Heroes Aren't Hard To Find: Part 1

"Everyone, we have a new member tonight. Please give a big FA welcome to... WordGirl."

"Hello, WordGirl."

"Congratulations, WordGirl! This is your first FA meeting. We are so pleased to have you with us. Remember, you are under no obligation to share. But when you're here, you're always in a safe place, okay? Is there something you would you like to share with us?
WordGirl?"

"Hi. Um... M-my name is WordGirl... and uh..."

"Hello, WordGirl."

Giggle.
"I... um, I'm a recovering Fundamentalist."

If there were an organization called Fundamentalists Anonymous, I'd be the first (albeit nervous) person through the door.
And I've uncovered a dirty little secret,too.
I would find myself in vast company.
Wonderful, caring, disillusioned and wounded people seeking guidance and love would be sitting right next to me and we would all have horror stories to tell.

Does that mean I have I given up on "church"? No, not at all. I have simply taken myself out of the mold and begun to examine who I really am. I had to. Or I was going to die.

For over five years I was the member of a strict Fundamentalist church. And as such, I believed there was an easy answer for everything. There was black and white. No gray. No blue. No yellow.

Self-righteous legalism had been stamped upon my forehead and I was taught that not only could I not trust myself, I couldn't trust anyone on the "outside" either. All those outside our "church" were suspect -- be they Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian or Catholic. They were all in error. We were supposed to pray for them. We were supposed to pity them. But we were never to take their views seriously.

We raised our hands, spoke in tongues, anointed the sick, fasted on prayer days, shouted, sang and prophesied. And I wanted so much to be a meaningful member of "God's elect" that I never considered the cost. You see, we were the children of God, the Bride of Christ, the sheep of the Good Shepherd -- and as such, we should not sin.

Did I lose you?

I hear you saying: "Wait, wait, wait. Hold on a sec, there, WordChickie! Isn't that a foregone conclusion? Of course we shouldn't sin! We want to please our Father, right?"

Of course. And my former church would certainly agree. But there was whispered an addendum. Their version read: We shouldn't sin out of Love. And if we truly Love, we shouldn't be capable of sin.

Ah, there's the rub.

I cannot count how many times I heard "if : then" come from that pulpit. "If you're really a Christian, then you won't..."
Or:
"If you're truly saved, then you would never ..."

Which lead to their ultimate "if : then":
If we sin, then we're not really saved.

And in my self-righteous, legalistic state, that didn't mean as much. Until it was turned on me. Because one Sunday I heard my Pastor say just such a thing.

Now I don't know about you, but I've committed sins in the thousands since I became a Christian. Some on purpose. And true, while I didn't rob a bank or anything, I did transgress.

Where did that leave me? What did that mean? I didn't know, but I cried the whole way home, wondering why I'd ever given my heart at all.

I've been back to that church only once.

Still, while it was hard to leave, it was harder to find another "church" that filled what I'd been accustomed to. Because what I'd been accustomed to was so extreme , I was terrified of going anywhere else for fear of being "out of the will of God."

A trip to New England helped to put that in perspective. Surrounded by the Faithful attending Catholic churches, I was forced to ask myself:
Which is closer to the heart of God: Raising your hands and shouting or kneeling in silent prayer?

Better (and untainted) study of my Bible has given me even more food for thought. We can't earn Approval. Approval eternal has already been offered to us by Grace. But we will never be free of sin in our bodies. Even Paul (Paul!) wrestled with this:

Romans 7:14-25
14 ... I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin.
15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.
16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good.
17 As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me.
18 I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.
19 For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do this I keep on doing.
20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
21 So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me.
22 For in my inner being I delight in God's law;
23 but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.
24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?
25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law
of sin.

Our slate is wiped clean. Not once for a one-time do-over, but for all time. For eternity. There's nothing that can break that.

Romans 8:33-39:
33 Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies.
34 Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died - more than that, who was raised to life - is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.
35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?
36 As it is written: "For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered."
37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers,
39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

But some Fundamentalists would have you think that there is something you can do to make God forget you and turn away. Usually, their solution involves more church attendance (even though you're already coming 3 or 4 times a week) and giving more money than just your tithe. Leadership is held up as totally "righteous" while the laity is always merely "striving." They should pay closer attention to Paul.

Romans 3:10-18 & 21-24
10 As it is written: "There is no one righteous, not even one;
11 there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God.
12 All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one."
13 "Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips."
14 "Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness."
15 "Their feet are swift to shed blood;
16 ruin and misery mark their ways,
17 and the way of peace they do not know."
18 "There is no fear of God before their eyes."
...
21 But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify.
22 This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference,
23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
24 and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

In the next few posts, I want to expand this issue and discuss one of the most overquoted passages of Scripture. It's the synopsis of the "heroes of the faith" in Hebrews 11.
At first glance, these personalities seem daunting, simply because we've been trained to think of them as somehow "holier" than other Believers.

What I hope to shed light on is how we are no different than they, nor they than us. And in the process, we can begin to remove the Veils between ourselves and those who would seek to subjugate us.

Further study for those interested:
Philip Yancey, "Soul Survivor"
&
Johnson & Vanvonderen, "The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse."

WWJB -- What Would Jesus Blog?

Following blog trends? Pick up Hugh Hewitt's God Blog Con I (being facilitated by SmartChristianBlog ) for some interesting speculation. Seems as if a whole crop of Evangelical Christian blogs have taken root and gained critical readership.

Readership enough to have the pesky MSM shaking in their shoes? Well, with the number of EC's who turned out for the last election, as well as the boo-yow that unaffiliated bloggers put down on Rathergate...

Simply scroll down the left side of Hewitt's main page under the heading "God Squad" and link to a few. Refreshingly, these blogs aren't frothing (a la street preacher) about the end of the world or telling anyone they're destined for the fires of hey-yell. This is smart, well-composed, thoughtful blogging... with a mission statement.

Blog themes range from apologetics, Pastored sites, sites for teens, politics, missionary work, and on and on. Evangelical Underground is even hosting an awards event for the best EC blogs. And E-Involved is exploring the exact title of this post -- no, seriously.

I for one hope Hewitt's EC blog hypothesis is correct.
Two reasons:

A) It shatters the notion that EC's are a bunch of naive simpletons who have no concept of the world beyond the stained-glass windows. And it forces non-EC's (and the MSM who spies on emerging demographics) to take EC's out of the box and look at them a little harder. It also forces EC's to look at each other. Something that is sadly, done far too scarcely.

B) It gives me a fresh perspective when my faith is falling down. (For more on this point, read my "Heroes" post.)
And if nothing else, it gives me someone else to argue with. Which is almost always worth it.

MoltenThought Film Festival: "A Shot in the Dark"

Wordgirl and I are deep in the throes of the first-ever MoltenThought Film Festival.

Unlike the hoity-toity Sundance Film Festival, we're watching strictly good movies.

The theme of the first festival is "The Ten Best Movies Ever Made" with a strong tendency toward underappreciated gems.

We arrived at our list by separately picking our ten favorites, then applying a weighted ranking to each list based on how much we wanted to see the movie again. We drew a line at the top ten weighted scores and incorporated these films in our final list. We're watching them in reverse order.

The first of these films is Blake Edwards' classic farce, "A Shot in the Dark" (1964). It is the first sequel to "The Pink Panther" and features the inimitable Peter Sellers reprising the role of bumbling French policeman Inspector Jacques Clouseau.

Whereas the first film was more of an ensemble cast, with strong performances and plenty of screen time from Robert Wagner and David Niven, "A Shot in the Dark" is a Sellers vehicle, pure and simple, although at a few points Herbert Lom as the deteriorating Inspector Dreyfus and Burt Kwouk as Clouseau's sidekick Kato steal their scenes and quite nearly the movie.

The whodunnit is of minor importance as the investigation into a murder at a VIP's mansion is merely the trigger of a cascading series of outrageous scenes showcasing Clouseau's bumbling good fortune. Rowan Atkinson clearly cribbed much of "Mr. Bean" from this movie, which revels in placing the silly but dignified Clouseau in awkward situations. My favorite of these is Clouseau's tracking a lead to a nudist colony, and having to "go native" to continue his investigation.

The "Pink Panther" movies open a window onto the 60s as few other films managed to accomplish. The shifting cultural mores, the colorful locales, the tension between the old cool and the new cool are evident in every scene. Indeed, Sellers' over-the-top slapstick (leavened by his hilarious attempts to rein it back in) is itself revolutionary in that the laughs are steeped in irony---we're mocking the silly Frenchman who insists on taking himself deadly seriously.

Taken as a whole, I prefer this movie to the first film, which dragged in spots as it lavished screen time on scenery and hewed a little to closely to James Bond-style conventions. The laughs are bigger, and the payoff larger, than in the original.

The only downside is Elke Sommer's performance, which I thought was awful, if not inappropriate for a woman who is simply popular for her beauty. Fortunately, her screen time and lines are limited.

All in all, this was a great, lighthearted romp with which to kick off the proceedings.

Recommended.

We Read Lefty Propaganda So You Don't Have To

Today's entry---the self-appointed former doyenne of the White House press corps, that diva of the Democrats, the rudest woman in Washington, Helen Thomas:

The question about America's new secretary of state is: Will Condoleezza Rice remain one of the primo hawks in this administration, or will she become the top U.S. diplomat that her new role demands?

Hold on, I'm confused already. I thought the official DNC talking points hold that the problem with Rice is that she's got a hole in her back so Dubya can make her lips move on cue, as opposed to say, Saint Colin of Washington, who speaks truth behind the backs of power except when the cameras are on.

Rice's hardline past as national security adviser during President George W. Bush's first term speaks for itself. She was one of the most consistent voices in favor of pre-emptive war against Iraq, and she used her position to promote an American attack with scary warnings that Saddam Hussein had a "smoking gun" that would turn into a "mushroom cloud."

Well, it doesn't really speak for itself if you have to explain it to us, Helen. Otherwise you could save word count for channeling the moonbats (TM Wizbang!). And didn't Saint Colin of Washington argue that Saddam had WMD? Did Saddam not have a nuclear program, as a defecting scientist described in detail? Was Hans Blix sent in merely to pad his expense account, or to make sure Kofi's oil-for-food money got wired to Kojo?

She was a go-it-alone unilateralist and demonstrated her disdain for many of the collective security treaties that the United States made in the post-World War II era.

Really? What collective security treaties did she disdain? As I recall the way collective security treaties are supposed to work, when your cosignee is threatened by acts of war, you either rush to their support (say, as Britain and France did when the Nazis and Bolsheviks invaded at the outbreak of WWII) or you break the treaty. For 10 years following the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein broke the terms of the ceasefire almost daily, particularly by firing SAMs at Coalition aircraft enforcing the No-Fly Zone. Seems our allies had an obligation to us, not the other way around. Put simply, so even Helen might understand it, collective security agreements are enforced when we are attacked, not when we (or another ally) attacks another nation. Thus, our NATO allies such as Spain had an obligation to honor the NATO alliance following 9/11, and when Hussein failed to meet the 1991 ceasefire terms. They cut and ran, good little leftists that they are.

Also, Helen, you're a professional writer. Words mean things. "Unilateral" is defined as "Obligating only one of two or more parties, nations, or persons, as a contract or an agreement". Thus when your buddy Jimmy Carter caught the vapors and advocated unilateral disarmament, he didn't really expect Brezhnev to disarm at all. By definition, military activity which involves more than one nation must be either bilateral or multilateral. In the case of the Iraq War, more than 30 nations fight with us. That's why we refer to our forces as "The Coalition" and not "The Americans". You can look it up.

Even were that not the case, you seem to misunderstand what the role of the Secretary of State is. The Secretary of State's job is not to present the interests of the world to Americans. It is to present America's interests to the world, and to help ensure our interests are preserved. As Disraeli told the Queen of England, "England has no permanent allies nor permanent enemies, only permanent interests." I guess he was a unilateralist.

