Notes on Tom Friedman's carbon footprint

Note to self: columnists who can promote their own books can become wealthy...

I lived within shouting distance of Friedman. Take a look at the carbon footprint this guy leaves. He lives on about seven acres -- it was once the home site of a prominent Washington attorney...The house sits on a hill with a great view and a western exposure. Friedman bought the house from the late lawyer's family about five years ago, tore down the huge older house and constructed an [over 11,000] square foot residence, with 7.5 bathrooms, on the hilltop. It is beautifully landscaped, as you can tell from the aerial/satellite photographs, and the foliage likely requires a lot of water. The property is listed on the tax rolls for [well over $9,000,000]. It makes me feel better that those who preach environmentalism practice such a modest intrusion on the environment itself.

Has the U.S. Intelligence Community Been Penetrated Yet Again?

After the latest NIE fiasco, this is not hard to believe:

On December 6, Donald Kerr, the PDDNI, that is, the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, laid out his agency’s 500-day plan to set things right. “What is required, first and foremost,” he said in congressional testimony, “is integrating the foundational elements and removing the barriers — in the areas of policy, management/budgeting, technology and acquisition, information, collection and analysis, and culture.” To this end, we need “to promote and build an intelligence community (IC) identity or sense of ‘jointness’ by creating programs that provide for cross-agency work assignments and training.”

The 500-day plan enters almost immediately into a discussion of the vital importance of “Equal Opportunity and Diversity.” It offers high praise for the intelligence community’s Diversity Strategy Implementation Workshop, an event held this past October that was an “an important step in the accomplishment of the IC-wide EEO and Diversity Cross-Cutting Emphasis Area Plan (CCEAP) by providing each of the IC Agencies with the mechanisms and direction. . . .”

I won’t bore you with the rest, but it is an astonishing compendium of bureaucratic gibberish guaranteed either to put you to sleep if you simply read it, or to give you nightmares if you pause to think about its implications

Read the rest...

Painfully YouTubing the Pelosi-Reid Congress

I was first

I was first, really.

Dang.

I could have sworn that I published an essay several months ago in which I stated that Hillary’s biggest problem was Bill. Not as in Bill the philanderer, or Bill the liar or even Bill of the spotted dress but Bill the President. Democrats have bought into the belief that people loved Bill Clinton and would love to see a re-run of his administration. But that is a fantasy. There were sighs of relief, even among some Democrats, when the moving truck pulled away from the White House with the stolen furniture and the ink on the Clinton pardons still drying on the Oval Office desk.

The long national soap opera was finally over.

Of course there is a hard core of true believers who are attached to that gang of Arkansas hillbillies. You see them gathered around Hillary like a high school reunion, reliving the past and talking about who dated whom. But Bill never polled a majority during his two runs for the Presidency. And the American people are not about to vote for re-runs with Hillary in the starring role as Nurse Ratchet.

Jonah Goldberg is onto something, but I was first …. If only I could find that essay.

Failed Fraudulence
When it comes Clinton-esque lying, Hillary is a cheap imitation.

By Jonah Goldberg


The most enjoyable aspect of watching the HMS Hillary take on water is the prospect that Bill — and his cult of personality — will go down with the ship, too.

Bill Clinton has been stumping for his wife on the Iowa hustings, framing the election as a referendum on his tenure as president. Last month in Muscatine (during the same speech in which he falsely claimed to have opposed the Iraq war from the beginning), he told the assembled Democrats that HMS Hillary could transport America “back to the future.”

Last summer, when he first started hawking Hillary like a door-to-door salesman, he told a crowd: “I know some people say, ‘Look at them. They’re old. They’re sort of yesterday’s news.’...

“Well,” Slick Willie said, grinning, “yesterday’s news was pretty good.”

Indeed, Hillary’s entire campaign has been grounded in her experience in the Clinton administration of the 1990s, even though that experience mostly involves designing a failed health-care plan and unsuccessfully hectoring her husband to move to the left. Still, as New York Times editorial writer Adam Cohen noted in a column last week, it was her decision to make the choice between her and Barack Obama a “referendum on a decade.”

