BlogRoll: Blogs4God, Evangelical Outpost, and Wittenberg Gate

With great moral controversies such as the state-sponsored murder of Terri Schiavo at the center stage of American politics, the godblogs are an indispensable source of righteous support. It's high time we added some more to the BlogRoll.

Blogs4God is a great portal to the explosive growth area represented by religious blogs. In addition to the most comprehensive listing of godblogs found anywhere, Blogs4God offers original content from its moderators. MeanDean has a great piece on his reaction to hearing that three men were arrested for attempting to bring water to Terri Schiavo. One wonders if the arresting officers reflected on the Roman soldiers at Calvary and their similar devotion to duty over mercy.

Evangelical Outpost is perhaps the most famous of the godblogs, for good reason---it's one of the best reads of the blogosphere. Check out this post on the implication of separation of powers and civil disobedience in the Schiavo case for a great example of the high-quality thought to be consumed at this great blog.


I first came across Wittenberg Gate during one of Hugh Hewitt's Vox Blogoli campaigns. I was favorably impressed by the sophistication of the site and its commentary, and began checking back periodically. Dory did such a great job chasing down relevant tidbits to key stories that this site's become the first place I check for a roundup of what's going on in the spiritual side of the blogosphere. Here's a great example: Wittenberg Gate found this account of Terri Schiavo's attorney's last visit with her before the feeding tube was removed. It's blogs like this one which make possible the rapid ad hoc networking that is the core strength of the blogosphere as a political force.

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

Dirty Little Secrets Roundup

Here's some of the secrets Jim Dunnigan's uncovered recently:

1. The Navy's using the eBay model to target Assignment Incentive Pay (AIP) offers with great results---more assignments filled for less money. Thus those who have a higher tolerance for crappy locales get to spend more time in them. It's karma.

2. Frivolous lawsuits are limiting the ability of the CIA to gather intelligence needed to wage the War on Terror. I'm sure the terror masters will kill lawyers last as a result.

3. Al Qaeda's found a last redoubt---Yemen. Wonder how much AIP they had to get to take THAT assignment.

4. China is staging logistical supplies for possible action in North Korea and Taiwan. They'd better bring a lot of body bags if they intend to cross the Taiwan Strait.

5. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) discriminates against soldiers who admit to playing Dungeons & Dragons. I tend to agree---if you're dumb enough to admit this, you're a security risk. Besides, all the cool roleplayers are into Paranoia or Vampire: The Masquerade anyway.

BlogRoll: ScrappleFace and The Onion

On days like this, laughter is precious.

Fortunately, there are some very talented humorists who've made the Internet their home.

Scott Ott produces pointed, spot-on, sometimes-painful satire for ScrappleFace.com. Here's an example of the power of parody:

Right-to-Starve Added to Feminism's Victories
by Scott Ott
(2005-03-19) -- The National Organization for Women (NOW) today held a jubilant news conference to celebrate the latest advance in women's rights -- the right to have your estranged husband choose to end your life.

"First, it was women's suffrage -- the right to vote -- then abortion, the right to privacy," said an unnamed NOW spokesman. "Finally, a man has led the way in freeing us from the antiquated bigotry that has kept our former husbands from choosing a slow, painful death for us."

The NOW source said the court-ordered removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, based on the testimony of Michael Schiavo alone has "opened a world of opportunities for women to freely die at the hands of the men they love."

"The next time you tell your husband 'I'd rather die than go to that party,' you can rest assured that your words have legal weight and, if the occasion arises, your wishes will be respected," said the NOW source. "What's more, you're free from the worry that your man will be prosecuted for your murder."

Michael Schiavo lives with another woman and their two children. He developed this "backup family" according to his lawyer, "to assuage his eventual grief over the coming loss of Terri -- the woman he loves to death."

Legal experts at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) also praised the "new progressive precedent in contract law."

"The court has affirmed that a verbal contract where the only witness is one of the contracting parties is legally binding even if that witness has already violated a written contract, in this case a marriage license, verbally affirmed before dozens of witnesses," said the ACLU expert. "The bias against known contract-breakers is gone. This also gives a more influential voice before the courts to our nation's incapacitated, comatose and dead citizens. Their wishes can be determined by the words of their beneficiaries without the hassle of documentation or multiple witnesses."

Now some folks might well find that tasteless, but the twin pillars of comedy are surprise and truth, and what gives this piece punch is the underlying truth of it---the feminist establishment has nothing to say about a woman being slowly tortured to death by the state at her husband's behest.

Ott's a humorist on the Right, a rare enough bird. Needless to say, there are folks who bring the funny from the Left, and not just the "Wow, you're not funny but you vote the way I do so I'll chortle politely" kind of laughs that Margaret Cho and Janeane Garofalo get.

I was first introduced to The Onion the way a lot of folks in Milwaukee were---I picked it up while waiting for a buddy at a bar. Soon it became must-reading, and when it went online and the staff picked up from their Madison, WI office and made the trek to the Big Apple (if not the big-time), I kept right on reading.

The Onion's definitely a left-wing rag, much like National Lampoon was, and their targets skew way more to the GOP than the far funnier Democrats. Yet I laugh, even when I think the piece is a cheap shot. Here's a recent example:

WASHINGTON, DC—Almost a year after the cessation of major combat and a month after the nation's first free democratic elections, President Bush unveiled the coalition forces' strategy for exiting Iraq.

"I'm pleased to announce that the Department of Defense and I have formulated a plan for a speedy withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq," Bush announced Monday morning. "We'll just go through Iran."

Bush said the U.S. Army, which deposed Iran's longtime enemy Saddam Hussein, should be welcomed with open arms by the Islamic-fundamentalist state.

"And Iran's so nearby," Bush said. "It's only a hop, skip, and a jump to the east."

According to White House officials, coalition air units will leave forward air bases in Iraq and transport munitions to undisclosed locations in Iran. After 72 to 96 hours of aerial-bomb retreats, armored-cavalry units will retreat across the Zagros mountains in tanks, armored personnel carriers, and strike helicopters. The balance of the 120,000 troops will exit into the oil-rich borderlands around the Shatt-al-Arab region within 30 days.

Pentagon sources said U.S. Central Command has been formulating the exit plan under guidelines set by Bush.

"The fact is, we've accomplished our goals in Iraq," said General George Casey, the commander of coalition forces in the Iraqi theater. "Now, it's time to bring our men and women home—via Iran."

Questions have been raised about the unprecedented size of the withdrawal budget.

"I'm asking Congress to approve a $187-billion budget to enable us to exit as smoothly as possible," said Casey, whose budget request includes several hundred additional M1A1 Abrams battle tanks, 72 new C-130 cargo planes, and two brigades of artillery. "We're concerned about the safety of our troops, so we need to have the capacity to deal with insurgent forces all the way from the Iraqi border through to Tehran."

Casey has requested a budget increase for the Pentagon, so that the government can reward recruits who serve in the U.S. mission to exit Iraq.

"The plan also includes a minor stopover for refueling and provisional replenishment in Syria," Casey said. "But I don't expect we'll need more than 50,000 additional troops for that stretch of the Iraq pullout."

Bush's plan has met with widespread support.

"The people who said Iraq was a quagmire and that the president would never get our troops out are now eating crow," said Sean Hannity on his popular radio show Tuesday. "Of course, I don't expect anyone will have the honor to come forward and actually admit that they were wrong to question our commander-in-chief."

Sioux Falls, SD's Dianne Haverbuck, who has two sons in the military, said she was pleased to hear of the impending exit.

"Don and Kenneth have already been in Iraq an extra four months, so it's so good to hear that they'll finally be leaving that dangerous place," Haverbuck said. "I can't tell you how happy I was when the president said—what was it? I wrote it down. 'Getting our troops out of the Middle East and back home to their families is a viable long-term goal.'"

"I can't wait to see the boys," Haverbuck added.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hoseini-Khamenei welcomed the exit plan.

