The Golden Gate

Go check out lawhawk’s comprehensive roundup.

I’d like to make a request. Let’s stop calling for Hamas to acknowledge Israel’s “right” to exist. Let’s stop associating the delegitimization of Israel by various bodies (such as the WCC, PC-USA, most British lefties that read Comment Is Free) by asking why these idiots think Israel is the only country that has no “right” to exist.

Let us point out, as Menachem Begin did, that Israel exists. She exists, and she needs no special acknowledgement from a bunch of terrorists, anti-Semites, and Israel-haters. She existed long before any of us having these arguments was born. She will exist long after all of us are gone.

You can see the rest of it here.

Dr. Rusty Shackleford:

After nearly two weeks of fighting a cyberterrorist attack launched by Turkish Islamists, and then wrestling with a new server, The Jawa Report is back!

We promise to continue the reporting the news the only way we know how–with mediocre analysis & plenty of offense. If that’s just a little bit more than Islam can allow, then to quote Kos, screw them.

For free thinking Muslims of the world we say: join us on our quest of exposing the danger of the bearded ones. While they may attack our website, we know you are exposed daily to much greater dangers which may result from offending their religous sensibilities.

Our website may have been beheaded for the last two weeks, but it is nothing compared to the barbarity, torture, and murder done in the name of Allah on a daily basis. We write from the luxury afforded by distance, while you face real danger on the front line. You have our sympathy and our solidarity.

Go visit the report.

Meryl Yourish, who is always a pleasure to read, has the latest on the IDF’s response to the incursion, kidnapping, and murder by the “palestinians”.

Cox and Forkum weigh in.

The Borowitz Report is always good for a well balanced laugh:

ROVE, SATAN PLOT G.O.P. FALL STRATEGY

White House Advisor, Prince of Darkness Resume Longtime Collaboration

At a joint press conference today in Washington, White House advisor Karl Rove said that he would be plotting the Republican Party’s fall election strategy with his longtime comrade-in-arms, Satan.

The Prince of Darkness, wearing his traditional red horns and cape and carrying a smoldering pitchfork, appeared to beam as Mr. Rove, his protégé, talked about how much he was looking forward to working with him on the fall campaign.

“Every time Satan and I get together, good things happen,” Mr. Rove said, adding, “Or should I say - bad things happen!”

The two of them then dissolved in laughter, demonstrating an easy collegiality that has made them an unbeatable team in past G.O.P. campaigns.

Satan’s partnership with Mr. Rove goes back to 1994, when the two of them teamed up to orchestrate George W. Bush’s first election as Governor.

But their work together reached its apogee, perhaps, during the 2004 presidential election, in which Mr. Rove and Satan devised the infernal “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” campaign.

While Satan let Mr. Rove have most of the spotlight in the hour-long press conference, he did take the microphone to say that he had been “relieved” recently when the White House advisor was cleared of all charges in the CIA leak investigation.

“I can’t imagine running a Republican campaign without my buddy here,” he said, giving Mr. Rove a bear hug.  “There are plenty of Satans out there, but there’s only one Karl Rove.”

Elsewhere, Dan Rather retired from CBS after 44 years there but said that he would remain active in news and misinformation.

All emphasis mine.

Excellent post by Jay Tea over at Wizbang!. Too much is quotable. It is a tight, well written, compelling essay. Just go read it.

Excellent response by Treasury Secretary Snow to Keller over at The Corner:

Mr. Bill Keller, Managing Editor
The New York Times
229 West 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036

Dear Mr. Keller:

The New York Times’ decision to disclose the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, a robust and classified effort to map terrorist networks through the use of financial data, was irresponsible and harmful to the security of Americans and freedom-loving people worldwide.  In choosing to expose this program, despite repeated pleas from high-level officials on both sides of the aisle, including myself, the Times undermined a highly successful counter-terrorism program and alerted terrorists to the methods and sources used to track their money trails.