So if Hillary Clinton loses the race for the nomination — heck, even if she just loses the Iowa caucuses — I hope to see this headline somewhere, perhaps in the New York Post: “America to Clinton(s): We’re Just Not That Into You.”

The rush of schadenfreude would be so overwhelming, the entire Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy would have to hie itself to its fainting couch. For years now, the Clintons’ defenders have claimed that the ’90s were halcyon days, thanks to the deft statesmanship of the Clintons. Much of the liberal establishment has become wedded to protecting the memory of the Clintons’ stewardship. David Brock’s progressive outfit, Media Matters for America, is a prime example. It should be renamed “Hillary Matters for America,” given that it is less a media watchdog and more an attack dog for Hillary Clinton.

But schadenfreude doesn’t really do justice to Hillary’s potential downfall. Her career is indisputably a product of her marriage. But for most of her life, Hillary had an independent ideological identity that now seems to have gone down the memory hole. In her own words, she championed a whole new “politics of meaning” and sought to redefine “who we are as human beings in this postmodern age.”

But, bit by bit, she sliced off chunks of her soul. Hillary used to be the personification of hope for the left. On the welfare debate, she was supposed to be Bill’s conscience. She was the Eleanor to his Franklin.

But now Hillary is the Democrats’ establishment candidate, pitted against the true believer, John Edwards, and the idealist, Obama. Even committed liberals tell focus groups she’s too cold, too calculating.

And how did she get that way? She studied at the feet of the master. Bill Clinton cast himself as a champion of the “Third Way,” a grandiose political phrase with disturbing intellectual roots. For Bill, it mostly meant that he could split the difference between any two positions. Any hard choice was a “false choice.” When asked how he’d have voted on the first Persian Gulf War, he said he agreed with the minority but would have voted with the majority. He smoked pot but didn’t inhale. Monica Lewinsky had sex with him, but he could swear under oath he didn’t have sex with her.

Bill can make those sorts of things work because he really believes them — or at least he does as the words are coming out of his mouth. Hillary has nowhere near that sort of skill. She’s learned the dance moves and she’s memorized the lyrics, but she can’t hear the music. That was evident in the now-infamous Oct. 30 debate performance during which she said she was both for and against driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants and for and against pulling troops out of Iraq.

In this race, she’s tried to be hawk and dove, idealist and pragmatist, martyr and hero. But unlike her husband — a jazz impresario of people-pleasing prevarication — she’s a terrible liar. She comes across as calculated because that’s all that’s left to her: calculation. Jesse Jackson once famously said that Bill Clinton had no core beliefs, he was simply “appetite” all the way down. That appetite seems to have become community property in the Clinton household, such as it is.

Obama is surging because Democrats want idealism and hope. Hillary has jettisoned her idealism, and she’s filed down her hope to mere yearning.

Jonah is right about Hillary as an unattractive, synthetic version of “Bill the Great Triangulator.” But I think he misses the point when he assumes that if Hillary were a better liar and less of a shrew she would be our next president. I disagree. I think that the American people are tired of both Clintons. Not just the ones, like me, who did not like Bill while in office, but also those who may have voted for him, twice. We are no longer on a holiday from history and the Clinton soap opera is not getting renewed.

Krauthammer on Religion: Concurring in Part and Dissenting in Part

Now I know how a Supreme Court justice feels when he writes a separate opinion “concurring in part and dissenting in part.”

I have tremendous respect of Charles Krauthammer. His commentaries are typically fresh. His views are usually grounded in reality rather than the politically correct, smooth, wave washed bromides so common among the columnists both Left and Right.

And Krauthammer has written a very good column An Overdose of Public Piety.

When he writes:

This campaign is knee-deep in religion, and it's only going to get worse. I'd thought that the limits of professed public piety had already been achieved during the Republican CNN/YouTube debate when some squirrelly looking guy held up a Bible and asked, "Do you believe every word of this book?" -- and not one candidate dared reply: None of your damn business.

Instead, Giuliani, Romney and Huckabee bent a knee and tried appeasement with various interpretations of scriptural literalism. The right answer, the only answer, is that the very question is offensive.

