Australia Poised to Reject Anthropogenic Global Warming Hoax!

The Wall Street Journal today has the latest state of the Waxman-Markey Bill which threatens to be an example of dogma suppressing both science and economics in the Democrat hysteria to "CAP AND TAX" the income of the American citizen for merely emitting carbon dioxide, an act committed "every breath you take," according to the famous Police lyric by Sting.

And a "Sting" is a great definition of the preposterous hodge-podge of flimflammery the Waxman-Markey Bill piles onto a pliant American Sheeple trusting in Obama's "Hope and Change" pixie dust. But a more serious country, unlike the sad Dominion to the north of the USA, is Australia, which retains a non-frivolous attitude toward the latest fashionable excesses in science fiction such as Anthropogenic Global Warming.

Ian Plimer is Australia's most respected "Earth Scientist" and the publication of his new book, Heaven and Earth, so effectively demolishes the superficial computer modelling and ridiculous Gore-bot hyperbolic hysteria that have characterized much of the AGW debate around the planet that Australia's Senate is poised to reject some "Cap-and-Trade" legislation along the lines of the Waxman gibberish now making its way through the legislative charades overseen & supervised by the Twin Terrors, Pelosi and Dingy Harry Reid. Here's a sum-up of our Australian betters on this issue:

Andrew Bolt, who has been leading the charge against the global warming hysteria for years, notes that Fielding's investigation "could blow apart the great global warming scare."

Fielding went to the US to assess the American evidence for global warming at close quarters. As Melbourne's Age reported on June 4:

Senator Fielding said he was impressed by some of the data presented at the [US Heartland Institute's] climate change skeptics' conference: namely that, although carbon emissions had increased in the last 10 years, global temperature had not.

He said scientists at the conference had advanced other explanations, such as the relationship between solar activity and solar energy hitting the Earth to explain climate change.

Fielding has issued a challenge to the Obama White House to rebut the data. It will be a novel experience for them, as Fielding is an engineer and has an Australian's disregard for self-important government officials.[edit. note: Sadly, most Americans are now afflicted by the Sheeple gene and bow like Obama to self-important apodictic anti-American dictators, be they foreign heads-of-state or in House & Senate Committees] Here is how The Age described his challenge:

Senator Fielding emailed graphs that claim the globe had not warmed for a decade to Joseph Aldy, US President Barack Obama's special assistant on energy and the environment, after a meeting on Thursday…. Senator Fielding said he found that Dr. Aldy and other Obama administration officials were not interested in discussing the legitimacy of climate science.

Telling an Australian you're not interested in the legitimacy of your position is a red rag to a bull. So here is what Fielding concluded:

Until recently I, like most Australians, simply accepted without question the notion that global warming was a result of increased carbon emissions. However, after speaking to a cross-section of noted scientists, including Ian Plimer, a professor at the University of Adelaide and author of Heaven and Earth, I quickly began to understand that the science on this issue was by no means conclusive…. As a federal senator, I would be derelict in my duty to the Australian people if I did not even consider whether or not the scientific assumptions underpinning this debate were in fact correct.

What Fielding's questioning represents is just the tip of the kangaroo's tail. He speaks for a growing number of Australians who will no longer take green propaganda on trust.

And that's what makes Plimer so influential—not just his credibility as a scientist, but the righteous certainty with which he dismisses man-made global warming as an unscientific dogma. He writes: "The Emissions Trading Scheme legislation poises Australia to make the biggest economic decision in its history"—Australia generates 80% of its electricity from coal, which would essentially be outlawed—"yet there has been no scientific due diligence. There has never been a climate change debate in Australia. Only dogma."

Plimer is not a "skeptic," a term which would imply that he merely has a few doubts about the global warming claims. Instead, he rejects the whole myth outright, and this seems to have emboldened and liberated a great many Australians who were already chafing under global warming conformity. As Plimer puts it:

[T]here are a large number of punters [Australian for "customers" or "gamblers"—in this case, skeptical customers who may or may not buy what the government's selling] who object to being treated dismissively as stupid, who do not like being told what to think, who value independence, who resile from personal attacks and have life experiences very different from the urban environmental atheists attempting to impose a new fundamentalist religion. Green politics have taken the place of failed socialism and Western Christianity and impose fear, guilt, penance, and indulgences onto a society with little scientific literacy.

Australia is not that different from America. If a shift in public opinion against the global warming dogma can happen on one side of the earth, it can happen on the other—especially when the US edition of Plimer's book, scheduled for July 1, hits the stands.

His role, Plimer says, is to show "that the emperor has no clothes." After three decades of relentless global warming propaganda, it's about time.

[emphases above my own]
Plimer's book comes out on my birthday and I will move heaven and earth to get my hands on it for a birthday present.

Hopefully, American religious dogmatism on Climate Hysteria will be outed as a complete hoax, along with other Obama con-games, such as his Health Care hyperbolic hysteria.

One can hope and pray, and only wish.....

The Revolution Shall Be Tweeted. Nobel Prize for Twitter Founders?

A GWB Dep NatSec Advisor named Pfeiffe suggests that Twitter technology is bypassing the isolated fossil government in Tehran and reporting on the suppression of protests of the rigged elections. The Iranian Revolution for the Easily Overwhelmed is a Twitter filter with updates every fifteen minutes or so. Iran.tweetmeme is another up-to-the-minute follow-up.

Yesterday I was on a radio talkshow talking to Todd Schnitt, who is very good on AGW & Iran & Energy in general. I mentioned that the phenomenon of Neda's murder in broad daylight has twitched the martyrdom gene in the Shi'ite DNA of Iran and that there will be three-day, seven-day, and forty-day commemorations of Neda's cowardly murder. If the script of the Iranian rev of '79 holds to narrative, the suppression of these mourning periods will spark new murders, which in turn will generate more martyrdom commemorations. It's a Shi'ite thing, and in '79 caused the downfall of the Shah over a year's period of asymmetrical punctuated equilibriums, as an economist or evolutionary scientist might put it.

Iran is sui generis to the nth degree and when Iran comes to a fork in the road, it takes it, in Yogi-talk. If a critical mass of the clerical elite decide that Khamenei and Ahmedinejad are worse than Rafsanjani/Khatami/Mousavi, then some serious change might occur, but not without the usual syncopation that Iranian politics always follows in its strange idiosyncratic way.

The one thing which might push the regime off its tottering throne is the application of much stronger UN and EU sanctions, but even these would be bypassed by Russian and Chinese rushing to pick up market share from petro-rich Iran. Remember that Marc Rich was prosecuted for trading with Iran by refining its oil offshore in Rumania, and most of Iran's gasoline is refined outside the country, with the corrupt "Religious Foundations" skimming off enormous profits which finance some elements of the Basiji and Revolutionary Guards. Because Iran has always been a trading nation, an effective boycott might do the trick. However, as Niall Ferguson notes in his book The Colossus, the UN has become a completely anarchic and ineffective organization. So unless the sanctions have some real bite, Iran will continue to develop a nuke, and the smoldering resentment of the cities will be offset by young Basiji zealots from the countryside---guided by cynical IRGC politically-connected goons like the one who was photographed on a motorbike who may have shot Neda. [See my earlier blog with this link.] And Iran will continue to lurch towards nuclear status and the Gulf Arabs will in turn be terrified and perhaps ask for American protection.

As it happens, some of her LA friends say that ironically, Neda and her father were stuck in Tehran's notoriously horrible traffic and got out of their stalled car to get some air, went to gape at the protesters, and Neda was arbitrarily shot from a coward on a motorbike, according to friends in LA. A YouTube of the purported killer taking out his pistol is up online.

Hope the links above help anyone seeking updates frequently on the anarchy in the streets of Tehran, Tabriz, and other major Iranian cities.

When Pictures are Worth a Million Words.

The LA Times has a photo gallery of Neda Agha Soltan, who had a lot of friends in the expat Iranian LA community and who aspired to be a tour guide as well as a musician.

A beautiful woman is transformed by death into something "rich and strange, those are pearls that were her eyes..."

For what it's worth, YouTube has a series of graphic cellphone images both of the poor young woman and a woman-hating creep on a motorcycle pulling out a pistol who also appears in photos with high-ranking politicos in the Mullocracy hierarchy. This was a contract killing of sorts....

Make an example out of a beautiful young woman in western dress. Ahnedinejad himself was one of the terrorists holding US Embassy prisoners hostage under Jimmy Carter's feckless POTUS shambles of a tenure. This fellow is probably an aspiring politician in the murderous security apparatus worthy of a Stalin or a Hitler. Stalin was a bank robber, Hitler was a vagabond...., Ahmedinejad was a terrorist.

And it looks like Obambi is going to give him the bomb, while looking like a deer in the headlights.

Persian Paranoia or Paranoia Across the Board?

Christopher Hitchens probably remembers sitting in that mosque listening to the Ayatollah Khamenei shout his "two-minute hate" with such vividness because it might have been one of the few times CH didn't have a morning hangover, given the dearth of hard liquor in The Islamic Republic. But Christopher has a point about Marg to the English as well as to the Great and Little Satans.

The British were seen as bad guys in the days that British Petroleum ran both Iran and Iraq as corporate subsidiaries back around 1910 and Winston Church as First Lord of the Admiralty was partly responsible for the bad rep that Anglos had in Iran. But Christopher, with whom I shared many a dram of Dewar's with back in the day, also is aware that the chief goal of the Iranian Mullahs is to dominate the "Persian" Gulf [which the Arabs call the "Arabian" Gulf] and that their object, at least in the competing paranoia of the Sunnis, is to push back Sunni interests in neutral places like Bahrain & the Emirates where Shi'ites reside, but Sunnis rule. The Tunbs and other islands in the Persian Gulf are much more important than one thinks, as the gigantic natural gas reserves of Qatar, third in the world after Russia and Iran, would revert to Iran if the Mullahs could dominate both sides of the Gulf.

The biggest paranoia in the Middle East is that of the Sunnis toward the Shi'ite Iranian Mullahcracy.

And Christopher does score a point against Obama by pointing out that Obambi missed his "Martin Luther King moment" by kinda sorta watching while he weasel-worded some uncourageous twaddle about "not meddling."

I guess he's Jimmy Carter all over again, but not brave enough to try to rescue the hostages, badly as that turned out....

But at least Jimmy got rid of a weasel named Cyrus Vance who quit because of the daring it took to decide to do SOMETHING...!

Not exact "Tear Down That Wall, Mr. Gorbachev," but Jimmy did try to man up.

Why Immigration Matters and Why Europe is Rapidly Becoming Islamicized

Mark Steyn had an NRO piece a while back in which he spanked Andrew Sullivan [who presumably enjoyed it] while doing a nice bit of statistical speculation that Gene Expression expands upon employing The World Values Survey.

Immigration control is becoming more important because NATO in twenty-five years will either be extinct or subject to Sharia law in a majority of its member nations [of which only the UK actually keeps a census count of the breeding numbers of indigenous versus Islamic live births].

[If you click on the map of The World Values box, however, you might notice that Ronald Ingelhardt's Ingelhardt Welzel Cultural Map of the World has Uruguay in Catholic Europe and Portugal in Latin America....tricky, those composite statistical boxes, eh?

ABC Nightly News Says Miami hit 105 Degrees [Actually it was 97!]

Again and again we are reminded that in the last 11-12 years, since 1998 at any rate, temperatures on average are going steadily downward, yet we see airhead "weather reporters" like Anne Thompson of NBC say exactly the opposite is happening on network news, after in Anne's case a breathless introduction by Bowin' Brian Williams concerning a pronunciamento by the Obama White House on curtailing the "global warming" hoax.

Tonight, the ABC-TV 2AM news broke with a breathless story on weather across the USA wreaking havoc in an unprecedented fashion, and among its temperatures was a verbally-announced 105 degrees for Miami.

Living in Boca, the temp was around 95 peak this afternoon, the hottest day of the year so far. The temp in Miami never is more than one or two degrees hotter as it is only 40 miles south of Boca Raton.

My guess is that the resident room-temp IQ "meteorologist," a blonde prettyboy named "Sam Champion" [possibly a pseudonym as David Letterman's was when he started out as a weatherboy?], has got the talking-head "anchors" on the After Late Night News trained to just read what the AP or whatever national news source ups the temp in Miami 8 degrees.

