The sad truth

Democrats on an escalator

Bad luck

"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck."

-- Robert Heinlein

I still like our President

The Anchoress provides some heart-warming pictures of President Bush just being himself.

Despite all of the vilification and hate that has been spewed at him, President George W. Bush remains a man of sterling character and impeccable quality. He has done more good for this country than many care to admit, yet the fact remains that this country needed him in 2001, and he served, and serves, gladly and well. And he did it in spite of the narcissistic, foolish people who have done everything in their considerable powers to neutralize his efforts.

I say this from my heart.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I used to be one . . .

Liberals in America are often wrong . . . but they're never in doubt.

-- USAdave

HillaryCare

Considering every example of socialized medicine in the world today. We do not want it here in the USA. Because all of those examples, like in Canada and Great Britain, result in inefficiency, obsolesence, and long wait times. Which is why many Canadians make the pilgrimage to the USA for critical surgeries that they cannot get in their own country without a prohibitively, and potentially lethal, long wait.

Exemplar

Quote-able

I'll believe it's a crisis when the people who say it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis.

-- Glenn Reynolds, of Instapundit, on global warming

Masterful brevity!

Rebuttal

Rick Perry, governor of Texas, responds to European criticism of the death penalty in his state.

“230 years ago, our forefathers fought a war to throw off the yoke of a European monarch and gain the freedom of self-determination. Texans long ago decided that the death penalty is a just and appropriate punishment for the most horrible crimes committed against our citizens. While we respect our friends in Europe, welcome their investment in our state and appreciate their interest in our laws, Texans are doing just fine governing Texas.”

Heh.

The 911 generation

Not their finest hour

Homeland insecurity

Heh

We have better soldiers than politicians. Then again, we have better everything than we have politicians. . . .

-- Glenn Reynolds

[Via Instapundit.]

Who's gouging?

It seems that every time gas prices go up, Congress talks about the "price gouging oil companies". This particular cartoon was originally posted at RedPlanet in March, yet it puts the politically-motivated price gouging rhetoric into proper perspective . . .

Kick me

The new House

Cartoon facts

[Via Chris Muir's Day By Day.]

Heh

"Freedom isn't free, and if you had any doubt whether the first amendment was free, I offer you Michael Moore. "

Thompson's reply to Moore

Fred Thompson criticized Michael Moore's "documentary" about Cuban healthcare. Moore, in turn, challenged Mr. Thompson to debate the issue and also managed to insinuate that Thompson's fondness of fine Cuban cigars may have resulted in violations of the trade embargo.

Thompson has now responded to Moore's challenge:

Priceless.

[Via Phoenix at Villians Vanquished, who is currently trying desperately to vanquish the one villian that seems to prevail against the best of us: bureaucracy.]

What Bush really said

1 May 2003: Mission accomplished Major Combat operations in Iraq have ended.

"Thank you all very much. Admiral Kelly, Captain Card, officers and sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.

Then he went on to indicate that we had a long road ahead in Iraq [Emphasis added.]:

We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We're bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We're pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes. We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated. We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people.

The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we will leave behind a free Iraq.

Just in case you ever wondered what President Bush really said that day on board the USS Abraham Lincoln.

HamNation and the Dishonorable Harry Reid

Mary Katherine Ham has a tongue-in-cheek recital of a slightly-altered Seuss story.

Democrat qualifications

Phoenix, over at Villains Vanquished has, in my opinion, a very insightful post up, entitled 22 Ways to be a Good Democrat.

It is filled with irony -- go read the whole thing.

Clash of civilizations

Stretching the truth

Air Force vs. Army game

Heh.

Cry for help

John Kerry's message to our troops in Iraq:

“You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

A unit of the Minnesota National Guard responds:

Gotta love 'em!

Dear New York Times

A letter written to the New York Times by our Dept. of Defense in rebuttal of a misleading editorial about Donald Rumfeld and troop numbers in Iraq.

It's in the extended entry. The New York Times declined to print this. Spread the word.

Good quote

"If Democrats went after America's enemies with the relentless ruthlessness with which they attack Republicans, the Axis of Evil would be toast."

Jack Kelly, Irish Pennants, 12 October 2006

Hurricane season

"In May, U.S. government and private forecasters warned of another dire Atlantic hurricane season. Coming on the heels of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the forecasts kept oil prices near a record for months. They scared away some insurance investors in a year the companies may end up turning in higher profits. And hedge funds like Amaranth Advisors LLC gambled big that natural gas prices would climb -- and lost. No hurricanes have struck the U.S. coast so far this year, deflating natural gas prices... The bungled forecasts shed light on what happens when energy traders, investors and, in some cases, the news media, rely too heavily on an inexact science" -- Bloomberg news service (with thanks to Benny Peiser at CCNet).

[Via OpinionJournal's Political Diary.]

Stone Cold

Call me paranoid but . . .

. . . that doesn't mean they are not out to get us.

My first thought upon hearing about the terrorist attack on our embassy in Syria was that it was staged, by Syria, in order to ease our hardline attitude towards them. Walid Phares, over at Counterterrorism Blog provides a lot more reasons why Syria may have staged that attack.

According to well informed Syrian sources, today's Terrorist attack against the US embassy in Damascus is one of the "Machiavellian" Assad operations. Let's remind ourselves that the Syrian regime's senior strategists and intelligence officers were trained by the sophisticated "intox" schools of the former Soviet's KGB. One of the main tactics of this old school, refined by Hafez Assad during his rule of Syria is based on the following concept: If the equation is to your disadvantage, create a new problem, offer to solve it, obtain recognition; and by that you'd change the equation.

The strategic objective of the Assad regime today is to deter Washington from further pressures against Syria, in the form of the Hariri investigation, the US pressure through the Security Council to deploy forces along the borders with Lebanon and the American ongoing support to the anti-Syrian Government in Beirut. Tehran-Damascus-Hezbollah axis is in dire need to "contain" Washington's pressures and gain time, as much possible of time. Why would they need time? Because they have to rearm Hezbollah, crumble the Lebanese Government, and face off with UN pressures on the nuclear. Syria has the marching orders to disorient the United States, and hence it adopted a twin approach:

Go read the rest.