"Let the Allied armies come to Iran," Khamenei said. "I believe I can assure you that, if they do withdraw here, their brothers-in-arms in the Islamic Republican Army, the Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Quds special forces units, and the Basij Popular Mobilization Army will no doubt do everything they can to make the troops' trip back home memorable."

So for bringing the funny from both sides of the American political spectrum, we'll add ScrappleFace and The Onion to the BlogRoll.

With a heave, and a ho, to the BlogRoll they will go!

Reliable Sources: Claudia Rosett

As usual, the Blogfather gets it right:

Rosett's attachment to the cause of the oppressed and the enslaved has already won her international acclaim among human rights activists, and her dogged pursuit of the oil-for-food-for-dictators scandals at the United Nations pushed that story in all of its mind-numbing complexity into the media mainstream, where it has done more to set in motion long overdue oversight of the United Nations than all of the previous blue ribbon reports and congressional hearings combined. She dug. She reported. And she did it long before it became fashionable to push Kofi to answer tough questions.

Rosett is the journalist-in-residence at the Foundation for the
Defense of Democracies, and a columnist for OpinionJournal.com, as well as a contributor to many other outlets. Her biography demonstrates that she is a reporter's reporter, but it is her passion for those who have no voice and no free press that sets her apart from the pack.

Rosett covers the despots of North Korea and the Middle East as well as the crooked sermon-givers at the United Nations. She follows the dissidents who are behind bars in many countries, and never lets up trying to bring light into dark dungeons. This week she reported from downtown Beirut, just as she had reported from Beijing in 1989 as Tiananmen Square became code for brutal repression.

Bloggers and Internet columnists often find easy marks in the ranks of old media, so they ought to pause and hold up for admiration and emulation those who do the job that a free press was intended to do. Claudia Rosett is as "old media" as they get, and the single best advertisement for what journalism can be when practiced with skill and passion.

Her largest contribution to date has been the deep dive coverage of the Oil-for-Food scam at the UN---for this alone she would have earned an honored place in our Reliable Sources list. But she has also been a determined opponent of the nonsense tyrants spew and the MSM gobbles up greedily at face value to fill column inches and knock America.

Any way you measure it, Claudia Rosett is a Reliable Source.

The War on Terri Part III

Terri Schiavo is starving to death right now, against the wishes of her parents, against the wishes of the United States House of Representatives, against the wishes of the President of the United States, against moral principle, the Hippocratic Oath, and legal tradition.

Here is video of the woman The Washington Post's Ceci Connolly called "comatose" as she sneered at efforts to save her on "Special Report With Brit Hume" last night. She's quite active for comatose, isn't she? Doesn't matter to Connolly.

Connolly's paper, The Washington Post, saw fit to call conservatives hypocrites for advocating that "accused criminals" be put to death, but stopping the State of Florida from executing the innocent Terri Schiavo. Andrew McCarthy takes the amoral rag to task:

Finally, as for the alleged inconsistency, there is, of course, no greater iniquity than treating two unequal things as if they were the same. The Washington Post’s editorial board should find another line of work if it cannot discern the difference between, on the one hand, a murderer who stands convicted despite having had had rich resort to various state and federal tribunals — including a jury of his peers — with the advantage of every legal and factual presumption our system can offer, and, on the other hand, an innocent woman who is alive and responsive to stimuli, who has parents ready and willing to care for her, and who is about to be subjected to two weeks of torture — starving and dehydration — that the Washington Post would have a cow over if it were applied, say, to interrogate Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

The right of the innocent to live isn’t contingent on the good will of governments and courts. — It derives from a higher law, as does the obligation to defend it. That there is such a higher law is not just an American principle (see the Declaration of Independence), a conservative principle, or a Judeo-Christian principle.

As much as I admire McCarthy's piece and the cause it serves, he's barking up the wrong tree referring to Judeo-Christian principles when talking about the MSM. How many Christians or observant Jews does he think sit on the Washington Post's editorial board? If there are any, they surely have erected a "wall of separation" between Christ's reverence for life and their noxious editorial position on torturing Terri Schiavo to death.

True feminists don't much care for the notion that a wife is her husband's chattel property, to be discarded when he no longer finds her entertaining. Michael Schiavo has waged a decade-long battle to kill his wife. He could have divorced her and let her parents care for her. He chose to remain in control over her, to refuse any effort to provide her with therapy, to refuse any additional diagnostic testing which might confirm the persistent vegetative state (PVS) diagnosis. God knows, were I in his situation, I'd want every bit of available information in order to sleep at night. Michael Schiavo has no conscience-stricken insomnia, and at least some feminists find that odd.

While bloggers post, Terri starves and weakens. It could take 1-2 weeks for her to die, an agonizing and slow death which her husband claims is warranted due to an alleged conversation he had with his young wife before she was stricken, but which she apparently didn't feel strongly enough about to write down during the "living will" craze 15 years ago.

If Terri is murdered by the state, this case will cast a long shadow, and serve as precedent for further repugnant actions.

Have an elderly parent costing you a fortune in nursing home fees thanks to Alzheimer's? No problem---you're the guardian; starve her to death.

Have a severely autistic child incapable of feeding himself? Save on those medical bills and headaches---withold water until he expires.

Is this the type of America we want to live in? A place where those without a voice, those unable to care for themselves, those who have people willing to love and care for them, those stricken and hurting souls are to be discarded like trash dumped by the side of the road?

For those of you who presume to judge "quality of life", what quality of life will we Americans have when we become even more expendable?

The War on Terri Part II

Terrible news today for Terri Schiavo as the insufferably arrogant Judge Greer ignores a Congressional subpoena and orders her feeding tube removed so she can slowly starve to death:

"I have had no cogent reason why the (congressional) committee should intervene," Greer told attorneys in a conference call, adding that last-minute action by Congress does not invalidate years of court rulings.

Judge Greer also ignored the President of the United States:

President's Statement on Terri Schiavo

The case of Terri Schiavo raises complex issues. Yet in instances like this one, where there are serious questions and substantial doubts, our society, our laws, and our courts should have a presumption in favor of life. Those who live at the mercy of others deserve our special care and concern. It should be our goal as a nation to build a culture of life, where all Americans are valued, welcomed, and protected - and that culture of life must extend to individuals with disabilities.

Lawrence Henry has peculiar insight into Terri's plight---he's been there:

Our news covers these situations in ghoulish detail. Terri Schiavo's case becomes a soap opera over her mostly inert body while the state legal establishment of Florida decides whether or not to "pull the plug" -- in this case, to remove her feeding tube. Even someone minimally aware, it seems to me, should not be subject to involuntary starvation and dehydration.

And one of this year's Oscar-winning movies depicts a supposedly "heroic" struggle wherein a crippled young female boxer persuades her wise, homely old trainer to...kill her. No, I haven't gone to see it, and won't. I've been too close.

Back in 1975, when my native kidneys failed, I got horribly sick all at once, not unusual with kidney failure. I had percarditis, couldn't walk well, had lost mental focus, had recently gone through a series of grand mal seizures related to an infection, can't remember what all, and it's probably just as well.

I found myself seriously considering whether or not to end it all -- to the extent that I was contemplating methods. Grace intervened, however, and I realized that people who think that way really aren't sane, and I asked to see a therapist. It hardly mattered who I talked to, but it did work.

Three things I remember from when my friends came to visit me in the hospital. One thing they all said later: "I thought you were going to die." To which I used to say, "If I ever get out of here, I'm going to get a motorcycle."

And the other was waking up at various times in my hospital bed, seeing my mother, always faithfully there, no matter what.

It is too damned easy to be cavalier and heroic about "dying with dignity" when somebody else is doing the dying.

All the usual suspects on the Left have nothing to say about Terri's impending murder.

The National Organization for Women seemingly has no issue with an estranged husband ordering the death of his inconvenient wife.

The ACLU, which routinely defends death row murderers, takes no issue with sentencing an innocent woman to a horrible, lingering death.

