Month: September 2004

Italy Sold Out — UPDATE: Maybe?

I have tremendous respect for the Italy’s solidarity with the US on the war on terror and the Iraqi front; they have bled and died with us, despite whatever John Kerry says about their character. That’s why the news that they paid a million-dollar ransom to Islamofascists for the release of two hostages disappoints so bitterly:

A senior Italian politician says he believes a ransom of $1m or more was paid for the release of two female Italian aid workers kidnapped in Iraq. Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said no money had been paid but MP Gustavo Selva described the denial as purely “official”. …
Gustavo Selva is head of the Italian parliament’s foreign affairs committee and a member of the National Alliance, one of the parties in the governing coalition.
“The young women’s life was the most important thing,” he told French radio on Wednesday.
“In principle, one should not give in to blackmail, but this time I think we had to give in…”

No doubt the Italians faced a difficult choice, especially since the terrorists in their, ahem, bravery had kidnapped two young Italian women and were threatening to behead them. Unfortunately, all they did was reward the kidnapers and encourage them to do the same again — and they will likely target the Italians more frequently now that they have shown an inclination to bargain. One million dollars buys a lot of ammunition and guns. It buys even more street credibility.
These people hack the heads off of civilian workers whose only crime is that they wanted to help the Iraqi people back onto their feet. They are animals, and the only way to save lives in the long run is to quit treating them like legitimate negotiating partners. Giving them millions of dollars only encourages more lunatics to take up kidnaping and beheading as a get-rich-quick scheme.
UPDATE: Agence France-Presse reports that Italy paid no ransom:

Italy insisted it did not pay a million-dollar ransom to win the release of two aid workers, as the country rejoiced in the homecoming of the women who said they were ready to return to Iraq to continue their work there.
Foreign Minister Franco Frattini insisted “absolutely no ransom” had been paid for the release of Simona Pari and Simona Torretta, both 29, known affectionately by Italians as “the two Simonas”.
A proud Frattini said Italy had simply used its “wide system of contacts” in the Arab world, adding that this “made the kidnappers understand concretely what they were dealing with: a country, Italy, loved and esteemed by the Arab world”.
“That was our only ransom,” he said in an interview with RAI state radio.

Well, that’s their story, and I predict they’ll be sticking with it. If Italy had that kind of love and esteem from the Arab world, why did the terrorists kidnap and hold Italian hostages for this long?

The Kerry/Edwards Draft, or Dodging History

The Democrats have had a fine time this month spreading urban legends about the prospect of a reintroduction of the military draft during a second Bush term. Not only have they and their associates started a shadowy e-mail campaign, but several of their party leaders accused Republicans of hiding a “secret plan” to restart the draft, despite the numerous denials from the GOP — and the fact that the only people to actually propose a new draft are two Democrats, Charles Rangel and Fritz Hollings. CBS helped out, again, by again treating rumors as fact and basing an entire news segment on the hoax.
But lost in the shuffle until now is John Kerry’s proposal to require service for high-school graduation, found by Swimming Through The Spin. Brian found the original web page archived, as somehow this proposal has been mysteriously deleted from the John Kerry website. Since the Democrats brought this up, what exactly are the plans for American youth under a Kerry/Edwards administration?

As part of his 100 day plan to change America, John Kerry will propose a comprehensive service plan that includes requiring mandatory service for high school students and four years of college tuition in exchange for two years of national service.

The more expansive PDF of Kerry’s plan doesn’t detail how the mandatory high-school service is supposed to work, nor does it clearly explain how they plan to pay for four years of college tuition for the 500,000 students per year they expect to put through this program, other than closing a loophole that allows lenders on student loans to keep extra interest paid. If a “typical public university” charges $5,000 per year for tuition — a rather moderate amount these days — then just the cost for the first year alone will be $10 billion, not the $12 billion over 10 years that Kerry claims. ($20,000 times 500,000 students = $10 billion.)
It seems that Kerry has once again been caught in a severe case of projection, and once again has deleted pages from his web site to cover his tracks. His party squeals about a draft which only they have proposed restarting while trying to back-door a plan for indentured servitude for the teenagers of America.