…I stand up and cheer.

Just as I cheered when Fred Thompson got tired of the insufferable Carolyn Washburn and refused to act like a third grader raising his hand and comply with her demand for bumper sticker answers. There are questions that are simply rude or so utterly stupid that they do not deserve to be answered by serious men.

But there are assertions about religion that are simply a-historical and deserve to be debated rather than dismissed.

Romney has been faulted for not throwing at least one bone of acknowledgment to nonbelievers in his big religion speech last week. But he couldn't, because the theme of the speech was that there was something special about having your values drawn from religious faith. Indeed, faith is politically indispensable. "Freedom requires religion," Romney declared, "just as religion requires freedom."

But this is nonsense -- as Romney then proceeded to demonstrate in that very same speech. He spoke of the empty cathedrals in Europe. He's right about that: Postwar Europe has experienced the most precipitous decline in religious belief in the history of the West. Yet Europe is one of the freest precincts on the planet. It is an open, vibrant, tolerant community of more than two dozen disparate nations living in a pan-continental harmony and freedom unseen in all previous European history

.

First, he did not “throw a bone” to non-believers because his speech was about religion, not its absence. Non-believers of good will realize that speeches about religion in America don’t dwell on people who are not religious just as speeches about patriotism don’t dwell on Benedict Arnold except perhaps as a bad example.

Unfortunately today there are many among those who profess no faith who attempt to equate all religions as a way of smearing some religions. It is a despicable commonplace on the Left to equate the Islamist bomber on Jihad as somehow equivalent James Dobson of “Focus on the Family” or the Methodist at prayer. Somehow the Left cannot condemn Islamofascism by itself, using its violence only as a way of condemning all religion.

Second, the dominant religion of the American people is Christianity. It is the Christianity that made its peace with the “enlightenment” and not the Christianity of the Inquisition. It is the Christianity of multiple denominations who live well together. There may be inter-faith disputes, but they are carried out by theologians in print, not by mobs rioting in the streets.

There is also a common American piety about people who come from humble beginnings. Abe Lincoln was a rich railroad lawyer but campaigned as a humble rail-splitter who grew up in a cabin on the frontier. This image is designed to connect with the average American since it is assumed that the candidate who grew up poor relates to the concerns of the typical American family. Bill Clinton perfected the technique with is famous phrase “I feel your pain.” Today, John Edwards, a multimillionaire trail lawyer, is talking up his humble roots. Why is it OK to tell people that you grew up poor, but it’s not OK to tell people you are a devoted Christian?

Third, Krauthammer used the example of modern Europe as a free society in the absence of religious belief. Yes, and Teddy Kennedy is a rich man in the absence of any effort on his part. He obtained his wealth the same way that Europe obtained freedom, by inheriting it.

The fact is that free societies are a rare thing in the history of the world. If history teaches us anything it’s that freedom is not free. Most countries have been ruled by kings or tyrants, and most still are. Many counties that experienced “freedom” of some kind have found themselves eventually unfree. Western Europe has only been “free” since 1945; Eastern Europe since the collapse of the Berlin wall. Russia has never been truly free and is rapidly reverting to rule by its present-day czars. It is sometimes startling to realize that the American experiment in freedom is unique for its longevity.

Throughout history, religion was state imposed. America is unique in that it rejected that model and let many religions co-exist. But it is also true that a free society requires a great deal of self-restraint on the part of its people. A society that does not practice individual self-restraint is a society in which restraint is imposed by a spider web of laws. In the case of America, that self-restraint derives from the religious beliefs of its citizens. And those citizens are, for the most part, Christians who believe in the Golden Rule and who try to follow, imperfectly, the Ten Commandments. Christianity is woven in the fabric of American society and it is literally impossible to conceive of the shape of American society separated from that heritage. It is written in our laws and guides our habits, even the habits of those who profess no faith at all.

It should not be necessary to point out that the bloodiest tyrannies of the last century were tyrannies that specifically rejected religion. Instead they were guided by human centered philosophy and/or racist beliefs in the perfectibility of mankind. So we see where the rejection of religion takes us.