The Democratic Party, ever publicly encouraging the federal government to intercede on behalf of the weak and oppressed, considers the Republican-led House's last-ditch effort to save Terri through a subpoena to be a "flagrant abuse of power."

Terri Schiavo is not comatose. She is not on a ventilator. She simply cannot feed herself, a plight similar to that of a toddler, or someone with advanced Parkinson's Disease, or a quadriplegic. Nourished, hydrated, and properly cared for, she is in no imminent danger of death---in short, she is not dying. She has family willing to care for her, willing to absolve her husband of all legal, moral, and financial obligations to her.

And Michael Schiavo and all of his allies in the various halls of power in this great nation, this shining city on a hill, this vibrant, liberty and life-loving country of ours do not care that she will suffer the agonies of death by thirst and hunger.

PETA would not let such a thing happen to a dog, but Judge Greer and his life-despising cronies lose no sleep over the tortures they will inflict on this disabled woman.

May God bless and keep Terri Schiavo's parents, her friends, and her supporters in this time of grief and strife, and may God forgive those who, presented with a choice between life and death for this woman, chose to drag her into the void.

Bringing Down the Krauthammer

Charles Krauthammer nails the hypocritical Left to the wall:

It is not just that the ramparts of Euro-snobbery have been breached. Iraq and, more broadly, the Bush doctrine were always more than a purely intellectual matter. The left's patronizing, quasi-colonialist view of the benighted Arabs was not just analytically incorrect. It was morally bankrupt, too.

After all, going back at least to the Spanish Civil War, the left has always prided itself on being the great international champion of freedom and human rights. And yet, when America proposed to remove the man responsible for torturing, gassing and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, the left suddenly turned into a champion of Westphalian sovereign inviolability.

A leftist judge in Spain orders the arrest of a pathetic, near-senile Gen. Augusto Pinochet eight years after he's left office, and becomes a human rights hero -- a classic example of the left morally grandstanding in the name of victims of dictatorships long gone. Yet for the victims of contemporary monsters still actively killing and oppressing -- Khomeini and his successors, the Assads of Syria and, until yesterday, Hussein and his sons -- nothing. No sympathy. No action. Indeed, virulent hostility to America's courageous and dangerous attempt at rescue.

The international left's concern for human rights turns out to be nothing more than a useful weapon for its anti-Americanism. Jeane Kirkpatrick pointed out this selective concern for the victims of U.S. allies (such as Chile) 25 years ago. After the Cold War, the hypocrisy continues. For which Arab people do European hearts burn? The Palestinians. Why? Because that permits the vilification of Israel -- an outpost of Western democracy and, even worse, a staunch U.S. ally. Championing suffering Iraqis, Syrians and Lebanese offers no such satisfaction. Hence, silence.

Until now. Now that the real Arab street has risen to claim rights that the West takes for granted, the left takes note. It is forced to acknowledge that those brutish Americans led by their simpleton cowboy might have been right. It has no choice. It is shamed. A Lebanese, amid a sea of a million other Lebanese, raises a placard reading "Thank you, George W. Bush," and all that Euro-pretense, moral and intellectual, collapses.

Dreams I'll Never See

Lorie Byrd describes the magical alternate universe when the MSM is devoid of liberal bias.

The Revolution that Should Have Devoured Its Children

More than 10 years later, the Republican Revolution has lost steam:

This is where the 109th Congress comes in. President Bush wants to revive the spirit of 1994 and get Congress to think big on reform. Most importantly, he wants to upgrade the old-fashioned Social Security program with a retirement plan based on personal savings. Shifting from federal handouts to personal responsibility worked for welfare, and it should work for retirement as well.

Predictably, some weak-kneed Republicans are saying that such changes are too politically risky. But that's not how we read the policy lessons of the past decade. If the party sticks together on pro-market reforms, it achieves successes that pay lasting political dividends. GOP veterans -- and former President Clinton -- still proudly trumpet the success of welfare reform. That should not be forgotten as Congress ponders further reforms to the welfare state with Social Security.

The influence of Bob Michel lives on in the senior Republicans.

As Dubya would say, "That's small ball."

"What Did You Do in the War, Mommy?"

The moronic Clintonista policy of "Don't fight, that's swell" regarding women in the armed forces continues, inexcusably, under Bush:

What a lunatic scenario: the military is placing women with combat units on the assumption that they won't see combat but should they see combat it will dissipate battle resources to "evacuate" soldiers who shouldn't have been there in the first place all so that it can maintain a modified "collocation" policy that conforms to a careerist feminist ideology in the Pentagon.

Soldiers have told Donnelly that the new collocation rule is insane. An infantry officer described what evacuating the 24 women in these units will mean: "[Removing] 24 fully loaded soldiers [would require] two Blackhawk helicopters, six Huey helicopters, one Chinook helicopter, two 5-ton (or LMTV) trucks, 12 up-armored HMMWV's (with a full crew of three) and four to six unarmored HMMWV's to move. These are assets that cannot be spared simply to move females to the rear. In combat, helicopters are preferable but a very scarce asset. Imagine an entire brigade trying to chopper out these female contingents before combat -- it would require almost half of a division's worth of aviation assets to move them all at once."

The Men Who Really Invented the Internet

Bob Tyrrell has the story.

The Democratic Party and Godwin's Law

More signs that the Democratic Party is done as a national political force---the tendency of Democrat leaders to bandy about the Nazi label in reference to their political opponents, the political violation of Godwin's Law.

Victor Davis Hanson calls them on it, and says in summary:

At some point a Gore, Byrd, or Soros has a moral responsibility not to employ Nazi analogy, if for no other reason than to prevent unleashing even greater extremism by the unhinged. No doubt Abu Ali’s lawyer one day soon will say that his disturbed client’s “musings” were no different from what he read from Knopf or in the Guardian — or that he simply fell under the influence of Moveon.org and thought it was his duty to remove the Bush/Nazi threat that even U.S. senators and presidential candidates had identified and warned about.

The final irony? The president who is most slandered as Hitler will probably prove to be the most zealous advocate of democratic government abroad, the staunchest friend of beleaguered Israel, and the greatest promoter of global individual freedom in our recent memory. In turn, too many of the Left who used to talk about idealism and morality have so often shown themselves mean-spirited, cynical, and without faith in the spiritual power of democracy.

What an eerie — and depressing — age we live in.

Al Gore, Robert Byrd, and George Soros are hardly moral exemplars, so arguing their "moral obligation" is a moot point. They are driven by the will to power, not by moral considerations.

One might as well expect Arlen Specter to deal in a straightforward and honest manner, or rivers to run with rich, creamy nougat on Easter Sunday.

Mulling over the Mullahs

Ledeen on Iran:

In fact, according to Iranians with whom I have spoken, there were monster demonstrations in eleven provinces and 37 cities, and many thousands — one source said more than 30,000 — people were arrested, some only briefly, others shipped off to the infamous prisons and torture chambers of the regime. The most dramatic events took place in Shiraz, where the demonstrators directed a chant toward Washington: "Bush, you told us to rise up, and so we have. Why don’t you act?"

Which is precisely the right question. The president publicly promised the Iranian people that the United States would support them if they acted to win their own freedom, and the Iranians are now calling on Bush to make good on that promise.

Now's not the time for niceties---the best way to achieve regime change in Iran is to help the Iranian people do it. The Iranians have been doing their best to thwart our efforts to toss out the Iraqi Ba'athists---why not repay the favor?

The War on Terri

Terri Schiavo would get better treatment if only she'd been a member of al Qaeda, according to this sobering piece by Andrew McCarthy:

In this instance, though, deafening is the only word for the silence of my former interlocutors — -civil-liberties activists characteristically set on hysteria auto-pilot the moment an al Qaeda terrorist is rumored to have been sent to bed without supper by Don Rumsfeld or Al Gonzales (something that would, of course, be rank rumor since, if you kill or try to kill enough Americans, you can be certain our government will get you three halal squares a day).