Lying about the local temps almost 10% upward sure gives the MSM another rung on the ladder to weather mystification 101, the BIG LIE needed to sell the "Anthropogenic Global Warming Hoax" to millions of mouth-breathing slackjaw libtards out there in TV land. Almost all with a public school education, so their critical thinking faculties are completely undeveloped.

EuroModel Rejected by Voters---in Europe!!

The Wall Street Journal notes the trend in Europe towards center-right politicos continues. Of course, here in the USA, a foam-at-the-mouth press and nutjob House & Senate temporarily with a minute Democrat majority are heaving leftward while Republicans/Conservatives/Libertarians regroup and clamber up the masts to reset the sails in 2010.

I first noticed the Euro-right trend a couple of years back when Sweden, of all countries, elected its first non-socialist government in more than 50 years. Something to do with immigrants assassinating their Prime Minister? [Which happened in the last Millenium, but the Swedes are pretty slow to catch up].

More seriously, the Left is still firmly in the driver's seat, except in small jurisdictions, because the Left institutionalizes its "reforms" which rapidly turn into new and less accountable centers of corruption. Had the French an oil-based energy system rather than wisely centering its largest resources into hydro and nuke energy, the economy would be worse off than it is with over 50% of personal "income" diverted to taxes, pre-emptively in France since no one actually files honest returns, so VATs and other imposts on lower income folks are the order of business. And the elites make their money [Lyon in the '70s had the highest per capita ownership pct. of any city in the world, all hidden in garages in the chateaux-suburbs and rarely seen on the streets of the grande ville] and avoid their taxes as they do in other countries with political elites largely serving a dirigiste model.

The Statists already control the EU and the individual countries, so the current reversion might be more of a death kick on a populace suspended on a gallows rather than a complete turnaround.

Meanwhile, in the USA the Democrat hangmen & ladies are preparing our population for the same suspension of liberties that the Euro-pendus have suffered for decades....

Were Cheney/Halliburton as Corrupt as LBJ/RMN were in Vietnam?

I recently had a discussion with someone who claimed that the Iraq War was bungled through corruption by US government outsourced responsibilities that companies like Halliburton infamously made much money off of. I recall in my Vietnam years that Pacific Architecture & Engineering [PA & E] had a large interest in the company held by Lady Bird Johnson, a fact which got little or no press coverage at the time. PA & E and another Texas firm, Brown & Root, got huge contracts to build bases at Hoa Binh and Nha Trang in Vietnam, with nary a peep from the MSM of the time, the Cronkites and others who were such moral heroes, as E.R. Murrow was supposed to have been.

After RMN won the election in '68, Dem contributors like Bucyrus-Erie and such were replaced by Republican contributors like P&H, for example, but the largest share of the contractual booty had been amassed by the LBJ consortium.

It's worthy of interest that Robert Caro has interviewed every one of LBJ's inner circle except one, a little Baptist preacher named Bill Moyers, who inexplicably won't talk to Caro.

Could the reason be that Caro has a few skeletons in Moyers' relationship with LBJ that the phony PBS "guru" doesn't want to confront. Besides being arrested for DUI, perhaps Moyers has other reasons for not being interviewed by Caro.

Not that the MSM would ever abandon one of its favorite mantras, the evils of Republic corporate malfeasance.

Obama a Deer in Headlights as Iran, North Korea Resemble "Axis of Evil" All over Again

Obama is showing his sophomoric foreign policy skills as he sends out nitwits like Time's Joe Klein to argue that doing nothing is better than "interfering" and "meddling" which suck-up Klein claims that "all Iranians" think the US would be doing if it offered moral support to the dissidents after a manifestly stolen election.

Henry Meyer's article above is the best short analysis of the consequences that The Supreme Leader faces after prematurely ordering the Election Commission to throw the vote to Ahmedinejad, who now thrashes about claiming "foreign interference" is behind the outrage Khamenei spurred by not waiting the necessary three days to actually count the vote.

Now that Rafsanjani, head of the Council of Guardians, the only body that could possibly evict The Supreme Leader, has thrown down the gauntlet on Moussavi's behalf after Khamenei, who is an ancient enemy of Moussavi's, panicked & soiled his underwear after preliminary returns had Moussavi, an ethnic Azeri, running far ahead in various parts of the country, including Tehran.

The constitutional structures of the so-called Islamic Republic, in reality a theocracy supported by Brownshirt thuggish paramilitary goons called Basiji, the young rural religious militia that also serves as Ahmedinejad's power base, are still supporting The Supreme Leader. The armed and nasty Basiji resemble the Hamas zealots in Gaza and the Hezbollah nutjobs in Lebanon, recently thwarted in relatively fair elections largely overlooked by the western press [except for an absurd state-media hack named Hertzberg in The New Yorker, who credited Obama, of all people, for inspiring Lebanon's heartfelt rejection of religious thuggery.]

Sadly, Nicolas Sarkozy is demonstrating true testicular and spinal vigor in his support of the forces of democracy and freedom. France is now led by a Ronald Reagan while the USA has a re-run of the dithering indecisive Jimmy Carter in the Rose Garden.

My guess is that he's plucking the petals from a daisy to discover which way US foreign policy should lean in Iran.

And of course, in the meantime, Kim Jung Mentally-Il is sending an armed missile ship to attack Hawaii on the Fourth of July.

Sharks in the water always respond to the thrashing about of weak and wounded prey.

And Kim Jung Mentally-Il still thanks Jimmy Carter for supporting him versus Bill Clinton in the 1990's, while he was starving 2 million NorK slave-serfs to death in his tiny abbreviated Gulag Archipelago of a country.
UPDATE: The New York Times has an interesting Op-Ed that refutes enemies of US interests in Iran such as Hertzberg and Klein. Klein parachutes into Iran & is an instant expert?

Foreign Policy Mag has a list of the wonderful leadership guys like Hertzberg & Klein believe Obama shouldn't "meddle" with.

Carlos Slim: [Relatively] Uncorrupt Businessman Buys a Corrupt NYT

The New Yorker has a sideways report on Carlos Slim, the quiet Mexican multi-billionaire. CS is a man of simple and frugal habits and tastes---he owns no home in the USA, unlike the other nine Mexican billionaires, and does not even know how to use a computer.

Carlos is of Lebanese Catholic [Maronite] origin and like many Maronites, has made a fortune after emigrating [via his father in the early 20th c.] to the New World. V.S. Naipaul has written a sympathetic novel, A Bend in the River, about Lebanese [or rather Levantine] merchants in Africa. Carlos is a mathematical genius and taught his fellow students linear programming at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Linear programming is often used to calculate the optimum allocation of resources---which, like Warren Buffett, Slim employed to grow an autonomous personal empire.

The article goes on to speculate why Carlos wants to buy the NYT, which the current publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr, has effectively almost destroyed through disastrous business moves [buying back stock in the early 2000s at forty bucks which is now worth about four bucks, buying the Boston Globe for $1.1 billion & refusing to sell it for half that price & now having effectively been forced to close it down.] The otiose Sulzberger clan has ironclad control over the Class B and the incompetent Pinch is the captain of the Titanic as the NYT appears to have hit a financial iceberg.

Lawrence Wright of The Leaning Tower is the author, so suck-ups like Tom Friedman and Frank Rich, the failed Broadway critic who is fancied to have insights on American political processes, both kiss up to Pinch Sulzberger, the tiny midget standing on the shoulders on his giant forebears who built a great journalistic institution which he is demolishing through reckless editorial and business decisions.

A Mexican competitor to Slim's Telmex, Spanish Telefonica, headed by Francisco Gil Diaz whom I was acquainted with back in my Amoco years, calls Slim a "crony capitalist" and all the other bad things that the Statist political elites call successful businessmen.

But CS is much like another refugee from Lebanon, former culture-hero Ralph Nader, who made the mistake of being the difference between a POTUS named Gore and GWB, hence the MSM holds him now in its Groupthink Penalty Box. Nader, whose home was near Suq Al Gharb in the foothills above Beirut where I lived for a year studying Arabic, came from that legacy of Syrian genius destroyed by the advent of "The Religion of Peace" which corrupts everything it touches. The Lebanon and anti-Lebanon still retain clans of cultural brilliance not tainted by the crazed first-cousin marriages favored by Muslims. And of course, "honor killings," which are as murderous as abortion in the USA.

Slim may impose a premium or surcharge on his Telmex operations and other successful businesses, but he too is a refugee from the disastrous 60 years of PRI socialism which corrupted Mexico's economy to the point that the disasters of the early '80s were almost a foregone conclusion.

Interestingly, Slim considers the US's current economic problems more like the Dot-Com Bust of 2000 than the ginormous catastrophe Democrats are calling it---to impose the same socialism that led to the PRI's economic backwardness in Mexico.

Is the USA retreating from economic heights to dwell in the miasmal swamps of socialist uniform economic illness? Looks like Obambi and his henchboys Rahm & Axelgrease are intent on turning the US into a Chicago of today, a political facsimile of the PRI during most of 20th c. Mexico.

Chicago Rules, NBA Crook as Mayor, and Obama The Hypocrite

The Wall Street Journal notes that Inspectors General get fired if they cross Obama nowadays, especially if they persecute his political allies by exposing official malfeasance and sheer corruption.

Monkeyshines prevailed when Kevin Johnson, a former NBA player, was caught using public funds in a program he wangled from his ol' buddy Obama---nothing unusual about that, as Chicago is the ethical template for Obama and his crew of moral lepers named Rahm, Axelrod, et al.

Read the link and find out how a mental cripple like Johnson managed to parlay $850K from Obama into the job of mayor of Sacramento. The capital of a Latino republic which is reverting back to bananas as its chief product---and mental state.

Panetta Should Stay Out of Politics, Especially Partisan Politics

Leon Panetta won respect on Capitol Hill for his decades of service as a Congressman, and his recent appointment to head the CIA seemed a well-earned end-of-career reward.
He started out well by defending the Agency from the absurd and twisted lies of Speaker of the House Pelosi, whose assertions that she was "lied to" by the Agency about waterboarding were contradicted by contemporaneous reports back when she was briefed in 2002-3.

However, Panetta is now venturing into dangerous waters, as he is leaving the realm of intelligence and analysis in order to score political points against a Republican speaking out on serious national security issues. Had Cheney made reckless unsubstantiated attacks against the Agency, I could understand Panetta's attack on him in The New Yorker, a fanatically partisan tabloid which has descended from journalism to hack yellow screeds against Republicans, period.

To extrapolate from Cheney's remarks that Obama's policies are putting American national security in jeopardy to the absurd conclusion that Cheney WANTS the US to be attacked is an absurd egregious solecism and unworthy of a man whose public service up to now has been unmarred by partisan fanaticism. He should be reminded that his job is to offer advice on intelligence and analysis to the POTUS, not engage in partisan brickbats with a politician of an opposition party.

And perhaps Panetta was put up to this by Obama as Cheney's speech [which Obama tried to pre-empt by subsequently scheduling a prequel prebuttal] garnered a lot of interest and respect.

This goes against the nasty agenda Rahm and Axelrod have concocted to demonize Cheney, Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck for being so popular in the national media.

Let Obama do his own dirty work, and leave Panetta to the professional responsibilities of a very important function.

Has Iran Now Crossed the Rubicon of no Looking Back?

Barry Rubin may have summed up the significance of Ahmadinejad's having to justify his lack of votes with an early, even premature, declaration of victory by the Ayatollissimo Khamenei. Rubin writes:

I certainly expected Ahmadinjad to win but figured the regime would play out the game. He'd either genuinely gain victory in the second round or they'd change just enough votes to ensure his victory. What no one expected is that the regime would tear up the whole process like this. Their brazen way of doing so--if you don't like it you can go to hell, we're going to do whatever we want, and we don't care what anyone thinks--signals to me that this ruling group is even more risk-taking and irresponsible than it previously appeared.

This is the key point: the problem with Iran's regime isn't just that it is a dictatorship, it's that it is such an extremist, aggressive dictatorship.

The only logical explanation for why the regime did this is that Ahmadinejad's opponents got so many votes that it frightened the regime. It also shows that the regime is wedded to Ahmadinejad and his approach.

Is a regime that just committed itself irrevocably to the most extreme faction, most radical ideology, and most repressive control over the country going to compromise with the West on nuclear weapons or anything else?

Of course not, like Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1960s, Syria's rulers in the 1970s, and Iraq's Saddam Hussein in the 1980s (and many examples elsewhere in the world) it is going to use foreign adventurism and mobilizing hatred against the West and Israel to consolidate its hold on the country.