UPDATE: Olivier Guitta, also over at Counterterrorism Blog, has more to add.

Nuclear Iran

Cox & Forkum has a pertinent cartoon up illustrating the carrot and stick approach to appeasement negotiations with Iran:

Hollywood for freedom

Would you look at this!

I suppose it's pretty darn cold down in Hell right now . . .

But seriously, good for them! I appreciate the gesture.

North Korean missile crisis

With tongue firmly planted in cheek, Scrappleface provides a news bulletin: U.N. May Threaten Kim Jong-Il with Time Out

(2006-07-06) — The United Nations Security Council, outraged at this week’s missile tests by a nuclear-capable North Korea, takes up debate today on a resolution to sanction that nation’s dictator with “one minute of time-out for each missile launched.�

Read the rest . . .

Dixie Chicks Vanquished

It seems that Phoenix, over at Villains Vanquished, has dropped all pretense of tolerance for foolishness and vanquished another set of villains.

And she renamed them, to boot:

Hehe. I'm still cleaning up spewed coffee . . . bad timing there . . .

[Note to self: Don't drink coffee while reading Phoenix's punchlines.]

Dementia illustrated

Past president Jimmy Carter has once again embarrassed himself in public:

Innocent Palestinian people are being treated like animals, with the presumption that they are guilty of some crime. Because they voted for candidates who are members of Hamas, the United States government has become the driving force behind an apparently effective scheme of depriving the general public of income, access to the outside world and the necessities of life.

Those 'innocent people' elected a government of terrorists. And regardless of why they did that, no free nation on this planet should be expected to subsidize terrorism.

Perhaps Mr. Carter should just go back to his peanut farm, and leave foreign policy to those who are more in tune with reality.

Well said

Captain Ed has some well-chosen things to say about Stephan Colbert's rude and tasteless remarks about President Bush . And about Colbert's apologists.

Standing in front of a tank in Tianenman Square is speaking truth to power. Lech Walesa forming a workers party in Communist Poland to demonstrate the plight of the oppressed is speaking truth to power. The bravery of West Berliners in the opening days of the Cold War is speaking truth to power. Humiliating Joe McCarthy on national TV by scolding him for his indeceny is speaking truth to power. Equating these actions to Colbert's performance should embarrass those who make the argument.

Go read the whole thing. The Captain has, once more, hit the nail squarely on its head.

Dissent

Mark Steyn points out a fallacious quotation that has become accepted by many national leaders as true.

Dissent for its own sake is like the Democrats' energy policy: We're opposed to any kind of energy; we prefer to be mired in enervated passivity. If the right is full of armchair generals, the left is full of armchair generalities: Nothing can be done, any course is futile, everything's a quagmire. All we can say for certain is that saying so for certain is the highest form of patriotism.

It's truer to say that these days patriotism is the highest form of dissent -- against a culture where the media award each other Pulitzers for damaging national security, and the only way a soldier's mom can become a household name is if she's a Bush-is-the-real-terrorist kook like Cindy Sheehan, and our grade schools' claims to teach our children about America, "warts and all," has dwindled down into teaching them all the warts and nothing else. Or as the Capital Times of Madison, Wis., concluded its ringing editorial on the subject:

"Thomas Jefferson got it right: 'Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.' And teaching children how to be thoughtful and effective dissenters is the highest form of education."

Teaching them authentic Jefferson quotes would be a better approach.

Go read the whole thing.

Observation

Judging from some recent comments I've received, I think people who like to visit Salon.com don't care for my site. Nor, it seems, do they care for any factual information that does not support their viewpoint.

Common sense

Naomi Schaefer Riley does a good job in illustrating why it is smart for women to use common sense to avoid situations that could result in an assault.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry.

Ladies, You Should Know Better
How feminism wages war on common sense.

BY NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY
Friday, April 14, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

Word came out this week that Darryl Littlejohn, the New York bouncer charged in the Feb. 25 rape and murder of graduate student Imette St. Guillen, has been linked by a DNA match to an October sexual assault on another woman. This latest revelation will no doubt (and rightly) lead to more angry cries about the failure of Mr. Littlejohn's parole officer to keep track of his violent charge and about the negligence of bar owners who do not check the backgrounds of their employees. But it should also serve to remind women, yet again, that it would be a good idea to use a little more common sense.

A police investigation has confirmed that on the night of her murder, Ms. St. Guillen was last seen in a bar, alone and drinking at 3 a.m. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It does not diminish Mr. Littlejohn's guilt or the tragedy of Ms. St. Guillen's death to note what more than a few of us have been thinking--that a 24-year-old woman should know better. Yet there are forces in our culture (writing letters to this newspaper even now) that find this suggestion offensive.

---

If you have attended college any time in the past 20 years, you will have heard that if a woman is forced against her will to have sex, it is "not her fault" and that women always have the right to "control their own bodies." Nothing could be truer. But the administrators who utter these sentiments and the feminists who inspire them rarely note which situations are conducive to keeping that control and which threaten it. They rarely discuss what to do to reduce the likelihood of a rape. Short of re-educating men, that is.

But just as sociopaths exist on the Lower East Side, they exist on college campuses. One or two might even be playing lacrosse for Duke University. The past few weeks have brought much hand-wringing about the alleged rape of a stripper at a team party in Durham, N.C. Understandably so: An email from one team member, just after the party, suggested that he was aroused by the idea of skinning a woman and killing her. Though the investigation is still under way, commentators have already blamed the event on everything from racism (the stripper was black, the accused players white) to the lack of moral instruction in colleges today.

Which explanation is most credible? Perhaps it doesn't matter. Whatever the problem is, it won't be fixed this year or possibly ever, even with best sorts of attitude adjustment. Perhaps the law of averages says that, with 14 million men in U.S. colleges today, a few of them will be rapists. What to do? For starters: Be wary of drunken house parties.