Lasers As Terror Weapons?

Michelle Malkin points her readers to this odd Washington Times story about a pilot whose retina was burned by in-flight exposure to a laser:

A pilot flying a Delta Air Lines jet was injured by a laser that illuminated the cockpit of the aircraft as it approached Salt Lake City International Airport last week, U.S. officials said.
The plane’s two pilots reported that the Boeing 737 had been five miles from the airport when they saw a laser beam inside the cockpit, said officials familiar with government reports of the Sept. 22 incident. The flight, which originated in Dallas, landed without further incident at about 9:30 p.m. local time.

The pilot will apparently return to flight status in a week or so as the damage was not permanent, and with three flight officers on the plane, it would not have disabled the aircraft anyway. However, a spokesman for the pilot’s union says that this is not the first incident of its kind:

“The Air Line Pilots Association has received reports in the past of incidents where lasers penetrated cockpits and, in at least one case, caused injury,” Mr. Mazor said.
Several years ago, a pilot flying into a Western airport was hit by a light from a laser light show. The causes of the other incidents are not known, he said.
Asked whether a laser aimed at pilots could cause a plane to crash, Mr. Mazor said: “I think that’s highly improbable. In every case in the past, the flights landed safely.”

It seems unlikely to me as well. If you wanted to aim something at a plane to make it crash, a shoulder-fired SAM would be much more reliable. Navy Commander Jack Daly got permanently injured by laser exposure while flying a mission and warned Congress that terrorists could use this method to bring down planes without leaving any evidence. But terrorists usually want to leave evidence of their work; the whole point is to terrify people, after all. Terrorists not only desire recognition, they need it as part of whatever cause they’re hoping to support with murder and terror.
It’s more likely that the people playing with lasers aren’t terrorists but malicious individuals trying to do damage in any way they can, or simply clueless nutcases who think it’s funny. But either way, it holds little comfort to the men and women in the cockpit.

Nick Coleman, Off His Meds

A number of high-profile members of the Fourth Estate have gotten mighty testy about the blogosphere lately, writing poisoned-pen columns about how we have the audacity to write criticisms of professional journalists who write criticisms of everyone else. It was just a matter of time before the third-rate hacks took up the same mission, and as Nick Coleman shows us in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, that time is now.
Nick starts off his factless tirade by sniffing about an odd characterization of Democrats:

This just in: I am a very wealthy man, born into privilege and power, and a stooge of the Democratic Party.
Oh. That reminds me, Smithers: Bring me the heads of some Republicans, would you? Also, set out the good silver. Fritz is coming over to give me my marching orders.
Dad-ums would be so proud, wouldn’t he, Muffy?
Nothing in the opening paragraph is true, but bloggers and talk-show barracudas have said so, tossing stuff against the wall to see what sticks. I happen to enjoy the idea of me as to the manor born, so I have taken to wearing an ascot to my corner pizza parlor. …
My dad was a Democrat (the first one to lead the Minnesota Senate since statehood). But he was a part-time politician and a mainstream Minnesotan who hated extremists of all kinds and enjoyed the company of many good Republicans, especially thirsty ones.
He’d be amazed that my $10,000 share of his Navy insurance policy — the sum total of what he left to each of his six children, in addition to various knickknacks — makes me a rich boy. Or to learn that he raised me in a mansion (actually, a split-level rambler) or sent me to tony schools (I believe St. James Grade School charged $30 tuition. A year).