Remember all those people who've said that Iran can be entrusted with nuclear weapons because the regime was so cautious in practice and its rhetoric should be disregarded?

And there's more. It isn't just a stolen election but the imposition by the ruling group of the most extreme, adventurist, nuclear-weapon waving, Holocaust-denying candidate. I would have been pleased if either of the two less radical candidates had won, not because they are super-moderate but that would have signalled a government less likely to go (or blunder) into war or use nuclear weapons.

Again, though, the significance of events in Tehran is the triumph of both the most extreme elements of the regime and of the advocate of the most far-out policy. Can any sane person think this group--intoxicated in the belief they are winning victories everywhere and will win more in future--is going to compromise with America and Europe?

Remember, too, before taking this step, the regime's leaders calculated they had nothing to lose internationally. What could that mean except that they hadn't planned on making nice with the West in the first place and also that they don't take Western pressure--at a time when there's so much talk of engagement, apology, and appeasement in the air--as a serious threat?

So now are we going to see an all-out effort to conciliate with the Islamist regime which has just signalled its intentions in the clearest possible terms? For goodness sake, is there truly no limit?

We can be sure the Eurotard cowards will continue to dawdle and pussyfoot with these out-and-out rogue criminals. Will Obama also follow the Juan Cole simper and hem-of-robe-plucking that a James Earl ["Jimmy"] Carter took with North Korea, with such notable success during the ClyntOOn regime?

Is Obama an Obambi? Keep tuned, won't take long to find out....

Tabriz Demonstrates Fraud in Iran Election.

The New York Times is on the side of the forces of light, but CNN is totally silent, comparatively speaking, as Iran teeters on the brink of a mini-Tienanmen Square moment.

Not hard to figure out why CNN is eyeless and clueless on Iran. Christiane Amanpour wants to preserve her access to the autocratic theocrats and doesn't want her colleagues at CNN to undermine her own personal career. And the clueless eff-up named J. Klein running the CNN third-rate operation goes along with his Iranian "expert" in ignoring what might be a huge story. The fact that the so-called "Election Commission" gave Ahmadinnerjacket a 50% victory in Tabriz, capital of Azeri Iran [Moussavi is an Azeri] shows that these anti-democratic functionaries don't even know how to steal an election! Tabriz has been a center against anti-hardline Ahma-dinnerjacket for years and I wonder if the whole city is not ready to defect to its northern neighbor whose capital is Baku.

Stalin annexed Tabriz after WWII and was only with difficulty forced to disgorge this ethnic enclave of Azerbaijan. Why not make a move to go northward? I know this is pie-in-the-sky, but it possibly represents a majority of the Tabriz population's inner wishes.

UPDATE: Sunday afternoon at the gym, I did notice Amanpour reporting on the violent aftermath of the stolen election, so perhaps it was logistics rather than an editorial decision that CNN was late out of the starter's box.

Phony LeBron/Kobe Ads Scored by Los Angeles Times

Nike's ads with ridiculous puppets obviously influenced by retarded over-the-hill Spike Lee celebrate LeBron with a little kid puppet asking him for tickets to the Finals.

Does Nike have even a quarter of a brain? Doesn't this premature ejaculation of a campaign stink like Sh*T, based on a faulty Cleveland Cavs team and a spoiled-brat entitlement fraud of a superstar who stalked off the court and whined about being "beaten up" after having basked in adulation for months by a fawning press?

LeBron is now officially outed as a creepy spoiled p.o.s.

Even the Los Angeles Times kinda hints at it, though the fact that this town can't even support an NFL franchise demonstrates its truly second-rate status in the world of professional sports.

Temps Plunge as Sunspots Disappear & CO2 Along with Them

Statist Political Elites are notoriously out of touch with reality, and this Spring, the "Mother of Parliaments" in Westminster was busy adding more inclusive amendments to a drastic Anthropomorphic Global Warming Bill while in early April [or was it late March?] there was VERY unseasonal snow falling outside muffling Big Ben's tones! Since then, we've seen that besides being out of touch, the Brit Parliament is notoriously in love with perks & benefits, but hopefully Cameron & the Tories might diminish that quirk of libtards and also lessen the climate nonsense as Scotland still freezes this June. [Proleptic thought: Gordon Brown is still PM busy destroying any vestige of Tony Blair's New Labour heritage.]

Ironically, the Brits have been the greatest astronomers when it comes to sunspots, although I believe it might have been a Dutch dude who first spotted them. Maunder noted that a lack of sunspots for 70 years led to a "Little Ice Age" just before the Industrial Revolution's dark Satanic mills blighted the atmosphere and turned Victorian London into a smoggy haze for a century-plus. No sunspots for more than a half-century meant that six 11-year cycles in a row were responsible for famines among which were the terrible crop failures that caused the French Revolution in 1789. Sunspots or the lack of them have political consequences, [and volcanic eruptions such as the horrific one in Iceland in 1785 contributed to said crop failures, I might add.] The summerless year of 1816 had snow on the Fourth of July, as Jefferson noted in his diary. But soon after, the solar cycles began producing more spots. Carrington, who was instrumental in discovering the different types of stars recorded a tremendous flare-up in 1859 that bears his eponymous moniker. So the "recent" 150 years [or more precisely around thirteen 11-year solar cycles up to the year 1998] had plenteous sunspots and a soaring world temperature, aided marginally by Industrial smoke and pollution. But the most recent 11 years leading to 2009 was the 23rd recorded cycle and relatively deficient in sunspot activity with a concomitant decrease in world temps. The Telegraph notes recent weather and food problems:

...... midsummer snow not just in Norway and the Cairngorms, but even in Saudi Arabia. At least in the southern hemisphere it is winter, but snowfalls in New Zealand and Australia have been abnormal. There have been frosts in Brazil, elsewhere in South America they have had prolonged droughts, while in China they have had to cope with abnormal rain and freak hailstorms, which in one province killed 20 people.

None of this has given much cheer to farmers. In Canada and northern America summer planting of corn and soybeans has been way behind schedule, with the prospect of reduced yields and lower quality. Grain stocks are predicted to be down 15 per cent next year. US reserves of soya – used in animal feed and in many processed foods – are expected to fall to a 32-year low.
In China, the world's largest wheat grower, they have been battling against the atrocious weather to bring in the harvest. (In one province they even fired chemical shells into the clouds to turn freezing hailstones into rain.) In north-west China drought has devastated crops with a plague of pests and blight. In countries such as Argentina and Brazil droughts have caused such havoc that a veteran US grain expert said last week: "In 43 years I've never seen anything like the decline we're looking at in South America."
In Europe, the weather has been a factor in well-below average predicted crop yields in eastern Europe and Ukraine. In Britain this year's oilseed rape crop is likely to be 30 per cent below its 2008 level. And although it may be too early to predict a repeat of last year's food shortage, which provoked riots from west Africa to Egypt and Yemen, it seems possible that world food stocks may next year again be under severe strain, threatening to repeat the steep rises which, in 2008, saw prices double what they had been two years before.

All this in the face of Statist Political Elites [led in the US by clueless nerds like Waxman & Pelosi] & Eurotards placing impossible targets for biofuels [which if made from corn and wheat often consume more energy to produce than they emit while used as car fuels]: The Telegraph has a good summary of the self-serving agenda of the control-seeking Eurocrats:

It is appropriate that another contributory factor to the world's food shortage should be the millions of acres of farmland now being switched from food crops to biofuels, to stop the world warming, Last year even the experts of the European Commission admitted that, to meet the EU's biofuel targets, we will eventually need almost all the food-growing land in Europe. But that didn't persuade them to change their policy. They would rather we starved than did that. And the EU, we must always remember, is now our government – the one most of us didn't vote for last week

.
However, the current cold snap lasting since 1998 more or less has even NASA predicting that Solar Cycle 24 might be another low-sunspot cycle as was Cycle 23. Ironic, since it is their spurious meteorologist, who in cahoots with a Stanford politicized prof, began the AGW nonsense in the late '80s, after the Global Cooling scare of the '70s had flared up and then disappeared. Maybe this time, NASA has gotten it right.

Why Democrat Hypocrisy Never Ends: Example 1001 [Alf Layla wa Layl]

Jim Gordon comments on a pinhead reader's dumb comment that Bush sold us a bill of goods on WMD. Here is Jim's "reality check" on the relentless humdrum lies that the MSM purveys on an hourly basis:

"Saddam's goal ... is to achieve the lifting of U.N. sanctions while retaining and enhancing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. We cannot, we must not and we will not let him succeed." -- Madeline Albright, 1998

"(Saddam) will rebuild his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and some day, some way, I am certain he will use that arsenal again, as he has 10 times since 1983" -- National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Feb 18, 1998

"Iraq made commitments after the Gulf War to completely dismantle all weapons of mass destruction, and unfortunately, Iraq has not lived up to its agreement." -- Barbara Boxer, November 8, 2002

"The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retained some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capability. Intelligence reports also indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons, but has not yet achieved nuclear capability." -- Robert Byrd, October 2002

"There's no question that Saddam Hussein is a threat... Yes, he has chemical and biological weapons. He's had those for a long time. But the United States right now is on a very much different defensive posture than we were before September 11th of 2001... He is, as far as we know, actively pursuing nuclear capabilities, though he doesn't have nuclear warheads yet. If he were to acquire nuclear weapons, I think our friends in the region would face greatly increased risks as would we." -- Wesley Clark on September 26, 2002

"The community of nations may see more and more of the very kind of threat Iraq poses now: a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists. If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow." -- Bill Clinton in 1998

"In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all too well affects American security." -- Hillary Clinton, October 10, 2002

"I am absolutely convinced that there are weapons...I saw evidence back in 1998 when we would see the inspectors being barred from gaining entry into a warehouse for three hours with trucks rolling up and then moving those trucks out." -- Clinton's Secretary of Defense William Cohen in April of 2003

"Iraq is not the only nation in the world to possess weapons of mass destruction, but it is the only nation with a leader who has used them against his own people." -- Tom Daschle in 1998

"Saddam Hussein's regime represents a grave threat to America and our allies, including our vital ally, Israel. For more than two decades, Saddam Hussein has sought weapons of mass destruction through every available means. We know that he has chemical and biological weapons. He has already used them against his neighbors and his own people, and is trying to build more. We know that he is doing everything he can to build nuclear weapons, and we know that each day he gets closer to achieving that goal." -- John Edwards, Oct 10, 2002

"The debate over Iraq is not about politics. It is about national security. It should be clear that our national security requires Congress to send a clear message to Iraq and the world: America is united in its determination to eliminate forever the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction." -- John Edwards, Oct 10, 2002

"I share the administration's goals in dealing with Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction." -- Dick Gephardt in September of 2002

"Iraq does pose a serious threat to the stability of the Persian Gulf and we should organize an international coalition to eliminate his access to weapons of mass destruction. Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power." -- Al Gore, 2002

"We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction." -- Ted Kennedy, September 27, 2002

"There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein's regime is a serious danger, that he is a tyrant, and that his pursuit of lethal weapons of mass destruction cannot be tolerated. He must be disarmed." -- Ted Kennedy, Sept 27, 2002

"I will be voting to give the president of the United States the authority to use force - if necessary - to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security." -- John F. Kerry, Oct 2002

"The threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real, but as I said, it is not new. It has been with us since the end of that war, and particularly in the last 4 years we know after Operation Desert Fox failed to force him to reaccept them, that he has continued to build those weapons. He has had a free hand for 4 years to reconstitute these weapons, allowing the world, during the interval, to lose the focus we had on weapons of mass destruction and the issue of proliferation." -- John Kerry, October 9, 2002

"(W)e need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime. We all know the litany of his offenses. He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation. ...And now he is miscalculating America’s response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction. That is why the world, through the United Nations Security Council, has spoken with one voice, demanding that Iraq disclose its weapons programs and disarm. So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real, but it is not new. It has been with us since the end of the Persian Gulf War." -- John Kerry, Jan 23, 2003

"As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, I am keenly aware that the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons is an issue of grave importance to all nations. Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process." -- Nancy Pelosi, December 16, 1998

From Nancy Pelosi in 1998 - to Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, John Edwards, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry et al - there were a LOT of liberal dems who sold us those goods - LOOOOONG before the eeeeeevil BOOOOOOSH!