So, yes, I agree with Romney that freedom requires religion. Even Europe, like the Kennedy family, is living on its patrimony of Christianity. When that patrimony is exhausted, Europe could very well fall to a belief system that does not require, or specifically rejects, freedom. Modern Europe has already imported immigrants who reject freedom and pluralism. Its people are already bowing to the wishes of the most violent among them. Its laws are being written to bend society to the dictates of Islam.

Some yokel asking the candidates of they believe if every word in the Bible is literal truth should be met with contempt. But it is perfectly legitimate to try to determine where a candidate for public office gets his ethical foundation. When it comes time to make policy decisions, the office holder will make those decisions based on his belief system.

If the office holder’s faith is based on the rock of political power, we get Bill Clinton: policy dictated by public polls, private detective digging up dirt on women who have been victimized by Bill and lies told with a straight face.

We have been well served by leaders who professed a faith in God, bringing us through the war of our founding and the tragedy of the Civil War. We currently have a President whose faith has allowed him to withstand unpopularity to turn the corner in the Iraq war and overcome the onslaught of Islamofacism.

The people who hurry past the empty cathedrals of Europe do not appear to be holding up as well.

Sleepy in Iowa: Why must we put up with biased or boring presidential debates?

It seems that the only person in the whole universe who thought that Carolyn Washburn - editor of the Des Moines Register did a good job moderating the Republican debate in Iowa is ... Carolyn Washburn.

Those who watched the Republican presidential "debate" in Iowa Wednesday now understand why The Des Moines Register is such a lousy newspaper.

"That was not just the worst debate of 2007, that was the worst debate in Western history, and that includes the ancient Greeks," said columnist Charles Krauthammer. "There is no record in any major European record of a debate this transcendingly and crushingly dull."

Mr. Krauthammer arguably wasn't engaging in hyperbole. Imagine a boxing match in which the boxers aren't allowed to lay a glove on each other, and you have an idea of what this "debate" was like.

This wasn't the fault of the candidates, all of whom turned in credible performances. Even libertarian fruitcake Ron Paul seemed to be on his meds.

The blame for this flop belongs to the debate's moderator, Des Moines Register Editor Carolyn Washburn. While most commentators compared her to an overbearing elementary school teacher, Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard likened her to Nurse Mildred Ratched, the villain in Ken Kesey's 1962 novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

Ms. Washburn decreed there would be no questions on immigration or the war in Iraq, which opinion polls indicate are the subjects of greatest concern to Republican primary voters. Instead, she asked snoringly dull questions about issues that were important to few others than herself, questions that were so open-ended the candidates could fall back on their talking points rather than engage with each other. On the rare occasions when the candidates did try to mix it up, she cut them off.

"The Register's Carolyn Washburn seemed unfamiliar with such concepts as the follow-up question, or contrasting one candidate's position with another," said Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post.

The "debate" also was marred by the puzzling presence of Alan Keyes, who demonstrated yet again that he belongs in a straitjacket, not public office. The Register's purported rules for participation were that a candidate was to have a campaign headquarters in Iowa and the support of at least 1 percent of those polled. Mr. Keyes has no campaign headquarters in Iowa, received zero percent support in the Register's poll last month, and had not been permitted to participate in any of the previous GOP debates. Yet there he was on the dais with the real candidates, and he was granted more air time by Ms. Washburn than either Sen. John McCain or former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

I had thought it impossible to have a more biased or incompetently managed debate than the CNN-YouTube Republican debate last month, where a third of the questions CNN selected were from Democratic plants -- including a member of Hillary Clinton's Gay and Lesbian Task Force who CNN flew from California to Florida for the occasion -- and most of the rest were from fringe lunatics. But Ms. Washburn proved me wrong. The CNN-YouTube debate at least was lively.

There will be no more debates before voting begins in Iowa Jan. 3. The bias and incompetence of CNN and The Des Moines Register have deprived Republican primary voters of the opportunity to hear the serious candidates interact on the issues that are most important to Republicans.