Now, readers may well assume that this advice is obvious and that no Duke coed would ever do what the stripper, by her own account, did: Upon finding 40 men at the party instead of the four for whom she agreed to "dance," she stayed and performed anyway. When the partygoers began shouting what she described as racial epithets and violent threats, she left but returned after an apology from a team member. A stripper with street smarts is apparently a Hollywood myth.

But smart women at top schools are engaging in behavior that is equally moronic. In another recent incident, a cadet at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., apparently got so drunk on two liters of wine and a couple of glasses of beer that she didn't know that she had had sex with a Naval Academy midshipman until he told a friend of hers the next day to get her the morning-after pill.

In a survey conducted two years ago by the Harvard School of Public Health, one in every 20 women reported having been raped in college during the previous seven months. Rape statistics are notoriously unreliable, but the kicker rings true: "Nearly three-quarters of those rapes happened when the victims were so intoxicated they were unable to consent or refuse." And those are just the ones who admitted it.

---

The odd thing is that feminism may be partly to blame. Time magazine reporter Barrett Seaman explains that many of the college women he interviewed for his book "Binge" (2005) "saw drinking as a gender equity issue; they have as much right as the next guy to belly up to the bar." Leaving biology aside--most women's bodies can't take as much alcohol as men's--the fact of the matter is that men simply are not, to use the phrase of another generation, "taken advantage of" in the way women are.

Radical feminists used to warn that men are evil and dangerous. Andrea Dworkin made a career of it. But that message did not seem reconcilable with another core feminist notion--that women should be liberated from social constraints, especially those that require them to behave differently from men. So the first message was dropped and the second took over.

The radical-feminist message was of course wrongheaded--most men are harmless, even those who play lacrosse--but it could be useful as a worst-case scenario for young women today. There is an alternative, but to paraphrase Miss Manners: People who need to be told to use their common sense probably didn't have much to begin with.

Ms. Riley is The Wall Street Journal's deputy Taste page editor and the author of "God on the Quad."

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Posted by USAdave at 06:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Somehow, I'm not surprised

Hamas is having financial problems -- actually they're broke.

The new Hamas-led government is broke and failed to pay tens of thousands of Palestinian public workers on Saturday, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said Wednesday.

It was the first time the radical Islamic group had admitted that it would have difficulty running the West Bank and Gaza Strip without massive foreign aid.

A country that can only remain solvent because of $1 billion worth of handouts every year should look very closely at how it should climb out of that hole (hint -- stop digging), or perhaps, more to the point, how it can justify its own existence.

My thoughts exactly

Phoenix on Katie Couric's job change.

Read the documentation

A peek into some recently declassified pre-war Iraqi documents has revealed that Saddam did, in fact, have WMD, and he did, in fact, have important dealings with al-Qaeda.

The released documents themselves may be found at the Foreign Military Studies Office
Joint Reserve Intelligence Center -- Operation Iraqi Freedom Documents website.

I wonder when the New York Times, the AP, and their ilk are going to hire translators and start reporting on the facts found in these documents?

I won't hold my breath . . .

Good quotes

NOTE: The link below is from December, but I just found it in my draft archive and want to share it because it is still pertinent - and amusing.

Paul Greenberg at Jewish World Review has a good column up with valorous quotes from our past, and one not-so-valorous from our present.

It's worth it . . .

Zogby poll of our troops

Jason, over at Generation Why?, seems to have a good time in this most excellent deconstruction of the Zogby poll analysis.

Now that Kristof and the Old Gray Lady have given their marching orders, be prepared for the onslaught of coverage and endless analysis by the rest of the MSM on this "bombshell poll". I only hope I'm not the only one who spent 20 bucks to get the whole picture.

Go read the whole post -- and then thank him for spending the twenty bucks . . . and for his time in setting the record straight.

U.S. cartoonists respond

Check out these cartoons.

Now would be a good time.

Tongue in cheek

Maureen Martin has a slick satire of CNN's news coverage of Islam.

[Hat tip to the Anchoress.]

Question

Does anybody find it discouraging that, during President Bush's State of the Union speech last night, the Democrats stood up and applauded the fact that they had effectively blocked Bush's efforts to save our Social Security?

Talk about arrogance. And the situation is getting worse with every passing day. But they're happy to have put a stop to implementing a sensible solution to our problem. After all, they don't have to worry about it. They get paid for life.

Wry quote

"Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards."

Robert Heinlein
US science fiction author (1907 - 1988)

If Pearl Harbor happened today . . .

Sacred Cow Burgers presents: "If It Happened Today" by Jay D. Dyson (12/07/2005).

It's worth the click . . .

[Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.]

Sinister peace movements

Robert Avrech, over at Seraphic Secret, brings the reader a history lesson about peace movements. Here's a snippet:

Rule # 1 of Peace Movements: They cannot imagine nor confront evil.
Rule # 2 of Peace Movements: They do not care about history.
Rule # 3 of Peace Movements: They are always secretly financed and penetrated by the enemy.

He provides much more in his post. I recommend the post as well as his blog.

Blogiversary

I can't believe that I've been doing this for a year now. It all started mainly as an attempt to counter-balance the tremendously skewed reporting that was (and still is) going on.

I have really come to enjoy blogging. I know I rarely write about myself, or even much about my views, but I enjoy researching and compiling the things that I link to and blog about.

I appreciate the two regular readers that I have even though you rarely (if ever) comment. And that is not a complaint -- it's a free country after all, and I am very comfortable with the way this blog is puttering along.

All of MuNuvia (the blogging 'community' that I am a part of) was moved to new servers recently. The move broke my randomized banners and quick quotes, but Phin has assured me that he'll figure out why the scripts no longer work, and get 'em going again. I really appreciate Phin's willingness to help out -- he and Sadie of Apothegm Designs designed and coded my blog's new look. (Update: It appears that Phin has fixed the scripts. Thank you, Phin!)

I appreciate the host and Great Poobah of MuNuvia, Pixy Misa. He has been working his tail off maintaining this blogging community, siccing the dog on spam, buying and configuring new servers, and then helping us all out with our various bumps, bruises, and technical issues. I suspect rather strongly that Pixy must actually be a corporate conglomerate . . . it's the only way to explain how he gets so much done (in addition to his day job!).