Well, I think what Nick is getting at is the fact that the average Democratic contribution for president is slightly larger than that for the Republicans, who have raised more money through small contributions. Or it could be the knock on the Kerry tax plan that considers the top of the middle class at $70,000 per year. Actually, it’s impossible to understand what the hell Coleman’s talking about here, because he never explains it — he just throws this out as if it’s a common argument among bloggers, when I’ve never really heard it at all.
Sorry that you grew up in a middle-class household, pal. So did I. But if you are that sensitive to criticism about your upbringing, then you’ve just gotten a mere taste of what Republicans hear all day long.
And then Coleman breaks into a non-defense defense of Dan Rather:

But this is not about me. It is about the war against the media. A lot of it, we deserve. But a lot of the attack against the mainstream media is coming from bloggers, which is like astronomers being assaulted by people who swear that aliens force them to have sex with Martians.
Why don’t you admit we are being invaded by Venusians?
I say: If you think Dan Rather is kooky, read some blogs and you, too, will be found in a daze, muttering, “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” But put on haz-mat gloves before you touch the mouse. …
Do bloggers have the credentials of real journalists? No. Bloggers are hobby hacks, the Internet version of the sad loners who used to listen to police radios in their bachelor apartments and think they were involved in the world.
Bloggers don’t know about anything that happened before they sat down to share their every thought with the moon. Like graffiti artists, they tag the public square — without editors, correction policies or community standards. And so their tripe is often as vicious as it is vacuous.

Funny, that’s the way we’ve always viewed your column, Nick. This edition provides a great example — plenty of invective and insults and almost no facts whatsoever.
Here are a couple of facts, Nick. CBS News and Dan Rather — who is their managing editor, a position you claim gives “professional” journalists an advantage over bloggers — ran a story smearing the President during an election, using forgeries so bad that anyone who spent two minutes in the military could have recognized it. The checks and balances you point to with pride all managed to turn off their hearing aids when their own experts told them the documents were faked. And after they were caught — by who, Nick? You? — they spent eleven days emulating the Nixon White House, stonewalling and having Dan Rather tell us he “personally vouched” for the documents’ authenticity.
Another fact: They still haven’t admitted the documents are fakes, only that they cannot authenticate them.
And we’re supposed to trust the mainstream media because …?

I have been a reporter longer than most bloggers have been alive, which makes me, at 54, ready for the ash heap. But here’s what really makes bloggers mad: I know stuff.
I covered Minneapolis City Hall, back when Republicans controlled the City Council. I have reported from almost every county in the state, I have covered murders, floods, tornadoes, World Series and six governors.
In other words, I didn’t just blog this stuff up at midnight.

This, ladies and gentlemen, represents all of the facts that Nick Coleman presents in today’s column, and it don’t mean squat. Rather’s been reporting almost as long as you’ve been alive, Nick, and he lied to us. It isn’t about incompetence, although in your case it’s a part of it. It’s about bias and prejudice, and in CBS News’ case, it’s about malicious intent. CBS News allowed its producer, Mary Mapes, to sate her five-year personal obsession about skewering George Bush on his National Guard service by knowingly putting evidence on air that was faked.
Their viewers aren’t fooled, Nick. They’re abandoning the Tiffany Network’s news programs in droves. CBS News made it up, at midnight or some other time, and it was the “hobby hacks” you decry that uncovered it.
Nick takes a swipe at the Power Line guys as well, specifically Scott Johnson:

Last week, one fashionable Minnesota blogger — a bank vice president who is getting a lot of ink and TV time lately — posted a scurrilous piece about U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton, calling him, “Minnesota’s contribution to the psychiatric profession.”
Whoa. Maybe bank vice presidents never need counseling. But they sure must need more to do. This suddenly renowned bank vice president posted his ishy Dayton item at 10:30 a.m. on a weekday, making me wonder exactly what it is a bank vice president does. …
We are not dealing with journalism, people. We are dealing with Internet chat rooms: sleazy and unreliable, with no accountability. Most bloggers are not fit to carry a reporter’s notebook.