Biased and incompetently managed debates have political consequences. The Iowa frontrunner, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, is judged a winner because the format denied his rivals the opportunity to challenge some of the more bizarre policy positions he has taken recently. Sen. McCain and Mayor Giuliani suffered because Ms. Washburn took their signature issues off the table. One wonders why the GOP candidates so meekly put up with this.

There may be a ray of hope. The highlight of the debate, such as it was, came when Fred Thompson, like Kesey's hero Randle McMurphy, defied Nurse Ratched. He refused to participate in a show of hands Ms. Washburn ordered on a global warming question. Apparently he thinks presidential candidates ought not to be treated like fifth graders.

When Sen. Thompson stood up to Ms. Washburn, the response meters in the focus groups went through the ceiling. Sen. Thompson has proposed the serious GOP candidates engage in a round-table discussion where they -- and not journalists -- set the agenda. If Iowans reward him in the caucuses next month with, say, a respectable third-place finish, perhaps the others will join him in flying over the cuckoo's nest.

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: How many more will die in 'gun-free' zones before the media start asking why?

The answer is: "never." The people who populate the "drive-by-media" have not come to their anti-self defense position rationally, so you can't convince them with logic. There is a phobia about guns in the media, like a fear of spiders or snakes. You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

Police have identified Robert A. Hawkins, 19, as the assailant who killed eight people with a semi-automatic rifle (not an assault rifle) at the Westroads Mall in Omaha Dec. 5.

Chalk up eight more deaths to "gun control."

The shooting was at least the fourth at an American mall or shopping center so far this year, including one in February in Salt Lake City.

Once again, the killer chose a "gun-free" zone.

For the non-phobic, pointing out the obvious may help.

Its a Quagmire!... Media Reports 6 Bogus Stories in 6 Weeks!

I thought that's what those editors and fact checkers were supposed to prevent.

On Tuesday, after there were already questions about this Diyala slaughter, TIME Magazine based their report on this one horrible massacre:

The horrible discovery in Diyala Province Monday was disturbing even by the standards of Iraq's running sectarian violence. Iraqi police said they found 20 decapitated bodies dumped near a police station west of Baquba, the capital of Diyala province.

It was a lie.
The 20 headless bodies story was a hoax.
It never happened.

** There was never any evidence of this event.
** There was no official report on this event.
** There were no photos of this event.
** The Iraqi media denied this event.
** The MNF-I officials denied the event.
** The Diala Security Operations Chief denied the event.

TIME Magazine has never corrected their bogus report.

Read the others.

Why is this important? Imagine that the Virginian Pilot reported that headless bodies were discovered in downtown Norfolk or that a traffic accident was caused by terrorists. And did this time after time, pretty soon people would be afraid to come to Norfolk, even if the reports were lies.

It's a good thing we have professionally trained Journalists with Journalism
degrees and Editors to bring us this high quality Journalism. Since their
professional skills are allegedly beyond reproach, I guess we have to blame
these "errors" on their insanely biased, dishonest agenda grinding.

The New York Post headline writes itself: Headless Bodies in Clueless Media

Oh, forget it, they'll just keep reminding us that Christians who feel that they are being targeted and shot are bringing it on themselves.

Rudy Giuliani

It's good. "Morning in America?"

Ix-nay on the Ihad-Jay

Someone on the Islamofascist side is saying that the 9/11 attack was a mistake. Click on the link for the full story.


The funny part is the discussion of the paperwork to get the 9/11 perps into the country:

Never mind the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents. There was visa fraud:

“This was perfidy towards the enemy, because they entered America with a visa, which is a contract of protection. There is no dispute about this among the scholars - even… [if someone] forges the signature of the residents of [the Abode of] War, and they believe it to be authentic, and then he enters their land, he is forbidden to betray them in anything - their lives, their honor, their property, without any distinction between combatants (military) and non-combatants (civilians) among the residents of [the Abode of] War, as long as he remains in their country…

Whatever. Call me an ignorant infidel, I still say among the crimes al-Qaeda committed on 9/11, the paperwork issues don’t loom that large. But we are talking about a singularly cyncial and deranged group of people, and if this is what it takes to convince them they are on the wrong path, so be it.

With Spies Like These . . .

Joseph Weisberg makes some interesting points about spies and the fallibility of intelligence.