Anyway, thank you all for a good first year. This blogging journey may actually take me along for another year.

And if so, I know it will be in good company. . .

Are you a redneck?

I received this in an email yesterday from my father-in-law. It's worth passing along. . .

You might be a redneck if: It never occurred to you to be offended by the phrase, "One nation, under God."

You might be a redneck if: You've never protested about seeing the 10 Commandments posted in public places.

You might be a redneck if: You still say "Christmas" instead of "Winter Festival."

You might be a redneck if: You bow your head when someone prays.

You might be a redneck if:: You stand and place your hand over your heart when they play the National Anthem.

You might be a redneck if: You treat Viet Nam vets with great respect, and always have.

You might be a redneck if: You've never burned an American flag.

You might be a redneck if: You know what you believe and you aren't afraid to say so, no matter who is listening.

You might be a redneck if: You respect your elders and expect your kids to do the same.

Though I've been an urban/suburban guy all of my life, yet given the definitions above, I might be a redneck after all!

How about you?

Remember this?

The Anchoress reminds us that Iraq was widely believed to have WMD capability well before Bush became President.

It's a good read. And it's a fact, too.

Scopes in reverse

Eighty years ago, a man came under fire for what he taught in the classroom -- Darwin's Evolution. Today, the tables are turned. Here's how the article ends:

John Scopes once said, "If you limit a teacher to only one side of anything, the whole country will eventually have only one thought.... I believe in teaching every aspect of every problem or theory."

Go read the first part . . .

Hollywood, take note

An interesting theory.

[Via Betsy's Page.]

Amerika

Phin, over at Phin's Blog, and with tongue firmly planted in cheek, has pointed us toward a better way to achieve socialism in America.

Heh.

Welcome to the new digs!

Welcome! Would you look at this place? Can you believe it?

Well, it's all due to the tremendous talent and industriousness of the Apothegm Designs team -- Phin and Sadie.

They are very easy to work with. Phin has been patiently explaining things and very quickly implementing things even when I only had vague notions about how to describe what I really wanted would like to see here.

Anyway, there may be a little bit of tweaking going on over the weekend (longer if Rita causes my power to fail), but this new, improved, blog is just about completed.

Well, it's late, and I've got a storm to attend to. I'll catch ya in the morning!

Bus pictures then and now

This post is snarky, but also very amusing. And it illustrates how better prepared and led the Houston/Galveston area seems to be.

The media misses it yet again (no surprises)

Here is a rather pointed op-ed about the hysterical nature of media coverage during Katrina's aftermath.

As the last of the evacuees from New Orleans settle into shelters, the levees are plugged and the water begins to recede, what is being revealed is not the tens of thousands of dead bodies predicted for the past two weeks but some of the most inaccurate reporting of a major news story in memory. While the mainstream media has been climbing all over itself trying to find ways to tie George Bush to the New Orleans disaster, it might be better served trying to figure out how they could have so uncritically accepted a body count from New Orleans that could easily be ten or more times the actual number.

There is actually quite a bit to think about in this piece. Read it all.

Insightful analysis

Bill Roggio, over at The Fourth Rail has a good analysis about what was behind the bombings in Baghdad, and why they happened. Here's a taste:

After Tal Afar, al Qaeda strikes in its predictable and brutal fashion: suicide bombs and terror. In Baghdad, a suicide bomber lures in Shiite day-laborers, blows up his truck. Reports indicate 114 killled and 156 wounded in this single incident. Mohammed at Iraq the Model states eleven separate explosions in Baghdad ocurred in today. According to Zarqawi today's attacks are revenge for al Qaeda's losses at Tal Afar, and the beginning of "all out war against the Shiites".

Zarqawi's terror campaign achieves its desired effect. Coalition successes in northern and westerner Iraq are overshadowed by the gruesome images of mass casualty assaults. Suicide bombs are a show of force, but not a measure of al Qaeda's power. al Qaeda has neither the popular support, the skill nor the means to govern in Iraq. Its real power lies in the ability to create fear. But the Iraqi people have not given in to fear, rendering al Qaeda's only weapon ineffective.

He goes on to detail how Zarqawi and other terrorists use the Western news media to further their goals in Iraq:

As the Iraqi government is not ready to provide for its own security, it is dependent on the United States for vital assistance. Therefore, al Qaeda's only hope of success in Iraq is to destroy the will of the American public and create the conditions for a hasty withdrawal. They are deftly manipulating our own media in an attempt to accomplish this goal. Zarqawi depends on the fact that the Western media will give his terrorist attacks top billing while regulating successful Coalition operations such as Tal Afar to the back pages, or support the cause by subtlely portraying American soldiers as criminals or thugs.

I recommend you read the whole thing . . .

Chrenkoff's essay on bad news

Chrenkoff has something to say about the battle to get unbiased information out to Americans. He makes some good points.

The media, just like Mother Nature, shows that dripping water will over time erode a mountain. But two can play that game, even if one side starts with a major handicap and has to suffer perpetual frustration in doing so.

The rest is well worth reading.

Aiding and abetting

Austin Bay says some smart things in this blog entry about terrorism and "strategic information". Here's his conclusion:

Terrorists can be a very small group of people or a politically weak organization. What makes the small and anonymous appear powerful and strong? In the 21st century, intense media coverage magnifies the terrorists' capabilities. This suggests that winning the global war against Islamist terror ultimately means accomplishing two things: denying the terrorists weapons of mass destruction and curbing what is currently Al Qaeda's greatest strategic capability: media magnification and occasional media enhancement of its bombing campaigns and political theatrics.

Most of our mainstream media is culpable. And yet they happily promote the murderous jihadists' agenda by disseminating the information so readily provided to them by terrorists. In the 1940s, many of them would have been thrown into prison for aiding and abetting the enemy.

I suppose that would be too much to ask for nowadays, eh? (Just kidding!)

Islam, Jihad, and Terrorism

An interesting review of a no doubt controversial book entitled The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims.

This brings up an important point: terrorism cannot be separated from Jihad, and Jihad cannot be removed from Islam. This is the reality that we are dealing with. Every Jihadi knows this; it is time others did too.