But don't be too embarassed by your ignorance of the proper role of a nation's top diplomat---Colin Powell couldn't figure it out either.

In the lead-up to the Iraq war almost two years ago, there was hardly a Sunday talk show that she didn't use to promote the imminent U.S. invasion. Her basic spiel came down to her contention that Iraq posed a threat to the United States, even though we had a chokehold on Saddam with tight economic sanctions and bombings in the two no-fly zones. We have yet to hear any apologies from Rice for her mistaken prediction about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Nor will we. It's not in the nature of this administration to admit a mistake.

Promoting U.S. foreign policy is exactly what we want the Secretary of State to do---weren't you listening?

Those "tight economic sanctions" enabled Saddam Hussein to replenish his military stores while making gobs and gobs of cash and buying the willing compliance of the UN bureaucrats who were supposed to be enforcing the policy, Helen---somehow they don't seem very tight.

As for WMD, why you and the rest of the MSM seem to be unable to comprehend the definition of WMD is beyond me. Perhaps you're expecting sinister humming boxes with WMD stencilled on the outside. That simply isn't so. WMD is everything from high explosives (hmmm, seems like a lot of those are being employed in Iraq these days), chemical weapons (why is it that the Iraqi soldiers had protective equipment in the first place? We haven't gassed anybody since WWI, your buddy Peter Arnett's bogus claims not withstanding), biological weapons (we did find portable labs, and there were accounts of villagers being asked to secrete stuff which looked quite a bit like it), and nuclear weapons (Saddam's own bombmaker detailed his efforts here, and the Israelis, of course, proved the point by taking down Osirak some years ago).

Also, Helen, why do you think all those trucks headed into Syria during the delay imposed by our "allies" in the run-up to the invasion? Was there a fire sale on torture implements or something?

As for admitting a mistake, Dubya might just be following the advice of the Clinton Administration. Has Clinton yet apologized for turning down Sudan's offer to hand us Osama bin Laden, or for Jamie Gorelick's infamous memorandum which turned the War on Terror into "Law and Order"? Why don't you ask him?

Earlier, Rice failed to heed warnings of a hijacking and plane attack against the United States just weeks before the 9/11 terror disaster. Gen. Henry H. Shelton, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of State, said she put terrorism "on the back burner."

Helen, Helen, Helen.

Anyone who's read that PDB knows you're completely mischaracterizing it. It is not a smoking gun. It gives nebulous warnings that are written in Washington cover-your-hinder bureaucratese.

And your buddy Richard Clarke made clear that the "back burner" was already on---that's where Bill Clinton put terrorism years before.

Bush told a news conference this week that she would make a "fine, fine" secretary of state. Rice is described as the president's "closest confidante" on foreign affairs and there is no doubt that she speaks for the president when she talks about international issues.

Is described as by who? Sid Blumenthal?

Helen, the freakin' Secretary of State job description is to speak for the President when she talks about international issues. Do you even remember Madeleine Albright, the Chicken Hawk?

Rice did not have an easy confirmation and won approval from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on a strict party-line vote after two days of tough questioning by Democrats on the panel.

Democrat intransigence does not speak to the quality of the candidate. Dr. Rice is far more qualified for the job than, say, Colin Powell was. Powell's diplomatic experience rested largely in sticking a shiv in his competitors' backs through typical Washington skullduggery. Why Dubya expected he would turn those skills outward toward America's enemies I don't really know, but Powell will go down in history as the most overrated SecState since, oh, Madeleine Albright.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., told her that her loyalty to the Bush administration to sell the war against Iraq had "overwhelmed your respect for truth."

Rice replied that she had "never, ever lost respect for the truth in the service of anything. It is not my nature. It is not my character." She accused Boxer of "impugning my credibility or my integrity."

This was a good try at the theory that a good offense is the best defense. No one had attacked her integrity, but her credibility certainly was fair game.

Well, Helen, your disgraceful performance during the impeachment saga of Bill Clinton rather confirmed that your loyalty to the Clintons and the DNC overwhelmed your respect for the truth.

But let's not go there.

Is Dr. Rice a mouthpiece for Bush or a dangerous, unilateralist hawk? Could you please make a coherent argument for either, but not both?

And for God's sake, if someone accuses you, as I have done, of "losing respect for the truth", how is that not a shot at your integrity?

Helen, let me spell it out for you: I am challenging your integrity. You are a pundit who pretended to be an objective reporter for many years. You made no effort to put forth both sides to the political stories you covered. You lost respect for the truth, and for your readers. I question your integrity, madame.

Rice clearly was not used to being grilled, an unaccustomed role she will have to learn because a Cabinet secretary is expected to testify before Congress from time to time and answer tough questions, almost always asked by members of the political party that doesn't occupy the White House.

I'm too bored to even go search for a reference where you lauded the Republicans' tough questioning of any Clintonista. Why search for Santa Claus? I know he doesn't exist.

The Senate confirmed her in an 85-13 vote.

Wow, that wasn't even close to party line, was it? She picked up 2/3 of the Democrats and all of the Republicans. Why'd so many Democrats vote for a dangerous, unilateralist, Bushy mouthpiece anyway?

When she took her oath of office earlier this week, Rice became the nation's 66th secretary of state, and the first black woman and the second woman to serve in that post.

She will make her first foreign trip as secretary of state when she visits Europe and the Middle East next week. One goal is to keep Israel and the Palestinians talking to each other.

Ahh, the dog that didn't bark. The race and gender card. Funny how color and genderblind Helen and the other Lefties become when they want to knock down a Republican.

Here's the other dog that didn't bark. Powell didn't travel all that much. He spent much of his term huddled with Armitage playing petty Washington politics when he could have been strongarming the North Koreans or hunting for bin Laden or something.

A Secretary of State needs to spend most nights sleeping in foreign hotel rooms, not gossiping like a little girl with the members of the Press Club.

And Helen: the goal of U.S. policy on the Middle East is not to keep the Israelis and Palestinians talking to one another. That was Billy Boy's disastrous policy. It is to keep them from killing one another. Deeds, not words.

At her inauguration, Rice said "history is calling us" to spread freedom throughout the world.

Let's hope she understands it can be done peacefully.

Can it be done peacefully? What tyrant has willingly given up despotic power to give his people freedom? Cincinnatus is the only example I've come up with, and that was 2000 years ago.

Liberation invariably involves violence. Tyrants yield power when they are killed or captured, not before. And that requires the steady application of fire and steel.

Dr Rice knows this, which is why she will make an excellent Secretary of State.

[Edited as I confuse Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden. Despots look alike to me.---Teflon]

Your Prayers Are Welcome...

...for those brave Iraqis who will risk their lives to vote this weekend, and for the brave Allies who will risk theirs to protect them.

In a more honorable time, with more honorable men in the press corps, Americans would be treated to wall-to-wall coverage of Iraqi spirit in the face of terror.

Instead, the French Wing of the Columbia Journalism School Alumni Association will spend their precious airtime spreading Ba'athist propaganda and trying their best to consign these brave and noble people to wear the yoke of despotism once more.

They deserve better, as do we.

May God be with them, and their liberators.

As the Worm Turns

From the AP:

SEATTLE - A teenager was sentenced Friday to 1 1/2 years in prison for unleashing a variant of the "Blaster" Internet worm that crippled 48,000 computers in 2003.

Jeffrey Lee Parson, 19, of Hopkins, Minn., will serve his time at a low-security prison and must perform 10 months of community service. He had faced up to 10 years in prison, but the judge took pity on the teen, saying his neglectful parents were to blame for the psychological troubles that led to his actions.

"(The Internet) has created a dark hole, a dungeon if you will, for people who have mental illnesses or people who are lonely," U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman said. "I didn't see any parent standing there saying, 'It's not a healthy thing to lock yourself in a room and create your own reality.'"

Defense lawyers said Parson feared leaving the house and his parents provided little support. He pleaded guilty last summer to one count of intentionally causing or attempting to cause damage to a protected computer.

Parson created a Blaster version that launched a distributed denial-of-service attack against a Microsoft Windows update Web site as well as personal computers. Blaster and its variants, also known as the LovSan virus, crippled networks worldwide.

Parson's lawyers said he has made great strides since his arrest. They also credited him with making a Seattle School District video warning teens of the dangers of Internet vandalism.

Parson apologized to the court and to Microsoft, saying, "I know I've made a huge mistake and I hurt a lot of people and I feel terrible." He will still have to pay restitution to Microsoft and to people whose commuters were affected in an amount to be determined at a hearing next month.

Parson was charged in Seattle because Microsoft is based in suburban Redmond.

Can't say he didn't deserve this, but how irony challenged is that judge?

Locking yourself in a room and creating your own reality is what Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer do every day the Supreme Court is in session.

Does Truth in Advertising Apply to the Left?

From the Drudge Report:

Hispanic Caucus Declines To Endorse Gonzales Nomination
Fri Jan 28 2005 09:44:08 ET

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus has declined to endorse Alberto Gonzales in his bid to be the first Latino attorney general.

ROLL CALL reportes: White House spokeswoman Erin Healy shrugged off the loss of a potential endorsement, saying, "Judge Gonzales is well qualified and will make an excellent attorney general. Throughout the confirmation process, he has met with 27 Senators, both Democrats and Republicans. He spent an entire day before the Senate Judiciary Committee and provided them with over 450 written responses."

Developing...

I'd like to see a federal antifraud measure requiring any race-based group which only supports candidates of one political party to add that political party's name to their official title.

Then we'd have:

The Congressional Democratic Hispanic Caucus
The Congressional Democratic Black Caucus
The National Association for the Advancement of Democratic Colored People

Saves confusion, no?

Tap a Kidney, Save a Life

From Drudge:

Man peed way out of avalanche

A Slovak man trapped in his car under an avalanche freed himself by drinking 60 bottles of beer and urinating on the snow to melt it.

Rescue teams found Richard Kral drunk and staggering along a mountain path four days after his Audi car was buried in the Slovak Tatra mountains.

He told them that after the avalanche, he had opened his car window and tried to dig his way out.

But as he dug with his hands, he realised the snow would fill his car before he managed to break through.

He had 60 half-litre bottles of beer in his car as he was going on holiday, and after cracking one open to think about the problem he realised he could urinate on the snow to melt it, local media reported.

He said: "I was scooping the snow from above me and packing it down below the window, and then I peed on it to melt it. It was hard and now my kidneys and liver hurt. But I'm glad the beer I took on holiday turned out to be useful and I managed to get out of there."

I hate to mention this, but he probably would have gotten the same result pouring the beer on the snow as he did by hosing the snow down.

Had this been Colorado instead of Slovakia, he no doubt would have been cited for drunk driving and public urination.

Could You Spare a Day to See the Gulags?

Another outrage from The People's Republic of California and the AP. A particular howler:

The UC Davis students, who arrived Jan. 2, had to pay $10,000 each for their 10-week program.

They say the elongated period is letting them move beyond tourism and Cuban government propaganda to get a true sense of life on the island. But, they add, the lengthier stay also gives them more time to discern contradictions in U.S. policy toward Cuba and witness harmful effects of the trade embargo on the Cuban people.

"On paper, this place looks good," said Gabe Feinberg, 25, a political science student. "But seeing that all the money and the tourism has created an upper class and the rest of the people are still pretty much at poverty level - it was a bit disillusioning."

If you're a political science student who believes Cuba looks good, even "on paper", your professors are doing you a grave disservice.

Here's an idea: how about using some of the 10 weeks of Bolshevik beach time to slip your minders and visit the political prisoners in the stinking, festering holes Fidel Castro shoved them in. They'll get a kick out of your Sweet Baby Che t-shirts, I'm sure.