What I find fascinating is the responses. Go to the comments section to see how the "reality based" community responds to the revelations that the agents your recruit may not be telling the truth, and that you don't know whether they are or not.

Joseph Weisberg worked in the CIA's Directorate of Operations from 1990 to 1994. Those were the Clinton years.

We need a respite from peace

Danny at Sampson Blinded is not a fan of the "peace process."

Here, however, is a short summary of our reasons to oppose the peace process.]

Peace process doesn’t lead to peace. Concessions to Arabs and imploring for peace only provoke them for the last-ditch fighting. That correlation is clear at least since the Oslo accords.

Peace process cannot lead to peace. If history is any lesson, peace is only achieved through crushing defeat of one’s enemy.

Peace process is highly unusual. Every other nation destroyed whatever aborigines happened to live on the land that nation chose to build a state.

Peace process is illegal. The original arrangement for the Jewish state included Transjordan, but the British illegally cut it off. Then the UN further partitioned Israel to accommodate Palestinian Arabs.

Peace process is immoral. Palestinian Arabs don’t constitute a nation. Offering them a state is a plot against Jews.

Peace process doesn’t offer safety. Jews need a secure state rather than a beach strip eight miles wide.

Read the rest ...

“Danny” at Sampson Blinded is very much opposed to the “peace process.” I agree with the underlying assumptions of his argument although I think some of his reasoning is a little facile

The fact is that the Israelis and the Arabs have only been able to live in peace as long as the Arabs were dominant. In the Middle East, the few Jews were tolerated because they were a small and manageable minority in countries run by Arabs who followed Islam. Following the founding of the State of Israel, the universal dominance was broken and the despised minority now became a despised minority that was not longer under Arab control. That was intolerable to the Arabs and they were and are determined to end this state of affairs.

Several wars followed.

There is little reason to believe that this situation will end unless and until the United States establishes its hegemony over the region. The Iraq war is a necessary and fundamental basis for this condition. If the United States is able to create a stable and democratic Iraqi state it will have demonstrated its ability to establish the conditions for peace in the region. That is why, for the Jewish people, victory in Iraq is so vital. Should we fail, Israel will fail. If we succeed, Israel will succeed because the Arabs will be forced to acknowledge our ability to control their destiny.

The key to the future, not just of the Middle East but of the rest of the world, is found in Iraq. It’s a terrible challenge and burden that the Left seems incapable of seeing, so consumed are they with BDS. I doubt if most Jews in or out of Israel realize this.

Fred Thomson: I'm Not Doing Hand Shows Today!

Running for President is serious business. We're facing pressing issues like national security, bankrupt entitlements, a broken tax code, and out-of-control judges. So what did the liberal moderator want at Wednesday's debate? A show of hands. We deserve serious discussion not kindergarten antics.

Don't you want a conservative leader who won't grovel to the liberal media?

If 2,400 people donate in the next 24 hours it will tell the liberal media that the American people are tired of their games.

Stand with Fred and reject the liberal media's "monkey business" and gotcha games. Donate today.

Then send an e-card to your friends letting them know you're standing up with Fred.

And the

Des Moines Register Editor Carolyn Washburn takes a shot at Republicans with an obviously false statement in her piece summarizing the recent Iowa debates which she moderated:

By and large, the Republicans say they can get us to smaller government and lower taxes with economic growth and government efficiency. They don't ask Americans to make terrible sacrifices. About half wanted to tackle global warming and about half chose not to talk about it. They want local control and choice in education.

Chose not to talk about it!?! Not only did one Republican ask to talk about it, as opposed to raising his hand, Washburn wouldn't let them talk about anything other than what she had pre-scripted in her mind.

Carolyn Washburn asks the question: who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

The Virginian Pilot vs. Christians

There’s an old joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto surrounded by hostile Indians with the punch line “what do you mean “we” white man?”

Sometimes you are just embarrassed by people who claim to be on your side.

Case in point: Donald Luzzatto, who is described as an editorial writer with The Virginian-Pilot. I put it that way because this is, after all, the Virginian Pilot and we can make no assumptions that anything written there has even a glancing acquaintance with the truth.