Dutch Treat for Taliban While Yglesias Thinks NorKs equal Abu Gharaib

"Dumb Dutchman" is a byword in my home state in the upper Midwest, but Joanie van Rijke is the dumbest Dutchwoman walking the earth today.

American Renaissance calls the Dutch Girl's behavior indicative of the "Pre-Captivity Stockholm Syndrome" psychosis afflicting the Eurotard Left.

Joanie is just an undereducated ditz who expands the meaning of the term "Dutch Treat" to its outer limits and beyond.

Her story is pitiful. After letting them know that she would write friendly articles, this naive nymphette was kidnapped after seeking out the Taliban, held in a cave for six months, raped repeatedly by a fellow who had three wives already and suggested that she join his harem. She was released only after a ransom of 100K Euros was paid to her captors. Coming out of her seclusion, this sad little nympho claims the Taliban treated her "with respect and are not monstors." [GWB in Gitmo, I suspect, would be this mental case's definition of a monstor.]

Matt Yglesias has a Harvard education, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, and represents how corrupt are the impostors in the American "intellectual class," formerly called the intelligentsia before that got eliminated by Yglesias allies like Joe Stalin & Mao & Pol Pot et al...

These JournoList cabal boys are simply undereducated in the liberal arts, except in those arts of disinformation & conveying leftist propaganda which suit their obvious agenda. Apparently they have no sense of values outside their narrow slice of the political spectrum which is infrared on the European red for left, blue for right color scale [or ultraviolet on the US inverted scale, which happened with the connivance of the Rather/Jennings/Brokaw troika of leftist droogs in the network nineties before cable squashed the nets.] Comparing North Korea and Abu Gharaib is comparing the Holocaust with one of those atrocity stories of a unit gone temporarily amok as happened frequently during World War II. Indeed, in WWII, armed partisans without uniforms were summarily shot, not incarcerated in prison camps and given lawyers as the US has done at Gitmo.

Yglesias is one more example of how the left simply allows murderous socialists like Mugabe, Castro, Kim Jung Il, [formerly] Saddam, and Chavez to run free and clear of any moral scrutiny by the "gatekeepers" who micromanage the American political elites' perspective on foreign policy. The JournoList cabal hates Israel because of the Likud & likes Iran & Syria because of the statist controls these ruthless anti-democracies maintain over their populations.

It's what these Fifth Column JournoList types would like to do to American capitalism---destroy it by a thousand cuts. Yglesias is a perfect product of the mental fudge factory that turns out libtards by the thousands.

The Leftist Elitist Flimflam Factory is represented in part by the NYT, JournoList bloggers, and the Obamaniacs in the NBC/CBS Groupthink Mental Deathcage. [Bowin' Brian Williams e.g., but Katie also scrapes & plucks the hem of The Won's robe. Has-been Evan Thomas suffers from progeria of the brain when he calls Obama "God," apparently believing himself dead and gone to socialist heaven].

Any comparison between Abu Gharaib and the slaughter by famine of two million Koreans while Billy Jeff Clinton flirted with NorKs using Madeleine Albright's twaddle and waddle to seduce them in person---that is as delusional as Jimmy Carter's 1994 free-lance diplomacy with the NorKs which forced Billy Jeff to strike a horrible bargain, paying them to shut down a plutonium plant they no longer used and would be shut down anyway. Madeleine was the worst Sec'y of State ever, and that includes Warren Christopher.

James Earl Carter defines the outer limits of delusion---though Yglesias & his JournoList crew are urging Obama to inch toward that precipice that the Carter legacy has plunged from and Jimmy's cred continues to plummet as he concocts new anti-Semitic versions of his hatred for Israel.

Amb. Bolton once again predicted that this is what would happen.

Finally, I suggest we send Fat Al Gore whose network foolishly sent the two women to NorK over to negotiate. Fat Al could use several years of manual labor to work off his own enormous delusions and a bit of avoirdupois at the same time.

Lenin observed that useful idiots come in all shapes, sizes and genders, but even he probably couldn't have imagined the mental gymnastics that Global Citizens like Yglesias, van Rijke, and Gore perform to advance the destruction of individualism and freedom of thought.

Snow in June in NDakota & Kofi "Rwanda" Annan Lies to us all

Kofi Annan rose to the top of the UN hierarchy after causing the genocide in Rwanda to worsen due to his absolute incompetence as UN Chief of African operations, making him primus inter pares among the faineants at the top of this International Joke---plus he was black so he would be next in the entitlement queue that passes for promotion in this diseased NGO.

An ICCC meeting in DC had no press coverage as it promoted the skeptics' point of view on Anthropogenic Global Warming, the one that the official UN version calls "deniers" in the new religion of what Richard Feynman called "Cargo Cult Science." You remember Feynman, the fellow who told NASA that its estimate that the Space Shuttle would fail every 100,000 trips was off by many orders of magnitude. Feynman predicted one in every 50 launches and so far is right on target with 2 in the first 100 Space Shuttle launches. Of course, the UN IRCC was behind Political Impostor Kofi's bogus publication.

By coincidence, NASA is the chief progenitor of the AGW hoax currently infecting a diseased and corrupt political religious sect called the Democrat Party. Al Gore, whose highest mark in college in science was a D+ is the high priest of the political side of which astronaut-killing NASA is the scientific guru.

Get the connection???
UPDATE re El Buffo Gordo Gore: "Two points:1. Money and 2. Power.

Money: Who stands to profit from the new "Global Warming Religion"? When Al Gore left office he had a net worth of around two million dollars. Now he is worth over $100 million! Its time for everyone to wake up and see this fantasy for what it is; a new source of tax advantaged money for the Leftist Political Class.

Power: If the Socialist can replace our Private Sector controlled Petroleum Based Energy Economy with a Government Based "Green Energy" based economy, they will pretty much control all our lives from cradle to grave.

This is what they want: Money and Power."

[From Comment on the

Pickled-brain Russian Colonel Blames Poland for WWII

Maybe it's the vodka, but Russian strategic thinking often verges on the phantasmagoric when it comes to bizarre out-of-the-box thinking. Col. K. published one of these wild and crazy apologies for the Molotov/Ribbentrop Treaty of August 1939 thusly:

The paper, titled "Fictions and Falsifications in Evaluating the USSR's Role On the Eve of World War II," recounts how in the run-up to Germany's invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler demanded that Poland turn over control of the city of Danzig as well as a land corridor between Germany and the territory now known as Kaliningrad.

"Everyone who has studied the history of World War II without bias knows that the war began because of Poland's refusal to satisfy Germany's claims," he writes.

Kovalyov called the demands "quite reasonable." He observed: "The overwhelming majority of residents of Danzig, cut off from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, were Germans who sincerely wished for reunification with their historical homeland."

Of course, there is a method to this loony-tune history, part of Tiny Vlad The Empoisoner's Rehab of Soviet history so we can all fantasize once again along Comintern lines:

The Kremlin presses a campaign to recast Russia's 20th century history in a more favorable light, [and] a research paper published Thursday on the Defense Ministry's Web site blamed Poland for starting World War II.

The unorthodox reading of history appears to be the latest effort by Russian historians to defend the Soviet Union and its leaders, especially their role in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War. Poland condemned the research paper.

Russia has angrily rejected claims that a Stalin-era famine in Ukraine amounted to genocide, and Russia's Supreme Court recently turned down an appeal to reopen an investigation into the massacre by Soviet secret police of Polish military officers and intellectuals in Russia's Katyn forest during World War II.

The generally accepted view is that Poland was a victim rather than the aggressor in the conflict, and that Adolf Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland marked the start of the war.

The fact that this factitious counterfactual appeared on the Defense Ministry website makes it a semi-official expression of what passes for "strategic thinking" at the highest rungs of the neo-Soviet madhouse being reconstructed by tiny Vlad. Although the Colonel in the Poland-bashing article can't hold a candle to Igor Panarin who predicts civil war and subsequent martial law across the US later this year [2009], a breakup of the USA into six "rump-states" by 2011, and the happy occurrence of a Russia/China "New World Disorder" shortly thereafter.

Panarin [is] a former spokesman for Russia's Federal Space Agency and reportedly an ex-KGB analyst, [whose thinking] meshes with the negative view of the U.S. that has been flowing from the Kremlin in recent years, in particular from Vladimir Putin.
Putin, the former president who is now prime minister, has likened the United States to Nazi Germany's Third Reich and blames Washington for the global financial crisis that has pounded the Russian economy.

Panarin didn't give many specifics on what underlies his analysis, mostly citing newspapers, magazines and other open sources. He also noted he had been predicting the demise of the world's wealthiest country for more than a decade now.

But he said the recent economic turmoil in the U.S. and other "social and cultural phenomena" led him to nail down a specific timeframe for "The End"—when the United States will break up into six autonomous regions and Alaska will revert to Russian control. Panarin argued that Americans are in moral decline, saying their great psychological stress is evident from school shootings, the size of the prison population and the number of gay men.

Turning to economic woes, he cited the slide in major stock indexes, the decline in U.S. gross domestic product and Washington's bailout of banking giant Citigroup as evidence that American dominance of global markets has collapsed.

"I was there recently and things are far from good," he said. "What's happened is the collapse of the American dream."

I suggest that Igor and Col. K lay off the "little water" for a while and detox enuf to get off Mini-me Vlad's alternate-universe for a short breather before sloshing back into Vlad's vodka & fish roe hallucinations.

Gallup Shows Cheney more Favorable Votes than Pelosi

Pelosi is becoming a byword for empty-headed chronic ditzy moves. My personal favorite was a couple of years ago when this Italian-American actually thought the Democratic slogan for the national elections should be "Contract On America." Yeah, and that's coming true so far as herself, Reid, and Obama are destroying the fabric of American life as surely as a mafia hit man makes his bones.

Perhaps this is a signal that the American people are now beginning to pay attention to what lies behind the unceasing propaganda of the liberal left, which includes the networks, especially Bowing Brian & Kiss-Up Katie, bashing Cheney at every turn for lies and insinuations about attacks on the Constitution. Compared to standard-issue methods of interrogation in the Middle East, waterboarding is NOT torture. And if it was done on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11 and personal murderer of Daniel Pearl, I personally would like to administer it myself.

More to the point, Cheney has been the object of ceaseless attacks which are dishonest and unmerited. Nancy Pelosi on the other hand has been idolized by the knuckle-dragging morons on the non-Fox cable networks and the Bowing Brian/Kiss-Up Katie networks.

So it's beginning to sink in that Nancy is really way above her skill set in the House, and Harry Reid parenthetically is a total joke in the Senate. Obama's IQ is probably the equal of both of his colleagues, but his moves so far to improve the economy are going to result in Carter-style 10& inflation and 20% interest rates before long.

Hopefully by 2010, so we can have a realignment of forces in the House and Senate to remove the current clowns from endangering our way of life any further.

Obama in Cairo: Welcome Back, Carter?

Obama made a decent enough speech in Cairo, though projecting a false equivalence between Israeli democracy and Arab cowardly autocratic regimes on the West Bank, which he claims has seen Israel holding Arabs "hostage," whereas it was the Arab cowardly autocratic regimes which held the Palestinians in refugee camps after their humiliating defeats in the '47-48 wars.

Threatening Israel with destruction--or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews--is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.
On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people--Muslims and Christians--have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations--large and small--that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.

Taranto's followup in the WSJ is appropriate:

Obama presents a false choice: between seeing the conflict "only from one side or the other" and treating Palestinian complaints about "the displacement brought by Israel's founding" and Israeli ones about "the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond" as equivalent and offsetting.

In truth, Israel's founding was not sufficient to bring about Palestinian displacement. Also necessary for the latter was the Arab states' violent rejection of the former. And the perpetuation of the Palestinians' plight is far more the fault of the Arab states (joined recently by Iran), not only for refusing to permit Palestinian immigration but also for giving both material and rhetorical support to Palestinian terrorism against Israel.

Probably it would have been diplomatically unwise for Obama in Cairo to put the matter as bluntly as we have done here. But no real resolution of the conflict is possible so long as the Arab states remain major players and are held to no standard of responsibility for their own actions.