That money and time would have been much better spent interviewing the Cuban refugees in Miami and providing a comprehensive account of their experiences under Castro and their flight from that island hell.

Nah, that would have involved actual learning.

BlogRoll: Brainster's Blog

Word Girl and I have been reading blogs for quite some time now, but one of the joys of blogging ourselves has been discovering blogs we never knew existed.

Brainster's Blog is one we happened on thanks to Blogfather Hugh Hewitt's recent Vox Blogoli. It's smart, funny, and covers a wide array of hot topics. Moreover, if you think you hate Maureen Dowd, you have not lived until you have singed your corneas on the white-hot Dowd-hating creamy nougat-filled goodness that is Brainster's Dowd coverage:

Hey Gang, What Time Is It?

It's Dowdy-Doody time!

Slow Mo is back with another of her spinster schoolgirl columns. It's even more insipid than her usual tripe, with Dowd "proving" that Secretary of State to be Condoleezza Rice doesn't know elementary subjects. Now, you might think that a woman who gripes all the time about how no man wants her because she's too smart might have a little sympathy for a super-intelligent, single woman. Guess again!

"Her geometry is skewed if she thinks she'll now be more powerful than Rummy and Dick Cheney. Doesn't she know that the Pentagon has more sides than her Crawford triangle with George and Laura?"

Two can play at that game. Hey, Maureen if only Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones had agreed to your suggestion of a menage a trois, you wouldn't be a shriveled-up and bitter skank. Well, actually you would still be a shriveled-up skank, but you wouldn't be quite as bitter.

And I thought Luskin was tough on Krugman...

Also, for some unKos-like disclosure, Pat at Brainster had some very nice things to say about our blog. In my defense, I had already vowed to link to this excellent blog upon seeing their Vox Blogoli response.

So with a heave, and a ho, to the BlogRoll it will go!

Blues News: Turn On Your Love Light For Bobby "Blue" Bland

Bobby "Blue" Bland, legendary soul blues vocalist, turned 75 years old today. (Hat tip to Powerline):

I doubt anyone who has heard his silky voice slide from a croon to a wail while his horn section boils over will ever forget him. He brought a horn-driven orchestral approach to the blues that has been imitated but not surpassed.

Bland has had a great number of outstanding songs. For my money, "Turn On Your Love Light" remains the finest, although he's justifiably famous for "Stormy Monday Blues", "Cry Cry Cry", "I Pity the Fool", "Ain't That Lovin' You", and the classic opener he performed for many years with former Beale Street Singers bandmate B.B. King, "Let the Good Times Roll."

allmusic has this biography of the great bluesman. The picture by Michael Ochs below is from that wonderful site.

Reliable Sources: Joe Galloway

I criticize journalists a lot. More than a lot, in fact.

It's only fair to highlight good journalists whenever I get the chance, to demonstrate why it is we should be so disappointed in most of the scribblers who so dishonor their field today.

Joe Galloway is a war correspondent whose name you might recognize. Mel Gibson recently immortalized him with his movie "We Were Soldiers Once..And Young", adapted from the book Galloway and Brigadier General Hal Moore wrote on their experiences in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965, the first major battle of the Vietnam War.

I met Mr. Galloway and General Moore shortly after their book was released. I had the honor of dining with them, and received a signed copy of the book from General Moore.

I will never forget the stories they shared at that dinner, nor of the rare bond between embedded reporter and career soldier I saw displayed that night, a bond that lasted a lifetime.

Joe Galloway is the real deal. He's not cut from the Mike Wallace prima donna mold, pontificating on the duties of the journalist while failing in his duties as an American, as a man. Mr. Galloway earned the respect of General Moore, and I daresay every soldier on the ground that bloody day in Ia Drang. In the process, he produced some damned fine war coverage as well.

He's been one of the few journalists I can call a professional without irony ever since.

I'm not going to link to a single piece, but rather to a gateway to a whole slew of his work. Check it out, and you'll see why I get so angry when one of his colleagues churns out DNC talking points under their byline instead of breathing chromite and blood like Mr. Galloway has done.

You'll notice that he's dubbed "The War Reporter"---check out his Iraq coverage, and you'll agree that he's earned that "The".

[Edited to reflect the correct topic header---Teflon]

Count Every Vote Update

Your intrepid correspondent continues to ferret out voter suppression efforts in the 2004 election cycle.

Why, here's an interesting update on dead people, clones, and felons voting in Washington State, courtesy of Wizbang!

And here's an update on voter fraud in Milwaukee, which looks to be the subject of a criminal probe, from the Powerline folks.

And Gateway Pundit continues to uncover voter fraud in Illinois.

Well, I'll be darned. These are all cases of DEMOCRATIC voter fraud.

And here I thought John Kerry, Jesse Jackson, and Barbara Boxer were all about making sure every vote counted. I guess they were so diligent they thought every valid vote for a Democrat should count twice.

Hmmm, somebody warned us what would happen if the election was close:

Sy Hersh, Muckraker of the MSM

I'm mulling two tests which I believe could be infallible in exposing MSM bias toward the Left.

Ask your favorite crusading journalist the following questions:

1. Who do you think are the moderates in the Senate today?

2. What do you think of Sy Hersh?

I suspect question 2 may well be the better indicator, given how Dan Rather viewed moonbat (trademarked by Wizbang!) Bill Burkett as "infallible."

Max Boot makes the case for Question 2.

Hat tip: The Corner.

[Edited as I gypped Wizbang! a link---Teflon]

Court TV: Guilty!

As seen on NRO, Court TV commits felonious spin with "The Exonerated."

The Left has a lot invested in the notion that honest-to-God innocent people are sitting on Death Row, and some have been executed. It is the holy grail for death penalty opponents.

As this broadcast demonstrates, if they can't find the real deal, they'll just by a leather mug at a Renaissance Fair and stitch "Property of J. Christ" on the bottom.

The Population Dud

Instapundit points us toward a looming catastrophe no one seems to be talking about, but is the root cause of Social Security and other woes:

To put it straightforwardly, and perhaps a little cynically, in the past children used to be regarded as investments that provided their parents with means of subsistence in old age. In Czech the word "vejminek" (a place in a farmhouse reserved for the farmer's old parents) is actually derived from a verb meaning "to stipulate": in the deed of transfer, the old farmer stipulated the conditions on which the farm was to be transferred to his son. Instead of an "intergenerational" policy, there used to be direct dependence of parents on their children. This meant that people had immediate economic motivation to have a sufficiently numerous and well-bred offspring - whereas today's anonymous system makes all workers pay for the pensions of all retirees in an utterly depersonalized manner.

Read the whole thing.

Culture Wars: "Coffee and Cigarettes" Leave a Bad Taste

For anyone who's ever relished a smoke with a brazen cup of joe, this movie seems like a great premise.

Think:
College, Waffle House, 2am, the clinking of plates and silverware, orders shouted over the din, activity, people-watching, the smell of hot grease, robust conversation, the rebellion and idealism of youth.

Or better yet:
Spring Saturday morning, bleary eyes, first cup of Columbian, television, stepping onto the creaky patio of your first apartment, compulsory Marlboro.

Hell! Even:
Coffee shop veranda, newspaper, book, pack of smokes, people walking past would suffice.

All of this apparently escaped the attention of Jim Jarmucsh. His embarrassing effort to capture the love affair connoisseurs have with the caffeine/nicotine speedball comes off as amateurish at best.

What he offers is a series of skits which are supposed to be arty, iconoclastic, gritty and off-beat, but instead smack of first-year film school, stilted acting, disjointed musical score, and painful self-congratulation.

We're supposed to praise his efforts because he's managed to film the entire thing in black and white and grab some interesting cameos. Oh, and we're supposed to be dazzled by the ubiquitous linoleum checkerboard and the odd locales as well.

No. Huh-uh.

From the very first skit we're doomed. The repartee between Roberto Begnigni and Steven Wright is not only not funny, it's not even interesting or quirky.

And the second skit with Joie and Cinque Lee is plodding, silly, and dull. Fans of Steve Buscemi perk up when he pops into frame in a waiter's uniform. Maybe the skit will grow legs when he says the pair remind him of magpies. Might there be some witty smack-down coming on? Wait for it... Wait for it... Nope. Nothing. Buscemi gets away unscathed and launches into some rant about Elvis's evil twin which (shockingly!) goes nowhere.

The rest blurs into a mundane haze, the only bright spot is Cate Blanchett's portrayal of her fictional punk cousin, Shelly. Again, the viewer is hopeful (though certainly less so after roughly an hour of substandard material). But this skit falls flat as well through bad writing and crap editing. The final "punchline" is stale and very unfunny.

By the time we reached Jack White's Tesla coil, I had to turn it off.

No more. No way. No how.

In short:
Bad writing. Bad acting. Winkingly esoteric music. Obviously staged locations. And, if you can imagine this, bad smoking.

I'm a busy person, and I live in a location that has one indie theater. And with the inherent gamble on indie films, it's always good to get a second opinion before investing. I bought this movie on the advice of Roger Ebert. Advice I have decided to shun henceforth.

"Coffee and Cigarettes." Glad I quit.


[Edited to include hyperlink -- WordGirl]

Howard Kurtz: Arrogance

Maggie Gallagher responded to this Howard Kurtz article on her failure to disclose her government contract with a statement today worth reading in its entirety.

What I find most interesting is Kurtz' response to her statement:

In response, Kurtz told E&P: "It's too bad that Maggie Gallagher, in the process of apologizing for her mistake, has seen fit to blame the messenger. My story made quite clear that her work at HHS included writing brochures for the President's marriage initiative, ghostwriting a magazine article for a top official, and briefing other department officials on the issue. That sure sounds like promotion to me, but none of this would be a media controversy had Ms. Gallagher disclosed the contract in her writing trumpeting the Bush marriage plan."

It seems to me that Gallagher and her HHS contact know a whole lot more about what she was hired to do than Kurtz does, and of course, only Gallagher knows what her intentions were in drafting her statement. Nobody likes to be accused of making an error, especially not media bigwigs like Kurtz. But to respond in such an offhand and unprofessional manner makes me question Kurtz' reporting on this in a way I would never have had he not seen fit to claim omniscience in his response.

Or does Howard Kurtz actually think that what "sounds like promotion" to him may in reality not have been promotion of the policy at all, at least in the eyes of the unanointed?

Why We Fight

The Library of Congress has just provided online access to 9/11 records.

The MSM may have an embargo on 9/11 exhibits; the Internet does not. Check it out here.

Do They Realize God Is Mocking Them?

The heartless bureaucrats in Britain, that is, who have no trouble condemning babies to slow death, but wouldn't dare do something so barbaric as give a murderer a lethal injection:

A PREMATURE baby that the High Court ruled should be left to die by hospital doctors has survived against the odds. So remarkable is the little girl’s progress that lawyers for her parents will this week go to court and ask for the ruling to be lifted.
Charlotte Wyatt, who weighed just 1lb when she was born prematurely, was given only months to live after a hospital won the legal right last autumn not to resuscitate her if she stopped breathing.

Doctors secured the ruling, against the wishes of Charlotte’s parents, on the grounds that she was brain-damaged and it was in the baby’s own interests not to be resuscitated since it would prolong her suffering and would be “purposeless”.

Doctors expected that Charlotte, now 15 months old, would succumb to an infection that would prove fatal without emergency intervention. However, she has survived 3½ winter months since the ruling; there is also evidence that her breathing is becoming stronger and she is less dependent on an oxygen supply — an improvement confirmed by hospital sources. The family claims she has some sight and can hear clapping.

Yesterday Carol Glass, a friend of the Wyatts, said: “Doctors said Charlotte would not live to see her first birthday and that was months ago. The hospital then said she was unlikely to make it through the winter months, but we are now a good way through.