In his article mocking Christians for being somewhat sensitive following several decades of being kicked around and out of the public sphere, he identifies himself as a Christian. Again, this is the Virginian Pilot and anything you read there … well you know the drill.

So when he says: “The war is over. We won. Merry Christmas.” I want to respond like Tonto did: what do you mean “we?”

But having made the dubious statement that “I've never met anyone genuinely or actively hostile to Christmas” (insert Virginian Pilot disclaimer here) I’m assuming that includes never having read articles about or seen news reports of people and organizations who have and are actively trying to remove Christ from Christmas and symbols of Christian faith from the "public square."

Forgive me for pointing out that this is such a dubious statement that Donny is breaking one of the commandments. But the statement is so artfully worded that it goes right up there with Bill Clinton’s “meaning of “is.’”

In the spirit of Christmas, let us pray that people everywhere put away their hatred, even the hatred disguised as cynicism, and look to the redemption that is found in Christ whose birth we celebrate this season.

Iowa, Religion, The Clintons, Illegal Immigration & Cynical Politics: Peggy Noonan.

Great article int he Opinion Journal by Peggy Noonan.

Excerpts:

The Republican race looks--at the moment--to be determined primarily by one thing, the question of religious faith. In my lifetime faith has been a significant issue in presidential politics, but not the sole determinative one. Is that changing? If it is, it is not progress.
...
I wonder if our old friend Ronald Reagan could rise in this party, this environment. Not a regular churchgoer, said he experienced God riding his horse at the ranch, divorced, relaxed about the faiths of his friends and aides, or about its absence. He was a believing Christian, but he spent his adulthood in relativist Hollywood, and had a father who belonged to what some saw, and even see, as the Catholic cult. I'm just not sure he'd be pure enough to make it in this party. I'm not sure he'd be considered good enough.
...
A thought on the presence of Bill Clinton. He is showing up all over in Iowa and New Hampshire, speaking, shaking hands, drawing crowds. But when he speaks, he has a tendency to speak about himself. It's all, always, me-me-me in his gigantic bullying neediness. Still, he's there, and he's a draw, and the plan was that his presence would boost his wife's fortunes. The way it was supposed to work, the logic, was this: People miss Bill. They miss the '90s. They miss the pre-9/11 world. So they'll love seeing him back in the White House. So they'll vote for Hillary. Because she'll bring him. "Two for the price of one."

It appears not to be working. Might it be that they don't miss Bill as much as everyone thought? That they don't actually want Bill back in the White House?

Maybe. But maybe it's this. Maybe they'd love to have him back in the White House. Maybe they just don't want him to bring her. Maybe they miss the Cuckoo's Nest and they'd love having Jack Nicholson's McMurphy running through the halls. Maybe they just don't miss Nurse Ratched. Does she have to come?
...
It is clear in Iowa that immigration is the great issue that won't go away. Members of the American elite, including U.S. senators, continue to do damage to the public debate on immigration. They do not view it as a crucial question of America's continuance. They view it as an onerous issue that might upset their personal plans, an issue dominated by pro-immigration groups and power centers on the one hand, and the pesky American people, with their limited and quasi-racist concerns, on the other.
Because politicians see immigration as just another issue in "the game," they feel compelled to speak of it not with honest indifference but with hot words and images. With a lack of sympathy. This is in contrast to normal Americans, who do not use hot words, and just want the problem handled and the rule of law returned to the borders.

Politicians, that is, distort the debate, not because they care so much but because they care so little.

Giuliani’s New Immigration Spot

Sounds right to me. But I'm not sure about this "virtual fence."

Exclusive: Eyewitness Account of Huge Taliban Defeat

Musa Qala:

Afghanistan's government flag was raised Wednesday on what had been one of the biggest strongholds of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and a leading world center of heroin production.

Read the whole thing.

"Journalists" Want to Get Citizens Out of Their Business

A blow dried hack who teaches "journalism" had decided to people reporting the news is too dangerous to be allowed.