Not so Terri Schiavo. She will be starved and dehydrated. Until she is dead. By court order.

What a sick world we abide in when a much-wronged innocent woman is sentenced to death in silence while Saddam Hussein enjoys his tete-a-tetes with his Democratic Party bigwig lawyer.

Now If Only George Lucas Would Go Down With His Sinking Ship

George Lucas compares the latest offspring in the degenerate "Star Wars" prequel line to "Titanic":

Director George Lucas had a message for fans as he previewed a glimpse of the final tale in the billion-dollar "Star Wars" film franchise: leave the lightsabers at home, but don't forget the tissues.

"It's not like the first one. It's more emotional," said the director of the upcoming space adventure "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith," which arrives in theaters May 19.

"I describe it as a 'Titanic' in space. It's a real tearjerker, and it will be received in a way that none of us can expect," he told theater owners at the ShoWest convention.

No longer content to mimic his own mediocre movies, now he apes another piece of godawful dreck.

When Will the Brits and Yanks Practice for the Inevitable Invasion of France?

Our "allies" the Russians at work again, per Drudge:

REPORT: CHINA, RUSSIA TO 'REHEARSE INVASION OF TAIWAN'
Thu Mar 17 2005 11:02:09 ET

MOSCOW, March 17. (RIA Novosti)-Yesterday, Chief of the Russian General Staff Yury Baluyevsky left for China to settle a scandal over the first Russian-Chinese military exercise, Commonwealth-2005, which is due to be held this fall off the Yellow Sea coast, writes Kommersant.

The initial plans were to practice operational teamwork in combating terrorism during the exercise. However, Beijing, skillfully changing the format of the exercise, has tried to re-orient the two countries' armies to practicing an invasion of Taiwan.

The choice of where the exercise will take place became a stumbling block. The Russian military selected the Xinjiang-Uigur autonomous region, basing their choice on the area's problematic nature due to Uigur separatists and its proximity to Central Asia, which has become an arena in the fight against international terrorism. However, Beijing flatly rejected the proposal. Instead, it suggested the Zhejiang province near Taiwan.

A joint exercise in this area would look too provocative and trigger a strong reaction not only from Taiwan but also America and Japan, which recently included the island in the zone of their common strategic interests.

Beijing is trying to use Russia as an additional lever of pressure on the disobedient island to show it that its policy is also causing dissatisfaction in Russia, from which the Taiwanese are expecting assistance in their dialogue with Beijing and bid to join the WTO and the UN.

On the Russian military's insistence, the exercise was shifted north to the Shangdong peninsula. However, the Chinese are trying to change the format of the exercise with proposals to enlarge the contingents with Marines and Pacific Fleet warships. Marine landings to seize the area will be practiced during the "antiterrorist" exercise.

Russia's agreement to hold the exercise will inevitably cause a furor in America, Japan and Taiwan. But a refusal will spoil relations with China, which three months ago courteously agreed to Russia's proposal to hold an exercise.

Developing...

Pluck o' the Irish

Brainster's got a great piece on the sisters of the man the IRA thugs gutted who are currently spoiling Sinn Fein mouthpiece Gerry Adams' visit to the U.S.

It's pretty bad when even Ted Kennedy won't do a photo op with you.

The Middle East is Neither Middle Nor East---Discuss

Barbara Lerner has an excellent roundup of the current Middle East situation.

To John Derbyshire, Freedom is Irrelevant

What has gotten into John Derbyshire? He catches the vapors vis-a-vis China:

Most likely the latter. My Chinese friends and relatives have been telling me for years that with rising prosperity and the demands of a confident middle class, China will morph into a rational, constitutional state any day now. Is there the faintest sign that this is happening? From all that I can see, the ChiComs really have got it worked out, and their despotism is stronger than ever. They learned all the right lessons from 1989, and there will be no massed popular demonstration in the streets of Beijing — not this year, nor the next, nor the next. An unelected and fundamentally lawless dictatorship rules China, and the Chinese people, by and large, are fine with it.

Why should they not be, if they have movies to watch, food in their bellies, gadgets to play with? Which they have, aplenty. If the phase of history we are entering is to be one of amoral, ahistorical hedonism, why should we suppose that constitutional government can manage that kind of world better than the soft despotism of modern China? After all, the most agreeable and hedonistic society anyone has ever been able to imagine, the one described in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, was not the least bit democratic. As in Huxley's utopia, bioengineering and pharmacology — both hot growth areas in Chinese science, with no Judeo-Christian ethical reservations or eagle-eyed tort lawyers to slow down research — can take care of the social problems. It is hard to push away the thought that what we are seeing over there is the future.

The sentiment that Nazism was the wave of the future was quite prevalent in the 30s, Communism in the 40s. The sentiment was quite mistaken.

It is hard to say that the Chinese people are "fine" with despotism given that they haven't been asked and that each manifestation of not being fine with it has been crushed by tanks and exile to the laogai camps for reeducation.

I am frankly surprised that Mr. Derbyshire, whose personal knowledge of China dwarfs my own, now buys into the notion that the Chinese people, perhaps unique amongst those on Earth, do not desire freedom from oppression.

Freedom is on the march, John---won't you fall into the ranks of those seeking it for those laboring under the yoke of tyranny?

When Morality Lies in a Persistent Vegetative State

Very disturbing news in this roundup of the Terri Schiavo case:

And, quite apart from the question of Terri’s therapy and care, it is entirely likely that Terri has never been properly diagnosed. Terri is usually described as being in a Persistent Vegetative State (PVS), and indeed Judge Greer ruled as a finding of fact that she is PVS; but this diagnosis and finding were arrived at in a way that has many neurologists expressing surprise and dismay.

I have spent the past ten days recruiting and interviewing neurologists who are willing to come forward and offer affidavits or declarations concerning new testing and examinations for Terri. In addition to the 15 neurologists’ affidavits Gibbs had in time to present in court, I have commitments from over 30 others who are willing to testify that Terri should have new and additional testing, and new examinations by unbiased neurologists. Almost 50 neurologists all say the same thing: Terri should be reevaluated, Terri should be reexamined, and there are grave doubts as to the accuracy of Terri’s diagnosis of PVS. All of these neurologists are board-certified; a number of them are fellows of the prestigious American Academy of Neurology; several are professors of neurology at major medical schools.

So how can Judge Greer ignore the opinions of so many qualified neurologists, some of whom are leaders in the field? The answer is that Michael Schiavo, his attorney George Felos, and Judge Greer already have the diagnosis they want.

Terri’s diagnosis was arrived at without the benefit of testing that most neurologists would consider standard for diagnosing PVS. One such test is MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging). MRI is widely used today, even for ailments as simple as knee injuries — but Terri has never had one. Michael has repeatedly refused to consent to one. The neurologists I have spoken to have reacted with shock upon learning this fact. One such neurologist is Dr. Peter Morin. He is a researcher specializing in degenerative brain diseases, and has both an M.D. and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Boston University.

In the course of my conversation with Dr. Morin, he made reference to the standard use of MRI and PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans to diagnose the extent of brain injuries. He seemed to assume that these had been done for Terri. I stopped him and told him that these tests have never been done for her; that Michael had refused them.

There was a moment of dead silence.

“That’s criminal,” he said, and then asked, in a tone of utter incredulity: “How can he continue as guardian? People are deliberating over this woman’s life and death and there’s been no MRI or PET?” He drew a reasonable conclusion: “These people [Michael Schiavo, George Felos, and Judge Greer] don’t want the information.”