The Arabs always prefer the Jacques Shh-Iraq stiletto/vendetta route, the craven stab-in-the-back that cowardly nations perform when they are too weak or lacking in male prowess to do the job on the battlefield. Roula Khalaf of the FT lauds Obama for avoiding the "terror" word. Comically, the Dems won't allow any use of the word "terror attack" on the cowardly murder of US Army Recruiter Long in Little Rock, and Obambi wouldn't want to spoil his debutante's ball in the Middle East with confronting terror in his own homeland.

Yep, James Earl Carter tried it once and failed resoundingly. Getting conned at Camp David. Maybe now that Terrorist Arafat is gone, the Palestinians will be more sensible. Oops, there's Hamas, guess not.

This little boy pretending to be President might make the same mistakes, though unlike Carter, he does have charm and an articulate way of putting things.

Maybe that makes him more dangerous than one-term Jimmy.

NPR & Obambi Ignore Terrorist Jihadist Murder of US Army Recruiter

Obama is too busy talking about Iran's right to go nuclear [despite having the world's largest natural gas reserves and no energy need for atomic energy] to notice or comment on the murder of a Little Rock Army recruiter by a jihadist Yemen-trained terrorist.

Nor does NPR think the religious "orientation" of the Islamist terrorist important.

At the same time, a creampie-fanny buffoon rants about "Christianist" murder of an infanticide mass murderer, supported by a nasty beotch recently named Sec of HEALTH!

Jeffrey Goldberg calls it "Death by Euphemism." I'd call it moral [political] cowardice by Obambi and the death of journalism by a statist socialist publically-owned propaganda network.

Saad Ibrahim Pleads for Real Democracy in Egypt

Sa'ad Ibrahim was a professor at American U. of Cairo in the mid-90s when I was at Amoco, the foreign company at the time with the largest assets in Egypt, second only to the Suez Canal Organization, a state-owned entity. I visited him at his Cairo suburb Ma'adi residence several times----the Amoco HQ was in Ma'adi just down the road [and the tallest building in the suburb, where I was on the top floor when a big earthquake hit in '92]. Sa'ad reflected the plight of educated westernized Egyptians faced with a choice between an autocratic praetorian regime and an Islamist Ikhwan party more vicious and misogynist than most Taliban-type Sunni zealots. Think of Zawahiri and Qutb.

As a US State Dept Arabist in the '70's, I was an "Israel Basher" of the first order, and much later became good friends with Chas Freeman, US Amb. to Saudi during the First Gulf War [I see the two GW's like episodes in a Hundred Years War]. Although I do know and am aware of the Israeli Lobby's strength [after leaving State, I was John Anderson's MidEast Advisor in the "80 Campaign & discovered most of JA's funding was from "Jewish" organizations], I am now glad the Lobby helped excise the Carter wart from the US govt's nether regions. Carter was a serial eff-up and now hates Israel because between Teddy K. & John A., their lobby spearheaded his loss to Reagan, whom they saw as more compliant & pro-Israel in the fundamental sense of pro-democratic.

As an Amoco Strategic Planner, I got invited by Shimon Peres to a three-hour "lunch" on the Dead Sea & I was strongly rebuked the next day by the Israeli Oil Minister Chacal, who doubled as the Police Minister & had bugged Peres's hotel room on the Dead Sea Riviera!!! I was escorted by the head of Shin Bet because the Israelis were mad about getting their own oil & gas from Amoco in the middle of the biggest oil patch on Earth.

It took a long time for me to understand the essential difference between a democracy, untidy as it is, like Israel, and the brutal misogynist oligarchies in the Islamic crescent surrounding the small island of semi-sanity called Israel.

9/11 sealed the deal for me, and since then I regard well-meaning guys like Chas Freeman as a "Fifth Columnist" in a campaign to justify the unjustifiable aggressive nature of "The Straight Path." War & Aggression are built in the DNA of Islam, and my long stays in both India & Pakistan also convinced my of the almost unviable nature of "Islamic Democracy." The Indian elections last week again proved that a sloppy democracy is better than a clan-dominated praetorian Islamic hodge-podge like Pakistan.

Or even the relatively docile Egyptians, whose age-old collective wisdom and significant Shi'ite and Coptic minorities have long been respected more or less in the political spectrum, though not given much leeway in the public forums available to them.

Mutatis mutandis, the same holds true for the "Fertile Crescent," which Egypt anchors on its southwest arc. The murder of the US recruiter in Little Rock is another indication that Islamic violence and terrorism, invented by "The Old Man of the Mountain" in the twelfth century, still employs assassination as its normal method of operation.

Another "Maunder Minimum" Mini-Ice Age in Store?

NASA proves again that there is science and then there are scientists and finally there are NASA "meteorologists," who evidently do their dartboard predictions after a few pints of Guinness. And here is a cogent argument from Canada's only sane newspaper east of the Rockies.

Not until the end of the usual boring bureaucratese BS do the NASA frauds get to kinda sorta the point:

From a research point of view, that's good news because solar minimum has proven to be more interesting than anyone imagined. Low solar activity has a profound effect on Earth’s atmosphere, allowing it to cool and contract. Space junk accumulates in Earth orbit because there is less aerodynamic drag. The becalmed solar wind whips up fewer magnetic storms around Earth's poles. Cosmic rays that are normally pushed back by solar wind instead intrude on the near-Earth environment. There are other side-effects, too, that can be studied only so long as the sun remains quiet. Meanwhile, the sun pays little heed to human committees. There could be more surprises, panelists acknowledge, and more revisions to the forecast.

For more on the "Maunder Minimum" and the possibilities, check out more ata non-bureaufudge version of the above. Here's an anecdotal tidbit:
During the Maunder Minimum

During the Great Frost of (1683–1684) in England, the River Thames was completely frozen for
two months, the ice was 11 inches thick at London. Sea ice was reported along the coasts of
southeast England, and ice prevented the use of many harbors. The sea froze, so that ice
formed for a time between Dover and Calais, joining England and France. (It is more likely that
the shorelines froze and a great mass of densely packed icebergs, some 11 feet thick, built up
along the coastlines fusing into a semi-rigid structure that may have connected the two
shorelines together.) The Thames was recorded to have frozen over at London during the
years: 1649, 1655, 1663, 1666, 1667, 1684, 1695, 1709, and 1716. [Sources: River Thames
Frost Fairs and Historical Weather Events 1650-1699] [See also: The Great Frost of 1683-4 and
Where Thames Smooth Waters Glide]

Not that Samuel Pepys or other highly-literate observers can tell the NASA Anthropogenic Global Warming Cabal about quack science. As Richard Feynman predicted in his famous talk on "Cargo Cult Science," the NASA quacks are now in control and have Nibelungs like Frank, Waxman, and other genetic freaks toiling on their behalf.

Biden Stains Air Force Academy Graduation with His Antics

"5 Deferment Joe" avoided military service with the same assiduous cowardice that his predecessor Dick Cheney displayed, but the DEEPEST-throat Drive-Bys never mention that when the


Remember, this clown said that Hezbollah had been "kicked out" of Lebanon during his laughable campaign---the doofus actually made fun of Alaska's small population during his attacks on Palin---the drive-by DNC arm called the media neglected to notice that Delaware itself is two senators representing a population the size of an average Congressional District.

Laughingly, a commenter named izi seriously maintains the Biden was adroitly making fun of himself when he made one of his trademark gafferoos concerning a teleprompter. If anyone thinks the BozoVeep was making a reference to anything approaching subtle humor, I have some well-watered land about 20 miles west of Boca I'd like to sell them.


Another commenter named Pom Pom Girl makes some very direct points outlining just what a dishonest coward this jerk actually is:

Since Joe Biden has been selected by Obama to oversee the implementation of the Stimulus plan, I thought it would be good to refresh our collective memories on Joe Biden.

In September 1987, Joe Biden's Presidential campaign ran into problems when he plagiarized a speech by Neil Kinnock, who was then-leader of the British Labour Party.

It was also discovered that, when he was a law student at Syracuse Law School, he had plagiarized a law review article. While the then-dean of the law school, as well as Biden's former professor, played down the seriousness of the incident, they did find Biden drew "chunks of heavy legal prose directly from" the article in question. Biden said it was unintentional due to his not knowing the proper rules of citation, (after 4 years of college one should know the rules of citation) and Biden was permitted to retake the course after receiving a grade of F, which was later dropped from his record.

When questioned by a New Hampshire resident about his grades in law school, Biden had inaccurately recalled graduating in the "top half" of his class when he actually graduated 76th from a class of 85, and he also falsely stated that he had received a full scholarship, and had earned three degrees. The truth is that he had received two majors, History and Political Science, and a single B.A degree, as well as a half scholarship based on financial need, not academic achievement .

When he was confronted with these truths, Biden withdrew from the nomination race on September 23, 1987, saying his candidacy had been overrun by "the exaggerated shadow" of his past mistakes.

He has since revealed his own bunker hideaways location, made racist remarks on Indian 7eleven owners in his distrect and even called Obama clean cut articulate etc..
When you get to know him you'll know why those in his district less than kindly refer to him as slow joe.

Another instance on when this moral leper BS-ed about his exploits [in the Oval Office, brave boyo!] is recounted on a good summary of just how incredibly stupid is the enfeebled brain of this moron-in-chief who was head of the Senate Foreign Relations Cte without learning any foreign policy.

P.S., for all you people wondering about Lebanon, Hezbollah was not "kicked out" of that country, but is assassinating itself into the dominant power in Beirut---not that Joe Squarepants would notice.

NBA: Refs Mean Cleveland Plays 8 Against Orlando's Five?

Joey Crawford appears to be following the Tim Donaghy rules when it comes to calls in Game 3 of the Orlando/Cav game, in which Dwight Howard was given no leeway at all [and called for a couple of Ben Wallace flops plus a LeBron drive which grazed the King's hip as DH tried to get out of the way]. LeBron can charge, but get a blocking foul on the Magic almost at will. OTOH, Dwight is being short-sheeted on playing time by refs who call him for no-foul flops by the likes of Williams and Wallace [and don't forget the time Williams threw a ball at Howard with no technical call].

I'll bet Magic fan Tiger Woods is glad he is his own ref more or less in PGA rules USGA golf. And watching good-friend Dywane Wade see Dwight get a ridiculous lack of respect from crooked refs must make him cringe.

It's crushingly obvious that the NBA's "hidden" agenda is becoming glaringly visible---the big Vitamin Water and other Corporate Masters want their puppet Stern to dance the Finals into a LeBron/Kobe confrontation. There's a lot of ad money riding on it.

When Coach Van Gundy says that the NBA Finals aren't like College Football voting for top game, he must have had his tongue in his cheek. And when a reporter asked him about the reffing, which makes any fan gag, he told the guy to write about what he himself couldn't say without a $25K fine! "Just write about what you saw." I'll bet Stern and his Gang of Deputy Commishes are wondering how to punish Van Gundy for excessive candor....!

And if it takes technicals like the one Joey Crawford called on Dwight to scare the Defensive Player of the Year into mediocrity, and dozens of loony calls like the perfect block of LeBron's three-point attempt at the end of the Fourth Quarter being called a foul on Dwight, well then that's what it takes. Damn the spectators and their lyin' eyes! Looks like the zebras are following the orders of Stern, who obviously takes his cues from former car-salesman Baseball Commish Selig [who sold my dad a '59 Fairland in Milwaukee a century ago] who IN TURN takes HIS cues from Larry King.

A bunch of old geezers who probably admire Bernie ["Made-Off"] Madoff.

Bring back Donaghy, he can't do worse than Crawford & Co. pushing the Cavs toward the Finals.

UPDATE A blog by Matt Yglesias was brought to my attention and this commenter seems to have voiced my thoughts on Commissioner Stern much better than I did above:
As with just about everything he does, Stern is acting like a high-handed, venal little shit. The NBA could have let this pass under the radar, but by protesting too loudly, all it does is once again place attention to the fact that to many fans the NBA is barely more credible than the WWE..
Agreed. I saw this on display during an interview with Stern regarding the suspension of a player (I believe it was Pierce's "menacing gesture"). The sideline reporter asked Stern about the player's appeal, and Stern smirked and said something like, "he can appeal all he wants, but I am the one deciding his appeal, so..." The announcers got a good chuckle out of his answer.
The obvious implication was that the appeal process was meaningless and that Stern is the final word on such matters, period. In my opinion, Stern is arrogant enough to think he can "correct" problems with officiating in the playoffs by making sure refs know what would please or displease him in a given series. To Stern, this wouldn't be him "fixing a game" - it would be him "improving the product."
When you put someone who believes he knows best in charge of an organization with no checks or balances, bad things tend to happen.