Supporters of "citizen journalism" argue it provides independent, accurate, reliable information that the traditional media don't provide. While it has its place, the reality is it really isn't journalism at all, and it opens up information flow to the strong probability of fraud and abuse. The news industry should find some way to monitor and regulate this new trend.

The North Shore Journal responds:

There are dozens of other stories that I’ve covered, that the old media ignored or reported incorrectly. Other bloggers discovered and reported on Dan Rather’s creative use of forged documents, Reuters’ staging photos in Beirut, AP’s repeated bogus reporting of incidents in Iraq, and The New Republic’s utter failure to fact check a series of stories. Let’s not forget the murders and rapes in the New Orleans Superdome that never happened. There’s lots more, frauds and mistakes by journalists, journalists that graduated from institutions like the one Professor Hazinski teaches at. Oh, yeah, Professor, that whole gay general YouTube thing. CNN set that up, not citizen journalists.

Maybe I don’t want to be tarred with the term “journalist”. It makes me feel dirty, and not the nice dirty either.

And there's this:

Actually, citizen journalists usually have to spend some of our time fact-checking the lies coming from the so-called pros. Ever heard of fauxtography, Dr. Hazinski? Google it. You’ll be there a while.
We haven’t seen any fraud from the MSM, have we? Nah. No international wires hiring terrorist propagandists. No major network news broadcasts airing fake documents. Nah. That only happens on blogs. Right.

And this:

He’s just got his academic and journalistic panties in a wad because a much smaller group of people are willing to swallow whatever swill the journo-pits pump out without tasting it first.

Your reputation wasn’t murdered, dummy. It was a victim of suicide.

UPDATE: From the Democracy Project:

According to a poll in 14 countries conducted for the BBC World Service, although press freedom is highly valued,


People were also asked to rate how free the press and broadcasters were in their country to report the news truthfully and without undue bias….

In the United States, Britain and Germany, only around 29% of those interviewed thought their media did a good job in reporting news accurately.


The full survey results are here.

Looking into the details, there is a deep irony. The public in the very countries that most value press freedom hold the performance of their major media, whether in private or “public” hands, in the lowest regard.

This reflects favorably on the strong attachment to truth of Americans, the British and Germans, and most West Europeans. But, at the same time, reflects the extent to which skepticism and cynicism and outright disdain of the reliability of MSM, across the political spectrum, has permeated Western publics.

The narrow incestuous worldview of media elites, coupled with repeated evidenced instances of absurdly unprofessional conduct, is widely recognized, and as witnessed by the steady drain away of their audiences is an unsustainable business practice.

According to the poll, we in the developed West do not value social harmony and political stability as highly as in the less developed or more authoritarian countries surveyed.

This helps explain why we’re more developed, as we’re more willing to take chances to progress. It, also, helps explain why we’re less willing to endure the “social harmony” of a small, overwhelmingly liberal caste that controls our media and imposes its views, especially when alternative media increasingly expose the transparent biases and shortcomings of those views in keeping us reliably informed.

Of course the Drive-by-media will tell us that we're paranoid nuts who believe in an imaginary War on Christmas. There is literally no point at which people who are totally invested in their own righteousness will admit that they are wrong. Exhibit "A" is the cracked staff at the Virginian Pilot.

Another Alleged Bus Beating In Baltimore

There has apparently been another bus beating on an MTA bus in Baltimore.

WBAL-TV reports that two men aboard the #64 bus in Brooklyn claim they were attacked by a group of 7 black teens. The two men say they were attacked because they were white. They also claim the bus driver refused to call police for them.

The two men suffered cuts and bruises.

The MTA says it is investigating the claim.

This comes less than a week after a white woman was beaten on a bus. 9 black middle school students have been arrested in that case.

Once is an isolated incident. Twice is the beginning of a pattern.

Pelosi: Republicans `like' Iraq War

Does insanity run in the family?

"They like this war. They want this war to continue," Pelosi, D- Calif., told reporters. She expressed frustration over Republicans' ability to force majority Democrats to yield ground on taxes, spending, energy, war spending and other matters.

I guees if you win control of congress and you have the nutroots yapping at your heels and can't get anything done and the even the lapdog press is beginning to notice, the frustration just boils over.