Dr. Morin explained that he would feel obligated to obtain the information in these tests before making a diagnosis with life and death consequences. I told him that CT (Computer-Aided Tomography) scans had been done, and were partly the basis for the finding of PVS. The doctor retorted, “Spare no expense, eh?” I asked him to explain the comment; he said that a CT scan is a much less expensive test than an MRI, but it “only gives you a tenth of the information an MRI does.” He added, “A CT scan is useful only in pretty severe cases, such as trauma, and also during the few days after an anoxic (lack of oxygen) brain injury. It’s useful in an emergency-room setting. But if the question is ischemic injury [brain damage caused by lack of blood/oxygen to part of the brain] you want an MRI and PET. For subsequent evaluation of brain injury, the CT is pretty useless unless there has been a massive stroke.”

I'm quite familiar with MRI, CT, and PET scans, having worked for several years for a company which built this equipment.

The reason PET and MRI scans are preferred for brain injuries by clinicians is that they enable the trained eye to clearly see what's happening with the brain. CT scans using contrast material, particularly those done on a LightSpeed-style multislice scanner, may approach MRI-level quality, but most CT scans won't really be helpful. The fact that Michael Schiavo won't let his wife have a simple procedure which involves no more discomfort than that caused by injecting the contrast material is pretty disturbing.

The Florida judge who has decided that Terri must starve to death is a disgrace. All her parents have asked to do is be allowed to care for her. Why has the judge imposed a death sentence on her, one marked by cruel and unusual suffering?

Raining On Blair's St Paddy Day Parade

John F. Cullinan compares Ireland today with Sicily of yore:

Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously observed of Jimmy Carter that being “unable to distinguish between our friends and our enemies, he has essentially adopted our enemies’ view of the world.” That in a nutshell is the besetting flaw of the British and Irish governments’ whole handling of the Good Friday Agreement and its implementation. Their error, which far exceeds granting moral equivalence to terrorists, was to treat Sinn Fein/IRA as the sole indispensable party throughout the peace process. “Sinn Fein holds the key to peace,” said Tony Blair. By appeasing the republicans at practically every turn, the two governments empowered the extremes at the expense of the moderates. The entirely predictable result was the political collapse of moderate nationalism and moderate unionism. Asked why his government repeatedly undercut the moderates, one party leader was reported advised by Tony Blair: “You have no guns.”

Indeed, this political — and moral — failure is clearest in the matter of guns. Every effort was made to avoid any hint of surrender and submission in the agreed handover of all paramilitary weapons to an international body. A deliberately neutral term — “decommissioning” — was applied to the process of “putting arms beyond use” in hopes of bypassing the ancient quarrel over who won and who lost, and who was right and who was wrong. Such decommissioning as has occurred (nobody knows how much) was even carried out in secret, under terms dictated by Sinn Fein/IRA and supinely accepted by the two governments.

But the single-minded focus on guns and bombs was too narrow. The real issue was not disarmament alone, but rather the root-and-branch demobilization of a lethal and disciplined force in being. It is no excuse that it is easier to quantify weapons than to verify that the paramilitaries are going away for good, you know. This is the classic error of the theology of arms control, with its obsessive focus on numbers and deliberate blindness to the character and intentions of adversaries (often carried to the point of denying that real adversaries in fact exist).

Here's the fundamental flaw in the various "peace processes", including the Irish one: peace is a condition, not a process. Peace is guaranteed through victory in war. When both sides are too weak or unwilling to drive to victory, you wind up with a bloody stalemate and a long period of sporadic violence.

You Don't "Loot" Using Convoys of Heavy Trucks

Hitch on the New York Times report on the on-again, off-again Iraqi WMD:

My first question is this: How can it be that, on every page of every other edition for months now, the New York Times has been stating categorically that Iraq harbored no weapons of mass destruction? And there can hardly be a comedy-club third-rater or MoveOn.org activist in the entire country who hasn't stated with sarcastic certainty that the whole WMD fuss was a way of lying the American people into war. So now what? Maybe we should have taken Saddam's propaganda seriously, when his newspaper proudly described Iraq's physicists as "our nuclear mujahideen."

My second question is: What's all this about "looting"? The word is used throughout the long report, but here's what it's used to describe. "In four weeks from mid-April to mid-May of 2003 … teams with flatbed trucks and other heavy equipment moved systematically from site to site. … 'The first wave came for the machines,' Dr Araji said. 'The second wave, cables and cranes.' " Perhaps hedging the bet, the Times authors at this point refer to "organized looting."

But obviously, what we are reading about is a carefully planned military operation. The participants were not panicked or greedy civilians helping themselves—which is the customary definition of a "looter," especially in wartime. They were mechanized and mobile and under orders, and acting in a concerted fashion. Thus, if the story is factually correct—which we have no reason at all to doubt—then Saddam's Iraq was a fairly highly-evolved WMD state, with a contingency plan for further concealment and distribution of the weaponry in case of attack or discovery.

By the Times' definition, D-Day was nothing more than the spring cleaning of southern England.

That Is Not Dead Which Can Eternal Lie

No, this isn't a post about Jimmy Carter. John J. Miller's got a great WSJ piece on H.P. Lovecraft:

Central to Lovecraft's effectiveness was his personal philosophy, and this is what separated him from Poe and the others who came before him. He was a thoroughgoing materialist--a socialist in his politics and an atheist in his beliefs. "Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large," he wrote upon successfully resubmitting the original Cthulhu story. "One must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all."

That's nihilism, of course, and we're free to reject it. But there's nothing creepier or more terrifying than the possibility that our lives are exercises in meaninglessness. "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods," says Gloucester in King Lear. "They kill us for their sport." From Lovecraft's perspective, this gives us far too much credit. In his grim milieu, we don't even rate as insect pests, but we still manage to get ourselves squished.

So it's a safe bet that Oprah Winfrey's book clubs won't be dipping into "The Dunwich Horror" or "The Dreams in the Witch House" this spring. Yet Lovecraft's circle seems ready for ever more widening. On the Internet, it's possible to take a virtual tour of Lovecraft sites in his hometown of Providence, R.I., or to shop for a Cthulhu plush toy. You can also buy a bumper sticker: "Cthulhu for President--Don't settle for the lesser evil."

I enjoy Lovecraft's stories in all their squamous hoariness, although the Lord Dunsany-inspired dream stuff grates at times.

For my money, the world's funniest skit would feature Maya Angelou slowly reading "The Call of Cthulhu" aloud in her stentorian manner---"Arise, Cthulhu, arise..."

Planned Parenthood: Aiding and Abetting

This just in: Planned Parenthood is hiding behind patient confidentiality to conceal the identities of child molesters and rapists.

Why am I not surprised?

I understand we don't want to create a situation where medical records can be bought and sold to the highest bidder or, worse, perused by anyone, but there's a name for this: OBSTRUCTION.

Happy Cows

For those of you who are new here at MoltenThought, I've had some issues with meat lately. We've posted entire volumes on the subject. It all stems from my decision to eat like a vegan for Lent. (A decision that eventually made me ill.) I've since had to tinker with my diet a bit, namely adding dairy and eggs back in, but no meat -- at least not until Sunday. (And don't even mention Easter! That ham is MINE!!!)

In the process of investigating the vegan lifestyle (mainly for health benefits and recipes) I came across some propaganda -- I mean footage -- from PeTa. We hashed it out with you, our wise and gentle readers, and then came to the conclusion that PeTA's full of it and that, while it ain't pretty, meat pretty much rocks anyway. I'm content to say a bit more respectful prayer over my dinner (which I think is precisely what God called us to do in the first place) and thank God for His life and the life of the animal that is feeding me. No oversentimental rubbish, just thankfulness.

I'll also do what I can to make sure that I'm responsible about my grocery shopping. Thankfully, my local supermarket has tons of stuff that meet my requirements. They have cage free store brand eggs, organic milk, etc.

And they have nearly the full line of yogurt products from Stoneyfield Farms.

I've had their yogurt in the past and it's tasty, with all the live yogurt cultures that are supposed to be beneficial, etc.. On the side of the carton is a web address. http://www.stonyfield.com What I found was every little girl's delight. They have happy cows. Cute little fuzzy, happy cows. They even name them -- their spokesmodel is called "PeeWee".