Though I am not an expert on Islam, I have done some research into it, and this statement is not counter to what I have read from informed sources.

Jihad is how Islam has been spread throughout its history. Muslims conquered territory and then offered the newly subjegated people a choice: Embrace Islam, or die. Essentially, jihad is Islamic evangelism. Here's another excerpt:

Genocide is often a direct consequence of Jihad though it is glossed over by ‘Islamically correct’ historians. The book gives contemporary and even eyewitness accounts of various genocides from the time of the Prophet to present day Africa. This includes not only the Turkish massacre of the Armenians, but also the so-called ‘ethnic’ conflict in Sudan, which is the direct consequence of the revival of Jihadism.

Like genocide, slavery is also an integral part of Jihad. In fact most Islamic regimes were based on slave economy. The Legacy of Jihad has a sixty-page section on Jihad slavery. It makes for chilling reading. Particularly disturbing is the revival of slavery and slave trade in Sudan as a direct consequence of the resurgence of Islam and the emphasis on Jihad.

I'm very interested in this book, though I have no idea when I'll have time to actually read it. The reviewer indicates that it is well-documented:

The documentation is so profuse, much of it recorded by Muslims themselves, the reader begins to wonder why all this has been kept away from the public by Islamic scholars and academics whose job it is to inform. As the great Islamic scholar and critic Ibn Warraq (the author of Why I am Not A Muslim) asks in his brilliant Foreword: why did it take Dr. Andrew Bostom, not an Islamic scholar but a medical scientist, to bring out this monumental compilation? Where were the Orientalists, historians, Islamic scholars and other sundry academics?

Has anyone out there read this book? Is it worth reading?

Do-ers and do-ees

I recommend that you read this and think about it.

Shelby H. Williams did.

Tribes

This is a rather long, but extremely interesting essay asking the question: "What tribe are you on?"

What would have happened if Katrina had hit on Clinton's watch?

Click here for an amusing bit of fiction. But it is sooo plausible!

Blockbusted

Without realizing it, I walked right into a police stakeout at my local Blockbuster. When a young man stepped out the door, a group of officers pounced, cuffing him and hustling him into a squad car.

Seeing my astonished frozen expression, one cop came over and said, "When they say the movie is due by noon the next day... they mean it!"

[Received from Marty's Joke of the Day by way of The Good Clean Funnies List.]

Claim to fame?

Munuvians everywhere have had their 15 minutes of fame, it seems. Michelle Malkin actually referred to us in her blog when our server's disk crashed.

Maybe "infamous" is a better word . . .

On good and evil

Ben Stein, at The American Spectator, in a few short paragraphs does an excellent job of encapsulating my thoughts on the subject of George W. Bush's presidency and who his successor might be. I just wish I was as good at articulating those thoughts.

By a great providence, we were sent George Bush. In his mind, there is such a thing as evil. Terrorism is evil. Racism is evil. The murder of unborn babies is evil. Torturing a totally innocent Terri Schiavo to death is evil. He sees it, acts on it, actively works not just to get along day by day, but to keep evil at bay and to overcome it where it can be overcome. As time goes by, I come to realize that George Bush, with all of his faults, is the spiritual heir to Abraham Lincoln, to Martin Luther King, Jr., to Winston Churchill, to the late Pope John Paul II. How unbelievably lucky we are to have him, and how grateful we should be.

Because there really is good and evil in this world -- whether we like it or not.

Recommended reading.

Evolution and Intelligent Design

I don't know why there is so much criticism of President Bush's statement about teaching intelligent design in schools along with evolution. I have long held the belief that God set up this universe to pretty much operate on its own. And evolution is a part of that. He designed evolution into how this universe operates.

The major difference between the theories of evolution and intelligent design is that evolution leaves the beginning of life and its development to absolutely random chance, and intelligent design attributes the evolution of life to a Creator. Neither of these points can be scientifically proven or disproven at this time, so they both remain theories. I, personally, look forward to finding out first-hand how it was really done from our Creator, Himself.

Anthropologist Peter Wood has written a column on evolution & intelligent design at the National Review Online. Here's a taste:

Under the circumstances, I think the sensible middle ground lies just about where President Bush pointed. If students study biology in school, they need know a good bit about evolution with a small e. Beyond that, it wouldn't hurt them to know about Evolution, Creation (or "Intelligent Design") as well. I don't carry a brief for Michael Behe, the intelligent-design proponent at Lehigh University, or the movement that he has started. But I also don't think science is well served by elevating to the status of unquestionable truth the image of a material universe governed solely by random and otherwise inexplicable events. That's a worldview, not a scientific conclusion, and it has no better claim to our intellectual assent than views that postulate an underlying purpose, meaning, or destination for humanity.

You should go read the rest -- no matter which theory you subscribe to.

Idiot spotting made easy

"Freedom of speech makes it much easier to spot the idiots."

-- Jay Lesseig, as quoted in the 7 Feb 2005 OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today article.

I just had to post this . . .

We must continue to run the course

Austin Bay has an op-ed up on the Weekly Standard entitled Nervous in Baghdad. Here's a taste:

My bet is that the Iraqis will pull it off. By the end of 2006 the Iraqis plan to have 250,000 troops and policemen in uniform.

But they won't if America wilts, and our weakness is back home, in front of the TV, on the cable squawk shows, on the editorial pages, in the political gotcha games of Washington, D.C. There, it seems America just wants to get on with its Electra-Glide life, that September 10 sense of freedom and security, without finishing the job. The U.S. military is fighting, the nascent Iraqi military is fighting, the Iraqi people are fighting, but where is the American political class?

Bullets go bang, and so do ballots in their own way. In terms of this war's battlespace, the January Iraqi elections were World War II's D-Day and Battle of the Bulge combined. But the bricks--the building of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the other hard corners where this war is and will be fought--that's a delicate and decades-long challenge.

It is well worth reading (it is a two-page article).

Lumos!

I submit this column by Rich Galen without comment.

Well, okay, with one comment.

Lumos is a cantrip that is used to provide illumination in Harry Potter's world. It's a light spell.