“Charlotte should not have this ‘do not resuscitate order’ left hanging over her. She could now live on with the right treatment. Her parents Darren and Debbie want her to be treated and are hoping that one day she will be able to go home with them.”

For those who might be inclined to think, "Can't happen here", I have two words for you: Terry Schiavo.

[Edited for homonyms---Teflon]

Yet Another Difference Between Adult Cinema and Real Life

I somehow suspect that pizza delivery guys would get similar consequences for this sort of thing:

Cherry revealed Monday that he had launched an investigation into charges that the four firefighters - three men and a woman - had engaged in group sex in their Hollywood Park station house.

"This will be the real test," said Councilman Steve Cohn about Cherry and Thomas' handling of the allegations. "Obviously the message is not yet strong enough - we will not tolerate inappropriate behavior."

When Fargo was asked Tuesday if she believed Cherry was capable of turning around the troubled department, she replied: "He'd better."

Hat tip: Drudge

Vox Blogoli---Insurgents in Sportcoats Round Two

Yesterday, Jonathan Rauch of The Atlantic Monthly replied to the blogosphere's dissection of his statements regarding religious conservatives and allowed Hugh Hewitt to post his full article. Thanks first to Mr. Rauch for taking criticism head-on, something more MSM types ought to do.

Mr. Rauch enters the CBS Plea of Haste in his partial mea culpa for analogizing religious conservatives to abortion clinic bombers and Iraqi terrorists ("insurgents", as Reuters would have it). He further self-mitigates with a recourse to the Context Argument (we've taken him out of context, of course).

All well and good.

Here's the paragraph which preceded the snip Hugh provided:

Moreover, although party polarization may disgruntle the center (can't we be for stem-cell research and school vouchers?), it helps domesticate fanatics on the left and the right. Though you would be partly correct to say that the mainstream parties have been taken over by polarized activists, you could also say, just as accurately and a good deal more cheerfully, that polarized activists have been taken over by the mainstream parties. The Republican Party has acquired its distinctively tart right-wing flavor largely because it has absorbed---in fact, to a significant extent has organizationally merged with---the religious right. As Hanna Rosin reports elsewhere in this package, religious conservatives are becoming more uniformly Republican even as their faiths and backgrounds grow more diverse.

The first and second sentences continue Rauch's pose as a moderate, looking askance at both Left and Right Wing "extremists." His last two sentences, however, oddly focus only on the Right. Let's take a closer look at them.

"Distinctively tart" is an interesting way of describing the Republican Party's alleged "right-wing flavor." Distinctive typically refers to something different, almost uniquely so. As we're comparing Republicans to Democrats in this paragraph, does Rauch mean the Republicans are "tart" to an extent the Democrats are not? He's comparing extremists to the middle elsewhere in the article. Does he mean to imply that the Republicans are further out on the tart spectrum (thus disctinctively so) than the Democrats? Tart isn't a good flavor, most of the time---the connotations of the word imply a rather shocking sourness. Given a choice of being described as sweet or tart, I suspect most readers would choose the former, even if they happened to be religious conservatives.

Either way, Rauch ascribes this GOP tartness to the religious conservatives in the party. Why, to make the entire soup "distinctively tart", one presumes these particular ingredients must be very tart indeed! The last sentence seems to buttress this interpretation, as Rauch is contending that being in the Republican soup not only makes the soup more tart, but makes the religious conservatives less so.

That's fine for sour things, as Rauch evidently finds religious conservatives, but let's trade "tart" for "toxic", shall we?

The Republican Party avoided David Duke like the plague in 1988. Would embracing him with open arms not have tarted up the GOP? Surely it would have. Would it have mainstreamed David Duke? Of course---that's what he was looking for. According to Rauch, not doing so weakened "social peace". Which is, of course, hogwash.

The two-party system works not because it embraces extremes but because it embraces the mainstream. Multiparty democracies tend to build unstable coalitions of radicals. If Mr. Rauch wants to see his model in action, he need only pop over to Italy. The U.S. is different, thanks largely to the Electoral College (which the Dems are looking to undermine). Because the President has to gain an electoral majority, he must be a mainstream figure palatable to a wide swath of the country. To do so, he's going to push his party toward mainstream policy---this is why the platform debate occurs at the presidential convention. He is also going to marginalize extremist tendencies within his party, as Bill Clinton famously died with his "Sista Souljah moment" (and failed to do with disastrous consequences when his wife decided to become the Medical Czarina).

It is no surprise that the religious conservatives have clout within the GOP. The President happens to be one. The DLC likewise had clout within the Clinton White House, since he emerged from their ranks. Where Rauch gets it wrong is the notion that religious conservatives are a radicalizing, extremist influence on the President and his party. It just isn't so. Indeed, Bush's compassionate conservatism creed stems directly from the ranks of these religious conservatives, and runs right against the grain of the entitlement-hating GOP rank-and-file. It's not the religious conservatives who are up in arms over Bush's spending at the moment.

Mr. Rauch never quite gets around to telling us what policy positions are being advanced by the religious conservatives which are so radical. Perhaps he takes exception to their opposition to gay marriage, in which case he has "radical" and "moderate" precisely backwards.

In any case, Mr. Rauch continues to misunderstand the role of religious conservatives within the GOP, continues to inflate their level of radicalism, and fails to draw the obvious parallels to the hodgepodge of disgruntled leftists which make up the Democratic Party today.

I'll make it real simple: If the Democrats are more moderate and less extreme than the "distinctively tart" Republicans, how does Mr. Rauch explain their continued and historic electoral losses at the state and national levels?

Update:

JollyBlogger doesn't much care for Rauch's notion of tamed Christians.

Skye Puppy notes Rauch's strange blind spot when it comes to leftist terrorism as well.

Update II:
Brainster nails Rauch for selective outrage.

No Left Turns marvels at Rauch's "Bipolar Disorder", and wonders if moderation isn't being defined through negation.

The Dutch Wake Up

Testimony this week in the brazen murder of a Dutch filmmaker for his critical portrayal of how women are treated in Muslim countries ought to provide a much-needed wakeup call in the War on Terror.

"What's extraordinary is the calmness with which as he did this," said the prosecutor, identified only as F. van Straelen. "Several witnesses described how he coolly knelt next to Van Gogh's body and reloaded his gun."

An autopsy showed Van Gogh's throat had been cut nearly to the spinal cord with a kitchen knife.

A note impaled in Van Gogh's chest threatened prominent politicians and vowed Islamic holy war, or jihad, against nonbelievers.

A bystander who witnessed the crime yelled at Van Gogh's killer "You can't do that!" to which the suspect replied: "Oh, yes I can. ... Now you know what's coming for you."

Bouyeri allegedly then walked away, apparently in search of police, Van Straelen said. He opened fire at the first police car he found, injuring a police officer.

The gunman fired about 30 times in a shooting spree, Van Straelen said.

Western Europe has been thoroughly infiltrated by terror cells among recent Muslim immigrants. Rather than aggressively deal with this problem, Europe does what it has always done---appease the worst offenders and lock out the rest, in this case, by denying moderate Turkey EU membership in addition to limiting the influx of Turkish workers West.

Turkey's response to terrorism is much different, and not surprisingly, more successful.

31 Marines Killed in Iraq Helicopter Crash

If Reuters is going to call foreign terrorists in Iraq "insurgents", why not call U.S. troops "liberators" or, better still, "heroes"? There's a lot more truth in the labels I'm recommending than in those Reuters is employing.

Goodnight and Sleep Well

Larry Miller's remembrance of Johnny Carson is simply wonderful.

No Child Left Behind, to Embarassment of Education Lobby

Another indicator of improved education since President Bush began the push for standards (hat tip: Drudge). The Edu-Bolsheviks, of course, have concerns quite different from trifling matters of teaching children:

To avoid inflating state performance, the College Board counted students once regardless of how many AP subject tests they passed. But that obscures the point that students in wealthy areas often have access to multiple AP courses while other students do not, said Bob Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest, which monitors standardized testing.

"Unfortunately, despite the value of AP courses, they end up reinforcing huge gaps between haves and have-nots because of differences in where courses are offered," he said.

For many students, an AP course is often their first exposure to challenging material, said Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust, which advocates for minority children. In that sense, she said, the growing participation rates are clearly good news.

But the AP popularity raises questions, too, Haycock said, such as whether the program takes the best teachers and leaves less experienced ones for struggling students. Among students who go on to college, about 40 percent take at least one remedial course.

"It's not the total answer," Haycock said of the AP. "If we think this is the way to improve academics in high schools, we need to think a little harder than that."

Here's an idea---why not put together a special Blue Ribbon committee of the kids who aced the AP tests and ask them how to educate kids? It's got to be a better solution than letting the mental mediocrities of the educational establishment have another crack.

Dirty Bomb Plot a Dirty Lie

The FBI maintains that the Boston dirty bomb plot was a false alarm.

White Male Senate Democrats Oppose First Black Female Candidate for Secretary of State

There's a headline that you won't be reading in the MSM, although you can bet that if Condi Rice were a Democrat, the New York Times would be paying me royalties (hat tip: Drudge):

"Dr. Rice is responsible for some of the most overblown rhetoric that the administration used to scare the American people into believing that there was an imminent threat from Iraq," Byrd said.

Kicking off the Democratic assault, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts charged that Rice, as Bush's national security adviser, provided Congress with "false reasons" for going to war. Had she not, Kennedy said in a speech, "it might have changed the course of history."

Sen. Mark Dayton, D-Minn., accused the Bush administration of lying and said he was voting against Rice's confirmation as a way of trying to stop mistruths. Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record), D-Mich., charged she concealed the Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites)'s skepticism that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium for a nuclear weapons program from Africa.

Oh, those poor, gullible senators, tricked into supporting a tragic war to liberate 30 million people by that wily Dr. Rice.

Oh, waitaminute, wasn't it Rice's predecessor, the sainted Colin Powell, who gave the key WMD testimony these silly people are so upset about?

Better confirm Condi quickly, then, and get that liar out of there.

[Edited to remove gratuitious Senator Byrd reference---Teflon].

In other news, Barbara Boxer gives Condi pointers on integrity:

The Most Disgraceful President

Man, this clown makes Andrew Jackson look like George Washington:

Carter worried by inaction on democracy, American region's giving record

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Former US president Jimmy Carter charged that members of the Organization of American States were not doing their utmost to reach the regional body's goals on defending democracy.

"I am concerned that the lofty ideals espoused in the Democratic Charter are not all being honored. I am concerned that poverty and inequality continue unabated," the Nobel laureate said in an address to the Washington-based pan-American body.

"I am concerned that we in this room, representing governments and in some cases privileged societies, are not demonstrating the political will to shore up our fragile democracies, protect and defend our human rights system and tackle the problems of desperation and destitution," Carter added.

In many nations across the Americas, he said "we run the very real risk that dissatisfaction with the performance of elected governments will transform into disillusionment with democracy itself."

Carter also lamented that "Americans give just 15 cents per 100 dollars of national income in official development assistance. As a share of our economy we rank dead last among industrialized countries."

Two things:

1. Was there any U.S. President with a worse record regarding the expansion of human freedom than Jimmy Carter? Weak and feckless doesn't work. Ever.

2. Notice the weasel-wording regarding "official development assistance" as opposed to charitable assistance, in which Americans consistently come out in the top ranks. Notice also the "as a share of our economy". I know Carter did everything he could during his disastrous presidency to improve this number by destroying our economy, but does this idiot really think that poor people care what proportion of the giver's income the dollar they're handed is?

This, of course, is after he claimed the Palestinian elections were as pure as the driven snow.

Michael Moore should have refused to sit next to him.