NYT Reporter's Foreclosure Book Leaves Out a "few details"

Megan McArdle of The Atlantic [h/t: Mangan's Miscellany] has discovered that the widely touted [on PBS Evening News & NYTimes Magazine] author who wrote a sob story about his home being foreclosed has a couple of bankruptcy skeletons in his marital closet. Seems his second wife is a serial filer and the seamy details reveal once again that the NYT is the least reliable source of news for honest and sincere factual analysis in the USA, if not the entire planet. Sort of like Pravda when Stalin was its Managing Editor [who was succeeded by Molotov, I believe, whom Pinch Sulzberger uses as his beau ideal of an overall redactor----hence Bill Keller.]

TPM Compassion for Failed Terrorists

The Treason Left is well represented by this specimen of hard-left human garbage named Roth who empathizes with the four arrested terrorist wannabes and detests the FBI for having used some undercover techniques to entice the group into doing what they wanted to do---like Rev. Wright and his acolyte for 20 years---hate America and destroy it and its values.

Pelosi and Sphincter and a creepy ex-Senator from FL named Graham all hate the CIA. I guess the left is now targeting the FBI for its zeal in protecting America from the left's terrorist allies.

Why Newspapers are Going Out of Business

Doug Ross is up with the original editorial the Sac-ofS**t Bee had up after the voters roundly trounced the Five Propositions the Elitist Faineants at the Bee had supported:

Sacramento Bee: "You did it! Uh, so what now?"

Good morning, California voters. Do you feel better, now that you've gotten that out of your system?

You wanted to show the state's politicians just how mad you are at them. And you did. Boy, did you ever.

Proposition 1A with its taxes and its spending limit? Too much of one and not enough of the other, you said (or was it the other way around), and voted it down. Never mind that the taxes go into effect anyway. You showed 'em.

Proposition 1B? That was a tougher call.

Proposition 1C? No way. You like the lottery just like it is. And all they were going to do with that extra $5 billion was spend it.

Propositions 1D and 1E? Forget it. You had already voted to put money into preschool and mental health programs. You're not taking it out now.

And 1F? Heck, yeah! Let's not pay our legislators if they can't pass a budget on time. So what if it likely won't have any effect, or that this year they actually passed a budget months earlier than they needed to? That's not the point.

The point is that you're sick and tired of all this political mumbo-jumbo. So you showed those politicians who's in charge. You. You're now officially in charge of a state that will be something like $25 billion in the hole for the fiscal year beginning July 1.

So, now that you've put those irksome politicians in their place, maybe it's time to think about this: Since you're in charge, exactly what do you intend to do about that pesky $25 billion hole in the budget?

Lay off some state workers? Which ones? And how many? Remember, the entire state payroll is about $25 billion. You could lay off every last one of them every Highway Patrol officer, every prison guard, every state firefighter, every health inspector, every professor in the UC and CSU systems, every DMV employee and every nameless, faceless paper-shuffling bureaucrat and the state would only be barely in the black. But if you want to do that, go ahead. You're in charge, remember.

Wait, how about taking money back from the counties? Great idea. Not that it will be easy. Most of them are already in the red and getting ready to lay off cops, prosecutors, probation officers and clinic staff.

Let's see. What about laying off more teachers? Shortening the school year? Releasing prisoners? Selling some of the state's real estate holdings? Borrow billions to tide the state over until the economy improves

What's that? Few of these ideas sound like what you want to do? Well, that's OK. You really don't have to do these things yourself. You just have to figure out what you want done and tell the Legislature to do it.

They'll surely hop right on it, now that you're in charge. Just keep in mind that your suggestions have to keep the state solvent and able to meet all its legal obligations. And you know how complicated things get when the lawyers get involved.
You say it'll take you awhile to figure this stuff out, that you'll need a little time to get up to speed on the details? No problem. You've got until June 30 to get it all straight.

That sounds a lot like work, you say? Sorry, no whining allowed. You asked for this job. Now you've got it, so get on it. Oh, and remember. The entire nation is watching to see how you do now that you're in charge.

No pressure or anything. Just thought you'd want to know.

The comments from readers rightly expressed disgust and dismay at a newspaper that eviscerated taxpayers who dared to turn down an out-of-control government bureaucracy run amok. Here's the replacement op-ed.

E

ditorial: Time for reform - not for blame

NOW VOTERS HAVE JUDGED LEADERS; HOW WILL LEADERS TAKE THE REBUKE?

Good morning, members of the California Legislature. Good morning, Governor.

Feeling bruised and abused this morning? Well, you can't say you didn't see it coming. The polls have been saying for weeks that voters were going to do just what they did on Tuesday: Conclusively reject your slate on the ballot, Propositions 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D and 1E.

Today, on the morning after voters kicked around your best effort at fixing the state budget as if it were a deflated soccer ball, you face a decision.

You can blame the voters for reacting with uninformed and misplaced anger.

Or you can look in the mirror and admit you had it coming. And you know you did.

Over the last couple of decades you and your predecessors in both parties created an environment of cynicism that poisoned Californians' faith in democracy. You have insulated yourselves from the electorate. You have rigged elections by drawing noncompetitive districts. You have discouraged turnout with negative campaigning. You have catered to special interests across the political spectrum.

As the state's fiscal situation grew more and more dire, you responded with years of gimmicks and stalling followed, finally, by secret negotiations to produce what turned out to be (at least in our estimation) an acceptable compromise.

But by then, the problem was too big to be solved so easily. And it was too late to make your case to the voters, who were tuned out and disengaged, which is exactly how most of you wanted them.

There is no simple recovery from this disastrous state of affairs. First, there is that huge budget deficit - $20 billion? $23 billion? $25 billion? - to deal with, and quickly, before the state runs up on the rocks of insolvency.

But after that, a much harder task awaits: Restoring citizens' faith - not just in government, but in the possibility that they can trust their elected representatives to act responsibly and honorably to solve common problems.

There is only one way to do that: Work to reform California politics. Not just simple reforms, such as requiring only a majority vote to pass a budget, but larger ones, too: more transparency in the Legislature and the Governor's Office; less ballot-box budgeting; more accountable schools, cities, counties and special districts; modernized and more efficient government, including pay and benefits for the reality of life in the 21st century. In other words, make Californians feel they are getting their money's worth from the governments they pay for.

If that sounds difficult, well, it will be. You're starting from a deep hole, one that you've dug yourselves.

The first step is to stop digging. Don't blame voters, no matter how much you may want to. Accept their verdict with good grace. Acknowledge that even if they don't have a mastery of all the details of the state budget, their judgment about your performance is not subject to your approval.

And at bottom, that was what this election was about: Not the fine points of governing, but the judgment of the public on your performance. You have been judged and have been found wanting.

For the sake of California's future, here's hoping you respond with a commitment to regain the voters' trust and restore their faith in representative democracy. If you can't do that, this state has a problem too big to be measured in mere billions.

If ever an editorial board could execute a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree midair turn, that was it.

The original op-ed was up from early morning (12:30AM PST?) to around 10:00AM, at which time the response convinced editors to (*ahem*) edit the content. The stated rationale?

Note to our readers: Many of the comments below refer to an article that was posted in error. That article was a draft prepared for internal discussion among members of The Bee's editorial board. Such discussions are a routine part of our work, and frequently lead to editorials that are considerably different from writers' first drafts.

That's what happened in this case. After discussion, we decided that our initial editorial about the special election should take a different tack. The result was the editorial that now appears on this page. This editorial is the only editorial about the special election that appeared in Wednesday's editions of The Bee.

David Holwerk, Editorial Page Editor, The Sacramento Bee

Once again proving that the only way to separate the mainstream media from big government Democrats is with a crowbar."

I would add Bertholdt Brecht's famous observation after the German "Democratic" Republic complained after the 1953 Berlin Riots that the German People were undeserving of the delights of worker-paradise Communism. Brecht is supposed to have remarked, "Then why doesn't the GDR choose a new people?"

California voters have the right to vote in a new collection of rascals, but given the gerrymandered collection of CDs, and other electoral districts in CA, perhaps a Constitutional Convention, a la 1878-9 would be in order.

Things You Just Can't Make Up

THE FLUMMERY DIGEST is a delightful collection of the absurdities the mindlessness pervasive in the MSM seems to produce on an hourly basis. The wonderful dude in Beantown who started this gallery of nitwittery must have been inspired by the "stupid criminal" videos that are on TRU TV and other cable networks for our late night entertainment.

Now we can understand how a freak like Joe Klein can emerge from the woodwork and, like the proverbial termite, consider himself the lord of the manor he is eating into long-term mulch. Some precious masterpieces:

In March, British artist Tracey Emin—whose depiction of her own unmade bed sold for £150,000 and was shortlisted for the 1999 Turner Prize—offered a reward for the return of her missing cat. However, all of the reward flyers she posted on London streets were quickly removed by art lovers eager to possess one of her original works, and the flyers were soon valued at £500 each. A spokesman for Ms. Emin offered a clarification in the London Times: "It's simply a notice to alert neighbors. It's not a conceptual piece of work and it has nothing to do with her art."

The site is an adornment to any blogroll, but one can't resist citing Joe Klein's Godfather in the absurdity business, a true gift from journalism that decade after decade, keeps on giving. I present, the inimitable Fox Butterfield:

[6/4/02]Reporting on crime statistics once again in the New York Times, Fox Butterfield writes that "the increased number of criminals put behind bars has not been an effective deterrent to crime." Instead, a Justice Department study shows "the rate at which inmates released from prison committed new crimes actually rose from 1983 to 1994." Butterfield explains the distinction as follows: "Criminologists generally agree that the prison binge of the last 25 years ... has helped reduce the crime rate, but largely by simply keeping criminals off the streets."

Fox should be displayed in The Smithsonian alongside John Dillinger's pickled penis and other strange sports of nature.....

I'm sure Fox has a deep and thoughtful take on what The Won should do with Gitmo... Perhaps he and Frank Rich should team up for an Off-Off Broadway presentation on "political vaudeville." Paula Abdul could do the commentary offstage....

Herbert Meyer Understands History and the Democrats

This pretty much sums up a lot of what is going on in the hidden agenda the Democrats are trying to soft-sell the average American into buying into. Herbert Meyer is a distinguished student of history who understands that countries lose their liberties by frittering away the rights of individuals vis-a-vis the central government. Schwartenegger has just given California's debt to Washington and as he did with the banks, Obama will take it. Let's see the lotus-eaters get back their rights, if they even care about them any more...

Like the banks trying to give back the TARP money, the conditions attached will cripple them.

The Three Stooges: Reid Now Competing with Pelosi & Biden for Gaffer-in-Chief of the Democrats

Harry Reid may have Barack-O coming to Nevada to help him drum up a mountain of cashfor his Senate race in 2010, but BHusseinO didn't help Dingy Harry much with an offhand remark about keeping high-rollers out of Vegas recently. Now Harry has displayed the sort of cavalier carelessness that the puffed-up overconfident Democrats demonstrate whenever they have both houses of Congress under their thumb [plus a POTUS in the White House].

Reid went far beyond his brief on Guantanamo after routinely flubbing a couple of ground balls about the health of Sens. Kennedy and Byrd,

[manglingl his party's position on the congressional news of the day, that Senate Democrats would join their House counterparts in withholding the money President Barack Obama needs to close the Guantanamo Bay prison until Obama comes up with a plan for relocating its prisoners.
But Reid went further than saying he wanted to see a plan for the money before Congress approves it. "We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States," he said.
No one, of course, was talking about releasing terrorism suspects among the American populace. Imprisoning them, perhaps, but not releasing them.
"Part of what we don't want is them be put in prisons in the United States," Reid clarified but digging himself into a bigger hole by departing significantly from some of his colleagues and administration officials. "We don't want them around the United States."
Did the administration put Democrats in an awkward position, asking for the money before setting out how it would be spent?
"Not at all," said Reid.
"Yes," his deputy, Sen. Dick Durbin replied to the same question.
Even the post-gaffe handling of Reid's remarks was awkward. Spokesman Jim Manley, who previously worked for Kennedy for years, swept through the press gallery to clean up after his boss. He retracted Reid's assessment of Kennedy's condition. He clarified Reid's comments about the Guantanamo Bay prison.