Your charge that our efforts to convince The New York Times not to publish were “half-hearted” is incorrect and offensive.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Over the past two months, Treasury has engaged in a vigorous dialogue with the Times - from the reporters writing the story to the D.C. Bureau Chief and all the way up to you.  It should also be noted that the co-chairmen of the bipartisan 9-11 Commission, Governor Tom Kean and Congressman Lee Hamilton, met in person or placed calls to the very highest levels of the Times urging the paper not to publish the story.  Members of Congress, senior U.S. Government officials and well-respected legal authorities from both sides of the aisle also asked the paper not to publish or supported the legality and validity of the program.

Indeed, I invited you to my office for the explicit purpose of talking you out of publishing this story.  And there was nothing “half-hearted” about that effort.  I told you about the true value of the program in defeating terrorism and sought to impress upon you the harm that would occur from its disclosure.  I stressed that the program is grounded on solid legal footing, had many built-in safeguards, and has been extremely valuable in the war against terror.  Additionally, Treasury Under Secretary Stuart Levey met with the reporters and your senior editors to answer countless questions, laying out the legal framework and diligently outlining the multiple safeguards and protections that are in place.

You have defended your decision to compromise this program by asserting that “terror financiers know” our methods for tracking their funds and have already moved to other methods to send money.  The fact that your editors believe themselves to be qualified to assess how terrorists are moving money betrays a breathtaking arrogance and a deep misunderstanding of this program and how it works.  While terrorists are relying more heavily than before on cumbersome methods to move money, such as cash couriers, we have continued to see them using the formal financial system, which has made this particular program incredibly valuable.

Lastly, justifying this disclosure by citing the “public interest” in knowing information about this program means the paper has given itself free license to expose any covert activity that it happens to learn of - even those that are legally grounded, responsibly administered, independently overseen, and highly effective.  Indeed, you have done so here.

What you’ve seemed to overlook is that it is also a matter of public interest that we use all means available - lawfully and responsibly - to help protect the American people from the deadly threats of terrorists.  I am deeply disappointed in the New York Times.

Sincerely,

[signed]

John W. Snow, Secretary

U.S. Department of the Treasury

Amen.

Great video that sums up my sentiments, to be sure. Woo-hoo!

Not PC. Not work safe. Not PG-13. AND the truth.

AbbaGav was first to relay the information in my RSS feeder. Could be his time zone helped.

Cox & Forkum right on time:

From Allah:

And from MSNBC on how we got it done here. Excerpt:

Two U.S. F-16 jets on patrol over Iraq were scrambled Wednesday evening as part of an intense six-week manhunt for Iraq’s most-wanted terrorist. U.S. military officials tell NBC News the jets were tracking Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s top deputy, Abu Abdul Rahman, as he headed to a meeting with Zarqawi in an isolated two-story farmhouse 40 miles north of Baghdad.

When U.S. special forces confirmed Zarqawi was inside, they fired two 500-pound bombs. U.S. military officials, who swept the area after the attack, say Zarqawi, Rahman and four others were killed instantly.

“We have been able to identify al-Zarqawi through fingerprint verification, facial recognition and known scars,” said Gen. William Casey, the commander of the multinational force in Iraq.

Moonbat Reaction:

    Some Democrats, breaking ranks from their leadership, today said the death of terrorist leader Abu Musab Zarqawi in Iraq was a stunt to divert attention from an unpopular and hopeless war.
    ”This is just to cover Bush’s [rear] so he doesn’t have to answer” for Iraqi civilians being killed by the U.S. military and his own sagging poll numbers, said Rep. Pete Stark, California Democrat. “Iraq is still a mess — get out.”
    Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, Ohio Democrat, said Zarqawi was a small part of “a growing anti-American insurgency” and that it’s time to get out.
    ”We’re there for all the wrong reasons,” Mr. Kucinich said.
    Officially, Democratic leaders reacted positively to the news and praised the troops that successfully targeted al Qaeda’s leader in Iraq with 500-pound bombs at his safe house 30 miles from Baghdad.
    ”This is a good day for the Iraqi people, the U.S. military and our intelligence community,” said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

Read it at the Washington Times.