I’m curious, Nick: exactly what kind of accountability do you have? What kind of accountability does the Strib have? Is there some magic about putting words into newsprint that automatically assigns truth to your words? Because from where I sit, having read your column for several years and laughing at all the wrong parts, I’d say that you’re not fit to carry Scott’s pen. Scott and John helped unmask an electoral fraud at a major news organization while you write paeans to editors, for Pete’s sake.
Besides, in the interest of full disclosure, one of your senior editors just came out on the losing end of a public war of words about Power Line’s coverage of the Swiftvets campaign, which your paper never bothered to cover in its news sections but decided to trash in another content-free editorial instead. After writing a pair of dueling columns each, we invited Jim Boyd to appear on our radio show to debate the subject, mano a mano with Scott, and Boyd chickened out. I know; I was there.
We have accountability, Nick, to our readers. We write opinion pieces, which means that we at least reveal our biases, unlike most of your brethren, who resort to the ludicrous “Some of my best friends are Republican” defense. We link back to our sources for our readers to check out themselves, and the blogosphere and the readers hold us accountable. If you read blogs about Venusian invasions and Martian body-snatching, that’s your problem, not the blogosphere.
And by the way, did you check the links on those Martian/Venusian posts? Perhaps they led back to the print world after all. (via Wog’s Blog)

A Grant Of Nobility

Jim Geraghty of the essential Kerry Spot notes tonight that the Washington Times has recognized a number of bloggers in its Saturday edition as “nobles” in their Nobles and Knaves running featurette:

A few honorary mentions are in order: Jim Geraghty of Kerry Spot (nationalreview.com); Ed Morrissey of Captainsquartersblog.com; Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com; the writers of Powerlineblog.com and Littlegreenfootballs.com; the writers and editors of Realclearpolitics.com; and the ever-vigilant freerepublic.com.
For their dogged pursuit of the truth in line with the honored tradition of American journalism, the bloggers are the Nobles of the week.

CQ sends its thanks to the editors of the Washington Times, and congratulations to the other bloggers honored along with us.

Pew: Kerry Falling Away, Bush Up Eight

The new Pew Research poll shows that George Bush is maintaining his strong lead over John Kerry, as the Democrat can barely muster the baseline 40% that his party affiliation should provide:

President Bush’s lead over Democratic nominee John Kerry increased to eight points in a Pew Research Center poll released on Tuesday, compared to a slight three-point lead in a poll conducted last week.
The telephone survey of registered voters showed 48 percent would vote for Bush and 40 percent for Kerry. A similar poll conducted from Sept. 17 to Sept. 21 showed Bush with 45 percent and Kerry with 42 percent.

Kerry continues to fall behind while Bush gains, extending his lead over Kerry by five points over the past week. The internal data of the Pew poll shows more softness in Bush’s support than other pollsters have found, but the news could hardly be worse for Kerry:

The poll finds that Bush’s gains in support are being driven more by perceptions of Kerry’s weakness especially on leadership and other personal traits than by improved opinions of Bush. Fewer voters favor Bush over Kerry on handling Iraq than did so earlier this month (46% now, 52% Sept. 11-13). But Kerry’s rating in the head-to-head evaluation on Iraq is no higher (38% now, 40% then). The Democratic challenger continues to inspire more confidence than Bush with regard to improving the economy, which 60% of Americans believe is in only fair or poor shape. But even here, the percentage favoring Kerry has not increased since the Sept. 11-13 survey (46% now, 47% then).
Despite Bush’s lukewarm evaluations on the issues, he maintains a significant advantage on most personal traits. Kerry has slipped slightly on some key personal assessments, including honesty and empathy. Overall, 32% of voters say the phrase “honest and truthful” better describes Kerry than Bush, down from 36% a few weeks ago (Sept. 11-13). Bush’s rating in that period is unchanged at 41%.