The Three Stooges atop the Dem Party hierarchy may be joined soon by the Alpha-"Mutt" [by his own description] if Barack keeps his own teleprompter mishaps continuing the way they have recently.

Busted: Jon Meacham Brings Newsweak out of Closet As DNC Satellite!

John Podhoretz recalls the halcyon days when Time paid him a nice salary with many perks under Henry Grunwald's imperial rule. Those days as a profitable publication are long gone.

But Newsweak is finally announcing itself as an op-ed partisan rag as if its [poorly-hidden] agenda under the sheets had previously gone unnoticed. Although occasionally Eleanor Clift will reveal Joe Biden as a true clueless buffoon [again, as if we didn't know], Newsweak will now confine itself mainly to singing hosanna to the highest, the Chosen Won. The pseudo-religious Meacham [I read his shabby book on American religious beliefs and politics] gets a Pulitzer for a bio of Jackson [which should have been won by true scholar H.W. Brands Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times ], but nobody is fooled by this bantamweight who succeeds welterweight Evan Thomas. Thomas occasionally lurched into relevance or clarity, but Meacham is Best Boy in a B-List movie shoot.

Podhoretz delivers a good thrashing, though without my utter contempt at how far Newsweak has fallen.

Canadian Fascism's Struggle to Suppress Free Speech Thwarted

"The Internet Saved My Tongue" is an intriguing and gutsy story about how Canada's only conservative magazine survived attacks by a Fascist Brownshirt Squad named the Alberta Human Rights Commission. Islamist terrorists whined and the Brownshirts kowtowed in fear of their lives, gutless losers that they and their fellow countrymen seem to be. And the Brownshirts, as the following demonstrates, made a pre-emptive capitulation in deference to their Islamic masters:

The cartoons were published in September 2005, but they didn’t make international news until the next year, when a group of Danish imams went on a world tour to drum up Muslim anger against Denmark. The imams brought three additional cartoons along with the original dozen. Those three additions, which hadn’t been published in Denmark or anywhere else, were grotesque, including one showing Muhammad having sex with a dog. They were the imams’ own handiwork, added to the bundle in case the Jyllands-Posten efforts didn’t achieve the desired response. Up until that moment, the phrase cartoon violence had summoned to mind images no more harmful than Wile E. Coyote fighting the Road Runner. But after the imam tour in the spring of 2006, more than 100 people died in purportedly spontaneous riots against the cartoons. Half a dozen terrorist plots to avenge the artwork were uncovered across Europe. Demagogic governments from Tehran to Damascus seized the opportunity to deflect attention away from their own problems.

Every newspaper and TV station in the Western world covered the story of the riots, but almost none of them showed the original cartoons themselves. The media’s self-censorship was based on the same fear exhibited by Denmark’s illustrators. As a journalist, I was appalled by this cowardice masquerading as sensitivity. Western Standard editor Kevin Libin and I knew our readers would be interested in this story and would want to see for themselves what all the fuss was about.

As our publication date drew nearer, we couldn’t help noticing that no other mainstream publication in Canada was planning to reprint the cartoons. We’d be the first, and possibly only, one. We sent the magazine to our printers on Friday, February 10, for printing over the weekend. The next day, word of the deed somehow leaked. By Sunday our decision had become national news, even though no one except our staff and our printers had seen the spread.

If you think Obama's deep curtsey to King Abdullah was a disgusting display, catch the surrender-monkey Canadian version of how Liberal Fascism is eroding that country's right to call itself a democracy by reading the rest of the Reason article linked above.

Hitchens Notes Sykes and "Over-ripe" MSM Relationship to the Won

Sykes' second-rate performance at the WH Correspondents' Affair is roundly sent up by Hitchens. He notes:

When comedians flatter the president, they become court jesters, and the country becomes a banana republic. There are probably even people who would wish to misconstrue that last phrase of mine if they felt "sensitive" enough. In which case they can take a number, get on line, and ask to suck my thumb

.
And also the bare-faced truth:

Still, the president did intermittently grasp the main point of the evening, which is that any humor must in some way be at the expense of the guest of honor: namely and on this occasion, himself. He showed he understood this when he opened with a gag about his famous reliance on teleprompters and when he told his audience, deadpan, "Many of you cover me. All of you voted for me." The whole point of self-deprecation is that it disarms: You do not have to be a masochist to know how to practice it.

But the most interesting insight CH has concerning the POTUS:

President Bush used to tell jokes about his weaknesses, the most salient of these being his tragic struggle with grammar, itself quite possibly rooted in dyslexia. Many of President Obama's jokes, his speechwriters should take note, were at the expense of his strengths—"I might lose my cool"—and were thus bordering on the narcissistic. (If I have a fault, and I'm the first to admit it, it's probably this: I am too sweet and too patient and too tolerant of the mistakes of others.)

Sykes sucks, in the end. But Obama is dangerously taken with himself. And that is much more dangerous than a second-rate comics' egregious suck-ups.

Pakistan and its Nukes: The More the Merrier?

Michael van der Galien has a response to Adm. Mike Mullen's response to Sen. Webb [with whom I had a conversation in a urinal at the Washington Times HQ eons ago before Webb went over to the dark side] concerning Pakistan's multiplying its nuclear arsenal. Michael had some points [in quotes] as to the reason for the Paki weapon expansion program to which I am responding below:

Back in the ’80s, I was working for Denis Neal [who figures prominently behind the scenes in Charlie Wilson’s War, the book,] as a Pakistan lobbyist and had occasion to visit the country and meet high-ranking Pakistani govt. & military officials. My friend Arnie Raphel was Ambassador and as an ex-FSO I had a lot of chances to get behind the stated policies of Pakistan by conversations with US Embassy personnel and other in-country assets. Michael's points are well-taken:
“1. [Pakistan] still fears a major war with India, and believes that you cannot possibly have ‘enough’ weapons of mass destruction”

This is true, but since India’s rapid economic development, there is less fear of an Indian pre-emptive attack and from my several visits to India, the Indians have an extremely high opinion of Paki fighting prowess (”one Paki is worth 5 Indians” was how an Indian put it

). And even in the '80s, the DepMinDefense of Pakistan told me that Paki and Indian generals would meet and fraternize in London as they were "batch-mates" at Sandhurst and other British military schools back in the day. The two countries have gone in different directions, largely because the Pakistani Army was used as the bricks and mortar of the new state in '47 and usurped power in the aftermath. India had the Gandhian legacy and used the vast railway system and other engineering and educational institutions as well as adopting an above-it-all stance in foreign policy.
“2. It fears Iran’s rise and nuclear program”

Yes and No. The Pakis have a significant Shi’ite minority and Benazir Bhutto’s mother was Iranian. Also many Pakis told me that eventually Pakistan might break up into its constituent parts, some of which would orient toward Iran. Back in the seventies, there was a Turkish/Iranian/Paki “Mutual Defense Pact” which disappeared after the fall of the Shah, but which might be partially revived as a bulwark against the Taliban [who hate the Iranian Shi'ites as much or more than Christian or Jewish infidels]

“3. It wants to give / sell some of these bombs to other, befriended states”

J.Q. Khan has already sold N. Korea & Iran the formulae and other construction secrets, and my guess is that an anti-American government might try to sell the finished product, though the US would do a lot to prevent that. The US did construct one of the nuclear reactors which produces the enriched uranium, I believe, [to counter Soviet influence in the sixties], and has a lot of intelligence & presumably some sort of a failsafe plan in place.

“[The US is] aware of every single nuclear weapon in Pakistan and it is therefore developing more so as to confuse the U.S. / make it virtually impossible for Washington to keep track of every single one of these weapons”

Not really feasible as the ISI is so completely penetrated by the US CIA as well as other foreign agencies who “trade baseball cards” and the Pakis notoriously are unable to keep secrets.

“5. Scary idea: something with Taliban and nuclear weapons”

This would be when Israel and India would finally have to make some sort of reconciliation. The US might even be a second-tier player if the Taliban got hold of nukes, and would have trouble restraining Netanyahu.

Of course, there is an overwhelming sense to the Pakis that India has now become more important to the USA than they themselves are. Intangibles like the unlikely popularity of "Slumdog Millionaire" and Manohman Singh's impressive recent election victory make Zardari's tawdry little political machine based on his late wife's legacy appear almost as incompetent and feckless as it really is. His democratic opponents, though anti-Taliban, dislike him almost as much as they do the Islamists, whose real political power in the countryside is almost nil, being based almost exclusively on intimidation and coercion [though, like Mussolini, they do make local utilities and transportation run on time and have cleaned out a lot of corrupt political appointees in the judicial system]. But the downside is no school for girls, acid in the faces of females not wearing purdah, a police composed of religious vigilantes and the other appurtenances of a brutal male machismo even including Iranian-style hanging judges. The population is fleeing the Taliban just as the Afghanis flooded Peshawar in the '80s before the Soviet onslaught [I visited the refugee camps run by relief agencies and the numbers were overwhelming their capabilities.]

India has its problems, and the main reason Obama wisely elected to remain in Afghanistan while changing the modus operandi with the installation of Gen. McChrystal was because of the threat a resurgent Afghani Taliban poses to Pakistan. I once spent most of a night talking with the Agricultural Minister of NWFP in Peshawar who frankly believed that his wild and wooly province would eventually become part of a Pushtun Afghanistan or a great Persia sometime in the future.

I wouldn't be too afraid of the Taliban filching a bomb unless they got the codes and the personnel from the Paki nuke facilities to make it work. Even then, they would have to get it to Iran or other customer or even some enemy target in a delivery protocol which wouldn't be intercepted.

All the makings of a James Bond movie. Wasn't "Octopussy" something along these lines?

UPDATE
"US Intelligence Sources" reveal that contingency plans to remove nukes are in place, though the news item notes that "rogue elements in the military and intelligence services" might try to deliver said nukes or some of them to the insurgents. McChrystal's appointment was largely due to his heading the JSOC combined operations out of Fort Bragg which would protect the nukes from enemy [yes, "enemy"] hands.

Odormann Ready For Clinical Committment---Outpatient or Long-Term?

Ben Affleck was on sport-of-nature Maddow's show and Keith-O the Recessive-Trait SuperStar of [P]MSNBC reacted in his accustomed calm and sober manner. Tonight, BOR mentioned that FOX in the Morning now gets better ratings than obnoxious oaf Odormann in his 8PM slot. Could it be the unkind words Alec Baldwin recently voiced about his being hurt by Odormann's intemperate froth-at-the-mouth Adolf imitations?

Ben did a great send-up of the Odorous One on SNL a while back---even the ultra-lefties are beginning to tire of this hatefest ranter night after night.

What did Nancy Know and When did She Know It?

The Hindenburg approaching that New Jersey landing strip is what Nancy Pelosi appears to resemble. She keeps pouring gasoline on a fire that she's trying to put out and pretty soon the entire episode what is left of her credibility as a political actor with any real suasion on the Hill.

Her strong-arm Queen Bee-nery assault on Jane Harman, her much more competent successor as Ranking Member on the Intelligence Cte, a job which she herself is now revealing that she fouled up, as her increasingly flustered interpretations of what she was told, when she was told it, and so on are suddenly turned into accusations that the CIA "lied" to her.

Only a serious case of PMS can account for this woman's increasing ineptitude, or perhaps it derives from a big-city hack being put in a sensitive position with international responsibilities. Jane Harman should have been the Chair of the Intel Cte in 2006, but the B-List mind of Pelosi couldn't handle having a much smarter female in a job she herself flubbed up. So a barely literate ESL hack named Reyes was named, and Silvestre couldn't even tell what a Sunni or a Shia was despite many years on the Intel Cte.

Maybe Steny Hoyer should take over. The Speaker's job isn't one for amateur second-raters.

"Religion of Peace" and Stoning Women

The Stoning of Soraya M opens in 10 cities in June and my bet is that froth-at-the-mouth jihadists will righteously make death threats that will cow many theater owners into thinking twice about showing such a graphic film.

The article linked above describes the film and more recent stonings, including one of a 13-year old Somali girl just last year.

Clockwork Orange as the Droogs Take Over England's Streets

Claire Berlinski has a column on British crime that should serve as an admonitory signal to the US as it slouches toward Socialism. The British Ministry of Justice trumpets that statistically crime is decreasing in England and Wales, while the media and the public report anecdotally that British streets are not safe, especially in the public housing tracts that spawned The Droogs in Clockwork Orange, the famous novel and movie about post-socialist England written in the '70s and immortalized by Stanley Kubrick's stunning film classic starring Malcolm McDowell as a very convincing juvenile delinquent gangsta leader.