This Won't Fly

Looks like playing good "D" isn't an option in the War on Terror:

WASHINGTON - Technology to guard airplanes against terrorist missiles is too expensive for commercial airlines and developers should work to come up with something more suitable "as rapidly as possible," a new report says.

Fitting the nation's 6,800 commercial jets with countermeasures against shoulder-fired missiles would cost an estimated $11 billion, with operating costs going up to $2.1 billion annually, said the RAND Corp. report.

The report noted that the federal government now spends about $4.4 billion annually on all transportation security.

Analysts who did the report questioned whether it was even possible to defend against such weapons, and whether in any case terrorists would simply find other ways and other weapons to attack jets.

Here's the problem in a nutshell: as soon as you come up with an effective defense against one form of terror, our enemies will find another.

We're a technological society. We like to think that for every problem, there's a gadget or three to solve it.

Our enemies are low-tech opportunists. They don't have airplanes, so they commandeer ours. They don't have tanks, so they load up a nutjob with bombs and have him walk into our rear areas.

The MSM's hysteria over shoulder-fired missiles is ridiculous. Number one, it's awfully hard to get this type of equipment in place unnoticed by somebody. That's why you don't find bad guys with this type of ordinance in the street except in the movies. Second, these things aren't easy to deploy. Aircraft move fast, even on landing approach. It's hard to hit them. The mujahedeen in Afghanistan brought down a decent number of Soviet helicopters, which a) move more slowly most of the time than airliners and b) they had lots of Stingers, which are quite good at bringing down aircraft.

Probability is small that al Qaeda is seriously attempting to down aircraft with shoulder-fired missiles. Even if they are, probability is small that they would be able to take a shot unmolested. Even if they did, probability is small that they would hit their target. Even if they did, the probability of destroying a large aircraft with one hit is certainly not 100 percent. Should we spend a lot of time worrying about this?

Let's say we should. We spend $11 B outfitting aircraft and training pilots. Hell, let's say the countermeasures are 100 percent effective. What then?

Al Qaeda moves onto Plan B, having done $11 B in damage to our economy.

There is no effective defense against a terrorist network based on small cells of dedicated nutjobs. There are too many targets to secure.

Let me pose another question:

Why aren't we worried about Nazi sabotage?

Why aren't we afraid of Soviet sleeper agents with suitcase nukes?

Why aren't we scrambling to secure our Pacific coastline against Imperial Japanese minisubs?

Because we destroyed those threats. They don't exist anymore. Their organizers are gone.

This is why the Iraq War is important. It is why eventual operations in Syria, Iran, and North Korea will be important. We must destroy the terror network to eliminate the threat.

If we're going to design new gadgets, how about ones that will smear fanatics along the walls of their caves?

Pink Slips---Smoke 'Em If You've Got 'Em

An employer sets smoking as a condition for termination.

FDR's ingenious scheme of payroll withholding continues to reap unintended consequences. If we each paid for our own healthcare, the market would punish smokers and anyone else with unhealthy habits with increased costs.

That said, the employer is perfectly within their rights to hire whomever they please, in my view (if not the law's). They are certainly right that in paying for health benefits nonsmokers subsidize smokers' premiums.

And the Winner Isn't

The 77th annual Academy Award (Oscar) nominations are out and whisperings have already begun regarding possible big winners. Among them are "The Aviator," "Ray," "Finding Neverland," "Million Dollar Baby," and "Sideways."

Keep scrolling... keep scrolling. Oh, yes, there it is at the bottom. Let's see... Nominated for... cinematography, makeup and original score.
Hmm... That's odd.

Maybe it's in the nominations for Best Foreign Film?
Nope... not there either.

Hmph. Well, this is weird. I'm confused. Because according to www.boxofficemojo.com it's number 24 in the top grossing movies of all time -- even though it was released in early 2004. And it's competing with "Titanic" in the number 1 slot which has had a bit longer shelf life since its release in 1997.

And in the highest grossing R-rated movies of all time, it's number 1, with $370,274,604 (as of this posting), blowing away its next nearest competitor, "Matrix Reloaded" which comes in at $281,576,461 since its 2003 debut. The number 3 slot is a movie released in 1984. And don't get me wrong, I enjoyed "Beverly Hills Cop," but it's hardly a contender for Best Picture.

Well, maybe the Academy didn't have time to actually view "The Passion of the Christ," what with all the anti-American, pro-abortion fare taking up their energies.

But if voting were actually conducted with wallets and hearts, "The Passion of the Christ" would clearly be the big winner in 2004.

Guess it'll be the little secret of millions and millions of devoted fans.

This Bears Watching

Michelle Malkin's on the case of a suspicious plane Homeland Security forced down in San Antonio last night.

Do you ever get the idea that there are some really big stories brewing which might be a better use of investigative reporters' time than, say, Tom Delay or President Bush's ANG service?

Some Marches Are More Equal Than Others

The American Spectator has the goods on how the MSM approaches the Right to Life March, which isn't news despite the President's encouraging words for it or the size of the crowd taking part in it:

Most youth causes -- particularly if they are infantile and dangerous to the common weal -- command the media's most solicitous attention. But if thousands of youth descend on Washington, D.C. in biting weather to protest abortion, that's a non-event. The Washington Post barely mentioned the march, though it did find a paragraph in its brief Metro story on Sunday to let a Planned Parenthood official smear pro-lifers as "people who love fetuses but hate babies and children."

Would the Washington Post have published a pro-lifer saying that Planned Parenthood hates fetuses, babies, and children? They do. As Margaret Sanger's son Alexander has put it, the unborn child is a "liability, a threat, and a danger to the mother." Child abuse follows from abortion in principle, a fear children whose siblings were aborted have confessed to psychologists. If they could have done that to my brother or sister, why did I survive? they wonder. And why couldn't they do violence to me now?

Is it me, or is the MSM getting more brazen in selecting mouthpieces for reporters' biases to provide quotes in these pieces?

Those Silly Democrats

John O'Sullivan provides insightful commentary on why the Dems continue to miss the point of their ongoing electoral woes:

What makes the Democrats' task of recovery so difficult is that the issues
that most concern voters — namely, national security and moral issues — fit into
the popular spectrum better (i.e., the Democrats and the voters are at opposite
ends of the spectrum on such issues — with the GOP in the middle). But because
the Democrats take their cue from elite institutions such as Hollywood and the
media, they never realize their vulnerability. And every election defeat
astonishes them.

Exactly. If you're only willing to listen to a dwindling elite, you're going to miss something big. Flyover country is getting a larger and larger voice in American politics, one the Dems disdain at their peril. Watch Hillary Clinton. She gets it.

Remind Me Never to Tick Off Donald Luskin

The man who's made Paul Krugman's life so interesting takes down factcheck.org over Social Security today---hard.

Whatever Happened to "Count Every Vote"?

Does Jesse Jackson know about this?

MILWAUKEE - The sons of a first-term congresswoman and Milwaukee's former
acting mayor were among five Democratic activists charged Monday with slashing
the tires of vans rented by Republicans to drive voters and monitors to the
polls on Election Day.

Sowande Omokunde, son of Rep. Gwen
Moore, D-Wis., and Michael Pratt, the son of former Milwaukee acting mayor
Marvin Pratt, were charged with criminal damage to property, a felony that
carries a maximum punishment of 3 1/2 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
The activists — all employees of the John Kerry campaign — are accused of
flattening the tires on 25 vehicles rented by the state Republican Party to get
out the vote and deliver poll watchers Nov. 2.
The GOP rented more than 100
vehicles that were parked in a lot adjacent to a Bush campaign office. The party
planned to drive poll watchers to polling places by 7 a.m. and deliver any
voters who didn't have a ride.

I guess not every vote should count after all, in the eyes of the Democratic Party.

Update:

Jim Geraghty (of TKS, nee The Kerry Spot) agrees.

Vox Blogoli: Insurgents in Sportcoats---The MSM View of Religious Conservatives

Hugh Hewitt, Blogfather, has kicked off another round of Vox Blogoli, where he solicits links to posts on other blogs in response to provacative subject matter he posts on his blog. We at MoltenThought are very pleased to be a part of this event.

Jonathan Rauch writes the following in an Atlantic Monthly article (subscription required):

On balance it is probably healthier if religious conservatives are inside the political system than if they operate as insurgents and provocateurs on the outside. Better they should write anti-abortion planks into the Republican platform than bomb abortion clinics. The same is true of the left. The clashes over civil rights and Vietnam turned into street warfare partly because activists were locked out of their own party establishments and had to fight, literally, to be heard. When Michael Moore receives a hero’s welcome at the Democratic National Convention, we moderates grumble; but if the parties engage fierce activists while marginalizing tame centrists, that is probably better for the social peace than the other way around.

If you want to know why the MSM is having so much difficulty coping with and understanding the 2004 election, the answer lies within Rauch's assessment of religious conservatives.

A more perfect insight into passive media bias has yet to be unearthed. Rauch plainly sees the world through a political lens---warring interest groups battle for the hearts and minds of the polity in his view, while "moderate" civilians are caught in the middle. "Social peace" is achieved by the moderates actively resisting the tendency of extremists to pull politics too far to the right or to the left.

What a delightfully convenient metaphor for a lefty confronting the prospect of future electoral marginalization!

Such soul-searching as the Left has seen fit to undertake since Dubya foiled them again has tended toward explaining away the pitiful performance of the Democratic Party these past 10 years as tactical errors or Red State ignorance, not a fundamental repudiation of leftism. They're utterly missing the point.

Religious conservatives are religious first, conservative second. The worldview of churchgoing Christians is not a worldview at all---their primary concern is not this world but the next. Outright hostility and bigotry on the Left and within the Democratic Party has roused religious Americans and pushed them into the arms of the GOP. While most of these new adherents to the Republican Party are Christians, the last election saw a similar trend among Jewish and even Muslim Americans. It isn't hard to figure out why---Democrats only show up in church to raid the offering plate on the way to their next effort to undermine religious observance in America.

Rauch's sneering condescension demonstrates that this trend will continue, as the secular humanists who dominate the Left cannot countenance a kind word for religion. Note how he sets up the false dichotomy of writing anti-abortion planks into the GOP platform (a symbolic and worthless political act which changes nothing) and the commission of domestic terrorism by bombing abortion clinics. One wonders what Rauch thought of The Weather Underground or the Black Panthers back in their bomb-throwing days. Would he have advised moderates to resist civil rights so as not to cater to these extremists? If only the mandatory bigotry of affirmative action were confined harmlessly to the Democratic Party Platform!

Yet there is a middle ground between symbolic but irrelevant and relevant but unconscionable. Religious Americans are citizens and they have a right to take part in politics. They are not so much coming to a political party as that party is coming to them. There is a reason why evangelical Christians in particular became a political force in the 80s. The GOP knocked on their doors and asked for their votes, and even went so far as to change their policies to make them more friendly to churchgoing voters. The Republicans continue to reap the rewards of this investment.

Yet Rauch has already given up on the notion of these folks ever voting a Democratic ticket again. In this passage, he's advocating for the Democrats not to shun Michael Moore and the hardcore leftists whose counsel has caused so much woe for their electoral performance, but to embrace them, to move even further left, so as to foster "social peace" and avoid the "street fighting" of the past.

Here he badly misreads the current situation.

In post-9/11 America, all of the initiative, all of the energy, all of the drive, all of the political momentum lies with the Right, not the Left. What bold new vision has any Democratic politician laid out which can compare to the audacity of President Bush's "Freedom on the March"? Why is it that the Democrats today can only obstruct, and not instruct, policy? Who are the reactionaries and who are the progressives in 2005?

The answer is obvious.

Fred Barnes has been fond of late of referring to the Arab saying, "The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on."

Rauch and his MSM buddies can bark all they like, but those ignorant religious conservatives have an honored place within the American caravan, which is leaving the Left behind.