And one last comment: I'm such a hopeless HP fan that I just couldn't resist posting this link.

Teaching the Constitution

Cal Thomas, over at TownHall.com, urges President Bush to nominate a person for Supreme Court Justice who wants to restore the Constitution to it's "original intent". Here's an excerpt:

This is a battle worth fighting and worth winning. To restore the value and integrity of the Constitution would not only achieve a political and ideological victory, it would also serve future generations of Americans.

President Bush's opponents would be fighting the words of the Constitution and the intent of the Founders and that is pretty good company for the president to keep.

I recommend you read the whole article.

al Qaeda and publicity

Austin Bay, at The Washington Times states the obvious. Here's an excerpt:

What makes the small and anonymous appear powerful and strong? In the 21st century, intense media coverage magnifies the terrorists' capabilities. This suggests winning the global war against Islamist terror ultimately requires denying terrorists weapons of mass destruction and curbing what is now al Qaeda's greatest strategic capability: media magnification and enhancement of its bombing campaigns and political theatrics.

Obvious, and yet, the news media still seems to have missed it.

8 Myths about the Iraqi conflict

John Hawkins at Right Wing News posted this article refuting 8 arguments used by people who are against the conflict in Iraq.

He doesn't cover all of the bases, but he does clear up some misinformation that is still being touted as fact.

Covert (but very real) ties

This op-ed by Claudia Rosett at OpinionJournal is one of many that states what has now become very obvious -- there really was a connection between Saddam Hussein's regime and al Qaeda.

The primary collection of evidence to which Ms. Rosett refers can be found here. It is impressive.

You can read Ms. Rosett's entire article in the extended entry.

Saddam and al Qaeda

There's abundant evidence of connections.


BY CLAUDIA ROSETT

Wednesday, July 13, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

President Bush has given some good speeches lately, including his talk June 29 at Fort Bragg, N.C., in which he stressed some of the reasons for going into Iraq, and his address this past Monday at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Va., in which he talked about the role of intelligence in defeating terrorists and stressed that "the heart of our strategy is this: Free societies are peaceful societies."

But there's another speech Mr. Bush still needs to give. That would be the one in which he says: I told you so--there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

In some quarters, that would of course provoke the usual outrage. Since the U.S.-led coalition went outside the corrupt United Nations to topple the Baathist regime in Baghdad more than two years ago, it has become an article of faith that there was no such connection. Typical of the tenor in both the media and western politics is an article that ran last month in The Economist, describing Iraq as Mr. Bush's "most visible disaster" and opining that "even Mr. Bush's supporters admit that he exaggerated Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda."

---

If anything, Mr. Bush in recent times has not stressed Saddam's ties to al Qaeda nearly enough. More than ever, as we now discuss the bombings in London, or, to name a few others, Madrid, Casablanca, Bali, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, or the many bombings in Israel--as well as the attacks on the World Trade Center in both 1993 and 2001--it is important to understand that terrorist connections can be real, and lethal, and portend yet more murder, even when they are shadowy, shifting and complex. And it is vital to send the message to regimes in such places as Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran that in matters of terrorist ties, the Free World is not interested in epistemological debates over what constitutes a connection. We are not engaged in a court case, or a classroom debate. We are fighting a war.

But in the debates over Iraq, that part of the communication has become far too muddied. Documents found in Iraq are doubted; confessions by detainees are received as universally suspect; reports of meetings between officials of the former Iraqi regime and al Qaeda operatives are discounted as having been nothing more than empty formalities, with such characters shuttling between places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan, perhaps to share tea and cookies. Any conclusions or even inferences about contacts between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda are subjected these days to the kind of metaphysical test in which existence itself becomes a highly dubious philosophical problem, mired in the difficulty of ever really being certain about anything at all.

Certainty is then imposed in the form of assurances that there was no connection. This notion that there was no Saddam-al Qaeda connection is invoked as an argument against the decision to go to war in Iraq, and enjoined as part of the case that we were safer with Saddam in power, and that, even now, the U.S. and its allies should simply cut and run.

Actually, there were many connections, as Stephen Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn, writing in the current issue of the Weekly Standard, spell out under the headline "The Mother of All Connections." Since the fall of Saddam, the U.S. has had extraordinary access to documents of the former Baathist regime, and is still sifting through millions of them. Messrs. Hayes and Joscelyn take some of what is already available, combined with other reports, documentation and details, some from before the overthrow of Saddam, some after. For page after page, they list connections--with names, dates and details such as the longstanding relationship between Osama bin Laden's top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Saddam's regime.

Messrs. Hayes and Joscelyn raise, with good reason, the question of why Saddam gave haven to Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the men who in 1993 helped make the bomb that ripped through the parking garage of the World Trade Center. They detail a contact between Iraqi intelligence and several of the Sept. 11 hijackers in Malaysia, the year before al Qaeda destroyed the twin towers. They recount the intersection of Iraqi and al Qaeda business interests in Sudan, via, among other things, an Oil for Food contract negotiated by Saddam's regime with the al-Shifa facility that President Clinton targeted for a missile attack following the African embassy bombings because of its apparent connection to al Qaeda. And there is plenty more.

---

The difficulty lies in piecing together the picture, which is indeed murky (that being part of the aim in covert dealings between tyrants and terrorist groups)--but rich enough in depth and documented detail so that the basic shape is clear. By the time Messrs. Hayes and Joscelyn are done tabulating the cross-connections, meetings, Iraqi Intelligence memos unearthed after the fall of Saddam, and information obtained from detained terrorist suspects, you have to believe there was significant collaboration between Iraq and al Qaeda. Or you have to inhabit a universe in which there will never be a demonstrable connection between any of the terrorist attacks the world has suffered over the past dozen years, or any tyrant and any aspiring terrorist. In that fantasyland, all such phenomena are independent events.

Mr. Bush, in calling attention to the Iraq-al Qaeda connection in the first place, did the right thing. For the U.S. president to confirm that clearly and directly at this stage, with some of the abundant supporting evidence now available, might seem highly controversial. But reviving that controversy would help settle it more squarely in line with the truth.