Pew also reports that Bush continues to gain among women (45-42), and significantly, shows strength among younger voters as well. Bush has gone from eighteen points down to six points in front (48-42) among the 18-29 demographic, one of the key support groups for Democrats. Bush also holds a ten-point edge among Catholics (49-39), another traditional voting bloc for Democrats. Bush leads in all educational strata, all economic demographics about $30k/year, and has a whopping 13-point advantage in battleground states (50-37).
The polling took place between 9/22 and 9/26, all of which came after Kerry supposedly launched his new Iraq policy (version 9.0). It looks like rather than reversing his slide, it may have accelerated it. Pew has a graph on their site which shows much more daylight between the two candidates than existed since the convention, and in fact may have reversed a mild recovery by the Democrats.
Democrats have labored under the delusion that Bush was riding a temporary bounce from the convention, but the truth is that Kerry has surfed downward ever since his. The electorate has finally gotten a good look at Kerry and have found him wanting.

Air America: Another 527?

franken-1.jpgAl Franken is taking his show on the road throughout battleground states in the upcoming election. The AP reports that Franken will be doing live remotes throughout the Midwest in the same time frame as the presidential debates:

Al Franken is taking his radio show on the campaign trail. “The Al Franken Show” will broadcast live across the country starting Thursday and ending Oct. 9, making stops in eight cities including swing state battlegrounds Minneapolis; Columbus, Ohio; and Miami.
“It serves a lot of purposes,” Franken told The Associated Press Tuesday. “The main one is to drive me into the ground before the elections.”

Of course, the way that Air America is going, it may be the farewell tour more than a campaign support tour. It seems somewhat odd that (a) Franken’s tour coincides with the debates, (b) his destinations mostly occur in battleground states, and (c) the AP sees fit to publicize it for Franken. Radio talk-show hosts do live remotes and tours all the time. Hugh Hewitt, of course, goes on the road on a regular basis but I’ve never seen the AP report it.
It confirms what we thought about Air America all along — it exists only to get around the new campaign-finance restrictions. Its purpose is to allow George Soros and others an unregulated route with which to campaign on John Kerry’s behalf, or more accurately, against George Bush.

Kerry Tries To Milk Dairy Farmers

Seldom has a presidential campaign seen such bald-faced pandering as John Kerry demonstrated yesterday in Spring Green, Wisconsin. With a polling deficit nearing double digits in a state Al Gore carried last election, Kerry tried stemming the bleeding by sucking up to Wisconsin’s dairy farmers. Long a supporter of the Northeastern Dairy Compact that put the screws to Midwestern producers, Kerry told the Spring Green farmers that he now has seen the light:

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry told voters in America’s Dairyland on Monday that President Bush had a secret plan that would hurt milk producers after the election. …
In the 1990s, Kerry supported the Northeast Dairy Compact, a regional pricing program that propped up prices for Northeastern dairy farmers over objections from their Midwestern counterparts.
“We’ve had a difference between the Midwest and the Northeast,” Kerry said. “I’m going to be very upfront with you about it.
“As a senator representing Massachusetts, I fought for the dairy compact and fought to have our dairy farmers get help,” the four-term lawmaker said. “I’m running for president of the United States now and I intend to represent all the farmers of America.”

Oh, so now that his Senate record generates opposition throughout the Midwestern region, he suddenly repudiates it, and not for any high-minded ideals. He admits that he supported the NDC and New England dairy farmers for purely political profit … but now that he needs more support, he’s glad to give his former supporters the shaft in order to win Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa.
How much more cynical can one get?
Well, perhaps it’s instructive to recall a little more history of the Northeastern Dairy Compact. Jim Jeffords, formerly a Republican Senator from Vermont, changed his party affiliation shortly after George Bush was elected in order to throw control of the Senate to the Democrats for the remainder of their session. One of Jeffords’ pet projects was the NDC, whose protectionism benefitted Vermont dairymen at the expense of their counterparts in the Midwest and elsewhere. Up to that time, some Democrats had pressed for an end to what had been sold as a temporary measure for short-term relief.
The NDC, or NEIDC as it sometimes is called, had bipartisan support from New England senators such as Jeffords, Leahy, and Kerry, as well as Republican support in order to keep Jeffords from bolting to the Democrats. As mentioned, Midwestern Democrats attempted to kill the program in order to assist their own constituencies. As soon as Jeffords went independent, Democrats such as Kerry tried to keep the program afloat, but the program expired without the broader support Jeffords could extort from the GOP.
Even though supporting the NDC was actually one of Kerry’s more consistent policy stands, he now repudiates it as he claims to be representing all of the US now as a presidential candidate. But if the NDC was so bad for the country, perhaps Kerry could explain why he continously supported it as a member of the US Senate.