Update:
The Hedgehog has some further comments I find absolutely compelling.

The Unusual Suspects has an interesting take---what makes anyone think religious conservatives are radicals?

Major Mike doesn't lend much credence to the notion that embracing radicals promotes peace.

Ravishing Light offers compelling proof that religious conservatives aren't prone to acts of violence---the MSM dog hasn't barked.

The Pseudo-Polymath wonders if Rauch's medicine isn't really intended to kill rather than cure.

Agricolae makes me wonder that if Rauch is correct, isn't he predicting more political violence on the Left? After all, if the 60s protestors turned violent as a result of being locked out of their party convention, wouldn't today's Left turn violent as a result of being locked out of power?

The Truth About Torture

James Dunnigan is a military historian of the first stripe and a true master of his field. His "Dirty Little Secrets" column may be the Web's worst kept secret---it's punchy, insightful, and never fails to surprise.

In this latest installment, he sets us straight on the torture debate.


If you want to understand the War on Terror, and I mean REALLY understand it, you really ought to turn off "24" and click on over to StrategyPage.

Don't You Just Hate It When A Colleague Thrashes You In Public?

That's what Andy Rooney's done to Gunga Dan Rather, according to this Howard Kurtz piece.
Captain Ed gets a hat tip, and of course provides insight into the matter.

The Man Who Saved the World

Today we commemorate the passing of the greatest man of the 20th Century and one of the greatest men who ever lived.

The past century saw numerous great dictators and exactly two great statesmen. The second of these was Ronald Wilson Reagan, whose vision of optimism and freedom and whose steely resolve ended the Cold War which raged throughout much of the century. He was truly a great man.

But not the greatest man. Not the Man of the Century.

That honor belongs to a man who had been known for much of his life to be a failure. He hadn't even started off very well. His father had been one of the most gifted politicians of his age, a man who might well have ascended to his nation's top political post had he not been laid low by disease. Despite being admitted to the best schools, our great man was a terrible student, whom his teachers suspected might well be mentally handicapped, until he demonstrated an enormous capacity for memorizing text when it suited him. He was a stubborn and willful boy who clashed with authority routinely.

When the time had come for him to enter his nation's armed forces, his poor grades placed him in the cavalry, a disgraceful post for a man of such pedigree. He was shipped off to the far corners of the Earth, where he soon took part in the final cavalry charge of his nation's military history.

He left active military service to become a war correspondent, soon running afoul of his country's military establishment with his withering criticism of its leaders' conduct of war. While covering a brutal conflict against terrorists, he took an active part in defending a friendly troop transport ambushed by the enemy and in so doing became a prisoner-of-war. He elected to escape rather than allow the enemy to use his capture for propaganda purposes or to obtain a ransom, and in so doing had an enormous bounty placed on his head, wanted dead or alive. He was forced to travel an enormous distance through enemy territory before finally reaching friendly lines.

He returned to his country a war hero, and soon began a political career. He seemed poised to follow his father to greatness, until he took the nearly unprecedented step of switching parties in mid-term.

On the eve of a global conflict, he was placed in charge of the finest navy in the world, and soon set about reforming it. He earned his pilot's license, invented the seaplane, and gave armored cavalry vehicles the name they bear to this day.

In the throes of a catastrophic war, his strategic vision offered the greatest opportunity to stem the tide of blood, until professional soldiers failed to execute the plan and soon created another bloody stalemate.

Driven from his nation's leadership in disgrace, he resumed his military career and went off to fight alongside his countrymen in the worst conditions imaginable. He returned to a government post later in the war, and continued in another for several years, although his political prospects remained dim.

After the war, he wrote what remains to this day the greatest history of that conflict. He fell back on his writing, his political career in tatters, but maintained close contacts with civil and military leaders in his nation and abroad.

He became a global celebrity, traveling overseas and lecturing to packed houses. On one such trip, he was struck by a car and nearly killed. He lost most of his fortune in the stock market, and lived in despair of money for a long time thereafter.

He lived the life of Cassandra for awhile, warning anyone who would listen that war was on the horizon again, a darker conflict even than the one in which he'd fought some years before. No one would listen. They thought him a warmonger and a crank.

When he was proven right some years later, in a most incredible fashion, he found himself first brought into government again, then became head of the government. It was small consolation. At the time, his country had been utterly defeated in battle, its chief allies had already surrendered, and it was likely to fall to its enemy within weeks. The once-proud nation stood alone in its darkest hour. Many government leaders were calling for peace talks, for appeasement, for surrender. Plans were made to run the war effort from exile overseas.

Yet he endured. He rallied his countrymen to his cause, and refused to give in, refused to even countenance the mere thought of giving in. He vowed to fight and die in the streets if it came down to it.

Eventually, he and his countrymen prevailed. He had quite literally saved Western civilization in the process, as Leonidas had at Thermopylae against the Persian hordes milennia before.

In the full flush of victory, he was cast from office. No matter. He wrote a history of the war, and earned the Nobel Prize for Literature in the process. He was returned to office one last time, and managed to once again predict another war to come, ever to be a realist, ever to be thought a fabulist.

He continued to write, and to lecture, and to paint. He died 40 years ago today, as blessed with years as he was with talent and vision, the man who had saved the world.



His name, of course, was Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill.

We are forever in his debt.

Do You Ever Get the Idea that the MSM Just Doesn't Get It?

Drudge has the goods.

TVP -- It's not just for breakfast anymore

I've lost a Backstreet Boy. No, I wasn't flung across the bar at Nobu by a feisty Cameron Diaz. I mean I've literally lost a Backstreet Boy. And while we weren't separated in a groundbreaking medical procedure, I am 100 pounds lighter.

People ask excitedly how I pulled this off. I'm sure they're not expecting my reply, because after I've told them, their eyes glaze.

I didn't get to where I am (which is no place special, just smaller) by following a gimmicky diet plan. I didn't cut out all my carbs, visit South Beach, invite others to Watch my Weight, meet Jenny Craig, or shout Hallelujah over my juicer seven times a day.
I worked my butt off.

This is not rocket science, really. The Rx? Eat less. Move more. Start slow. Keep going. Be consistent.
Bam! Weight loss!
And maintenance is about the same, except for the first part... You can eat a little more.

Sounds boring? Sounds like it might not be worth the sacrifice? Try that in the dressing room at Banana Republic when I'm pulling on a slinky size 8.
"Oh no, no! This just won't do! Do you have something frumpy and blocky in a 22? With ruffles?"

Renee Zellweger was asked how she lost the weight after two "Bridget Jones" films. The answer (though not a direct quote) was something along the lines of "Lots of bran, lots of water, and walk your a** off!"

Okay, first off, to get that garishly skinny, you'd have to be eating nothing but bran, drinking gallons of water and walking about 15 miles a day.
Eat a sandwich, sweetie. You're scaring the children.

But really, she's right. Let's investigate:

1) Lots of bran:
According to recent studies, dietary fiber seems to block about 9 calories per gram ingested. Which means at the end of the day, you can take the total grams of fiber you've had, multiply it by 9 and subtract that from your total calories. Pretty freaking cool.
Except that you actually have to learn how to eat whole grain bread instead of white. (The flood of low-carb bread and pasta products are great sources for this.) And you're going to have to get some veggies down your gullet at some point, whether you like it or not.
Fiber also has the added advantages of keeping one's stomach feeling fuller as well as helping to eliminate what's been eaten faster. (Metamucil, anyone?)
I've personally gotten so grossly full on grilled vegetables that I couldn't move. And we're talking maybe... 300 calories worth.

2) Lots of water:
Nearly everyone has experienced the groaning childhood glut of too much soda in summertime. Kids, that buoy rolling around in your stomach is liquid.
Liquids tend to be heavy and very good at filling shrunken spaces (a.k.a. your growling stomach).
Hungry? Chug down a quart of water and then see if you're ready for the buffet.
Water also flushes your system of the fat you've been burning with all those "Sweatin' To The Oldies" videos and, like fiber, keeps your elimination system shooting right along.
It's supposed to be good for your skin, too.

3) Walk your a** off.
Well... yeah...

Which leads us to one of my favorite discoveries of the past 7 years -- TVP.

No, it's not a disease that's killing children by the thousands in Africa. And no, it's not something being loaded into a crop duster. It's textured vegetable protein. Which sounds just as discouraging until you've tried it.

TVP is used in a myriad of vegetarian dishes; veggie burgers, veggie chili, breakfast "bacon", "sausage", veggie "chicken", all kinds of stuff. Why do I like it so much?

When you're trying to lose weight, TVP is one of your best friends. One can't go out for ribs much on 1500-1800 calories a day. What to do? Grab some veggie riblets and a Diet Coke and boogie around your living room in your new skinny pants. (I recommend "It's Raining Men.")

"Gardenburger" and "Boca Burger" (among others) are pushing this stuff like crack and making a pretty penny. TVP is filling, fiber rich (in most cases), low in calories and loaded with protein. And it don't taste bad either. (My personal favorite line of products comes from "Light Life.")

Sadly, some simply can't palate the stuff. To them I say: don't eat it. I don't know what to tell you. Find another source that does all the cool tricks this stuff does. And when you do, let me know. I'll toast you with my Diet Coke and my meatless veggie corn dog.

Now, back to the disco.
More fog, Roberto!

BiasWire: Disposable Babies

Wire services like AP and Reuters matter in that the feeds they provide are often cut-and-pasted into daily newspapers to fill space. Moreover, their stringers are often relied upon to be "eyes on the ground" for newspapers which lack the wherewithal to do their own reporting in a given area. Their copy gets propagated, often without editing, throughout the MSM.

In BiasWire, a recurring feature, we'll be taking a deep dive on a wire story of interest to investigate how the biases of the wire service correspondents infect an enormous swath of the media.

In this installment, we'll look at an AP Breaking News wire story.

Jan 23, 2005

Church Buries Hundreds of Fetuses a Day After 32nd Anniversary of Supreme Court's Abortion Decision
By Catherine Tsai
Associated Press Writer

Abortion makes for a great faultline in investigating media bias. Here's the first hint: whether an unborn child is labelled a baby or a fetus is a very contentious issue in the pro-life/pro-choice debate. Pro-lifers say it's a baby. Pro-choicers say it's a fetus. Notice that the reporter uses "fetuses" without any indication (such as the scare quotes they typically employ when using one side's favored label). Interestingly, the headline refers to Roe v. Wade as the "Supreme Court's Abortion Decision", which of course is absolutely correct. The language could have been even more strongly worded as "woman's right to choose", I suppose.

BOULDER, Colo. (AP) - A Roman Catholic church buried the ashes of hundreds of aborted fetuses Sunday, a day after the 32nd anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal, drawing criticism that the church was exploiting women's grief to make a political statement.

Note the rewriting of history here. Roe v. Wade did not make abortion legal---it made laws prohibiting abortion illegal. There's a difference. Pre-Roe, one could travel to any number of states which permitted abortion to get one. Moreover, even in states where abortions were illegal, providers were available (although they have since been demonized as "back alley abortionists"). Moreover, the reporter refers to nebulous "criticism" from unnamed sources to couch the accusation that this church was "exploiting women's grief to make a political statement." So it's the Church that's political, and the women who are grieving---gotcha.

A crowd of 250 parishioners prayed as the ashes were buried in the Sacred Heart of Mary Church cemetery, while a handful of protesters gathered nearby holding signs that read, "This church is a grave robber."

If there was only a handful of protestors, it couldn't have been as hard to count them as it was to count the 250 parishioners. We also get to hear the opinion of the protestor(s)through the sign, but do not get an excerpt from the prayer here.

A mortuary hired by the abortion clinic to dispose of the fetuses had been giving the ashes to the church for years to be buried at a memorial. Dr. Warren Hern, clinic director, said he had no idea such an arrangement had been made and said his contract required the mortuary to bury the ashes in its own plot.