These cows run around the pasture all day munching grass and then (supposedly) come in at night to be milked. Aw! Sweet! They even have a resource where children can "adopt a cow" and get reports on how they're doing, when they give birth, all kinds of stuff. Neato. There's even reporting -- rather maturely -- on the "passing" of cows on the farm. They explain this in very nice "grown up" terms as a natural aspect of farm life, rather unlike militant animal rights wackos who mourn the deaths (even from natural causes) of ANY animal -- as if they are all supposed to be frozen until a cure is found for old age.

So, long and short, glad I did the research. Pass it on to your little ones. They can Moo and Ahh together over some "Chocolate Underground" organic. (Good, good stuff.)

Getting Things Done

For those of you with a nerdy and neat bent, here's the coolest website I've seen recently. It's called 43 Folders. It appeals to all things tidy for your time management. Ahhh.... tidy...

Check out the review of "Getting Things Done".

Water, Water Everywhere And Not A Drop To Drink

Don't like water? Still think you have to guzzle eight 8 ounce glasses of the stuff every day to get your RDA? Think again.

Since I've been treating my body better (read: turned into a health nut), I've read all kinds of folly about the need for water. "If you're thirsty, you're already dehydrated," "you have to drink tons of water to flush out fat when dieting," "you can't count the fluid in diet soda, coffee, tea, or juice towards your recommended daily intake," etc., etc..

Looks like (what a relief) you can... Um, for those of you who actually, I dunno', care about this. You can count the fluid in every liquid that enters your body, including what's contained in your food (i.e. fruits that are especially juicy, lettuce, etc.).

And when should you drink water? When you're actually THIRSTY.

There's a novel concept.

The Bible For Dummies

Now there's a Holy Scripture for the rest of us:

For readers of the Bible confused by its archaic language, such as its use of the term "stoned" for a form of execution rather than the effects of smoking dope, help is at hand.

One of the world's most widely read Bibles, the New International Version, has been modernised by a team of 15 American and British scholars and is published today.

Gone is the word "aliens", which the academics thought was invariably associated in the minds of the younger generation with extra-terrestrials. It is replaced with "foreigners".

Even the term "saints" is deemed to be too "ecclesiastical" and has been banished, to be replaced with "God's chosen people". The Virgin Mary is no longer "with child"; she is "pregnant".

And, to the dismay of traditionalists, who will suspect a feminist agenda, "inclusive" language has been introduced throughout.

Where the original read: "When God created Man, he made him in the likeness of God"; the new version says: "When God created human beings, he made them in the likeness of God."

For those unfamiliar with the punishments meted out in Biblical times to blasphemers and adulterers, the new version is also helpful, changing "Naboth has been stoned and is dead" to "Naboth has been stoned to death".

More than 45,000 changes - about seven per cent of the text - have been made. Even the title has been changed to Today's New International Version.

The new version has already caused a stir in the United States, however. Paige Patterson, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, said that the translators had gone beyond trying to clarify meaning.

"They have an agenda - to attempt to force egalitarian and even feminist perspectives on readers in the name of translation," he said.

But the scholars who worked on the book rejected the charges, saying that their changes were a fair reflection of the original Greek or Hebrew texts or updated colloquial English words.

Sure, and the carefully-selected lefties of The Jesus Seminar had no political axe to grind either.

If in reading the Bible your primary concern is that it's not "inclusive" enough, you've got bigger problems than the use of language.

Why not take this all the way?

Aren't the Ten Commandments too unhip?

Why not make them a little more 21st century, a Generation Y translation if you will:

1. I am the cool mack daddy of the dope hype flow. Give me props and mad respect.
2. Don't be kneeling for some bling bling.
3. Don't be throwing my name around, be it J. Hovah or Yah Diddy.
4. Yo, Sunday is "funday", ya dig?
5. Respect your moms, your pops, or whoever it was raised you, unless they whack.
6. Thou shalt not bust a cap in someone's ass.
7. Don't be running around on people like they don't know.
8. No five-finger discounts.
9. Don't front.
10. If your neighbor's got a fly crib or a pimped-out set of wheels, that's they bidness, not yours.

Update:

Reader James takes me to task in the comments for poking fun at African-American culture with this post. That was certainly not my intent---the satirical Ten Commandments above was intended to parody the notion of updating an exalted text through the lens of modern language fads. The language was deliberately distorted and exaggerated so as to sound like a middle-aged adult trying too hard to be "hip".

In any case, I apologize to anyone for whom this post caused offense, and hope that you will be willing to grant that however inartful the satire was, it was not intended to ridicule African-Americans or even today's youth, but rather the efforts of politically-motivated Bible translators. A fuller response may be found in the comments section. My thanks to James for his comments, and my thanks to you for reading.

Scalia, I Worship A Judge Named Scalia

The great man strikes again:

In a 35-minute speech Monday, Scalia said unelected judges have no place deciding issues such as abortion and the death penalty. The court's 5-4 ruling March 1 to outlaw the juvenile death penalty based on "evolving notions of decency" was simply a mask for the personal policy preferences of the five-member majority, he said.

"If you think aficionados of a living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again," Scalia told an audience at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Washington think tank. "You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it. That's flexibility."

Here's the deal: the Left is dead in this country. They simply cannot get a majority at the national level, and so their agenda cannot be enacted in Congress anymore.

As a result, you're going to see four things:

1. The Democrats will fight to the bitter end on judicial nominations to keep their political hacks on the Supreme Court and in the lower courts in their seats. What they can't get at the ballot box they will attempt to get at the bench.

2. The Dems will evince a renewed respect for the concept of states' rights, as they try to take advantage of reciprocity to force social change such as gay marriage through their diminishing liberal enclaves.

3. The Left will increasingly resort to voter fraud and intimidation to steal what elections they can. They will throw as many elections to the courts, where they retain a disproportionate number of political hack judges who'll do the bidding of the Democrat leadership.

4. Since Americans are too smart to adopt neo-Bolshevism, the Left will increasingly turn to anti-American international organizations in an attempt to thwart any turn back from the socialist precipice in domestic policy. We're already seeing the warning signs of this as the left wing Supreme Court justices are beginning to ignore the Constitution and the American polity in favor of foreign laws.

This is the death knell of Leftism in this country, but don't think these folks will go quietly. They worship political power, and will resist the loss of their shrunken god at all costs.

St. Patrick Didn't Quite Drive All the Snakes from Ireland

Mark Steyn on Gerry Adams:

Adams is usually billed as the "President of Sinn Fein," which in turn is usually billed as the "political wing" of the IRA. This artful form of words is supposed to suggest some kind of distinction between "President" Adams and the murkier fellows who do all the bombing and killing and knee-capping. In fact, as the Irish government recently revealed, "President" Adams is a member of the Provisional IRA's ruling "army council" -- i.e., the fellows who order all the bombing and killing and knee-capping.

So instead of one more chorus of "The Wearing of the Green," it's the wearing out of the welcome for Adams at the White House. In his place, President Bush will welcome the fiancee and five sisters of Robert McCartney. McCartney was a Belfast Catholic and a Sinn Fein supporter, but he made the mistake of getting into an argument with a Provisional IRA big shot in a pub in January. The other "Provos" present grabbed McCartney, beat him with iron sewer rods, slit him open from his neck to his navel, severed his jugular and jumped on his head, causing what was left of it to lose an eye. There were 70 witnesses in the bar but none of them saw a thing.

Depravity-wise, what exactly is the difference between McCartney's murder and the lynching of the four U.S. contractors in Fallujah? None -- except that the organization responsible for the former has enjoyed a decade of White House photo-ops.

