Hope This Is True

It’s a very encouraging analysis making the case that the cut-and-run Left may have misunderestimated things again.

There are signs that the global Islamic jihad movement is splitting apart, in what would be a tremendous achievement for American strategy. The center of the action is in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the very territory which is thought to harbor Usama, and from which Al Qaeda was able to launch 9/11. Capitalizing on existing splits, a trap was set and closed, and the benefits have only begun to be evident.

The Perils of Live Newscast Video Switching

Sometimes things like this happen.

Ask The Guy Who’s Been There

What’s the real threat, “global warming” or the “environmentalists”?

Here’s someone who should know.

“As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.”

Gutsy

Kudos to Renault for this ad.

A Rose By Any Other Name

It seems that “poison” is the new euphemism for AIDS when “Palestinian” terrorists get it.

Because an HIV infection couldn’t possibly explain kidney and liver failure.

Update:

I’m shocked. Shocked.

Feel Safer Yet?

Sleep tight tonight, your TSA is awake.

Hate Crime

Were such a thing as a “hate crime” actually to exist, I think Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Chappaquiddick) just committed one.

Kopel turns over a rock

and finds an individual right to keep and bear arms in the strangest place.

The War Is Lost

The war has been lost in a huge part of Iraq.

Lost – by al Qaeda.

Success, Treason, or Both?

Stanley Kurtz makes the case that A-job’s visit to Columbia was a success.

Let’s acknowledge that the Ahmadinejad event at Columbia was a huge success, which does indeed prove that debate and dialogue work. It’s just that the debate in question wasn’t between Bollinger and Ahmadinejad. The debate that mattered was the one between Bollinger and his American critics. Once Bollinger was called out on the blunder of his invitation, he was forced to redeem himself by publicly speaking the truth about Ahmadinejad. The real success of that event was Bollinger’s introduction, and it happened before Ahmadinejad said a word.

I’m willing to concede that forcing the Looney Left to say words they otherwise wouldn’t is a political silver lining, but I want someone to tell me why Bollinger shouldn’t be tried for treason. Answer these two questions for me:

• In what way is Ahmadinejad not our enemy?
• In what way did Bollinger not give him aid or comfort?

Update:

Arthur Herman is just as impressed as I am with the supposed silver lining.

Supine Intellectualism

On your must-read list for today: an excellent piece, delightfully written, on the Left’s rush to suicide.

Atlas Mugged

How the blogging flea came to vex the MSM elephant.

Islamophobia

Derb makes many good points. Especially the arm’s length part:

That’s the Islam we’re up against. I don’t myself believe we can do much to reform it. Muslims have to do that for themselves. Any helping hand we reach out will be spat upon. While they sort out their problems, though, I do think we should keep Islam at arm’s length, for our own safety. Keep ’em out; fence ’em off; send Muslim visitors home; keep a wary eye on Muslim citizens. Leave them the consolations of their faith, though; stop trying to convince me that there is no good at all in that faith; and, if you’re the praying type, pray that the good will prevail at last.

The footnote about phobias is worth noting as well.

The Real Trouble With Health Care

It’s not that too few have health insurance.

It’s that too many do.

John Stossel lays out the case succinctly. He’s absolutely right that we can blame the mess on income taxes.

Going Postal

The reality is better than, say, the British Police.

The Next Iranian Revolution

Michael Totten has a great article on his visit to the Iraq/Iran border.

One thing that’s made abundantly clear is that the Middle East is a messy, confusing place. But there are real signs of hope.

Sanjari has fierce and intimidating eyes, the eyes not of a fanatic but of a deadly serious person who is not to be messed with. He spoke slowly and with great force. “They repress people in the name of religion,” he said. “They torture people in the name of religion. They kill people in the name of religion. The young generation now wants to distance themselves from religion itself.”

Calling All New Yorkers

We need a human wall around Ground Zero on Monday. The Secret Service (shame!) is planning to accompany Ahmanutjob on his visit there.

He should be arrested the moment he sets foot on American soil.

Or kidnapped by students and held for a year or so first.

This is an outrage.

Jerry Brown, Comedian

Because the secret of great comedy is timing.

Hunting al Qaeda, Part III

Yon’s capper to his latest three-part series is up.

Don’t miss it.

Rathergate Redux

Your belly laugh for the day: Dan Rather is suing CBS for “damaging his reputation”.

Discovery should be quite entertaining.

The Weekly World News may be gone

but fret not. The rest of the MSM will continue to pick up the slack.

The best teacher I had in High School taught us to view TV “news” critically. With only a half hour, minus commercials and sports, to provide the information we need to be responsible, informed citizens, they show us a building on fire. Unless you own or live in that building, that’s just not news.

ABC picked up a tabloid style “human interest” story from Venezuela about a man who reportedly “woke up” on the autopsy table. Now, let’s be generous and stipulate that although this can’t qualify as a real news story it’s at least odd and unusual enough that people will want to read it. That’s how it got linked on Drudge, after all.