Which abortion clinic? Is there only one in Colorado? In Boulder? And if this has been going on for years, how is it news? How is it controversial? Is it because the abortionist---oops, I mean "clinic director"---just found out about it and called AP?

Note also the nice, clinical "dispose of the fetuses" line the reporter uses. I love it when the MSM has a whiff of the jackboot in their phrasing. I suppose "inter the remains" would have been too sentimental.

The church agreed to return the remains of 300 to 500 fetuses that had been cremated in November before the service began Sunday. The church had been planning to bury up to 1,000 fetuses. Seven bags containing remains from miscarriages also were buried.

Okay, so we've got up to 1,000 abortions, but "seven bags" of remains from miscarriages. The cynic in me wonders if the reason we're not given a ballpark on the number of miscarriages is that we could then compare it to the number of abortions and judge for ourselves if the "rare" part of "safe, legal, and---" holds sway here. Also, if the Church is burying unborn children, regardless of whether they were aborted or miscarried, how is that a political statement?

Organizers said they wanted to give the fetuses the burial they deserved and provide a place for women who have had abortions to grieve and mourn.

Note how the reporter chooses "Organizers" over such friendlier terms as "Clergy" or "Church members" or the like. Political events have "organizers", you see. I'm fairly certain these "organizers" did not call the unborn children "fetuses" either, or they might even have been quoted. It is interesting that the Church folk want to provide a ceremony for women who have had abortions to "grieve and mourn"---given that the "clinic director" seems to have handed off these remains without any thought given to such a ceremony, given his confusion over what was to be done with the remains.

"I think they misunderstand what we're doing," service organizer Susan LaVelle said. She said the parish has held unannounced burials twice a year since 2001, but the parish priest agreed to make the burial public this year.

LaVelle said the timing of the service so close to the Saturday anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision was a coincidence.

Could the reason for the public service have anything to do with wanting to give women who've had an abortion a chance to attend and mourn? What is the big deal about the day after the 32nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade? There's nothing magic about 32, and Church services do tend to happen on the Sabbath. Was this somehow out of cycle for these type of ceremonies?

But Kate Horle, spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, has said many of Hern's patients were devastated by the news of a religious service.

"Our concern is for the women who had personal relationships with Dr. Hern and their understanding of what would happen with the fetuses," she said. "That trust was violated with a third party."

Horle said most of Hern's patients have fetuses with fatal anomalies. His clinic specializes in "late abortion for fetal disorders," according to its Web site.

How many? This reporter seems to have trouble with simple counting. I have no doubt that women who are not devastated by having an abortion may well be devastated by news of a religious service, but one wonders how they discovered this fact in the first place. Might Planned Parenthood have been involved, or Dr. Hern? As to their "understanding of what would happen with the fetuses", what was it? We're not told, and it apparently isn't on Dr. Hern's website. Funny that Dr. Hern didn't see fit to mention his specialty when the reporter asked him about the church service. Is partial birth abortion available at his clinic? We're not told, despite the battle being waged over it in Congress.

Hern did not immediately return a message seeking comment Sunday, but called the service last week "a cynical exploitation of private grief for political purposes."

Doug Kramer, 18, said his family attended the burial because his sister considered an abortion 14 years ago but instead gave her baby up for adoption.

"It's great to bring this out to the public," he said. "The word needs to be spread. Abortion does stop a beating heart. It's not giving a girl or boy a chance at life."

If he didn't return a message seeking comment, how did he call the service "a cynical exploitation of private grief for political purposes?" Moreover, on what does he base his assessment that the Church is acting cynically or politically here? We at least get a quote from an attendee, who notably does not use the word "fetus," but rather "girl or boy." The reporter also gives this person the last word, which is certainly fair.

Perhaps the aforementioned website can shed more light.

Ahh, yes, there's the tagline regarding specialization the reporter found through a deep dive of the site's main page (it's in the upper right hand corner, big as life).

Let's dig a little deeper. From the About Us page we learn Dr. Hern isn't just the clinic's director, but a practicing abortionist:

It is my opinion, as a practicing physician, that the provision of abortion services must first meet the highest standards of medical care and surgical safety. It is also critically important that the woman who seeks this service must feel that she is being cared for at every point by health care professionals who are not only empathetic to her needs but who are also strong supports of reproductive choice and freedom. All staff members who help me with this work at Boulder Abortion Clinic are selected with these criteria in mind.

Is it me or does the "strong supports [sic] of reproductive choice and freedom" line sound a bit political? It's one thing to provide a medical service as best you can; quite another to require your staff to share your philosophy of the same. Might Dr. Hern have a political agenda to drive his outrage? Nah, I'm just cynical. And political.

By its name and continued existence, Boulder Abortion Clinic makes a statement that women are free to make their own choices about their own lives, bodies, and family needs. I have been personally involved from the beginning of my medical career in advocacy of reproductive freedom, and I continue in this commitment. We have survived anti-abortion harassment and violence and shown our determination to provide these services in spite of everything. As a result, our patients are protected by the highest standards of safety and security when they come to my office.

As we have recently observed the 31st anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade decision, we know we have done our part to make the meaning of that landmark decision for human freedom a reality for our patients and their families. The true meaning of "family values" is the freedom to choose your own life and values with those you love.

Warren M. Hern, M.D.,M.P.H., Ph.D.
Director, Boulder Abortion Clinic

Now waitaminute! "Makes a statement...personally involved...in advocacy of reproductive freedom..." all sound pretty darned political to me, but the last paragraph is the dead-nuts clincher. In it, we learn that the clinic "observes" the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, that the director believes it to be a "landmark decision for human freedom" and that he defines "family values" as "the freedom to choose your own life and values with those you love." Sounds pretty political to me.

Yet in the article he was presented as a medical bureaucrat concerned only for his patients...odd.

A review of the medical services page reveals that the clinic performs abortions up through 36 weeks (9 months) since the last menstruation. Here's something interesting:

One of the main differences for third trimester patients having a pregnancy terminated for fetal anomaly is that they may wish to have an intact fetus that they can examine and hold as part of the grief process. For many of these patients, it is not a fetus - it's a baby. The woman and her family may request special procedures such as special religious ceremonies, genetic studies, formal autopsy, private cremation, or private burial. We can arrange for any or all of these special procedures upon request.

While these procedures or ceremonies can be arranged upon request, we do not expect or require any patients or families to go through any special rituals, ceremonies, or grief process at Boulder Abortion Clinic. Dr. Hern believes that the patient's own family, physician, and religious counselors are better prepared to provide these kinds of support at home in most cases.

Hmm, if the abortion clinic staff can recognize that there is some debate as to whether unborn children are fetuses or babies, perhaps the AP reporter might? It's interesting that the good Dr. is against having any sort of ritual, ceremony, or grief at his facility. I wonder if this fuels his anger on the subject to some extent. As nobody has asked him, I'll keep wondering.

Still digging, I find this on another page of the website:

STATEMENT
of
Warren M. Hern, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D.
Director
Boulder Abortion Clinic
1130 Alpine
Boulder, Colorado 80304

Assistant Clinical Professor
Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology
University of Colorado Health Sciences Center
Denver, Colorado 80220

Before the Judiciary Committee
of the
United States Senate

Concerning S. 939
17 November 1995

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to submit a statement to this body concerning S. 939, the so-called "Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act" of 1995. I appreciate the invitation to prepare a statement that came to me from Senators Kennedy, Biden, and Specter as members of the Judiciary Committee. I also deeply appreciate the joint request by Senators Hank Brown and Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado that I be given an opportunity to testify in person and that my remarks be inserted in the record. Since I was not permitted to testify in person, I request that this written statement be entered into the record as per the requests by Senators Brown and Campbell.

It seems the good "clinic director" was opposed to the Partial Birth Abortion Act and submitted an official statement at the request of two Colorado senators. Not that that's political or anything.

He's actually quite the politico. This page lists his recent articles. Here's a couple of titles to provide the flavor of his work:

December 21, 2004
"What's intelligent about this design?" The Daily Camera.

July 30, 2004
"Ronald Reagan And Abortion" The Colorado Statesman.

October 22, 2003
"Did I violate the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban?" A doctor ponders a new era of prosecution. Slate.com

January 25, 2002
"Repressive abortion policy of Owens and GOP is similar to Taliban's 9th century attitudes. The Colorado Statesman, Commentary

March 31, 2001
Free speech that threatens my life. The New York Times Op-Ed page, Saturday, March 31, 2001.

January 31, 2001
"A Doctor's Fear"
The New York Times, Letter to the Editor and response from the Chairman of the House Republican Conference.

January 21, 2001
"GOP will attack abortion rights"
The Daily Camera (Boulder, Colorado), Guest Editorial.


Well, you get the idea. It might have been nice to know that the fellow accusing churchgoers of cynicism and politics was himself a political activist.

Now, I'm not going to attack Dr. Hern, his practice, or his beliefs. He has a right to all three, and Roe v. Wade and subsequent Supreme Court decisions are the law of the land, like it or not. I am sure that he is as dedicated to the safety of the women who enters the doors of that clinic as he maintains he is. I'll further maintain that if women are going to have abortions, the abortion procedure should be as safe as it possibly can be for them. No sense compounding the tragedy here with two deaths instead of one.

I do think that Catherine Tsai ought to be taken to task for trying to present Dr. Hern as apolitical, while inferring without any evidence presented at all that the Sacred Heart of Mary Church personnel are political creatures.

Here is the Church's website. I defy you to find anything political on it, in stark contrast to Dr. Hern's.

Regardless of how one feels about abortion, we ought to expect better than sloppy, biased reporting from our media.

The Latest Fad in Education, Chinese-style

And I thought American primary education was a propaganda mill:

XINMI, China -- Three years ago, he was a die-hard Falun Gong follower, serving a life sentence for trying to set himself afire in the name of the spiritual movement banished by China as "evil."

Today, with his prison term drastically cut to 19 years for good behavior, Liu Yunfang is a convert of a different sort -- and one Beijing is eager to showcase as a successful "rehabilitation."

"I was wrong," Liu told reporters who made a government-organized visit to his prison in central Henan province this week. "I should be punished by law."

Liu is one of three men imprisoned for orchestrating a group self-immolation in Tiananmen Square in 2001. Liu doused himself with gasoline but was grabbed by police before he could ignite himself.

However, a mother and her 12-year-old daughter died, and images of their bodies engulfed in flames -- and later charred and blackened -- were aired on state television to underscore China's position the sect is a dangerous cult.

Liu was sentenced for producing pamphlets teaching that Falun Gong followers could reach spiritual fulfillment by burning themselves. Falun Gong members abroad have denied the group's teachings encourage suicide, saying instead its philosophy values life.

Since banning the group in 1999, Beijing regularly disseminates propaganda against it and justifies its ongoing crackdown by allowing reporters to interview converts in tightly controlled settings.

The persistence of that campaign illustrates the ruling Communist Party's continued perception that Falun Gong is a threat.

Falun Gong drew millions of followers in the 1990s with its mix of calisthenics and doctrines drawn from Buddhism, Taoism and the ideas of its founder, Li Hongzhi, a former government grain clerk. Until the 2001 self-immolations, followers staged near-daily protests of the government ban in Tiananmen Square, the spiritual and political heart of the Chinese capital.

Liu and two other converts, Wang Jindong and Xue Hongjun, wore matching blue-and-white striped uniforms and caps when they met reporters individually this week. In contrite tones, they renounced their faith in Falun Gong and its founder, and expressed their gratitude to the government for treating them well.

"These three criminals have deeply reflected upon themselves while in prison," warden Yu Xiaoming said. "Finally, they are clear about the nature of the Falun Gong cult."