Berlinski compares today's London to 1980's New York City, which I visited on a monthly basis for weeks at a time during the period and well remember the lawless grunge that Democrat administrations had permitted ever since Kitty Genovese famously bled to death in Kew Gardens because fifty-odd neighbors refused to call the police. Rudy Giuliani was elected, busted subway and broken window cheats and suddenly found that most crimes were committed by very young hooligans who never before were challenged by flaccid, soft-on-crime Democrat administrations since Lindsay in the sixties. Berlinski takes the feckless Jacqui Smith, the fatuous Minister of Justice and her criminal-pampering colleagues in law enforcement to task in the article attached. First, CB proves the old adage, "lies, damned lies, and statistics," is particularly true with crime stats.

To understand why the dark figure of crime escapes exact measurement, realize that for a crime to be officially recorded, three things must happen: someone must be aware that a crime has been committed; someone must report that crime; and the police must accept that a law has been violated. But each link in the chain is easily broken. People may be unaware that a crime has been committed because they view it as normal or trivial behavior: in some neighborhoods, it would seem perfectly natural to settle a dispute with a good brawl, while in others, this would be seen as assault. Other crimes may go unrecognized because the victims are unaware that they have been victimized—either because of the nature of the crime, such as fraud, or because the victims are drunk, mentally ill, or otherwise incapable of understanding what has happened.

But that is only the beginning of the cascade of conditions which prevent crimes from being reported. CB ticks off a long list of reasons that even when victims recognize a crime has been committed, crime goes unreported.

immigrants who don’t speak the language well enough to explain what happened to them. Rapes can go unreported because the victims are ashamed. So-called victimless crimes involving sex and drugs also go unreported, of course, because the criminals have no motivation to inform the police that they are hiring prostitutes or shooting up. Crimes can also go unreported because victims fear reprisals. Above all, crimes can go unreported because victims feel no confidence in the police and see reporting a crime as pointless. Even if a crime is reported, it will not necessarily be added to the official statistics. The police may conclude, for example, that there is insufficient evidence to believe the report. Moreover, poorly performing police departments have an incentive to stop recording crimes: it makes them look more successful than they are. For these reasons and many more, criminologists commonly posit that the dark figure of crime is far larger than the official figure—perhaps by as much as an order of magnitude. And there is good reason to believe that in Britain, the dark figure is unusually high.

Berlinski points out the silliness behind the rosy stats Jacqui advances to justify her competence, which most observers believe is lacking in all sorts of areas due to her loony Janet-from-another-Planet Napolitano stance toward political dissidents. [Patriots are a threat because they wish to defend the country from Islamist terrorists---ala Napolitano.] Smith's MoJ policy of not prosecuting serial offenders or letting them off with token "fines" which are never paid has resulted in a great leap of violent crime and a reluctance to report petty crime by Londoners and others due to slack enforcement practices:

[Note] the even grimmer picture painted by police records of violent crime. Sure enough, when the rules changed in 1998, the total number of violent crimes recorded jumped from 231,000 to 503,000. But then, even after the switch, it continued to rise sharply, hitting a peak of 1.06 million in 2006. That number has since declined only slightly: in 2008, the number of police-recorded violent crimes stood at 961,000. When it comes to violence, in other words, Police Recorded Crime actually confirms the public’s general view.

Further, the recent decline to 4.95 million total crimes recorded could well mean that the public has lost faith in the criminal-justice system and no longer believes that reporting crimes will result in the punishment of the perpetrators. Support for this hypothesis comes from a British Federation of Small Businesses poll indicating that 60 percent of businesses in London had been victims of crime in the past year. But proprietors reported to the police only half of the burglaries, vehicle thefts, and assaults that they suffered—and not a single case of arson. They didn’t think that the offenders would be caught and punished, they explained. Going to the police just wasn’t worth their time.

And the methodology of the British Crime Survey is severely flawed in that respondents are selected from among homeowners, and not renters, skewing the statistical base away from poorer neighborhoods where crimes usually take place. One of the designers of the BCS, a "criminologist" named Hough, exemplifies the unaccountable nature of the small-time bureaucrats who shrug their shoulders at the fact that the BCS overlooks the vast majority [only 5 million of 26 million crimes are reported] by the classic rejoinder of "triviality," suely the time-honored favorite dodge of the bureaucrat.

"Are the revised crime estimates significant? It is “true but trivial,” says Mike Hough, a criminologist at King’s College London who has helped design the BCS since it began in 1981, that if you include all crimes, “an astronomical amount of crime is committed.” Surely nobody is really in a panic about petty crimes, he adds."

But this may be false logic, or a sort of deliberate avoidance of the basic problems facing enforcement---a feeling among petty criminals that even if they get caught, they get off with a slap on the wrist.

But not all the repeat crime is petty: according to Farrell and Pease’s study, if calculated correctly, violent crime would be 82 percent higher. The BCS figures, on their own terms, show substantial drops since 1995 in “acquaintance” and “domestic” violence, but “stranger” violence and muggings—the kind of violent crime that really terrifies people—remain at their extraordinarily high mid-nineties levels.

The limp-wristed excuses of the smug petty functionaries in the MoJ and their academic co-conspirators contradict the incessant complaints of law enforcement police on the beat:

Officials at every level of the British criminal-justice system—detectives, judges, prison officials, probation officers—complain that too few criminals are caught and that those who are caught rarely receive sentences that will function as a deterrent. Lack of resources and a massive bureaucracy hamper police efforts: the average time to process an arrest in London is over ten hours, and the number of forms that must be filled out averages about 35, according to various analyses. Home Office figures released in 2007 show that police officers in England and Wales spend only about 13 percent of their time on patrol—and 20 percent on paperwork.

One London cop in the Criminal Investigation Division blames the police’s ineffectiveness on the unintended effects of community policing. “There was a perception that there weren’t enough beat cops—people who knew the local area,” he remembers, which led to sending extra cops to problem spots. “But in practice, they ended up going to community meetings and liaison. They’re not actually dealing with minor crimes. If they were answering emergency calls and dealing with minor crimes instead of doing community liaison, that would indeed take a huge load off the system, but they’re not. So in practice, what this means is that when I started working as a police officer, there were 25 people on staff answering 999 calls”—the British equivalent of 911. “Now there are 15.”

Perhaps as a consequence, more than two-thirds of burglaries reported to the London police are never investigated, according to police figures released under the Freedom of Information Act and obtained by the Daily Telegraph. Under 10 percent result in an arrest. And even if an arrest leads to a conviction, it’s unlikely to include real punishment. The London policeman adds that it’s common for a burglar to be arrested 30 times a year, taken to court 20 times a year, and punished with nothing more than a fine—“which is meaningless, because they can’t pay. There’s no chance that with minor-level crimes you’ll go to prison.” A London magistrate clarifies: “It’s not that they can’t pay, it’s that they won’t—and the system doesn’t push the point.” Theodore Dalrymple, a contributing editor of City Journal and a former prison doctor, tells me that he recently met a burglar on his 57th conviction. The burglar was fined 50 pounds, to be paid in five-pound installments—considerably less than someone in a legitimate business, making a comparable amount of money, would pay in taxes.

Dalrymple is a medical doctor who has served in the British Public Health Service and in WHO around the world. He has written a number of books on the seedy underworld of the socialist nightmare infested by criminals and politicians who tax the rich to in effect subsidize and aid/abet the crimes of the poor. As Berlinski notes, the habitual underreporting of crime, the lackadaisical policework following a crime and the general hopelessness concerning less-than-serious crimes has produced a clone of New York City before Giuliani applied tough love to clean up the streets:

The situation in Britain, then, resembles that of 1980s New York, whose crime problems were routinely called insoluble. What the British government fails to understand is that the majority of serious crimes are committed by a small cadre of criminals, who are also, disproportionately, the authors of minor crimes. If you lock these criminals up—reliably, and for a long time—crime will drop precipitously. The reason Broken Windows policing works is not that it is inherently important to jail every petty thug who breaks a window; it is that the window-breakers tend to be muggers, rapists, burglars, and murderers as well. If you get them off the streets, the rate of serious crime will fall. To dismiss as “true but trivial” the finding that “an astronomical amount of crime is committed” in Britain is only half right. The British people know this full well, even if their government does not.

The rise in hooliganism and violent crime might be obscured by statistical hocus pocus wielded by self-serving functionaries wishing to obscure colossal failure of a social model for political reasons. But hopefully, the historic common sense of the British people will overcome the preposterous rubbish their government attempts to peddle in order to re-elect a Labour Party gone seriously off the rails.

Holbrooke and Haqqani, a Matched Pair?

The NYT's "Saturday Profile" of Pakistan's Ambassador Haqqani gives a glimpse into the weird and bizarre world of Pakistan, a country which I worked on as a registered foreign agent in the '80s, even getting an anonymous nod in the movie "Charlie Wilson's War." Back then I was familiar with Jamshid Marker, another Pak ambassador fluent in English, though with a toney British accent and rather elegant continental style.

Haqqani has the distinction of being kidnapped by his own country's intelligence agency [or, rather, agents thereof, who could have been working for anyone!]

But the NYT's vapid journalism reveals its underside when the source of the article, the NYT's own paladin Richard Holbrooke, makes the front page for the umpteenth time in a laudatory mode.

[Haqqani] speaks several times a week with Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, who calls him “one of the most skilled ambassadors I have ever seen.” He figures he has met with 90 members of Congress. And he is a fixture on CNN, the op-ed pages of newspapers and at research groups around Washington.

But critics say Mr. Haqqani is a quick-change artist who cozies up to whoever is in power. Before he left Pakistan in 2002, after falling out with Gen. Pervez Musharraf, he had worked for both his country’s leading political figures — Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto — switching from one to the other with dispatch, depending on whose fortunes were rising.

Which reminds me of the funniest Holbrooke story I've ever heard. Seems that staunch Democrat Holbrooke was seen in Henry Kissinger's parlor up in NYC skulking and slinking about when Henry the K was John Connally's chief foreign policy honcho [and Connally was a "shoo-in" for the Republican nomination that Reagan finally won] and Kissinger was left to pursue his private sector goals while Richard, "a quick-change artist who cozies up to whoever is in power," had an unsuccessful attempt to switch parties go awry.

Holbrooke was still parking his motorcycle in the guest quarters of Averill Harriman in the '80s on N St., N.W. in Georgetown, perhaps servicing nympho Pamela while the old Crocodile, Stalin's nickname for the US Amb to the USSR during WWII, was dozing in senectitude in his sumptuous living quarters nearby. Pam was working a scam called "Democrats for the Eighties" while Ronald Reagan was winning over the hapless Carter. RH also had visitors Diane Sawyer and WSJ Editor Karen Elliot House tiptoeing over to Holbrooke's N Street pad to "strap their thighs around his engine." Among other groupies.... [I admit I'm jealous!]

But if Holbrooke can pull off a Paki rescue mission, he does deserve a great deal of kudos. His goal of becoming the second FSO [Larry Eagleburger was first] to attain the cabinet post of Sec'y of State might be attainable were Hillary to ever make it to the White House or something happen to Obama. Holbrooke has legions of enemies [myself the very least among them, dating back to a couple of lunches in Lyon France while I was Vice Consul under Peter Tarnoff & Holbrooke Moroccan Peace Corps chief in the midst of a messy marriage break-up].

My own half-dozen stays in Pakistan date to the eighties and the country is simply almost impossible to not rend itself asunder due to what are always called "fissiparous tendencies" in the jargon of diplomats. In other words, half the Pakis hate the other half, or various slices of the demographic pie are wanting to peel off into Iran [Benazir Bhutto's mother was Iranian and the Baluchis consider themselves Iranian rather than Pakis] or in the Punjab, get away from Sindhi influences like the PPP of Bhutto and Zardari. Singh's ardent opposition is as much Punjabi localism as anything else. Lahore is more part of India than many Moghul fort cities elsewhere.

And Pakistan's American allies, including Chris Dodd and John Kerry, both of whom voted with the Republicans for a huge arms increase to Pakistan in the '80s [re: Charlie Wilson's War], prodded by Denis Neal's donations to the Democratic Senate Campaign Cte,, will dutifully remain watching which way the wind blows, with their palms outward for more baksheesh.