Feed A Cold, Starve A Blogger

I seem to be one of the fortunate souls that catch the flu at the beginning of the season. I spent the past two days in bed, only to wake up today feeling even sicker than before. After an abortive attempt to get into the office this morning, I’m back in bed again with daytime television. (Have you watched this stuff lately? It’s egregious; I just watched an operatic diaper commercial. I’m not kidding.)
You would think that the time would allow for more and better blogging, but the opposite is true. It’s hard to concentrate on reading through the news properly in order to form coherent opinions about it. (As much as I’m ever coherent, anyway.) Yesterday I wound up watching pieces of X-Men 2 three different times, thanks to HBO’s lack of imagination in its programming and a couple of naps I took. Actually, X2 was better than I thought it would be. Maybe I should write movie reviews instead.
Anyway, since I can barely talk and feel like mostly sleeping all day long, I’ll probably post on and off today. Coherence is not guaranteed…

Ooops — Our Bad

After seventeen years of on-and-off intifadah, the Palestinians have slowly come to the realization that bombing civilians in pizzarias may not be the most effective way to generate sympathy for their cause:

When Abu Fahdi joined a Palestinian militant group and took up arms against Israel, he thought he was serving his people. Now he believes he did them only harm.
“We achieved nothing in all this time, and we lost so much,” said the baby-faced 29-year-old, who, because of his status as a fugitive, insisted on being identified by a nickname meaning “father of Fahdi.” “People hate us for that and wish we were dead.”

Well, boo hoo, but when people shoot indiscriminately at civilian vehicles as Abu Fahdi confesses and blow up civilians on buses and in shops, they don’t attract love from anyone except the Che Guevara fans of mass murder (of which there are far too many, admittedly). And if we had to choose between Abu Fahdi and his ilk of bombthrowers or the free civilians in Israel who don’t spend their time supporting serial killers, the rational among us would prefer that the Fahdis were no longer around to trouble us.
The Los Angeles Times reports that many Palestinians now question their leadership and whether the intifadah was a big mistake. Two thirds polled in the West Bank and Gaza Strip now support a cease-fire instead of continued “military” action, reversing an earlier result. Note, however, that they don’t favor suspending the civilian bombing and strafing because it’s wrong — just that it’s been ineffective and made them look bad:

Although dogged resistance to the Israeli occupation helped keep the Palestinian hope for statehood in the world spotlight, many now believe that the visible public support for suicide bombings was a crucial error.
“In a post-9/11 world, that could only harm our cause,” said Manasra, the Bethlehem governor.

At least it may be a start, although the Palestinians unleashed some forces that it may find impossible to withdraw. Syria and Iran fund Hamas and Islamic Jihad not out of overwhelming concern for the plight of the Palestinians but out of hatred for the Jews and the state of Israel. Also, even if the Palestinians reject the terrorism that have defined their entire strategy for decades, they have yet to reject the leader that designed, implemented, and maintained that strategy — the disastrous Yasser Arafat. Between Arafat and the power of Syria and Iran, any effort to rid the territories of terrorists are doomed, and they know it.
The Palestinians sold their souls long ago to these demons. If they are to be rid of them, they will need to rise up and push them out of their midst — and the effort will cost them dearly. When they undertake that mission, then we will know they are serious. Until then, the Abu Fahdis can wail all they want about how the world hates them, wringing their bloodstained hands for the press, but we will spare our sympathy for the women and children they have butchered.