Ms. Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Her column appears here and in The Wall Street Journal Europe on alternate Wednesdays.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Bush: End Farm Subsidies

Last Thursday, President Bush stated that the G8 was working to end farm subsidies.

President Bush said Thursday that he is seeking agreement with the European Union on a plan to eliminate by 2010 the $112 billion a year that wealthy countries spend subsidizing their farmers. "We want to work with the EU to rid our respective countries of agricultural subsidies," Bush said at a news conference in Gleneagles, Scotland, where he is attending a meeting of the Group of Eight industrialized nations.

Here's a later report:

Leaders of the Group of Eight nations agreed Friday to work toward the abolition of farm-export subsidies and reduce subsidies on all agricultural products, though they stopped short of a broader proposal from President Bush. "We have made the commitment to end all export subsides," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said at a news conference at the conclusion of the G-8 meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland. "We should set a credible end date" at the World Trade Organization’s December summit in Hong Kong, he said. Bush said Thursday that he’s seeking agreement with European Union leaders to scrap subsidies by 2010. Assistance should be ended as part of the so-called Doha Round of negotiations of the WTO, he said.

Bush’s appeal is the most farreaching yet by a political leader of a major industrialized nation, going beyond the proposals now being considered in the WTO. The EU has said it’s prepared to phase out farm-export subsidies provided more advanced developing countries make what European Trade Minister Peter Mandelson called "equivalent gestures."

Our President seems to be successfully pushing real solutions to our world's problems. Good for him.

Call to Action

Daniel Henninger at OpinionJournal is saying that it is time for us, as a nation, to put up or shut up about really reckoning with global terrorism.

And he is 100% correct. Here's an excerpt:

The U.S. seems to have experienced a post-9/11 fall from seriousness. As the reality fades of a September 11 in America, a resort in Bali or a train station in Madrid, it somehow seems "safe" to propose setting a deadline to remove our troops from Iraq, to close Guantanamo, to dump the Patriot Act. We in America can do any of these things, and it will still be OK. We can believe that Islamic terrorism is less than it is, and get away with it.

One more time? Should one assume that July 7 in London--the ripped-open double-decker bus, the stunned, bloody faces of those who lived--will in time fall in the queue of concerns to make it safe to argue, again, that all of this will go away if George Bush goes away?

The entire op-ed is in the extended entry. And it's a good one.

'Close Guantanamo'?

Our politics fiddles while London burns.


BY DANIEL HENNINGER

Friday, July 8, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

London's images of blood, toil, tears and sweat were seen by all the world's civilized people yesterday, and I think there is one thing they would agree on: You don't blow up the bus.

In cities everywhere men and women board buses daily for work or school, and you don't need a U.N. declaration on human rights to understand that part of the deal is that no one blows up the bus. You don't blow up the office building. You don't blow up the train. It's too easy. It is the most cowardly cheap shot one can imagine. But they keep doing it.

So maybe for starters, we don't want to close Guantanamo.

The U.S. seems to have experienced a post-9/11 fall from seriousness. As the reality fades of a September 11 in America, a resort in Bali or a train station in Madrid, it somehow seems "safe" to propose setting a deadline to remove our troops from Iraq, to close Guantanamo, to dump the Patriot Act. We in America can do any of these things, and it will still be OK. We can believe that Islamic terrorism is less than it is, and get away with it.

One more time? Should one assume that July 7 in London--the ripped-open double-decker bus, the stunned, bloody faces of those who lived--will in time fall in the queue of concerns to make it safe to argue, again, that all of this will go away if George Bush goes away?

---

Every Islamic terrorist, from bin Laden and al-Zarqawi down to the next suicide bomber, knows how politics in the West works now. They know that many people of the West react to acts of violence differently than they did in 1940 when Winston Churchill demanded "Victory in spite of all terrors. Victory, however long and hard the road may be."

But there were no cameras and satellite feeds set up on every corner of that death-strewn road. Yesterday's attack produced another new-media first: Grainy video images fed by a cell phone from a bombed subway tunnel. If the American people had seen daily the up-close reality of every battle and bomb in 1943, might we have "withdrawn" before June 1944?

For bin Laden and al-Zarqawi, the relatively small bombs they set off in Iraq or London are a second-grade weapon. Their large-bore weapons in the terror war are modern electronic news technology and, ironically, open democratic societies.

We think we're merely observers of events such as London's awful scenes yesterday or the Baghdad car bombs. No, if you watch television, you're on the battlefield. And some of us don't want to be there. Bin Laden and al-Zarqawi set off these bombs to pound the combatants at home, or in Congress, to make them put their hands on their head and, in effect, surrender. Suffering living-room shell shock, some do. The experience of seeing battlefield death or blown-up people from the couch is not normal.

What happened yesterday in London was an attack on the modern world by pre-modernists. Tony Blair said, "Our values will outlive theirs." Maybe. Ours might not, though, if against theirs of wanton murder, our answer is "close Guantanamo." But there is a better example of the fundamental inability of our politics to sustain seriousness against such a threat: the Bolton nomination to the U.N.

---

We know that Chris Dodd, Joe Biden and the Senate Democrats believe Mr. Bolton is temperamentally unfit to represent us at the U.N. Less well known is that in April 2004, the Security Council passed Resolution 1540 to prevent proliferation of "nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and their means of delivery"--what the terrorists will ultimately win with if they can get it.

Resolution 1540 outlaws A.Q. Khan-type networks, including state participation. It is a Chapter Seven action, and thus binding. It requires members to report their compliance measures in detail. It requires member states to "establish, develop, review and maintain appropriate effective national export and trans-shipment controls over such items."

We should want this if we indeed believe that a complex, globalized threat exists. Its success, however, depends on the will of the Security Council and whether its five Permanent Members will punish with sanctions any country not in compliance. Are you already ahead of me on this?

The one person in the world with the knowledge, experience and will to conceivably make 1540 work is John Bolton. At State Mr. Bolton ran the Security Proliferation Initiative, whose goals precisely parallel those of Resolution 1540. The SPI under Mr. Bolton, for example, helped to shut down the A.Q. Khan nuclear-weapon materials network.