Their sentences were reduced because they were "active in rehabilitation," Yu said. Wang's 15-year term was lessened by 2 1/2 years and Xue's by two.

Practitioners claim they have been abused, tortured and killed by the hundreds in Chinese prisons and labor camps. Chinese authorities deny mistreatment but have not disclosed how they rehabilitate Falun Gong members.

When reporters visited the prisoners in a government-organized trip in 2002, Liu was steadfast about his beliefs and even demonstrated the slow-moving exercises that Falun Gong followers practice.

Now, the former factory worker seems changed.

Shuffling into a fluorescent-lit meeting room, Liu mumbled incoherently at times to reporters, his voice shaking and eyes welling with tears as he spoke of his former life. Prison officials say he is ill, suffering from high blood pressure and other maladies.

Liu said he stopped believing in Falun Gong on Sept. 27, 2003.

"I was more addicted than (the rest) so I caused more harm to the country and the government," said Liu, 60, who sat hunched in his seat. "Last time when reporters came to me, I still wanted to uphold Falun Gong, but now I know I was wrong."

He was supported by prison officials on either side when he left.

Wang, 54, is the only one in prison who set fire to himself. His face, devoid of eyebrows, is mottled with scar tissue. Some fingers have been amputated.

"It is the government that has given me a second life," Wang said. "I have totally woken up and I think I should persuade people still addicted to Falun Gong to wake up, too.

"To Li Hongzhi, I have only one word in my heart -- hate -- because he killed so many of our beloved and our compatriots."

Wang placed a half-dozen photos on a table: his wife and his daughter smiling, himself as a handsome young man.

"I feel ashamed about believing in Falun Gong," Wang said. "It is Falun Gong and Li Hongzhi who have ruined me."

In Kaifeng, a bustling city northeast of the prison, Wang's wife and daughter -- both former Falun Gong members -- live with the daughter's husband and baby in a single room tucked in a maze of alleys. The room is filled with a bed, piles of comforters, suitcases and cupboards. A map of the world hangs on the wall.

"We feel so cheated to have our deep beliefs shattered after all these years," said Wang Juan, Wang's 26-year-old daughter. "My father's change is sincere. We are filled with hope for the future."

Minutes away, Hao Huijun, 51, and her daughter Chen Guo, 23, the most physically destroyed of the Tiananmen group, live in an airy welfare home.

Flames burned off their noses, lips, ears and hair, leaving their faces and skulls shiny with scars and grafted skin. Hao -- a former music teacher -- has only a patch of skin over her eye sockets, with a tiny slit allowing blurry vision out of her right eye. Her hands are stubs and she is partially deaf in her right ear.

"I realized that I made a lot of trouble for the government and society," Hao said, weeping as her daughter, ill with a fever, slept in the next room.

"We are thoroughly rehabilitated."

From Newsday.com

This is flat-out appalling. The usual suspects in the MSM who decry American interrogation techniques and routinely accuse talk radio of indoctrination and propaganda take no issue with China's brutal treatment of Falun Gong and other religious dissidents. Is this what they're looking forward to in "The Chinese Century" to come?

The Day the Laughter Died

Johnny Carson passed away today:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Legendary television entertainer Johnny Carson has died of emphysema at age 79, the NBC television network reported on its Web site on Sunday.

Carson hosted NBC's popular "The Tonight Show" for nearly 30 years, long dominating late-night television with an estimated 12 million viewers each night. He did his final show on Friday, May 22, 1992, seen by 55 million, and was replaced the next Monday by the current host, Jay Leno.

Sidekick Ed McMahon introduced him nightly with the rallying cry of "Heeeeeeere's Johnny!" Carson's blend of humor, music and conversation was the last thing millions of Americans heard before drifting off to sleep.

"I am one of the lucky people in the world. I have found something I liked to do, and I have enjoyed every single minute of it," a teary-eyed Carson said as he closed the show for the last time. "I bid you a very heartfelt goodnight."

In later years, Carson became something of a recluse in his Malibu, California, home, rarely venturing into the public eye.

After a 1999 quadruple bypass heart operation, Carson cut back on his tennis and discontinued his annual treks to Africa, the French Riviera and the Wimbledon tennis tournament. He had battled emphysema for years.

Carson had an enormous impact in comedy and entertainment. His generational stint on "The Tonight Show" established the format of every major late night talk show to follow. His support of standup comedy broke comedians like Jerry Seinfeld nationally. His monologues were a bellwether for the course of American culture and politics.

A great man has passed, one who will be deeply mourned.

You Would Have Thought the Canadian Border Would Have Been Easier

From Reuters, news that isn't quite as comforting as one might think at first blush:

BOSTON (Reuters) - Police carrying radiation detectors patrolled
Boston's subway system on Friday after the FBI added another 10 names to a list
of people it wants to question over a reported "dirty bomb" plot in the
city.
Authorities reassured area residents that there was no cause for panic
two days after an uncorroborated tip triggered a Federal Bureau of Investigation
manhunt. Media reports spoke of threats to explode a so-called "dirty bomb"
which disperses low-level radioactive material.
The top federal prosecutor in
Massachusetts would not rule out the possibility of a hoax, while Boston
newspapers reported on Friday that officials were eyeing revenge as a possible
motive for the anonymous tip received by California police.
"It could be a
drug deal gone bad and (the tipster is) using this threat of a terrorist attack
to bring a ton of heat down on someone," the Boston Herald quoted one unnamed
law enforcement official as saying.
While there was no change in the terror
alert status either nationally or in Massachusetts, authorities appeared to be
treating the potential threat seriously.
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation
Authority, the region's mass transit system, deployed more officers than normal
around downtown Boston and some were using radiation sensors, according to
Deputy Chief John Martino.
"As is the case with any alert we deploy teams of
officers with radiological detectors throughout the system," Martino told
Reuters, adding that such deployments were also standard for big events such as
the Boston Marathon and July 4.
The FBI, which on Wednesday night released
the names and photographs of two Chinese men and two Chinese women it sought for
questioning in connection with the potential threat, released the names of
another 10 people on Thursday night.
The FBI called the 10 people -- nine men
and one woman -- "persons of interest in the unspecified potential threat to the
City of Boston." But as with the four names released on Wednesday night, the FBI
said none of the names had ever shown up on any "watch list."
Eight of the
nine men had Chinese names, while the ninth was named Jose Ernesto Beltran
Quinones.
The FBI released passport numbers and possible dates of birth for
six of the 10 people. The lone woman, Yu Xian Weng, was listed with two passport
numbers and two possible dates of birth.
Officials at the Chinese Embassy in
Washington were not immediately available for comment.

Here's the problem: we've got a Mexican neighbor printing comic books telling their undesirables how to infiltrate our borders. We've got a Canadian neighbor willing to let every imam with a sob story into their country, the border of which is barely patrolled. Moreover, we've got a bunch of Blame America Firsters who both believe that no one is out to hurt us and that even if they were we probably deserved it, so no domestic counterterrorism operations should be allowed, especially if somebody might find my hydroponic pot stash in the process.

Let's say this dirty bomb thing is legit.

Most people probably believe a dirty bomb is something requiring lots of technical knowhow and sophisticated planning to deploy. It's not. It's a bunch of radioactive or other toxic materiel put into some sort of container in proximity to some explosives. When the explosives go boom, the nasty, poisonous stuff is scattered far and wide. Some radium extracted from discarded medical equipment and a fertilizer bomb would do nicely.

The point of a dirty bomb is not to kill, although some folks will be killed by it. The point is to sow terror. We are uniquely vulnerable to this type of terror in that the EPA has spent decades convincing people that an increase of one part per billionth of arsenic in their drinking water will ruin their health. Erin Brockovich is considered a hero for confusing correlation with causation in the environment. Americans will panic if a dirty bomb goes off somewhere in this country, and that panic will kill more people than even the lingering effects of such a bomb would. 9/11 frightened many Americans off planes---a dirty bomb in one of our cities would have far worse consequences, despite relatively minor and short-term damage.

This is why it is so important to crush al Qaeda and other terrorist movements abroad. It is nearly impossible to stop a determined enemy from launching such an attack domestically, and what could be done the Left will not let us do. Instead, we need to keep the enemy occupied by destroying their command and control networks and drying up their money, either of which will keep the terrorists from pulling off a successful operation.

The notion that Chinese terrorists might have driven most of the way across our country with a dirty bomb should give us some pause. A color-coded scale isn't going to do anything to prevent such a nightmare scenario from occurring, but an educated populace committed to the War on Terror will.

[Edited for missing link---Teflon]

Culture Wars: "Six"

I watched a documentary called "Six" last night. Dr Helen Smith, a forensic psychologist who also happens to be married to uber-blogger Instapundit, relays the story of six teenagers from rural America who slew a family of Jehovah's Witnesses in cold blood at a highway rest area in 1997. The hour-long documentary includes interviews with two of the teenagers, courtroom camera footage, and interviews with friends, family, and associates of the perpetrators and their victims.

This is a fairly disturbing piece of film.

The six teenagers were drawn together as outsiders in their high school ("freaks"). Several had been diagnosed with severe mental disorders, at least one had a history of cutting herself, and all but one had a horrible family life. Alone, they were outcasts. Together, they were dangerous, dabbling in the occult and taking advantage of their dysfunctional families to get away with increasingly antisocial behavior. This culminated in a bizarre blood-drinking ritual in a local motel room which led them to flee their small Kentucky town for New Orleans. It was during this flight that they met a religious family who began to witness to them. They slaughtered two adults and one child and critically-wounded the other child (a toddler).

The film consists essentially of scenes of interview subjects talking to the camera interspersed with courtroom testimony and footage of the local area. While the story is simple, the writer (Dr. Smith) and director Roman Karpynec overcomplicate it with jumpy editing. The viewer is left with Rashomon-like questions regarding the official narrative (Did the teenagers drink each other's blood? Who shot whom? etc) and no real understanding as to how events unfolded as they did.

The documentary's efforts to highlight the family backgrounds of the murderers are more successful. The interview with Natasha Cornett's mother is particularly chilling. She relates family tragedies (chiefly of her own making) nonchalantly while spouting Oprahisms about the need for "help" and "caring". Help and caring are wonderful, but perhaps marrying your daughter's father, not abusing drugs, and refraining from beating your daughter are likely faster paths to a stable home life. But if you ask her, she blames society.

Which at heart is what troubles me about this film. The writer and director never intrude upon the presentation, but given the manner in which the material is presented, and given the description of the movie from their website, one wonders if the message they are trying to convey isn't "Society must do more." I suppose society must always "do more", but mustn't individuals make their own choices as well? Short of involuntarily committing these children when their behavior turned violent, it is unclear exactly what the documentarians would suggest be done to fix these problems. Perhaps it is better that they don't.

I suspect, however, that this film is not about issue advocacy at all, but rather about encouraging the viewer to think more deeply about violent crime and children today, not just in this one tragic set of murders, but also in those which assault us daily in the evening news broadcast yet pass unnoticed, video wallpaper flickering away while we eat dinner.

Recommended.

Weren't We At War or Something?

Hugh Hewitt, the Blogfather, has a piece in today's LA Times providing sound advice to the paper if it has any interest at all in improving its coverage of the War on Terror:

In short, The Times needs to reorganize to actually cover the war as a war.
The last global war was not covered as though the Pacific Theater was
independent of the battles in North Africa, or the Russian front
disconnected from the D-day invasion. As with that global struggle, so with
this one. As it is, unfortunately, readers know less of the terrorist enemy
than 1942 readers knew of the geography of North Africa.

This is the Bush Administration's biggest and most inexplicable failure, in my opinion. By not having Administration personnel hitting the Sunday talk shows every week in a full-court press to drive home what's going on in the War, the MSM can simply write "Are we done yet?" stories to their black hearts' content.

[Edited to include links---Teflon]