingdom's royal family -- which is paying full scholarships for most of the 15,000 students -- says the program will help stem unrest at home by schooling the country's brightest in the American tradition. The State Department sees the exchange as a way to build ties with future Saudi leaders and young scholars at a time of unsteady relations with the Muslim world.

But some officials say efforts to fast-track educational diplomacy with Saudi Arabia could use additional scrutiny. Clark Kent Ervin, a former inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said the U.S. government has yet to ensure proper safeguards are in place to do effective background checks on all applicants.

At first blush, and perhaps second blush, many will ask whether the Bush administration has lost its collective mind. At the very least, announcing this on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 seems politically inept. Not too many of us have forgotten that the terrorists attended Jihadi U for a one-day seminar five years ago at the World Trade Center and Pentagon, admitted here through the same kind of mechanism and the exact same country. Quintupling the number of Saudi students, even without Visa Express, sounds like a strange notion given the lack of progress we have seen in Saudi-supported Wahhabi schools and their exhortations of hatred against Jews and Westerners.

On the other hand, an argument can be made that this program could have a moderating effect on Saudi sensibilities, and that the Saudi royal family may honestly desire that end. They seem to have seen the end result of their fanatical Wahhabism as it came back to bite them in the form of al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden took Wahhabism at face value rather than just a means to keep anger in Saudi Arabia focused outward, and bin Laden has applied it to the Saudis themselves. They have fought AQ ever since 9/11 and have discovered that they don't much care for the terrorists either.

Sending young men abroad to study in Western universities accomplishes two goals for the Saudis. It lowers the number of young men in Saudi Arabia, which helps hold the political temperature down. In polygamous societies, young men provide a destabilizing influence if given nothing to do, as the number of marriageable women is kept artificially low. Without social outlets, they turn to radical pursuits. Getting them out of the country for a few years allows the pressure to recede and gives them the opportunity to find something other than radicalism to occupy their time.

The second goal gets accomplished on their return. Having been immersed in open democracy, the students who return will hopefully bring that moderating influence back with them. Although that could eventually create a challenge to the power of the monarchy, the House of Saud apparently feels that the risks of jihadism are greater, which is why they have taken a few tentative steps towards democracy. Those young men who return also will have more earning capability and have better prospects for marriage, extending the moderating influence to another generation.

All of this doesn't address the question of whether we benefit from the exchange -- and whether the benefits are worth the risk we assume.

I'd say that the benefits of a more moderate Saudi Arabia make this a program worth considering -- as long as the risks are properly managed. It appears that the government has learned its lesson from the disastrous Visa Express program. The replacement will track classroom attendance and completion of studies to keep the students under careful watch. As we saw with the ten Egyptian students who suddenly disappeared, the FBI found out about it very quickly and resolved the situation, deporting the students once they were found (most of them turned themselves in).

And let's not forget another potential benefit in this war on terror, which we can assume will last for several more years. Saudis who come to the US could later provide good intelligence on radical movements abroad. They will hold highly-prized American university degrees and will likely find work all over the Middle East. If we can convince them of the superiority of freedom, democracy, and tolerance, we may find that we can create a network of intelligence resources throughout the region within a short period of time. That could go a long way to addressing the chronic humint shortage we have faced, especially in that region, since the Carter Administration.

This could work to the benefit of both nations, if properly managed. It could have waited until next semester, however.

The Path To 9/11 ...

... is the path to lunacy, if one keeps up with the links at Memeorandum. They're already planning Phase II of their war on Disney and ABC after the showing of the miniseries, having failed to dislodge the network with their "vociferous and righteous public outcry". The bloggers now refer to the show as "terror porn" and decry the fact that the producers have distributed advabce copies to conservatives -- although they fail to note that the conservatives that got them are media personalities who often get advance copies for pre-release review. It's called "publicity", and usually broadcasters like it.

I don't know whether the film is terrible or terrific, and unfortunately I won't get a chance to find out. I'll be at a benefit dinner this evening honoring a fallen police officer (see below), and I'll be at Macalester College Monday night engaging in a much more rational debate over the Iraq war -- and hopefully local CQ readers will join me there. In the meantime, I'll just sit at ringside while the Left melts down over a TV movie and continues to obliquely threaten to shut down a broadcaster over a political disagreement. That totalitarian streak will probably provide the clearest example of political honesty over the next two days, and certainly will be the most entertaining aspect of the week.

A Dinner For Shawn Silvera

This evening, the First Mate and I will attend a dinner and silent auction in memory of Shawn Silvera. Shawn gave his life one year ago in service of our community as a Lino Lakes police officer. He left behind a wife and family, and a community which he had served not just as a police officer, but also as a member of the Peace Corps and as a volunteer for several charities. The evening will benefit several charities that reflect Shawn's passions for community and service, including Minnesota COPS (Concerns of Police Survivors), Catholic Charities, and our own Marriage Encounter. We're honored to be recognized by the Silvera family and we're looking forward to meeting them tonight.

If you have the means, please consider supporting any of these fine organizations, especially Minnesota COPS, in Shawn Silvera's honor.