Inside Politics has this (not a permalink):

Not this year
For the first time since Northern Ireland's 1998 peace accord, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy is refusing to meet with Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams on St. Patrick's Day.
Mr. Adams, head of the political party affiliated with the Irish Republican Army, came to the United States this past weekend to seek support from Irish-American activists amid outrage over recent IRA activities.
But although Mr. Kennedy has met with Mr. Adams every St. Patrick's Day since the Good Friday peace pact seven years ago, the Irish-American senator informed Mr. Adams there won't be a meeting this year, according to Kennedy spokeswoman Melissa Wagoner.
The spokeswoman cited "the IRA's ongoing criminal activity and contempt for the rule of law" as the reason for Mr. Kennedy's decision.
Sinn Fein is reeling from accusations that the IRA mounted the world's largest bank robbery, stealing $50 million from a Belfast bank on Dec. 20, and was responsible for killing a Catholic civilian outside a Belfast pub on Jan. 30.

If John Kerry, faux Irishman, had won the last election, is there any doubt he'd be feting Gerry Adams and any of the other Irish murderers he'd care to include in his bloody-fisted entourage?

Pro-American When Convenient

The United Auto Workers union accuses U.S. Marines of being insufficiently patriotic:

The United Auto Workers says Marine reservists should show a little more semper fi if they want to use the union's parking lot.

The Marine Corps motto means "always faithful," but the union says some reservists working out of a base on Jefferson Avenue in Detroit have been decidedly unfaithful to their fellow Americans by driving import cars and trucks.

So the UAW International will no longer allow members of the 1st Battalion 24th Marines to park at Solidarity House if they are driving foreign cars or displaying pro-President Bush bumper stickers

"While reservists certainly have the right to drive nonunion made vehicles and display bumper stickers touting the most anti-worker, anti-union president since the 1920s, that doesn't mean they have the right to park in a lot owned by the members of the UAW," the union said in a statement released Friday.

Shocked and disappointed, the Marines are pulling out.

"You either support the Marines or you don't," said Lt. Col. Joe Rutledge, commanding officer of the battalion's active duty instructors. "I'm telling my Marines that they're no longer parking there."

So if you're supporting our president, as 53% of American voters did in this last election, you're un-American?

I'd love to see the Marines storm union headquarters and demand to see their financial records. I'd even be willing to write another verse of the Marine Corps hymn for that.

Did Dick Armitage and Colin Powell Get Any Work Done Between "Off-the-Record" Interviews?

Sure doesn't seem that way, given this Bob Novak bit:

State-Defense Harmony

The new deputy secretary of state, Robert Zoellick, has met four times this year with his counterpart at the Defense Department, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. That quadruples the number of meetings between Wolfowitz and Zoellick's predecessor at State, Richard Armitage, during the past four years.

The lone meeting between the State and Defense deputies was a one-on-one luncheon at the State Department hosted by Armitage. Wolfowitz failed in efforts for a return meal at the Pentagon. This year Zoellick met with Wolfowitz once even before Zoellick was confirmed by the Senate.

Wolfowitz and Armitage both served in the Reagan administration's Defense Department as assistant secretaries. But during George W. Bush's first term, they disagreed on broad strategy questions -- including the attack on Iraq.

Perhaps a 120-Story Middle Finger Pointed Eastward Would Do The Trick?

Deroy Murdock wants to see the Twin Towers restored. Today.

Had savages destroyed the Empire State Building, the Capitol, or the White House, the restoration of those icons surely would be underway. Rather than Pataki’s time-wasting architectural beauty contest, rebuilding the Twin Towers should have begun the moment the last pebble of debris was plucked from the crime scene. Before this country squanders more time and national honor fiddling with the Pataki-Libeskind Fear Tower, Americans should demand the disposal of this high-rise dog’s breakfast. Instead, Herbert Belton’s and Ken Gardner’s new and improved Twin Towers should rise like the Stars and Stripes above Ground Zero.

New Yorkers are supposed to be spunky, aren't they?

Why are they letting their weak-kneed politicians lay down for terrorists?

Build them higher.

The Anticommunist Journalist and Other Extinct Species

John J. Miller on the passing of John Barron, journalist and patriot.

The Birth of An American Oligarchy

Mark Levin on Roe v. Wade, an excerpt from a lengthy and interesting passage in his new book:

But Blackmun went further, and the Court followed. Not satisfied to strike down the Texas law, Blackmun began to write what seemed to be a new federal statute. According to Blackmun’s opinion, a woman’s right to abortion could only be abridged by a compelling state interest. In effect, Blackmun argued that there was an inverse relationship between a woman’s interest and the state’s interest that ranged across a spectrum from conception to birth. Therefore, the state’s interest at conception was minimal but increased as the pregnancy progressed, reaching its peak at the end of the pregnancy. A woman’s interest, paramount at conception, began to give some ground to the state’s interest in protecting the fetus as it matured toward being able to live outside of the mother. But Blackmun specifically declared that the unborn child was not a “person” under the Fourteenth Amendment, and thus had no equal protection rights.

Blackmun wrote that what really mattered was the unborn baby’s viability outside the womb. A fetus capable of life outside the womb, Blackmun believed, was more deserving of protection than one in its earliest stages of development. He also shot down Texas’s attempt to define life as beginning at conception, which “by adopting one theory of life,” would have then allowed Texas to extend its interest to the earliest stage of pregnancy. Blackmun wrote, “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man¹s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.”

Blackmun gave deference to medicine, philosophy, and theology (from his own perspective), but not to the Constitution, the people, the states, or the other branches of the federal government. In truth, Blackmun did establish, at least for constitutional purposes, when life begins by recognizing abortion as a constitutionally protected right to privacy. He did precisely what he lectured should not be done.

Dick Thornburgh, Call Your Office

This is how you determine political bias in media coverage, as demonstrated by yet another study on the MSM's anti-Bush partisanship in the past election cycle:

U.S. media coverage of last year's election was three times more likely to be negative toward President Bush than Democratic challenger John Kerry, according to a study released Monday.

The annual report by a press watchdog that is affiliated with Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism said that 36 percent of stories about Bush were negative compared to 12 percent about Kerry, a Massachusetts senator.

Only 20 percent were positive toward Bush compared to 30 percent of stories about Kerry that were positive, according to the report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The study looked at 16 newspapers of varying size across the country, four nightly newscasts, three network morning news shows, nine cable programs and nine Web sites through the course of 2004.

The Decline of Customer Service

I hate bad customer service.

Nothing makes me angrier, nothing animates me more, nothing can drive me into a cold fury faster than lousy customer service.

This week was worse than most in this regard:

1. I shop quite a bit online, chiefly for the convenience of not having to shop. I took advantage of clothier Jos A Bank's sale on suits by ordering a couple in January. I was informed of a backorder status in February indicating I'd receive my merchandise by March 5th. Okay, it sucks, but things happen.

March 5th comes and goes without a word. I call up the company and they inform me that they have no idea when the suits will arrive and can obtain no further information. The woman asks if I want to wait. Wait? For what? The glaciers? It makes no logical sense to wait for something which will likely not arrive. I tell her to cancel my order, and she gives me an attitude.

I e-mail the company with some attitude of my own. When I get a response back, no name is associated with it. They offer 10% off my order and free overnight shipping. I point out the flaw in their logic---10% off an order I'll never receive is irrelevant, as is overnight shipping on something they don't have in their possession.

Sure enough, I get the notification that afternoon that half my order has shipped. Given that I'd ordered it with alterations, and that they mandate a 5-day window for such alterations, they both had to have my suit in possession and know about it.

Utter incompetence. I bet I won't get 10% off and it won't be shipped overnight either.

I won't be shopping at Jos A Bank, online or in-person, ever again, and recommend you don't either. Try their competitors---Paul Frederick and Men's Wearhouse are solid alternatives.

2. My car had a flat which I noticed when returning to the parking garage downtown at the end of a grueling day. I used my Fix-A-Flat to patch and partially inflate the tire (if you don't have some in your trunk, you should get some, unless you like putting a spare on for some odd reason). I limped toward my Saturn dealership, since I had some additional work I needed done. They close at 6 pm. 6 pm! Who on earth reliably goes home before then?