Over at the Gates of Vienna [the place to go for in depth analysis on all things Islam and our struggles with its global aims] the Fjordman has filed a report on the EU with a call for its destruction in order to save Europe. Here is a taste:

The Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950, widely presented as the beginning of the efforts towards a European Union and commemorated in “Europe Day,” contains phrases which state that it is “a first step in the federation of Europe”, and that “this proposal will lead to the realization of the first concrete foundation of a European federation”. As critics of the EU have noted, these political objectives are usually omitted when the Declaration is referred to, and most people do not even know of their existence. A federation is of course a State and “yet for decades now the champions of EC/EU integration have been swearing blind that they have no knowledge of any such plans. EEC/EC/EU has steadily acquired ever more features of a supranational Federation: flag, anthem, Parliament, Supreme Court, currency, laws.” The EU founders “were careful only to show their citizens the benign features of their project. It had been designed to be implemented incrementally, as an ongoing process, so that no single phase of the project would arouse sufficient opposition as to stop or derail it.” Booker and North calls the European Union “a slow-motion coup d’état: the most spectacular coup d’état in history,” designed to gradually and carefully sideline the democratic process and subdue the older nation states of Europe without saying so in public.

In 2005, an unprecedented joint declaration by the leaders of all British political groups in Brussels called for PM Tony Blair to push for an end the “medieval” practice of European legislation being decided behind closed doors. Critics claim that the Council of Ministers, the EU’s supreme law-making body, which decides two thirds of all Britain’s laws (and the majority of laws in all Western European countries), “is the only legislature outside the Communist dictatorships of North Korea and Cuba to pass laws in secret.” As one of the signers put it: “We still have this medieval way of making decisions in the EU; people hide behind other member states, and blame them. It increases people’s sense of cynicism, but what we need is some straight talking.” According to British Conservative politician Daniel Hannan, this is how the EU was designed. “Its founding fathers understood from the first that their audacious plan to merge the ancient nations of Europe into a single polity would never succeed if each successive transfer of power had to be referred back to the voters for approval. So they cunningly devised a structure where supreme power was in the hands of appointed functionaries, immune to public opinion.” “Indeed, the EU’s structure is not so much undemocratic as anti-democratic.”

But be sure to read the whole thing.

UPDATE: this is good news:

Many adults in the Netherlands hold strong views on the way Muslims adapt to the European continent, according to a poll by Motivaction released by GPD. 63 per cent of respondents believe think Islam is incompatible with modern European life.

And they would be correct. And god help us all if modern European life is altered to accomodate Islam in its current form.

Oh, man:

Bloomberg has become so used to being chaffeured about that he’s either forgotten (or never knew) that there are times when acceleration is necessary for passing, merging, etc., and that preventing people from speeding on occasion will likely create more safety hazards than simply continuing to police speeders as the city presumably does now.  That such nannystatist programs—proferred always in the name of public safety but used, primarily, as a way to increase revenues—continue cropping up, leads me to believe that what we really need is a device placed on Mayors that light up everytime these bored petty tyrants do something other than, say, cut the ribbon at some mall opening, or fire up the Bat signal, should the Penguin get all uppity.

That way, at least people will have time to hide their wallets.

Indeed.

Go see him.

It is a long-ish article using Detroit as the American problem model, but any City could learn from it, including my own San Francisco:

[...] It needs to be said at the outset that no government in the U.S., not even Detroit’s, has ever imposed the kind of crushing regulations that the Indian government imposed during the height of the notorious License Raj in the mid-’50s. Key industries—steel, telecommunications, airlines—were nationalized, but even more harmful was the Kafkaesque web of regulations that the remaining private businesses had to endure in the name of ensuring a “rational allocation of resources.”

Every move of private industry, big or small, was subject to licensing. Forget setting up a new plant or a factory. If an enterprise wanted to buy or import equipment, change its product mix, or even produce more than its allotted quota for a product, it had to first obtain permission from the Directorate General of Technical Development, a process that could take years and a small fortune in bribes, points out Gurcharan Das, author of India Unbound and former CEO of Procter & Gamble, India. “Large business houses set up parallel bureaucracies in Delhi to follow up on files, organize bribes, and win licenses,” he recalls.

Confronted with a massive fiscal crisis and the prospect of defaulting on its international debt obligations, the Indian government dismantled much of this ridiculous licensing regime in 1991. In a bid to boost exports to replenish the country’s empty foreign exchange reserves, it also eliminated all import licensing and slashed tariffs on capital goods. Both were relics of India’s import-substitution days, when manufacturers were discouraged from buying equipment from abroad in order to build the domestic industry. This jacked up production costs and made the country’s exports hopelessly uncompetitive.