My beef with ABC is that they accepted the story uncritically, without spending five minutes to reason it out and research.

Start with the scar on the guy’s face. Does that look like a scalpel incision to you? Looks to me more like a bicycle accident or a bar brawl. Second, doesn’t it seem fishy that an autopsy would start with an incision on the chin?

To keep you informed and appropriately skeptical, Buttle’s World did the research. It just so happens that we have a reader who has actually done autopsies. I told him I smelled a rat.

Note: If you’d rather not read the description of an autopsy, stop here. The executive summary is that they don’t start by cutting the face.

I smell one, too.

If there was a forensic reason to open the chin (such as to extract a bullet or examine the path of a wound), it might be done, but you’d do that after the main part of the autopsy.

Besides, a scalpel incision of the chin should not cause “excruciating” pain.

Routine autopsy procedure:

1) A Y-shaped incision, with each arm of the Y going up the chest, the the leg of the Y going down the abdomen.

The skin is peeled back, and the chest wall cut free (we used branch cutters).

All organs (including the trachea, larynx, and tongue, en bloc) are removed through this Y incision.

After the organs are weighed and samples taken for microscopic analysis, the remains are all poured back into the chest/abdomen cavity like a slurry, and the chest wall is wired back in place.

2) A U-shaped incision from ear to ear. The scalp is peeled back anterior and posteriorly, exposing the skull. The calvaria (skullcap) is sawed off so that the brain may be removed.

The brain is placed in formaldehyde for examination about a week later.

A morgue attendant* then sews up the incisions. Add a competent undertaker, and you can have an open-casket funeral without any tell-tale signs of an autopsy.

*The word Diener is German for servant. In English, it is used to describe the person, in the morgue, responsible for handling, moving, and cleaning the corpse. It is derived from the German word Leichendiener, which literally means corpse servant. Dieners are also referred to as morgue attendants.

Who has the better crystal ball?

Economists or Ecologists? John Tierny examines the record.

I don’t find the result at all surprising. Being an Economist is something that can be fairly well defined, and one can picture a curriculum to learn how to do it. But, as my dad would say, “what the hell is an ‘Ecologist’? Any housewife can slap the title on herself and get air time on TV as if she were an expert.”

Tierny is a bit more fair, calling them “biologists who study the environment.” That’s at least a definition of something. But “ecologist” has always meant Birkenstocks and chanting to me.

What Would Victory in Iraq Look Like?

Probably a lot like this.

Do not miss Totten’s latest: Hell is Over.

“the interests of prudence and the demands of shame”

The silence around Israel’s Syrian raid.

Start Dissing the Dads, and…

…who knows where it will lead?

Term Limit Trickery

California voters beware: The corrupt tag-team of Nunez and Perata are trying to weaken term limits by playing on public support for it. In short, the scam is to make it look like term limits are being tightened, while hiding the fact that the law would change to allow that much in each chamber of the state legislature. So term limits would be nearly doubled. And they got their henchboy, Fairy Jerry Brown, to write the supposedly neutral ballot description. Other chicanery includes funny business with counting petition signatures.

Did I mention that it has language specifically to allow Perata and Nunez to stay in office?

Just the tip of the iceberg.

More at termlimits.org, and California-specific info atstopthepoliticians.com.

The Next Colin Powell?

Abizaid seems to have drunk deep from the waters of Foggy Bottom. I wonder how long his thinking has extended the war.

Speculating on the Syrian Raid

Speculation it is, but it seems to be informed speculation.

Hunting al Qaeda, Part II of III

Yon’s latest dispatch includes this handy advice:

We walked and walked, and Soldiers kept asking me if I was okay. Especially one Soldier named Staff Sergeant Chuomg Le, who kept asking if the heat was getting to me. I kept saying I would be carrying him before he would be carrying me. He just laughed. Other Soldiers said Le is a physical animal. But one of the tricks to combat reporting that I’ve learned is you don’t have to be tougher than all the Soldiers, just tougher than one. When the first one collapses, and they stop to stick an IV into him, you also get a break.

In fact, the next day three Soldiers would collapse from the heat during some fighting, and two of them were so dehydrated that their veins collapsed, proving once again that you don’t have to be tougher than everyone, just the guys who don’t drink enough water. If you can beat those guys, you are like the Lion King of reporters. Soldiers say, “I can’t believe the photographer is still standing when Sergeant So-and-So face-planted.” It’s all smoke and mirrors. I drink water like a fish and dive for every sliver of shade, thinking of the body like a battery that gets drained quickly by the heat and sun. With only so much juice, taking every sliver of shade, even if it’s only for 30 seconds, and pounding that water continuously, all adds up to a longer charge.

Malfeasance

In Dearborn the local government tried to keep the arrest of a Jihadi secret to “avoid stirring anti-Muslim sentiments”.

In related news, a Health Inspector in Florida has witheld information about a cockroach infestation at a local restaurant to “avoid stirring anti-cockroach sentiments”. And California school curricula will no longer teach the germ theory of disease, so as to avoid stirring “anti-bacterial sentiments”.