In any case, I elect to drop the car overnight (to avoid towing if the tire deflated overnight) and let them know I'd call first thing in the morning.

They never call me back despite promising to do so, and as I call throughout the day it's clear that their claims of working on my car "right now" are lies. They had to change a tire, replace a power lock relay, and replace a washer fluid jet---that's not a 7-hour fix, even in a UAW shop.

In any case, I lose most of the day at work (didn't want to bring my laptop home in case I had to have the car towed or leave it somewhere overnight) waiting for them to tell me I can pick it up.

At 3 pm, I finally call and find out it's ready. Saturn's service has precipitously declined since I bought my first Saturn back in 1992. I bought this one in 1998. I won't be buying another.

3. Now I needed to get to the Saturn dealership, which is about 5 miles from my home. I call a cab company. The lady takes my information and hangs up on me without confirming someone's on the way. No prompt, no interruption in the middle indicating a dropped line, she just hung up.

I wait a little bit.

When the cab hasn't arrived in 30 minutes, I call her back.

She tells me he's on the way, he'll call me in 1-2 minutes.

10 minutes later, I call back.

She tells me he's "trying" to get to me, sounding for all the world like a low-rent Miss Cleo channeling the dead.

I ask her why she lied to me about him either being here or calling me in 1-2 minutes.

She asks me if I want to cancel.

When I say yes, she hangs up.

In response to this wonderful customer service, I did what anybody would do in my circumstance---I started walking to the dealership. In a thunderstorm. After I passed the halfway point, my girlfriend found me and picked me up. She had to bail on work early to keep me from getting hit by lightning, drowned, or having to procure a lawyer for me when I strangled the next person to screw with me.


It's not hard to provide great customer service. I try to do it all the time in my professional life, and for the most part I succeed.

To do so, one must recognize a couple of basic business realities:

1. Customers pay your salary. Lost customers = lost wages.

2. Every pissed-off customer will tell everyone they know about their experience and do their level best to drive down your business. Unless you sell exclusively to agoraphobics or the antisocial, you're going to take a bigger hit than the one customer you failed to help.

3. Most customers are very reasonable---they just want some indication that their business matters to you. Mistakes happen---we all know this. But to treat people with disrespect and make no attempt to put things right when mistakes do happen is to cross the line from misdemeanor to felony poor customer service.

4. If you don't care about customer service, chances are your boss does. If she doesn't, chances are her boss does. And if a customer's really furious with you, they'll ride the org structure of your business all the way to the top if need be to take you down. They'll find someone who takes a very dim view of your inability to rectify this problem at your level eventually, and you'll have some career consequences for it.

The simplest path is to just do what it takes to satisfy customers, even if it means bending rules or going out on a limb.

If Jos A Bank had either tracked down my backorder or cut me a one-time good deal (say, a 25% discount or throw in a free belt and tie or something) I'd still be a loyal customer.

If Saturn had merely picked up the phone as they said they would, and if they had offered to send someone to pick me up or even given me a loaner (something they used to do all the time a few years ago) I'd still be a customer.

If the taxi dispatcher didn't try to string me along while her driver delivered another fare, I'd still be a customer.

As it is, I will go out of my way to avoid doing business with these companies in the future, and will offer my unsolicited opinion that their customer-facing employees were former Khmer Rouge functionaries on any and all occasions.

When the Law Is Wrong

Wittenberg Gate has an excellent take on the Schiavo case, and what it means when the law runs perpendicular to what is right and just.

We are a nation of laws, it is often said. This is manifestly untrue.

We are a nation of men, a nation of human beings bound together by culture, by history, by accident, and by will.

We have hundreds of thousands of laws on the books, two-and-a-half centuries' worth of inscrutable scribbling by lettered parasites who presume to be statesmen.

It has gotten to the point where you and I unknowingly violate several of these innumerable, insufferable little demands a day, mostly without any consequence at all. The nation moves on.

Are each of these laws to be accorded the respect of the Decalogue?

No.

Were the legislators who crafted each of these laws infallible?

No.

Are the judges who weigh each law against each alleged violation of it possessed invariably of Solomonic wisdom?

No.

What recourse have we when corrupt judges and corrupt lawmakers conspire against their sacred obligation to their countrymen?

Read Wittenberg Gate and the implications should become crystal clear.

All The News That's Fit To Undermine the Global War On Terror

I hope that this is the result of a brilliant misinformation campaign and not the London Times deciding to sabotage efforts to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons:

ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans for a combined air and ground attack on targets in Iran if diplomacy fails to halt the Iranian nuclear programme.
The inner cabinet of Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, gave “initial authorisation” for an attack at a private meeting last month on his ranch in the Negev desert.

Israeli forces have used a mock-up of Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment plant in the desert to practise destroying it. Their tactics include raids by Israel’s elite Shaldag (Kingfisher) commando unit and airstrikes by F-15 jets from 69 Squadron, using bunker-busting bombs to penetrate underground facilities.

The plans have been discussed with American officials who are said to have indicated provisionally that they would not stand in Israel’s way if all international efforts to halt Iranian nuclear projects failed.

The Washington Post's Manchurian Candidate

Let the blogswarm begin---Washington Post Managing Editor Philip Bennett lets the mask slip in an interview with a Communist Chinese propaganda mill and manifests effete Leftist fellow-traveling of the worst stripe:

Yong Tang: In such sense, do you think America should be the leader of the world?

Bennett: No, I don't think US should be the leader of the world. My job is helping my readers trying to understand what is happening now. What is happening now is very difficult to understand. The world is very complex. There are various complex forces occurring in it. I don't think you can imagine a world where one country or one group of people could lead everybody else. I can't imagine that could happen. I also think it is unhealthy to have one country as the leader of the world. People in other countries don't want to be led by foreign countries. They may want to have good relations with it or they may want to share with what is good in that country.

That is also a sort of colonial question. The world has gone through colonialism and imperialism. We have seen the danger and shortcomings of those systems. If we are heading into another period of imperialism where the US thinks itself as the leader of the area and its interest should prevail over all other interests of its neighbors and others, then I think the world will be in an unhappy period.

Yong Tang: So the world order should be democratic?

Bennett: Democracy means many things. How do you define democracy? As a Chinese journalist, you may have your own definition of democracy which corresponds to your history and your way of seeing the world. I may have another definition. Someone else may have their own definitions. Democracy means a lot of different things.

Let me give an example. Democracy in one sense means the majority decides, but it also means the rights of the minority are protected. As UK late Prime Minister Winston Churchill said, democracy is the least bad system that we have ever thught of. So democracy is never perfect. It always has problems. Our democracy here in the US has many contradictions, problems and challenges. So democracy is not a cure that could turn everything bad into good. It has its own advantages and its disadvantages.

Every time I see another idiotic utterance from the Hair Helmet Hamas, I think to myself---THESE guys think they're the elite in America?

If every American could sit in on a board meeting or shareholder meeting with the leadership of America's top companies, they'd walk away quite impressed with the intellect and drive of the American business executive.

If every American could hear just five minutes' worth of a Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting, they'd walk away convinced that America's military leadership represented some of the smartest and sharpest Americans around.

Whenever I hear America's top journalists teeing up propaganda soundbites which dictators will employ to break the will of political prisoners and erode the efforts of free nations to pressure them for peaceful regime change, I just shake my head.

It's real simple, Bennett---you can look up democracy in any dictionary and you'll see it's not compatible in any way, shape, or form with dictatorship.

Thank God that the U.S. is in the global driver's seat right now and not China, or you might find out what it's like to churn out government-mandated propaganda in a Chinese slave labor camp instead of spewing your weak-kneed equivocations in service of a brutal mandarinate from the sanctuary of a free nation made and kept so, to paraphrase John Stuart Mill, through the exertions of better men than yourself.

Of course, you probably wouldn't need the incentive of Chinese-perfected "reeducation" to churn out homilies to Maoism, would you, Phil?