Trade liberalization was a boon for the I.T. industry, which already had escaped many of the stultifying controls that other industries faced simply because the architects of India’s industrial policy had failed to anticipate its birth. [...]

read the rest on your own.

Heh.

The Department of Homeland Stupidity is a site I just discovered a couple of days ago. Most of it good, some of it a little off–like their running debunked stories being recycled by Rolling Stone. Debunked. Anyway, more interestingly, by coincidence I ran accross a web developers blog who mentioned the Tempus Fugit Blog who has a post [now we are getting to it] about his first post to The Dept. of Homeland Stupidity. And in his excerpt of his own post, he is spot on:

On paper, Republicans are easily more favorable than Democrats to a libertarian-minded person such as myself. On paper, they support lower taxes, less socialism, limited government, a rigid interpretation of the Constitution, property rights, parental rights and gun rights. In practice, they do little to permanently relieve the tax burden, they support wealth redistribution in a variety of forms, they’ve bloated the government to an unprecedented degree, they’ve made a mockery of Amendments One, Four, Six, Eight and Ten, they’ve been slow and inadequate in their response to the Supreme Court’s eminent domain decision. That leaves parental rights and gun rights. So if all you want to do is to teach your kid that God created the world in seven 24-hour periods or shoot empty beer cans for fun, the Republican Party has your back. Otherwise, it’s time to wake up and realize you’ve been duped.

*sigh*

Too much to say on this that others have already said.
That said, I think this is brilliant. Citizen enforcement.

Well, Al Gore’s PowerPoint Slideshow/Movie is opening today, and it got a glowing review in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The following is more “food for thought” on the subjects addressed by Gore’s film:

Instapundit — “SO I GUESS KYOTO WORKED, THEN: “Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase.” (from the Telegraph, UK)

“UPDATE: Canada is abandoning Kyoto. Just when it was starting to work!”

On the “Inconvenient” Movie itself:

From _Slate_:

“…This raises the troubling fault of An Inconvenient Truth: its carelessness about moral argument. Gore says accumulation of greenhouse gases “is a moral issue, it is deeply unethical.” Wouldn’t deprivation also be unethical? Some fossil fuel use is maddening waste; most has raised living standards. The era of fossil energy must now give way to an era of clean energy. But the last century’s headlong consumption of oil, coal, and gas has raised living standards throughout the world; driven malnourishment to an all-time low, according to the latest U.N. estimates; doubled global life expectancy; pushed most rates of disease into decline; and made possible Gore’s airline seat and MacBook, which he doesn’t seem to find unethical. The former vice president clicks up a viewgraph showing the human population has grown more during his lifetime than in all previous history combined. He looks at the viewgraph with aversion, as if embarrassed by humanity’s proliferation. Population growth is a fantastic achievement—though one that engenders problems we must fix, including inequality and greenhouse gases. Gore wants to have it that the greener-than-thou crowd is saintly, while the producers of cars, power, food, fiber, roads, and roofs are appalling. That is, he posits a simplified good versus a simplified evil. Just like a movie!”

“The Moral Flaws of Al Gore’s _An Inconvenient Truth_”

Brief “Inconvenient” responses (video):

(60 second spot questioning the science behind Gore’s film):

“Glaciers”

“Captain Planet”

“If you don’t fly commercial, don’t talk to me about greenhouse gases or conservation.” (Instapundit, again)
A comprehensive and humorous look at “Inconvenient” that (among other things) questions the moral congruence of Gore promoting “Inconvenient” by flying all over the country in his private Gulfstream jet (which on a single one-way LA-DC trip burns as much fuel as a Hummer does in a year). Also looks at some of the recent Hollywood Celeb “Environmental Ads” featuring Cameron Diaz, Gwyneth Paltrow and others…

Video Here.

More writings:

A second look at Climate Change data in the WSJ.

Finally, here is Michael Crichton who posits that Environmentalism is our modern, western fundamentalist religion.