Mr. Bolton is famous for his views of North Korea, but he is expert in the activities of one other incorrigible proliferator--Iran. Yesterday I asked a high international official, whose job is to develop global anti-terror structures, which states are still actively supporting terrorism. He said, "There are two, Syria and Iran."

If the U.S. Senate wanted to send a signal of resolve and seriousness to whoever bombed London, Democrats would join with Republicans their first day back to dispatch proven anti-terror warrior John Bolton straight to the U.N. They won't. They'll keep playing political fiddles while London burns.

The standard response to all this is that if George Bush and Tony Blair hadn't done Iraq, we'd all be as one in the war on terror. The standard response before September 11, was that if we weren't so close to terror-beset Israel, none of this would ever happen. For 30 years, the standard response to this terror has gotten many of us killed.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

I think it is time that our distinguished Senators in Washington, D.C. lay aside their petty politics, get off of their candy asses, and buckle down to the very serious long-term task of supporting the war on terrorism!

Reporting numbers

A wry note by Greyhawk over at the Mudville Gazette.

"Live 8" and a whiff of hypocrisy

Major K., currently stationed in Baghdad, really puts the Live 8 hoopla into perspective. Here's an excerpt:

. . . While I am sympathetic to the plight of so many of the nations in Africa and their people, this type of stuff really annoys me. I wonder how many of these musicians have even been to Africa other than Bono and Bob Geldoff. The idea of a bunch of obnoxiously wealthy, overpaid, pampered pop stars holding concerts to raise money from John and Jane Q. Public for African famine relief seems so hypocritical, especially when they spend so much time reveling in ostentatious displays of their own wealth and fame. I would be more impressed if these same musicians put down the microphones, and picked up a pen and opened their checkbooks. . .

Anti-Subjugator: Thanks America!

This post by Paul Edwards, an Australian who blogs at Anti-Subjugator, is so refreshing, unique, and humerous that it is well worth reading. The subject is "Thanks America", and here's a little glimpse of what is in the post:

And then there's the glorious imperial measurement system that you still cling to, in honour of the glorious King George, long after the rest of the world, including Australia, has metricized, which even caused one of the Mars probes to be smashed to smithereens. Hmmmmm. Hmmmmm. Ok. Hmmmmm. Let's move on folks, nothing to see here.

I really enjoyed it!

Heh

An interesting article citing a recent Gallup poll was published on DefenseLINK News this past Friday.

It's in the extended entry (emphasis added). . .

Military Tops Public Confidence List in New Gallup Poll
By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, June 3, 2005 – The American public has more confidence in the military than in any other institution, according to a Gallup poll released this week.
Seventy-four percent of those surveyed in Gallup's 2005 confidence poll said they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the military - more than in a full range of other government, religious, economic, medical, business and news organizations.

The poll, conducted between May 23 and 26, involved telephone interviews with a randomly selected sample of 1,004 people 18 and older, Gallup officials said. Those surveyed expressed strong confidence in the military, with 42 percent expressing "a great deal" of confidence in the military and 32 percent, "quite a lot" of confidence. Eighteen percent said they have "some" confidence, 7 percent, "very little," and 1 percent, "none."

Public confidence in the military jumped following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has remained consistently high, Gallup officials noted. The 2002 survey reflected a 13 percent increase in confidence in the military over the previous year's poll. The public expressed a 79 percent high-confidence rate in the military in 2002, an 82 percent rate in 2003, and a 75 percent rate in 2004.

This year's 74 percent confidence level exceeded that of all 15 institutions included in the 2005 survey. Police ranked second, with 63 percent of responders expressing "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in them. Organized religion rated third, with 53 percent of responders expressing high confidence, and banks rated a 49 percent high-confidence rate.

Health maintenance organizations bottomed out the list, with just 17 percent of responders expressing high confidence in them. Big business and Congress tied for the second- and third-lowest rankings, with 22 percent of responders expressing "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in them.

The Gallup organization noted that public trust in television news and newspapers reached an all-time low this year, with 28 percent of responders expressing high confidence in them.

Headlines of Note

[Excerpts from James Taranto's OpinionJournal article.]

"Antarctica Ice Cap Growing, Another Sign of Warming"--headline, Palm Beach (Fla.) Post, May 20

"Conservationists Track Jaguars From Space"--headline, MSNBC.com, May 20

"Jobless Workers Could Lose Jobs"--headline, South Bend (Ind.) Tribune, May 20

"Saudis Earn Low Rank in Women's Rights"--headline, Associated Press, May 21

Iraq vs. D.C.

My brother emailed this to me this morning, and I thought it was a pretty interesting statistic. It's also funny in a macabre sort of way. ;-)

If you consider that there have been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraqi theater during the last 22 months, that gives a firearm death ratio of 60 per 100,000.

The firearm death ratio in DC is 80.6 per 100,000. That means that you are more likely to be shot and killed in our Nation's Capitol, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, than you are in Iraq.

Conclusion: We should immediately pull out of WASHINGTON, DC!

UPDATE: Preston, in his comment, pointed out how the numbers cited above don't quite add up. I have been very much involved in a lot of things lately, and did not give this post a critical look, as I usually do. I will see if I can get to the source(s) of these numbers. In the meantime, we may want to chalk this one up as potentially another email-myth.

FINAL UPDATE: As Jeremy pointed out in his comments, the numbers cited refer to "gun deaths". Specifically, deaths brought about by gunshot wounds (this excludes IEDs, VBIEDs, accidents, etc.). Though it's a little squidgy, it is a legitimate statistic. And, yes, Washington D.C. has a higher rate than Iraq in terms of "gun deaths" of U.S. citizens.

More irony -- PETA killing animals?

I saw this post about a PETA animal shelter putting thousands of animals to sleep at Snooze Button Dreams. If this is true, there is a lot of irony (hypocrisy?) going around this country here lately. Jim at Snooze Button Dreams does a good job of defining the problem space, though, so go read his post . . .

Oh, the irony!

This article can be summed up with:

A University of Delaware student has filed a lawsuit demanding to be reinstated. He was suspended for cheating in a corporate ethics class.